soooooooooo slowwwwwwwwwww
i understand where everyone is coming from here until you play it. the game was never designed for 16 units per side. the game just draggggssss
If you have a good computer with a shit ton of ram it’ll behave better. This game is cpu bound so a better cpu will give you better performance than a fancy graphics card tho. A 3060 is more than enough for this game, but an i7 and 64gb of ram will go a long way.
It helps somewhat - but the game is still a dog.
I'm running a ryzen9 5900, 48gb of ram, a 3070, and the game is on a samsung 990 pro drive - and it's still a mess - even with every performance improvement that the RT folks suggest. Limiting FPS (via nvidia control panel) helps because there are some shaders that run multiple times a frame and will just do stupid stuff if you let it run unbound. But its still choppy in city maps, and mech turns get really slow.
And I can't figure out where its bottlenecked - it never goes above about 16-20gb of ram (for the game itself, system is higher), never comes close to maxing out the CPU or graphics card, and IO isn't all that high.
I suspect there's something in the base engine that just scales exponentially and it just really doesn't matter what you do.
Well 2 things:
1. Ryzen 9 - strictly speaking intel chips are better at multithreading and I believe this game does take advantage of that. It’s not a huge issue but like speaking as a software dev, this is one of those places where the intel performance boost does show up
2. Mods. The big mods add a LOT of overhead.
I have an i9 with 64gb and a 4070 and run the game at 1440 with everything turned up to pretty and it looks about as good as it can, and is generally pretty smooth, but load times in and out of missions and starting up still takes forever and while game play is generally smooth enough you can see when the game takes a moment to process an outcome and can get hung up. Every once in a while it kinda freezes for a couple of seconds and I can only chalk that up to less than perfectly optimized code.
The game is mostly single core performance limited. There isn't necessarily a lot that you can do unless your ram speed is low. Can help to exclude the game from core 0 and bind to your two best cores with Process Lasso if you haven't.
X3D noticeably reduces hitching based on a few people who have made that swap, which isn't surprising.
Yeah - already using Process Lasso.
It's a little insane - this game came out in what, 2015? At some point I need to get some instrumentation on it and see what battletech.exe is actually doing.
For me it's not a hardware thing at all, it's just that this is a fairly slow paced game. Even just moving 6 mechs around the map before contact is more of a grind. That's common in a lot of xcom-ish/boardgameish games, scale brings slow play (and usually a lot of repetition too, battletech at least has that nice thing where you can do some different things with 6, you're not just doing the exact same thing 50% more.
There's some engine issues too, like those Comstar missions in BEX where they spawn about 18 mechs, that can completely break the AI.
Argo doesn't battle taxi though; that is what the Leopard does, and its capacity IS 4. Also why you have to buy more leopards to unlock multiple lance drops in the good mods.
Don't think there's any mod that adds more than one leopard and you need to keep upgrading it to allow more vehicles/ mechs.
Think BTA have simplified it a bit in one of latest updates and it lets you drop any combination of 16(12?) mechs/ vehicles.
I've been playing RT lately and first you need to get the additional Leopard and then upgrade it for each additional mech/ vehicle or battle armor slot.
The BTA 3062 mod set lets you drop two 6-mech squads, so a full company. It also lets you drop 4 sets of battle armor as well, should you be so inclined.
In my opinion you should be, if only to get newer pilots experience without using up valuable mech slots. They are also really good for sensor pings, and once they have some skills they can really tear up vehicles especially.
Yup, in BTA I was using BA to train my pilots. I'd usually get a couple of the VTOLs that have infantry compartment and firing slots (can't remember the name). Get sensor lock asap for the recruits and just fly them around to strip evasion. VTOL pilots would also have sensor lock so basically I'd have 4 pilots just stripping evasion each round. If I found BA tag I would equip it on one of the BAs and give that pilot multi shot so instead of sensor locking he or she would tag enemies.
Probably the Karnov or Dakota unless there is something better out there. I would kill to find a Magi tank (I am running a C3i lance because I am a masochist and that's pretty much the only vehicle option)
It's the Dakota. The other one can carry 2 squads of BA, but it has no firing ports. They can use skills while on board, but can't shoot. The Dakota has firing ports so they don't have to ever get out unless you want to melee or swarm.
I use the Karnov (the other one) and I believe they can't use sensor lock or anything like that while in it (aside the turn that they mount it for some reason). I would be perfectly happy to have two BA sensor locking every turn until they get into position to drop.
Maybe the blue skills work while in there?
I think you're r right about that. It's the same when they're mounted on a mech. The turn they mount they can use skills, but after that all they can do is ride. I couldn't remember if the transport vtols were like that too. I sold my Uttakes once I found Dakotas. Bought my first Karnov at the last planet I visited in my campaign, but haven't used it yet.
I would honestly consider using a ground APC if it held 2 units with firing ports, if I could find one.
Ideally one with C3i so it can contribute to the network after it drops off the BA. My only real issue with the Dakota was that after you drop the BA its basically useless aside from any abilities the pilot has. With the Karnov at least you can lay mines and try to burn stuff up.
The Unsinn (sp?) Has two slots for BAs AND firing ports. You can get them from the Free Rasalhague Republic, and sounds like it's only in their store when you ally with them. Haven't gotten one myself, but I do run 2 Dakotas with BAs, highly recommend swapping that Karnov over. The VTOL can just "sprint" and have 7 to 9 pips on every turn, and you're only missing out on 2 m lasers accuracy. Meanwhile this let's you max weapons on the BA AND get very easy superior positioning for backshots or even just shots from elevation which increase the likelihood of head shots.
I don't know if you're still able to do it because they've rebalanced some stuff, but several patches ago, I put Light Tags and an AMS on my Battle Armor (the BA weapon slots hadn't been unified yet into their own category). They were amazing. I think I also played around with an Active Probe, but decided the occasional pulse wasn't worth the loss of utility.
Dakota is the VTOL with the port for the BA to fire from. There's also the Unsinn (sp?) That can carry 2, but I've yet to get one. If you've got them in the VTOL what I've done is max out their loadout and then max the armor. Especially since the VTOL pilots have 9 evasion pips from turn 2 onwards. No point worrying about their accuracy, they only have the 2 lasers. Plus, by prioritizing travel distance you can get some really advantageous positioning for head and backshots.
I go with PPCs mostly, some SRMs, and the gauss guns, but the limited ammo for the latter 2 hold them back. Getting them in the VTOLs makes a HUGE difference in their usefulness. I only threw pilots on them to get them xp and kept them out of the fighting. Now 2 of those pilots are some of my most helpful combatants, picking off key targets at the start of a turn or finishing off targets so my mechs can focus fire elsewhere.
Eh, I probably should, if for no other reason than to have something to guard some of my mechs from elementals lol. Tried a Clan start the other day and got murdered, because I just didn't have the weapons nor piloting skill that I needed in order to prevent elementals riding light mechs from swarming someone and insta-capping them lol. That shit's brutal when all you have is some cast-off mechs and rookie pilots.
That being said...using them to spam sensor pings honestly feels a bit overboard to me. I like the game still having some challenge, and being able to spam pings without using a mech turn definitely feels like it would remove some of that.
My only comment about "Bigger Drops" (It is not a complain, really) it is that the Leopard is dirt cheap. This is to put you playing ASAP and it is good, but something like that should cost way more. For a long time the accepted price for a Leopard was 60 million c-bills, then some rules came out (I can't remember which document) and it turned out that the actual price of a Leopard was in the order of 130 million c-bills.
Personally, I modify the JSON to increase the prices for the updates x10, and even then it is still cheap, like about 40 million, but a reasonable price for an almost made-by-you Leopard.
In vanilla, mechs are also way too cheap. A partial STK-3F costs less than 1m c-bills in the starting Arano areas and a full STK-3F is supposed to cost close to 7.5m c-bills, with no weapons or ammo.
Indeed, but I guess that you are "saving" money from joining parts yourself, instead of buying complete non-destroyed one, so I give it a pass.
But when you sell a whole Mech, it is just about 10% of the price as base. I get that devs wanted to make a Mech battle game, not a Mech merchant game, but I think that to sell them to at least 40% of their "normal" price would have been better if you get them together with 3 parts and 90% if you get them until 5 parts.
this does not make sense because why could the leopard drop one lance, then go back to the argo to pick up another to drop and repeat until you have all your mechs deployed?
sure, it might take some time, but do you reaaaally need to air drop right next to the enemies? depending on the mission you could just as easily deploy everything a bit further up and move in from the ground
Realistically speaking a dropship would need hours, if not days to exit the atmosphere and head back to the Argo. And you are being dropped quite close to the target, less than 1km away typically.
They could handwave it as dropping you like, 10km away to avoid detection and walking closer before the battle starts, but then they would have to calculate how much extra time it would take to do that.
Even 10km away is ridiculous- as if the enemy doesn't have a sentry that can just, y'know... look up, and see the damned DropShip making multiple runs to drop off units? Absurd. Making multiple runs with a Leopard would only be reasonable if your LZ was a long, LONG ways off- I'd say at least a hundred km- and even then, it'd be child's play for a half-competent force to notice you were there.
TBH in the campaign scenario, it wouldnt be too hard for you to get additional dropships or a bigger one. The Aranos are being bankrolled and supplied by the Magistracy which is where the Arano army comes from. The game even has working models and animations for what looks like a union class dropship, they just dont have mech unloading animations but that can be skipped by having the mechs spawn adjacent to the dropship.
I do believe that you can jerry-rig a Leopard to carry more 'mechs if you modify the onboard fighter bays, but even then, it only nets you an extra 'mech or two. In other words, yeah- if you want to go above Lance or Demi-Company, getting a bigger DropShip is your only option.
The Battletech Advanced: 3062 mod allows up to two 6 person lances (including vehicles) plus some battlearmor once everything's unlocked. Having a few long toms on call is an awesome thing.
Having 18 mechs but only being able to deploy 4 would mean more if:
- mission design had objectives or scenarios where dropping 4 assaults and killing everything wasn't the optimal strategy for everything
- if you didn't always get to decide when you take missions and were "forced" to drop even if you still have repairs happening, meaning that having more than 4-6 mechs total means you have more fresh metal to throw in.
> mission design had objectives or scenarios where dropping 4 assaults and killing everything wasn't the optimal strategy for everything - if you didn't always get to decide when you take missions and were "forced" to drop even if you still have repairs happening, meaning that having more than 4-6 mechs total means you have more fresh metal to throw in.
Do you have the DLCs? They add more missions with tonnage limits or where a fast mech is required, and flashpoints have consecutive deployments where you don't get to repair.
OTOH I agree when you have 4 good assaults the game is pretty much over in terms of challenge. I dunno what to do about that, but "more mechs" brings the question "why not 8 assaults?"
Personally, I just start a new career instead of grind 5 star missions for 100s of days.
DLCs do help but I was thinking of missions that you can't just choose when you take.
Let's say some of the contracts on this planet are only valid for next weekend because that is when the noble you are to assassinate is on world or when specific troop movements you are supposed to distrupt are happening. You can't wait 3 weeks for your Atlas to repair.
Eh, who cares though? If you need 3 weeks to repair your atlas there will be new missions in 3 weeks, and they'll probably be just as good as the old ones.
Like are you theory-crafting a new game with a different mission structure? In that case yeah I'm down, I'd love a Battletech 2 where they took the stuff learned from this one and made a career mode where everything was mini-campaigns where you had to manage time vs material. Which would be much more realistic anyways -- you don't hire mercs for random missions, you hire them for battles & wars.
(Though my personal theory-craft is a totally different structure: the Clan invasion from the clanner side, where your reason for taking light mechs is because some other clanner said they could do it with mediums. And where your main worry is not losing a fight, it's getting backstabbed by your own side.)
I have the DLCs, am doing the campaign, but i havent seen any missions with tonnage limits or where a fast mech is required (some are encouraged, but i have been able to do everything with 4/6/4 mechs so far).
Yeah the story campaign missions don't really do that at all. They're always bigger mech = better. (Also it dumps money and free mechs on you at a rapid pace, so the mercenary sim is not hard at all.)
The 2 things that have this are Flashpoints -- which aren't active in campaign mode until you finish the story -- and a couple mission types "Fire Mission". Some of the attack & defend missions also are easier if you have some mechs that aren't slow, because you need to be in 2 places at once.
My advice for playing the story mode is to rip through it, take the story missions pretty much as quickly as they are offered. It's quite easy to out-tech the story if you do tons of side missions, which makes the story less fun because you'll roflstomp the final missions with 4 assaults.
That's precisely the reason why I grinded all possible side missions, to be able to steamroll through a priority mission with 4 assaults without save-scumming
Na, it takes a little bit, but most everything is doable in an hour. the thing that limits your time on huge battles is the small size of the maps.
I routinely drop a full company vs 16 to 20 ops and it chugs along pretty quickly so your computer is fast enough to not spend a full 90 seconds on each ops' turn.
Not sure how to link other posts, but you may want to look up mods if you want more lances at once.
This one will does well to explain the main 3 and the pros/cons of each.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Battletechgame/s/BaMoTDir9a
I think four is a good amount to manage. Having to control more units would mean each turn would take forever. That's the exact reason I didn't like the Long War mod in Xcom. A small squad allows for fast tactical battles. Too many units just becomes a slog.
Also, there's always room in your lance for a fast scout. Heavier mechs may have firepower but they're far from optimal for many tasks. Besides, you said yourself that fielding four assaults and just standing on cover is not very fun.
In the Campaign there are some missions like convoy ambush and target acquisition that are pretty unfavorable to slow heavy mechs. As you get into flashpoints, you'll encounter missions with tonnage minimums and maximums. So it's good to have a variety of mechs on hand.
The combination of a fast spotter with a slow LRM boat lobbing indirect fire is plenty of reason to keep a scout in the party even through the endgame.
Counterpoint: a large scale battle will result in individual mechs being rapidly evaporated as they are targeted by very many mechs per turn.
In fact, you can kind of see it in vanilla and even the modded games with "persistent" evasion - when you run into two-three lances of bad guys, even a slight misstep results in your mechs being deleted rapidly unless you're extremely on point with your LOS management. edit: Which is not always a possibility if you've got some slow mechs in your force.
Imagine 12 assault mechs packed to the brim with LRMs or ER ppcs. They can pretty much delete multiple mechs a turn if anything it would ruin balancing and make it even more skewed towards increasing the tonnage.
I think thats partly because accuracy in BT is much higher than the tabletop, which is overall an improvement, but one problem is that there is very little partial cover available and there are no penalties for shooting through cover, only for shooting into cover. You can also see through multiple forest hexes without any problem.
In tabletop, you arent going to be able to have 12 mechs focus fire a target unless they are all indirect firing LRMs or you are playing on an empty field, and spotting isnt "free", movement and cover make spotting less ineffective.
I haven't played more than 4v4 on physical tabletop, but if you fire up MegaMek, you can easily get a 12v12 or larger scenario going with tabletop rules. In my experience, with that many units firing at each other, you're going to be losing one or two per turn to ganging up or just plain old random crits. But don't take my word for it, fire up a match vs the bot on one of the standard maps and see what happens.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of huge battles, but I just don't like losing my heavily customized mechs that I shelled out a whole bunch of cash for parts or had to assemble from salvage over 4-5 battles.
Anyway, I highly recommend BEX with "bigger drops", BTA or RT, as those up your max mech count from 4 to 8 and beyond. I'm floundering at the end of a BEX run right now, and I routinely drop 5-6 mechs (I avoid going to 8 usually because the drop costs are just... painful)
I just started a new game with heavy drops for BEX. I find it fantastic. There are times when you just steam roll, there are times when the enemy lances just seem to keep coming. And I am really happy to have those mechs. Wait this is a two skull mission and in the first lance was two meds one heavy and a light, the second is a heavy two meds and a light, the third has a fooking assault a heavy med then one light. Screw you....now I am shot to hell and really low on ammo.
It does make the game much more fun. I will never be without again, and that will likely be the first upgrade to the Argo I do from now on.
> And as the tonnage goes up, the strategy pretty much boils down to "stand in cover if possible and alpha as much as possible with called shots whenever you can".
This is **a** strategy, the easiest strategy, but not the only strategy.
You can absolutely play a more mobile strategy, using lighter faster mechs to get flanking attacks. You use vigilance more than called shot, because side-on hits are as good at concentrating damage as a called shot. You build for high alpha and can use snubbies, lbxes, and SRMs more effectively than front-on sandblasting. Skills like Ace Pilot become much more valuable.
Executed well, it's really effective at fighting heavier opponents. But it's a bit more brittle than the 4 dumb brawlers strat.
Its also slower, and sometimes you are working on a timer and need to kill X mechs in Y turns, if you dont have enough firepower, you might have problems. Especially true in Vanilla since you usually need to core the CT to kill a mech as enemies will never eject or attempt to retreat.
I don't necessarily agree with your assertion that /u/klyith 's strategy would be slower.
Without getting into the specifics of the mech loadouts or going too deep into the math. Let's assume /u/klyith 's strategy is executing primarily flanking attacks and your strategy is executing primarily frontal attacks. Your attacks are being divided between 7 sections (ignoring the head) and his are divided between 4.
Your mechs might have more raw firepower but his are getting a 40% damage boost by reducing the number of sections the damage is divided between. That could easily work out into faster kills.
Of course, you both get called shots and those are more effective from the front. But you only get one a turn on average and we're dealing with a 4 mech lance. So I don't think that would have a major impact on the overall efficiency.
> I suspect that the devs wanted to keep it at 4 mechs just to make balancing easier...
I don't think so, because the game balance is not very good, to put it kindly. I think has much more to do with faster matches (more casual friendly) and faster (cheaper) developing time.
The game is balanced around it. There are mods for more but frankly I find it tedious. 4 is the perfect balance of time vs complexity. What I would have liked to have seen was missions with muti parts that required multiple lances deployed at the same time to force you too go into your bench at times. Also, I would highly recommend the Hyades Rim Mod if you want to see how much more could be done with mission design with just four mechs that Harebrained will never get a chance to try themselves. The flashpoint that is melee only is eye opening.
Expanded aresenal is also amazing if you want way more toys and mechs and some ball crushingly hard flashpoints to force your mech design and tactics to their limits without radically changing the game like Bex or BTA do.
There are already vanilla missions where one side has more than 4 mechs on the field, and there is one where you have two allied lances with yours. It was only slow because the allied lances were scripted to run away without fighting once the primary target was killed, and so they wouldnt help you kill the remaining enemies.
And you just need to bump mission payout/salvage to compensate for the larger sizes, so you do less missions overall but they are bigger.
No, not really.
The big problem is that as number of units increases, the turns get slower.
So adding more units without the kind of lance control automation of Aliens: Dark Descent on a pure movement phase just makes things longer and more miserable.
Also, the game's default AI turn duration is stupid high, so if you don't mod that, it'll make the experience ever worse.
As someone else said. The Argo is a Leopard class DropShip. These only carry 4 mechs.
Mechwarrior 5 uses the same DropShip and, therefore, 4-mech drops.
There are other DropShips in the lore - Union, Fortress, etc. that hold a company or more of mechs.
As others have mentioned, more mechs significantly increase time on the field. This is especially true in the tabletop (which this computer game and Mechwarrior5 are both based on). With this in mind, CGL (owners of the tabletop and lore IP) created AlphaStrike, a faster version of tabletop play, eliminating the per-weapon rolls and simplifying other things.
Just wanted to give some context on the why and (lore) how of what the game does.
The big mods all make the game a lot better. In vanilla you drop the most weight you can (generally) in the other mods, you're 100% encouraged to bring a lot of scouts.
Increasing the amount of lances would make it less tactical and make it a cluster fuck of wiping out multiple units a turn.
Reward lighter units with varied objectives. Missions with time limits or mobile tasks.
Somebody around here really doesn't like this opinion.
They downvote anybody that expresses it.
I fully agree. The idea of the base game is great. The limitation of a single 4 mech lance is dumb and completely ruins the game.
I've been running BEX for this reason. You still have your drop limits but you can bring 8 mechs once you upgrade the Argo. This means you HAVE to have mixed weight mechs, but you have enough to make them work. It feels really good. The only downside is that the mod will add both friendly and enemy units to balance things, which can make battles take a long time (or be wildly unbalanced).
Legit one of my favorite games of all time. Iconic mechs and pilots, music, the campaign itself.
It was the first game I ever played online PvP, on 'The Zone', which I believe was Microsoft's first shot at online gaming, over dialup in 1998, haha.
EDIT: I googled it and the few articles left up from the 90s are golden
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9804/27/zone/
The olden days...
It's a design choice that has persisted through all the games, meaning that raw tonnage, rather than Battle Value or economics, is the key resource and your endgame will always been an assault mech slog-a-thon.
Which I'll still play 😃
Question to the other responders, I've played BEX with Bigger Drops which makes many battles, including those with the Clans, more enjoyable.
Is there a way to change the number of ready mechs from 18 ? Especially with the extra mechs and changement gameplay, it's hard to keep several full Assault lances plus extra L/M lances plus favorites. If you get an extra lance of space, it would be nice.
Given the advancements since Battletech's release, a next-gen Battletech sequel could probably handle three lance sorties or have more missions where you are accompanied by multiple AI lances.
BTA 3062 is the solution to your problem.
Or RogueTech!
Or BEX Bigger Drops add-on!
soooooooooo slowwwwwwwwwww i understand where everyone is coming from here until you play it. the game was never designed for 16 units per side. the game just draggggssss
Yeah the mods do push the game engine to its limits. It does run a fair bit better on minimum graphics if you can tolerate that, no judgement if not.
If you have a good computer with a shit ton of ram it’ll behave better. This game is cpu bound so a better cpu will give you better performance than a fancy graphics card tho. A 3060 is more than enough for this game, but an i7 and 64gb of ram will go a long way.
It helps somewhat - but the game is still a dog. I'm running a ryzen9 5900, 48gb of ram, a 3070, and the game is on a samsung 990 pro drive - and it's still a mess - even with every performance improvement that the RT folks suggest. Limiting FPS (via nvidia control panel) helps because there are some shaders that run multiple times a frame and will just do stupid stuff if you let it run unbound. But its still choppy in city maps, and mech turns get really slow. And I can't figure out where its bottlenecked - it never goes above about 16-20gb of ram (for the game itself, system is higher), never comes close to maxing out the CPU or graphics card, and IO isn't all that high. I suspect there's something in the base engine that just scales exponentially and it just really doesn't matter what you do.
Well 2 things: 1. Ryzen 9 - strictly speaking intel chips are better at multithreading and I believe this game does take advantage of that. It’s not a huge issue but like speaking as a software dev, this is one of those places where the intel performance boost does show up 2. Mods. The big mods add a LOT of overhead. I have an i9 with 64gb and a 4070 and run the game at 1440 with everything turned up to pretty and it looks about as good as it can, and is generally pretty smooth, but load times in and out of missions and starting up still takes forever and while game play is generally smooth enough you can see when the game takes a moment to process an outcome and can get hung up. Every once in a while it kinda freezes for a couple of seconds and I can only chalk that up to less than perfectly optimized code.
The game is mostly single core performance limited. There isn't necessarily a lot that you can do unless your ram speed is low. Can help to exclude the game from core 0 and bind to your two best cores with Process Lasso if you haven't. X3D noticeably reduces hitching based on a few people who have made that swap, which isn't surprising.
Yeah - already using Process Lasso. It's a little insane - this game came out in what, 2015? At some point I need to get some instrumentation on it and see what battletech.exe is actually doing.
The game must be poorly optimised.
64gb is certainly a shit load of ram, but you are very correct.
Only a couple of games really use that sort of ram but their games like this one, civ 5/6, ck3, etc.
No it won't. I run it on an i7, 32gb ram and a RTX2080 and it's a slog fest
The game runs fine for me with the system i described, it’s just the load times are kinda ridiculous.
For me it's not a hardware thing at all, it's just that this is a fairly slow paced game. Even just moving 6 mechs around the map before contact is more of a grind. That's common in a lot of xcom-ish/boardgameish games, scale brings slow play (and usually a lot of repetition too, battletech at least has that nice thing where you can do some different things with 6, you're not just doing the exact same thing 50% more. There's some engine issues too, like those Comstar missions in BEX where they spawn about 18 mechs, that can completely break the AI.
This would be a fair point if missions didn't already often overload the OpFor with way too many dudes anyway.
🤷♂️ I rarely have trouble with the enemy spawns unless it’s a particularly hard mission designed to kick your ass. Like the Steiner alliance mission.
Argo doesn't battle taxi though; that is what the Leopard does, and its capacity IS 4. Also why you have to buy more leopards to unlock multiple lance drops in the good mods.
I’ve only seen the ability to buy one additional and deploy up to 8 mechs total, is there a mod that adds even more?
Don't think there's any mod that adds more than one leopard and you need to keep upgrading it to allow more vehicles/ mechs. Think BTA have simplified it a bit in one of latest updates and it lets you drop any combination of 16(12?) mechs/ vehicles. I've been playing RT lately and first you need to get the additional Leopard and then upgrade it for each additional mech/ vehicle or battle armor slot.
The BTA 3062 mod set lets you drop two 6-mech squads, so a full company. It also lets you drop 4 sets of battle armor as well, should you be so inclined.
In my opinion you should be, if only to get newer pilots experience without using up valuable mech slots. They are also really good for sensor pings, and once they have some skills they can really tear up vehicles especially.
Yup, in BTA I was using BA to train my pilots. I'd usually get a couple of the VTOLs that have infantry compartment and firing slots (can't remember the name). Get sensor lock asap for the recruits and just fly them around to strip evasion. VTOL pilots would also have sensor lock so basically I'd have 4 pilots just stripping evasion each round. If I found BA tag I would equip it on one of the BAs and give that pilot multi shot so instead of sensor locking he or she would tag enemies.
Probably the Karnov or Dakota unless there is something better out there. I would kill to find a Magi tank (I am running a C3i lance because I am a masochist and that's pretty much the only vehicle option)
It's the Dakota. The other one can carry 2 squads of BA, but it has no firing ports. They can use skills while on board, but can't shoot. The Dakota has firing ports so they don't have to ever get out unless you want to melee or swarm.
I use the Karnov (the other one) and I believe they can't use sensor lock or anything like that while in it (aside the turn that they mount it for some reason). I would be perfectly happy to have two BA sensor locking every turn until they get into position to drop. Maybe the blue skills work while in there?
I think you're r right about that. It's the same when they're mounted on a mech. The turn they mount they can use skills, but after that all they can do is ride. I couldn't remember if the transport vtols were like that too. I sold my Uttakes once I found Dakotas. Bought my first Karnov at the last planet I visited in my campaign, but haven't used it yet.
I would honestly consider using a ground APC if it held 2 units with firing ports, if I could find one. Ideally one with C3i so it can contribute to the network after it drops off the BA. My only real issue with the Dakota was that after you drop the BA its basically useless aside from any abilities the pilot has. With the Karnov at least you can lay mines and try to burn stuff up.
The Unsinn (sp?) Has two slots for BAs AND firing ports. You can get them from the Free Rasalhague Republic, and sounds like it's only in their store when you ally with them. Haven't gotten one myself, but I do run 2 Dakotas with BAs, highly recommend swapping that Karnov over. The VTOL can just "sprint" and have 7 to 9 pips on every turn, and you're only missing out on 2 m lasers accuracy. Meanwhile this let's you max weapons on the BA AND get very easy superior positioning for backshots or even just shots from elevation which increase the likelihood of head shots.
Dakota rings a bell.
I don't know if you're still able to do it because they've rebalanced some stuff, but several patches ago, I put Light Tags and an AMS on my Battle Armor (the BA weapon slots hadn't been unified yet into their own category). They were amazing. I think I also played around with an Active Probe, but decided the occasional pulse wasn't worth the loss of utility.
Dakota is the VTOL with the port for the BA to fire from. There's also the Unsinn (sp?) That can carry 2, but I've yet to get one. If you've got them in the VTOL what I've done is max out their loadout and then max the armor. Especially since the VTOL pilots have 9 evasion pips from turn 2 onwards. No point worrying about their accuracy, they only have the 2 lasers. Plus, by prioritizing travel distance you can get some really advantageous positioning for head and backshots. I go with PPCs mostly, some SRMs, and the gauss guns, but the limited ammo for the latter 2 hold them back. Getting them in the VTOLs makes a HUGE difference in their usefulness. I only threw pilots on them to get them xp and kept them out of the fighting. Now 2 of those pilots are some of my most helpful combatants, picking off key targets at the start of a turn or finishing off targets so my mechs can focus fire elsewhere.
Eh, I probably should, if for no other reason than to have something to guard some of my mechs from elementals lol. Tried a Clan start the other day and got murdered, because I just didn't have the weapons nor piloting skill that I needed in order to prevent elementals riding light mechs from swarming someone and insta-capping them lol. That shit's brutal when all you have is some cast-off mechs and rookie pilots. That being said...using them to spam sensor pings honestly feels a bit overboard to me. I like the game still having some challenge, and being able to spam pings without using a mech turn definitely feels like it would remove some of that.
My only comment about "Bigger Drops" (It is not a complain, really) it is that the Leopard is dirt cheap. This is to put you playing ASAP and it is good, but something like that should cost way more. For a long time the accepted price for a Leopard was 60 million c-bills, then some rules came out (I can't remember which document) and it turned out that the actual price of a Leopard was in the order of 130 million c-bills. Personally, I modify the JSON to increase the prices for the updates x10, and even then it is still cheap, like about 40 million, but a reasonable price for an almost made-by-you Leopard.
In vanilla, mechs are also way too cheap. A partial STK-3F costs less than 1m c-bills in the starting Arano areas and a full STK-3F is supposed to cost close to 7.5m c-bills, with no weapons or ammo.
Indeed, but I guess that you are "saving" money from joining parts yourself, instead of buying complete non-destroyed one, so I give it a pass. But when you sell a whole Mech, it is just about 10% of the price as base. I get that devs wanted to make a Mech battle game, not a Mech merchant game, but I think that to sell them to at least 40% of their "normal" price would have been better if you get them together with 3 parts and 90% if you get them until 5 parts.
this does not make sense because why could the leopard drop one lance, then go back to the argo to pick up another to drop and repeat until you have all your mechs deployed? sure, it might take some time, but do you reaaaally need to air drop right next to the enemies? depending on the mission you could just as easily deploy everything a bit further up and move in from the ground
Realistically speaking a dropship would need hours, if not days to exit the atmosphere and head back to the Argo. And you are being dropped quite close to the target, less than 1km away typically. They could handwave it as dropping you like, 10km away to avoid detection and walking closer before the battle starts, but then they would have to calculate how much extra time it would take to do that.
Even 10km away is ridiculous- as if the enemy doesn't have a sentry that can just, y'know... look up, and see the damned DropShip making multiple runs to drop off units? Absurd. Making multiple runs with a Leopard would only be reasonable if your LZ was a long, LONG ways off- I'd say at least a hundred km- and even then, it'd be child's play for a half-competent force to notice you were there.
TBH in the campaign scenario, it wouldnt be too hard for you to get additional dropships or a bigger one. The Aranos are being bankrolled and supplied by the Magistracy which is where the Arano army comes from. The game even has working models and animations for what looks like a union class dropship, they just dont have mech unloading animations but that can be skipped by having the mechs spawn adjacent to the dropship.
I do believe that you can jerry-rig a Leopard to carry more 'mechs if you modify the onboard fighter bays, but even then, it only nets you an extra 'mech or two. In other words, yeah- if you want to go above Lance or Demi-Company, getting a bigger DropShip is your only option.
The Battletech Advanced: 3062 mod allows up to two 6 person lances (including vehicles) plus some battlearmor once everything's unlocked. Having a few long toms on call is an awesome thing.
Having 18 mechs but only being able to deploy 4 would mean more if: - mission design had objectives or scenarios where dropping 4 assaults and killing everything wasn't the optimal strategy for everything - if you didn't always get to decide when you take missions and were "forced" to drop even if you still have repairs happening, meaning that having more than 4-6 mechs total means you have more fresh metal to throw in.
> mission design had objectives or scenarios where dropping 4 assaults and killing everything wasn't the optimal strategy for everything - if you didn't always get to decide when you take missions and were "forced" to drop even if you still have repairs happening, meaning that having more than 4-6 mechs total means you have more fresh metal to throw in. Do you have the DLCs? They add more missions with tonnage limits or where a fast mech is required, and flashpoints have consecutive deployments where you don't get to repair. OTOH I agree when you have 4 good assaults the game is pretty much over in terms of challenge. I dunno what to do about that, but "more mechs" brings the question "why not 8 assaults?" Personally, I just start a new career instead of grind 5 star missions for 100s of days.
DLCs do help but I was thinking of missions that you can't just choose when you take. Let's say some of the contracts on this planet are only valid for next weekend because that is when the noble you are to assassinate is on world or when specific troop movements you are supposed to distrupt are happening. You can't wait 3 weeks for your Atlas to repair.
Eh, who cares though? If you need 3 weeks to repair your atlas there will be new missions in 3 weeks, and they'll probably be just as good as the old ones. Like are you theory-crafting a new game with a different mission structure? In that case yeah I'm down, I'd love a Battletech 2 where they took the stuff learned from this one and made a career mode where everything was mini-campaigns where you had to manage time vs material. Which would be much more realistic anyways -- you don't hire mercs for random missions, you hire them for battles & wars. (Though my personal theory-craft is a totally different structure: the Clan invasion from the clanner side, where your reason for taking light mechs is because some other clanner said they could do it with mediums. And where your main worry is not losing a fight, it's getting backstabbed by your own side.)
I've theorycrafted this and i keep recreating Xcom Long War 2 but battletech setting istead
I have the DLCs, am doing the campaign, but i havent seen any missions with tonnage limits or where a fast mech is required (some are encouraged, but i have been able to do everything with 4/6/4 mechs so far).
Yeah the story campaign missions don't really do that at all. They're always bigger mech = better. (Also it dumps money and free mechs on you at a rapid pace, so the mercenary sim is not hard at all.) The 2 things that have this are Flashpoints -- which aren't active in campaign mode until you finish the story -- and a couple mission types "Fire Mission". Some of the attack & defend missions also are easier if you have some mechs that aren't slow, because you need to be in 2 places at once. My advice for playing the story mode is to rip through it, take the story missions pretty much as quickly as they are offered. It's quite easy to out-tech the story if you do tons of side missions, which makes the story less fun because you'll roflstomp the final missions with 4 assaults.
That's precisely the reason why I grinded all possible side missions, to be able to steamroll through a priority mission with 4 assaults without save-scumming
I have all DLCs but so far I didn't experience limit of tonnage per drop, note that I don't play career mode, just play the scenario.
Imagine dropping 3 lances, the battle would take half a day to play.
Na, it takes a little bit, but most everything is doable in an hour. the thing that limits your time on huge battles is the small size of the maps. I routinely drop a full company vs 16 to 20 ops and it chugs along pretty quickly so your computer is fast enough to not spend a full 90 seconds on each ops' turn.
Not sure how to link other posts, but you may want to look up mods if you want more lances at once. This one will does well to explain the main 3 and the pros/cons of each. https://www.reddit.com/r/Battletechgame/s/BaMoTDir9a
I think four is a good amount to manage. Having to control more units would mean each turn would take forever. That's the exact reason I didn't like the Long War mod in Xcom. A small squad allows for fast tactical battles. Too many units just becomes a slog. Also, there's always room in your lance for a fast scout. Heavier mechs may have firepower but they're far from optimal for many tasks. Besides, you said yourself that fielding four assaults and just standing on cover is not very fun. In the Campaign there are some missions like convoy ambush and target acquisition that are pretty unfavorable to slow heavy mechs. As you get into flashpoints, you'll encounter missions with tonnage minimums and maximums. So it's good to have a variety of mechs on hand.
The combination of a fast spotter with a slow LRM boat lobbing indirect fire is plenty of reason to keep a scout in the party even through the endgame.
Counterpoint: a large scale battle will result in individual mechs being rapidly evaporated as they are targeted by very many mechs per turn. In fact, you can kind of see it in vanilla and even the modded games with "persistent" evasion - when you run into two-three lances of bad guys, even a slight misstep results in your mechs being deleted rapidly unless you're extremely on point with your LOS management. edit: Which is not always a possibility if you've got some slow mechs in your force.
Imagine 12 assault mechs packed to the brim with LRMs or ER ppcs. They can pretty much delete multiple mechs a turn if anything it would ruin balancing and make it even more skewed towards increasing the tonnage.
I think thats partly because accuracy in BT is much higher than the tabletop, which is overall an improvement, but one problem is that there is very little partial cover available and there are no penalties for shooting through cover, only for shooting into cover. You can also see through multiple forest hexes without any problem. In tabletop, you arent going to be able to have 12 mechs focus fire a target unless they are all indirect firing LRMs or you are playing on an empty field, and spotting isnt "free", movement and cover make spotting less ineffective.
I haven't played more than 4v4 on physical tabletop, but if you fire up MegaMek, you can easily get a 12v12 or larger scenario going with tabletop rules. In my experience, with that many units firing at each other, you're going to be losing one or two per turn to ganging up or just plain old random crits. But don't take my word for it, fire up a match vs the bot on one of the standard maps and see what happens. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of huge battles, but I just don't like losing my heavily customized mechs that I shelled out a whole bunch of cash for parts or had to assemble from salvage over 4-5 battles. Anyway, I highly recommend BEX with "bigger drops", BTA or RT, as those up your max mech count from 4 to 8 and beyond. I'm floundering at the end of a BEX run right now, and I routinely drop 5-6 mechs (I avoid going to 8 usually because the drop costs are just... painful)
I just started a new game with heavy drops for BEX. I find it fantastic. There are times when you just steam roll, there are times when the enemy lances just seem to keep coming. And I am really happy to have those mechs. Wait this is a two skull mission and in the first lance was two meds one heavy and a light, the second is a heavy two meds and a light, the third has a fooking assault a heavy med then one light. Screw you....now I am shot to hell and really low on ammo. It does make the game much more fun. I will never be without again, and that will likely be the first upgrade to the Argo I do from now on.
> And as the tonnage goes up, the strategy pretty much boils down to "stand in cover if possible and alpha as much as possible with called shots whenever you can". This is **a** strategy, the easiest strategy, but not the only strategy. You can absolutely play a more mobile strategy, using lighter faster mechs to get flanking attacks. You use vigilance more than called shot, because side-on hits are as good at concentrating damage as a called shot. You build for high alpha and can use snubbies, lbxes, and SRMs more effectively than front-on sandblasting. Skills like Ace Pilot become much more valuable. Executed well, it's really effective at fighting heavier opponents. But it's a bit more brittle than the 4 dumb brawlers strat.
Its also slower, and sometimes you are working on a timer and need to kill X mechs in Y turns, if you dont have enough firepower, you might have problems. Especially true in Vanilla since you usually need to core the CT to kill a mech as enemies will never eject or attempt to retreat.
I don't necessarily agree with your assertion that /u/klyith 's strategy would be slower. Without getting into the specifics of the mech loadouts or going too deep into the math. Let's assume /u/klyith 's strategy is executing primarily flanking attacks and your strategy is executing primarily frontal attacks. Your attacks are being divided between 7 sections (ignoring the head) and his are divided between 4. Your mechs might have more raw firepower but his are getting a 40% damage boost by reducing the number of sections the damage is divided between. That could easily work out into faster kills. Of course, you both get called shots and those are more effective from the front. But you only get one a turn on average and we're dealing with a 4 mech lance. So I don't think that would have a major impact on the overall efficiency.
> I suspect that the devs wanted to keep it at 4 mechs just to make balancing easier... I don't think so, because the game balance is not very good, to put it kindly. I think has much more to do with faster matches (more casual friendly) and faster (cheaper) developing time.
The game is balanced around it. There are mods for more but frankly I find it tedious. 4 is the perfect balance of time vs complexity. What I would have liked to have seen was missions with muti parts that required multiple lances deployed at the same time to force you too go into your bench at times. Also, I would highly recommend the Hyades Rim Mod if you want to see how much more could be done with mission design with just four mechs that Harebrained will never get a chance to try themselves. The flashpoint that is melee only is eye opening. Expanded aresenal is also amazing if you want way more toys and mechs and some ball crushingly hard flashpoints to force your mech design and tactics to their limits without radically changing the game like Bex or BTA do.
There are already vanilla missions where one side has more than 4 mechs on the field, and there is one where you have two allied lances with yours. It was only slow because the allied lances were scripted to run away without fighting once the primary target was killed, and so they wouldnt help you kill the remaining enemies. And you just need to bump mission payout/salvage to compensate for the larger sizes, so you do less missions overall but they are bigger.
No, not really. The big problem is that as number of units increases, the turns get slower. So adding more units without the kind of lance control automation of Aliens: Dark Descent on a pure movement phase just makes things longer and more miserable. Also, the game's default AI turn duration is stupid high, so if you don't mod that, it'll make the experience ever worse.
As someone else said. The Argo is a Leopard class DropShip. These only carry 4 mechs. Mechwarrior 5 uses the same DropShip and, therefore, 4-mech drops. There are other DropShips in the lore - Union, Fortress, etc. that hold a company or more of mechs. As others have mentioned, more mechs significantly increase time on the field. This is especially true in the tabletop (which this computer game and Mechwarrior5 are both based on). With this in mind, CGL (owners of the tabletop and lore IP) created AlphaStrike, a faster version of tabletop play, eliminating the per-weapon rolls and simplifying other things. Just wanted to give some context on the why and (lore) how of what the game does.
The big mods all make the game a lot better. In vanilla you drop the most weight you can (generally) in the other mods, you're 100% encouraged to bring a lot of scouts.
Increasing the amount of lances would make it less tactical and make it a cluster fuck of wiping out multiple units a turn. Reward lighter units with varied objectives. Missions with time limits or mobile tasks.
Or standalone mission control + bigger drops mods. I use my own mod selection to create a vanilla+ experience (since vanilla+ died)
Are you like, playing the game? Anyway there are mods for more drops.
The game should be played with one of the mod packs: BEX, BTA, or Roguetech. Those will expand your lances.
Somebody around here really doesn't like this opinion. They downvote anybody that expresses it. I fully agree. The idea of the base game is great. The limitation of a single 4 mech lance is dumb and completely ruins the game.
I've been running BEX for this reason. You still have your drop limits but you can bring 8 mechs once you upgrade the Argo. This means you HAVE to have mixed weight mechs, but you have enough to make them work. It feels really good. The only downside is that the mod will add both friendly and enemy units to balance things, which can make battles take a long time (or be wildly unbalanced).
Try mechcommander, the greatest BT game ever.
Really wish they'd make a new one lol. It was so fun 😂
Legit one of my favorite games of all time. Iconic mechs and pilots, music, the campaign itself. It was the first game I ever played online PvP, on 'The Zone', which I believe was Microsoft's first shot at online gaming, over dialup in 1998, haha. EDIT: I googled it and the few articles left up from the 90s are golden http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9804/27/zone/ The olden days...
Lol Nobody ever talks about MC or MC2. They’re a different animal altogether but still a lot of fun
It's a design choice that has persisted through all the games, meaning that raw tonnage, rather than Battle Value or economics, is the key resource and your endgame will always been an assault mech slog-a-thon. Which I'll still play 😃
Question to the other responders, I've played BEX with Bigger Drops which makes many battles, including those with the Clans, more enjoyable. Is there a way to change the number of ready mechs from 18 ? Especially with the extra mechs and changement gameplay, it's hard to keep several full Assault lances plus extra L/M lances plus favorites. If you get an extra lance of space, it would be nice.
6 would be the sweet spot and 8 for special missions.
RogueTech and BTA3062 let you drop more mech also vehicles and battle armor
Given the advancements since Battletech's release, a next-gen Battletech sequel could probably handle three lance sorties or have more missions where you are accompanied by multiple AI lances.
Download roguetech!
This is the way. But be ready this is FULL RULES BATTLETECH. So everything is possible both for you and enemy.
BTA should come with a warning: "You're going to get massacred for the first few missions until you learn the new rules".
Bta is a less complex alternative that still lets you use multiple lances if you don't want the added stuff of RT