KickStarter BATTLETECH - turn-based mech combat from Harebrained Schemes

[Cael]

This game have been collecting dust in my library for so long and I'm planning on starting a playthrough soon. Should I bother at all with the original or just go with one of the big overhaul mods straight away? If so, which one would you guys recommend? I'm leaning towards Advanced 3062. Also do you use any additional mods together with the overhaul?

Play the original as is. I want to see how long you'd last before your handle becomes prophetic.

 

[Alter Sack]

Thinking about playing this game.

Does it still kill your gpu?

 

[lightbane]

I recommend you give the base game a try while you download all of the shit necessary for 3062, as it will take a while due having to download many GBs. Your tolerance to the game wasting your time and insulting your intelligence is how good you'll value the base game, especially the campaign, before switching to mods or at least the Career mode.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Thinking about playing this game.

Does it still kill your gpu?

Unless you have some kind of specific concern about the capabilities of your GPU, that shouldn't be the main factor in your decision.

The game isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. It has a lot of issues, without a doubt: wokeness, lore, loading times, and strategic options that really aren't as deep as you would think at first glance. And I guess if you want to know all of the game's flaws, the Codex has discussed those in 103 pages of cranky detail. But it's still a decent game if you like stompy robot battles.

 

[BrotherFrank]

Unless you have some kind of specific concern about the capabilities of your GPU, that shouldn't be the main factor in your decision.

This is the only game i have ever played where i was seriously concerned my pc would melt after just 5 mins

 

[Alter Sack]

Thinking about playing this game.

Does it still kill your gpu?

Unless you have some kind of specific concern about the capabilities of your GPU, that shouldn't be the main factor in your decision.

The game isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. It has a lot of issues, without a doubt: wokeness, lore, loading times, and strategic options that really aren't as deep as you would think at first glance. And I guess if you want to know all of the game's flaws, the Codex has discussed those in 103 pages of cranky detail. But it's still a decent game if you like stompy robot battles.

It's not that I doubt the capability of my gpu.

I recently got my hands on a RTX3090 FE for MSRP and I don't want to endanger that sweet peace of hardware considering the current state of the gpu market.

I mean it's still under warranty but who knows how long a repair would take?

I think I won't risk it.

 

[underground nymph]

Jesus fucking Christ are you people seriously discussing the possibility of damaging your GPU by a video game? I’ve finished Battletech 3 years ago on my old as shit laptop without any problems AT ALL

 

[mediocrepoet]

Jesus fucking Christ are you people seriously discussing the possibility of damaging your GPU by a video game? I’ve finished Battletech 3 years ago on my old as shit laptop without any problems AT ALL

Well, the 3090 might not be enough card for uh... Battletech, released in 2018.
Too bad no one told him about putting fans in to cool things down under the immense load of a game I ran on a laptop back in 2018.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Jesus fucking Christ are you people seriously discussing the possibility of damaging your GPU by a video game? I’ve finished Battletech 3 years ago on my old as shit laptop without any problems AT ALL

Well, the 3090 might not be enough card for uh... Battletech, released in 2018.
Too bad no one told him about putting fans in to cool things down under the immense load of a game I ran on a laptop back in 2018.

I played it with my ancient desktop that has a GTX 750 Ti, a video card released in 2014.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Jesus fucking Christ are you people seriously discussing the possibility of damaging your GPU by a video game? I’ve finished Battletech 3 years ago on my old as shit laptop without any problems AT ALL

Well, the 3090 might not be enough card for uh... Battletech, released in 2018.
Too bad no one told him about putting fans in to cool things down under the immense load of a game I ran on a laptop back in 2018.

I played it with my ancient desktop that has a GTX 750 Ti, a video card released in 2014.

Nice. I ran it on a RADEON 7750 and later a GTX 1060M.

 

[Suicidal]

I've played for a few hours and performance has been fine aside for the slow loading times. It runs better than my heavily modded XCOM 2 did (no memory leaks and hourly RAM overflow so far). Game is pretty fun but I'm wondering if starting with Advanced 3062 was a good idea cause I don't understand how anything works yet and tutorial popups only appear in the campaign. I did a few contract missions by just cluelessly fumbling around and then got an offer to start doing the original story campaign and during that mission the game started explaining basic concepts like initiative and shit. As I understand, in the original game the campaign is what you start with while in 3062 it's just an optional mission chain you can do from the world map like everything else.

 

[Jason Liang]

A redditor made this in mechbay after finding a bug~

One part Stalker, one part Centurion, and one part Thunderbolt. I only managed to grab the one screenshot before I lost it, trying to get a better one.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

A redditor made this in mechbay after finding a bug~

One part Stalker, one part Centurion, and one part Thunderbolt. I only managed to grab the one screenshot before I lost it, trying to get a better one.

Cool. I was looking at the picture, thinking, "Is that a Mad Cat? Sort of looks like a Mad Cat. Did someone make a Mad Cat out of existing parts?" And then I read the rest of your post. Is that 'mech actually playable? Is it any better than a regular Stalker?

 

[gurugeorge]

I'm giving this a go. The whole mech thing completely passed me by (I think I played Earth Siege, which was an alternative DOS mech game back in the day, and that's about it), and I have no idea what's going on with this, but it does look nicely complicated.

Anyone got an overview for a complete nub re. what to focus on? (I'm starting with the "Campaign" - e.g. how should I build my main guy there?)

 

[Removal]

I'm giving this a go. The whole mech thing completely passed me by (I think I played Earth Siege, which was an alternative DOS mech game back in the day, and that's about it), and I have no idea what's going on with this, but it does look nicely complicated.

Anyone got an overview for a complete nub re. what to focus on? (I'm starting with the "Campaign" - e.g. how should I build my main guy there?)

Honestly, a love of mechs is really the main reason to keep at Battletech since none of the underlying fundamentals were ever fixed.

There's no combat log, load times while improved are still pure meh and you'll spend a good part of the game in them, you'll probably do most of the procedurally generated mission types within the first couple hours, the game difficulty still depends on your single lance being outnumbered in almost every fight, and there's no overall strategic game to cover up deficiencies on the tactical level.
focus on ballistics/missiles and rush for heavy and assault mechs, add in a dash of called shots and you'll wreck face

 

[gurugeorge]

I'm giving this a go. The whole mech thing completely passed me by (I think I played Earth Siege, which was an alternative DOS mech game back in the day, and that's about it), and I have no idea what's going on with this, but it does look nicely complicated.

Anyone got an overview for a complete nub re. what to focus on? (I'm starting with the "Campaign" - e.g. how should I build my main guy there?)

Honestly, a love of mechs is really the main reason to keep at Battletech since none of the underlying fundamentals were ever fixed.

There's no combat log, load times while improved are still pure meh and you'll spend a good part of the game in them, you'll probably do most of the procedurally generated mission types within the first couple hours, the game difficulty still depends on your single lance being outnumbered in almost every fight, and there's no overall strategic game to cover up deficiencies on the tactical level.
focus on ballistics/missiles and rush for heavy and assault mechs, add in a dash of called shots and you'll wreck face

So is it one of those games where all those interesting-looking levers and switches just spin and flip uselessly and don't have much of an effect?

 

[DeepOcean]

On the base game, most of the fights have less tactics to them than on their shadowrun games and this is supposedly to be a war game.

 

[gurugeorge]

Well thanks, you guys have put me right off it lol

Hmm, so do any of the mods make it more properly tactical?

 

[DeepOcean]

Well thanks, you guys have put me right off it lol

Hmm, so do any of the mods make it more properly tactical?

Most of the problems on the base game come from the questionable maps that are too small or void of good design and the awful balancing basically eroding any tactics than isnt get the heaviest shit you can get and pound the enemy into submission as far away as possible, also there isnt enough punishment on the strategic layer to make it meaningful, when brute force is so much rewarded why try anything else? I'm hearing good things about Advanced 3062 but Lone Wolf is the guy to ask about that.

 

[Jason Liang]

focus on ballistics/missiles and rush for heavy and assault mechs, add in a dash of called shots and you'll wreck face

I found medium and large lasers to be extremely useful, while SRMs and LRMs to be comparatively worthless to other weapons and not worth the space they take.

Most of the problems on the base game come from the questionable maps that are too small or void of good design and the awful balancing basically eroding any tactics

Never really ran into map issues. There are several interesting scenarios from the DLCs that I found pretty cool.

than isnt get the heaviest shit you can get and pound the enemy into submission as far away as possible,

There are some issues with the AI for sure, but faster mechs exploit those issues much better than slow assault mechs. On my first playthrough endgame lance, my Atlas II was actually the least effective mech, being slow and good for not much more than a tanky punching bag. The Marauder and Warhammer were the ones that got kills and melted face, and the Cyclops Z gave everyone else steroids. The slowest mechs have nearly zero ability to retreat after they get pounded, and I would never take more than 1.

also there isnt enough punishment on the strategic layer to make it meaningful, when brute force is so much rewarded why try anything else? I'm hearing good things about Advanced 3062 but Lone Wolf is the guy to ask about that.

The problem is, does making the strategic layer punishing actually make the game more fun? HBS evidently did not think so, and I would agree with them. As for rewarding, well, some people find it rewarding to be able to beat the game with a lance of Firestarters so rewarding is a subjective quality.

 

[mediocrepoet]

focus on ballistics/missiles and rush for heavy and assault mechs, add in a dash of called shots and you'll wreck face

I found medium and large lasers to be extremely useful, while SRMs and LRMs to be comparatively worthless to other weapons and not worth the space they take.

I like ballistics and missiles for the chance to knock down. Also with LRMs, you can just have a spotter and keep a missile boat back out of LOS and volley the crap out of a target.

 

[Jason Liang]

focus on ballistics/missiles and rush for heavy and assault mechs, add in a dash of called shots and you'll wreck face

I found medium and large lasers to be extremely useful, while SRMs and LRMs to be comparatively worthless to other weapons and not worth the space they take.

I like ballistics and missiles for the chance to knock down. Also with LRMs, you can just have a spotter and keep a missile boat back out of LOS and volley the crap out of a target.

Stability damage does not scale well versus heavier mechs though and its easier to focus on coring than on jumping through hoops to knockdown.

One key imbalance issue is that the pilot abilities progression is OP so I would certainly recommend playing with limited/ slow/ no pilot progression.

 

[Suicidal]

Well thanks, you guys have put me right off it lol

Hmm, so do any of the mods make it more properly tactical?

I'm playing with the Advanced mod and I'm having a lot of fun. I never played the base game so I have no idea what the mod fixed or broke, but the battles are plenty tactical (need to pay attention to a lot of things like evasion, heat management, terrain types, flanking, etc.), mech customization is very detailed and interesting and there's a huge variety of different mechs and weapon types that I'm still not bored of doing the same "kill all enemies" missions. I've heard that in the original game you can only control 4 units in one mission, in the mod it's up to 12 units - 8 mechs and 4 tanks. Maps are usually big so there's a lot of room to maneuver and flank and artillery units are very valuable - both on your side and on the enemy's.

Main thing I dislike are the slow loading times but I am on a very old PC. If you don't have a good PC with an SSD or a second monitor to watch shit while the game loads it can get very obnoxious. But other than that, the game runs better than heavily modded XCOM 2 did for me, which apart from super long loading times also featured frequent crashes and memory leaks.

 

[gurugeorge]

Well thanks, you guys have put me right off it lol

Hmm, so do any of the mods make it more properly tactical?

I'm playing with the Advanced mod and I'm having a lot of fun. I never played the base game so I have no idea what the mod fixed or broke, but the battles are plenty tactical (need to pay attention to a lot of things like evasion, heat management, terrain types, flanking, etc.), mech customization is very detailed and interesting and there's a huge variety of different mechs and weapon types that I'm still not bored of doing the same "kill all enemies" missions. I've heard that in the original game you can only control 4 units in one mission, in the mod it's up to 12 units - 8 mechs and 4 tanks. Maps are usually big so there's a lot of room to maneuver and flank and artillery units are very valuable - both on your side and on the enemy's.

Main thing I dislike are the slow loading times but I am on a very old PC. If you don't have a good PC with an SSD or a second monitor to watch shit while the game loads it can get very obnoxious. But other than that, the game runs better than heavily modded XCOM 2 did for me, which apart from super long loading times also featured frequent crashes and memory leaks.

Thanks, yeah I think I will give the mod a try - the only problem is that my hd is pretty full atm, and it's quite a hefty mod. I'll give it a go once I'm done with a couple of other games. Meanwhile, I'm just going to noodle through the campaign and get a general feel for the game.

 

[lightbane]

I would advice against playing the campaign, especially without quality-of-life mods, such as those that reduce load times. The writing is tailor made to be bad and to piss you off, even if you don't give a fuck about the lore, as I do, because of the blatant contrivances made to ensure certain plot situations happen, sometimes at the expense of gameplay.
Ie: During the first campaign mission, your client betrays you, and you get NOTHING for the mission, which will take you 10+ minutes to complete due how slow combat is in-game, and you'll get nothing but some exp and whatever damage your mechs take.
The issue though is that clients betraying mercs in BTech don't tend to last long, this is not Shadowrun where corps break the rules all the time.
Even ignoring that, the game should have let you get some salvage, or at least repair your mechs for free so that you do not deliberately start the game with a very artificial disadvantage.

Spoiler

Then I read here about some side-quests that do not make sense in-universe or anywhere, like hunting down a drunkard hiding in a bar protected by veteran mechwarriors and heavy turrets. Derp.