/btg/ - BattleTech Genera

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>>50260727
First for Phoenix Hawk best girl.

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>>50260727
Lynx here....

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>>50260880
Lynx was Ok.

Beast and Hitman were great.

Rooster was like nails on a chalkboard. Like the krusty-burger cashier was given a neurohelmet.

Also, MW4 Mercs... Favorite pilots? Mags and Goblin for me.

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>>50260727
Why is there a Tie Fighter in the game?

>>50260880
>Lynx in the Mad Cat
Hunter is best. Hitman was the most deadpan.

>>50260942
Hilarious factoid. Rooster and Hunter were done by the same guy.

>Also, MW4 Mercs... Favorite pilots? Mags and Goblin for me.
Falcon, Claymore and your mission control woman, who is also Molotov Cocktease and Girl Hitler, for the Venture Brothers fans in the audience.

>>50260942
>MW4 Mercs... Favorite pilots

Blaze and the cowgirl. But nothing can beat the Castle's cod Nordic accent.

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since somebody mentioned hardened armor grasshoppers last thread, I threw one together.
also, as a bonus, a pretty simple IJJ upgrade to the -5H. gunned like half a Penetrator and change, 4/6/6

>>50260942
Duncan Fisher

Who was a Solaris jock before retiring and becoming the greatest Solaris announcer that ever was

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQGMK3iUWLE&index=2&list=PLewuqAr3mjOaETryM9qnsAUxIvSDRuGqk

The Voice actor George Ledoux, has gone on to make a short series highlighting a few notable events of Innersphere history, iirc he does a few of them in character as Duncan Fisher

>>50260942
>MechCommander
I miss this damn game so much. All those hours on MPlayer, lost, like tears in rain...

>>50260954
Joke? I think I recall seeing it on a landing pad someplace in the game. You used to be able to get away with easter eggs like that back in the day and not get sued.

>>50261072
Not bad. I actually prefer strapping Hardened Armor to Light 'Mechs, myself. It's a shame you couldn't cram another MPL in the head on the IJJ one. Since it's so mobile, maybe you could swap the ERLL for a LPPC+Cap to get that 5th MPL?

>>50261130
>Hanse Davion will be forever remembered for throwing the most violent wedding party in history

That shit is pure gold anon, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Ultimately, who would you reckon for the most purely tragic iconic character in BattleTech?

>>50261633
Minobu Tetsuhara is pretty far up there. Zane Nova Cat is up there for me too. Teddy K? (Seems like the trend for me involves Kuritans)

>>50261633
Shit, really, this thread's oldest pal Wayne Waco is up there. He's tragic in the oldest sense. He's not a bad man, but he's a man betrayed by fortune and ultimately his fatal flaw, vendetta.
I mean, look at the man. A man works hard at his job, and his family, looses the family, and there's actually folks to blame. After that, the man dedicates himself to his job, works his whole life, picks a man he thinks a decent successor, for lack of a lost son. Less than a dozen years in, that successor makes a fool of himself, gets him and the men who followed him on the words of their old best boss killed. A man works his whole life, and at the end, seventy-odd years on, ain't got more to show for it than he started with, maybe less, no family. So at the final extreme he dedicates himself to the last vendetta, and succeedes, not really at the cost of his life, but at the cost of all those who followed him, even into the dark.
If that isn't tragic, ain't much else is

>>50261749
Except Wayne Waco blows the Goons to hell, so it's not really tragic at all.

>>50261633
Victor probably even though most of it was his own fault. The man was always looking to the good of the whole sphere instead of what would bring the most advantage to his own country, and that's what led everything to ruin.

He would have made a great First Lord, but he made a fucking terrible Archon Prince.

>>50261820
The man who shot Jaime Wolf
He shot Jaime Wolf
He was the bravest of them all

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>>50261749

A man needs to unrustle his jimmies.

A man had over a year of his life wasted by a girl, and a man could not care less.

>>50261633
Grayson Carlyle mebbe, but that's because the author of the dying time was a cunt.
He was a pretty stand up dude, just kept getting fucked over.

>>50261820
He tore the Wolves a new one and got Jamie but failed to destroy the Dragoons... hell even the wrath of god they unleashed for hitting Terra failed to kill the Dragoons. Which by the way, is when I finally respected the Dragoons.

>>50262560
What about that made you respect them?

>>50262559
He's actually one of the better writers for the series' books, usually applying some realistic military sense to what's going on. It's not his fault the folks writing BT's arc wanted the GDL to die. Just saying.

>>50262645
It's not that they died as much as how.
They went out like a bunch of bitches, and it just wasn't consistent with their character.

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Generic question for those assembled:
What got you into Battletech and big military realistic robits in the first place? I'm sure there is a few interesting stories here.

>>50262574
They went from being the Yankees to being the Cubies, and I'll be damed if the few of them that were left didn't just keep on fighting, I respect a man who can lose and keep losing and just not give up.

TLDR They just don't have any quit in them.

>>50262690
Dying in war isn't always consistent with character. Shit like Lori getting hit with a grenade just happens. I love the GDL but I like the book.

>>50262698
Saw MW4 was freeware download about five or six years back, gave it a shot and loved it.
I'd always been a fan of mechs and robos, wanted to get into the sauce so I bought the intro box. Started reading the novels and other lore, ended up here.
Funnily enough it was also a contributing factor to me getting into the animu with Robotech, though Crimson Skies is actually what really got me into it.

>>50262733
Not like they had a choice. Losing all their warships and getting rekted hard was some poetic justice for having to put up with all their Sue BS for so long.

Honestly it's a shame they couldn't stay dead. They're so out of place in the post-Jihad universe.

>>50262752
That's my point though, they went from the Mary Sues to absolutely nothing, when they had nothing and kept going I finally respected them.

>>50262698
Saw a friend playing mechcommander. Got a copy of MW2 Titanium ed out of a bargain bin, along with a burned copy of MC from my buddy shortly thereafter. There was no hope for me.

>>50262767
And then they crawled back up through the power of Sue. What would have been worthy of respect was going out like a boss, not lingering around because the authors are afraid to kill you and then returning to a giant strength that threatens most states in the post-Jihad era, maintaining elite status and equipment despite having no access to any of the tech, factories, or Clan resources they once did.

More appropriately I saw them lose some forces on Outreach and Mars, heard they weren't *all* dead, and rolled my eyes wondering how they'd make another comeback.

>>50262801
You know what's telling about them in the Dark Age? In Bonfire of Worlds when the Wolves and Falcons are bringing the Lyrans to their knees they hire the Wolf Hunters. The Kell Hounds fight to the last man. They go begging to the Davions for help... and in name Wolf's Dragoons never even comes up.

>>50262906
>Wolf Hunter
Yuck, there are too many Wolf subfactions.

Weren't the Dragoons off working for the Combine then?

>Kell Hounds fight to the last man
Now see, there's a merc unit to respect. Humbler origins, go out swinging, etc. Yeah they had their own Sue moments, but they were never five reinforced regiments, plus scores of support regiments strong Sue.

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>>50262698
My story revolves around being impressed with actual effort. When I was a kid, robots were ugly crap like the two links below.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/1f/b1/3b/1fb13bfd55b0f398536fe56a1cf1e635.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/7MXg2yhQIBE/maxresdefault.jpg

However when the Transformers cartoon came out, I was stunned at the level of detail that was going into the box art for the toys. One of the original G1 TFs was Jetfire / Skyfire, in which the toy was based on the old Macross Super Valkyrie which became the Phoenix Hawk in Battletech.
I used to go to bookstores in the mid-80s and Battletech's second edition caught my eye because it had that level of intricate detail. The back of the box art had those various Macross mechs at the top and it looked professional, like an "adult's" product and not a kid's toy. This got me interested.
From trying Battletech, I got into realistic military robots when they looked like the artist gave a damn, which led me into animu and watching things like Macross and MOSPEADA to find the source of Battletech's art, and later things like Fang of the Sun Dougram when that guy (who I think went by the name X Nebula) subtitled them a few years ago.
It was the professionalism in art that drew me in, and I never looked back. I'm a mech-nerd for life.

Also it sucked the Gray Death Legion got killed off as well. Are there any heroes anymore in the Dark Ages? So depressing, man.

>>50262690

Word of Herb is that if you have a problem with how Dying Time was written, you actually are the cancer that's killing Battletech. Everybody wanting happy results for their factions all the time instead of accepting the fact that in the majority of the time, your favorite people from your faction should die scared, alone, and far from home. The fans' inability to accept this is the reason why the devs have to keep compromising their vision of the universe and keep fucking everything up. The Dying Time is the way almost every character in the Battletech univers should end, and the GDL dying like bitches is a feature, not a bug.

Real life is shit, and if you expect your game fluff not to reflect real life, then you're the problem. Not the writers.

>this is not an edge troll
>that actually is Herb's response to this exact point
>I genuinely wish it was an exaggeration

>>50263169
He's not entirely wrong though. It's BattleTech, not SafeSpaceTech.

>>50263169
>>50263188
I've got no problem with characters dying, and things ending. But if you're going to write a capstone to a series, it needs to match the tone of the rest of the series, otherwise it's going to be offputting as hell.

>>50262698

I liked Robotech. My uncle bought me the 2e boxed set for Christmas (1986) thinking it was a Robotech-related product. It wasn't. It was better.

>>50263169

Fuck, I remember that post and the shitstorm that followed. IMO TPTB deserved every bit of the fan rage they got for essentially blaming the fans for wanting the characters they liked to get an ending they could be proud of and not die like complete bitches. There was a Terry Goodkind book that did something similar; it spend ~400 pages developing a new (interesting) character, and then like 100 pages from the end the main characters of the series basically just rode by and smashed his head open with a mace, and not another mention of him was made and the book ended by following the main characters for the last 100 pages. Building a character and killing him like a bitch betrays the audience's trust in the author that you're going to be told an interesting story, and an author who thinks that's OK by all rights should find themselves without an audience at all pretty quickly.

>>50263188

I agree. However, I feel that it should be expressed by having characters and factions should probably die MUCH more often than they actually do.

I don't think anybody is really upset that the GDL died. Honestly, I don't even think anybody is that upset at the way Grayson himself died; traitors happen, and the cancer that killed him was a logical consequence of things that happened to him. It was the way the REST of the GDL died that gets people upset, especially Lori. The fact that they killed off Alex in a footnote (one of those, "oh yeah, he was on this world when X happened...guess he died too) was just the capstone on it.

It's realistic to kill them off that way. But it is bad *storytelling*. The two things are different, and I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be upset by the abrupt, unannounced, and never-repeated shift in tone from "storytelling that is roughly in the low-powered hero range" to "GRRM on a bad day". The fact that this shift in tone was used explicitly to kill a very popular and long-running faction just made things worse. If TPTB had been killing off units like that for 4-5 IRL years and then moved on the GDL that way, I don't think the backlash would or should have been so great. But they basically did it for the span of a single novel, just to kill off a fan-favorite merc unit. That's pretty much asking for trouble, and doubling down on it in defense of the move the way Herb did is also doubling down on the stupidity.

>>50263281
This
Yeah, people die, and that's normal. Even the situation where they got fucked over by Katrina, that's fine. But there were many other times where for example Lori was sure they were gonna die but she never before exhibited a "run away and hide" response. It's inconsistent. It's shitty storytelling and it's intentionally kicking the fans in the nuts.

>>50263407
Wasn't she like in her late 60s and behind enemy lines on her own? Stuff like that will change your actions.

>>50263475
Not really anything she hadn't done before. I don't think it would change her fundamental character.

>>50263475

She was on her own for like 2 minutes. She was performing rear-guard duties in her Victor, and got caught up in a fire. Even though she'd very explicitly beaten the "fear of fire" thing 30 years prior, she reacted just like she did on Trellwan, panicked, and ejected from an otherwise functional Mech. She hit the ground and ran, still panicked, and was chased down by a couple of infantrymen, who shot her in the shoulder. While she was lying in cover, they threw a grenade next to her.

Basically, she reacted as though the author read Decision at Thunder Rift, never read any other GDL books, and then the author wrote her death scene.

And yet I can't be too mad at the writers. This is what you get for supporting a Mary Sue faction, and aside from the Hounds, Dragoons, FedSuns, Capellans, Falcons, Wolves, Bears, MOC, and WOB, the GDL are the biggest bunch of Mary Sues in the setting.

>>50263655
You forgot Focht

>>50263655
Wasn't there another ending that the author of the majority of the books had in mind?

>>50263509
>>50263655
She was in her 60s. People lose their edge, believe it or not. They lose it a lot earlier than that if they're exposed to constant stresses of warfare, and say maybe just lost the love of their life.

I'm starting to wonder if this is all real criticism of the boom or just demonstrating how many introverts here have never been in combat or love.

>>50263788
Losing their edge =/= directly contradicting previous character development.
Also sacrificing good storytelling for muh realism is a shit trade.

>>50263863
It actually is the same thing.

>>50263788
There's plenty of other stuff going on in the book that illustrates Lori is losing her edge. The better way to end the book would have been some moment of clarity where she rallies a bit, before going out.

>>50263781

Yeah but not for a stand-alone novel, so far as I've heard.

What I heard was that Keith was going to write one of the books set on Huntress during Serpent and the Legion would dissolve after Grayson, sick of war, wandered off into the swamps and was never heard from again.

>>50262698
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz3e2hpbo50

>>50262994
>Humbler origins
>"Deny this man, Morgan Kell, nothing."

>>50262801
>>50263188
It is super weird and totally nonsensical in the setting for a brigade-sized unit to just up and die. Get reformed under another name, sure. Get absorbed by a House, sure. But someone's got to be top dog, and the biggest, or best reputed, or most elite units are never going to suffer for want of skilled recruits or wealthy sponsors. The most realistic way to "kill" them would be to break the survivors up into multiple competing groups, and then let those splinters either fade into obscurity or feed into the new generation of "hero" units.

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>>50262698
The year was 1996, the family had just gotten our first PC. Dad got one game with it, loaded it up, and I saw this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X3GD0UnBCk

Played the game, read the lore, loved it. That Christmas I got the 4th Edition starter pack for the tabletop game.

That next summer I got "Bred for War' and read my first BT novel.

My brother and I saw the movie "Screamers" five minutes in on tv and at first thought (due to the glory of simple cable) maybe it was a BT movie about the Exodus civil wars or something.

>>50264767
>implying a note used 18 years after the founding of the unit isn't humbler than starting out with 840 Clan Wolf Star League Era mechs, a similar number of Wolf/Scorpion trained MechWarriors, scores of aerospace fighters, six bloody WarShips, scores of dropships and jumpships, and shitloads of support personnel, vehicles, etc, etc

Give your brain a chance.

>>50264767
>It is super weird and totally nonsensical in the setting for a brigade-sized unit to just up and die.
Not under the circumstances presented. Their homeworld nuked and occupied, all their infrastructure and logistics elements gone, Home Guard gone, Alpha, Beta and Epsilon Regiments destroyed in the opening moves, Zeta Battalion also destroyed, Delta shattered in 3070 and disbanded, and so forth.

Literally nothing weird or nonsensical about them dying in the Jihad, or at least being reduced to maybe a regiment. Coming back with three regiments plus three independent battalions in the Dark Age is serious Sue bullshit.

>>50264807
>implying the note wasn't used to found the unit
>implying literal carte blanche applies less to the Kells than to the Dragoons

>Give your brain a chance
You first.

>>50264907
>making shit up
>ignoring that the startup for the Hounds came from inheritance money

Seriously, give your brain a chance instead of passive-aggressively meming at me.

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>>50264907
>>implying the note wasn't used to found the unit
Nope, it was money from Arthur Luvon that was used for that. Read the lore before joining these types of discussions. It'll help.

>>50264888

>Coming back with three regiments plus three independent battalions in the Dark Age is serious Sue bullshit.

Yes, god forbid that over a period of 80 years they grow by like a regiment an a half.

>>50264888
Picking a war with a larger state is going to be bad for them, unquestionably - Misery sure didn't end well - but they are strong enough and well organized enough that at least some combat units would survive. And since the Dragoon supply infrastructure isn't confined to Outreach, they unit should be expected to rebound. They still have their skill and reputation, so it's not even surprising that they'd become top dogs again.

I'd be curious to know who took that top dog spot while they were rebuilding, though.

>three regiments plus three independent battalions in the Dark Age
Was that during the part of the Dark Age when everybody was battalion-sized, or after the Houses all built their armies back up to normal size?

>>50264943
>>50264974
>Implying I've forgotten the exposition from when Morgan used the note to cut in line at a ball on Tharkad
>Implying my meming isn't mere reciprocation
Anon...

>>50265099
The Dragoons had emptied their caches of gear after the Dragoon Civil War, and had to rely on whatever they could manufacture on Outreach. Hilariously, the destruction of Outreach had to involve Waco and the Word obliterating the Dragoon Sibko program. And we never hear from Brian Cameron again. The ultimate spaghetti/friendzone character, and he's sidelined just like Caradoc Trevena and that other sucker who isn't Galen Cox.

>>50265099

>I'd be curious to know who took that top dog spot while they were rebuilding, though.

Probably the Kell Hounds, the other large units were either destroyed or like the Highlanders went state forces.

It's also worth noting that the Dragoons' size and strength in the DA is a large part of the Dracs' success against the Suns, since the DCMS by itself is too shitty to win the way they have been. You can attribute a good quarter to third of where they are to the Dragoons. And at least half of it is down to Caleb.

How much this says about the fiat involved for the Dragoons or the Dracs, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

>>50265166
The Dragoons had suppliers in Davion, Steiner, Liao, and even Taurian space. They weren't dependent on any single source.

>>50262698
I was briefly interested in MWDA because giant robots are cool as shit, and I was ten. I was looking in a new store for more booster packs when the guy working there suggested that maybe I should buy an old 4e introbox they had, instead. I did and never looked back.
Later, I sold all my MWDA models to a buddy and bought copies of 3025, BMRr and 3026, and went full battletech

>>50265038
>during a period of strict arms restrictions and with none of their old resources

Yes, odd isn't it? And that's more than a regiment and a half. They lost 4/5 regiments in the opening of the Jihad.

>>50265356
All of which were blown away or committed to national interests. So where are you getting this?

>>50265356
Most of their stuff came from Outreach and had for decades. Not to mention they lost 99% of their personnel and support base.

>>50262698
I can't recall if I found Mechwarrior 2 or Battletech first. It's been too long. But it was one of the two, around that time.

We need a new MW game, and it needs to be as good as MW2: Mercs. We could have had it, but Piggy went online with it instead, because writing is hard.

>>50262698
So out of curiosity, why is the first battlemaster, the 1G designated the G?

>>50265830
Honestly, it's because star league-era manufacturers just kinda stuck whatever the fuck they wanted letters at the end of mech designations, though -R, -G, -Q and-H are generally the most common

>>50265526
I more felt because MMO is everything now. Plus MMO=$$.
I can't get MW3 or MC1 to work on my PC :(

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>>50266211
>I can't get MW3 or MC1 to work on my PC :(
I know that feel.

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>>50266211
>>50266317
Is it a Windows 10 issue? I still have an old toaster running Vista 32-bit and both runs on that old thing.
Although MW3 seems to have a few bugs in the first few missions that crashes to desktop that I haven't been able to track down.

>>50266742
>PHX
This doesn't look like a Phoenix Hawk, it looks like the love child of Master Chief and a Gundam.

>>50266742
I'm rather computer dumb, but I am 64bit win7u.
MC1 just won't play and MW3 plays at like an unusable slow pace IE moving targeting could take 10 seconds to cross the screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pcZjNC0ypk

>with apologies to Edgar Allen Poe

>>50266844
"The Raven" is among my favorite poems ever and Duncan Fisher is equally fabulous. This is truly amazing.

>>50266844
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR1vJOEeqII

>all this Poe
YES

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There any other units that use tiger stripes in their camo schemes?

>>50267179
There's one unit that uses a full mech zebra stripe pattern. Can't remember the name, though I remember that they're a merc unit.

>>50267196
>full mech zebra stripe

That would be Little Richard's Panzer Brigade.

>>50265442
>bought copies of 3025, BMRr and 3026, and went full retarded

You had everything to not be a grog and you still failed yourself

>>50267312
Some people prefer real BattleTech to WizKids™ Presents Derp Age

>he did the Voice of Kerensky speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcyKB4nMjlg
fuck yeah

>>50260942
loved the Jade Falcon pilot, but forgot her name. I love women with dominant voices.

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>I like Clan mechs
>friend likes IS mechs
>sometimes we have "Freeborn scum" and "Clanner scum" banter
>have argued in the past about whether to call Ebon Jaguars by the proper name or to call them Cauldronborn
>normally it's a friendly, meaningless argument but today he's really insistent on it, even going so far as to saying I'm inserting my own fanon
>he says that since only Clan Smoke Jaguar referred to them as Ebon Jaguars, I should be calling them Cauldronborn if I'm not Clan Smoke Jaguar
>I say that I'm not an actual person in that universe, just a guy who likes playing Clan mechs, so I'm right to call them by the name Clan Smoke Jaguar gave them and at worst it's directly equivalent to referring to Goku as Kakarot
>neither of us have budged on our positions but he's shut down and gotten mopey because I didn't agree with him
Why do we nerds have to have arguments like this?

>>50267660
Too much free time. I had arguments like that until I got a gf

But I'm here now I will say this, it's Ebon Jaguar and Jaguars forever!
https://youtu.be/SOJQbsbpQzo?t=40

>>50262698
Oh boy, I remember everything.

Back in 2001 or 2002 a friend of mine bought MW3 and I watched him playing it. Back then, it looked boring as fuck to me. Ugly robots on a desert map, slow gameplay and stuff, I repeat: boring as fuck (I was 11/12 back then).

A few months later I went to holidays with my parents. There was a store which sold second hand stuff and also books. And between fantasy books and stuff there was one used book which grabbed my attention. It had a big robot on it and the name "BattleTech" above it. Even though the name "MechWarrior" didn't appear, I just knew it was from the same universe. The book's name was Riposte by Michael Stackpole. The second book of the Warrior trilogy, as the cover told me.
I bought it for 0.5 or 1 Euro and started to read it at the beach.

The thing is: Even though I thought the game was shitty as hell, the fact that books about this did exist made me curious.

And holy fucking hell. I didn't know shit about what's going on. I remember like it was yesterday when I read the prologue with Myndo Waterly arguing with Tipolo, Dan Allard coming the Morgan Kell on Zaniah III and all that stuff. I was confused as fuck.

And when Hanse Davion gifted the Capellan Confederation to Melissa, I fell in love with BattleTech.

Afterwards I bought MW3 and it is still one of my favorite game of all time.

Interesting sidenote: It took nearly 10 years for me to get the third book of the trilogy. And it was a reprint with minor changes compared to the first print (I am German and the translator translated the Mech's names for the German audience, the reprint had only the English names which were confusing as fuck sometimes) and I got my "real" print of Coupe only a few months ago.

>>50266317
I recently played MW3 after nearly 15 years. There is a patch that should fix your shit up. It worked for me though.

http://www.replaying.de/files/mechwarrior-3-patch-fuer-windows-7-8-1-x64/

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So what exactly is the point of the Longbow?
It just seems like a shittier Archer to be honest.

>>50267945
Well, the Archer has 40 tubes and the Longbow has 50.
The Salamander has 60 but I suppose that comparison is rude.

>>50267557
Star Colonel Aisa (can't remember her last name, though), callsign Falcon. Good God but did it feel good, beating the Green Birds fair and square and then hearing her squawk when she heard you were taking her as a bondsman.

>>50267945
It's more boss because it carries more tubes usually. 50 tubes is a lot of LRMs.

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>>50267735
That is some crap acting. Yet I kept playing that game SO MANY TIMES it was worthy of caps lock.

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>>50267945
Macross Destroid holdover. They used the Tomahawk, Defender and Spartan, so why not the Phalanx?

>>50267735
Anybody remember the line in the expansion pack Pirate's Moon where one of the allied pilots tells the chick pilot it's good to have her back, "wide hips and all"?

>>50268010
The Longbow that anon posted in the -12C, which carries 70 tubes (2 -20s, 2 -15s). The Longbow also has the six MML-7 variant and the double AIV variant, both of which are pretty slick.

>>50267945
Archer is just a shittier Mad Dog

>>50268294
t. furfag

>>50268294
Mad dog is a shittier timber wolf.

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>>50267945
When you absolutely, positively have to bombard every douche at range, how can you go wrong?

>>50267945
It really depends on which longbow we're comparing to which archer. Like, the -0W really is just basically worse than the -2R, but the -7V is probably a bit better than the -2R, but worse than the -4M, and it gets even harder as later, higher-tech models come out

>>50268325
If charging my PPC to Callie Briggs makes me a furry, damn it I don't want to not be one.

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>>50268382
Remember to paint your anime girlfriend on your mech.

>>50267179

The Pleiades regiments in the taurians do tiger stripes... but in blue or yellow.

>>50267179
There's a Cappie unit that does

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>>50268472
Following the SLDF traditions, I see.

>>50268773

Weeaboo's never die. They only get bigger Gunpla.

Is there any way aside V hunting to use a Man O War Prime?

Aside not playing flavor and running around kicking the shit out of IS mechs that can't out run it.

>>50270040

Tag teaming IS mechs with a hole punching comrade since IS forces don't deserve to face you in honorable combat.

>>50270040
aerospace and vtol hunting, being a cold blooded murderer who abuses the Called (not aimed, Called) shot rules and spraying LB5x pellets at the punch chart all game long.

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>>50260727
>his favorite isn't Hunter

>>50268018
>femdom space spartan bird nut sex

>>50262752
>Jihad
>good
>post Jihad
>good

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>>50268472

ALL the missiles!

>>50270701
fite me irl trashborn

>>50262698
Played Cresent Hawk Inception, thinking it was Robotech related LOL!
I would say Mechwarrior 2 Merc that got me into it the whole BT universe, especially the mission while I have to steal a Clan Kodiak to turn it over Dracs, but I was given the option to take it for myself, I took it!
You can say stuffs like that make BT universe fun - unexpected options and chances you can take.

>>50268420
>Callie Briggs
Who?

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>>50268055
I now want to see a Jaguar mech painted like Garfield. This HAS to be done.

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>>50270651

My man.

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>>50271412
/co/ will hook you up, my man

I'm going to be running a mercenary campaign for my tabletop group soon, and I could use some NPCs to fill out the other 7 mechwarriors in their company, plus some of the support crew.
The start year is 3059, please give me whatever you've got

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>>50271798

Which assaults did the Falcons favor in the Invasion? I know the Wolves used the Gargoyle, Bears used the Gladiator, and Jags used the Masakari/Dire Wolf

>>50272302

They didn't really favor one, as we'd define it. They split pretty evenly between Gargoyle, Warhawks, and Dire Wolves. Just as a reminder to myself, when I saw your question I skimmed through the listings of the Jade Falcon Phonebook and got the approximate numbers of each Clan Assault type:

Man O War/Gargoyle: 26
Masakari/Warhawk: 14
Gladiator/Executioner: 32
Daishi/Dire Wolf 22

These are approximate, both because I'm skimming, and they infuriatingly use the Inner Sphere reporting names some times and the Clan names sometimes, which may throw off my count slightly. However, I feel that even giving a +/- 3 to each Mech type, it is still pretty clear that they don't overwhelmingly favor an Assault Mech to the degree that the Wolves favor the Gargoyle.

>>50272605
Thanks. While I have your attention, can I ask who fields/fielded the Cauldron Born other than the Jags? Is anyone still using it in 3145?

>>50272669

It's extremely widespread, being on both the Homeworld and the Inner Sphere Clan "General Availability" lists, meaning that basically every Clan is going to have a meaningful amount of them. What's a meaningful amount? Nobody knows, but I'd say that more than a dozen throughout their touman is a reasonable interpretation and forms a decent "floor" for the numbers available.

The primary production facility was on Huntress, and it was captured by Clan Star Adder after the elimination of the Jags. However, as far as I can tell, we simply have no information as to whether the design survived into the Dark Age. The data is simply a null set (and the MUL has not been updated with that era's availability data). I personally don't feel that it's likely to have survived in the Inner Sphere in the Dark Ages given that the IS Clans are cut off from the only factory for the design...but it's certainly reasonable that the Star Adder factory is still in operation in the Homeworlds, so those Clans could reasonably still be fielding the design.

>>50272605
>>50272669
Also also, what are the best non-light Clan omnis for carrying BA?

>>50272798
>The primary production facility was on Huntress, and it was captured by Clan Star Adder after the elimination of the Jags.

Actually, I should go into this point further.

The factory complex is called DL-6. The Twilight of the Clans novels were pretty explicit about all the war-making infrastructure on Huntress being smashed by the SLDF. However, TRO 3058U (IIRC), which post-dates those events, explicitly says that the DL-6 plant is making Ebon Jags and is on Huntress. There's a contradiction there that to my knowledge hasn't been rectified. I personally feel that the SLDF smashed everything they could reach, but the DL-6 plant either escaped their notice or was "annexed" by the Adders before the SLDF could get to it.

(I hope my notes are right about this. At one time I tried putting together the index of all components and their producers, organized by year, and I gave up after a few hundred hours of work. But this is what my notes had.)

>>50272805

Any of them with primarily arm-mounted weaponry. I personally prefer something like the Dragonfly/Viper because an 8 Jump means you can get your Toads to where they need to be, quickly. However, using your BA for ablative armor is also a viable tactic, and a bunch of Elementals across your torso can turn an already-tough Medium Mech into a positive zombie, or can guarantee getting into range; a Stormcrow B with BA on the torso is very difficult to stop before it gets into UAC/20 range.

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>>50262698
It was a combination of two things, the Battletech cartoon and Mechwarrior 2.

As an 8 year old, there were no cgi shows. Suddenly out of nowhere this cartoon with 3d rendered robots shooting lasers and missiles and an ear-worm theme song. I was nuts for it, but only for the cgi fights. Problem? I had difficulty remembering the name (so easy to remember that I forget it), and YTV used to shuffle it around the saturday morning lineup haphazardly. It went off the air, but the theme song stuck.

A few months later, my dad installed another batch of shareware demos from his computer magazine to shut me up. One of which was mechwarrior 2. I couldn't get enough of it, and as a christmas gift, it would be the first pc game I ever owned. I used to flip through the sepia-colored pages of the manual religiously. It would be a half year before I noticed the connection while hunting for cheat codes on the brand new dial up internet.

By mw2 mercenaries, which I got a year or two late for christmas 97 (and also found and bought powerhits battletech in a bargain bin), I found out about the ccg, tros, and miniatures, also marking the first time I ventured into an lgs.

No mw2/cartoon/ccg stuff on my phone, img more recent.

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>>50262698
>What got you into Battletech and big military realistic robits in the first place? I'm sure there is a few interesting stories here.

I've always been interested in anime (Speed Racer, then Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, Captain Harlock, and Robotech), and fell in love with Battledroids the moment I saw it!

Back then, there was just "Autocannon", and then, with TRO 3025, suddenly that was "AC/5" and there were three other kinds of autocannon! Holy cow, was that cool! Still liked the unseen designs the best...

>>50262698
Honestly, a pair of friends roped me in over multiple years. I resisted, since it sounded too groggy to be something enjoyable, but I found that the ruleset is quite enjoyable once you dig into it far enough. I also discovered a strong like of painting minis along the way. It's the only wargame I bother playing and that's not gonna change.

>>50262698
MW2:Mercs. I actually had to install both a sound card and a CD:ROM drive into my computer which was a handmedown IBM workstation. Before that I could only play games that came on floppies, like the original X-wing.

So I fell in love with Battletech and learned how to work on computers at the same time.

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>>50266768
Is that honestly such a bad thing in this instance? The VF-1 design is pretty dope but it would do to make it look a little bit less like a transformed jet plane. The pseudo-Gundam appearance still gives that feeling of innate speed, agility, and generally-speaking humanoid combatant perfection that is the PXH while staying away from the copyright issues of the Valkyrie design.

I'm personally a fan of taking pic related and mixing in a bit of the MWO design and (>>50266742) and (>>50260866) without looking almost exactly like a Gundam rip-off, but it's still one of those 'mechs where there are as many opinions on how it should look as there are people in the fan-base.

>>50267945
It's the FWL's shittier Archer, from a time before the Archer was everywhere.

>>50272798
>>50272866
WoR Supplemental states all the remaining HW Clans except the Coyotes have ditched Lokis in favor of the Cauldron Born, so it that would suggest they still have the means to produce them.

>>50273546
>It's the FWL's shittier Archer, from a time before the Archer was everywhere.
>has between 10 and 40 more LRM tubes
>shittier
Anon, what the fuck are you doing.

>>50271798
Is that from Swat Cats?

>>50268420
Yes, yes it does. and thats ok

>>50273645
Yes, yes it is.

>>50273554

Not him, but while it might have more LRMs it also has more heat, less armour, and fewer support weapons.

Given a choice between the two I'll always go an Archer.

>>50273546
>WoR Supplemental states

That only means that the Cauldron-born is available through the end of the WoR. Whether they're available in the Dark Age is an entirely different question. There is, after all, something like 80 years between the source you quote and the time period being asked about.

>>50273554
I'm just operating with the terms >>50267945 used.

>>50273772
It does have some more heat sinks though, enough to be heat neutral when keeping the LRM 20s going. The armor is definitely its biggest issue though, bad enough an 85 ton mech only having 9 points of armor on its arms, even worse when said arms contain the main weapons of the mech.

But all that is what the 7Q is for. Though I think it would have been better to drop one heat sink and keep that second ton of LRM 5 ammo for alt ammo purposes.

>>50273999
>There is, after all, something like 80 years between the source you quote and the time period being asked about.

Yes, but I was responding specifically to posts about the possibility of continuing manufacture after the fall of Huntress, not the base question.

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So this was ultimately cut from the TRO, but I'm wondering if /btg/ can see why...

What book is this new RISC tech in?

>>50274946
I dunno, because the Davions don't make a 380XL? The Lyrans, Mariks and Dracs did but not the Fedrats.

I hate Light AC/5's though. The one good thing about the old bitch is the PPC range brackets. But you lose that with the light.

>>50275042
IntOps.

>>50275058
Mainly the light throw weight for an assault and the CT bomb in the primary.

>>50274946
>CT ammo
Probably that.
Also, isn't it just literally a better Mauler? Sure feels like one

>>50274946
It's oversinked as fuck in most configs. It's a 95 ton non-vehicle AA platform. The 3N is under-ammoed to hell. the 1Na makes no sense. the Cerberus is invoked but there are no similarities, and it's a Drac machine. Why would an AFFS unit be based on a Drac machine? I'd say ammo in the CT but it's got an XL engine, that doesn't even matter. I guess it makes it suck more when an enemy gets a TAC but the thing is already fragile, so... meh, whatever.

>>50274946
Still better than a malice

>>50274946
Multiple tons of ammo... some variants with SIX TONS...
No CASE.
Da hell?

>>50275204
>Malice
That was also the immediate parallel I drew as well.

>>50275140
>It's oversinked as fuck in most configs
Actually, I can't do math, no it isn't. It's just really wonky in the Tbolt config.

>>50275219
>Multiple tons of ammo... some variants with SIX TONS...
>No CASE.
>Da hell?
Welcome to the dark age (or 3055, but whatever)

>>50275246
It kinda feels like the horrific bastard lovechild of a malice and a mauler, really

>>50274946
I'm glad Muninn rejected that piece of shit tbqhwy

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>>50274946
Oh look, I can AA too, and at a fraction of the price!

>>50275219
>>50275261
>no CASE
To be fair, CASE+XL is shit. CASE II is what you'd want. And it really should have it.

>>50275140
It's a Ceberus configuration I made years ago when I needed something to show off the new "awesome" gear from MaxTech, I just changed the name. The plan was that the art would draw heavily from the Cerberus for inspiration. And it works well enough as an AA mech, if you don't mind paying through the nose for it.

>>50275204
The highest of bars to go over.

>>50275219
CASE is a trick perpetuated by BattleMech maintenance crews. Don't let them take your C-shekels!

>>50275319
Not every design can be a winner anon, but that hurts. Right here, in my CT bins.

>>50275330
But does yours come with backup lasers that it doesn't really have the HS to use? No, it does not.

>>50275261
>>Multiple tons of ammo... some variants with SIX TONS.
Actually makes sense for loading up with precision or AP. Carrying that many LAC/5s in the first place is probably the bigger issue.

>>50273440
Anon, I'm pretty sure that's a Veritech.

>>50275482
>it works
Well of course it does, it can load all kinds of specialty ammo. It's just too spendy for the role, BV-wise. I don't think you should ever spend more than 1k BV per AA platform, personally. Or thereabouts.

>JM7-S
No, it does not. I shall hang my head in shame. I have an unhealthy love for the JagerMech, so I had to do it.

>>50275505
Anon, I'm pretty sure that for the longest time the art of the Phoenix Hawk was literally the VF-1 Valkyrie Battroid.

Look at its Sarna page. It literally still is, and only a few miniatures of its updated design exist.

Being one of the Unseen is kind of a bitch.

>>50275505
And I thought that Transformers' Jetfire! LOL!
Blamed HG for being a major a-hole. Better yet, blamed Jap company for selling those designs to HG without reading legal fine lines properly.

>>50275353
>To be fair, CASE+XL is shit
For single battles yeah it doesn't matter, but for literally anything other than one-off deathmatches a mission-killed but repairable mech is 100x better than a pure loss

>>50275482
>if you don't mind paying through the nose for it.
I mean, it IS the Darkest Of Ages, where "popular mercenary mechs" with XXLs are a thing, so clearly the whole era is a money for nothing and chicks* for free zone

*well, sisters

>>50275664
I suppose so. Still, a destroyed engine is really expensive, along with the rest of the stuff lost in that torso. I almost wonder how it would even compare, since the engine is a gigantic chunk of the cost on any 'Mech. With as long as it'd take to fix, it's probably out of any single campaign anyway. Though, I'm not as privy to the campaign rules as I should be, so I could be wrong there.

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>>50275530
Right, but I'm pretty sure you've actually posted an image of Fokker's Veritech from the Macross/Robotech series sans paint.

>>50275741
Less than 4 engine hits are repairable. But a side torso XL loss usually means replacing the engine shielding which is what makes those things so fucking expensive in the first place. Pure StratOps rules just make it a repair roll though.

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>>50275786
Okay? Realistically, how's that any different from you posting a miniature of a Veritech Battroid with "UN Spacey" literally written on its gun-pod?

If we're going to nitpick which Macross/Robotech is more true to form, we might as well restrict ourselves to only posting MWO designs since they were forced to get around the copyright.

As I said in (>>50273440), there are just as many opinions on how it should look as there are fans of the franchise. Personally I use the earlier linked picture as my personal PXH in my group's roleplaying game; since my group has a similar opinion on the PXH's awkward art history to me, it has not shown an issue.

Personally, I deferred to (and rather like) the above-posted Veritech picture because:
>A) the forarm weapons actually look like they were turned into laser nozzles as opposed to looking like SRM-2s and with its narrowed muzzle the gun-pod doesn't look as much like a machinegun
>B) the paintjob doesn't rip off the M/R series as much because its an actual camo with its own darker sections to add a bit of identifying charm (and if you're right about it being Fokker's, oh well I suppose)
>C) I rather like the Veritech Super "jump jets," on the back and legs of the battroid and appreciate how the paintjob mentioned in B makes the cockpit in the chest look less like a cockpit, so I can reasonably fit inside the head
>D) M/R designs tend to allow for more range of motion than MWO designs, which I (and my group) personally love; we don't like how MWO makes the mechs feel so stiff and tank-like when books describe them having a wider range of motion.

>>50262698
There was some nerd (me) who liked Legos and science fiction giant robots a whole bunch as a kid/pre-teen. One day these two loves came together in the form of me finding BattleTech MOCs on the internet's murky days of 90s/early 2000s, which I traced back to Mechwarrior, eventually BattleTech. I'm almost sure my love of models is that retained manchildishness.

I finished reading "No Limits" today. I guess this isn't canon, right? I really liked the story, it remined me on one of the Maxim Kammerer Stories by the Strugazki brothers. But I do not want to have parallel world or aliens in my BT universe.

>>50276346
Not canon, but I still like having the guy from the 1980's run a Solaris Stable in my games anyway.

>>50275907
Newbie here. What's an MOC?

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>>50262698
1998-2000, age of 4-6, as my father recalls, we were over at my Paternal Uncle's house, and he had a Battletech game going, I thought the minis were cool as hell, he introduced me to the MW videogame series and the tabletop wargame, I had a Haitus between the ages of 8 to 16 as my parents broke up and times got rather rough.

Met a few friends from age 9 to now (22), we mostly played d&d and various other RPGs, always had an old copy of the MW 1st ed book that I would flip through from time to time, and I was big into the MW games and ended up playing through all of them except Cresent Hawk's Inception, and have been playing solo using MegaMek since about 2011


About 3 or 4 years back my IRL group decided to pick up the introductory boxed set, which was huge for me, it's difficult to keep our schedules together at this point in time, and we play occasionally between other RPGs

Mostly I just play with designs in SSW, SAW, and MM,

Still waiting for a MW5 or a remake of MW2M

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>>50276501
My own Creation, Name for Fan built LEGO creations

http://www.moc-pages.com/

>>50276821

And now I shall build an AWS-8Q while singing "Everything is Awesome."

>>50276821
>>50277094
There's also this:

>http://www.brickcommander.com/

>>50275505
>>50275660
>>50275786

If CGL wasn't a bunch of criminals who steal from other companies and themselves whenever the desire strikes them, then this entire issue would have never existed. Don't use other people's designs: ever. How hard is that to figure out?

>>50276799
>Still waiting for a MW5 or a remake of MW2M

Never ever

What's a decent lance with a pixie?
What would you think of a SW Phoenix Hawk who swaps the MGs for a flamer (left arm) and a HS?

>>50277523
Phoenix Hawk, Javelin, Javelin, Stinger.
Scout lance.

>>50277523
>What's a decent lance with a pixie?

3 x AWS-8Q Awesome, 1 x PHX-1 Phoenix Hawk.

>>50277523
Pixie, twin Wasps, plus a Stinger or Locust, for the classic light scout lance.

>>50277507
Is this supposed to be facetious?

>>50275860
Why did you take the bait anon

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Gentlemen, am I a madman?

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I really don't like infantry.

>>50277929
Not even close unless you just went nothing but SLs.

>>50278258
Someone needs to make a super stock charger, yank a bit of armor and see how many SL's you can stuff on the damned thing.

>>50275741
A triple engine hit (like you'd presumably get from a CASED XL blow) is repairable

>>50278131

My players would love you, given how much I've been dunking on them with infantry in cities. Mechs vs mechs they do okay, but as soon as I start throwing in combined arms shenanigans they falter pretty hard.

>>50278131
>Inferno Trebichet
>no SRM with special ammo
Anyway, if you hate infantry roll a Firestarter

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>>50279444
Given how much ridiculous crap I've had happen to me by infantry over the years, yeah, flame the little bastards.
It's no damn fun to have a fresh light mech jump on top of a building and have infantry across the street open fire and crit several leg actuators. I have had to make judgment calls on abandoning mechs to get them back later because of that crap.

>>50279622
Get thermobaric on their asses, it'll be great

>>50262698
My dad's been playing it since 2nd edition, so naturally he indoctrinated me into Mechwarrior since I was like 3.

Obviously I wasn't able to really play Mechwarrior 3 at that age, so he set up an instant action match of him vs. 1 elemental, kill it, and then let me run around the map while I make up my own stories.

While I always knew about it, it would take a while before I properly played BT through megamek.

>>50279678
What is thermobaric?
And if autocannons is BRRRRRRT, what would be the flamethrower / flamer version, a FWOOOSSSS?
SFX mean a lot to me when I play. You have to do the right sound effects when you barbecue infantry and such.

>>50279845
>What is thermobaric?
You know what a fuel-air bomb is?
That.

>>50279845
With autocannons you only get BRRRT with Rotary AC, normal AC are more like DAKKA (BLAMMO with LB-X)

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>>50279622
This is what my friend did to my bug after I tried being sneaky.

>>50277523
Honestly I ditch MGs on just about every design I use. A flamer, heat sinks, extra armour, just about anything is better.

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>>50281054
It's like you hate loud noises and pretty tracers.

>>50281253
I'm just traumatized by years of playing with grogs and having no CASE. With MGs usually of less use to me than other ammo based weapons, ditching that ticking time bomb always seemed prudent.

>>50280974
I do have a question about the infantry rules changes. Didn't laser and SRM infantry have a much higher damage curve back in the day? Did they nerf the laser damage capacity, because I thought portable lasers were pretty powerful for a long time and preferred.

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So, funny story. I got Megamek/Meklab a while ago, and eventually decided to stop dicking around with 200 ton superheavy designs armed with equipment culled from unofficial splatbooks and make a legit, legal design that fit my tastes. I set tech to Inner Sphere level 2 and got cracking, and what I ended up with was a 3/5/3 100 ton assault with full armour, a gauss rifle in either side torso and some backup lasers...and then I discovered that in a startling case of convergent design I had inadvertently built a mech that pretty much already existed. Thus was the beginning of my affair with the Pillager.

Anybody else have any love for this thing? Because right now I can't get enough of it, especially after I worked out my own variant with TSM. It can patiently outshoot almost anything at range, and anything it can't it can close with and place it firmly on the receiving end of a brutal 40 damage melee combo, and the stealth models are pretty fiendish as well.

Is there something like the Devastator (dual Gauss+dual PPC), but with hands?

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>>50281285

>>50281577
I love that thing. One of my best games was as a Taurian up against a Davion player. His choice of faction is irrelevant, but the guy himself was always finding reasons to be salty. So from the get go he was complaining that me having a Pillager in a Taurian force was "unbelievable". When I headcapped his CO's Devastator early on he got even worse.

Overall, a great ride.

>>50281577
The pillager is a complete horror, indeed. I always liked the pillager because when it was introduced it was really the only even sorta mass-market dualgauss murder mech, as opposed to the all fedcom 24/7 others.
And I feel you on the convergent design thing. A while back, I posted a design of mine from somewhere around 2002, only to discover that I'd basically independently invented the Hound

>>50282372
As it happens I was testing my custom Pillager against a Devastator a couple hours ago. No freak headshots, but once I got inside its reach the PPCs were far less useful, and I was ever jumping behind it or into adjacent cover. I more than made up for the difference in guns by popping my TSM and doing my best can opener impression on its torso, it was utterly metal.

I also pulled off the clutchest of clutch victories against an Atlas with the -1N variant (the level one version with AC/20s). The Atlas had fucked me up bad, wrecked one cannon and hit the gyro with a freak crit that left me in the dirt while it unloaded into me and brought me a few points of internal structure from death. I decided to go out with a bang and let off one last defiant salvo of all my guns and damn the heat...and the AC/20 got him in the side torso, stripped the last of its armour and nailed the ammo bin for his own autocannon, his mech going up like a firework while mine shut down in a cloud of steam from the intense heat (which I hadn't expected I'd last long enough to care about). I just about wrecked my mech and cost myself the game trying to drag it down the street by its one good arm after the pilot like a 100 ton Terminator and kill him out of principal, which was also pretty metal.

>>50271839
Donburi Rosar - former scummy bounty hunter, trying to turn over a new leaf. Knows more about security and escapes than about 'Mech weaponry or tactics.

Goda Maskin - distant cousin to a Rasalhaguian Jarl, is working as a journeyman field technician until he has enough experience for a good position in Swedenborg Industries. Falls in love with some local on every planet.

Mirek Bosco - easy-going tabloid monger who talks conspiracy theories constantly. 70% of the time he's glad to lend a hand with any cockamamie thing you could want, but 30% of the time he's obnoxiously paranoid and obsessed with coded messages he exchanges with acquaintances in other star systems.

Adriana Castilla - Was a driver and general labor for a few years, did a few months as an emergency gunner on the dropship, then got volunteered to operate the weapons in an immobilized 'Mech. The 'Mech was fixed and she remained its pilot. Constantly trying to one-up the academy-trained pilots (outside their cockpits).

Darla Landau - Veteran of a regiment smashed in the Chaos March. When facing former comrades, is more likely to call a short truce than pursue immediate contract goals. Still hungry for glory.

Repete - inherited his 'Mech from his brother, who died while boating. Listens to half of an argument or plan and then commits to a position early. Extra proud of anything he achieves and doubles down when challenged.

>>50282372
>So from the get go he was complaining that me having a Pillager in a Taurian force was "unbelievable".
Which is funny, because it's pretty much the ONLY dualgoose that would feasibly show up in a taurian unit outside of maybe refits like that stalker that gets posted here sometimes

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>>50282636
I don't think it has a single bad variant either.

The level 1 -1N version is a bit lacklustre, if only because it inexplicably has only 2 jump jets, but it's still a damn fun for urban combat, which is what it was made for (it's like a way tougher Demolisher tank that can fly).

The stock -3Z has the dual gauss, and plenty of lasers, including a large one. No CASE + an XL engine isn't the best, but being able to alpha strike and still *lose* heat is a plus.

The -4Z stealth model is, I'm convinced, a creation of Satan himself. Not the most firepower for an Assault, but the combination of stealth, armour, CASE and a standard engine means that at its preferred range it can soak hits like a medium sized planet while doing very respectable damage in return. Plus, how many other assaults can jump about firing their main guns with stealth on and still have plenty of heat to spare? While testing I beat a Dire Wolf one on one with this thing, it's crazy.

The -5L is an artillery unit that, once it runs out of missiles, can crack its knuckles and wade into the thick of things.

I might not be the biggest fan of how the -5Z removed the jumpjets, which I always thought were one of its most distinct features, but I know well what havoc TSM can wreak, and an extra PPC is nothing to scoff at either.

And the Anvil...I haven't really tried yet, but am informed that it can take any non-mech element of a combined arms force and make it very, very dead. Plus I have to respect for the insanity of putting TWO long tom cannons on a mech. Plus it looks pretty sweet.

By and Large, Pillagers can take hits with the best of them, and while they have less volume of fire than many assaults, what guns they do have are well chosen, and the value of the manoeuvrability edge afforded by their jumpjets cannot be understated. Plus they look cool as hell.

Speaking of the Pillager, when you guys do AUs do you ever add the production of certain 'mechs to other factions? Like I saw that StarCorps produces the Pillager and was thinking of adding it to any faction with a StarCorps factory world because some get slim pickings and the design is old enough that I think it's kind of "general."

If you were in a campaign and the GM did this would you object?

>>50279935
Rapid. Fire. Machineguns.

>>50283249
>No CASE + an XL engine isn't the best
It's never really given me any major trouble, to be honest. But the nice thing about it is that you could pull a sink for CASE with effectively no reduction in performance, which is pretty nice.
And the -4Z should be illegal, it's just an abomination, and the -5Z is even worse. Hell, now that I think about it, are there ANY pure IS tech machines other than the -5Z that are over 3000BV? I really can't think of any

>>50283513
>do you ever add the production of certain 'mechs to other factions? Like I saw that StarCorps produces the Pillager and was thinking of adding it to any faction with a StarCorps factory world because some get slim pickings and the design is old enough that I think it's kind of "general."
I did exactly this, giving the pillager to StarCorps FWL to cure their lack of a dualgauss machine, and put Nightstars in the combine, just to even things out.
I also put some factories in the periphery just for balance and variety, but that's a different sort of thing.
>If you were in a campaign and the GM did this would you object?
I can't see why anyone would

>>50279935
So what SFX would the flamers use? I need to know these things i order to role play with people much younger than me.

>>50281577
As far as 2goose assaults go, my favorites are the Nightstar and the Fafnir 5B.

The Nightstar because it's oversunk, over-ammo'd, has goose in the arms to help it survive them blowing, and it packs MPLs that help a lot more against flankers than two mediums.

The Fafnir has so many advantages over other 2goose rides it's insane. SFE, DHS, ECM, CASE, max armor, and an MPL. The sheer amount of bullshit it can ignore in comparison to a Thunder Hawk definitely makes it worth the price tag. Not to mention ghost targets making it harder to hit is just stellar.

>>50283684
Like a FWOOOOSSSSHHH, I should imagine.

>>50283739
The faf's big advantage is it's lack of a third big gun like the pillager's LL or the nightstar's ERPPC. Plus, isn't it endo?

>>50283614
>It's never really given me any major trouble, to be honest
Yeah, the mech is perfectly fine as is, but there'll always be that niggling little risk of a crit to the fairly large gun gutting the machine, so it's nice that the -4Z doesn't have that risk, one more reason it's so good.

> you could pull a sink for CASE with effectively no reduction in performance,
Oh sure, I was just talking stock designs. Any issues they have can be fixed within tech limits with small changes, for instance after trying the -1N I pretty much had to go in there, flip the head laser forward, move one arm laser to the torso and scrap the remaining laser and the SRM, then use the remaining weight/space to up the armour closer to the Pillager standard and add that third jet.

My own Pillager configuration started with the -4Z but lacked the stealth because I badly wanted both arms free and an ER large laser and couldn't fit one in the torso otherwise. I ended up dropping a little armour for that and a compact gyro, and as a result I ended up with no weight to spare, and enough crits for stealth, but not in the right areas. What I could fit though was TSM. So my personalised version ended up kind of an amalgam of -3Z (large laser), -5Z (TSM) and -4Z(everything else).

>>50283739
>The sheer amount of bullshit it can ignore in comparison to a Thunder Hawk definitely makes it worth the price tag
Yeah, I recall one of the first things I did was seeing how many gauss rifles I could reasonable fit, and seeing what that gave you. The Thunder Hawk seemed cool at first, but the large number of explosive guns either exposed on the arm or snuggled next to the engine was kind of a turn off. I do like the Fafnir, but ultimately I have to give it to the Pillager in personal preference, there's a wide new world of unconventional movement options available to an assault with jump jets, and having good punching capacity is great for any wiseguy who tries stepping inside minimum gauss range.

>>50284015
The Faf 5A has Endo and an ERLL to go with the two GRs.

>>50284038
Endo is the best fucking thing for dualgauss and 3/5 XL assaults in general , for real. I've actually got a couple 'discount' nightstar, emperor and pillager refits using endo to let them use a SFE, and man, they're pretty mean

>>50284102
If you ask me, they both create two different types of rides. the 300XL coughs up about 10 tons, while a 100 ton ES skeleton only nets 5.

>>50283513
No. If you don't like the selection of mechs a faction has, *don't play it*

>>50283675
Why would the FWL deserve a dualgauss? They prefer light gauss rifles anyway.

Nobody respond to this b8

>>50284469
Sorry, responding to it. It was just too strong of a bait for me.

>>50283249
>The level 1 -1N version is a bit lacklustre, if only because it inexplicably has only 2 jump jets
2 jump is basically minimum utility jump. Just enough to get you over 1 hex obstacles like water and such when you get up next to them.

Not necessarily the best design decision, but they can be great when you end up in circumstances that can use them, I had a 1N in a map full of swamps once, and those JJs repeatedly got it unbogged or let it pass over a swamp or mud hex entirely.

>>50284863
Oh yeah, any jumpjets is always better than no jumpjets. 2 is also enough to hop you over and behind anyone that closes to melee range with you, a nasty surprise for sure. But when a third jumpjet would take so little effort to fit and drastically improve a unit's options in an urban environment (what the -1N was really meant for), it just seems like a strange option. The rear laser too. My understanding is that a rear weapon might be of some use on something like an Atlas, which many things can run rings around and which can frankly spare the room for them given the size of the rest of its arsenal, but the Pillager not only has limited weaponry, it also has jumpjets, and I kind of feel like using them to affect rapid turns or position changes is the way to go when dealing with flankers in one. As is, it's just a wasted slot, even if you do let yourself get shot in the back you're never going to do enough with a single medium laser for it to help.

Then again, the -1N is a fairly early design, so frankly I should be grateful those are all the questionable design choices it has considering how bad the design flaws are on some other contemporary mechs.

>>50285077
>My understanding is that a rear weapon might be of some use on something like an Atlas, which many things can run rings around and which can frankly spare the room for them given the size of the rest of its arsenal

The main problem with rear weapons in principle is the +2 for shooting at a secondary target to the rear. So it ends up that you usually just focus on something in front of your or behind, and if doing that you can just use arm weapons, either with flippy arms or just by torso twisting. So they make the most sense on quads or mechs that are intended to have the no torso twist quirk without flippy arms, but the latter tricky since quirks are optional rules. Pulses do negate that modifier and you see them often ending up rear mounted when they become available, but the extra weight pretty much offsets the advantages.

Even though the Atlas isn't hurting for firepower in the front, if it mounted those two rear lasers in each arm along with the ones already there, it could just torso twist and put two lasers on something at its rear, and also have them available for forward use.

>>50285272
A fair point. Rear weapons seemed pretty pointless to me, but I figured they must have *some* sort of point. I used to think you could just mount arm weapons and forgo lower arms to cover any angle with much of your arsenal via arm flip, though that opinion has waned somewhat now that I've discovered how potent double punches can be when you can pull them off, as well as noticed how arms tend to go sooner rather than later, since they have the thinnest armour and will be blown off by side torso loss as well

>>50285077
>>50285272
Though while I'm griping about it I don't think the SRM is a great inclusion either. Yes you can crit seek with it, but I kind of feel like the Pillager isn't really that sort of mech. If it's going to kill something it'll do it by crushing its bones and drinking its marrow, or in more practical terms blowing off all or most of the armour in one autocannon shot to a location and then the internal structure in the next, along with quite probably a chunk of the next location over. Criting this or that component is less useful when you're liable to obliterate whole locations at a time anyway.

>>50285421
Taking out whole locations is great, but there have been so many times where I've opened up a couple of holes just to spend the next six turns trying to land another shot there and blasting tons of the legs, arms, RT, etc. uselessly. Critseeking through holes is definitely useful, especially on mechs with explosives or larger engines.

>>50285362
Forget double punches.

>100 ton assault with TSM and Super Charger
>Piloted with Melee Master

3x20 point punches. Just imagine

>>50285459
Yeah, but the Pillager already has a few lasers that can fill that roll quite handily, and between them and 2 AC/20's a turn it's generally not long before something gives. I just feel like the SRM is a prime candidate for ditching, since you could replace it with that all important third jumpjet and still have weight leftover for additional lasers/sinks to improve crit seeking, or some more armour to bring it closer to being in line with its more advanced cousins.

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What's the Black Dragon Society's deal?

I'm reading Path of Glory and they're planning attacks on the Lyrans and Ghost Bears, but why then? Why the Ghost Bears when the Combine is still recovering from all the previous Clan fighting?
Are they blinded by nationalism or actually trying to destroy the Combine?

>>50285477
Melee Master is pretty kickass, but given one piloting skill to choose I'd have to go for Jumping Jack simply for how much I abuse the jump jets. There are times when I have to remind myself that walking is actually the more efficient form of movement in the given situation, because otherwise I'm leaping around like a jackalope, and being at a mere +1 penalty to hit things while doing that is unbelievably useful; it lets me backup and shoot, drawing out the time it takes things to close in, and once they do I can use it to leap around them keeping up ideal positioning and still reliably hit with my guns and punches.

>>50285570

>Are they blinded by nationalism or actually trying to destroy the Combine?

They reject Theodore and his reforms because in their eyes none of it has worked. Which is actually a defensible position.

Take the 4th SW. Theodore commanded the Lyran front and had free rein there. Takashi commanded the FedSuns front. Theodore lost over 50 worlds, Takashi gained a few.

Or the War of 3039. Where Theodore's counter-attack factually achieves *nothing,* his most ardent reformist units get stomped, and the result is dictated by Hanse just giving up and going home because reasons.

And then the Clan War, where Theodore refuses to defend Luthien, refuses to rescue Hohiro, and regardless of whether a unit is progressive or traditional they still get completely owned by the Clans. Wolcott is won by cheating, and at Luthien the traditionalists put in a better showing than the progressives.

In reality the Dracs definitely needed to reform though. It's just that what Theodore did was never shown to be working. Their counter-reformation shit never helped.

>>50285710

>Jumping Jack

Misogynistic shitlord REEE

Check your priviledge before you flip out, I'm joking about an actual autistic shitfit from the OF that actually got bans applied to the people who responded with "Jesus Christ, it's just a name, calm down."

>>50285710

por que no los dos?

>>50286150
It was Jumping Jill that shitbag got butthurt about. Because obviously women can't jump as far as men.

>>50283675
Design challenge?

A FWLM variant of the Pillager, say early 3060s.

Hardmode: no LGR.

>>50286981
Mount LPLs instead of decent guns. Done.

>>50286981

Replace the GRs with LrM-15s, load Semi-Guided ammo?

>>50263655
>names many of the major factions; says they're Sues
Cute bait, but wrong.

>>50286503
Scotty's an otherwise decent fellow (for a filthy Catalyst running-dog), so I'm willing to excuse him having a SJW freakout.

>>50287970
>decent fellow
>Catalyst running-dog
>SJW freakout

Yeah nah

>>50287970
The constant shilling of AS and early twenties smugness belies your statement. So no.

>>50277507
If any company associated with BattleTech is criminal, it's the failsons of FASA, pal. Catalyst wasn't particularly smart to bring up the Unseen issue again in the late 2000s, but FASA started this idiocy back when they game first started, and never handled their legal issues with an ounce of intelligence.

Like, I'm not saying they stole the designs, but they should have had a far better grasp of what it meant to borrow from a Japanese company that already had a complicated relationship with another American company.

>>50288077
Incorrect. FASA licensed the Unseen from a company that, as far as they knew, had the right to sublicense the designs to them. As for Catalyst, they got tripped up by a secret clause in the original agreement from the late 90s, rather than any idiocy on their part.

>>50270701
>3025
>good
>anything from the fall of the Star League to the Clan Invasion
>good

>>50262698
My family had just bought our first joystick (a Microsoft Sidewinder, IIRC), and it came with a copy of MechWarrior 2. From the moment the Clan Wolf intro played (I had played around in Instant Action for a short while), I was enraptured.

Around this time, Robotech was playing on Toonami for the first time, so seeing similar designs in the show and the game was certain weird to young me, haha. Add into that my burgeoning love of Star Wars,

Come to think of it, those couple of years saw the start of my journey as a fan of mecha, science fiction, and anime.

got inspired by someone posting the copypasta in a /his/ thread

That's it. I'm sick of all this "objectively worse than a Hatchet" bullshit that's going on in the Battletech system right now. Swords deserve much better than that. Much, much better than that.
I should know what I'm talking about. I myself commissioned a genuine Sword on Luthien for 2,400,000 K-Bills (that's about 20,000 C-Bills) and have been practicing with it for almost 2 years now. I can even cut slabs of solid ferro-fibrous with my Sword. Kuritan smiths spend years working on a single Sword and fold it up to a million times to produce the finest blades known to mankind. Swords are thrice as sharp as Fedrat Hatchets and thrice as hard for that matter too. Anything a Hatchet can cut through, a Sword can cut through better. I'm pretty sure a Sword could easily bisect an Atlas with max armor with a simple vertical slash. Ever wonder why the Federated Commonwealth never bothered conquering the Combine? That's right, they were too scared to fight the disciplined Samurai and their Swords of destruction. Even in the Clan Invasion, Jaguar warriors targeted the Mechs with the Swords first because their killing power was feared and respected. So what am I saying? Swords are simply the best weapon that the Inner Sphere has ever seen, and thus, require better stats in the Battletech system. Here is the stat block I propose for Swords:

.5 ton per 15 tons mech weight
1 crit per 15 tons mech weight
2 damage per 5 tons mech weight
-3 to hit
Automatic critical chance in the hit location

Now that seems a lot more representative of the cutting power of Swords in real life, don't you think?

tl;dr = Swords need to do more damage in Battletech, see my new stat block.

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>>50288314

welp, looks like we have more bait copypasta

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Battle Bump...
or sissy slap fight. Whatever works.

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>>50288314
>100 ton mech with TSM and a sword.
>40 points normally.
>80 points with activated TSM.
I should not react like this.

Of course, if this ever happened, you know it would be exactly like the Orochi.
>Made by the Draconis Combine. One week later, the world that produces it was captured by the AFFC

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I can't remember if I posted this, but have another of the Rejected file, though I think this was more "CA make something that isn't 30 or 35 tons."

>>50289462

A 100-Tonner with a Sword does 11, 22 with TSM.

Hatchets are 20, 40 with TSM and there's a Berzerker with that setup. LA only until the DA though.

>>50289493
>Plasma Rifle
>Clan
u wot? I gotta say though, I dig that Prime.

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what book is this from?

>>50289713
One of the Jihad Hotspots covers

>>50289635
We WiE now. but yes, it's a bug with SSW, since that config is Mixtech.

>>50289635
It's the cover to JHS:3076.

>>50289528
... You didn't read the post he was responding to, did you.

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I'd really love to get into Battletech but now seems like a really poor time to do so. The Introductory Boxset has vanished from retailers and is only being sold on the second hand market for a pretty big price markup. Any chance of a reprint at some point?

>>50260727
TRACK THAT POD

>>50287814

But he's not wrong. Almost every faction is a Sue faction by any reasonable definition. Some aren't (FWL, Outworlds, Randis), but the vast majority are.

>>50290408
Those are all Sues.

>>50288108

Ignorance of the law isn't an excuse. FASA may have messed up in the first place, but CGL is basically made from FASA people anyway. On top of that, they tried to bring back the Unseen knowing that the actions of FASA were criminal in the first place, and that makes them equally guilty. Plus, CGL leadership are criminals on their own, with the whole porch thing and withholding earned compensation from freelancers and demo people.

Please don't try to defend the indefensible.

>>50289462
>Of course, if this ever happened, you know it would be exactly like the Orochi.
>Made by the Draconis Combine. One week later, the world that produces it was captured by the AFFC


Well then with any luck it would be produced on Luthien.

>>50290416

OK, I'll bite on the obvious bait. The FWL doesn't get written about, doesn't get nice designs, doesn't get plot, doesn't get especially memorable characters in numbers even approaching that of Periphery factions, and existed only to be broken up and essentially destroyed as a faction. How is it Sue?

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>>50289890
There will be, undoubtedly, but the thing is that Catalyst gets a lot of their printing and miniatures done overseas in Asia, which means longer wait times, and in some cases it shot them in the foot. (Case in point getting fucked over for Leviathans because China didn't like how they portrayed Taiwan, so not just "we will refuse your business", but outright "You ain't getting shit and we're keeping the money". As a result, Leviathans was screwed before it even got off the ground.)

Now... I'm going to say - don't let that stop you. Myself, I got my start in Battletech when there was no introbox. I was getting into it in '05, and the last introbox was long gone, cost the same price, and only had cardboard chits. I went from the PDF quickstart rules directly into the tournament rules (Granted, it was the last edition, rather than the current Total Warfare rulebook).

My suggestion as someone who had to start from ground zero without outside help? Don't worry too much about the minis from the get go. I used paper standies I found on a website called "Pryde Rock Industries" for a few years. Also, there's word about a new rulebook coming down the pipe called Battlemech Manual which cuts out all the combined arms in Total Warfare and slims it down to be just mechs. It sounds handy to me, but there's no PDF yet so it's up in the air as to how it'll be. Record sheets can be handled by Solaris Skunkwerks for free (though they stopped updating, it's only... what... two years out of date now? Compare that to the joke that is Heavy Metal Pro...)

Minis... of course the intro box is the best bang for your buck, but you're also getting a pretty good deal from the Alpha Strike lance boxes, and 2/4 of the mechs in the lance packs are not in the Battletech introbox. Another route? Good old e-bay or facebook groups. There's always some oldbeard whose wife has brow-beaten them into getting rid of their minis. They might need serious simplegreenage.

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>>50289890
>>50290486
The only thing I'm going to suggest right off the bat that you really should try to get your hands on? The mapsheets. They're OOP now, but whether you're getting them second hand or in their plastic-wrapped sets, absolutely try to get your hands on the following, in this order.

Battletech Map COMPILATION 1
Battletech map COMPILATION 2
Battletech Map pack 7
Battletech Map Pack Solaris.

If you can get a bunch of them second hand, players often dump old mapsheets without even considering their value in the lots, and they're an absolute must for playing. If you buy from the listed packs I told you earlier, you'll have at least one copy of every map you will need for the game.

The box sets and new map products are really going for the hard cardboard and cardboard chits to add on top, but I really like the "Random Roll" method of map generation that we saw in Total Warfare and earlier editions. There's a bit less of the "terrain chess" going on at the beginning.

Quick question about miniatures.
What's the going rate for reselling old Ral Patha mechs from back in the day? I might know a guy that has possibly a few hundred he needs to sell. Some of them are painted poorly so that has to be taken into account. The guy isn't getting away from Battletech, but he can't hold onto his collection for much longer and wants to see them get a good home.
Most of them are from the lance packs from back in the day, with a few others. It'll be a long while before I get to see him again.

>>50290408
I think the FWL is the only one you list there that isn't.

Randis gets its special snowflake Cloud Cobra-trained ex Smoke Jaguar leader and is the first Periphery power to independently develop assault 'Mech production facilities. Also Kit as a patron author.

The OA gets the Ravens.

>>50291065
Depending on his country, he might have an easier or harder time moving them.

Facebook has a Battletech Trade/Sell community on there as well, and I think that Lords of the Battlefield did a fair bit as well...

Besides that, I couldn't tell you. Unseen in the heavies range tend to fetch good prices, but more average 3025'ers, not so much. There are some unexpected ones, like old-sculpt wolfhounds, that are tough to find because the original molds broke.

>>50291409
>The OA gets the Ravens
Isn't it the other way around?

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>>50291065
>What's the going rate for reselling old Ral Patha mechs from back in the day? I might know a guy that has possibly a few hundred he needs to sell. Some of them are painted poorly so that has to be taken into account. The guy isn't getting away from Battletech, but he can't hold onto his collection for much longer and wants to see them get a good home.

Like >>50291661 said, it depends on what he's got. I usually see old Ral Partha models go for $10-$12 when sold individually, but you usually make less money on the whole when selling them as a lot. There are some, however, that are highly prized - particularly LAM's and the other old Unseen sculpts. I sold a NIB MAD-3R Marauder - not even the really old "lacking detail" sculpt - on eBay for $75.

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>>50291843
>really old "lacking detail" sculpt

Pic related

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>>50290405
>TRACK THAT POD

Mr Harrison? I have an *invasion* to go to!

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>>50281306
>Didn't laser and SRM infantry have a much higher damage curve back in the day?
Absolutely, yes. The changes happened between Total Warfare and the edition just before it, BMR.

I think it had more to do with synching up better with the RPG, which was presenting the laser weapons as a high-range-low-damage option. Laser has been replaced with Rifle-Energy. I'm not exactly sure how the former rifle infantry, now Rifle-Ballistic infantry, came to be as powerful as they are, but that's their gimmick now.

Another infantry change that I'm not sure if people picked up or not is that the damage values have been increased around the board, but it also requires that you roll on the cluster hits table after a successful roll.

Overall, this means they spoot out a little bit less damage, but combined with their boosted survivability thanks to Total Warfare saying it's stupid that a PPC or AC20 shot meant for penetrating power can take out a whole squad of infantry spread over an area, means that they've overall improved in their battlefield effectiveness by leaps and bounds. Former infantry weren't even doorstops, but modern infantry can be a real nuisance and handy area denial. They also make fantastic IDF/Artillery spotters, since movement doesn't affect their attack modifiers, and range doesn't matter between spotter and target. As most players don't bother bringing infernos, MGs or flamers, and an ERPPC is only going to take out two troopers at a time if they are in the open, a single squad of jump anything infantry can make a great force multiplier for LRM units - especially in urban areas.

>>50291936
>I think it had more to do with synching up better with the RPG
Probably, since one thing is that modern infantry are variable as fuck, the generic ones in TW are just that, and TM has stats for all sorts of specific weapons. Generic laser rifles aren't too bad, but Mauser IICs and the can be fucking brutal. I think generic auto rifle platoons got a damage boost since otherwise the other platoon types made them kid of pointless doing more damage with better range.

Another change to damage is that TW changed it to 2 point gropus instead of 5, so infantry are much nastier against vehicles now.

>>50291915
>you will never command a light-medium lance against clanners
>you will never be outgunned despite having twice the tonnage

feels bad man

>>50291936
Thanks for the heads-up. I was away from Battletech for a while and about a year ago got the latest incarnation of Megamek. It was to my surprise when light mechs like a Stinger and Locust would just get sandblasted by infantry making their already pitiful armor seem paper thin.

So what's the biggest mary-Sue fetish faction in battletech, why is it the MOC, and why shouldn't all of their fans be sterilized?

>>50290405
Target's coming into vision.

Show yourself you son of a-

>>50292764
Sir, I don't have jump jets

>>50292741
Really there's no reason, but why worry about it now? You can't undo the writing and none of them will breed anyway.

>>50292764
EJECTING EJECTING

>>50292789
I KNOW what you have

>>50292764
This annoyed me even as a kid. I asked my dad as he booted it for the first time why Harrison was such a crap MechCommander. He's got a Raven with sensors barely better than his Hunchback's, and he just has the Hunchie try and do stand off combat, rather than get close. Of course, that's when my dad said it's just a game.

>>50293172
desu the hunchie tried to get close, but the Timber just fucked him up too fast

>>50292813
>Really there's no reason, but why worry about it now? You can't undo the writing and none of them will breed anyway.

The MOC could be retconned away, if CGL was sufficiently threatened with either loss of revenue or loss of life. That would be sufficient. Who wants to step up and be a hero to everyone who appreciates actual, legitimate, battletech?

>>50293559
I want to get into MegaMek, what do?
Are the basic rules enough or should I get extra backup books

>Playing a planetary 4SW campaign.
>Hotly contested bridge
>Opponent sends a light lance to scout it out
>I had sent an assault lance to hold it when it first became contested. They just arrived.
>Now he can't threaten my supply depots because he cant take the bridge.

So this is what a Lyran general feels like...

>>50293760
>making a good decision that safeguards your situation
No, that isn't what being a Lyran general feels like

Did the Invasion-era Nova Cats have a lot of Timber Wolf mechs? I was looking at the Revival trials sourcebook and they had a bunch of T Wolves in their heavy RAT, like only one less than Clan Wolf itself.

>>50293645
Starting rules/total warfare is pretty well all you need. I would suggest taking a look at tactical operations if you want to use some of the optional rules such as double blind.

>>50294088
I meant more along the lines of laughing as insect try to dislodge me from my position.

>>50294169
Now that does seem rather Lyran. Laughing, getting outflanked and defeated, then blaming it on the Davions/Skye/Kelswa/etc.

>>50293760

That's some pretty terrible roleplaying, anon.

For the true Lyran experience, you should have reserved all of your heavy and assault-class units (being 96 of the 108 Mechs in the regiment) for a thrust toward the largest concentration of enemy forces in an effort to forcibly create a Clauzwitzian "decisive battle". That thrust will then be dodged by your lighter, more mobile foe and your company of non-Heavy/Assault Mechs which you scattered in lance-sized lots to form a "mobile picket" of the 14 different ways for flanking units to approach your support forces will be overwhelmed in detail by the enemy's own company-sized flanking units. These flanking forces will then destroy your supply depots and overrun rear-line C3 centers, eliminating your ability to coordinated the planet's remaining defending forces. Your overextended main thrust will thusly be left exposed and unsupplied as your encirclement is completed, leaving as your only option a call for VTOL DropShip extraction as yet another Lyran world is abandoned to the oncoming yellow peril.

But hey, the Lyrans have a badass Guasswall, right?

>>50294284
This was 4SW, and I'd already done that.
This was me realizing if I lost this world I would lose the family Atlas.

>>50294284
just crush the enemy "faster"

I need some advice for a game i'm trying to set up this coming sunday.

I'm trying to introduce my long time group to the basics of Alpha Strike(using the Introductory Alpha Strike rules in the AS core book) and was wondering if those were in desperate need of any of the additions added to the game via the Companion book or whether we could manage without. It'll be played with the Hex map conversion rules already but is there anything else we NEED to add for such an intro game?

>>50294284

Jesus christ, that's like 'Lyrans: the Movie Experience'. Was that really how they worked up until getting absorbed by the Suns?

>>50294404
and then they still managed to hold on more or less

does this mean the enemy is even more incompetent?

>>50294404
Basically, yes. The Lyran grasp of tactics was terrible. I'm still sure that Schwerpunkt is their goal, but enough officers have realized that being able to force the issue is the winning strategy.

File: This is why Lyrans make the Firestarter.gif (499KB, 500x268px) Image search: [Google]

499KB, 500x268px

>>50294404
No. Because the Lyrans facing the FWL are the Cavenaugh boys who have historically known how to fight like not-retards. What he describes is how they fought the Dracs.

And the Dracs were all like "HONOOOOOOOOOOOOOR!"

>>50294756

So then, yes it was. Just not usually when facing the FWL.

>>50294756
so Lyran High Command did everything right :^)

>>50294851
More like they had competent people usually facing competent people and then incompetent facing incompetent.

>"Sir, the Lyran force is massing on us."
>"Bring me my Dragon 1N so that I may challenge their commander to single combat!"
And then the Drac wins because he graduated from Sun Zang and is a 2/3 compared to that 6/7 socialite tub of lard

>>50294284

What the hell do you do that you can just rattle off this sort of stuff? You just described a whole campaign that I'd have to look in a dozen sourcebooks and probably go to West point to understand all of it.

but no seriously, while I understand that Lyran production is off the charts, I can't believe they can shit out that many incompetent "commanders"
or are those just good/lucky enough at surviving?

>>50295135

NEA may have terrible taste in factions and women (sorry man, but I like big tits), but he knows his shit when it comes to milhistory, strategy, and tactics. He did a primer on a refused flank technique a few months ago that I saved, and I've gone like 6 wins, 1 loss with over the last several BT games I've played where I've tried it.

Disregard somebody know knows stuff at your own peril.

>>50295184
Their regular officer corps is surprisingly not shit. It's their upper echelon command strategy that's garbage. Even good soldiers get fucked by bad strategy. The snakes are in a similar boat, except they have the best mechwarriors in the inner sphere and decent strategists but their tactic level operations are garbage because of gloryhounding.

>>50295184
More that they've got members of business families/nobility who buy their way to the top slots. The guys who come out of, say, the Nagelring are fine, but they lack the prekissed asses and bribes to make it to high commands.

>>50295297
wait, from the books I recall that the asskissing in the Nagelring is actually pretty high

Hope I'm not too soon.
New thread.
>>50295406

>>50294453
Until the luck of the Hanse in the 4th war they had been holding on by their fingernails. They'd lost scores of worlds on the Drac front and were mired in a stalemate/losing ground on the Free Worlds front too.

It's less that they did stuff right and more "all according to plan" plot advancement.

I'm not saying this in a "arghh, fiat blah blah" way but more just looking at their tactics and history of success.

>>50295184
It's cultural.

>>50295286
Drac MechWarriors are overrated.

>>50292136
>>50291936
I particularly remember one battle where a couple of squads of rifle infantry duked it out with a Zhukov and then took down a plasma-rifle Gun. They definitely had some help from the scenario, where they were defending a pass through rugged terrain, but still.