Battletech by Harebrained Schemes (Shadowrun Returns)

That Highlander is the bomb. It basically never left my lineup once I got it, barring short breaks for repairs after a hairy mission.

Battlemasters on the other hand are kinda weak. They aren’t as bad as Banshees but share the same fundamental problem. So much engine weight devoted to making an assault mech move at heavy mech speeds means that there’s not a satisfying amount of payload space for weapons and equipment.

For reference a Battlemaster is 10 tons heavier than Orion, moves at the exact same speed, and has the exact same available weight available for weapons and equipment. But the Orion is a heavy mech and gets an initiative advantage over the Battlemaster. The only reason to use a Battlemaster over an Orion is for a specific build that needs that much mobility, more armor than an Orion can take, and very little weapon load. So basically close range builds built on lots of medium/small lasers and melee. The Orion beats the Battlemaster in any other type of build.

I love the intiative system, but man does it screw over mechs like the BattleMaster, Dragon and Quickdraw.
It’s almost always better to take a mech a few tons less, just because. Hopefully the developer is willing to play with it maybe basis on movement speed instead, so that mechs like above aren’t always weak sauce.

Also, they need to add a level 0 initiative so that Assault mechs can be knocked down .

Is the initiative rating on mechs a matter of BT tabletop rules, or something the devs created? If the former, it wouldn’t be legit for the PC game to change the rules of the game.

There was no intiative system in the board game, but there also was few reasons to get a light mech when you had access to heavier mechs.

The issue is that any big change on this may have a lot of unintended consequences.

If memory serves in the tabletop game there was a team based initiative rule, basically rolling to see who had to go first and then players alternated moving mechs. Also in tabletop it was clearly understood that heavy mechs were better but generally friendly games were done based on tonnage. So each team got 200-300 tons worth of mechs in their lance. That did create situations where people ran light or weaker medium mechs with their fourth slot just because of tonnage available left available. I’m not even going to talk about all the permutations on Battle Value as people tried to find more reasonable metrics than tonnage to balance out a match.

I feel like the initiative system in the Battletech video game is an improvement over tabletop but it’s aggravating in that it could be so much better with just a few tweaks.

Yeah I get that. My Battlemaster carries a PPC++, AC5 ++ and a LRM15++. I think 840 armor. Not a frontline mech. My Highlander has The Gauss Rifle (yay!), 3 ML++, SRM6+++ and LRM20++. My other two mechs are Orion Ks. All the pluses geared toward stab damage or +accuracy and crits.

I can always switch the BM for another Orion K. For a while I was running 4 Orion Ks. I had an Awesome but the 3 PPCs didn’t do it for me.

Edit: Oops, reply meant for @Tortilla.

I don’t get mixing SRM and LRM. Sure you’re flexible, but you have a whole lance to be flexible with. Better to load up on one or the other, IMO, if for no other reason than ammo efficiency. Also I hate PPCs and LLs, but that’s probably just me…

That’s not just you. As you can see from the above spread sheet, LL just don’t make sense. PPC++ is okay though, if you have double heatsinks and all the trimmings.
As for mixing LRMs and SRMs, flexibity is one thing, but an LRM 5 is pretty light and gives you something to do (peal off those evasion pips, if nothing else) and since they don’t often overlap, you don’t have to worry about the heat as much, since you probably aren’t firing both.

I’ve done some mixing of SRM and LRMs, but not with full racks. It’s more of something like 3 SRM-6 as main armament, and an LRM-5 to multi-target and finish the knockdown on something with a full stability bar.

If you opt into the beta, there’s a patch out with substantial changes to balance, optimization, and UI improvements.

Accelerate the current action with SPACEBAR. Players can now press SPACEBAR to greatly accelerate the current action. Game speed will return to normal after the action completes.
Speed-Up mode to accelerate all combat actions. Added an option in the Gameplay Settings menu that significantly speeds up combat.

As for the large laser being useless:

Large Laser heat generation reduced to 18 (was 30).
Medium Laser heat generation increased to 12 (was 10).

It’s nice to see them responding to criticism so fast even after they’ve had a successful launch.

That’s pretty substantial. I am in!

Soon your joy will turn into tears…

Easy fix, remove Gauss rifle and keep it safe.

Yes I understand that functionally this is even worse. But it makes me feel better.

I am going to do some fooling around, but I just coupled my Gaus Cannon with an AC 5 and an LRM 15, so thaty Highlander need never be put into harms way.

Or just reload last save if you lose lostech equipment. That’s what I always do. I’ll accept any loss of pilots and mechs these days, because anything but lostech can be replaced with some patience. But if the game is going to give out precious unique irreplaceable stuff then I won’t accept a loss of it.

Wow, that’s quite the shift. Lots of new designs to play with! My medium/small-laser-boat Grasshopper is going to get retired but lots of long range energy platforms are suddenly starting to look attractive. Especially as they made SRMs spread more on called shots. In the current game the SRM is the ultimate short range called-shot murder weapon.

Any word on when they’ll patch in the option to skip the tutorial? That’s what I’m waiting for before restarting.

That… makes it actually useful!

They said they tried to get it into this patch but weren’t able to, so I guess maybe the next one?

I still think they need to bring the weight down a ton. 5 tons to get 40 damage versus 1 ton of Med Laser to get 25 damage, sure ML is shorter range, but that’s a pretty huge DPT differential. At 4 tons and 18 heat, I can see some good LL builds.