Battletech (May contain spoilers)

I like your cautious approach. However I should for clarity sake point out what I can field.

here is a list of mechs I can run. More then enough to field a good lance and some left in reserve. I also have a secondary missile boat ready to go (Trebuchet or Trenchbucket to some). But my main arty guy will be fixed and ready to run by the time we make orbit.

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Your personnel are the real problem at this point, especially since you can’t get quality pilots in the seats. Building up some skills for what you do have is going to take top priority, and if you do a 3 skull mission then you could be going up against a full heavy lance – bad odds with only a medium lance without good pilots.

Orders from Count Dooku aka @Franze advised that the present readiness of the lance was not in a good enough condition to take on the 3 “skull” mission. Reviewing said mission it involved taking on an enemy heavy lance. I only have one heavy in my lance so I think Count Dooku’s advice was solid.

So accepting the 2 skull mission the briefing is as in the picture below. Travel will be to Ryan’s Fate system with a travel time of 20 days. Its a Martian environment, different than what I am used to. To be safe I think its best to choose my mechs that run coolest.

After the financial bashing in the last campaign which I cut short, I have decided to play with the payment sliders. Opting for a larger payment in credits with less choice of salvage.

Its time to travel to Ryans fate. Enroute mech repairs have also finished and all mechs are battle ready.


As I join the jumpship above the last upgrade to the Argo was completed. I have decided to upgrade the engines this time round. Not sure what benefits that gives me, but hopefully it will come in handy.

Departing the jump ship and arriving at Ryans Fate.


As I hit orbit, the next bill has arrived. Urrrgh

Whilst the hunchback seemed pretty heat efficient, I have swapped it out for a shadowhawk which runs cooler have mix autocannon laser and missiles.

Dropping into the martian landscape, it looks very nice if not foreboding. There are also dust swirls getting about which limits visibility. The mission is a two pronged mission. I am to make my way to the facility and defeat any contact en-route. Once at the facility the security team with the fugitive will deploy and I will have to escort them a short distance to a landing pad for them to be extracted.


The facility is not far away. Nothing on comms, but I have no idea if the enemy will attacking the facility so I make haste towards my objective.

Moving down a ravine I get my first sensor contacts off to the left and right. There is 3 of them in total, but I missed a screenshot or two in my haste to knock them out. Just to the left of the furthest right mech you can make out a dead scout mech laying on the ground.

The heat build up is noticeable but presently manageable. I try to conserve heat by turning off weapons that do not have a good chance of hitting. I am not sure if it makes a difference. But I have to fire through the dust storms that sits between me and the enemy. My percentage to hit seems lower than normal so if the environment does hamper, then very well done.
The commando to the right is doing a very good job sucking up my fire.



With death of the commando, we shift to the Jenner on the left and engage.



With the final blow its centre torso is destroyed bringing the Jenner to a shuddering halt.

The scouting group is defeated and the way is clear to the facility. I rush all mechs forward leaving a tactical spacing to escort the vehicles to the Launchpad.

As the vehicles appear, so do enemy contacts. Looks like they are coming from the other side of the ravine. I rush the mechs forward to position between the vehicles and the enemy. They will come, that is certain. Can the vehicles make the Launchpad in time… I hope so.

The enemy is a way away and as they march down the ravine, the trucks almost make it to the landing pad.

The line of 4 mechs are close now. They will pop into firing range any second. I only hope they cannot get many shots off at the vehicles. Maybe shoot at us instead. At the very least, I hope the vehicles armour is good.

I scurry to the bottom of the ravine at best speed. I want to engage them before the vehicles come into the enemies firing range.
The first into view is a commando. Quickly it is engaged

The rest of the mechs come into view. In total they are 3 lights and a medium who unloads his PPC at a vehicle. I squint expecting to see explosions but the vehicles armour holds. As I advance, my leopard class dropship has already arrived at the landing pad ready to receive the convoy.

Only a few enemy could fire with no deaths to our convoy. I guess they sprinted into range which meant they could not fire. Its my turn now. The conditions made for poor hit percentages but I did what I could.


Not satisfied with the damage output, I need to close the distance. Its time to get up close and personal. So an assault on the enemy line is ordered and mechs advance firing as they move.

the dust storm between us.

The enemy are fully engaged now and the convoy seems safe.

The battle rages on

A pesky commando won’t take no for an answer. With that a bit of physical tutelage may get the message home.

The commando, not happy with what just happened, runs behind my mech and shoots him square in the back. My heavy mech jumps in to provide a bigger slap the the enemy mech,

All that remains is the Panther.


who looses and arm

The panther hits rage mode and in a surprise attack lunges forward and melee’s my heavy mech !

Its a daring move, one which left the panther wide open. My wolverine hunkers in behind the panther for a huge sucker punch through his centre torso instantly ending the enemy.

Mission report.
Increasing the payment slider really helped. My bank balance receives almost two months worh of funds.

I did receive an injury of ten days though. Perhaps if the mission board has more on this planet, I can sit in orbit until the wounds have healed.

Good decision thanks Count Dooku !

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Mission #5 is here. I opted for the easiest mission while I made a few adjustments to my mechs (getting the ammo containers off of the centre torso).

Going to work my way up the mission list avoiding the entry that requires travel until I get to the story mission.

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Couple more missions before I move off to the story mission.

A Milk Run mission: Mission #6 here;
And a defense mission: Mission #7 here;

The defense mission was harder seeing as how it is difficult to defend in depth in this game? I guess I could have moved out into the valley in front of the maintenance station I was defending but that would be bold. Also learnt that there are firing arcs and that your missiles will not do a 180 and hit something behind you.

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I have missions #8 and #9 posted.

Protect the convoy: Mission #8 here;
Mistakes were made: Mission #9 here;

Game is still fun. It has a ton of potential but it does feel like there are a number of ‘quality-of-life’ features that are mission. Example: Why can’t I sort the Buy/Sell lists by value?

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We all like to have a good ejection (yes read it correctly you dirty minded individuals)

Getting in what I feel is the mid tier game of Battletech. I have realised the worth of pilots and their skills. To be honest, they are just as valuable as a mech themselves. So begrudgingly I have learned a few lessons.

Spoiler alert (possibly)

[spoiler]The Argo’s medbay. You want to trick this out as quickly as you can in order to reduce downtime for your mechwarriors. Its expensive in the latter tiers but covers its costs easily from the reduction in downtime of your pilots.

The ejection handle. Yep, eject your pilots when the mech looks like it will be toast. Sometimes its hard to time right as you can only eject on that pilots turn. But they stay alive and you keep those very handy skills. I have lost too many high levelled characters because I have tried to utilise the mech to its fullest. Now that I am utilising this feature, I am headslapping myself why I haven’t done this earlier.

Again with mechwarriors. Upgrade the Argo to utilise “pod Gamma” IIRC its correct name. That unlocks a host of MechWarrior pilot accommodation. Costs about 2.5 mil, but in the latter stages of the game, those injuries really start racking up.[/spoiler]

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Update on Bogusheadbox’s Marauders.

Well there has been ups and downs…

Lots of missions have been completed behind the scenes. One recently and most memorable was a 2.5 “skull” mission that left its mark on my mechwarriors, mechs and consequently my finances.

In a short summary;

I can now field a lance of heavy mechs. I have multiple Dragon Mechs in the 60 ton class. They sit firmly in the OK department of the smaller “heavy” class. My hunchback dishes out more damage, but these can take a bit more punishment.
Anyhow, so I undertook this 2.5 mission. I was expecting some tough opposition but what I rolled into left me scraping my jaw off the ground. Quite frankly on paper, I should have been splattered over the battlefield. However, from this mission, the importance of well trained mechwarriors was shown.

Its started with contact. A single contact. An Orion, all 75 tonnes of it. Now, please note that my largest mech is only 60 tonnes, that’s a bit of a disadvantage. Shortly after him, I was engaged by vehicles up to and including 80 tonnes. Ever seen a tank with 3 PPC’s? There was many a stained underwear. But it didn’t end there. The mech lance held a medium mech, a heavy mech and … another fricken Orion. 2.5 “skull”? I don’t bloody think so !!! I have been bushwacked.

It was a devastating battle. If the enemy hit, parts went flying. I was running my mechs from cover to cover trying to single out the enemy one by one.

If it weren’t for the perks of my mechwarriors and the precision shot ability (amongst others) things would have been different.

We were victorious. But the cost was bitter.
One destroyed heavy mech. One destroyed medium mech. One dead pilot and all the others with injuries some of which were well over 100 days. I had to let another pilot go because he was out of action for so long. And hence, two new recruits were added to the list.

I wished I had ejected them.

Anyhow. Some successful lower level tier mission (that were actually lower level) and selling a huge amount of my stockpile and the bank balance is back at a somewhat workable number.

The argo now at Lyreton. All pilots healthy and notice the pods that jut out. All now upgraded to useable

Two new crew. Starfish and Pooka. Pooka I have been levelling up.

My mechbay. Full of ready mechs and a few heavies in there. One is under minor repairs. However most of my stockpile of mechs in storage have been sold off to stave off impending bankruptcy.

The argo and her current upgrades. There may be things on here that are minor spoilers so look at your own risk. upgrading the medbay to the next slot is my next objective. But that is 2.5 mill

My expenses have soared to almost 500,000 credits per month. Unfortunately the costs mean that you need to keep undergoing missions. Any down time is devastating to the wallet.

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That’s an option? I didn’t even know that you could do that outside the auto-trigger in the tutorial mission! I must take a closer look at the GUI.

Yeah, I had to do some google - foo to find out how to do it. For such an important thing its really a tiny button. Go figure.

Its in the lower left hand side of the screen

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Do you guys know if anyone has written a reference article or manual which explains the differences between the various mechs? Something which explains to you how you should fight them, both as a user or against? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

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Thats a bit hard, due to the tinkering that can be done on each mech

Lets start with basic types and weight ranges
Lights IIRC 40 (or 35 can’t remember which) tonnes and below
Medium 40-55 tonnes
Heavy 60-75 tonnes
Assault 80-100.

Lights generally have excellent speed and benefit most from jump jets. Assaults generally have the most armour and internal structure which usually makes them slow.

The difficult part is the way you can configure each mech. You can opt to take less weapons or lighter weapons and in return you can add more armour or internal structure (to a max value that mech allows).

So if you had two of the same mechs side by side, you may need different tactics to handle each one.

Thats where you sensors come in. You can disseminate their armour composition and weapons. Therefore you can target weakspots or by knowing what weapons they have, stay at the enemies non-optimal range. Things like ppc’s and LRM’s don’t like it up close

Here are some basic rules though.
1). Destroying both legs kills a mech (legs don’t have front and back armour - so hitting it from any angle will strip it.
2). Destroying a left or right torso also destroys / removes the arm that is attatched to it.
3). Engine sits in centre torso - destroying that (called coring) destroys mech. Tabletop coring had a chance the reactor goes critical for a mini nuke explosion. I have not seen any reference to this in game.
4). Destroying the head - mechwarrior sits in head. Head goes pop, so does mechwarrior.
5). Attack from the rear (gigiddy). By default less armour is carried on the rear to maximise armour on the front. So getting a manoeuvrable mech behind the enemy can be devestating.
6). Damage travels inward. If you destroy an arm and hit the same area damage tranfers to the side torso. If that is destroyed and you hit that area, damage is transfered to the centre torso.
7) always manoeuvre your mech to the weakest quadrant of the enemy. I.e. if its left side has taken a beating attack it from its left. Getting shots on a different quadrant will only hit fresh armour (unless its an arm or leg)

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Spoiler

Also for those thinking about other weapons like gauss rifles, they are in game. I have reached a section of the story line where los-tech is mentioned and gauss was specifically talked about. It also mentions different weaponry like pulse lasers (aren’t they clan?) mechs we haven’t seen before and other stuff

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As Bogus mentioned its hard because they are customizable. I don’t know if the AI mechs are customized or all stock. I am sure there are guides on them in Steam community hub for the game under the Guides tab. There are alot of guides in there now.

As for customizing your own, here are a few thoughts -

First it is helpful to think of the mechs the same way we think of planes and ships in real world planning: as weapon delivery systems or platforms. All of the mechs have legs, arms, heads, can melee and have the same vulnerability points like Head, CT, Legs. So the combat value of a mech is its size, its weapons, and the pilot skills in it.

There is not too much to talk about as far as size - As time goes on your mechs will have to get bigger because theirs do :wink: Just don’t try to melee a mech bigger than yours, right @fridge?

So designing a mech is about putting the weapons on it for the style or effect you want that mech to perform with the right pilot tactics in it. The game throws a curve into this in that the difference in mech designs is defined by each mech only allowing to put certain weapons in certain locations on the mech. The Blackjack you start with is a clean design in that each arm can have a laser and a cannon. It has no missile hardpoints however (if memory serves) so its design choices are pretty straightforward.

But if you look at the Shadow Hawk it has no weapon slot in the left arm. So the designers must have planned for that arm to be used for melee. This creates some interesting tactics, such as loading up the arm with max armor, placing the mech on the left side of your formation, and always turning the mech to face that left arm towards the enemy. it will soak damage and when it gets blown off you are still combat effective. (definitely turn to the right after that happens though…) That’s just one example of some things to think about.

Jump jets seem to be a game changing design choice in the game. In the board game not every mech was jump capable and you were limited in how many times you could do it in battle (I think). Here it seems that every mech can jump (@Bogusheadbox if you could confirm that, I am not as far as you and haven’t seen a lot of bigger designs) so jumping all over the place is probably more important here than in other Battletech games. I took the jumps out of my Vindicator to get an LRM 10 onto the field but may put them back in and pull the PPC for 4 MedLas instead going forward.

Anyway the take away here is to field designs that group weapons and their min/max ranges with pilots who can utilize them. The mechs themselves are just boats that you work around how the stuff fits on them. Definitely a big part of the game play.

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This is quite true :slight_smile:

Also a few links that I have used to get started:

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Listen, That Arano chick better watch her tone. If she thinks I am going to keep getting my face pushed in for her without some sweet talk going forward, she has a lot more disappointment coming…just sayin.

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Update to Headbox Maurauders and general update.

Things have been progressing nicely. Though not without their injuries, severely damaged mechs, and extortionate upkeep costs.

My monthly bills have now reached a staggering 560,000+ credits just for monthly upkeep. This does not include repair / replacement costs.

I am now at the point I will start playing with mechs in storage. Its easy to put them in storage and pull them out and you don’t pay upkeep on mechs when in storage.

But I have a question that some of you may know. I know that once a mech goes into storage that all weapons are stripped.

So the question is, once you pull the mech out of storage, is it rebuilt the way you had it or does it get rebuilt to default stock and then you have to spend more time to refit it the way you want? I have modified most of my mechs to where I like them and I want to keep their configs.

Anyhow, if no-one knows I will play with it and find out.

Moving on. Campaigns have been fought and won, the story line has been progressed as well (I won’t spoiler any story lines - too much)

However, I have managed to put together from salvage a variant of one of my favourite mechs (I play this one a lot in MWO back in the day as well). Its a Cataphract. Its at the top end of the heavy class at 75 tonnes with a chicken leg design. Variants of the cataphract can also have jump jets as well.
So here is mine.

I have refitted mine to sport ppc+, large laser, 3 medium lasers. Its not the most heat efficient build. But the plan is to utilise the PPC+ and LL for long engagements or if I need the knockdown or EM bonus of the PPC. Then at medium range it will fire 3 med lasers and one Large laser. Close range and melee it will be combination of mediums and large. In addition for close range/melee I have two machine guns to hopefully add crit damage.

If I find its heat management is not great, I may drop the PPC+ for another Large laser and get some more heatsinks. However I will miss the bonuses the PPC’s generate.

So that is my favourite mech. But moving up a belt class in the fight, the Headbox Marauders has two new acquisitions. They are the “Awesome” and the “Highlander” Assault class mechs.

Firstly the Awesome. Topping in at 80 tonnes, its signature calling card is 3 PPC’s that can ruin your day. Its a hefty mech that can give and take a punch.

Below I have amended its load out. I have dropped one PPC in favour of maximising from armour and heat management. I want to run this both in medium and cold climates. So it sports 2 PPC’s, 4 med lasers and one small laser. With this it carries a heap of heat sinks to manage it and sports max frontal armour whilst still putting out a nasty punch for anyone that gets stuck in my combined range arc.

So not to finish is my “Piece de resistance” the highlander. Its a behemoth of a mech topping in at 90 tonnes of assault mech goodness. I am not sure really what to do with this guy and so I may need some suggestions from you all. He has a signature calling card and that is the double edged sword. More of that later.

this mech runs cold. So I have amended slightly its load out to reduce heat efficiency and increase armour. So lets get to the nitty gritty then. GAUSS RIFLE, say it with me… GAUUUUUSSSSSSS. Yep here is proof that guass rifles are in game. However, as far as I can see they are rare as hens teeth. Here lies the double edge sword. The guass rifle is devastating, no doubt about that. But if it gets destroyed in battle, how do I replace it? Its a rare item. So do I take the gauss rifle into battle or do I change the load out to conventional weapons and keep the gauss rifle in storage? Thoughts on a post card please.

Anyhow, in my current guise. Here is the highlander. [edit] On reviewing the picture, I am definitely going to move the one box of gauss ammo from the right arm to the left arm. I DO NOT want an ammo explosion to happen where the guass rifle sits.


Moving along and on a different note. After the patch I still think there is a bug with enemy re-inforcements. Maybe its an intended mechanic, who knows? Anywhow I am still getting, after the mission is completed a warning about incoming enemy re-enforcements. So I am not sure if the re-enforcements are triggering correctly. Maybe they are and its just the message that is out of sequence.

But the game is still fun and looking forward to using my new Assaults with great vengeance.

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“Smoke 'em if you’ve got 'em.” A highlander without a Gauss (or better yet, ER or Heavy Gauss, though those probably aren’t in game) is a sad Highlander. If you lose it you could probably stuff a pair of the heaviest autocannons you have to keep it effective until you acquire another.

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Agree with Aero. The only thing less useful than a destroyed Gauss Rifle is a stored Gauss Rifle. Keep him on the right side of your formation and keep your left side angled toward the enemy, and blast away.

Gauss ammo does not explode, nor should it. They are big nickel steel balls (heh). They exploded in MWO but not here. Should be in the tooltip.

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Well i ran him a couple of times and you guys are right. Yep that gauss rifle is something good. He is my heavy hitter now.

Having good crew morale works very well for the precision strike perk. I try to have the highlander run last and precision fire on the area softened by the rest of the lance. Usally works well. If the enemy mech is not destroyed at this point, it is almost certainly knocked down from being hit with a gauss, around 35 missiles and 3 ppc’s

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