What makes you like this game?

[onomastikon]

I own this on another distribution platform and am baffled: this game has such great reviews, and the genre and play style should push all my buttons - I love TBS, squad based tactics, and why not mechs!

I am trying to force my way through the writing of the campaign, which I find cringe worthy. The controls and UI seem so counter intuitive, and often buggy (suddenly I select one of my mechs and my turn is over). Endless loading, waiting.

What am I missing?
Should I just forget the campaign and move right into the "career" mode (which I assume is the main sp mode - I'm not interested in multiplayer).

Thanks in advance

[desrtfox071]

If you don't like the writing, but are interested in running a mercenary company of mechs and their pilots for (hopefully) profit, then yes, skip the campaign and go for career.

For me, there are a number of things that I like:
1)Tactical Depth
2)Mech customization depth
3)Battletech setting and lore
4)moddability


I play these days with the RogueTech mod which really adds to all of the first 3 points I mentioned.

This basically takes the TT game I've had experience with since the 80s, improves on it and adds quite a bit to it.

(waiting for Ohm to shipost)

[BrUwU]

Originally posted by onomastikon:

I own this on another distribution platform and am baffled: this game has such great reviews, and the genre and play style should push all my buttons - I love TBS, squad based tactics, and why not mechs!

I am trying to force my way through the writing of the campaign, which I find cringe worthy. The controls and UI seem so counter intuitive, and often buggy (suddenly I select one of my mechs and my turn is over). Endless loading, waiting.

What am I missing?
Should I just forget the campaign and move right into the "career" mode (which I assume is the main sp mode - I'm not interested in multiplayer).

Thanks in advance

Nothing, its a minimum viable product.
All your observations are spot on.
Awfull optimization, its barely funcional, even the most stongest fans of this game, calls it out, by calling its code sphagetti.

There is really not that much tactical depth, because game game have no actual combined warfare. You have tanks, mechs and implacements, and you can't even control 2/3rd of those. Infantry? Present in all versions of BT. No. Aviation? Nope. VTOLs? Yeah that some LosTech in HBS BT somehow.
Besides that add really lacking mission variety and map variety and its bad. Real bad. Making tactics variety is even less.

And the "depth" of the mech customization is a farce. Lack of combined arms, means lack of tactical pressure on your squad. Making many strategies irrelevant. Because of that, you will be building your mechs for one purpose only, to fight with armor, no reason to have cavalry specialized in anti infantry engagments, or AA coverage, or... Just slap most optimal gun to deal with enemy armor and move on.

All pilots are essentially the same, there is no depth in RPG system. All of them will overall ends up with same stats with very minor difference in skill set.

If you are experiencing issues with performance, mods make it worse. So i would say move on. Try Phantom Brigade, its way better.

But mods do make it kind of bareable. BTA and RT is what this game was suppose to be in the first place, not this barebones garbage. But keep away from RT, their community is... Something else. You can see above, criticism of their "beloved" game is "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥".

[VipreRX]

The campaign is imo just a one long tutorial. I thought it had an alright story, but nothing fantastic.
It's the mods that really make the game shine. They add more to the game in every way but the core is still just drop and shoot.

[HurtfulPlayer97]

I didn't like the Campaign at first and I originally never finished it, but I went back and restarted it. It gets better as it goes along and the story works better if you don't choose dialog options that make you a ♥♥♥♥. :)

[wesnef]

Originally posted by onomastikon:

I am trying to force my way through the writing of the campaign, which I find cringe worthy. The controls and UI seem so counter intuitive, and often buggy (suddenly I select one of my mechs and my turn is over). Endless loading, waiting.

What am I missing?

For me. . . the writing didn't bother me, because it reminded me of the cheesy/melodromatic 80s/90s Battletech novels, very nostalgic ;)
I didn't have any trouble with the controls & UI, it all just seems to work for me, seems reasonably straightforward?
And the loading cleared up when I put the game on an SSD.

Not sure what else to say. /shrug
(played 1k hours without mods, another 300 or so with BEX. Only other Battletech game I've played is the boardgames back in the late 80's/90's.)

[fluidwill]

Big fecken robots, with guns and tactics and stuff but mostly its the big fecken robots. I love em

[JC]

This game needs to be run on an SSD, If you have a decent comp with an SSD the load times are not an issue. Though if random 10-15 second load times bug you then i'd say this game is not for you. A good comp and SSD will not make all the other stuff like swapping to mechs and pilots and other stuff won't have loading times worth mentioning. If your running on an HDD it will be an issue.

Bugs? I dunno what you mean by buggy i've personally only had a couple in all my hours of play, Both were a failed to end turn, and both times a steam verify and it fixed it by replacing a single file.

Play Career mode.
There are pretty good mini story missions in that mode called Flashpoints. They are chained missions that are fun, decent story and challenging. They show up on the map as little glowing yellow circles, there is also a longer campaign that flashes Green, it starts in the lower middle map. (you need the DLC for this but maybe you have it because the Mercenary bundle is the best deal anyway)

In the end you might not like it, I really enjoy this but X-com bores me. We all have some games we like and others we don't. Maybe this is one of them for you.

Originally posted by VipreRX:

The campaign is imo just a one long tutorial. I thought it had an alright story, but nothing fantastic.

I used to think that, but in the end i think career is a much better way to learn the game. You go at your own pace. the campaign on the other hand once you know hot to play, plays far better just stomping through the missions but you can really only do that understanding the game, buying salvage, limit time spent farming ect.. If you have to spend so much time grinding the story looses all it's pacing and it just becomes background fluff.

[revenantsknight]

Originally posted by onomastikon:

I own this on another distribution platform and am baffled: this game has such great reviews, and the genre and play style should push all my buttons - I love TBS, squad based tactics, and why not mechs!

I am trying to force my way through the writing of the campaign, which I find cringe worthy. The controls and UI seem so counter intuitive, and often buggy (suddenly I select one of my mechs and my turn is over). Endless loading, waiting.

What am I missing?
Should I just forget the campaign and move right into the "career" mode (which I assume is the main sp mode - I'm not interested in multiplayer).

Thanks in advance

I like TBS and squad games, and I think Battletech does a few things that others in my library don't do:
- The emphasis is on the equipment builds, not character XP leveling. Don't get me wrong, I like a good RP-driven game too and experienced pilots are important in Battletech. That said, sometimes I want to play a game that's between heroball and faceless masses, and this fills that space for me.
- Combat isn't nearly as binary as most other squad games where a screwup tends to cost you a fighter and so you spend a lot of energy figuring out how to get in first strike advantage and avoid taking hits. Battletech combats feel less like puzzles to be solved.
- In Career mode at least, Battletech doesn't do much advancement gating and so you can go at your own pace. If you want to take it slower, you can spend time banging around the low difficulty systems, while if you know what you're doing you can quickly spin up to midgame power. This is somewhat less true than Campaign, which doesn't actually have a timer but scales difficulty to story completion status, so pushing the story too quickly can be trouble.

For the writing, I have a high tolerance for the writing being awful because the setting is a hot mess anyway and I knew that going in. If that's a serious issue for you, then yes, Career may be more fun. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the main single player mode - it depends on what you like - but I've spent the majority of my playing time in Career.

Further, I don't really have long loading times or performance issues. Since it's possible lag/performance is at least partially responsible for the control issues you state, control issues may be mitigated by playing a little slower, perhaps, or maybe doing some optimization. There's a performance guide on Steam here that may help. Aside from that, I don't know if the command interface is super well-designed but I don't think it's bad for the genre, and even in cleaner games like XCOM I'll have the odd misclick.

[Werecat101]

What makes me like the game is that yes its a reduced to easier to learn game, well it need to appeal to a wider audience which it does. It sold well for a niche subject game and depending on your point of view is enough game to lead you into a universe and story that was designed to be small groups of mechs fighting each other, if anything the skirmish mode is the closest to the tabletop game lance vs lance with a set value.

why do i say this? I am one of the people that sits and help new arrivals on Rogue tech which is a fantastic mod as are all of the big mods, but if a learning curve is too steep and players need to learn 600 pages of whats and whys before they can play the game it will fail, something that RT suffers is even if you know the vanilla game its a very steep learning curve.

all in all HBS did well they got this just about right in my opinion.

[onomastikon]

Ok thanks.
One of my problems is that the "big FFF robots" that you mention feel kind of small, i don't really get a sense of huge scale so far, maybe that changes. What does rogue mod do that makes the game "what it should have been"?

[HurtfulPlayer97]

Originally posted by onomastikon:

Ok thanks.
One of my problems is that the "big FFF robots" that you mention feel kind of small, i don't really get a sense of huge scale so far, maybe that changes.

The game isn't set in a Kaiju universe. You are not going to see 100m tall mechs. :)

[desrtfox071]

Originally posted by HurtfulPlayer97:

Originally posted by onomastikon:

Ok thanks.
One of my problems is that the "big FFF robots" that you mention feel kind of small, i don't really get a sense of huge scale so far, maybe that changes.

The game isn't set in a Kaiju universe. You are not going to see 100m tall mechs. :)

Right, mechs are big and stompy like tanks ae big, not like buildings are big.

[onomastikon]

Yes obviously, I was expecting 40 to 90 ton humanoid robotic frames.

[desrtfox071]

Originally posted by onomastikon:

Yes obviously, I was expecting 40 to 90 ton humanoid robotic frames.

Yes. That's what is depicted, 20 to 100 ton humanoid-ish mechs. They are actually a little big for clarity in the game compared to how big a mech would be in real life or in canon.

[Magni]

What makes me like this game? Big. Stompy. Mechs.

I mean, do you really need any more reason?