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I just started playing this - it was released today.

I haven't gotten very far in yet. It seems like a hybrid between MechCommander and Xcom, though.

Anyone else into this yet?

Now that I understand the game a little better I'm liking it more. I played the tutorial but still wound up not understanding how some basic stuff worked. Not sure if it was unclear or if I was just not paying attention well enough.

I had thought I did pretty well on a mission where my mech lost his left torso, left arm, and my pilot was injured, but alive. Not so much: the pilot is out of commission for 54 days, and the repairs to my my mech were expensive both in cbills and time. Avoiding damage seems pretty important. Like xcom, you're going to want to have a stable of pilots available so you can have a few spares for when people are injured or killed. They level up, as well, so like xcom, always try and take a rookie with you to get him some XP.

I just had my first end-of-month financial report. Hemorrhaging money, but the game starts you out deeply in debt.

If you find that the x-com-esque action camera that fires up and follows your mech on random actions slows things down you can toggle those off. I haven't done so yet though.

Lots of little micromangementy stuff between battles. Not a complaint, that was the heart of Mechcommander.

Complaints: It doesn't support ultrawidescreen, which is kind of annoying.

More of an observation that a complaint - It's really hammering my 1080. it's not a problem - the game runs very smooth - but there is definitely some performance optimization to be had which perhaps should have happened during development.

-Loki- wrote:NVIDIA released new drivers today optimised for Battletech. Hopefully that solves some issues for people.

*shakes fist with impotent rage* I am stuck using a fairly old driver because my Oculus Rift has a bug with drivers after 388.59 (december 2017). What was only a little annoying how now become more annoying, I guess

Graphite wrote:There's something glorious about a Battletech game requiring more heatsinks

hah! It is apt.

Yeah, that was neat.


I haven't yet encountered a SRM carrier, but I did encounter a LRM carrier and was pretty unhappy with it. I was, as said in here previously, kind of expecting a nuisance and was surprised with the missiles started coming and didn't stop for a really, really long time.




I watched this tip video earlier and I find it to be handy - there was stuff in there that I didn't know about from having played the tutorial. Like, all of your "support weapons" like MGs and small lasers fire when you do a physical attack, you don't gain heat from a physical attack, exactly how evasion works, initiative order, and so on. Good use of 10 minutes if you're new to the game.

What kind of builds are you guys running? I'm still mostly in mediums all-rounders, but just got a Trebuchet which I'm outfitting into a lurm boat to support my guys.

You're the underpowered video card guy, right?

That's gotta be super frustrating, that it worked for part of the game and then didn't. Sorry, man.

Getting really frustrated by Liberate: Smithon. My 4 medium mechs vs 8 mechs, they have turret support, plus I'm supposed to task one of my mechs to stopping 2 transports? Not sure how I'm supposed to handle this. I've taken 6 or 7 swings at it in various ways and nothing really has worked for me.

 Mr Morden wrote:

Infected by the SJW

No idea what this means - if its about the fact that women have major roles in the story etc - well - have you read any BattleTech lore in the last thirty years!

Presumably it's because you can pick your pronoun, which is an o-o-outraaaage!

 Avatar 720 wrote:
That said, my pilots were fairly experienced, and I was using a loadout of 1 Medium--an LRM Shadowhawk I've been using since the beginning--and 3 Heavies: an Orion kitted out for brawling, with an AC/10, a few lasers, and 3 SRM6s; a Jager with pretty much stock loadout of 2x AC/2s and 2x AC/5s; and a Grasshopper equipped with a lightshow of max MLs and max SLs, but I took sod all damage because nothing lived long enough to do much; coming at you in groups of 1-2 really cuts their strength down.
(snipped)
It could well be that you have to load up an earlier save and grind some more, though. Taking on 2-3 skull contracts for more likelihood of heavy mechs you can salvage might be the only way, even if it means reloading a few times to get a matchup you can deal with.

I really appreciate you taking the time to type all of this out. I've decided to take you advice - I'm going to load an earlier save and save this mission for when I have more tonnage. The mechs you did this with are much heavier and better armed than the mechs I currently own.

 Wolfblade wrote:
I think I got through that with a really lucky shot on an ammo crate when ~4 of them clustered around it.

I did win a single time, but it was such a pyrrhic victory I can't live with it. I caught 3 of them around a crate, but even then I "won" with 2 dead pilots, 2 destroyed mechs, and an 80 day medbay stay for myself, along with the 2 surviving mechs having lost all the fancy ++ weapons and gyros I had accumulated to that point.

When do you guys start seeing assault mechs? I'm at about 425 days in, and the heaviest mech I've seen was 65 tons, and that was an outlier. I almost always see the same variants of shadowhawks, vindicators, jenners, locusts, and sometimes hunchbacks.

I got a Grasshopper!

I was so excited about finally moving past that one story mission.

Then in the second round, he got knocked down, focus fired, and when his arm got blown off I quit angrily. Maybe I'll try again when I get even more tonnage. I saw a Jager but I couldn't get it whole - he was doing too much damage to my bros.

I am really enjoying the game except for this one mission I am stuck on

Also, kind of hard to believe that head injuries really are working as intended but ok, whatever.

See, I've never had that happen (so far) - whenever I've lost a pilot, I've always seen it coming ahead of time, either after a lot of attrition or during a sequence of bad but plausible events, like a knockdown and a lance's worth of focus firing.


Hey, side note. have you guys ever noticed that like... the AI will sometimes seemingly adapt to your tactics? I feel like this game can't possibly have the capability of doing it, but if you form a gun line like battleships, the AI is cool with doing that all day long. If you leapfrog over a mech to shoot into the rear armor, though, the AI will start jockeying you for position to do the same. Same for melee - I've never really seen the AI typically initiate physical attacks, but if I do one, then the AI will start doing them that drop even with mechs that were out of range - they will close and melee instead of shooting.

Maybe just coincidental but I've seen it kind of a few times now.

... I'm still stuck on that same mission. I got a Grasshopper, so now trying with a Grasshopper, a Trebuchet, a Shadowhawk, and a Centurion. Getting really, really mad at this point to be honest - if I back out and do a mission that is rated twice as hard, I can breeze through it, but this one stupid story mission just feels completely unwinnable to me.

I guess I am going to try watching some youtube videos and I guess grinding some more, maybe I can get an additional Grasshopper.

I've only gotten a single heavy so far. I have been looking at strats tonight and will try again tomorrow, I guess. I have tried with what LRMs I have but I don't think I've been using them wisely. I'm also going to start scum saving just so I can move on.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Am i the only one that enjoys the cut scenes and animations.

I love the cut scenes, but I think I've seen the Argo hook up with a jump ship enough by now, personally.

Finally beat that stupid mission. While more tonnage and having read some tips on positioning helped; a lot of it was also luck of the draw. I didn't have the RNG come up with mostly Cicadas with PPCs hanging out in the back focus firing on sensor locked guys, they didn't avoid the ammo crates, and so on. truthfully I think it wasn't so much as the mission was impossibly hard as I just had a lot of unlucky elements working together several times - I was doing 4 skull missions with relative ease. When I finally did beat it, it was 10 turns and no one was even seriously damaged.

Now I'm breezing through the game and again really enjoying it. I think they may have done some minor speedups last patch too - I noticed ally movement seems a little faster without stops when transitioning between allied units.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I cannot recommend going through the Tactician tree to get that +1 Initiative skill enough.

I've got a Medium that goes when the Lights go, and 3 Heavies that got when the Mediums go. It's incredible.

When I bring my Kintaro ('Shokan'), with Dekker piloting it, he can sometimes get the drop on Lights before they get their evasion up and tear 'em to pieces with 3xSRM6++ and some medium lasers.

2 of my guys have it and it's an enormous game changer. I would tie split fire with tactician in terms of usefulness.

Dragons also seem incredibly hard to kill.

My secondary "tank" if my bulwark pilot gets too beat up is a Grasshopper with like, 8x small lasers+ or something, atop medium laser vomit.

If you can close to range, then small lasers are absolutely amazing for the tonnage, especially when you're a dude who is going to be meleeing when possible anyway.

I also just did "Graverobbers", and was doing pretty good halfway though, but when those reinforcements dropped and I saw them, I just spend the rest of the mission sprinting every mech to evac.

I agree with Elbows that the difficulty curve is not very polished at all. I have 4 skull missions that are utter cakewalks and 2 skull missions that are super difficult. I'd really like to see that addressed in a patch; some of these missions really need to be adjusted - some up, some down.

Also not sure how I feel about PPCs. I've got a build with 2X PPCs and they don't really seem to deliver the damage you would think, and of course that's a lot of eggs in a basket that might just miss.

Medium Lasers, LRMS, and SRMS really are my go-to weapons, with small lasers for my punchers.

Hah, I also put the ammo in the legs, and for the same reason.

 Orlanth wrote:

 Ouze wrote:


I agree with Elbows that the difficulty curve is not very polished at all. I have 4 skull missions that are utter cakewalks and 2 skull missions that are super difficult. I'd really like to see that addressed in a patch; some of these missions really need to be adjusted - some up, some down.

The skull ratiings are intel estimates, sometimes they are inaccurate. This frankly is how it should be.

If accurate, I don't think I'd have a problem with that if the game made that more clear - that the skull estimates are based on best-guess intel. As you say, it would even add flavor. However like many things I've learned I don't believe the game supplies this information very well and without that information you have to assume it's bad game design.

Yeah TBH some of the vehicles terrify me more than the mechs. I will definitely ignore a 60 ton mech in favor of attacking an SRM carrier or a Demolisher.

Nice. That is probably #2 on my list of most desired mechs, right after the Stalker. Also want a King Crab pretty bad.

Ironically the mech I like the most in this game is the Centurion, which was a real mediocre mech in MWO in my opinion.

I simultaneous empathize with you, and am glad someone else also struggled with it just as badly as I did.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Is it just me or do turrets have endless vision?

Definitely not. If there aren't any spotters around they are trivial to roll up; once they get detected you can sensor lock them with one mech and then have the other 3 mechs kill it in a single round of shooting without them ever having a chance to shoot back, they just turn orange again if you don't kill them. You can roll a whole base up pretty fast.

Of course, what you clearly experience is what i often get, as Wolfblade said - some other unit or mech acting as a spotter for them, in which case they paste you from max range, which for a LRM or PPC is super crazy far, further then you can see unassisted.

I definitely wouldn't consider what mechs or weapons are in the game to be spoilers. This is based on a tabletop game older than the majority of posters on this forum, and you're complaining someone "spoiled" that a weapon was in the game that was introduced into the canon in 1989 and was installed a mech that was introduced in 1996.

You're being more than a bit silly.

I thought the Atlas would be larger. In MWO it's a pretty thicc boi but here it just seemed a little... underwhelming, size wise. But it was about the same size as a Highlander, which is about right, so I am gonna have to chalk that up to difficulty of showing enormous scale when all of the models are viewed from overhead and are usually about half an inch tall.

Kinda bummed the Raven isn't in the game. Shouldn't it be, timeline-wise? I sure could use an electronic warfare mech. It seems like it would be pretty easy to implement, too.

Which are the ones that should be in at this time but are caught up in legal problems (again, ffs) - Marauder, Warhammer, and maybe Rifleman?

That artwork is neato. Real...... neato.

Are any of you guys using any mods? I'm more or less happy with the gameplay but have considered some sound mods. I'd love to get that proper PPC crackle and sizzle back.

There is also one that changes the maintenance from a flat fee per mech to one based on chassis type, which honestly makes sense - you would assume a rare assault costs more to maintain than a common light.

I could understand not wanting plot spoilers, and people have been respecting that, but not saying what mechs are in a Battlemech game is an absolutely outlandish request.