Hello, and welcome hapless forum-goer, to what might be the first of my semi-regular blithering rambles (we'll see how this goes) on my love of Never Leaving Any Game Untouched and thus Ruining BattleTech, as I cheerfully take a hatchet to the rules of the game you all love, in the pursuit of making it "better," for my own given value of "better."
I am Aotrs Commander, or more properly Commodore Bleakbane of the Army Of The Red Spear (Aotrs - pronounced "A- (as in "hay") oat-ers") - I've been using this moniker for a long time - or even more properly, "that sodding lich what Ruins All Of The Things." I am very solidly Lawful Evil, which is why things like taking beloved sets of rules people have played for decades, deciding that's not good enough for me, and bending them into horribly shapes to fit my twisted idea of "better" comes so naturally so me!
So this will be part me mechanically musing, partly a vague sort of after-action report and partly just and excuse to take and show photos from my usual club-level wargames (as opposed to at conventions, where I am Doing My Proper Work...)
Some introduction, first...
I started BattleTech with the animated series in the mid-nineties, and almost my first purchase after the box set, was the 3050 technical manual. I spent at least one happy holiday solo-playing with 3025 IS mechs being cheerfully murdered by self-designed Clan mechs, at first represented by LEGO men until I got some "proper" models (from ICE's Steel Warriors plastic models). I played BattleTech semi-regularly with a mate or two a good few years back, enough that I bought HeavyMetalPro, something I have very much never regretted!
I then didn't play it for a good long time - mostly, I think, during the period of thirteen or so years I was writing my starship rules, Accelerate and Attack: Aeons of War. When I heard about HBS releasing BATTLETECH, about the time it showed up on Paradox, I thought "hey, I'm struggling to find time/energy to always write something interesting and flavourful for my AccAtt scenarios and my primary gaming is struggling getting down reliably to the club at the moment - I have over a hundred mechs or something that I’m not using, and BT we don't have to take so seriously, we can use that as a casual game!"
So I dug it out, bought another dozen or so mechs and vehicles (taking the total to actually closer to 150 when I looked it up) from Ral Partha (marking the first time in AGES that I bought a model, since I predominantly make my own now, CAD modelling for 3D printing being my day job) and working out how I was going to improve our various attempts to house-rule BT to my satisfaction.
Because that - and I cannot state this enough - is what I do for something I'm taking casually. I don't do anything by halves.
(Starships - what I Take Seriously - I have over 1400 across about twenty fleets, and there's about another six or seven across my various mates who play...)
So then, the true heresy of Bleakbane Ruins BattleTech begins - the house-rules!
(And if you think this is bad, you should see what I have done to D&D or Rolemaster...!)
What we are playing is basically running off bits of Master rules/Maximum Tech, informed by bits of Total War and the Tech Manual. (Because there was NO WAY I was printing out those overly-coloured PDFs at hundreds of pages - the rule books and selected bits I've written down are just easier to take down the club. Even that in this latter date, I have a tablet.) I kept bits of the old rules I liked; in some cases, the bits that Total War explicitly wanted to stop you doing (like pulse lasers and RACs with targeting computers) and adopted the new ones where appropriate.
We are running off BV2, because in my struggle to get my old version of HMP working on Win 10 during the set-up (and finding my CD wouldn't work, even), the fine chap there sent me the more recent version (he went and dug out my decade old purchase record to check it, bless 'im!), so it is... Better? than BV1, at any rate.
Also - and you can directly blame HBS for this, the damage for the ACs has also been improved, more or less in-line with what they did. (AC 2 => 5, AC 5 to 8 and AC => 11 (12 would have had the same head-cropping issue HBS avoided by being able to go from 60 to 61 hits!) I also smoothed the heat progression of the AC 5 to 2 heat as well.) I explicitly did NOT change the damage for Rotary ACs, however, on the basis that seemed too nasty.
When we played BT a few years back, me and my mate decided to use the salvo fire rule - i.e. you group your weapons and you can fire one group (or alpha strike), and you make one attack roll for the salvo, and all the weapons to-hit numbers to the roll. It is certainly faster, but being younger, it took me much longer to twig that the statistics of small numbers is a problem. (It was less so for my mate, who is one of those loved by the dice gods.)
So, when we took it back up again, I elected that we would change shooting (and later piloting checks) to D20, keeping the modifiers the same. That would give us not only a more even distribution for the modifiers, but more hits overall to counter the small number of dice rolls.
We also used to play at 1 hex = 1 inch, but there is a reason we really never finished a game on an 6' x 4' table. I also discovered, in an earlier experiment with MG BT, that the ranges verses boar share were simply not enough to allow long-range units to support properly. so, thanks to HMP, when we took it up again, we switched to 1 hex = 2", which works way better.
The major change was to the turn sequence.
In essence, I have basically tore out shooting and damage system out of BattleTech and pasted it onto Manoeuvre Group.
Manoeuvre Group - and I would be delighted but astounded if anyone of you has heard of it - is a set of 1940 to moderns set of rules (which effortlessly adapts to scifi, which is what I use it for). (It is, for anyone interested, available on Wargames Vault.) It was written by my Dad (an ex-Rolls Royce aerospace engineer) and his mate (something of a military technical expert to the point he's occasionally done lectures for the Royal Army). I categorise it as a tactics simulator. Dad and his mate like to play very simulationst games, where the point is to be simulating, basically the sort of decision making, rather than weapon factors. It is a very demanding game, not because of the rules (which are fairly simple), but because of the level of thinking involved. My Dad says a good game of MG leaves you going home with a headache. It is, then, a bit of a niche set of rules and is really not suited to folk who just want to turn up to have a social game with their mates once a week.
I have similar tendencies, though not as extreme. My starship rules (which I finally published a year ago myself!) have a similar sort of tactical requirement - and it is such that motivates my particular BT heresy, to, while keeping the fun nuts-and-bolts of the Mechs, change the way the game plays to something that is my cup of tea. Basically, on the table-top, the sort of games I aim to play are the wargame equivalent of those of your who like to have all the difficulties at maximum on computer games. It's where I get my fix of that - on computer, I will tend to gravitate to lower (normal or even easy) difficulties, since I explicitly don't play them for the same thing as I do tabletop.
Anyway, so MG is not a game for anyone who isn't really keen on that sort of thing (my Dad calls it a very "geeky" game even in a "geeky" hobby.) But, because my Dad's job was literally mathematical modelling, it is an excellent and very flexible engine to play with.
(Worth noting that, as I play scifi - and now BattleTech - with it, it is as much a heresy to MG as it is to BT.)
MG is D20 based (which was my input), since that gives sufficiently granularity that D12 (or multiple D6s) lack, without having to worry about the false sense of scientific credibility percentiles bring. (AccAtt uses D20 too, and I think it is probably the only one that uses buckets'o'D20...!) This was partly what prompted the shooting change - the base to-hit numbers are the same in MG as BT (4 on d20), so I had some idea of what the final result should be like.
In MG, each unit has an activation - not unlike the computer game version of BattleTech or D&D 3.X - consisting of two actions. Activations alternative between sides each round. The one with the least number of units at the start of the round can elect to go or to force the other guy to go until they have equal numbers of units left to activate.
You can also take reactions - the most common of which are provoked when an enemy moving into sight, or you are shot at by an enemy. Each time you take a reaction, you get a marker, which basically gives you a -1 on shooting rolls, until you spend an action to make a check to take it off. (In MG, proper, you can have three reactions, and anything after that doesn't give you any more markers, but you suffer a more severe check to Leadership, which would very loosely correspond to increasing your Piloting skill in BT (and any rolls which aren't shooting, say) by 2. This is not an issue in the BT issues for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.) Basically, reactions are you essentially stealing a bit of next round ahead of time. (It's a bit like the concept overwatch, but not quite.)
The big thing with MG is that you don't have a move action - you have five speeds - slow, fast, stop, reverse (represented by a marker with a short point, a long point, an inverse point and flat edge - you'll see this in the photos later) and transit, which is "as fast you like, but frack help you if anyone sees you." The major issue is that you use an action to CHANGE speed. And if you perform an action or make a reaction, you move at the same time (in the case of shooting, technically you decide at what point you shoot during the movement) - in fact you are required to do so. So in MG, if you are Fast speed (minimum 6 (inches at 5mm, cm at 144th)) and you take a shot, you HAVE to move 6, even if it means you have to drive into a ditch.
This equates fairly neatly to BT - Run, walk, standing still and sprint in place of transit (reverse is unnecessary). So in AotrsTech, you can spend an action to change speed. Unlike in MG, where you have to from stop to slow to fast, you can change speed from any speed to any other speed, just like you can choose whether to walk or run in BT. The difference is, you are then stuck at that speed until you spend another action to chance it. At walk speed, you can move forward or backwards without penalty, but at Run, you have to move forwards.
MG also allows the commanding unit to handshake. In what, given the numbers on D20 is basically a piloting check, the platoon - or lance commander, in this case) can use one of his actions to give one of his subordinate units an extra activation.
Now, unlike MG proper, BT has heat to worry about. So rather than allowing you to fire as many times as you like, there is a flat rule you can only shoot a given weapon system once until the end of your activation. Second, that heat is only calculated an applied at the end of an activation. So, if you make reaction fire, you note the heat build-up, but don't apply it until the end of the unit's next activation. You might, for example then, be able to fire a different weapon group on your activation, but the heat from that adds up before it gets sunk.
(I considered letting you shoot weapons as many times as you wanted, bearing in mind you'd only get you heat sinks once, but then realised that would, for example, make Gauss Rifles way too potent.)
Melee attacks, notably, don't follow this rule, so you can make them as often as you want to spend an action to do so.
What we discovered when we did this, is that this, combined with the reaction system means that you get something that feels more like X-Com 2 - you spend a while setting you your forces and trying to prove the other guy into firing, at which point that Mech is basically out for the round. So, again, not massively unlike the turn sequence in the computer game - the same sort of logic applies. (Forcing the other guy to go, for example, is very much like reserving - and because you can choose to activate units in any order, you can do the same thing as you can with lights and have two goes in a row, but with anyone.)
We have played several games at lance level (or star), each time iterating a few bits. Jumping, for instance, I quickly realised, needed a few notes - essentially, you have to spend an action to jump, and you end at stop speed (but if you jump twice in an activation, you don't have to use a second action point. This means you can still do a jump and then attack.) Also, with effectively doubling the distance you can cover in a round, you get a much more mobile game. (Shooting modifiers, by the by, only take into account what speed the Mech was doing in its last phase, so if you run with one action and change speed to walk, if someone shoots you, you only count the distance you walked.)
Bleakbane Ruins BattleTech Battle 01
Having done several games and getting a result at the lance/star level, today's game, then, was a brave (and perhaps too ambitious) attempt to see if we could do two lances verses a single star.
I also elected that it was time to dig out my Capellans, and introduce my mate to Stealth Armour, TAG and Arrow IV and the C3 system. (Notably, my Capellans, and the one time I used Arrow IV and TAG with clans, mark the only time I ever ne against my first mate at BattleTech...!)
So, I fielded two Raven 4Ls, a Sha Yu 4B (C3 slave) and a Lao Hu 3B (C3 Master) and a lance with a C5 Catapult (Arrow IV), and the Liao stealth armoured Warhammer and Pillager and a regular Sha Yu 2B.
The opposition I gave (since I have all the stuff!), a Blood Asp, Canis, Thor, Mat Cat and Vulture.
(Yes, I am a dirty freebirth surrat, thank you for noticing!)
While the Clans have (nearly) all the best toys, I cannot take them too seriously. My old mate created the Clan'o'Matic, which is a list of D100 Adjective Nouns, which we roll for at the start of the game to see which clan we are (and the sillier the better). I started the idea off with my spurious Clan Concrete Llama, he just ran with it. So, with great ceremonial importance, we determined today he was Clan Wraith Emu. Which is sadly almost plausible, kinda (and if you think about it, would not be a creature you would really want to fight.)
The plan was to try several things. One, the larger force. Two, stealth armour. Three, TAG and Arrow IV and a more general four, going back to the Master Rules piloting check modifier of +1/20 points of damage (where this is assessed per phase), rather than the newer flat +1 for 20+ points.
Deployment
Board:
Capellans
Clan Wraith Llama
(You can clearly see the MG marker next to the Vulture on this one. The markers are designed to be unobtrusive (later on, you'll see they are green when flipped over after a unit has had its activation), but we are up-market, since we cut the markers on Dad's laser cutter!)
The Battle
Right out of the gate, I made two mistakes. I immediately forgot that I didn't have to accelerate through walk to run, and as a result, my Stealth Armour units were not moving nearly fast enough.
I ran my Sha Yu out right into the Canis line of fire (hoping my stealth armour would protect me). It didn't. I also then forgot - despite having the discussion with my mate not two minutes before, that because the Canis was behind the hill, we both had partial cover to each other (following MGs visibility rules, which are more strict than most games - though BT, rarely but to its credit, DOES have some dead ground rules itself). Thus when he rolled an ER Large laser and AC/10 hit to my leg, I forgot it should have been ignored!
Off to a good start, then.
It stood up (since it was knocked down by reaction fire, it was allowed to use any MP that it hadn't spent on movement (i.e., which gave it the to hit number)) and shot back, and missed. As per usual...
The Thor used one action to walk, walking round into sight, provoking reaction fire from the Sha Yu - if it had been in range. the second action was to fire - missed - and then my mate used the required movement to go back behind the building.
However, having react-fired with the Canis, my mate didn't then dare fire his remaining ER Large Lasers due to the excess heat it would have generated. I had a few shots at it with my other mechs, and managed for get a critical on one of his LB-X AC/10s.
In return my Warhammer took the worst of the fire.
Having forced most of his Mechs to go, at the end of the round, I had my remaining Raven run (which I had remembered at this point!) round, safe from reaction fire, and tried to TAG the Canis. Like much of either our shooting this game, I missed.
I then used the Lao Hu, the commander, to handshake to the Raven with his first action. I used this to run nearly behind the Thor and hit it with a TAG. (At this point, I realised that we needed to consider that, until the regular BT action, the possibility that a vehicle using TAG might be killed before the corresponding artillery unit could fire. But conversely, that until the Mech's next activation, the TAG would continue to be held on.)
The Lao Hu used his second action to handshake to the Catapult, which was then able to fire an Arrow IV. I hit - daftly enough, considering the attack was coming from the right) the left arm, but that was enough to hit internal structure - and I hit the ammo! Less huzzah, because Clan, but my mate was a bit peeved.
After his last action, the catapult was able to use its own activation to be able to fire a second Arrow IV. True to form, I rolled a 1. End of bound.
At the start of the bound, the Canis finally fired again, overheating. The Raven had one shot at the Thor at point-blank range, and then ran off.
It was at this point, my mate realised that walking into sight, firing and backing off was good in one respect, but bad in another - it meant that if he walked out again, he would provoke more reaction fire. It was at this point I remember to be more Manoeuvre Group and that we had created rules such that he could go into position (with a piloting check) - the Mech equivalent of hulldown for a tank in MG - around the corner of a building. That would allow him first shot (as it is not an automatic spot for my mechs). This would mean he would get the bonus for partial cover, but any hits to his right side location would be ignored. (Like how partial cover works now - and how MG does it, actually. In MG, a hit roll of a multiple of 3 hits the hull of a tank (anything else hits the turret) and on a hull-down tank these are ignored. Great minds and all that).
Problem - the left side was now missing an arm. But he still has his LRM 15...!
The Warhammer got the crud shot out of it a lot more.
The Pillager alpha striked at the Thor as it turned off the not-helpful-now stealth armour and closed. And hit. And proceeded to hit right-side locations with three out of the four weapons. It was at this point I realised how much more powerful that was than just ignoring legs hits, and that we would have to watch that.
I ran my Sha Yu 4B all the way around, right up into his Thor's arse... And missed. He used the Blood Asp (his commander) to handshake to the Thor, which turned around and prompt head-cropped my Sha Yu with the ER PPC. Naturally before my commander's Lao Hu could take advantage of the C£ network...!
The Mad Cat blew the Warhammer's leg off. My Sha Yu 2B missed. The Vulture stepped around, and my mate debated whether to shoot the Pillager or the Warhammer while it was down. He choose the latter, alpha-striked... And then proceeded to roll two head hits with two of the medium pulse lasers. He regretted not shooting the Pillager, then.
And the game came to a close with a whimper, as my other Raven ran forward and TAGged the Canis. The Catapult missed. 4 or more of D20. My commander twice attempt to handshake (5 on D20) with both of his actions and failed, thus wasting his go and failing to let the Catapult fire again.
It was time to pack-up at this point, though I was two mechs down for only minimal damage, so we called that a clan win.
So, what did we learn?
1) Two lances (or two lances/ one star) is still too many for an evening's game. Not only had we not played BattleTech in a while, we hadn’t played Manoeuvre Group in a while, and that did not help. Especially since I forgot to account for MG requiring you have to have some thinking time.
2) Stealth Armour needs a bit of a buff in the switch to D20. 8 to 10 on 2D6 is significantly more than percentage chance than on D20. So we agreed that the modifier needs to, as a starter, double to 2/+4 and medium/long range.
3) Going in position around the corner of a building is very powerful, and means we need to actually track the destructiveness of buildings, which we hitherto didn't bother with.
4) Overall, despite switching to D20 from 2D6, the statistics of smaller numbers are still far too harsh. We may have to try going to, while keeping the salvo fire system, rolling to attack per weapons again (albeit on D20) and perhaps also look at upping the fire modifiers a little bit.
5) Going back to +1/20 damage as per Master Rules will be fine, since the damage is assessed per phase, not per round.
6) When dealing with more than one lance, we do need to note down the distance a mech moved on its last action, because we can't just always remember.
So, that brings us to the end of this massive, terrifying diatribe. If you made it this far - well done! you have survived being Bleakbane'd at!
I hope that either you found something of interest, or at least that the terrible, merciless way I have done BattleTech wrong has moved you to tears. (Evil, I did tell you.)
If there is some interest, I may do this again at some point. (Actually, considering how much I like the sight of my own typing, I might inflict this on people again ANYWAY...)
I am Aotrs Commander, or more properly Commodore Bleakbane of the Army Of The Red Spear (Aotrs - pronounced "A- (as in "hay") oat-ers") - I've been using this moniker for a long time - or even more properly, "that sodding lich what Ruins All Of The Things." I am very solidly Lawful Evil, which is why things like taking beloved sets of rules people have played for decades, deciding that's not good enough for me, and bending them into horribly shapes to fit my twisted idea of "better" comes so naturally so me!
So this will be part me mechanically musing, partly a vague sort of after-action report and partly just and excuse to take and show photos from my usual club-level wargames (as opposed to at conventions, where I am Doing My Proper Work...)
Some introduction, first...
I started BattleTech with the animated series in the mid-nineties, and almost my first purchase after the box set, was the 3050 technical manual. I spent at least one happy holiday solo-playing with 3025 IS mechs being cheerfully murdered by self-designed Clan mechs, at first represented by LEGO men until I got some "proper" models (from ICE's Steel Warriors plastic models). I played BattleTech semi-regularly with a mate or two a good few years back, enough that I bought HeavyMetalPro, something I have very much never regretted!
I then didn't play it for a good long time - mostly, I think, during the period of thirteen or so years I was writing my starship rules, Accelerate and Attack: Aeons of War. When I heard about HBS releasing BATTLETECH, about the time it showed up on Paradox, I thought "hey, I'm struggling to find time/energy to always write something interesting and flavourful for my AccAtt scenarios and my primary gaming is struggling getting down reliably to the club at the moment - I have over a hundred mechs or something that I’m not using, and BT we don't have to take so seriously, we can use that as a casual game!"
So I dug it out, bought another dozen or so mechs and vehicles (taking the total to actually closer to 150 when I looked it up) from Ral Partha (marking the first time in AGES that I bought a model, since I predominantly make my own now, CAD modelling for 3D printing being my day job) and working out how I was going to improve our various attempts to house-rule BT to my satisfaction.
Because that - and I cannot state this enough - is what I do for something I'm taking casually. I don't do anything by halves.
(Starships - what I Take Seriously - I have over 1400 across about twenty fleets, and there's about another six or seven across my various mates who play...)
So then, the true heresy of Bleakbane Ruins BattleTech begins - the house-rules!
(And if you think this is bad, you should see what I have done to D&D or Rolemaster...!)
What we are playing is basically running off bits of Master rules/Maximum Tech, informed by bits of Total War and the Tech Manual. (Because there was NO WAY I was printing out those overly-coloured PDFs at hundreds of pages - the rule books and selected bits I've written down are just easier to take down the club. Even that in this latter date, I have a tablet.) I kept bits of the old rules I liked; in some cases, the bits that Total War explicitly wanted to stop you doing (like pulse lasers and RACs with targeting computers) and adopted the new ones where appropriate.
We are running off BV2, because in my struggle to get my old version of HMP working on Win 10 during the set-up (and finding my CD wouldn't work, even), the fine chap there sent me the more recent version (he went and dug out my decade old purchase record to check it, bless 'im!), so it is... Better? than BV1, at any rate.
Also - and you can directly blame HBS for this, the damage for the ACs has also been improved, more or less in-line with what they did. (AC 2 => 5, AC 5 to 8 and AC => 11 (12 would have had the same head-cropping issue HBS avoided by being able to go from 60 to 61 hits!) I also smoothed the heat progression of the AC 5 to 2 heat as well.) I explicitly did NOT change the damage for Rotary ACs, however, on the basis that seemed too nasty.
When we played BT a few years back, me and my mate decided to use the salvo fire rule - i.e. you group your weapons and you can fire one group (or alpha strike), and you make one attack roll for the salvo, and all the weapons to-hit numbers to the roll. It is certainly faster, but being younger, it took me much longer to twig that the statistics of small numbers is a problem. (It was less so for my mate, who is one of those loved by the dice gods.)
So, when we took it back up again, I elected that we would change shooting (and later piloting checks) to D20, keeping the modifiers the same. That would give us not only a more even distribution for the modifiers, but more hits overall to counter the small number of dice rolls.
We also used to play at 1 hex = 1 inch, but there is a reason we really never finished a game on an 6' x 4' table. I also discovered, in an earlier experiment with MG BT, that the ranges verses boar share were simply not enough to allow long-range units to support properly. so, thanks to HMP, when we took it up again, we switched to 1 hex = 2", which works way better.
The major change was to the turn sequence.
In essence, I have basically tore out shooting and damage system out of BattleTech and pasted it onto Manoeuvre Group.
Manoeuvre Group - and I would be delighted but astounded if anyone of you has heard of it - is a set of 1940 to moderns set of rules (which effortlessly adapts to scifi, which is what I use it for). (It is, for anyone interested, available on Wargames Vault.) It was written by my Dad (an ex-Rolls Royce aerospace engineer) and his mate (something of a military technical expert to the point he's occasionally done lectures for the Royal Army). I categorise it as a tactics simulator. Dad and his mate like to play very simulationst games, where the point is to be simulating, basically the sort of decision making, rather than weapon factors. It is a very demanding game, not because of the rules (which are fairly simple), but because of the level of thinking involved. My Dad says a good game of MG leaves you going home with a headache. It is, then, a bit of a niche set of rules and is really not suited to folk who just want to turn up to have a social game with their mates once a week.
I have similar tendencies, though not as extreme. My starship rules (which I finally published a year ago myself!) have a similar sort of tactical requirement - and it is such that motivates my particular BT heresy, to, while keeping the fun nuts-and-bolts of the Mechs, change the way the game plays to something that is my cup of tea. Basically, on the table-top, the sort of games I aim to play are the wargame equivalent of those of your who like to have all the difficulties at maximum on computer games. It's where I get my fix of that - on computer, I will tend to gravitate to lower (normal or even easy) difficulties, since I explicitly don't play them for the same thing as I do tabletop.
Anyway, so MG is not a game for anyone who isn't really keen on that sort of thing (my Dad calls it a very "geeky" game even in a "geeky" hobby.) But, because my Dad's job was literally mathematical modelling, it is an excellent and very flexible engine to play with.
(Worth noting that, as I play scifi - and now BattleTech - with it, it is as much a heresy to MG as it is to BT.)
MG is D20 based (which was my input), since that gives sufficiently granularity that D12 (or multiple D6s) lack, without having to worry about the false sense of scientific credibility percentiles bring. (AccAtt uses D20 too, and I think it is probably the only one that uses buckets'o'D20...!) This was partly what prompted the shooting change - the base to-hit numbers are the same in MG as BT (4 on d20), so I had some idea of what the final result should be like.
In MG, each unit has an activation - not unlike the computer game version of BattleTech or D&D 3.X - consisting of two actions. Activations alternative between sides each round. The one with the least number of units at the start of the round can elect to go or to force the other guy to go until they have equal numbers of units left to activate.
You can also take reactions - the most common of which are provoked when an enemy moving into sight, or you are shot at by an enemy. Each time you take a reaction, you get a marker, which basically gives you a -1 on shooting rolls, until you spend an action to make a check to take it off. (In MG, proper, you can have three reactions, and anything after that doesn't give you any more markers, but you suffer a more severe check to Leadership, which would very loosely correspond to increasing your Piloting skill in BT (and any rolls which aren't shooting, say) by 2. This is not an issue in the BT issues for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.) Basically, reactions are you essentially stealing a bit of next round ahead of time. (It's a bit like the concept overwatch, but not quite.)
The big thing with MG is that you don't have a move action - you have five speeds - slow, fast, stop, reverse (represented by a marker with a short point, a long point, an inverse point and flat edge - you'll see this in the photos later) and transit, which is "as fast you like, but frack help you if anyone sees you." The major issue is that you use an action to CHANGE speed. And if you perform an action or make a reaction, you move at the same time (in the case of shooting, technically you decide at what point you shoot during the movement) - in fact you are required to do so. So in MG, if you are Fast speed (minimum 6 (inches at 5mm, cm at 144th)) and you take a shot, you HAVE to move 6, even if it means you have to drive into a ditch.
This equates fairly neatly to BT - Run, walk, standing still and sprint in place of transit (reverse is unnecessary). So in AotrsTech, you can spend an action to change speed. Unlike in MG, where you have to from stop to slow to fast, you can change speed from any speed to any other speed, just like you can choose whether to walk or run in BT. The difference is, you are then stuck at that speed until you spend another action to chance it. At walk speed, you can move forward or backwards without penalty, but at Run, you have to move forwards.
MG also allows the commanding unit to handshake. In what, given the numbers on D20 is basically a piloting check, the platoon - or lance commander, in this case) can use one of his actions to give one of his subordinate units an extra activation.
Now, unlike MG proper, BT has heat to worry about. So rather than allowing you to fire as many times as you like, there is a flat rule you can only shoot a given weapon system once until the end of your activation. Second, that heat is only calculated an applied at the end of an activation. So, if you make reaction fire, you note the heat build-up, but don't apply it until the end of the unit's next activation. You might, for example then, be able to fire a different weapon group on your activation, but the heat from that adds up before it gets sunk.
(I considered letting you shoot weapons as many times as you wanted, bearing in mind you'd only get you heat sinks once, but then realised that would, for example, make Gauss Rifles way too potent.)
Melee attacks, notably, don't follow this rule, so you can make them as often as you want to spend an action to do so.
What we discovered when we did this, is that this, combined with the reaction system means that you get something that feels more like X-Com 2 - you spend a while setting you your forces and trying to prove the other guy into firing, at which point that Mech is basically out for the round. So, again, not massively unlike the turn sequence in the computer game - the same sort of logic applies. (Forcing the other guy to go, for example, is very much like reserving - and because you can choose to activate units in any order, you can do the same thing as you can with lights and have two goes in a row, but with anyone.)
We have played several games at lance level (or star), each time iterating a few bits. Jumping, for instance, I quickly realised, needed a few notes - essentially, you have to spend an action to jump, and you end at stop speed (but if you jump twice in an activation, you don't have to use a second action point. This means you can still do a jump and then attack.) Also, with effectively doubling the distance you can cover in a round, you get a much more mobile game. (Shooting modifiers, by the by, only take into account what speed the Mech was doing in its last phase, so if you run with one action and change speed to walk, if someone shoots you, you only count the distance you walked.)
Bleakbane Ruins BattleTech Battle 01
Having done several games and getting a result at the lance/star level, today's game, then, was a brave (and perhaps too ambitious) attempt to see if we could do two lances verses a single star.
I also elected that it was time to dig out my Capellans, and introduce my mate to Stealth Armour, TAG and Arrow IV and the C3 system. (Notably, my Capellans, and the one time I used Arrow IV and TAG with clans, mark the only time I ever ne against my first mate at BattleTech...!)
So, I fielded two Raven 4Ls, a Sha Yu 4B (C3 slave) and a Lao Hu 3B (C3 Master) and a lance with a C5 Catapult (Arrow IV), and the Liao stealth armoured Warhammer and Pillager and a regular Sha Yu 2B.
The opposition I gave (since I have all the stuff!), a Blood Asp, Canis, Thor, Mat Cat and Vulture.
(Yes, I am a dirty freebirth surrat, thank you for noticing!)
While the Clans have (nearly) all the best toys, I cannot take them too seriously. My old mate created the Clan'o'Matic, which is a list of D100 Adjective Nouns, which we roll for at the start of the game to see which clan we are (and the sillier the better). I started the idea off with my spurious Clan Concrete Llama, he just ran with it. So, with great ceremonial importance, we determined today he was Clan Wraith Emu. Which is sadly almost plausible, kinda (and if you think about it, would not be a creature you would really want to fight.)
The plan was to try several things. One, the larger force. Two, stealth armour. Three, TAG and Arrow IV and a more general four, going back to the Master Rules piloting check modifier of +1/20 points of damage (where this is assessed per phase), rather than the newer flat +1 for 20+ points.
Deployment
Board:
Capellans
Clan Wraith Llama
(You can clearly see the MG marker next to the Vulture on this one. The markers are designed to be unobtrusive (later on, you'll see they are green when flipped over after a unit has had its activation), but we are up-market, since we cut the markers on Dad's laser cutter!)
The Battle
Right out of the gate, I made two mistakes. I immediately forgot that I didn't have to accelerate through walk to run, and as a result, my Stealth Armour units were not moving nearly fast enough.
I ran my Sha Yu out right into the Canis line of fire (hoping my stealth armour would protect me). It didn't. I also then forgot - despite having the discussion with my mate not two minutes before, that because the Canis was behind the hill, we both had partial cover to each other (following MGs visibility rules, which are more strict than most games - though BT, rarely but to its credit, DOES have some dead ground rules itself). Thus when he rolled an ER Large laser and AC/10 hit to my leg, I forgot it should have been ignored!
Off to a good start, then.
It stood up (since it was knocked down by reaction fire, it was allowed to use any MP that it hadn't spent on movement (i.e., which gave it the to hit number)) and shot back, and missed. As per usual...
The Thor used one action to walk, walking round into sight, provoking reaction fire from the Sha Yu - if it had been in range. the second action was to fire - missed - and then my mate used the required movement to go back behind the building.
However, having react-fired with the Canis, my mate didn't then dare fire his remaining ER Large Lasers due to the excess heat it would have generated. I had a few shots at it with my other mechs, and managed for get a critical on one of his LB-X AC/10s.
In return my Warhammer took the worst of the fire.
Having forced most of his Mechs to go, at the end of the round, I had my remaining Raven run (which I had remembered at this point!) round, safe from reaction fire, and tried to TAG the Canis. Like much of either our shooting this game, I missed.
I then used the Lao Hu, the commander, to handshake to the Raven with his first action. I used this to run nearly behind the Thor and hit it with a TAG. (At this point, I realised that we needed to consider that, until the regular BT action, the possibility that a vehicle using TAG might be killed before the corresponding artillery unit could fire. But conversely, that until the Mech's next activation, the TAG would continue to be held on.)
The Lao Hu used his second action to handshake to the Catapult, which was then able to fire an Arrow IV. I hit - daftly enough, considering the attack was coming from the right) the left arm, but that was enough to hit internal structure - and I hit the ammo! Less huzzah, because Clan, but my mate was a bit peeved.
After his last action, the catapult was able to use its own activation to be able to fire a second Arrow IV. True to form, I rolled a 1. End of bound.
At the start of the bound, the Canis finally fired again, overheating. The Raven had one shot at the Thor at point-blank range, and then ran off.
It was at this point, my mate realised that walking into sight, firing and backing off was good in one respect, but bad in another - it meant that if he walked out again, he would provoke more reaction fire. It was at this point I remember to be more Manoeuvre Group and that we had created rules such that he could go into position (with a piloting check) - the Mech equivalent of hulldown for a tank in MG - around the corner of a building. That would allow him first shot (as it is not an automatic spot for my mechs). This would mean he would get the bonus for partial cover, but any hits to his right side location would be ignored. (Like how partial cover works now - and how MG does it, actually. In MG, a hit roll of a multiple of 3 hits the hull of a tank (anything else hits the turret) and on a hull-down tank these are ignored. Great minds and all that).
Problem - the left side was now missing an arm. But he still has his LRM 15...!
The Warhammer got the crud shot out of it a lot more.
The Pillager alpha striked at the Thor as it turned off the not-helpful-now stealth armour and closed. And hit. And proceeded to hit right-side locations with three out of the four weapons. It was at this point I realised how much more powerful that was than just ignoring legs hits, and that we would have to watch that.
I ran my Sha Yu 4B all the way around, right up into his Thor's arse... And missed. He used the Blood Asp (his commander) to handshake to the Thor, which turned around and prompt head-cropped my Sha Yu with the ER PPC. Naturally before my commander's Lao Hu could take advantage of the C£ network...!
The Mad Cat blew the Warhammer's leg off. My Sha Yu 2B missed. The Vulture stepped around, and my mate debated whether to shoot the Pillager or the Warhammer while it was down. He choose the latter, alpha-striked... And then proceeded to roll two head hits with two of the medium pulse lasers. He regretted not shooting the Pillager, then.
And the game came to a close with a whimper, as my other Raven ran forward and TAGged the Canis. The Catapult missed. 4 or more of D20. My commander twice attempt to handshake (5 on D20) with both of his actions and failed, thus wasting his go and failing to let the Catapult fire again.
It was time to pack-up at this point, though I was two mechs down for only minimal damage, so we called that a clan win.
So, what did we learn?
1) Two lances (or two lances/ one star) is still too many for an evening's game. Not only had we not played BattleTech in a while, we hadn’t played Manoeuvre Group in a while, and that did not help. Especially since I forgot to account for MG requiring you have to have some thinking time.
2) Stealth Armour needs a bit of a buff in the switch to D20. 8 to 10 on 2D6 is significantly more than percentage chance than on D20. So we agreed that the modifier needs to, as a starter, double to 2/+4 and medium/long range.
3) Going in position around the corner of a building is very powerful, and means we need to actually track the destructiveness of buildings, which we hitherto didn't bother with.
4) Overall, despite switching to D20 from 2D6, the statistics of smaller numbers are still far too harsh. We may have to try going to, while keeping the salvo fire system, rolling to attack per weapons again (albeit on D20) and perhaps also look at upping the fire modifiers a little bit.
5) Going back to +1/20 damage as per Master Rules will be fine, since the damage is assessed per phase, not per round.
6) When dealing with more than one lance, we do need to note down the distance a mech moved on its last action, because we can't just always remember.
So, that brings us to the end of this massive, terrifying diatribe. If you made it this far - well done! you have survived being Bleakbane'd at!
I hope that either you found something of interest, or at least that the terrible, merciless way I have done BattleTech wrong has moved you to tears. (Evil, I did tell you.)
If there is some interest, I may do this again at some point. (Actually, considering how much I like the sight of my own typing, I might inflict this on people again ANYWAY...)
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