Let me just say the Clan that eventually settled in the Rasalhague region also gets shit on in the lore. I don't care what "Oh Ghost Bear still has the numbers or whatever" they fought a stupid pointless war because a stupid mary sue faction THEY SHOULDN'T EVEN LIKE told them "nah you're not good enough."
And were right back up to normal power levels over night. No exhausted units, no emptied supply depots, no factories working overtime to produce new arms and equipment, no undermanned units filled with undertrained and green recruits just shoved in because they were a warm body. Nope, it was like their civil war came and went and nothing at all was the result.
I've played it a lot and the biggest change is that energy and ballistic weapons now have specific uses. Instead of armor just being a block that had to be completely wiped out to get to the juicy mechmeat inside, you now have ballistic weapons that knock off blocks of armor and energy weapons that drill small holes but can go right through the armor to get to internals. You use ballistic or missile to remove the armor to the point that the energy has a chance of penetrating. The flip side of that coin is based on how much armor there is, the energy weapon might penetrate or it might effectively be useless. But the big takeaway is ballistic weapons do have a place and you see more than just flashbulbs on the battlefield.
As trashy as BLP's writing has been for the past decade, at least he wrote some good eras of BT, too. The current team's fucking clueless, yes.
Baine is a very good scifi author, and I feel that firing him is actually a disservice as he could make the IlClan make some bit of sense. He had written both Hour of the Wolf and No Substitute for Victory both of which deals with the IlClan era and both made the clans make sense in their motivations rather than rah rah Clan Wolf best. However I feel that the political thrillers he wrote is more or less just exploitation and his Land and Sea books are more or less the same as his Battletech novels. Point is that without him the current crop of writers couldn't figure out how to make their characters stand out without linking them to the main power players if that makes sense.
So, how many people has he killed in cold blood out of pure opportunism?
That sounds infinitely better than what we got.
Hanse's enemies were at least allowed to be competent and rack up wins of their own, like the War of 3039 where Teddy managed to fake him out, Takashi learned from his prior mistakes, and then after one unpleasant holo-call from the Capellans Victor proceeded to be not the man his father was, yet still capable enough in his own way, although there were no shortage of fuck-ups on his part when he tried to be his father.
Well, they're a literal plot device, and always have been ever since their introduction, so no questions there.
I've got a big soft spot for Focht considering he went from a complete fuck-up as Frederick Steiner to the man who saved the Inner Sphere, first from the Clans and then from ComStar itself, and again, Jihad aside, was generally competent in writing.
It's amazing that Critter-TEK figured out BattleTech's biggest vice thirty years ago and parodied it and FASA's successors still haven't done anything about this weakness. Fuck having a "winner" in the Inner Sphere, I want the Successor Houses and the Clans to have a Forever War that lasts well into the 41st Millennium because the Forever War is the whole point of the setting. It's really no wonder BattleTech keeps being accused of "harboring Nazis" by the blue-haired freaky people when even the Nazis didn't pitch as many tents for anything vaguely wolf-themed as BattleTech's writers do.
See, that's the problem with having a constant winner/author's pet in a setting like BattleTech: since we know the setting must go on and no major established faction is ever going to fully disappear/be conquered, any given winning streak will eventually start feeling both forced and pointless in the long run, The Davions were authors' pets for the longest time, and yet they never really had any major victories. They chunked the Capellans, but then ended up having to retreat later. They fucked extensively with the Dracs, but the borders ended up staying mostly the same. They created the Federated Commonwealth... and then that broke up and everybody went back to business as usual.
The last time the wolves got stromped on was during the jihad when the hell horses stampeded through the Wolf OZ. And while they eventually stopped thjey lost a lot including their Khan. But yeah, the wolves are THE Mary sue faction in BT. But on the other hand they might just set up to fall very VERY deep. I am just waiting for the "wait you paid MERCENARIES to help you defeat the Falcons on Terra? Dirty, money-loving MERCENARIES????? Oh and in revenge they took all of your children and spread them through the Inner sphere?????" part
See also: 40k's Ultrasmurfs.
The biggest thing that irks me about the whole ilClan storyline is that not only do the Wolves win, but despite being depleted military wise at the end of taking Terra, they manage to take the surrounding worlds to make Terran Hegemony 3.0 and their forces back in the Wolf Empire and Jade Falcon zones just collapse. No military discipline, no communications with Terra, just "the boss went to Terra, time for us to die or revolt." The JF left behind shouldn't be turning into petty kingdoms, they should be PISSED that the handful of remaining JF warriors who lived to the end of the campaign were thrilled to be Wolf lapdogs. The Wolf warriors in the WE should be working hand in hand with Alaric to shore up Terra, miffed that their forces didn't even know about the campaign during the planning stages, but still he's the superior officer so he's in charge. And the other Clans like GB and SR should be paying him lip service and ignoring him entirely. When he calls for GB to send reinforcements, they should send the bottom of the barrel warriors and malcontents to be used as cannon fodder and claim they are in the middle of a war with the Dracs, sorry that's all we could spare. The Ravens should do the same and send outdated and broken ships that can't reasonably be upgraded without complete overhauls that would be more expensive than building them from scratch.
Hoo boy, where to begin... Let's start with the part where Wolf-in-Exile decides to join up with the Wolf Empire. You know, the guys who split off from not just the Clans in general but Clan Wolf specifically because they were all Wardens and disgusted with the Crusaders, going so far as to send half their forces to participate in Operation Bulldog.
That would be G. "Doc" Swift. He has been given the entire Scorpion Empire storyline.