Rules for r/BattleTech

Now I need to find a group that’ll teach me to play. Or maybe I could drag my brother out of his video game long enough to learn to play a game.

…after taking down an Atlas and Awesome in the same round - both melee attacks from the rear. Everyone was so scared of the Stalker they discounted two cheap fast bois and their fists of fury.

Great game, sadly the DCMS failed to take down their fusion reactor defended by the AFFS in the time allotted, but caused significant materiel losses on the defenders. Major victory went to House Davion.

I really need to get some background “sky” next time i take photos…

Im starting to play the Battletech video game and wanted to I guess, immerse myself a bit. I chose my dude to be from Federated Suns cause it seemed like silly knights. Is there any resources I can use to make a backstory? I heard MekHQ actually generates things is that true?

So I’m playing the video game and I can see that tanks and mechs are what take to the field, but what about traditional small arms units? Are there famous infantry squads who’ve defied the odds and have taken out mechwarriors ?

My buddy and I are very new to the battletech game and we were wondering if it mattered what mechs we use with what factions... I've learned some of the lore and like I am going to be playing wolf's dragoons but if he were to play let's say house steiner would he be able to use the Marauder IIC or a Stone Rhino cause in the lore those are like a clan only mechs

Locust, Fireball, Stinger & Wasp they are part of the scout lance. Scarabus, Marauder, Archer & Griffin they are part of the long-shot support lance. United for the C-bill!

Hey all.

Long time player and fluff guy. Been around since the 90s playing tabletop plus the games. One thing that I've always liked was both the fluffiness of 'Your faction has these units', plus the flexibility of 'Everyone has some salvage of something'. We so often are building tabletop forces, and have materials like the RATs to show what's available... but it's so opaque, to the point of being effectively useless. The RATs for example are 2d6 curves, so you only ever have 12 mechs per roll, and they're VERY heavily weighted to the center.

What would people think of just a simple classification table, perhaps by era, for what's available? Leave it at as 'Ubiquitous, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very-Rare' and leave it at that. If people wanted to play with fluffy restrictions, great.

But that way, you'd have an easy way to see 'Oh yes, Kurita in 3058 has 'Uncommon' on the Black Hawk KU Omnimech they built (but are ramping production), while it's 'Very Rare' to the Taurians. But meanwhile, the various 3050s Panthers are 'Ubiquitous', and so-on. By 3067 era, many types of Clan Mechs in the Former FedCom and DC are 'Rare'. Davions get basically 'Ubiqiutous' Valkyries for their entire run, given the New Avalon factory has never stopped building the damn things, etc.

One could use these as guidelines such as 'No more than 1 Very Rare per Company', or '1 Rare per Lance', or '2 Uncommons per Lance' to help set flavor rules while not being overly constraining.

Thoughts?

Hey everyone! Last time I posted here about a year ago, I had painted up a squad of mostly classic mechs for my Dad, as he'd played as a kid and I wanted to bring soke of that love back to him.

Which brings me to now, where I've started my own force, and....generally don't know where to go once I'm done painting!

These are the mechs I have now; I only know the Summoner by name. What are the strengths and weaknesses of what I have? Which rule set should I dip into to both help bring back my Dad's game as he knew it but stay accessible to me, who knows nothing of the rules?

Any help would be great! I have the lightest ideas of lore terns and the like but just about nothing else.

In the latest Mechbay Podcast, the guest alpha strike guru said that the current vision for the Aces Box set has the following attributes:

-Will have miniatures

-Have the Aces deck/ scenarios and campaign style play

-Intended to be an "expansion" to the Alpha Strike box set.

Does this imply that the box will feature the Northwind Highlanders? I would have gambled that the Aces Box set would be the showdown between Liao and Wolf on terra. Baseless speculation that I don't apologize for.

So far my reaction to his writing, at least in this book, is a strong desire to hold him down and tattoo "SHOW don't tell" on his forehead.

From what I'm seeing, a lot of the books that are most important to the overall plot of Battletech are Stackpole novels. It's going to be a long, hard slog to get through them unless the quality of prose (and to a lesser extent, dialogue) improves drastically.

I am a new Alpha Strike player. I love it because it’s quick and simple. One of my hobbies has always been building terrain and I plan on building amusement park pieces. So that brought about my question. Do civilians still partake in things like amusement parks? Would they still exist? I’m not really into the lore and the answer won’t dissuade me from building the pieces. Just genuinely curious.

So I've been trying to flesh out the Wolverines' history between when the Minnesota Tribe disappeared and we read about Halloran Hallis in 3149 and his references to the "Great Father," a name for Aleksandr Kerensky that only the Clans used and Hallis surname having been a Wolverine Bloodname - indications that Clan Wolverine has persisted, in some fashion, until the ilClan-era in a similar fashion to how Clan Smoke Jaguar survived it's Annihilation and persisted into the ilClan-era.

We know ComStar was tracking them, but lost them at Valentina in the Draconis Combine, right on their border with the Outworlds Alliance (at the time) and near the Federated Suns border. In my (head) canon I have them settling in a sparsely populated region of the Periphery situated between the Tortoga Dominions and the Federated Suns, relatively close to their last confirmed sightings and thus still close enough for regular pilgrimages to Barbados (as mentioned at the end of Betrayal of Ideals).

The planet they settled was once an independent world that had been listed as abandoned or depopulated during the Third Succession War and basically disappeared off of the star charts as many worlds did during the Third War. So the Wolverines settled there and began rebuilding their society. Between the mid-2800s and the early-3020s (where my fan fiction picks up) they had absorbed Periphery denizens from the neighboring areas and even some FedSuns expats.

Given the FedSuns influence the Wolverines adopted a combined arms philosophy with their rebuilding Galaxies eventually taking on a Fourth War-style RCT configuration with one Cluster of BattleMechs, three Clusters of conventional vehicles and five clusters of mixed infantry per Galaxy, plus a Command Trinary, two Trinaries of AeroSpace Fighters and one Trinary of artillery support. They retained Clan-style formations but eventually adopted FedSuns-style rank structures.

Their society is a mixture of Inner Sphere and Clan, using both a eugenics program and natural breeding paired with recruiting locals from the nearby worlds in the Periphery and adopting FedSuns expats to flesh out their society. They still maintain the forty Blood Houses of Clan Wolverine, but membership is not determined by maternal genetics as with the Clans and even naturally born warriors can be adopted into a Blood House and earn a Bloodname, nor are Bloodnames limited to just 25 people per Blood House.

Technologically the Wolverines were the most advanced of the Clans prior to their Annihilation, so it is reasonable to have them continue developing new and improved weapons and equipment in the same fashion as the other Clans so they would have a roughly equivalent technology level as the Clans. They also continued building their own BattleMechs, conventional vehicles and AeroSpace Fighters, but limited manufacturing capabilities for fusion engines and endo-steel lowered their BattleMech and AeroSpace Fighter output while conventional vehicle output, at least for ICE designs, was going full bore (another motivating factor to combined arms philosophy among the Wolverines).

The machines used by Clan Wolverine will mostly be ancient SLDF Royal BattleMechs and some other surviving SLDF and early Clan Wolverine machines that have been maintained since Operation SWITCHBACK, some newly manufactured Clan Wolverine designs (Stag, Stag II, Mercury II and Pulverizer), some FedSuns designs expats (or disaffected defectors) brought with them or were salvaged from pirates (who in turn had salvaged them from the FedSuns) and some Clan salvage that is collected during long range trips to the Exodus Road and that region for pilgrimages to Barbados, predominantly Clan Ghost Bear. Clan Wolverine has also sent small units into the Inner Sphere, in a lance or company layout, to work as mercenaries from time to time - mostly for intelligence gathering and some recruiting.

I don't see myself giving the Wolverines more than 4 or 5 Galaxies - a relatively small force that would make them a regional power, but not huge enough to be noticed. In comparison Clan Wolf has 16 Galaxies and the Rasalhague Dominion has 12 Galaxies. And with all the forces concentrated primarily on one planet, it would make that planet a tough nut to crack (assuming an invading force makes it past the handful of WarShips Clan Wolverine still has, although we know the SLS Zughoffer Weir ends up in the hands of the Word of Blake at some point in time). I'm currently assembling Zeta Galaxy, the "oldest" Clan Wolverine Galaxy as that was the one that accompanied the fleet during Operation SWITCHBACK, in accordance with the RCT-style build outlined above.

It'll be a while, but this is where my head canon is. I have the Wolverines surviving, even thriving, but not becoming so powerful that anyone will take notice of them. This is entirely an exercise for me to help with building my Clan Wolverine forces and explaining away some of the BattleMech choices (such as my Kodiak and Executioner) using established lore to support my head canon.

Hey all! I'm about to purchase one of those fancy feldharr cases but I'm worried my clear bases might not fit, as they're a bit bigger (they match map hexes exactly). Does anyone have feldharr foam? Do you have some room in there with a normal base? Thanks! 😘

I'm hoping to get my gaming group into Battletech. None of them are really into wargaming, but we do play a lot of RPGs together so I thought we could ease into the rules by setting up a RPG type campaign using the battletech tabletop rules.

The basic idea would be for each player to pilot their own mech and work as a mercenary team accepting different missions during each play sessions. I tried this out with a 2 v 2 match a little while back and it worked pretty well.

Has anyone here tried something like this? Are there any rules or resources that would help facilitate a campaign like this? I'm still new to the tabletop game myself and would appreciate any guidance.

So me and my wife wanna try a game of BT. I was wondering what is simpler and engaging version of free quickstart rules to try BT?

BT/ Alpha Strike or Battleforce?