|
Sky Shadowing posted:No, the books are pretty clear that nobody could get a lock on Morgan Kell, and in the second duel nobody could get a lock on either of them. Plus, during the battle of Luthien it's hinted that not even the Clans are able to get a lock. It's a battle between writers and larger viewpoints. Everyone generally agreed that, walking tanks aside, BT was a realistic universe -- no ghosts need apply -- but exactly what that means to any given writer is another thing. So you have Stackpole's fiction with some mystical martial arts bullshit, and even a sourcebook or two acknowledging this with a power writeup for this Phantom Mech ability, and then every other writer since then saying "when we said 'realistic' we didn't mean Ninja III: The Domination" and doing the best they can to distance the game from it (which is where the game is generally at today). Robert Charrette handled this sort of thing much better: there's a fun scene in one of his novels (Wolf Pack, I think) where Jaime Wolfe enters the room and a warrior monk calls out his name, even though the monk was facing the other way. When Wolf asks him how he knew that Wolf had entered the room, the monk replies that Wolf's ki was so strong that it was obvious it could only be him. But Wolf passes off the remark with a joke, and it could have been that the monk recognized his footsteps or saw a reflection (consciously or not), or heard someone mutter his name, or whatever: it leaves you room to speculate and presume what you want without being so gauche as to have a pile of targeting computers operated by multiple people all go on the fritz at once. Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:07 on May 25, 2017 |
#
¿
May 25, 2017 17:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 5, 2024 10:06 |
|
|
It'd be a fun novel or sourcebook excerpt, anyways. A bunch of mechs wildly flailing with their limbs like a Power Rangers episode, with the pilots all yelling about how so and so killed my father and now vengeance is mine and then the flying dropkicks commence. *adds notes to next sourcebook pitch
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2017 23:30
|
|
|
The Reseen were abominations unto god almost without exception and I'm glad that MWO hired away Iglesias from CGL, even if it means CGL doesn't get his sweet artwork much any longer. As for a unified aesthetic, that's one thing I'm not so thrilled about. With the hodgepodge of artists and art directors that BT has had over the decades, it's really helped give the feel that you've had multiple in-universe design bureaus and mech design trends come and go. Everything looking the same, even good the same, is a bit dull. I'll take a bunch of crap-looking mechs if I can have variety in the good stuff.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2017 22:10
|
|
|
The idea that the Clan LRMs or other weapons were accidents based on editing mistakes is a myth with no source that just refuses to die. They were supposed to be crazy over the top badasses from the start.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2018 22:18
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Do you have a source saying that it's bullshit? I'm willing to believe it's a myth, but I've been hearing it pretty consistently for decades now so I'd like to see an interview or something with someone who was involved where they say "no, we wanted them that way from the get go." I would think it would be the other way around: the evidence that no-minimum-range was intended is that that's how they were printed, and despite multiple printings of that book, an official errata sheet for that book which I own, and a revised edition of the book, no change to them was ever made (and as can be seen with the Tactical Handbook, FASA was perfectly willing to correct weapon stats if they were wrong). Where's the evidence that it was ever intended to be otherwise? Even the previous line developer of BT specifically said that he'd never been conclusively shown or told it was a mistake, only that he'd heard the rumour of it. It's just been going around so long that it's taken on a life of its own, but no one has ever been able to prove it; it's always just "I heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy's hairdresser's best friend". Same with the rumour about the original Omnimech versions. Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jan 28, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2018 06:54
|
|
|
Skoll posted:It made me immune to bad writing. I read the Star Wars New Jedi Order right after. Christ. Just follow that up with the Sword of Truth series and Ready Player One and you're set for life.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2018 00:48
|
|
|
It must be rough knowing that that book about the fragile New Republic facing its most dangerous threat yet is no longer canon.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2018 01:22
|
|
|
They're available for sale in ebook form from Catalyst, so sharing them here would probably get you dinged with a piracy ban.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2018 07:55
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Are all of them available now? The last time I looked there were huge gaps in what you could get. They had almost the whole classic line available (i.e. the non-Dark Age stuff), but it looks like in the transfer from their old, now defunct store to the new one a bunch of the titles have been dropped/not yet upped. Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Jan 30, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2018 18:32
|
|
|
Baron Porkface posted:Those are some dudes who got together during the clan era, I was asking about the foundation of successor state warfare. The entire history of Battletech is based on the fundamental premise that democracy beyond the planetary scale does not work and feudalism was needed to bring stability after it was tried and failed. Every one of the major Houses and Periphery powers are organized along this basis. Unforunately, this background material has been greatly deprecated in more recent products--not so much retconned as quietly ignored--but it's there. Feudalism is one of the foundations of the setting.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2018 16:44
|
|
|
Disappointed that the thread title isn't "Reactors online April 24th".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2018 05:55
|
|
|
SpaceDrake posted:Also, yeah, FASA hit the skids at the turn of the millenium and then things got really complicated, but FASA hit trouble in part because their game was hard to play. You're projecting your dislikes into the main reasons that the game went downhill. Things like removing miniatures from the basic (4th edition) box set (which caused sales of them to plummet) and bleeding out via a series of hideously expensive lawsuits, then dividing the IP to other companies as a way of paying for those suits were all much more relevant than people having hard time looking up charts or finding Far Country or other novels (which you could buy in mainstream bookstores, which helped push the brand to a wider public) a tad goofy. At the same time, while BT is not difficult, I will readily admit that BT is too cumbersome for most modern gameplayers. The new manuals and box sets are going out of their way to make things as pretty and usable as possible within the confines of the same rules that were being used in 1984, but it's still the same rules that were being used in 1984. I love BT, but lord do I wish it had a revision some time in the 1990s at least. Xotl fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Apr 19, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2018 21:41
|
|
|
R0ckfish posted:I know it would be the best way to throw existing players into a froth along with being a titanic effort, but I do feel that they should do a reset/rework on the rules. Gameplay design has advanced so much that I feel they could maintain the feel of the gameplay without the tedious bullshit. It's tricky. Much of the tedious bullshit is also what gives BT the flavour it has. Not many other games allow you to blow off your opponent's arm, pick it up, and then beat them to death with it. The granularity of the rules system creates a lot of possibilities for crazy results that last in the mind. Additionally, the way the BT product line is constructed means that any major changes have to be weighed against the need to potentially redo all the Technical Readouts and units in the game (now in the thousands). I think the main problem is the cluster and hit location charts, the damage tracking, and the heat system. All these things are interesting concepts, implemented in time-consuming ways. Between all of those items you have the bulk of what takes up time in BT. Of course, implementing something that works and has some combination of keeps the grogs happy / attracts new players enough to make the redo worthwhile is no easy matter. To return to our 40K comparisons, BT is stuck in a realm like 40K 2nd edition, having never taken the turn to the streamlining of 3rd edition and beyond. There was something to be said for having models hallucinating and on fire stumbling across the battlefield while rolling on datafax damage tables, but ultimately I think 40K is better off for having jettisoned most of that when it did.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2018 22:19
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:Catalyst is a mess. I'm pretty sure you can't even get copies of the tabletop rules anymore, I looked on Amazon and they don't have the core rules and the expansions are going for 5-10k dollars Pretty much everything is out of stock at the moment, but it's all coming back into print in the next few months in errata-corrected new printings, along with two new main box sets with re-edited rules for clarity, more modern production values, and new minis that don't look like boxes from the 80s, in order to help new players pick up the game. There is a new rulebook available right now though that is just mechs only (as they've acknowledged that that's the reason people play, for the most part) and has been written from the ground up to be as user friendly as the current rules allow while still giving people access to the vast majority of the tech toys that the game has released over the years. Xotl fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Apr 19, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2018 22:33
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:I thought you grouped damage together with cluster weapons Depends on the weapon's cluster size. LRMs are in groups of 5. But SRMs and LB-Xs are all cluster size 1, which means roll a separate location for every. single. goddamn. round.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2018 22:56
|
|
|
Nickiepoo posted:I mean, I just went looking and found the products on this page but have no idea of the context in which they exist or the quality of the models. Ruleswise, it's as follows, in order (stop whenever you want, of course, but the following is the intended path): Buy the 20$ box set. Get two models and a special stripped down for dummies version of the mech rules. Buy the larger box set with eight minis. Get the full version of the mech-only rules, but no advanced tech (aka "3025 tech" only) Buy the BattleMech Manual. Get all the most common advanced rules that people actually use, plus about 95% of the advanced tech. Still mech only. Has some overlap with the next two books, as it came out later. Buy Total Warfare. Get the rules for infantry, battle armour, aerospace fighters, dropships, combat vehicles, protomechs, industrialmechs, zeppelins. Recommend waiting for the new printing, as there's a lot of errata corrected. Buy Tactical Operations. Get 4 jillion optional rules so that you can fight on a low-g worlds in the middle of a sandstorm while being swarmed by locusts, surrounded by lava, and having artillery shells rain down on you. Get a ton of gear for non-mech units. Recommend waiting for the new printing, as there's a lot of errata corrected. After that, it's whatever you actually feel like branching out into (increasingly higher level and abstract mass combat rulesets, running your own mercenary unit, designing your own machines, era-specific niche gear, more aerospace stuff, etc etc etc). But it's all pretty niche from this point on. Xotl fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Apr 19, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2018 23:02
|
|
|
They're great weapons (as are SRMs) when you've already whittled a guy down, because you normally have a hard time hitting any given spot. If you punched a hole through the armour in a place or two, a widespread cluster attack is likely to find those holes through sheer weight of rolling hit locations, and then you start rolling up the critical hits. Even 1 damage to the internal structure can blow something to pieces.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 19, 2018 23:09
|
|
|
Alpha Strike can be fun if you're using it to throw whole battalions at each other: it's helped by piggybacking on the established BT universe so that your army of highly disposable robots has more flavour to it than the rules mechanics themselves would give you if it was just a generic wargame. It's fast and easy, but it has a few major flaws: 1) Three range brackets only, with short being incredibly ultra short and long being pretty much useless because the range penalties and #2 means you'll never hit anything, which means everybody pretty much rushes to medium range and slugs it out. The classic Clan range advantage doesn't really exist. 2) Said slugging factor not being helped by a unit gets its full movement-based defensive modifier for just not standing still. So, moving even just 1" count as sprinting as far as you can. Units often hole up in trees and scootch around just enough to add their movement bonus, making it very turrety at times. 3) All-or-nothing hit pattern actually makes high-speed units incredibly annoying. Whether you have one gun or 20 in BT, in AS you have one attack stat, which you roll once to hit for. So trying to hit a guy that can put up a +3 or higher innate defense bonus means that even your guy that in regular BT has a zillion guns (and thus more chances to hit via sheer number of attacks) misses just as often as someone with one gun. And if you hit those little buggers, all your excess damage is overkill. The flipside to this is that at least light units are often worthwhile in a way they aren't in regular BT. 4) Attempts to model the critical hit system because it's a core element of BT, but the firepower vs. survivability ratio is so skewed in favour of firepower that it almost never comes into play in any significant fashion. Good players can mitigate some of the above, and overall it's better than I make it sound (I'm highlighting the main flaws; I actually like to play it with large unit numbers), but it needs some work to be first-class. Hopefully the new one-book edition being released some time this year fixes some of this. Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Apr 20, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2018 09:53
|
|
|
If you're worried about bloodnames, you're using Clan LRMs, which have no minimum range.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2018 21:37
|
|
|
I'd totally give a bonus for that in a RPG-based campaign, though.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2018 21:42
|
|
|
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 17:01
|
|
|
Fusion engines don't catastophically explode, but IIRC one of the stories by major BT author Mike Stackpole (the same guy who's writing the HBS novellas) had this occur, and it's been called stackpoling in the BT community ever since. They even put out an optional rule in one of the BT rulebooks to allow players to say "physics be damned: I want everything to go boom".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 17:53
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:My first complaint: "Service guarantees citizenship" is only textbook fascism if you've read bad blogs about Starship Troopers: neither Italy nor Spain nor Portugal nor Germany had that as a requirement. And "total subservience of the individual to the state" is a classic dictatorship model regardless of political foundation. Long story short, the CapCon is a command economy (unlike the other Houses), so broadly "socialist". that it also features a service = citizenship model is not a commentary on how socialist states (or any states) are now, but rather a fictional construct for a fictional state 1,000 years in the future, where no state has a 1:1 analogue with any modern political construct (remember, this is a universe where space feudalism is the predominant system). Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Apr 24, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 18:10
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:1. command economies are not socialist That's why I said "broadly" (and put socialist in quotes). They're obviously referring to the Cold War era mindset that the game was originally created in and to which to some degree holds today, where having a command economy was one of the hallmarks of a communist state. Whatever the term you wish to use for it, outside of wartime it's considered a far-left practice. The fascist states didn't even do command economies very well during times of war; hence their poo poo production capabilities. quote:2. subservience of the individual to the state is distinct from deferring to state authority, and in context of how the Caps are presented it is fascist in that every individual's value correlates to their contribution military mobilization of the state Without specifying what states and periods you're talking about, your contrasting of subservience vs. deference is not very meaningful. In terms of BT (which I'd prefer to focus on), it's worth noting that the CapCon is also the only clear loser in what has been a three-century war. They've lost more than half their territory in that period, and have resorted to increasingly draconian measures just to survive; I'm not sure that they've always been that way. All the Houses have had their nominally standard political structures warped to some degree to deal with the Succession Wars (see also the Free Worlds League, which doesn't have a permanent Captain-General as part of its standard political structure, but appointed one early on "for the duration of the emergency", which has just happened to have lasted 300 years, to the regular ire of its Parliament). Xotl fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Apr 24, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 18:38
|
|
|
I wonder how soon until the patch that they were no doubt working on even before the game shipped. I generally like to wait for those. I hope they add some quality of life improvements in addition to the usual bug squelching.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 19:01
|
|
|
Drone posted:Oh my loving God, HBS you're brilliant (or Kiva/Isildur): Haha, awesome.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2018 19:36
|
|
|
After I just closed and relaunched Steam, it downloaded a 15.4 meg update to the game. I have no mods installed; anyone else see this? EDIT: Never mind -- I think it was the preorder Shadowhawk Pack. Xotl fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Apr 25, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2018 00:53
|
|
|
Sarsapariller posted:6) Despite having a dueling culture, where political power derives from winning duels, not one piece of clan military equipment is actually designed to win duels. All of their weapons are straight up field combat machines, evolved from centuries-old designs but just better at it. In fact their actual dueling rules are basically "Stand at 100 paces from each other in the biggest can you can find and then proceed to trade shots. First one to get a headshot wins." This is even more spectacularly impractical than skill-based dueling! Now you're not even talking about the more skilled combatant being the winner, you're literally just doing luck-of-the-draw. This is actually a regret of one of the older BT line developers. He's said that if he had the chance, he would have redone the Clans' weaponry and mech design to better reflect a dueling aesthetic, with an emphasis on short range instead of long, and instead of generally reflecting the idea of "Inner Sphere but with technological advancement".
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2018 18:57
|
|
|
Cowcaster posted:Harmony Gold has been copyright trolling mechwarrior/battletech stuff perpetually since the 1990's afaik The 80s. Robotech aired in 1985, and HG complained to FASA pretty much on day one as far as I know. It just took a few years before the lawsuits really came out.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2018 20:26
|
|
|
I think all that was clearly a case of punch-counterpunch. They knew exactly what was going on, but knew a judge or jury wouldn't and wanted some easily-abandoned claims to muddy the waters a bit.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2018 20:33
|
|
|
raverrn posted:They did, called the Reseen. HG sued anyway because lol That's not true. The Reseen were introduced in 2003, and had absolutely no legal problems. The only reason they didn't solve the problem once and for all is that they looked like absolute dogshit. Here's the rework of the beloved Warhammer, the cover mech on the classic Battletech box.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2018 23:43
|
|
|
Chronojam posted:The game decided to take thirty minutes to patch on an SSD and now thirty hours of saves are all gone. On the forums they say that if you roll back to 1.0.3 the saves will reappear: the new patch apparently hides them, rather than erases them.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2018 05:50
|
|
|
It's still a proposed settlement, so it's not quite over with, but yeah, this looks pretty good.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2018 15:57
|
|
|
Azhais posted:http://www.sarna.net/news/harmony-gold-and-piranha-games-have-settled-probably/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hIAGuxzEy3ZE4_mjyj-jiw4TMuwoIn3g/view There's a (proposed) newer one that just dropped yesterday that says it's done and over with for everyone, including CGL, with the only costs being everyone paying their own legal fees and that's that. I'm not sure how often these things fall through at this stage, but I would assume by this point it's just a matter of paperwork.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2018 16:21
|
|
|
DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:It doesn’t indicate the terms of any settlement. I think the note about all parties paying their own fees is to stop anyone from arguing that the settlement means they win and so they would be entitled to fees, so it’s just a CYA boilerplate inclusion. It also doesn’t indicate whether or not anyone agrees to allow certain warrior robots to be depicted or whatever. So it’s not clear what will happen as far as the game goes. If the basis for the agreement is dismissal with prejudice, doesn't that by default mean that the images that were the source of the dispute would be permitted? I'm assuming that wouldn't okay the use of the original Macross images, but the derivatives that PGI and CGL made would be okay, would it not?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2018 16:56
|
|
|
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/beta-battletech-update-1-2-0-release-notes.1115763/ A new beta, for the 1.2 patch. Lots of goodies there, and when combined with the upcoming expansion it's looking good for the future of the game.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2018 05:57
|
|
|
Because PGI decided that they were going to go ahead and change the artwork enough to, in their minds, legally use those machines, and went ahead and did so. CGL did the same. Then the latest lawsuit hit, and CGL retreated, pulling their particular redesigns, but PGI stood and fought, and as part of that kept using their redesigns. HBS also took a cautious approach. They may implement those designs in the game now that the lawsuit is resolved, but if so it will take time (because it's not a simple "copy & paste the art assets" thing), and they have a lot of other stuff on their plate (got to get that Linux build out, got to ready that patch, got to get that expansion out, etc), so it may simply be a matter of priorities and available resources. I'm hopeful that we'll see both machines in both the HBS and CGL games. CGL has a pretty sweet Rifleman redesign lying around by Marco Mazzoni, ready for release but put on ice by the lawsuit, that will be nice to get out as well. Xotl fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Nov 8, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2018 22:59
|
|
|
When we made the master quirk list for the Battlemech Manual, we tried to slip in "Boombox" for the Yeoman but it was caught in editing.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2018 21:41
|
|
|
Pretty sure Curtiss Militech isn't going to be launching any lawsuits any time soon. EDIT: I just realized you probably thought I meant I tried to insert the image. That's just an old meme image that I thought people would be familiar with, the one that inspired the quirk--the attempted insert was literally just the word "Boombox" in a list of quirks. Xotl fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Nov 12, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2018 21:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 5, 2024 10:06 |
|
|
Tiger Crazy posted:Why are the capellans poo poo on in almost every succession war? Some one in the lore department must have had it out for them. The Capellans haven't been weak in terms of storyline results since the mid-90s, and in the current timeline they're the outright strongest House.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2018 02:00
|
|