Hurray! Battletech is finally out. Been waiting on this since the Kickstarter. I did not follow the development at all though.

I fired it up and played the first "tutorial" fight or two, felt sort of indifferent about it, but I was busy with God of War still anyway. Finished that game and now it was time to really give Battletech a go, and boy (boy!) was that fun up until my current situation.

Amazing intro sequence. There 100% needs to be a real nice Battletech anime (maybe Netflix distributes it?) I did stumble across some 90's Battletech cartoon and downloaded that for supplementary amusement. So far the game has excellent cutscene animations and super music to go with it. I had no idea the game was going to be sort of.. XCOM-ish in the career mode? My current dilemma, after clearing the first few missions and completing one that, lets say involves resurrecting something, my career feels like it is over already lol My Mechs and pilots were thoroughly wrecked afterwards and I had to spend the entire reward getting everything repaired and refitted and give the pilots time to recover, so probably another two months salary waiting on all that. Then I was stuck around Contracts that seemed potentially too difficult, took one that paid for travel, and that took a bunch of time so another month salary.. See where this is going? Deployed on a 1 1/2 star difficulty mission, to no surprise there were a handful of Mech harder than anything I had fought before, my pilots missed every 80% shot they possibly could, meanwhile I got a bit beat up. And here I am, nearly broke just as the game really starts.

I kinda just wanted to vent and ask if that is how this game is really going to be? There doesn't seem to be save scumming unless I go copy the files? Do I really have to start all over again, doing all of those early missions? Ugggggh..

The game seems awesome and I'm really into it, but I don't know if like.. hardcore Iron Man mode tier gameplay is what I want this early in the game. Sure, a pilot could die and that adds fun tension, but if my Mechs are going to be obliterated on a single mission and I don't have the funds to recover.. then that's it lol Even though I did a few extra Contracts prior to doing that first Priority Mission, clearly it wasn't anywhere near enough to build up some cash and supplies for refitting. I also realized I could've combined the travel time on the last Contract I did with all the refitting and recovery time to avoid so much downtime.. but I wasn't sure what I was going to do next anyway..

Blah blah blah I'm ranting now. This game is awesome yet extremely difficult apparently?

Edit: Ah, I see in terms of the save games, you can view/load a bunch of previous saves. I guess I just only had the one save when I loaded it up before.

I was about to tell you about the saves but it looks like you've already found it. If you're battered enough where your mercs or your mech needs nearly a month to fix up you might want to redo the mission. Also in-mission if it's not a story mission and you and your mechs are in danger, as long as you have completed one objective and killed one enemy you can do a "good faith" withdrawal, receive a fraction of the credits and most importantly not hurt you MRB standing.

I haven't done this before but if my pilots get close to 2/3 injuries I might just pull out instead letting them die and having most of your mechs in the shop for the month.

Battletech definitely has a learning curve to it. Two things... no three things I've learned from Mechwarrior Online that transfer to this game is sweep the legs, sensor locks, and lrm boats.

Having trouble hitting things? Reduce their evade using sensor lock follow up with hell from the sky by lrm. After the barrage, the mech should either be blown to pieces or just about to be knocked down. I stripped off the armor and shoved a lrm 20, 15 and 5 into the Shadowhawk then combine it with a Tactian pilot to acquire the majestic rain of fire.

Still can't hit things? Abuse Call Shots to increase your hit chance and bum rush a mech in the start of a skirmish.

Don't got that? No worries. Kick them in shins.

I learned quick that evade is key in battle making manuverability more important than being in cover like in XCOM. Unless you trained your pilots otherwise.

Anyways, Battletech does a pacing problem to move you along and hinting what yet to come as well. I think I spent like an year in game before even starting the first campaign mission. It is definitely rough managing your crew, mechs and contracts while dealing a really crippling wait time for injuries, repairing and refitting. The worst being refitting for me since I want to tinker with my mechs a lot.

I think difficulty rating really doesn't reflect how really hard mission are. I've done 2.5 without any injuries or internal damage, but good god I stay any from ambush convoy especially on a hot bio dome no matter the rating. Most of the time I'm trying to catch up to melee those accursed vehicles since some of them have a lot of armor even more than a mech. I shake my fist at you, manticore!

Oh one more pro tip. Don't get your main character killed. I got goomba stomped one mission and I was out for 110 days...

So yeah. Awesome, but hard... like an Atlas.

I just redid the capture argus mission and it went a bit smoother. Knowing where enemies are going to spawn in helps to setup a formation beforehand. So I took some damage but I wasn't missing all sorts of limbs like I was before. Minor recovery time afterwards, much smaller bill, and I paired it up with a contract jump so there wasn't so much wasted downtime. Figured I'd have things more on track now but..

Speaking of convoy ambush, the very first contract I took after that mission was this. Seemed simple enough, no? I think it had a 1 star rating? Harder than I thought, only because the stupid Strikers seemed to take so many hits. The only problem I had was one of my scout's arms was taken off right at the end from three consecutive Striker attacks. They felt it necessary to drive across the whole map, drive by my bigger mechs, to all go lay down on that poor dude. None of my other mechs had any structural damage. I'd call this a pretty good result. A single mech arm can't be too bad.. Turns out that costs something like $75,000 to fix it all and it's going to take 32 days before Yang can get it done? Wtf? That's like one third the reward with bonuses.

Geez this game is savage. And now the contracts I'm being given in-system only offer like $150k max which isn't even enough to keep the lights on. Maybe I need to watch someone else play this to see what the magic is because it seems like they expect you to go through fights with zero structural damage on anything. Even being extra cautious doesn't seem to help.

@seikenfreak: This is unfortunate. I'm really looking forward to getting this game in the next month or so. I really enjoyed XCOM at first but it got to be too frustrating when I would miss three 75%+ shots in a row. This sort of thing happened multiple times and it just wasn't fun anymore.

As far as that BattleTech cartoon...whoa, you're in for a ride. I used to love it when I was a kid. The CGI battles were amazing! Went back to watch it last year for my podcast and...yeah. It has NOT aged well. At all.

Always go full salvage, never take the money. Not only do you get stuff you need but you can sell all the extras as well as piece together extra mechs from salvage and sell those for a lot.

If that kind of thing bothers you, this game might not be for you. Missing three 75% shots in a row isn't even that uncommon of an occurrence, mathematically speaking.

I am loving this game. It feels a lot like the tabletop game except someone else is doing all the maths! And they're probably not making any mistakes like I would. There is also a lot of world building that they didn't have to do but really pays off. They could have just given planets a A/B/C/D rating for their Hiring Halls and Stores but instead every planet has a list of Attributes including stuff like the poverty levels, technological advancement, plate tectonics etc. It is functionally the same but it gives places real flavour.

I have a question: Does placement of Jump Jets in the mech make any difference other than that places need to be hit for them to be destroyed? For example the Spider that Dekker starts in (RIP Dekker I didn't know how dangerous Scorpion tanks could be) has 8 JJ's with 4 in LT and RT. I have since swapped them too have two in LT/RT and two in RL/LL so that if he cops a hit to the side torsos (which seems to be most of the time) I wont have to buy 4 new ones, only two.

I wish there was a lower difficulty option, most normal battle's are ok but those story ones are really hard.

@hayt: Placement doesn't affect efficiency for anything, whether it be a jump jet or a heat sink.

@mike: Good to know!

You have the right idea though. Spread your stuff out, don't put all your ammo in the same location and never store ammo in your CT. Spread your good equipment out that way if a body part or an entire mech gets destroyed you don't lose all your good items. Mechs can always be repaired but if a weapon is destroyed it's gone forever, so take special care to protect rare equipment.

I've been able to do a few contracts now and it really is fun. Been able to clear them pretty much unscathed which makes the rewards feel a whole lot better. What is the deal with disabling a mech via head/legs? I thought I saw tips suggesting you do it that way if you can as you'll be able to salvage the whole mech or something. At least that is how I interpreted it. It makes sense to me; you avoid causing the whole thing to explode and you can retrieve it. The one contract I did, I took the legs off a Hunchback and a Griffin, but neither of them even had parts in the salvage pool. I was sad.

I also saw mention of ejecting the pilot? To save them from death but disabling the mech, I believe. Is there a HUD button I haven't noticed? Preferably one I have to click once to break the glass and then again to eject.

Things are definitely going more smoothly, luckily. It does feel like luck lol I'm dying for more extra production value in the game just because it's so good and there doesn't seem to be other media around for the Battletech universe like this. I want cutscenes with dudes in the Mech Bay. I either want to wander around and look at them in first person or I want to look in the background of the scene and see buncha little people carting stuff around, welding sparks, big cranes lifting arms.. I want to see post-battle clips of the blown up mechs being salvaged.

And I still can't get over the music. I've decided to play this on my lovely big OLED TV (the pitch black of space looks perfect on these) since it doesn't have 21:9 support (and it doesn't have 4K resolutions either?) Some nice 7.1 audio, I tweaked the in game sliders so the music is louder.

Oh and another question: Any else have a somewhat hitchy game experience? It does it during loading screens, when it calculates the AI actions, or when it does the various battle cameras sometimes. I was watching a let's play and it didn't seem to be happening to them.

System specs: i7 2600k @ 4.4ghz, 16GB of RAM (Vinny mentioned Austin having to buy more RAM?), GTX1080, installed on an SSD. The ol "Sandy Bridge" is my only guess but I haven't had any issues with other modern games like Far Cry 5.

I'm wondering if the difficulty has the same sort of curve as Final Fantasy Tactics where it feels almost unfair towards the beginning until you get some flexibility and a nice crew setup that you have a good mojo with and some sort of attack plan for every fight. I know I gave up on XCOM at some point because it wasn't fun anymore having everyone die every fight and the dumb dooms day clock time limit.

You need three pieces of salvage to build a mech. Killing the pilot gives you all three pieces. Destroying the mech's head kills the pilot. Destroying both legs kills the mech and gives you 2 pieces of salvage. Coring the mech gives you one piece. You can also kill the pilot by injuring them enough to incapacitate them, which could be 3-5 injuries. Also yes, the game has some performance issues.

Yeah it's a lil hitchy at times (lucky it's turned based haha). The weirdest one for me is on loading screens it seems like there's meant to be animation of the dropship flying in but that doesn't start until it unhitchest when the loading is finished. Seems like an easy patch candidate but it's very minor. I've heard rumblings of save corruption bugs but so far I've been safe thank god.

This game can be real brutal sometimes. Had a 2 1/2 difficulty mission start taking a turn for the worse when a reinforcement lance decided to show up right alongside the scout lance I was supposed to hit. Engagements like that really stress that you need to quickly dispose of your enemies as soon as you find them as often times you're pitted against 2 or more lances throughout a mission. Learned quickly from that mission that I need to strip evasion off of the units I'm fighting and then go all-in on a precision shot to bring down an enemy quickly. The longer a fight goes on, the higher the chance a stray missile or MG shot can hit the cockpit and put a merc in the med bay for the remainder of the month. Had two mercs almost die that mission from stray shots to the cockpit and now they get to wander around the ship for 51 days.

Then I took a one level difficulty mission and it happened again with two more mercs: just a single hit to the heads of each of their mechs from missile impacts. Now I have four mercs out of a total seven camping the med bay for about 1-2 months. Brutal.

The game is not as brutal/hard as it may first seem. There is just a learning curve to go through and learn the tactics. If you're having a hard time at the start don't worry, that's natural, you're kind of supposed to unless you already know what you're doing from either watching streams or just knowing basic battletech rules and conventions.

Some tips for peeps:

Get the Bulwark perk, on every pilot, always. It is the single most OP perk in the game and only gets stronger as you get into later stages with bigger slower mechs. If you don't move it's 50% damage and stability reduction. This is better then all but the fastest evasion maneuvers on small mechs. All other perks are marginal, and situational at best. Bulwark is always useful for everyone. Trust me. You could write a whole manual on the usability and effectiveness of Bulwark. Other perks wish they were Bulwark in their wet dreams. Evasion charges will get stripped quick, bulwark normally wont and it's more dmg absorption then 5 or less evasion. Honestly i'm kind of on the fence whether its too good and breaks the game or an essential tactic to running missions efficiently.

Try doing as many contracts per planet as possible, 2-3 is ideal, before moving on. And doing mech repairs/upgrades and pilot healing as you're traveling to a new place. Bettwe ship engines can help with that actually as you will get to a planet faster thus theres less chance contracts will expire.

Just because a planet/system has no current contracts doesn't mean you shouldn't travel to it, the game usually generates missions when you get there.

If you are having difficulty with the missions being currently presented to you by the game, travel back on the star chart to towards the starting lower difficulty planets and you can do lower difficulty missions to farm up some cash, parts and repair/heal up and get back in shape.

It pays to have around 6 pilots and 6 mechs in early-midgame so that you can swap things in if they get damaged or destroyed. Any less then that and you're risking not being able to go on missions too much. Any more and you will be eating into your bottom line early on while money is tight. You can move on to the luxury of having more pilots and mechs then that when your're more money comfortable.

Missions take 1 day. This is ideal for repairing simple structure damage on a mech as that only takes 1 day no mater what. (not part replacement or lost limbs). This way when you're doing multiple missions per planet you can essentially bring back a damaged mech online right after another mission.

More armor is better. This is generally a not who one shots who type of scenario game. For the most part its about attrition. The more armor you have taking hits, the less your internals are getting shot, less chance of component damage, limb destruction, and less repair cost/time. Don't skimp on armor.

Strip bullshit from the default loadouts. Like support weapons for example. That extra one or two tons can mean extra heatsinks or extra armor. The only exception to this are dedicated super close range brawler/melee mechs (like firestarter(L), shadowhawk(M) or grasshopper(H)).

Make mechs for specific roles. Or rather weapon ranges. A close range fast mech doesn't need that LRM or that AC2. A dedicated long rang fire support mech like a catapult or a jagermech don't need SRMs or medium lasers necessarily, since they shoul'd be in th back line far from the enemy anyway. Dedicated brawlers (like the ones mentioned above), can normally run hotter safely, since when heating up they can switch to melee and dump heat while still being effective.

Customizing mechs heat performance for specific heat conditions is great in theory but impractical for long time (until you're swimming in cash and mech bay slots essentially). So a good average median for heat efficiency is about 3 bars off maximum. This way you will never overheat in a cool climate, and in a hot climate only a few weapon rotations will keep you fine.

ROTATION will save you enormous amounts damage, destruction, money and repair. Rotation of both mechs from the back to the front line to bait the enemy into shooting them instead of damaged teammates and torso rotation. Torso rotation can be done in place, meaning the mech will stay in the same spot, thus comboing with Bulwark, since it technically didn't move. Since damage is positional presenting first one side to the enemy then another can double your survivability or more. Torso rotation + Bulwark can absorb unholy amount of damage on a well armored mech. For example I went up against a and assault lance in a head to head, then during that got ambushed by a heavy/assault mix from the side, but my Catapult which was in the back as dedicated fire support stalled that entire lance for several turns, by simply activating Bullwark every turn and rotating the torso to spread the damage. It got banged up but allowed me to clean up the first lance and move on to the second, thus winning a 4v8 vs heavier mechs then mine with only minor structural damage.

@seikenfreak: Try to quit and restart the game from time to time, it seems to have a memory leak issue for quite a few people and the game starts to slow down in terms of loads. This helped me a bunch.

Not Strictly true, there are exceptions. Any weapons slotted into arms have a bonus +1 to hit. Heatsinks slotted into legs will allow the mech to dump way more heat when they're standing in water.

For choosing salvage vs. money. It can vary from missions to mission. Some missions naturally offer you way more money and less salvage and visa versa. For example a mission can give 1 million credits and 3/14 salvage max, or 0.5mil and 4/21 salvage max breakdown. Generally the sell value of goods will not make up for the money on high paying missions if you're just selling them. It is however more profitable compared to the buy cost. Even full mech salvage teeters on that edge, a full mech can sell for 300-500 on average lets say in the midgame, that's 3 parts, 3 parts in a 1 mil paying mission can be less then money sometimes. Also consider the mission difficulty and what mech tier you're at. Lets say i'm running an all Heavy lance, going into a 2 tier difficulty mission i would only ever go for 0 or 1 pip of salvage because i just don't need the parts and they would sell for less then mission payment anyway. But same Heavy lance and going into say a 4th difficulty mission tiers, i know that is likely to have heavy/assault mechs so i will likely boost the salvage to max or near max to get as many parts as possible, because that's the next step to upgrading my mechs.

(edit): One of the most useful salvage/shop gear items people would want to look out for are cockpit mods, they cost no tonnage and will prevent 1-3 pilot injuries (depending on quality), whether they are from head hits, torso explosion or plain falling over.

@tennmuerti: Thanks for the tips. I did actually stumble upon the first cockpit mod I've seen right before bed last night and decided it was worth splurging on.

And I just realized Bulwark was a passive skill last night (I thought it was just a better Brace action) so that does seem good to have, especially for the way I've played. The biggest, yet not so obvious, or goes against your usual tactical game conventions, is the movement/evasion system compared to cover. I still find myself torn here which probably means it's a good, unique concept. As for getting Bulwark on everyone, I'll have to keep that in mind for the future as I'm still using the original four crew members and some of them are beyond that. Now that I've heard Drekker being the first to dye is a joke, I'm determined to keep him around. I'll keep it in mind for future warriors though.

As for that eject button question I asked earlier: There is in fact a small red HUD element in the lower left window where it shows your current Mech info, in the top center of that section is a little red arrow thing that ejects the pilot.

The play loop I've been using, similar to what you mentioned, is just doing contracts I feel I can do where I currently am and if a warrior/mech needs service (often 19 days minimum) then I look for a travel contract to another system which tends to also take 19 days to get there.

Performance issues haven't been much of a problem, just what I mentioned about and what @hayt pointed out. It doesn't bother me that much, I was just curious if it was some problem on my end, and I'm still not convinced it isn't. Something in the background perhaps doing intermittent CPU hits.

Current mech bay:

I just got the Griffin together before stopping last night, stuffed a LRM++ on it, so eager to try that. I usually only ever run one light/scout type mech and I'm not sure how I'd even field more than that because they are so fragile, I wouldn't be able to attack anything and survive. In theory they are good for attacking convoys I guess? Still think they'd get rocked by vehicles. So I've recently acquired the Panther and like using it as my spotter/sniper. I run a full lance of medium armor if I expect a tougher fight. I've got a couple other older or smaller mechs in storage for backup.

I've changed my company name a handful of times of course and still can't come up with something I really like.

The "Under Tonnage" warnings are annoying, or specifically the weighting of armor. Both of them have 0.04 tonnage left over and I can't get it to fill out evenly.

Speaking of loadouts, I'm excited to keep going (if I'm ever able to as it just feels like I'm kinda lingering where I'm at, slowly collecting parts) and see what other types of weapons and support parts there are. I'd love to see like a chaff or flare support item (has certain number of uses), radar jammers, smoke grenade (probably 50 gallon barrels haha) launchers, EMP of some sort etc. I'm sure someone here familiar with Battletech here can just tell me, but I expect they'll say "No, those don't really exist" and I'll be disappointed lol

I've watched a few streams and this game looks like a ton of fun. It's depth and learning curve really appeal to me. Has Austin put out any video on this game? Right in his wheelhouse I'd guess.

@pweidman: There is this stream Austin did. Of course they spend a bunch of time in character creation but its interesting hearing people who are more familiar with the universe discuss this sort of stuff.

And they just put up this review read/discussion podcast about it which I'm listening to at this very moment. General discussion starts after 20 mins or so (after a commercial read) if you don't want to hear the overall review. Been a good listen so far.

@seikenfreak: Some if not all of those definitely exist in the Battletech universe and tabletop. Some of those are sometimes implemented in various games throughout the franchises history. But I don't think most of those are in this particular game at least i have not seen any and i'm pretty deep in atm. Some are due simply to the timeline setting (this game is set early on so a lot of stuff is not available/common/manufactured yet) others i can see would just be difficult to make useful in this particular implementation.

The most common one is electronic countermeasures, ECM makes mechs have a smaller radar detection radius vs them, and/or increases missle lock on speeds (lock on missiles again something not yet available at this time the game takes place in). So this for example is understandable why its not in this game (as far as i know), there would be no real use for it and its not there lore wise yet.

Others like smoke ammo for missile weapons exist technically in the tabletop but they're very situational/esoteric type of gear that generally doesnt make the cut into games, at its ammo and hence tonnage people wouldn't want to spare.

This game is deliberately set very early on in the general Battletech setting timeline when action takes place, so a lot of gear/mechs/weapons are not generally available yet. It kind of gives them a good base to start with I assume and introduce people to the franchise and immense room to grow in future games.

It's also a nice change of pace actually for old timers since a lot of BT fans are so used to insanely tricked out mechs and loadouts, this game is a kind of back to the basics kind of deal, back to when you put on more then a single PPC on a mech and suddenly you're cooking your insides. The general firepower overall about doubles over time as more and more better shit gets introduced found and manufactured. It's very seat of the pants trying to make old junkers work type of feeling essentially (for me anyway), very ye olde school, basic and raw, without all the fancy shit.

@tennmuerti: Has the leg heatsink thing actually been tested? I've had heatsinks in my legs and not in my legs and haven't noticed a difference in water.

Yesssss! I just cleared the next (second I guess?) story mission (prison) which, maybe to you pro guys was easy, but I had seen ahead of time what was involved and was worried. I thought the person I watched did fairly well until one of his mechs got taken out right at the end.. I wanted to avoid any casualties.

Took a completely different approach than what he did, something a little more subversive, and it worked! Ahh the double edged game design sword of stressful = rewarding vs easy = boring strikes again.

I'll block it incase people want to find their own solution: Took out the two easy generators right in front, then decided to swing down towards the water and ignore the other generators. Very carefully approached, luring and taking the vehicles and turrets out from afar while trying to conserve ammo. My Griffin ended up taking some shots here which beat up the one side. I then noticed the play area went way down along the side of the prison so I thought I'd see what happens if I approached from way down there, sort of flanking/coming from behind. The enemies triggered before I was even over the wall so it was go time. Immediately put Dekker on sensor duty to lock down the Trebuchet while I chucked LRMs at the thing, it didn't do much but I've learned that any safe damage is better than more damage with risk. I sent my Centurion farther down and hopped the wall which baited and split the Jaeger away from the group. Continuously battering the Treb with LRMs and then got more aggressive on it as it was getting worn down. Kamea busts in at that point and she is directly behind them tearing it up. Highlight for me though was my Centurion vs the Jaeger: I believe I did two precision strike, full volleys right in front trying to core it out, he retaliated, I then figured he didn't have jump jets so I retreated back over the wall.. and he immediately turns around and starts walking away! Left him wide open, jump over again and another barrage into his back. Dude gets torn UP. Now, I love the AI here because it immediately goes into defensive mode and spends two turns literally parking himself in a 90 degree corner to protect his back and right sides which I've ripped wide open. Went in for some point blank shots, Centurion is right on the line of overheating at this point, and I finish the Jaeger off with a rock'em-sock'em robot smash to the gut. Rest of the AI was in full pants shit mode by now and didn't know what to do. Was just standing around getting hit from all sides.

This game rocks.

@mike: Hmm, you know you might be right, i just checked the water tooltip and it says heatsinks do better period, not sure where i saw that, or if it's just the boardgame ruleset / general lore in my mind.

For the duders who are farther along: What's your experience with the contract rating system? Is it reliable at all? I'm trying to understand if the game just scales with what story mission you're on or if it scales with your gear? And the difficulty rating is maybe more about the structure of the mission type or whatever? Just picked one that was still only a two star rating and there must've been two lances, most of them being equal or larger mechs than my same old stuff. I tried but I had zero chance. After a bunch of turns, not even really leaving the spawn point because I was surrounded by huge mountains, all these mechs in front of me, and the map corner behind me, I was only able to take out a Spider and was hurting real bad. I tried to do the Withdraw thing after killing the one but it still said leaving under bad faith? I thought you just had to kill one. So, first mission quit of the game. Loaded up the save before it.

I don't believe I've left the spot where the second story mission was but I'm seeing even more new mechs and generally harder missions but with the same rating.. Which is why I ask if the whole game scales around your story progression. Guess I'll try and fly back a bit and see if there is any difference.

@seikenfreak: I have heard but not experienced that the skull rating is based on your mechwarriors in your roster and gear you have in your bay. I also believe that "bad intel" is a feature, although that could be people making excuses for the game.

@seikenfreak: The skull rating is reliable, but to an extent. On the deployment screen, you can see chevrons that fill in. Those are your own "skull meter", and gives you an idea of where your lance is at versus the mission difficulty.

Additionally, missions of the same skull meter can still sometimes have wildly different reward totals, and the ones on the high end are usually "traps".

Lastly, different missions have quirks that can make them easier/harder. I generally find base capture/base destruction/recovery missions to be the easiest since you can control how many enemies engage you by advancing cautiously. Battle/ambush convoy/assassination usually has you fighting multiple lances at the same time, and get a lot harder as a result.

@seikenfreak: The difficulty of random missions seems to increase based on your merc rating. And that will increase most substantially via story missions by a big margin, but will also increase naturally slowly as you do tougher random missions and get heavier mechs. It also depends on the system you're on/traveling to. You can always go back to starting areas for lower difficulty missions overall. Or go deeper into hostile territory to find harder missions.

The mission difficulty rating itself is interesting in that it has a baseline of what enemy mech tonnage you're gonna go against. 2ish stars light to medium lances, 3ish medium to heavy lances, 4 heavy to assault. Also this rating is affected by extra objectives or map conditions. For example convoy escorts or base assault will raise the difficulty rating of a mission up, but not the tonnage of enemy mechs. While pure "destroy enemy lance" type of objectives while rated lower will actually have above average opposition mech tonnage.

Which is why you can do a 4.5 star mission against nothing but heavy/medium mechs when tasked with destroying an enemy base/installation, but also a 4 star mission vs. a heavy/assaults mix when doing a pure kill the enemy mission.

Probably the hardest mission type overall for me has been the convoy ambush, especially when the enemy starts fielding the nasty side of vehicles with multiple AC20s tri-PPCs and mass lrm launchers etc, as all that nastiness will engage you right alongside the escorting lance, never mind the reinforcements that show up as well.

@tennmuerti: While this is true, there are also exceptions here and there. I was doing a 3 skull base defense mission, and one of the attackers was an Assault with shoddy armor.

@turambar: For sure. Also for some reason I never seem to get any of those, base defense missions I mean, so I'm not sure how they tend to skew the difficulty rating at all.

@tennmuerti: I've only seen one base defense contract, and it was glitched. I had to defend it for 10 turns, and the reinforcements didn't come within sensor range until turn 10. It would have been 1 medium, 1 light, and 1 assault for the first wave, two mediums and two heavies for the reinforcements, this at 3 skulls.

@tennmuerti Hmm okay. I know there is the variance of "bad intel" that Darius explains in the beginning tutorial stuff, but what you and @turambar are describing sounds more along the lines of what I've seen.

I did maybe my first base defense last night and that was serious business. Lance of two or three lights and a medium, I get the engineers back to base and get the turrets working, I've killed most of that first wave by that point but I figured there was going to be more. And more there was. They drop a Trebuchet, Hunchback, a Locust and I think one other small Mech behind me but only two feet away! Along with two more Lights and two vehicles from the opposite side? This deadly pincer setup. Immediately buildings and turrets start dropping like flies. I didn't think I had any chance of winning this but I managed to squeeze by with a few buildings left. Brutal stuff. So brutal in fact that my framerate took a massive hit as well and was running single digits when looking at the burning, smoking base and all the mechs around it. First time I've had framerate issues.

Another note for anyone with technical difficulties: I updated my Nvidia drivers to the latest, which mentions support for Battletech, and I think the game runs better? Not sure if it's placebo effect. It still has the load screen hitching but during battles it seemed to be smoother? Maybe I'm crazy.

Mentioning the Trebuchet, I had my first bug/problem last night I think. Finally got my own Treb (missile salvos turn me on) and the first contract I deploy, the map spawned the Treb on top of a small rock. Without any jump jets, I was unable to move from this wide open placement. I thought it was very fitting of the mech name lol Emergent gameplay if I've ever seen it. Mission went pretty well and I super dig the "Trench Bucket".

After listening to the Austin & Rob Battletech discussion, I'd love to see gameplay of people using non-conventional or specialized Lances. A bunch of light mechs for hit and run tactics specifically. Or something focused on close range and melee engagements. I favor the relative safety of range for sure but I know I need to be more flexible than this.

@turambar: I've done a few of the Base Defense missions, and only had one go south (largely because I positioned a Shadowhawk in the PERFECT place for a LRM heavy vehicle to launch 40 missiles at it...with no evasion. My bad.)
You do generally need a good mix of maneuverability to stay ahead on the scouting and speed tank -- and heavy weapons and range is less of a factor as they come to you, granted you can concentrate fire well enough to keep the in-range enemy munitions low.

@seikenfreak: Austin and Rob are on one hand right in their hopes and wrong at the same time. It's a bit of a complex balancing discussion. Both for the game itself and Battletech in general as a game setting.

For starters light mechs eventually get replaced and do not hold up in pretty much every battletech game, if you can bring a lance of assaults to bear they are always just gonna outgun and out tank everything, thats the reality of things. This is true for this game as well. Eventually you just progress far enough to run bigger stuff with bigger guns. same goes for Mechcomander and Mechwarrior games.

The ways it's balanced is because with the tabletop players have to use a point system or rather a C-bill value system to limit what gear and what kind of tonnage they can bring. Basically the same way skirmish in this game works. Then the system becomes one of checks and balances, because you can't just bring the biggest stuff and have to balance your mech lance on a budget. However single player campaigns don't usually have any such restriction as you just keep growing upwards. Mechcommander 1&2 had a system where they at least limited your tonnage on a per mission basis as all missions were hand designed and it kind of worked like a decent halfway solution

So their dream of specialized lances kind of doesn't exist here as you have to face bigger and tougher missions and opponents, you'll just be outgunned eventually.

But, but, they are also right in their hopes in that you can definitely specialize specific mechs for certain interesting roles and do interesting stuff for the tonnage you're at. You just still need a regular core of guns and bodies too and not go full crazy.

Building mechs around melee or secondary weapons is generally a bad idea in this game. Melee is not to be confused for something a mech should be doing on the regular but rather as a tool in your toolkit. On paper any good weapon configuration should and will do much more dps. It's there to remove Guarded states from entrenched mechs because it ignores them and negates them for others. It's there so that your long range specialists have something to fall back to if they're forced into a close quarters fight. Or to dump heat because melee doesn't generate any, while still doing decent damage and stability. To crush vehicles due to double damage. And finally to use as a last ditch attack when out of ammo or even just guns.

There are however outliers to be found. For example the Firestarter is a great early-midgame tool to bring to hot biome deployments with 6 flamers and just run around shutting down enemy mechs, it's doable and viable and more importantly fun. Or running it with 6 small lasers is also great as they are almost on par with mediums in damage and generate way less heat and a light mech is always fast enough to be close enough to use them; that damage becomes very scary early on.

A Shadowhawk 2D is an excellent brawler, even tho it's stock its a jack of all trades. Because it turns out it has great speed for a 55 tonner, the strongest melee attack of all mediums, and enough missile and energy slots to mount an arsenal of SRM's and medium lasers and also 2 hardoints for secondary small lasers, and it all synergises because you can run it hotter then normal sacrificing heat for firepower and armor (and remove jump jets too), because when it starts heating up it's still a perfectly great asset, since it should already be up close and personal due to its arsenal, it can dump heat by doing melee attacks that do good damage and are helped by two small lasers too. It was a mainstay of my front line for a good chunk of the game. Always useful always in the thick of it. Even when my backline fire support mechs moved on to heavies, that shadowhawk was the last medium medium to get replaced.

In the heavy category there is Grasshopper. Ooooo nasty stuff. It's kind of like the combination of the two above. It has the 6 support slots of a Firestarter. Good speed for a heavy, jump jets with low self damage, and the strongest melee attack in the heavy category, stronger then some assaults even. With 6 energy slots you run this baby with medium lasers, run it hot and heavy and an srm4 in the head. Run up, unload, heat up, melee, repeat. The 6 support weapon hardpoints can be used at users discretion, 6 flamers for hot deployment fun, 6 small lasers for pure melee damage, or 6 machine guns for ammo explosions in the enemy insides. If you get lucky and find a good ++ melee damage mod it's even nastier (sadly i found one of those for myself way too late).

Assaults don't really do that. A. they are too slow for melee and support weapon shenanigans period. B. they bring a lot of guns anyway making their firepower far outstrip their punch potential. Making the situation where you rather punch then shoot almost nonexistent. Almost. There is one mech where i was able to use support weapons for good effect, just as part of it's close range firepower load out with jump jets to get it moving at least a a somewhat bearable distance and still able to shoot, 3 machine guns for the crits basically. But even then you eventually realize the opportunity cost on that kind of stuff is too high, the amount of turns support weapons go unused on an assault mech due to insanely short range vs. actually shooting then is not worth it, more armor and more heatsinks will just make you perform baseline better at all times. Which is generally true for most other mechs in lower weight categories as well actually (short of the specialised outliers) it's just that the math is more pronounced and visible with assaults.

So there you have it, it's not all dreamland of fun speedy specialized light lances versus massive Goliaths since you only have 4 slots and infinite potential tonnage drop and enemies always outnumber you and you can only dodge shots so much. But there is room for some fun and creativity and specializations from time to time, and definitely more so in skirmish where tonnages and overall cost of the lance deployment is limited.

@tennmuerti: Yea I figured they were being a little optimistic, but I guess even seeing people use anything other than what I use would be interesting. As I've mentioned, I'm playing it relatively cautious and safe.

I had a weird sort of epiphany moment realizing that a Mechs tonnage, even if it is only 5 tons more, that is a lot more armor potential. Specifcally, I was using the Trebuchet and I was going to substitute it over the Griffin when I noticed the Griffin was heavier yet less armor or the same? It sounds super obvious and dumb; what I'm saying is clearly how this all works, but seeing the two of them be pretty much similar potential loadouts, I replicated the same setup as my Treb and was able to put a bunch more armor on it. I called it the "Backfire" because.. you know, it fires from the back row.. But really, it also has hardly any rear armor so that could backfire on you, and pretty much every possible cool Mech name has already been used in Battletech according to Sarna. Plus it sounds cool.

Besides that random tangent, I was going to say my Lance has changed to my modified Treb, "Tirador" and the "Backfire", both with double LRM15s and three stacks of ammo means I can apply it liberally. "Backfire" being my personal rig, it's got some special sauce with the two LRM15 being ++ variations adding stability damage and crit chance. Both of the Mechs have some medium lasers and other bits which make them more flexible. I hit medium Mechs and those single heavies like a freight train now and knock them over hard. Shadow Hawk and Centurion provide more missiles and front line support. All of this to keep me mostly safe and at a distance.

So I would like to see people use at least a single light fast Mech in the campaign at some point. I've heard about the Firestarters and slaughtered a few myself, almost completing one. I'd be interested in seeing anything close range because I don't have any machine guns or small lasers etc. I only get into fist fights when I have to with the Centurion usually. Mech with a bunch of machine guns and AC is something I want to try and make as that should look cool. I guess any sort of cool Lance combination of units that isn't the artillery method.

Other notes: I am finally sure that the different weapons you equip seem to actually be reflected on the Mech model itself, which is awesome. Or at least it does it with missile pods lol I also bought the Digital Deluxe thing off Steam which comes with the OST, but mostly because I'm enjoying this game maybe more than MH: World or God of War (both very good) and it is 100% worth more than the $25 I paid on the Kickstarter and more than the $40 they are charging for it. I also ordered this Battletech Technical Readout book (it was mentioned on a Polygon article) the other day for fun additional reading, cool pictures maybe, and ideas for Mech stuff. More financial support for the universe as well I suppose.

• Does shooting from high ground give a better chance at headshots?
• Someone mentioned stomping on vehicles doing double damage which answers that question. Could a couple quick Light mechs be used for clearing out vehicles in theory?
• What does "-2 Indirect Fire Penalty" mean exactly? Not sure what -2 is a measure of. Part of the Tactics tree.
• Is an "Ammo Explosion" different than umm.. the usual ammo explosion stuff you get? I can't remember what it says exactly. "LRM Ammo Explosion" or something. But on a few occassions, I've absolutely wrecked a dude and all the damage info pops up and hes still standing there.. then a slightly delayed "Ammo Explosion" and he's dead. Is this just a generalized, major ammo explosion roll?

Except you can't unless you are in the very beginning of the game. The light mechs are completely worthless when you are facing a mix of 8+ big mechs all at the same time. You just have to bring as much firepower as you possibly can and focus fire down the enemy mechs quickly.

@mike: Yea I understand that but I'm not talking about the mid to late game stuff I guess. I've probably been playing 20-30 hours at this point and I'm still just using mediums, fighting a range of light, medium and heavy. I just tried another ambush convoy mission and that didn't go well. Even at a full sprint in my mediums, I was barely able to reach the convoy before it got to the escape spot. One of them was sitting right next to it. Whole mission was a shitshow. 2 star difficulty my ass. I cleared the convoy and escort in the end but my mechs were in pieces, Shadow Hawk crawling around looking for his arm.. Glitch was an inch away from death so I had to park her in a corner and pray. After all that I got I think 200k ish and about 5 pieces of salvage. Save scummed that bs. Anyway, just me venting about the random scaling again. I need to learn my lesson and completely avoid base defense and convoy missions.

@seikenfreak: Each 1 point of "to hit" is a 5% hit chance wither positive or negative. So for example if you see a +1 accuracy on an upgraded weapon that's +5% chance to hit. Mounting weapons on arms gives a a natural bonus of 1 to hit. Auto cannons suffer a 1 to hit penalty each time they are fired without getting rest (negated by guts). Each evasion pip gives 2 to hit penalty to the enemy or 10%. So basically every modifier adds or subtracts on this basis.

• yes high ground gives you a 1 point to hit bonus
• in theory yes, agaisnt starter vehicles especially, but later you still just move on to bigger mechs that can still stomp and tougher vehicle armor
• -2 indirect to fire penalty is a counter to the normal penalty to hit you get when indirect firing misses (without line of sight and over obstructions), normally firing missiles like that carries a big penalty to your hit % (whish is why you usually see so many missiles miss when you're getting fired on from some enemy you cant see), with this bonus its largely negated, making a high level tactics and gunnery pilot in an LRM boat able to land 90-95% of their payload, which is kind of banannas in stability damage
• if ammo is crit it basically trashes the section of the body its in, doing massive damage that is frequently enough to destroy that body part, so if you say crit an ammo bin that is in the center torso there is a very high chance you will just take out the CT outright destroying the mech; also damage in battletech transfers inward, so say you destroyed an arm, any further damage in that salvo will transfer to the side torso and eventually to the CT if the side is destroyed, this can cause a lucky/unlucky cascade on occasion, of ammo explosions damaging nearby sections with spillover damage and triggering more ammo explosions. This is why when customising your mechs, you never store ammo in the center torso and preferably not even in the side torsos; the best place for ammo bins generally is in the legs (as far as the delay goes probably just be the game being dramatic for effect)

(also a mechs tonnage class carries an inherent to hit bonus or penalty with light mechs being naturally harder to hit, while assaults much easier) All of this -+ to hit stuff can be seen listed if you mouse over any particular weapon when you're aiming at an enemy about to shoot. Just keep in mind that it's a bit arcane in borrowing from the tabletop rule set. Where what you will see listed - to hit is a positive for you while + to hit are penalties. It's a to hit difficulty added to the diceroll, so a + to hit would be a to hit difficulty increase essentially.

I love the Mechwarrior universe, but i don't like hard games :(, hopefully there's an easier mode coming.

Really want this game but reading through all these replies makes me think i'm better off waiting a big longer to actually get it.

I grabbed this on Friday after watching Austin and Rob play some of it for Waypoint and ended up losing most of my weekend to it. I don't think I've been this enamoured with a strategy game since Stellaris, and that's really saying something.

I was curious about how HBS intend to support the game going forward and came across this AMA on Reddit from one of the developers. Some highlights (taken from here) if anyone's interested:

• New content will take the form of DLC and FreeLC.

• New content will include things like different encounter types (think battle, capture base, escort etc), some of these will be designed to increase the use of light and medium mechs late-game.

• Other additions may include 'broader systemic gameplay, recurring enemies with grudges, contracts that aren't what they seem, and "unexpected events" in battles'

• Looking to add to the post-game. Possibly harder missions, a map 'Domination' mode, enemy mechs with modded weapons and custom loadouts.

• A Long War-esque (an X-com mod) options menu to change variables in the game (i,e ironman mode) to control difficulty is being considered. Other variables mentioned include 'CT destruction permanently destroys a mech, you need 5 pieces of salvage to reconstruct a mech, rather than 3, parts that get blown off a mech may lose slots or max armor capacity, etc.'

• More random ship events which make use of mechwarrior tags, more Argo content and other additions to out-of-combat gameplay to come.

• Technical performance issues are the top of their list of priorities and being worked on right now. FPS increase, ultrawidescreen compatibility issues etc. Press release coming soon.

• They are working on cleaning up speed of animations and general dead time to speed up the game.

• Linux support coming within a few months.

• Reinforcements appearing at the start of missions confirmed not a bug, but it's unexpected due to poor communication. Likely changes to the difficulty rating of missions though to make them more accurate.

• Weapons are being rebalanced. In particular lostech weapons will get a boost.

• Lostech weapons will be made available outside of the story campaign.

• Urbanmechs are being made more common.

• Juggernaut skill (guts tree) is being looked at/redesigned.

• New mechs, including possible clan DLC may be coming but he is under NDA. 'We have plans' is all he could say. If there is a clan DLC the Stone Rhino will be included. Most of the new content needs to be discussed first at the roadmap meeting.

• Ability to sort mechs in the mechbay is being considered.

• No Land Air Mechs coming.

• High/low spirits bug- they are looking for the cause so they can fix it.

• AOE weapons may or may not come. Friendly fire unlikely to be implemented as it wasn't fun in testing.

• No plans to have players control more than one lance at a time. Additional lances may have 'off screen' effects.

Reinforcements appearing at the start of missions confirmed not a bug, but it's unexpected due to poor communication. Likely changes to the difficulty rating of missions though to make them more accurate.

Nope, don't believe this for a second. Yeah, I could believe that they have an intention for some missions to have 'bad intel' but that's not what is happening. Seems like there is both a bug with reinforcement missions and a separate dialogue issue with bad intel missions.

Awesome. I'm down for future content/expansions. Thanks for finding and posting that.

I already mentioned more items in your proverbial toolkit would be great. As I play I keep thinking of other neat offensive and defensive support item ideas and try to imagine how they'd make them look in the game. As I've slowly been absorbing and learning about the BattleTech universe and story, it sounds like the Clan stuff is the next tier in technology, but I can see how it just becomes a power creep thing and that wouldn't be fun. I'd rather just specific commanders or units function almost as a boss would have some of the better tech and you could loot it from them.

More mission variety would be great even though I haven't tired of it yet. Everything has felt unique and dynamic, even watching other people play the same contract, the direction you choose to move over the terrain right from the start changes how battles are fought. I think some convoy ambushes should involve fast moving vehicles which maybe require you to use Light and Medium mechs. Another type of convoy contract I'd add is one where it's stated they are transporting special tech. Say there are 4 convoy vehicles, each one you are able to kill before it reaches the goal gives you an additional piece of the special salvage. Maybe you do a smash and grab variation of this against a military base. You have to run in, collect plans or gear or whatever the narrative is, from certain structures. Meanwhile you have a limited time or increasing numbers of reinforcements are showing up, idea being to grab whatever you can, as fast as you can, and get out alive. Again, the number of buildings you reach determines your reward.

Not sure what I'd change or improve about the whole space mercenary company portion of the game. Maybe some kind of end game phase that is a little more open financially? I don't think I'm anywhere near the end so maybe it does become that, but I could see the narrative being.. Yay you won or whatever, now we are forever in your debt and you have our backing or something.. Maybe you function as their military force so you have this massive financial support, removing or drastically cutting down your monthly costs so you can just explore, toy with mech setups, and collect more loot. I also wouldn't mind if there was a whole base construction element similar to Ni No Kuni 2's Kingdom except make it not suck and not just a clicker. I guess it'd be similar to the space base of XCOM in terms of building research facilities, mechwarrior training school, manufacturing, salvage operations etc. Maybe there are missions to defend it. That is probably how I'd 1up this whole Argo base element. It'd be mid to late game content.

Can you make your own company logo and use it in the game? A file directory somewhere? That'd be cool.

More of everything. Done. I should be a game designer.

Have the devs said anything about the game being a success yet? Is it selling well? I hope so. Caught some article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun talking about his experience with the game and it was a bit painful to read. If you're not into this type of game, then you shouldn't play it. Don't ask the devs to change the whole thing.

@cikame said:

The early game is honestly the hardest. Once you have a good stock of medium or heavy mechs and have upgraded your pilots a bit, the difficulty isn't nearly as high.

Awesome, can't wait for the Urbie-love! :D

So... I just had a jaw dropping moment in a 1.5 difficulty mission. Just a simple battle mission. No problem. Reinforcement? No problem. Then I checked the stats on the two vehicle reinforcements. One had 3 LRM 20 and the other had 10 SRM 6. I literally had to watch it shoot missiles at my Centurion for 10 sec straight. I swear this game just throw in clown cars of mass destruction if you're doing too well in battle.

@herrheimlich: I had a Mechwarrior die to what I thought was a striker. Turns out it was an SRM carrier with roughly a billion SRMs. Lesson learned!

Can anyone explain the percentages of Called Shot? I assume it's the chance of my hits landing in Called area. Ie. Let's say I have 85% chance to hit but do a called shot on the leg with 16%. My shot is 85% chance to hit. Then IF it hits it has a 16% chance of hitting the leg?

@seikenfreak:They've mentioned in the AMA that they are very happy with it's sales, or something to that effect. Hence the future plans. You can make your own logo, theres a folder for it in the game files somewhere, but it's a little more esoteric format then just a jpeg i believe.

@hayt:Yep.