The Story of BattleTech: What's wrong with it?

[krainboltgreene]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'has no draw for any crowd beyond the fans', if you weren't a fan of mech combat you'd probably never hear about Battletech.

Meaning that BattleTech simply doesn't have the same draw as it once did in order to make new fans and players. The storyline and setting don't make much sense anymore to people. Maybe in the 80's and early 90's sure, but the current generations need more than just "mobile war suits" to get hooked.

As lame as Battletech has been of late who's done better?

I can't think of anyone either :/

[magnuskn]

Macross: Singing ALWAYS defeats the aliens

But the singing is AWESOME. At least Sheryl Nomes. Although I have a fondness for some Fire Bomber songs. BOMBAAAA!

[Clutch9800]

The storyline and setting don't make much sense anymore to people. Maybe in the 80's and early 90's sure, but the current generations need more than just "mobile war suits" to get hooked.

Come on,

You could say that about pen and paper gaming in general.

Clutch

[setmonster]

I'm not actually sure the storyline is relevant in BattleTech anymore. I mean, people who play it these days, do they actually ensure that they religiously stick to Catalyst's vision of how the game should be played?

If you think about it, why should you accord Coleman, Bills, Beas and their coterie of writers any authority anyway. None of them were involved in the original fleshing out of the BT universe; they're all just fans who became writers. They don't even own the BT licence. Their version of BattleTech is only 'official' because they pay Topps a stupid amount of money. Anyone could do what they are doing.

Look on Catalyst's "official" BT forums. Many of the topics are people discussing and fleshing out their own versions of the BT universe. It seems to me that alternate BT universes are far more popular with fans than the canon Catalyst one. Personally, I think the only real value that Catalyst has added to the wealth of BT material that already existed, was to organise the ruleset into core books (not that I necessarily agree with how the rules have been organised and modified) and made the core rules era-non specific.

That means you can just take the basic rules and play in whatever universe you fancy. After all, most people can write better storylines than the shower who are writing for Catalyst at the moment.

[magnuskn]

I guess for some it is hard to care about something fictional once its "core" setting has been made kaputt by the developers. Same thing as with BT happened to me about the Forgotten Realms, once the devs there decided to take a sledgehammer to the setting.

[Clutch9800]

Set,

You are right to a point. I'm not sure "anybody" could do it, but the BattleTech universe is certainly a sandbox where you can grow your own. I'm pretty sure you're wrong about being able to write a better backstory. But you're free to prove me wrong.

Mag,

What setting did they take a sledgehammer to? What BattleTech setting that is.

You guys are long on generalities and way short on specifics.

Give me specifics!

Clutch

[magnuskn]

Mag,

What setting did they take a sledgehammer to? What BattleTech setting that is.

You guys are long on generalities and way short on specifics.

Give me specifics!

Clutch

Did you bother to read my reply from Friday?

[Username17]

You guys are long on generalities and way short on specifics.

Give me specifics!

First of all: fuck you.

That having been said, you have a fundamental problem with your demands, which is that people who think something is lame probably can't give you specifics. Because they think it's lame, and didn't read it all the way through.

The Jihad failed to maintain my interest. That makes it bad. But it also means that I can't give you a play by play of why it sucks, because I don't remember it very well and started skimming pretty fast.

-Username17

[Blasted]

I think everyone on this board has the opinion that the Jihad storyline of late has sucked. I'm not sure what you mean by 'has no draw for any crowd beyond the fans', if you weren't a fan of mech combat you'd probably never hear about Battletech.

As lame as Battletech has been of late who's done better?
Macross: Singing ALWAYS defeats the aliens
Gundam: There always seems to be one whinny emo kid that ruins things.
Heavy Gear: Rips off Mad Max, but so did Battletech, they're just late to the party

Who has done better? Depends on how you define the scope.
If you absolutely must have whopping big robots, then CAV does it better. (in terms of rules set and gameplay)
If your robots can be slightly smaller, then war machine is better.
In fact, I'd say that war machine has taken over the 'big robot' genre.
Even though it can involve magic.
If you like anime, then infinity does it better.
maybe at43 is in there too? Even 40K has a bunch of big robots (depending on faction). There's an argument to be made that epic 40K is a much better game involving huge robots.
There are a whole bunch of different options and judging by the very small number involved in the 'only very very very big robots' genre, I think most people have moved on. Battletech isn't just competing in that area, but against all other wargames and it does so with both hands and feet tied behind its back.

[Clutch9800]

Facts about the Jihad:

1. The Jihad was not planned in advance.

2. Word of Blake had the good of the Star League in mind always.

3. WMD were used because Word of Blake was relatively weak militarily.

4. All of the Inner Sphere intel agencies (with the possible exception of SAFE) were aware of the strength of Word of Blake.

5. Word of Blake had no qualms about using WMD because they culturally had done it before.

Clutch

[Juton]

Facts about the Jihad:

1. The Jihad was not planned in advance.

2. Word of Blake had the good of the Star League in mind always.

3. WMD were used because Word of Blake was relatively weak militarily.

4. All of the Inner Sphere intel agencies (with the possible exception of SAFE) were aware of the strength of Word of Blake.

5. Word of Blake had no qualms about using WMD because they culturally had done it before.

Clutch

That's true from an in universe view but the Battletech writers had some idea before the started to skip down that yellow brick road.

Who has done better? Depends on how you define the scope.
If you absolutely must have whopping big robots, then CAV does it better. (in terms of rules set and gameplay)
If your robots can be slightly smaller, then war machine is better.
In fact, I'd say that war machine has taken over the 'big robot' genre.
Even though it can involve magic.
If you like anime, then infinity does it better.
maybe at43 is in there too? Even 40K has a bunch of big robots (depending on faction). There's an argument to be made that epic 40K is a much better game involving huge robots.
There are a whole bunch of different options and judging by the very small number involved in the 'only very very very big robots' genre, I think most people have moved on. Battletech isn't just competing in that area, but against all other wargames and it does so with both hands and feet tied behind its back.

I've played CAV but I haven't played war machine. CAV is quicker and simpler than Battletech but I didn't find it as involving. It's been years but I think Heavy Gear does CAV-style mecha combat better than CAV.

I'm not sure what anime you refer to, 'Infinity + Anime' returns a lot of results. Does At43 have any books in english, their site is in french and I can't find it anywhere else on the web.

Some real evidence that Battletech has lost ground is this:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/# ... ech&cmpt=q
This could be due to a variety of factors, but ultimately it means Battletech must have lost a huge amount of market share.

[Username17]

Why are WMDs even a thing in the later Battletech books? It's just a nuclear bomb, so fucking what?

Nuclear weapons don't destroy everything, they just hit really hard over a large area. But the mechs in the setting have fusion reactors in their chests and shoot each other with plasma bolts. A nuclear explosion is just a PPC that is harder to dodge and causes large amounts of collateral damage. If you really hate some city or another, I'm sure that's fine. But if your opponents are running around in armored vehicles that explicitly do keep running after getting covered in plasma, it's a waste of resources.

-Username17

[Clutch9800]

Why are WMDs even a thing in the later Battletech books? It's just a nuclear bomb, so fucking what?

Nuclear weapons don't destroy everything, they just hit really hard over a large area. But the mechs in the setting have fusion reactors in their chests and shoot each other with plasma bolts. A nuclear explosion is just a PPC that is harder to dodge and causes large amounts of collateral damage. If you really hate some city or another, I'm sure that's fine. But if your opponents are running around in armored vehicles that explicitly do keep running after getting covered in plasma, it's a waste of resources.

-Username17

Well,

It's because of the way the history was written. In the 1st and 2nd Succession Wars the Inner Sphere came close to nuking each other back to the stone age. They did reduce some planets to levels of tech that were 1800's.

There had been a backlash against the use of WMD that led to the Ares Conventions, that was written in such a way that it sanctioned pretty much endless small scale conflict, but used a NATO style caveat that the use of nuclear weapons against any House would be treated as an attack against all Houses. Nuclear Weapons were anathema in the Inner Sphere and the Clans. Everybody had them, but no one was supposed to consider using them. This is one of the reasons that Clan Wolverine was subject to a Trial of Annialation by all other clans, because they nuked a genetic repository. The Clans took it to the level that anyone found with the DNA of someone from Clan Wolverine is marked for death, even if they were never a member of Clan Wolverine.

Anyway, in BattleTech Nukes=Bad. Universe wise for the above reasons, game-wise because thay would be terribly unbalancing.

Clutch

[Juton]

There was a Battletech book 'Ideal War' which has a scene where the bad guys are flinging Tac-Nukes about willy-nilly and the good guys in their mechs where able to stop them. In the setting the nukes you have to worry about are the multi-megaton ones or orbital bombardment. As tough as mech's are they can't survive a blast of such a nuke within a kilometer, or whatever distance.

In fact I believe there is a rule somewhere that says after a nuke:
Step 1: Remove all terrain features within a 25 hex radius, replace with a depth 3 crater.
Step 2+: Yadda-yadda

So nukes in Battletech can be quite dangerous.

[Crissa]

Mechwarriors want to get out of their mechs at some point.

If you can fly in, litter their world with a few hundred-megaton bombs, there's no towns and farms and ships left for the mechs to do anything about. It doesn't kill the mechs, great, but it kills everything they're defending.

-Crissa

[magnuskn]

Also consider that actual numbers of mechs are pretty small. If you attack a planet with, say, 5 regiments, that's pretty huge already, and that's only 540 machines. If somebody drops a nuke on top of those 5 regiments, that someone basically wiped out the garrison forces for 5 planets in one strike.

[setmonster]

Yeah, well all this is bollocks. Everyone knows that the BT universe is governed by FASA-Fiziks and FASA-nomics, which are entirely incompatible with real-universe physics, military dogma and economics.

In the BattleTech universe, a dozen bipedal warmachines can somehow pacify an entire planet of a billion people by their sheer presence.

Furthermore, the BT intergalatic governments, whose feudal star empires encompass some five hundred worlds, can only manage to afford to outfit something of the order of 80 regiments of men and machines. Which are not only enough to garrison their star-spanning domains, but are enough to regularly pulverise their neighbours back to the stone-ages.

Go figure...

[Username17]

Well, FASAnomics and FASAdynamics are FASAnating and all, but I'm seriously asking about what the big fucking deal with WMDs are in the post-FASA continuity. WMDs come in three varieties, which all should be of little consequence to a Mech as outlined:

• Nuclear. Of most importance, a nuclear weapon causes a great deal of destruction. But it's not actually hotter than the weapons that Mechs use on each other, nor does it exert more pressure. For fuck's sake, it's just a fusion reaction and there is a continuous fusion reaction inside every Mech just a meter or so under the pilot's nutsack. Unless it lands very close, it's basically just some nuclear hellfire - something that Mechs withstand on a regular basis.
• Chemical. Mechs are sealed. You can run around in the harsh vacuum of lunar combat, and indeed totally do. While there are doubtless some nice corrosives that would ruin a Mech's armor or heat sinks or both - no ordinary toxin is going to have any effect at all.
• Biological. Again with the whole "total environmental seal" thing those machines have going on. These are more insidious of course, in that a Mech could get some nasty bacteria on it and then get everyone sick back at the camp when it returned home. But in general, I should think you'd be able to set the Mech on fire, since being on fire is a minor nuisance for a Mech. And that is a pretty decent sterilization strategy.

Over and above the moral questions, I just don't see the functionality. Modern armored vehicles are designed with nuclear weapon use in mind. And the Mechs are supposed to be way better than those. I totally get how nuclear weapons could kill a lot of civilians an how that would be a totally dick move. But I just don't see how they would be of much use against a Mech with the capabilities that Mechs are supposed to have.

A nuclear bomb is not an unstoppable super weapon. It's just a super weapon. From the forties. The Nineteen Forties. Your 4th millennium super armor should bounce that shit.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Well, it all depends on the SIZE of the bombs . .
Kiloton nukes won't do much i guess.
Megaton nukes on the other hand are on a completely different scale.
Mechs have a controlled fusion reaction going inside, that's true.
But through the magic of the super alloy of handwavium, that's sub tactical in boom-power. Kilotons at best, not even a single megaton.
Now, if you make one of them really go critical, everything in about 150m takes lots of damage. Usually enough, to make other mechs go critical, if you're unlucky.
Now please turn your eyes that way. Do you see that big, nice, shiney dropship? With a Fusion-Reactor the size of several entire Mechs? Yes?
OK, NOW we are talking. If those huge engines go boom, then yes, there's several dozend, if not hundreds of Megatons of Energy going Boom. And the Battle-Tech Nukes are in THAT size-category, not in the subtactical up to one kiloton or so the Mechs are running around with.
Ideal War had the really old ones, like 1940's old ones i guess . .
Every single one of these nukes destroyed mechs in a radus of about 300m. And they had set off two in close proximity and shortly after each other. After Dozends of dekades, after hundreds of years of not being used. More or less . . it's as if someone were to use an old roman or egyptian super-weapon. Not really on par with TODAYS boomex, but still pretty impressive, if you just want to do damage . .

Any of you bothering to follow the ramblings of Herb?
He's proud of having decimated the warship-capacity of the universe down to 10% or so of what it was before the djihad . .
And also to have obliterated most of the really old known faces and names.
Some of those did not even get a propper death. I don't remember which one that was, probably camachos caballeros, but at least one of the big names of mech regiment or more sized units got wiped out, because a planet was glassed. And everybody had forgotten about the unit actually being on that planet.
"OK, so the complete Planet is now a barren nuclear glas-desert. What's next on the Scedule?"
'We need to make a list of Units that are still active and where they are and where they have been in the mean-time. For example XYZ. Where are they? where have they been? what were they doing there?'
*sound of rustling notes*
"Hmm . . well . . this is awkward . . remember that planet we glassed just now? XYZ was on that planet when the glas-time came it seems"
' . . . Ah hell with it . . Next?'

[Crissa]

Frank, the point isn't that they'd use it on mechs and hardened targets. You can fight your mechs on airless moons, for crissake.

It's that using one on a city basically can wipe out a planet's economy or population. Most planets don't have billions of people on them. That have thousand megaton weapons, and it costs entire planetary economies to outfit mechs and their support.

So either you build everyone within mech-heavy armor, and you still live in fear of your farms and factories being blown up, or you don't, and manage to outfit a few mechs.

It's like the Tick said: That's where all my stuff is.

If a poor planet (by inner sphere qualifications) can afford enough weapons to glaze half their planet... How much do you think someone who can afford starships the size of moons?

You don't fear its battlefield use. That's stupid. You blow up the city they're defending. You blow up their starship. Their economy is now... Nonexistent.

When mass destruction means the surface of worlds, you don't want that to be the level of combat.

-Crissa

[magnuskn]

Any of you bothering to follow the ramblings of Herb?
He's proud of having decimated the warship-capacity of the universe down to 10% or so of what it was before the djihad . .
And also to have obliterated most of the really old known faces and names.
Some of those did not even get a propper death. I don't remember which one that was, probably camachos caballeros, but at least one of the big names of mech regiment or more sized units got wiped out, because a planet was glassed. And everybody had forgotten about the unit actually being on that planet.

Wolf's Dragoons, innit? They were the first victims of the burned earth strategy of the Wobbies, after all.

If someone glassed Camacho's Caballero's, sign him up for an ass-kicking. Cassie Suthorn was awesome and her colleagues a riot.

Although I haven't read anything on the Wikis that the Caballeros were destroyed, only that they had a bad run-in with the Ghost Bears after Black Dragon.

[TheFlatline]

Over and above the moral questions, I just don't see the functionality. Modern armored vehicles are designed with nuclear weapon use in mind. And the Mechs are supposed to be way better than those. I totally get how nuclear weapons could kill a lot of civilians an how that would be a totally dick move. But I just don't see how they would be of much use against a Mech with the capabilities that Mechs are supposed to have.

A nuclear bomb is not an unstoppable super weapon. It's just a super weapon. From the forties. The Nineteen Forties. Your 4th millennium super armor should bounce that shit.

-Username17

Maybe you hit on the crux right here.

Nukes aren't a tactically attractive option in Battletech. The only thing they really can do is kill craploads of population and destroy soft targets unless you manage to actually drop the fucker on top of a mech. 25 hexes is *not* a lot ground covered when you consider the size of a planet or even a large-scale battle.

Hell, an orbital ship probably would be tactically better off firing 20 kilos of tungsten at a fraction of the speed of light into the planet than dropping a nuke. Similar levels of destruction, no fallout or radiation.

So if the only reason why nukes would be used is to destroy civilians and soft targets and destroy the infrastructure required to live on a planet, they could be seen as the ultimate terrorist weapon. Militarily not very useful, but great for destroying populations. Hell you might make that argument about nukes today.

[setmonster]

Any of you bothering to follow the ramblings of Herb?
He's proud of having decimated the warship-capacity of the universe down to 10% or so of what it was before the djihad . .
And also to have obliterated most of the really old known faces and names.
Some of those did not even get a propper death. I don't remember which one that was, probably camachos caballeros, but at least one of the big names of mech regiment or more sized units got wiped out, because a planet was glassed. And everybody had forgotten about the unit actually being on that planet.

Wolf's Dragoons, innit? They were the first victims of the burned earth strategy of the Wobbies, after all.

If someone glassed Camacho's Caballero's, sign him up for an ass-kicking. Cassie Suthorn was awesome and her colleagues a riot.

Although I haven't read anything on the Wikis that the Caballeros were destroyed, only that they had a bad run-in with the Ghost Bears after Black Dragon.

I think it was the Black Thorns who got nuked by mistake, during the glassing of Galedon V.

[Ganbare Gincun]

Honestly, it's pretty bad when the tech in Battletech looks quaint and antiquated in comparison to the technology in Warhammer 40K. It's time for a revamp that updates the technology and makes the game play more like the giant robot anime that originally inspired its creation... but I'm not holding my breath for either of these things to happen.

[setmonster]

Honestly, it's pretty bad when the tech in Battletech looks quaint and antiquated in comparison to the technology in Warhammer 40K. It's time for a revamp that updates the technology and makes the game play more like the giant robot anime that originally inspired its creation... but I'm not holding my breath for either of these things to happen.

It won't happen, certainly all the time that Catalyst hold the BT licence. The Catalyst people go out of their way to avoid retconning stuff. The whole ethos of the 'modern' BT ruleset is that it is compatible with all of the editions that came before. So, essentially, BT is a mid-eighties board game, that can never truly evolve.