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.