Battletech - Also known as Trannytech

  • 🔎 If you see an alert for analytics.usips.org, this is a self-hosted system I am running as a test. It is GDPR compliant and collects no invasive information.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
What’s with the sudden change of opinion on the jihad era? Is it just reddit minded people trying to spite “le heckin bad grognards” or is there something legitimate to this change in opinion?
 
Abella said:
What’s with the sudden change of opinion on the jihad era? Is it just reddit minded people trying to spite “le heckin bad grognards” or is there something legitimate to this change in opinion?
Click to expand...
I like Jihad because a lot of factions start really getting a lot of cool mechs and we see some neat weapon systems being fielded more often. Plus WoB as a faction to play is neat.

I think most of the lore is whatever, which is more than I can say for ilClan which I hate its lore.
 
The Bogwater Flows On said:
I like Jihad because a lot of factions start really getting a lot of cool mechs and we see some neat weapon systems being fielded more often. Plus WoB as a faction to play is neat.

I think most of the lore is whatever, which is more than I can say for ilClan which I hate its lore.
Click to expand...
I think the only thing I really disliked about the Jihad was it leading to Comstars destruction. I feel like Comstar in exile would have been a better plot point than just outright destroying them
 
Professor Donger said:
Ah, come to think of it I have seen more people be positive about it, same with the Il-Clan era which is really fucking weird
Click to expand...
I think that era’s caused more fatigue in a lot of players from what I’ve seen, despite being the current age going forward.
The Bogwater Flows On said:
I like Jihad because a lot of factions start really getting a lot of cool mechs and we see some neat weapon systems being fielded more often. Plus WoB as a faction to play is neat.
Click to expand...
I’m like that with dark age, which I’ve always had a soft spot for despite the annoying elemental battle armor and savannah master spam lists.
Professor Donger said:
I think the only thing I really disliked about the Jihad was it leading to Comstars destruction. I feel like Comstar in exile would have been a better plot point than just outright destroying them
Click to expand...
The lore doesn’t bother me as much as my annoyance with how your only options back then for the WoB omnimechs was mail ordering IWM blisters or rebasing clixwarrior mechs.
 
Abella said:
They’ve become fans of it despite previously disliking it and trying to censor the name of that era.
Click to expand...
I think its pretty normal for a change that is seen as fairly negative at the time getting retrospective appreciation, the real question though is whether its because either a reconsidering of the knee jerk reaction to change or because the new content is worse and that makes the previous content look better in comparison (think of the appreciation of the Star Wars prequels vs sequels).
 
Moja Zemlja said:
I think its pretty normal for a change that is seen as fairly negative at the time getting retrospective appreciation, the real question though is whether its because either a reconsidering of the knee jerk reaction to change or because the new content is worse and that makes the previous content look better in comparison (think of the appreciation of the Star Wars prequels vs sequels).
Click to expand...
Side note are there any Novels that actually cover the Word of Blake Jihad at all? I've kind of noticed that Battletechs novels tend to be weird with what they do or don't cover
 
Moja Zemlja said:
I think its pretty normal for a change that is seen as fairly negative at the time getting retrospective appreciation, the real question though is whether its because either a reconsidering of the knee jerk reaction to change or because the new content is worse and that makes the previous content look better in comparison (think of the appreciation of the Star Wars prequels vs sequels).
Click to expand...
It wasn’t a bad era like a lot of people claimed it was. I think it came at a time where a lot of tabletop games were trying to do something new or different (like D&D 3.5e). I’m fond of that era of tabletop games, but I could see people going back because of their dislike of the il-clan era.
 
The main problem the Jihad had at its time was Wizkids trying to do a proto fnaf-style lore breadcrumbs type of story, where you had to sift through a bunch of vaguely connected "hints" and rely on theories of what the hell is going on.
After that idea was taken out back and shot with the rest of HeroClix, they started filling out the era with actual sourcebooks and novels, largely fixing the problem by giving people the full story. Newbies getting into the franchise after the fact would only be exposed to this version of the Jihad, so they'd never have to deal with the frustrations of MWDA and can judge it purely on the story itself.

It also helps that the propaganda/misinformation-laden nature of the Jihad, and the Dark Age reset that follows makes it a very "no holds barred" era to play. You can do anything you want, suspension of disbelief be damned, because it's all getting erased on Gray Monday anyway.
 
Last edited:
Abella said:
What’s with the sudden change of opinion on the jihad era? Is it just reddit minded people trying to spite “le heckin bad grognards” or is there something legitimate to this change in opinion?
Click to expand...

I think it's a consequence of trying to escape the prison of eternal 3025. And also legit secondaries going only for "ambience". The Jihad in its form existed exclusively to justify the Dark Age as @AbduluCthuluZulu said, entire pieces of the setting were nuked because they needed ClixTech to exist in a specific form.

Lately they're trying to push for non-3025 eras, and amongst all the Jihad has the most "character": IlClan is pushed hard but it's a very confused era, the FFCW is simply completely retarded and lives through Mechwarrior 4 memes, the Clan Invasion has been done to death, the Jihad at least has an interesting hook with "nukes are free, with a serving of cyborg warfare".

The actual writing of the Jihad was completely dogshit like all Btech writing, but it's a novel setting. Redditors hate the WoB though, you can see legit spergouts of crying warcrimes an' shit.

Professor Donger said:
Side note are there any Novels that actually cover the Word of Blake Jihad at all? I've kind of noticed that Battletechs novels tend to be weird with what they do or don't cover
Click to expand...

No. The Jihad is covered mostly by... old Battlecorps stories, that aren't even readily available.I think Isle of the Blessed is the longest Jihad-adjacent work that was ever thrown out. Some stories are nice though, for example the couple short ones we got about the Manei Domini Gazael and his black ops bullshit. Again, we have very little because the Jihad had a schizo development during a troubled era for the game.
 
RSU 1741 said:
No. The Jihad is covered mostly by... old Battlecorps stories, that aren't even readily available.I think Isle of the Blessed is the longest Jihad-adjacent work that was ever thrown out. Some stories are nice though, for example the couple short ones we got about the Manei Domini Gazael and his black ops bullshit. Again, we have very little because the Jihad had a schizo development during a troubled era for the game.
Click to expand...
That's a shame, the Jihad could be a pretty great era if explored properly
 
Professor Donger said:
That's a shame, the Jihad could be a pretty great era if explored properly
Click to expand...

Out of memes, CGL was tired of writing Robes. That's why Comstar died and why the reborn Blessed Order got nuked with extreme prejudice as fast as they could by the Republic.

Now I'm extremely out of the loop (I don't read Btech novels if I'm not forced to) but I don't think there's a lot of Robes books and stories. For sure, there's a lot of stories about plucky mercs companies starting from scratch or Clans. How weird people don't get tired about writing those. How peculiar.

Shitposting aside, I've always felt killing off Comstar was an extremely misguided move, because they killed one of the factions with most "character" they ever had in exchange for... what, Clan Sea Fox that's just a Clan but jews?
 
AbduluCthuluZulu said:
It also helps that the propaganda/misinformation-laden nature of the Jihad, and the Dark Age reset that follows makes it a very "no holds barred" era to play. You can do anything you want, suspension of disbelief be damned, because it's all getting erased on Gray Monday anyway
Click to expand...
That’s a great way to put it, the lore was always just kind of drip fed and open to interpretation and that frustrated a lot of people who cared about the lore.

You had some games like the mech assault game for the DS as well that was more focused on demonstrating that you could make a MW game for a Nintendo platform that wasn’t clan invasion like MW: 3050 for the SNES.
RSU 1741 said:
I think it's a consequence of trying to escape the prison of eternal 3025. And also legit secondaries going only for "ambience". The Jihad in its form existed exclusively to justify the Dark Age as @AbduluCthuluZulu said, entire pieces of the setting were nuked because they needed ClixTech to exist in a specific form.
Click to expand...
I never realized how much (justified) hate for clix existed until I gave it a try in 2009. This was after the game was discontinued and played with the people I used to play games like confrontation with. I have always disliked the way wizkids did heroclix and while the game was alive I just used them as a way to cheaply get plastic mechs that’d take a mean green bath then be cut from their shitty clix base and put on a hex base.
RSU 1741 said:
Lately they're trying to push for non-3025 eras, and amongst all the Jihad has the most "character": IlClan is pushed hard but it's a very confused era, the FFCW is simply completely retarded and lives through Mechwarrior 4 memes, the Clan Invasion has been done to death, the Jihad at least has an interesting hook with "nukes are free, with a serving of cyborg warfare".
Click to expand...
Il-clan is a new era so they don’t have to do as much if any revision to appease modern audiences. There’s people that have tried to relabel jihad as “the word of Blake kerfuffle”, like mech frog, but that can be chalked up to YouTube being sensitive.
 
Abella said:
There’s this reddit fаggоt who’s been trying to convince to start having a competitive alpha strike scene and showing everyone his lists and it’s just the most unfun looking sweaty win at all costs shit. I looked into it and it’s basically AS350 but with even more rules that you’d see in 40K tournaments like having to play combined arms and having a banlist.
Click to expand...
Alpha Strike Rules! Do you want to fight company/reinforced company level combined arms engagements in a single afternoon? Play Alpha Strike.
 
Tactical Wizard said:
Alpha Strike Rules! Do you want to fight company/reinforced company level combined arms engagements in a single afternoon? Play Alpha Strike.
Click to expand...
I like AS, I just don’t want to play it competitively. Competitive tabletop games always mean having to play optimized lists that really aren’t fun in order to win at all costs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom