Reply To: Massive Battletech News Dump

[phaidknott 7023xp 1]

When we used to play many, many moons ago, our group had a “house rule” that just seemed to make the game so much better. Simply the max tonnage we could have for a single mech was limited to 70 tons.

Our “glorious leader” we well into Battletech, the lore, the tech, etc. He took a standpoint that the Assault Mech would only hit the field during massive set piece battles (when all the scouting, logistics etc were done). He felt that many gamers go straight for the 100 ton “clan” mechs, and as he said “they move slow, there’s no tactics, you just throw dice at each other”.

And he was right in the long run (we didn’t see it ourselves), playing the game with mostly mediums with a few lights and heavies thrown in just seemed to make the game more dynamic, more tactical (basically you had more options on the table). After a massive campaign he ran with us first coming across militia in vehicles and helicopters, and gradually he ramped things up to where the opposition was just as tough (and similar tonnage) as our group of players. Playing on multiple map sheets also really opened up the game. The campaign had us landing on a planet as “pirates”, and we had to hit hard to grab as much loot as we could as the local militia and planetary defence forces became active. Things were different as we couldn’t fix our mechs in the field (we had to instead go via dropship back to the jumpship, which meant the repair times could really hit us hard as we had to start making decisions to push things and go into battle with an already damaged Mech, or play it safe and send it back but then we wouldn’t be able to use it for a couple of battles).

But after that campaign we all agreed we could never go back to using Assault Mechs. He was so right, we were just “throwing dice at each other” as our Assaults shambled across the table straight at each other (where the dice decided things, and “how” we played didn’t seem to matter as much) 🙂