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I have been trying to learn this game of late and a few concepts are throwing me for a loop.

For example, all attacks must be declared in alternating order (starting with the player who lost initiative) before resolving attacks/damage. The seems totally impractical for anything more than a few units.

Do people actually follow this rule? If so, how do you remember everything til you actually start rolling dice?

Manchu..
Quality of the mech the pilot is in. not all mechs are the same quality. Going by 88-96time frame

Though majority of time its turn based. You think 2 turns ahead of positioning to set up your targets

Edit

playing Lance? Actually tell me the mechs you are using


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jihadin wrote:
Manchu..
Quality of the mech the pilot is in. not all mechs are the same quality. Going by 88-96time frame

Though majority of time its turn based. You think 2 turns ahead of positioning to set up your targets

Edit

playing Lance? Actually tell me the mechs you are using

Edit II

Your not playing Clans are you?

Er ... I'm referring to Total Warfare (published by CGL in 2011). Players alternate declaring attacks. When it is a player's turn to declare an attack, he can choose any of his unit that he has not already declared. As far as I know, there is no "mech quality" rule. I don't have any specific mechs in mind; this is a general rules question (well, actually a question about the practicality of RAW).

Bypass that rule because combat is fluid. Each turn is "10 sec" of combat.

We never bothered with it. Alternating movement, sure, because that's why Initiative is important, but alternating declarations of attacks seems kinda pointless. And we wrote down the calculations for attacks, and then did them one at a time. I mean, you could argue, that from an initiative perspective, declaring attacks in an alternating fashion allows you to better react (ie. your opponent ends up declaring all his attacks against one 'Mech before you declare the 'Mech they're targeting, so knowing it's about to die you declare an Alpha Strike), but chances are you know when your opponent is going to focus fire on something (usually based on their movement), so it's not really an advantage.

Apropos, as I'm writing this reply a track from the Mechwarrior 2 soundtrack starts playing.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
alternating declarations of attacks seems kinda pointless

Right? I can't figure out why the rules have this declaration sub-phase before anything gets resolved.

EDIT: Nevermind - brain storm - it's to prevent you from picking targets that aren't already destroyed.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
we wrote down the calculations for attacks, and then did them one at a time.

Can you post an example calculation?

Uhh... well, we made an excel sheet that had:

'Mech Type
Pilot Name
Gunnery
Piloting
Movement (in full, including anything extra like TSM/MASC)
Total heat dissipation (plus room to leave dice on the sheet to represent current heat)
A "shooting" box where we'd write out the equations for shooting/melee attacks.

And then any notes.

As far as an example, that was just a matter of using the basic system.

So if you had a Gunner 3 'Mech using 4 Medium Pulse Lasers and two Streak 6's, were at Medium range, hadn't moved and they hadn't moved but they were in woods that'd be:

Medium Pulse Lasers: 3 (Gunnery 3) -2 (MPL special rule) +2 (Med Range) +1 (woods) = 3-2+2+1 = 4+ on 2D6 to hit (rolled 4 times, one for each MPL)
Streak 6's: 3 (Gunnery 3) +2 (Med Range) +1 (woods) = 3+2+1 = 6+ on 2D6 to hit (rolled twice, once for each Streak 6).

We'd also calculate the heat as well. The only real declaring we'd do is declare which weapons we were going to use, and if a 'Mech died before it got to another 'Mechs turn to fire at it, well too bad, it still fired, still generated the heat and still wasted the ammo (where applicable).

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The only real declaring we'd do is declare which weapons we were going to use

Wouldn't you also need to declare the target, so you were committed to firing even if the target was destroyed before that attack resolved?

 Manchu wrote:
Wouldn't you also need to declare the target, so you were committed to firing even if the target was destroyed before that attack resolved?

Sorry yes, declaring what target and with what weapons. The order or declaration was never important (or was obvious, so it never became important).

Okay -- thanks, that's very helpful. It sounds like I just need to come up with an easy way to record declarations as they're made.

As with most of CBT, it feels like this mechanic was designed by people making a PC game rather than a board game.