|
Carcer posted:How successful where the clans invasion? Did they take significant a significant number of IS planets or did the IS manage to fight them off without significant loss? They were only stopped because Comstar got off its rear end and took advantage of clan honor to stake the whole invasion on a single fight between equal numbers on one planet A lot of Inner Sphere was Clan territory after the invasion.
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 17:15 |
|
|
Sky Shadowing posted:Politically, any faction that goes against their aims can get put under an Interdiction, where they refuse to send any of this info. This is catastrophic enough that Great Houses balk at even considering pissing ComStar off, because an inability to communicate means you're hosed. The FWL almost fell when Marik realized ComStar was loving them over and got justified revenge. Don't forget the decade-long cold war Operation Flush between Davion and ComStar when the former realized ComStar was sharing all their communications with their enemies
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:08
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:Can someone explain Clan invasion "bidding"? So the way it usually works is that a couple of commanders bid against one another to get down to the most "efficient" force to take the target. So let's say we're both Clan Wolf yahoos and we've been sent to take a Jade Falcon technology back in one of the Clan homeworlds. We know the Jade Falcons are defending their tech with a Trinary of 'mechs (fifteen). We know this because we showed up and asked the Falcons what they're defending the secret of Schezcwan Sauce with and, being good Clanners, the Falcons told us honestly. So you and I meet and I say "I can beat those Falcons with two binaries of mechs." (That's 20 'mechs.) To be precise I'd name two particular binaries under my command. Maybe I'd name four particular stars (squads of five 'mechs each) or maybe a binary that is used to working together or whatever. Then you'd say "I can beat those Falcons with a trinary of 'mechs and a star of Elementals." That's a lower bid since Elementals are generally considered less powerful than 'mechs. Then I'd go "I can beat those Falcons 'mech to 'mech, I bid a trinary of 'mechs." You might respond "I can beat those Falcons with a binary of 'mechs!" I'd think about it and say, "Fine. Beat those Falcons." Then you'd have to take your ten 'mechs and try and beat the Falcons' fifteen 'mechs. However, if things went south on you, you'd be able to call in forces up to my last bid (five more 'mechs to make up a trinary). It'd cost you some honor, since it meant you couldn't do the job with your original bid, but its better than losing. Needless to say this system really only works when you're fighting against opponents who play by the same rules you do. Because if you go up against a non-Clanner who's got his poo poo together, you can end up in all kinds of poo poo as Hohiro Kurita taught the Smoke Jaguars at Wolcott.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:12
|
|
|
Carcer posted:How successful where the clans invasion? Did they take significant a significant number of IS planets or did the IS manage to fight them off without significant loss? This is the Inner Sphere 10 years before the Clan invasion:  This is the Inner Sphere 2 years after the Clan invasion after ComStar fought them at a planet called Tukayyid and bound them by treaty to not continue invading for another 15 years:  The Clans weren't actually working together beyond having a similar broad goal, and each of them conducted their own invasion with their own resources and war planning goals for the most part. Each Clan was racing to try to conquer Terra/Earth first(since they view it as a holy planet), and then whichever Clan conquered it would become the ilClan(big boss Clan) which would then lead the rest of the Clans to conquer everything else. If ComStar hadn't decided to reveal their military and fight the Clans they would have absolutely done this because the FedCom and Draconis Combine were getting loving pasted and the Free Worlds League and Capellan Confederation were absolutely not going to do poo poo to help until it was far too late. Kanos fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Apr 19, 2018 |
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:13
|
|
|
Internet Explorer posted:Should have just changed the only option to they/them/theirs and put all the portraits in the same category. april fools joke for next year imo
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:15
|
|
|
So what I'm hearing here is that Battletech is rad beyond the level I thought it was and I wonder now why it's so relatively niche while Warhammer still seems to be doing so well for itself. I'm assuming the actual reasons for that are complex and nerdy but if anyone has any insight then I'd be pretty interested.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:23
|
|
|
The more I read about the clans the more I realize they're just dumb klingons
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:26
|
|
|
have you seen how many dice you have to roll to play a tabletop game of battletech
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:26
|
|
|
Cowcaster posted:have you seen how many dice you have to roll to play a tabletop game of battletech 2d6
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:27
|
|
|
 I want bird warriors
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:28
|
|
|
isildur posted:The amount of poo poo I've had thrown at me over this. Uggggh. Still, I've had NB people contact me to thank me for it; one of those is worth a hundred angry KotakuInAction posters. From a few pages back, but congratulations, I will probably buy extra copies for people now just 'cause.  I was already looking forward to this but it's good to know that Good Folks are workin' on this.Also, as an interesting corollary to the Clan invasion chat: the direction of the invasion had an interesting effect on the Federated Commonwealth. It had been stitched together by the Lyrans and the FedSuns earlier in history, and by 3049 was actually doing okay for itself, and a decent sense of overall unity was building despite some bigger bumps in the road. Part of what encouraged it was that soldiers on both "sides" of the new superstate were contributing to this birth of a new unified human state - in particular, both former sides got to fight the Combine together. There was a sense of shared struggle. Thanks to the trajectory of the Clan invasion, this was shattered in 3050 because it was exclusively the Lyran side of the FedCom that got hammered by the Falcons and the Wolves. This led to all sorts of accusations that the former Suns were deliberately not doing their part to help their Lyran counterparts (some true, some just the fact that moving mech forces en masse that quickly was just not something the IS was equipped to do in 3050) and ultimately led to the FedCom collapsing back into the Lyran Alliance and the "FedCom" occupying the former Federated Suns territory.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:29
|
|
|
Nickiepoo posted:So what I'm hearing here is that Battletech is rad beyond the level I thought it was and I wonder now why it's so relatively niche while Warhammer still seems to be doing so well for itself. The IP has had a rocky life, especially in the past 20 years or so. It's been bought and sold a bunch of times, the rights for board games / books / PC strategy / PC simulation were spread to the winds a bunch of times. As opposed to Warhammer, where Games Workshop has had an iron grip on their IP.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:29
|
|
|
Nickiepoo posted:I'm assuming the actual reasons for that are complex and nerdy but if anyone has any insight then I'd be pretty interested. Actual tabletop BTech takes ages to play. It's nice and detailed and doesn't need that many dice, but actually tracking everything is incredibly time-consuming and there's lots of room for human error even with well-meaning players. As opposed to something like Warhammer, which can get big and dumb but smaller games are pretty good beer & pretzels fare. People have wanted a "proper" BTech video game for ages (outside of something unofficial like MegaMek) because having a computer to speed up the bookkeeping would improve the game immeasurably. Also, yeah, FASA hit the skids at the turn of the millenium and then things got really complicated, but FASA hit trouble in part because their game was hard to play. Phi230 posted:The more I read about the clans the more I realize they're just dumb klingons This is another part of it. While a lot of the fluff sounds rad summed up, there has been some really dumb Clan fiction and whatnot over the years. As posted, some of the BTech novels are Out There.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:33
|
|
|
Lore question, do ComStar people believe in their own technotheocratic fart huffing, or does everyone know it's just a front for keeping their hands on the keys to the castle (of Terra and HPG secrets)?
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:34
|
|
|
Ciaphas posted:Lore question, do ComStar people believe in their own technotheocratic fart huffing, or does everyone know it's just a front for keeping their hands on the keys to the castle (of Terra and HPG secrets)? They mostly believe their own stupid bullshit. ComStar themselves lean on the more practical side of it (just keeping themselves in power), but the off-shoot faction Word of Blake are all in on the fart-huffing that Blake was a holy messiah type and listen to his vague, barely remembered words.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:36
|
|
|
DrPop posted:I can't recall much of the fluff about WarShips *after* the Jihad, but I know that a shitload of them were destroyed during it. Warships went extinct during the Jihad because they're no fun. Nickiepoo posted:So what I'm hearing here is that Battletech is rad beyond the level I thought it was and I wonder now why it's so relatively niche while Warhammer still seems to be doing so well for itself. BattleTech tends to be fairly math heavy and the tabletop game attracts a certain type of player. The number of "That Guy"s in BattleTech is staggering and they do not make for a good new player experience because they're typically the win-at-all-costs what's mathematically most efficient sorts of people. When really, the board game is fun and a chill way to spend a few hours pew pewing imaginary robots and drinking your choice of beverage. It just really speeds up play if you've got someone who has the hit location table memorized. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Apr 19, 2018 |
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:40
|
|
|
Nickiepoo posted:So what I'm hearing here is that Battletech is rad beyond the level I thought it was and I wonder now why it's so relatively niche while Warhammer still seems to be doing so well for itself. There's a lot of potential reasons for this. First, as Internet Explorer says, Games Workshop stuck with and controlled their brand with an iron fist and developed it over a long time while perpetually-cash-strapped FASA shotgunned their license everywhere, leading to brand dilution. For example, the most popular and well known Battletech products are the Mechwarrior games and there are many people who bought and enjoyed those games without ever knowing they had anything to do with Battletech in the first place! FASA invented some of the neatest tabletop settings in existence(Battletech, Shadowrun, Crimson Skies) but never, ever had the market penetration or influence that GW had. Second, Battletech is traditionally aesthetically ugly as hell and didn't improve for a long time. For every instantly memorable iconic design like the Atlas or the Mad Cat, you've got a fat metal baby or a weird mecha-stork running around, and most of the iconic character art is bad sourcebook art. Third, Battletech's story is really hard to rope kids in with. It's got giant robot fighting but most of the backstory is a relatively complex web of dry setting history and politics. Fourth, the actual tabletop Battletech game is an absolute loving chore to play. If you don't have the hit tables memorized and your 'mech sheets pre-printed it can take an entire afternoon just to play a single lance on lance. Stuff like Megamek providing automation makes it much better and smoother but playing it with pencils and paper loving sucks.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:41
|
|
|
SpaceDrake posted:Also, yeah, FASA hit the skids at the turn of the millenium and then things got really complicated, but FASA hit trouble in part because their game was hard to play. You're projecting your dislikes into the main reasons that the game went downhill. Things like removing miniatures from the basic (4th edition) box set (which caused sales of them to plummet) and bleeding out via a series of hideously expensive lawsuits, then dividing the IP to other companies as a way of paying for those suits were all much more relevant than people having hard time looking up charts or finding Far Country or other novels (which you could buy in mainstream bookstores, which helped push the brand to a wider public) a tad goofy. At the same time, while BT is not difficult, I will readily admit that BT is too cumbersome for most modern gameplayers. The new manuals and box sets are going out of their way to make things as pretty and usable as possible within the confines of the same rules that were being used in 1984, but it's still the same rules that were being used in 1984. I love BT, but lord do I wish it had a revision some time in the 1990s at least. Xotl fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Apr 19, 2018 |
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:41
|
|
|
Kanos posted:There's a lot of potential reasons for this. First, as Internet Explorer says, Games Workshop stuck with and controlled their brand with an iron fist and developed it over a long time while perpetually-cash-strapped FASA shotgunned their license everywhere, leading to brand dilution. For example, the most popular and well known Battletech products are the Mechwarrior games and there are many people who bought and enjoyed those games without ever knowing they had anything to do with Battletech in the first place! FASA invented some of the neatest tabletop settings in existence(Battletech, Shadowrun, Crimson Skies) but never, ever had the market penetration or influence that GW had. Fourth, I think you get a bit more diversity (ironically) in Warhammer. Everybody that has robots in Battletech is a human. So you have a bunch of racist caricatures to split them apart in the lore, and various political bullshit, but aside from the IS/Clan breakup everybody is driving roughly the same robots shooting the same guns. You don't have orks, you don't have guys with anime supertech, you don't have magic space elves, and your guys in power armor are (by default) weird Michelein man looking toad robots instead of supermen in ornately covered but mostly humanoid armor. [EDIT]And if you mean tabletop specifically instead of just the brand, you get a lot more space barbies to paint.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:45
|
|
|
Kanos posted:FASA invented some of the neatest tabletop settings in existence(Battletech, Shadowrun, Crimson Skies) It's almost criminal to leave Earthdawn out of this list. It wasn't the most robust game system but the setting was incredible and made even more so when you finally saw a map of the world beyond Barsaive and realized that the evil Theran empire was western europe.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:45
|
|
|
My introduction to BT was playing MW2 and Ghost Bear's Legacy on my family's ELITE KICKIN' RAD Acer 486 with a whopping 16 megs of ram  I was too young to really 'get' it so I mostly just messed around with the in-game cheat modes on. Found a fun bug where I could give a mech negative heatsinks but that would also give back essentially infinite tonnage, at the expense of blowing up almost instantly if you loaded into a mission with heat management still turned on.I didn't realize there was more to the universe beyond just the MW series though until I saw a paperback of one of the billion terrible terrible books at an airport bookstore and grabbed it to pass the time as a teen on a vacation. clans r dum EDIT: With the mechwarrior revival in the past few years, when are we gonna get another Starsiege game. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:48
|
|
|
GW was also REALLY good at marketing to the hobby shop crowd to the point where they eventually spun off their own line of basically nerd crack dens. Fasa was always way behind the ball on that front. I remember being a young nerd who got I to BT via a third hand copy of the 3rd ed box set that a friend of a friend lent us and special ordering more minis maps books etc at the local game shop. GW stuff meanwhile was just sitting there on the shelf. Frankly I probably would have ended up a WH4K guy if the group of players at that shop hadn’t been dominated by a bunch of hyper goths waaaaay into the grim dark aspect that I couldn’t stand. Basically middle school politics is what made me the BT nerd I am today. Edit: didn’t hurt that I knew stackpole from Star Wars novels so getting the blood of kerensky trilogy was an easy sell for me. As it happens his BT work is pretty solid for pulp sci if.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 21:52
|
|
|
i played mechwarrior 1989 when i was too young and stupid to understand what i was doing and then didn’t touch the battletech franchise again until mechwarrior living legends. this has been my battletech story
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:00
|
|
|
There are a ton of reasons why tabletop Battletech withered away (which folks have largely touched on), but I do genuinely want to reiterate one in particular: it really just is a loving behemoth of a game to play from a bookkeeping and rules-knowing perspective. Lance-on-lance games take loving forever, even with people who know the game like the back of their hand. MegaMek is really the greatest thing to happen to Battletech since the MechWarrior games, and it looks like HBS' Battletech might even top that. Further, tabletop Battletech really shines when you play well-thought-out, dynamic campaigns whose campaigns consist of fun-minded players who don't just want to take the "best" thing available. Having something akin to the Warhammer 40,000 tournament scene today for Battletech would be hell on earth--it'd just be pulse boat vs pulse boat vs targeting-computered CERPPC boat. I wish the MekWars Legends server was still around. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:03
|
|
|
I know it would be the best way to throw existing players into a froth along with being a titanic effort, but I do feel that they should do a reset/rework on the rules. Gameplay design has advanced so much that I feel they could maintain the feel of the gameplay without the tedious bullshit.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:08
|
|
|
This is all making a lot of sense. I'm someone who owns Warhammer models despite never having any interest in playing the game or ever specifically hanging out with people who do and getting me to that point probably required a huge invisible effort on the part of a marketing team. I loved the old Mechwarrior games and would probably have bought a dumb little robot to paint if I'd ever had any visibility on the tabletop franchise but instead I wasn't even really aware of if it even still existed or what was available which seemed strange given how the two franchises share a very similar space.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:10
|
|
|
Is the tabletop really that bad? I've played a few 1v1 games this week and it's pretty normal compared to any other tabletop game Aim gun, add like 2 modifiers, roll Roll again Check off damage boxes
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:12
|
|
|
Like I don't even know if you can get battletech minis anymore and if you can I have no idea where to get them Then most mechs kinda look lovely on their own and the miniatures from what I've seen aren't great
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:14
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:Like I don't even know if you can get battletech minis anymore and if you can I have no idea where to get them 
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:16
|
|
|
He said lovely, not amazing.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:19
|
|
|
R0ckfish posted:I know it would be the best way to throw existing players into a froth along with being a titanic effort, but I do feel that they should do a reset/rework on the rules. Gameplay design has advanced so much that I feel they could maintain the feel of the gameplay without the tedious bullshit. It's tricky. Much of the tedious bullshit is also what gives BT the flavour it has. Not many other games allow you to blow off your opponent's arm, pick it up, and then beat them to death with it. The granularity of the rules system creates a lot of possibilities for crazy results that last in the mind. Additionally, the way the BT product line is constructed means that any major changes have to be weighed against the need to potentially redo all the Technical Readouts and units in the game (now in the thousands). I think the main problem is the cluster and hit location charts, the damage tracking, and the heat system. All these things are interesting concepts, implemented in time-consuming ways. Between all of those items you have the bulk of what takes up time in BT. Of course, implementing something that works and has some combination of keeps the grogs happy / attracts new players enough to make the redo worthwhile is no easy matter. To return to our 40K comparisons, BT is stuck in a realm like 40K 2nd edition, having never taken the turn to the streamlining of 3rd edition and beyond. There was something to be said for having models hallucinating and on fire stumbling across the battlefield while rolling on datafax damage tables, but ultimately I think 40K is better off for having jettisoned most of that when it did.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:19
|
|
|
R0ckfish posted:I know it would be the best way to throw existing players into a froth along with being a titanic effort, but I do feel that they should do a reset/rework on the rules. Gameplay design has advanced so much that I feel they could maintain the feel of the gameplay without the tedious bullshit. There is Alpha Strike, a streamlined version of the rules. I never found it to be interesting, it lost too much of what made TT Battletech fun to me.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:22
|
|
|
Mordja posted:He said lovely, not amazing. Yeah that owns
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:23
|
|
|
R0ckfish posted:I know it would be the best way to throw existing players into a froth along with being a titanic effort, but I do feel that they should do a reset/rework on the rules. Gameplay design has advanced so much that I feel they could maintain the feel of the gameplay without the tedious bullshit. I hope they release a board game version of this game, but as an example of what I was talking about earlier the Battletech board game rights are owned by Catalyst Games, which as far as I can tell has absolutely nothing to do with HBS. Maybe they could work something out, but yeah...
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:23
|
|
|
Naga? Pretty sure that's the name of the one that looks sorta like that.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:25
|
|
|
William Henry Hairytaint posted:Naga? Pretty sure that's the name of the one that looks sorta like that. It's the Yeoman, playa http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Yeoman
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:27
|
|
|
Internet Explorer posted:I hope they release a board game version of this game, but as an example of what I was talking about earlier the Battletech board game rights are owned by Catalyst Games, which as far as I can tell has absolutely nothing to do with HBS. Maybe they could work something out, but yeah... Catalyst is a mess. I'm pretty sure you can't even get copies of the tabletop rules anymore, I looked on Amazon and they don't have the core rules and the expansions are going for 5-10k dollars
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:27
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:Is the tabletop really that bad? I've played a few 1v1 games this week and it's pretty normal compared to any other tabletop game It has been a while since I played but the things that stick out in my memory (I might be wrong on some of them): -Consulting tons of tables before you have them memorized is nasty for introducing people, there is a reason 8th ed in 40k tried to replace as many of them as possible -rolling lots of 2d6 dice at once is a pain without a ton of multicolour dice or a tackle box -The number of factors to keep track of can get a bit awkward and ties back into consulting tons of tables -Balance is a bit awkward, with a weird switch from taking forever to kill anything in 3025 to instamurder in later tech, but that is my opinion. Essentially my issues were that as new players it is pretty daunting to do the actual playing, with experience it is less of an issue but the game can have excessive amount of time being spent on doing record keeping.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:28
|
|
|
Oh yeah another cool thing about TT BT is that there were units that, in the fluff, were held up as solid mainstays of certain armies. For example, the Hellbringer/Loki and Summoner/Thor for Clan Jade Falcon. While the latter was somewhat undergunned and over-costed (from a BV perspective, with BV being the "points" of TT BT), it was passable in game proper. The Hellbringer/Loki, on the other hand, was absolutely terrible no matter which way you cut it--it was underarmored, overgunned, and fragile. Despite ostensibly representing the pinnacle of Clan engineering, they could be easily popped by a mech half their weight.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 17:15 |
|
|
DrPop posted:It's the Yeoman, playa "Designed specifically as a fire support 'Mech" YOU DONT SAY. 3060 is probably why I didn't recognize it, I kinda dropped out of game after 3050 or so.
|
|
#
?
Apr 19, 2018 22:30
|
|