Yes, but 1) there’s actually some talk of Megamek and its associated tools lately, and better to have it in its own thread than in the nu-Battletech thread, right? and 2) I really wanted to set my new personal best for ‘oldest thread bumped for good cause’.
For me, this current dive into Megamek and MekHQ started with this post by @AWS260.
The short version is it’s now possible to play a fairly engaging mercenary campaign using MekHQ and Megamek; MekHQ does most of the rolling for the Against the Bot set of mercenary rules.
@AStott has good instructions on how to get started. The BattleTech Introductory Rulebook is also handy, given that Megamek assumes you have familiarity with the BattleTech rules.
There are some downsides—it’s still admittedly a little clunky and rather poorly documented, but it’s the fullest BattleTech mercenary simulation of which I am aware.
My tips for Megamek:
- When moving and firing, Backspace belays the last move/fire order, and Escape belays them all.
- Aircraft are a pain.
- Flying: use the ‘accelerate’ order to gain velocity. The top center of the hex has a number (e.g. 2/16). You must move that many hexes per turn. You can turn when the number in the top right of the hex turns yellow or green. Otherwise turning won’t work. As the first action in a movement phase, you can hover and turn.
- Attacking other aircraft: on ground-size maps, it seems like it’s only really plausible to attack from the same altitude. (Listed as e.g. A: 3 on your aircraft.) There are dead zones to consider for different altitudes which tend to be enormous compared to the ground map size.
- Attacking things on the ground: you must fly directly over them.
- Running out of flying room: fly into a map edge and you can use the ‘Fly Off’ order to leave the map and circle around, redeploying from the same map edge a turn or two later.
- Nighttime is your friend against stronger foes. Movement speeds (unless you pick the ‘Reckless’ order) is dramatically reduced, and so are effective weapon ranges. Closing with the enemy to kick them down one at a time is a lot more plausible at night, and melee attacks are a great equalizer (provided you have good pilots).
- Some mechs have searchlights, which can be toggled on or off as a special order. During the attack phase, a searchlight-equipped mech will illuminate itself, its primary target, and any units in the hexes between the two, switching the to-hit penalties to daylight.
- You can use the /victory and /defeat commands to force the bot to withdraw or accept your own retreat. Useful when it deploys a tank underwater and can’t leave the map on its own.
And for the campaign:
- The Big Battles and Special Events are frequently a little off on balance. My little mercenary company usually has between about six and eight combat-ready mechs at a time, plus a pair of aerospace fighters, totaling at present 395 tons. The big battles often pit me against 400 tons in assault mechs alone. I haven’t been shy about removing them from the list with GM mode and rolling fairer scenarios.
- For proper post-battle repair difficulty, don’t forget to set the site with the ‘Change site’ context menu option on units in the hangar. Working in the field is much harder than working in a transport bay.
- There is no persistent opposing force in MekHQ, so as you get worn down over the course of a contract—especially a contract in which you have reduced parts availability—you’ll find yourself increasingly battered. I wrote some rules for prior enemy damage to level the playing field a bit.
My poor company is in the middle of an extraction raid, and is looking pretty battered. I did not read the Against the Bot rules before diving in, and didn’t realize that parts availability is dramatically reduced when you’re raiding an enemy planet. Oops.
The Fishy Fifty-First is two lances of mechs, more or less; we started with ten, we currently have nine, and two are out of commission, including a recently-captured Orion which will be our heaviest combatant and a Trebuchet currently missing a gyro, which it turns out we can’t order. Something about shippers being a bit leery about dropping off parts to an invader. Deployed, we have our custom Locust with three medium lasers, except it’s missing a left arm and a right shoulder actuator, so it’s more like one and a half medium lasers. Everything else is in decent shape, although it’s all lightweight and, in some cases, obsolete. Add to that an aerospace flight—a Thrush fighter and a Lucifer fighter-bomber—and you have the whole picture.
Happily, it generated a nighttime probe for me—destroy a quarter of the enemy force without losing more than a quarter of my own—and I suspect I can manage that. If nothing else, it helps having bombs on aerospace fighters, which can seriously mess up an enemy. I also ran through an earlier iteration of my prior enemy damage rules from above, which prompted the different damages per weight class. (I blew a leg and an arm off of a Stinger on a few lucky rolls.) Now my pair of lances are facing an equally-beat-up lance or two of mixed mechs and vehicles.
Perhaps I’ll report on that fight when it happens.