Anyone play the miniature game? I played Mechwarrior on the PC back in the day and picked up Mechwarrior 5 a few months ago on the Xbox. I want to try the miniature game out for me and my son.

Was looking to get this starter box:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5YNQF8F?tag=arfcom00-20

Not in decades. But it was fun when I did. I probably had more fun designing mechs than battling. Didn’t like clan stuff though. I wanna say they were way too powerful, but it’s been so long I don’t distinctly remember.

Played battletech on the C64.  Still have the game in my disk case.

Good starter set. Has everything you need for the basic game.

Battletech has been in my life for decades! I first learned how to play back in 1986. I have had the pleasure to play with and against West Point cadets as well as their professors and every walk of life since. We have a regular tabletop gaming group here consisting of retired and active military, law enforcement and fire fighters. 10 members in all. We try to meet once or twice a month and play miniatures war games such as Battletech. The beginner box is great to start out. There are thousands of products and hundreds of units to choose from. Mechs, tanks, aircraft, infantry, you name it. At 53, I like playing even more as it keeps your mind sharp and you really need to know tactics. The Battletech universe is HUGE and rivals that of Star Wars and LOTR. If they made movies based on it, the epic nature would be mind blowing!

Last time I played Battletech was in 1987...good game, GREAT book series.

Haven't played since the late 90's but still read the books on occasion.  It's an amazing universe, if more people local were into it I would likely start playing again.

Any recommendations on books to start? I do love the lore I’ve picked up from in-game and reading sarna.net.

grab everything from michael stackpole and blaine lee pardoe.
there's a couple more but those two were my main authors for the battletech novels.

never played the minatures.

i still have crescent hawks inception on 5.25" floppy somewhere.

If you want to get into a tabletop game this is the one. With the last Kickstarter you can get into the basic game for around $20 with the beginner box. The other two boxes cost around $50 and A Game of Armored Combat gets you almost a company of miniatures and really is all you need to play at any level,  the Clan invasion set adds more advanced tech, the additional force packs with 4-6 miniatures are $20-30 each. There are Facebook groups listing people playing by zip code so they may be games going in your area.

Attached File


Ironwind Metals makes the pewter miniatures and Catalyst Games makes the plastic ones. The plastic boxed sets are a better buy while the metal minis sold individual are pricey.

IIRC one of the original designers (Babcock, maybe?) said they regretted the disparity of power with clan tech.

Medium lasers exemplify this.
IS 1 ton 1 crit 3 heat 5 damage 3/6/9 range
Clan erml 1 ton 1 crit 5 heat 7 damage 5/10/15 range
IS large laser 5 ton 2 crit 8 heat 8 damage 5/10/15 range

Massive disparity.

OP, Battletech is great.  One thing is the internet and time both makes things better and worse.  Old school battletech is hard sci fi in a mostly devastated universe where life is limited by vast gulfs of space and desolation.  Space is a big scary empty place, assaults on planets are measured in travel times of days and months where arrival planetside may mean death during a drop and then fighting on many planets is represented by fights across great empty wastelands or centuries old cities left in ruins by centuries of war, or worse yet, fighting in the handful of places with something left to fight for.  "Life is cheap, battlemechs aren't."

Later years of battletech and the internet became an escalation of books, mechs, tech and more, slowly eroding the vast forgotten star empire collapsed by its member states generations before your character's life begins.  Mechs were rare machines handed down across generations, and capable of devastating most foes (represented in harsh rules against vehicles, infantry, etc).  There's some in universe changes made to accommodate the change in mechs being less rare and tech being found again, but that starts to change roughly once FASA isn't running the show.

Factions that were fleshed out civilizations with depth and nuance get twisted by writers who oversimplify the material or maybe didn't get it to begin with by exaggeration of the one feature they did get (house civil war, house social generals, house white knight etc).

And all that said, there's also vast resources and good fanfic and a massive dedicated playerbase.  And things like the BPL "Tex talks battletech" video series on mechs are really good, lending an idea of the depth of the game lore.

The experience getting into it today may be very different compared to those growing up with the game and books.

Decision At Thunder Rift and all the Gray Death Legion books are pretty good and set the tone for the universe.  Reading about the Succession Wars and well before it the Reunification War are both terrible wars in scale and concept that really give an idea of how harsh the universe is.

As a game, it's great fun.  But get used to spending 10 minutes of play time for 30 seconds of game time.

Btech its probably one of the most underrated tabletop games of all time in my experience.  It has a pretty low cost to entry and a ton of tactical flexibility.  I played a bit when I was younger (back in the very early 2000s) and read the books in the late 1990s (I still have a few dozen of them).  It has a very complex and enjoyable lore to it as well.  Unfortunately, I haven't met someone who still played it since the early 2000s either.  If you can get you son into it and enjoy it yourself, count yourself blessed.

I couldn't get into the Btech computer game as I wasn't a huge fan of the story and was very disappointed in MW5s gameplay and story.  I hope they suit you better than they did me.

"Any recommendations on books to start? I do love the lore I’ve picked up from in-game and reading sarna.net."

If I had to only pick a specific set: "The Warrior Trilogy"

Others I would specifically pick:
-The Saga of the Gray Death Legion
-The Blood of Kerensky Trilogy
-The Jade Phoenix Trilogy
-Highlander Gambit
-Impetus of War

I read your post and had to fix mine - as soon as I read the whole line I remembered it's from Grayson Death Carlyle's name and that I'd misspelled gray with an e.

The old 1980s era house books lend a lot of flavor to the game, well before new generations of non-FASA writers oversimplified the themes and overcomplicated the world.

There are some new books that are also really good, but it depends if you want some mystery removed and the universe mapped more or mapped less.  The main book on the Reunification War comes to mind.

A thing to keep in mind is that the game has rules written for a theme.  A hex is 30 meters, so something like an AC20 (heavy autocannon) with a max range of 9 hexes is only going to hit out to 270 meters.  Which really isn't very far.

An infantry rifle platoon I think only reaches out to like 4 or 5 hexes, so maybe 150 meters max range, which is... somewhat silly.  But it works for game focus purposes, as the idea is to allow for close combat with robots.

Several years ago I used to play paintball with a guy that was friends with Forest Brown, the creator of the original Battletech game.  I became interested in the Btech gaming and story universe from playing PC games, and was hoping on meeting him over at Challenge Park outside of Chicago, another one of his creations.  Brown passed away in 2010.

I'm kind of shocked that nobody has optioned BTech for a Netflix/streaming show, yet.  It's well-made for the "The Expanse" treatment.

Fanpro, allegedly, has the movie rights tied up with Dean Devlin's production company, but it's been in Development Hell for several years.

10% chance it would get the "Expanse" treatment.
90% chance it would get the "Cowboy Bebop" treatment.

I'd personally rather they just not do it then taint good memories.

I've never been one of the "OMG, the movie sucked, and now the books are contaminated" people.....because I never expect the visual adaptation to really faithfully match the prose source material.  It can't, as the mediums are controlled by constraints that don't match up, so right out of the gate stuff has to change radically.

Change and alteration are not innately bad.  100% fidelity from a movie/show to a book is impossible.  The Expanse doesn't perfectly follow the source material and is good.  the LoTR movies didn't perfectly follow the source material and were good.  Dune 2021 didn't perfectly follow the source material and was good.  They key there is that they respected the source material.  Many show writers and directors currently proudly do not respect the source material.  If you aren't willing to respect the source material, why even bother using the original IP to begin with other than to wear its skin as a costume to bait prior fans in?  Also, many of those same people will buy the IP and retcon the original work, condemn it or find some other way to bury it.

This, and because a name has market recognition.

A preexisting "brand" already exists in the market and can rope in money, as well as money from backers.

Say you're going to make an original story and you have to sell that new idea, not just to audiences but to producers and marketers and studios.  Say you're going to take something with a existing market presence, and you'll be more likely to get financial backing.

This is also how things can shit on source material, because all that matters is how much can you make how fast.  And how they can shit on sources and still make money.

I'm reminded of Kevin Smith's story about trying to make a superman movie and having a producer insist he fight a giant mechanical spider.  Smith said no, it didn't fit with the story.  Producer canned it.  Smith said he later saw that producer involved with Wild Wild West (also another example of preexisting market name, despite being unconnected to the original).

Honestly the Battletech cartoon was a better representation than some of the new books that keep writing into stereotypes.  If the same show were made today, the Mauler would've had to have been the Obakemono (or whatever the Kurita-pre-Mauler was) painted with cherry blossoms and wearing a kimono, Adam Steiner would've traded his Axman for an Atlas with a prototype gauss that would weigh 55 tons, take up 30 crits, do 100 damage and have a range of 3 because big dumb big dumb, etc.

Current game writers barely respect the game material.  Cue discussion of Blaine Lee Pardoe's being severed from the game.

Dude basically wrote half the BTech fluff, for 30 years.

I haven't been keeping up on what's been going on after Catalyst Game Labs decided to go woke a couple of years ago. What happened with that?  I enjoyed Blain posting some if his notes from the early days of Battletech on his blog.

Edit:  I looked up Blain's blog and did some reading.  I'm really not surprised, unfortunately.

@hoosierhick

They are showing all the signs of going radically bigoted and exclusionary re: the social crap"

We're inclusive, and if you don't agree with what we want to include, you're a subhuman sleaze, get out!

The normal self-righteous nonsense.

The blane thing ...

(they fired him because some dude who claimed he was a lesbian nurse whipped up a lynch mob to attack him for being a ... well, no insult to him, but milktoast normal almost boring conservative ... than CGL published said mob-raiser under a false name, which said liar later admitted was false)

... has been followed up by CGL (they control but do not own the BT Ip) allowing their people to act like a bunch of exclusionary hidebound ignorant bigots. Sarna.net's bt "news" guy has been proselytizing for the whole sexual anarchy and "no you have to include everyone to be inclusive, except those conservatives, they're subhumans" type stuff.

IIRC stackpole has used the bait and switch version of the definition of "woke" (literally, just be nice to peple and be aware that things are bad for (insert your favored victim group here) to say that "bt has always been woke" - when we know that's not what woke is, in the streets and in businesses.

Just a general leaning towards being arrogant ignorant self-righteous bigots who can't defend what they believe and say you're scum merely for disagreeing with them.

They got rid of the rommel tank because YAHTZIS :



We've seen this happen over and over so many times that nobody is even willing to take an extreme odds bet that it won't turn out how they always do.

Thankfully, you can buy virtually all the old stuff second hand, they maintained continuity (unlike 40k) to the extent that you can almost use stuff from battledroids first edition in current stuff, and because 3DPrinter go BRRRRRR if you have the urge to buy a mini ... well screw them, you can just make your own:  

https://stlbase.com/browse/battletech+at/3/

https://stlbase.com/browse/battletech

https://archive.org/details/thingiverse?query=battletech

and don't forget:

https://github.com/MegaMek/

CGL has made it obvious that they hate my guts and everyone like me, for no good reason at all (ironically, while supporting people who make terroistic type threats at work 'cause they don't get what they want, and supporting wonderful people, like bishop steiner - whoyou should ask why he is in mexico - or was last I heard).



So I won't give them another penny and there's a ton of great older stuff, from back when they could at least keep their mouths shut and not turn everything into bang on your door and ask if youv'e met their lord and savior, leftist progressivism, no don't you dare disagree with my beliefs or ask me to explain them.

I didn't know about them making the Rommel disappear.  That's delicate wokeflake shit.

I mean, everyone hated Harmony Gold for their bullshit, but this is self-imposed damage.

Not sure if it's already been mentioned, but the Harebrained Schemes Battletech computer game that was otherwise... not too bad, did involve an alphabet people developer who was infamous for either a "girls only" or "no boys allowed" sign on [Matt Walsh]his[/Matt Walsh] door.  A retconned bullshit self-insert queendom that ignores the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat and decades of writing about them, as well as that the space they chose to park it in is literally part of the development of those two nations and critical as it pertains to periphery expansion and could really make for interesting stories with either of them... is kind of insulting to decades of fucking work, as well as being boring and inconsequential, because it frankly doesn't fit with anything that came before it and can be dismissed as stupid and non-canon regardless if the publisher says it is.  I also didn't care for Dark Age, and I consider it absurd, I don't much care for the WoB jihad galaxy reset button, and while I'm not a fan of the clans (compare IS LL to clan ERML breaking the game), there are ways to make them work (or just alternate history them away)... but the House Awooga nonsense is rewriting the game in the middle of its heyday.

Then again, I think Far Country was a neat story, but I can suspend some disbelief for stone-age-intelligence birds that worship LCT-1s as a one off.  And considering there were primitive ape-men in one of the very first novels, eh, whatever.  Could be explained away as a Star League experiment like everything else weird out there.

Old books can still be found, but expect to pay:
https://www.nobleknight.com/

I'm sure they're available on the high seas or something as well, but have never checked.

Yeah.

Thratchen is a dude who decided he was a she (I have no idea if he's still saying he is a she or not) and went for the uber-bigoted vein regarding anyone who wouldn't think what he wanted them to on the topic. IIRC was head game developer or game engine guy or something like that. The studio also had a furry who, again, IIRC, it's been years - got in trouble for (you guessed it) being some sort of perv.  

As for HBS"bt"s new periphery faction ... CGL has even given them a house sourcebook, done in the style of the old original 80s ones.  At this point, I don't trust them to be adult enough to not mess things up with the setting, so it's good that there's 30+ years of content out there already.

It wouldn't surprise me to see them trying to do stuff that retroactively messes with the setting, I mean, they were willing to publish stuff from a mentally broken guy who lied to them about who he was and they KNEW that person was atttacking one of their long time authors to boot.  I guess the "oops our funds got mixed up and some got used to build out someone's house" and "well they've published my content I wrote for them and I'm still not getting paid what I owe" stuff from the past were not outliers?

----

Dark age - so, I actually read the novels. They are not bad. Some are pretty good. Except for illsa bick's stuff. It's filth and she openly admitted that she hated writing mech combat. I legit wonder if she wasn't a diversity hire. I didn't go in expecting more than beer and pretzels level sci fi for dark age...  and that's what it was. Hint hint: they got out of the agromechs fast and it spun up to company on company and larger level battles *quickly.*

For dark age, they really seem to have been trying to find a way to get back to what was good about original era BT - 3025 scavenger fighting, where you could take or defend a planet with a lance or 4 at the most, where individual mech combatant actions were very important to the outcome. I don't think they got there and I don't think they could put that toothpaste back in the tube ... and I don't think they ever needed to try to. If you want that kind of play, than play in the 3025 or so era, and limit lostech and force counts.

As for the WOB jihad ... that didn't bug me. I've learned enough RL history that I don't mind fictional history being somewhat "what? that came out of left field, what the heck!"  I guess I just don't take the setting at that level.

I'm not happy with it, but I am content to ignore what CGL puts out now, if it's crummy work. They can say it's canon, and try to force it to be so. I'll just shrug and say "that's cute kids. Have fun, your content sucks."

Oh. clan weapons "breaking" the game. Yes, and the austrians hated that darn french chassepot rifle, it forced them to take absurd casualties to assault french infantry.  I don't mind a game where things are allowed to be "just better."  I detest games where "everything has to be equal in the overall, nothing can be meaningfully better overall."

But that's just preference, and maybe why the tech advances in the BT fiction haven't bothered me. Pick an era and a tech level that makes for gameplay you like and have a blast ...

Besides, the clanners are officially socialists. So we get to have the fun of blasting effectively commies and stealing their nice toys from them because they're hidebound fools ...

ETA: https://www.chamblinbookmine.com/ at least *used* to keep a good selection of the BT novels ... second hand, so not one penny for people who have made it obvious how they detest us.

I always liked both the 3025 timeframe and the clan invasion timeframe.  They are both very different, both made for good stories and I don't have to view one as superior to the other because I can always go back and read pre-invasion books or post invasion books without invalidating the other timeframe.  It's the same with the tabletop game as well.

I played the OG game pre-Clan invasion back in the late 80s into the early 90s and liked it, but I never read the books or the lore. To me the game was just the tabletop game... units vs units, the only story was whatever mission objectives you and your friends concocted to generate the immediate game you were playing. We saw it as a sort of "anti-D&D" where it was all about the nuts and bolts (pun intended) and strategy of the combat rather than any sort of story.

I've also played a few of the PC games including the most recent Harebrained Schemes game. I liked the actual "game" part of the HBS game, but the "story" was turbo cringe and I skipped almost all of it to get back to the actual game. I really like the management aspects of the game, maintaining and equipping the units then seeing how they work with your tactics. The game was definitely totally broken in some aspects of pilot skills early on, and they did a bunch of patching to even it out.

The clan invasion, where they were trying to figure out how to handle combat between clan units and tech level 1 (introductory level tech, for you new guys, IIRC) was pretty hard, I bet.

People kvetch about how much better the clan weapons are for the invasion era, and they absolutely are, but IMO the real game changer was the 2 slot clan double heat sink. It changed the heat management part of the game a lot, allowing for soooo much more damage output.


@JsARCLIGHT

You probably will get a kick out of this:

https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Essay:_BattleMech_Technology

The bit of tech I enjoyed the most out of HBS's ... intallment ... was the argo. Very much a one-off thing for the setting.

Did a lot of patching to even it out ... I haven't the slightest what you could be referring to, and I've read the stuff from battledroids on up ... ?

You like the management aspects ... have you seen https://github.com/MegaMek/mekhq - integrate all the managment stuff, maintenance, travel, contracts, all of it.

I played the HBS game on launch day for quite a while, and the original incarnation of the game allowed you to create drastically OP pilots through the skills system. They had broken stability damage pilot skills where I could put an elite pilot properly skilled in my missile boat and basically get instant knockdowns on virtually anything, then my other elite pilots with broken aim and damage skills could then one-shot the head of that knocked down unit with an AC20. Admittedly that was late game, but even mid game with halfway there pilot skills it just took two units to get a knockdown and then two units to crit the head. Perhaps one would miss, but it was still borderline game breaking.

When I went back to replay the game a year or so after launch they had completely revamped the pilot skills system, and the skills that created those knockdown one-shot monsters had been nerfed back to reality. They also drastically increased the pilot lethality... in the original launch day version of the game I should have lost pilots far more often than I did, it actually became quite the episode of GI Joe how my pilots would miraculously survive unit losses over and over again, whereas in the newer versions of the game I'd lose pilots far more often and in situations that I thought they should have survived.

LOL NM.

Utter brainfart on my end, IDK why, I read that as you referring to the original tabletop system, not HBS's game.

Yes, they changed a lot of it.

I suspect a lot of that happened because they utterly borked the combat order - instead of having all damage resolved simultaneously, simulating the unknowns of combat, they broke it out into phases, allowing people to do free hits that couldn't be replied to.

They said this would make the lights viable ... in reality, it screwed them.

We tried to tell them. HBS wouldn't listen.  It's like jordan can't grasp the idea that people like the game he and the other guys created when they made BT.  I guess it's the classic old thing of "if you make it, you can see all the flaws that nobody else can."

Admittedly it has been literal decades since I played the tabletop, and the ruleset we used has probably been revamped extensively since then, but even I could tell the original incarnation of the HBS game was borked.

I remember light mechs being frustrating in the tabletop, they were perfect for harassment, whereas in the HBS game my goal seemingly was to keep moving the pilots up the weight chain until I was basically fielding a lance of assault mechs pretty much built identically. Two heavy gunners and two heavy missile boats. Who cares that the enemy had a mix, it just meant they died faster.

It hasn't. ETA: Yeah, a few things got tweaked, like how partial cover works, or who rolls for critical damage.


So, HBS decided to let the light mechs go first AND have their damage be resolved first, and than (roughly) go down the weight scale, with assaults going last.

They said this would make the lights more viable. No, it means they cannot station themselves safely in range of heavier mechs because the heavier mechs can survive their attacks, but they can't survive the attacks from the heavier mechs.

HBS was told repeatedly how this would break stuff. Their lame answer was "well we can't figure out how to exploit it in gameplay" - and they  probably couldn't, but as anyone worth their salt knows, once it goes out to the players, they will find every single weakness in your system.

In tabletop, with simultaneous damage resolution, and the initiative system, you could choose who moved and when ... AND the light mechs could move fast enough to have to-hit armor for movement AND position around the already-moved bigger mechs. This is, of course, if you're being silly and using light mechs as straight up combat only units and not using them for anything else that they are great for.

It really surprises me how stable the tabletop rules have stayed.  Yeah, they have tweaked some things, but the core rules have stayed pretty much the same since I started playing back in the late 80's.

So they took the Rommel tank out.  What about the Hetzer, or anything else that had a WW2 Germany inspiration?

Any book recommendations for someone who doesn’t know much about this universe?

If I had to only pick a specific set: "The Warrior Trilogy" (A lot of info about the Inner Sphere)

Others I would specifically pick:
-The Saga of the Gray Death Legion
-The Blood of Kerensky Trilogy (A lot of info about the Inner Sphere & Clans)
-The Jade Phoenix Trilogy (A lot of info about the Clans)
-Highlander Gambit
-Impetus of War

Ha! Star Captain of the Smoke Jaguar clan checking in!  played the multiplayer version of MW3 on GameZone in late 90s, early 2000s.  I had a pager and would get "War is announced in 1 hour" alerts in the middle of the night.

Thanks. I'll check them out.

The modification I would make is

warrior trilogy, than blood of kerensky, than if you've decided you like it, instead of i am jade falcon, dive into the twlight of the clan series.

After that, anything and everything. Fair warning, stay away from anything ilsa j bick has published (her stuff showed up in print in the dark age era) - at least some of it is pure unadultrated filth with no redeeming value, and she openly admitted she hated writing mech combat.

Don't go into reading the books expecting fantastic high level prose, philosophy, etc.  It's not fine wine level stuff, it's beer and pretzels. However, some of it can be really GOOD beer and pretzels.  You might get to really like some of the characters, like Morgan hasek-davion. There are also a few, one especially, who, if you read the books, you will almost have a gut reaction of utter blinding hate towards. Don't hate on kell, or kai, victor... that's a waste of time.

As far as the large factions: there is no USA in space. Davion is british-french. USA in space was the terran hegemony, it made the foundation that the star league was laid on, and is no longer around. Taurians are like ... think sorta american, but utterly paranoid, and more ruthless about some things ... kind of a crazy cousin.  Steiner is germanic with a subset of scots/irish, kurita is nationalistic japanese of ww2, FWL is ... a giant splintered raging mess and IDK if you could liken it to anything. Capellans are communist chinese backstabbers who can only be trusted to be utterly untrustworty and ruin everything.

The clans are a completely ******ed up mess of socialism, hardcore (as in, enforce with death if necessary, and far worse) eugenics, no value for human life (they will waste you in an instant and don't care), literal might makes right, warriors are the political leaders, and warfare is a game, and the most important thing ever is ... think current alphabet pride on amphetamine and roids, delusional level, except in the clan's case, it's for warrior glory. To the point that their worship of the god of warrior glory is so ingrained that it shoots them in the foot all the time.

The only redeeming thing about them is they have nice toys to be stolen. Nick kerensky, the real founders of clan culture, was a scumbag of the highest order. Think stalin and pol pot had a lovechild and kafka raised it.

Otherwise, virtually all groups are represented somewhere, on some world. Hawaii? Formalhaut.

The politics of the great houses at the larger level are set, but don't make the mistake of thinking the local planet *in* the boundaries of any of the great houses are set and will be inside those boundaries.  They don't (and I think can't) maintain that level of cultural control across the planets.  You can find hardcore constitutionalists and borderline real life communists "in good standing" inside of house davion space, for instance.

It's a future of the early 1980s to the 1990s and is intentionally (self consicously) staying there. Don't go in expecting nanotech and other stuff like that.

For those who haven't seen it (yes, the info is a bit dated, but it's still worthwhile):

Timeline of BT image, BIG!



BY:

https://skiltao.blogspot.com/

https://www.deviantart.com/skiltao/gallery

ALSO:



Direct link to image above

For people who do not want to support the current controller of the license's trollery, this vid (yes, posted it earlier) tells you how to legally play the game without supporting the trolls at CGL.

Thanks for taking the time to write that. I appreciate it.

Awesome post.  Played a heap of Battletech growing up back when if first came out.  In addition to playing nearly every version of the table top and RPG for many years, I have played all the Mechwarrios PC games and most of the other ports to the computer.  I have also read many of the novels especially the earlier ones.  The Clans were OK as far as the story went but the Clan Tech really unbalanced the games and created a huge power surge.  I have really enjoyed Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries for the simple fact it returned to relatively early in the time line and you run into a bunch of the character from the early novels.  Thoroughly enjoying playing that game.



Most of this collection bought new in the late 80's & 90's It includes nearly all the issues of the Battletechnology.  
   

Cool stuff.

Wait, where's the plastech?

I ran across the setting when I saw the MW3 box in the video game store. Found the books shortly after that.

SO, a guy by the handle of ... IIRC ... XOTL was doing a fan project of fixing all the silly continuity mistakes in the tros and all that, and it eventually went official and they have sorted virtually everything out.

You can find it here:  masterunitlist.info/

All the units are there.

I'm printing out 2 lances of IS mechs to do battle with a star of Clanners.

Haven't played TT, but I've played all of the games. Kiddos and I are excited!

Pics of the minis?

Let us know how it turns out.



Random fun video:



Walked out in front of a hardened bunker with ~2 squads of these suckers in it, in my king crab (megamek) ... dude saturated my hit table and shook my pilot so hard he died and I think they probably had to hose what was left of him out of the cockpit.

Cool.

Tactical Handbook kicked ass.  All the weird tech you're not going to use in your Battletech game, but you'd include in your Mechwarrior RPG.  And attempts to fix vertical LOS.

Tandem charge missiles that make battle armor obsolete...until there's a rewrite to basically say "we didn't think this through".  Won't rewrite the ERML to LL range/damage/weight/crit difference as overpowered, but accidentally write a game changer that's entirely consistent with the world and oops...  yes, I still consider that a clear marker of the tech difference and an unbalanced move.

Also had dead fire/dumb fire missiles that made LRMs scary again, though they got warped into MRMs or something.

I dig the House Books (and have most of them) that were 98% story and history that gave the game character and ideas for things to stumble on, and background for personalities.

Mechwarrior 2nd Edition was also amazingly straightforward RPG system, too.

I think one of the problems with the game in the last few years was/has been the intro of new tech that disrupts the purpose of the game.  Once you have protomechs (yes, a while ago) and a dozen different types of battle armor and every week there's a new gauss rifle subtype that's standard rather than experimental, it suffers from bad, bad power creep...and ignores that some rules were made to serve the game world.  Vehicles were horribly nerfed off the bat with damage locations and effects that make it seem like every tank was designed with T72 exploding turrets, but that was to keep the focus on mechs.  Enough extra rules and things made for the flavor of the week and writer of the week kills it.

Though I do dig the historical stuff fleshing out huge conflicts like the Reunification War.

Latest Tex talks bt is out: hunchback.

Well THAT got interesting quickly.

Catalyst game labs (the current non-owners of the BT ip excluding the video game who otherwise control/produce on it) have gone full inquisition/witch trials and are banning anyone who will not accept the current democrat/leftist/sexual anarchist thing.

They have already done mass bannings on their twitter account.

So where did this come from and what happened?

Part of it you already reasonably suspect - CGL hired the typical hidebound "you can't be different than me" leftists who are control freaks and busy bodies.

The details of how these people are screwing things up and being bigots (as expected and normal from people like them ) ... I willl try and give a quick summation of the recent history and what just now happened.

So, there was and "is" a subreddit on reddit - "r/battletech" that previously was a rather active place.  It was targetted by leftist fellow thinkers for entry and take over and these shock troops started filling the reddit with sexual anarchy content in the form of mech minis painted in the bigot flag (ie the if you don't accept this movement you are subhuman trash flag). The moderators of  r/battletech were removing at least some of the more obnoxious entryist content. The entryists than used weaponized victimhood to assert their aristocracy and claimed that removal of their posts was removal of them as people, etc. The usual irrational emotionally manipulative lies.

As far as I know BT was targetted because the bigots were looking for their next kill after they had succesfully killed 40k and turned it into a skinsuit so they could use it's power and prestiege to further their inquisition. Many 40k fans left 40k and went to BT as a non-woke (critical thinking applied to the idea of race) alternative.

The person who created r/battletech who wasn't participating anymore found out about it, came back, used their admin abilities and removed the admins who were trying to gatekeep out the dishonest entryists who were only there to gain control of the space to enforce their orthodoxy.

Gaming media got involved. Than catalyst came in and in the form of one of their female employees (who will figure in quite heavily in what happened) participated with others from catalyst in taking control of r/battletech, which is now a shell of what it used to be.

Others have since put up more gatekept alternatives, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/NormalBattletech/ or https://www.facebook.com/groups/battletechfandom  ... I am sure there are others.

The point of mentioning this is - CGL is actively getting control of places it didn't control before, and in my opinion they never should have.

-------------------

Now for what just happened:

Catalyst game labs has a group of non-employed volunteer fans who are part of a group called the catalyst demo team (hereafter CDT or DT) that had a discord chat server that CGL had no control over that was not official and was there so the DT members could talk and organize for events and discuss things in an unofficial capacity.

Due to stupid internet drama (the people researching this have not been able to 100% confirm the exact details of what went down to cause this) CGL moved on the DT'eams discord server and took it over. They fired the admin of the server who had also lead the demoteam, and to the best of my knowledge the lady the fired was well liked and not combative or any of that nonsense.

The same female employee of CGL was also a part of the takeover on the DT discord.   Oh AND there are reports that she had a list of "problematic people" who she had asked the lady that ran the CDT and the discord to remove before the takeover, but she was rebuffed.   All of the possible sources I have seen mentioned for this list of bitter clinging deplorables to be purged are real pieces of work.

So, this bigot (I don't see any way she couldn't be) female employee seems to be running a CGL inquisition and is involved in the takeover of online places that aren't the appropriate sort of bitter lefty fundmamentalist.



Which led to this:

We have been hard at work updating our community guidelines. These guidelines will be in effect across all platforms that are operated by CGL.

We will have more information for the community in the coming weeks.#community #guidelines #catalystgamelabs pic.twitter.com/9lYhVka3Cs

CatalystGameLab  (@catalystgamelab) January 23, 2024

https://twitter.com/catalystgamelab/status/1749809280918925374
https://archive.is/GKnf5
https://archive.is/UuPsK


And their official twitter account there has already started mass-banning people who don't agree with their fundamentalism AND they're apparently mass banning people for *following the wrong sort of deplorables.* ETA: I've seen several more posts and comments from people about getting banned on twitter and in the (IMO) illicitly taken over reddit for reasons that don't even begin to align with their boilerplate announcement above.

Yes, razorfist has been banned. ETA; so has blaine pardoe. He said he hadn't posted anything on their stuff in ~2 years.

Yes, the people involved in this ... let's put it this way. The most normal ones I saw amongst the people involved in this are furries. The rest I looked into were worse. On top of them being exactly like the westboro baptists towards anyone not like them, and for equally nonsense reasons too.

Given what happened in the past with loren  six figure (iirc) "oopsie we mixed buisness and personal funds, somehow the funds just accidentally paid for my house expansion" coleman ... I can't say I'm surprised that they got taken over by people who are only there to take control of CGL in order to use it's power to push their fighting fundie worldview.


CGL is now actively working against those who like and liked battletech.

It's a good thing you don't need them to play the game and the second hand market for older books and content is robust.

CGL rejected BT.

I suspect a good number of BT fans will return the favor and reject CGL.

Amen.

Also:

https://twitter.com/locust_labs?lang=en


https://www.patreon.com/locust_labs


https://www.thingiverse.com/tag:battletech


https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php?q=battletech+stl&fl%5B%5D=description&fl%5B%5D=identifier&fl%5B%5D=item_size&fl%5B%5D=mediatype&fl%5B%5D=title&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&sort%5B%5D=&rows=50000&page=1&callback=callback&save=yes&output=tables

I hope this shit stays out of Mechwarrior. I've been enjoying it's very lack of wokeness.