I’ve never played the tabletop game. Some concepts are pretty universal, like attacking from behind or higher elevation is good. I wish they could have been bothered to cover all of the concepts though. I’m pretty anal about wanting to make informed decisions.
Is picking specific attack target locations something that I’m expected to do most of the time or is it situational?
Is there a decent short guide on this stuff? I never played BT tabletop.
Good question. Focus-firing on spots is always beneficial, but you can burn up your points pretty quickly if you use the special abilities to do so. With that in mind, positioning your mechs to attack from the sides or the rears to limit the potential spots you’ll connect with can be an efficient way of pulling this off. An attack from the left, for instance, will hit the head, left arm, left torso, or left leg. So if you’ve already weakened one of those with opening salvos, run around to that side to take better advantage. Of note, you also want to shield your own wounds via such positioning.
This one’s decent, although I believe the summary of mechwarrior stats at the bottom are slightly out of date (they got tweaked a bit).
Mechs are “dead” when one of the following occurs:
If you see a red hex on the map, something is going to land there, soon. That’s a warning; DO NOT GO THERE, as any mech is instantly lost if it shares the space when whatever arrives…
Chance to hit
When targeting an enemy, you’ll see the percent chance each weapon has to hit. Note that missiles fly in a cluster; launch 20 with a 70% chance to hit, and you’ll likely have 14 land somewhere on your target.
Heat
All weapons generate some heat. When you are aiming at an enemy, those weapons which can fire will contribute a specific amount of heat and this is shown via a horizontal bar on the left side of the screen. If your heat is going to get too high, you’ll have minor internal damage and potentially shut down until the mech has a chance to cool. You can choose to disable weapons which will cause too much heat (or to preserve ammo) by clicking on the circles by each. Note you can use flamers (sadly quite short-range and limited ammo) to add to your enemy’s heat and potentially shut down their mechs.
Attacks from behind
Rear armor on all mechs is MUCH less than front armor. As such, make sure to not put your back to the enemy if you can help it. On the flip side, if you can hit your enemy from the rear, light 'em up!
Eck’s (that Dan linked) is excellent, but a bit outdated. I’ve been making a lot of use of Shymer’s lately, which is also very good:
Steam Community :: Guide :: Shymer’s Guide to Battletech (Flashpoint update 1.4)
Thanks for the info Dan. So if I’m planning a move and it shows a red line between my mech an an enemy I’m assuming that it has direct line of sight. Will any weapon within range have some % hit displayed? So if the weapon card doesn’t have any % hit filled in the weapon is out of range from that spot?
Edit; Never mind, after I click to select the spot the to hit info fills in.
Yep! You got it.
Edit - oh, if you’re targeting a knocked-over mech, it’s a little weird; you’ll still have the same indications of chances to hit with your weapons, but you’ll also see new percentages when picking the body part you’re aiming for. These are the chances those specific parts will get struck IF the first “die roll” to hit the mech is successful. A success on the first but a miss on this second roll just means another body part gets hit.
Yeah, I’ve never played the tabletop version of the game. I had no idea what I was doing in the first mission. I assumed I couldn’t move and fire in the same turn, or that moving and firing in the same turn would give you an accuracy disadvantage. And then when I saw the enemy moving and firing in the same turn, I figured I could too. So I tried sprinting and firing, which didn’t work at all. Needless to say, things didn’t go well.
A friend who has played the game a lot came over and helped explain the key concepts to me when I replayed the first mission. That was incredibly helpful. No problems digging in after that.
That doesn’t help as much as you’d think, since certain significant elements of the game are not direct translations from tabletop. For example, there are no hardpoints in tabletop.
Well, except for the clan OmniMechs.
Many of the features seem to be ripped from the table top, at least at first glance. The mech design and slot system seems to exactly like that used by table top system, although the hit points and heat are a bit different (I think heat is multiplied by 3, and the hit points by 8 or something).
The initiative system is different, as are the perks, but the one thing I didn’t like was how you can’t run and shoot at the same time. In the table top, you can run (move 50% faster) at the cost of heat and attack penalty. This change has meant that jump jets are much more effective, since you can jump and shot at the same time.
At the cost of an additional attack penalty, anyway. Running has twice the costs that walking did. I was a bit sad to see that there was no hit penalty for walking versus standing still in the game.
The benefit of running is that on flat ground, running on the table top was actually faster than jump jets.
I wonder why running was taken out as a move action? Would Jump Jets be less useful if we had running?
Jumping still provides the effective +1 to opponents to-hit (on top of distance traveled), but they completely nerfed your own to-hit penalties from jumping (which is +3 in tabletop). So it seems like they really tried to give jumping a broader appeal.
I think it really comes down to the broadening of the hit dice. Instead of it being based on a pair of die rolling 2-12, it’s now 1-100, which opened up more room for discretization of penalties/bonuses and the ability to encourage certain behaviour. The total removal of attacking penalty after jumping is huge.
Jumping is almost the default movement now, tbh.
A big problem (for me) is that you can’t regain your elation pips and also retain LOS with just walking, or you’ll only gain one pip, so with jumping you (used) to get full evasion pips and retain omnidirectional facing control.
However on release you seemed to get full evasion lips for jumping no matter how far you jumped but i noticed recently I was getting far fewer pips, even just one, for jumping, Maybe this was changed?
Keep in mind that jump distance is dependent upon the number of jets installed. For mobility reasons, you may only equip your mech with 1 or 2 of them instead of up to the max (as specified by the max walking speed defined by the engine size of the particular mech in question).
I don’t think it’s changed; I thought jumping always provided an evasion benefit scaled on distance traveled.
Maybe it used to give 3 evasion pips as a baseline then? I’m pretty sure I remember getting 3 pips no matter how far I jumped around release. But! might be misremembering.
I picked this game up at launch and played for several hours, having a blast, but then other games started grabbing at my attention (which happens from time to time…) and I shelved into my Backlog catagory intending to get back into it. Well, with the expansion dropping I thought I’d maybe see what we have for other DLC during the Steam sale, and I was shocked to see the game at pretty low/mixed reviews. It looks like the negative reviews started just in the last few weeks, however.
What happened? What is everyone complaining about? Should I skip the DLC? I see there are two now (Flashpoint, Urban Warfare, and an upcoming one that hasn’t been announced yet). Should I keep it on the backburner for now?
As someone who loved the game (it has its flaws but it does Battletech for me amazingly), looking at the recent negative reviews it looks mostly like a lot of people with literal hundreds of hours complaining about the DLC not being bigger.
I wouldn’t let them turn you off. I loved it at full price.
I kind of figured it was something like that, it usually is when you go from mostly positive reviews to a bunch of complaining right after new DLC drops. Thanks for the advice!
The DLC are in fact under-whelming for the cost, but the base game is so good, I recommend the base game. If you can pick up the DLC on sale, it’s worth it. I’ve bought the DLC at full price, as I am OK with supporting the company, but honestly, they are relatively small DLC for their price point.
I have to agree, especially as the flashpoint missions won’t occur in the campaign until it’s done (they’ll be mixed in from the start in career mode, however). Don’t get me wrong, the DLCs add some really cool stuff, but they’re overpriced (especially when you can use mods to add mechs or expand the map). I’d only get the DLC when it’s on sale.
