"Is BattleTech a Poorly Written Game?" Topic

In a current thread about point system objectives, Farstar has been very critical of the point system used in BattleTech, the old writing staff of FASA, and the core rules of BattleTech.

If I understand his argument, the Death From Above rules presented in the first five printings of BattleTech were broken and badly written. This led Farstar's group after extensive dissection of the half-written rule to abandon BattleTech.

TMP link

I'll correct Farstar regarding the first printing (1984) of BattleTech, the Death From Above maneuver was not introduced. I reviewed the rule in the 2nd. edition of BattleTech (1985) and find the rule clearly written. While rarely effective, I never found DFA to be a problem in play.

I was surprised a couple of years back when I checked the FanPro Classic BattleTech site and over 40% of players were playing pre-clan invasion games. The rules have changed very little in the last 25 years from my perspective. There has been new equipment introduced over the years, tons of new 'Mech designs and the story line has changed dozens of times, but the core rules have remained stable.

While currently I game more historical games, I still like this old game. I have hosted games every few years and even a convention game or two in recent years. Games are always dramatic.

Are the rules broken in key ways?
Should the designers of BattleTech be proud of the game's core rules?
Should the designers of BattleTech be ashamed of the game's core rules?

disclaimer: I haven't played in years.

Using tonnage for a points system never, ever worked. Not only do IS mechs have about only a 1 in 10 chance (made that up) of beating a Clan mech, but it doesn't take Piloting and Gunnery into account at all. The whole "roll for piloting and gunnery" at the beginning of the game was screwy.

One other random thing. Taking cover in water was dumb as it meant that instead of a 1 in 36 chance of taking a direct head shot, there was a 1 in 6 chance of taking a head shot.

But I also always had fun playing, despite insisting on playing Inner Sphere against my buddy and his Jade Falcons.

I don't think I ever won a game.

It's a boardgame that grew out of hand and nobody ever had the guts to overhaul it. Other than that it is great fun.

A slight correction and some clarification.

We gave up on BT when the Clans rolled out. Prior to that, we simply stopped using DFA. And buildings. And vehicles (that was before BV was introduced, so the balancing factor for vehicles was tonnage and price, neither of which treated vehicles well). Early BV calculations were also flawed.

In short, it was all little stuff that added up and detracted from our game. The Clans were the last straw.

The present edition of the game, while suffering a bit from triple-megabookitis and poor indexing ("the rules for setting things on fire are *where*?"), has overcome the early problems. Clantech is clearly represented in BV calculations, as is the fragility of vehicles. Buildings are no longer built by Toho Films, and DFA appears to be properly written.

I also reject the idea that I'm the only one who abandoned BT at the introduction of the Clans. It is to FASA's credit that they soldiered on to complete the timeline, aided in no small way by the Keith novels, but their player base wasn't the same as it had been.

A lot of the old players I've talked to end their "I played BT" tales with "…and then the Clans came along."

The two local stores that carried the BT miniatures always sold the pre-Clan mechs, while most of the Clan designs sat.

The big convention game (huge contoured board, scenery bits, the works) I see once or twice a year locally always has the instantly recognized pre-Clan mechs on the table.

I have ot admit that I too played BT… and then the clans came. Instant turn-off. I liked the sort of hoakey "lost the tech to build new mechs, so hand them down to your children" thing. You could give an old mech a lot of character (remember the old McKinnons Raiders supplement? There was a pretty quirky Stinger in there, as well as Clavels Rifleman in the Black Widow scenario book).

It was not just the clan mechs that did it, but the whole story line. Still bums me out.

Anyways… Though I had a ball with the rules when younger, now I think that they are nowhere near streamlined enough. I can't play a Company vs Company game in 3 hours. It takes significantly longer than that (sometimes 2 sessions worth). I really do think that a good overhaul would do the game some good.

"A lot of the old players I've talked to end their "I played BT" tales with "…and then the Clans came along.""

While, I don't necessarily disagree with this statement- I know a lot of folks who were in this boat- I continued to play and enjoy this game well beyond the Clans.
…
A) Then, I played against this one dingus that simply hated to play with anything *besides* custom 'Mechs. All he could say, as I was mopping the floor with him, was how great he'd be with [insert random homemade 'Mech here].
I was like, "Dude, at least try to give me your A-Game before comin at me with your Custom Cheese Boxes."
B) Then, I tried to play a friendly team play game at a FLGS with this guy who was nothing short of a complete a-holio.
I walked away from that game so disappointed and disillusioned that I quite literally thanked my lucky stars I recycled the 200 'Mech minis I'd colected over time after walking away from Battletech the first time around.
C) Then, I went to Kublacon in the spring of '02. I was running a CAV demo and they put me in a room where a B-Tech game was going on. I swear to you the stench of BO in that room was so horrific, I had to beg the Con Coordinator for another room.
My wife never went with me to another con after that and I swore I'd never give another dollar to the Battletech franchise again.

In short, the rules didn't kill the game for me. Sure they were kinda cheesy, but for a Beer & Pretzles game, you can't ask for more. And, they were a lot of fun for me!
Contrarily, the Battletech player killed the game for me. And, as the saying goes, "Don't blame the player, blame the game."

So, I blame Battletech.
And, there you go.

Cheers!

Unsurprisingly, I agree with Darby 100%.

ClanTech altered (completely) what I liked about the game's setting and feel. CBT3025 revolves around managing heat buildup and rate of "armor erosion". When some jokers come along with double-strength heat sinks and extra powerful weapons, well, that's just not the same game anymore.

(BTW, an early inkling that I was destined to go into historicals was my preference for playing "stock" mech designs.)

It's possible that had I started with ClanTech, I would not feel this way, but we'll never know. :)

Simply put, BT isn't poorly written, just old school and over-simplified.

In a bit more detail -

1) Having to chew through every point of armor or get a lucky shot to do real damage is cumbersome and crude.

2) Tonnage as a balance factor is wrong.

3) Vehicles were artificially handicapped to keep mechs the kings of the battlefield.

4) Far too much randomness in the effectiveness of combat. Missiles swarms that produce few or no hits, lack of guidance systems and silly range vs power balancing acts on weapons (all suitably PDBed).

All that said, I loved the game for ages and played it more than any other tactical game in my life.

-Eli
leadpeople.blogspot.com

Sorry, but could never get beyond the "heat points" action limiting mechanism among other things. Still played it to be social and collect the minis for other games, though

Fun but fiddly little game that my high school friends played. Very much a squad (lance) level game if you wanted it to be completed within a reasonable time. As noted, it had clunky rules but no real show stoppers. The Stackpole books I read (the 4th Succession War) were a great read for a 14 – 15 year old.
Then along come the Clans, and out I went. Plus I had discovered the Challenger rules set for moderns, and WHFB so made th move over to tabletop mini wargames.

I have a couple issues with the CBT rules.

The biggest one is the lack of focus in what the game was supposed to be. Are you writing a close-combat game, like the various Toho Films monster movies, or are you writing a tactical game where shooting is important?

The ablative-armor mechanic is frustrating, and not representative of a lot of the Giant-Robot genre.

Heat-limitations worked until the Clans came. Then ClanTech was lighter and harder hitting, so tonnage was screwed as a balance mechanism. My old rule of thumb was Clans got 60% of the Tonnage that the Sphere got.

And don't even get me started on the bass-ackwards relationship between range and weapon damage capability.

I have heard the comment many times that people stopped playing Battletech when the Clans were introduced. I find this sad and at same time amusing. Introdicing the Clans was ALWAYS the plan for the game creators. They made no secret of it. Gamers are such finicky creatures. They never let a good game or system get in the way of a good grudge. Some people aren't happy unless they are complaining. I have played battletech on and off (more off, due to Star Fleet Battles) since 1988. I don't remember having any trouble with the DFA rules. The editing in the original couple of releases could have been better, but my friends and I were always able to read past the syntax errors. It is a good system and diversion.

I've played battletech since 1985, and used DFA rules from the 2e boxed set. I never found them poorly written or broken. I also think the tonnage as play balance is a bit of a gamer-ism, and something people did back-in-the-day because of the lack of points. That has been addressed in CV, BV, and now BV2 (which is getting better).

I would also note they began retconning away from the "Mad Max with Robots" thing within a few years of the game release (1985 boxed set, Hesperus II is a mech storehouse; 1987 in the House Steiner book it is the largest mech factory in the Inner Sphere). The setting as presented in the 1984-86 products I'm not unhappy to see gone. It was the setting between 1986 (first retconns IIRC in the Mechwarrior RPG) to 1990 (i.e. the "3025" era) that was the definition of the game to me…

Damon.

Range vs damage… a Tomahawk missle will do the same damage at ten miles as it does at one thousand miles. A military grade laser will do the same damage at one mile as it will at ten miles. The beam diffusion at these ranges ins't enough to reduce the damage.

This thread popped up at a really good time for me. I just ran/played Classic Battletech with 7 other friends lastnight. Two lances facing off over some Heroscape terrain with Woodland scenic trees. The 7 friends are all old school Battletech players that haven't played in years, but I've only been playing since Classic Battletech came out. I shied away from it in its previous incarnations because it seemed to attract the wrong people. Power gamers and jerks. My friends said this was mostly because of clan technology, people building min/maxed mechs, and using tonage to determine forces. Regardless the people I didn't want to play with always seemed to be playing it. Your experiences may differ.

I'm really enjoying the present Battletech rules. They could be written more clearly, but once you put them together they are good solid rules. Using the battle values off of the heavy metal pro program, I built two lance of 4vs4 and 3vs3 in case some didn't show. We played one and then the other after some had to leave. Everyone agreed it was a well balanced game as it always came down to a few battered survivors facing off against each other.

As a person who has been a gamer for 20+ years I would have to say these are good solid rules and the creators should be proud of. I'm probably gonna stop at the 3039 books as I am pretty happy gaming in that era.

Oh there are so many problems with BT rules, that it's best to just play it without thinking about it too much. The tonnage thing was just a fill in for balance, but then few actual battles are of balanced forces to borrow the comment from Stargrunt II.

The Clans changed that as a Clan ER PPC does 15 points while the IS ER PPC was still stuck at 10, and the Clan's weapon still had a better range. Until the revamped and added an altered points value to it, it was almost treated by many as the same weapon even though they were very different.

The game was written as if it was made in an over night session. What was the original rules being made for again?
It's still a fun game as long as you don't treat it as serious hard sci-fi.

Yes, to the original question.

And don't even get me started on the bass-ackwards relationship between range and weapon damage capability.

Amen.

Let's not forget the machine gun that weighs half a ton and has a range of 90 meters.

I want to also comment I just pulled out my 2e boxed set (copyright 1985, the one with the Marauder/stinger/warhammer on the back in a swamp scene) and re-read the rules on DFA. Very concise and easy to understand IMHO.

Also in terms of rolling for pilot skill, the actual rule says: "At the beginning of the game, the players could roll randomly for Piloting and Gunnery skill of every Mechwarrior" (emphasis mine). This was in the optional rules section.

I couldn't find anything about using Mech weight as a metric for game balance…

Damon.

I don't dislike the later-era stuff, ans I really like a lot of the designs from 3060-onwards (the "Unseen" excepted, there's probably a dozen or fewer designs from 3058 and earlier I like, total).

The reasons I play 3025 are:

Heat is more important, as described repeatedly above (although, the first time I used a Mad Cat, I fired off every weapon, overheated, shut down and fell over ).

I like the simplicity of the weapons list in 3025 – 3 lasers, 4 autocannons, 3 SRMs, 4 LRMS and and MG. No ER, Pulse, Ultra, LB-X, Rotary, Heavy, Light, etc, etc versions.

As for Death From Above attacks, are these really broken? I've never seen a successful one occur.

We tended to just stick with regular 3 Pilot 4 Gunnery 'Mechwarriors (which might be why no-one ever managed a DFA attack), so that removed one balance item. In addition, we only ever use stock 'Mechs (and the standard variants at that). Given that, we found tonnage was a reasonable balance aid, although you really had to keep numbers roughly equal – 5 lances of Locusts vs a lance of Atlases is no fun. As for Clan stuff, we used 1 tonne of Clan stuff = 2 tonnes of IS stuff, and 1 tonne of vehicles = 1/2 tonnes of 'Mechs.

I have heard the comment many times that people stopped playing Battletech when the Clans were introduced. I find this sad and at same time amusing. Introdicing the Clans was ALWAYS the plan for the game creators. They made no secret of it. Gamers are such finicky creatures. They never let a good game or system get in the way of a good grudge.

The Clans were a foregone conclusion for the setting, yes. Maybe not from day one, but certainly as soon as Wolf's Dragoons and a certain Ms. Kerensky made their first appearance.

What they did to the setting is not really the issue. That's the flow of "history".

Its what the Clans did to the *game* that most people dislike. Its already been described by others, so I won't go into it, but I'll note that a lot of the ret-con work, now invisible 20 years later, made the transition smoother than it was the first time. The technology jumps were huge, spotty, and unexplained unless you happened to be reading the novels. Which we weren't.

The novels were the best thing to happen to the game, really, until the unified timeline of the FanPro edition put the whole mess into perspective. But you HAD TO READ THEM. Far beyond what FASA was communicating in Battletech (as opposed to MW RPG) materials, the novels were a vital part of the game experience. Without them the retcon & General War period was simply an unpleasant set of rules revisions and inexplicably huge technology increases that ended with the Clans. Yech.

In retrospect it makes a lot more sense. At the time it was enough to drive us away.

FASA was attempting the closest thing to "multi-media" that the games biz could attain (TV being out of reach at the time): boardgame, RPG, novels. Unfortunately, they failed to recognize that gamers are a fractious and opinionated lot. Board-wargamers didn't cross over with RPG gamers all that much at the time, and the idea of novel-supported meta-plots was a brand new one. It didn't help that RPG-derived fiction was generally awful.

I no longer own the really early editions of BT. The earliest is the Critter Commandos licensed version Crittertech. I will look at that and see if I can enunciate the shortcomings we were seeing 20 years ago in the DFA rule.

I never read the novels either. Don't care about who killed whom or who had a fued with whom. I just like to play games, lots of different ones. If you think the rules are broken mod them or play something else. If you must complain fine. Just don't pretend that any of this is real. Its a GAME. I have to suspend my observations about how things really work to play several games I like. Star Fleet Battles comes to mind as does War ar Sea by Avalon Hill. I go back to my statements that gamers are finicky and they like to complain. Tweak their favorite game a little, sit at "their" table at the game store, change their game night or their game location, try to introduce them to different genre of game or try to introduce a new person to their group and the get pretty y. I like them game. Could they have been a little more clear in some areas, sure but I still like the game.

The many issues with balance, cheeseball tech race, and taking all year to shoot the armor off a unit is part of what led me to write Wardogs. I felt that the CBT rules just didn't thrill me anymore and there was a better way to play IMO.

Have all the novels and have read them 3 or 4 times over the years, and enjoyed them. Our group at the time, 1988 to 1990 enjoyed playing the game, with some home rule adjustments: charging, DFA and a couple other rules. We played company + level games, with it usually being a ongoing scenario complete with salvaging to keep the "battle force" going, while the enemy unit changed with each challenge. Who ever had the game battle force was given tasks to accomplish and we rotated that. Just fun, killing time.

Have

One other random thing. Taking cover in water was dumb as it meant that instead of a 1 in 36 chance of taking a direct head shot, there was a 1 in 6 chance of taking a head shot.

I'm very familiar with this wonky rule as well. Basically if your mech would go hull down masking the legs you made yourself more vulnersble to a headshot. Well that no longer applies. All ranged attacks on hull down mechs and vehicles are now resolved on the full body chart. Any attacks that hit the legs do not cause damage. HUZZAH!

I too prefer the 3025/3039/Tech Level 1 rules. You really have to take care of your heat management. Salut y'all!

Bruce the Texas Grognard

I found the BT rules to be a great and fun rules-set (came over from Car Wars, so the "stripping armor off a whole side" thing was something that I was used to, even if I didn't particularly like it). DFA was a great, but very limited tactic, iirc. You had to pay extra movement points of jump to get the altitude, and so it was for very short range ambushes.
Since we played with ongoing characters, head shots were extremely important.

While the way the weapons worked wasn't necessarily technically believable, it was a good way to balance the game – as was the heat buildup vs. heat sink mechanic. And having a giant bipedal mech be more powerful than a tank of the same weight wasn't very believable either. It was a game, it had cool mechs in it, we got over that.

The whole "technology in decline/sci-fi dark ages" backstory was a problem from the start (much like in WH40K) – it made the gaming universe technologically static, which was good; but which also limited the number of expansion products that could be released.

While the trilogy of novels about the coming of the clans was great to read, the introduction of the clans really ruined the game.

I was never a hard core player. But back in the late 80's I did enjoy the game a lot. I read the novels and felt the atmosphere they created was tremendous. Then came the clans…

As I said, never very hard core, so it didn't take a big push to get me out. The clans ruined the BT universe. Better this, better that. Yadda yadda yadda.

If I ever would go back to BT, it would be the classic.

Cheers, Xin

I was a BT fan until FASA introduced Renegade Legion. GravTanks, Hell Rounds and THOR Strikes, hoo dawgy! It played fast and furious, and with a mutually supporting system of games you could start off with a Planetary Assault and Fleet battle, and zoom into a tactical game of gravtank combat. Too bad the game cannibalized BT sales so FASA eventually dropped the line. Still have my stuff, couldn't part with it.

I'm not sure what "poorly written" means in this case.

Battletech plays the way it plays. It's not my favorite mech game but it does what it does. It's kind of clunky but it also feels satisfyingly familiar and distinctive to me. (I could say the same sort of thing about D&D or Warhammer or Heavy Gear)

Battletech is not a good representation of armored warfare much less future amroed warfare, and its not a universal giant anime robot combat game either but the basics are easy to learn and it is mainly a board game and for a long time it was the lingua franca of sci-fi wargaming at cons.

I like the background in general but it turned into a soap opera of nation states awfully quickly and it seemed to abandon its "knights fight for water as technology degrades and everyone waits for the next big war that will probably bring everything tubling down" by the time the first 3025 TRO came out.

Also I thought the whole 'James Clavell's Shogun' obsession of House Kurita wore a bit thin. I thought the Comstar stuff was FNORD funny (in that the phone company somehow became a ruthless and secretive religion that wanted to drive society into a dark age so they could bring it back out their way this was back in the day when ATT&T and SouthWestern Bell and land lines were a huge deal when some people STILL had party lines and rotary dial phones and PC's were still primarily toys to teach your kid 'logo' or play Choplifter with) but I think it got a bit too confusing to follow all the Comstar plots. Of course it eventually lead to the Gray Death legion finding a Star League data core which led to a new TRO full of new mechs.

The 4th Succession war turned out not to be too apocalyptic after all except for the poor old Capellan Confederation and that was supposedly okay since it was so badly managed. Then the clans came and so did lots of stupid lingo and then we got adjustments that were supposed to solve the clans vs. IS problem. We also got a Solaris BoxSet that was supposed to lead to a MORE detailed subset of the rules instead of add on rules(City Tech), parallel rules with some crossover (Aerotech, Battletroops), or greater abstraction (Succesion Wars board games, Battleforce) withut resorting to Role Playing (Mechwarrior). We also got some decent merc rules to let us break out of the old mech unit splat books and make up our own atrocity of an ongoing merc campaign.

Before all that, I remember reading the weird Blackthorne B&W comics for Battletech that had a guy surving a suicide mission and being ordered to kill himself 'cause that's what bushido demands so he ran off with his mech and got killed anyway. There was a another story about a guy in a Crusader fighting some kind of secret experimental cyborg-mech monster.

Overall, I think there is a lot to criticize in Battletech if you want to. It plays almost like an old ironclad-style navy game with robot physical attack stuff and infantry and "other" vehicle rules tacked on to it. The ranges are completely ridiculous when interpreted literally thought they work okay for a board game. It seems to have too detailed a damage model for fast play and certain weapons are serious time wasters. It personifies mechs and pilots instead of generalizing them. It has a bit too much of a 'collect them all' focus encouraging mixed lances over prebuilt purpose built units. The TRO's over the years have contained a LOT of typos and errors.

But I still think it's pretty fun.

Now that DP9 is sort of back on it's feet and Battletech is attempting a big 25th anniversary push with the retrun of unseen artwork and a new Mechwarrior video game on the way, maybe we will get to see a new edition of Mekton, Ogre, or Mecha! eventually. Or Something.

:)

I love BT. We've played it for years and never found any issues with it.
Quite frankly, you guys are just whiners. Most of what you're griping about is poor players and tactics…those have nothing to do with the rules.

We do play IS rather than clan, that was a significant story change than no one in our group really got into.
We also play with the Unseen mechs.

BT shares a lot of common ground with AD&D. Old-fashioned illogical rules that only make sense as a boardgame, have no bearing to reality and I love it.

I've often wondered if you couldn't have more realistic ranges or overhaul the armour system, but it would take away the soul of the game. Besides I have long made the decision of separating BT the game with silly short range and BT the universe where a Warhammer could take on a platoon of M1A2 tanks with one PPC tied behind its back.

I pretty much followed the game from 2nd edition up until the demise of FASA. After that I just picked up the Technical Readouts and looked at how the universe progressed from afar.

If anything, the Clans were a major event. The new tech was a potential game breaker but at the same time they were the last weapons that didn't have a major built-in disadvantage. Most new tech that followed the Clans always had this major disadvantage to worry about. RAC, MML etc.

And Clan weapons had one advantage, they did make the game faster. You could shoot more and bigger guns, but armour was never improved, a maxed-out Clan mech will not carry better protection than an Inner Sphere one.

As for the tonnage/points I realised very early on that you could have a seriously unbalanced game if you gauged by weight alone even when the clans weren't involved. A Charger and a Banshee were quite simply no match for a Warhammer an Archer and a Jenner even if you fiddled with the piloting skills.

The only real problem is see with BT is that that nobody ever seriously considered fixing the game early on and that everything else was tacked onto a fun but extremely limited boardgame.

One minority voice here, I enjoy playing Clantech games. I'll happily play 3025 as well but the 2 don't mix even if you allow for the points value shift for Clan equipment.
I don't go beyond 3060 though. The whole Jihad storyline was just TOO far for me. I know it's a game/just fiction/ etc but how a small extremist group with little political support can suddenly turn into a galaxy conquering megaforce while no one else is looking jumped the shark.

Well, as a long time BattleTech player, I think that any game that one is still playing after 25 years, warts and all, says buckets about the value of playing repeat games. I too am not that enamoured by the introduction of the Clans, but can live with them. The current direction of the game is pretty slick, if a little OTT.

Finally, I quite like the idea of the Jihad and the Word of Blake, who are going to have their asses handed to them in due course by the great Houses of the Inner Sphere.

I will admit I have not played it recently. I fell head over hills for the novels then got onto the game. I know I am in the minority but I really liked it when the Clans were added. The guys I played with really liked the scenario books. They made for some very fond memories and were very balanced as I remember. Granted once the Clans came it was harder to just grab some mechs and ply but if you used there books it was just great fun. As for how well written the rules are, at the time they were some of the best out there, now the new version is still solid.

I would recomend to anyone to give the new Intro Box Set and Total Warfare rules a try. The rules are fundamentally the same as before so no big changes from what you've played before. But these are nicely laid out and easy to follow as a new BT player.

The new Intro Box Set and Tota Warfare (together with such add-ons as the new Sword & Dragon campaign book) have very high production values and are glossy enough to stand comparison with other games I have played such as W40k, Warmachine/Hordes and FOW.

Cheers

James

Let's also not forget the crazy way mechs are armed. Some have such a mix of weapons that they can't function well at anything. LRMs mounted on a mech with mostly short range weapons like Med. Lasers. The LRM look out of place. The better mechs were the ones armed for their specialty, if it's a long range bombardment mech LRMs would be the norm.

The rules are not badly written, and none of the arguments that people have posted here have anything to do with the rules being written badly or not.

What people have problems with is the logical rules of the game universe that the game designers decided on when they designed game, not that the rules are badly written. The rules don't match the real world at all, everyone who played the game when it first came out recognized this fact.

I have always had problems with the rules, they make no sense in the game setting itself. Civilization has lost all technology related to missle guidience yet can still make giant walking battle mechs. I'm sorry heat seeking guidience systems are not hard to make, and with mechs pumping tons of heat out of their heat sinks means taht heatseekers should rule the battlefield. But if you add that the game falls apart. Missles can hit anything anywhere on the board, and the result is no one plays anything but mechs with lots of missles. These rules problems turned me off the game after a few years.

The funny thing is that all you have to do is change the background setting, and suddenly it all makes sense. I say up front this was not my idea, I saw this on a web site long ago, and I don't remember who came up with it. When I saw this, I got back into Battle tech. The logic made sense now.

You see, mech battles are not won by the fighting on the battlefield. It's won by who get's the most ratings on TV when the battles are televised. Suddenly all those stupid rules make lots of sense. TV Viewers don't want to see Mechs getting one shot taking out by super accurate missles, they like seeing huge explosions going off around mechs, so scrap the guidience systems. Flamer units are really useless in battle, but viewers love to see mechs on fire, so burn those mechs! It's gladitorial combat for entertainment, not a true combat situation.

The website I saw had rules for winning based on not only the victory objectives, but added victory points for flassy moves. Death From Above gave you TONS of victory points because nothing looks cooler then a mech smashing down on another mech.

And there's the real ruling logic of the Battletech game. The rules that are in the game are not there because they are logical, but because of the 'coolness' facter.

The earliest is the Critter Commandos licensed version Crittertech. I will look at that and see if I can enunciate the shortcomings we were seeing 20 years ago in the DFA rule.

I looked. Critter-Tek doesn't include those rules…

Since this has become a big talking point, I will make a further effort to recall why the specifics of the DFA rule bothered us.

I gave up BattleTech after meeting Camille Klein.

I preferred the basic rules in the first printing and BattleTroops. In BattleTroops, 'mechs actually matched their fluff. For one thing, they couldn't miss due to advanced sensor and targeting systems.

I gave it up for a variety of reasons…power gamers, the Jihad making little sense. I stuck through a lot..but the last 3-4 years has been good and bad for the game IMHO.

As for "Hurricane Camille"..Coelacanth1938…she's writing for Catalyst now..yeah, I know.

I might have played B-Tech back in 1994-1996 about two dozen times.

The first time was with a guy who took "equal tonnage" in tanks, and massacred my cool looking lance of Phoenix Hawks to 'teach me the game'.

After that, I found people who just wanted to duke it out with groups of 5 mechs at some maximum tonnage (which steadily crept up as we got more and more miniatures). It occupied us for an entire summer. We did figure out quickly that using Inner Sphere mechs was a great way to completely lose the game (Gosh, do I want to dissipate one heat, or two for nearly the same cost… I dunno….).

It took hours to resolve 20 mechs on a field duking it out, but at the time, I didn't want it to take less time, I wanted to stay up all night and roll dice and tick off minuscule boxes with a grease pencil.

Now, however, If I have to have 5 sheets of paper in front of me to play a game, it's too much tracking. I want to be able to abstract the damage into something I can easily remember and calculate modifiers for without going to a book. Furthermore, I found myself referencing the book a lot in those games, something I don't have to do with the rulesets I play now (granted, d20 modern,Blood Bowl, and Battlelore are not "true wargames").

It's a style of gaming that no longer fits with the time I have, or the "I look at the field, I make a decision, I take my turn, we're done in 2 hours" type of gaming I do these days. I won't condemn the B-Tech rules, but they certainly show their age.

And actually, that's what my biggest gripe with the CBT rules is, Pyg.

They're *slow*. Heavy Gear (even the first edition rules) played much faster, and felt like you were in a Giant-Robot movie. Lots of fast action, vehicles blowing up left, right and sideways.

A couple years ago, the Battletech league at the LGS in Bremerton decided to throw down on a big, open-field scrum. They'd figured out some tonnage-balance for pilot and gunnery skills, so each Inner Sphere player had 420 tons of Mech+pilots to work with. The Clans bid their forces down, and the next week we actually threw down. I took a lance of 4 Warhammers (forget the model #, moved 5-8-3 and had a targeting computer) with good pilots. I took the left-guard position and elevated myself to target #1 when I could get max-range shots on fast Clan Mechs. 8 hours later, the game was still going on, and I was playing a third game of 40k, since I'd been out of the CBT game for 7 hours.

I don't mind games that have a slower pace to them (Naval games especially), but CBT takes too long to resolve more than a 4-on-4 game. Other games with a similar setting handle more vehicles per side in less time, with a similar level of detail.

Think that's bad Lion…I got into a game where we had 100 mechs on the board. Was at Game Faire in Spokane early 90's…in 12 hours we finished three turns with 50 players.

I played battletech under its old name back in the 1980s. The products of BT were a staple of my sales for over a decade. In the painted miniatures area I have sold more BT than most other genre.

I played the old timeline system but stopped once the super mechs of the inner sphere was introduced. In those years I found very few problems with the system.

Right – I don't think CBT is poorly written at all, though I honestly had to "call" more games than I ever finished.

I just don't have the patience to play CBT anymore. Two Hours is about all I have the attention span/allocated gaming time for these days.

I played a TON of BT "back in the day." Sometimes we used clan rules, sometimes not. Enjoyed building our own mechs a great deal. Have some fun stories from those days. Have no interest in ever playing again though. There are some problems with the rules:

1. Get more than a handful of mechs on the table and the system collapses under its own weight.

2. Tanks and other armored vehicles aren't really very well integrated into the game and get obliterated by mechs. I can understand wanting to keep the focus of the game on mechs, but this just rubs me the wrong way.

3. Insta-kills from head shots is a terrible part of the game. We used to build mechs optimized around head shots because those wound up being the most effective.

4. Power armor was far too effective at killing mechs IIRC. . . don't know that we used it much because it didn't look like fun though so I'm not 100% on this issue.

5. The cover system making it more likely to take a head hit was terribly written also.

6. It's entirely too easy to break the mech design system.

But basically the biggest issue is #1 and #6 and that's why I don't play anymore.

The ablative armor mechanic never bothered me. That's more of a personal preference thing than anything else. Never had a problem with DFAs – they almost never worked out for the attacker.

When I was a teenager these things were ok. But just like movies you saw when you were younger aren't nearly as good now – Battletech is a game I enjoyed at the time, but am not interested in anymore. As a result, writing a sci-fi armored combat game is on my "to do" list.

Easy to break the mech design system yes, but so few people actually do. I used to toy with it to design mechs that were more space to weigh efficient than the mechs in the tech books. Then I'd use that and take some mechs in the game of the best weight and make them more efficient. So I was maxing out the 60 ton Dragon, making it better than some of the heavier mechs.