Battletech

Punko

Punko

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In the base game I noticed weird AI priorities, but it doesn't matter one bit once you start playing properly.

I either kite the enemy into death, or shoot em straight to death, if I can't do either, my build / approach have failed and its time to go home.
 
Erronius

Erronius

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Evernothing said:
The AI priority is something like First Seen>Lower Evasion Chevrons>Guarded>Proximity to simplify it a hell of a lot.(Rear attack possible is also considered as is heat\ instability\damage and a bunch of other stuff)

And First Seen seems to be weighted very highly I've often had mechs run past other mechs of mine even ignoring rear attacks just to nail first seen.
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That might have been why I kept having people chasing my commander in the Blackjack, as I kept trying to get elevated early and start plinking with AC2s.


So far the cbill grind and constantly looking for systems with mutiple missions is kind of...meh. I dunno, unless there's an easier way (I'm assuming the higher the faction, the more missions that faction offers you?) Right now I'm sporadically doing the storyline, and while I can chose to go elsewhere to look for random missions, most of the time the only missions I see 'remotely' are Arano, who I am at Allied with.
 
Sludig

Sludig

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It's hard to say without watching over your shoulder. I fairly early stopped having cash issues. There is such a thing as side missioning too much which can lead to minimal rewards and I think you can get stagnant there, vs if you push at least a handful of story missions in, you get huge cash payouts for each and kinda starts unlocking more in the way of higher difficulty missions. I side missioned a ton but was able to snag several mediums and I think a heavy before I even did the mission on the pirate moon with the quickdraw leader.

Don't stockpile mechs like crazy, you really only need 4 with maybe one backup. Don't be afraid to sell most things. Early on salvaging mechs can be hard because they tend to lose center torso and die before you can take 2 legs, or get enough wounds via side torso destruction + knockdowns or headshot. (You might find yourself needing to essentially reserve and juggle things that you can LRM boat them from 0 to full stability, then someone else hits with a minor thing to finish knockdown, then give your other mechs a chance to free called shot them on the ground, or if it's close to dead, let it stand back up and knockdown again...

AC'2s should be quickly outgrown. Try building boats min max style. IE 1-2 LRM boats. (Though again I'm not sure how nerfed they are since I finished before patch, but they should still be reliable damage) Then usually an SRM/MG boat was good. And iirc medium lasers still the hotness there so you can build a medium laser vomit build for murdering things you arnt trying to salvage. High heat mechs generally mix well with meleeing. Blow all the heat you can one round, next round punch while dropping heat.

I gave up on AC's unless I had no other options except for AC20's that were still great for called shotting to the torso to just delete medium/many heavies quickly.
 
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goishen

goishen

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Yeh. It's kind'a funny, but I tried to play the correct way (only did at max 2-3 side missions for every main mission) and failed miserably. In the end, I was up against like nine mechs, five of which outweighed me.

That was the point where I said I was gonna have to do some more side missions if it killed me.
 
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Fadaar

Fadaar

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Early on salvage mechs as much as possible and sell them. Also keep a small roster available since it costs more to keep them active, plus you need to keep them in storage to sell them.
 
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Erronius

Erronius

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Sludig said:
Don't stockpile mechs like crazy, you really only need 4 with maybe one backup. Don't be afraid to sell most things. Early on salvaging mechs can be hard because they tend to lose center torso and die before you can take 2 legs, or get enough wounds via side torso destruction + knockdowns or headshot. (You might find yourself needing to essentially reserve and juggle things that you can LRM boat them from 0 to full stability, then someone else hits with a minor thing to finish knockdown, then give your other mechs a chance to free called shot them on the ground, or if it's close to dead, let it stand back up and knockdown again...

AC'2s should be quickly outgrown. Try building boats min max style. IE 1-2 LRM boats. (Though again I'm not sure how nerfed they are since I finished before patch, but they should still be reliable damage) Then usually an SRM/MG boat was good. And iirc medium lasers still the hotness there so you can build a medium laser vomit build for murdering things you arnt trying to salvage. High heat mechs generally mix well with meleeing. Blow all the heat you can one round, next round punch while dropping heat.

I gave up on AC's unless I had no other options except for AC20's that were still great for called shotting to the torso to just delete medium/many heavies quickly.
Click to expand...

I stopped with the AC2s pretty quickly, even on the BJ. I think I put an AC5 + MLas and max armor/JJ, and even then I more or less stopped using it completely. (Now, if I could put 6xMGs on one like the MWO Arrow, I would)

I think i had read somewhere that LRMs with Stability mods were great to stack, but up until now I'd been trying to avoid boating LRMs. Both my Onion-Vs have a mix; one has 2xSRM6s/LRM20 and the other (I think) has an AC10, LRM10 and 2SRM6s. I'll probably take the AC10 off the one if I can find a decent rare LRM20. I think I have an AC20+++ so maybe I should build one of them around that, I dunno. I still haven't managed to get 3 pieces of a HBK-4G yet,so I may as well.
Fadaar said:
Early on salvage mechs as much as possible and sell them. Also keep a small roster available since it costs more to keep them active, plus you need to keep them in storage to sell them.
Click to expand...

I thought about selling at one point, but I saw they only sold for something like 200k (?) and just balked. But I do have a ton of light mechs that I'll never use. I have quite a few complete locusts, but I don't think I've ever used one.

Another odd thing that struck me is that I normally see the AI running the same handful of mechs, with an occasional 'rare' mech in the mix. I can't swinbg a dead cat without hiting a #&%$(#@ Vindicator, but mechs like the Catapult variants seem far more rare for me (I think I've only seen each of those variants once)

I'm getting the impression though that mech selection is randomly generated at the start of each mission, after restarting a few times and seeing different enemy selection. BUt I'm also not sure how hardcore I want to be about cycling the same mission until I see specific mechs I want to salvage...
 
Sludig

Sludig

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iirc, mechs are also tied to regions some which matters more as you unlock more of the map. So others saw like a ton of black knights and I saw 1 in my entire play thru as an example.

As far as selling sure locusts might be 150k, but costs ramp up quickly. (And make sure thats selling in store not "scrapping")

I'd quite a collection but realized late game, you pretty much never other than to be stubborn and use something you like aesthetically, ever going to use anything besides your 4 biggest mechs. (Excepting things like Dragon/Banshee other super terrible mechs)
 
goishen

goishen

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Banshees are terribad mechs. I could never get anything besides I think five ML, and four MG's on them without them overheating like a mother fucker.

For a 95 ton mech, that's pretty sad.
 
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ronne

ronne

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That's because the Banshee has a fucking massive engine in it, but for whatever fucking reason they don't show engine sizes/weights/ratings in the game so mechs just come with seemingly random amounts of available tonnage on the paperdoll screen.
 
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Gavinmad

Gavinmad

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ronne said:
That's because the Banshee has a fucking massive engine in it, but for whatever fucking reason they don't show engine sizes/weights/ratings in the game so mechs just come with seemingly random amounts of available tonnage on the paperdoll screen.
Click to expand...

And it's canon for the Banshee to just generally be trash tier, even when fully refitted or redesigned from the bottom up with Star League/Clan tech.
 
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Erronius

Erronius

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Yeah, not really a fan of being unable to swap engines (or any other type of weight savings, like endo/FF). I also kind of want AMS. But I get that they're being hardcore canon nerds, so it kind of makes sense. I don't think any of my friends ever stuck to canon with tabletop Battletech that hard.

There's still a lot of mechs I wish were in-game, and not even necessarily the Unseen/Reseen.

I also think that MWO ruined me on a lot of mechs. I finally got an Urbie and took it out...just meh. I'm not sure what I had really expected, given that it isn't quirked heavily for armor like in MWO, nor do we get any of the fancy advanced tech to kit mechs out with, either. A lot of these mechs just don't really feel unique at all, once you get past hardpoint selection.

...though I am liking the Grasshopper a lot, but that's probably due to the 6 support weapon hardpoints.
 
khorum

khorum

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AMS would break the 3025 game---which it eventually did when it was introduced in the 3050 game. It's actually why I'm leary of the "fixes" to the knockdown mechanic from LRM spam they've introduced. You could build around it with gyro stabs to cut back on the knockdowns, but really LRMs were king until AMS.

AMS could technically be found as lostech in the 3025 game tho... or the cheap Davion knockoff could be dropped/purchased in Davion space.
 
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Erronius

Erronius

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Well, I'm generally opposed to LRM dominance, in theory. But I'll definitely take some against the AI.

Free weight in this time period is pretty restricted, though. Was it 1/2 ton for each AMS and 1t lot for ammo? I'm not even sure how many I would take if I could, since pure tonnage is so precious in 3025. When I try comparing MGs and small lasers, I often end up opting for the smalls just due to the ammo weight. Or taking none at all.

As far as game breaking goes...I do love me some AC/20s and Called Shot Mastery. Or multishot + breaching. Some of that is simply ridiculous.
 
khorum

khorum

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In the tabletop there would be more weapon diversity for sure, since you would fit for a relatively balanced composition. I think the problem with LRMs in this game is that the knockdown mechanic has become THE survival mechanism when fitting to fight against three or four lances---two or more of which may be engaged with you at any time. Couple that with the fact that some missions require you to chase targets down and it's a no-brainer. So a lot of the chassis and builds that would otherwise make better sense in a 1-to-1 battle tends to be pushed out by considerations for surviving and winning against those numbers.
 
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Erronius

Erronius

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I can feel the burnout coming on. Which is probably a good thing, considering I haven't logged into MWO in a while.

I had wanted to do some Taurian missions to work up my faction (faction whooooooore!) but after running around the map randomly, I'm guessing that you can't even get any Taurian missions until you progress the storyline far enough that the Taurians break with [whatever the 'bad' storyline faction is]. So...heading back to priority missions again, I guess.

khorum said:
I think the problem with LRMs in this game is that the knockdown mechanic has become THE survival mechanism when fitting to fight against three or four lances---two or more of which may be engaged with you at any time.
Click to expand...

I've had some issues with just killing mechs quickly enough so that I can turn my attention to the reinforcements.
 
Gavinmad

Gavinmad

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Erronius said:
I can feel the burnout coming on. Which is probably a good thing, considering I haven't logged into MWO in a while.

I had wanted to do some Taurian missions to work up my faction (faction whooooooore!) but after running around the map randomly, I'm guessing that you can't even get any Taurian missions until you progress the storyline far enough that the Taurians break with [whatever the 'bad' storyline faction is]. So...heading back to priority missions again, I guess.



I've had some issues with just killing mechs quickly enough so that I can turn my attention to the reinforcements.
Click to expand...

Battletech is a lot like Shadowrun Returns. Solid framework behind a mediocre game but with a lot of potential after another iteration or two.
 
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Harshaw

Harshaw

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Erronius said:
Well, I'm generally opposed to LRM dominance, in theory. But I'll definitely take some against the AI.

Free weight in this time period is pretty restricted, though. Was it 1/2 ton for each AMS and 1t lot for ammo? I'm not even sure how many I would take if I could, since pure tonnage is so precious in 3025. When I try comparing MGs and small lasers, I often end up opting for the smalls just due to the ammo weight. Or taking none at all.

As far as game breaking goes...I do love me some AC/20s and Called Shot Mastery. Or multishot + breaching. Some of that is simply ridiculous.
Click to expand...

I got an AC 20 Headshot on a King Crab. It was glorious.
 
Erronius

Erronius

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Gavinmad said:
Battletech is a lot like Shadowrun Returns. Solid framework behind a mediocre game but with a lot of potential after another iteration or two.
Click to expand...
One of the things I didn't like about Returns was it felt like 3 versions that were an alpha, beta, and release build, builds that you purchased seperately when it should have been a single product, and even then it felt linear as fuck without a lot (or any) replay value.

So far I don't know if I feel quite the same about this game, but I might if they sell multiple upgraded versions.
 
Erronius

Erronius

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I just finished the campaign, and immediately it felt like the difficulty of missions ramped up a notch. Before I left Coromidor I decided to do both the missions that were there...they're both 5 skull...and nothing but pure assault lances. Am I taking crazy pills? I don't think I'd seen missions with nothing but assault mechs prior to this.
 
goishen

goishen

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Yah, some of those five skull missions are beastly. Just pray to god that you never hear, "Well, looks like they've brought in reinforcements... Better be on your toes commander" on one of those missions.
 
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