I actually don’t really want a story heavy campaign either, I’d prefer something like Battle Brothers where you start with a small squad on a random galaxy/map and just… go as long as you can until you retire, so to speak. I don’t mind some light story telling, but the less of that there is the more replayability there would be (assuming it’s that kind of campaign).
For now. If this is successful, and I bet it will be, they’ll make more. And if we don’t get the Clans in game 2 I will be shocked. Game 3 at the absolute latest.
They can put the Clans in a DLC for this game if they don’t won’t to wait.
I’d be firmly in favour of that, because that makes it easier for me to ignore.
I want combined arms if possible. I really would love to have hidden infantry pop out of harden buildings with SRMs or use hovercraft missile boats.
Both of these were difficult to pull off on table top, but it would be awesome on the PC.
Also, I wants my LAMs.
Dezgra Surat Freebirth Scum! I will only use one mech in my lance to defeat you. And it is already shot up and steaming hot on the verge of shutdown.
Oh who am I kidding. Clans, Kerensky and all that was really lame. Wish I could unread some of those books I bought in the 80’s LOL.
I backed this. Can’t wait.
There are at least tanks and hovercraft, although they may be AI opponent only. I saw them in the play tests, but never saw the devs using them. Infantry I don’t really care about as you’d only notice them when you had to clean them out of your treads at the end of the mission.
I don’t get the reason for all this hate of the Clans… that people couldn’t restrain themselves on the table top and ignore Clan ROE’s and min max designs to come up with ridiculously overpowered beam boats was a problem with the metagame… Is more a people problem than a concept problem.
On the computer games, the Clans have always turned out to be challenging opponents that can be outwitted and outflanked…just like in the better 1990s novels.
I’ll mention Car Wars again, but it has so many parallels with BT. In the beginning, both games were relatively simple and straightforward, as well as being relatively balanced. You pretty much got cars/mechs with actual weaknesses offsetting their strengths; e.g. that Assault mech was pretty badassed, but its 2/3 movement sucked when a bunch of 6/9 or 8/12 (!) little shits were pinging you to death.
But then, FASA and SJG games have to make money. Which they did by introducing, a bunch of new OP components that badly unbalanced the game (a decked-out MadCat really doesn’t have much to fear, or a Nova loaded down with ER medium lasers and double heat sinks).
I preferred the standard Inner Sphere versus the Clans but the Clan-era had its merits. It was interesting with new mechs, opponents and added a whole new political dynamic to the game. I believe that clans caused two major traps that were easy for GMs to fall into that made the game less fun.
(1) Most people do not fighting losing wars and a true clan campaign would wipe out most mercenary commands. So most GMs would either create a campaign that was not much fun as it wiped out the players or a campaign that was too easy which made players wonder why the rest of the universe was not slapping the clans back. Crafting one that was both challenging and survivable was very, very difficult because the clan mechs were so unbalanced. So most player-run games fell apart because of mediocre or bad GMs who simply could not balance the engagements.
(2) Double heat sinks made mechs too powerful and it was easy to stack weapons. Pulse lasers, ER PPCs, Gauss Rifles and the like each seemed to have their own rules. When all of this adds up, it made the game more complicated and more range-based. The close combat aspects were greatly reduced and something was lost when things like DfA were no longer real possibilities. Players also had to understand more rules and it made teaching the game to a newcomer far more cumbersome.
It does not mean that the clan stuff was bad but it was much more challenging to put together a decent campaign while accepting new players versus the 3025 era.
Ah, the memories! :-) Great summary, mate.
While I don’t object the Clans being part of these new line of BT computer games, I totally understand the HBS old hands wanted to grapple with the two items above on their initial release. I don’t think either of those problems have been solved in any of the rulesets published in the last 25 years.
I liked clan era because it gave me more options to build awesome mech.
That, and I really liked by LB-X 10 and Thunder LRMs.
And the C3 computers.
So Mario Mechs?
In competitive BT, level 2 tech (Clans) came down to CER-LL, targeting computers, and occasionally CLPL/CMPL. Unless you secured a favorable map, everything else was secondary. Even with vanilla mechs, there were plenty of munchie designs that could obliterate anything the IS could field point-for-point.
Didn’t you hear? This game’s basically a clone of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, with Mechs instead of Yoshi.
I am all over this. It gives me a nice window of roughly a month to play Surviving Mars before this.
Whoa, wait, what? Was there a battletech cartoon? That has a distinctly 80s look to it, how could I have missed that?
It was mid 90s, and yes there was.
Mate get on it.
Ah well 90s, probably explains why I missed it. Still, I was watching Batman The Animated Series in the 90s, not like I was too “grown up” for a cartoon, and I’m even less grown up now. Off to see where I can find these!
It was okay, but in the end, it was a poor man’s Exosquad.
Thankful, it wasnt horrible like the heavy gear cartoon. That was the worst!
And all of them could have been good.