JohnTheRevelator
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2011
- Messages
- 1,160
This picture and more cool BattleTech stuff here: http://shimmering-sword.deviantart.com/art/Battletech-Unseen-Moon-396176559
What's this all about you ask? Simple. Recently I found out MegaMekHQ got new feature. Built-in Against the Bot rule-set that let's you (with much, much less work involved) play custom campaign with randomly generated missions/contracts/unit and personnel market. As the name suggests it also sets up bots for you to fight. Is this heavan?
I ran a large number of test games, tried out different things, see what works or me and what doesn't. BattleTech is a complex system and it comes as no surprise bots coded by unpaid hobbyists have difficulty handling it. For instance you won't be seeing any enemy VTOL's in this campaign, simply because AI can't really play them. Still it overall does work well enough and I can and probably will adjust rules as the game goes on. If for instance I'll suddenly find out I'm swimming in piles of money, I'll adjust contract payment rates accordingly. Maybe even lose some of that money through "random" event. If the fights will be too easy, I will make them harder. After all what kind of LP would that be if no one died? We can't have that.
What I'm saying is it's a work in progress on all accounts. Weird stuff or bugs may happen and sometimes I'll have to fudge things up a little bit to keep the game rolling.
It's 1st January 3047 by the way.
Let's take a look at our unit organization chart.
As you can see we're not exactly full company yet. On the upside we do have dropship AND a jumpship and you can bet your ass we'll be filling those empty mech bays once the money comes rolling in (seriously though, we can afford fucking jumpship just to run out of money for just 2 lances of mechs, whoever manages our finances is not very good with money, just saying). Hmm.. or should I say if? Ha, surely such prestigious mercenary unit like Knights of The Codex won't have any problems earning few million C-Bills.
How about we take closer look at the machines we'll be using?
Let's start with the biggest and by far most expensive assets.
Our pride and joy Scout class jumpship.
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Scout
As a side note I won't be doing any space battles, bots can't do that in first place. There is also small detail that I didn't quite get to that part of rulebooks yet myself. In any case it is out of scope I have in mind for this campaign and we'll never be able to afford any warships anyway.
Our dropship:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Union
Keep in mind in BattleTech universe "dropship" doesn't necessarily mean what you may think it means. It's pretty wide term describing all sorts of large ships without FTL drive but equipped with docking collar with which they can attach to jumpships. There are civilian dropships used just for ferrying cargo.
Our dropship is definitely of the dropship "dropship" variety though. It's armoured and armed and can fit whole company of mechs with supporting aerospace fighter lance. Goal for immediate future is to fill this thing up with all sorts of goodies.
Since we have those out of the way let's look at something you will be seeing here often. The Mechs.
Heaviest mech in the roster, our main big hitter:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cataphract
Especially since it's piloted by the veteran mechwarrior. Should be kicking a lot of ass, sometimes quite literally.
Moving on.
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Shadow_Hawk
Very good armour for a medium, decent mobility. Doesn't pack quite as much firepower though. Weapon load out on our variant is heavily long range focused, both of it's weapons suffer from minimum range hit penalties up close. It's job will be mostly to provide fire support.
Next we have this:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Phoenix_Hawk
Very jack of all trades kind of mech. Great mobility (especially range on jumpjets), decent enough armour, decent firepower.
Last machine in 1st (and for now only) mech lance:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jenner
It's a light but it certainly falls on heavier side of light. Very good armour for it's class. It does have slight flaw in that it can't twist it's torso. It's not a big deal though.
Finally our support aerospace fighter lance (or if you prefer flight)
As you can see what we have here are two pretty much identical medium aerospace fighters.
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Corsair
Our variant has two large lasers and short range missiles. They also are capable of carrying 10 bombs each, option I definitely will be using. They will be doing some serious work here, don't think BattleTech is exclusively mech show.
So here we are, with all this expensive military equipment just sitting on our asses in Outreach. C-Bills we have left won't last for too long. We have to find our first contract or it's game over man.
Luckily something shows up very quickly. Well, actually we had surprising amount of offers to choose from, I guess it's easy to fool people into thinking you're some big time mercenary outfit if you have jumpship. I picked something that should be safe and easily turn us profit. Short 3 month contract with Federated Commonwealth. Mission is Recon Raid in Free Worlds League controlled system Asuncion.
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Asuncion
Pay is good, salvage rights not so much, only 20% but you gotta start somewhere, right? Anyway even if 20% isn't much it should be enough to scoop up the juicy pieces we actually want. It's not too far away, only roughly 28 days trip. Thanks to that we won't burn too much money by just getting there.
We just have to snoop around for a bit and cash the check. There shouldn't be all that much fighting here. Maybe hit their supply lines a bit or do an ambush or two. The only issue I can see is that we're not exactly a scout lance material. I'm looking at you fat-ass Cataphract. Still it can't hurt to have all that extra firepower if shit hits fan.
There will be fighting, in the first update though. I already have the game played. I just have to do write up. Which I'm doing right now, hopefully it should be up today.
BTW I need ideas for codexian rank system.
Also here is full list of personnel, yes there is more people than just mech pilots. Take a look:
You know, now that I think about it there is all those people in there and none of them have any call signs yet. Geez I can't come up with that many all by myself. Peoples of The Codex, you'll have to help me here.
Just keep in mind that if you'll sign up as support personnel, especially very disposable support personnel like astechs you probably definitely will never get any spotlight in this LP. I'm not going to write prose about mundane daily life of assistant mechanic whose main job is to fetch wrenches and power tools for actual technicians.