Anyone playing Harebrained Schemes Battletech?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

So, is anyone else playing Battletech?

It's been quite addictive for me.
Though I've finished the campaign last week, so I figure I'll play it a bit less often now. Unless I decide to experiment seriously with some modding.

 

[jonesy]

Honestly I completely forgot about the whole game coming out.

How long was the campaign in hours played, and how would you rate it?

 

[MarkB]

I'm enjoying it a lot so far. I'm still playing through God of War, and mostly bought Battletech just as something I could play occasionally while having a podcast running in the background - but it's been addictive enough that I've been playing it exclusively for the last week.

 

[Janx]

how much is it like the FASA board game?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Honestly I completely forgot about the whole game coming out.

How long was the campaign in hours played, and how would you rate it?

I played about 70 hours, it's probably doable in less (I heard something around the 50 hour mark somewhere).
The campaign doesn't force any time limits on you, so it can be a good idea to take regular mercenary contracts to shoot yourself some better mechs and gear, train your pilots, and upgrade your ship for better repair facilities, medical facilities and morale-boosting amenities.

how much is it like the FASA board game?

It is different, but still with many similarities.

You still have to do heat management, you have all the different hit locations with their seperate armor and structure values, with the chance of critical hits.
Positioning matters, if you shoot from the side, you have a higher chance of hitting locations on that side, if you attack the rear, you get to attack the soft rear torso armor and stuff like that. If your morale is high or a mech has been knocked down from stability damage (ballistics, missiles and melee inflicts stability damage in addition to regular damage) or having lost a leg, you can also take called shots to specific locations, but normally it's random.

Initiative is very different. There are 5 phases, one for each weight class and an additional one for particulary trained pilots in light mechs. The lighter the class, the earlier its phase. In your phase, you can choose to reserve to a later phase, or act, allowing you to move and then fire or use some special options. Within a phase, the sides switch. (So lights for example can reserve to the end, move, take a shot, and then the turn is over and the new phase begins, and they can sprint away again before any heavier mechs can act to their presence. Particularly trained pilots could potentially also attack and then move.)

Mechs come with stock loadouts, though you can tweak mechs in the mech lab. You can't change the engine, and mechs have hard points that limit where and what kind of weapons you can load. (So you can't turn a Hunchback 4G into a missile or laser boat).

There is also the metagame of managing your mercenary company, you take contracts that hopefully earn you money and salvage. But you have to repair any damage your mechs took (potentially replacing destroyed mech parts), and your mechwarriors need to recover from injuries taken in the fight, or need to be replaced because they died from those injuries.

 

[Blue]

Great summary [MENTION=710]Mustrum_Ridcully[/MENTION]. Building off your excellent foundation, a few more things:

Mechs have a stability rating, and some weapons do stability damage, with melee attacks doing the most. You have five bars to fill up before you fall, and an extra protection that you can't fall from an attack unless you were Unsteady before it. Unsteady is some number of those bars filled (depending on your pilot rating). So you can't go from "okay" to down in one hit.

Movement options are move (allows action), sprint (ends turn) or jump (allows action). They don't seem to penalize attacks like they do in TT. Also, they give you "pips" of evasion, up to 4 normally (more with high skills), and each mech that attacks it removes a pip. (There's also a turn-ending ability called "sensor lock" which removes two and locks it in for indirect fire.)

Indirect fire is exactly what it sounds - if you have LRMs in range and any of your mech has eyes on a target, you can fire LRMs, even over blocking terrain. There's a penalty to hit that way you can offset with skills.

The smallest weapons (MG, Small Lasers and Flamers) are now "support" weapons. They only have a range of 2 hexes, ignore evasion, and are the only weapons that can fire if you make a melee attack.

Oh, and mechs get Guarded and Entrenched, either through actions or terrain like forests. These reduce damage from attacks from the front and sides by 25% or 50% (except against melee attacks).

For all of that, it feels a lot closer to tabletop then many D&D game adaptions. You can even Death From Above!

 

[Jhaelen]

Hmm, I have to admit, all of this sounds rather cool!

 

[Blue]

Hmm, I have to admit, all of this sounds rather cool!

I kickstarted it, had to listen to my friends who went to the Beta Playtest backer level talk abut how much fun it is, and since it was just released it's been my game of choice.

It does have some rough edges - load screens take too long, and before the 1.0.02 patch I had a few crashes. But the play is sweet.

 

[jonesy]

You guys are making it sound like exactly the kind of Battletech/mech game that I've always hoped for.

Mech Commander was ok, I just wish it would have had a turn-based option. The second game went in the wrong direction, and Mech Assault was bland arcade.

Of the really old games that I remember MechForce(MechFight) had potential, but I don't recall it ever getting a campaign of any kind.

Steel Empire (that's Cyber Empires for Americans) was real-time arcady and you also had to severely limit the top two mech classes in multiplayer, because otherwise those were the only mechs anyone would ever use and the end game was always just Titans (superboring). The Catapult was supposed to be the best in wide open ground, and the little quick ones (can't remember the name) in city maps, but Titans just tore through both (biggest issue with the Catapult was that multiplayer was split-screen so you could tell where to aim with a Titan by looking at your opponents screen).

7th Legion was just like a Command and Conquer mod.

Best of the bunch was MissionForce Cyberstorm (taking place in the early Earthsiege/Starsiege/Tribes universe), which is still a pretty good strategy game if you can get it to work. The problem with the campaign was that while the maps were random the players actions had no control over what happened.

 

[Blue]

I'm only part way through the campaign, still working on getting heavier mechs so my roster is about 2 heavies, 10 mediums and some lights in storage. My "usual lance" that goes down are my heaviest mediums, 50-55 ton range, and I've got a few replacements so I'm not delayed in doing more missions if they are down for repairs - the monthly financials are always ticking closer.

Unlike mechs, I don't have a roster of the usual suspects for mechwarriors, I try to rotate them all through because you will have some out in medbay after pilot damage. Your in-game alter ego can't be killed, but I've lost several other mechwarriors, and I took enough damage to kill my main and he was in medbay for months of game time.

My "heavy" mechs are both 60 tons - just barely into "heavy", and because the initiative system makes them go after all mediums (unless you have an exceptional pilot), I usually leave those in my mechbay and field four 50-55 ton mediums. Up until now I've usually been fighting medium & light mechs (which i why I have few salvaged heavy mechs), and I have a decent lance setup for dealing with them but it's having problems with missions with many heavy mechs:

1x "breacher" - fast & jump, lots of medium lasers. Designed to poke holes in armor. This is where switching to something with bigger weapons to slam the same hit location harder might be better vs. the larger mechs. Overloaded with weapons, I usually get two alpha strikes and then a round of melee (plus support weapons) to cool down some.

1x knockdown/crit seeker - fast/jump with a lot of SRMs. If a foe is knocked down, they get close enough to alpha strike using the free called shot from knockdown, trying for the center torso unless the foe is already missing a leg. If there's no foe down but one that's unstable, they get to it to try to knock down with those SRMs. Finally, they go after mechs with holes in their armor because the missiles each have their own hit location (though grouped around the first I've read) so more chances for internals or blowing off a limb/torso. Also runs hot, ready for occasional melee to cool down.

2x LRM boats - about 25/30 LRMs, and 2-3 medium lasers. Designed to lag behind and pound - usually looking for armor breeches or trying for stability damage to knock someone down. Though if I use morale to make a called shot a load of LRMs focused on CT can make quite the mess. They can deal with heat for an extended battle if just using LRMs, they will overheat if they use their medium lasers too much at the same time, but having the short/long range mix of weapon works, plus I may be firing LRMs at one opponent and multifire a ML at a close one just to use up a pip of evasion.