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[Man of Paper]

So I still almost always watch the intro video. Dunno why I like it so much but I do. It gets me ready to play.

I also realized why I've been wondering what the hell this Medusa everyone has mentioned was. Real early on one of my core four (MC, Dekker, Behemoth, Glitch) got wounded for a while and we had to take contracts without them. It was Medusa's first outing and she wound up getting cored and killed in a Badlands brawl. We're at week 188 now, so it's been a while.

[Hanzoku]

Honestly, infantry won’t add a lot except pointless gore. Regular infantry exist in the game to show how ridiculously lethal the battlefields are. Any infantry unit would be outright deleted by a melee-specced Firestarter or Grasshopper (machine guns, flamers and small lasers all rip through infantry units), or any SRM/LRM build without being able to even really threaten your mechs.

[umiman]

So I still almost always watch the intro video. Dunno why I like it so much but I do. It gets me ready to play.

I also realized why I've been wondering what the hell this Medusa everyone has mentioned was. Real early on one of my core four (MC, Dekker, Behemoth, Glitch) got wounded for a while and we had to take contracts without them. It was Medusa's first outing and she wound up getting cored and killed in a Badlands brawl. We're at week 188 now, so it's been a while.

Heh, Medusa is actually a guy believe it or not. No idea why he'd choose that... Nameohigetit.

[marples]

I've only just realised that that the displays on the dropship background scenes are the old TT stat sheets.

[Greiger]

I would definitely like something to make lighter mechs more viable.  I like the Jenner and in MW4 I was using a medium mech long past the point where they were still viable.  It sounded like enemy infantry would be a good way to do so until I started thinking about it.

What exactly would infantry be able to do to a heavy or assault that they wouldn't be able to do to a light or medium?  I'm a little lax on the lore but all I can think of are anti-tank rockets or anti material rifles, neither of which a lighter mech would have a much better chance of avoiding than a heavy, and it would be functionally the same as a SRM2 or an AC/5, which a heavy can just tank better anyway.  Maybe if you have 2 more initiative than the next slowest unit you can get 2 turns a round. 1 turn at initiative 5 and 1 turn at initiative 1, and allow them to stack their evade ticks for those 2 turns? 

Give you a reason to put your pro tacticians in lighter mechs instead of just missile boats since that would effectively double their dps with the +1 initiative trait, and let them get their evade up to crazy heights making them less likely to just be blown away by the first atlas or black knight they come up against.

[Sensei]

I finally finished the campaign. I don't know if I'll play much more in free roam, I feel like I've pretty much seen everything there is to see and even if the story was pretty weak, I don't like to play without some kind of goal to work towards. If wander to the edges of the galaxy looking for a King Crab I'll be too bored to actually use it after I get it. looks like my total gameplay time is 50 hours, I reckon I got my money's worth. I may have to dabble in the multiplayer still, I haven't touched it at all.

My main 4 actually didn't include my MC, since he got wounded for like 160 days on multiple occasions and everybody else got better. I also killed all of my starting mechwarriors. I did have Medusa though, he was one of my better ones. In retrospect I got really unlucky with my early game contracts. In the early game it's VERY easy to take enough damage to your mechs that a contract isn't profitable even if you win. But, for all they talk about running from a fight being a good idea, I usually felt like I was going to go bankrupt if I didn't get the reward money. Usually by the time it was clear that it might have been a better idea not to take that contract, I was already have way in and somebody died. Missions that end up being harder than advertised are very unrewarding, and on top of that the difficulty curve seems a little backwards, the early game is much harder than the late game in that losing mechs before you have mech bay upgrades is extremely punishing. I think it would have made sense to make light mechs faster to repair or something.

[MrRoboto75]

What exactly would infantry be able to do to a heavy or assault that they wouldn't be able to do to a light or medium?

I believe in tabletop they could swarm a mech's feet and do a bunch of damage that way.  Presumably, it'd be a bit easier to catch a slower mech than a faster one.

Like in a test game I did on megamek some battle armor swarmed an atlas, very quickly the atlas was on the ground and then dead.

[Sensei]

To be fair, Battle Armor is a completely different story from infantry (and also I think not seen in the Inner Sphere by 3025, when this game takes place). In TT, besides just being there to make Battlemechs look badass, the real purpose of infantry was to be absolutely piss cheap. Since you were making an army with a point budget, infantry could fill in the last bit of leftover budget you have, or maybe you could field a whole lot of them if you wanted to for some reason. Speaking of attacking slower mechs though, I think there is a high damage bomb they can stick to a mech's legs (C8 or somethign) but if you're serious about doing that you'd want battle armor for the job.

Of course, this game doesn't really have that. There's no "bringing a large number of cheap units" in this, you get your four slots and that's it. I'm sure if you were able to replace your assault mech with four light mechs or whatever, it would make for awfully slow turns as you moved every unit, and infantry would just be a more extreme version of that.

Mind you, as much as I really do like big stompy mechs, I feel there's a twisted sort of fun-ruining amusement to be had in destroying someone's cool but unrealistic mechs with your boring, realistic tanks and infantry, especially since mechs are really the whole point of the setting.

[MrRoboto75]

Battle armor was developed because IS thought clan elementals were pretty cool, yeah.  I'm just saying I'm pretty sure standard infantry has similar rules.  Infantry was also pretty silly if you were in an urban situation.

Vehicles I feel really get shafted though.  They get hit once and they're immobile and basically boned.

[NullForceOmega]

Grey Death Legion has just been formed by 3025, and BA is pretty much their entire thing.

[marples]

I'm sure I've got a tech manual with infantry stats somewhere. Probably in one of those boxes I meant to unpack when i moved in fifteen years ago. Pretty sure the infantry were difficult to hit, but only fielded SRM2 and AC/2 stuff. The vehicles were fucking beasts though. And don't forget the 'Long Tom'.

A bit off topic, but did anybody play the TOG universe stuff that FASA made after Battletech? Centurion, Leviathan, and the chariot race stuff. Similar mechanics but with a fancy armour damage model that varied on what weapon was used.

*edit* Turns out the infantry could field PPCs. Other weapons were flamers, laser, and mg.They were just cheap weapon platforms that could only move 1 hex. They also didn't take any damage at all if bunkered in the strongest building type.

[etgfrog]

The downside of bunkering inside a building is if the building collapsed, you lost the squad. The issue that I saw was that mekhq saw the cost of each individual being about half the salary of a mechwarrior. I think at one point I tried doing an infantry focused campaign in against the bots but saw an issue happen when the random generator decided to put my army in the middle of a f5 tornado, which instantly killed everyone.

[Draignean]

The downside of bunkering inside a building is if the building collapsed, you lost the squad. The issue that I saw was that mekhq saw the cost of each individual being about half the salary of a mechwarrior. I think at one point I tried doing an infantry focused campaign in against the bots but saw an issue happen when the random generator decided to put my army in the middle of a f5 tornado, which instantly killed everyone.

Join the infantry, the sez. Take the world by storm, the sez...

[Man of Paper]

I will say I'm getting a bit miffed at the enemy AI's ability to focus down a single piece of armor. And get two or thee headshots in a round. And hit a full salvo of missiles through five evasion pips. And take all but the last .1% of their Stab. bar.

[Rince Wind]

The stab bar is probably the intentional mechanic that you can't knock down someone with a single attack.