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No steve's analogy is correct. Although it's more like a modern tank maintained by modern crews vs. a 1960's tank maintained by 1930's crews. The Clans continued to develop Star league tech, so their technology is as far above Star League tech as Star League tech is above IS tech.
Can basically do the same things and have the same stuff but the new equipment is smaller, more effective e.t.c.
Star League ER medium laser: Weight 1 ton, 5 points of damage, 5 heat, ranges 1-4/5-8/9-12
Clan ER medium laser: Weight 1 ton, 7 points of damage, 5 heat, ranges 1-5/6-10/11-15
IS PPC: Weight 7 tons, 3 critical slots, 10 points of damage, 10 heat, ranges 1-6/7-12/13-18 (minimum range 3)
Star League ER PPC: Weight 7 tons, 3 critical slots, 10 points of damage, 15 heat, ranges 1-7/8-14/15-23 (no minimum range)
Clan ER PPC: Weight 6 tons, 2 critical slots, 15 points of damage, 15 heat, ranges 1-7/8-14/15-23 (no minimum range)
Star League Ferrofibrous armor requires 14 critical slots on a mech
Clan Ferrofirbrous armor requires 7 critical slots on a mech
Star League Double Heat Sink: sinks 2 heat, requires 3 critical slots
Clan Double Heat Sink, sinks 2 heat, requires 2 critical slots
Everything Clan built is better than Star League tech.
I'm starting to see that "Overpowered" thing people keep mentioning. That's not even powercreep, that's downright game-breaking.
Like I've said in a prior thread if they're handled in the future it makes sense to follow the precedent of Crescent Hawks Revenge where it's a separate game that starts with War of 3039 as a framing device to build the player up to commanding a Company of Mechs with Artillery and associated support, and in turn have the Clan Invasion basically being Boss Rush at the end leading into the participating in the Battle of Luthien, maybe with a Tukayyid scenario where instead of your Merc unit you're commanding a Comstar unit in historical scenarios.
Honestly for a game like that I would lean in by continuing the autocannon rebalance forward, up the Clan Gauss Rifle damage to something like 16 or 18 damage to better preserve its intended relative position, and respect that in turn in the scenario design with stuff like you can use Artillery but if you do they'll use it against you as well.
You've got to look at the Clans in context of both what was happening in-game, and at FASA, the original publisher of Battletech.
The Clans come after a particularly violent period in the Inner Sphere. The 4th Succession War ended with the Combine loosing territory to Steiner and Davion, as well as the formation of the Free Rasalhague Republic and St. Ives Compact from Kuria and Laio space, respectively.
Its into this mess that the Clans arrive in '49-50 on the Periphery of Lyran and Combine space. Steiner and Davion havent officially formed the FedCom, but it functionally exists. However, Kuria is still seriously weakened, and in no position, even 20 years after the fact, to fight another major interstellar war.
What the Inner Sphere does have is a significant production base, and what followed was essentially an ablative war - each system that slowed the Clan invasion gives the rest of the Inner Sphere time to catch up, with the help of ComStar, which has been sitting on Star League goodies for some time. So they went from unstoppable to stopped dead in their tracks at Tukayyid three years later.
And FASA liked releasing game-breaking content. The Clan invasion source book for Clan Wolf was released around the same era as the Universal Brotherhood made their appearance in Shadowrun, the other major property of FASA. Players were suddenly faced with opponents who simply shrugged off the heavy firepower that typified a Shadowteam at the time. And since this was early edition SR, the insect spirits were particularly unkillable.
The problem that these two properties faced was that often opposition was too easy - and one path towards that was to make your opponents OP. Shadowrun in particular has such a quick advancement curve that making things difficult for players can be a challenge even to seasoned GMs. So FASA took the route of overwhelming superiority. Which might explain A&D missions, since HBS is run by the designer of both Battletech and Shadowrun.
It would have been world breaking. Fortunately clans are bound by Zellbrigen which is a ritualistic honor system. In Tabletop when players didn't use this is broke the games. If you did not play tabletop with Zell then there were battle value point tables to go by (ie you don't just go by unit numbers on the table). If you did not do either of those things then you were just trolling. In lore clan society is always focused around limiting waste to a bare minimum particularly in conflict (either with eachother or against the Inner Sphere). Clans consider collateral damage and loss of life wasteful. They also initially do not engage you more than one at a time and only after announcing and challenging. They want to prove their superiority. If they DO find an IS warrior that is great they may take them as bondsman to become a member of the clan. This seems like slavery but it actually is a huge honor and compliment from their perspective.
It can be argued that during the Clan Invasion the Inner Sphere only achieved three major victories in the form of the Battle of Twycross, Battle of Luthien, and the Battle of Tukayyid. Of those only the first two involved Great House forces. Twycross basically involved massing multiple regiments of elite FedCom forces to defeat a regiment and a half worth of Clan garrison troops. The Battle of Luthien involved a massive Draconis Combine and Federated Sun coalition backed up by the entirety of the Wolf Dragoons.
The Battle of Tukayyid was a grudge match between the two remnants of the Terran Hegemony, which ComStar won because they're not above lying, manipulating, and being the most brutal group of psychos you've ever seen.
So to review the precedent established was that massed elite units could defeat an inferior number of Clan Garrison troops in 3050. In 3052 an extended campaign that culminated in 12 Regiments fighting 5 Galaxies managed to end in an Inner Sphere victory, with the aid of the entirety of the Wolf Dragoons. Later in 3052 the ComGuard established why you don't underestimate ComStar after demonstrating their mastery of manipulation associated with setting up said battle.
In turn in lore while Tukayyid helped to establish precedent the reason that the Inner Sphere wasn't subjugated begins and ends with the Warden Clans intervened in the form of the Wolves with the Refusal War and Wardens including the Nova Cats' actions associated with enabling the massive coalition involved in Operation Bulldog.
This is super old but eh, why not . . .
I've been reading up a bit on the logistic involved in total warfare and it's really something of a multidimensional problem.
I don't think the Clans could ever have outright conquered the Inner Sphere. They simply lacked the forces to fully occupy the successor states even if they could smash them militarily.
Going by Sarna the clans totally a bit over a 1 billion souls in all. Whereas the inner sphere population is easily 6 TRILLION. The Clans are outnumbered 6000 : 1
This sort of gap should represent an insurmountable manpower and industrial advantage.
At least in theory.
But there's another element. That being per Capita GDP. In short, a lot of Inner Sphere worlds are impoverished crap sinks that contribute only a fraction of their economic output to their host state.
Most of their resources are tied up locally and they only add up to a considerable economic power by aggregating the hundreds of inhabitted worlds of each Successor State.
Much like the British Empire, which dwarfed Nazi Germany, a great deal of that economic might, however, could not be converted into warfighting potential. It was tied up in essential economic activity. Like feeding the population, seeing to local industrial needs, and maintaining terraformed worlds.
With less margin, fewer hands can be spared for a standing army. (Note that the clans have this problem too, for a war like society their force under arms is hillariously small compared to their population. But this a problem for all faction in battletech, the sense of scale is way off).
On top of that, the Inner Sphere at the time of the Clan invasions was dependent on almost irreplaceable Jump Ships. While new ships could be built, the creation rate was a trickle and the needs of essential trade between systems meant that only a fraction of the Total Jumpship fleet would be available to conduct military operations or Troop Redeployments.
Meanwhile, the Clans both had sufficient Jumpships and warship fleets in a time and place where warships were all but extinct outside the hidden caches of ComStar.
That said, and keeping in mind that the Clans couldn't really win by brute force, they COULD potentially have unbalanced the Inner Sphere, collapsing the delicate power structure maintained by ComStar, cut up the carcasses of the successor states, and ruled over the disemembered ruins as power brokers and King Makers/Lord Breakers as they slowly digested their prize over subsequent generations.
It simply would have required the application of a political and military doctrine totally at odds with the Clan way of thinking.
Warship fleets engaging in the hit and fade destruction of Jumpships charging at jump points across the Inner Sphere could rapidly collapse the economies of the successor states with little chance of reprisal or even discovery of the perpetrator.
Destruction of the few remaining Jump Ship yards would render replacement impossible. And given a few years of this, degrading the successor states and leading ComStar around by the nose, the potential would exist to simply bypass the Successor states, plant their flag on Terra, and begin a slow and stead generatiosn long campaign of conquest, indoctrination, and consolidation.
But then Giant Stompy Robots wouldn't be as relevant to the story. :P
The idea at the time was that you would have two IS lances (8 mechs) vs one Clan Star (5 mechs) and none of the tech was cross compatible so it was a quantity vs quality battle.
I also think that Battletech was always supposed to be a narrative driven game, they even had an RPG ruleset that could be directly integrated into the tabletop game.
Still, for me, while the clans do have the cool factor, I prefer my Battletech / Mechwarrior stuff set in 3025 era when things were simple and each weapon / item had a clear defined and distinct role.
If you include the RPG side of it all... but now with Alphastrike and the new rulesets that were released with the IS boxsets, it's all getting rolled into one system so hopefully more cost efficient for the consumer vs before.
Back then you almost felt inclined to drop cash on damn near every source book and technical readout book to keep updated. Of course this was all prior to and at the dawn of the holy internet lol they still cost a lot but dammit it's easier to obtain now vs then when only select stores would carry anything BT related depending on where you lived and what game was trending more (meaning more sales for store).
But yeah... 3025 to 3045 is the good years of BT
But the kicker... more tech than you could imagine, Mechs on paper you'll never get mini's of... and... the magnitude of rules and tech compliance, etc... enough you'll spend more time reading rules and ♥♥♥♥ than actually playing.
Here's hoping Catalyst Games does it right this time around with their "reboot" if you want to call it that... sorry... rant over lol