Actually between friends and I yes....
Saladin. 8/12 movement with an AC/20 fixed in the front hull, BV of 596. Not much armor but good luck hitting it. There's also the Saracen, which trades the AC/20 for a turreted LRM-10 and a trio of SRM-2, and the Scimitar, which swaps out the LRM-10 and one of the SRM's for an AC/5. All relatively cheap, but hard-hitting and fast, so easy enough to swarm the enemy with them all.
The issue isn't that us Spheroids are losing, its that we tend to be able to turn the tide pretty quickly against equal BV Clans. Like one of our heaviest hitters is a Thunderhawk and the BV is roughly equivalent to a Timberwolf or Summoner, while its less mobile the firepower is roughly equivalent and it has more armour so it can win out trading damage.
I have to blow the dust off an ancient memory cell here, but there's a modder for the Battletech game who goes by 'bloodydoves' who balanced clan mechs by essentially tuning all their equipment to closer range and increasing the weight penalty of things like CASE. His logic was that this reflected Clanners more 'up close and personal, die for glory' mentality, so it balanced their power without sacrificing their character. You can still find the guy on patreon and iirc the tables and stuff he uses are generously given if asked.
Yeah the shitting on Taurians while propping up Capellans and Clan Wolf (both of whom I don't give a fuck about) makes me not even care a little about the lore for the most part.
As a House Marik loyalist you have my sympathies. My Captain General is a literal fraud incompetent in the contemporary setting. And worst part is everyone thinks it's funny instead of stupid.
Buddy, imagine what it feels like to be a Clan Blood Spirit enthusiast. Derpy little autistic purists who just can't catch a break, ever.
The Recguides seem to point towards something like this as the end goal, with the whole premise of the narration being that the Ilclan is still going strong a century later, and one snippet of dialogue stating that by the time the Recguides take place, there is no longer a distinction between clan tech and spheroid tech. Hell, even recently a campaign ops eratta got rid of the penalty for IS techs trying to work on Clan tech.
100%, and if anything, the structure of the lore and rules have seemed to encourage people to make their own shit up, from mercenary companies to alternate histories to custom 'Mechs and the companies produce them. There's either rules or enough examples to use as a template for you to do basically whatever you want and for it to still feel like Battletech. Almost everyone I've interacted with has their own "What if" especially for the clan invasion. What if they came from a different 'side' of space? What if different clans won the invasion bid? What if some crusader/warden philosophies were swapped?
It also seems to be a huge tournament mindset to not have custom and what not. Which is why I will never care for tournies. I just want my big dumb mechs piloted by barely literate idiots to run into other people's big dumb mechs piloted by equally illiterate idiots.
Campaigns are definitely super fun when you have a good GM. I have to give catalyst one thing in regards to their recent books, the Hinterlands make for a great sandbox if you want to play with all the latest tech.
Can't have badass Space Texans with things like "civil rights" and "minding my own damn business" in a game about nobles waging endless war amongst themselves for a perpetually empty throne.
Space Franco-Texans, with how much weird Napoleonic shit they have. Ecole Militare, their uniforms, force tables. But they don't like our precious space anglos, so they must die.
