maddogdrivethru.net

Looks like the Open Beta is here soon.



http://mwomercs.com/


The testers have currently been saying that the LRM Boats are OP since they all hit and can be fired even indirectly via borg spotting from teammates. So hopefully that gets toned down. But.. still.. it's fucking mechwarrior, assholes!

And, no, the persistent map-cap isn't done yet. But.. there is no more planned wipes after Open Beta starts so it's basically a rough pre-release.

Now that is something I could get back into,.........I was one of those table game Mech heads. Fought in some glorious regimental sized battles back in the day. Took me 4 years of playing tournament style to take my lance up to a combined arms multi-regiment force to be reckoned with. Of course stumbling upon a lost Star League Cache helped me expand with roughly 22 Battlemechs discovered along with 12 MBT. I was a Merc unit that basically became a House Davion regular unit.

IIRC, I finished my playing days with roughly:
2 Jumpships (owned)
3 Jumpships (under contract)
7 Dropships (owned)
14 Dropships (under contract)
1 Reinforced Regiment of Mechs (4 Batt)
2 Infantry Regiments
1 Armor Regiment
1 Aerospace Wing with 38 fighters

Had a planet lease hold on the Davion/Kurita border near the Periphery. Gave me good yearly income and a stable base of operations. My unit was almost destroyed during the Clan invasions in my last tournament. Came out with barely a company of Mechs and some ground pounders. That was about the time I really quit playing, I was emotionally destroyed watching my unit being destroyed while fighting a delaying action across 3 worlds. I just could not stomach trying to rebuild after that. Knowing I would once again be thrown into a fight with the Clans who had so roughly handled my unit. I think I was more scarred by that 4 day battle set than any of my actual combat tours. After spending all those weekends playing tournament battle sets salvaging a Mech here and there, capturing a Mech here and there, absorbing a small Merc lance, negotiating a unification of another Merc Bn to come on board with me rather than fight me (I had him pinned and cut off from his supply bases and outnumbered 2-1) plus I was moving my armor and infantry to capture his dropships.

My unit had 5 friends of mine as unit commanders. We fought and moved with limited intel in different rooms. Made for a really good time. I was the head cheese, each human controlled a BN battle group. Usually with 1 Mech BN, 1-2 Infantry BN's, and a Armor BN. The 5th was my Aerospace commander and my intel relay person. As the admins made sure who could see what, I was in 1 room with all the maps in front of me, I could see my units locations and as contact was made, it was relayed to me and my maps updated. I would then issue orders that were relayed to my commanders. Had some real fog of war using that method. That was the way it was done once we entered the big time. Fighting entire planet drops. Using Aerospace rules and BattleTech rules. My summers were one long tournament back then. Each real day was 1 week game time. So a major battle might see my unit not in action for a week or more due to repairs and such. Having to order supplies, ammo and such, in the numbers that might be needed during a campaign, tracking travel time for delivery. I remember 1 campaign, I way under-estimated my ammo stocks and had to fight the last of the campaign with captured ammo stocks or energy weapons only. Then there was the time I suffered a sneak attack by a lance of Ravens that blew my entire ammo dump sky high and the resulting explosion destroyed 5 Mechs and damaged almost a company. It was after that when I split my unit into battle groups and each had their own depots.

Or the time I ran my personal Mech company right into a ambush with a BN of jump infantry trained in anti mech tactics. I had 6 Mechs kneecapped during that fight. Oh the memories, it almost makes me want to go dig the books out and paper fight a few battles.

Wow. That's some epic Battletech campaigning.

The clan stuff lessened the fun. I understand that they wanted to add something new, fresh, etc but it just tipped the old background on it's side and unbalanced factions.

Luckily MWO is just 3025-based so it's the old school kinda pure, at least until the knuckleheads get the same yearning for a 'NEW' label. After release their key-punchers will be starting work on the MWO campaign layer so you can (supposedly) do stuff with your Merc company like plan attacks on planets to cap or raid and other such fun stuff while working for one of the houses. Speaking of.. no House Davion for me! Everyone did that. It's gotta be one of the others - Steiner or maybe Marik perhaps.

Yep, I miss it so bad I actually dug out the old manuals and re-read the rules, campaigning, read up on the Mechs.......even tripped over my 5 spiral notebooks that I used during campaigns. One even had my master roster of Mechs and such from my last campaign, complete with all the KIA marks next to them. My total losses for the last campaign was 107 Mechs, 16 Aerospace Fighters, 83 Armor and 44 Infantry squads destroyed. Total casualties including my support personnel was over 10,000 people.

Looks like my support bases got over run 4 times over the 3 worlds with heavy losses. 85% of my support troops KIA/MIA. Over 80% of my combat forces failed to escape.

Final OOB looks like this:

15 Mechs.........3 light, 6 med, 4 heavy and 2 assault
7 Aero.........2 light, 1 med, 3 heavy
9 Armor........3 light, 2 med and 4 heavy
5 infantry.........2 foot, 1 mech, 2 jump

Total Personnel

Mechwarriors............33 total, 14 combat ready, 17 WIA, 2 retired by wounds
Aerospace................13 total, 8 combat ready, 5 WIA
Armor crewmen...........87 total, 29 combat ready, 33 WIA, 25 retired by wounds
Infantrymen...............126 troopers, 83 combat ready, 22 WIA, 21 retired by wounds

The list is longer but it gets hard to read, lots of smudges, might be tears of shame at destroying my command.

Pre-Battle OOB was exactly this:

Mechs.............168 Mechs
Aerospace........38 fighters
Armor..............260 (includes artillery tracks, units based on 4X4 BN with 4 BN in Reg) assume 4 men per vehicle
Infantry...........2169 troopers
Support...........4583 personnel (includes, techs, astechs, mechanics, medics, docs, admin, transport)

Space fleet which included dropships and jumpships totaled

2 Starlords with 60 crewmen (1 survived, 1 captured)
6 Invaders with 144 crew (2 survived, 2 destroyed, 2 captured)
3 Leopard Dropships with 27 crew (2 survived, 1 destroyed)
3 Overlord Drops with 129 crew (1 destroyed, 2 captured)
2 Union Drop with 28 crew (1 survived, 1 captured)
2 Seeker Drop with 40 crew (both captured)
3 Condor Drop with 72 crew (2 destroyed, 1 captured)
1 Excalibur with 50 crew (1 survived)
2 Triumph with 30 crew (1 destroyed, 1 captured)
4 Avengers with 60 crew (4 destroyed)
1 Mule with 20 crew ( captured)

Not sure I agree, the Clans were needed to fulfill the story line, and also to add some fresh to the game. I was a big enough unit that I could basically fight a Davion RCT to a standstill and even money defeat it. Kurita, Marik, Lio units got slaughtered facing me.

I thought I was king crap, the Clans taught me humility and defeat. And to add to that insult, I never faced more than a Cluster in any 1 battle. Cluster being roughly a BN in size. The last battle was only a Trinary of Mechs with 1 Star of Elementals facing my 1 Mech BN plus, 1 1/2 armor BN's and 2 Infantry BN's. I lost handily.

Yeah, like I said the Clan stuff added something fresh. That's nice for tabletop but in multi-player video games, it's not terribly fun due to the overpowered stats gravitating everyone towards it.

For that reason the devs on MWO made a wise balance choice for only (currently) including the originals. But since it's a match based game (like World of Tanks) right now, I can also see them adding the Clan stuff later once a lot of people have 'level-capped'.

People who had signed up for the game login (and beta too perhaps?) evidentally got invites today even though the Open Beta was pushed back until next week.

I can vouch for their reasoning for the delay as the client is pretty unstable from what I've seen thus far. Not so sure about the server capacity either, after being disconnected and lagged out after primetime hit today.

Hopefully they can bring the mess together by next week. Supposedly, there is no wipe after Open Beta officially begins so your progress is saved after the 23rd.

Be forewarned that a poor showing in a match can actually lose you credits, overall, after rearming and repairing your mech.

You start (and can still use) a 4-set of "Trial" mechs that don't require money for post-drop fixing. But you only earn 25% of the money from the drop (the match). So you can still grind out more money.

While this thing is still short on content and has stability issues (memory leak in there I'm pretty sure), it has two big advantages over something like World of Tanks. One is the customization options. This game was based on the tabletop, and it shows in how everything works - including the details on the mechs and equipment. Although there are some added restrictions as to how many & what type of weapons can be loaded in specific mech locations, on each model, it's still the same basic setup from the pen & paper. I'm a bit rusty about the actual numbers, and they have yet to put the details on the weapons & equipment into the interface so I'm going from distant memory. Like I said, it still needs some polish.

The second advantage MWO has is that (I'm told) it has no "Pay-To-Win" bullshit. Everything you can get in the game can either be purchased with cash or earned with in-game C-bills awarded for playing matches. While paying will make things easier and progress faster (the way these Free-To-Play games basically work), you can still make your way to any of the mechs or equipment given time. In a contrasting example, WOT has some Premium tanks that could give some advantage over others. I specifically recall one that would earn mountains of in-game money every match and, notably, would usually be the toughest tank type in it's matches so it could punch all the babies and melt their faces. Hence the derogatory term, "Wallet Warriors". People started hating such unbalanced matches with someone who just spent $30 on a tank while they may have been sub'ing money for "Premium" time. The other big complaint about Pay-To-Win was the "Gold Ammo" which is cash store ammo that has superior penetration compared to the regular kind. That is out & out pay-to-win. So evidentally the MWO people have listened to all the requests to keep the game balanced, and that's a good thing.

I've seen mention of 1 week until Open Beta. Maybe two. I'm guessing they want to get another hefty patch in before everyone jumps in. They pushed it back as it was originally set for Tuesday, although they've been sending some invites to people who have signed up (and posted in the forum before?). As it is, I'm still having a far better time playing War Thunder beta and that one's not finished either. But damn is it a blast. It will be nice having some variety with these Pew Pew pseudo-RPG games.

Just let me know what you want to know, I have all my books out of the storage garage. I can look up any combo you want to make depending on what tech level you are using etc. I am guessing 3025 era, and that is one of the 2 books I cannot find, my 3025 Mech book and the Star League one.

Of course there are lots of online PDF you can d/l that have the info. Let me know and I can either email you them or can send the links here for the d/l's.

In my looking around, I am way behind and did not even realize that the game has been so resurrected by another game company.

I had a rather large box mostly full of old Battletech stuff, but evidentally it's gone missing after moving a few years ago. I still remember most of the 3025 stats .. probably.

There are differences, though. Like Lasers are an almost 2-second long damage-over-time effect so you have to hold your aim on the target while it's firing, as best you can. All the changes like that, to bring it into a shooter form, makes a difference in what I want to load up. Besides that point, buying extra hardware with in-game C-Bills sucks your funds right out of ya early on so it's slow going for customization (without purchasing of course).

I'm kinda waiting for the Open Beta release because 1) They don't plan on wiping anymore after it goes OB and 2) I hope they get some fixes, adjustments and more content in on the pre-OB update. Although the latter is just wishful thinking.

I'm having much more fun with the War Thunder beta. Can't wait to see it once all the content is done because it's already damn fun. I dunno if I'll get into MWO much before they get the House Wars thing going.

Now, that would be a cool PC - game, wouldn't it? Not another one of these

"Oh, there's a locked door - whatever shall I do?"
*Companion sidekick says* 'Hey, there's a key on the floor right in front of you, maybe it could be used to open the door'
"Ah, I'll give it a try"
"It worked!"

*Achievement Unlocked - Keymaster*



Now- I really wish some company would pick up the tab and make a good wargame that would be played like you described.