Battletech by Harebrained Schemes (Shadowrun Returns)

Beware, enemies get the same weapons, and there are more of them :)

Today’s story of laughable mission intelligence:

4.5 skull mission that mentions a super heavy mech or something. They’re on the other side of a big hill so I start climbing it. I get instant reinforcements to my right. I still haven’t reached the target, so I decide to deal with the reinforcements. It’s two Quickdraws and two Jaegermechs. I quickly dispatch them with my assault lance, then turn to face the main force.

The terrifying opposition? A single Demolisher.

So much for that 4 priority salvage I negotiated.

Okay, I never knew there was an actual heavy laser. Also, I choose to ignore the fact that their might be a heavy laser since I don’t recognize any tech after the clan invasion.

I aim to misbehave

Yeah, that exact thing has happened to me 2 or 3 times. When they say the target is a super-heavy mech, it seems to always be an 80-ton vehicle (either Demolisher or PPC Carrier)

I just realized that the combination of an LRM 15 and LRM 5 is one ton less, but produces 3 heat more. It’s great for my Jaeger, since I don’t have any awesome LRM 20s to replace the LRM 15.

The only LL that are useful are +++ same for PPCs. Otherwise an 8 ML mech with an SRM addon rocks.

Today’s funny story about dramatic timing (final mission spoilers):

I cut Victoria off at the legs, and Kamea made her dramatic speech while she was getting knocked down by the next enemy mech in the queue. Bonk!

Oh, no looting the sweet mech from the final mission? Piss off.

You can encounter that same sweet mech in high-skull random missions and loot it like any other. I’m working on doing just that right now.

Yeah, I get it. But that takes more time!

Anyway, nice game overall. Destroying robots remained fun the entire time. I can’t say I loved it though. The story was a little heavy-handed for me with its wholesome progressive values in every dialogue. There were also obvious technical issues, but I don’t think they necessarily dragged the game down to a lower score or whatever. I just needed a little more juice. Maybe an expansion pack or a sequel or a strategic layer would help.

The base story is fine for BT lore, but yeah, Proust it ain’t. I think what gets me a bit is that the game does not really give you the feel of being a mercenary, really. You are pretty much a House lapdog (which, admittedly, most of the merc groups end up being in BT lore), and you can take, oh, forever between dire and important story missions.

Yeah, they made the story missions not just necessary to advance the story but also the best bang for buck payouts. I feel like I needed to do some story missions just for the cash boost. You kind of need to do the story to ramp up the power curve.

I think the game (which I really like) would have been somewhat better if the merc missions paid somewhat better (say 20% better?) and the story missions paid less, equal to or maybe a bit less than merc missions. That way a player could ramp up while doing merc missions and the reward for doing the story missions would be the story, plus the occasional sweet bonus mech.

Kamea: “This… thing that you’ve built… it isn’t who we are.”

Oh please Obama – I mean Kamea – let me kiss your feet!

Take a drink everytime a character pointedly tells you that he’s doing something not for some undesirable reason, but for a noble one.

The wackiest moment was Ostergaard making sure everyone knew he was acting on his own and not in the name of his state, despite being crazed with rage and grief.

All right, break time until the next patch! No use grinding Pokemon when everything is so slow right now.

Another consequence of the smallish battlefields and short engagement ranges is that there never seems to be a reason or chance really to hit and run or smash and grab. Even when you’re told you can just get in and get out, it’s nearly always quicker and simpler to just kill all the enemies, who conveniently come to you. And the maps are so small that actually fleeing would be somewhat useless.

I don’t think that it is necessarily a progressive thing as it just fits the shallow glamorized knights in space theme. I read a couple of the old 90s novels right before this came out and they are full of this kind of ‘mercenary for hire killing people but also I have a heart of gold’

Weird that people associate conventional virtue with progressive politics and deride it in the same breath. It may be saccharine, but this is a game world where the peons are ruled by nobility. There’s nothing progressive about it. This is a prince valiant story, not a dialectic.