The developers read these forums. They probably implemented the feature when they read your post.
(Not really. Joking. :P)
cicobuff
3587
For what it’s worth, I actually went through what you faced when I first played this. I got squashed by the dropship, before they fixed that bug. After all the battle and I won, I got squashed!
I was so annoyed. But my second play through went MUCH faster because I already knew what I was doing. So you WON’T be going through another hour. Probably less than 30mins.
If you try it, you’ll get to enjoy a good game.
Did you accidentally start an Ironman game? You should have been able to save in-mission. That very first campaign mission is one of the longest in the game with like four enemy groupings to handle. So I recommend saving after each enemy group is handled. And if you are seriously damaged after the first two just restart.
As I recollect the first mission does a good job of teaching you, painfully, why its important to utilize cover and focus fire on enemies.
I encounter save game bugs during story missions. Basically, you shouldn’t do it.
Tman
3590
I don’t see how I would have been in Ironman mode, but the save button was greyed out when I first tried to save after the first encounter.
I encountered a save bug that wasted about 3hrs of progress in the career mode.
The stupid directory’s permissions somehow interferes with the ability to save.
It’s horrible.
Benhur
3592
What load out would you use for those Griffons?
Sharpe
3593
I posted this in the Bargain thread but it’s relevant here: there is a Steam Publisher sale for Paradox 5/14 to 5/18 and the base Battletech game is 75% off ($10) and the DLC is 50% off ($10 each). If you are a turn based strategy gamer and haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet, this is a good time. Also if you own the base game but felt the DLC were too pricey, the DLC are worth $10 each IMO ($20, not so much).
Tim_N
3594
I was very disappointed by the DLC for this game. Sure, they’re fine, but there’s so much potential that got wasted.
When the game was in development the developers had this habit of answering every kind of “will there be X in the game in future?” question by saying “with success everything is possible”.
I thought the game was successful, it appeared to sell alot. We only got expansions that tightened up the core game and fleshed out what was already there, along with releasing new mechs and environments. I was kindof hoping that they were half-focusing on a sequel, but then they announced that they’re leaving the battletech universe for the forseeable future.
Mechwarrior 5 also being a disappointment compounds the disappointment here, I suppose. At the end of the day this was a good game and I am glad to have played it, but the fantasy battletech strategy game will still only exist in my head for potentially forever.
I really liked Harebrain’s Shadowrun games and I played the old Battletech games a lot so I’ve had this on my wishlist forever. I’ve read so many negative things about game performance and bugs never being fixed that’s it’s kind of put me off buying it. Did they ever get things straightened out or is it still a bit of a mess?
For whatever it’s worth, I’ve played the game for 80+ hours and never had a problem.
Whatever their expectations were, or whoever was setting those expectations, they were not met, because after launch it seemed like they were ramping down production pretty quickly to get out of the investment.
I do feel like the very rule set of BattleTech is BattleTech’s biggest weakness, and this version leaned heavily on the old rules even as they tried to modernize and update them. It still ended up as BattleTech Pokémon though, which is what happens when you follow the letter of the rules.
Ironically the second biggest weakness is the very fictional world that ended up getting spun out - basically every fictional year past 3050 the world gets further and further off the rails. Unfortunately they made a toy-game system without toys, and the fiction suffered. You can imagine a paintable miniature version of BattleTech that survived to this day.
But, yea, i’m sad it didn’t take off. There are so many possible settings that could have been had.
I’m thinking that you believe that you should like the whole BattleTech thing, but you actually pretty much don’t. I mean, the ruleset and the fluff behind it are pretty much all there is.
Citation needed. No, not being smarmy here – I’d be interested in reading the sources of this business decision just for my own edification. Although I do have to say that I don’t see evidence of this - the game was in development for some time and was continued to supported for, what, 2-3 years?
For yourself, perhaps? Again, I’ve heard no reports about HBS saying anything like this.
My own opinion of the game is pretty simple: it’s a decent conversion of the TT rules set in a reasonable wrapper, a B-level production with B-level production values. At one time, when my hair wasn’t so grey, I would have committed fraud and usury to have had something like this. (I mean, I’ve kept a pre-built installation of WinUAE loaded up with Battlefort on an old thumb drive for a over a decade) . Alas, much of my boyish enthusiasms have dimmed, and big stompy robots just aren’t as sexy as they used to be.
Well, you know what i’m talking about. Everyone feels 3025 is “canon” as the kids say because that’s what BattleTech is. Everyone believes 3050 is “canon” but can pretty easily understand how the added Clan tech breaks the game without additional rules to restrict. By around 3080 or whatever there’s so much nonsense probably a good part of the community would be happy to reboot the fiction at that point.
If you accept every Technical Readout as being canon past 3055 you end up with like a hundred or more stupid mechs that look dumb, lots of fiction drama that feels like drama for the sake of drama, and such a wide game space that the system falls apart.
Imagine let’s say, Warhammer 40k, but there are 300 kinds of Space Marines. And half of them looked like their were conceived by your kid brother scribbled on the margin of his notebook math class scribbles in high school.
A lot of the game balance systems were already fundamentally flawed - the relationship between ammo and damage out put, for ex. There’s also a lot of fiction that’s changed in emphasis over the years - originally the “pilot roll” and pilot health were supposed to reflect that 1) pilots were neuro-linked to the Mech (the 80s were very cyber) and 2) cockpits were hotboxes of death because of the heat generated. Technically a lot of that stuff is still in the game but it’s basically diminished to be window dressing rather than a core element. Mechs were supposed to be super rare and Mechwarriors like an inherited nobility, but that also diminished pretty quickly because it really didn’t make sense with a centralized government. It’s all still in there, more or less, but again, depreciated to the point it can’t really be pointed at and noticed.
The point of all this grousing is that unless you want to reboot post-3050 fiction BattleTech has nowhere to go. Unless Hairbrained took it on themselves to reboot the entire fiction at some point. And in fact even getting past 3039 causes such fictional issues that the core setting, the decaying remnants of a stellar empire, that it’s probably better to stop before you even get there.
But all these fictional issues are because the core of what BattleTech was was selling rule books of Mechs. The very need to sell more rule books, with more mechs, more equipment, more stuff, almost inevitably spoiled the soup. Every additional Technical Readout had to justify itself, how suddenly in 20 years there are a hundred new Mech models, and keep the fiction rolling without actually going anywhere. GW has more or less perfected fiction moving in stasis - but they have far more resources and time to do so. I don’t blame FASA for not figuring that stuff out in the early / middle 90s, but they never really did.
Successful games have to keep churning out more of the same. Film at 11. In other stories, sky is blue, water is wet, and it seems like death and taxes are unavoidable.
I mean, yea. Maybe I read between the lines too much, but while I loved Hairbrained BattleTech I could just see all the cracks showing up, not with their implementation but the core systems. They did their best within those limitations, and I think it turned out very well tbh. I guess i’m projecting that it would be hard to keep “Mech-mentum” going if the first game wasn’t as popular as they wanted. They did crank out 3 Shadowrun games, though to be fair by comparison those were much less technical to do.
Seppey
3602
Have you seen the new Primaris marines?
I think people feel that these kind of things need to keep growing to show they are alive (and therefore playable).
I thought this game was good, i didnt have huge expectation and they exceeded it. It is kinda slow and of course i want more, but I still play it occasionally, especially with mods.
I’m in the group that feels the game is “good but not great.” Which is fine, given the play time I’ve gotten out of it. While I’ve always rather liked the low-level core 'Mech combat stuff in BT games, my real love is for the mid-high level stuff, the planetary invasion level stuff and the fiction that took place in the pre-Clan era. I game that riffed off of BattleForce type stuff would be my preferred approach to the BT universe, as at that level you can avoid a lot of the wonkiness. But speaking as someone with a bookshelf full of BT novels, I will admit that conceptual depth, coherence, and narrative quality are not hallmarks of this franchise.
I loved that the game was a throw back to the boardgame, but better. They really did a good job on porting the rules, but also balancing them a bit better (so that Light Mechs have some sort of purpose).
I think the game failed in the limitations it put in. The limitations of 4 mechs made assault mechs more powerful and necessary then ever. Being able to land more then one lance of mechs would have made Lights and Mediums more worth while, especially if there was a still a tonnage cap.
The other limitation was the lack of combined arms. Don’t get me wrong, mechs are center stage, but mechs are usually supported by other units. Most mercenaries were supported by infantry, tanks, and VTOLs. I wanted the full merc experience by running combined arms.
The one thing I do missing is high tech Inner Sphere weapons. The pre clan invasion but post Helm Discovery, when LBX-10 and Swarm LRMs were coming up.
I wouldn’t have minded some Clan fighting. It would have been cool to be outclassed against Clan mechs, and be able to salvage clan weapons and mechs. It would be cool to fight an AI that was more then just more mechs.
Someone didn’t buy all the DLCs.
In my last play-through with all DLCs I had a Marauder (MAD-2R SLDF Variant) with two Ultra AC-5s and four ER Medium Lasers backed by a load of double heat sinks and some jump jets. It wrecked everything in sight.
