BattleTech lore spans over 1,100 years of wars, events, people, and space exploration, from an alternate version of the Cold War era to the far-flung future. Harebrained Schemes' BattleTech is set in the year 3025, a critical epoch where humanity has been in fractious decline due to centuries of continual warfare with no end in sight.

Like many games that come from tabletop beginnings, BattleTech world-building is split between a variety of novels, sourcebooks, and other supplements—enough to satisfy any lorehound for a lifetime. Here's a brief smattering of recommended readings to really get you invested in the universe of BattleTech.

The Warrior Trilogy

(Warrior: En Garde, Warrior: Riposte, Warrior: Coupé)

This series takes place across the 3020's and establishes a number of characters and organizations that become continually important for the BattleTech timeline. Written by Michael A. Stackpole (who also wrote the special novellas released with HBS' BattleTech), these books deal with the political and military machinations taking place in the core of humanity known as the Inner Sphere. There are also awesome mech battles, of course.

The Blood of Kerensky Trilogy

(Lethal Heritage, Blood Legacy, Lost Destiny)

Another era-defining series, these three books capture a picture of the Inner Sphere and its warring Great Houses immediately before the apocalyptic Clan Invasion and their response to the threat of total annihilation. Continuing with the approach of the Warrior trilogy, Stackpole introduces new scions of previous heroes and villains and advances the political landscape. The Clanners and the strangeness of their society and obvious military might are also introduced here.

Illusions of Victory 

A personal favorite, Illusions of Victory skips forward over a decade after the start of the Clan Invasion and centers on the game world of Solaris VII. Solaris is a political microcosm of the rest of the Inner Sphere, and rumblings of civil war within neighboring Great Houses has everyone on edge. This book is notable for its entirely standalone nature, being supported by existing lore but not requiring previous knowledge to become immersed. It's a good sampling of everything the BattleTech universe has to offer in terms of action, suspense, intrigue, and giant robot duels. —Ryan Burrell

Technical Readout: 3025

Nominally a resource for tabletop gameplay stats, TRO 3025 is chock full of lore write-ups and full page illustrations for mechs, vehicles, and even spaceships present in the BattleTech universe. Many of these military assets are downgraded remnants from the glory days of the ancient Star League, with in-world deployment histories and notable pilots. This book established the format for all later Technical Readouts as a mixture of mechanics and storytelling. 

Sarna.net

No article about BattleTech lore would be complete without mentioning the definitive BattleTech wiki, Sarna.net. I made heavy use of Sarna in researching story elements for the BattleTech: Restoration campaign, and it's quickly become one of my favorite resources for deep-diving into the lore and history of the setting. —Andrew McIntosh 

Ryan Burrell is a systems and UI/UX designer at Harebrained Schemes, working primarily on its combat gameplay and MechLab experience. He's been enthralled with BattleTech for over 20 years after grabbing his first Technical Readout at the age of 10. His favorite mech is the appropriately named "Awesome." Andrew McIntosh is the principal writer of BattleTech, and has been writing games for HBS since Shadowrun: Dragonfall. His favorite mech is the humble Urbie, a 30-ton trashcan with an enormous gun and stubby little legs.

Editor's Note: You can find many of these books on Amazon or eBay, although they vary in rarity, format, and corresponding price.

When I first sampled Battletech at last year's Gamescom, I learned, pretty quickly, not to underestimate its Death From Above attack. Both Chris and Evan have since regaled us with hands-on tales of warring mechs and unique internal structures—but I've equally enjoyed learning why Battletech's world is at war. 

To this end, the game's latest trailer is story-focused. Here's franchise creator Jordan Weisman, studio manager Mitch Gitelman and game director Mike McCain on Battletech's civil war, totalitarian regimes, and how players are encouraged to craft their own tales in-game:

Above, Weisman suggests Battletech's overarching narrative helps contextualise its reputation building mechanics, and the ways in which players work for different houses in order to succeed. 

"It’s a wonderful way to get a true, classic Battletech story," says Weisman. "This really opens it up for the player to extend their own story of their mercenary unit, in whichever direction they want to go."

Choose your own path, should you desire, when Battletech lands on April 24.

The new trailer for Harebrained's turn-based tactical combat game Battletech sets up a not-exactly-new tale of deposed backwater nobility going to war to reclaim their lost throne. But you're not the noble—you're the hired gun taking up arms for the cause not because you're a believer but because you've got bills to pay. It's a fairly bare-bones setup, but as an excuse to hustle around in hundreds of tons of stomping, fire-spitting death robots for cash. It'll do. More relevantly to our immediate interests, the trailer also brings us a release date of April 24.   

"We’re massively thankful to our Kickstarter backers and fans of the MechWarrior legacy," Harebrained co-founder and Battletech creator Jordan Weisman said. "Without their patience, dedication and support, this modern turn-based Battletech wouldn’t soon be launching on PC and Mac." 

One of the reasons the story isn't such a big deal, as Harebrained explained a couple of weeks ago, is that as a mercenary commander, the problems of this particular princess are not necessarily your own. It will presumably serve you well to back up her claim—a regular paycheck and first salvage rights may not be the most exciting way to earn a living, but it's better than watching the repo man tow away your Warhammer—but you're free to wander amongst the stars, taking contracts to earn space-bucks and glory as you see fit. 

It's an approach that can really give a game like this legs if it's handled well, and it's showing signs that it will: We said in a January preview that it's "shaping up to be a great tactical combat game, and an absorbing mercenary sim." Which is no promise of anything, but definitely promising.

I don't remember if I ever finished the old Mechwarrior game from back in the day, but I poured an awful lot of hours into it because it was an open-ended game: Players could pursue the main quest, or opt to live the simple life of a merc, cruising the galaxy, taking on jobs, and trying not to die. Harebrained's upcoming Battletech will offer the same sort of option by way of a "mercenary" simulation layer that takes place "a level above" the battlefield simulation. 

"It's an open-ended game, which means you can fly wherever you want, and do whichever missions you want," studio manager Mitch Gitelman explains in the video. 

"Escort missions, securing bases, steal things and bring them back—there's a huge variety of kinds of things that really keep you very dynamic on the battlefield, and facing very different kinds of tactical challenges," Battletech creator and studio co-founder Jordan Weisman says. 

Along with choosing the jobs you want to take on, there will also be day-to-day events aboard the ship that will have to dealt with. Some of it will be routine—recovery, repairs, upgrades—but others will be trickier to manage. "Three weeks into space, two of your mechwarriors get into a fight. Do you break up the fight? Do you let it go? Do you take somebody's side? And every decision you make has repercussions," Gitelman says.

"There are all these interlocking systems, and touching one affects another one. It's a giant engine that you are manipulating." 

The strategic simulation appears pleasantly deep and while repetition is a risk with randomly-generated scenarios, I hope that Battletech will offer up enough variety to keep that at bay for at least, say, 100 hours or so. (Maybe not quite that much, but you know what I mean.)   

Battletech is currently expected to be out next month, and is available for preorder on Steam and GOG, or directly from Paradox.

The first of three new Battletech trailers showcasing the challenges facing giant fighting robots and the people who drive them in the war-torn Inner Sphere of 3025 rolled out today, as Harebrained Schemes announced that preorders are now live, and that the game will be out sometime in April. 

The video is a fairly basic overview of Mechwarrior combat, which Battletech creator Jordan Weisman describes as similar in many ways to that of XCOM. However, "the tactical challenges are very different, " he says: Battlemechs are massive machines that pack a tremendous punch, but they also generate huge amounts of heat that has to be dealt with, and they're like a tortoise flipped onto its back if they fall over.   

"There's all sorts of different kinds of tactical combinations between the mechs and the mechwarriors, and what their different capabilities are. Do I have, this one is going to be my long-rage scouter and then be able to fire in remotely? Am I trying to do brawlers who can really go in and use melee?" 

We took Battletech for a spin in January and found it to be a very promising sci-fi mercenary sim, at the tactical level and in the overall strategic layer: Damaged mechs cost money, dead pilots bring down morale, and occasional shipboard events—"mini choose-your-own-adventure digressions with consequences for morale," and thus pilot effectiveness—will have to be handled as well.  

Battletech is available for preorder now on Steam, GOG, or directly from publisher Paradox Interactive, for $40/£35/€40, or $10 more for the "digital deluxe" edition with wallpapers, the soundtrack, and a digital artbook. 

Dekker has fallen over. His 30-metre-tall mech is prone at a desert crossroads, flanked on two sides by canyon walls that do not—it turns out—prevent him from being shelled by artillery. I’d sent him in because his mech is the most armoured: his job was to tie up enemy firepower while my quicker mechs flanked through a lowland forest to the south.

I’m commanding a lance—a squad of four mechs—featuring designs and loadouts that’ll be familiar if you’ve ever played a MechWarrior game. BattleTech pulls the series back to its tabletop roots, focusing on strategic combat between mercenary outfits who dip in and out of star-spanning future wars to turn a profit. In this specific instance, I’ve been tasked with blowing up valuable buildings in two separate locations. As Dekker and another heavy mech approach the gates head-on, I’ve set up a flanking strike to eliminate the power generator sustaining the base’s turrets. At least, that’s the plan. 

A bit of faulty reconnaissance on my part means that I didn’t realise that the enemy base defences don’t need line of sight to open up on my heaviest mech. Similarly, while years of MechWarrior games have left me wise to the dangers of overheating, I didn’t consider stability. Dekker’s armour repels the worst of the missiles that rain down on him from the far side of the hill, but their explosive impact is enough to send him off balance and, ultimately, crashing down to the floor. 

It’ll take a two-part plan to save him. In the forest to the south, my two flanking mechs really need to take out that power generator. And Dekker’s wingmate—no small mech herself—needs to take out the enemy mech that is acting as a spotter for that distant artillery. Neither of these things go quite to plan.

Although you have a degree of real-time control over your mechs as they explore the battlefield, contact with an enemy causes the game to shift into a turn-based system based on each pilot’s initiative. In each phase of the fight you can choose a mech to activate and perform a move action followed by an attack. It’s a little like XCOM, but much more granular in a way that feels like a tabletop game. I choose one of my flanking mechs and instruct her to use her jump jets to reach a higher vantage point, risking her heat sinks in order to take the shot that might save Dekker. She opens up her medium lasers on the entirely stationary, very large generator—and misses.

Dekker takes another round of fire and loses his mech’s left arm. He stands and opens fire with all of his remaining weaponry, tearing chunks out of the enemy walker but overheating in the process. The next round of artillery fire incapacitates him—he has a chance to crawl away from the wreckage alive, but I won’t find out until the end of the mission (had I chosen to eject him rather than attack, I could’ve ensured his survival). 

In response, Dekker’s wingmate charges the enemy mech and performs a melee attack—a first for a BattleTech game. Mechs don’t have melee weapons, and there’s nothing elegant about ramming them into each other—this is a sprinting shoulder-charge that smashes catastrophically into the enemy. I get lucky—the enemy pilot is killed, and their mech collapses. The artillery opens up again, but it won’t get to fire after that. I move another mech into a flanking position, and this time they can hit the broad side of a power generator. 

There’s loads to like about BattleTech as a purely tactical game: you’ve got a lot of control over your squad’s positioning and weapon options, and achieving an advantageous position means carefully paying attention to altitude, heat and, yes, stability. This single combat encounter is a straightforward example of the drama that the game generates on the fly. Later on, I discover the thrill of using jump jets to deliver fatal drop attacks on tanks like an expensive metal Mario, and conduct the rest of the mission in this manner.

It’s the broader strategic layer that has me excited for BattleTech, however. The events of this mission are shaped by—and shape—a much bigger and more open-ended attempt to earn a dime as a mech-commanding space mercenary. For example: while Dekker-the-pilot was unable to escape the burning wreck of his mech, the mech itself was not completely unsalvageable. Yet the specific damage it took will need repairing, and if there were any expensive guns bolted to that left arm—well, it’s gone. That’s a potentially expensive loss that’ll need accounting for when I decide to take on my next mission. Also, you know, Dekker’s dead, and that’ll probably have an impact on morale.

Back on the ship (initially a small Leopard-class dropship, later a massive upgradable hulk called the Argo) there are loads of decisions to make. Each of your pilots has a randomly-generated personal history, which influences their outlook and connections. You’ve got your own baggage too—you create your main character through a questionnaire at the beginning of the game that reminds me a little of the Mount & Blade series. 

These factors influence the types of missions that will be made available to you beyond the confines of the story-led critical path. When you take on a mission, you can choose to emphasise payment, salvage rights, or forego either to make factions like you more. Salvage rights are deliciously specific, too—what you get depends on the outcome of the battle that is subsequently fought, so if you’ve chosen to take your payment in the form of scrap then you’d better be sure that you only blow the bits off enemy mechs that you don’t want to keep. 

You might choose to take missions in tundras or wetlands where the environment can be used to keep your mechs cool and able to sustain their firepower for longer, or head to the desert with a more lightly-armed contingent that can exploit the temperature to their own advantage. You might try to curry favour with one of the great houses of the BattleTech universe, or slum it with pirates and steer clear of interplanetary war.

You’ve got loads of freedom to refit each mech to your specific needs, but these changes take up both money and time. A week-long refit will be broken down into subtasks, and if you choose to interrupt work to get a mech into the field in a hurry you may find that your engineers have finished fitting the new gun but not, say, loaded its ammo. As time passes you’ll occasionally be presented with shipboard events, mini choose-your-own-adventure digressions with consequences for morale. And morale, in turn, influences your pilots’ performance in battle. 

There’s a lot of XCOM to this structure, but unlike XCOM the stakes in BattleTech aren’t quite as high. Certainly your employers would like you to succeed, but you’re not trying to save the world—you’re trying to make a living. Taking heroic risks (like, for example, wandering your biggest mech unsupported into the line of fire) isn’t always the right call. To reflect this, missions don’t have a straightforward success or failure state: if you choose to retreat from a mission with only half your objectives completed, that’s not necessarily an outright disaster. Depending on exactly what you managed to achieve, you may come away with partial payment and a slight knock to your reputation but—crucially—a ship full of pilots who are still alive and mechs that don’t need expensive repairs, which is its own form of success. 

This feels like underexplored space for this type of game. I’m really taken with the idea of a campaign system that discourages save-scumming by giving you more freedom to make the best of a bad situation. And the detailed links between BattleTech’s galaxy-spanning ‘sim game’ and on-the-ground combat are something I’d like to see much more of—being a good space-war businessperson isn’t just a matter of making the right macro-scale decisions, but of optimising your efficiency on the battlefield, too. There’s loads of potential for interesting stories to come from these systems—and, yes, like XCOM, you can rename all of your pilots after your mates. And apologise to them in person when your bad decisions result in them falling over and exploding.

Whether you enjoy turn based games or a good RTS, 2018 will present some interesting options. Naturally, the brace of current 4X games like Civilization 6, Stellaris and Endless Space 2 will continue to receive expansions and updates throughout the year, but there are a bunch of new titles to look forward to besides. Here are the ones we're most excited about, and a few that we can expect to see appearing in 2019 and beyond.

Frozen Synapse 2

Developer: Mode 7 | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site

Frozen Synapse was a sleek, streamlined tactical squad combat game released in 2011. A tight variety of weapon types and smart asynchronous multiplayer helped it to stand out, now the sequel plans to couch these combat encounters in a procedurally generated city populated by embattled corporations. As in the original game, you give orders to your neon operatives in five second bursts by drawing out pathing and aiming instructions, then you press 'go' and watch your orders play out. The core combat is proven, but we'll have to see how the addition of an overworld relic-hunting metagame builds on those fine foundations. The digitised cut-glass cities already look gorgeous.

A Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia

Developer: The Creative Assembly | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site

Total War fans waiting for a return to history could be in for a treat as The Creative Assembly debut the "Saga" series. It's a sizeable Total War game with a much tighter focus on a particular flashpoint in history, namely the aftermath of Alfred the Great's victory against the Vikings at the battle of Edington. Three factions are poised to fight for control of the British isles, but the country is rendered at a much greater scale than we've seen before in a Total War. Take a look at the map at the end of the video below and you can see how the game intends to zoom in and explore the territory in detail.

BattleTech

Developer: Harebrained Schemes | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site

We like everything we've seen so far of this turn based mech combat game. You spend half of your time engaging enemies with a squad of highly customisable mechs, and half managing your mercenary organisation in a tough universe where betrayal is a constant risk. Learn more in our interview at the PC Gaming Show, where we learned more about your home base and the strategic metagame that binds your missions together. BattleTech/MechWarrior creator Jordan Weisman is onboard, so long-term fans of the BattleTech universe can expect a detailed and authentic take on the universe.

Into the Breach

Developer: Subset Games | Release date: TBA | Link: Official site

It is a good year to be a mech fan. Into the Breach, from the developers of FTL, doesn't have an official release date yet even though from what we've played it could come out tomorrow and be brilliant. It's a turn based tactical combat game set over a tightly limited turn count. In each encounter you have to do is survive an onslaught of giant creatures burrowing up from beneath the planet's surface, but where many strategy games rely on dice rolls and happenstance to generate drama and tactical dilemmas, Into the Breath shows you everything. You know exactly how and where each enemy is going to strike next, and how much damage they will do. Then it's up to you to craft a perfect series of attacks to push enemies around the battlefield and blow them up for sweet XP.

Phoenix Point

Developer: Snapshot Games | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site

The creator of the original X-Com, Julian Gollop, is returning to the genre he helped create with an exciting modern take on the formula. Bodypart targeting, mutating enemies and a grittier look all help separate Phoenix Point from Firaxis' recent XCOM reboots. Soldiers will have willpower and endurance stats to model how stressed they feel when they get shot by alien crabs with miniguns for arms, and there are multiple human factions with their own tech preferences. Of course you can expect to repurpose crab tech for your own purposes, in true X-Com fashion.

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition

Developer: Microsoft | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site

This could be a dream remaster of one of the best loved PC series ever. The art has been updated to look good at modern resolutions, the population cap has been increased, you can zoom out, pathfinding has been adjusted, you can attack-move, there's an "enhanced orchestral soundtracK" and more. The package will include the original campaign and the scenario editor. The only drawback is the game is releasing "exclusively to Window 10 PCs" according to the Microsoft Store page. Hopefully we'll see it coming to a wider range of PCs later.

Wargroove

Developer: Chucklefish | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site 

This will look very familiar to Advance War players, but we're sorely lacking bright turn based tactical games like this. Wargroove's four factions are depicted in vivid pixel art, and include exciting unit types like 'dog' and a very excited archer. Careful positioning and adjacency bonuses are everything in the Advance War formula.

Abandon Ship

Developer: Fireblade Software | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site

An FTL-esque oceanic romp set in a procedurally generated seascape full of pirates and the odd tentacle monster. You order your crew around your vessel during sea battles as they load cannons, fix holes in the hub, and fend off boarding attempts. Meanwhile you have to target your enemy using a range of attacks, from cannons to chain shot that ruins sails. Between battles you navigate between ports to take on missions, earn bounties and upgrade your ship.

Phantom Doctrine

Developer: Creative Forge Games | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site 

If the phrase 'Cold War XCOM' piques your interest, keep an eye on this tactical squad game in which you command a team of agents. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sabotage opposing nations, recover intel and flip enemy agents. Stealth is preferable of course, but you can charge in with a machinegun if the circumstances warrant. There is no in-game footage yet, but the first screenshots are full of moody lighting and period outfits.

Looking further ahead

Age of Empires 4: Easily one of the most exciting  strategy games on the horizon. A slim concept-art only teaser trailer reveal suggests that it could be some way off, but genre-specialists Relic Entertainment are developing the project, It's a great opportunity to bring back a bastion of PC gaming.

Warhammer 40,000: Gladius—Relics of War: In the grim darkness of the future there is war on hexes, where futuristic units take it in turn to annihilate one another for the glory of their respective factions. Warhammer 40K stalwarts the Ultramarines, Orks, Imperial Guard and Necrons  duke it out in this follow up to Slitherine's Sanctus Reach and Armageddon.

Forged Battalion: Forged Battalion is a colourful RTS from the vets at Petroglyph. You forge your battalion using an extensive unit customisation suite before taking them to the field to battle The Collective. It's due to enter Early Access soon but the final release date is as yet unknown.

Phantom Brigade. Another mech game—hooray! This one features turn-based battles in destructible environments and, true to the genre, heavy war machine customisation between missions.

Above: Raw gameplay footage of a base capture campaign mission I played.

If all of your pilots die in BattleTech, you don't lose. It's a big setback for your mercenary company, but hey, there's always more procedurally-generated mechwarriors willing to jump into the cockpit for cash.

If all of your mechs die in BattleTech, you also don't lose. It's a massive setback, or as game director Mike McCain tells me, "Losing an entire mech is an order of magnitude worse than losing a mechwarrior." Still, even if all your hardware gets blown up by lasers you can still take out a loan, buy some more mechs, and try to grind a few missions to pay off your debt. "People are easier to replace than the mechs, as horrible as that sounds," says McCain.

BattleTech's only loss condition is bankruptcy. As the leader of a mercenary outfit, your focus in the singleplayer campaign is on helping an ousted leader, Lady Kamea Arano, to liberate her people. But as you're lining up long-range missile shots against Arano's enemies, you'll also have to consider the economics of running a freelance team of pilots, mechanics, and medics and keeping your mechs, equipment, and ship in shape. 

Inside your spaceship, the Argo, there's a room past the MechBay, navigation console, and other stations where you can examine your budget. Here, everything gets tallied up: the cost of ship upgrades, mech upkeep, and pay for your pilots, doctors, and mech technicians. It's not a granular, sim-like Excel sheet or anything—for example, you set a single, shared pay rate for all your pilots, rather than typing out salaries for each character. 

But unlike other games in the genre, like XCOM 2, nearly everything in BattleTech costs credits. Repairing your mechs. Moving your ship on the galactic map. Even using a hyperjump costs extra, like passing through a cosmic tollbooth. Worrying about your bottom line might encourage you to build mechs that don't expend lots of ammo, because every missile or autocannon round you fire in BattleTech costs money to replace. If you're low on funds or underpaying your MechWarriors, you'll also encounter a set of special events on the Argo.

You'll also have to weigh pay against salvage and your reputation with the factions you take missions from. In a 'negotiation' phase before each mission, you have a chance to set how many credits and how much salvage you'd like to earn. Demand less salvage and less pay, and you'll earn more reputation, a resource that will ultimately drive factions to trust you with harder jobs, or offer discounts at stores on planets they control.

Staying in the black

Although economic judgments are woven into BattleTech, managing your finances isn't meant to be punishing. "We don't intend this kind of financial failure to be constantly looming over your Mercenary career at every step," explains McCain. "The game is about growing your mercenary company, and helping the Restoration to liberate her people. Financial ruin should lurk in the distance—and incentivize players to improve their management efforts if it catches up to them—but the game isn't designed to be a constant battle for financial solvency."

As McCain says, you'll be warned well in advance if you're running low on credits. "We want to provide plenty of opportunities for the player to recover—whether by firing some MechWarriors, paying your crew less, selling off extra Mechs and gear, taking out a loan, or taking more challenging and lucrative contracts," he says.

What's interesting to me about the way BattleTech treats money is the way it influences the game's structure. Because bankruptcy is the only way your mercenary career can end, you can actually fail the main questline of the campaign and still continue playing, taking missions from other factions. 

That main questline has you fighting on behalf of Lady Arano, leader of the Arano Restoration. She's been driven out of power by an authoritarian group known as The Directorate, led by her uncle. You'll probably want to help her out—not only will you miss out on the game's biggest story beats, but the Restoration pays really well, Harebrained Schemes tells me. If you do choose to ignore these "Restoration Missions," you'll see more and more planets swallowed up by the Directorate on BattleTech's galactic map. "If the story campaign is lost, the Restoration is extinguished and all Directorate-controlled planets become travel-able—and the Directorate becomes a possible client for mercenary missions in the game," says McCain. 

In short: if you let the bad guys win, you can start working for them. Don't expect a bespoke 'Directorate campaign' to spring out of the ground if this happens, but it's still neat and unexpected that BattleTech's campaign structure is this malleable. "It's a significantly a bigger game than our Shadowrun games," says McCain, and then studio co-founder Mitch Gitelman, laughing, takes it a step further: "'Significantly' is an understated word. This is the biggest, most complex game we've ever made as a studio."

Harebrained Schemes isn't comfortable estimating how long a campaign will take to complete for an average player, from the hour I spent with it, BattleTech reads as a strategy RPG that you'll be able to grind pretty freely, taking procedurally-generated assassination, escort, base defense, base attack, or capture missions from the other factions that populate the map.

And while mod tools are off the table for the studio, that doesn't mean that BattleTech won't have any mods at all. "We are not offering mod support. We are also doing nothing to prevent it," says McCain.

I need to spend a full day or two with it to see how BattleTech's systems fit together, but my hope is that they congeal into something less like XCOM with robots, and more like a dynamic tabletop campaign made digital.

"You can't take the AI to school at this point," Harebrained Schemes' co-founder Mitch Gitelman tells me when I ask how Battletech's AI has evolved throughout its beta phase. "Now the AI takes you to school." 

Two minutes later and one woefully misjudged siege sees me not only blowing my chance of taking down a hostile Panther PNT-9R, but also has me stranded and outnumbered behind enemy lines. Two minutes after that and my Shadow Hawk, piloted by my interminably reckless and renegade soldier Kraken, has its left arm torn off. 

In response, I unleash a volley of close-range rockets and missiles that deal some pretty hefty damage to my aggressor's torso. But, as the setting sun envelopes the sandswept Mars-like 'Red City' battlefield in a fiery orange glow, the enemy's formidable Awesome AWS-8T mech steps in and swats me aside. I'm down and Gitelman is right: I've been schooled.    

Battletech, for those uninitiated, is a 33-year-old military strategy tabletop board game that's since been treated to several videogame interpretations in the intervening period. Most of the latter have fallen under MechWarrior's canopy which, despite taking place within the overarching Battletech universe, have historically tended towards action in the face of their source material's turn-based strategy. 

Battletech as we know it here pays closer deference to the original tabletop. It was successfully crowdfunded to the tune of $2,785,537 in 2015, having asked for just $250,000.

Gitelman's allusions to educating yourself by way of defeat in Battletech are important. During my brief foray into its single player Skirmish mode, I admittedly leaned on luck as much as I did considered strategy—yet there was always something to be gleaned from failure. 

Perhaps I hadn't paid enough attention to my odds of landing a ranged attack, or maybe I hadn't considered pulling out wide so as to take advantage of peripheral cover. Was it the case that sprinting further into the fight would've improved my chances of maintaining line of sight—or should I have hung back and let the enemy come to me? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and in Battletech understanding where you go wrong, and you will go wrong, is key to improving. 

Despite the bout of ill-conceived misadventure outlined above, Gitelman encourages me to throw caution to the wind in Skirmish mode, as this is the safest place to crash and burn, away from the game's less-forgiving multiplayer forums. The margin for error is just as slim here, granted, however losing a pilot, or worse, a mech within the relatively consequence-less confines of single player is far preferable than falling to anonymous fighters online. Gitelman tells me that repairs and pilot reassignment cost money in the game's multiplayer, so I'm  relieved to be off the hook scot-free in this instance.

During my second run, I discover that individual positions in my staggered four-slotted attack can be held back so as to leverage certain mechs back-to-back. I find this allows my lighter machine to flank and draw out heavier offenders, in turn leaving them exposed to my harder-hitters. I then charge down the central thoroughfare with flamethrowers, rockets and rail guns as I proceed to throw just about everything I have at my foes. The drawback to my most powerful offence, though, is limited ammo. It's at this point that Gitelman mentions 'Death From Above'.

As Fraser outlined in his impressions earlier this year, Battletech allows players to pit mechs against one another with their fists in close proximity—however, Death From Above lets you leap into the air before crashing down upon nearby enemies below. Beyond the overwhelming damage this causes your adversaries, watching a mech propel itself skyward by virtue of its boosters jets before executing such an overwhelming maneuver is a sight to behold. 

The trade off for doing so sees you destabilised and overheated—the latter of which temporarily paralises your mech. Lingering too long in the former status is even more threatening, however, as you then run the risk of being toppled. This in turn allows enemies to "call a shot" on you, which is as devastating in practice as it sounds. Gitelman moreover stresses that Death From Above might be best suited as a last resort, given the fact it damages the internal structure of your mech's legs in the process.

With this, and from what we've seen from its backer beta, Battletech is in great shape. It's come on leaps and bounds since what Fraser reported on in May, and has seen its interface frequently tweaked and adjusted to help players understand the layout of the battlefield along the way. It's also added breathtaking attacks such as Death From Above. 

Battletech is still without a hard release date, having been recently delayed into 2018. That said, I'm nevertheless confident Gitelman and his Hairbrained team know what they're doing. With new planets, new weapons, and new mechs planned down the line, fans and newcomers to the series alike have got plenty to look forward to.

Harebrained Schemes' turn-based tactical combat game Battletech has never had a firmed-up launch date, but as we noted with the release of the debut trailer in May, it was expected to be out sometime this year. Today the studio pushed it into "early 2018," however, saying that the delay will give developers "the time they need to deliver the type of quality experience the company is known for." 

"Throughout development our Backers have been clear: ‘Don’t rush it, just make it great.’ and we have taken that advice to heart," Harebrained Schemes CEO and Battletech creator Jordan Weisman said in a Kickstarter update. "HBS, Paradox, and our Backers all share a deeply personal attachment to this project and we are committed to delivering a game that not only meets the high expectations of our Backers and fans but introduces BattleTech to a new generation of players." 

Weisman said Battletech continues to make "solid progress," and that the open-ended mercenary campaign "loop" is now playable. "We’ve made a ton of progress on all the component pieces of the game and this phase of development is all about bringing them together—the core combat game, the mercenary simulation aboard the Argo, the single-player story and cinematics, the open-ended mercenary mission system, the ‘Mech customization system," he wrote. "It’s a lot of stuff and it’s exciting to see it all getting stitched together and 'upleveled' with art, audio, UI, and writing." 

Later this week, Harebrained will roll out a new update to the Battletech beta available to backers featuring "gameplay changes, AI upgrades, balance changes, and interface enhancements based upon the reams of useful feedback" from the community, while a following update will enable PvP combat. Full details of the first update will be released when it goes live, but the "highlights" are listed below. 

• Evasion, Sensor Lock, and Evasive Move have received major revisions.
• Morale has been replaced with a new system intended to reduce the snowball effect of early game advantages.
• Weapon balance has been tuned on a variety of weapons.
• Crits are more frequent and powerful. Components and ammo now require only one crit to be destroyed, while weapons become damaged on the first crit (+2 Difficulty to-hit) and destroyed on the second.
• A/C damage has been reduced (previous: 25/50/75/100, current: 25/45/60/100) for AC2, 5, 10, and 20 respectively.
• Global heat has been tuned down by about 10%.
• Water doesn't increase heat dissipation as much (previous: 200%, current: 150%)
• Stability damage accumulates slower and also bleeds slower, and in larger discrete chunks.
• MechWarriors now have two abilities, which increases their usefulness and flexibility.
• An eyeball icon appears on enemy units if they will have LOS on you after you make the move you’re plotting.    

 Beyond these gameplay mechanics, this beta update also includes:

• A big, tasty update to AI that includes enemies using MechWarrior abilities, making called shots on prone or shut down units, using Death From Above, and generally messing up your life.
• A Settings Menu that allows you to change your settings and remap your keyboard shortcuts. (Currently only available from the Main Menu.)
• Some UI changes/enhancements both in combat and the skirmish setup screens.