- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Battletech - Also known as Trannytech
- Thread starter Frosted Snowflakes
- Start date
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
I mean I'm sure there are some members of the Great Houses that find "walking death sentence for the pilot" to be a damn good niche for certain people
the real question is could you stick Jeremiah Rose, Hanse Davion, Cassie Suthorn or (insert plot-armored person of choice here) into that deathtrap and have them demolish an entire lance of (insert Great House Military mooks here)?
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Sure. Just add a narrow pass, some rocks, and a reactor all ready to Stackpole.
Of course, now you mentioned Plot Armor, some recent thoughts about the New Exford Beach Fight came back to me. Two lances against a full trinary? That's the shit living legends are made of. Also, you're a pussy if you do the night raid and pass up the best damn pilot in the game, and with 0 salary.
Of course, now you mentioned Plot Armor, some recent thoughts about the New Exford Beach Fight came back to me. Two lances against a full trinary? That's the shit living legends are made of. Also, you're a pussy if you do the night raid and pass up the best damn pilot in the game, and with 0 salary.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
The worst part about Suthorn is she doesn't even need THAT
"yeah let me take out a fucking Battlemech with a fucking handgun real quick no biggie"
BITCH
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2016
Damn. It takes 19 damage to an arm to have enough oomph to transfer all that damge straight into the centre torso and killing the mech.
A Highlander-burial would inflict 29 points of damage on a mech that has 36 hitpoints spread across the punch-location table.
I guess you could always try to dash across the map at a great distance to the frontlines and shower enemies with LRM fire, possibly even with semi-guided LRMs, when someone else is tagging, and get away with just one ton of armor, but any attack that's more severe than a mild sneeze would knock that thing into fist-sized chunks, so any kind of return fire would be devastating.
I played the HBS BT multiplayer with a friend a couple times, in our first match, he used the 1M variant to pelt me from afar, which was annoying, but during combat, I managed to decimate his lance until that Locust was the only thing left and I had a rather beat up Urbie R90 and a Commando that was even worse off.
Without ammo, my friend positioned his locust to strafe me at max speed while pelting me with his medium laser, but my trusty little Urbi hit his (hitherto pristine and undamaged) mech in the centre torso and blew him up instantly.
A few games later, he managed to repay me that favor by decapitating my Commando with his first salvo, despite the Commando having like 6 evasion-blips.
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- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
If there's one thing HBS-BT does that's faithful to the tabletop, it's how closely it adheres to the maxim "no plan survives contact with the enemy". You may have everything figured out in your head, but as soon as the shooting (or the piloting rolls...) starts you just throw your hands up into the air, yell out "RNGESUS TAKE THE WHEEL!", and roll with the punches. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they don't, sometimes they go completely off the rails and no one knows exactly what to do.
My Ghost Bear trinary has a Warhammer IIC it that's the butt of most of my lucky swings, it seems. One time it took a stray AC/2 shell from a JagerMech running at full speed on the other side of the map. The target number was something stupid like 11+. Two shots. One goes wide, the other hits. We roll for location, he gets a 2. That's a possible crit through the Center Torso. He rolls 8 and confirms a single crit, and it lands on the Gyro. Fine, mark 2 damage off the CT, tick the Gyro, the pilot has to make a piloting skill roll to stay upright at the end of the phase (with a penalty due to the damaged gyro). Since it's the first or second turn and most 'Mechs on the field are short-ranged, there are just a few more pot-shots being taken and minor damage (the Warhammer IIC misses with both PPCs). Time for the piloting roll... and I fail. The 'Mech goes down. Roll to avoid damage on the pilot? Also fail. That's 8 falling damage, split into a cluster of 5 and a cluster of 3. Both land on the head. Two more damage on the pilot. Consciousness roll on a 7+? Roll a 5. Pilot is unconscious, 'Mech is rendered immobile, and next turn every single long-range gun and missile on the enemy team went for him.
On the other hand, that very same 'Mech decapitated two enemies in three turns just a couple games later. It's just how the dice go sometimes.
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2016
And the reason why BT is awesome the way it is. You *don't* want to be a in a position where you need to hope for a lucky shot somehow making the ridiculously unlikely string of rolls necessary to turn the game around, but sooner or later, in some game, your scout's small laser will somehow end up blasting the pilot straight out of the last remaining, undamaged assault mech and completely turn the tide of battle.
But when it happens, it's pure bliss and even on the receiving end, you can't help but laugh at how crazy it is.
More often than not, you'll just miss your shots or spread damage across the entire mech without ever punching through, while he might have a lucky roll or two and hit the same location twice with some heavy hitter.
In the HBS game multiplayer, I had a lot of luck hitting the same side-torso on my opponent repeatedly, usually ending up removing that mechs main weapon or causing an ammo explosion. At the same time, I often got away with a mech shot to shit, where almost every location was down to its internal structure and still that thing soaked up PPC blasts and barrages of medium lasers somehow. More than once, a definite killing blow managed to hit the only remaining location with enough HP to withstand the blast, or something causing a crit in a location with 2 or 3 tons of ammo and somehow managing to hit a heatsink or jumpjet.
In one notable match, my friend managed to shoot up a Crab so badly, it had only it's small laser and center torso left and that thing then proceeded to somehow survive the entire remainder of the match, knocking one mech off his feet with a kick (which was then cored by a trebuchet alpha strike) and killing another mech with a headbutt to the center torso two turns later.
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- Joined
- Mar 31, 2020
Didn't Suthorn bring down her first mech (a Wolverine) with a broomstick? I remember something like that.
And Mechs that are deathtraps: the Hussar brings 1,5 t armor to the table right from the start. Sure it's fast and you can snipe with your laser but one hit and you're gone. Or how about the Charger a 80 ton mech with 5 small lasers. Some of those mechs have real Meme potential
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
That Mary Sue cunt disabled a Wolvie with a broomstick or something lodged into an actuator yeah
Suthorn is 100 shades of bullshit
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
See, I'll take a Stackpoling any day of the week compared to that shit.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
Also I think it was... Jaime Wolf who had literal fucking space-magic-tier bullshit going on with his Archer being an INVISIBLE GHOST MECH in a number of battles and someone decided this was totally the same thing as having Guardian ECM or whatever the fuck active
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
That was Morgan Kell (and later his brother Patrick) and his "Phantom 'Mech" skill. It was very early in the setting's history so they hadn't 100% nailed down the "no magic, EVER" angle of BattleTech. Since then I'm pretty sure it's noncanon and any examples of it happening are the result of unreliable narrators getting things wrong when recounting the stories.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
they pulled that kind of bullshit for a while tho IIRC, not like "this pilot is impossibly good" bullshit, more like "there is absolutely NOTHING in the rules to really support this but it's SO KEWL WE'RE GONNA DO IT ANYWAY TO SELL BOOKS" bullshit
Pick a character, basically. Jaime Wolf, Phelan Kell, Morgan Kell, Cassie Suthorn, Jeremiah Rose, Kai Allard-Liao, Natasha Kerensky, and just comb through their exploits and you'll find some outright Mary Sue bullshit in there somewhere
And then with later stories/novelizations/etc. they went from "Mary Sues" to "holy fuck how fucked up is this person?" esp in Dark Age stuff (tbf Jeremiah Rose was a genuine fucking piece of shit already but you know)
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
That's just what's going to happen when you go from a wargame where everybody can (and probably will) die within just a few battles, and try to spin a whole library's worth of novels out of it. There's going to be a lot of dissonance for one simple reason: people in novels can actually aim their damn guns. We're subjects to RNG and dice rolls. Our Ace MechWarrior can miss every single point-blank shot five turns in a row.
Characters in a story, through? They're more like MechWarrior Online players: give a sufficiently good pilot a Jenner and he'll circlestrafe an Atlas to death. And that's when the author doesn't add in stuff that aren't in the rules. They can aim straight for specific modules ("I need to take out that Gauss Rifle before it recharges or I'm toast!"), and at point-blank range their LB-Xs don't use the cluster shots table. And since those characters need to stay alive through multiple books, each with their own pivotal 'Mech-on-'Mech slugfests, it all starts looking like plot armor.
That's actually something I liked about the Dark Age novels. Compared to the old BT novels I've read, you got to see more no-name characters and their 'Mechs fighting and getting killed from their own PoV.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
You're looking at the Charger all wrong. It's 80 tons of 64 damage, 8-hex charges. Just bring something most people will see as a bigger threat to distract, like a Banshee-3E or a Quickdraw.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
>non-3S Banshee
>seen as bigger threat
the worst part is you're probably not wrong
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Even in straight damage, the Charger can generate a whole 15 points of damage with its lasers, the -3E is all of 18, but the SL range overlapping with the PPC's minimum is...less than optimal. The -3M can at least potentially force a PSR at something like range and if you get inside its minimums, it can still fire both PPCs at a penalty, and than close the distance and hit you with that tree it picked up. It's peak 4/6 Banshee utility and perfect for guarding your League fire lance. Ideally, one -3M and three Archers, everyone already having a tree in each hand.
Banshee-S models are pretty great though and I prefer them to Atlases. It can't, however, crush a light mech like a bug with a single charge.
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2020
I checked the rules. Annoyingly, it's "only" a 56-damage, 7-hex charge. You need to reserve movement to enter the target's hex. It's still a wallop, but a slightly less meaty wallop. Plus the 15 damage's worth in Small Lasers since the Charge doesn't count as a punch.
Of course, you then have a heavily-armored 80-ton bastard right in the opponent's face with 9-damage worth of Small Lasers it can fire with impunity (only two of them are in the arms), plus 8 damage per punch. And if the enemy moves away, they're opening themselves to another charge the next turn. Rinse and repeat.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Right, I forgot a charge works differently from the other melee attacks. Enough damage that no one will underestimate your Chargers ever again.
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2020
RE: Battletech novels
Michael Stackpole has said in several interviews that he always rolled hits when writing battle scenes.
Michael Stackpole has said in several interviews that he always rolled hits when writing battle scenes.