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There's supposed to be an AMA tomorrow (11am PST/2pm EST) where you can ask questions of myself and other BT writers on the new RecGuide series, but trying to get the URL hasn't been working out too great. Hopefully it still goes ahead and anyone who feels like it can ask us about the new machines and 3150 fluff and the status of stairs in my house and what have you. If I can get some more solid info I'll post it here.
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Apr 24, 2021 05:19
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Ask them how we can get a plasma rifle into the Hauptmann's head. It is VERY important.
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Apr 24, 2021 05:58
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Okay, meeting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U9cOdY_q4o Come and hang out, we are now live. Xotl fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Apr 24, 2021 |
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Apr 24, 2021 17:16
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Defiance Industries posted:Yeah you'd think someone would take Jasek Kelswa-Steiner dying as a wakeup call, since he's the fourth only child of his house in a row. Given how Jasek was written I'm sure he'll have a dozen bastard children revealed whenever necessary to keep the line going. quote:I think that claim probably comes exclusively from Republic characters, just like anything about the Federated Suns and "freedom" comes exclusively from Feddies. Because I cannot for the life of me find a difference between their doctrine and that of the AFFS and LCAF, right down to having three tiers of units with increasingly complex arrangements of conventional support regiments. Look all I want is a couple Wolf Clusters to run into a barrage of Long Tom Artillery and get shredded. Is that too much to ask?
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Apr 26, 2021 14:26
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It's a nice dream but then you have to read the mech combat in a novel, and that's even worse than the stuff where the characters talk.
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Apr 26, 2021 18:20
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Defiance Industries posted:It's a nice dream but then you have to read the mech combat in a novel, and that's even worse than the stuff where the characters talk. Hey now, who doesn't like reading the author write out the results of a battle they played out in the actual game? Not me!
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Apr 26, 2021 20:44
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I punched up the Warhammer's highlights based on a suggestion in the minis thread. Since the difference between the red paint and the metallic red paint wasn't really as noticeable as I'd hoped, I brought back just a touch of the gold to help emphasize them. I also finished a little over a lance of my planned 8th Crucis Lancers company. Unfortunately I can't paint the rest of the company until Wave 2 hits, but it's nice to know in advance that my colors really work. CattleMaster  Hungry Crickett  MAD  Fang of the Sun Dougram  And House Davion's premier totem 'Mech, the very living emblem of the Federated Suns' military prowess: the Valkyrie!  
PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 26, 2021 23:57
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Crooow! posted:Hey now, who doesn't like reading the author write out the results of a battle they played out in the actual game? Not me! I moved forward four hexes. My ER PPC spat a bolt of man-made lightning at you as molten rivulets of armor ran down your torso. Then I got late-night breakfast at Denny's
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Apr 27, 2021 04:25
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This ought to cheer you up, DI! 4th Alliance Guards Commando  Griffin  Unfortunately, House Steiner is almost as bad off as House Kurita for the number of 'Mechs I'm able to paint before Wave 2, but I dig the 4th Guards keeping their old colors. Blue and pale gold match the player unit from the original MechCommander pretty well!
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Apr 27, 2021 06:25
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Those guys shouldn't have hosed with Regulus, plain and simple. I miss Poulsbo as much as the next guy but Regulus wasn't gonna be stopped. Also, the new Commando sculpt (for IWM stuff) is REALLY nice. Got that in my last order.
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Apr 27, 2021 07:25
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Ah, rats. I picked them because the source I was looking at at the time said they were still around after the Jihad. That's my fault for not double-checking. Oh well, I'm painting Smoke Jaguars anyway so it's not like I'm a stranger to dead units.
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Apr 27, 2021 17:16
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PoptartsNinja posted:Ah, rats.  battletech is basically a game of pick your era now. I like just about everything but Dark Age and everything Devlin Stone related. Also the iLClan should be the wolverines.
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Apr 29, 2021 04:53
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Nah, the Wolverines were ruined by that novel about them. That was some Stackpole-level boring rear end whitehat poo poo.
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Apr 29, 2021 06:29
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Rhymenoserous posted:
Dark Age is awesome, read the Wizkids novels before your try the Catalyst stuff. The Catalyst Dark Age era products are literally just trying to advance the timeline along and get out of the Dark Age. Wizkids stuff was actually trying to establish and do new things. Just don't read Ruins of Power.
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Apr 29, 2021 16:35
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Sometimes trying new things isn't a good idea. Like the splinter factions, terrible idea. Nobody wants to play as a fat Canadian with knives taped to their fingers, they want to play as Wolverine. Dark Age itself was also largely a reactionary movement to get things back to the idea of mechs being rare and a lance fight somehow deciding the fate of a world, which was really only the reality for the first three years of the game anyway so I think you're overselling their attempt to do something new rather than roll back changes in the setting.
Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Apr 29, 2021 |
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Apr 29, 2021 17:08
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Dark Age is awesome, read the Wizkids novels before your try the Catalyst stuff. The Catalyst Dark Age era products are literally just trying to advance the timeline along and get out of the Dark Age. Wizkids stuff was actually trying to establish and do new things. Huh, this isn't a take I'd heard before.
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Apr 29, 2021 22:13
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Always cool when someone accidentally phases through from another reality for just long enough to hit the post button. WizKids was trying, explicitly, to return to the "a Lance of 'Mechs is a big loving deal" vibe of the original setting, it was literally the opposite of trying something new. Also most of the books early books are hot rear end garbage, they don't get good for a while.
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Apr 29, 2021 23:32
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"Hey kids, wanna see me do a somersault, cartwheel and handstand?" -This fucker in a Dark Age novel
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Apr 29, 2021 23:56
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what's the scope for
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Apr 30, 2021 01:55
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also the magazine
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Apr 30, 2021 01:56
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o ya also the finger hole
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Apr 30, 2021 01:57
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I just told you, somersaults and cartwheels and handstands, duh.
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Apr 30, 2021 02:29
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Dark Age is awesome, read the Wizkids novels before your try the Catalyst stuff. The Catalyst Dark Age era products are literally just trying to advance the timeline along and get out of the Dark Age. Wizkids stuff was actually trying to establish and do new things. Are you trolling me? I have most of the Wizkids novels and I choked them down the same way I do most current star wars media. With my nose clamped in hopes that maybe something redeemable will come out of it. The entire story is Deus Ex Machina 1 (Devlin stone) retires and suddenly Deus Ex Machina 2 happens (HPG NETWORK SHUTDOWN) and something something bad things, no sense of continuity in the fluff and for some reason we're back to strapping machine guns on agromechs like the Grey Death Legion is acting as cadre in some backwater shitville again. I'd like to take this moment to state how much I hate Devlin Stone as this out of nowhere Dues Ex Machina who suddenly fixes everything while a lot of succesful military commanders who have a lot of experience (Cough, Victor, Hohiro, etc...) fighting enemies with vastly superior technology just so they'd have an excuse to do Star League Lite. EDIT: The whole setting sucks, if it weren't for companies being so stuck in "Well we have to keep it now mode" I'd say they should scrap it and go back to retelling the Jihad because outside of battlecorps it's not as well explored as it could be. Defiance Industries posted:Nah, the Wolverines were ruined by that novel about them. That was some Stackpole-level boring rear end whitehat poo poo. You expected something different? It's pretty obvious nicky was a shithead from how his clans turned out in general, the only reasonable explanation for a clan being hunted like that is they were like "No in fact this is dumb as poo poo." Rhymenoserous fucked around with this message at 08:27 on May 1, 2021 |
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May 1, 2021 08:19
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The Wolverines were always being scapegoated, that was clear. What I meant is how they rewrote the events from WoK. WoK implies the Wolverines were chosen as the example to reinforce Nicky's power because they were serious rivals to the Wolves (Nicky's favorite toy) and says the big dramatic action was using a tactical nuke to destroy a genetic repository as a warning for everyone else to back off while they left, which instead escalated the fight to total war. The novel says that they were targeted because they had too much freedom (not joking) and the nuclear attack was a false flag. The earlier version is some people being done dirty without trying to make them seem perfect, while the revised version falls all over itself to tell you that the Wolverines are perfect angels. Best thing to do would be to retcon it into some kind of propaganda film like they did with the Warrior trilogy.
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May 1, 2021 17:13
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PoptartsNinja posted:The metallic red effect of applying it over gold is subtle but noticeable, I'm not sure it photographs well though. I'll have to add a few more gold patches once I get more 'Mechs that are destined to be Kuritans. Unfortunately, the Whammy's the only 'Mech in wave one I get to paint red. I know the usual process is for transparent red over gold but I've found Blood Angels red so intense that it's best over something as shiny as possible otherwise the metallic effect can get lost. I know you've already painted them already but you could also try Flesh Tearers red for the non-metallic parts and reserve Blood Angels for the metallics to push the contrast more.
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May 1, 2021 20:57
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I wanted to paint a few more 'Mechs, so I picked some up. A couple more Smoke Jaguars because I wanted a second Summoner. It pushes me over a Star, but I'm going to have a full Trinary when wave 2 hits anyway:    A few more Jade Falcons because I wanted another Timberwolf (since this is Vau Galaxy, that means I now have Nicolai Malthus, Kristen Redmond, and Ciro  ):   
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May 4, 2021 01:58
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God thats just a genuinely good colour scheme and those look fantastic PTN.
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May 4, 2021 02:53
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Disclaimer alert: I got into Battletech through Mechwarrior Clix, so yes, my favoritism of that Era and its fiction is gonna be biased due to that being the "Battletech" I knew and played first. No different from the bias CBT players had Hating New Thing *tm about it.Rhymenoserous posted:Are you trolling me? I have most of the Wizkids novels and I choked them down the same way I do most current star wars media. With my nose clamped in hopes that maybe something redeemable will come out of it. The entire story is Deus Ex Machina 1 (Devlin stone) retires and suddenly Deus Ex Machina 2 happens (HPG NETWORK SHUTDOWN) and something something bad things, no sense of continuity in the fluff and for some reason we're back to strapping machine guns on agromechs like the Grey Death Legion is acting as cadre in some backwater shitville again. A time jump will often seem like a Deus Ex until more of it gets fluffed out. And the best Dark Age novels (Sword of Sedition, Fortress Republic, Surrender Your Dreams, all the Steiner/Marik ones) are easily on par with the best of the old Battletech books (minus Wolves on the Border, because nothing really equals that one). Sure there's some really bad ones, there's also some real lovely old Battletech books (Far Country? That one that's just letters? Ideal War?). Arming agromechs made sense for the setting because one of the Republic's policies was de-armenent and a focus on social spending, which meant more agro/industrial mechs and if you're a ragtag pirate group with limited means it's easier to arm an industrial mech than it is to just get a Battlemech. quote:I'd like to take this moment to state how much I hate Devlin Stone as this out of nowhere Dues Ex Machina who suddenly fixes everything while a lot of succesful military commanders who have a lot of experience (Cough, Victor, Hohiro, etc...) fighting enemies with vastly superior technology just so they'd have an excuse to do Star League Lite. Devlin Stone emerged as a successful resistance leader who told nobles to shut the gently caress up during the Jihad while all the other Great Houses decided to get into more squabbles and get people killed while Blakists were going around nuking poo poo. He was one of the few leaders to actually fight the Word of Blake back and people rallied to that. The Great Houses eventually came around because they didn't want their heads on pikes and after nearly 70 straight years of massive wars the average Inner Sphere person was pretty damned tired of the nobility like Victor causing billions of death by being dumb as poo poo. By the end of the Jihad Devlin Stone had a huge coalition force because he Got poo poo Done and basically told the Great Houses to give him the old Hegemony planets as a buffer state so they wouldn't have another reason to fit more pissant wars with each other. He also had the most regiments to throw around so arguing with him was a bad idea (See what happened to Liao and Marik after 3081). Steiners, Davions, and Kurita went along because Victor Steiner-Davion decided Stone was the way to bet and he had clout with at least 2 of those Houses. The Clans went along because Stone flattered them and told them their system was best (And encouraged them to do more reavings of bloodnames to make the # of warriors even smaller, lol). Stone and his Republic then managed to start rebuilding the economies of their planets because they didn't spend all their C-Bills on mechs like an inbred two-headed Kurita samurai cosplayer, and people actually appreciate it when you do some social spending on poo poo like medicine, the environment and food. Cue the Republic recovering from the Jihad, and everyone else in the Great Houses saying "Why can't we have that too?" putting pressure on their Great House leadership to do the same. At the same time Stone encouraged de-armament to prevent another all-out war. Stone's bigass problem was eventually he started believing in his own hype way too much and allowed de-armament to go to far, because you still need a viable military force to keep bad actors in line. Most of the loyalty in the Republic was to Stone himself, so when he left in 3130 (Because his ego had got too big to fit in the Exarch's office), a lot of Republic people suddenly looked for new authorities to be loyal to. 2nd and 3rd generation kids looked to their grandparents' ancestries, ignoring the reasons their grandparents left the Great Houses to begin with (Something that happens pretty common with 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant families). Then the Blackout happened, which isn't the first time in Battletech lore the HPG system has gotten turned off or broken (Amaris did it back during the Amaris Civil War), and suddenly you had lots of little separatist groups formed by those 2nd/3rd generation kids forming up declaring the Republic was dead and they wanted back in with their Great Houses. Cue all the intercine fighting in the Republic. Then the greedy rear end Clans and Great Houses see this Republic, wracked by Civil War, as a juicy target, and they all come in for a slice. Then they starting fighting everyone else and you basically have the 6th Succession War (Jihad was the 5th). Dark Age is loving awesome. Defiance Industries posted:"Hey kids, wanna see me do a somersault, cartwheel and handstand?" -This fucker in a Dark Age novel Rhonda Snorrd. Or maybe it was some Solaris pilots who did stuff like that, can't remember. Point is, that poo poo happened in 1 book and that author never got to write Battletech again due to fan complaint. Also, the splinter factions were pretty cool. It was no secret from Day 1 the big parent factions were still around, and they were re-introduced pretty quickly in the clix game. But the goal of the game was to do small-scale combat, and having House Davion and House Kurita throw around regiments like nobody's business wasn't going to help with that. The splinter factions were also interesting from a socio-cultural perspective. You got 2nd/3rd generation families with split loyalties to their ancestor's realm vs. their current realm. There's a lot that can be played with there for good stories. Strobe posted:Always cool when someone accidentally phases through from another reality for just long enough to hit the post button. Always cool when the old CBT crowd shits all over Dark Age and its fans not realizing they're turning a lot of the old Clix players away from converting to BT because they don't want to deal with the grognards always being angry. Can't tell you how many friends who played clix explicitly pointed that out as why they steered away from their local BT group once Clix was shut down. But I guess making GBS threads on the game that literally saved the Battletech IP is more important than growing the fanbase. In the first ten books you got Ghost War, Call to Arms, Fortress of Lies, Flight of the Falcon, and Blood of the Isle, all decent Battletech books. That's 50% decent to good vs. 50% garbage. And it got better from there. Crazy Joe Wilson fucked around with this message at 15:00 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 14:41
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The clickytech sculpts are really ugly, but frankly a collectible miniatures game was not just a good move for the franchise but a necessary one. Battletech needed money to stay alive. And it needed a flagship game you can play in less than four hours. And the clicky dials were a good way to try to streamline the rules while retaining the idea of "units take damage and change across the course of a battle." And whatever peoples' problems with the Dark Age setting, it could have been so much worse. The writers attempted to maintain the personality and history of the past factions; they didn't totally rewrite the Inner Sphere. They even evolved some of the factions in interesting ways, like the Sea Foxes. The history of the setting is acknowledged rather than, say, declaring the Clans returned to their homeworlds and were never heard from again. There's an attempt made to say "this is still the same universe you know and love" rather than pulling a MechAssault. They're much higher effort than a book like, say, Prince of Havoc, where the grand finale battle royale against the Clans gets a totally colorless and tension-free half of a novel.
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May 4, 2021 16:02
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The initial presentation was pretty bad too and the general reaction of the fans of Battletech were "You sold it out to make a CCG-esque game (after the previous attempt at a CCG didn't go well)". Click-tech was not welcome.
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May 4, 2021 16:36
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The problem with Stone is that he gets what he wants against the best interests of the people who give it to him and the reasons don't make sense. When you compare him to Ian Cameron, the differences look really bad. He and Albert Marik spent like 20 years bribing and undermining economies and ultimately signing mutually exclusive secret treaties. Stone just tells people to do things and they do it. Ultimately they recycled the same plot beat but didn't put as much work into it and it's just lazy by comparison. Why would anyone ACTUALLY disarm after seeing what happened in the Star League?Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Also, the splinter factions were pretty cool. It was no secret from Day 1 the big parent factions were still around, and they were re-introduced pretty quickly in the clix game. They'd be fine as a tertiary option. What you don't want is to be told this is who you play INSTEAD. It's the MvC:Infinite problem, if you play Magneto, you want to play Magneto. You don't want to be told that there's this other character who does some of the same stuff, and we're taking away the thing you actually like and telling you to play that instead. And that's if the faction you play was in the game from the start. It took four years to get actual Donegal Guards, the thing that I play, and I lucked out. House Marik literally never showed up. General Battuta posted:They're much higher effort than a book like, say, Prince of Havoc, where the grand finale battle royale against the Clans gets a totally colorless and tension-free half of a novel. The secret of the novels is that they never got worse, you just stopped being twelve. (Really gross stuff like DRT or Ghost War not included) Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 17:07 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 16:50
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Taerkar posted:The initial presentation was pretty bad too and the general reaction of the fans of Battletech were "You sold it out to make a CCG-esque game (after the previous attempt at a CCG didn't go well)". Click-tech was not welcome. The initial rollout of clix to classic fans at GenCon was "bad" in that they decided to hype Industrialmechs, and freaked everyone out with "time jump", but honestly, Wizkids was a decade ahead of the time in combining print fiction, online sources, and gaming resources. You had the Wizkids website with a fully-interactive map of the Republic, detailed bios of every planet, an every day updated news website that told you about the politics of the Republic. You also had a weekly published article detailing the history of every past faction (4 articles per faction), and then when the Blackout hit, they shut it all down and then brought it back after a week or so. And they kept updating the online website until the game ended in 2008. That was in addition to the new novels being released, and all the fiction stuff that came with the starter sets. And the interactive map of the Republic changed to reflect which factions controlled which planets, which was driven by player campaigns. For 2002, that was impressive. Also, many old time CBT players may not have welcomed it, but the amount of new players clix brought in easily dwarfed the existing Battletech community. You probably had a half million clix players at its height, I don't think Battletech has ever top 100,000. Defiance Industries posted:The problem with Stone is that he gets what he wants against the best interests of the people who give it to him and the reasons don't make sense. When you compare him to Ian Cameron, the differences look really bad. He and Albert Marik spent like 20 years bribing and undermining economies and ultimately signing mutually exclusive secret treaties. Stone just tells people to do things and they do it. Ultimately they recycled the same plot beat but didn't put as much work into it and it's just lazy by comparison. Why would anyone ACTUALLY disarm after seeing what happened in the Star League? Stone had the biggest stick on the block and had just taken down the Word of Blake. He was a household name, and the average Spheriod thought more positively of him than they did of their own local nobles, who had been mucking things up the last 70 years. It's less that he asked and received, it's more that he said "do this or you die" and his 50+ regiments and allies were standing behind him ready to kill. House Liao and Marik both tried to resist and smacked around. This was a guy with a big enough military force to beat on two Great Houses at the same time. Also, States might disarm because in history they do that all the time. No nation-state or empire ever maintains the maximum number of possible soldiers they can at any given time. Militaries are expensive, mechs especially so (and yes, I know FASAeconomics make no sense), and after 70 years of fighting, there's going to be an immense amount of pressure on Successor States to stop building mech regiments and to start repairing aqueducts, dams, roads, and farms that the Blakists just war crime'd. Hell, just look at most of Europe or Japan today to see countries that are continually spending less and less on their military in order to pay for their social safety net. Disarming doesn't mean all the militaries got rid of everything. They just went from having 100 regiments of Battlemechs (Which honestly they probably lost a bunch during the Jihad, House Liao wrote off any regiments the Republic destroyed in their brief war as destroyed during the Jihad, lolz) to 30-40, and mothballed another 3-10 for easy reactivation. Only the Republic apparently went crazy and demilitarized from 50 odd regiments to just 10, and they paid for it in blood. Again, Stone bought into his own hype and thought he really could. That or after David Lear died he just didn't care and let the Senate slash the military budget to save on taxes. quote:They'd be fine as a tertiary option. What you don't want is to be told this is who you play INSTEAD. It's the MvC:Infinite problem, if you play Magneto, you want to play Magneto. You don't want to be told that there's this other character who does some of the same stuff, and we're taking away the thing you actually like and telling you to play that instead. And that's if the faction you play was in the game from the start. It took four years to get actual Donegal Guards, the thing that I play, and I lucked out. House Marik literally never showed up. I can understand this problem, it sucks to not have your favorite faction be in there from the beginning. With that said, the original focus of the game was just the Republic territories, with descendants playing in their grandparent's uniforms. And no one told you to play it, Wizkids licensed Battletech right back out to FanPro and allowed Classic Battletech to be a thing. They could have totally said "gently caress you play clix" but they didn't, they supported both. Also to be fair, the Stormhammers were introduced by the 3rd expansion, so you could play Steiner cosplayers if you wanted to. Apparently, Marik was going to come in the next immediate expansion (Outlaws).
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May 4, 2021 17:28
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Stone had the biggest stick on the block and had just taken down the Word of Blake. He was a household name, and the average Spheriod thought more positively of him than they did of their own local nobles, who had been mucking things up the last 70 years. It's less that he asked and received, it's more that he said "do this or you die" and his 50+ regiments and allies were standing behind him ready to kill. These things are also all true about Ian Cameron. He actually had a bigger comparative advantage than Stone (like having an army triple the size of anyone else's and a fleet larger than every other navy put together), both the Age of War AND four different Houses having major civil wars to weaken them, and a House lord in his corner doing all kinds of shady poo poo that Stone never had to (like a bunch of illegal currency manipulation in the LC or a pump-and-dump scheme that caused an economic recession in the FS). And he needed all of this because people weren't interested in making themselves subordinate to a foreign government without massive incentives, you know, like how reasonable people behave. quote:Disarming doesn't mean all the militaries got rid of everything. They just went from having 100 regiments of Battlemechs (Which honestly they probably lost a bunch during the Jihad, House Liao wrote off any regiments the Republic destroyed in their brief war as destroyed during the Jihad, lolz) to 30-40, and mothballed another 3-10 for easy reactivation. Yeah, stopping at 3-10 is the problem, it makes our characters look like they learned nothing from the First Succession War. Oh, the Combine had a bunch of secret regiments and so the Federated Suns is about to collapse after an rear end-fisting? What a surprise. The fall of the Republic should have meant massive armies springing up from nowhere but apparently nobody but Liao and Kurita know how to do that. quote:Also to be fair, the Stormhammers were introduced by the 3rd expansion, so you could play Steiner cosplayers if you wanted to. Which is the reason I wasn't interested, I wanted to play the 2nd Donegal Guards, not the wish.com version of their parent formation's parent formation. Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Apparently, Marik was going to come in the next immediate expansion (Outlaws). I don't think it really speaks well to how the clix folks valued Marik fans that it would have taken them... eight years? To get included when we got four different Clan Wolf spinoffs, and that the set isn't even named after them.
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May 4, 2021 18:48
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In 2000-2001 as a teenager with lots of time on my hands I liked the crunchiness of classic Battletech and wasn't interested in Clickytech at all. The way the timejump was handled -- initially it seemed like there would not be any "classic" universe to play in and the Word of Blake was just an "LOL nukes" excuse to reset the universe into something unfamiliar -- made Clickytech seem like all that more of an unwelcome intrusion. Eventually it became clear that the licence for Classic BT would continue but that was far from obvious in the aftermath of FASA's collapse and the announcement of the new timeline. (Keep in mind there were far fewer places to discuss it online too, there was much less information flow back then.) In retrospect Clickytech was a golden opportunity for the franchise. It's a shame that the execution ("WOB blew everything up," timeskip, focus on ROTS and weird unfamiliar factions) turned off the existing playerbase from a universe lore perspective. Although BT players are groggy so maybe a big chunk probably never would have been happy even if Clickytech had started right in 3064 with the FedCom Civil War...
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May 4, 2021 18:48
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Defiance Industries posted:The secret of the novels is that they never got worse, you just stopped being twelve. (Really gross stuff like DRT or Ghost War not included) No I just reread a bunch of them and there's definitely a quality delta between the highs and the lows.
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May 4, 2021 18:50
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Well yeah, WotB and HttD are both actually decent reads. But Charette totally blows out the quality curve, you have to exclude those as outliers.
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May 4, 2021 18:54
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Defiance Industries posted:These things are also all true about Ian Cameron. He actually had a bigger comparative advantage than Stone (like having an army triple the size of anyone else's and a fleet larger than every other navy put together), both the Age of War AND four different Houses having major civil wars to weaken them, and a House lord in his corner doing all kinds of shady poo poo that Stone never had to (like a bunch of illegal currency manipulation in the LC or a pump-and-dump scheme that caused an economic recession in the FS). And he needed all of this because people weren't interested in making themselves subordinate to a foreign government without massive incentives, you know, like how reasonable people behave. But Stone wasn't making anyone subservient to him. He was just setting up his own nation out of the planets most devastated by the Jihad and a sore point for centuries between all the Great Houses. The Lyrans got to jettison a troublesome secession-happy region, Davion did the same, Liao and Marik fought to keep their poo poo but they got beat up so who cares. The Hegemony worlds needed a lot of work to recover and the Great Houses didn't want to spend the money on it. quote:Yeah, stopping at 3-10 is the problem, it makes our characters look like they learned nothing from the First Succession War. Oh, the Combine had a bunch of secret regiments and so the Federated Suns is about to collapse after an rear end-fisting? What a surprise. The fall of the Republic should have meant massive armies springing up from nowhere but apparently nobody but Liao and Kurita know how to do that. You're assuming leaders should always be rational but that's just not how history works. If Leaders were rational Takashi Kurita wouldn't have gone after the Wolf's Dragoon's during 4th Succession War, Katrina wouldn't have tried to usurp her brother's thrones, Victor wouldn't have led from the front Every Single Battle, etc. etc. When we go off of Field Manual 3145, only the Combine really comes off as being really low in terms of regiments; House Davion and Steiner has lost 15-20 regiments apiece between 3140-3145 from multiple invasions (and betrayals), and Liao is sitting pretty at 51. And House Marik has the excuse that they never really disarmed because all those little statelets were constantly fighting each other, and their Civil War probably destroyed a bunch more. quote:Which is the reason I wasn't interested, I wanted to play the 2nd Donegal Guards, not the wish.com version of their parent formation's parent formation. 6 years, and there were only 2 Clan Wolf spinoffs (Steel Wolves and Wolf Hunters, not to mention the Steel Wolves disappeared when the Wolf Hunters appeared, so there was still only 1 Wolf faction at a time). Wizkids wanted to bring in factions as the story warranted. The names of the sets also only occasionally alluded to whoever was being brought in (Liao Incursion brought in House Liao, but Firepower brought in House Kurita, Annihilation Clan Nova Cat, and Domination Rasalhague Dominion, so.... eh?) I'll grant you, they probably should've brought all the major factions back in when they rebooted the game rules... but I get why they didn't. They were trying to make the game flow with the story. An interesting choice I think. Carbolic posted:Although BT players are groggy so maybe a big chunk probably never would have been happy even if Clickytech had started right in 3064 with the FedCom Civil War... On one of the Classic Battletech facebook groups there was a grognard chat where they said "What should Wizkids have done to make us like Dark Age?" and 90% of what got posted was literally what Wizkids actually did, lol. Crazy Joe Wilson fucked around with this message at 19:30 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 19:27
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:But Stone wasn't making anyone subservient to him. He was just setting up his own nation out of the planets most devastated by the Jihad and a sore point for centuries between all the Great Houses. The Lyrans got to jettison a troublesome secession-happy region, Davion did the same, Liao and Marik fought to keep their poo poo but they got beat up so who cares. The Hegemony worlds needed a lot of work to recover and the Great Houses didn't want to spend the money on it. He was set up as a hegemon and then got to dictate the size of everyone else's army, that looks pretty subservient to me. FM:3085 specifically notes that House Kurita wants to raise new regiments but the Republic will not let them. Also, what rebellions was House Davion facing on Achernar or Addicks? quote:You're assuming leaders should always be rational but that's just not how history works. If Leaders were rational Takashi Kurita wouldn't have gone after the Wolf's Dragoon's during 4th Succession War, Katrina wouldn't have tried to usurp her brother's thrones, Victor wouldn't have led from the front Every Single Battle, etc. etc. They shouldn't never be rational, either. People make mistakes, but it shouldn't be the exact same mistake that their government made before that resulted in the most famous massacre in history. Yvonne's big talking point at the end of the Jihad was "never again" and rebuilding the army around a new defensive paradigm, not "let's disarm so the Combine can murder us." When the decisions that get someone to a bad place aren't reasonable ones, the audience doesn't feel any sympathy for them and so the whole thing is rendered pointless. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 4, 2021 |
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May 4, 2021 20:07
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Defiance Industries posted:Addicks I wondered for a brief moment if this was some weird typo or joke, but no, there's a planet called Addicks.
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May 4, 2021 20:19
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Always cool when the old CBT crowd shits all over Dark Age and its fans not realizing they're turning a lot of the old Clix players away from converting to BT because they don't want to deal with the grognards always being angry. Can't tell you how many friends who played clix explicitly pointed that out as why they steered away from their local BT group once Clix was shut down. Lol I love the Dark Age and I got into the game through MechAssault, put that gatekeeping excuse away. Ghost War is so bad PTN didn't finish it in his Let's Read, A Call to Arms is mediocre at best, Flight of the Falcon is bad (and I love the Falcons!), and Blood of the Isle is #11 not 10. There are a small handful of okay books until Scorpion Jar and then most are good but prior to that is dire.
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May 4, 2021 21:31
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