I’m a ways into a (finally) more or less successful career run. Fielding seven MechWarriors on most drops, running mostly mediums and a couple of heavies. The skills are finally getting to the point where I can focus on designing some platforms that don’t have to load up on weapons just to have a chance to do any damage.
All the talk has made me reinstall. Since my computer is weak I went with Battletech Extended 3025 CE with the 3039 start to make sure I see at least a few cool new toys.
I’m still in mostly my starting mechs but I have picked up a Raven with an ECM package that I don’t remember seeing before. It looks like it will be great later but right now it isn’t that much use in close range slugfests with pirates.
I have a new system, any ways to easily install the mods? I had a bear of a time with it the first time.
The Battletech Extended 3025 CE has pretty clear installation instructions. I just re-installed it a week ago, so feel free to ask if you have any questions.
I can’t speak to BTA 3062, since I’ve never tried that one.
BTA 3062, is probably even easier than BTE to install as it has one installer to run that handles both installing BTA and the Community Asset Bundle, and I think even runs the modtek injector. In both cases they are pretty straightforward.
- Install and run the community asset pack. This installs, well, all the community stuff. It’s a BIG download, as in many GB. Make sure the cache dir is set to a drive with room.
- Download and install BT Extended 3025 CE.
- In the modfolder, there will now be a .modtek folder. Open it and run the executable.
Every month or so, rerun the community asset pack exe. It will look for updates to the CAP and install them.
That’s it.
This is actually much more clear, thanks - the Nexus page says it requires a clean mods folder, yet it also requires the CAB. That struck me as a wee bit of a contradiction which just confused the hell out of my simple brain, lol.
Now THATs clear! Thanks
3062 is simple as can be, really, so either one is probably an easy thing to do.
I did learn something about vehicles, though. If you field one, and it gets destroyed, it seems you are out the whatever huge price you paid for it, as they don’t seem to be repairable…ouch.
The longer I play in a career the more I feel I should know more of the lore. I really don’t know who are the “good guys.” For that matter I still have troubles keeping the names of the Houses matched up with the names of the political entities.
The lore, particularly the books, don’t really pick one “good guy” side IIRC, though the most familiar feeling to us would probably be things like the Federated Suns or the Lyran Commonwealth; both are pseudo-Western European style monarchial thingies. The Cappelan Confederation is House Liao is, well, China and Russia through a filter that is part PRC, part USSR, and all cheese, while Draconis Combine is mostly House Kurita as Space Samurai basically. The Free Worlds League is nominally a democracy but really a House Marik military dictatorship of sorts. I can’t keep them all straight (this site helps).
Comstar is a sort of high tech priesthood/church cum technobabble cult that historically kept the Hyperpulse generators going, the things that allow communication between systems. The history is intricate and confusing, but essentially the Clan Invasions wound up having Comstar ditch the quasi-religious bits and lose a lot of power. The Word of Blake group you might hear about in the game is a splinter that wanted to hold on to the zealory.
And of course the Clans, each with its animal totem identity, bigotry against people born from actual women (“freebirths”), obsession with genetics (sort of like Space Marines, come to think of it, or vice versa perhaps), and bad-ass tech. In the lore, Wolf, and Jade Falcon seem to come off the best in terms of likeability, though I recall some Ghost Bear and Nova Cat stuff too. Really though there isn’t much to pick from in terms of which Clan is better than another in most cases.
tl;dr, it matters not one whit. The lore features good characters from pretty much every faction, and bad ones as well. Some characters switch factions. Every faction has its bloodthirsty, power mad zealots and its noble heroes. Etc. If you are not a Clanner, any Clan can be considered the bad guys at the level of the game. As a merc, though, the only thing you need to do is balance relationships. It becomes difficult to maintain good relations with all the factions because missions tend to put one against the other. You can I suppose just take anti-pirate missions, but those get stale and the cooler ones are tied to factions usually. As your rep gets better, you get access to more missions and Flashpoints, and the opposite is true too. Nothing like spending $100,000 and a month to get to a system only to find that all of the juicy contracts are locked behind a reputation wall.
My comments are based on BTA 3062, though, so some of the nuances might be different in a vanilla play through. The basics are the same though–none of the empires/houses/factions are really “good” or “bad.”
Remember: 1980’s edge here. No “good guys”. Think grimdark, only American and with stompy robots.
Yeah, the setting and lore aren’t that interesting here. It enthralled me as a teen, but with more cynical adult eyes I can see it’s just a thinly-veiled grimdark rip-off of the actual dark ages in Europe after the fall of Rome. As an original story, it’s weak. As a plausible-enough backdrop for endless wars of stompy giant robots, it’s perfectly serviceable.
Oh yes, indeed. I confess to having a shelf of BattleTech novels, and I’ve read most of them multiple times, but it is very much a sort of guilt pleasure, as they are wildly inconsistent in quality and generally, um, not exactly Ulysses, ya know?
I mean, it’s hard to take anything seriously that features ginormous fusion-powered battle robots as the epitome of far-future warfare in the first place. It gets especially ludicrous when you realize that all of those stompy robots are death traps, poorly engineered, horrendously vulnerable, and stupidly impractical. The whole shebang is about suspension of disbelief for the wow factor, and it works really well as long as you don’t take it too seriously.
Yeah, I read a decent number of novels when I was younger and the reality of the lore is just that it doesn’t really make any sense. It is just wildly inconsistent between different authors and plot lines and doesn’t really fit together at all.
I found a lot of them fun escapist romps, but there’s not much to ‘get’ from the lore.
Yea FASA didn’t have the luxury of decades of iteration that other game worlds that did not die have had, so don’t peel too far back on the layers of Battletech lore if you don’t want to br disappointed. The lore is very 1980s Americana and Cold War and full of bite and bobs of what feels like anachronistic material.
Hairbrained did a lot of updating on the edges of the lore as well, and 2017 Battletech feels a lot more rich and fleshed out already than 1993 Battletech.
To me imo Battletech “stops” after the Battle of Tukayyid and the clan invasion halts. After that the lore more or less descends into “stuff happening to sell increasingly silly toys for an increasingly marginal product”.
Yeah, the story arcs worth thinking about kind of peter out or flat out end around then. Everything else is the game world on life support. But it doesn’t matter, because the combat bits are still fun, and that’s always been what it’s about.
I completely agree with you. I really enjoyed the Jade Falcon Trilogy, and how it ended in stale mate.
How Comcast used every trick in the book to defeat the Clan and pulled out all the stops.
Then again, you do have the trial between Jade Falcon and Clan Wolf, with the Crusaders versus the Wardens, the role of the Wolf Dragoons in resettling the Wolf Clan, and then the politics of Clan vs Clan.
I do like the idea of Innersphere tech coming up with new things that the Clans don’t have.
Wouldn’t mind having C3 computers in the game. Or LAMs!
LOL! I played Battletech back in the 80’s so I can agree completely with the feel of grimdark Cold War mixed with dark ages Europe ideas. I just like fluff in games and was wondering how much of a dick I was being by aiding the Capellans against St. Ives.
You’re a mercenary! Don’t worry about who you’re helping. It’s also kind of unofficial lore that no matter who you help you’re probably not changing the course of anything too important, unless you’re a merc company of regiment size or larger.