Fair enough. I never did play the original tabletop, so I think I have a clean slate, so to speak.
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Who doesnāt?!
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Iāve been playing this a bit and been enjoying it. Iāve taken my time with the campaign, mostly taking contracts and slowly inching up the tonnage of my lance.
I managed to kill the pilot of an Awesome fairly early on, which helped a lot - the Awesome has been my brawler with an AC20, a flamer and a few SRMs with boosted stability hits.
I also scored a Marauder a little later, which has been my disco ball (PPC/laser) - she runs fairly hot but it is manageable: she works well as a medium range PPC / laser alpha turret, provided you take the occasional turn to brace and open the windows a bit to cool down.
On hotter climates (against selected opponents) I tend to hurl out a PPC / laser alpha and then sprint up close for a melee bash for more damage output per turn on average while the barrels cool down (as opposed to taking a bracing break).
For quite a while the lance was: Awesome (brawler), Marauder (disco ball) and a couple of generalist Shadow Hawks with an autocannon / laser mix.
A couple of nights ago I got a Catapult from a story mission, thoughā¦so I swapped that in instead of one of the Shadow Hawks. Iāve kitted her out as a pure LRM boat (1 x LRM15 with boosted stability hits and a standard LRM20 rack).
Ohh boy. She is madness, itās great.
Hereās roughly how it seems to work: a circa 55-tonner enemy mech or two show up (seems to be their standard workhorse in the contracts I take).
The Catapult lets loose with 35 LRMs at the nearest / most threatening enemy mech, enough to put a dent in him but more importantly destabilize him. The Awesome starts a mad sprint right towards him. She might take a hit or two from other enemies nearby at the end of the turn but itās okay - she is a big girl and can take it, plus at full sprint she has a bit of evasion too.
The enemy gets one turn before the Awesome reaches him, generally not enough to really hurt. Then itās time for another load of LRMs, followed by a melee hit by the Awesome. This combo seems to be enough to overwhelm the stability of most mechs up to medium-heavy, causing them to fall overā¦and when they do, the disco ball Marauder and the Shadow Hawk are at alpha range.
Basically it seems I can wipe out / cripple one decent-size mech like this in 1-2 turns, which tends to set the scene for the rest of the battle well - generally it tips the balance in my favor.
So much fun! Iāve only had a couple of contracts with the new lance but so far itās working brilliantly.
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I have been replaying Battletech for the last few weeks as well. The turn-based nature of the game lets me multitask, which I canāt do while flight simming 
I am not at the part in the game where I hit those mech sizes but I just swapped out my remaining Jenner targeting scout for a Shadow Half equivalent. I have been having good success with maneuver warfare and a LRM missle chassis (25 in my case with 1 being a 10 LRM ++ launcher). The AI does not seem to handle that well and keeps pushing toward me in pieces.
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I said Awesome, I meant Victor, sorryā¦Awesome is longer range.
Nice! Yes, maneuver warfare works very, very wellā¦a few contracts back I had a cool one, āthe B teamā 
Basically you take a bunch of rinkydink light mechs for a training patrol, which of course goes wrongā¦you only get to take one proper mech of yours with and the rest of the lance is random mechwarriors with 25-30 ton mechs.
I really had to take the maneuver warfare to the extreme with thoseā¦I was just running circles at full speed from one cover to another while I slowly sniped the enemy mechs with my sole proper mech, a Marauder. It was quite funny, it worked but those poor light mechs were pretty beat up by the end
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@Fridge did you end up continuing your campaign? I just fired up Battletech for the first time since Feb, got a storyline mission done.
I think Iāve been taking the storyline a bit slowlyā¦my lance is getting pretty heavy for the story missions. Iām sure itāll get harder in due course!
Naw. I got to a point where it was impossible to judge the strength of the enemy I was facing. Either they were way too easy or way too hard, and with n middle ground. It became less fun
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Fair enough! I think Iāll try to get through the campaign once like this (Iāve been shamelessly restarting missions if theyāve gone sideways) and if I still have interest, try going more hardcore and not rolling back if things go sideways.
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Wow - do you guys have any Marauders in your lances? It seems to have a very interesting feature: at 10 gunnery skill, youāre able to get headshot called shot accuracy up to 35%, basically double what any other chassis gets by the looks.
Itās almost too goodā¦basically a 1/3 chance that you can knock off any mech (even assault) regardless of its condition - just put a double PPC between the eyes of the pilot. Heat is a thing so you canāt be throwing alpha strikes all day long but still. Iāve had some hairy situations turn into easy ones in one shot because of it.
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Oh my goodness. After completing the campaign, I decided to try career modeā¦and while I donāt have Ironman on, Iām effectively taking it as it comes and not reloading. Itās a very different game.
I think Iāve taken a step too far too quicklyā¦I had to retreat from a contract when I was getting absolutely hammeredā¦needed a full month to recover and almost went bankrupt.
Took a slightly ambitious contract to recoup lost timeā¦all went well until a lance of reinforcement arrived without me noticing and they started shooting me in the back. The mission was to destroy an enemy base and I was almost there, so I blitzed inside the base with the turrets still up and took down a couple of the target buildingsā¦but then the reinforcement lance alphaād my hard-earned Hunchback in the back, destroyed all his M lasers, blew the center torso and almost killed the pilot (95 days to heal!). Also took out the PPC arm of my Pantherā¦
I did get ~$400k of a honourably failed mission payment, but Iām going to have to lick my wounds for another month, hire another rookie pilot to replace the hospitalized one for the next 3 months and replace a whole bunch of weapons somehowā¦so I think Iāll have to limp to an easier planet and admit my defeat. Quite challenging!
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