Why is Battletech the most popular mech wargame? It's not the most realistic, or the most tactical, its setting isn't the most varied, it doesn't attempt to do combined arms particularly well, but nor does it focus entirely on the mechs. Is it just the law of averages? It does a little bit of everything just good enough to appeal at least a little bit to everyone?
It was the first It had a cartoonIt had tons of video games, don't underestimate media tie in'sHad some good designs nabbed from anime and shared with Robotech
>>93417090Same reason 40k dominates the sci-fi infantry wargaming scene. And why Star Wars and Star Trek remain the dominant franchises in sci-fi movies/shows.Battletech is old as fuck, so it has accumulated an insane amount of content/lore and a widespread fanbase to support the continued release of new content. There's over a hundred novels in the setting, a galaxy-spanning map of canonical worlds, and well over a thousand established mechs/vehicles. How can a new mecha game hope to compete with this level of depth?
>>93417090It had a pretty cool cartoon.
>>93417656Everyone always brings up Macross, but it took designs from other stuff too like Dougram and Crusher Joe. Plus a bunch of UC Gundam references. Hell there's a clan mech that's just a Zaku.
>>93417802Actually the design overlap's because of a shared contractor's fuck-fuck games.
>>93417656Oh and it has huge lore you can get lost in>>93417802I do't bring up Dougram because I'm kinda sick of it only being known as just "the battletech anime", but yeah. Battletech manages to capture both a weeb audience that would be into mechs, and at the same time a non-weeb audience that like the idea of giant war machines but might not enjoy how anime depicts them
It sold anime to americans when they were afraid of and resentful towards anime, so it became "the one that's okay to like" for its generation, like things like Bebop or DBZ became for theirs. Now that anime is commonly liked and accepted it's just still around because it's a pretty decent tabletop game. If they ever make a good licensed gundam game it'll probably get swallowed up.
>>93417656Absolutely this.Though I think something often missed is that it's just a good, well made game that has needed little fixing since it first kicked off. It also was a wargame that had very good support for running it as a pseudo-historical game or wargame campaign that blurred the lines between an RPG and wargame, while most other games are much more tournament/competition focused. Further, while other miniatures wargames are constantly pushing to go rules-light, with faster play and all the emphasis on how many miniatures you can put on the table, it's one of the few antitheses you can buy if you want the focus to be on a good granular game and not just a way to show off figurines.Even before the new plastics, it still managed to be a granular alternative to games that largely felt the same. There are other granular games too like Starfleet Battles but Battletech managed to stay the one that people turned to when they wanted autistic crunch.That being said, if CGL make the mistake of trying to push Alpha Strike as the primary title or worse, Alphastrike-ifying Battletech, it will lose what makes it stand out from the crowd and will be pushing daisies the minute some new hotness with nicer cheaper minis comes around.
>>93417090>Why is Battletech the most popular mech wargame?FASAtechs Great, and was based on something Great too.
>>93417656>It had tons of video games, don't underestimate media tie in'sI would say that that over half of all BT players I know, and probably more like 90% of those under 40, got into it via video games (and one person I know got into it via the fucking TCG!).It helps that BattleTech has an engaging universe and rules that are reasonably fun, that it's got incumbency, and that the cost of entry is literally zero because people don't mind if you play using counters or standees, but I'd say that the video games are the single biggest contributor to it being the biggest.
>>93417802>ZakuLies! The Horned Owl is its own totally unique design!
>>934170901) It's a good game. This gets passed over, but while it's a weird game in today's space, it's good at what it intends to do. It works.2) It's had a slow but steady stream of some very popular video games constantly bringing fresh blood into the game, from the 80s through to today.3) It's been constantly iterated but never massively changed, so that anyone who ever bought the box set in 1984 can still dive in today yet there's a constant stream of new gear, lore, war machines, rules, plot developments, and even whole sub-game engines. It's been able to have its cake and eat it too.4) Much like some old name or music / fashion trend that goes through a period of awkwardness only to emerge as fresh all over again, it's now so old that it has looped back around to interesting, playing completely differently than all the other modern skirmish games out there, which tend to focus on streamlined, fast-paced play.
King Crab, my beloved.
>>93419190Originality is the hobgoblin of small minds, as they say.
>>93417090Inertia. Same as D&D.
>>93417090Do you have examples of other mech games that are better? Battletech seems solid to me, and thats not mentioning the sheer scale in terms of how much extra shit you could add to your games.
>>93417090It has a good, grounded background of interesting characters and politics.
>>93418963>That being said, if CGL make the mistake of trying to push Alpha Strike as the primary title or worse, Alphastrike-ifying Battletech, it will lose what makes it stand out from the crowdThe inertia of 40 years makes it so that's the only direction you can really take the game mechanicallyYou could have revised rules that could at least excise some accumulated jank but that would alienate the main playerbase of ancient grogs. Alpha Strike and such don't really step on their toes and are more beginner friendly
>>93422822BT is far from grounded, but it's kinda like Forgotten Realms - there's a lot of lore to choose from for Your Games
>>93417090Best story maybe, also good characters/worldbuilding.
>>93417090Because everything else has been horrifically mismanaged by comparison.And especially now, mecha is a dead boomer genre. You'd be pretty stupid to invest even an extremely conservative 10k into a mecha wargame.
>>93417090>or the most tacticalWith optional rules, the tactical granularity of Battletech is higher than any of its non-existent rivals.
>>93423050>>93425392I feel like the lore is actually the weakest part of the setting, just because it’s so samey. It’s be like if Warhammer 40 was just 12 slightly different variations of the Imperium.
>>93425793If you want gay fag aliens, keep playing 40k. We don't want/need you in Battletech.
>>93425793That's actually a strength, because so many other settings go full gonzo in an attempt to make every faction completely separate and unrelated from every other one. Battletech only having human factions (no, the stone age aliens that nobody cares about and who don't participate in anything more than a short walk beyond the caves they live in don't count) with a shared history and common tech base makes it stand out, particularly to a certain subset of historical players. Everyone using similar mechs is like everyone using similar muskets and cannons in a napoleonic game. Some people don't want the Prussians to be using magic bows while the Russians use steampunk nonsense and the French have rifles from the future, and Battletech hits a similar niche.
>>93425793It's like Star Trek, where everybody who can into space operates at a comparable tech level, so I guess the problem is that there aren't enough distinct facial ridges for plebs to grok the existing differences between the polities.
>>93425527I mean spending $10k to put a new mecha game to market, which is very conservative if you aren't sharting a MS Word PDF with no editing and no art on Wargames Foundry.
>>93426127Thinking that a brat from a libertarianist monarchy who grew up only being able to fall upwards after his parents aknowledged him as theirs will have a common frame of reference with somebody who grew up in a quasi-sectarian hardcore social darwinist meritocracy is a classic Tucker Carlson fallacy.
>>93426127This argument wasn't compelling when it was spammed across the general a few months ago and it's still not compelling now.
>>93426411>Dude I think they had one of the all-time Kickstarters, where individual whales were pledging that much money.The Robotech vaporware where Siembieda fucked the backers harder than Coleman fucked Shadowrun? Yes, this is proof that Battletech is the one-eyed man in the land of Helen Keller.
>>93426472A minimally competent rulebook with art and copy editing and a small print run is going to cost thousands of dollars, even if sweat equity is treated as free.I don't think there's enough interest in mechs that aren't BT to justify even that. DP9 takes months to get things back into stock.
>>93426411>And yet that's exactly what the writers do...Look, even among the succ lord kids in the Stackpole novels, there were the Liao kids, who absolutely flipped the table and refused to fall in line politically.There's also the legendary freak out of Jamie Wolf, who couldn't even entertain the idea that the Kuritas may not be a Clan-style warrior society and that they would bin prime giftake material on grounds of politics.
>>93425793>Slightly Different It sounds like you've done nothing to actually look into the differences of the great houses and their battle doctrines. Each is very distinct culturally and tactically. Even the Clans have differences even if they're closing to just being 14 Imperium's like you said. This isn't putting you down but just because there are no aliens it doesn't mean it's boring generic space stuff.
>>93426551You want minis for this hypothetical Indy mech game? I hope you realize 3d modelers work on "fuck you, pay me". So that's probably a few grand for a handful of stls.
>>93426596The Clans are more alien than most space operas' actual aliens, and that's a good thing!
>>93417090>It's not the most realistic, or the most tactical, its setting isn't the most varied, it doesn't attempt to do combined arms particularly well, but nor does it focus entirely on the mechs. You should try actually playing it
>>93426596Ultimately there's really only two factions in battletech.>The Inner Sphere monarchies>The ClansEveryone is just a variation of those.
>>93426660Stop ban evading.
>>93425900That's fair, it could be said that Battletech is more of a historical wargame than a military sci-fi game.
>>93426660>Which are disagreements, not entirely alien thought processes.Tucker figured he'd get "More like OSAMA, amirite, DEI more like DIE"-jokes rather than rantings about ancient, spacefaring vedo-russians when he sat down with a politician with whom he shared a common dislike of the current political system of the United States.
>>93426757It has already been mentioned that the Clans are hardcore darwinian meritocratists while the loin spawns of IS nobility have a lot of security networks and safety blankets, as 1%ers tend to have.
>>93417090maybe not here, but alot of people dont like this very real answer; its mostly luck and timing, and more often then not just being first like >>93417656first reply said.thats it, thats the secret to winning 9/10 times.
>>93426968Sure but the clans still have the convenience of their leaders heirs conveniently getting the best of everything to win those little competitions hence why the Wolf Clan is usually being lead by a Kerensky.
>>93427046Clan warriors have to earn their name. The Wolves are led by Kerenskys because anyone good enough to become a Kerensky is good enough to have a shot at becoming the ruler of the clan.
>>93427046The current Khan of Clan Wolf earned the bloodname Ward and is genetically a Steiner-Davion^2 with no relation to previous khans.
It was if not the first, but the first big one, and it's been sustained by a player base that loves the old school crunch, and that active scene attracts others
>>93417090It combines Japanese Mecha with western historical fantasy, what's not to love?
>>93426735Yeah that's like saying the Tau are the same as the Eldar because they're both space aliens. I guess if you zoom far enough out it's the same yeah. You also forgot ComStar which was an entirely unique third party that was a separate player operating off of a single world Damn, I wish they didn't utterly obliterate them in the 'current day ' of the setting. I guess that's the good thing about being able to play in any era you want.
>>93428370>You also forgot ComStar which was an entirely unique third party that was a separate player operating off of a single worldComStar was always an NPC faction though.
>>93428393ComGuard players and the entire Jihad begs to differ.
>>93428370If you compare, say, the Davions and Steiners, how different are they really? Sure you have minor differences, but they're similar to the differences you might find in a historical game.
>>93417090The models are cheap and easy to get. A whole lance is $30 and I can get them at Barnes & Noble or Target. I don't think that Heavy Gear ever figured out their distribution issues.
>>93428504One could argue that their similarities is why they become a united front, another unique situation in all of BattleTech because they actually put aside their differences for the sake of mutual gain in the long term. Before that, the Lyran had no delusions about being extremely lederhosen wearing plutocrats who made all the fucking money and were rather backwards and stilted in their leadership which is why you have the joke about steiner scout squads being four Atlas because they can afford to be that wastefulFedeRats are in an eternal WW2 we'd do it all for King and Country all in this together bullshit while also being the biggest space occupier in the Inner Sphere. You never had full on Marik civil wars but you had plenty of shit like Isle of Skye and the Capellan March plotting to escape the Davion thumb and be their own true bastion of what it means to be jolly ol England. Also they have some of the best spies in the business so plenty of James Bond assholes are running around fucking shit up. I mean, everyone has their special intelligence agencies but the Ministry of Intelligence always seemed to be a step above and its what let Hanse run circles around people so I really consider that to be their strongsuit
>>93427046No. The Warrior caste only gets the right to violence and to attempt to win the succession rights of a blood name, but they have to win blood names and positions before they can start owning private mini fridges that are safe from being raided.Also no leader has any relation with what could be their heirs, because those are produced in large batches without any mental or physical involvement from them and they will eventually attack said leader in a bid to oust them.
>>93417090Do you like the medieval and renaissance period? Do you like mechs? Then you'll like Battletech.
>>93428504>If you compare, say, the Davions and Steiners, how different are they really?There are mountains, so clearly there is no material difference between growing up in Switzerland and the Appalachians.
Is CAV any good? Ive sern minis for it, but I've never seen anyone playing it.
>>93430911I got mad at it when I read the rules and it said melee was stupid and it isn't in the game, and it achstoually only has very close range abstracted shooting that resembles a melee system. Otherwise yeah it's just store-brand battletech.
>>93427726The current Khan is Ward-and sister brother jarring.
>>93430934>>93430911I like it, but it's more Alphastrike than BattleTech. It's fast and damage impacts a mech or vehicle with each hit, which is good. I've liked it since 1e, but compare it to Alphastrike, not BattleTech as it's more of a many unit game and doesn't have the detail of BattleTech.
>>93417090>Is it just the law of averages? It does a little bit of everything just good enough to appeal at least a little bit to everyone?You choose how much you want to spend in terms of money, space, gaming and hobby time and brain power- the floor is the Mariana Trench chasm and the ceiling is literally in orbit.It never changes, just advances slowly, so someone who quit twenty years ago can just drop back in as if nothing happened. Yet despite the rules never changing, there is more content and more ways to play than any one human can explore in their lifetimeIt can't fall out of fashion as it was never really in fashion. The derpy designs were always derpy, the "roll 2D6 up to seven times for each individually-tracked shot" design was never slick, so there's nothing there to decay with the passage of time. Basically Battletech was there before most people on this board or active wargamers were born, and it'll still be there in roughly the same form when we die- except that there'll be more Mechwarrior games in whatever direct-brain-access form video games eventually take. In short, Battletech is more of a widespread hobby than a product, unlike almost any fantasy or scifi wargame one could care to name.
>>93433417>so there's nothing there to decay with the passage of timeAside from their rights to use certain designs lol
>>93433492Hardly matters when the vast majority of the designs aren't in active production outside some really poor metal sculpts, and when you can play using standees or cut-out bits of cereal packet anyway.
>>93433492That was resolved years ago by HG suing EVERYONE and losing. Unseen are fair game and all have new minis now.
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/BTechReadoutshttps://bundleofholding.com/presents/TotalWar2024Are these worth paying for?
>>93438592Bundles are always great values: they give you a shitton of whatever it is you're looking at.The only issue with this one is that while the price is good, it's not the best way to actually start with the game. Total Warfare is the core rulebook, but it's also like stepping into D&D by getting all three core rulebooks at once and needing to figure them all out. CGL makes intro box sets that do way better jobs than what Total Warfare does to actually make the game digestible and comprehensible. But if you know that going in, you can't go wrong here.
>>93430911It's basically a buncha BT grogs cooking up their own Alpha Strike that doesn't suck.The setting is completely uniteresting though.
>>93438592battlemech manual is the only rulebook you need as someone starting out, most people play only with mechs and mechs are the basis for other rules, you can add combined arms in later and BMM is actually well laid out
>>93417090Which mech game is better?
>>93417802>>93419190>ZakuDeath Army actually
>>934170901: The basic game has changed very little (apart from optional add ons and tech) in the past 40 years. This means that grandpa can get out his card standees and put them against his son's plastic mechs or his grandsons resin miniatures, all using the same original rules. 2: Other big companies (GW, WOTC, etc) keep killing off the previous rule systems and models of their games so that they can sell a new version, over and over. This splits the player base, each loyal to a different edition, discouraging many of them from playing outside the version they learned and became invested (time and financially) in. Because (until recently with alpha strike) Battletech has never done this, the player base tend to regard themselves as one group and are more friendly to players of different generations.3: Battletech encourages the use of proxies and stand in models, even including a set of construction rules that allow players to consistantly design mechs and vehicle stats for whatever they want to use in the game. GW experimented with that in a few early editions but soon dropped it and insisted on only 'official models' being used in their games to boost sales of their official products.4: Most of the lore is about normal humans fighting normal humans, with no aliens, gods, demons, world destroying supertech, etc. It's more grounded and relatable than some of the 'turned up to 11' kiddies fantasy powerwank of other franchises I could mention.
>>93441698Heavy Gear is basically "Battletech but realistic and grounded"
>>93445294HG is basically VOTOMS, but 'hard' scifi plus unit size inflation.
>>93419190>>93441820The Atlas - Scopedog connection seems stronger than this one.
>>93445336Well VOTOMS is about as realistic as you can make a mech show (minus the protagonist).
>>93445384VOTOMS is a high fantasy show wearing a coat of Industrial Light and Magic, my friend.
>>93445410And yet it's still the closest thing we have to a realistic mech setting.
>>93419190>>93441820
for me it was the novel series about the grumpy jade falcon woman. loved those as a kid
Don't mind me just posting the best mech
>>93441820Nah I'm pretty sure the Horned Owl based directly on the Zakus. Notice both the same pose and how the HO has those tubes coming out the frame like the Zakus does in >>93419190 plus the shoulders are much closer to the Zaku than death army.
>>93445549The Death Army is similar, but the pose is fucking identical to the Zaku; the Death Army's stance is wider and the arms are bent a little and facing forward instead of down at the side.. Maybe the Horned Owl takes inspiration from both, but I'd bet almost anything that the artist was looking at a Zaku when they drew their thing...if not literally tracing it as the base. Plus if it was the Death Army it would have a handheld-style gun.
>>93426773It's more that instead of "these are the avian-esque aliens who use magical crystal mech while these are toad-like aliens who use blocky, industrial designs" BT has enough variety in mech and non-mech units that uniqueness is defined by how and what they use out of more or less the same general pool. "No, as honorable warriors we will only use the most refined of weaponry and not sully ourselves with dishonorable tactics like ambushes" versus "fuck you, an Atlas is a scouting mech."
>>93417090Lore, history and most of what every other reply has said. it also doesn't have much competition for combined arms mech games with heavy gear being pretty nonexistent especially since so much of the stuff from the lore has playable stats, like you have playable dropships that can carry your entire force, mechs, aircraft, vehicles and infantry while also sticking around for firesupport.
>>93426968The Great Houses are a bunch of preening, backstabbing egotists operating under a thin veneer of superior breeding, the Clans are a bunch of preening, backstabbing egotists operating under a thin veneer of superior breeding. The biggest takeaway of the initial Clan invasion was that the social darwinist meritocracy was all bullshit for the little people while the head honchos are all position scrabbling, closed door politicking shits out for themselves.
>>93449110The Clans: nobility systems are so horrible and inherently corrupt.Also the Clans: we should have our society run by a martial oligarchy obsessed with bloodlines and breeding.I have to say that learning more about how hypocritical the Clans are was one of the things I enjoyed more about the 3050-67 period. "We're super honorable...unless it's inconvenient. We care so much about eliminating waste...except that we throw away 95%+ of our cadets despite the fact that a couple Clans clearly show that this isn't necessary; etc."I think that the Clans are appealing to players because they're kind of exotic but ultimately very human.
>>93449110>>93449797>Also the Clans: we should have our society run by a martial oligarchy obsessed with bloodlines and breeding.The Clans (other than the Bears) aren't particularily obsessed with bloodline beyond a fella having enough percentiles to claim a blood name. Heck, they will explicitly use the genes of freeborn if they manage to break all previous records even.Furthermore, nobody's holding the hands of their bottle babies just because they could be direct descendants of their founding father and only 5% of each generation ever get within reach of a chance to win ultimate honour while being allowed to own an un-raidable mini fridge stacked with good beer.The other 95% will be hauling boxes in an invasion fulfillment center.
Idk why people say the clans are darwinian or meritocratic when they're practically the opposite of both. Darwinian theory is entirely about survival of the fittest, where evolutionary fitness is determined by successfully passing on your genes to the next generation. "Might makes right" gorilla caveman shit isn't darwinian, the entire point of fitness is that it's about the end results, not just might makes right, the strongest chimp doesn't always have the most kids, sometimes it's the sneakiest or smartest or the luckiest. if you're a strong burly manly man who goes off to war and Jody fucks your wife while you die in battle, you are less fit than he is despite being """"warrior caste""""" material. Yeah sure bro go die for the clans in honoraburu single combat.>oh, well, they don't have kids via fucking anyways, they clone people in giant batches!yeah, that's not darwinian then dumbass, batch cloned segments of the population vomited out without a concept of parentage is closer to gay space communism than it is anything""""darwinian""""", and in fact purposefully engaging in eugenics along artificial cultural lines and enforced ideology is the opposite of allowing natural selection and darwinian evolution to occur.
>>93450072Okay, let's call them "eugenicist meritocratists" then, as they after all do deliberately counteract some of the class ossification that comes with true, blue social darwinist politics.The idea of the program is - to fast track the creation of better human warriors. As in people who perform superior as pilots of large to giant robots, but who are still genetically compatible with baseline humans.To that end, they - take the warriors that peformed the best, recombine their sperm and ovaries in petri dishes and let them have hundreds of descendants by growing the embryos in tubesThey then- put all of those kids through rigorous training and testing to get the best from naturally occuring mutations and random genetic recombinations of the given gene stock.The kids that succeed will then be folded back into the program and assist in the producion of the next generation.Inbetween, the Scientists make sure they don't drift too far from humanity in general and probably do occasionally throw in a couple clones to test whether the program is still measurably on track.Also yes, they are gay space communists as they are obsessed with socialized heterosexual procreation. Which is very gay.
>>93417090MechWarrior is better
>>93450072>Idk why people say the clans are darwinian or meritocratic when they're practically the opposite of bothIt's what the Clans say about themselves.
>>93417090>Why is Battletech the most popular mech wargame? It's not the most realistic, or the most tactical, its setting isn't the most varied, it doesn't attempt to do combined arms particularly well, but nor does it focus entirely on the mechs.Which mech games do you propose are better?
>>93450072>Darwinian theory is entirely about survival of the fittest, where evolutionary fitness is determined by successfully passing on your genes to the next generation.But if individuals who show great military prowess are given the chance to have massive amounts of descendants, while others aren't allowed, then fitness IS military prowess. The clans just have different evolutionary pressures.
