3266

I still think the intro cut scene is the greatest BattleTech thing ever made; it’s also so so much a better setup than the silly Warfapper 40k thesis statement about uh… Archaeon… no… Horus! that turbostupid Horus Heresy emo silliness. Even if the BT universe is still a bit thin around the edges and starts to not make sense if you squint.

I’m also kicking myself I didn’t spot them the 1k-2k to get my name in the game as a “hero” recruitable. Never forgive myself for that! I just… didn’t want the silly jacket.

3267

It baffles me they can’t fix this.

3268

Strangely I managed to cope with BATTLETECH load times just fine, while Shogun2’s load time were an absolute ahowstopper for me. Weird.

3269

Agreed. Shogun 2 ran like a dog on every PC I had. I remember it taking forever to load and it was prone to crashing. Every time it did, I was forced to wait 10 minutes for it to load again and I would have lost my entire battle.

Battletech is not particularly snappy but it does not get too bad for me as long as I log off every couple of hours to clear out the persistent memory leak.

3270

Maybe cuz now you can alt-tab and do stuff while you wait :p

3271

Shogun 2 had probably the worst initial load times of any game I’ve played, but once loaded it ran pretty well for me, and the transitions between strategy and battle map were not too bad.

Battletech on the other hand has long initial load times, but not as bad as Shogun 2. However, the strategy / battle transitions are much worse than Shogun 2, although not quite as bad as that initial Shogun 2 load delay.

I can handle a long delay on start up, I just fire up the game and go make coffee, etc. But the multi-minute delays during the middle of a play session just kill me. Sure I can alt-tab out but that blows the pacing and immersion to hell for if I do it too much. And the transitional load times in Battletech are so bad I want to alt-tab before and after every single mission, and the game involves a lot of missions.

I tried it again tonight; gutted my way through initial load up, and then just lost my crap when it sloooooooowly loaded the first battle screen.

So, yeah, they need to fix that. I love the game but the transitional load times are just hell.

And, they are definitely worse after Flashpoint than they were before, for me. They’ve always been long, but now they are just ridiculous.

3272

Anarchy Online. I rest my case.

Still waiting for it to load. I’ll get back to you.

3273

So the Urban Warfare expansion is out today but I’m holding off for now. The “urban warfare” elements leave me underwhelmed. The only real draw is they claim “a wide variety” of new flashpoint missions but I was semi disappointed by the relatively sparse flashpoint offerings in the Flashpoint expansion. If this expansion actually does provide a decent helping of flashpoints that are interesting, I will probably pick it up. Otherwise, probably not.

Any impressions thus far?

3274

So, we are still missing the ability to do combined arms and large battles? I remember that was the whole point of the Urban Box set, you could set up infantry ambushes in buildings, and set up turrets.

3275

Our review won’t be ready till Friday unfortunately.

3276

I will be playing this over the weekend, so I can chime in with some thoughts.

I thought there were not enough Flashpoints as well but I preordered all the expansions because I do love some Battletech.

3277

I should mention one reason I am hesitant to pick up the new expansion is that patching up will overwrite all the custom balance changes I made to the .json files. I’ve been experimenting with many variations of balance changes off and on for a long time, based on that spreadsheet legowarrior made of the various weapon stats (AC2s and AC10s are too heavy, as are large lasers!, most arm/leg mods are too heavy/too big, the “big engine” weight cost on some mechs (I’m looking at you Banshee) are ridiculous, etc.) - I like trying my own custom fixes.

(For those interested, my current testing makes me feel a weight of 5 tons for AC2s and weight of 10 tons for AC10s is much more balanced. I’m not sure if a weight of 4 tons or 3 tons is best for Large Lasers yet. As for the arm/leg mods and the big engines, more testing is required.)

3278

I liked the game a ton playing through it, but this is one of the general issues with Battletech itself for me. Loadouts are super unbalanced because the lore is basically that everyone is making due with the scraps that they have. AC/2’s are kind of dumb for mech vs mech battles but hey we have a plant that makes AC/2’s on one of our planets so fuck it this mech is getting one. So in theory a lot of the game is making due with what you have.

However, once you collect up all the best stuff, there’s no real reason to run other things except for nostalgia. I basically ran stock mechs for the first 20-30 hours just to get more of what felt like ‘Battletech’ to me vs other turn based strategy games.

I can see the idea of balancing out loadouts to make more variety compelling but (for me personally) at that point I might as well just play a game that is built around the idea of parity. For me it has to be an unbalanced cluster or it isn’t Battletech (of course I don’t think this needs to be the case for anyone else)

3279

Bah. Even though I set my Battletech on Steam to “only update when I launch it” and I was it launching it using a non-Steam shortcut, it updated today anyway. Damn Steam Imperialism!

So, since my tweaks are overwritten I may as well buy Urban Warfare and start a new career. I will report back in a few days or so.

3280

That setting has never worked in my experience. It’s one of Steam’s (many) failings. It’s also the reason I enormously appreciate devs and publishers who provide roll back support under the beta feature, which incidentally BATTLETECH has since it’s a Paradox game. RIght click it in your library and go settings -> beta and you can roll back to whatever version you’d like.

3281

Honestly I am totally burned out on this game. I loved it. But I’m not sure that this can bring me back.

3282

Roll back does not help in this situation as the patching process overwrote my custom edits. I could simply re-edit all the .json files back to the way I had it but I will just go ahead and try the new content instead. (Then, I will probably edit stuff again later.)

Edit: I fired up a new game and hey it turns out this patch did not overwrite my changes (I’m guessing they made no changes to the weapon stats so they didn’t touch the base .json files with the weapon data). Which means I can continue to enjoy my self-mods.

3283

I keep debating on the season pass. The DLCs just seem so overpriced, but at the same time I enjoy the base game quite a bit. I keep expecting some better discount, but it doesn’t seem to be coming. Any general thoughts?

3284

I keep putting off buying the game. Maybe it’s unfair, but I figure that if I wait 18 months the game will be polished smooth as glass, and the performance issues will get ironed out. This is probably very unrealistic.

3285

I just fired up a career. I just had my original campaign save before that I was playing when it originally came out. They seem to start you out with a somewhat decent lance in the career mode. It gave me a Centurion, a Vindicator, a Cicada, and a Commando. I ran a couple missions, but no urban fights yet.