Hmmm, so far I'm fine with one Black Knight, two Shadow Hawk and one Wolverine mech, i.e. one heavy and three mediums. The only missions where you'd think a light mech is still useful later on are the "intercept a convoy" ones... until you run into the convoy's escorts which proceed to ream your light mech a new one. Turns out, it's better to pre-plan your route so that you can still intercept the convoy and not get sandwiched between its escorts and then the mech escort.
Sheesh, SRM and LRM carriers are really scary if you can't kill them before they unload their missiles even once. Had to reload a story mission because an SRM carrier stripped off half the armor of the Black Knight in one salvo. Also hit my character about twice in that one salvo as well. :-/
OTOH, as soon as I got the Black Knight (managed to get it in one mission by carefully knocking out the pilot and then save scumming until random chance gave me the third part as salvage. ^^) and I rebuilt it to be a bit more heat efficient, one round kills of enemy mechs got a lot more easier. One large laser and seven medium lasers with my best gunner (my character) help a lot.
BTW, the reason why you don't want to keep using light mechs later on is the "Evasive" mechanic, which is not part of original BattleTech. Your evasion value due to movement does not degrade due to weapons fire in the original game (except if you are in a wood hex and the opponent decides to clear out the trees), which keeps light mechs longer in the game since they are so difficult to hit.
This game both degrades your evasion value if fired upon by multiple mechs and also missiles seem to partially hit in 90% of the cases, which does not go along well with minimally armored scout units.
Hence, the best tactic always seems to be concentrated fire and if one your own mechs get damaged heavily either take it over a mountain or at least make it as difficult to hit as possible and maybe move one of your undamaged mechs to be hit more easily. Seems the AI can be fooled at least sometimes into taking the easier hit.
I've been running a hunchback with mess of medium lasers as my tactician. He has a harder time closing for that initial salvo, so he does sensor locks until he's close enough to attack on his own.
I'm having a trouble with taking head shots though, my pilots are getting knocked out for 2 months at a time from unfortunate head hits.
I'm sitting on 2 partials of an Orion and it's annoying me. I really want to be able to finish it.
Hah, yeah. Same here with the partials. I got two thirds of an Orion and a Thunderbolt in the bay and one third of a Jaegermech. I could be running around with a full heavy lance by now. Oh, well, I'll get it over time.
Cant you buy the last piece?
Cant you buy the last piece?
Nope. You can buy a mech outright but you're only going to get the good ones on high-value planets, and they're also the ones that are going to chew you up with missions. The way funding and travel (time and costs) works, it's very hard to build up a mass of cash to fly to a distant, high-value system, buy a good mech and travel somewhere less lethal without going bankrupt.
It's quite a nice system. If you enjoy battlemechs, football management games, space opera and XCOM, this is a weirdly specific blend of those genres.
Strange, I could have sworn you could have...maybe that was just the pre release version. Ah well.
You can buy the piece if it is available for sale. But you can buy that piece whether you have other pieces or not. Occasionally there are whole mech's for sale as well.
Finished my Orion. I have that and a Quickdraw, with the rest being various 50-55t mechs. Positioning keeps working out that the Orion actually doesn't get targeted much, so I've been able to keep it on every mission and rotating out my damaged 50t mechs. The Quickdraw has enough speed though that it pushes to the front very quickly.
Oh, I guess you can then. I've just never seen one.
I have a Dragon and a Quickdraw in service now and they're doing a nice job of dishing out damage and taking it. Ideally I want another Heavy to take over as a plasma gunner from my Vindicator, which now seems to draw the fire of every unit on the field. Also have a Centurion for good close-up work. But yeah, I need to start working to get 4 Heavies before I start doing the next story missions (although a medium with jump jets with sniping would be a good backup. Hmm).
Given how jump jets can be such a life-saver in so many regards, I am very tempted to just refit every mech I get to use them. I'll have to see how viable that is when I get to assault mechs later on.
I really wish I could spring for a faster move speed. More jump jets might be a solution though. Basically I want a fast moving, high weight mech who's job it is to be shot and punch things.
I had a mission where I got ambushed by second lance of Locust mechs, but I was able to take them out with a single punch each. It was kind of awesome. It makes me want a heavy/assault mech with nothing but speed and armor. Especially since punching is also great at removing evasion on enemies.
Melee attacks seem to be a bit overpowered in this game. It also very much reminds me of front mission, and with lawsuits and everything, I am a bit concerned...but only a bit.
I heard good things about the firestarter for a melee mech since small lasers, machine guns and flamers automatically go off during melee. I am interested in melee in general, but I forsee it being nerfed as it is devestatingly effective in game.
I really wish I could spring for a faster move speed. More jump jets might be a solution though. Basically I want a fast moving, high weight mech who's job it is to be shot and punch things.
There's a hack here to get the move speed really tuned up:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/05/02/battletech-speed-fix/
So, I started the campaign over, because I wanted to build my mechwarriors better and also get some of the kickstarter backers, because I find the standard portraits the game generates to be pretty bad.
I save scummed like crazy to get constant do-overs for who's in the hiring hall.
PSA: The game re-rolls who's in the hiring hall every time you make a jump to a new system, so if you save your game just before the jumpships jumps, you just have to reload, wait through the animation and then either continue to the planet or reload the save again.
BattleTech advice: if you get the story mission for Liberation: Smithon, do not try to do it straight away. It's such a difficulty spike that it's ridiculous. You want to be running a full lance of 4 Heavies or maybe even have an Assault before you try it. It's a b++++ of a mission with 8 enemy mechs (including at least 4 plasma snipers who can shoot you from halfway across the maps when the light spotters come into range and 3 LRM-focused mechs) and lots of turrets, including two LRM turrets that can chew up your mechs early on.
If you want to try it with just Mediums and Heavies, load up massively on LRMs and be aware that you can detonate the ammo crates to create massive explosions that can damage enemy mechs. If you get lucky, you can take out half the enemy force indirectly this way. Mobility is also hugely important. The best luck I've had so far is charging up the right side of the map, sniping the crate next to the two LRM turrets and then pulling back to the start area and drawing the enemy into a killing field. You will take heavy damage (unless you're very lucky) and you may have to sacrifice a mech or two and eject the pilots. It's brutal.
Oh, and the whole mission takes place in a desert so you can't fire with your full weapons loadout every turn. Fantastic.
Cool.
It's actually not that hard. Just ignore the ammo trucks (they are just a bonus objective for a bit more cash), stay in your starting area and let them come. Move one well armored mech up to the ridge for as long as needed to get rid of the three turrets and use the Vigilance morale skill to make him decently save against damage. If it takes a bit too much damage, switch it out against another mech and rinse and repeat, because you want to get rid of the LRM turrets which somehow can still shoot you despite no enemy mech being in spotting range.
I just destroyed one ammo crate at the end as a novelty to try out how much damage it would do to the last enemy mech standing. Three heavies and one medium in my roster, with two SRM boats, one LRM boat and one medium laser laden Grashopper to lop off legs and side torsos after the SRM's and LRM's knockdown one mech per round.
That mission was brutal, I nearly went bankrupt recovering. I had to clear out a bit of inventory to stay afloat. My main pilot "died", but they can't die, so always end up in the med bay. I got lucky with my other pilot, but it was two mechs that needed a near complete refit, plus 2 pilots in med for over 60 days each.
That mission was ridiculous. I did win it though. The key was running my Vindicator right to the edge of the opening area in the "non-combat" phase of the opening go, triggering the enemies so I then went into combat with that one unit and shooting the ammo crate next to the two LRM missile towers. They got blown up without taking a shot and the resulting fireball crippled a nearby Heavy. I then retreated my Vindicator, used a Dragon to take down the other turret and then lured all the other mechs into a kill zone in the starting area. It was brutal but I managed to win.
Of course, both the optional merc side-missions on this planet are insanely hard and the next story mission, where you have to destroy the dropship on the moon, is beyond crazy. Still, #battletech
Got into an frustrating groove in BattleTech where I'm running around clearing up low-level missions. This is great because it gives me a fair bit of money and also XP, which is key. I'm boosting my lance pilots all the way up the ranks quite nicely between missions now.
The problem is that although I have three Heavies, two of them are Dragons, which are close-range brawlers. On most missions that's fine, but the second I start trying higher-tier missions (like just half a skull above the 2 skulls I can normally do with ease) they bring out 8 mechs, usually 4 mediums and 4 heavies, and then I'm toast, as they can wipe me out before I close to range. It doesn't help that my only viable ranged sniper is a Vindicator medium, who immediately attracts the fire of every unit on the battlefield so is of limited utility on the battlefield. Ideally I need to find more useful and versatile heavies, but that's been tough so far.
It's annoying because I want to get on with the next story mission, but right now that's impossible as I die the second the enemy reinforcement lance lands, as my damage output isn't enough to deal with the 4 mediums and lights at the start of the game without taking damage, and then the 4 heavies take me out very quickly.
The amount of grind in the game is annoying, especially because it seems highly variable: I seem to be about 50-60% of the way through the story at 35 hours and am running around grinding, and other people are reporting finishing the whole game in 20-25 hours because they had a smooth run of picking up heavy and assault mechs very easily thanks to the RNG gods.
I heard about the difficulty spike. You may have to max armor and go meh on weapons. 4 medium lasers can break some teeth if you have good called shot abilities.
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Finished the game. Very strong overall, although it was probably too long: I logged 54 hours in the game and it definitely got monotonous in the middle there. Fortunately it picks up a lot towards the end with a lot more story missions you can directly swing between.
My final lance roster was the Highlander you get as part of the campaign, 2 Battlemasters (1 of which I only get in time for the last battle) and a bunch of heavies: an Orion and a Thunderbolt did a lot of the legwork in fighting. Favoured weapons ended up being the AC20+++, the Gauss Gun and L Laser+++, with a nice load of heatsinks. I regret I spent so much time mid-game on LRMs, as the damage output of LRMs is too weak. Would have probably shaved 5 hours off the game if I'd gone SRMs and close-up builds instead. Oh well.
I had two Highlanders and two King Crabs. Never saw an Atlas on the enemy side in random missions.
It got really boring toward the end, outside of the story missions.
The story was serviceable and overall I had a quite good time.
The FLASHPOINT expansion came out today. Adds a new freeform campaign mode allowing you to completely bypass the storyline if you want, and also adds a series of mercenary mini-campaigns with multiple battles on the same planet. It also adds new class-specific missions where you have to use light or medium mechs (so you can't just power through with the Assaults and LosTech boys).
It also adds new map biomes (including a beach setting), three new mechs (Crab, Cyclops, Hatchetman) and various patches to stability, graphics and UI.
They've also said the second expansion, which will arrive in the summer, will be based on the old CITITECH side-game, so will focus on close-quarters urban combat.
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URBAN WARFARE (and sadly not MECHS AND THE CITY) came out last week, haven't had a chance to try it out yet but it looks good. They've also combined that with a patch which adds physical damage effects, so now if your massive missile barrage misses the primary target it may hit things behind it (including your own mechs, so be careful and remember to clear your firing lines!).
Will give a whirl in a while. I tried playing FLASHPOINT a while back but realised I was burned out on the base game, so gave it a bit more of a rest.
After several years, I finally got this game.
Wow.
It is everything I could have hoped for and more.
Some frustrating moments with bad faith negotiations/difficulty spikes, but I am very happy.
Need to find out where I can go to get more crests, as I really want to use the republic of the sphere symbol.
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Late to the party but I just jumped into Battletech this weekend. I am a big fan of these games and this one is quite enjoyably. I do wish the voice acting was better (like mechcommander series) but overall a great addition to the BT/MW game series.
Looking forward to Meachwarrior 5 later this fall!
Looking forward to Meachwarrior 5 later this fall!
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Looking forward to Meachwarrior 5 later this fall!It's been delayed until December.
Damn, maybe a blessing in disguise since I start up my grad studies again in a few weeks!
Hmm.
Okay.
Are you playing the base game or a mod?
What are your(god I hate this term) builds?
Are you chasing evasion and maxing your armor?
Are you using your special abilities?
Are you fixing everything after your mission(not trying to be snarky, I TOTALLY forgot to fix some mechs sometimes, especially when I had more than one of the same mech)?
How many skulls are you on, exactly? There IS a massive difficulty spike when you go from 2ish to 3ish, I have to say.
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Hmm.
Okay.
Are you playing the base game or a mod?
What are your(god I hate this term) builds?
Are you chasing evasion and maxing your armor?Are you using your special abilities?
Are you fixing everything after your mission(not trying to be snarky, I TOTALLY forgot to fix some mechs sometimes, especially when I had more than one of the same mech)?
How many skulls are you on, exactly? There IS a massive difficulty spike when you go from 2ish to 3ish, I have to say.
Base game.
I BELIEVE it was mostly medium mechs to start but I don't remember the details except that I was following Steam build guides.
Yes, I fixed after every mission, that was part of why I was bottoming out on credits and would've gone bankrupt if I left to try to find another mission.
Any mission above half a skull is nigh unbeatable, one skull story missions are possible to defeat with luck but 1.5 is flat impossible. I have never even tried a 2 skull or higher, I'm certain of it.
Okay.
What I am going to suggest is to go through your salvage and sell EVERYTHING, with an eye towards ammo. Got a mission that makes you choose between cash and salvage? Pick salvage, and sell what you find. This SHOULD help you increase your cash on hand.
Also, when making your mechs, focus on maximizing armor and having firepower be a secondary concern. Stay away from mostly medium mechs at first- light mechs move faster and have more evasive chevron. But even an agile mech needs armor, focus on that. Make sure you have at least 3 evasion per mech. Do not attack anything with more than 3 chevron unless you are trying to wear them down.
Stay away from large lasers. Heat is an issue in the early game, and you don't want to shut down in front of someone. Focus on medium and small lasers. Remember in melee, small lasers, flamers, and machine guns go off automatically, use that to your advantage. Close in and punch enemies in the face. If you can overheat someone with flamers OVERHEAT SOMEONE WITH FLAMERS. Look for the enemies with a lot of PPCs, large lasers and the like. You need to shut people down and then shoot them in the early game. Focus fire in guys who are either shut down or have had their evasion stripped from them.
Stay with 1 skull missions. The spike is too awful with 2 skull and up missions. You need to bore yourself with the easy missions, collect your body weight in heat sinks and ammunition and the like and sell them when you have a lot. You need to have a lot of not just spare cash but spare parts to deal with random turns of fortune in the game(and there will be a lot of those). Stay on a planet and do them ALL. Negotiate for salvage and sell it back. Do not leave a planet unless you have done every small time mission there.
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I did a recent replay and ended up putting 100 hours into the game in a much more relaxed, enjoyable playthrough. The mix I found was doing story missions but then doing every optional mission on the same planet before moving on. Before I mainlined the main story missions and quickly outlevelled myself, and had to spend ages mid-game grinding side-missions. If you mix them up from the off, the game becomes much better paced.
I would definitely recommend playing with the DLCs installed and switched on. The city maps are a huge force equaliser, turning very tough missions into easier ones because you can take cover behind buildings, disrupt sightlines, use jump jets to get better vantage points or blow buildings apart which enemy units are standing on, which can destroy their legs. However, if playing with the DLCs remember to keep 4x Lights and 4x Mediums in reserve for missions with tonnage limits (in the base game you can literally get rid of them all and just have 4x Assault running around, which is no longer the case).
A huge advantage - I didn't really bother first time around, hence why so much frustration - is using the Called Shot and Vigilant abilities to give you a boost in combat, and on the ship taking upgrades that boost your morale. Maxing out your morale bonuses on the ship means being able to use special abilities every 1-2 turns in battle rather than maybe once or twice in the entire battle, and you can level up morale upgrades on the ship surprisingly quickly.
There's also much wisdom in looking out for better mech salvage and pieces to buy, and being optimistic about it. On my first playthrough I didn't get Assault Mechs until almost the end of the game (I think I still had 1 Heavy on the final mission), but on my second I lucked out with getting a couple of Assault pieces early on and then salvaging the third piece from the very first enemy Assault Mech I faced, so had an Assault running around relatively early which was a huge force equaliser.
So it sounds like I basically need to completely restart from scratch?
I would more say go back a few saves.
The heavy metal DLC makes the game a lot easier. In both weaponry and specialized mechs. Though, if you already dislike the base game not sure you want to put any more money towards it.
Couple things I've not seen mentioned, leveling your pilots is huge. They will get better at everything that matters in the game. Defense, offense, heat management, called shots, etc... Any particular mission can go up or down in difficulty, this is on purpose to add some variance to the missions in the game. The difficulty system is based on two factors. First is the skull challenge. This determines the size, + weaponry, and condition of the mechs you will face. The second is payout. The payout is based on what you will be facing in the missions. Pay attention to the comments by the intel officer. He can usually tip you off to suicide missions.
THANK YOU, I knew I was missing something.
Level up your pilots. If this is vanilla battletech we are talking focus on Gunnery.
You have intrigued me to the point that I am going to restart my vanilla battletech game today with a new campaign and see if I encounter any of the issues you are encountering. I have been playing BTA so long I may be missing issues with Vanilla.
You have intrigued me to the point that I am going to restart my vanilla battletech game today with a new campaign and see if I encounter any of the issues you are encountering. I have been playing BTA so long I may be missing issues with Vanilla.
I ran one a month or two ago (im back in MW5 now). I remember there is a bit of a curve where you think you are ready to move up a skull, and quickly find out, that you are in fact, not ready. Still love this game and its difficulty is one of the best parts.
One more thing I forgot, not all missions are meant to kill everything either. Recovery missions are a good way to make cash and get pilot experience. Just get the asset and GTFO. Assassination missions sometimes have a convenient bee line to the target. Kill and GTFO. Ambush convoy missions, well you get the idea kill and GTFO.
I tried to start up a new game but my mods have superceded the original game- I can only play bta3062 now it seems.
One of the few games I never felt the need for any mods. Though, Id love to get some clan mechs on my lance. Im holding out for BT2.
I'm going to suggest something ad a result of me being unable to play the original game- get the battletech save file editor mod. It takes a moment or 5 to learn, but once you do you can give yourself a lot more money, and you can use that to mitigate a lot of frustration. If you want to go whole hog, give yourself mechs, weapons, pilots...anything.
Sorry you are so frustrated with the game but this may help.