9 Things Battletech Does Right - And 3 Things That Are Horribly Wrong.

 

 

 

 

1) THE SETTING

Almost all space scifi leans heavily on aliens, but BattleTech is one of maybe two or three properties I can think of (the Expanse?) that only has humans - and shows how glorious and awful we are. From the very beginning of the fiction, the House Books, the writing made you FEEL as though the human race had spent four hundred years expanding and the next six hundred squabbling like children, with deep ideas and lots to explore. What made it even better was the pre-planning involved; the return of Kerensky's children was heralded from the first setting books, so the Clan invasion didn't feel forced or surprising if you'd been paying attention. The original devs applied that planning to all of BT's big events til past the Jihad.

2) STEED AND ARMOR AS ONE

The central characters being neofeudalistic space knights whose armor is also their steed is BRILLIANT as well. The conscious lean more towards the gritty tanks-on-legs aesthetic inspired by FotS Dougram and Armored Trooper VOTOMS, rather than taking inspiration the Macross and Gundam (LAMs excepted of course...) was another great choice, making it feel more grounded instead of fantastic. It was an evolution of what we could already look at and see, rather than animesque wildness, and it immediately grabbed wargamers and held onto them.

3) ITS REAL LIFE HISTORY

The IRL history behind it gives BattleTech weight. It's operatic in its own right to compare with the space opera of its in-universe history."Will George Lucas's threat make them change the name from BattleDroids? And: Enter Harmony Gold. Stay tuned for next week!" CREATING the world's first internet-based game and E-sport? Then just suddenly shutting their company down because "tabletop gaming is dead lol goodbye sons!" Slowly coming back to life again? The only comparable game currently is D&D, but even that doesn't have all the drama and facets BT history does - most of their drama is wrapped up in Gygax's... ah... personality... and lacks all the other amazing pieces.

4) 2d6 AS CENTRAL DICE MECHANIC

Any game that has easy probability calculations is solid by me, and the 2d6 has the perfect bell curve: 8+ is against the odds, 7+ is with the odds. It lets you predict more easily how to change the boardstate and which moves are safeor risky. Compared to the GW-standard of multiple d6s, some of which oppose each other, makes it harder to calculate what's optimal at a glance. The simplicity of this frees more brainpower towards the actual GAME instead of trying to figure the mechanics.

5) THE DIFFERENT SCALES OF BATTLE

The scaling levels of battle that the game allows you to run is AMAZING! You can run almost every part of a planetary invasion - from a massive fleet battle involving giant WarShips, or smaller fighter-based battles, as you advance into a system. Then you can run a BattleForce or Alpha Strike game for quick, huge battalion or regimental scale combats. Then you can run Battletech for small, important moments in the game. The only thing it's missing is a 28mm small squad wargame, though arguably the RPG can do that quite well with a fair bit of preparation.

No wargame out there does this. At all. Ever. Not in the organized way BT does

6) THE GRANULARITY OF DAMAGE

They wreck some of your lasers? You can still shoot the other ones!  Ding their engine so they heat up faster! Blow off one of their legs and reduce them to standing still or hopping! Or tag their head with that Gauss Rifle shot and watch them topple downward.

This is the reason that Alpha Strike fails as a replacement for BattleTech - it's a solid game, mind, but it doesn't FEEL like Battletech. It loses too much of that granularity in exchange for upping the scale of the game... but once again, the game is about space knights fighting each other in giant robot steeds. Having AS as an option is fine, but as the main way to play the game? Nawh.

7) IGOUGO TURNS

Now, I'm not omniscient in wargaming history, but BT must be one of the first to use alternating model activations instead of alternating entire turns where a player moves ALL their models. If you've had your head under a rock, for the last 15 years this has been the standard wargame method because YOURTURNMYTURN is way boring, non-interactive, and drags the game.

The last time I played a game of Warmachine I literally left the store to get a pizza while my friend took his first turn - I knew I could trust him to play fair - and in the time it took to go there, buy it, cook it, and come back he STILL hadn't finished his first turn. That's garbage, and IGOUGO is much more dynamic and interesting, creating changing boardstates you can interact with.

8) ALL THE OPTIONAL RULES

The sheer number of circumstantial, optional rules you can use if you want or need to. Low gravity? Got it! No atmo? Got it! Morale? Got it! Field upgrading and repairing your 'Mechs with battlefield salvage between engagements? Got it! Off-board artillery? Got it! Yeeting smaller BattleMechs at your opponent? Got it! Minefields? Got it! Picking up your own blown-off arm and using it as a club? Got it! 

 

Games tend to lock themselves into a small and tight set of ideas these days, and BT has none of that. You can reach as deep as you want - or ride it out in the shallow end.

9) TRANSPARENT DESIGN SYSTEM

The design and scoring system being completely transparent and available to the players. Once again, look at 40k. Why is a Space Marine 15 points? Or Fallout Wasteland Warfare; why is a Psycho 45 Caps but the much worse Psycho Outlaw only one Cap less? Or X-Wing - why IS Luke Skywalker 61 points? And can you design your own units in any of those games? Hollow laugh.

BT, on the other hand, has a design system that from day one anyone can use - my personal favorite is a 35-ton 'Mech that moves 5/7 and uses 10 tons of Hardened Armor to have an AMAZING amount of protection for its HPPC headcapper weapon. I call it the Shocker.


Now, for what is horribly wrong, at least IMHO...

1) THE GODDAMNED RULES

Less is more. The fewer rules that your core game contains, the more you can build on top of it. Malifaux is deceptively simple - each player flips a card from their deck, adds the model's stat to it, decides whether to Cheat in a card from their hand or not, and then the action resolves. But it allows each model on the table to feel like a hundred in terms of possible actions and changing boardstates.

In Battletech, to make a hit with one weapon, you need to check the range modifier (as each weapon has 3-4 potential ranges each with a given penalty); check how fast the firing unit moved; check how fast the targeted unit moved; check to see if any additional movement or type modifiers apply; check to see if the weapon is in an arm with damaged actuators (and which type!); check the Heat of the firing model to see if it has a penalty; check to see if the firing model has any damage to its sensors; check if the targeting unit is obscured in some way or is standing in obstruction; THEN you can roll 2d6 twice at minimum, once to hit and once to determine location. Oh, but before you do that last part, you need to see if you're standing on the front or side arc of the targeted unit! And you might add between two and ten 2d6 rolls if it's a Cluster weapon!

For ONE weapon. ONE. Now, most of those modifiers stack between shots, but that's 8 variables - some of which have sub-variables - for each attack. Also, since most weapons have differing ranges and you can switch targets, that's a little more skull-sweat spent on mathing that out instead of actually moving pieces and changing the gamestate. And then you have to go back and figure out the math for every other attacking unit!

There are FOURTEEN TABLES for running BattleMechs that are not on the record sheet. Add in any other type of unit, and you're looking at least two more, possibly up to five. That number of potential variables and lookups more closely resembles a computer game, not a tabletop game. It's why Risk beat Axis & Allies.  

Yes, there are clunky game aids to help - dice boxes exist, as do the gloriously modern tracking dice that are sold to put behind 'Mechs so you know what they did during a game - but the more time you spend worrying and calculating how to resolve an action, the less time you spend actually PLAYING the game.

2) THE HORRID PACING

You know why you remember the Gauss headshot that killed the incoming Stone Rhino turn 1 or the TAC that set off the Archer's ammo twenty years ago? Because the first half of the game is boring, where the game state does not change radically unless something EXTREMELY unlikely happens. So when it does happen it stands out so much more than the 99.999% of the time that the result is "I hit your left arm with a medium laser, now to roll the other three..." It isn't until the latter part of the game, where enough armor is stripped away for there to be interior critical shots, that the gamestate changes enough to be fully engaging.

Compare it to FFG's X-Wing, where it's designed to be engaging even BEFORE the game starts! Each player takes it in turn to shape the battlefield - making approach lanes, making it hard to maintain formations, placing inconvenient obstacles out of the way. Then the game starts, and from the first turn you're jockeying for position. The games I remember from X-Wing aren't like the BT games I remember. BT games that stand out are the ones that weird variance made something happen early on. The X-Wing games I remember are the nailbiters where I didn't know I was going to win until the last roll hit the table.

When BattleTech started, this idea of design - that the gamestate should be in a constant state where both players can create changes to foster maximum engagement - wasn't really known or defined. Shit, games were only ten years past drawing chits out of a cup to simulate polyhedron dice!
 

3) THE FANBASE

No, not all fanbases are formed equally. Basketball fans are much more mellow than football fans - witness the different reactions to the kneeling 'controversy' - and soccer fans are just nuts. Dr Who fans are almost emblematic of their bumbling but well-meaning namesake - engaging in fun debates about the 'best doctor' while no one argues about a WORST doctor - whereas Star Wars fans almost universally HATE anything that came out after they turned 18.

Gaming fanbases are the same. D&D players are almost universally forward-looking; while there are some grognardian players who prefer D&D 1/2/3/Pathfinder/4 over the new flavor of 5, they never argue viciously about which edition is best or worst or insist that that anyone who doesn't play their particular version is damned to the Nine Hells with ACTUAL DEVILS not these baazaariiit bullshit.

Then there's BattleTech players.

I know - I KNOW! - that there exist mellow BattleTech players, even if I'm not one of them. I'm friends with quite a few, I've gamed with them, and there are some reading this.

But you wouldn't know it from the online fanbase.

There are ones who hate anything after 3025. Who hate anything after 3055. Who hate anything after 3067. Who insist the only units anyone should ever take are the ones printed in the books. Who mock stupid Spheroid players that prefer 3025. Who call anyone who doesn't design all their own 'Mechs retarded. Who take any suggestion that the game did not spring perfect from the head of Weis to a chorus of angels as a personal attack. Who will argue about every goddamn minor point until and after proven wrong, after which they will flee and pretend the conversation never happened. Whose favorite roleplay is "The AC/5 isn't a shit weapon that makes the Chauchat look brilliant."

And I'm one of them, but my personal hill to die on is that change is inevitable. You can either get trampled by it or ride it where you want to go: those are your choices.

And right now I'm saying that BattleTech needs to and should change. It should keep the six things it does right gameplay wise and look at revamping all the other crap. But that won't happen, because the people developing the game are also fans. This hampers their ability to stand apart from the game.

And know this: If you're reading this, growing angrier with every word, just ITCHING for the chance to reply, then you're the asshole I'm talking about. Maybe rethink your life choices?