Mechwarrior 5 Tips for BattleTech Veterans

Playing Mechwarrior 5 after having played a lot of BattleTech? Here's a few quick tips to ease the transition from turn based to live action. The guide should be useful for anyone looking to go the other direction, too.

Mechs Can't be Killed as Easily

In BattleTech, if all four of your mechs attack one enemy mech in a single turn, that enemy is going to be seriously hurt. If you've got pilots good enough to do called shots to specific parts, you can take down a mech per turn. If MW5 battles went that way, battles would be over in less than a minute! That wouldn't be fun at all! So, you'll need to hit mech parts a lot more times before they break.

Speed Armor

In BattleTech, particularly at the start of the game, you do a lot of missing because the chances to hit light mechs are low and your pilots don't have much skill. In MW5, the fast mechs are harder to hit, but not all that much harder. I’ve never seen anything official, but apparently weapons do less damage to something that’s moving fast.

Glass Cannons

Mechs have a lot of armor compared to the weapons they have. Helicopters and turrets have almost none: a good blast from a medium laser will finish them off. LRM and SRM carriers go down very easily, too. Early tanks don’t take much, either. The thing is, your allies are controlled by AI. In this game (and many others), AI tends to prioritize whatever has been hurting it. That means that, once the battle gets going, they will likely be prioritizing the mechs that have been shooting at them. You’ll need to prioritize the pesky little bothers yourself or, if a helicopter has gotten above your head where you can’t shoot it, you’ll need to give orders to your squad to take it down. (Or just switch to a different mech.)

Arms Fall Off More

Arms get blasted off a lot in this game. They’ve got a much larger range of fire than torso weapons, so don’t just write off all arm mounted weapons as bad, but you do need to get comfortable with the fact that arms are going to be destroyed in many missions. If you get a fancy, high-tier weapon, you better put it in a torso slot where it will be better protected.

Legs Fall Off Less

While arms are dropping like leaves in the Fall, legs are surprisingly safe. They can certainly get blown off, but I think I’ve seen right and left torsos blasted off more than legs. That makes them pretty safe places to store things like ammo and heat sinks. (Personally, I like to put a heat sink in the head. I think it’s funny to imagine pilots running the mech’s cockpit heater with the windows open to try and keep the engine cool. ;)

Your Commander is Most Important

If a mech in your lance gets destroyed, the pilot may die or the pilot may be able to escape, but the rest of the team fights on. If your own mech goes down, you lose the mission. If your mech has lost all center torso armor, you had better start hanging back! Or better yet, switch to a different mech, then tell the pilot of your old mech to go stand somewhere safe while you press on.

No worries, now. The game will put you in another mech and stick one of your AI allies into the cockpit an instant before it explodes. It's good to be king.

Salvage Isn't the Best Way to Get New Mechs

In BattleTech, buying a complete mech is very expensive while getting pieces and putting them together is fun and pretty easy. In MechWarrior 5, it’s not an effective way to get good mechs. In the early game, when you’re looking for some medium mechs, even maxxing out your salvage shares may not be enough to get a new mech unless you’re doing a mission that gives you a bonus for bad weather. If no mechs drop that you want or can afford, you have to waste all those shares on equipment.

I’ve found it’s far better in MW5 to maximize your cash. Once you get about 8 million saved up, save the game and go on a shopping tour! Go to an industrial hub and see what they have for sale. Be sure to look at the hero mechs but there’s plenty of good “common” mechs out there, too, so don’t ignore them. Oh, and keep an eye out for better pilots, too. If you find nothing in your travels, fall back to your save game and take a different tour.

In fact, after the game goes through the tutorial and initial escape-the-system missions, you’ll be in a good position to do a shopping tour. You certainly need some pilots and it would be good to get another light mech, too, so save the game and check out that industrial hub!

Love Those Heroes!

Hero mechs often have armor that’s extra light weight, special engines, and other perks that allow them to hold more armor/weapons than typical versions (not to mention cooler paint jobs). This is a big boon in a game that limits what you can take by weight! The game is also nice enough to mark where they are in an industrial zone so you can find them quickly.

Be careful with the rare mechs. Typically in video games, rare means better. In MW5, it just means it isn’t a commonly found mech. They can certainly be excellent mechs, but so can the not-rare mechs. Don’t let the salesman fool you into buying a mech with the old “be the only mechwarrior in your sector with this mech” line!

Note: hero mechs show up even if you don’t own the Heroes of the Inner Sphere DLC.

Weapon Slot Differences

You’ve got some more freedom in BattleTech to mount weapons. BT will tell you that a given section can mount some number of weapons in a given class, say 3 energy weapons. If you want to cram 3 PPCs in there (and the torso is big enough), you can do it. In MW5, there are slots with size ratings. A heavy energy weapon like a PPC requires a heavy energy weapon slot. A heavy energy slot can also hold lighter weapons, but small slots can’t hold heavier weapons.

Otherwise, the games are pretty similar. You can still put heat sinks and ammo anywhere. The weapon in your right arm will fire just as well whether the ammo is along side the weapon in the right arm or if it's stored clear down in the left leg. The heat from the weapon can exit out the left arm just as well as the right, too. There is a difference in that BattleTech treats small weapons (machine guns, flamers, and small lasers) as its own classification while MW5 puts MGs in ballistics and the other two into energy, but it doesn't factor in much.

Parallel Repair

In BattleTech, you can only repair one mech at a time. In Mechwarrior 5, you've got enough mechanics to work on all your mechs at the same time. However, you can upgrade your ship in BattleTech to make repairs go faster, which isn't possible in Mechwarrior 5.

Also, if you start your repairs outside of the core worlds in MW5, repairs will take longer and cost more. Sometimes a LOT more!

Target Locking

LRMs (and certain, rare types of SRMs) require lock on, which isn’t in BattleTech at all. Once you get lock, your missiles will steer toward the target wherever it goes! You can lose target lock if the target goes behind a hill, ridge, or building or if you switch to a new target. Also, some weird bug will make you lose target lock on VTOL aircraft as they come toward you.

If you lose lock on, missiles will go toward the last known position of the target - so you can still hit turrets and sometimes tanks if you lose your lock. If you shoot missiles without lock on, the missiles will try to go vaguely toward where you’re pointed.

Environmental Heat

Terrain effects in Mechwarrior 5 seem similar to BattleTech on paper. For instance, your weapons will cool about 15% faster in snowy terrain than in normal terrain. However, in practice, the terrain may not matter as much. In BT your pilots are shooting more or less constantly, but in MW5 you will often take the time to aim at least a little and maneuver around. That won't apply if you're in some LRM boat, spamming away at your locked-on target, but you'll likely be more careful with PPCs and large lasers.

By the way, those DLC moons (?) with rocks flying in the sky seem to count as normal terrain as far as heat is concerned. They aren't airless, so your mech won't be treated like a thermos bottle.

[HeadHunter996]

YAML, and it's add-on mods, overhaul MW5's salvage and 'mech-lab to behave similarly to BT(pc) or MWO and adds slots for TT hardware like better sensors, non-slandered engine heat-sink kits, up-graded gyros, alternate cockpits, traits per 'mech history (or memes, Urbanmechs just don't die with YAML), and so much more it's best to go to YAML's mod page for all the changes and additions

[notCyke]

For comparison, in classic Btech, weapons cycle once every 10 seconds, so in one turn a 'Mech can travel as far as its speed (for that movement type) would allow in 10 seconds, and each weapon can be fired once.

In MW5, weapon cycle times are much faster, have double the ammunition per ton, and can be aimed more easily to attain higher hit rates. However, armor values are all doubled. The armor doubling more than compensates for the increased lethality of the weaponry, which preserves the length of the battles.

[pyr0kid]

i recommend dual heavy rifles for headshotting.

[PSG - Neoxa]

Salvage isn't the best way to get New Mechs?

Try arm your mech with multiple A/C and snipe s*** out of everyones cockpit. Tried and true tactic since MW2

[Mo¡stDreams]

Yet Another Mech Lab, and its weapons mod... now go see how that compares.

[BigTimeGamer]

wait i just thought about this
is there really no map's that take place on a moon/Vacuum
that was one of the terrain type's i had more fun with in battletech
if so that's disappointing
i like a challenge and that was one of the best terrain types for a fun challenge

[Spirit_OK]

Speed armor confirmed - there are hidden Evasion and Reduction stats that depend on the mech class, mech speed, lateral component of this speed relative to the shooter (!), veterancy level of the enemy/lancemate AI and whatnot. An "elite" enemy in a Locust running around can eat up multiple AC/20 shots without any noticable damage. There are mods to fix this annoying issue and make combat more fair (and more deadly - for everyone!).

[Intwidamala]

Yea tell me. So every time I have to talk to them I raise hell, but to no avale. It just gets slower it seams.

[Zloth]

ADSL? Oh no no no! Roll the clock back another decade. This game was played over a modem. Probably a 1200baud one. That would translate to a speed of 0.00015MB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplayer_BattleTech:_EGA

[Intwidamala]

(continued) Then we had to and are still dealing with century-link bullsh** that they call internet connection of 6 MB ADS L down to 3 MB at which they have kept it at for 27 yrs now. while ALL surrounding areas have 92 Gigs FIBER OPTICS. But as for the Genie network it wasn't even an option do to the speeds here ADSL is so slow I don't think it is used any where else in the US and maybe even the world now, but here in this 40 mile square area that is locked to all other providers" I know they HATE me cuz I pull NO punches for them and I give it Full of the most beautiful cuss words I know!! And I'm a retired US Ranger of 23 yrs 1973 - 1996 when soldiers were trained to be killers and women would never see combat and no one cared about the words you spoke.