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The Field Manuals detail the infantry regiments that are directly attached to mech regiments, but other than that, not really. I kind of figure most standard (non-jump, non-BA) infantry is planetary militia rather than regular army anyway, especially as you go further down the timeline.
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Dec 30, 2020 05:22
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They don't, and I'm pretty glad they don't because they'd either get the scale laughably wrong (like they did when they stated the number of JumpShips in the Inner Sphere (which has since been redacted to the number of military JumpShips in the Inner Sphere IIRC)) or they'd ruin one of the things I secretly like about the setting: that most people in the Inner Sphere live OK-enough lives that they don't need the constant threat of military violence to 'keep them in line.' It also means authors can write in what they need to, or include interesting little details about a planet's militia: like Towne's substantial wet-water navy (which was used to deter Towne's also apparently substantial wet-water piracy), which flipped Tai-sa Jeffrey Kusunoski's kokuryu-kai backed invasion the bird because they knew the Kuritans hadn't brought anything capable of handling a battleship.
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Dec 30, 2020 05:39
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Or how the wealthy on Skye put a missile rack on their party boats so they could register them as planetary militia and write the yacht off. I like to think they were basically the boat that The Gang bought.
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Dec 30, 2020 05:42
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I don't think it's worth trying to assign numbers to things and just use whatever numbers you need to make whatever you want to do work. But if you want, you can total up the conventional units in the field manuals and then assume that each planet has several militia regiments (more or less depending on the size and importance of the planet) and there you have your number.
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Dec 30, 2020 05:43
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Yeah I think this is me more picking at the setting to see if they did anything odd or interesting there.
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Dec 30, 2020 06:04
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Yeah I think this is me more picking at the setting to see if they did anything odd or interesting there. House Kurita has bigger planetary militias than anyone because their massive planetary police forces get conscripted to catch bullets for the samurai whenever one of their planets gets invaded, it's why nobody's all that keen on invading them and they can get away with being colossal assholes to their neighbors all the time. Even Hanse Davion left House Kurita mostly alone during his honeymoon and focused on seizing worlds from the Capellan Confederation and Free Worlds League. The Capellan Confederation's militia is nearly entirely conscripted criminals, so planets with more social unrest tend to have huge, unwieldy militias. These militias can't be trusted to do anything (they're not even good bullet catchers because "shot if you do and shot if you don't" means they'll bolt at the first opportunity). Nearly all of the CCAF's penal regiments were an active burden on the Confederation's limited resources until Sun Tzu put an end to that nonsense in the 3060s. Every single citizen of the Lyran Commonwealth does a stint with their home planet's militia when they turn 18. Melissa Steiner was pushed into the infantry The Federated Suns and Free Worlds League don't have much said about their militias. As a general rule they leave it up to the local planetary (or regional) governments to work out the details. General assumption in the Suns is that every planet is walking a fine line between "enough militia to deter pirates" and "not so much militia that the local baron is paranoid that the militia is plotting against him." Edit: In the periphery, the "local militia" is the pirate band that has been stealing water from the next planet over because somehow one DropShip full of water is enough to keep everyone alive for another six months. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Dec 30, 2020 |
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Dec 30, 2020 06:17
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PoptartsNinja posted:Every single citizen of the Lyran Commonwealth does a stint with their home planet's militia when they turn 18. Melissa Steiner was pushed into the infantry 16. It was 19 before 2901, back when it was three years' service instead of five. Presumably it's a "one weekend a month, two weeks a year" sort of thing.
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Dec 30, 2020 06:46
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PoptartsNinja posted:House Kurita has bigger planetary militias than anyone because their massive planetary police forces get conscripted to catch bullets for the samurai whenever one of their planets gets invaded, it's why nobody's all that keen on invading them and they can get away with being colossal assholes to their neighbors all the time. Even Hanse Davion left House Kurita mostly alone during his honeymoon and focused on seizing worlds from the Capellan Confederation and Free Worlds League. That's helpful. It's an interesting tension they have to play between planets as little chunks of a larger empire, and planets as whole-rear end planets.
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Dec 30, 2020 06:48
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Dumb question but why are invasions done in waves? It seems like a really standard Battletech meta-structure, to the point where if you're writing for the setting, you need to break a given war up into waves in your plot proposal. But what advantage does holding planet N really give you in terms of invading planet N+1 (deeper into enemy space)? A safe place to recharge your JumpShips? That's just a matter of aerospace superiority...and you've got operations like Serpent which clearly recognize that you can just hop through uninhabited systems all the way to a key target. I don't get it.
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Dec 30, 2020 18:49
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Strategic reserves. Landing on a half dozen planets gives command time to recognize how a contest is going before committing additional resources to taking planets that are no longer feasible targets. In the time between the First Succession War and the Clan Invasion, it was also a matter of communication. If you landed your command would have no idea what the progress on the ground was until the HPG was successfully taken or a courier delivered news; mobile and ship-borne HPGs were practically unheard of. In the time after Gray Monday, even regular HPGs are rare. If a flotilla suffers a misjump, they're as good as dead. Serpent falls between both of those dates, and included significant assets with HPGs that made that kind of strategy safe enough to have a backup plan that wasn't "Guess we'll die."
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Dec 30, 2020 19:12
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Also building a supply chain is really important. Transport is a big limiter and jumping more than 30 LY is a no-go. You want a safe way to move supplies to the front. Ideally, you only want the last jump of a supply chain to be within 30 LY of someone else, and the more you expose that, the more opportunity your enemy has to jump in and steal your poo poo. These are people who spent over a hundred years beating each other up so they could steal crates of self-stealing stem bolts, so odds are whomever you're fighting has gotten really really good at stuff like that. So basically the same reason that just fighting in a straight line to an enemy capitol didn't really work, I guess.Strobe posted:Serpent falls between both of those dates, and included significant assets with HPGs that made that kind of strategy safe enough to have a backup plan that wasn't "Guess we'll die." Serpent was also an incredible mess of contrived time tables that was nothing but people showing up just in time, every time. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Dec 30, 2020 |
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Dec 30, 2020 20:00
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That's fun to read though.
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Dec 30, 2020 20:04
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You must remember that book very differently
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Dec 30, 2020 20:06
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If you want to hold a world, it needs to be close enough to your lines to be resupplied. House Kurita had to move heaven and earth to keep Wolcott supplied. Even though the Clans were honor bound to not re-invade it, they still could have retaken the system without a shot fired if their blockade had been successful. House Kurita, the epitome of "you go here and do this or else" almost couldn't manage to hold it even though it only took a single jump through an uninhabited system to reach. House Kurita often had to sacrifice entire DropShips and mercenary groups to keep the Smoke Jaguars from finding out which pirate points they were using, and because Wolcott was so close to their own supply lines the Smoke Jaguars could park WarShips at the Zenith and Nadir jump points indefinitely and keep the rest of the system swarming with fighters. If the Clans had put more of a doctrinal emphasis on scouting and recon Wolcott never would have held.
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Dec 30, 2020 20:14
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Scouting if for nerds like the Scientist caste
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Dec 30, 2020 20:20
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I got my Tukayyid book and it's good     Looking forward to getting all my stuff in Wave 2 and painting up some IS mechs in ComStar colors.
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Dec 30, 2020 20:50
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That guy with the handgun is hosed
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Dec 30, 2020 21:07
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Defiance Industries posted:That guy with the handgun is hosed Have you even played Cyberpunk 2077? That dude is probably doing headshot crits for 50 damage.
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Dec 30, 2020 21:35
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Back before they capped how much damage weapons could do to infantry, a small laser was enough to kill three infantrymen in a single shot. Those Elementals don't even need to hit him to kill him, a near miss is going to be enough.
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Dec 30, 2020 21:46
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Fortunately, TW came out and everyone stopped standing in a single-file line. I don't know if they changed the damage conversion, but back when MW3rd was the thing, each point of TT damage was 1d6 +15 damage. Anybody who gets hit with mech scale weapons is DONE.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:38
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Strobe posted:Strategic reserves. Landing on a half dozen planets gives command time to recognize how a contest is going before committing additional resources to taking planets that are no longer feasible targets. Didn’t Davon have some kind of slow communication system that didn’t need HPGs? Like it was 56k to HPG’s Cable, but it did allow Fed Suns to invade Capella(?) during... 3030? This was like 25 years ago when I read the books though.
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Dec 30, 2020 23:55
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The fax machines, yeah. Everyone has them now, they don't use wormholes to send messages so they're reliable but JumpShip "Pony Express" is faster.
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Dec 30, 2020 23:59
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They're also small so you can use them for spy poo poo. But the HPG sends a data from one point to another while a Black Box works like a radio, so if anyone else has a Black Box, they'll know someone on planet is sending something. You need to be REALLY sure that nobody can crack your codes, whereas an HPG only sends information to the station it's beaming data to so it's pretty secure (unless ComStar runs it).
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Dec 31, 2020 00:16
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PoptartsNinja posted:JumpShip "Pony Express" is faster. Wut?
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Dec 31, 2020 00:21
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Radioing a JumpShip and having them jump to the destination is faster than the FTL fax machines, even over long distances. The trick is: you have the JumpShip to spare, and if they have to jump into a system with long recharge time the fax can beat them. If you pre-arrange a "command circuit" JumpShips can carry a message across the length of the Inner Sphere in a matter of hours, beating even the HPG network. It would be hugely, mind-bogglingly expensive and wasteful but if all they need to do is wait in a system until another JumpShip appears and radios a message to them nothing will move a message from one place to another faster than a command circuit. Command circuits are usually reserved for moving troops for a reason, operating a JumpShip is expensive and making even one wait on standby when it could be carrying cargo is even more expensive. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Dec 31, 2020 |
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Dec 31, 2020 00:32
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Before the HPG was invented, messages were piggybacked on JumpShip routes. So if you live on Gibbs, which is the place JumpShips stop to recharge between Tharkad and Donegal, you probably know everything that's happening on those worlds, since you're constantly getting fresh broadcasts from every ship that comes through. But news from Skye takes longer to get back to you because someone needs to decide to go from Skye and head to Gibbs instead of Donegal and Tharkad. When the HPG grid went down, this went back to being the norm on most planets.
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Dec 31, 2020 00:35
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My experience with Battletech have been brief forays into Mechwarrior and Mechcommander as a kid, and more recently PTN's delicious LP. I saw GMG LP-ing Alpha Strike recently and it looked so much easier to wrap my head around compared to the maths and record keeping in CBT. Are there any tips for someone looking to start Alpha Strike? I've ordered a bunch of 3D printed mechs (2 lances and 1 star). Should I just start with bashing robots together? Does it do combined arms with tanks and infantry well?
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Dec 31, 2020 01:36
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Alpha Strike works well with combined arms but 'Mech only works perfectly fine. Unless you're looking to convert custom units into Alpha Strike stats or use very big naval vessels, the only thing you actually need is Alpha Strike: Commander's Edition.
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Dec 31, 2020 02:25
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All the Alpha Strike cards are available free on Master Unit List. My group has found that 300 points is a good level to fill an evening.
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Dec 31, 2020 03:05
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Z the IVth posted:Are there any tips for someone looking to start Alpha Strike? You can play Alpha Strike on hex grid or without, if you play on hexes halve everything's movement. 2" = 1 hex. Skill 3 or 4 Mechwarriors are just about ideal. If you get your cards off the Master Unit List (you should), you can change a unit's skill and the MUL will recalculate the unit's point value for you. If you're playing a GM'd campaign, throw together a few pages of Mechwarriors in Excel and cut them out, that way your players can keep the Mechwarrior right with their 'Mech, and if the warrior has a Special Pilot Ability it makes referencing it easy. It can be very all-or-nothing, but the Clan vs. IS balance is generally better in Alpha Strike than standard play (endo steel and XL engines reduce a unit's structure value in Alpha Strike), but some Clan units do such incredible damage using them can turn a fight into a game of rocket tag. If you're looking to avoid that I'd generally suggest avoiding 'Mechs that do more than 5 Alpha Strike damage except on rare occasions. You can safely ignore this if you're planning to play a GM'd campaign. In that scenario, if the players wind up with one or more high damage units the GM can bring greater numbers to compensate if you'd like a fight to be even without making the players feel cheated. I find a lance or two of Panthers to be really useful for this, because they blow up relatively easily and because it can be intimidating watching eight 'Mechs advance in unison. Alpha Strike is pretty forgiving, but some of the Special Pilot Abilities are more powerful than their points value would suggest. - - Terrain Master: Forest is borderline too good and should be avoided, but the other terrain masteries are largely fine. - - Range Master Medium is an order of magnitude better than Range Master Long. Most fights take place at medium range. - - The change to Sniper means it doesn't synergize as well with the Range Mastery SPAs anymore, but since it's explicitly S-0/M-1/L-2 now (it used to halve the range penalties) you can take Range Master Long and Sniper to give a 'Mech a short/medium/long attack of s2/m1/l0 which is pretty amusing on the right unit. - - The melee SPAs get exponentially better the more of them a pilot has. - - Mechwarriors can only have 3 SPAs, and some SPAs require another SPA. Marksman/Sharpshooter are the most obvious. Marksman looks bad at a glance but being able to force a crit can be really powerful with a low-damage unit (like the Panther!), Sharpshooter generally isn't worth the investment (if you can do damage you don't usually need to force crits). Combined arms is fine, but infantry (and Urbanmechs) are weaker than they should be because the "Ambusher" role doesn't fit into any lance type. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Dec 31, 2020 |
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Dec 31, 2020 05:30
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I'm thinking of getting Hour of The Wolf tomorrow, does the author have a good reputation?
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Dec 31, 2020 06:38
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Baron Porkface posted:I'm thinking of getting Hour of The Wolf tomorrow, does the author have a good reputation? He's a Confederate apologist and his prose is standard genre fare. Don't give him money.
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Dec 31, 2020 07:04
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Thanks for all the advice. Regarding rocket tag with clan mechs, I'm thinking the optional rule rolling to-hits per point of damage helps smooth out the variance at the expense of being slightly more fiddly?
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Dec 31, 2020 10:55
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Z the IVth posted:Thanks for all the advice. If you have a way to automate dice rolls that seems like it'd be a great option. (Note: I have never played Alpha Strike)
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Dec 31, 2020 15:21
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Z the IVth posted:Thanks for all the advice. We just switched over to this method and it just generally makes everything better. Get some matched pairs of dice and its golden.
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Dec 31, 2020 16:39
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I absolutely hate that option because it means that high damage Mechs can just turbofuck a light mech that relies on high TMMs through the law of averages. Shooting at a mech on 9s for 7 damage will fail to kill a lovely Locust 73% of the time under normal rules. Under the roll-per-point method the chance to kill outright is still low but the damage accumulates faster with no waste and the likelihood of doing a significant (to the Locust) amount of damage is really, really high.
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Dec 31, 2020 17:09
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PoptartsNinja posted:
Just read this in more detail, looks very helpful. Is the game balanced around needing SPAs and lance bonuses?
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Dec 31, 2020 17:25
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Z the IVth posted:Just read this in more detail, looks very helpful. Is the game balanced around needing SPAs and lance bonuses? You can play without, but SPAs help add a lot of flavor.
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Dec 31, 2020 18:17
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And at midnight, the (fiction) book that declares the ilClan is out. and we learn who Devlin Stone WAS. A soldier that the Wobbies created to be the ultimate general
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Jan 1, 2021 06:45
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SirFozzie posted:And at midnight, the (fiction) book that declares the ilClan is out. Solid Snake?
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Jan 1, 2021 06:46
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