cicobuff
3146
Does it happen when you disable the cinematics?
Expansion time!
The first is out 27 November and adds tropical maps and a new victory condition requiring you to capture points on a map before the enemy. Additionally, it includes 30 hours of new side missions and a few new mechs. The second is urban-warfare focused and out next summer. The third is TBA. I guess I need to go back and finish the campaign at some point.
I’ll be interested in hearing what the consensus is among the group as to whether this is a sufficient amount of new content to warrant another run through.
schurem
3149
man do you really need an excuse to do more BATTLETECH?!
I can count on my hand how often I have felt the need to buy a DLC on day one. I might need to buy the Season Pass.
Thraeg
3151
I thoroughly enjoyed this one, but don’t need to go back right away. I’ll probably revisit it once all three are out.
haha, well, I mean yes and no. I played pretty slowly the last time taking side missions and ended up spending 188 hours. So, it’s really more just do I want to dive into something that long again? Suppose I probably will only I’ll try and make it a faster run, but then if this new content is about beefing up the side mission stuff I might well end up going down the rabbit hole again…
What I would like to see is more combined arms possibilities. VTOL, anti mech Infantry, building garrisons.
I would love to see some real fun scenarios, while you do in other strategy games.
Tim_N
3154
I am probably going to get this first expansion. It will pair very well with the new career mode they have planned for the free 1.3 update: no story missions, no tutorials, just an inner sphere sandbox as a mercenary commander. The flashpoints/sidequests of the expansion, as well as the new mission types that need light/medium mechs will hopefully keep it fresh for quite awhile!
EDIT: here is a link to a dev discussing the details of the new sandbox career mode, it sounds really good: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/developer-diaries-4-career-mode.1123028/
I preordered the season pass. Maybe I’l do a career mode playthrough after all the expansions come out.
I’m going to grab the season pass to show my support. As someone who played on tabletops decades ago, this was my favorite game of this year.
I should do that to. My most played game of the year.
robc04
3158
Is this game overly fiddily managing parts and pilots? Sometimes too much of that stuff can turn me off. I tend to like tactical battles though. I’m not overly interested in giant robots but if the systems are good then I can get past that.
schurem
3159
Depends on ypur definition of overly fiddly. I found it the cat’s ass, the bees knees and the dog’s bollocks, buts just like, my opinion man.
robc04
3160
I guess what I mean is that I don’t want to feel like I constantly need to juggle parts and people. If in between battles I need to change a part here and change a pilot there, that’s fine. Too fiddly is that I need to wade through a dozen parts and try and match them up between 6 mechs.
Pilot management is really straightforward. You level them up in a few skill trees and basically over time decide if they are focused more on close range or long range, then plop them into the appropriate mech for each mission. You just need to keep some spare people around when your best pilot inevitably ends up injured for 200 days, or buys the farm in a lucky headshot.
Mech outfitting can get pretty involved if you are really focused on minmaxing your weapons and armor. Otherwise you’ll mostly have to repair battle damage and just add back any weapons lost during a mission. If you don’t want to experiment you can just match the default loadout each time, tossing on the higher grade versions when you find them in your inventory.
I pretty much agree with everything Brad said. Pilot management is minimal. You can spend a decent amount of time customizing weapons/armor loadouts on your mechframes if you wish, and there is a bit of an art in balancing weapons/damage and heat dissipation for a good mech build. But as Brad’s last sentence states, you can be more of a mech tweaker than a full out mech rebuilder and still do just fine with the game.
Sharpe
3163
I agree with the above: you can play and enjoy Battletech PC without doing very much (if any) customization of mechs. In my view, the biggest advantage of customizing mechs is not so making the “best” or “most efficient” mech builds but rather tailoring the mechs to your playstyle.
An example is the discussions between Legowarrior and I about mech build philosophy: Lego likes mechs with weapons that cover a wide variety of ranges so that he can almost always have a good shot from any range, whereas I prefer mechs with weapons focused on a single range category so that I only shoot when I have a good alpha strike option. Lego’s style is built around maneuver and mine is built around using the Bulwark skill. Interestingly, there is a patch which includes a major nerf to Bulwark in the works, which may mean that my entire mech build philosophy will change for the expansion.
That’s a good example of the synergy between the tactical gameplay and the strategy/design component of customizing mechs. I like both; but customization is optional unless the default loadouts are just really not your style. But since the default loadouts offer a pretty good choice of options, running non-custom mechs is a perfectly viable strategy.
