If your also interested in the lore, pick up the novels. Decision at Thunder Rift is a good entry point to get into. Honestly if you asked on Monday you could have picked up the audio book for 5 dollars. Its great listen, Tren Sparks does the narration he also provided the voice Santiago Espinosa in HBS Battletech, hes the crazy evil uncle your facing down.
I was actually wondering which of the novels to pick up. I enjoyed the short story that came with the Beginner's Box about Colby's Commandos and I've mainly been taking in the lore via the Sarna wiki.
Well good news, Decision at Thunder Rift is made by William H. Keith, Jr. and continues the story Durant Carlyle.
I own like a dozen or so BT novels and after originally reading them in my teens and never touching them again, I re-read them over the course of the last year... And I was totally blown away at how well they held up. It's not LOTR for sure, but they are way better than a setting about big stompy robots leads you to expect. I don't wanna oversell them, but they are a really good read imho.
I started with The Warrior Trilogy since I happened to find the books at a used books store. I have The Gray Death Legion Saga books, but haven't started on them yet. I've read from others that The Sword and the Dagger is really trashy and can be skipped over, even though it sets the stage for the events that happen in The Warrior Trilogy. I could never find a reprint of it, so it must have been that much of a mess.
Wolves on the Border is pretty good, as it's kind of a companion piece to the Warrior Trilogy.
That's kinda what happens when fictional universes hit a dark age. 40k's been in a dark age for ten thousand years and everyone has the brain of a pea.
You mean playing HBS BT to begin with or HBS not making a sequel, where they improve upon their game?
They can't do it until they find another tranny game lead.
Not gonna lie, I'm surprised they didn't go about pushing the timeline forward with oodles of expansion-tier DLC. I expected us to be balls deep in FedCom Civil War campaigns at this point. I guess Paradox didn't get as much return from the game as they expected to. Certainly not as much as they got from their captive audience of grand strategy spergs buying everything they put out without a thought.
The engine being ass on a stick aside, there's nothing preventing modders from adding these sorts of functionalities to HBS BT. For a new game, that's... very unlikely to happen. Besides vehicles not being the big draw for the setting, game designers these days are deathly afraid of "confusing" their players by giving them more than a handful of units to control, even in a turn-based game.
MechWarrior Living Legends and MegaMek are the only two I can think of.
"Total War: [insert favorite BT era here]" would be fucking amazing. A game where you have a shitton of unit types including infantry, tanks and VTOLs, where Mechs are just the high tier stuff that you will ever only have a small handful of, now that would be something I could get behind. Though admittedly, it would be something that would be a niche franchise in an even more niche genre... so never gonna happen.
We'd be more likely to get a Total War: Warhammer 40k first given their existing ties with GW. No reason said game couldn't be modded into BT though.
