KickStarter BattleTech Pre-Release Thread

[Infinitron]

Kiva does seem like an SJW drama bomb waiting to happen.

On the other hand, sser has told me that his game design tweets are actually pretty interesting.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Kiva does seem like an SJW drama bomb waiting to happen.

On the other hand, sser has told me that his game design tweets are actually pretty interesting.

If s/h/it can refrain from injecting ridiculous troon SJW politics into Battletech, my fears may be unfounded. But that usually isn't how those types work. Hence "doesn't bode well".

I'm jaded enough about the franchise and the path it's already taken that honestly, Battletech going out with a whimper after being co-opted by agenda-driven SJW types doesn't really bother me that much, but it would still be sad. I more or less wrote Battletech off as a choice for serious emotional investment after MWO happened.

 

[Cael]

If s/h/it can refrain from injecting ridiculous troon SJW politics into Battletech, my fears may be unfounded. But that usually isn't how those types work. Hence "doesn't bode well".

BTech is about big giant mecha shooting other big giant mecha against a background of politics. Inserting SJW shit into it does NOT add to the whole thing. That the idiots are trying takes it well beyond "doesn't bode well".

 

[Jimmious]

Kiva does seem like an SJW drama bomb waiting to happen.

On the other hand, sser has told me that his game design tweets are actually pretty interesting.

From the video of the campaign it seemed like Kiva knows what's up gameplay wise. That's all I care about.
If the addition of a "THEY" is enough to trigger an anti-SJW war again, what can I say.
Honestly it's pretty tiring to see people fishing random bullshit from twitter accounts to make a point in this retarded war.

I can not fathom in any way what the fuck this twitter post has to do with the game in any way.

 

[PanteraNera]

From the video of the campaign it seemed like Kiva knows what's up gameplay wise. That's all I care about.
If the addition of a "THEY" is enough to trigger an anti-SJW war again, what can I say.
Honestly it's pretty tiring to see people fishing random bullshit from twitter accounts to make a point in this retarded war.

I can not fathom in any way what the fuck this twitter post has to do with the game in any way.

I partly share your opinion, (agree on your first paragraph) than again this Kiva-"thing" reminds me an awful lot of Brian Mitsoda's wife Annie regarding that "Dead State incident", that didn't fare well.

 

[PanteraNera]

It's just a feeling I can't give you citation.
Like I said it reminds me of Annie Mitsoda.

 

[Alienman]

Jimmious

If this was the only case of this kind of stuff, I would agree with you 100%. But this is like a tradition now, taking an old franchise and inject NuPolitics into it and then later on when it doesn't sell well enough because of NuPolitics it will be blamed on TOXIC GAMERS.

 

[Jimmious]

PanteraNera I put the citation because I have no idea about what incident you speak of.

You see, all these "incidents" exist only because people seek them, from both sides.
I never had heard of any of them before Codex.
The whole SJW/anti-SJW paranoia is really hard to follow with people stalking twitter accounts, message boards and so on, to fish quotes that fit their agenda.
And since I only get such "information" in the Codex, I only see the anti-SJW hatred side and honestly, it sucks balls.

The whole thing is extremely bizarre for me. It must be "something" in the US I guess, because it's completely outworldly for me. I've never met anyone who I would call "SJW" in real life althought I've heard people complain about them... because of stuff they read in the internet.

I'm guessing it's in the vein of the anti-globalism sensation that goes around... in the internet of all things. This period of time is seriously fucked up

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

I'll take a little SJW crap in character creation I can ignore if it gives the BT franchise any chance of getting off life support. If the SJW content goes beyond that though, at least I can rest knowing that in the franchises death it can feed my love for retarded gamedev drama.

 

[Alienman]

Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear is a good example. They even had a rallying cry on Twitter to get their SJW twitter warriors to come and help them against the bad evil misogynistic BG grognards

 

[PanteraNera]

PanteraNera I put the citation because I have no idea about what incident you speak of.

http://murderblonde.tumblr.com/post/105832304380/exhaustion

Will answer to the rest of your post soon, as currently I have not much time

 

[Bohr]

Don't knock Twitter, it's a great source of inspiration when it comes to naming our merc company:

Spoiler

More seriously, those tweets from Kiva (on making the maps) that I linked earlier were actually really interesting, as were some of those on adjusting lethality etc. There's actually quite a bit of insight on the dev process considering it's just a Twitter account.

(But I guess that tweet about packing more diversity into the game, or whatever, was never going to go down that well around here)

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

(But I guess that tweet about packing more diversity into the game, or whatever, was never going to go down that well around here)

The Battletech universe is already plenty diverse by default, is the issue. One does not NEED to shoehorn in more shit. Of course, there's diversity and then there's their brand of "diversity", which are very much different things.

 

[Jimmious]

PanteraNera I put the citation because I have no idea about what incident you speak of.

http://murderblonde.tumblr.com/post/105832304380/exhaustion

Will answer to the rest of your post soon, as currently I have not much time

Man either I guess I'm really out of date, but I don't get anything from that link

Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear is a good example. They even had a rallying cry on Twitter to get their SJW twitter warriors to come and help them against the bad evil misogynistic BG grognards

Boy how much they'd wish SJW stuff were their problem in the game...
The writing is tremendously bad, regardless of what it says. I don't care what you want to talk about, at least do it with someone that has talent

 

[Jimmious]

My issues with the game so far have nothing to do with pronouns or tweets. If Kiva is indeed a prestigious grognard with inclined design principles it's not obvious to me that is being realized in the game.

Gameplay-wise it's unclear what is going on. No timers, no ironman, no difficulty settings, and looks like it's all up to the modders to fix, from the strategic layer balance down to the tactical AI. Game Journalist mode may be good business but maybe the Goons have it right that you should just play with the tabletop simulator and import the battles into the game's skirmish mode. Ideally someone could write a hook that auto-exports that into battletech, or mods battletech to import setups from a txt/csv.

Story-wise it's a mixed bag. I'm not impressed so far with the cartoon villains and cartoon villain sidekicks that the Directorate is being depicted as in the introductory sequence. Perhaps the rest of the campaign will be more nuanced but I think not; this is HBS.

I was reading a bit through their forum today, I think they'll "squeeze" an Ironman mode in before release.

 

[Bohr]

Story-wise it's a mixed bag. I'm not impressed so far with the cartoon villains and cartoon villain sidekicks that the Directorate is being depicted as in the introductory sequence. Perhaps the rest of the campaign will be more nuanced but I think not; this is HBS.

Agreed. I think the management and economic sim look much better than I expected, but need to be a lot more challenging to get the most out of them. Difficulty levels are sorely needed. Reasonably happy with the tactical combat. Nice variety of maps in the bits I've seen so far, decent number of star systems to visit. Story looks underwhelming. Events have potential, as long as we're not constantly getting the same ones.

I think I'm mostly optimistic about what modders will do with this base, given how dedicated some of the fanbase is. What people did with just the backer beta was quite impressive, and people are still modding the likes of MechCommander to this day. The plans I've already seen for mods and campaigns look really promising.

 

[Viata]

"Does not represent HBS!" I'm pretty sure in this century, anything you do in your private time represents your employeer for the SJW.

 

[PanteraNera]

PanteraNera I put the citation because I have no idea about what incident you speak of.

http://murderblonde.tumblr.com/post/105832304380/exhaustion

Will answer to the rest of your post soon, as currently I have not much time

Man either I guess I'm really out of date, but I don't get anything from that link

Well I haven't gave you the proper context to begin with.

Annie had been very vocal on her twitter account before she wrote the tweet I posted, mostly about equality of men and women, strong women and other stuff what is seen as SJW by the codex. Hence why I see similarities. Also I think it was pretty clear that quests like the abortion was her influence as well, but that is just a side note.

Often these individuals just seem to like to be very vocal about their "superiority" and how unjust the world is. Similar to a lot of vegans I know and just to put it out of the way, I was quiet some time in my life a hardcore vegan myself, feeling all superior and lecturing people if they liked it or not. Most didn't

 

[Infinitron]

oasis789 All I've seen ITT is a bunch of forum posts about individual features. Seems like it'd be hard to determine the overall difficulty of the game from that. You need to see how it all comes together in practice. Do you have access to a review copy of the final game?

 

[GarfunkeL]

you still have to pay for internal structure repairs and even more for replacing blown out CT (yeah, mechs with destroyed CT can be repaired ). But the prices are kinda low, so the things you spend most money on are per-month maintenance(which stays mostly constant) and buying new weapons and mech parts & hiring pilots.

You do realize that losing a Mech in a mission during the campaing means that 99% of players will reload? Claiming that the devs are retarded for making that choice is silly, like saying that awakening in Mortuary in PST is stupid because player is forced to reload if death happens in every other D&D game. The BT lore has never been strong about why CT means mech is totally destroyed and cannot be rebuilt and it has never made much sense. It's a tabletop rule for game balance reasons, end of story.

 

[Alpharius]

you still have to pay for internal structure repairs and even more for replacing blown out CT (yeah, mechs with destroyed CT can be repaired ). But the prices are kinda low, so the things you spend most money on are per-month maintenance(which stays mostly constant) and buying new weapons and mech parts & hiring pilots.

You do realize that losing a Mech in a mission during the campaing means that 99% of player will reload? Claiming that the devs are retarded for making that choice is silly, like saying that awakening in Mortuary in PST is stupid because player is forced to reload if death happens in every other D&D game. The BT lore has never been strong about why CT means mech is totally destroyed and cannot be rebuilt and it has never made much sense. It's a tabletop rule for game balance reasons, end of story.

That may be so, but what about ironman? Also, from what i've seen on streams mech parts seem to be pretty abundant, so losing a mech may not be such a big deal once the player looks at his mech storage after 10 or so missions. Like, the dude on a stream got 3 full mediums from one mission(assembling mechs from parts is also free and instant and they come with a standart loadout and all weapons & armor already installed).

HBS should have made it an option for hard difficulty at least, along with hard difficulty itself.

I'm unclear about what the rules are but generally it's supposed to be symmetrical, right? The remains of your damaged mechs should be the same as the salvage you can get from equivalently damaged enemies? Is that not how it works?

Thats what i expected, but right now destroyed player's mechs with blown out CT are treated the same way as operational mechs with destroyed arm.

 

[Bohr]

I've also got the impression the game is a bit easy right now, but then that was always the suspicion when they said they weren't having harder difficulty modes and given the likelihood the game would be balanced so new players wouldn't hit a wall or ragequit. Some on the PDX forums speculate the game will get much harder later on, but that seems a bit unlikely (at least in the economic sim portion) given what we've seen of available cash sinks and how most games inevitably result in a player swimming in money late-game. Guess we'll soon see.

At the moment one can watch a streamer play like a drain, with his attention elsewhere, and never really struggle... casually upgrade the Argo without checking the costs, and sell a bunch of mechs that he didn't need. All after some early missions when he knew the least about the game and the unit was supposed to be struggling to get by.

IMO it comes down to the interaction between a number of factors, many of which seem reasonable on their own but need adjustment to come up with a more challenging game overall.
- Abstracted salvage, where one gets bits of mech chassis pretty easily, and need 3 pieces to make a complete mech: Tyler has talked about a harder difficulty level where 4 or 5 will be needed
- Once three pieces are obtained, they are assembled into full mechs instantly, at zero cost, with full weapons loadouts without requiring that you actually have those weapons to fit: Some debate as to whether this is working as intended, been asked for clarification on tomorrow's dev stream, but that's the evidence from the streams thus far. Would surely fit better with the scrappy merc company theme if one had to spend some time/money on getting these up to scratch, and maybe installing inferior or non-stock weapons if that's all one has
- CASE-equivalent on ammo to limit damage from ammo explosions, no reactor stackpoling, mechs never fully destroyed: All probably fine in a game like this, but in combination with the flow of new mechs from salvage means one just gets more and more mechs in storage: Devs thought mech destruction would be too punitive for new players, but Tyler spoke about allowing it in a harder/ironman difficulty mode
- PC mechwarrior can't die, story missions never expire so no limit on grinding other missions to build up for them
- Ammo and armour automatically replenished after battle at no cost: Supposedly 'abstracted' into operating costs, but operating costs do not vary from a Locust to an Atlas as they didn't want people to feel negative about getting bigger mechs

Unless there are serious money sinks in the late game we haven't considered, if I were HBS I would honestly make the harder difficulty options Tyler mentioned a priority, not a nice to have sometime after release. Would be a shame if any reasonably decent player (surely a high proportion of the backer population, at least) could just cruise through the campaign without breaking a sweat.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

- Ammo and armour automatically replenished after battle at no cost: Supposedly 'abstracted' into operating costs, but operating costs do not vary from a Locust to an Atlas as they didn't want people to feel negative about getting bigger mechs

The fuck??!!

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

It's seriously starting to pan out just like MWO. "Repair and rearm is too punitive on big ballistic/missile-toting mechs, ditch it, people are just using welfare ammo anyway"

 

[Bohr]

- Ammo and armour automatically replenished after battle at no cost: Supposedly 'abstracted' into operating costs, but operating costs do not vary from a Locust to an Atlas as they didn't want people to feel negative about getting bigger mechs

The fuck??!!

People were asking about that since we saw this in the first PDX video:

Spoiler

Then in last Thursday's stream Kiva responded (timestamped link):
https://youtu.be/k0M0Nag4yuY?t=692