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Did Robotech finally tell the Battletech guys to stop copying their stuff? I don;t see any of the Mechs I loved. BT was my first Minis game way back when but the cool mechs are gone and replaced with some really ugly ones.

Warhammer
Archer
Phoenix
Rifleman
Marauder
etc.

Bummer that the coolest ones are gone. Oh well, still might be a fun game to play as I loved the original as a kid.

Reecius wrote:Did Robotech finally tell the Battletech guys to stop copying their stuff?

I really do wish people would get their facts straight before spouting crap like this... honestly...

Last I heard, that whole mess basically happened because the Japanese owners of those mech designs believed they could license the rights for games and models separate from the art work and animation distribution rights. Harmony Gold got the animation distribution rights and FASA got from a broker working with the Japanese animator the rights to use the mech designs for their books and games. Harmony Gold has asserted that their rights include the derrivative rights to those designs, and thus the broker FASA used had no right to sell the mech designs. This confusion comes from ongoing disputes over who the proper Japanese owner is. Stateside the in court end result was denial of motions, a very quiet settlement and FASA choosing not to use those mechs for the sake of avoiding further legal issues.

That's a lot more helpful and explains a lot.

For those who want to speed up their Battletech games a bit try this...reduce every to hit modifier for targets movement by half, rounding up. It may not seem like much but it will result in many more hits, quicker damage, and an overall quicker game. It also makes long range shots far more worthwhile.

Another one of my home rules is no to hit modifiers for the attackers movement. I figure that a unit as advanced as a mech should at least be able to adjust fire and compensate for its own movement.

I like the rules exactly as they were written, but it's an interesting idea. Difficult to-hit mods is what kept my beloved Spider and Assassin team alive. It would work if everyone was riding around in huge lumbering armored PPC platforms, but not for the jumpy dodgey mechs.

One of the things that makes Btech so cool to me is the 2d6 +/- modifier system. This means stacking +1s and -1s has a greater cumulative effect than it would on a single die system. Knowing how to exploit your jump speed, the right cover to land in, the optimum weapon range for your mech compared to your opponents, when to time your attack based on heat, can lead to you shooting your main weapons at short range with a -3 to hit and him shooting at medium range with -5 or -6 to hit. It's the only way lightly armored mechs can last.

The easiest way to speed up Battletech is to remove Heat buildup and Ammo counts.

Then you can fire all day and pop mechs like crazy.

yeenoghu wrote:I like the rules exactly as they were written, but it's an interesting idea. Difficult to-hit mods is what kept my beloved Spider and Assassin team alive. It would work if everyone was riding around in huge lumbering armored PPC platforms, but not for the jumpy dodgey mechs...

It still keeps the small fast mechs fairly hard to hit, just not as hard as they used to be. Making it an even reduction keeps it from favoring anything more than it did before. It doesnt change the balance of the game at all, just ups the hit percentage.

Mad4Minis wrote:For those who want to speed up their Battletech games a bit try this...reduce every to hit modifier for targets movement by half, rounding up. It may not seem like much but it will result in many more hits, quicker damage, and an overall quicker game. It also makes long range shots far more worthwhile.

LMAO - I thought I was the only guy who played like that.

TalonZahn wrote:The easiest way to speed up Battletech is to remove Heat buildup and Ammo counts.

Then you can fire all day and pop mechs like crazy.

or you can just play the first person shooter


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Mad4Minis wrote:

yeenoghu wrote:I like the rules exactly as they were written, but it's an interesting idea. Difficult to-hit mods is what kept my beloved Spider and Assassin team alive. It would work if everyone was riding around in huge lumbering armored PPC platforms, but not for the jumpy dodgey mechs...

It still keeps the small fast mechs fairly hard to hit, just not as hard as they used to be. Making it an even reduction keeps it from favoring anything more than it did before. It doesnt change the balance of the game at all, just ups the hit percentage.

It does change the balance of the game. Some mechs cannot be hit as much as others. ergo a higher hit percentage means the lumbering armored weapons platforms overpower the lighter maneuver mechs. Skilled battletech players don't like to give their opponents easy shots. When we were kids, we would just run up on each other and blaze away, but as we got older, finesse became important. This way of making it easier to hit reminds me of the 5th grader mentality we started playing with a couple of decades ago. I enjoyed battletech for the finesse. It is far less blatant and oafish than 40k rules if it's played right. It's not meant to be a fast action game, it is meant to be calculating and thoughtful.

yeenoghu wrote:

TalonZahn wrote:The easiest way to speed up Battletech is to remove Heat buildup and Ammo counts.

Then you can fire all day and pop mechs like crazy.

I'm so old that I played MPBT Online and was a Beta Tester for MPBT 3025.

I actually remember Battledroids on the shelf at the store.

yeenoghu wrote:
It does change the balance of the game. Some mechs cannot be hit as much as others. ergo a higher hit percentage means the lumbering armored weapons platforms overpower the lighter maneuver mechs. Skilled battletech players don't like to give their opponents easy shots. When we were kids, we would just run up on each other and blaze away, but as we got older, finesse became important. This way of making it easier to hit reminds me of the 5th grader mentality we started playing with a couple of decades ago. I enjoyed battletech for the finesse. It is far less blatant and oafish than 40k rules if it's played right. It's not meant to be a fast action game, it is meant to be calculating and thoughtful.

Eh, to each his own I guess. I always found the light mechs running around racking up 13 or 14 to hit numbers in a 2d6 system to be a bit silly. Though i must admit it was never really an issue, as Ive never played with or against light mechs in anything other than scenarios specifically set up for them, or very large multi player games. Only done one of those, it took forever but was really fun. IIRC it was 8 players per side, 2 mechs per player.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

Reecius wrote:Did Robotech finally tell the Battletech guys to stop copying their stuff?

I really do wish people would get their facts straight before spouting crap like this... honestly...

I agree with you H.B.M.C. There is a lot of just plan wrong information out there which it seems like some people doggedly cling to in this age of instant information. The joke that FASA stole anything seems to be troll bait for people who enjoy causing grief. it is like a bad dated punchline that people keep insisting on using at parties. It wasn't clever when new and now it is just stale and old hat.

Like remember guys when Harmony Gold got an idea for an Exo-Squad toy and they were like "Schwing!This is totally awesome!!!" And then FASA was like, "Fool! That toy looks like a MADCAT, Homey Don't Play That!" and slapped a lawsuit on them AND THEN Harmony Gold was like, "Oh yeah, you know those licensed designs you are using well you licensed them from the wrong company so BOO YA counter-suit!" Which made FASA go, "OOPS! DID I DO THAT?"

Totally stale man.

All the hate on this set amuses me greatly. When the last version of this came out a couple years ago, we sold a metric crap-ton of em at the store I worked at. Most of the gamers were warhammer players that either hadn't played the game in years( many didn't realize it was still around) and lots of newer, younger players that had never heard of it or never seen it. $50 got you everything and more that you needed, enough for a few people to play out of the same box even. For the first time since 2001 we actually had people playing Btech regularly, even a league going. And having fun with it too, it's a VERY differant style of game than what is now made. Of course the plastics suck compared to the metals, this box obviously isn't for people that care that much about the minis, but for people getting into it or back into it, it's an amazing set and one helluva step up from carboard cutouts.

Besides, a decent coat of paint on those mechs makes all the differance in the world. A camo scheme, a few highlights, and a heavy coat of GW wash and they look just fine. My only problem with the minis is the bases aren't regular hexagons, the sides are not the same length as the front.

I purchased this boxed set just last year (not understanding their post about pre-ordering it) while the rules have little changed in them, the "missing due to IP theft" Mechs makes the game "blah" and the plastic mini's that come with it suck balls. I've seen some poorly done plastic mini's in my 40 years as a hobbiest, but these are absolute rubbish. I cut mine up and made wreck markers out of them. They are of the quality of the green army men you can buy a bag of 500 for a buck (USD) at the Dollar General store. Bendy, covered with some oil that comes back after cleaning them with dish washing detergent so any paint won't stick.

I know that Catalyst Labs probably spent a ton on the license, but the quality of the MINI's is unacceptable. I'm glad I had a 40% off coupon for Borders where I found it. Paying full retail for such mini's would have made me go postal.

The cardboard standees I got in my original BattleDroids box (re-released as Battletech) are a better value.

All other items in the box are TOP quality. A real shame though because if the Mini's hadn't been such shitte I'd have raved about this product. Card board standees would have made me rave about this product. But the fact that the company tried to pawn off those <insert every explicative you can think of> miniatures almost seemed like they were giving me the Middle Finger as they laughed that they got my $$$.

Yea, I'm pretty pissed that the quality of everything else in the box was absolutely great but the important part (to me) was crap. Even a year later.

TalonZahn wrote:The easiest way to speed up Battletech is to remove Heat buildup and Ammo counts.

Then you can fire all day and pop mechs like crazy.

You don't have to deal with as many units in a game of Battletech as it is, so you can afford spending more time on each unit.

On a tangential note, I always thought people would have been more open to the book keeping aspect if the models were larger.

I did boycot Battletech as a child for two reasons.

One, I told my mother i wanted a robotech rpg for my birthday. She brought home battle tech.

Two, battletech did totally rip of the Robotech mechs.

I only played the first battletech computer game on my commadore 64 because if you beat the game and found the code at the end you could send off for a Phoenix.. eerrr Veritech fighter.

aka_mythos wrote:You don't have to deal with as many units in a game of Battletech as it is, so you can afford spending more time on each unit.

On a tangential note, I always thought people would have been more open to the book keeping aspect if the models were larger.

You really don't have to convince me about anything concerning Battletech.

I have almost every book ever made for it (including many BattleTechnolgy mags) on a shelf right next to me and somewhere near 1000 mechs (not one beyond the year 3039 and most are OOP Originals), over 40 Aerospace mech scale fighters, and 2 cases full of tanks/vees.

From personal experience, somwhere in the 20+ years range, the absolute fastest way to speed up the game (IMHO), is to remove counting ammo and remove heat build up. Then people can always move at max and always fire every weapon they want. Modifiers are easy to track by putting a die by the mech indicating the Modifier number.

Just one mans thoughts.

[Edit] Just for fun, I dropped my Grey Death Legion (according to their book TO&E) Company pictures into my gallery. Long live nostalgia!!

I'm just saying there is no need to rush the game. Its meant to be more of a sim game... and removing those elements removes some of the inherent disadvantages with certain armaments and unit choices. At that point you might as well just delete those things from the game. Its the equivalent to taking chess and reducing it down to checkers.

I think you guys are bringing up some good points. The sum of which is that Battletech needs some stream lining and I for one would like to see an updated version of the game that is more balanced and runs faster and smoother. There is never a game of CBT when you don't end up page flipping for 15min to an half hour just trying to work out how to do some simple maneuvers. To top it off the core rule books are poorly organized and often pages are mismarked. I'm glad to have PDFs of all the books now so that I can do key word searches using my iPad but the game design can be a major turn off for new players.

Battletech really has not changed in 25 years which is a plus and a minus as they have generally just added more and more to the game making it more and more complicated without doing much in the way of fixing problem areas or streamlining the existing system. One member of the CBT forums had brought up a really good point about how Total Warfare does in almost 400pages what the previous edition of the rule book did in like 70 pages or something to that effect but Total Warfare does it even more poorly. More is not always better.

I had to delete this post 3 times as I was geting too heated. My main point of those delted posts is that if you got offended this set has cheap mechs, you're not at all the target audience for it, and there's far better options for you to get into the game with. If you ARE the set's intended audience, the intro set is absolutely AMAZING. Full, complete game for an affordable price that has high-quality components with a good art design? And it actually comes with figs and costs the same amount as a game that didn't come with any figs, even if they're cheap supermarket quarter-machine quality? AND, for those modeling enthusuasts, they license a complete line of high quality metal figs to replace your cheapo plastics with? AND they make a large series of expansion books that allow you to add as much or as litle extra detail as your gaming group could possibly ever want? Phenominal.

As for speeding up play, we used to just give everyone veteran pilots. Anything more than that and you really started to lose out on what makes it battletech over any of the other miniature games out there: a small scale duel between pilots using machines that are meant to dish out and take an enormous amount of punishment, with the victor decided by the beter strategist (or who could get luckier on the crit chart, that too). Gunnery 2 instead of a 4 makes a HUGE differance, although it did tend to favor the mechs with bigger guns. Personally, I was super excited to hear about BattleForce, thinking it would be a trimmed down batletech so you could use more figs per side, until I saw the preview that showed each "mech" was a lance. I still think something like that it has potential, but I hate rulesets that aren't 1:1 for vehicles/mechs. I'm all for streamlining the game, so long as it's a differant game, keep classic Btech super-detailed, couple mechs per side.

blood angel wrote:Two, battletech did totally rip of the Robotech mechs.

Of FFS... no they didn't. Jesus...

blood angel wrote:Two, battletech did totally rip of the Robotech mechs.

Not really. It's more that Battletech licensed designs that Harmony Gold also licensed when they turned Macross into Robotech. neither was the initial designer, and both had some limits to the license, although very different limits. This is a massive oversimplification of the whole kerfluffle.

I'm curious, how many people would have completely skipped over battletech altogether if it weren't for fasa "ripping off" robotech? I know the only reason i ever grabbed any of the mechs or looked at the game is becuase it had an Excalibur blasting away on the cover, complete with RDF symbol (I was super into the robotech novels and rpg at the time, the show was long off the air). Later I found out it was macross they "ripped off", but the important thing was inch-tall robotech figures! OMG! Mom, buy me that one! Wasn't till the latter 90s i actually played the game. I can't for a moment believe I'm the only one that only looked twice becuase it WAS robotech.

Kalamadea wrote:I had to delete this post 3 times as I was geting too heated. My main point of those delted posts is that if you got offended this set has cheap mechs, you're not at all the target audience for it, and there's far better options for you to get into the game with. If you ARE the set's intended audience, the intro set is absolutely AMAZING. Full, complete game for an affordable price that has high-quality components with a good art design? And it actually comes with figs and costs the same amount as a game that didn't come with any figs, even if they're cheap supermarket quarter-machine quality? AND, for those modeling enthusuasts, they license a complete line of high quality metal figs to replace your cheapo plastics with? AND they make a large series of expansion books that allow you to add as much or as litle extra detail as your gaming group could possibly ever want? Phenominal.

I've mostly held my tongue as I do work for a company that makes another mecha game but keep in mind that a lot of people on the thread are looking at this boxed set as an introduction to the setting. I have some background with BT, so I know that weird designs are a core of the setting. You know that. New people don't, and they're seeing not-great plastics (but as you said, they're priced right, and look reasonably faithful to some of the original source art) combined with not-great mechanical designs (I'm talking spindly legs, not how many SRMs or heat sinks a design has) and the combo is unappealing. It's not putting the best front forward, unfortunately.

Mind you, the awful mechanical designs reflect the clunkiness of the rules.

Nurglitch wrote:Mind you, the awful mechanical designs reflect the clunkiness of the rules.

They're not my style but some people like them. I find they make a bit more sense if you think of the Mechs as more land battleships than dueling knights/samurai.

Balance:

I know some people like them, but I'm not really clear on why. I don't think they work well as land battleships either: at least they're not like any battleships in naval games I've played.

As a veteran Battletech player since 87, this looks interesting enough.

Like many have mentioned already, it's a simple system and in 30 min, you know how to play. I've always liked the rules, but they expanded them throughout the years, and you could always build/modify your own mechs easily enough if you didn't like running the stock designs.

I have almost every battletech supplement or source book and own several hundred mechs up to the 3060 era (inlcuding every novel...lol!).

I liked the old classic designs, however, as has been mentioned before with the Robotech thing, I think it's been put properly in its place (thanks to HBMC and others), so enough about that.

The good thing about the game though, is you can use the rules you want, so it is a bit customizable on what kind of game you want to play. Though I must admit, since the Total War core rulebook came out, sometimes it has been difficult to look up some things. A few things did change in Total War, ie partial cover no longer is a +3 mod now with hits going on the punch-table. Now it is a +1 mod with any hits hitting the legs totally ignored.....interesting rule change there....lol!

But anyway, with some of their other books like Tactical Operations and Strategic Ops, you can make it as complicated or easy as you want to....even cherry-pick the stuff you like for your gaming group. I'll admit, they can complicate stuff with all the tables and charts for engineering and cost-formulas, but it's there if you want it.

Great game and it was one of the first miniature wargames I ever played......still play it today, but more retro, circa 3025 to 3039.

H.B.M.C. wrote:Wow. Whole lotta hate going on this this thread. If you don't like BattleTech, that's cool. But please, let you're opinion-as-fact bull-gak at the door.

I know. Especially the "OMG it is so hard to play!" people.

It is simple math. Can you add from 0-14? And read a page of charts? That is really all Battletech takes. It isn't hard.