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big cummers ONLY posted:Does anyone have experience with Catalyst customer service? Try this thread on their forums https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,64290.0.html And complain in it that you still haven't gotten a response after two weeks.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:00
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Couple of things Anyone have a Marauder or 2 they might be interested in parting with? The command lance has been out of stock here (UK) for forever. Anyone want the catalyst  coupon from the AGOAC box? I can't really use it because of crazy catalyst shipping and it seems a waste to just bin.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:45
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I do have an unallocated Marauder but my brain has decided that they are rare and special beasts that are difficult to get. So what you should do is come to Gaelcon in Dublin at the end of October and buy one out of the back of my mate Dwayne's car.
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Oct 4, 2023 19:55
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Z the IVth posted:Couple of things I will have an extra legendary Marauder when the KS ships, if you can wait that long.
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Oct 4, 2023 20:01
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Z the IVth posted:Couple of things PM'ed.
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Oct 4, 2023 21:34
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So when you say "Marauder or 2" does that mean multiple Marauders or are Marauder IIs up for consideration?
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Oct 4, 2023 21:35
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I'm in a similar boat. Can't find the Inner Sphere Command Lance available anywhere in the world, and madly want a Marauder. And yeah, that $20 voucher is useless to me too. (The postage they quoted to ship the new TRO to NZ was $169 US. 0_0 )
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Oct 4, 2023 21:43
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Airspace posted:So when you say "Marauder or 2" does that mean multiple Marauders or are Marauder IIs up for consideration? Marauder IICs are easily available as are Marauder 2s - seems Catalyst recently restocked their entire range here except the Command Lance for some reason  Defiance Industries posted:I will have an extra legendary Marauder when the KS ships, if you can wait that long. I would hope the Command Lance would have been restocked before then. If not I might take you up on that kind offer.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:07
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Yeah just use the $20 voucher on something digital, a rulebook or a recognition guide or something like that that you don't have already, that's what I did.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:35
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Marauders are a rarity for sure. I wound up with 8 Timber Wolves (3 different sculpts), 8 Blackjacks (3 different sculpts), 8 Vipers, and I still only have one Marauder (not counting the original hero Marauder which is barely a resculpt) and one Stinger. I've pulled so many Vipers out of blind boxes, holy poo poo. Everything else in the IS Command Lance has another source. The Marauder and Stinger are unique to that box. I think the Stinger's actually the rarest 'Mech in my collection, lol. Not counting the stuff from the Proliferation Cycle box because I could get more of those.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:38
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They really just need to let me buy a company of bug mechs. 4 locusts, 4 stingers, 4 wasps. It's perfect in its elegance.
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Oct 4, 2023 22:44
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Defiance Industries posted:They really just need to let me buy a company of bug mechs. 4 locusts, 4 stingers, 4 wasps. It's perfect in its elegance. Yeah, I'd love more lights and mediums in my collection, there's never enough it seems. If we're doing goon trades maybe I'll throw up some of my assaults I'd want to swap after the KS delivery comes.
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Oct 4, 2023 23:00
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Aren't the stinger and the locust like the most common mechs in 3015-3025?
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Oct 5, 2023 00:16
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I got one too many Ice Ferrets if someone wants to trade for something, preferably another Clan unit. Edit: ^ Wasp and Stingers I think, then followed by Locust? Not really sure what's third place.
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Oct 5, 2023 00:16
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ilmucche posted:Aren't the stinger and the locust like the most common mechs in 3015-3025? The Locust is the most common mech in existence, with hundreds of thousands of them having been built. The Stinger is #2, with 200,000 of them constructed just during the Star League period. There's also a shitload of Wasps; the design's so old it was the test bed for jump jets. The Phoenix Hawk and the Griffin are the two most common mediums. In TRO: 3025 they talked up the sheer quantity of PHX that were built, while they emphasized that the Griffin is used in basically every military unit in the Inner Sphere. In the Rec Guides, they switch that: there are PHX in every unit and there have been shitloads of Griffins built. For heavies and assaults it's both in black and white: Archer (nearly 100,000 built by the Star League alone) and Stalker (no number given).
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Oct 5, 2023 00:34
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What does an 'average' IS lance look like circa 3050? What roles does each mech fulfill?
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Oct 5, 2023 01:02
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Kesper North posted:What does an 'average' IS lance look like circa 3050? What roles does each mech fulfill? Depends on the lance. Scout lance, fire lance, command lance, assault lance? As they climbed out of the Succession Wars, you saw less in the way of "whatever we have laying around" plugged into lances, and more thought towards actualy designing a complementary roster. But it varies so much by House and unit. I always thought the combined arms side of the AFFC was underwritten in the books. You never much saw it in the fiction, at least at the tactical level you'd expect.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:48
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Kesper North posted:What does an 'average' IS lance look like circa 3050? What roles does each mech fulfill? In 3050, the Inner Sphere was still building their units around the classic "trooper mediums." Which were typically utterly devastated by the Clans and their trooper heavies (which were as fast if not faster than most succession wars trooper mediums). They didn't really start to develop new, anti-Clan paradigms until 3055-3058, and even then they were still throwing poo poo at the wall to try to figure out if anything actually worked.
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Oct 5, 2023 01:56
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GD_American posted:Depends on the lance. Scout lance, fire lance, command lance, assault lance? Can't believe that Stackpole did a bad job of portraying the details of the universe. It's almost like he doesn't read anything that he did not write.
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Oct 5, 2023 02:20
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Defiance Industries posted:The Locust is the most common mech in existence, with hundreds of thousands of them having been built. The Stinger is #2, with 200,000 of them constructed just during the Star League period. There's also a shitload of Wasps; the design's so old it was the test bed for jump jets. I thought that was the Wasp, from Sarna - "Even after the sheer destruction of the Succession Wars, the Wasp still remained the most numerous 'Mech ahead of the Locust and Stinger;..." Case of conflicting/outdated lore or is just how it's phrased? The LCT page says a line about being one of the most common, but not where it ranks.
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Oct 5, 2023 02:29
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Hmm, sounds like the entry on the Wasp is wrong and needs to be fixed then. At no point do any of my books suggest that the Wasp is more common than the other two bug mechs, in fact 3025 makes a point that the Wasp lost a big contract to the Stinger.
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Oct 5, 2023 02:37
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Defiance Industries posted:Hmm, sounds like the entry on the Wasp is wrong and needs to be fixed then. At no point do any of my books suggest that the Wasp is more common than the other two bug mechs, in fact 3025 makes a point that the Wasp lost a big contract to the Stinger. Oh cool. I have a 1990-ish print of the TRO: 3025, I'll take a look at that tonight as well.
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Oct 5, 2023 03:22
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None of BattleTech's logistics should ever be taken as real numbers. It just doesn't make sense. 'Mechs are often designed, prototyped, and enter production in a single year. Sometimes their successors come out less than a decade after. The Atlas was produced in 2755, the Atlas II was designed and produced in 2765. The Atlas was "Everything Kerensky requested" despite the fact nearly every significant Royal technology already existed by the time it was first produced. Several of the SLDF's most famous 'Mechs aren't designed or produced until after the Amaris coup began in 2766. The OG Marauders were all SLDF royals. The Marauder we all know didn't enter production until 2819. The "notoriously bad" Rifleman that fought during the Amaris Coup was armed with two PPCs. The autocannon-armed version we all know and love doesn't appear until 2770. The Rifleman II was designed to replace the brand new RFL-3N and manufactured in 2773. The JagerMech was designed and produced in 2774. The Rifleman III was designed and manufactured in 2776. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 04:18
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PoptartsNinja posted:None of BattleTech's logistics should ever be taken as real numbers. It just doesn't make sense. 'Mechs are often designed, prototyped, and enter production in a single year. Sometimes their successors come out less than a decade after. The Atlas was produced in 2755, the Atlas II was designed and produced in 2765. The Atlas was "Everything Kerensky requested" despite the fact nearly every significant Royal technology already existed by the time it was first produced. The original MAD-3R was introduced in 2612 according to TR:3025 (it explicitly refers to the model number), so I'm not sure where the 2819 comes from in the Master Unit List. The Royals are a retcon to explain why the earliest sourcebooks (like the House books, TR:3025, Star League, and 20 Year Update) which were introduced before TR:2750 in 1989 talked about the Star League as having qualitatively superior 'Mechs but still referenced Phoenix Hawks, Warhammers, etc. The RFL-2N with two PPCs is a weird one, which I would call an unnecessary retcon. TR:3025 describes a progression from a lighter original model (which now has stats as the RFL-1N) that started production in 2505, to a newer model with better lasers and more heat sinks, and finally to the RFL-3N in 2770. It further implies that a PPC-armed Rifleman was a novelty invented by Hanse Davion.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:11
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So what my copy says is "The MAD-3R Marauder is considered one of the most effective BattleMechs in existence. When first built by GM in the early 2600s..." Like a lot of the other times that they had to walk things back, the writers have interpreted those intro date statements to mean the general design, not that exact model. The Orion and Griffin both got similar treatments, off the top of my head. It probably could have stood as-is if they had dated it earlier, put the dates for stuff in TRO: 2750 like the Champion and Lancelot later, or not had the lines about special fancy armor. Defiance Industries fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Oct 5, 2023 |
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Oct 5, 2023 05:18
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This is why my first thought was "Conflicting/outdated lore..." It's a mess and always has been. Wiseman has strait up said "I pulled those numbers out of my rear end" before. Given they had to name and write lore about the entire Inner Sphere at some point, it's going to be a spaghetti ball of contradictions.
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Oct 5, 2023 05:20
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It's why I say not to take anything BattleTech logistics too seriously. Like the JumpShip count post succession wars. That number only makes sense if they're only counting the military JumpShips under the direct control of the great houses. And even then only barely. It should take 2-10 years to prototype a 'Mech, and longer to get anything in numbers. I've just been fighting with dates a lot thanks to my current LP. There're more than half a dozen 'Mechs that are already extinct by 2763, and none of them is the Mackie (which was apparently a tech favorite and super easy to modify despite its lack of variants).
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Oct 5, 2023 05:36
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The original TRO:3025 is so full of inaccuracies both to itself and to anything that came after it that if you run into an inconsistency it's significantly more likely that 3025 is wrong than the other thing. I think my favorite is the Banshee, which if I'm remembering correctly according to TRO:3025 debuts a number of years before the Mackie does. I might have the wrong mech in mind but I definitely remember that at least one that had that error.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:10
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Strobe posted:The original TRO:3025 is so full of inaccuracies both to itself and to anything that came after it that if you run into an inconsistency it's significantly more likely that 3025 is wrong than the other thing. “Inaccuracies” is not the word I would use. You can’t blame the book for not anticipating future retcons of its content. TRO:3025 is one of the most foundational sourcebooks for Battletech, if not the most foundational sourcebook. My point is that it would be nice if the writers would avoid contradicting it for no good reason, like putting in a PPC-armed Rifleman-2N centuries before TRO:3025 implies the concept was first seriously attempted.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:33
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Nah, burn the FASA era stuff imho
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Oct 5, 2023 07:37
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Carbolic posted:“Inaccuracies” is not the word I would use. You can’t blame the book for not anticipating future retcons of its content. The good reason is that it's full of inaccuracies even within its own pages let alone anything that came after trying to fix the mess it made. Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:Nah, burn the FASA era stuff imho
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Oct 5, 2023 07:48
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TRO 3025 was literally making up poo poo that would be expounded on 10,000% later on. If continuity bugs were a huge priority for CGL (they shouldn't be), they could have revised stuff when they started selling PDFs with updated artwork.
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Oct 5, 2023 07:58
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They did. There's a lot of stuff originally printed in TRO:3025 that is not printed in any current product, like literally any reference to hard numbers of production units that started this line of conversation. Deleting and rewriting entries to remove those is absolutely a revision.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:05
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GD_American posted:TRO 3025 was literally making up poo poo that would be expounded on 10,000% later on. "It's too late now" is not an excuse to give up on fact checking. CGL has had staff constantly working for years on this to finally settle on a game universe that doesn't flip the table every time Jordan Weisman wants to try something new, or when one of the writers is too far up their own rear end to realize they're not commissioned to drive the universe wherever they please and alienate players along the way. You do a disservice to their work by dismissing it as low priority.
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Oct 5, 2023 08:18
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Exact numbers aside, my 1994 copy of TRO:3025 doesn't actually say anything about ranking the most produced bug light. Just that they're all very common survivors and were made in large numbers. Wonder where those specific claims about most and second most produced designs originated. Maybe the updated 3025 or possibly the SL era TRO?
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Oct 5, 2023 08:48
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I wonder how much of the distorted view of development comes from thinking everything is like WW2 where you can crank out random vehicles and prototypes on an annual basis without realising that the typical WW2 tank is less technically demanding than a modern car and assuming sci-fi development works the same way. If it was realistic you would have stories of overpriced mechs taking 3x the expected development time, 10x the cost and have engines that don't work when it's too cold and armor plates fall off in the rain. Also the S&P agreement stipulates that all maintenance work requires the mech to be shipped back to Hesperus II.
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Oct 5, 2023 09:59
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we can all agree there are many bug mechs
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Oct 5, 2023 12:12
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PoptartsNinja posted:It's why I say not to take anything BattleTech logistics too seriously. Like the JumpShip count post succession wars. That number only makes sense if they're only counting the military JumpShips under the direct control of the great houses. And even then only barely. BattleTech has fallen into the same trap as Pokemon where they just can't help but keep creating new designs that do the same thing as old designs. Clan Wolf in the IlClan era developed ten new designs amidst a migration of only a couple % of their entire population, while fighting multiple wars. Clan Jade Falcon has gutted their scientist caste repeatedly yet created 10+ new designs in the same window of time. It's ridiculous.
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Oct 5, 2023 12:52
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Also worth remembering that the TROs are kind of implied to be in-universe publications and therefore quite likely just wrong.
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Oct 5, 2023 13:28
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Strobe posted:The good reason is that it's full of inaccuracies even within its own pages let alone anything that came after trying to fix the mess it made. Are you really arguing that there is no difference between “TRO:3025’s ‘Mech production numbers are a problem for the in-universe logic so we’ll quietly change/ignore them to make the universe consistent” and “TRO:3025 explicitly says the second Rifleman model had lasers for its main weaponry, and indicates that PPC-armed Riflemans didn’t become a thing until Hanse Davion, but we’ll throw in a historical RFL-2N with PPCs anyway”? Battletech owes a lot of its early popularity and subsequent longevity to TRO:3025. It’s a classic that deserves respect even if some of the universe details had to be tweaked for consistency.
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Oct 5, 2023 13:29
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