Battletech by Harebrained Schemes (Shadowrun Returns)

Yay that means more mechs.

I was watching a “combat basics” video and Height and Terrain do indeed introduce important factors. For example, from higher up your ballistic weapons will have more range and from lower elevations direct fire weapons will be blocked by terrain, indicated by a straight line being drawn to your target, but indirect weapons (such as LRMs) will have a slight upward curve to the line, indicating the missiles will arc to your enemies location.

There were also concepts like ambient temps affecting heat build up, different terrain having influences on things like cover (think: forests) or being easier to hit (think: lose shale/rough terrain), and all of it had nice mouse over tool-tips.

image

Actually, the UI is packed full of info without being super intrusive, I think it’s going to be something a lot of tactical fans enjoy.

Should mechs no longer be able to target an enemy if they lose direct line of sight (hills, trees, etc.)? Or are a lance’s targeting computers networked together (like US military to some degree, now)?

Yeah, the latter - if someone in your squad has line of site all your mechs do (same for enemies). You can even use sensor locks to reduce evasion charges on your enemy mechs (and they, you). Highly recommend that video for new comers to the Battletech rules, sounds like they are incorporating stuff directly from the pen and paper rules.

This is also where the initiative system comes in. If you sensor lock someone who then moves, you lose some of the value of the lock. So it’s sometimes worth pushing your light mechs down the order sequence chain so they can move and lock someone right before your big mechs get to shoot, so that you get the full value.

Exactly - it’s this level of deeper tactical mechanics that really drew me in. I was thinking it would be a fun game before and I went ahead and pre-ordered it, but stuff like this is making me think I’ve got a lot of fun hours ahead of me. :)

Is it the 24th yet?

Sadly, no. And worst, I pre-ordered God of War which drops the 20th, so I have two competing games now coming in the same short window. Thankfully I wrapped up Far Cry 5 at least.

I preordered back during the kickstarter but I’m currently at the birthing centre who’ve confirmed my wife’s waters have broken. As such I think any gaming time in the near future will be severely curtailed!

Glad it’s looking good though, and won’t be neutered by any harmony gold bull shit!

Enjoy it guys!

What was going on with Harmony Gold?

I can’t bring myself to watch hour-long preview videos of unreleased strategy games, so I’m going to embrace it as going in blind to enjoy the experience fresh.

This. I watch just enough to confirm my interest/excitement but that’s about it.

The short version is that they sued Piranha Games and Harebrained Studios over depictions of the Unseen, and it came out that Harmony Gold never actually bought the rights to those designs in the first place.

The sad part of this is that FASA, Catalyst, and any number of video game developers have avoided the unseen mechs for almost 30 years due to this fallacy. That’s not to say any of those guys would/could have bought the rights, but at least they would have been potentially obtainable. The BT world is poorer for this. :(

I know. All this time, we could have been playing with LAMs. LAMs!

I don’t blame you, and I almost didn’t bother with that particular video myself, but I’m glad now to be going into the game with a good grasp of the mechanics/rules. I think it will help me get into it faster, and be less frustrated.

But in my case the only Battletech thing I’ve ever played were the FPS MechWarrior titles, and the last one of those I touched was 4. And all I ever did was load PPC’s onto massive mechs and dominate the single player, so I don’t think I learned much from them. ;)

You are in for a treat. Commanding a Lance of mech is so much more fun!

Now, if expansion to the game give me combined arms and ambushes, that would be awesome.
Also, hopefully we will get to see a lot of variants and maybe the ability to design our own mechs and vehicles in the future.

That reminded me I did play the old Mech Commander game back in the day, and I really enjoyed it. And yeah, I’m really excited to command a full lance of mechs in turn-based combat (finally)! I’m also really interested in the campaign with the mercenary/salvage aspect of the game. The overall experience should be really engaging and enjoyable, I hope it does well for them because I’d love more content down the road, like you.

I would love to see combined arms, but HBS has been so steadfast in their ‘max of one player-controlled lance’ stuff that I doubt we’ll see it. Armor and infantry is awesome in BT, but you need so much of it to compete with mechs that they’d need to allow players to control companies of the stuff.

Well and they only went through about 4 full turns because they were so excited about describing every single feature and decision that they ran out of time, so no loss there.

Actually i was a bit annoyed they were closing with a bunch of Jenners. Would have stood off and shot them from range ;).