Ok yes.
Heh. A lot of the rules of Battletech are kind of fudged. Vehicles are nerfed, kind of randomly, just to keep them inferior to 'mechs in Battletech. Because Battletech isn’t about infantry or vehicles. (One of the funny things about Battletech rules was that a company of soldiers of about 28 men could do up to 7 points of damage against a 'mech. Considering how rare and valuable 'mechs were the literal answer to a 'mech would have been just a swarm of infantry. Again… not the best balanced game.)
Man, injury and repair times are brutal (but I like it). I have to own and deal with the consequences of my poor performance getting both my mech and myself shot up so we’re now both out of action for an extended period of time (way more than enough to make it really hurt).
edit: maybe a slower paced TBS is just really in my wheelhouse, I’m enjoying this one a lot…
Indeed, i was down 2 pilots and 2 mechs for around 30 days. I had to do a couple of missions with 2 light mechs and a medium.
My mecs rarely take damage, but my pilots get scrambled up.
My main hero took critical damage at the first obligatory mission (dropship). I thought game was over, but nope, they can’t die. She did however end up in the hospital for 120 days.
I have pilots at 5/5/4/4 skill levels and this one is still in the freaking hospital now urgh.
I ended up buying another pilot. Turns out you can do the initial missions with 3 mechs pretty well. (I finished the second “priority mission”).
I had 111 days on each of 2 of my guys, one of which was myself. Brutal
It’s way more intuitive overall that higher skill values are better, but that’s the inverse of how the tabletop system works so it’s a mite confusing from that perspective.
I remember my first game of CityTech, a bunch of infantry hidden in buildings almost took out two of my mechs (well, one was helped along the way by falling after stomping one of the buildings to dust, of course). Taught me to respect infantry a little more than I once did.
Basements, ugh.
Turning off steam overlay as well as updating drivers further upped my fps to a reasonable place on High
Eight hours later… this isn’t perfect, but this is the Mechwarrior game I’ve been waiting for.
Also, say hello to the Mech of Theseus.
I’m almost ashamed to type this, but Radeon HD 5450. ‘Low’ settings.
Questions:
Should one finish off a mech that falls? Thinking better salvage if don’t shoot it up too much? I had a mech get back up and shoot me in the back when I thought it was finished. :)
How to back out of a move? I tried hitting escape based on post above but it did not do anything.
Is it better to have mix of weapons or specialize?
I
OK, so, finally got to play. Have gone through the opening missions, up to where you finally get to make decisions as a merc leader.
All I have to say is that this is pretty much everything that I’ve been waiting for Battletech-wise. That’s all.
You get to pick your shot on a downed Mech, so if you don’t have other targets then you can try to land an aimed shot on the fallen mech’s head. If you can pop the pilot then you’ll potentially get more salvage options. If you leave it long enough eventually the pilot will recover and stand up the mech and if it still has weapons it can still be a problem. It could even stand up, get behind you and land a melee hit to rear armour.
Once you’ve actually made a move I don’t think you can. If you click once the move cursor will lock there so you can check line of sight and weapon percentages and can escape out to check somewhere else, but if you double click and actually move I don’t think there’s an undo feature.
Yes!
Less facetious answer : It depends. You definitely want a mix of ranges across your lance, but if you know you’re dropping somewhere urban with good cover than having a dedicated brawler, covered in short range weapons can be murderous. Getting close in behind someone with a large Autocannon can absolutely swing entire battles your way.
Equally, if you’re in an open area, kiting enemies with PPC and LRM also works, it’s just a bit less instant and dramatic.
Oh ok that’s a fair bit older than my card…sounds like I could run at lower settings. Thanks to you & Harkonis for responding. Really helpful.
Only played an hour or so, but am really enjoying this - even without 21:9 support. They definitely got the feel of Battletech down and the combat feels right, at least from my distant memories of playing Battletech forever ago.
Does anyone have a list or chart showing what you get for each point in a skill? Most of them have ‘hidden’ stuff that unlocks later, like Guts giving refire bonus at 5 and extra heat max at 6.
It was kind of hard to get the game running too, but I was experiencing some heavy issues with Internet more generally. Sounds like somebody compromised Google’s DNS servers to perform a man in the middle attack to steal cryptocurrency from unsuspecting punters. That had some flow on effect… Interesting times.
That didn’t help for the initial experience.
I had clocked 20 hours with the Backer Beta, which was a pretty solid and deep tactical game. The release version still is, and I see most of the major issues / discussions in the beta to have been taken into account to some degree. I am not sure it has become a better game because of that just yet.
I am not happy about the cinematics, their interest wears off very quickly, and the scenery looks crappy and drab from up close. Very debatable investment of development resources in my opinion.
This game keeps the soul of Battletech. A game about battlemechs, not tanks, zeppelins or armoured trains. The logistics and physics of Star Trek are also sketchy and still works as an entertaining Sci Fi show. But this computer based instalment has basically tossed overboard all the drek from the old rulebooks and come out with a pretty deep, yet tense tactical combat game.
It is as tense as playing a war game - a serious one - when you are left wondering whether that unit has a flank up in the air… to see your opponent maneuvering and indeed, making you pay for the wishful thinking. The AI does that to you too.
Some of the fights will be a slog… because they’re all fights to the bitter end. A reasonable mechanic would have introduced ways to surrender or retreat, concede or grant a cease fire.
There’s a lot going for BT… we will see how it goes.
Back when we played tabletop, we had developed a meta-game where we had a larger overall combat force, and we made some rules where you could near-immediately (like one turn without firing-ish) pull your mechs from a match gone too wrong at a reasonable penalty (couldn’t repair/reuse them or something for a while). But things like retreating to the edge of a map isn’t very easy since you’d have to turn your back, and for slower mechs that had already been engaged a while, would be disastrous. But there isn’t inherently an easy mechanic to retreat in BT, unlike, say, where old-world warriors can ditch their shield and sprint away, or where in modern tank battles, the range allows you to drive away before the enemy realizes it and can pursue. Maybe if retreating were an option and influenced a campaign where they could be used again later, light mechs would make more sense, since they could get away so much easier from heavies.