Battletech by Harebrained Schemes (Shadowrun Returns)

It is fun stomping on vehicles, and annoying as hell when you whiff on the stomp. There are some scary vehicles that pack quite a punch.

Missing a stomp on, say, an SRM carrier?

Sharpe’s guide is great! One other thing I would add: in the early game, mobility is absolutely key. First, mobility (sprinting/jumping) gives you more evasion, which makes you harder to hit – which is good, because your mechs can’t take too many hits, and every hit costs C-bills. Second, my go-to strategy in the early-mid game is to flank enemies and hit their lightly armored rears. For a lot of the lighter mechs, one or two decent hits to the rear can get you into dealing structural damage and crits, which is a nice way to quickly knock enemies down.

Related to that, remember to use your firing arcs both for targeting enemies and also to change where you’re going to take damage. If your right side is damaged, twist so that your left side is more exposed.

I would also recommend the DLC because of the additional mechs and the flashpoints (which are fun little mini-campaigns that provide additional rewards/mechs).

My starting lance last night has an urbie with a ppc that is messing people up. Our first rebuilds of salvage have been a Wasp, and a Panther. I have half the parts for a Griffin-1N, which should give us a little more resilience.

That is one angry trash can.

He just plods along behind everyone and rips off limbs of opposing mechs. Took the head off one poor fella. He is having fun with all of these beat up mechs in the .5 skull missions.

My career game in BTA 3062 is hitting something of a stride. I don’t have more than two or three month’s of operating cash in the bank, usually, but I’m not getting completely obliterated in missions either. Once you hit a sort of tipping point in salvage and start being able to field 220+ tons or so, with some choice in loadouts, it gets a lot better.

Sometimes RNG is fun/terrible, too. Like when a stray shot that misses one guy hits another and crits their engine or takes their head off.

I funded this on Kickstarter but due to life, I’m just getting rolling in the game. I have the vanilla version and I chose GoG instead of Steam (whoops)… So question is, does the Season Pass ever go on sale? I’m happy just playing vanilla now, but having been a fan of these games since Battlemech on the Amiga, I’m sure I’m going to eventually want all of the official extras.

Really solid tips, thank you all, from this dad of small children who doesn’t have a lot of time to figure strategies based on trial and error. (I think my Dark souls days are over! At least for now…)

I would like to thank/blame all of you for making me re-install this game. It’s so good.

823 hours played… :( And I just reinstalled it yesterday.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the DLC on sale on Steam but cannot recall the details. Dunno about gog.com.

My view on the DLC is that I recommend them IF you can get them at a discount. They are easily worth $5 to $10 each IMO but not $20 each.

The DLC does go on sale somewhat regularly, but if you’re on GOG that may limit your options (it’s usually the Steam version that’s on sale). You can track sales for each of the DLCs individually (along with all the other Battletech stuff) through IsThereAnyDeal.com. The Season Pass is the collection of all the DLCs in one package; cheapest historically on GOG is $17, but current is $50.

It may end up being easiest, however, to just buy the “Mercenary Collection” – which is the base game plus all the DLCs – since it may be cheaper to do that than buy the DLCs alone on GoG (cheapest historically is $15, current is $31). You may get a Steam package for that, though. I don’t think that package includes the fancy Shadow Hawk that you got for kickstarting the game, but that’s not a huge loss.

EDIT: I’d reiterate what Sharpe said, too. While I’ve gotten more than my $20/ea. worth of value out of the expansions, it’s way better to get 'em cheap since unless you’re going to play the game multiple times you probably won’t get $60 in value out of the DLC.

Sometimes you just gotta spend the money to get the goods. Especially when it comes to big, stumpy robots.

Vote with your wallet. Big Stompy Robots for the People.

Do any of the mods bulk up the AI to more intelligently try and deal with your lance’s range profile?

I love the game but I felt like the AI would constantly close with me when they had a range advantage and I had overwhelming short range firepower. Made it a lot easier than having to try and manage position.

Does the game still take an Age to load? I would like to return with all the DLC at some point.

Yes, it does.

They improved the performance of the base game somewhat over time, although it is still slower than i would prefer. However, the added DLC then took some of those gains back. The urban maps in particular are slow to load. It’s unfortunate in that I feel the devs never really demonstrated technical mastery or efficient programming with their chosen engine, but the actual gameplay is really strong and the content ended up being quite plentiful with good breadth and depth. It’s not like a “buggy POS” kind of game but rather a game where you can feel the rivets occasionally straining under the load.

I can’t say if the mods do this or not, but in the BTA 3062 games I’m playing, the enemy tends to use its artillery and long range firepower quite well. They will close with you, but they don’t seem like lemmings at all.