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StrixNebulosa posted:This is on sale for the next 22~ hours. I played the game for 12 hours back in 2018 and remember liking it, but thinking it was quite slow. I then moved onto XCOM and forgot about it entirely. The DLC is good if you like the game, but that feel of "slow" is still here and that's not everyone's cup of tea. When the game launched some of the slow was technical stuff -- pauses between attacks and animations, too many glam cams, slow plodding mechs. That stuff has been improved. The pauses mostly got eliminated (other than the hitches that happen from excessively violent chain-reaction deaths), there are are settings to turn off the glam cams, and spacebar speeds up animations. But there is still an inherent slowness to it. Xcom is a combat puzzle; if you're playing well you resolve fights pretty fast with a good flanking move and have a sort of control over how things play out. Battletech just doesn't work like that. It's about tactical attrition and making favorable trades. The game is slow because mechs die slow. And that doesn't even touch on the mechbay and how much time you can spend trying to come up with better mousetraps.
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Mar 4, 2024 02:25
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Klyith posted:It's about tactical attrition and making favorable trades. The game is slow because mechs die slow. this is a good way to put it. However, specifically about the DLC, I'll say it adds a lot more variety and that matters more than it might sound at first. At least for me, part of the base game's slow feel (which I agree with, I just liked it anyway) was stuff like 'I keep seeing the same mechs everywhere on the same map. Where's something new?' and simply building out more content helps reduce that feeling a lot. There's a lot more mechs, tilesets, unique missions, etc. It's more engaging, even if it may not be strictly faster. (Though sometimes it is, the overall lethality level goes up so fights can resolve quicker. On the other hand this can mean more mechlab time, so maybe it's a wash?) now I don't think the dlc is going to flip anyone's opinions a 180 but it really does polish off a lot more rough edges than it might seem. and I think that variety of content lifts the whole experience up. I'd also say this is part of what drives these enormous mods. the other part of course is insane TT fans 
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Mar 4, 2024 02:38
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Klyith posted:The DLC is good if you like the game, but that feel of "slow" is still here and that's not everyone's cup of tea. Psion posted:this is a good way to put it. These two posts are extremely good, thank you. I've let the idea spin a bit and just nabbed the DLC (the 3 gameplay ones) - I'll give the base campaign a shot, vanilla flavor, see how I feel. If I like it, woo! If I don't, my budget can handle tossing 25$ away and I'm still happy to finally own the "complete" game.
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Mar 4, 2024 03:30
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Klyith posted:And that doesn't even touch on the mechbay and how much time you can spend trying to come up with better mousetraps. The rest of your post was an excellent summary of the flow of Battletech's gameplay, but I'd like to zero in on this point a bit too. An integral part of Battletech that isn't present in most tactical games is what I'd basically call the Pokemon effect. A lot of tactical games give you things on a fixed schedule, or have you determine the development of your arsenal of tools via things like research. In Battletech, a lot of your power advancement is achieved by salvaging the corpses of your fallen foes, which means that every single enemy appearing against you is potentially simultaneously a challenge and an enormous opportunity. If a big scary enemy 'mech shows up, there's a curious mixture of "oh poo poo, I have to deal with a Marauder" and "oh poo poo, it's a Marauder, I want that" that happens. You then get to weigh pros and cons of trying to remove a potentially dangerous enemy from the board as fast as possible or whether to try to softball it to keep it intact to salvage more at the cost of potentially taking on more danger to do so. It also has ramifications for the campaign map where if you tread water on mission difficulties that are easy and comfortable you will see relatively modest forward progress(because you're only running into 'mechs that aren't much heavier or better than what you're using), but if you push the envelope and take on greater risk you're almost guaranteed to run into something or other that can give you a big power spike if you can steal it. Modded playthroughs kick these aspects into overdrive by adding 10 billion mechs and additional build options that supercharge the customization aspect of the game and make things like "I want to go fight the Davions because I want to steal x mech that they primarily field" into considerations.
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Mar 4, 2024 03:58
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Kanos posted:The rest of your post was an excellent summary of the flow of Battletech's gameplay, but I'd like to zero in on this point a bit too. Community Content in BTA adds some REALLY bonkers 'mechs to collect. Kodiak-BN is so much fun. It pretty much insta-deletes most enemies is one volley.
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Mar 4, 2024 18:25
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very general overview of the three major megamods: BEX: mechanically the closest to vanilla, just adds Lots More Stuff, keeps pretty close to lore. generally does not melt my laptop Roguetech: i have not really looked as hard at it but the general gist i get is that they try to be mechanically closer to tabletop, and generally lore-abiding. mechanically very different, because you need to change a lot to make HBStech play like CBT. adds a whole lot of stuff. would probably melt my laptop a little BTA3062: adds all the things, all of them. does not care about lore (but has settings to disable the completely-lore-unfriendly stuff). changes the mechanics a shitload, in some ways that i think are very cool and in some ways i haven't made up my mind about yet. kinda melts my laptop a little because my laptop is terrible
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Mar 5, 2024 00:05
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I think you have Roguetech and BTA mixed up there. Roguetech has literal transformers and superheavy urbanmechs and Macross flashpoints.
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Mar 5, 2024 00:18
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oh maybe, i only played one of them a bit for long enough to overheat, and didn't try the other, and this was a while ago. switched to BEX because less overheating, played the poo poo out of that one
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Mar 5, 2024 00:41
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Yeah rougetevh is the kitchen sink one that includes lots of fan idea bullshit and no quality or balancing editing
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Mar 5, 2024 00:57
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If you're just playing this for the first time I'd do the main campaign before going too off the rails. The story is reasonably OK and everyone should suffer through raising the dead at least once. If you want some mods to get started, use BEX since that is really just vanilla+ and the campaign plays normally with it. Beyond that BEX < BTA < RT for options, weirdness, and canon breaking. I personally find BTA to be the sweet spot since RT is a) weird and b) is designed around being a poverty simulator and I find it to be frustrating since I just want to put all the weird poo poo in mechs and it costs too much  You can play the main campaign in both BTA and RT via flashpoints, but really sort of waters down the experience imo.
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Mar 5, 2024 01:27
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BTA has artillery and makes light scout mechs have a use again. And artillery is the best.
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Mar 5, 2024 03:25
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I never realized raising the dead had a reputation for being hard until I googled it just now. I beat it on my first play through and never had an issue with it.
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Mar 5, 2024 03:29
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M_Gargantua posted:I never realized raising the dead had a reputation for being hard until I googled it just now. I beat it on my first play through and never had an issue with it. raising the dead part 1 is easy, part 2 can be annoying, especially with BTA/RT when you've got a bunch of nobody pilots in stock starleague mechs honestly liberating smitheon is the one I routinely have the most troubles with, which is like mission 4 in the campaign. hot planet, little cover, lots of enemies. It's not hard if you just just tell Kamea where she can stick her optional objectives, but recovering all the crates while constantly overheating is tough with bad pilots and/or mechs in the early game
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Mar 5, 2024 03:45
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Azhais posted:raising the dead part 1 is easy It's easy if you figure out the gimmick quickly, or have an all-energy loadout. IIRC I had a nail-biter on the pt 1 because my mechs were kinda skimpy on ammo, and some of my guns started to run dry. I could easily see that becoming an impossible scenario for the hesitant. But yeah, Smithon is the big ball-buster mission most people have problems with. Even if you've been slow-rolling the campaign and have better than normal mechs, it gives you a really difficult fork between the objective APCs and the enemy mechs. The other campaign mission I remember being tough is the late-game one where you're defending a dropship from getting war crime'd. It's not really different from a regular base defense mission except a) the enemy gets a whole lot of high-offense mechs b) iirc it's a pass/fail, unlike a normal base defense where letting a building get blown up isn't the end of the world Klyith fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 05:25
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Getting a Marauder (or three) greatly helped with the campaign missions, especially before they fixed the head cap bonus. A Marauder with three AC-2++ was a Tier-1 mech when the game first came out.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:50
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Battletech report: prologue/tutorial missions poorly paced and slow, but I made it through and turned on the speed toggles and I'm several missions into being a mercenary and having fun! Especially because the game is WAY snappier and responsive performance-wise than I remember in 2018, missions just zoom along and it's fantastic. ps dekker lived, but wow I don't know what to do with tiny robots in this game
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Mar 6, 2024 17:12
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StrixNebulosa posted:ps dekker lived, but wow I don't know what to do with tiny robots in this game If you're playing vanilla, you keep a Firestarter or two and sell the rest ASAP.
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Mar 6, 2024 17:28
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StrixNebulosa posted:ps dekker lived, but wow I don't know what to do with tiny robots in this game The spider you start out with is nearly worthless, but a thing you can do with it until you get a better 4th mech is: remove the MLas in favor of 2x SLas remove 2 jumpjets add armor Now it won't be one-shot by a stray breeze, and enemies will generally dislike shooting at it if they have other targets. The AI does a basic offense vs HP calculation when deciding what to shoot at, glass cannons are prized targets. What you do with it: mostly sensor lock to improve your terrible early-game accuracy, but occasionally run up and punch something that's braced because melee cancels brace. Only do this when you have initiative control (ie the opponent has already moved, you can punch and then run away before they can smash you) or against targets you aren't worried about being punched back (other lights). McGavin posted:If you're playing vanilla, you keep a Firestarter or two and sell the rest ASAP. Eh, Heavy Metal makes the long-term Firestarter kinda redundant IMO? Vulkan can do the melee / disabler thing better, and phoenix hawk is better at jumpy backstabs that can core heavies. Firestarter is still good and all, especially against mediums for initiative control, but less than it was. Jenner is also very good against mediums, though you don't want to put + gear on it due to how easily it loses arms.
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Mar 6, 2024 18:48
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Klyith posted:Eh, Heavy Metal makes the long-term Firestarter kinda redundant IMO? Vulkan can do the melee / disabler thing better, and phoenix hawk is better at jumpy backstabs that can core heavies. Firestarter is still good and all, especially against mediums for initiative control, but less than it was. I wouldn't know. I usually have a full lance of Centurions or better by the time I find a Vulcan so I've never used it. Meanwhile, Firestarters are everywhere.
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Mar 7, 2024 04:06
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M_Gargantua posted:BTA has artillery and makes light scout mechs have a use again. What is the use they have?
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Mar 7, 2024 05:11
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McGavin posted:I wouldn't know. I usually have a full lance of Centurions or better by the time I find a Vulcan so I've never used it. Meanwhile, Firestarters are everywhere. Weird! I find firestarters to be one of the rarer mechs. Vulkans aren't super common either, but there's at least two variants. I suppose if you strongly prefer a few types of missions that could account for it. I know some people basically only take battle & assassination missions, which would tilt the mech types you see. (You can get a Vulkan from the Heavy Metal bonus crate, TBQH that's when I've really used them the most.) edit: lmao oh right! There's a reason vulkans aren't super-rare for me: I have the cfixes mod which fixes some mechs having missing tags, which means they rarely get picked to spawn. If you are tired of Centurions and want to see more Vulkans (and every other DLC mech) in missions, install the cfixes mod. Your game will be infested with Crabs! Klyith fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 05:20
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Jarvisi posted:What is the use they have? They can actually survive since evasion doesn't decay every time you get shot at. Combined with the ability to sprint and shoot (at an accuracy penalty) light units can be ludicrously hard to hit, zooming around while giving line of sight for longer ranged heavier firepower or getting behind bigger mechs to blast through the rear armour.
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Mar 7, 2024 05:59
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I think COILs were HBS' attempt to try to make Light mechs more useful by making a weapon entirely dependent on how much evasion you could get but when you have speedy mediums like the Jenner or Assassin, there wasn't much point for even that sadly.ro5s posted:They can actually survive since evasion doesn't decay every time you get shot at. Combined with the ability to sprint and shoot (at an accuracy penalty) light units can be ludicrously hard to hit, zooming around while giving line of sight for longer ranged heavier firepower or getting behind bigger mechs to blast through the rear armour. There's also the fact that with a fully unlocked mechbay you can use them for a wide variety of builds so you're not just stuck with the gimmick shutdown spamming Firestarter once you have a good heavy/assault lance built up. Stuff like stealth plated speeders that can evasion tank safely thanks to having 9 or more pips, Clanner heavy laser carriers that can backstab or kneecap an assault with a single called shot, the ability to slap XL engines or ferro-fibrous on everything so you can have a lot more survivability, like there is a ridiculous amount of things you can do with them. Plus with the expanded lance size right from the start you never have the main issue that comes up with vanilla BT where you constantly go "why waste one of my four slots on a light when my Steiner Scout Lance is right there?" BEX sort of has this as well, you don't have the open mechbay but if you have Sim difficulty and expanded lances on means you kinda gravitate more towards lights as well since they don't cost nearly as much to drop tonnage wise and, again, you have more room to use them without wasting a drop slot and it has a lighter version of BTA's evasion tweaks, where there's a base chance to keep your evasion after a miss, while ace pilots or certain mechs with the right quirks have a much higher chance. Warad fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 06:03
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BTA is extremely different from the vanilla game's meta in general. The higher tech level, the existence of 'mech variants with advanced construction materials like endo/XL engines, and double heat sinks existing means that the general firepower level is tremendously higher, which means that simply planting your feet and soaking up incoming enemy firepower is much more dangerous. This coupled with a lack of evasion decay means that very often a zippy mech running around generating a ton of evasion pips is actually more durable against massed firepower than a slow bulky heavy. Sprinting and shooting also means that zippy 'mechs are really good at getting backstabs. In BTA I rarely run assaults because I don't like dropping slow 'mechs at all, whereas in vanilla the assault lance is the inevitable endgame. Kanos fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 08:11
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if dropping four hundred tons of king crab is wrong, I don't want to be right
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Mar 7, 2024 08:18
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Kanos posted:This coupled with a lack of evasion decay means that very often a zippy mech running around generating a ton of evasion pips is actually more durable against massed firepower than a slow bulky heavy. * Durability not guaranteed if zippy mech stays within kickboxing distance of an Atlas
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Mar 7, 2024 13:50
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Psion posted:if dropping four hundred tons of king crab is wrong, I don't want to be right This is why I named my mercenary company "Deadliest Catch".
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Mar 7, 2024 14:24
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Latest run has been the "Wait Whose Name Here" company, though "[REDACTED]" will probably be funnier.
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Mar 7, 2024 15:09
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I got the Argo!   All it cost was setting everything I own on fire 
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Mar 7, 2024 15:59
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There's not much way to balance up lights without the bigger drops mod to allow more than 4 mechs. The main thing that makes lights useful in the TTG is that you can field 2 Jenners for the cost of an Atlas (by BV cost). And that math only balances because the TTG has way more swingy RNG than the HBS game; your one Atlas can get disabled by lucky crits. As much as I think it's cool and interesting that BTA and RT return to that balance and make lights have a big place, I don't blame HBS for not doing it themselves. I'm not sure it makes for a better game overall. Warad posted:I think COILs were HBS' attempt to try to make Light mechs more useful Missions with tonnage limits or that strongly incentivized fast mechs were their attempt, but they got pushback from the people who like their 4 assault squad. Warad posted:speedy mediums like the Jenner lol Jenner so good it gets promoted to honorary medium
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Mar 7, 2024 17:17
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Klyith posted:lol Jenner so good it gets promoted to honorary medium Both it and the Panther, so sayeth the Dragon  I mean hell, if the Cicada can be technically classed as medium... Warad fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 18:06
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So quoth the RVN-3L, Arrow IV.
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Mar 7, 2024 18:22
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Klyith posted:There's not much way to balance up lights without the bigger drops mod to allow more than 4 mechs. The main thing that makes lights useful in the TTG is that you can field 2 Jenners for the cost of an Atlas (by BV cost). And that math only balances because the TTG has way more swingy RNG than the HBS game; your one Atlas can get disabled by lucky crits. The vanilla game's core mechanics are simply set up to not reward mobility very much at all, especially later on when you're fighting more enemies that can shoot you at a time that will have no problems stripping your evasion and killing you in one or two hits because you're a light mech fighting heavies/assaults. HBS never actually attempted to address the real problems for why lights and mediums failed to keep up in the later game, they just added mission types that forced you to use those flawed units, which both doesn't address the issue and also pisses people off because you're forcing them to use something that they know isn't very good. Non-decaying evasion and sprint-and-shoot are way more important BTA changes to make small 'mechs viable than increased drop numbers. If you gave me 12 drop slots but kept the mechanics the same as vanilla I'd probably only drop as many heavies/assaults as I could fit.
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Mar 7, 2024 19:36
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In vanilla melee attacks ignore evasion and usually cause enough stability damage to remove it entirely from a light 'mech. It's basically never a good idea to rely on evasion in vanilla.
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Mar 7, 2024 19:42
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Please don't let your lights get into melee range.
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Mar 7, 2024 20:02
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M_Gargantua posted:So quoth the RVN-3L, Arrow IV. 
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Mar 7, 2024 20:19
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M_Gargantua posted:So quoth the RVN-3L, Arrow IV.
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Mar 7, 2024 20:23
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Klyith posted:edit: lmao oh right! There's a reason vulkans aren't super-rare for me: I have the cfixes mod which fixes some mechs having missing tags, which means they rarely get picked to spawn. Thanks for this, btw! I want to play vanilla but bugfixes are always welcome.
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Mar 7, 2024 20:48
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The Firestarter is amazing in Vanilla, it's the tankiest Mech in the game. The AI will prioritize an evasion-specced Firestarter over your heavier Mechs (because it thinks it can one-shot the low armor target), but with enough evasion it'll assess its hit chances and usually fire only a single medium laser. PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 21:16
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Vanilla Heavy Metal 4 Light Mechs vs 5 skull missions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jRJKrVq2PE
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Mar 7, 2024 21:38
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