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KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,153
Picked this up, gave it a whirl. My god its amazing how poorly designed it is.

4 unit cap, really? Firaxis figured out that even nuXCOM needed an unlockable 6 unit cap back in 2012.

Not having a tonnage-limited deployment, or some kind of deployment limit/cost, is insanely stupid. There's even a deployment tonnage counter on the deployment screen but its just fucking irrelevant. Presumably the devs' suffered from their IQ temporarily skyrocketing to the room temperature level required to figure out that a tonnage limitation was needed but then forgot to actually implement it.

This game accomplishes an incredible feat of becoming dumber and less strategic as the game goes on. The first few missions are the best because you can actually flank and shit and use something other than just standing and firing till things die. Running around and jump jetting behind things with a Panther to snipe from behind with an LRM and PPC was cool. Skip ahead 10 missions and you'll just get chewed up instantly, because for some dumbfuck reason being shot at makes it easier for other things to hit you and you'll have 8+ AIs shooting per round. Loadout becomes progressively less interesting as you play, because where there's lots of options when you have 3 weapon slots and 12 tons available, when you have 3 weapon slots and 30 tons available you just fucking pick the biggest weapons because no one is loading small, short-ranged laser pointers to shine on enemy assault mechs surrounded by 6 other enemy mechs.

Who the fuck decided on this targetting system? i.e. not having a targetting system at all unless you spend magic?. All I've played is Mechwarrior where angling your body is fairly useful to hide your weakened side. Here? Only cardinal directions matter and its a pure dice roll unaffected by the mech structure or relative position other than cardinal direction. This makes orientation fairly useless as you always need to be positioned at least a little bit forward-facing because you need to fucking shoot things, yet the damaged arm that should be 95% hidden behind the entire rest of the mech's body has the exact same chance to be hit as the opposing arm that is directly in front of the line of fire. I don't know tabletop rules but I'm going to guess this is some dumb shit they took from there because no one could think that the current system makes sense for a game. Due to how you have 8 separate targets to hit from the front it becomes highly random whether you get enough repeated rolls to hit the same thing and actually disable the enemy, and its also random whether you took out an arm that has literally nothing or the central torso that kills the mech. I also don't recall having 3 separate armor levels for the torso in mechwarrior, it's really fucking obnoxious. The targetting spell itself is a joke, it only adds like a few % to target a specific part which makes it useless and irrelevant that fixes none of the problems with the dice system... until you level tactics and suddenly you have a 35% chance for every weapon to hit the head, utterly breaking the game. What is even the point of shooting at any other point than the head then? Also why does DFA not hit the head? Isn't that the whole point of the maneouver?

AI is awful, as soon as combat starts it just sort of blindly walks towards you until it can see and shoot you. It seems to merely be walking towards the center of your group of mechs, which means if you space them out into four corners the AI flat out breaks, letting you abuse initiative to peak out and take potshots then get back into cover by their next turn, where they'll just walk around in the center of the map. As far as I can tell in 95% of random missions getting in combat with any AI effectively aggros the whole map towards you, and the 5% is usually the AI bugging out on cliff wall.

Why is there no recon or even a general force estimation for 90% of maps? Why are we bidding on salvage when we don't even know the enemies? I did several missions where I bid high on salvage and there weren't even fucking mechs that showed up! The mech salvage system is atrocious. Getting 2 or 3 "wrecks" for a kill rather than just 1 is pure luck until you get the game-breaking headshot ability, which means taking any more than 1 salvage pick is basically just praying to the RNG gods. Why do you have to pay multiple times for different parts of the same whole mech you just headshotted anyway? Was King Solomon summoned on-site to make the three cuts into the completely whole mech? Furthermore how are players expected to estimate their ammo requirements based on the expected number of enemies? Oh right, just get a bigger mech so you can carry 480 LRMs. There's not even a damn map of the area to see where you are deploying before you deploy.

This game has the most godawful performance I've ever experienced. I've dealt with shit loading times, fine, whatever, I can leave it windowed on one monitor while I fuck around on another. But how does the game lag for a second every fucking time I bring up the UI element to fire a weapon, or dismiss said UI? How does the most COMMON FUCKING ACTION OF THE GAME REMAIN BROKEN? I could literally pay some pajeet programmer $50 to create a game UI for me, and he could create an in-game chrome browser that loads twitter photos of the UI element on-demand, and it would still be more responsive than this sack of shit.

I'm sure all this and more has been thoroughly discussed at this point.

Random question for whoever here might actually know a lore more about the Battletech lore than I do: Isn't the scale of combat for the universe completely fucking off? Like with battles where whole worlds are taken by low hundreds or even dozens of mechs? Shouldn't any reasonably normally advanced planet with a billion or so people be maintaining forces of hundreds of thousands of mechs? I mean I get that at this specific point in the timeline mechs are supposed to be really high tech and hard to reproduce well for the inner sphere in a sort of dark age, but even still mechs literally weigh 25-100 tons, quite comparable to modern tanks, so anything that could produce them should be able to churn them out at least as fast as we can churn out tanks in the 21st century if needed (btw this is really weird, why are 100 ton tanks microscopic next to 25 ton mechs?). Is there an explanation for this lack of large armed forces or is it all sort of just ignored for the purpose of allowing small level tactical fights to win wars?
 
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Olinser

Savant
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Denial
Random question for whoever here might actually know a lore more about the Battletech lore than I do: Isn't the scale of combat for the universe completely fucking off? Like with battles where whole worlds are taken by low hundreds or even dozens of mechs? Shouldn't any reasonably normally advanced planet with a billion or so people be maintaining forces of hundreds of thousands of mechs? I mean I get that at this specific point in the timeline mechs are supposed to be really high tech and hard to reproduce well for the inner sphere in a sort of dark age, but even still mechs literally weigh 25-100 tons, quite comparable to modern tanks, so anything that could produce them should be able to churn them out at least as fast as we can churn out tanks in the 21st century if needed (btw this is really weird, why are 100 ton tanks microscopic next to 25 ton mechs?). Is there an explanation for this lack of large armed forces or is it all sort of just ignored for the purpose of allowing small level tactical fights to win wars?

Yes, the scale of combat has always been ludicrously off in the universe. At absolute peak the biggest clans only had a few thousand 'mechs each.

They never gave exact numbers, but the 'standard' large unit in the Inner Sphere was the Regiment, which is approximately 100 to 200 mechs (depending on tonnage, composition of non-mech units, and organization), usually averaging about 150 mechs. A Regimental Combat Team was basically a Regiment of mechs with support units, and they would be responsible for a decent sized sector consisting of possibly dozens of worlds.

Smaller non-strategically valuable inner sphere worlds had at most a Company of mechs on them, which was typically 3 Lances with possibly a support Lance (~12-16 mechs). Larger non-strategic worlds rarely had more than a Battalion, which was 3 Companies (~36-50 mechs).

At their absolute peak the Com Guards were the single biggest military force in the entire universe, able to fight 7 clans at once in the Battle of Tukayyid, and they consisted of if I recall correctly 12 Armies, with an Army being somewhat variable but averaging about 1000 mechs (plus or minus a couple hundred).

So the single biggest unified military force in in the setting by a huge margin had about 12,000 deployable mechs at peak, and they had the capability to easily conquer the entire Inner Sphere if they wanted to.

THEORETICALLY they hand-waved this away by saying the RCTs and up had large units of infantry, but in practice they never told you the details of those units.
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
Picked this up, gave it a whirl. My god its amazing how poorly designed it is.

As discussed many times already, blame incompetence and trannies wasting more time designing Mary Sues, absolutely-haram Muslim women with uncovered sleeves and tattoos, removing the blonde hair from the character creation and replacing it with pronouns and so on.

This game has the most godawful performance I've ever experienced. I've dealt with shit loading times, fine, whatever, I can leave it windowed on one monitor while I fuck around on another. But how does the game lag for a second every fucking time I bring up the UI element to fire a weapon, or dismiss said UI? How does the most COMMON FUCKING ACTION OF THE GAME REMAIN BROKEN? I could literally pay some pajeet programmer $50 to create a game UI for me, and he could create an in-game chrome browser that loads twitter photos of the UI element on-demand, and it would still be more responsive than this sack of shit.

See above. Lunatics can't code, but can complain non-stop.

Random question for whoever here might actually know a lore more about the Battletech lore than I do: Isn't the scale of combat for the universe completely fucking off? Like with battles where whole worlds are taken by low hundreds or even dozens of mechs?

Olinser says it. One of the (many) broken promises was that you would be allowed to deploy vehicles along with your mechs, but it never happened.

Soo, is this game worth a play-through with mods and all of the DLCs by now? I would ignore the story and focus only on the gameplay bits, of course.
 
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Country_Gravy

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 24, 2004
Messages
3,406
Location
Up Yours
Wasteland 2
i have the DLC on wishlist. They want $27.69 for all DLC. I will be playing this again when the season pass is $4.99.

This IP seems to have so much potential and always comes up short.

I paid about $50 for MW online as a founder and it never turned out how I wanted. That's cool. I'm not much into twitch combat.

This had "Remember Shadow Hawk's Revenge on the C64 when you were in second grade? We did that shit only better." written all over it.

All they did was shit on my memory of good TB BattleTech combat. I'm going to install a C64 emulator and save on my $5 when this thing gets put in the discount bin at Software Etc.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Here's that final update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/637090/announcements/detail/1709616757504899224

LIVE - BATTLETECH 1.9 Update Release Notes

Thank you for playing BATTLETECH! Release 1.9 is now available on Steam, GOG, Humble, and Paradox Plaza. The main areas of improvement are: ‘Mech and vehicle variants, gameplay options, Convoy AI, and mod support.

Release 1.9 Notes, 2/20/2020

‘Mech Variants
  • Trebuchet TBT-7K
  • Grand Dragon DRG-1G
  • Warhammer WHM-7A
  • Marauder MAD-2R
  • Marauder MAD-3D
  • Zeus ZEU-5T
  • Zeus ZEU-6T
  • BattleMaster BLR-1GB
  • BattleMaster BLR-1S
  • Crab CRB-27b
  • Cyclops CP-10-HQ
  • Javelin JVN-10A
  • Raven RVN-3X
  • Cataphract CTF-0X
  • Phoenix Hawk PXH-1b
  • Rifleman RFL-4D


Vehicle Variants
  • Striker Narc
  • Scorpion Mk.II
  • Schrek Snub PPC Carrier
  • Galleon TAG
  • Demolisher LBX
  • Inferno Carrier
  • Arvakr APC
  • Alsvin APC


Gameplay Options
  • Added a Career Mode Difficulty Setting that allows players to reduce Argo upgrade costs
  • Added a Settings option that allows players to speed up the real-world time it takes for an in-game day to pass
  • Added a Settings option to assist those with color blindness allowing them to select alternate LOS lines and indirect fire colors
Mod Support
  • The mod installation folder is now configurable
  • The ModLoader is now patchable
  • Added more Dynamic Enumerations
  • Added more logging and error reporting
  • DLC checks have been added to ModDef
  • The ModLoader is now easier to use
  • Fixed many other mod support related bugs
  • Added several mod support quality of life improvements


Convoy AI
  • Fixed some long-range and short-range pathfinding issues
  • Escort vehicles can now move through the player’s ‘Mechs and each other
  • Killing the entire OpFor now auto-completes escort missions


Other
  • A new ammo tab is now in stores and the ‘Mech Bay
  • Half-ton machine gun ammo is now available
  • +/++ variants of machine guns are now available
  • Fixed an issue that prevented some players from being able to delete their GOG saves


Known Issues (to be fixed asap)
  • The debug console, build number widget, and combat debug options cannot be evoked when using their corresponding shortcut combinations
  • Under certain circumstances the game does not exit cleanly after saving


Roll Back
It is possible to revert to past versions of our game in case you have trouble. For more platform specific information go to our forums at: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-rollback-to-a-previous-patch-version.1112335/

As always, if you experience further issues please contact Customer Support at: https://support.paradoxplaza.com
 
Joined
Feb 20, 2018
Messages
999
hows roguetech? they introduced the ability to field more than 1 lance per deployment sometime ago.
Roguetech is still abhorrent at balance and despite repeated pleas to change the loot table so everyone and their mum doesn't field OP Lostech. The mod author still hasn't actually balanced the game. Commander's Edition is still your best bet for the dynamic house wars and territory control. But it's not perfect either and is quite unstable.
 
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tindrli

Arcane
Joined
Jan 5, 2011
Messages
4,465
Location
Dragodol
This game was such a disappointment that I felt the need to write a negative review. Only the 2nd or 3rd Ive ever done.
while i still play it from time to time i couldn't agree more bro. it could be great game but after all this time its just not worth it
 

TemplarGR

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Bethestard
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May 30, 2013
Messages
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Cradle of Western Civilization
I think the worst part of this game is the attrocius optimization, both in performance terms and in loading times. Yes, the gameplay is limited and wastes the setting's potential, but still, if the stages loaded rapidly and the game actually ran according to its graphical quality and not like a PS6 game, most people would overlook its faults and enjoy it. After all, if we wanted to improve the gameplay we could always mod it, but seeing as the base game is a chore to even load the menu screen, why bother? There are no people playing and thus no cool mods.

This is my main pet-peeve with isometric indies in general. They are horribly optimized and they ruin the mood. You can expect something like Red Dead Redemption to need a beastly PC but not Battletech.... I just lose any motivation to keep playing.
 

tindrli

Arcane
Joined
Jan 5, 2011
Messages
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Dragodol
beside many many things. i dont see how can one enjoy a game where you constantly watch a same cut scenes of same of a same
 

oldmanpaco

Master of Siestas
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
13,609
Location
Winter
Yeah the loading times were absurd. Its not like the maps were huge or the objects all that varied and detailed. And the delay when doing simple things like targeting enemies was ass as well.

This remains my biggest KS regret and I backed Torment.
 

Syme

Arbiter
Joined
Jun 11, 2018
Messages
325
With all the DLC's being out and modders having had enough time to update their stuff I decided to give Roguetech one last shot. I played for about a week and had two nice lances with my first assault mechs finally coming online, including a 100t Annihilator with 3 artillery pieces that would wreck light mechs from across the map (it kinda had to since it could only move about 2 squares and engine upgrades are expensive). However, I reached a point where I just couldn't deal with the poor performance anymore, same as with my other attempts to play this game (both vanilla and various iterations of Roguetech).

Simply put, it's the worst performing game I've ever played in my life and I've played hundreds going all the way back to the late 80s. I can forgive a long boot up time, but it then takes a minute to load any given savegame on top of that, even early in the campaign. It sits at 10-12 gigs of ram, which is about half the game, and still takes upwards of a minute to load each and every mission on an SSD. Every single click, whether it's cycling through targets, cycling through your own mechs, navigating the menu on your ship, or simply clicking OKAY on a message, is followed by a short delay. Every time you want to speed up your movement animations by pressing SPACEBAR, which you want to do ANY time something moves in this game, you get heavy stuttering. Each time a hovercraft or VTOL calculates its turn it takes about 45 seconds and should you decide to speed up the movement after it fired, it takes twice as long for some reason, as if it started its movement calculations all over again. Great fun on missions with 4+ of the mentioned vehicles. Every time a mech dies due to missile spam there's a 2-3 second pause where the game seemingly tries to figure out what exactly happened just now. And then there's the occasional memory leak where the game simply shits itself and becomes unresponsive on a mission start, dumping all its 10 gigs into nirvana and showing the .exe as 5% of my 16 gigs, yet task manager shows me that I'm at 95% overall memory usage. Naturally this is followed by killing the task and 3 minutes of loading screens to get back to where you were. I'm not even gonna go into talking about overall low fps while still looking like dogshit, because that's honestly the least of Battletech's problems.

Whoever programmed this pile of shit shouldn't be working in the industry at this level. I can't comprehend how you can ship something like this and still look at yourself in the mirror - and then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it and release some half-ass cashgrab DLC's the following year. It's doubly disappointing because the base game, while bland, provided plenty of modding opportunities to make something great. However, this isn't Bethesda level incompetence, this is so much worse, because mods can't fix fundamental problems with the engine itself.


Time for me to go back to Mech Commander, again.

pLCejtL.jpg
 

jac8awol

Arbiter
Joined
Feb 2, 2018
Messages
408
They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on this one. All anyone needs to do to make a fat stack of cash is take Mech Commander, make it turn based, give it modern day graphics, and keep the SJW agenda to themselves. That's all! The formula could not be simpler. And for the guy that created the franchise to mess it up this badly... Well I guess if Picasso wanted to piss all over his paintings and set them on fire, it's his choice.
 

Nutria

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Mar 12, 2017
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한양
Strap Yourselves In
At the risk of being an old man shouting at clouds, Microprose made games that fit in 640kb of RAM that are still playable today. That's the basic level of competence that I expect from anyone selling me a game for money 30 years later.
 

santino27

Arcane
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Oct 1, 2008
Messages
2,679
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Yeah the loading times were absurd. Its not like the maps were huge or the objects all that varied and detailed. And the delay when doing simple things like targeting enemies was ass as well.

This remains my biggest KS regret and I backed Torment.
Optimization was awful, no doubt, and there were a lot of other missed opportunities, but I actually finished this (once), and I didn't make it more than an hour into Torment. That game taught me to never back InXile.
 

oldmanpaco

Master of Siestas
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
13,609
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Winter
Yeah the loading times were absurd. Its not like the maps were huge or the objects all that varied and detailed. And the delay when doing simple things like targeting enemies was ass as well.

This remains my biggest KS regret and I backed Torment.
Optimization was awful, no doubt, and there were a lot of other missed opportunities, but I actually finished this (once), and I didn't make it more than an hour into Torment. That game taught me to never back InXile.

Well to be fair to Torment they made the butt pirate an actual pirate. That was a bold move.
 

Deuce Traveler

2012 Newfag
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
You guys make me so sad. I have a deep love for the tabletop Battletech game (3025-3055) and have finished the original Mech Warrior, BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, and both Mech Commander games. I was so ready to throw money at this game, but unless I support a Kickstarter then I never pre-order a game and prefer to wait for the reviews. When I heard this one was shit, I thought that it might get fixed by mods or patches by now, but here we still are. And it's not like Hairbrained Schemes have fessed up to the problems or show any indication that they learned something. In fact, they've moved on to other IPs. And to my knowledge no one else is planning to make an RPG based upon the BattleTech license, although there's a huge fan base for giant mecha. I feel like I'm trapped in a skit for Waiting for Godot.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
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And to my knowledge no one else is planning to make an RPG based upon the BattleTech license, although there's a huge fan base for giant mecha. I feel like I'm trapped in a skit for Waiting for Godot.
Microsoft owns the rights to use the BattleTech IP for computer games, and two years ago they purchased an RPG developer that is ideally suited to create an isometric BattleTech RPG, so perhaps Godot will one day appear as a game in progress. :M

vWqQGSr.png
 

TemplarGR

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck Bethestard
Joined
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You guys make me so sad. I have a deep love for the tabletop Battletech game (3025-3055) and have finished the original Mech Warrior, BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, and both Mech Commander games. I was so ready to throw money at this game, but unless I support a Kickstarter then I never pre-order a game and prefer to wait for the reviews. When I heard this one was shit, I thought that it might get fixed by mods or patches by now, but here we still are. And it's not like Hairbrained Schemes have fessed up to the problems or show any indication that they learned something. In fact, they've moved on to other IPs. And to my knowledge no one else is planning to make an RPG based upon the BattleTech license, although there's a huge fan base for giant mecha. I feel like I'm trapped in a skit for Waiting for Godot.

For some reason Mech games have gone downhill. Never understood why. Mechwarrior used to be the shit, especially Mechwarrior 2 used to be a huge brand name in the 90s, i recall every game magazine mentioning it all the time back then. For some reason while technology allowed for better Mechwarrior games, we never got them. It puzzles me to this day. I even played the original Mechwarrior SNES game back then, in an emulator. LOL.
 

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