If someone is behind you then you are doing it wrong. Stay behind everyone else, keep the AC/5s peppering the opposition and light anyone up with a full salvo if anyone gets close. I like that mech.
One of the fun pars of the game was taking some of these oddball mechs and making them work. Not something stupid like the Charger (that was inexcusable) but take mechs like the Hatchetman or Scorpion and put them into positions to succeed was a blast. It is easy to win when you have Warhammers and Awesomes. It is much more fun to win when you have a lance with some weird shit and you faceroll the enemy.
I still have a whole bookshelf of BattleTech novels, bought on ebay years ago because the originals I had read had all been lost. I might even re-read some of them.
I’m enjoying that part of my MekHQ/Megamek mercenary campaign. Sure, we have an epic 0+/1+ pilot in an Awesome leading the company, but we also have a bunch of weird chassis, like a pair of Lancelots, a Locust (whose pilot has the current assassin crown; all four of her kills are mechs), a Vulcan, and of course a Rifleman. (The company’s second; the first one got blown up in its first battle.)
A lot of it comes down to pilots, and particularly to having good gunners.
I totally agree, and that was a big part of what I didn’t like about the clan tech. While the various clan mechs still have strengths and weaknesses, they are just generally so much more balanced and can hold their own. The 3025 tech really needs smart combined arms approaches to work.
Is there a good online primer on BattleTech lore? Maybe something as simple as a rundown of the different mechs and houses that’s friendly to someone who knows almost nothing about it? My only exposure to the universe is through MechWarrior 2 and 3, and that’s been a minute. I doubt it matters too much to play the game, but the way you guys keep going on about it has made me curious.
To be more pedantic, the original MechWarrior pen and paper game added an RPG layer to the traditional BattleTech hex-based tabletop game. In video gaming however, ‘MechWarrior’ games tended to be first-person affairs while the old ‘BattleTech’-branded games, such as Crescent Hawks, were more turn-based top down. To add further confusion, you had the ‘MechCommander’ series being an RTS.
Outside of the PC, I only played the Wargames. I didn’t understand the appeal of the RPG, when you could just blasting each other with giant mechs.
That being said, since Shadowrun and Battletech are being revived, I wonder if they will tacke Renegade Legion? Sadly, I never got to play with Gravy Tanks, despite my older brothers owning the game.
I played in one or two MechWarrior RPG campaigns (pen and paper, face to face, real people) and they were pretty fun. If you got into the BattleTech lore, it was a reasonable SciFi RPG universe, with cool 'Mech combat. Not as intriguing as, say, Fading Suns, but cool.
i enjoyed smashing the giant robots together, but the most fun I had in the BT universe was with the Mechwarrior RPG.
It helped that we had an excellent GM, but all the stuff that spun up from trying to find replacement parts, ammunition and other supplies plays straight to the compromises mentioned by Fishbreath in his MegaMek game. It’s why it resonates with me so strongly when scharmers writes “Succession War era garbage” because boy did I drop into combat in some garbage.
The Mechwarrior RPG is why I was thrilled to hear this game’s campaign area will be in The Reach. It means I might run into House Marik forces on the field and dice rolls made ~25 years ago mean I will outright murder those people.
