Battletech - Also known as Trannytech

[RSU 1741]

In fairness, that's not a new thing in BT. The Clans were also a textbook example of writing backwards: we want a brand new faction to carve through the Inner Sphere, how do we do it? Although back then even those situations were handled a bit more elegantly.

Clans had a better introduction, they were kinda sorta foreshadowed and , God forbid, they made "sense" in the setting. The fact that mechanically they disassembled the game balance is beyond the point.

The Jihad is the best example: as far as I understand (people can correct me) the desire was to nuke old Btech for Clixtech or whatever so we got the time jump and Devlin Stone messiah/Jihad shenanigans, when they had to recover the old game writers were forced to write the Word of Blake as a superpower that summoned 40 divisions out of thin air, cyborg death squads, Omnimechs and super weapons and they declared war to everyone at once on the flimsiest excuses. Also they could not be defeated by the usual plot-armoured Protagonist Factions because unknown Devlin Stone was needed. Also, laugh at me if you will, I like it. Yes, the writing is cheesy, yes, it often does not make sense, but the WoBbies kicking the teeth hard of the Dragoons, Fochstar and assorted Protagonists feels nice for once, it's not the sensation of boring low-stakes conflict you got from the IlClan trial were Clan Wolfity Wolf won because they're the Protagonist and that's it (of course, Stone was the Protagonist, but he was a unknown nobody).

By reading Field Manual: Comstar I always got the impression the WoBbies were meant at best as a speed bump for Fochstar or some other faction, and they had to improvise. As much as the Jihad is hated, at least it isn't boring as mud. The IlClan feels like they're not even trying.

 

[LOWERCASE LETTERS]

What's with the Taurians having so many fanboys? Aren't they just another minor periphery power?

 

[William Murderface]

If I had to introduce the Clans, I would have had them still slam into the IS, just giving them the SL tech they had in TRO 2750 (which still outclassed the old Succession War stuff the IS had been holding together with spit and bailing wire in 3050) and if anyone asked just said the Clan scientists were too busy with genetics to worry about technological innovation beyond BattleArmor. Then slowly add in new tech like FASA did in the Field Manual series.

What's with the Taurians having so many fanboys? Aren't they just another minor periphery power?

They're Texas with BattleMechs.

 

[Moja Zemlja]

What's with the Taurians having so many fanboys? Aren't they just another minor periphery power?

They're probably the most noteworthy periphery power being one that set in motion the events that lead up to the Amaris Civil War, have a fun spin on the 'muh liberty' gimmick that is distinct from the FedSuns, and aren't thoroughly infested by troons like Canopus is.

 

[William Murderface]

The Liao Behemoth in Rec Guide 31 has no ammo for the Gauss Rifle.

I can't decide if it was just a mistake or that's just how the CC does things.

 

[Corn Flakes]

The Liao Behemoth in Rec Guide 31 has no ammo for the Gauss Rifle.

I can't decide if it was just a mistake or that's just how the CC does things.

Is it simply not listed but accounted for in the tonnage, or are they really going around with a empty gun and 1 free ton?

 

[William Murderface]

Is it simply not listed but accounted for in the tonnage, or are they really going around with a empty gun and 1 free ton?

I'm not sure. I just noticed it on the record sheet and haven't tried to put it together in MML.

I like to imagine that the Liao crews get introduced to it and when one of the crewmen says, "hey, where's the GR ammo?" that the rep from GM just says, "yeah, about that..."

Clans had a better introduction, they were kinda sorta foreshadowed and , God forbid, they made "sense" in the setting. The fact that mechanically they disassembled the game balance is beyond the point.

The Jihad is the best example: as far as I understand (people can correct me) the desire was to nuke old Btech for Clixtech or whatever so we got the time jump and Devlin Stone messiah/Jihad shenanigans, when they had to recover the old game writers were forced to write the Word of Blake as a superpower that summoned 40 divisions out of thin air, cyborg death squads, Omnimechs and super weapons and they declared war to everyone at once on the flimsiest excuses. Also they could not be defeated by the usual plot-armoured Protagonist Factions because unknown Devlin Stone was needed. Also, laugh at me if you will, I like it. Yes, the writing is cheesy, yes, it often does not make sense, but the WoBbies kicking the teeth hard of the Dragoons, Fochstar and assorted Protagonists feels nice for once, it's not the sensation of boring low-stakes conflict you got from the IlClan trial were Clan Wolfity Wolf won because they're the Protagonist and that's it (of course, Stone was the Protagonist, but he was a unknown nobody).

By reading Field Manual: Comstar I always got the impression the WoBbies were meant at best as a speed bump for Fochstar or some other faction, and they had to improvise. As much as the Jihad is hated, at least it isn't boring as mud. The IlClan feels like they're not even trying.

I didn't mind the Jihad per se. I didn't even mind some of the WoB toys, after all, BT is a space opera and having Snidely Whiplash bad guys with super weapons is just part of the trope. I just minded how they did stuff like superjumpships and nuking and sliming and dropping rocks on planets in a temper tantrum and had everything like cyberzombies and hidden armies and everything under the sun because C* had worlds and factories and labs and whatnot that not even the First Circuit had, and the factories on Terra, and 10% of the FWL economy and nobody noticed and so on and so forth.

It wasn't the idea, it was the execution that I never liked.

And some of that was more Weisman's fault than FanPro or CGL. He wanted a new Succession War that lead to the RotS and they had to fill in the gaps and that was that.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I didn't mind the Jihad per se. I didn't even mind some of the WoB toys, after all, BT is a space opera and having Snidely Whiplash bad guys with super weapons is just part of the trope. I just minded how they did stuff like superjumpships and nuking and sliming and dropping rocks on planets in a temper tantrum and had everything like cyberzombies and hidden armies and everything under the sun because C* had worlds and factories and labs and whatnot that not even the First Circuit had, and the factories on Terra, and 10% of the FWL economy and nobody noticed and so on and so forth.

It wasn't the idea, it was the execution that I never liked.

And some of that was more Weisman's fault than FanPro or CGL. He wanted a new Succession War that lead to the RotS and they had to fill in the gaps and that was that.

Can't agree enough. The Jihad in itself wasn't terrible -- a way to shake up the status quo -- but the Word of Blake felt like a hilarious deus ex machina to make it happen.

Later writers would try to fix the logistical holes by having the Wobblies parasitize and take over the FWL, but it still felt incredibly forced.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Can't agree enough. The Jihad in itself wasn't terrible -- a way to shake up the status quo -- but the Word of Blake felt like a hilarious deus ex machina to make it happen.

Later writers would try to fix the logistical holes by having the Wobblies parasitize and take over the FWL, but it still felt incredibly forced.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind the WoB if they knew they were fucked in a straight fight and terrorism and nuclear tantrums had been their only options. The Successor States have their own intelligence services (some much better than others), but by and large they were only really prepared for direct unit-on-unit combat with each other. So there was plenty of space for the Blakists to cause trouble on the ground. One dude with a virus canister can destroy an entire continent, after all. But no, the writers had to go with this idiotic ultra-advanced hidden army idea. The ComGuards were bad enough, but at least they had some foreshadowing. The Blakists just went full ridiculous with it.

It's the same gripe I have with the Society on the Clan side. Same shit, different star systems: a peer armed force capable of challenging every other kid on the sandbox, somehow kept completely under wraps. Seriously, the game is about big stompy robots, but you are still allowed to have disruptive factions rely on sabotage to change the metaplot. Once they're done throwing their tantrum and have been properly quashed (you can do that in just a few paragraphs at the start of the introductory book for the new era), you can go back to the stompies.

 

[William Murderface]

Part of it was they had already had ComStar whip out a huge hidden army once. Fine, I get it, we know Kerensky left some units with Blake, some units just "vanished" [read: gave their 'Mechs to ComStar at Keresnky's orders] and they had access to whatever was left in the Castles Brian, various SL depots that were found around the IS and Periphery, and Terra's factories, and that was how they broke out a fully armed and trained ComGuard at the FedCom wedding. Cool. But then the robes break out a second army? An army that was built on worlds that not even the First Circuit was trusted to know about? That not one member of ROM who didn't defect but knew about mentioned to Mori or Focht or anyone else? Or that the reformed C* version of ROM stumbled across? Or even an economist somewhere asked where the FWL economy was going to when the numbers didn't add up and someone thought "hey, what is WoB doing with that money?"

It's that kind of stuff that strains credulity.

 

[RSU 1741]

I still think the Jihad as we got it was completely improvised. It's clear that originally the WoB did not have all those resources and there's barely any hint of their super weapons and magical divisions - it needed to happen because it was needed for the Republic of the Sphere. It's not even internally coherent, what could the spergout-with-war-crimes obtain? It simply needed to happen and honestly HOW it happened wasn't even that bad. Beats boring pseudo-political plots with the Successor Houses any day of the week.

I'd be curious about the original plan for the WoBbies, probably someone for the Dragoons to kill off to show how cool they are.

It's the same gripe I have with the Society on the Clan side.

The Society is narratively similar to the WoBbies: it's needed to clean up a section of the lore that the devs don't want to bother with for some time (the Homeworld Clans, they never knew what to do with 'em) and internal coherency does not matter. Also, if you take them away from the unfortunate narrative reasons for their existence, they're cool as fuck by design (cruel and practical technocrats that go for genetics and protomechs, almost a direct opposite to the cyborg-obsessed Word). As usual in Btech, wasted chances because we need to get back to Protagonist Factions.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

There’s a minor argument about how Strong Jump works at my local. Is it supposed to increase your TMM by 2 instead of the standard 1 or is it supposed to only increase it by one and incur a lesser shooting penalty. My view is the former because the blurb about jumping in the rulebook references tmm going up and down in relation to it and weak jump. Is there errata that I’m not aware of?

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

There’s a minor argument about how Strong Jump works at my local. Is it supposed to increase your TMM by 2 instead of the standard 1 or is it supposed to only increase it by one and incur a lesser shooting penalty. My view is the former because the blurb about jumping in the rulebook references tmm going up and down in relation to it and weak jump. Is there errata that I’m not aware of?

Not familiar with that. Is it a Mech quirk, a Mechwarrior ability...?

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

Not familiar with that. Is it a Mech quirk, a Mechwarrior ability...?

Basically a mech quirk.

In alpha stike a lot of tech/weapons/etc. are codified into abilities instead of being tied to wherever it was mounted in the mech. So a Mech with the Energy or CASEII rule treats ammo hits as if they don’t exist on the crit table. The mech’s size and overall movement speed is aggregated together into Target Movement Modifier (TMM) which in gameplay terms is a number that’s combined with distance modifiers, terrain and cover modifers, and the shooting mech’s pilot skill to determine what number on 2 d6s you need to score a hit.

A mech being able to jump is represented by said mech being able to go anywhere in it’s jump distance while increasing its TMM by one and increasing that mech required rolls to land hits on everything else by 2. Strong Jump (JMPS#) is used to illustrate a mech with jump capabilities in large excess of what is the standard of 120 to 150 meters, like the Shadow Hawk IIC 8 or Pheonix Hawk PXH-9. This guy has somehow got it in his head that a mech being able to jump 280 meters is supposed to be represented in the rules as having an easier time shooting because it can jump further than it can move instead of being even harder to hit than it should already be.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Basically a mech quirk.

In alpha stike a lot of tech/weapons/etc. are codified into abilities instead of being tied to wherever it was mounted in the mech. So a Mech with the Energy or CASEII rule treats ammo hits as if they don’t exist on the crit table. The mech’s size and overall movement speed is aggregated together into Target Movement Modifier (TMM) which in gameplay terms is a number that’s combined with distance modifiers, terrain and cover modifers, and the shooting mech’s pilot skill to determine what number on 2 d6s you need to score a hit.

A mech being able to jump is represented by said mech being able to go anywhere in it’s jump distance while increasing its TMM by one and increasing that mech required rolls to land hits on everything else by 2. Strong Jump (JMPS#) is used to illustrate a mech with jump capabilities in large excess of what is the standard of 120 to 150 meters, like the Shadow Hawk IIC 8 or Pheonix Hawk PXH-9. This guy has somehow got it in his head that a mech being able to jump 280 meters is supposed to be represented in the rules as having an easier time shooting because it can jump further than it can move instead of being even harder to hit than it should already be.

Okay, Alpha Strike. I'm not super familiar with that and need to remedy the issue.

Like improved jump jets (god I hate those fucking things), then. Why the hell would it make it easier to shoot (as the jumper)? Weird.

 

[BlackDragoons]

There’s a minor argument about how Strong Jump works at my local. Is it supposed to increase your TMM by 2 instead of the standard 1 or is it supposed to only increase it by one and incur a lesser shooting penalty. My view is the former because the blurb about jumping in the rulebook references tmm going up and down in relation to it and weak jump. Is there errata that I’m not aware of?

This is from the Alpha Strike rule book.

JUMP JETS, WEAK OR STRONG (JMPW#, JMPS#) This unit has particularly underpowered, weak jump jets or overpowered, strong jump jets compared to their non-jump movement . Weak Jump Jets subtract the # from their TMM when using Jumping movement . Strong Jump Jets add the # to their TMM when using Jumping movement .

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

This is from the Alpha Strike rule book.

I’m aware. Am I reading it right in that that itms implying that it should increase my TMM by 2 instead of the standard 1? Dude is fucking adamant about this and I have no idea why.

 

[BlackDragoons]

I’m aware. Am I reading it right in that that itms implying that it should increase my TMM by 2 instead of the standard 1? Dude is adamant about this.

You increase the TMM but the # next to the JMPS. So if its JMPS3 you increase the TMM by 3 and applies the standard penalty for your mech to shoot. What mech are you using?

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

You increase the TMM but the # next to the JMPS. So if its JMPS3 you increase the TMM by 3 and applies the standard penalty for your mech to shoot. What mech are you using?

The two mechs I mentioned in the previous post. They have a TMM of 2 with JMPS1. Does basic jump not have an effect on your tmm? That’s how they’ve been doing it at the local.

 

[Corn Flakes]

The two mechs I mentioned in the previous post. They have a TMM of 2 with JMPS1. Does basic jump not have an effect on your tmm? That’s how they’ve been doing it at the local.

Whether a unit has jumped or not that turn has no bearing on their TMM: simply being able to jump at all gives them a +1 to their TMM.

Following the same logic, Weak or Strong Jump Jets modify the TMM whether or not the unit has jumped. All units are implied to be moving as much as they can at all times, including jumping around to avoid damage as needed.

Does it make intuitive sense? Not really, since a MechWarrior that knows he's driving a machine with weak jump jets would simply not use them at all unless absolutely necessary. But that's how the rules are written.

Nevermind, outdated rules.