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[Mephansteras]

I'm going to be doing a screenshot LP of modded sandbox Battletech. It'd be sort of a community game where forumites can claim Mechwarriors to customize and direct the skills on, give me direction on where to go and various important decisions to make in the game.

For anyone not aware of it, Battletech is a fairly new Turn-based adaptation of the classic table-top miniatures game. It's quite well done, and I've been having a blast playing it for the past few months.

People can choose pilots to claim. We are limited to 8 at the start (not including the Commander who I'll be running). But we can get more later as we upgrade our ship.

[Rince Wind]

On one hand: yes
On the other: I want to play it first, and I need a better PC to do so, and I can't afford one right now, so I wouldn't be reading.

[Knave]

I'm always down for all things BT, so count me in!

I imagine the modded Sandbox would avoid most of the story content?Will be interested to hear more about the mods.

[Mephansteras]

@Rince Wind - the Sandbox mod I'm using completely disables the campaign, so there should be basically no spoilers on that front.

@Knave - Here are the mods I'm using:

MekTek & BTModLoader - Used to dynamically load mods. Makes things *much* easier.
AdjustedMechAssembly - Mechs that are assembled from salvaged parts appear broken in the Mechbay and need time & money to bring to a usable state
AdjustedMechSalvage - Mechs now require 5 pieces of salvage instead of 3 to assemble. Salvage available is now dependent on limbs destroyed in combat, though coring a mech still leaves only 1. Mechs of ours destroyed are now actually destroyed and will become salvage (though we get all of it automatically).
ContractSort - Sorts the available contracts so that it is easier to read what is available
DropCostPerMech - There are now Operational costs for each mission. Heavier mechs cost more. (4-Assault lances should be used sparingly)
InjuriesHurtMod - Mechwarriors who are hurt suffer penalties to their abilites based on how hurt they are (both ours and AI).
InnerSphereMap - Expands the map to be the entire Inner Sphere instead of just a slice of the Periphery. Also changes the start location to be the Mercenary Board HQ planet in Lyran Commonwealth territory.
JB_SL_Era_Markets_120 - LosTech items are rarely available for purchase.
MechMaintenanceByCost - Mechs cost more the heavier they are
MeleeMover - The player can reposition to attack in melee the way the AI can
Meph's Balance Tweaks - Some of my own tweaks to the game jason files, mostly increasing the number of contracts available and the big one being a change to Braced which makes it only reduce damage/stability down by 33% instead of 50%.
NoCampaign - Removes the Campaign from the game, leaving it in Sandbox Mode
PunchinOut - Mechwarriors will now have a small chance to Eject if they think they are going to die soon. This goes for both AI and our own. I have it set to a max 10% chance right now to keep things balanced for salvage purposes. Still happens often enough to feel good without being too broken, at least based on my experiences so far.
RandomCampaignStart - You start with a random set of mechwarriors and mechs instead of the hardcoded set from the campaign. I still have it set to be 3 mediums and 2 lights, though.
RandomTravelContracts - Travel Contracts can now take you pretty much anywhere on the map instead of being breadcrumbs to take you to the next story mission. (Necessary since we don't have a story to follow)

[Mephansteras]

I think there is enough interest. So I'll try to get started on this sometime in the next few days.

In the meantime, if people want to sign up for pilots feel free to do so. First 6 will get spots in the immediate roster, and we can add others later on.

I'll be claiming the commander.

We can decide as a group what we want the company name to be and what the logo will be. I'll post screenshots at some point of all the options the game gives us. Oh, and the 3 colors we want for our mech paint scheme (primary, secondary, and accent).

EDIT: Ok, got the new save up and running.

Spoiler: Mercs (click to show/hide)

Here are the mercenaries we've started with. I chose randomly from a list of characters I use for various games, so our Commander this time is Keandra 'Sorceress' Tayfur. (Who started life originally as the Sorceress from Diablo 2).

Mechwarriors have 4 stats. There are also 2 special skills associated with each stat. Each mechwarrior can have 2 of the first level skills and 1 of the second level skill.
Gunnery - How well you shoot. Special skills are Multi-target (can fire weapons at separate targets) and Breaching Shot (can fire a single weapon and have it ignore cover and Brace)
Piloting - How well you move. Handles Evasion, Stability, and Melee attacks. Special Skills are Evasive Movement (bonus evasion when moving) and Ace Pilot (can move after shooting)
Guts - How tough you are and how well you deal with heat and recoil. Special Skills are Bulwark (you automatically Brace if you did not move that turn, giving you 33% damage reduction) and Juggernaught (Melee against a mech sets its initiative back a phase).
Tactics - How good you are at firing missiles without line of sight, firing long range weapons at short range, and called shots. Special Skills are Sensor Lock (reduces the evasion of a mech and gives the squad sight on them even if no one can directly see them) and Master Tactician (Move 1 Initiative Phase earlier than your mech would normally).

As we get more experience we'll be able to level up the various stats. Skills are chosen at level 5 in a stat and level 8 (IF you have the level 1 skill in that stat already).

Special Skills, once chosen, cannot be changed. So the mechwarriors who started with skills are stuck with those. So Kitsune has Sensor Lock and Panda has Sensor Lock and Evasive Movement.


The list is slightly longer than fits on a single screen.


You guys can pick any of the other unclaimed mechwarriors for yourself. This screen shows the options you have for customizing your character.

Spoiler: Company (click to show/hide)

We need to choose our Company Name, Logo, and colors for our mechs. Sorceress by default uses a Green and Gold color scheme, but I'm not locked into that. There are many colors to choose from. Primary shows up on the model as the torso, secondary as the legs. How that works in practice depends on the mech and the paint scheme chosen for it (each has about 8 or so options).

The screenshots below show all of the possible logos we can pick for our company.

Spoiler: Mechs (click to show/hide)

We got a pretty good set of Mechs this time around. I'd have liked a 55ton, but that's all right. We have a lot of options here, and there is a great deal of customization we can do to the mechs to kit them out how we want. Right now we have more Mechwarriors than Mechs, but eventually I'd like to have a single mech for each pilot.

Welcome to the Inner Sphere, folks!

[Mephansteras]

Decided to do a quick mission to kick things off.

Spoiler: Getting Started (click to show/hide)

We haven't actually decided on our Company or the Logo yet, but I figured I'd put something decent in place rather than leave it with the defaults.


Before we pick a mission, I head to the store to see what they might have. There is a lot of customization we can do to our mechs, after all.

While that is a great missile launcher, the price is a bit too steep to consider right now. Maybe if we do some really lucrative missions.


Speaking of missions...wow, that is a lot of local missions. Normally I just see a few local and a bunch of travel mission. Well, we don't have to do all of them.


Hmm, and some challenging but possibly very worthwhile ones down near the bottom. We'll have to consider carefully if those will be worth the risk.

We can handle up to a 2-3 skull right now, though anything over 2 skulls has the potential to go pretty wrong. Heck, 2 skulls can go pretty wrong, really. Those ratings are an estimate, and can be off by a full skull. Though the money rewards are often a clue as to how dangerous it really is.


To get us started I just pick the easiest one. It'll let me explain things without worrying too much about the danger.

This one is a base assault. At that money and 1/2 skull, I expect we'll fight a lance of light mechs. Probably with bad armor, and possibly a vehicle or two instead of full mechs. I don't expect turrets this low on the threat scale, but you can never be sure. If there are, we'll need to stay at range and pick them off without letting them fire back at us.

I don't expect great salvage, which is why I don't set that higher. I also like to have some decent choices for salvage, though, so in this case I decide to split down the middle. If we were working for an actual faction rather than a local government we'd also have the option of giving up money & salvage for extra rep.


You'll notice that operations cost there near our lance weight. The heavier we drop, the more it costs. So for this baby mission I'll leave one of the 50 tonners out. The Hunchback is a bit overkill right now, and since we're attacking a base it won't be all that useful, really. The Centurian has long range weapons, as does the BlackJack, and should give us plenty of firepower. The two light mechs can hold their own vs other light mechs and will give us good maneuverability and scouting options. And they're cheap to field, which is a bonus.

Since it's a base assault, I take both Mechwarriors with Sensor Lock. Those will let us use the long range weapons on the two Medium mechs outside of sight range, which should let us get through this without much risk.

No much difference between the rest of our pilots, so I grab Dragonfire to give her some XP.


Buckle up, pilots, it's time to drop!

Spoiler: Drop (click to show/hide)

Darius starts us off with a quick mission overview and shows us the area. The Base is straight ahead past some lakes.


The yellow lines there show the map edge. We dropped right in the bottom right corner of the map. Not much room to maneuver if the enemy has mechs close, though this weak of a mission I don't think that'll be a problem.


Panda here is our main scout. He has two very useful abilities, Sensor Lock and Evasive Movement. That, coupled with his Jenner which is both fast and has jump jets, means he can move around very quickly and get great evasive defense from it. Each of those little chevrons near the move-to point is about -10% to hit for the enemy. His mech doens't have much armor but that won't matter if things can't hit him


While it may be slightly overkill at this point, I'm going to have the entire squad do a move-and-brace advance. It's slower than doing a double-move sprint, but bracing at the end of our move gives us 33% damage reduction if we get hit. (The tooltip shows 50%, but I have it modded down a bit. I should probably find where the tooltips are stored and update those.)


Jump jets and pretty much all weapons generate heat. Lasers the most. Heat is only a problem if it gets too high, but that is a thing we want to avoid. Too much heat and it'll damage our mech's entire structure (expensive). Get way too high, and the mech will even shut down. Water leaves you pretty open to fire, but keeps you cool.


Weeeeeeee!


Contact! Time to fight!

Spoiler: Mortal Combat! (click to show/hide)

A locust moves into view, but doesn't have any actions left to shoot us with. Locusts are the smallest mechs and generally the least dangerous. They can be decent, but the AI just isn't good enough with them and tends to charge straight in. Bad move when you have little armor.


Panda moves back a bit and gives us a sensor lock. That means the locust loses some of its evasion, and we can shoot at it up to our weapon max ranges even if we can't physically see it.


Looks like he has a friend coming up to support him, so we want to take this thing out quick.


As I suspected for a 1/2 skull, the enemies are shoddy and have only 50% their normal armor. So...basically nothing for this locust. It should go down quickly.


The Commando takes a decent chunk out of it.


And Sorceress uses the long range weapons on her Centurion to finish it off.


Dragonfire moves to take a closer firing position for next round.


Since he's closer, we use Kitsune's Sensor Lock this time.


A Jenner. Fun. With shoddy armor it'll be quick to take down, but that thing has some serious firepower on it. If we're not careful, it could take out the Commando in a single turn.


He can't see any of us, though, so we get a free turn to smack it around. He's Guarded, though, so we'll do less damage.

Spoiler: Gunning for the Enemy (click to show/hide)

Dragonfire gets in a solid hit with her AC/2's, stripping off most of the armor in one spot.


Sorceress follows up with a solid volley of missiles. But she missed with the Large Laser, so we still haven't breached its armor yet.


I decide to take a risk and move Panda up to attack. He can do a lot of damage, but if he's in range that Jenner is too.


Solid hits, there. We're close to taking off an arm, which would remove two of the Jenner's medium lasers.


Looks like they have turrets after all. I'll have to have Panda fall back, or we risk his mech losing an arm as well!

Really, I should have assumed they'd have turrets when the Locust going down updated our mission parameters to say we had 50% of the garrison destroyed. Two lights isn't strong enough for even an easy mission like this.


Next round. I have Panda fall back out of range to keep him from taking more damage. The enemy Jenner in turn fires on Dragonfire, but only manages a light hit on the Blackjack's armor. Really, having him attack one of the mediums was our best-case scenario there.


Kitsune is back at fairly long range for his weapons, since the Commando has very little armor, but does manage to score a few hits and take out the Jenner's damaged arm.


Dragonfire lights it up, having moved in close enough to fire her full compliment of weapons.


Her attack shreds it, destroying the other arm and the torso on that side. This thing is just about dead.


With Sorceress I do what I should probably have done with Dragonfire and use our morale (the blue bar next to our mechwarriors) to do a Precision Strike. This lets us call where our shot goes, and also lets us knock the enemy back an initiative phase which can be worth it all by itself.

I should have done with with Dragonfire and knocked it's leg out. If a mech loses both legs it is removed from the fight and you can get more salvage from it. However, this thing is trashed so I think we'll just go for a killing blow to the center torso. We want it gone so it can't spot for those turrets any more.


The Large laser does its job, and that Jenner is scrap metal.

Spoiler: Careful Approach (click to show/hide)

We want to stay out of the line of fire from those turrets in case any of them sensor lock us. So we'll go around that ridge to the right.


Our scouts pick up two of the turrets in sensor range.


Kitsune is close enough to get a lock, which he does on the turret nearest us.


This allows Sorceress to use the long range weapons on the Centurian to pick it off safely. It's not an exciting way to do battle, but we're in this for money not excitement.


She hasn't moved far enough around to be out of direct line to the turrets, and the large laser + missile combo makes short work of the turret.


Second verse, same as the first.


Missiles have the advantage of being able to go over things like hills, which is handy. Though her LRM 10 can't do enough damage in a single volley to take out a turret. We'll need two shots for this.


We proceed to do the same for the rest of the turrets while the lance moves around the side to engage.







And that's all of them. No shots fired on us the entire time, which is exactly how I like things.

Spoiler: Mopping up (click to show/hide)

Buildings have decent hit points, but with no defenses left we can take a few rounds to blow everything up at our leisure.


For destroy the base missions you don't have to destroy all the defenses, you can just rush in and blow up the buildings before retreating.

Our dropship pilot, Sumire, is telling us here that we've completed the main objective and can now head to the extraction point to leave if we want.


But with everything on the map taken care of, that's not necessary and we get to quit out.


Not bad for a quick and easy mission. We made some money even with our operational costs (you can see the drop cost as the bottom line) and got a little rep with the Mercenary Review Board. We'll want that for better missions and pilots.


Our pilots got through it without any injuries and earned a bit of XP. Damage was light in general, with just the Jenner taking anything of note.



Turns out I should have either taken less salvage options or worked harder to salvage more of that Jenner. With the options we took we get to pick 2 pieces that we get for sure and then get assigned the other 6 pieces (of the 8 we negotiated for) randomly. Since there were only 6 pieces of salvage total...getting those two picks was worthless.

Shame, but, it's fine. We made a profit off the mission and ultimately that was the important part.


Back in the Mech Bay we have our Chief MechTec, Yang, get started on fixing up the Jenner. Not too expensive and it won't take too long to fix, so we're still in good shape overall.


Back to the main screen for our Ship, the Argo. We can decide from here what to do. There are plenty more mission in this system if we want them, or we can decide to travel somewhere else.

And that's that. I'll probably try to streamline combats in the future, since most missions will take much longer than that, but we can see how things go.

We still have to decide for sure what our Company Name and Logo will be, and all of our regular Mechwarriors are still up for grabs.

[Rince Wind]

I love that last battle screenshot with the exploding turret and the laser and the missiles in flight.

But I really want to play this for myself, not just for the story, for which I don't really have high hopes anyway, but also to learn what works and what doesn't.

[Mephansteras]

Ah. I get that. Though this modded set does change things a good bit as far as what works well and doesn't.

[EuchreJack]

I'll take Mr. Sand Wedge.  Looks like I aspire to pilot a Catapult!

[Mephansteras]

Sure. Did you have any customizations you wanted to make?

[EuchreJack]

Sure. Did you have any customizations you wanted to make?

Long spikey hair with sunglasses, jumpsuit green.  Or whatever.

[Mephansteras]

Sure. Did you have any customizations you wanted to make?

Long spikey hair with sunglasses, jumpsuit green.  Or whatever.

Don't think I can do glasses but I'll see what I can do for the rest. Any name/nickname changes?

I have been very busy lately, but I should have some time tomorrow to play.

[birdy51]

Ah hey, this is pretty cool. This is a game I've not heard of so I'll be watching with interest. As for a suggestion for a Company name, how about The Moonlighters with that nice little moon symbol on page 4 of the catalogue?

Also, request to be brought in as a blonde soldiery looking fellow by the name of Birdvig Krauss. If there are any good ways to customize it, I wouldn't mind if his mech went heavy; either heavily armored, heavily armored, or heavy and ready to be right in the thick of it with a big, close range weapon. Whichever way fits your style!

[Mephansteras]

Sure, we can do that. What Callsign would you want for your mechwarrior?

And as far as the mech style goes, we can do any of that. The Hunchback we've got is a good candidate for now, as it packs the biggest close range weapon in the game.

[birdy51]

Sure, we can do that. What Callsign would you want for your mechwarrior?

And as far as the mech style goes, we can do any of that. The Hunchback we've got is a good candidate for now, as it packs the biggest close range weapon in the game.

If it's called the Hunchback, callsign Notre Dame sounds pretty good. : P