My Life As A Gamer: BattleTech: It's Really A Game Of Naval Combat

Jeffro was, well, Jeffro again on Twitter.

It is very distressing that BattleTech is a playable game with completely bogus mecha specifications while Robotech is a non-game with painstakingly correct mech data.

I feel like nobody has solved this problem. pic.twitter.com/RsGTUrfERh

— Jeffro Johnson (@JohnsonJeffro) December 1, 2022

I am going to make some of you mad, some of you nod sagely, and the rest go "What the cinamon-toast-fuck are you on about?"

Let me put it simply: BattleTech is a game of naval combat masquerading as a game about giant robots.

"But there's tanks and powered armor and-"

Bright, if you please.

Now that we've squelshed the Gamma, I can get to the point.

The core gameplay experience of BattleTech, for all its trappings, better resembles late 19th and early 20th Century naval warfare more than anything else. You have small units, often of varying sizes, with different sizes of units fulfilling specific group roles in the battle line. Occassionally you get proper one-on-one combat, or disadvantaged encounters (one vs. two or more opponents), but usually it's a matter of which side (a) has a better read on the situation and (b) holds superior command and control that determines the outcome.

The units in combat care mostly about first wearing down armor until circumstances allow a shooter to go for direct internal hits, but most of the time direct fire (and the occassional missile salvo) is sufficient to just brute-force the target down or out- which maps better to naval combat of the time than anything else.

What Jeffro complains about above is this mismatch between the source material for the game and the game itself. Macross, go figure, is built off fighter combat as its model; Dougram is actually about armored combat, which is often just as quick.

In both cases, if the armor doesn't defeat the attack then the attack defeats the target outright. This is Save Or Die combat--Save Or Suck if you want to be nice about it--and that's not Normie-friendly on the tabletop. (Videogames, due to much higher pace of play, make this tolerable- even enjoyable.)

This is why BattleTech really sucks for those coming to it from mecha anime, as this is rarely seen in such series (e.g. Heavy Object), but due to abject failures on the parts of Palladium, R. Talsorian, and even Dream Pod 9 (the best competition BTech ever had) Western gamers rarely get any lasting alternatives that attain the mindshare (and thus user network--there's those Network Effects again--of players) that BTech has.

No, having terrible product lines that don't serve the needs of prospective players doesn't help at all; hence "abject failures".

BattleTech, therefore, is much like the other reigning brands of the tabletop space: an early success that blundered into the top spot and despite itself managed to stay there ever since, and now Network Effects serve to protect it against all but the most supreme of possible threats- and due to the low-status tabletop gaming has, any such talent will be bled off into videogames or film/TV (depending on specific talent) due to higher status and with it easier prosperity.

In short, only a mad genius with a fanatical commitment to grant him the persistence necessary to do so will unseat BattleTech now.

I hope you like your IronClads-In-Robot-Drag.