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Rygar201 posted:If you own a jump ship why would you ever waste time doing anything other than hailing drop ships around for fat stacks Each jump in a Jumpship pays about 100k in c-bills if you're just hauling the dropships, a Jumpship averages about 3 jumps a month.
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Mar 7, 2018 14:02
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Oh and for those new to it there are some useful Megamek console commands and a few tidbits i've picked up. To replace a bot with a different AI (e.g. you reached victory conditions and its time to withdraw) /who (gives you the list of players including bots). /kick (The bot player number, most likely 1, it'll be the number right after 'Server') 'File' (top left corner) -> Game - > Replace player -> Set bot to 'ESCAPE' /victory or /defeat ends the megamek game and sends you back to MekHq. Enemy forces classes are in a big part determined by the total weight of the lance you have assigned to a mission not the types of Mechs you have in it. Light is 0-130, Medium is 131-200, Heavy 201-280 and Assault 281-390. This I think determines the general weight class of the enemy you will face. It does seem that the enemy BV gets topped up with more and more units to match yours pretty often if you have good pilots boosting your unit BV. Look at the *.l4j files for Megamek and MekHQ. Open them in text editor. How much memory is allocated to them? By default its -Xmx512m and increasing this can greatly improve performance.
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Mar 7, 2018 14:32
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Saros posted:About MekHQ campaigns. What, exactly are you supposed to do with Dropships and Jumpships. After scrimping and saving 130m C-Bills, spending ages searching for a ship and taking a loan for another 20m C-Bills to actually be able to buy it I am now the proud owner of a Gazelle. Well, for starters you shouldn't buy a Gazelle. It's a bad dropship for nearly any situation. In terms of raw mechanics, there really isn't a reason to buy a dropship (let alone a jumpship). The benefit is that you get small boosts to your unit's ratings if you've got transport. There's also a contract benefit - each contract has a section for Transport. If you don't have your own, that goes to paying for dropship/jumpship costs for getting you to where you need to go. Have your own, and you'll get the same amount but you get to keep it. (This will almost never actually be a break even for the costs of running the ships, let alone their initial costs.) There's a tab that you can look at in one of the administrative sections that will tell you your transport capacity versus what you need - likely your costs didn't change because the Gazelle can't carry poo poo because it's tiny. The benefits of the ships are more narrative in nature.
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Mar 7, 2018 17:45
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The only Mechwarrior game I played where we all rolled off a generated table for characters- I ended up with the Dropship captain who owned his own Union. Our fledgling merc group spent nearly every C-bill we made keeping it operational. I eventually bet it on a longshot match on Solaris and won, allowing the character to retire. Owning a dropship was no joke.
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Mar 7, 2018 20:56
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I've got that latest Battletech RPG "A Time of War" and have been wanting to try it out for some time. I figure some online groups would probably start forming when the new PC game comes out.
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Mar 7, 2018 22:40
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Rabidredneck posted:I've got that latest Battletech RPG "A Time of War" and have been wanting to try it out for some time. I figure some online groups would probably start forming when the new PC game comes out. I've honestly been wanting to play in one myself but when I tried to start one, the mechanics (and the really terrible attempt to put BT's tabletop in via their own special mechanics AND how it seems personal combat is stupidly lethal) kinda killed it for me. I'd be interested in trying at some point though! In other news, this LP kinda inspired me to start my own Against The Bot Campaign via MekHQ. It's going decently so far, doing a Planetary Assault against a Drac world.... man does AtB just kinda flood you with vehicles and other things. While that would take a lot of work, sometimes I wish it calculated the total force you're facing on the planet first and THEN pull from that for opponents, occasionally rolling in reinforcements as additional dropships come in or something. Feels weird when you just absolutely demolish like, two companies of mechs/vehicles and they still keep coming (this is from a start year of 3000).
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Mar 7, 2018 23:27
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All of the BattleTech RPGs are absurdly lethal. I love the universe but I'd say it'd almost be better to play the out-of-'Mech stuff with Dread.
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Mar 7, 2018 23:33
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That actually sounds kind of awesome.
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Mar 8, 2018 00:28
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A Time of War is incredibly crunchy to, unfortunately, not a lot of benefit. It's not like Fragged Empire where you've got a crunch-heavy game that's also streamlined yet extremely mechanically rigorous to the point where you can basically run XCOM with it (with mechanics for managing a base, researching, and developing new weapons and armor built in to the system). No, AToW is kind of clunky, unintuitive, and in a weird way a little barebones? There's not much there besides an overly complex chargen system, a lot of equipment stats, a skill resolution framework, and the pilot SPAs. Speaking of which, the one real contribution AToW brings are the pilot special abilities, which people really like to use in BT campaigns. PoptartsNinja posted:All of the BattleTech RPGs are absurdly lethal. Anticheese posted:That actually sounds kind of awesome. Runa fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 00:36
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The HBS guys actually made their own Homebrew RPG system to run some Merc campaigns as both part of the HyperRPG twitch channel, and I think research for this game. I think they are getting it published.
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Mar 8, 2018 00:49
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Phrosphor posted:The HBS guys actually made their own Homebrew RPG system to run some Merc campaigns as both part of the HyperRPG twitch channel, and I think research for this game. I think they are getting it published. I think it was more of a marketing decision but I would be interested because ATOW is really rough. I'm actually running another campaign using mechwarrior 2.
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Mar 8, 2018 01:18
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Great thread, loving it so far! All this talk of MekHQ has got me dipping my toes into that for the first time, I've thrown together a random assortment of 3 x Medium, 1x Light Mechs and a few random Mechwarriors to pilot them assigned them, made them into a Lance and all that (working off this guide) but I'm a bit stuck with the other support personel needed. Do you just grab one of each to begin with?
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Mar 8, 2018 02:23
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I tried it. My java screen kept having issues but I might try it again later.
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Mar 8, 2018 02:27
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Following the thread, but as a newbie to the lore/game, I'm having a bit of troubling following just how bad (good?) things are going for the merc company. How are we actually placed at coming out ahead in terms of $$$ once this mission/contract is finished?
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Mar 8, 2018 05:38
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PotatoManJack posted:Following the thread, but as a newbie to the lore/game, I'm having a bit of troubling following just how bad (good?) things are going for the merc company. How are we actually placed at coming out ahead in terms of $$$ once this mission/contract is finished? We're deep in $$$ debt to one of the most untrustworthy and unscrupulous groups in the Inner Sphere, who are also our employers and probably have not been telling us the truth about who we're fighting or why we're here. It's bad, and the only questions are just how bad and what the hell does ComStar actually want with us.
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Mar 8, 2018 05:42
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Xarbala posted:A Time of War is incredibly crunchy to, unfortunately, not a lot of benefit. It's not like Fragged Empire where you've got a crunch-heavy game that's also streamlined yet extremely mechanically rigorous to the point where you can basically run XCOM with it (with mechanics for managing a base, researching, and developing new weapons and armor built in to the system). No, AToW is kind of clunky, unintuitive, and in a weird way a little barebones? There's not much there besides an overly complex chargen system, a lot of equipment stats, a skill resolution framework, and the pilot SPAs. Alright, this is interesting to me. Tell me more about fragged empire - I see there's a few books in the line having poked around the website, but having played mutant: Year zero i'd love to hear about more games that have a Civilization-esque development of the hometown mechanic stapled on top. So its both streamlined and has base building, you say?
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Mar 8, 2018 05:52
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Cythereal posted:It's bad, and the only questions are just how bad and what the hell does ComStar actually want with us. In this era? They want troops who do their job and don't ask questions. If we do that they're likely to "encourage" us to visit Terra and join the ComGuards eventually which is actually something of a good end for a mercenary group in 3025.
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Mar 8, 2018 05:54
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Cythereal posted:We're deep in $$$ debt to one of the most untrustworthy and unscrupulous groups in the Inner Sphere, who are also our employers and probably have not been telling us the truth about who we're fighting or why we're here. Y'know, you say that, but which of the groups isn't untrustworthy or unscrupulous? Katrina was less than the others (I'd argue), but then, y'know, Loki agents against a certain group of jumpships while sacrificing her own cousin... This is Game of Thrones with 'Mechs. With Lori as the Hound!
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Mar 8, 2018 06:12
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PotatoManJack posted:Following the thread, but as a newbie to the lore/game, I'm having a bit of troubling following just how bad (good?) things are going for the merc company. How are we actually placed at coming out ahead in terms of $$$ once this mission/contract is finished? Odds are very low we're going to make it out of this contract with a profit. Most likely we're going to get caught in a Company Store situation - ComStar isn't going to just forgive the debt, but will most likely have it paid off by a follow up contract. Said contract will probably be at bad terms and bad pay. On the surface, to let us work off the money we owe; in practice the intent will be to sink the company further into debt and get everybody stuck in ComStar's service.
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Mar 8, 2018 06:15
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Tempest_56 posted:Odds are very low we're going to make it out of this contract with a profit. Most likely we're going to get caught in a Company Store situation - ComStar isn't going to just forgive the debt, but will most likely have it paid off by a follow up contract. Said contract will probably be at bad terms and bad pay. On the surface, to let us work off the money we owe; in practice the intent will be to sink the company further into debt and get everybody stuck in ComStar's service.  : "This shall not come to pass!!!!!"
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Mar 8, 2018 06:35
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I can't get MekHQ to run on my Mac.
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Mar 8, 2018 06:38
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PhotoKirk posted:I can't get MekHQ to run on my Mac. Yeah Comstar doesn’t let unregistered violent military fantasy simulations run on their hardware
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Mar 8, 2018 06:54
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I’ve just caught up with this thread and it’s making me want to pre-order this game. Thanks for all the work put into this
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Mar 8, 2018 07:13
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TheParadigm posted:Alright, this is interesting to me. Tell me more about fragged empire - I see there's a few books in the line having poked around the website, but having played mutant: Year zero i'd love to hear about more games that have a Civilization-esque development of the hometown mechanic stapled on top. Well, base building is a part of the Fragged Kingdom fantasy ruleset because the basic idea of Fragged Kingdom is civilization reclaiming a world nearly destroyed by their equivalent of the Dark Lord, the fanatically anti-civilization Archdruid. But a supplement was released to "genericize" those rules to apply to the spacefaring main game. Research and development is a part of character advancement and there's some interesting stuff there, too. You can use your research to improve your own abilities (Secret Knowledge or Perks) or equipment (Prototypes), or you can spend research units to gain Influence--explicitly, publishing your findings to an academic institution and making your research available to the public. Thing is, Fragged Empire was designed with eurogame sensibilities, just instead of being an elegant boardgame it's an elegant rpg with a lot of modular parts and grid-based tactical minis combat. So where there's a good amount of complexity, it all just makes sense and everything fits together in a way most TT rpgs don't. Unfortunately actually "getting" it can be difficult at first because the core rulebook was designed to be an efficient and readable reference document more than, you know, an accessible introduction to the game. The Fragged Empire setting's also pretty interesting too, and it's kind of amusing to see Fragged Kingdom take the old cliche of "magic is actually sufficiently advanced technology, fantasy world is a post-collapse sci-fi world" and play with it, because you already know what the actual pre-collapse sci-fi civilization looks like. Well, "pre-collapse" is a matter of perspective, as Fragged Empire is also a post-collapse setting. But I've digressed enough, this is a thread about getting hosed over by ComStar. E: TheParadigm posted:Awesome. I'll check that out, and thanks for the quicksell! If I may, two questions before the derail ends: What's that supplement you mentioned, and if the base book is a rough intro, what would your recommended reading/basic pickups be to start with to get ahead of the getting it wagon? Like, if the core book's a poor start, are there any specific ones you'd recommend instead? I can see it has a few lines of series - I take it they're mostly meant to be interchangable and work together? Thing is, you really do need to read the core book, it's just not arranged for teaching well. It is, however, clear and concise as a reference doc and if you're an old hand at tabletop games you'll pick it up fast. To be honest the quick start rules aren't great at teaching either, I get the feeling the lead dev thinks more like an engineer than a writer but it makes for a very solid game. There's a variety of alternate lines, which are essentially campaign settings, sometimes with rules expansions. Fragged Kingdoms is the fantasy game that provides the core of the base-building and mass combat rules compiled in the supplement. Fragged Seas is the swashbuckling adventure game which also uses the momentum-based combat system and I don't know much more about it. Fragged Aeternum is a weird niche sidegame that's just Literally Bloodborne and it's not nearly as fleshed out as the others, and I also don't know much about that either. The supplement that ports the Kingdom stuff into the main game is called Fragged Empire: Hacked and it's quite small. Essentially, it takes stuff from Kingdoms and re-fluffs things to make it more appropriate for a spacefaring setting, and in the case of the base-building rules adds more traits and so forth. Runa fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 08:08
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Xarbala posted:Well, base building is a part of the Fragged Kingdom fantasy ruleset because the basic idea of Fragged Kingdom is civilization reclaiming a world nearly destroyed by their equivalent of the Dark Lord, the fanatically anti-civilization Archdruid. But a supplement was released to "genericize" those rules to apply to the spacefaring main game. Awesome. I'll check that out, and thanks for the quicksell! If I may, two questions before the derail ends: What's that supplement you mentioned, and if the base book is a rough intro, what would your recommended reading/basic pickups be to start with to get ahead of the getting it wagon? Like, if the core book's a poor start, are there any specific ones you'd recommend instead? I can see it has a few lines of series - I take it they're mostly meant to be interchangable and work together?
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Mar 8, 2018 09:02
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The guide referenced earlier for MekHQ/ATB is a little out of date. I'm actually writing in my minimal spare time a guide to getting an Against the Bot campaign set up and walking through company creation and a first contract, partly as a way to keep my mind on it for an eventual LP.  So far I only have "look these are actually the important campaign/megamek options, here's what I recommend setting up as" done, I can post that by itself in this thread if people want and just post more as I piece it together. There's enough ATB chat in this thread that I don't think it's too out of bounds.
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Mar 8, 2018 13:19
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Xarbala posted:A Time of War is incredibly crunchy to, unfortunately, not a lot of benefit. It's not like Fragged Empire where you've got a crunch-heavy game that's also streamlined yet extremely mechanically rigorous to the point where you can basically run XCOM with it (with mechanics for managing a base, researching, and developing new weapons and armor built in to the system). No, AToW is kind of clunky, unintuitive, and in a weird way a little barebones? There's not much there besides an overly complex chargen system, a lot of equipment stats, a skill resolution framework, and the pilot SPAs. Personally I actually rather liked the chargen system of AToW. It helped me put a lot of meat on my character's backstory and integrate her into the world much better. I started out with relatively little in the way of a concept and ended up with a child miner (yay for growing up in Liao space) turned aerospace pilot turned disgraced nobody, turned scion of a member of the house Cameron (this was set before/during the civil war) mostly through the way the system guided me through the early life of the character. But yeah, apart from that it is a rather dense and unwieldy system. Though I actually rather liked the combat, even if it is on the cumbersome side. There are lots of ways to do cool poo poo, particularly in melee/unarmed combat. I'd specced heavily into martial arts (it's the space '80s and my character was from space China, knowing Kung Fu seemed mandatory ), and I could basically John Wick my way through a bunch of close-range firefights with combinations of melee moves and short-range shooting.And holy poo poo yeah is it ever deadly. For that reason our GM had us mostly end up in unarmed or nonlethal fights early on. Then we ended up in one altercation where we had our guns out and ran into a squad of enemies at short range. All we had were a bunch of light handguns and a single shotgun, but despite that it took just one and a half combat rounds until the fight was over with all the enemies dead and half the party severely injured. Good thing we had a skilled surgeon along for the ride.
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Mar 8, 2018 14:11
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PoptartsNinja posted:In this era? They want troops who do their job and don't ask questions. If we do that they're likely to "encourage" us to visit Terra and join the ComGuards eventually which is actually something of a good end for a mercenary group in 3025. I'd be okay with this, actually. Sounds like an interesting basis for a campaign.
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Mar 8, 2018 14:43
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Cythereal posted:I'd be okay with this, actually. Sounds like an interesting basis for a campaign. ComStar is very much a best/worst case scenario. If they feel we've outlived our usefulness and aren't White Robe material, they'll eventually give us a mission to pretend to be pirates to keep one of the Great Houses destabilized, and then warn that House that a pirate attack may be imminent for kudos points. They will get their money's worth out of us, is what I'm saying.
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Mar 8, 2018 16:06
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Mukaikubo posted:The guide referenced earlier for MekHQ/ATB is a little out of date. I'm actually writing in my minimal spare time a guide to getting an Against the Bot campaign set up and walking through company creation and a first contract, partly as a way to keep my mind on it for an eventual LP. I'd love an updated guide to the two programs, they're very complex. I've managed so far to muddle my way along into a contract, then setup my stuff into Lances, etc and assign them to the missions, mostly through a bit of trail and error and googling. Unfortunately in the mission the first move I made I wasnt paying enough attention to what I was walking on and from what I can tell my mech just plowed through a building, demolishing it, and raining rubble down on itself giving it a good load of LT and RT damage to start the game off with. Also I'm supposed to be protecting those buildings so thats not ideal, at least it made me laugh. Edit: What PDF/Manual should I be looking to get my hands on to find out what all these various skills, quirks, etc actually do? I looked at this but was throughly confused. Tindahbawx fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 18:20
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PoptartsNinja posted:ComStar is very much a best/worst case scenario. If they feel we've outlived our usefulness and aren't White Robe material, they'll eventually give us a mission to pretend to be pirates to keep one of the Great Houses destabilized, and then warn that House that a pirate attack may be imminent for kudos points. Still not seeing anything more dickish than any other employers are likely to pull. Mercenaries generally don't get happy endings.
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Mar 8, 2018 18:24
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Cythereal posted:Mercenaries generally don't get happy endings. Counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CB3VgTF8Ds
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Mar 8, 2018 18:50
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AJ_Impy posted:Counterpoint: I said generally.
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Mar 8, 2018 19:16
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Cythereal posted:I said generally.  But there are two Generals on the list! 
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Mar 8, 2018 19:20
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Waco Rangers! Fantastic, Battletech really does cater for everyone. Did their career go up in flames at the end? Is their insignia anything like the Branch Dravidians happy eel and a star flag? 
Tindahbawx fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 19:46
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Their CO is batshit crazy. Although less so than David Kharesh.
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Mar 8, 2018 20:00
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Cythereal posted:Still not seeing anything more dickish than any other employers are likely to pull. To be fair, very few people get Happy Endings in Battletech. It's a very gritty setting.
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Mar 8, 2018 20:59
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Tindahbawx posted:Waco Rangers! Fantastic, Battletech really does cater for everyone. You have no idea. While they were a fairly successful mercenary outfit, their CO also had an obsessive hatred of Wolf's Dragoons. Combine that with heavy losses during the Battle of Coventry, and they eventually did something incredibly stupid that got most of them killed and led to the remnants being hunted down with extreme prejudice.
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Mar 8, 2018 21:01
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Lord Koth posted:You have no idea. While they were a fairly successful mercenary outfit, their CO also had an obsessive hatred of Wolf's Dragoons. Combine that with heavy losses during the Battle of Coventry, and they eventually did something incredibly stupid that got most of them killed and led to the remnants being hunted down with extreme prejudice. Unsurprisingly, the Blakists were also involved.
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Mar 8, 2018 21:02
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Tindahbawx posted:Waco Rangers! Fantastic, Battletech really does cater for everyone. Noted Spiteful Dickheads the Wolf's Dragoons killed Colonel Wayne Waco's son in cold blood. As the Dragoons run the MRBC (taking over from ComStar in the 3030s) the MRBC sided with the Dragoons who swore the death was an accident (you don't "accidentally" step on a BattleMech's cockpit). For reasons Colonel Waco declared a vendetta against the Dragoons, and it's notable that the only people who ever describe Colonel Waco as crazy are the Dragoons themselves. The Waco Rangers do very well for themselves, they're a full regiment of seasoned veterans and survive the Clan invasion relatively intact (so significantly better than most other commands). They're one of the few that can provide direct competition to the Kell Hounds, Dragoons, etc. without being a multi-regiment unit like the Eridani Light Horse. The MRBC declares them less-than-reliable because they tend to bounce from one employer to another rather than risk getting indebted to the "company store" but they make money and pay their debts and don't default on their contracts so that rating is either someone attempting to get into the Dragoons good graces (and not realizing the Dragoons don't give a poo poo) or the Dragoons being spiteful assholes. 50/50 which is the truth. The Waco Rangers die in the Jihad because they, like a great very many merc units, sign on with the Word of Blake for the fat lucre and the promise for revenge against those who have "wronged them." Wayne Waco and Jaime Wolf kill each other on Outreach and the Waco Rangers are ultimately destroyed during the Jihad. It should be noted that the MW:Dark Age tried really, really hard to do away with all of the "pet" mercenary regiments (due to RL issues involving the Eridani Light Horse and a Brony that I'm sure someone else will elaborate on). The editorial "Death to Mercenaries" decree was far more successful than Takashi Kurita's, but I don't feel it was ultimately beneficial to the setting because it drastically limited the sorts of campaigns you could run in the post-Jihad era. This was their unit insignia:  RIP Waco Rangers, you successfully made a career out of hating the Dragoons and died doing what you loved. Godspeed. Edit: And God Bless Space Texas. Double Edit: I'm also pretty sure the Waco Rangers pre-dated the Branch Davidians by 3-5 years. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 21:10
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