May 4, 2018

BATTLETECH

Following Chris' enthusiastic BattleTech review, Evan sits down with Harebrained Schemes' Mitch Gitelman and Mike McCain to talk about the game's reception, incoming bug fixes, and what the studio might explore in future expansions.

PC Gamer: BattleTech's been out for a little more than a week. How do you guys feel?

Mitch Gitelman, studio co-founder: Our heads and our hearts are full. Put it that way. [laughs] We’re not relaxed, I’ll tell you that much. We’re not sitting down and smoking cigars and high-fiving each other.

Mike McCain, game director: Yeah. Launch is always a roller-coaster of emotions. The number one thing, though, is just that there’s a sense of accomplishment, and there’s a sense of—

MG: Duty!

MM: Reward? All the incredible stories people are sharing, it’s incredibly fulfilling. And then there’s a sense of duty, a sense of what’s next. How are we going to keep on building on the success? That’s been the arc of our journey over the last week, culminating with that Kickstarter update. All right, we’ve been working on this game for two and a half years. It’s out there and it’s amazing. We’re hearing a lot about what was done well and we’re hearing a lot about the places where people do still have some feedback. We’ve been synthesizing that, and now we’re jumping back into the fray with a rich plan for what’s next.

I think some folks have this perception that you ship a game and everybody goes on vacation.

MG: Yeah, no.

The way we describe it internally is we just ran a marathon to get to the starting gate. And now, finally, we can start in earnest, growing this thing from the platform that we built.

How do you feel about the commercial performance of the game so far, and the critical reception?

MM: We’re happy with both.

MG: Yeah, yeah. Relieved.

Would you say it’s performed to your expectations so far?

MM: Yeah, definitely, without a doubt.

MG: Without equivocation.

One of the vocal, minority reactions to BattleTech's release centered around a microscopic element of the game—the ability to select a gender pronoun during character creation. Right now, of 1,023 negative reviews on Steam, 47 mention "gender," and 60 mention "politics." What was the reaction within the studio as you were seeing players with very low playtime negatively review BattleTech for such a tiny feature?

MG: We only have one on-the-record answer to that. Internally, what we say to each other is, our work speaks for itself, right? And that’s that. Our only public statement is, we believe that… we make great games that are welcoming to everyone. Our character creation system just reflects that belief. That’s it. And that’s it.

How many people made BattleTech?

MM: Average team size, if I had to pinpoint it in the middle somewhere, was around 30. We peaked at almost 45 people in the final stretch of development. But starting out it was just a few of us on preproduction, and then a core team of maybe 10 or 12 people that were working on the initial prototypes and establishing the framework of the game. Over two and a half years we’ve scaled from that small initial team up to, I think, probably still about 45 people here right now.

Any first expansion we put out will not be, "We re advancing the timeline and here s the Clans now!"
Mike McCain

Some players have been experiencing crashes and performance issues, which you mention as a top priority in your post-launch roadmap. Do you have a grip on what was causing those issues?

MM: We do now, yeah. It took a few days and some long nights from some of our developers here. We see that stuff happen and there’s a strong emotional reaction. Nobody wants somebody to not be able to play or have a good experience with our work.

MG: The team here is focused less on the bug and less on the game than on the people that they’re hurting. You know what I mean? The people that are hurt. They’re really focused on solving problems for people, which makes it really cool to work here.

MM: That said, it is a small percentage of people that are experiencing a combination of hardware and software compatibility issues, primarily. We have a couple of leads and a patch that we’ll be likely putting out. We just put our first patch out yesterday. We’ll likely have a new public beta patch coming out [Thursday] or [Friday]. The way we do that is we put it out to a beta branch on Steam first, so that people experiencing issues can hop in. This next patch, we believe, has a fix for some of the video player crashes that people have been experiencing. We’re hopeful to continue improving that for the people that are experiencing issues, and obviously we’re continuing to provide a great experience for everyone else who’s been playing.

MG: Like we said in the update, that’s number one. Nothing else matters to us right now besides smoothing that experience for people.

Another thing that some people have noticed is that BattleTech seems to work their GPUs harder than expected.

MM: That one, also, we’re pretty confident is hardware-specific. We’re still working to triangulate a little more within that. We’ve been talking to Nvidia about it. That’s not to say they’re to blame, just that we’re investigating.

MG: We’re aligned in our goals.

MM: Again, it’s specific to some users. We’re also looking at—this next patch will push some memory usage optimization as well. Some improvements there.

Outside of the technical stuff, one of the other conversations around the game has been difficulty. You addressed this in your most recent update, talking about options and managing difficulty spikes. What to you represents undesirable difficulty in BattleTech right now that you want to fix?

MM: When it feels unfair and poorly communicated. When we talk about spikes, we’re talking about outliers to the intended curve and variance of that curve. We’re not looking to create [a situation where] I see a two and a half skull contract and I know exactly how challenging that will be. Some of that variance is exciting. That lends to the drama. "I scored big on this mission or I had to retreat from this mission."

But there are a few issues we’ve had. Either we’re not properly communicating when reinforcements arrive, or every now and then there’s some bugs in that system too. We’re investigating the outliers where it doesn’t feel like part of the intentional difficulty of the experience we want to provide.

Speaking for myself, it's a double-edged sword. Sometimes I roll into a mission all cocky like, "I can use my B-team on this one and use it as an opportunity to level them up, it’s two skulls, whatever." And then I’m getting owned by Demolishers, PPC Carriers, assault mechs. "Oh god, I have to find a way out of this. Maybe I have to withdraw."

MG: The way I think of it, if it tends to make players feel like it’s a bug, or it makes enough players feel like it’s a bug—

MM: Then it’s a bug.

MG: It doesn’t really matter whether it’s officially a bug or not. That’s the kind of stuff we’re trying to fix. If it felt like an intentional surprise, then that’s a big success.

The goal from the start was to bring the BattleTech universe to life in a way that did not require prior knowledge of the lore.
Mike McCain

Will we see an ironman setting among the new difficulty levels?

MM: Yeah, we definitely want to do ironman. I don’t know exactly where that will fall on this roadmap, though.

MG: A lot of people right now online are telling me that they’re playing something called, what is it, "Honorman?" Instead of ironman? They’re just doing their own version of ironman. Which I think is kind of cool.

Another thing mentioned in your announcement this week is that Harebrained Schemes would "love to release a paid content expansion or two." What direction might this take? Is it stuff that you think would be very systemic in nature, that would be fit into the existing structure of the game and enhance it? Would it be a new stand-alone campaign? What’s appealing to you?

MM: I think it’s a little too early to say right now. I can certainly say that we have an abundance of ideas. But right now, we’re just a little more than a week past launch. We’re really focused on playing the mid-game. We want to make sure that we’re getting people critical fixes and that we’re reacting to some of the immediate trends and feedback for the game. We want to set this title up for a long and healthy life and growth. As far as DLC, we’re just starting to have some of those conversations, but I don’t want to put a stake in the ground now that we might have to pivot from.

It seems like the BattleTech timeline would allow for several different approaches.

MM: Here’s what I will say, just to set expectations. Any first expansion we put out will not be, "We’re advancing the timeline and here’s the Clans now!" We’re going to start—

MG: Incrementally.

MM: Yeah. We’re gonna work incrementally.

MG: But yeah, we like the idea of moving the timeline forward. We like it. We’ll see what happens, but we like it.

MM: Certainly the Clans are not off the table. But just setting expectations now, if we put out a first thing, that’s not where we’re going first.

MG: BattleTech’s timeline and history is so vast and has so many interesting hooks to play with. The hard part is actually figuring out which of these great hooks to use.

On that note, how did you guys tackle telling your own story in a big, complicated universe that's been around for 30 years?

MM: I think the goal from the start was to bring the BattleTech universe to life in a way that did not require prior knowledge of the lore. We managed to find this blank slate on the BattleTech map that we could work within. That was just fantastic, because it let us build this story without being constrained at every step of the way by lore, the way we would be if we’d tried to integrate a story into the politics of Inner Sphere at the time, which have already been written about extensively. And then, as we’re building this story, we had so much to draw upon from that lore. We could integrate that into our story to enrich it, bringing in the adjacent factions to the Origan Reach, the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat. All these things big and small.

But rather than being beholden those things, we could pull them in strategically to our story based on our story’s needs, to hopefully deliver a strong character arc, and also to onboard people to what makes the BattleTech world exciting. That’s one of the reasons we chose that classic betrayal story for this first title. We’re not going to pretend that we invented this type of story, right? But what we’ve tried to do is tell our betrayal story, tell it well, and make it special by having it in the BattleTech universe and featuring these characters that we care deeply about.

MG: All of that detail that we brought into it adds a layer of texture to it and makes it feel part of something. It’s not just a story that’s on top of the BattleTech universe. It’s within it and it’s surrounded by it.

Best of luck working on the next phase of fixes.

Apr 27, 2018

BattleTech's complicated lore, explained by its creator

BATTLETECH

BattleTech's sprawling science fiction story has accumulated over 30 years of games, novels, networked LAN centers, and a 1994 animated series. If you're diving into BattleTech this week but scratching your head at the difference between the Inner Sphere and Star League, or don't know jump jets from JumpShips, here's a primer courtesy of BattleTech's creator, Jordan Weisman.

BATTLETECH BASICS

PC Gamer: Your most recent take on BattleTech is set in 3025. What's humanity managed to achieve in 1007 years?

Jordan Weisman, BattleTech creator and Harebrained Schemes co-founder: Basically, we take to the stars. We develop an interstellar travel capability, what’s called a 'jump.' You can jump from star system to star system. About 30 light years is the maximum jump that can be done. So mankind spreads to the stars. As they do so, communication does not keep up with travel. Communication is stuck in the Pony Express days. We don’t have any kind of interstellar communication except for what travels on JumpShips.

So people can't Snapchat each other across the cosmos. How does that affect the universe?

As people spread out, there’s a kind of safety in blood, blood relations, as opposed to governmental ties. And as we’ve seen several times in human history, when expansion moves faster and to greater distance than quick communications can, you tend to fall back into a feudal sort of organization. That’s what happens as we reach out to the stars. You start getting these vast noble houses, which control star systems and the trade and travel between them. The BattleMech is developed as a solution for how to have a vehicle which can be effective in an enormously wide range of environments, from terrestrial to completely non-terrestrial. It becomes the dominant surface weapon.

Over time, the wars between the various factions are brought to an end by a very compelling leader named Ian Cameron, from one of those noble houses, who manages to get the five other major noble houses, the Great Houses, to agree to band together into a Star League. This becomes the pinnacle of our interstellar society, in that we stop fighting for a while, and put all that energy into building up better technologies, building up a better quality of life.

[BattleTech] is a very conscious retelling of the Roman successor states, with the fall of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and so on.

So the Star League represents a sort of peaceful golden age?

Well, BattleTech is a world of grays. What looks like a great and shining empire from the inside of it looks like a conquering colonial government from the outside. Those who didn’t sign up to become part of the Star League soon find themselves being subjected to or forced to become members of Star League. This starts a series of battles along the edges of known space. That center space has become known as the Inner Sphere, which is roughly centered on Earth, the capital of the Star League. But out on the Periphery, these smaller governments, who had moved out and tried to not be part of the warring states and their politics to begin with, now find themselves faced with this colonial empire. It becomes a long series of battles along the Periphery, the front.

Eventually those Periphery battles start to seed the elements that will eventually tear the Star League apart. After several hundred years. The Star League lasts for several hundred years, and then it falls apart with a combination of insurrection and battles and betrayal. So the Star League—House Cameron is basically wiped out. As part of the insurrection, these operators from the Periphery start to inspire the Houses to become more suspicious of each other, to start to build up their own arms again, as opposed to only trusting the Star League army itself.

This reminds me a lot of Game of Thrones and The Expanse—politics, division between insiders and outsiders. Do these factions have their own militaries?

The Star League army is, to a large extent, based in a feudal system where you would have a knight who would then provide forces to a liege lord, who then owes them to the king. The Star League army is built on that principle. There’s a standing army that’s the Star League’s only, but the majority are House units that are then tributed to the Star League.

THE SUCCESSION WARS

What happens after the dissolution of the Star League?

When the core of the Star League falls with House Cameron, the Star League army, which at the time is led by a guy named Alexander Kerensky—he goes around and they track down and destroy the Periphery forces that assassinated the Camerons. And then watches the Great Houses, rather than staying unified, immediately turn on each other to claim the throne of the Star League. Kerensky doesn’t want to see the enormous amount of firepower under his control used in wars against itself, so he convinces a large portion of his forces to basically exodus from the Inner Sphere. He says, "I give up on these guys. Come on. We’ve all watched them eat at each other for centuries. There was one brief shining moment when they didn’t, and now they’re going to go back to it. If we stick around with our weaponry, we’ll watch humanity destroy itself, and we’ll be the ones doing it. Instead, let’s leave. Let’s go find a new place to live. Let’s strike out and build a better society."

So they go for it. A large percentage of his forces agree, and away they go. Our game takes place 100 years after that event, roughly, where, as he predicted, the five Houses of the Inner Sphere have now gone through three wars of Succession, beating the snot out of each other in a vain attempt to try to reclaim the glory that was the Star League. Our game takes place after the third of those Succession Wars has kind of petered out.

You've talked before about BattleMechs being rare and valuable in this era. What does that mean?

So the result of the warfare over this intervening century has been a rapid decline in the overall technological standing of humanity, from the height of the Star League. We’ve been in this technological retrograde, and we’re still in it in 3025. The BattleMech that was made 100 years ago is better than the BattleMech that’s made today. You get this feudal nature again, passing the suit of armor down from one generation to the next. Now the mechs are passed down in a similar way and maintained, because it represents both your standing and your power.

JumpShips are completely sacrosanct. No one s ever going to shoot a JumpShip because you can t make a new one.

This is where BattleTech begins, right? You inherit your family's ancestral Blackjack mech.

That’s exactly right. The analogy I was going to point to… when we started on the game, Mike McCain, the game director, he and I have worked together for many years. He had played MechWarrior 2 when he was a kid. Never really invested himself deeply in the universe. So as we started working on this game he really dove into that. He comes to me after a couple months and says, you know, this story is pretty much identical to Game of Thrones. It was written 10 years before, but it’s pretty much structurally exactly the same.

Having loved the Game of Thrones books, I said, you’re right, it is. In no way do I think he [George R.R. Martin] borrowed it from BattleTech, of course. I think we all stole it from the same place, which is, you know—what this is a very conscious retelling of the Roman successor states, with the fall of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and so on, tracking down and killing the people who killed Julius Caesar, and then proceeding to eat each other, to a point where, over a course of several hundred years, until the Mongols eventually invade and we end up in the Dark Ages. Not because of the Mongols, but because of the Romans consuming each other. It’s very much that kind of a retelling.

I see. So the Star League was essentially "the height of the Roman Empire."

Exactly right.

So, in review: mankind creates FTL travel, expands outward. Colonization. The formation of the Star League. The disintegration of the Star League and the beginning of the Succession Wars. Kerensky flees with his forces, who will eventually become the Clans. 100 years later you have the start of your game in 3025, which is still in this period of rapid technological decline. BattleMechs are rare—there aren't factories cranking out new Orions and Trebuchets, right?

There are still some BattleMech factories, but they’re fewer and fewer, and they produce lower-quality product than they did 100 years ago. Some technology has taken on an almost mythical quality. We haven’t been able to produce a new jump drive since the fall of the Star League, or within 100 years of the fall of Star League that capability has disappeared. JumpShips are completely sacrosanct. No one’s ever going to shoot a JumpShip because you can’t make a new one.

Similarly, the limited interstellar communication, which is run by an organization called ComStar— technology has taken on this almost mystical quality, where the people who maintain it now have no idea how it actually works. they’ve turned into a monk-like organization that does things by rote with these giant tomes. "Follow process 27 and chant three times and cut open a chicken." Because they really don’t understand the core technology. They’re just trying to maintain it. They also become this kind of independent and sacrosanct group that no one fucks with. All communication flows through them. They’re kind of… they’re my analogy to the Catholic church. As Rome became Christian and then broke into all the different fragments of Europe, the Christian church was the unifying nature. No one taxed it, no one attacked it, and it was central to everything. That’s what ComStar is kind of like.

ComStar isn't exactly a galactic AT&T.

It’s AT&T with all of the… every kind of conspiracy theory you ever imagined, then turned into a quasi-religious order.

One of the hard things for a newcomer to BattleTech to absorb are the various Great Houses. What are the differences between them?

I think one of the key things we were really trying hard to do [in BattleTech 2018] is to make it so you really don’t need to know any of that to come in. One reason we set the game in the Periphery is that we moved it away from the core of those big central Houses fighting each other. Instead, we moved it to a much smaller little entity, where you have a very classic feudal story. A princess was about to take her throne, become queen of the realm, succeed her father, and her uncle usurps the throne. We wanted to keep it kind of small and intimate, because first off, you’re a nobody. The big Houses don’t hire you. When you start off as a mercenary, the Kremlin doesn’t come knocking right away. You’re working for banana republics. That’s this situation. It’s a little tiny group. That’s who is interested. We kind of keep that big many-proper-noun-filled thing a little off stage. That’s hopefully an easier onramp to this stuff.

MERCENARY LIFE

Tell me more about the role of the mercenary in this universe.

Mercenaries fill an interesting niche. One, they’re obviously expendable units, compared to your House or governmental units. But due to the nature of the scarcity of mechs and equipment, they’re more like ronin than a bunch of guys who picked up a sword. Most of these people had to have come—if they have a mech, that mech had to come from someplace.

One of the reasons we set BattleTech in 3025 is because the main forces of the Inner Sphere at the time had just fought this Third Succession War, which ground their industrial and military economies to a point of exhaustion. They’re just not in a position to wage large-scale war at the moment. But their ambitions—while their resources are exhausted, their ambitions are not. They continue to try to make political advantage with everything from small scale skirmishes to crazy-ass plots, and use mercenaries to help them accomplish that. Mercenaries can work anywhere from a small government, like in the case of Kamea and her journey to restore her throne, to local governments who are trying to defend themselves from pirates or bandits. You have wide ranges of potential employers who need some muscle. As you gain in reputation over the course of the campaign, the bigger entities become aware of you and more interested in you. They start hiring you for their political objectives.

THE CLANS

If players give a damn and we get to make more of this, we have a lot of fun ideas.

If I played the MechWarrior games back in the ‘90s, I probably heard about "the Clans." I know they don’t feature in this most recent game, but if I’m a newcomer to BattleTech, how would you explain where they fit in?

They’re about 50 years down the timeline from where we are at the moment. Obviously what wasn’t known 35 years ago when we were rolling out the game in the beginning is that’s who Kerensky and the Star League army becomes. But that’s not known at this point in the timeline. The reason we did that is, we wanted to establish the baseline. We wanted to be able to work our way through the timeline. The Clans bring with them a whole different culture. They bring a whole different technological base. To be able to appreciate that difference, you have to have a baseline to start from, to be able to then understand the differences they bring. It also kind of—from a game mechanic standpoint, we wanted to be able to, again, establish—to not have to take on all the varieties of exotic technology all at once, and create a good solid baseline to which, over time, we can add in all those exotic components. Of course, that depends on people liking the game or not.

What are just a couple of the key figures at this point in 3025 that every person who’s sitting down to play BattleTech should be aware of?

In the context of our story itself, the one that forms the through line of the campaign, Lady Kamea Arano is the one who was supposed to inherit the Aurigan Coalition. She was denied that by her uncle, Santiago Espinosa, who took that realm away. Those are the two political figures that form the core of the immediate drama. The nation states that surround that, that also play into the drama, are the Taurian Concordat and the Magistracy of Canopus, the other two larger Periphery states in the area that figure into the politics. On the larger scale of the Inner Sphere, people like Hanse Davion, who is the head of House Davion, the Federated Suns, his nation sits just above the area that the game is played in. His expansionist tendencies, from the Inner Sphere out here into the Periphery, definitely play a role, as well as Maximilian Liao, who is head of House Liao, the—I only wrote it 30 years ago, you’d think I could remember. The Capellan Confederation. He’s the other compelling leader whose influences are felt in the game.

One of the bigger events in the universe is the marriage of Hanse Davion and Melissa Steiner.

Yeah, that’s not too far down the road, but yeah, that’s a big one. We have, again—if players give a damn and we get to make more of this, we have a lot of fun ideas on how to play with the events leading up to that and what happens after.

Apr 24, 2018

BattleTech guide: Manage your mechs to victory and riches

BATTLETECH

BattleTech is a deep and granular tactics game. Avoiding disaster means paying attention to the details of a given encounter, and inevitably you're going to make a few costly mistakes along the way. Ahead of the game's release, then, here are a few learnings from the battlefield. If any of these tips help you avoid having your favourite mech's arms and legs shot off, then I've done my job.

Get to grips with armour, heat, and stability

Experienced BattleTech or MechWarrior players know this already, but each mech is more than a healthbar with a gun. It's actually lots of healthbars with several guns, and trying to attack all of them isn't the right way to approach combat.

Take a look at the bars over a given mech's head. Here's how that breaks down: the white squares are armour. This bar is a simplified view, but broadly speaking the first half of the bar is front armour and the second covers the rear (it's much more granular than this, really, but let's go with that for now). Armour is basically free to replace and protects your internal systems.

Structural damage is very bad. This is how you lose arms, legs, weapons, and pilots.

The orange squares represent internal structure—damage to these systems is likewise represented by orange, rather than white, damage numbers. Structural damage is very bad. This is how you lose arms, legs, weapons, and pilots. Concentrating fire on a given part of a mech will strip its armour first, then inflict structure damage, ultimately destroying the component.

The red bar is heat, which is generated by firing weapons and can be increased by environmental effects, losing heat sinks, and with flame weapons. If the heat bar fills up all the way to the top, the mech shuts down and needs to be rebooted, and can even take severe damage.

Stability, the yellow bar, is a measurement of your mech's balance. It builds as mechs take damage and can be given a major push with either focused fire to legs or a melee strike—though bear in mind that death-from-above attacks, where you use jumpjets to bop an enemy mech on the head like Mario, also wreak havoc on your own stability. If the stability bar fills up, the mech falls down. A fallen mech falls behind in the initiative order and can't get up until its own turn, during which time enemies get to make precision called shots against any components they want. Falling down is bad. Don't fall down.

Learn counters to Evasion, Guarded, and Entrenched

These are the defensive buffs that you'll see in every battle. Stacks of Evasion are gained when mechs move. They last until that mech's next activation, and moving further adds more of them. Each stack makes that mech harder to hit with ranged weapons. Evasion can be mitigated by using the Sensor Lock ability—part of the Tactics line—which removes two stacks, or you can get around it with melee strikes. Taking fire will also strip a stack of Evasion even if the attack misses. This is often a good use of light mechs and weapons that aren't in their effective range bands, helping them set up better shots for your more powerful weapons.

Guarded and Entrenched are buffs applied when a mech takes the brace action. Guarded halves incoming damage from the front and sides, while Entrenched reduces stability damage. The ideal response is an attack from the rear, but this isn't always possible. A successful melee strike can strip away Guarded, however, so a good opening against a bracing foe is to send a fast mech to headbutt them before the rest of your guns open up (although bear in mind that this is likely to open up your light mechs to a potentially deadly counter-attack).

Factor in repair time

When you start out in the campaign, you'll naturally be concerned with earning money. That's a healthy concern: being unable to pay your monthly upkeep costs is a critical fail state. However, you'll quickly find that the time it takes to repair stuff is more costly than the money it costs.

There's an opportunity cost associated with repairs and refits that must be accounted for. If you can't do a lucrative mission because your best kit is in the shop, then you're effectively in the hole for that amount of money. This problem becomes less pronounced later in the campaign when you have more mechs and an upgraded mech bay, but early on you'll want to plan your missions very carefully. If you take a few easier and less rewarding missions and do well, you might make more money overall than if you fling yourself into a tough challenge and wreck your mechs doing it. Similarly, it's sometimes worth spending an entire month on repairs and refits rather than taking on work 'just because.'

Salvage: it's good

When you take on a mission, you're able to figure out how you want to divide up the reward between cash, priority salvage rights, and faction reputation. Early on, the temptation is to crack that money slider all the way up. However, don't underestimate the usefulness of salvage.

A higher salvage claim allows you to pick up more stuff from the battlefield—this is based on specific damage done over the course of a mission. Broadly speaking, it comes in two forms: specific bits of gear (like jumpjets or lasers) and mech salvage. Collecting three pieces of mech salvage of a particular type allows you to add that mech to your roster.

Here's the thing, though: when I started out, I understood this as 'mech salvage allows you to build that mech for yourself.' That's not right. When you finish the set, you immediately get access to that mech with its basic loadout—weapons and all. This can act as a huge force multiplier, particularly when you're struggling to keep your main roster out of the repair bay for long enough to fight. My campaign hinged on a mission where I sniped the pilot of a massive Battlemaster assault mech, allowing me to fully salvage it and putting me into a much higher weight class for the subsequent missions.

Plan pilot training ahead of time

Each pilot gains XP over the course of the campaign, and you'll invest that XP in four paths: Gunnery, Piloting, Guts and Tactics. Each path has two special abilities. You can ultimately maximise all four paths, however you can only ever have the first special abilities from two trees, and the second special ability from one. The second special ability you choose determines that pilot's final class designation—for example, if you pick up the second skill in the Gunnery path you become a Lancer.

Piloting grants pilots extra evasion charges when they move, and Guts grants them Guarded and Entrenched for free as long as they stay still.

This means that effectively you're building a custom class out of a combination of two paths. A reliable combination I found was to pair either Piloting or Guts with one of the other two skills. This is because Piloting and Guts each grant different, incompatible passive defensive abilities. Piloting grants pilots extra evasion charges when they move, and Guts grants them Guarded and Entrenched for free as long as they stay still.

Here are some sample combos: combine Guts and Gunnery for a pilot that specialises in reaching a vantage point and sniping with high-impact weapons like PPCs and large lasers. Alternatively, combine Guts and Tactics for a pilot that is good at hiding behind a hill, sitting stationary, and bombarding foes with long-range missiles.

Combine Piloting and Tactics for a pilot who excels in fast mechs, moving up quickly at the top of the initiative order to apply Sensor Lock to priority targets. Or combing Pilot and Gunnery for a skirmisher that remains mobile on the move.

You'll figure out other combos you enjoy with a bit of time. Piloting and Guts is actually pretty good for a melee-focused mechwarrior, as it allows you to sprint into melee range with extra Evasive charges and then defend yourself during a slugging match with Guarded and Entrenched.

The reserve function is important

While moving first in the initiative order can be very useful, it also establishes that mechs' positioning and defensive buffs very early in the round—letting your opponent act with perfect information. Opting to Reserve instead shunts a mech into the next initiative slot, allowing you to act after your opponent if you choose. Always remember that you have this option, because it can open up strategic possibilities.

For example: if you have a Tactician in a heavy mech (there's a decent chance of this, as they make a good choice for artillery mechs) then they'll naturally go later in the order. This makes Sensor Lock less useful, as your lighter mechs shoot before it can be applied. By using Reserve to shunt your light and medium mechs into a later initiative slot, you can then use your Tactician to set up a Sensor Lock for their teammates to exploit.

Understand your Inspiration abilities

As your mechwarriors fight they build morale points, and you'll start with a huge bonus pool of them if you can keep them happy outside of battle. These allow you access to two special abilities—Precision Shot and Vigilance—that are essential for overcoming stacked odds. Knowing how and when to use them is how you win battles, and both have obvious and less-obvious uses.

Precision Shot allows you to take a called shot (where you get to pick the body part you want to strike) against an opponent that hasn't been knocked down. The obvious use of this is to try to take out legs or weapons before your foe gets to act. The other crucial aspect of Precision Shot, however, is that it pushes your opponent back a slot in the initiative order. This is, I'd argue, the more important thing about it. One targeted shot is good: an enemy being forced to take alpha strikes from your entire lance because you pushed them deeper into the initiative queue is better.

Vigilance applies Guarded and Entrenched to a mech regardless of the situation they find themselves in, but it also—crucially—moves them ahead in the initiative order and removes all stability damage. It's this final bit that I've found match-winning. When you're commanding massive assault mechs, you'll often find them teetering uncomfortably at the upper end of their stability bars at the end of a full turn of shooting—and being so heavy, they almost always act last. Saving morale points to use Vigilance is often worth it because it lets mechs stay on their feet on turns when they're otherwise guaranteed to get knocked down.

Anticipate concentrated fire

Here's a final hard-won lesson: the AI loves to concentrate fire on a weak target. This is appropriate, given that you'll be doing the same thing to their units, but the difference is that you field up to four mechs and the AI fields anywhere from four to a dozen, plus static defenses, tanks, and so on.

Here's how this can go wrong: you advance a scout mech to take a potshot at a single mech at the vanguard of the enemy force. You don't kill them. They provide line of sight to your scout mech to every single other enemy unit, which—for the sake of argument—comprises a tank column each armed with long range missiles. Your scout mech, evasive though it may be, then gets to enjoy an entire round of LRM fire from every single enemy on the map. If you still have a scout mech at the end of this experience: congratulations. I didn't.

Here's another example: your assault mechs are doing well but one of them has lost all of the armour on its left side. The entire enemy army falls in love with the left side of that mech, moving to annihilate it at the expense of closer targets. It looks weird but it's very effective. You lose your assault mech and possibly snap your keyboard in half.

The AI can be a bit weird at times, in that regard, but it's also consistent—and there are things you can do about it. The first is to be careful, as a rule, and to pay attention to both line of sight and scanner range. If you can scan them, they can scan you: and it only takes one enemy mech with line of sight to open up the danger of indirect fire. Kill spotters and break line of sight where you can. Often, revealing a bunch of full-health mechs at once is a good way to encourage the AI to split its fire.

Mech orientation matters

The worst way to spend an attack, usually, is spreading your damage evenly across all body segments of an enemy. Whenever possible, flank or angle your mech so that its weapons have a greater chance of hitting the softest side of your enemy. You can also try to prioritize a key weapon, like a Hunchback's AC/20, by going after its armor location from the outset.

On defense, if your mech has lost all of the armour on its left side, move it so that your opponent is forced to shoot it from the right—even if this means you don't get to shoot. Then, take the brace action. Golden rule: it is almost always better to give up your shot for a turn to force the AI to waste theirs. Don't turn in for a shot until you know it's going to do maximal damage, because—with a vulnerable mech—it could well be the last shot they get to take.

Apr 24, 2018

BattleTech review

BATTLETECH

If, as Sid Meier likes to say, good strategy game design boils down to providing a series of interesting decisions, then what comes next should be a series of interesting consequences. This is where BattleTech excels. Harebrained Schemes has taken the hard sci-fi tabletop game (best known to PC players as the basis of the MechWarrior series) and married it to the XCOM formula in a way that brings out the best qualities of both.

You field a lance of up to four bipedal battlemechs in open-ended, turn-based combat encounters that cover swathes of open terrain. Unlike many of its tactical peers, BattleTech doesn't use a grid—this is a far more granular wargame than most, asking you to pay attention to not just the position of each mech but also its degree of rotation, its speed, and its relationship with its environment.

Here's an example of how this might play out. Taking advantage of the initiative bonus granted to light units, your opponent activates their Jenner skirmish mech and has it sprint into a flanking position along a distant treeline. Moving a longer distance grants it several stacks of the evasion buff, and moving into trees provides cover. In response, you move your Wolverine medium mech into a firing position—but the Jenner's evasive action makes your odds of hitting pretty low.

However, this Wolverine is piloted by a mechwarrior with the Sensor Lock ability, allowing them to forgo shooting to strip two stacks of evasion from the Jenner and reveal them to your other battlemechs. This in turn allows your heavier Trebuchet mech to launch an indirect attack with its long range missiles: the barrage catches the Jenner out, dealing critical damage and blunting the flanking attempt. You've committed two mechs to dealing with what could well be a feint, however, and now your opponent has an opportunity to exploit your new position. Situations like this are the meat of BattleTech as a wargame.

The metal and the meat

The fact that this is a game about vehicles, rather than soldiers, is vital. Mechs take damage based on the precise angle of each assault, with layers of armour protecting specific components, weapons, and ammo housed in one of 11 body segments. You must also consider the heat generated by your weapons, each mech's ability to keep itself cool, and how this relates to your environment: an Orion standing in a river can fire indefinitely, while an Orion standing on an exposed hilltop on a moon with no protective atmosphere will overheat very quickly. There's also stability to consider: take too many successive hits, or a critical strike to the legs, and a mech can fall with potentially devastating consequences.

All of this is driven by the dense internal logic of the BattleTech universe, which spans from the internal workings of each mech to the technology that powers interstellar travel and communication. Becoming a better commander means understanding the exact strengths and weaknesses of each of your combatants. New players will inevitably make mistakes, but with experience comes a gratifying sense of understanding and ultimately mastery. If you've played a MechWarrior or BattleTech game before—if you know your LRMs from your PPCs—then you've already got a head start. It's a testament to Harebrained Schemes' success at adapting the source material that skills developed in very different games are transferable to this one.

The UI has so much information to impart that it can initially seem a little overwhelming, but with time and greater fluency I came to appreciate how much it manages to express with relatively few elements. BattleTech has no undo function for a turn gone awry, so it's vital to know exactly where your mechs will end up after a move, what they'll be able to see, and who can see them—the UI achieves this. There's plenty of detail to dig into, too—while initially you might see a red signature on the long-range scanners and not know what to do about it, with more experience you'll learn to pay attention to the tonnage of the incoming foe, weigh this against your understanding of the various mech types, and plan accordingly.

It's not perfect. Cancelling out of a planned move or attack is unintuitive, and what a given mech can see and shoot at doesn't always align perfectly with the battlefield. The line-of-sight indicator might tell you that you've got an unobstructed shot at an opponent on the other side of a big rock, and in the jankiest edge-cases this'll result in you firing accurately through level geometry. The vital thing is that the targeting indicator is always right, regardless of what your eyes might otherwise be telling you, but this aspect of the tactical game could certainly use a bit more polish.

In the singleplayer campaign, you take the role of a mercenary commander dragged into a war between great houses on the fringe of human civilisation. Your primary objective is not simply to win battles: it's to pay the bills, build up your roster of mechwarriors and battlemechs, and upgrade the ship that carries you from planet to planet. As in XCOM, this strategic layer grants additional significance to each battle you fight. When one of your pilots comes under sustained fire you must consider ejecting them, or risk losing them forever.

BattleTech is a far denser game than XCOM, however, and as such the consequences of both success and failure are more interesting. You might win a battle but lose the arms of one of your best mechs, incurring expensive and lengthy repairs—and potentially a journey to find and replace their rare SRM 6++, a special variant with slightly buffed stability damage. On the other hand you might be hopelessly outmatched in a battle, but if you can score a single objective before retreating then you'll earn a good-faith failure and partial payment. When that payment lets you keep the lights on for another month, running away can feel like a victory in a way that it rarely does in this type of game.

Mercenary life

There's a lengthy, story-driven series of critical path missions to guide you, and while these are ostensibly optional they often come with the best rewards and gate your access to certain game features. I enjoyed the story, but diving into it headlong feels like the right way to play in a manner that undermines the freedom that an open campaign structure purports to offer. Similarly, the campaign's light RPG elements feel underdeveloped. When you create your character you construct their background through a questionnaire, but the choices you make here don't seem to impact very much at all. Likewise, each of your pilots has a series of keywords that define who they are—criminal, soldier, noble, etc—but this never seems to have an influence on battles or the story. These feel like hooks for systems that aren't quite in place yet, and their absence is one of the things holding BattleTech back from all-round excellence.

There can be frustrating moments, too. Every time an otherwise well-positioned mech takes fire, there's a chance that something goes critically wrong. Given how risky each mission can feel, taking that one-in-a-hundred crit that takes one of your best pilots out of action for a month feels pretty bad. The tendency for the AI to focus on exploiting weakness—while smart strategically—can also result in rough situations where waves of hitherto-unseen enemy reinforcements pummel a single mech to pieces before you can do anything about it. The answer is to take as few risks as possible, which is a worthy tactical lesson but slows the game down considerably. In Skirmish mode, where combatants field matched forces, this isn't an issue.

I've got a few concerns about how difficulty varies from mission to mission, too. Noticing some strange spikes—battles that seemed wildly harder or easier than their listed difficulty rating—I tried generating the same battle twice by loading a previous save. The first time, I faced a heavy mech, two medium mechs and a heavy tank supported by a reinforcing lance of mixed heavy and medium mechs. The second time, I faced a squad of four heavy tanks supported by mixed medium and light mech reinforcements. The second version of the same mission—same objective, same payout—was considerably easier. Variance like this encourages the player to load a save rather than live with the consequences of a mission gone south, which is directly contrary to one of BattleTech's most pronounced strengths—the intricate relationship between the outcome of a battle and your overall campaign. There's no 'iron man' mode to force your hand, so it's ultimately on you to respect the negative consequences of a tough fight.

These are inconsistencies in what is otherwise an accomplished and fundamentally sound strategy game. BattleTech's success at making you feel—and want to live with—the interesting consequences of each mission is its greatest achievement, and will hopefully have an influence on other developers working in this genre. Where it fails, it fails because it doesn't fully implement all of its best ideas. Given the quality of what it accomplishes elsewhere, however, that's a good-faith sort of failure.

Note: this review is based on advanced access to an early version of BattleTech. As such, we were unable to gauge the performance of the multiplayer mode in a live environment.