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Xotl posted:You'll get a warning for calling anyone a hack - personal attacks are not allowed. The BT forums are not SA. So how does Megamek avoid the license issues?
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Mar 14, 2013 15:19
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TardedPanda posted:That was a pretty good read. I just started looking for my first set of minis. All I have is what came in the box set but I'm starting to get the itch to buy new ones. Fortunately I only have to compete with one or two others in North Florida to buy them at my local shop. I'm pretty sure nobody near Jacksonville plays the game. I'm a novice painter at best, but I will say that I am pretty surprised how good the cheap plastic minis (some of them at least) look with a good primer and some paint.
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Mar 16, 2013 16:04
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Yeah, they require a LOT of cleanup work (and some even have some nasty divots in them) but after that they do a really good job. I agree, I would love to see the hard plastic minis on the market, but my understanding is that it's not going to happen for a while. Part of the problem is that, as I understand it, the cost of making the initial molds are super expensive. I'm a little surprised Ironwind hasn't set up a kickstarter like Reaper did, since they apparently cleaned house.
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Mar 17, 2013 04:05
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Defiance Industries posted:The LAM doesn't exactly set the FANBASE on fire, let alone the whole interwebs. There's a lotta folks like me who can't stand me. Yeah. I was super excited when I saw "Iron Winds Kickstarter" and then my heart sank when I saw they were doing LAMs.  I mean jesus. Make a kickstarter for all the 3050 clan omnimechs, and use the reach goals to add IS mechs for every $5000 raised over the base limit or whatever.
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Mar 17, 2013 16:17
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Silly question -- What specifically is implied when someone refers to "Stackpoling"?
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Mar 19, 2013 02:15
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Here's my latest painting project. Part of a mercenary force I'm going to run through a small Pre-Clan campaign with a friend. My painting technique needs a little bit of work, but I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
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Mar 24, 2013 00:51
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Arquinsiel posted:They look badass. Better than 80% of the Battletech painters I've seen out there. Are you planning to play on mapsheets? For completeness sake, here's one of the other sets that's mostly completed (obviously I still need to do the bases for all of these):  The painting is a little bit more sloppy here, but I wasn't stressing too much over these as they were just the plastic minis that come with the Intro set. As mentioned earlier, with a coat of good primer, they take paint really well and look pretty good. I'm particularly happy with how the Quickdraw and the head on the Atlas turned out. We're planning on playing with map sheets (I picked up the Lakes/Rivers terrain set, which I really like, and I'm shopping for some map packs off of eBay). My friend and I both ended up getting the Intro sets, so our plan was to do all 48 plastic minis in about 4 different patterns, along with metal minis for our "protagonist" force. Once we finish with painting all the miniatures, we've talked about doing some foam-core pieces to enhance the map sheets (like risers to make hills "pop", etc) but we're definitely planning on sticking with hexes.
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Mar 26, 2013 15:32
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Arquinsiel posted:If you're going to go nuts on terrain for the game then the easiest way to do it is to get Heroscape hexes from ebay or whatever. If you plan to play on regular old mapsheets then your bases may be a smidge too big. Some of those starter mechs barely fit on as it is. Yeah, I've noticed that about the hexes. These are the 1-3/8" hexes from Litko and in theory should fit perfectly, but they're a smidge bigger than the map sheet hexes. In practice I don't anticipate it being too much of a problem, though. Good tip on RPUK -- I'll give it a look!
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Mar 26, 2013 16:18
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Is there somewhere I can get PDFs of blank record sheets -- ideally for all the unit categories, but specifically Mech, Vehicle, Aerospace, and Drop/Jumpships? It seems a little silly for me to be photocopying from the back of my book in this day and age.
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Mar 27, 2013 22:05
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Kommando posted:Big Clan on Clan bash this easter. Since no one responded to this yet, I just wanted to say this is completely f'ing awesome and I can't wait to see the time-lapse. I noticed you've got some "smoke" markers that appear to be extruded cotton or something. Are those attached to the mechs, or is that some cool piece of mini engineering that you can just attach to/place next to a base? I'd totally love to add those to my next game.
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Mar 31, 2013 15:07
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kingcom posted:Its going to have an alien invasion isn't it? http://www.kaetetoa.com/ 
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Apr 4, 2013 04:13
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Kommando posted:
So I picked up the Total Chaos book, and the cover art (along with this) makes me wonder -- how tightly integrated are Catalyst's art team with BT licensees, like PGI?  Comparing it to the art that's in the "core" books like Total Warfare and the older TROs, they seem to have a similar and generally more modern aesthetic. I mostly ask because I really like both looks, and would be excited if this was the way things were going for new content in general (and god willing, some new minis).
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Apr 6, 2013 14:38
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Davion were the "bad guys" in the War of 3039, right?
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Apr 8, 2013 02:20
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Honestly, Battlemechs are just kind of retardedly light for their size. I usually just ignore this by pretending they're being measured in "SPACE TONNES" or something, but seeing them next to tanks using the same weight scale brings that back to forefront. I mean, the M1 Abrams weights 60T! Battlemechs must exclusively be made out of some crazy super-lightweight spacemetal.
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Apr 10, 2013 02:50
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Hey so this thread went kind of quiet, and I'm surprised no one else has pointed out that Catalyst is having a 25% Off Everything On BattleCorps sale. Also, apparently there are 3145 TROs for Federated Suns, Draconis Combine, and Capellan Confederation now? If you are interested, now seems like a decent time to pick them up.
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Jun 13, 2013 15:12
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Kommando posted:Big Clan on Clan bash this easter. Out of curiosity, did you ever compile the time lapse for these?
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Jun 22, 2013 17:42
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Defiance Industries posted:I actually really like that view of the separate parts. I think that would be cool as, say, a desktop art or one of the color plates in a sourcebook, seeing a mech get put together from its components. I agree -- I think art that kind of fleshes out the "giant f'ing machines" aspect to give the mechs a sense of scale and context really drives home the setting. I'd like to see something like this, but with a mech in a factory.
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Jun 27, 2013 03:02
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BT scenario planning question: How much should I weigh a squad of infantry versus mechs, balance-wise? I'm throwing together a slap-dash encounter for tonight, and I want some cheap local militia canon fodder that the other player can come in to rescue. It's going to be a "Defense" secenario, which I believe says that the defenders should have roughly 150% the force strength of the attackers? I'm thinking the Opposing force is going to be a light/medium Lance, and the player force is going to be medium/heavy, so I am trying to figure out how many squads of infantry I can throw in to make up the balance. There may be a few Hardened buildings involved, in case that boosts the infantry's value/survivability any.
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Jul 22, 2013 20:20
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BattleMaster posted:If you have Tactical Operations on hand and if the other player agrees to it, you can make use of some great rules. Field guns, in particular, will make a motorized auto-rifle platoon into a much bigger threat and bump up their BV a bunch. I like using light gauss or ultra autocannon/10s, but if it's an earlier tech game standard AC/5s and AC/10s work well. Thanks, I'll give this a look
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Jul 22, 2013 21:10
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Does anyone who's done any modeled battlefield stuff have any advice for buildings? I'm collecting some stuff to hack into some generic pieces, but I'm wondering if there are any decent sources of 6mm sci-fi terrain that wouldn't break the bank.
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Aug 22, 2013 21:44
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Arquinsiel posted:Try get your hands on Monsterpocalypse terrain. It's cheap and awesome. Also RPUK do some decent resin stuff for BT. As a follow-up, I came across this guy: http://www.burnindesigns.net/search/label/Battletech He seems to have some pretty versatile looking stuff, and I've gotten decent results from the laser-cut wood style in the past.
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Aug 23, 2013 05:04
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Direwolf posted:Oh man! I'm just getting into this game with some friends after we tried it out at Gencon, and we literally played Herb in the Masters v Minions "fight the devs" event, we had a great time. My experience from painting my starter mechs: - You'll only be able to get so much of the flashing cleaned up, but you can still improve a fair bit with a hobby knife. - Clean those bad-boys with some soapy water, and ideally a spare tooth brush! I had some real problems getting paint to adhere to them until I realized that. - If you have a pin vice/hand drill, you can drill out some of the gun/missile ports that are kind of under-detailed. - Hit them with a touch of spray primer and they'll already start to look worlds better - If you're not going to base them, consider super-gluing a penny or dime underneath them, inside the base hex they come on. It adds a fair bit of weight to them and gives them a decent feel. The molds aren't the best in the world (the Catapult is particularly embarrassing in my opinion) but with a clean-up and paint, they actually look shockingly decent.
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Aug 28, 2013 22:06
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Arquinsiel posted:They got new moulds made for this run. The Atlas isn't sucking in his gut anymore. Yeah, I'm super jealous. I'm actually considering buying a second starter pack just to get another set of minis to do in a different set of colors. If the casts are good, it's practically a steal at $45 (compared to $10-12/figure, or $30-40 for a set of 4).
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Aug 28, 2013 22:52
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I got to the point with my friends where we all decided to throw in and just build some actual terrain. So I spent some time last month with a foam cutter and a bucket of watered-down PVA-glue: (Still a work-in-progress) Moving away from the mapsheets, though, I've got to actually lay out a lot more terrain myself. Does anyone with more experience with BT have any pointers on what makes some good layouts? - How much cover/elevation change is good vs bogging things down? - What's a good rule of thumb for sight-line distance? - How can you make asymmetric battlefields that are "balanced" (or at least predictably imbalanced)? - What are some environmental conditions for scenarios that can mix things up, but don't necessarily add a lot of extra work to keep track of? etc.
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Sep 15, 2013 20:45
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Arquinsiel posted:The maps are very well designed and playtested and without careful thought you'll find that you've turned the game into MWO-snipefests. You really need to look at your map, check the ranges you can get at level 0 and then compare to the printed sheets to see what kind of changes have been made. Yeah, this is exactly what I'm concerned about. For what it's worth I have a feeling we'll be erring more on the side of having MORE level changes and line-of-site obstruction, just because we went to the effort of building all the terrain and so we want to use it. My plan is probably going to be to just recreate the mapsheets as is, and maybe tweak them very slightly for variety. Leperflesh posted:I'd add to this to think carefully about hover, track, and wheeled vehicles. There are terrain transitions that are problematic for some vehicle types; I played on a map once where a river cut across the whole map and due to depth/elevation changes, vehicles just couldn't cross it at all. This is solid advice, thanks. We haven't really played much with vehicles yet (we've been playing with two intro box sets, and I'm only now building up a more "conventional" force of 6mm infantry and vehicles) but I definitely plan to add them at some point so I'll double-check those factors. Leperflesh posted:For urban environments, I think it's good to have a mix of single- and double-wide streets, along with some big plazas. Use a mix of building heights and construction factors, and watch out for reinforced tall buildings where the mechs with jump jets can camp - try to put them evenly spaced, if you have them, so mechs deployed on one edge or corner don't have an advantage over the other edges/corners. Same thing with bridges, either make them all able to support assault mechs, or none, or be even about how they're distributed. Yeah, I think the answer is really just that I need more experience playing on different map types so I can recognize those sorts of "trouble spots" when they pop up.
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Sep 17, 2013 00:38
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Arquinsiel posted:Gut reaction is "no" because it's not a full hex worth of "stuff" at waist height to the target. Further elaboration from mine own gut: 1) Hexes are really out-scale -- mechs are roughly 3-4x smaller relative to a hex than they appear on the board if you assume 1-3/8" hexes and a 30m hex scale. This is usually why units never provide cover: there is a lot more open space to shoot through than you'd think. A prone mech makes that doubly so. 2) A downed mech is pretty small compared to an upright one, so at best you'd have to be prone yourself to get any reasonable degree of cover from it, the advantage of which would already be outweighed by the benefits of being prone. If I had to make a judgment call, I'd let Infantry alone treat a wreck as light cover.
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Jan 3, 2014 18:32
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Apollodorus posted:When is the new printing of the box set supposed to be? The artwork on my 1985 first edition set is scaring off some potential opponents, and also I want me some plastic minis that aren't 40k. (They did a post recently about a production backlog, but are hoping to have it on shelves Q1 2014)
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Jan 4, 2014 01:48
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Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:Except that the allies they fight with now, or at least the fans of those ally factions, admire them for their Nazi-ness. Because it's totally okay if they're OUR Nazis. That's not entirely an inaccurate description of post-war Germany. There are stories, however apocryphal, of Patton arguing that the US should just re-arm the Wermacht divisions they captured as prisoners and just keep rolling East into Russia, since war was only a matter of time (for example). And, of course, our wholesale adoption of the Reich's rocketry and aviation programs. Even today, you see a lot of western war buffs who have this sort of historical bias of casting the German military in this kind of air of tragic perfection -- if only that mad man Hitler hadn't micromanaged them, their honoure, fighting spirit, and almost mythic technological capability would have led them to sure victory against those filthy slavs! I kind of feel like the cult of Kerensky in BT isn't really that different from the misguided hero worship of Rommel, in a very abstract sociological way. Hubis fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 01:11
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PeterWeller posted:That groggy attitude is so lovely because Btech has always supported players like me who just want to slum it with 3025 and 3050. Maybe that attitude has had the adverse effect of enabling grogs to stay grogs. As lovely as the GW player base can be, it exhibits comparitvely little bitchiness regarding the games' advance, possibly in part due to GW not giving a poo poo about one's desire to continue playing the game he started with in '92. So, as someone who has only recently gotten into Battletech, I've found that the 3025-3050 era is most appealing to me as well for a few reasons: - The politics and cast is a lot simpler - The mechanics seem much more straightforward -- my friends and I are all learning the broken configurations of "standard" weapons, without adding a shitload of other rules we have to look up to include Clan stuff, etc. - As far as I can tell, it's still the "default" setting (based on what's included with the intro box set) If I did want to move beyond the 4th Succession War/Clan Invasion era, what are the most massive changes in gameplay I'd have to consider, and where should I jump to? I was kind of considering just going straight to 3145.
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Feb 14, 2014 14:10
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With all the mistreated and derelict battlemechs out there, do you think there's something like an Antique Road Show -- but for mechs -- in the inner sphere?
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Feb 21, 2014 15:06
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Semi-related: This Kickstarter looks great if you're in the market for Battletech-scale buildings.
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Mar 20, 2014 20:30
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Kommando posted:Oh yes, i'd totally love me some.... Gothic tenements, what? The "Fortified" and "Industrial" variants look quite usable... But yeah.
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Mar 21, 2014 12:49
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So, I ordered a combo-pack of the new Intro Box Sets -- the "free set of miniatures with two boxes" deal. These things are nice -- way beyond the old ones, so much so that it almost makes me sad to sell the boxed sets off to my friends.
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Mar 26, 2014 23:11
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Apollodorus posted:Also, the new edition is worth it, I take it - but is it worth it for the minis alone? I still have my set from 1985 with the maps and cardboard stand-up 'mechs in good shape. 26 mechs (a spread of pre-3049 and 2x clan mech kits) for $55 comes to around $2.30 each for the minis alone. Whether you feel you need them or not is up to you, but it's a pretty decent deal.
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Apr 3, 2014 02:44
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I am 100% sure someone will drop in with some actual descriptive lore, but my imagination of how they worked was always as a kind of two-phase energy weapon: first, it fires a focused stream of particles to ionize the atmosphere between it and the target creating a plasma channel, and then fires a massive charge of energy down it that does the real damage. This jives with the somewhat hand-wavey fluff of there being a danger of "feedback" at close range (although it doesn't explain how they'd work in a vacuum...)
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Jun 12, 2014 18:14
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The "Marshigama's Legionnaire's" image is like BATTLETECH.JPG to me
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Aug 21, 2014 21:52
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tuluk posted:people who got the updated 2014 battletech starter kit: how improved are the minis? I would consider never buying metal ones again, given the option.
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Oct 16, 2014 01:20
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Yeah I am amped about the lance packs. Of course, I've got a lot of painting to catch up on before then.tuluk posted:the 25th yr starter kit minis were so horrible, I HAD TO BUY metal ones, to make sure btech minis didn't suck as bad. Yeah, I got both sets, and while the original plastics looked OK (depending on the mini) once you got them painted, the detail on the new ones is so sharp that I think they've pretty much nailed the formula.
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Oct 16, 2014 14:25
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Lance Pack Release Schedule Assault and Pursuit lances available for pre-order now. $20.
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Oct 27, 2014 03:58
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signalnoise posted:I've been recommended Battletech based on the following criteria: The scale of the figures is basically 6mm, but the scale of the hexes is wrong compared to that -- it's roughly 1.75" hexes that correspond to 15m in game space. My group just got a 2" hex hotz-mat that we use which is a much better fit.
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Nov 18, 2014 01:32
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