Reply To: Re: Battletech XLBS

[phaidknott 7031xp 3]

Many, many years ago we ran a campaign set in the Periphery with a local force of militia vs pirates. Set just before the clan invasion, even then we were using mechs out of the 3025 book (and felt ourselves to be lucky to get hose mechs). We “self nerfed” our game with a mech tonnage “max” of 65 tons (the BT grognards in our group said when you get to 70 tones that’s when the mechs really start to specialise and games get a bit “what you brought in your lance” rather than how you played on the table). So our Mechs were mainly lights and mediums with just a few heavies thrown in (again the “nerfage” was that Assault mechs, would only be house mechs and even then only if it was a BIG massive battle), we also had a fair amount of infantry (and as about 50% of our mechs were lights, they could form a viable threat, so you couldn’t just ignore them), and a fair few tanks and recon vehicles. Finally to make things even harder on ourselves we set this all in a badlands/desert biome (so losing heat was difficult (Hey….. we got to use MGs instead of small lasers :D).

 

And those BT games were the BEST we had EVAH!!!!!!!

 

Usually we see lots of 100 ton clan mechs, and games where it’s who brought the biggest toys to the table (Clan stuff really did mess up the game balance massively and was probably what triggered our whole “nerf the damn game” campaign we did). But playing on those hex maps with stuff you couldn’t afford to throw away as cannon fodder (even a locust was an asset to the militia forces who had a lot of infantry and vehicles trying to hold the line against the mainly mech and vehicle armed pirate lances). Ah those were the days…….. the chap who ran that campaign was a master, and managed to restrict the players without making us feel that we were “punished” for playing 🙂