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Contract 1, FedCom Extraction Raid

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Total Members Voted: 4

[GentlemanRaptor]

Name: Roger Williams
Callsign: Raptor
Age: 28
Birthdate: October 28
Gender: Male

Nation of Origin: Free Worlds League

Bio: From the day he was born, Roger Williams always wanted to be a Mechwarrior. Everything he did was towards that goal - he lived and breathed BattleMech operations, tactics, and management. Finally, when he was eighteen, he secured an appointment to his homeworld's military academy. He served with distinction - until, that is, he got caught up in one of the many petty power squabbles characteristic of League territory. Men and women he'd known for years were dying for what basically amounted to an interstellar dick-measuring competition. So, one day, he cashed in his favors and took an indefinite leave of absence. Of course, his superiors called it "absent without leave" and "high treason", but really, aren't those all the same thing? With nothing but the clothes on his back and a ridiculous amount of C-Bills "borrowed" from the planetary treasury, Williams found his way outside the League, bought himself a new 'Mech, and set out to find someone who had a use for his only real skills: wanton destruction, ruthless killing, and illegal parking. Well, mainly the first two.

2d6: 11
1d1000: 162

EDIT: How the hell did you get Against the Bot working? I tried once, and got stuck midway through one of the massive spreadsheets.

[Xardalas]

Check the mekhq thread in other games. It's not that hard to get it running.

[Knave]

edited in some background. Probably needs some work >.>

[Taricus]

Name: Alexander Roberts
Callsign: Thermo
Age: 26
Birthdate: 22nd of August
Gender: Male

Nation of Origin: Random, see below

Bio: (Might have to adapt that to the random nation, so I'll wait on that first.)

If you want a random nation of origin, roll 1d20: 18
Roll 2d6 (A dice roller can do so): 8
Roll 1d1000 (you can use Random.org to do so): 946

[Hanzoku]

18 gets you Draconis Combine as your nation of origin. Given your name, you probably come from one of the border worlds that gets traded back and forth, but it's up to you.

Your mech rolls give you a GRF-1N Griffin

[Taricus]

Yeah, border world sounds about right, probably one of the FedSun worlds. Maybe even hailing from either Quentin or Formalhaut and signing up to a merc company out of defiance towards the combine after the results of the war of 3039.

[Hanzoku]

Edit: Since AnvilFolk helpfully pointed out where to find all the older versions of MegaMek, I have updated to the newest version available that works with Against the Bot – 0.3.19. Because of this, I’ve updated this entry for the new options built in since 0.3.14. All the changes are found in the Campaign Options section, and only a few screens were effected.

Episode 1 - Setting up MekHQ (Game Options)
For my game, I’ll take the version that Professor Lemur kindly packaged up for download in the thread here. It’s a little behind the times, but doesn’t come with the crippling bug that the latest development version (0.3.20) has, that prevents you from turning on Against the Bot rules. It’s already fixed for the next version, but who knows when that will come out.

When you set up a new campaign, the very first thing you’re confronted with is a dialogue to choose your starting date and year. As I said in the first post, we’ll be starting in 3040, and for the day, I choose a random number between 1 and 365, then check on Wikipedia which day of the year that would be. In this case, I ended up with March 26th (it would have been 27th, but even in the far future, 3040 is a leap year.)

Spoiler: MekHQ Options (click to show/hide)

There’s a lot of options and a lot of tabs. Luckily, there’s a fairly good checklist for this game. The link in Professor Lemur’s post has expired due to the forums at battletech.com being shuffled around, but the post can be found here.

General
Here, you select a name for your game, your faction from a wide array, a unit rating method and the camo your mechs will be painted in. If you downloaded the version from Professor Lemur, then a massive array of camo options has been added. I pick out something from the poprocks high quality camo section for the moment – we can still change this later, or on a per-mech basis.



Against the Bot
For the most part, I follow what’s recommended in the post above. The only changes is I allow it to track the MechWarriors’ original unit, and allowed for variable contract lengths instead of being standard 3 month / 6 month / 1 year contracts.

The big change here from the original post is that the RATs now give a general date range, making it easier to choose out ones that fit your campaign year.


Maintenance & Acquisition
Again, pretty much as recommended. I do leave maintenance checks turned on and on a one-week basis. If we start seeing units becoming damaged by botched maintenance checks too often, I’ll up the check to every two weeks or turn it off entirely. Generally this won’t be an issue if you have veteran or elite techs to handle the maintenance work.

I turn on the ‘Use Quirks’ button here. This gives some mechs minor advantages or disadvantages – a Locust, for example, is small and armless, so it’s slightly harder to hit, can’t punch with its stubby little machinegun arms and has a hell of a time getting up. Because of the way the laser is slung underneath, it also can’t torso twist. On the other hand, it’s at least easy to maintain and find parts for.

Quirks:
Easy to Maintain – Bonus to repair and replacement rolls for this unit
Narrow/Low Profile – Imposes a penalty on enemy attempts to hit with ranged attacks
No/Minimal Arms – Penalty to Piloting rolls to stand up, and cannot punch in melee combat
No Torso Twist – Cannot perform the torso twist maneuver

The Locust is something of an extreme example for quirks – many mechs are pretty average and don’t have any quirks.

Here, I ticked the new option ‘Reverse quality names’. It always threw me for a loop that ‘A’ quality was a hunk of rusted junk, and ‘F’ quality was factory fresh. That’s now reversed.


Tech Limits

Obviously, since the Clan Invasion hasn’t started yet, we uncheck the option to pick up their equipment on the open market.


Personnel

No surprises here. The version we’re using doesn’t have the ‘higher precision skill averaging’ checkbox, so that’s obviously not checked. Now included, higher precision skill averaging is also checked.


Finances

During our initial acquisitions, there are no changes here, besides the recommended higher price for anything clan-related. If we go long enough, that cost will slowly start stepping down as Clan technology becomes more available.


Mercenary

Set as recommended. This one’s important as without it, your mercenary contracts are going to be money sinks. With these options, you’ll generally earn a reasonable amount.


Experience

Also set as recommended, this will help slowly grow everyone in experience, which particularly helps the green or ultra-green members of the unit. More elite pilots benefit from the XP for every kill, as they can quickly rack up kills with their superior gunnery.

Skills, Special Abilities, Skill Randomization, Rank System, Name and Portrait Generation
I leave these tabs alone, except for ticking the ‘give a portrait to everyone’ checkboxes.

You can choose a rank system that makes sense for your unit – either based on the House they belong to or other basis. The Star League rank system is sort of the generic one, and the one our mercenaries will use.

The ranks are:
Recruit
Private
Corporal
Sergeant
Master Sergeant
Lieutenant JG
Lieutenant SG
Captain
Major
Colonel
Lieutenant General
Major General
General
Commanding General
Star Lord

Now, as funny as it would be to declare myself the new Star Lord, I’ll be using the following system for now:

Non-officers:
Recruit – Ultra-green
Private – Green
Corporal – Regular
Sergeant – Veteran
Master Sergeant – Elite

Lieutenant JG – Green/Regular, lance commander
Lieutenant SG – Veteran/Elite, lance commander
Captain – Company commander


Personnel Market
Changed as suggested.

With that, we’re done with the setup options for MekHQ. All of these can be changed at later times, allowing you to tweak settings to your desired values.

Before I start explaining the MekHQ program, let’s look over the MegaMek game options – these are the things that come into play once the shooting starts.

Spoiler: MegaMek Options (click to show/hide)

Basic Options
As you can see, a lot of options, most of which I’m not going to touch. The two things I change in the basic options is paranoid autosaving (I’ve had a lot of problems with the reinforcement AI crashing while trying to place its units) and changing the game year to 3040.


Victory Conditions
Not a lot to see here, I leave these alone as you generally need to declare victory or defeat yourself with AtB through the command line.


Allowed Units and Equipment
Likewise, I leave things alone here.




Advanced Rules

I think AtB changes some of these already, and I generally leave them alone. Minefields, for example, are not the bot’s best friend, as it has a tendency to blunder through its own minefields.





Advanced Combat

A lot of possible tweaks and changes, but I’m going to leave them alone, as it skews the balance away from where I expect, and I’m not sure how well the AI handles all of them.



Advanced Ground Movement

I do check one of the options here – (Unofficial) Ejected Pilots Flee. Without this option, when a mech is destroyed, if the MechWarrior survives the experience, they’re placed on the map and then continue to move around (at one hex a turn) and do nothing useful. Meanwhile, the AI tends to get a little… homicidal, and spend their time trying to murder the downed MechWarrior instead of shooting at proper targets.

With the option checked, they disappear from the map and all is well.



Advanced Aerospace Rules

Fun, but we don’t need to worry about these. They do allow you to use Megamek to play BattleSpace Aero Tech 2, the WarShip/DropShip space combat portion of the game. Just remember kids, it’s all fun and games until your Clan opponent plays a Leviathan Battleship and then it all ends in fire.

Seriously, the things are amazingly overpowered and can wipe out other battleships (multiple) in a single round while surviving nukes to the face.


Initative Rules
Also nothing we need to mess with. The simultaneous options are a nice idea for playing with human opponents, but I’ll stick with the stock options against the AI. The Infantry and Protomech options are also unnecessary, given we won’t be seeing either.

Based on what Anvilfolk said, I’ll go ahead and try the simultaneous firing and physical rounds option. We’ll see if it speeds up things nicely or not.


RPG Related

Last but not least, the RPG options. What we need has already been checked during the campaign options setup. Manei Domini are crazy cultist cyborgs that won’t be around for another 30+ years.

In the next episode, we’ll go ahead with looking at MekHQ and finishing the setup of the company.

[Hanzoku]

Name: Han Zoku
Callsign: Rebel
Age: 26
Birthdate: March 27, 3012
Gender: Male

Nation of Origin: Federated Suns

Bio: Han’s parents hailed from the Draconis Combine and arrived on the planet Tancredi IV in the 3010s to help coordinate the export of its agricultural activities back to the Draconis Combine. He was born on March 27^th, 3012. When the Federated Suns liberated the planet from the Draconis Combine in 3023, his family was cast into poverty.

Despite his family’s hatred and distaste for the Federated Suns for their fall from prosperity, the efforts of the Federated Suns to reeducate a planetary population that had been under the Draconis Combine for the last hundred years were successful for young Han Zoku, and he became a very patriotic and loyal citizen of the Federated Suns, leading to many arguments with his parents.

At 18, he applied to and was accepted by the New Avalon Military Academy. He was disowned by his furious parents, who saw his desire to join the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth as a betrayal of his heritage and his family. Dismayed, he left his homeworld behind.

He scored well in his classes at the NAMA, but started becoming bitter and disillusioned with the Federated Suns as he experienced a great deal of racism due to his obvious Kuritian features. MIIO discreetly keep tabs on him through his schooling, as there was a great deal of suspicion that he was some form of sleeper agent.

Despite the antipathy of his classmates and teachers, Han Zoku graduated with honors and was assigned to the 2^nd New Ivaarsen Chasseurs in the Draconis March.

This posting proved a difficult one for Han Zoku. He was assigned a captured Draconis Combine WHM-6K Warhammer, but the institutional apathy towards anything from the Draconis Combine saw him and others with similar heritage receive the worst assignments among the unit and poor performance reviews, irrespective of their actual efforts.

In 3011, the 2^nd New Ivaarsen Chasseurs participated in a raid in force on the world of Ares in the Capellean Confederation. There, they became bogged down in heavy fighting against the defending 12^th Liao Lancers. When the AFFC forces detected reinforcements burning towards the planet, they staged a retreat towards the star port where their Dropships were waiting. Han Zoku was among the half-dozen MechWarriors left behind as a rear guard taking position in a broken and metal-rich badland. The unit also happened to be the last six members of the Chasseurs with any trace of Draconis heritage.

The experience broke the last of Han’s loyalty to the Federated Commonwealth, but he had no choice but to fight as the Lancers threw a full battalion of light and medium mechs at their positions. In the vicious fighting, the Davion mechs were pushed back into the badlands and became separated.  He was listed as missing in action and presumed killed, and that was that for his military career.

However, Han survived, and managed to smuggle himself and his battered mech off planet. Alive but without any remaining loyalties, he turned to a life as a mercenary, and made his way to the planet of Outreach, looking to join a mercenary unit.

[GentlemanRaptor]

Wow. Way to put all the rest of our backstories to shame!

[Anvilfolk]

Hahahahah He is the GM, so I'm gonna go with that!

Also, Hanzoku, I have my copy of 0.3.19 MekHQ here that I've zipped up. Want me to upload it somewhere? It seems to work just fine, except that you can't repair parts in the warehouse somehow.

Looking forward to seeing where we start We definitely feel like a rag-tag bunch so far.

Still surprised you didn't use symfire and symphys. So much time saving

[Hanzoku]

Sure, there looks to be some good fixes in the versions up to 0.3.19

We'll be starting on Outreach - that's where everyone will have gathered before we form our ragtag mercenary company.

What are symfire and symphys? I did a search for each of those, but got back some disturbing results for symphys. >_>

[Anvilfolk]

HAHAHAHAHAH, oh gosh, sorry! It's lingo for Simultaneous Fire and Simultaneous Physical Attacks! Basically all it means is that you can declare all of your attacks at the same time that the bot declares theirs. Which of you is getting shot at doesn't really influence who of them you decide to shoot - and maybe similar with physicals. Physicals can be a little bit more iffy because you might want not to kick if someone is kicking you, to reduce chances of falling or stuff like that. I tend to have an Always Kick Policy

Here you go - uploaded it: http://www.filedropper.com/mekhq-0319-windows

I am an idiot, there's also the official downloads where you can choose what to download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mekhq/files/development/

[Hanzoku]

Ahhhh, OK. Honestly, I wasn't sure how well the AI handled those options, but then again, it never seems to care who I focus my attacks on, so I might enable them both to speed up the attack phases of combat.

Ah, and that's where that link is. I knew they had the files on sourceforge, but I was failing my roll to find back the development head directory so I could get to an older version with functional rules. Thanks!

[RedKing]

Name: Konrad Lai
Callsign: Little Dog
Age: 40
Birthdate: October 26, 2999
Gender: Male

Nation of Origin: Free Republic of Rasalhague (Unzmarkt)

Bio:
Konrad hails from an old Lyran family that migrated to Unzmarkt after the First Succession War, when it was added to the Tamar Pact. The family's fortunes were undone as Kuritan forces annexed the planet a generation later in the Second Succession War. They managed to eke out a modest fortune as livestock brokers for the next 200 years. Prior to, and during, the Fourth Succession War, Konrad was already a seasoned reconnaissance pilot with the 1st Tyr Regiment. After the creation of the Kungsarme, he joined the Kavalleri but agreed with the Motpart in feeling that the more Steiner-aligned Rasalhagians (who had done most of the fighting) were getting short shrift in favor of those who had been freed from Kuritan domination "not by their actions but by a treaty signed in the blood of others".

He left the Kavalleri regiment, taking his mech with him, and seeking to find a new home elsewhere.

Roll 2d6 (A dice roller can do so): 3
Roll 1d1000 (you can use Random.org to do so): 938

(I'd really love to have a JR-7F if possible...this is a recycle of an old BTech 3056 MUSE character that I played a couple of decades ago....)

[Robsoie]

HAHAHAHAHAH, oh gosh, sorry! It's lingo for Simultaneous Fire and Simultaneous Physical Attacks! Basically all it means is that you can declare all of your attacks at the same time that the bot declares theirs. Which of you is getting shot at doesn't really influence who of them you decide to shoot - and maybe similar with physicals. Physicals can be a little bit more iffy because you might want not to kick if someone is kicking you, to reduce chances of falling or stuff like that. I tend to have an Always Kick Policy

Didn't noticed those options in megamek, thanks for mentionning, that simultaneous combat will come greatly as it's reminding of what you get in the Mechwarrior games (in which due to real time , mechs do all fire at the same time)

Following this thread to see how that Against the Bot campaign can play, as i have not still tried.