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I had a lot of trouble actually following this mission, but at least part of that is external stuff. But I did find it harder to evaluate things like who should be mvp with alpha strike. Incidentally I have no idea who to vote for.
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Jun 5, 2017 21:46
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RA Rx posted:I guess for me the granularity of weapons, hit locations, hp and crits in Battletech is just essential, even though I'd like the decisiveness of Alpha Strike occasionally, but I'm glad there's a number of people who feel differently. This would be a worthy cause, but I don't know of any software that would tackle PTN's needs.
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Jun 6, 2017 00:58
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Night10194 posted:This seems like the real rub, yes. Agree entirely. If they want the core game to be good again they need to be willing to change things up.
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Jun 6, 2017 01:08
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If you want to give PTN money, use his patreon.
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Jun 6, 2017 01:19
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Hi PTN, Replacement Wolfhound/Spider chiming in. Alpha Strike seems ideal for mass combat, and is definitely an improvement on Battleforce with individual players. I wouldn't mind seeing an RCT v Galaxy Alpha combat, just to see the chaos that ensues. Player MVP is to the Hunchback, and NPC is to that bastard Crusader.
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Jun 6, 2017 05:55
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Higher than a couple Battalions each side still takes a metric assload of time and is progressively less worth it. Another local player and I threw reinforced Regiments + Air Wing at each other and got through three turns in seven hours. Granted, by then, the destroyed units pool was something on the order of two battalions each and we had a clear (eventual) winner in sight, but it was still a massive slog.
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Jun 6, 2017 06:19
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Getting much beyond company size seems to really take you out of the scale battletech was designed to simulate. They'd probably be more suited to being played out through a more abstracted level of wargame. The kinds with chits and sliders and worrying about encirclement and poo poo.
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Jun 6, 2017 08:46
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Battalions are still fine, even a couple if one of them is of infantry. Up to 1500 PV is doable from setup to completion in an afternoon. Past that just use Battleforce or something.
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Jun 6, 2017 14:20
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Alpha strike is a much better game with better mechanics. But battletech's just funner to me.
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Jun 6, 2017 19:30
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chutche2 posted:Alpha strike is a much better game with better mechanics. But battletech's just funner to me. Yeah, I agree. I think it ultimately has to do with the narrative distance. With Battletech, you're in the Command Couch. You know what your instruments are reading, you know the state of your armor, you know if you need to eject ammo. AlphaStrike abstracts some of these details, so you're farther removed from your Giant Stompy Robot; less 'mech vs. 'mech and more one set of numbers against another set of numbers. Incidentally, that's pretty much all games are, one set of numbers against another set of numbers. The 'secret sauce' is how well you are able to hide it from the players.
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Jun 6, 2017 20:52
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CourValant posted:Yeah, I agree. I think it ultimately has to do with the narrative distance. I like this analogy. It would be neat to attempt to run with it in a gameplay session--the two dueling Archers are playing by Battletech rules, and the regiments around them are abstracted away with Alpha Strike. I know that there would be problems with that implementation, but...
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Jun 7, 2017 01:10
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My group had a potential way to do that in place, where if two Assault 'Mechs ended up within ~24" of each other the fight would "zoom in" on them and play it BattleTech scale, 3 turns per Alpha Strike turn. Distance was the thing that was screwing us up, but I think the best way to do it would probably to have duplicate miniatures or proxies, and have them fight on a 1x2 or 2x2 mapsheet that corresponds to that 24" square or so, and move them basically relatively the same distance as they end up actually moving. It's still going to be really fugly and weird.
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Jun 7, 2017 01:20
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CourValant posted:Yeah, I agree. I think it ultimately has to do with the narrative distance. It's the difference between BattleTech and MechCommander, I think.
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Jun 7, 2017 05:20
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Having been playing the Battletech Beta for the last few days, I'm not sure which of the two systems I'd compare it to. But then I was never too big on the BT rules anyway. Great job as always everyone.
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Jun 7, 2017 17:55
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It's pretty great. I've been posting a bucket of gifs in the actual thread (currently titled MechsCOM: Enemy Unsteady, in honor of a particularly bad derail) but I could crosspost for the lazy. I think it can pretty comfortably straddle the line of "this is you personally lining up the shot and ruining that fuckin' Trebuchet's entire day" and "this is you commanding your squad of stompy robots" ...because it almost gets there now, it just needs some polish to sell it. Mechanically, this thread has prepared me for it kind of incredibly well? It's not exactly the same, of course, but PTN's approach of "TT to play-by-internet where I discard bullshit" has a lot of parallels to HBS' approach of "TT to videogame where we discard the bullshit" Anyway about Alpha Strike vs BT rules, one thing I noticed is that voting MVP is harder. Previously it was pretty easy - someone pulls off some obscene move (or fails horribly) due to dice, and it's memorable and people vote for it. In this, the different level of abstraction makes it harder to judge. like walking up and crit headshotting a mech on turn 1 gets attention, Alpha Strike-style killing it on turn 1 is ... less spectacular, even though it's basically the same thing. Psion fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jun 7, 2017 |
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Jun 7, 2017 18:50
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DFAs and Charges are significantly easier to pull off in Alpha Strike; usually in home games the Spider that plows into an Atlas hard enough to disintegrate both of them in a shower of metal confetti (note: slight exaggeration, Spiders doing that only do 4 damage against the rear arc, but the guaranteed crit did that once) gets the MVP vote.
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Jun 7, 2017 19:07
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I need to change the thread title to "Let's All Play X-Com and rewrite Inner Sphere History" by the way. Expect that change in a few days.
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Jun 7, 2017 23:58
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PoptartsNinja posted:I need to change the thread title to "Let's All Play X-Com and rewrite Inner Sphere History" by the way. Expect that change in a few days. yesssssss pleaze don't kill uncle Amaris...
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Jun 8, 2017 00:15
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RA Rx posted:yesssssss This but do actually kill him. And every Amaris.
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Jun 8, 2017 02:54
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evilmiera posted:This but do actually kill him. And every Amaris. I hope Uncle Stevie has jump torpedoes on a dead man's switch targeting all the haters who are wishing death on him. 
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Jun 8, 2017 02:56
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Zaodai posted:I hope Uncle Stevie has jump torpedoes on a dead man's switch targeting all the haters who are wishing death on him. That's no Amaris... That's a space station! 
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Jun 8, 2017 06:11
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PoptartsNinja posted:I need to change the thread title to "Let's All Play X-Com and rewrite Inner Sphere History" by the way. Expect that change in a few days. I've been rocking this crossover even since I named a guy Scott "Archon" Steiner and let him kill aliens with a laser sword GIMME A FUCKIN MIC
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Jun 8, 2017 06:47
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evilmiera posted:This but do actually kill him. And every Amaris. If the Demon Hawks are all murdered by Clan headhunters I would punch through my laptop screen. Then I'd buy another one and keep reading.
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Jun 8, 2017 08:28
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Scintilla posted:If the Demon Hawks are all murdered by Clan headhunters I would punch through my laptop screen. Then I'd buy another one and keep reading. evilmiera fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Jun 9, 2017 |
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Jun 8, 2017 21:51
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evilmiera posted:See? Now you have to do it PTN, it is the perfect plot twist. We need a new Me tares massacre event to reinvigorate the war. Autocorrect problems? Never saw BattleTech as X-Com before, but I guess the new game's beta contributed to that and now I can't get it out of my head...
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Jun 8, 2017 23:56
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Are you sure it wasn't the ten pages of bad-faith argument that HBS BattleTech was an X-Com ripoff because you weren't able to fight 1v4 and win? 'Cause I have a word to describe any `Mech fighting without support. And that word is "dead."
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Jun 9, 2017 00:27
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PoptartsNinja posted:Are you sure it wasn't the ten pages of bad-faith argument that HBS BattleTech was an X-Com ripoff because you weren't able to fight 1v4 and win? I haven't been to the thread in Games, so the only exposure I've had to the BT/X-Com comparisons is in this thread. If that's the case over there, then Yikes.
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Jun 9, 2017 00:52
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PoptartsNinja posted:Are you sure it wasn't the ten pages of bad-faith argument that HBS BattleTech was an X-Com ripoff because you weren't able to fight 1v4 and win? "But I could do it in MechWarrior 3, all you had to do was shoot all your guns into the enemy leg!"
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Jun 9, 2017 01:06
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GhostStalker posted:I haven't been to the thread in Games, so the only exposure I've had to the BT/X-Com comparisons is in this thread. If that's the case over there, then Yikes. Yeah, you were fortunate to miss the derail. One guy just went on a long rambling argument about how the new Battletech game is literally a straight copy of the combat out of XCOM. Such gems include "Why do you control 4 mechs? Because XCOM starts you with four guys." and the fact that the movement system is ripped straight from XCOM wholesale. Pilots having skills? He acknowledges that pilot skills exist in the Battletech source book, but that they're only being used because there are character classes in XCOM. Also simultaneously argues that the game is lovely XCOM, but that the game doesn't classify mechs into "hard" classification roles like XCOM, so it's awful for not being ENOUGH like XCOM. It would have been hilarious, if not for it being so overwhelmingly sad.
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Jun 9, 2017 01:16
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It was the best troll I've seen in a while, so it was pretty hilarious.
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Jun 9, 2017 01:22
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I was dumb enough to let that contradiction go unnoticed in the morass of bullshit, I'm glad I didn't feed the troll that time.
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Jun 9, 2017 01:35
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Player MVP: The little Scarabus that could. OpFor MVP: The bigass Crusader that did. PoptartsNinja posted:It was the best troll I've seen in a while, so it was pretty hilarious. Ironically, I wasn't reading that thread because I was playing xcom2. Imagine my surprise that the backer beta was out!
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Jun 9, 2017 01:52
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GhostStalker posted:Autocorrect problems? Yeah, my phone sometimes decides to make typing and showing what I wrote at the same time be nearly impossible. I blame Comstar, which incidentally my phone corrected to Comcast.
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Jun 9, 2017 04:41
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PoptartsNinja posted:It was the best troll I've seen in a while, so it was pretty hilarious. Good trolling is like performance art. Spending literal hours of your life roleplaying a moron by chaining together 500 word posts isn't really the same thing.
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Jun 9, 2017 05:56
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evilmiera posted:Yeah, my phone sometimes decides to make typing and showing what I wrote at the same time be nearly impossible. I blame Comstar, which incidentally my phone corrected to Comcast. If you don't think the only telecom provider that would be available to us in a post-technological future where an evil cult controls all communications and murders everyone who tries to better humanity would be Comcast, then I don't know what to tell you. Blake be praised, it's Comcastic!
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Jun 9, 2017 21:41
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Sup I'm getting caught up with the thread. So last mission, what was the official deal with that cracked out Black Marauder.
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Jun 11, 2017 07:47
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Viva Miriya posted:Sup I'm getting caught up with the thread. Probably some ancient ComStar / Rim Worlds experimental prototype. We know it had no gyro, which means it's got an Interface Cockpit, which is a fancy piece of kit that literally connects a pilot to the mech via brain implants which also have the nasty side effect of driving said pilot insane after a few missions. Basically it's what happens when science goes too far.
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Jun 11, 2017 13:53
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Scintilla posted:Probably some ancient ComStar / Rim Worlds experimental prototype. We know it had no gyro, which means it's got an Interface Cockpit, which is a fancy piece of kit that literally connects a pilot to the mech via brain implants which also have the nasty side effect of driving said pilot insane after a few missions. I think you mean 'not far enough', since the side effect wasn't worked out.
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Jun 11, 2017 15:43
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I mean, if the mech could actually eat people and had basically magic powers, I wouldn't rule out it actually having some kind of weird magic built in. Since it's not the Canon universe, PTN can write in whatever he wants, and there being some weird, unexplained stuff that is Event Horizon-esque wouldn't get the grogs all up in arms like it would if it were straight official canon. I hope we never find out what the deal is with the black marauder, because it was nicer as a one shot enemy and I sure don't want to run into more of them.
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Jun 11, 2017 19:03
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The idea was that it's piloted by an AI, and that its reactor needed water to keep running because the failsafe to keep the insane AI from running amok was fuel starvation (fusion reactors in battletech universe run on water). So it "ate" a person to extract its water. This is of course ridiculous and impossible, but that's par for the course with Battletech.
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Jun 11, 2017 20:02
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