As far as the missions go, I have some quibbles. Anytime you have a target which you have to stop from getting to a denial zone, it has a 50-50 chance of being complete bullshit, with the other half being, kind-of bullshit. I have lost count of how many times I have been funneled through a chokepoint (jump-jets or not) where I have to fight through a lance. That, in and of itself is fine. The bullshit comes in where the target is immediately in movement range of escape, and typically has a mech that is hard to destroy with the one mech I have capable of targeting it, that is if I am able to get in contact at all before it bolts. It should be noted that I am not slowing down at all to engage the defensive lance. Heck most of the time I am sprinting.
At this point i am seriously considering outfitting a Spider so that I can at least get my LRM boats some visual contact.
The other one is the structure defense missions which seems to have a lower chance of fucking you in the ass. Still, it seems to be a bit of a roulette as to whether the enemy mech will aggro on my mechs (in which case I almost always win) or they focus on the buildings, completely ignoring my blasting away at them (in which they have a much higher chance of getting their objective). If there is a way for me to bait them into not attacking the objectives, please let me know.
I wholeheartedly agree. Most missions are fun, but a few are total bullshit. There are base defense missions where your lance spawns south of the base that you are supposed to protect and your enemies spawn to the north. Oftentimes, they are in range of the base before you can even engage them. Then you get blindsided by another lance that spawns to the east early on... and of course, they spawn so close that yet again, they can take potshots at the base, especially when you haven't managed to break the first lance's line of sight.
Your only course of action is to either savescum such missions or bite down on the pillow as the shitty mission design has its way with your ass.
And I refuse to blow a mission cause the cards have been deliberately stacked against me in every way possible. If the game doesn't play fair, I will use savescumming and cheesy tactics (like abusing the AI or taking advantage of the Marauder's base chance of headshots at 30ish %)
On a sidenote, the mechwarrior abilities to do breaching shots and getting a bonus on damage reduction behind cover are totally broken.
The former allows you to ignore cover/damage reduction whenever you attack a single target with a single weapon, which also applies to multi-targeting (that means an Awesome can attack three targets with one PPC each and get the bonus every time).
The latter means you receive about 50% of damage when standing in a forest or similar cover. Since your enemies seldom take advantage of breaching shot, you become insanely hard to kill.
The ability to sensor lock is neat, the ability to puke out coolant to reduce heat is rather meh. You lose a lot of heat, but the mech (for some stupid reason) gains more heat the following turns, so it's hardly worth it imho.
In BT2018 it feels like their indirect fire LRMs are magnetized to your 'Mechs, and half the time you get shot by something you can't see, World of Tanks-style. Going up against overwhelming odds there just isn't as fun as in the MechWarrior games, because BattleTech (both the videogame and the boardgame) are meant to portrait roughly balanced formations duking it out. That Catapult or LRM Carrier flinging indirect lurms at you might be annoying, but it's one fewer enemy unit in range to split your fire. But in BT2018 those same indirect fire units are just more stuff you have to go up against all at once.
Yeah, it's really annoying when there's multiple lances with long range weapons and you get pelted by 2 or 3 waves of LRMs from an unseen force every turn while fighting off a lance.
A shame you can't run an additional lance, given that I own a full battalion's worth of spare mechs, I should be able to buy a second Leopard and show those off-screen fuckers who's boss.
