BattleTech

[Ranger REG]

I'm glad I've never really been a fan of Star Trek; the thought of having another lifestyle game like SFB to play is scary! !

SFB a lifestyle game? I guess it is, since I have pulled more than one all-nighter in my younger years.

It's not that bad, really.

 

[Korgoth]

I know. Its why I think that battletech is dying. Sooner or later some fancy state-of-the-art european anime/comic hybrid mech based wargame will come along and provide competition. It will play in two hours, benefit from modern sculpting and molding technology, and have a strongly enforced design aesthetic that makes it an absolute beauty on the table. See, eg, Infinity, Anima Tactics, Helldorado, Alkemy, and old school Rackham.

Meanwhile battletech will continue plugging along with the license owned by one company and rented out to another with the rights to produce the miniatures sub-let one step further, with core rules decades old, a 10+ hour playing time, no design standards imposed on the sculptors, and with miniatures that even today are not produced remotely to scale with one another.

Battletech will retain its loyal fans, but the new blood is going to be harder and harder to get the older the community grows, and the more miniature gaming changes. Its much like the trap that games workshop is in, except that Games Workshop is enormous and can wield the might of an existing player base and convention system to attract new players in a way that battletech cannot.

The point of my invocation of Federation Commander was to show an example of an old school wargame that can have the rules simplified and tightened up without having to change anything fundamental about the game. BattleTech doesn't need to compete with the latest anime. It just needs to do the same thing it has always done... only faster.

 

[Loincloth of Armour]

Reading this thread made me unbox my Technical Readouts and run through them again. Great fun, great fun... but some gosh darn awful art in a lot of cases (pretty much all of TR 2750), and FASA... while it was fun, you made so many bad mech designs (Cicada, Hussar, Hollander, and JagerMech I, II, and III, I'm lookin at you)!

Speaking of Battletech innovation, did anyone play the ProtoMech rules that came out in Technical Readout 3060? I'm not sure what they were trying to accomplish with them as it's an idea that appeared to go nowwhere fast. Was it something they thought would be the new way of doing things (with mechs the size of heavy gears), or was it simply brought out in the fiction and thus added to the rules?

 

[Korgoth]

Reading this thread made me unbox my Technical Readouts and run through them again. Great fun, great fun... but some gosh darn awful art in a lot of cases (pretty much all of TR 2750), and FASA... while it was fun, you made so many bad mech designs (Cicada, Hussar, Hollander, and JagerMech I, II, and III, I'm lookin at you)!

I dunno... that's more of the ol' 3025 charm to me. Military designs are rarely "perfect"... they have to work with what they've got. Maybe one Mech was designed on a world that has a good heavy equipment industry, so it's big and mounts a large autocannon, but it's slow as heck because they suck at building transmissions, and so on.

The Sherman was a great tank in WWII not because it had a good gun (it didn't) or good armor (it really didn't). It was a great tank because it was easy to drive, easy to repair and possible to produce in ridiculous numbers. In fact, they were so easy to repair that we could often repair and recrew a tank that had been knocked out and send it back to the front (you just had to give the insides a new coat of white paint to cover up all the blood of the previous unfortunates). That's a war-winner right there. As opposed to any number of ponderous German wonder tanks that had faulty transmissions and/or were so heavy that if one threw a tread it had to be abandoned and burned because there was no way to get it back to a depot... and were so difficult to produce that you couldn't have very many of them. Sometimes you can be better on paper but worse on the field.

A real ace makes do with what he has. The vaunted Michael Wittman had to put in plenty of time in a Sturmgeschutz before he ended up with his Tiger.

 

[Andre]

I dunno... that's more of the ol' 3025 charm to me. Military designs are rarely "perfect"... they have to work with what they've got. Maybe one Mech was designed on a world that has a good heavy equipment industry, so it's big and mounts a large autocannon, but it's slow as heck because they suck at building transmissions, and so on.

The Sherman was a great tank in WWII not because it had a good gun (it didn't) or good armor (it really didn't). It was a great tank because it was easy to drive, easy to repair and possible to produce in ridiculous numbers. In fact, they were so easy to repair that we could often repair and recrew a tank that had been knocked out and send it back to the front (you just had to give the insides a new coat of white paint to cover up all the blood of the previous unfortunates). That's a war-winner right there. As opposed to any number of ponderous German wonder tanks that had faulty transmissions and/or were so heavy that if one threw a tread it had to be abandoned and burned because there was no way to get it back to a depot... and were so difficult to produce that you couldn't have very many of them. Sometimes you can be better on paper but worse on the field.

A real ace makes do with what he has. The vaunted Michael Wittman had to put in plenty of time in a Sturmgeschutz before he ended up with his Tiger.

True enough, but this is a game, not real life. Players should not make sub-optimal choices for the sake of pseudo-realism. If the designers want to add in such factors, they need to do so in a way that makes the choice meaningful to the player.

Silent Death did this very well, in my opinion. Many of the fighters included in the game were clearly lousy designs, but they were also much cheaper than better designs, or had other useful features. Players could make a conscious choice - take the fighter that's undergunned, but more reliable; take the fighter that's prone to breakdowns, but I can get twice as many; take the fighter that's best at everything, but I'll be badly outnumbered by my opponent; take the fighter that has great short-term firepower, but runs out of ammo quickly. All of those are reasonable choices that are built into the game, and add to gameplay.

Battletech primarily uses weight as the deciding factor, so when choosing mechs, taking a lousy mech of the same weight as a great mech just doesn't make sense - there's no reasonable reward for doing so.

 

[Cadfan]

Technically battletech uses BV as the deciding factor. The problem is, BV doesn't work. It doesn't account for synergy, just for DPS versus heat sinkage.

 

[Andre]

Technically battletech uses BV as the deciding factor. The problem is, BV doesn't work. It doesn't account for synergy, just for DPS versus heat sinkage.

In my defense, my version of the game is from 1985, before they used BV (battle value?) There were component cost charts, but we never used them in balancing forces.

I wonder - do the current BV values really work, even mech to mech? In other words, if you design an effective mech, will the BV be higher than that of a lousy mech with the same weight? I don't expect the rules to get things like synergy right - that's too subjective - but I hope they are at least close when comparing one mech to another.

 

[Cadfan]

They mostly work. There are two major problems, in my opinion.

First, they don't effectively account for weapon synergy within a single mech.

Second, you can sometimes reduce the BV of a mech by adding more weapons. Because BV is pro rated, ie, because they add up the BV of your weapons and then reduce by a certain amount based on how well you can cool those weapons, you can sometimes add weapons you don't care about that generate a lot of heat and take up very little space, in order to bring the overall heat index up as high as possible. Then, in game, you simply do not fire those weapons- they existed purely to minimize your BV cost. This even happens in published mechs, although to be fair published mechs rarely gain more than pocket change in BV advantage by adding redundant weapons.

Does that make sense?

Basically, if you cool 10 heat, and you have 10 heat of weapons, and you add 20 heat of really crappy weapons to your mech giving you a total of 30 heat, you may have a lower BV than you did when you had only 10 heat worth of weapons. Then, in game, you just ignore the 20 heat of junk, and play with the original 10.

 

[Loincloth of Armour]

Basically, if you cool 10 heat, and you have 10 heat of weapons, and you add 20 heat of really crappy weapons to your mech giving you a total of 30 heat, you may have a lower BV than you did when you had only 10 heat worth of weapons. Then, in game, you just ignore the 20 heat of junk, and play with the original 10.

Interesting. I suppose you 'pay' for it by the wasted tonnage required for those 'junk heat' weapons, but as you say, it could be manipulated.

We never used BV, just asked the question, "Is this mech a good match for other examples of its weight class?"

As an example, if you have a Thunderbolt, I would want to use another 65 tonner to make it a fair game. Same if you used a Catapult, or a Crusader. If you used a Quickdraw, I'd be willing to pilot a 60 ton machine and not feel I'm sacrificing advantages to you.

However, if you pilot a JaggerMech, I'd feel like I was cheating if I used anything better than a Vindicator. Heck, I'd even consider a Panther a fight with the odds still in my favour. If --at the same tech level-- I'm willing to fight at a 20-30 ton dissadvantage... then I think the design is so bad I have to ask why it's in a Technical Readout I paid money for.

 

[MerricB]

Because.... nah, I don't think I can justify it.

Within the confines of the Sword and Dragon campaign we're currently playing, they do make some sort of sense, and they make a great opponent for those crappy planet militias our elite forces are going up against.

We played two games on Friday; the first (4 vs 4 mechs in very heavy woods) took us 4 hours (about 13 rounds); the second (6 vs 8 mechs in open ground and a pursuit scenario) took about 3 hours (about 8 rounds).

Fun, though.

Cheers!