Finally ordered my new computer, will be getting here next week. Enthused for the Battletech game, but is MechWarrior still a thing or did I miss my chance to waste money?
Mechwarrior is currently on a downward spiral as the developer is reallocating resources to their next game. So its worth a play, but be extra cautious with RMT for now.
The game is at least in a worthwhile place, especially if you listen to veterans. Make sure you play Clan mechs until PGI figures out their balance stuff.
MWO: Adamski
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NipsHe/HimLuxuriating in existential crisis.Registered Userregular
Finally ordered my new computer, will be getting here next week. Enthused for the Battletech game, but is MechWarrior still a thing or did I miss my chance to waste money?
MechWarrior is still an ongoing concern, and certainly there's a hole to throw all your money into there.
As for BATTLETECH, in today's Let's Play in the Morning I probe the bounds of skill and sanity. I present: Team All-Scrubs.
Finally ordered my new computer, will be getting here next week. Enthused for the Battletech game, but is MechWarrior still a thing or did I miss my chance to waste money?
MWO is still going. They're adding more mechs all the time and going to be introducing some new weapons soon.
Finally ordered my new computer, will be getting here next week. Enthused for the Battletech game, but is MechWarrior still a thing or did I miss my chance to waste money?
Mechwarrior is currently on a downward spiral as the developer is reallocating resources to their next game. So its worth a play, but be extra cautious with RMT for now.
The game is at least in a worthwhile place, especially if you listen to veterans. Make sure you play Clan mechs until PGI figures out their balance stuff.
Thanks.
I played awhile back and got a Founder's pack, but stopped for real life reasons. Then, when I was about to come back, computer started fritzing (screen going black randomly), so I stopped multiplayer games for a bit to prevent being a burden on teammates.
I have 20,000 MC due to Founders pack. I am guessing that's like one Mech these days? Have an Atlas and a Centurion from previous play.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
The trick to scouting, is to ignore the scouting and treat it as a 4v4 deathmatch.
So bring a 50-55 ton mech, and make sure its setup for some brawling or a good alpha with SRMs and MachineGuns and MLAS.
DO NOT BRING:
LRMs
Poke Mechs (PPC, ERLL)
DO NOT RUN AROUND IN YOUR LIGHT MECH COLLECTING DATA WHILE YOUR TEAM IS FIGHTING.
**HANG TOGETHER OR GET HUNG SEPARATELY**
Make sure you are rolling your shoulders to spread damage, try to avoid isXL engines as best you can, even if you run slower.
Clan Side: Nova, Huntsman, Hunchback IIC
IS Side: lots of options, but even more traps. Ask the thread for a build if you are unsure.
I've gone from my Griffin 2N to the Bushwhacker just to run a STD engine in it since it seems that throws off the Clanners since they can't just blow up one side and run off. Of course I think more people are running them since they have learned to blow off my left side where all my missiles are at.
Finally ordered my new computer, will be getting here next week. Enthused for the Battletech game, but is MechWarrior still a thing or did I miss my chance to waste money?
Mechwarrior is currently on a downward spiral as the developer is reallocating resources to their next game. So its worth a play, but be extra cautious with RMT for now.
The game is at least in a worthwhile place, especially if you listen to veterans. Make sure you play Clan mechs until PGI figures out their balance stuff.
Thanks.
I played awhile back and got a Founder's pack, but stopped for real life reasons. Then, when I was about to come back, computer started fritzing (screen going black randomly), so I stopped multiplayer games for a bit to prevent being a burden on teammates.
I have 20,000 MC due to Founders pack. I am guessing that's like one Mech these days? Have an Atlas and a Centurion from previous play.
You can buy a champion Dire Wolf, the most MC-expensive 'Mech in the game, for 8770 MC. If you make it stretch and depending how you spend it, that 20k MC could get you upwards of 10+ chassis if you wanted to. Probably between 3-7 chassis, realistically. If you wait for sales (usually around holidays; July 4th and whatnot are coming up), you can make it go farther.
The trick to scouting, is to ignore the scouting and treat it as a 4v4 deathmatch.
So bring a 50-55 ton mech, and make sure its setup for some brawling or a good alpha with SRMs and MachineGuns and MLAS.
DO NOT BRING:
LRMs
Poke Mechs (PPC, ERLL)
DO NOT RUN AROUND IN YOUR LIGHT MECH COLLECTING DATA WHILE YOUR TEAM IS FIGHTING.
**HANG TOGETHER OR GET HUNG SEPARATELY**
Make sure you are rolling your shoulders to spread damage, try to avoid isXL engines as best you can, even if you run slower.
Clan Side: Nova, Huntsman, Hunchback IIC
IS Side: lots of options, but even more traps. Ask the thread for a build if you are unsure.
I've gone from my Griffin 2N to the Bushwhacker just to run a STD engine in it since it seems that throws off the Clanners since they can't just blow up one side and run off. Of course I think more people are running them since they have learned to blow off my left side where all my missiles are at.
the ol Laserback 4P works great with a STD for Scouting.
I run a 270std and 9Mlas in two weapon groups of 6x and 3x (Hunch and Head/Arms)
The trick to scouting, is to ignore the scouting and treat it as a 4v4 deathmatch.
So bring a 50-55 ton mech, and make sure its setup for some brawling or a good alpha with SRMs and MachineGuns and MLAS.
DO NOT BRING:
LRMs
Poke Mechs (PPC, ERLL)
DO NOT RUN AROUND IN YOUR LIGHT MECH COLLECTING DATA WHILE YOUR TEAM IS FIGHTING.
**HANG TOGETHER OR GET HUNG SEPARATELY**
Make sure you are rolling your shoulders to spread damage, try to avoid isXL engines as best you can, even if you run slower.
Clan Side: Nova, Huntsman, Hunchback IIC
IS Side: lots of options, but even more traps. Ask the thread for a build if you are unsure.
I've gone from my Griffin 2N to the Bushwhacker just to run a STD engine in it since it seems that throws off the Clanners since they can't just blow up one side and run off. Of course I think more people are running them since they have learned to blow off my left side where all my missiles are at.
the ol Laserback 4P works great with a STD for Scouting.
I run a 270std and 9Mlas in two weapon groups of 6x and 3x (Hunch and Head/Arms)
It does work.
Damn I keep on forgetting to buy an Hunchback to try that build out.
Finally ordered my new computer, will be getting here next week. Enthused for the Battletech game, but is MechWarrior still a thing or did I miss my chance to waste money?
Mechwarrior is currently on a downward spiral as the developer is reallocating resources to their next game. So its worth a play, but be extra cautious with RMT for now.
The game is at least in a worthwhile place, especially if you listen to veterans. Make sure you play Clan mechs until PGI figures out their balance stuff.
Thanks.
I played awhile back and got a Founder's pack, but stopped for real life reasons. Then, when I was about to come back, computer started fritzing (screen going black randomly), so I stopped multiplayer games for a bit to prevent being a burden on teammates.
I have 20,000 MC due to Founders pack. I am guessing that's like one Mech these days? Have an Atlas and a Centurion from previous play.
Thats a pretty sweet spot to be in.
PGI has made changes so that the Trial Mechs are now built by players instead of stock loadouts, so pilot those and get a feel for what mechs you enjoy before spending any MC while earning C-Bills.
Even then, you probably have a bunch of Premium Time banked, so turn that on, and let the C-Bills flow, which should also help you buy new mechs, and save MC for things like Mech Bays.
Also, I think you should get a ton of C-Bills from the Recruit Bonus achievements, and can also do the Tutorial for some achievements there that also grant more C-Bills.
The trick to scouting, is to ignore the scouting and treat it as a 4v4 deathmatch.
So bring a 50-55 ton mech, and make sure its setup for some brawling or a good alpha with SRMs and MachineGuns and MLAS.
DO NOT BRING:
LRMs
Poke Mechs (PPC, ERLL)
DO NOT RUN AROUND IN YOUR LIGHT MECH COLLECTING DATA WHILE YOUR TEAM IS FIGHTING.
**HANG TOGETHER OR GET HUNG SEPARATELY**
Make sure you are rolling your shoulders to spread damage, try to avoid isXL engines as best you can, even if you run slower.
Clan Side: Nova, Huntsman, Hunchback IIC
IS Side: lots of options, but even more traps. Ask the thread for a build if you are unsure.
The IS King of scouting is probably the Griffin 3M a fast duelist with a standard and nice survivability quirks. I personally use the Griffin 2N and Shadowhawk 2D2 with XLs, although you can run the 3M build on the 2N with ECM with a slightly smaller engine. This was all before the Skill Tree and the engine agility desync, so it might be worth downgrading the engine to a Standard and taking the speed hit.
My guesses on whats good today would be the Hunchback 4SP, a classic, which has always been an underrated monster. The Centurion AL is a similar, less durable option. The Pheonix Hawk 1K and Cicada 2B are both nice Pulse Laser brawlers, and work well with large XLs due to the bonus structure they have.
General Scouting Tips
Max out your Survival Tree. These stack with the bonus armor and structure quirks PGI has given IS mechs. The Pheonix Hawk, for instance, will have 58 arm armor, more than an 85 ton assault! The Hunchback 4SP will have an Atlas-esque 85 CT structure!
You'll want stacked coolshots to burn in the initial brawl to keep your DPS up. Consumables are pretty key in Scouting. When you engage, you have to go all in with your team. Its basically a dps race to 100% heat, and if you don't focus down a target in the first one or two salvos, you'll probably lose.
The best way to counter Clan Streaks it to actually face tank them. If you twist, they end up focusing one side of your mech that can easily one shot an arm or even side torso. For everything else, you can twist.
The XL rarely makes a difference IMO because once your armor is gone, most Clan mechs can one shot your unarmored CT anyway. You never know when you'll have to chase down some Clan Light to finish the match. Experiment with spreading damage and try switching when you feel more confident (or just wait for the LFE)
I'm fairly up on the clan invasion stuff but the inner sphere power struggles have always been about as opaque to me as the Balkans
which is, I imagine, the intent
Blake always came off to me as the "well shoot we need another Big Bad uhhh quick here it's a cult thing oh no everybody better team up for better narratives"
Steam: Cilantr0
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
Im wondering if its possible to reboot the world narrative then or if that creates a dissonance.
DC/Marvel do it. I mean, we see it with disney's star wars and the eu/legendary lines.
Sure there was a big lash from fans in the beginning, but now that its done, it doesnt seem that big a deal. You tell the story in a new interesting way.
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
I completely agree. The franchise was designed in the kind of stone age of nerd IPs, before there wa a lot of institutional expertise about how to do these things, so you get weird shit like phantom mechs creeping in around the edges, and also there's just some kind of dated, unfortunate elements like the weeaboo country (with most honoraburu battlemechs folded 1000 times) and the sinister commie yellow peril country complete with actual, no-bullshit long-fingernailed mandarins.
When Mike McCain from HBS did a reddit AMA I asked him about some of that stuff - I tried to kind of word my question in such a way that it wouldn't get him or me in trouble with a thousand people screaming about "SJWs" or whatever - and he did indicate that they're planning on kind of gently realigning some of those sorts of things. And that's cool, but yeah, at this point I almost would rather just have a hard reboot.
Also for gaming purposes: the Inner Sphere is so comprehensively mapped, and there is so much insane detail in every sourcebook about which engagements happened where and what regiments and companies were involved, that there's almost no space left to tell new stories! That's why both Death From Above and the HBS game are set in the Periphery. I feel like when you hit that point, where even people making official material have to set their adventures in some never-explored corner of the map far away from some of the core story elements that people are interested in, it's time to maybe cull the chaff.
It would be a good time to reset the BattleTech Universe right now as well. Given the new era of gamers and the HPG game launching, it couldn't come at a better time. Like everyone here has said, all the other major stories are doing it (heck even Hasbro is doing it with Transformers and GI Joe to a degree) and it is being accepted. I just wonder if anybody could wrangle the licenses back to one "Owner" in order to do the reboot.
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
As long as they don't throw out any of the mech designs, they can do whatever they want. I think the revised mech designs from MWO are pretty great overall.
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
I completely agree. The franchise was designed in the kind of stone age of nerd IPs, before there wa a lot of institutional expertise about how to do these things, so you get weird shit like phantom mechs creeping in around the edges, and also there's just some kind of dated, unfortunate elements like the weeaboo country (with most honoraburu battlemechs folded 1000 times) and the sinister commie yellow peril country complete with actual, no-bullshit long-fingernailed mandarins.
When Mike McCain from HBS did a reddit AMA I asked him about some of that stuff - I tried to kind of word my question in such a way that it wouldn't get him or me in trouble with a thousand people screaming about "SJWs" or whatever - and he did indicate that they're planning on kind of gently realigning some of those sorts of things. And that's cool, but yeah, at this point I almost would rather just have a hard reboot.
Also for gaming purposes: the Inner Sphere is so comprehensively mapped, and there is so much insane detail in every sourcebook about which engagements happened where and what regiments and companies were involved, that there's almost no space left to tell new stories! That's why both Death From Above and the HBS game are set in the Periphery. I feel like when you hit that point, where even people making official material have to set their adventures in some never-explored corner of the map far away from some of the core story elements that people are interested in, it's time to maybe cull the chaff.
Yeah, but thats also a double edged sword because I want more content from the periphery with the nations there that are so radically different from the great houses. Just not with the burden of 40 years of bad drama and mistakes.
I was actually talking with @Nips about doing a Megamek campaign in the Periphery, didnt go anywhere..but I just want more interesting shit from whats not a cosmic superpower. (or the equivalent in the late post apocalypse inner sphere)
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
As long as they don't throw out any of the mech designs, they can do whatever they want. I think the revised mech designs from MWO are pretty great overall.
Well, maybe some of the mech designs.
+6
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kaliyamaLeft to find less-moderated foraRegistered Userregular
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
To BT's credit, it advanced the timeline from 3075 to 3150 or so without covering all of that in real time. And while there are some (too many, IMO) major events causing the cataclysm-inflation you describe, there's also lots of relatively uneventful decades happening in the time-skip. The tentative plan seems to be to progress it ahead to 3250 or 3200 once they cover some 3150 events, too. I'm hoping it comes with a soup-to-nuts rules reboot since the game has accrued decades of useless greebles and needs a complete rework to be relevant in today's gaming market.
kaliyama on
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SpectrumArcher of InfernoChaldea Rec RoomRegistered Userregular
Got bored, fired this thing up for the first time in forever. Had a couple mediocre warm-up matches and then this:
Yeah, Mechwarrior: Dark Ages was an attempt to reset the timeline, sort of, by advancing really far into a post-apocalyptic setting where you could simplify things.
But at that point you're baking an entirely new cake on top of what's already a three tier cake.
A reboot would be pretty great. Or else someone could, you know, make a classic battletech style game that's not quite set in the battletech universe...
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
As long as they don't throw out any of the mech designs, they can do whatever they want. I think the revised mech designs from MWO are pretty great overall.
I feel like the Battletech story is pretty cool and coherent and has a good narrative shape in the broad strokes for about the first 2/3 of it. You have this kind of wrecked, almost postapocalyptic society that's running down due to endless war. Then thanks to a few unexpected developments, like the recovery of old Star League data, and the actions of some brave individuals - particularly Katrina Steiner for trying to broker peace, and Hanse Davion for accepting it - things start to slowly change. The Lyrans and Federated Suns team up and wreck the authoritarian Capellans. Technology starts coming back. It begins to seem like there's light at the end of the tunnel and humanity might pick itself out of the gutter.
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
As long as they don't throw out any of the mech designs, they can do whatever they want. I think the revised mech designs from MWO are pretty great overall.
Well, maybe some of the mech designs.
THE YEOMAN IS A TREASURE!
Agreed. So let's bury the damned thing and never speak of it again.
Honestly, the only two mechs that I've ever kinda sneered at where the Stalker and the Fafnir. The Stalker for obvious reasons and the Fafnir for similar ones.
They look so hillariously top-heavy. At least the King Crab is hunched over like a boss.
Honestly, the only two mechs that I've ever kinda sneered at where the Stalker and the Fafnir. The Stalker for obvious reasons and the Fafnir for similar ones.
They look so hillariously top-heavy. At least the King Crab is hunched over like a boss.
Depends on the art in some cases. Like the line drawing for the Fafnir give if thick stumpy legs that look like they barely articulate to go with the massive chest so it looks less top heavy.
I'd bet that even the Yeoman could look decent if given a good redesign so it was more than a couple of boxes mounted on a pair of legs.
Edit: So, about that potentially decent Yeoman redesign...
Found this on a thread on the MWO forums about the Roughneck...
Yeah, Mechwarrior: Dark Ages was an attempt to reset the timeline, sort of, by advancing really far into a post-apocalyptic setting where you could simplify things.
But at that point you're baking an entirely new cake on top of what's already a three tier cake.
A reboot would be pretty great. Or else someone could, you know, make a classic battletech style game that's not quite set in the battletech universe...
Frankly, the ridiculous history is what gives the BattleTech lore its lovely flavor, for me. I'd hate for them to reboot it, and I'm glad they've continued to nominally push the timeline forward past 3145 into the late 3100's. Honestly, I'm more excited for that new "history" than to see more stuff crammed into the existing timeline. The events of BATTLETECH excepted, of course, because of how they managed to carve out a time and place for an interesting story.
Alternately, I know there exists somewhere a supplement that posited what would happen if Kerensky and the SLFD hadn't left the Inner Sphere, and the history that followed (spoiler: it wasn't as bad as the Succession Wars, but basically was the Succession Wars but with a few new players). It's killing me that I can't find the book, though, and my searches are coming up completely dry.
Yeah, Mechwarrior: Dark Ages was an attempt to reset the timeline, sort of, by advancing really far into a post-apocalyptic setting where you could simplify things.
But at that point you're baking an entirely new cake on top of what's already a three tier cake.
A reboot would be pretty great. Or else someone could, you know, make a classic battletech style game that's not quite set in the battletech universe...
Frankly, the ridiculous history is what gives the BattleTech lore its lovely flavor, for me. I'd hate for them to reboot it, and I'm glad they've continued to nominally push the timeline forward past 3145 into the late 3100's. Honestly, I'm more excited for that new "history" than to see more stuff crammed into the existing timeline. The events of BATTLETECH excepted, of course, because of how they managed to carve out a time and place for an interesting story.
Alternately, I know there exists somewhere a supplement that posited what would happen if Kerensky and the SLFD hadn't left the Inner Sphere, and the history that followed (spoiler: it wasn't as bad as the Succession Wars, but basically was the Succession Wars but with a few new players). It's killing me that I can't find the book, though, and my searches are coming up completely dry.
I honestly don't hate civil war. It felt like a good way to sort of make things small and personal again after the big huge Star League vs Clan Council war played out. Like, it almost feels like it goes back to MW1 with "okay now you have to wage a war to get back your home and your name and your honor"
But the actual continuity of CW and Jihad and....yeah it gets a little weird after that.
My biggest, biggest biggest gripe of all though, is the technology. Why in the 3100s is IS endo steel still a thing? How is that possible? How have Clan methods not replaced it yet? Like, for real.
I honestly don't hate civil war. It felt like a good way to sort of make things small and personal again after the big huge Star League vs Clan Council war played out. Like, it almost feels like it goes back to MW1 with "okay now you have to wage a war to get back your home and your name and your honor"
But the actual continuity of CW and Jihad and....yeah it gets a little weird after that.
My biggest, biggest biggest gripe of all though, is the technology. Why in the 3100s is IS endo steel still a thing? How is that possible? How have Clan methods not replaced it yet? Like, for real.
Like, come on.
Counterpoint: Scarcity is absolutely a consideration in the BattleTech canon, and sometimes you work with what you got. Look at how many mid-3000's era 'Mechs use Ferro but not Endo. It's because actual scarcity makes for more interesting 'Mech designs. This way, not every single 'Mech on the field is its MWO UberMech counterpart, using the best of all equipment and where scarcity does not exist. Further, if you have manufacturing facilities that you've been using for anywhere between 50-300+ years, and you don't have the means or resources to retool, you (again) use what you can make.
Also, by the time of the 3145's, "Clan" grade tech has largely made its way to many of the factions through trade and commerce, but not in overwhelming supply. Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox, anyone? A couple of the Clans were willing to trade tech and materiel to the other factions in the Sphere, but never in the kinds of quantities that could outfit entire armies. Prior to the Blackout, the Republic had about the best-equipped military using top-line Clan tech, but even they had to rely on lower-grade IS tech to garrison the thousands of worlds under their control.
[Edit] This is also why I really fucking like a lot of the design coming in the post-Jihad, Republic, and post-Republic era, because you get MixTech designs using whatever the designer can scrounge for or buy.
Yeah, Mechwarrior: Dark Ages was an attempt to reset the timeline, sort of, by advancing really far into a post-apocalyptic setting where you could simplify things.
But at that point you're baking an entirely new cake on top of what's already a three tier cake.
A reboot would be pretty great. Or else someone could, you know, make a classic battletech style game that's not quite set in the battletech universe...
Frankly, the ridiculous history is what gives the BattleTech lore its lovely flavor, for me. I'd hate for them to reboot it, and I'm glad they've continued to nominally push the timeline forward past 3145 into the late 3100's. Honestly, I'm more excited for that new "history" than to see more stuff crammed into the existing timeline. The events of BATTLETECH excepted, of course, because of how they managed to carve out a time and place for an interesting story.
Alternately, I know there exists somewhere a supplement that posited what would happen if Kerensky and the SLFD hadn't left the Inner Sphere, and the history that followed (spoiler: it wasn't as bad as the Succession Wars, but basically was the Succession Wars but with a few new players). It's killing me that I can't find the book, though, and my searches are coming up completely dry.
Posts
Mechwarrior is currently on a downward spiral as the developer is reallocating resources to their next game. So its worth a play, but be extra cautious with RMT for now.
The game is at least in a worthwhile place, especially if you listen to veterans. Make sure you play Clan mechs until PGI figures out their balance stuff.
MWO: Adamski
MechWarrior is still an ongoing concern, and certainly there's a hole to throw all your money into there.
As for BATTLETECH, in today's Let's Play in the Morning I probe the bounds of skill and sanity. I present: Team All-Scrubs.
MWO is still going. They're adding more mechs all the time and going to be introducing some new weapons soon.
I figured I would wait till the second day to run Scouting since all the tryhards probably will have finished by then and it'll be back to the PUGs.
Steam: betsuni7
So bring a 50-55 ton mech, and make sure its setup for some brawling or a good alpha with SRMs and MachineGuns and MLAS.
DO NOT BRING:
LRMs
Poke Mechs (PPC, ERLL)
DO NOT RUN AROUND IN YOUR LIGHT MECH COLLECTING DATA WHILE YOUR TEAM IS FIGHTING.
**HANG TOGETHER OR GET HUNG SEPARATELY**
Make sure you are rolling your shoulders to spread damage, try to avoid isXL engines as best you can, even if you run slower.
Clan Side: Nova, Huntsman, Hunchback IIC
IS Side: lots of options, but even more traps. Ask the thread for a build if you are unsure.
MWO: Adamski
Thanks.
I played awhile back and got a Founder's pack, but stopped for real life reasons. Then, when I was about to come back, computer started fritzing (screen going black randomly), so I stopped multiplayer games for a bit to prevent being a burden on teammates.
I have 20,000 MC due to Founders pack. I am guessing that's like one Mech these days? Have an Atlas and a Centurion from previous play.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I've gone from my Griffin 2N to the Bushwhacker just to run a STD engine in it since it seems that throws off the Clanners since they can't just blow up one side and run off. Of course I think more people are running them since they have learned to blow off my left side where all my missiles are at.
Steam: betsuni7
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
You can buy a champion Dire Wolf, the most MC-expensive 'Mech in the game, for 8770 MC. If you make it stretch and depending how you spend it, that 20k MC could get you upwards of 10+ chassis if you wanted to. Probably between 3-7 chassis, realistically. If you wait for sales (usually around holidays; July 4th and whatnot are coming up), you can make it go farther.
the ol Laserback 4P works great with a STD for Scouting.
I run a 270std and 9Mlas in two weapon groups of 6x and 3x (Hunch and Head/Arms)
It does work.
Damn I keep on forgetting to buy an Hunchback to try that build out.
Steam: betsuni7
Thats a pretty sweet spot to be in.
PGI has made changes so that the Trial Mechs are now built by players instead of stock loadouts, so pilot those and get a feel for what mechs you enjoy before spending any MC while earning C-Bills.
Even then, you probably have a bunch of Premium Time banked, so turn that on, and let the C-Bills flow, which should also help you buy new mechs, and save MC for things like Mech Bays.
Also, I think you should get a ton of C-Bills from the Recruit Bonus achievements, and can also do the Tutorial for some achievements there that also grant more C-Bills.
MWO: Adamski
The IS King of scouting is probably the Griffin 3M a fast duelist with a standard and nice survivability quirks. I personally use the Griffin 2N and Shadowhawk 2D2 with XLs, although you can run the 3M build on the 2N with ECM with a slightly smaller engine. This was all before the Skill Tree and the engine agility desync, so it might be worth downgrading the engine to a Standard and taking the speed hit.
My guesses on whats good today would be the Hunchback 4SP, a classic, which has always been an underrated monster. The Centurion AL is a similar, less durable option. The Pheonix Hawk 1K and Cicada 2B are both nice Pulse Laser brawlers, and work well with large XLs due to the bonus structure they have.
General Scouting Tips
Max out your Survival Tree. These stack with the bonus armor and structure quirks PGI has given IS mechs. The Pheonix Hawk, for instance, will have 58 arm armor, more than an 85 ton assault! The Hunchback 4SP will have an Atlas-esque 85 CT structure!
You'll want stacked coolshots to burn in the initial brawl to keep your DPS up. Consumables are pretty key in Scouting. When you engage, you have to go all in with your team. Its basically a dps race to 100% heat, and if you don't focus down a target in the first one or two salvos, you'll probably lose.
The best way to counter Clan Streaks it to actually face tank them. If you twist, they end up focusing one side of your mech that can easily one shot an arm or even side torso. For everything else, you can twist.
The XL rarely makes a difference IMO because once your armor is gone, most Clan mechs can one shot your unarmored CT anyway. You never know when you'll have to chase down some Clan Light to finish the match. Experiment with spreading damage and try switching when you feel more confident (or just wait for the LFE)
which is, I imagine, the intent
Blake always came off to me as the "well shoot we need another Big Bad uhhh quick here it's a cult thing oh no everybody better team up for better narratives"
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
Then comes the twist! The Clans invade and seem to be unstoppable and as a result, everything that came before, all the infighting, suddenly seems way less relevant. Arch-enemies have to team up to save the Inner Sphere. All the mercenaries that the Draconis Combine hates end up saving its capital planet from being annihilated. And then the secret evil cult phone company reveals that they actually have a giant secret army and, led by a dude who used to be a villain 25 years earlier, save the entire Inner Sphere in a giant apocalyptic battle.
It's great. I don't think it was exactly planned this way but if you stand back from a distance it ends up being this really cool story of people who have been fighting pointless futile wars for hundreds of years finally coming together to accomplish something meaningful and save their culture (which is a lot like our culture) from a hostile alien threat (the Clan aren't alien, of coure, but they serve that role in the story, and their society feels like a sci-fi dystopia).
But the thing with these ongoing game settings like this or Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun or, in a different medium, the Star Wars EU, is that nothing is ever allowed to end. The need to keep cranking out game material means there always has to be some big new world-shaking event coming down the pike and eventually the wheels come off as the sheer quantity of world-shaking events becomes more than the setting can bear. And for me, Battletech starts hitting that point around the time of the FedCom civil war, and definitely with the Jihad. Breaking up the FedCom, and cutting the invading Clans off from their homeworlds, feels to me like an admission that the creative directors of the franchise at that point couldn't figure out a way forward so wanted to just hit the big red reset button so they could go back to having five noble houses fighting each other over and over again, settling for the illusion of change over the real thing.
Anyway, that's why I'm really happy that the HBS game is set in 3025 and I hope they take their sweet time advancing the timeline with sequels and expansions. I'm in no rush.
Honestly, I'd really like for Battletech to come out with, basically, Battletech 2.0
All the old lore, stories, mechs, everything..washed away. Discard 40 years of mistakes and missteps and start again at the start, with a overarching plan to drive the narrative through the decades as the game is updated and released, to create a smoother story without shit like Phantom Mech or Aliens.
Dont have to totally reinvent the wheel with whole new people and nations and whatever, but the narrative could do with some polish and tightening up.
DC/Marvel do it. I mean, we see it with disney's star wars and the eu/legendary lines.
Sure there was a big lash from fans in the beginning, but now that its done, it doesnt seem that big a deal. You tell the story in a new interesting way.
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I completely agree. The franchise was designed in the kind of stone age of nerd IPs, before there wa a lot of institutional expertise about how to do these things, so you get weird shit like phantom mechs creeping in around the edges, and also there's just some kind of dated, unfortunate elements like the weeaboo country (with most honoraburu battlemechs folded 1000 times) and the sinister commie yellow peril country complete with actual, no-bullshit long-fingernailed mandarins.
When Mike McCain from HBS did a reddit AMA I asked him about some of that stuff - I tried to kind of word my question in such a way that it wouldn't get him or me in trouble with a thousand people screaming about "SJWs" or whatever - and he did indicate that they're planning on kind of gently realigning some of those sorts of things. And that's cool, but yeah, at this point I almost would rather just have a hard reboot.
Also for gaming purposes: the Inner Sphere is so comprehensively mapped, and there is so much insane detail in every sourcebook about which engagements happened where and what regiments and companies were involved, that there's almost no space left to tell new stories! That's why both Death From Above and the HBS game are set in the Periphery. I feel like when you hit that point, where even people making official material have to set their adventures in some never-explored corner of the map far away from some of the core story elements that people are interested in, it's time to maybe cull the chaff.
Steam: betsuni7
As long as they don't throw out any of the mech designs, they can do whatever they want. I think the revised mech designs from MWO are pretty great overall.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Yeah, but thats also a double edged sword because I want more content from the periphery with the nations there that are so radically different from the great houses. Just not with the burden of 40 years of bad drama and mistakes.
I was actually talking with @Nips about doing a Megamek campaign in the Periphery, didnt go anywhere..but I just want more interesting shit from whats not a cosmic superpower. (or the equivalent in the late post apocalypse inner sphere)
Well, maybe some of the mech designs.
To BT's credit, it advanced the timeline from 3075 to 3150 or so without covering all of that in real time. And while there are some (too many, IMO) major events causing the cataclysm-inflation you describe, there's also lots of relatively uneventful decades happening in the time-skip. The tentative plan seems to be to progress it ahead to 3250 or 3200 once they cover some 3150 events, too. I'm hoping it comes with a soup-to-nuts rules reboot since the game has accrued decades of useless greebles and needs a complete rework to be relevant in today's gaming market.
Not entirely convinced I skilled this thing right, but eh.
But at that point you're baking an entirely new cake on top of what's already a three tier cake.
A reboot would be pretty great. Or else someone could, you know, make a classic battletech style game that's not quite set in the battletech universe...
THE YEOMAN IS A TREASURE!
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Agreed. So let's bury the damned thing and never speak of it again.
They look so hillariously top-heavy. At least the King Crab is hunched over like a boss.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Depends on the art in some cases. Like the line drawing for the Fafnir give if thick stumpy legs that look like they barely articulate to go with the massive chest so it looks less top heavy.
I'd bet that even the Yeoman could look decent if given a good redesign so it was more than a couple of boxes mounted on a pair of legs.
Edit: So, about that potentially decent Yeoman redesign...
Found this on a thread on the MWO forums about the Roughneck...
That has taken all kinds of stupid mechs and made them awesome looking.
Frankly, the ridiculous history is what gives the BattleTech lore its lovely flavor, for me. I'd hate for them to reboot it, and I'm glad they've continued to nominally push the timeline forward past 3145 into the late 3100's. Honestly, I'm more excited for that new "history" than to see more stuff crammed into the existing timeline. The events of BATTLETECH excepted, of course, because of how they managed to carve out a time and place for an interesting story.
Alternately, I know there exists somewhere a supplement that posited what would happen if Kerensky and the SLFD hadn't left the Inner Sphere, and the history that followed (spoiler: it wasn't as bad as the Succession Wars, but basically was the Succession Wars but with a few new players). It's killing me that I can't find the book, though, and my searches are coming up completely dry.
It...
It was me.
I'm sorry everyone. I shouldn't have balanced my coffee on that shelf above the server rack.
Lesson learned. No hard feelings, right?
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Empires_Aflame
But the actual continuity of CW and Jihad and....yeah it gets a little weird after that.
My biggest, biggest biggest gripe of all though, is the technology. Why in the 3100s is IS endo steel still a thing? How is that possible? How have Clan methods not replaced it yet? Like, for real.
Like, come on.
Counterpoint: Scarcity is absolutely a consideration in the BattleTech canon, and sometimes you work with what you got. Look at how many mid-3000's era 'Mechs use Ferro but not Endo. It's because actual scarcity makes for more interesting 'Mech designs. This way, not every single 'Mech on the field is its MWO UberMech counterpart, using the best of all equipment and where scarcity does not exist. Further, if you have manufacturing facilities that you've been using for anywhere between 50-300+ years, and you don't have the means or resources to retool, you (again) use what you can make.
Also, by the time of the 3145's, "Clan" grade tech has largely made its way to many of the factions through trade and commerce, but not in overwhelming supply. Clan Diamond Shark/Sea Fox, anyone? A couple of the Clans were willing to trade tech and materiel to the other factions in the Sphere, but never in the kinds of quantities that could outfit entire armies. Prior to the Blackout, the Republic had about the best-equipped military using top-line Clan tech, but even they had to rely on lower-grade IS tech to garrison the thousands of worlds under their control.
[Edit] This is also why I really fucking like a lot of the design coming in the post-Jihad, Republic, and post-Republic era, because you get MixTech designs using whatever the designer can scrounge for or buy.
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
God damnit, I looked at the blurb for this doc four times, and at no point in my brain did it register as the thing I was looking for.
You guys are butts
Look that was the last straw, okay?
I mean, they're making dick jokes canon? That's just a bridge too far, we need to just reboot the whole thing.