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[Dohon]

And another Kickstarter update.

Beta Update is Live.
Multiplayer Beta can be tested (beta-testing the beta, héhéhé, okay, i'll stop)
Updated Backer Manual
Changelog

*early 2018.

Which might mean Q1 or any time before midsummer.

Yeah, didn't mention it in my post, updating it now. Thanks.

[Neonivek]

By the by looking at the lawsuit... They haven't put a restraining order on Harebrainschemes so it LOOKS like it wont halt production.

Golden Times (err... dang what are they called?) is just looking for money.

[Aklyon]

Of course they just want money. Trying to stop it instead would be harder and cost more than patent trolling for HG.

[Iduno]

Golden Times (err... dang what are they called?) is just looking for money.

Showers?

Also, I know the movement=dodge calculations are harder when you don't have hexes (or have a lot of very small ones), but how difficult would it be for them to calculate a distance equivalent to the number of hexes to get the movement bonus? Maybe color the movement line/arc thing red at the +0 dodge area, yellow for +1, and green for +2 or higher to show if you're moving "far enough"? That's a major benefit that mobile mechs normally get. Sure, they die the second time you hit them (or the first, if you're lucky), but it's tough to get hits against them.

[Dohon]

Time for some updates! The next few posts will just be about Q&A videos that the Devs have been doing since May. Real life has been keeping me busy and I haven't had the time (or the energy) for updating the thread. So, the next few posts will all about Q&A. I'll be doing a video per post because I need the space for the transcripts. Not all have been transcribed yet, but I'm working my way through the backlog. Be sure to check out the last one, because it gives more details on the campaign game.

That said, here is the Q&A that went down in June.

[Dohon]

And the Q&A for July.

Spoiler: Transcript. (click to show/hide)

• People present: Mitch Gitelman, Holly (Animator), Steven (Technical Artist), Mike McCain.
• Mitch says that right now, BattleTech has entered an exciting time in development. Previously, the game was being developped in pieces. Tyler [Carpenter] and Andrew have been working on the singleplayer story along with Kevin Malony. AJ and Kiva have been working on the Mercenary Sim. THe art team has been working on cinematics, visual effects, environment, ... Right now, those pieces are being put together. When you take it all together, it's where the rubber meets the road. There is a lot of anticipation, with figuring out how to go from here to the end product. As a gamedev, you basically want to die, you want to develop stuff, not start planning it all out. Soon, you'll have the game as a gem and HBS will be chipping away at the edges to make it shine. There is still roughly a metric fuckton of work left to be done.
• Steven became a technical artist basically by sitting a lot behind a computer and repeatedly banging his head against it. He wanted to be in game development right after he played Doom and Quake. He always stradled that line between being an artist and an animator. He started out with fixing computers and then moving up to programming. He went to school in California and focused on 2D animation. 3D stuff he figured out on his own. Then he got into a few animation projects before moving to Seattle. He worked on the movie Food Fight as an animation / mo-cap cleanup guy. He ended up at HBS.
• Mitch heard something that Steven said and that resonated within him. The great people, the great developpers are always curious how things work and start out by making stuff on their own, trying out different things. One can create an "audition" as it were by using the Shadow Run Hongkong editor and making something with it. Learn how you create a game as well, it will help you with getting into the industry.
• Holly started out with a traditional animation study. She was and is into painting, drawing, movies and games. That led her into animation. Shortly after school, she was hired by HBS and worked on Strikefleet Omega, creating characters and 2D animations. Then HBS went 3D with Shadowrun and Holly moved with it. Her advice for getting in the industry is that get something you are good at and studios need, but also be ready to adapt. She has now been an 3D animator for 5 years.
• A technical artist (as defined by what Steven is doing right now) is working on the character side of technical art. Setting up animation rigs ... An animation rig is ... imagine a 3D model as a puppet. The rig is the strings that connect everything together and allow the animator to manipulate the model for animations. and act in a predictable way. And make it easy for the animator, the better the rig, the easier to create the animations. Holly depends on Steven's rigs.
• Holly's favorite character in the game is Kamea (sheer badass), Steve is a fan of Yang (badass and a cybernetic arm and leg). Kamea blends badass and beautiful, along with a great portrait. Mitch gets to walk around and see it all coming together.
• Holly loves (animation-wise) the Atlas Mech a lot, simply because she throw a lot of "weight" behind it. There is this GIF of an Atlas kicking an Orion and the arm flies off. All of the elements coming together, with the kick and the lighting and the scale and the physics and the sound ... Mitch loves the collaboration of every team member. It feels a lot like the final game as well. The game always iterates and now the game is at a point where the big picture is shown (as with the beta for instance) and you can see the final product.
• Holly found kicks the hardest to animate. A human, when kicking, throws him or herself completely off-balance. With Mechs, you have the pilots doing that and slamming against the windshield. It didn't look right at first and almost, there wouldn't be any kicks whatsoever. They solved it by binding it to a Mech moving forward.
• As with body slamming, it seems logical to BattleTech fans that you want to protect your cockpit and as such, don't headbutt an enemy but use your shoulder and torso instead. Holly feels however that not every Mech has "sufficient" torso twist or shoulder twist or geometry to keep that head safe. But it is a struggle to make it look good.
• Steven's favorite tool was made by a friend at HBS and it helped him a lot to rig the Mech models that they received from PGI [MechWarrior Online]. There are also scripts that help with the pipeline (getting stuff as quickly in the engine and game) by automating stuff. Reduces errors and that.
• PGI's Mechs also came with their animations, but those had to be adapted to fit BattleTech and the type of game HBS is making. About 50% of the animation suite is being used, but those had to be changed with regards to timing and adapt to a turn-based environment. The other half is made from scratch by Holly, including Melee.
• Melee animations started out by just animating two Mechs, an Atlas and Commando going at it. You had these different punches and stuff. You then noticed the ones that didn't feel right and reworked those, going through all of the animations and ending up with the ones that you want. Holly then started going through each Mech individually and working on melee animations. You'll see that some Mechs, with similarities in Body structure, will share melee animations. The UrbanMech is a special case, with a lot of unique animations. That makes it expensive too.
• Some of Steven's challenges has been setting up pipeline stuff. There is also collision volume, the boundaries that define when an object is actually colliding with something. The smaller you can make that volume, the less you are demanding of your processing power. If the collision volume is off, you can see punches going through the model without doing anything. There are also tools that offer animation events. Tying a foodstep and a sound effect together for instance. It all had to be done by hand for Shadowrun. Steven now has a tool that allows Holly to put keyframes in Maya and that datafile can get passed between Maya and Unity. Steven also makes tools himself. How to export a Mech from Maya to Unity for instance.
• Limping is a placeholder in the beta. HBS got animations for that from Piranha, but they need to be edited. Those animations must be slow and feel heavy, but right now, it doesn't feel right. It is being revised. Mechs will limp.
• You want an animation to look and feel good, but the game must still progress. It must flow.
• All the animation states (mech dodge, mech hit, mech heavy hit, mech melee, ...) that you see in the beta are the ones that they had to have in the game. It is the minimum. After beta, they are able to expand on that and add more. Do not forget that each of those animation sets have to be created per BattleMech.
• Falling forward is still hard, because you need to add a new idle state with the Mech resting flat on its front, a new animation with it getting back up, ... That you have to multiply like 50 or 60 times.
• HBS isn't sure that there will be quads and their animations. Will it be harder to make than bipedal animations? Holly just feels it will be a blast to make quads. It will be a challenge. However, quads will NOT BE IN THE GAME WHEN SHIPPED.
• Holly says that Steven is also good at animating and is a great drawer. Steven says that Holly is really really committed to getting the animations right. Right now, there aren't a lot of Mech games to compare the game to. You have Robot Jox, you have Gundam, both that vary wildly in animation style. Steven feels that BattleTech right now has its own animation "language".
• Mike will not be going to GenCon. Jordan will, the game too. Mitch will be at GamesCom in Germany. There might be a panel at Pax this fall too. Might.
• HBS loves the community too. Honest! They are part of the community as well.
• Clan Mech DLC? In success, everything is possible.
• You'll start the singleplayer campaign with access to a few story missions. Those will set-up the story, your unit and the way you get around the starsystems. Afterwards, your mercenary campaign kicks-off and you are sorta "on-call" for the Aurigan Restoration (and yes, you can ignore them). Lady Arano will be fighting her war and you are going to be sort of the "special ops" help. As the Restoration conquers planets, more story missions will get unlocked. You can't run through one story mission after another, the war has to make progress before you can do another story mission. You can go to planets whenever you want, do a few missions there, launch and go to another planet. But you'll also see these "Restoration Events", like planet sieges or assaults, which will unlock more story missions. You can "grind" a bit before those missions.
• Please do continue filling out the surveys. In a month(ish), there will be a new update and HBS would like you all to focuse then on the surveys as well. It will allow HBS to gather data and compare it to the previous beta state.
• The multiplayer beta update will be out this year, no worries! HBS had to take a step back with the beta and refactor certain code architecture in order to have a solid base for it. HBS didn't like to do that, but skimping on it, you are pushing the problem down the road. It must be fixed.
• You can't buy prints of Mike's BattleTech art because, technically, HBS doesn't have the license for that.
• Mitch and Mike didn't know when the third part of the Stackpole novella will be out. Follow up necessary.
• There won't be Steam Workshop support for mods. BattleTech is a different game from Shadowrun, yes. HBS doesn't shutdown mods. Shadowrun did have an mission editor, allowing access to the engine itself. However, BattleTech this time around does not have one guy working one year around the clock on such an editor. Thus, no mod tools for BT, but mods aren't discouraged.
• Can you fail the singleplayer campaign? Yes, you can run out of money. There are a lot of ways to get money and lot of ways to save money. You gain money and salvage by doing missions. You can even decide how much to pay your troops, which also affects your monthly expense rate and morale. You can take loans too but if you reach a quarter (sidenote: quarter instead of month because travel time must also be taken into account) without meeting your expenses and you are unable to take another loan, it is game over. You'll get fair warning in advance though and you can recover.
• Charging isn't in the game. Displacement events are complex. It was prototyped. Distance turned out be important and very very fiddly. Being too close for a charge, being too far away ... Displacing the units back in space was eventually beyond the scope of the game. Not to mention what happens when you charge a Mech into a wall.
• Can you get your MechWarriors and crew drunk in the game? Probably. There will be at least one event in the game involving alcohol.
• There are events that pop up, random events, but tied to events in a way. For instance, after a mission, you have an event that tells you of a barroom brawl between two mechwarriors. You get to choose on how to deal with it and it will result in morale changes and / or tag changes for those pilots. Another example: if you do not have a lot amenities (rec room, bar, ...), you will get more negative morale events as a result. Get those amenities and you'll get more positive events.
• There might be some "behind-the-scenes" video with some help of HBS' partners, but, we'll see.
• Fauna will not be in the release cycle. HBS would rather have infantry in the game than fauna. But, there are some birds though!
• Mechs are penalized when shooting / melee after standing up. HBS is experimenting with having some accuracy bonuses for arm-mounted weapons for the beta. This implies that you would lose the accuracy bonus if you lose all the weapons on that arm.
• The PVP Beta Update will have gameplay changes. What those are, you'll see.
• Beta Feedback was really helpful. There was a lot of information. A. Lot.
• You will not be able to turn to piracy in order to gain funds in the single-player campaign.
• Two examples of what low morale can do. Unhappy MechWarriors can leave your employment. Low morale will result in bad events. More fights, ... Morale of your crewmembers also dictates your morale level when starting a mission.
• HBS is looking at critical hits and tuning the hit frequency. As to the effects, you'll see those more in the sim part of the game. Crits will in the future (in progress) destroy components more easily. Do remember that in the sim game, there will be more components than in Skirmish or Multiplayer. Gyro upgrades and the like, which are also vulnerable to crits. After launch, more components will be made available in multiplayer as well.
• The story of the game will only indirectly tie-in to the novella's released by Stackpole.
• You will only barely be able to move into the Inner Sphere. If you happen to be pretty far from a Restoration Event, you will get reimbursed by the Restoration for moving back to help them.
• MechWarriors won't gain negative "perks". They can get certain tags in the sim game, but having a perk like "shell-shocked" and bam, your MechWarrior is now afraid of missiles ... That's something for post-launch. Maybe.
• In some missions, you will have allied support, meaning there will be allied units on the map, helping you. Not on a grand scale, you don't want to have to move your units, and then wait for the enemy AND your allies to move theirs.

[Dohon]

The Q&A for August.

[Dohon]

And September. Almost there, I swear!

[Dohon]

October Q&A. Watch (or read) more to learn something about the (sandbox) campaign in the game. Juicy bits in there!

Spoiler: Transcript. (click to show/hide)

• People Present: Mitch Gitelman (Studio Co-founder), Kiva Maginn (Lead Designer) , Mike McCain (Game Director BattleTech)
• TOPIC: Singleplayer Campaign / Mercenary Simulation Side
• This will be the last Q&A for this year. There is a LOT of work to do till the end of the year. And everyone is very tired and cafeinated for this Q&A. Welcome to gamedevelopment!
• Kiva has been in the industry since 2003. Started out as designer and then lead designer on an MMO called Pirates of the Burning Sea. It was a HUUUUUGE success. GREAAAAT ratings. EVERYYYYYBODY loved it. After that, she pitched for a few more contracts at Flying Labs Software. Did some indy contracting as well (mainly "fill-in-the-gap" stuff). A friend told that HBS was rebooting an IP and she said "oooh, must be BattleTech". Considering that a turn-based strategy game with a complex simulator was somedthing she dreamed off, she showed up and said "hire me!". That friend was a designer that Mitch knew for a couple of decades and he recommended Kiva. It helped that Kiva and Mitch shared the same sense of humor.
• The story covers a couple of heavily hand-crafted missions, the kind of missions you would expect from HBS. Beyond that, filling up the holes in the "wander-around-the-galaxy, getting-into-trouble mercenary stuff", is a LOT of ad-hoc content you can do. Take contracts for Great Houses, Planetary Governors. The purpose of those is (beyond fighting is fun!) is leveling up your guys and getting new equipment (is also fun!). Making money is the whole point of a mercenary outfit. It is a core component. Some jobs pay better, some are more "above board" than others.
• Tthe high level setup is that you are helping Kamea reclaim here throne. You are cponsidired to be the "elite" force that she hires, a force there to do missions that are considered to be too dangerous for the normal troops. You will also help these take key planets away from the Directorate (the bad guys). YOu'll have plenty of downtime to roam and grown your small band of a few Mechwarriors to a full fledged company that can help Kamea. There is a lot of content.
• Kinn has been designing the sim-game since the development of BattleTech started. The simgame has always been Kiva's focus. In a sense, she has been designing this simgame for 15 years. Kiva feels strongly about it. The simgame has been "done", several times now in fact because Mitch and the team keeps asking her to do it again and again ... The core principle behind the simgame is that you get all these random generated characters and Kiva wants you to feel like that these are true people, with their own stories. That way, it will hurt alot when she kills them. Oh sorry, when the random number generator kills them. This principle (making you care) is the most important to Kiva.
• There is a life-track system for your mechwarriors in place. Upfront, Kiva mentions that this system is basically overdesigned. There is stuff in that is not needed, but she wanted it in ... Every pilot you hire has gone through a lifestyle progression. Kiva knows where they came from, what is their education, how their careers went, ... Some might start as a commoner, but fall into a life of crime, become a convict and then get recruited into a pirate band after their sentence. One of the pilots you start with developped contacts in prison and became a hired killer. There are also disgraced nobles, wealthy traders who are looking for adventure, disgraced comstar adepts, solaris gladiators, ... A very complex system. When you look at a guy, you are a looking at a dossier with bulletpoints, his resumé. That proces not only generates their stats, but also tags and personality traits that key into the event system (and other systems) to flesh that person out. It's not just pilot Bob Kurita. It's Bob Kurita who is a former Tech, hot-headed and rebellious. That will influence the content that Bob gets involved in.
• Kiva's proudest achievement is the event system. The system is something you have seen when playing Crusader Kings or Stellaris. It is a pop-up thing "this happend!". It is a complex and powerful system. It drives things that even don't have anything to do with events anymore. For instance, take hotheaded Bob Kurita. An event might pop up where that hotheadedness is being tested and you have to decide: Is that okay? Do you want to yell at him? Or do you want to encourage his behavior?
• There is an event where some of the crew are bowling in the corridors of the ship. How do you deal with it? Do you let it happen? Do you shut it down? Do you even encourage it and establish a tournament? This has effects on the people involved individually, but also on the morale of the entire ship. This little events will pop up after, something like "here's how it is to live on this ship, this LosTech hulk".
• There is morale that you can gain or lose over time during the simgame. There is also morale in combat, where your simgame morale can pay off. If you have big simgame morale, your morale in the mission will start higher. You use this morale to do things and abilities. Simgame morale goes between 0 and 50. Combat Morale is between 0 and 100. You can start a mission with your bar already half-full. But simgame morale feeds more than just the combat portion. High morale will influence the events you get. Bottom-Low morale will see Mechwarriors wanting to leave, rebellious mechwarriors becoming mutinous. High morale conversly will see other mechwarriors wanting to join your crew or having crewmembers help eachother out more.
• There is also the indivudal itself. Morale of the ship influences the individual, but there are also individual triggers. A militaristic mechwarrior won't really like it when you set your spending levels to very high extravagance. A mechwarrior from a wealthy family and used to beign treated well, will be upset if you force them in spartan accomadtions. Specific traits of the individual can apply higher or lower morale. This influences the combat part. A high morale mechwarrior can pop off abilities one after the other. A low-morale one will struggle and pay for it in the longterm.
• The event system can do a lot and low morale can do a lot of crazy things ...
• The player can affect morale with money. You can also use morale to save yourself money. There are 5 levels of expenditure you can set. This impacts maintenance, salary, ... It isn't fun to manage your finances on a line by line level. There is a general knob for everything. But a certain setting will have its own influence events. Setting it to Spartan will save you money, but events will happen that only happen because of the spartan setting. Setting it to Extravagant, will trigger special events. Every Quarter, you gain or lose morale based on your spending setting. If you gain a lot of money and keep the setting on Extravagant, you will get a lot of build-up morale.
• Remember, running out of money will make you lose the game!
• The Argo is at the start just a hulk. Some engines and space and some barely functioning Mechbays. It's a garbage place to live. As you spend money on improving it, you can make it a place where people will want to live and work. The original mission of the Argo was exploration and served as a homebase. It doesn't start out that way, but in return for cash and time, you can get there. Unlocking parts will also tie-in to the event system and unlock more events related to those upgrades.
• The contract system consists of "encounters", the building block. Kiva looked at the common scenario's you might run into. Simple battle for instance is just a simple battle. Defend base is where you are hired to defend a base. Defend base can have different moving parts. There might be turrets, the turrets might have to turned on, there might be one or two of three waves, the spacing between the waves might be different, the buildings you are defending might vary in strength, ... All these things are variations and are build in the encounter. On top of that you add something like: is it an ammo depot? What kind of forces are attacking you? Kurita Elite of Pirate Garbage enemies? This "flavor" level turns on and off certain parts of the encounter. The contract might say one wave of enemies, no turrets and just defend a base. Or you have to turn the turrets on, defend the APC with the Techs in and you'll have a third huge difficult wave that's just out to stomp you. The person who writes the contract can use the encounter and its variations to build the piece of content that you want. The contracts that you will see will fit within 8 different types of structure (defend base, capture base, destroy a base, assasinate target, ...). And on top of THAT, you have the employer and the target. A local owner of the planet perhaps wants you to kill a pirate band. Or the Davion forces want to destabilize the Taurian government of a border world and asked you to sabotage a munition factory. These are variations on the "destroy base" structure. Which world, where you are in the story and random luck are also factors that play into the contract generation.
• Because the system is flexible, HBS can tailor contracts. For instance, there will be contracts that are only "unlocked" when you have sufficient reputation with a certain faction.
• Right now, BattleTech exists as a game. All the different parts, be they cinematics, combat engine, simulation game, ... are now in the game and working together. You can play it start to finish with all the different parts operating. A tester actually played the game till the end and got the message "you have restored the Orano restoration". This is a big deal. The simgame works fully. But it is not content complete and there is a lot of programmer "placeholder" art. The final event ui works and it looks great.
• The simgame might not be content complete, but you can't really draw a line of "that's it, no more needed!". It will be something that you keep adding on, always adding more ideas for events. For instance, there is an idea bouncing about with regards to upgrading the Argo's engines. Once upgraded, you can travel at a speed that puts a 1.4 g pressure on your crew. You'll go faster, but the crew will not like it. The new event pops up and the crew complains. You can decide to slow down permanently, but you'll not get the speed boost.
• While you can play the simgame, it is still swarmed with placeholder art (programmer art). And that placeholder art is really ugly and makes it look "not real". The system works, you can manipulate everything (or at least what HBS allows you to manipulate).
• The simgame is completely data driven. If you looked at the beta files, you'll see it is full of .json files. The same for the simgame, it's all build on JSON data files. Which is nice because designers aren't very smart people, they don't really navigate code well, so, a good .txt file helps!
• The hardest part to balance and make feel "right" in the simgame, is the BattleMechs themselves. In the lore, a Mech is kinda like a Knight's suit of armor, owned by a nobleman. The ownership of the armor, the weapon and the horse makes you the knight. It is hard to mesh that with the Mercenary company. HBS wants you to acquire Mechs, customize them, hire the pilots to drive those Mechs. HBS knows how much a Mech costs, the numbers are available in the sourcebooks. And it is an absurd amount of money. Mechs are basically walking mansions. If you go into a mission and you get a Mech headcapped by a Hunchback with its AC20, you are out several million C-Bills. You are not going to make that much money for the mission. You may as well get out because you lost missions, despite losing one Mech. Even the cheapest Mechs are so expensive that you really can't afford to lose one. Acquiring a Mech would also be expensive and thus very rare to do it. Besides, according to the setting, Mechs aren't really for sale. They are relics, family heirlooms and being able to buy an Atlas in a store is weird because it is a rare and powerful Mech in the Inner Sphere. Merging the loyalty (authenticity) and the way HBS wants you to play was a pain in the rear end. There were more meetings about salvage than any other part of the economy. Where they are now, is good solution, but it is the result of design compromise. But then again, that is game development.
• BattleTech is not an RPG like Shadowrun, but it has a bit of a RPG feel to it. You can't directly talk to individual mechwarriors for instance. You interact with them through the event system. There are conversations that take place and advance the plot. You can talk to Samira in the navigator room and get to know her better. There aren't a lot of choice trees in the background that drive dialogue. There might be some answers that have tags, but beyond that ... You can ask more questions if you want to know more. Or you can express yourself in a different way, when you talk to Kamea Arano, you can use a more "mercenary" tone or more of a "noble" attitude.
• The story is pretty linear.
• There will be time-sensitive story missions. There are in essence two type of story missions. There are Restoration Missions. You'll have to help the Restoration either keep or take important planets. These missions are used to track campaign progress (or regress!). Think of it as an frontline, where both sides are jostling for control. If you ignore these missions, it's a setback for the Restoration. You are their "special forces" after all. If you ignore all the missions, the Restoration will be conquered. [EDITOR: Mike didn't explain what the second mission type was. Presumably, it's about regular story missions, the hand-crafted ones.]
• When negotiating contracts, remember there is the "iron triangle". There is money, salvage and reputation. When offering contracts, the clients will offer you a certain amount of C-Bills. You can negotiate how much of that amount you want as salvage. You can even decide to go "under budget" in both C-bills and salvage in return for reputation gain. If you win the mission, that is.
• Remember, you need money to run your company. Salvage get you equipment. There aren't any Mech Walmarts out there. Planets have a very limited selection of items (and that selection is also slightly randomized). You might not be able to find what you are looking for exactly. But if you encounter a Panther, you can kill it and take the PPC. Focusing on gaining reputation will unlock the hard stuff. Shopping at a faction you work with, will be cheaper. They will give you better deals, be more friendly. You have to keep the balance between money, equipment and opportunities to do work.
• Missions will not level-scaling (proportional challenge). Kiva hates that. There is a difficulty scaling that operates behind the scenes and that determines what kind of mechs spawn and what kinds of  opposition forces you will face. The scaling itself is based on a global scale that progresses across the entire story. When you start out, you will face lances of Locust and a couple of vehicles. When you are at the end, you will be facing a Steiner Scout Lance. [EDITOR: A lance of Assault Mechs.] And in between, you'll face lances that are hard to beat (but not too hard). In the beginning of the game, say you take a difficulty 3 mission. You might square off against a low-level Mech Lance. At the same point in your game, a difficulty 8 mission will see you face heavy and assault mechs. The missions will be keyed so that their scope makes sense. You will be rescuing kittens that are guarded by Atlases, nor will you assasinate a prince from the Inner Sphere houses who is guarded by two Swiftwind scout cars. And on top of the scaling, you'll have a variable difficulty list. Your contract list might contain a 3 star contract, a 4 star, a 2 star one. The 2 star one will be an easy contract. You can thus choose the difficulty of your content by choosing the easy contracts. They pay less, provide less salvage and give low reputation rewards, but if you are limping along as a company, such an easy contract might be something you need. Over time, the lower ones will fall off and you get the more high-end stuff. And on top of that, the difficulty of contracts varies between regions. In some parts of the game, missions will be harder. Doing contracts near the Davion-Taurian border will be hard. There is a conflict happening there, so expect difficult opposition. On the other hand, doing jobs for some yokels on a backward planet in the more unpopulated parts of the Reach will see you tangling with low-end baddies. You'll be fighting pirates who have Mechs made of junk.
• Mechwarriors have 4 statistics. Gunnery, Piloting, Guts and Tactics. Each skill area has two different abilities it can unlock. You get two specializations that unlock your level 5 ability and you choose one of those two specializations to be your expertise, which gives you a level 8 ability. So, no, no super Mechwarriors with all the abilities. You can level up your Mechwarriors and upgrade your 4 statistics to be in the 10-area. The Warriors in the Beta have 5's en 8's and so on, but your Starting pilots will not be so "advanced". As you level your pilots, they get to pick a specialization and then another one. One of those evolves to an expertise and once you reach 10 in your expertise, your pilot becomes elite. Elites help non-elites level faster. And as you level your pilots, classnames will be unlocked too. Like sharpshooter, ...
• Mechwarriors do not come with their own Battlemechs. This is a design concession because of the Lore of Mechwarriors being nobles. HBS wants you to be the owner, seller, re-builder and customizer of Mechs.
• You can rename your Mechwarriors. This means first name, last name, callsign, pronouns, portrait ... Handy for Streamers and getting your friends killed in the game.
• You can rename your Mechs.
• When your Pilots level up, their monthly expense will go up. It is always cheaper to have someone you leveled up than hiring a high level pilot, the former being about 1/3rds cheaper. You pay a premium price when recruiting a premium Warrior. Losing a bad-ass pilot and replacing him with an equally bad-ass pilot fresh from the market will be expensive.
• C-bill expenditure will fluctuate. When shopping in different regions, prices will be different. When talking about the running costs of the Argo, those will not fluctuate, but for the exception of just what you have build extra on it. More modules will make the ship more expensive to run. Expenses like fuel and the like have been abstracted into a "here's how much it costs to run the Argo".
• When you negotiate for salvage, you are doing so for both a certain amount (8 for instance) and a certain priority number (let's say 2). The rate between the two remains the same, so it is 4 to 1 priority, 8 to 2, 12 to 3 and so on. When you end the mission, you are presented with a salvage pool. What's in the pool, is all the things that remain of the enemies you killed. If you destroy a Panther, but manage to destroy its right arm in the process, you'll not be able to pick the PPC for salvage. Anything you blow up or reduce to scrap will be gone. Once you are presented to pool, you get to do your priority picks. So, you get to take the PPC and one other item, say a jumpjet. After that, your employer will randomly give you salvage up to the remaining numbers you negotiated for. If you had 2 priority and 8 salvage, that means you get 6 more items after your priority picks. Everything else remaining stays with the employer. You can negotiate up to 20 pieces of salvage. If you know (or suspect at least) that the mission will have quite a lot of cool Mechs in it, going for salvage will be nice. But the total amount depends on the type of mission.
• Not only does the opposition vary depending on the mission, it's the same for the maximum amount of salvage. A rescue operation does not allow for a lot of salvage just because you do not really have thte time during the rescue to salvage Mechs and their equipment. A Destroy Base mission on the other hand Not only that, but your employer also plays a role. Even if the mission allows for the maximum amount, your employer might not be willing to go that high. So, the balance between C-Bills, salvage and reputation and your goals also depends on the context of the mission.
• There has been some further tuning to weapons and other balance since the beta. And there are some changes that people will either hate or love.
• No Quads. No. Nonono. No.
• Fun aside: when your MechWarriors train, they do so in pods. And those pods like a bit like the ones used in real life Battletech conventions... Not that you will actually interact with those pods in the game, it's just a small gimmick.
• Melee weapons are not in the game. Not there in 3025. And while the Hatchetman exists technically, practically ... But let's not forget, if the game is succesfull, everything is possible!
• There used to be a system for modeling the contract negotiator (the guy / gal you sit with at the table). However, focus equals quality and it got reduced. You will still get to see the characters, their personality and their backstory. And maybe in the future, the aforementioned system might return.
• You can't back or work for the Directorate during the story campaign. However, if you don't do the Restoration missions, the Directorate will win. And after that, they are just another possible employer.
• Will there be any rare / unique Mech variants like LosTech or Hero Mechs? No comment.
• There will not be underwater battles. That requires some extra stuff and HBS is focusing on terrestrial combat. Vacuum (as in, on an asteroid, not free-floating in space) will be in though and it sucks. Vacuum battlefields don't allow you to dissipate heat as easily.
• There is only a "shore leave" system pertaining to shore leave events.
• The loan system is pretty simple. If you have played Cities Skylines, you have basically seen it.
• You won't see double heatsinks. Specialised weapons ... If you are on a Taurian capital world, with a lot of weapon factories, you will be able to get some specialised stuff. Specialised weapons are also by manufacturer. These are associated with certain Houses, so you'll have to go to different areas to get different stuff.
• If you destroy the side torso on a Mech, the arm that's attached to it will be salvageable. You haven't destroyed the arm itself, it just falls off and can be recovered.
• The tutorial will be a short and sweet primer on how to move and shoot with your Mechs. It's also in-story, not something that exists outside of the campaign.
• There might be separate scenarios like famous battles post-launch, but not when the game launches.
• There is a backstory for your Mechwarriors, but not for the enemy Mechwarriors.

[Sensei]

Quite a lot late, but when I played the beta at Gen-Con the game was essentially hex based. There wasn't an actual hex overlay on the map, but there were dots all over the map representing your actual movement options and mechs could face in six directions. Light mechs weren't worthless, they could provide sensor information for the big mechs to use and their speed meant they not only got a movement-based dodge bonus but often the best tree cover as well. There were melee attacks too; you could choose to punch or kick (I think) and, most importantly, they had a good chance to knock mechs over. Obviously this favors heavy mechs over light mechs, but it was definitely possible to keep a damaged mech down by kicking it a lot.

[Mephansteras]

Thanks for the Transcript, Dohon!

[Dohon]

Thanks for the Transcript, Dohon!

And more will follow!

In other news, HBS dropped a serious campaign update! You have gameplay footage of one of the early campaign missions, you have screenshots of the campaign mode (never seen before!) and there is a nice kickstarter update to round it all up. The kickstarter update talks about the two bits mentioned before, gives some info on where the game is at right now. HBS is aiming to be feature complete by the end of the year and then spend sometime balancing and bugfixing. Early 2018 should see the game released.

Game news outlets RPS and IGN have written up a piece about the campaign mode too. Same for PCGamer and PCGamesN.

[Rince Wind]

I love you for those transcripts!


The game sounds really good so far, I am looking forward to it (didn't pay for the beta access).

[Gabeux]

I want that. Damn.
I loved Mech Commander 2, finished it a bunch of times and played a lot of Mechwarrior. Back then I didn't knew english, so I have absolutely no clue about lore stuff. 
Loved the complexity of combat, being able to knock people down and whatnot. Definitely gonna try it eventually.

[Hanzoku]

Yeah, I watched the single player mission today, and I’m liking what I’m seeing. I want to see more of the out of combat structure, but what you transcribed sounds like it has a lot of good potential. I wish they included Star-League tech as the final/best trch, but only because it’s so much fun to stomp someone with a Royal Highlander.