In the last article we have covered the basics of battletech and if you have followed the guide you have a firm understanding of the rules of the game, you have a fair amount of context about the setting and you have a source book that covers the Succession Wars era of play including all of the Mechs from that era to use in your miniature battles. This should be enough to create some very memorable and varied games for you and your friends.

At this point you may have already reached out beyond this guide and began exploring some of the material and resources available in Battletech, I’m sure it’s all very tempting. That’s the wonderful thing about Battletech, it inspires the imagination and gets us thinking in grandiose scales as we envision playing out epic long running campaigns on huge battlefield in the historical context of a rich science-fiction setting. Well if that is where your brain is at there is plenty of great stuff waiting for you but as this guide endeavours to introduce the game slowly and in a logical manner, I don’t believe we are quite far enough along to start digging quite that deep into the game as tempting as it may be.

Creating some variety

Battletech is a great game, but once you have played it a few times, you will note that there really isn’t much of a balancing mechanic in the game. If you simply choose “the best 4 mechs” for your lance and play games that have the basic “kill everything” winning condition, you will start running into balance issues even if you use some of the basic balancing features like tonnage of mechs for example. Not all 50 ton mechs for example are created equal, in fact if you read your Succession War Technical Readout a bit more thoroughly you will realize that this book covers a pretty wide range of mechs ranging from some of the most effective, to historical duds. Battletech is a living breathing world and its filled with engineering success stories as it is with failures.

Battletech doesn’t really try to be a balanced game in the classic sense, in a way, its more of a role-playing game in that its intended to be run with unique stories and in the context of a tactical game, using unique scenarios based on historical events. To get some interesting variety for your games you really need to reach out to some of these stories on which scenarios are based which will give you both some interesting tactical challenges as well as some great historical story context for your matches.

Unfortunately most of the resource for Battletech make the assumption that you are using some or all of the core resource books that really expand the ruleset and push the game away from just straight mech on mech action and into the combined warefare rules which are found in the Battletech: Total Warfare rule set. It’s a great book and we will get to it in this guide, but now is not the time. This ruleset complicates the living shit out of the game and if you take it on too early you will find yourself confused and frustrated. Besides you didn’t get into Battletech to push infantile troops around, you got into it to have giant robot fights.. am I right?

That said there are a couple of books, though not based on the Succession Wars, but that come close enough that they can be used and since the point of moving through the content is to keep increasing options and variety, its ok that you don’t match the eras of play exactly to the sources you currently have. Especially with these two great books that I recommend which are The Sword and Dragon starter book and The Wolf and Blake Starter Book. Both are self contained starter books that give you everything you need to run the story-mini-campaign in your home game within the historical context of the periods they represent and both are exclusively focused scenarios on Mech versus Mech, Lance versus Lance action.

Now there are two caveats here, these starter sets were designed with selling specific miniature sets which are not the Box Core Set. Catalyst Game Labs is clever that way, but as already mentioned a couple of times, the miniatures are just place holders, the characters sheets are the mechs and so its as simple as using your miniatures as proxies and printing out the included Battlemech sheets for these campaign scenarios.

In these scenarios you will be using a designated force, with designated pilots all balance to create some very challenging and fun scenarios. Of course the best part is you get to experience the battletech universe from the drivers seat, giving you a chance to re-write a piece of Battletech history. In these mini-campaigns you will manage your forces, make campaign decisions and battle it out in key moments of the conflicts. It’s great fun!

Reading through this material you will be introduced to the basics of Battletechs campaign systems, new mechs, special mechwarrior abilities, some new weapons and in both cases new eras of play. Both books ease you into these new eras of play so the complexity is limited, while connected to future resources you may be interested and will seem familiar after playing through these two stories. I recommend doing them in order, starting with The Sword and Dragon.

Moving into the deep end

If you play one or both campaign scenarios you will have gotten a basic understanding of the campaign rules for Battletech and may start looking towards both building your own force and testing that force in the context of other campaigns. In fact if you played Battletech the PC game published by Paradox Interactive, you may have found these two campaign scenario rules familiar and that’s because there is a lot of connection with how campaign rules for the boardgame and the PC game work.

Still I think it’s still best to stick to exclusively Battletech combat, but you may at this point be comfortable enough with the existing rulesets to start imagining the construction, customization and design of your own Battlemechs and your own Battlemech forces with their own backstory, history and with a desire to run them in a campaign either of your own creation or one of the challenging campaigns that Catalyst Game Labs has come up with. And so you should.

From this point I can recommend a couple of the core rulebooks that work in unison and are dynamic enough to be used in part or as a whole. The first is the Battlemech Techmanual. With this book you will have detailed rules for constructing or customizing Battlemechs first and foremost which is kind of one of the more fun things you can do with Battletech. Creating your own mechs or customizing existing mechs is really the starting point of creating a piece of Battletech history of your own. Now this book also gives you the rules for creating all of the other types of mixed units of the game and at some point you may use those as well, but this book is well worth just the content that applies to Battlemechs.

Next you may want to consider Battletech Campaign Operations, after all once you start creating and customizing your own mechs you will no doubt want to put them to the test and or combine them into their own lance or even add them as part of larger force in a campaign. The content of Campaign Operations you will already be somewhat familiar with as you have already used parts of the rules in the Starter Book campaign scenarios assuming you are following along with this guide. This expands campaign rules to completion and gives you the rules for force creation and the many details around getting ready for a campaign either of your own creation or one of the many published ones. This book includes many custom rules that you can start including in your game like special mechwarrior abilities, featured in the core box sets (see mechwarrior cards). Having the core rules for running campaigns really is getting into the advanced form of the game, while you can still maintain that Lance versus Lance core gameplay.

After acquiring, reading and applying these books for the game you are no doubt going to be looking to exercise the many available options to actual gameplay. By the time your through here you will likely have customized mechs, created some of your own, created a force, unique Mechwarriors, maybe even defined some core narratives about your force like what house they work for, or perhaps they are pirates or mercenaries. This is all well and good, but now you want to start using what you have constructed as much of what is in these two books is prep work.

This is where my final recommendation of Part II of this guide comes in and that book is Battletech: Total Chaos.  

Battletech: Total Chaos is a two prong book. First it is a review of some information you have already learned in the Starter Books and the Battletech Campaign Operations book. The information here is added here because strictly speaking you could just use this book in the same way you did the Starter Book, in many ways its self contained but with the Techmanual and Campaign Operations book, you can tackle the many campaign scenarios available here with your own created forces and manage them throughout the campaign. Which brings me to the second prong of this book, the campaign scenarios.

There are several here and really its really a pure gold mine of content designed to provide you with hundreds of hours of gameplay in unique battles populated by some of Battletechs greatest hits of history. This book is like a dozen starter books in one, though the scenarios are more challenging, more dynamic and in many ways more complex.

One issue with this book and really with most Battletech books that deal with campaigns and scenarios is that they make a lot of assumptions about what sort of other content you might have in your possession. For example maps. Maps is something you really want to acquire as those 2-3 that you have that came with the starter and core set are not going to be enough to replicate the scenarios present in this book. You will want to acquire more maps and really map acquisition is something of a thing with Battletech. They aren’t readily available and there are many of them that you need so often you will have to proxy or use estimated (similar) maps as the ones called for in scenarios. Suffice to say you want variety. Thankfully paper maps work just fine with Battletech, in fact, most players will eventually prefer them simply because they take up less space on your shelf. Acquire as many as you can get your hands on and try to get a variety of locals and regions so you have variations. There are many fan created maps, google is your friend in this case.

Ok that concludes part II of our guide, I hope it has been helpful. In part III, we will continue our guided tour of Battletech into more complex and higher level play, as well as explore some setting books to fill out your collection.