What do you guys think of HBS Battletech?
Also does anyone know of a way I can change the potraits of my pilots? Preferably without a save editor. I have a mod which lets me use an image for my own character during character creation but it'd be neat to be able to choose for my pilots too.
Also if there's alternatives to this game which are more aesthetically pleasing or with more varied units I'd love to hear about it, I really like how things get hit in this though.
It's very satisfying to blown arm off or get an instant kill on an enemy mech by killin the pilot.
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The game didn't respect my time. Way too slow.
I loved the game, but fpbp. The game is quite slow and grindy. I installed mods that extend the date to further periods with new mechs, but never actually got up to them.
Not "bad" bad but with severe issues especially on an engine level, memory leak, lack of multi-threading etc. performance is abysmal.
Game design also has the issue of always incentivizing the heaviest mechs possible and the way initiative works fricks up weight class changes. I.e. a 60ton heavy is objectively worse than a 55ton medium, the medium gets to move first and has more tonnage for weapons and armor.
I still kind of like it but BT is pretty starved for decent content.
>change the potraits of my pilots? >Preferably without a save editor
There are a couple pilot portrait mods, might be possible to change the images for others with the same name.>
That's an accurate description
>bunch of animation that slog down the game
You can disable/ fast forward those and it still feels like it takes too much time tbh. It's kind of impressive.
Not suprising, if I remember correctly one of the devs, the troon, wanted to make a dating sim
I don't like how everyone is brown
I don't like how at launch there wasn't a sandbox mode and you had to play the gay campaign
I don't like how few mechs you can field and how many the enemy can field
I don't like how mech customization is worse than MWO
I wanted to give this game another shot again with the extended mod. Like what said, the game has a bunch of animation that slog down the game and having only 4 slots for your mechs mean that you’re gonna run heavy only. The campaign I never finished but I heard it was written by a guy who never read battletech lore and got his inspiration from mecha anime.
>was written by a guy who never read battletech lore and got his inspiration from mecha anime.
That sounds like nonsense from someone who's never played the game. The campaign is kinda boring but nothing about it is "anime". People are just screeching about it because it features brown women and one of them tells you what to do.
>People are just screeching about it because it features brown women and one of them tells you what to do.
Kamea is a borderline mary sue and the real protagonist of the story, you're just some interchangeable lap-dog. I also hate how the story is told retrospectively so you know nothing actually matters because we know kamea gets her throne back in the end anyways.
Kamea:
Has a rare for the time and place personal mech in the Kintaro
Is the only one to posses secret knowledge of the location of a lostech dropship, the only surviving example of her two-class run.
Said dropship also has a map detailing the location of every single SLDF depot, base, and facility in the periphery
Is given the only Atlas II left in the entire inner sphere as Kerensky was supposed to have taken all of them in the exodus, except apparently the one she finds at the SLDF base.
Is the single most skilled pilot in the battletech universe given that she knows 5 pilot skills when everyone else can only obtain 3
Gets away with committing atrocities and the only person to take any offence at that is written as a psychotic madman out for petty revenge
Is written to be a saviour to the player when she, for reasons never explained or even questioned, decides to stop leading an attack of a space port to show up completely unsupported at the prison you are assigned to liberate
Melodramatically laments her oh-so-hard decisions of having to do the right thing normally expected of her
It's not that it's anime (which it isn't) and it's not just "people being mad a woman tells them what to do." The writer was a narcissistic homosexual who admitted that they knew nothing of BT. I don't know if they're actually troon and that part doesn't matter but they carry on in the exact way those homosexuals do in declaring that they're going to fix it by "making it about the people not the mechs," proving they then did no research because they'd have known even from basic plot summaries that existing BT stories are already about the people.
Pretty accurate, one issue with the campaign was Kamea being a really unlikable and incompetent character, generally not an issue for BT Lore but they tried to go for a personal angle and it fails at that.
I don't care about some incompetent b***h, I don't care if my "mentor" gets betrayed and killed in the first 5 minutes of the game it's just annoying.
I'm in it for the money, doesn't help that one could argue it would be better for the people to support the new regime because Kamea is so idiotic.
The other part of it is the characters being actually pretty unimportant and one dimensional, so it even fails at that.
To add to you, the (mostly) full story was the writer for the game mentioned after the assignment that they went in not knowing anything about the Battletech universe, didn't like mechs, and already had a story they wanted to write and had originally tried adapting it to fit the game. If I'd had known all this before release, I would've assumed it to be dead in the water, but what released is decent for the most part, even if the cast is an overly diverse group indicative of our era.
I can only assume someone must've ghost written the overall skeleton for the game (The inter-faction politics, the details of where the Restoration was getting its support from, etc) and the lead writer only had to write the individual missions and characters since that's the only explanation I could buy for why the game didn't turn out to be a non-canon travesty. Even so, I think House Espinosa's characters and motivations worked well and your pursuit by the Taurian commander was good even if the scene that served as reasoning for it did a poor job at setting it up, and I like the Canopeans had a legitimate reason to back Kamea and bankroll her operation instead of it simply being you doing guerilla operations for her as a favor.
>I think House Espinosa's characters and motivations worked well
Evil Uncles plan was moronic, especially everything to do with the Taurians. He massively indebts himself with them and has absolutely nothing to ensure they won't just take over when he's cleaned up kamea's little resistance. He also makes victoria committ an atrocity against them for.... what reason exactly? How did poisoning that planet make the Taurians want to work with him, again?
Then you have Kamea similarly indebted to the Canopians who also would undoubtedly make her a client state afterwards with nothing to offer them.
>He thinks the story is any good
When the game killed the mentor character only to bring him back 5 story missions in and then to kill him in the same fricking missions I just gave up. I uninstalled the game and only played it again with BTA and only because they added fun stuff like RAC's
The campaign was written by the line developer of Battletech.
Try Battlech Advanced (BTA) mod. It fixes the problem of only 4 units - you can field up to 12 mechs, vehicles and battle armor.
Also, customization is far better than vanila. Diffrent armor types, engine sizes and equipment other than guns (ECM, mines, smoke, that kind of stuff). More mechs too, even quads.
On the other hand it exaggerates the slowness of BT, since unit counts are so inflated.
Also, there are bugs, jank models, usual memory leaks problems, and some updates break saves, but at least you will be warned.
Haven't played Extended and Rougetech, so can't comment on those two.
>everyone is brown
It's almost racist if you didn't make your PC a white middle-aged man.
You didn't?
it's trash
on the other hand unless you go back to Cyberstorm there's nothing else in the market
I only played skirmish few times, but not the campaign.
Skirmish 4 vs 4 mechs worked great.
But as far I understand you are always limited to 4 in campaign, while enemy has whatever RNG throws at you, which kinda kills my motivation to try play campaign when any SRPG provides more freedom than this.
Anyone knows how to get Mechcommander 1 and 2 working on modern computers?
But yeah this game even with the speed up moves is way too slow, also its unoptimized as all hell. You need to delete saves and restart the game every few hours.
https://www.moddb.com/games/mechcommander-gold/news/what-is-mcg-darkest-hours-all-about
Check that out for MC1. It's a bit different as it has a ton more salvage containers and missions. The last I played it I did come across a couple of bugs though so fair warning.
For all the people complaining that it's all about tonnage, there's a guy on youtube named edmon who did a campaign with lights. You need to take advantage of their speed to max evasion pips (lights also have a -1 to hit modifier) and try to get rear attacks. It's slow though because it's move with max pips, next turn reserve until end while they mostly miss then attack, back to move next turn during light phase, and the cycle repeats. I haven't personally watched that campaign, but watching others, I know that dude is vicious with a firestarter.
It had a lot of potential but it's just not a lot of fun to play.
>kinda buggy, even at the end of its lifecycle
>awful AI, especially for allied units who are completely braindead
>implementation of pilot skills is limited, unimaginative and just dumb
>slow animations compound the already slow turn based combat
>campaign is bland as frick, career mode would have compensated for this but it's unbearably repetitive -- they tried to fix this by adding a bunch of events/mini-storylines to the career mode but those don't add much variety at all
>can only use 4 mechs max
>no limit on drop weight, you're only capped by the number of mechs not by tonnage, which means Assault mechs rule everything -- they tried to make Light/Medium mechs more viable with some rebalancing which is stupid because the game was never supposed to be balanced in per-mech manner, but rather balanced around total tonnage
Mods do manage to make the game more enjoyable but it just fails to live up to its potential. I would've liked to see a sequel if they could've fixed some of the more fundamental flaws but it's probably not going to happen.
>Game has an option for changing your character's pronouns
>Game has no option for changing your character's voice
>Have to spend the entire campaign listening to WARNING ARMOR BREACH INTERNAL DAMAGE WARNING ARMOR BREACH INTERNAL DAMAGE WARNING ARMOR BREACH INTERNAL DAMAGE WARNING ARMOR BREACH INTERNAL DAMAGE WARNING ARMOR BREACH INTERNAL DAMAGE
Whoever approved this needs to be fricking gutshot and left in the desert.
Hey, you can complain about the other bullshit all you want, but you leave b***hin' Betty out of this. I wouldn't have it any other way.
You're heavily outnumbered in every scenario so you only bring the heaviest mechs. It's a shame, really. I like armoured behemoths as much as the next guy, but I would also like a viable reason to use the light mechs.
I only have a few complaints about the game for the most part.
>Lances only
You're locked to four mechs and besides some handwaving for tonnage limits on some missions, it quickly devolves into dropping your four heaviest ones onto the field. Rarely is there a reason not to deploy two King Crabs, an Atlas, and a Highlander if you have them because at the end of the day sheer firepower and HP totals are what you need to clear missions, it's mostly a quick and dirty slugfest at this scale.
The small force size was to prevent the game from getting bogged down from the player having to micro too many units, but it also diminishes the amount of strategies you can employ. Even so though, not ever mission needs to be a full company sized deployment, just some of the major ones to help encourage a more well rounded roster. It would also help to maybe add some upkeep based on mech size to represent maintaining an assault mech is a pretty expensive endeavor and there's a good logistical reason for not filling your roster with them.
>Mission Balance
Missions are ranked between .5 and 5 skulls in difficulty, but your intel isn't perfect and this doesn't always correspond to what you'll face. I think sometimes the enemy force can veer towards quite overpowered, usually in the case of large SRM/LRM carrier vehicles and turrets, which seem to be weighted very low for their potential punch (An LRM carrier is probably valued between a light-medium mech based on their deployment, but packs a punch equal to a heavy mech.). It'd be nice to run another pass on enemy force compositions so you're not being matched against four LRM carriers, two mediums, and two lights on a 1 skull mission.
Everything else I can tolerate mostly, I could complain about the cast but at least the story doesn't create any egregious breeches of canon and is fitting for the setting in a believable way. Your engineer is the only thing I really raise my eyebrow at for her ability to fix everything.
It's garbage. Roguetech was alright until the troony running the mod shut down fricking everything because he got called out for being a troony shitter, but it still ran like shit and got old after a bit. Not really sure if there's any other mods worth actually playing if you want to play a mercenary company simulator. If you want to actually play the game, you'll need to replace the portraits because the trannies who paid to get their pictures in the game apparently didn't pay enough for whoever the artist was to pretty them up. Here's a freebie for the worst looking one of the bunch.
But Roguetech is still up
It isn't. You have to apply and interview on their discord to play it.
Interview? They pretty much only require you to have spent some time in the group, the other requirements like being active in the discord got dropped. And of course this is only for playing with the online map.
>have to suck up to the troony modder to play their troony game
Piss off, gay enabler.
BTA Chads can't stop winning
shitty xcom clone that failed to make small lance tactics interesting by relying heavily on braindead ai leading to raw-tonnage-only-balancing and refusing to scale up because console players can't afford a second braincell to rub against the first one so they'd get all sad and confused and also their box might melt down at displaying too many triangles. potentially interesting story idea hamstrung by the urgent need to ejaculate lostech at an inappropriate time and a devastatingly uninteresting royal character with a sense of timing that mimicked farcry2 malaria.
not designed or managed by pgi making it automatically not the worst battletech game ever released, so it's got that going for it
The Mission Control and Bigger Drops mods are life savers.
>alternatives to this game
https://megamek.org/
more aesthetically pleasing, not really, graphics are barebones
but definitely more varied units
i just play mekhq
it was ok for a playthrough but i had no desire to replay or try career mode.
fun fact: on release there were no blonde hair options in the character maker. The ones that are there now were added in a later patch.