Battletech Retrospective

So I talked about my history with Robotech. Well, not all that long after, all things considered, I was also introduced to Battletech. While Robotech was a shared love with my friends of the day, Battletech just worked out as a more private experience.


Of course, when I initially saw the tactical game with little stand-up cut-outs of mechs, I thought "How cool, veritechs and stuff!" Heh. Using those same designs borrowed from Japan-based series would later lead to a whole mess of legal issues between FASA and Harmony Gold due to confusion over who had the rights to sell as much as who bought them. Lawsuits later, that would mean a number of iconic Battletech mech designs would disappear and/or change.

LAMs, Land-Air Mechs, seem to have suffered a similar fate. While battlemechs that could transform into aerospace fighters were a notable part of the game to begin with, they were sort of phased out as time went on. Part of that is surely because the originals were based on the Valkyrie/veritech designs that were so legally hard to deal with. In part, it may also have been that they didn't really fit the game well. Between conversion equipment and fuel, they were simply not as good as regular mechs or aerospace fighters within the model of the game. In a "realistic" sense, the ability to drop in and fly away would make them incredible for diversions or special operations insertions behind enemy lines, but when the game is built around mech vs. mech combat, there isn't much place for that.

But I was blissfully ignorant of all that back then (so where the companies involved apparently). It was a neat game that was my practical introduction to things like simultaneous attack resolution, hit locations, and management of heat versus ammunition. The game painted an interesting picture of an interstellar society that had risen and fallen, but still was advanced enough to communicate and travel between star systems while using giant humanoid robots as the way modern military use tanks. Now I can point at any number of reasons why that's not very realistic, but then it was just a bundle of awesomeness.

The playing of the game, however, didn't really catch on. A friend owned it, and we moved around, so there was only really a year or two when I played. One Christmas, though, I received Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception for my Commodore 64. Heh. I also got a Koosh Ball, and the scent of that surgical rubber is forever tied with thoughts of playing that game on my holiday vacation. That game featured the awe-inspiring image on the front of a... Locust. Somehow, they made what many would consider the least of battlemechs look cool. The game was the first real "immersion" in the setting, as I played a Lyran Commonwealth trainee on a work that came under attack by the Draconis Combine during a training mission. If you're good, you can escape with a mech.
From there, it's off to find allies and track down clues left by the protagonist's father, all while dodging or defeating Kuritan (Combine) patrols. The game featured one of the more detailed of the fire control systems in a Battletech adaption, letting you selectively fire and or all weapons - that worked pretty well considering you control a group of 4 people/mechs at the most. It also displayed how ridiculously powerful a person with a rocket launcher is against another person, but barely useful at all against a mech.
And in the end, you find your father's Phoenix Hawk LAM in an old Star League cache and are recognized by the liberating forces as having been an instrumental resistance force, thus you're given a commission as a mercenary group, The Crescent Hawks.

That story was followed up in The Crescent Hawk's Revenge. That game included a lot more units, including vehicles, and allowed control of more at once. It covered some training, a mission into Draconis Combine space to free the main character's father, and a time-skip that brought the timeline up to the Clan invasion. In the end, the Crescent Hawks even work with the Draconis Combine to step the Clans' (mostly Smoke Jaguar in that region) advance. It was a pretty great experience.
It did take a slight step back in control, though, sort of lumping weapons together effectively, which made it harder to control ammunition consumption. Most strikingly, that came out in the rescue campaign, which was a few missions in sequence. You have to take vehicles in, though you can take more light vehicles or a smaller number of heavier ones, as I recall. The heavy option gives you four tanks that are really pretty good, even against mechs. The problem is, they'll run out of cannon ammo along the way, reducing their effectiveness to almost nil (I think they had some piddly machine guns as backup). But you can capture and use some powered-down Archers Crusaders at a base along the way to replace the tanks. Woo!
Even at the time (this was... 1990, I think), I saw the Clans as being... kind of cheap. They worked okay in the context of the video game as a daunting opponent, but in the board game, introducing one side that's better than the other and only limited by "honor" and "rules of engagement" is... not so good.

I also got into the Mechwarrior video games, which put you in a first person mech cockpit. Those were pretty fun too. It was interesting to get to play the other side, as one of the installments makes you a pilot in Clan Ghost Bear. That sort of showed me what was wrong with the whole Clan idea, though. They're supposed to be the descendants of the best and brightest of the Star League who left the Inner Sphere back at the height of technological advancement. So they've got the best technology around. Their "down side" is a highly structured society and rules of engagement where they try to take objectives with the least resources possible. That's admirable and all, but realistically? It decreases the assets being risked, I suppose, but it also increases the change of failure. And when promotions are handled by duels, that seems self-destructive.
In the game, I went into one promotion duel and said, "Huh... well, I have to defeat one enemy, so I may as well load out my mech with big guns." I think that translated to multiple Ultra AC/20's. The duel started, I fired my linked weapons, and blew clear through the torso of the opposing mech in one volley. So... in order to be promoted as a mech pilot, "I" completely ruined another mech and possibly killed another pilot. I try to imagine the USAF saying pilots have to shoot down a superior officer in order to be promoted. The cost in vehicles and personnel is just... stupid. But whatever. Suspension of disbelief, right?

The MechCommander games were pretty good too, especially since 2 got back into Lyran Commonwealth space, which I feel a certain affinity for from back in CHI. I've read some of the novels. I used to look through the Tech Readout manuals and design mechs for fun, even though I never played with them. I got into a Battletech MU* that was being formed and even made an elite special operations character for the Federated Commonwealth MI:6 Rabid Foxes, but I fell away from that before the game really got up and running.

When WizKids took over and the whole Dark Age thing happened, though, I sort of lost interest in the brand. I was drawn into the technological advancement and building upon history, to see things go back wasn't fun. It wasn't quite a reboot, but it felt that way. Since then, I haven't seen any real releases I could sink my teeth into (which would mostly be single-player video games), though I have had some interest in Mechwarrior Online and Tactics (more the latter).

All-in-all, I have found the setting to be fascinating. It's got some gargantuan logic holes here and there, sure, but imaginative and a lot of the material out there really commits to that "reality."

Besides, giant robots are just cool.