Enthusiastic Rant: Battletech

Critical Hit

SRM-4 Destroyed

Eject

Eject

Eject

The voice was a ringing in the ears as the Mechwarrior raised himself just enough to see the humanoid shape on the ridge wither beneath the missiles of the advancing mechs. The hit punched through the armour a great crash echoed by a drumroll as the SRM magazine erupted, tearing the torso of the mech open. It’s head, the cockpit where he’d been sat moments before, was shorn away and thrown into the distant treeline. He slumped down into the mud, his hand coming up to his face to wipe away the blood and rain that slicked his eyes and something standing to the side of his shock told him that he was lucky to be alive.

The year is 3025, the end of the Third Succession War. Gone is the Star League and those long centuries of stability that came with Humanity unified beneath a single banner. In its wake great noble houses vie for control of the civilised worlds of the Inner Sphere, waging war with the aging war machines known as Battlemechs.

This is the world of Battletech, but what is Battletech?

Depending on your entry point to the series it is either:

• An incredible dense and esoteric tabletop wargame.
• A series of science fiction novels.
• A roleplaying game (where you can be permanently injured in character creation)
• A first person robot simulation game.
• A squad based RTS
• An arena shooter
• An online shooter
• A turn based strategy game.

However as I am old school I will mostly be talking about Classic Battletech; the Tabletop wargame and why I love it.

The first thing to know about Battletech is that it is old. The original game was released in 1984 as Battledroids before being changed to Battletech to avoid falling foul of George Lucas’ trademark on the word ‘droid’. With this age comes a certain amount of baggage. Battletech doesn’t have lore like other wargames such as Warhammer 40,000. No, Battletech has history. Nothing in Battletech has ever really been discarded and whilst this makes the games impenetrable at times there is a rewarding game in amongst the old ruins.

So why do I love Battletech?

Well first and foremost I love the big stompy robots. I’ve tried to write this several times and every time my biggest mistake is not putting this first. From Neon Genesis Evangelion, through Gundam, Zone of the Enders and Front Mission 3, I love big robots doing big robot things. Usually wrecking things. Whilst you can play Battletech with troops and vehicles and planes why the heck would you?

Giant frickin’ robots are great.

Robots come in four flavours and by flavours I mean weight classes. Small ones are fast and harder to hit, big ones are slower and have more guns. At either end of the spectrum Battletech is, despite it’s complex rules, pretty well balanced. In the middle the mechs tend to miss out a little unless they’re specialised around one big gun.

That’s not the only thing to consider though. Battletech is a simulation which means weapons have ammunition or generate heat. One of the more challenging aspects of the game is knowing when to shoot which guns. Fire your missiles every turn and you’ll soon run out of ammo. Fire all your lasers and does your mech swallow enough heat in a turn to stop it building up until your pilot starts drifting in and out of consciousness or worse; the reserve missiles you’ve been stockpiling cook off in the launcher and explode.

You make choices, you hedge your bets or find clever solutions and Battletech has 30 years of rules lawyering to back you up. Want to fire all your lasers in a turn without overheating your mech, the rules specifically say you can stand in a lake to improve the efficiency of heat sinks located in your mech’s legs. Set a forest on fire to smoke out your enemies and cause their mechs to overheat.

If that doesn't work you can always resort to building your own mech.

Welcome to the Dark Arts, brace yourself, there is maths inside. Luckily there is also Solaris Skunkwerks, a mech design program to help do the maths for you. If you have a mind for it though and the willingness to spend some time with a calculator Battletech will let you build any unit you damn well please. Want Evangelion Unit-01? Take a 100-Ton mech, give it Triple Strength Myomer musculature and more armour than God, maybe a C3-Subordinate* computer to simulate the Dummy Plug system and you’re halfway there.

Want a Variable Fighter from Macross? Well-

A dozen Harmony Gold lawyers rappel in through the window.

-Oh. Oh yeah.

So back in 1984 the same people who were worried about getting sued by George Lucas were apparently less concerned about being sued by Studio Nue and Tatsunoko and so not only are Variable Fighters part of the original roster of Mechs, some of their designs are straight up plagiarised from Macross. Naturally this didn’t go down so well and the resulting legal dispute caused these particular mechs to be removed from products going forward, rendering them ‘Unseen’ and out of production until some of them were redesigned as part of Project Phoenix.

In a truly strange quirk however, the concept of transforming fighters wasn’t covered by the copyright, meaning that LAMs, the Battletech name for Variable Fighters, exist in the rules even though the mechs that used those rules no longer exist**. This however means that you can make your own.

So deep, evocative, adaptable. Would I recommend you play Classic Battletech?

Uhhhhhhhhhh….

OK, if you’ve made it this far I love you and would never want to hurt you. I adore Battletech, but it’s not a game I can recommend unless you’re already sold on the idea of playing it. As a game it’s slow, maths intensive and clunky, to the point that I am in the process of rewriting some of the rules to make them more accessible. It offers a promise of the Battletech experience that I had in my head, running a campaign managing my own mercenary company, but never really offers a way of doing that without me house ruling the game to heck and back.

There is a scaled down game called Alpha Strike, but it lacks Heat Management or some of the flashy (read; explosive) critical effects that really make Battletech interesting.

So if you’re inspired what’s the solution? Well. The new Battletech game is everything the game promises to be and doesn’t take forever to play. Or if you want something more immediate Mechwarrior Online is doing a good job of updating old mechs and providing an authentic Mechwarrior experience.

Though if you’re still here and I haven't scared you off I hope that you can find the fun in the game that I’ve found and maybe, if the stars align and our paths cross, we can maybe play a game together some time.

-JP

*Addendum: Now I said Battletech was old but the actual name of this piece of equipment is a C3-Slave computer and I have to call it out for falling back on the old Master/Slave computer terminology. I know a new boxed set is coming out at the end of the year which may mean we end up getting a new set of rules soon and I do hope that Fanpro (or whoever ends up writing it) manage to fix some of the less savoury aspects of the setting and terminology. That said Battletech is, unfortunately, very resistant to change.

** I want to stress this wasn't subtle either. LAMs have Fighter, Battroid and Gerwalk modes, how the concept was allowed to remain I have no idea, but then I don’t really understand Copyright law all that well.