So for bette or worse i sided against Kamea in the mutiny.

Only to discover that the drunk has decided to go mano-o-mano against the autocracy.

I've tried it several times. Assault, heavies, different pilots. I thought perhaps the point was you can't win all battles and lost it however no matter what i can't win.

You get absolutely hammered by light mechs with ridiculous weapon load outs.

Light mechs do 100 damage on meele whilst having evasions that are huge

Apart from the early game where I understand cash is more important for upgrades etc, over time, is it "universally" better to negotiate salvage on contracts say 2 skulls and up? Career, no mods.

My recent missions seem to suggest max salvage esp on the "average" mid-late game contract (lets say 4*) will usually give me say 1.5-2 machines around the 50-75 tonne range on average and these might sell for say 600k each, for which I'll have given up 500-750k cash. But then sometimes on a convoy mission or whatever I'll end up picking up like two locusts and a bunch of LRMs which are worth nothing.

So is max salvage a good universal rule, or is it like "99% true with some rare exceptions", or is it much more nuanced?

(Nb. Not a big fan of mech surgery to remove weapons from the pool (just not a fun way to play for me) so looking for a more "normal" rule of thumb to rely on.)

Thanks in advance!

I fell off the wagon and decided to dive back in to BTA now that BTAU is out. I've been having fun, but that fun gets sapped pretty quickly when a Steiner Scout Lance just teleports into existence with max evasion directly behind me or on top of my missile boat.

Are reinforcements supposed to be a complete roll of the dice, or is there a mechanic that I just don't know about which mitigates this? I get not wanting the player to be able to set up traps to just nuke the enemy the second they appear, but having no way to either defend against reinforcements or go on the offensive against them seems a little excessive.

Hi all! I am finally thinking about getting the game and trying it out. I am familiar with the Battletech Universe and the ruleset from the table top game (from 25 years ago though). Scratching the surface I already got the impression that usage of mods is highly encouraged to get a great experience. Now I am wondering which mods are highly recommended (and why) and also which DLC are recommended ( or even needed for said mods to work).

Edit: I should add, I like my turn based tactical/strategic games to be very difficult (Long War and Long War of the Chosen are my favorite mods for XCOM).

Ive modded this game before, just going one mod at a time and it was fun, but after I did all the mission it got stale quickly and left it for a while. Ive been thinking of coming back to it and try one of the big modpacks that change a lot of stuff, so I tried BTAU, but the widly different models inconsistency irks me so much. I don´t like seing a nice base game catapult standing next to an ugly box with flat texture and some weird cupola wich looks like the incredibles robot head. So, of all the other modpacks, is there one wich keeps a higher standard of model artstyle consistency? Not triying to disrespect old battletech, but some stuff is very hard to look at, wich I wouldnt mind if I didn't have the nicer looking stuff right next to it. I know most mods use CAB to get models, but do all of them just use whatever theres in that without any exclusions?

Out of curiosity, do you know a decent Shadow Hawk build?

I thought it would be good to honor my contract. I got 750k, a couple of measly AC2+s, and a leg mod that gives +5 damage on death from above. welp

Starting out a campaign of BEX:T and tried to load tracer ammo into my AC/20 only to find that it apparently doesn't figure into the ammo count? My Hunchback currently carries exclusively tracer rounds and has dropped into battle with "no" ammo.

Searched around for any hits for tracer ammo in general and I can't find anyone with this issue. Am I misunderstanding how tracer ammo is intended to work? Does it require regular ammo to be loaded as well?

Hi guys, I've spent some time reading threads on certain topics but I have a few questions!

I did the beginning of the campaign and have the Argo and doing the repairs to it, all while flying from place to place (in seemingly no particular order except for IDs about being a Periphery world or that make it seem like there will be decent missions or rewards at my level) to grab some C-bills and fill out my Mech bays. Is that pretty much the way to do it, or is there a more, uh, scientific approach?

I'm also hoping to put together some decent t Mechs from salvage, and I'm not 100% on how to maximize that for when I do come across a Mech I'd like to snag. My Called Shot percentage is pretty low, does that increase if I do something else? Like, do a certain amount of damage or knock them over?

How often should I be going back to do campaign missions as opposed to just regular faction ones?

I'm sure there's something else floating around in my head. Thanks!

As I play through BTAU I'd like to highlight some mechs that stood out to me as being particularly impressive or interesting, and see what other's opinions or experiences has been with them.

Today it's the Vision Quest VQ-2NC, a 60 ton Nova Cat design. While lorewise a rare find, for us it's a selectable reward from the flashpoint 'Yang Virtanen's Big Score'. While it's not the coolest looking mech of the choices by a long shot, I think it may be the best.

What makes this mech cool? Well, Clan Mech quirk gives you a grab bag of good things. But unlike most Clan mechs it's not an omnimech, meaning half it's parts are not locked down. This thing is fully customizable!

That being said there are limits to where you can go. It's max armor isn't very high so you're not making a tank. Coming with Clan DHS's and the Ice Cold pilot affinity, the Vision Quest can have a lot of cooling, but it only has 2b/2e/0m/3s weapon hardpoints. And of course the downside of being a Clan mech is that you can't take full advantage of being in melee range anymore.

So what to do with few weapon slots but extra heatsinking? By god, do I hear the sound of a Rotary AC spinning up? Here's the direction I went with it. Pilots with less than 9 Gunnery need not apply.

Two RAC-5s is a lot of damage (up to 420), and we can handle the potential 120 heat alpha well enough (especially since you usually won't need or be able to squeeze off 12 rounds for 3+ turns in a row). 5/7 movement and 1000 armor is 'good enough' to be where it wants to be: hosing stuff down with bullets at midrange and not likely to suddenly die there.

Anyone else have experiences using this mech? What were your preferred roles and loadouts?

I just finished the final Heavy Metal mission against the Black Widow and Bounty Hunter (in BEX) and forgot how much I enjoyed that one. My spotter got torn a new one, but my long range optimized Lance was able to land shots from the outside.

Other missions I think are well designed and fun are:

• the campaign mission where you race up the mountain, avoiding artillery.

• the escape from the Star League fortress

• The prison break.

Where does one go about acquiring one of these? I'm on vanilla and have all the expansions. Is it available in the base game?

Has anyone else had 2 extra lances dropped along side your own lance. To clarify I'm not playing a modded game but for the first time that I can remember I took a mission I think it was 2 skulls and I noticed I got two allied lances alongside mine. Caught me off guard.

Hive mind. Do all 5 Points of an Elemental Star need to be the same Battle Armour? Could you mix 1 point of Elemental in with 1 Point of Golem and 3 points of Ravager?

So im all maxed out on pilot stats for my 7 pilots ive beat the career mode and I'm not headshotting nearly as well as I think I should it may say 30 percent but it feels like 10 at best ive been ki da looking at the bullshark and just throwing uAC20s and uAC10s on it and just incteasing volume of fire versus one shot. Any ideas?

Mechs under say ~75T like the Thunderbolt, Rifleman, and Phoenixhawk (vanilla, no mods) all have cannon slots but I find the cannons simply weigh too much, or in the case of the AC2 don't do enough damage.

Every time I've tried one, it feels like it's always better to just go 3 more M lasers and some armor instead of trying to put an AC5 on there. Always end up with ~2 firepower which is about half my other mechs, even if range is slightly longer. Or you get an AC20 with 5 shots.

I've found a couple of UACs and LBX's and they help a bit but still have the same issue, especially on the lighter mechs like PHX or Rifleman. (As an aside I also struggle to "get" the value prop of the phoenix and shadow hawk which I see a lot of people rave about. But the variants with no guns and only lasers seem ok).

Is this an environmental thing, e.g. should I keep a couple of gun mechs for lunar/desert missions for heat purposes because that's where they shine?? Or am I simply building them wrong? TIA

Does anyone here have a mech they think is just cursed. For instance I had a shadow hawk I got pretty early on that I thought was a great find well my first pilot gets killed head gets destroyed. I shrug it off repair the mech another pilot gets killed headshot again again I shrug and try a third time and well that pilot and the mechs head didn't exist anymore. I promptly sold it first chance I got and low and behold my pilots have staryed thriving.

So I got my first assault mech :D

What do.you guys think of how it's fitted? It's my first campagne as well, I just slapped everything good on there I had. Thoughts for easy tweaks? I'm not sure about the roll it'll have, probably something along the line of unstoppable walz of ppc moving forward.

Ps. Aiming for better (snub) ppcs++ stuff but I don't have em yet. And I'm not gonna make it sleepy, it seems the tonnage is fine on vanilla for these shenanigans. This fit is like 79,56 tonnage.

I'm looking for missions, or difficulty settings, or a compatible mod to get bigger enemy forces in BTAU.

EDIT: to explain this better, think of Flashpoints, you bring 4 units and fight 8-16 units. To scale this up properly to your full company, you bring 16 units and the OpFor should have 32-64 units (of course 64 being a rare 'holy-shit' event but should be possible).

One thing that appealed to me about the mod was being able to drop a lot more stuff, make you feel like a real mercenary company. However, after over 100 missions the enemy forces have not scaled up to match all the extra stuff you can bring to the battlefield. It's possible to highroll enemy support lances but the odds of them spawning AND all engaging you at once and causing a real problem is really, really low, and the rest of the time you're just clubbing seals.

I've fought WoB/Comstar and their 6 mech lances, and the Sanctuary guys, and yes they are harder, but like 50% harder, when what's needed is like a 2-3x multiplier on enemy forces most of the time. Basically, if I'm going to be dropping 16 units and 800 tons, I need some missions where the minimum of simultaneously engaged enemies is equal to that with the chance of going higher.

And yes, I could just drop less units. But I'm already getting challenging small unit combat from flashpoints. If I can field 16 units, I want missions that actually need it!

Ok, hyperbole aside, I'm restarting an iron man career run after a really really unlucky start.

second planet in, decent team of mechs, pull a 1.5 skull mission for assassinate a local politician.

Roll in and see a group of spiders, no problem, in walks a wolverine, and I"m like YES the target. I take extra damage so I can hopefully get more wolverine salvage... take out the wolverine and.... that wasn't the target.

wipe out the escorts and a GRIFFIN shows up. I get excited and sacrifice my firestarter trying to be gentle on it. finally take it down... mission isn't 'over. by this point, they cored 1 of my mechs and a second I've lost all weapons on when... a fully healthy shadowhawk appears.

I beat it down, but I have 2 KIA mech warriors, a destroyed centurian and almost no salvage.

I think I'll start over. but I was so excited for loot I forgot to keep my team alive.

I’m a veteran player using the BTX mod with sim++ difficulty, and I never payed much attention to critical hit bonus on weapons. So I’m wondering if they have their use on specific builds? In the BTX mod, 4 critical hits on the torso/engine compartment disables the mech but that happens only very rarely. Mechs are usually destroyed way sooner than 4 critical hits happening. Am I missing something here? Are some of you actually using weapons with critical hit bonus?

New player, took me a while to understand all the mechs and stuff but I remember thinking in campaign (dimwit) "wow Kintaro good" -> (midwit) "nooo Kintaro hot, weak, wrong weapons, etc, bad bad" -> (jedi) "wow Kintaro good"

Now on career and yeah damn this is a good piece of machinery. I don't even think I've built it optimally yet, but it is extremely fast, hits at every range, is relatively cool and delivers a hell of an alpha strike. Works great with a gunner (multi-shot) who also has bonuses on called shot. I have two Marauders on my squad and the Kintaro keeps pace very well; if I couldn't see the numbers I wouldn't be able to tell it was a Medium instead of a Heavy.

https://preview.redd.it/xgo7kjafgozd1.png?width=1174&format=png&auto=webp&s=30d2555d455c0fee5175e6ea36471c8342d18075

As far as I can tell, looks like the price of selling a full mech is close to the price of buying a part of it.

Whether 3 parts make a mech or 8 parts, it is weird when I think about it. My best guess is maybe the quality of the store mechs is better than one I assembled?

I know it is game balance but I am wondering if there is a reasonable explanation for this