I've taken a wee bit of a break from my usual blogging after starting to get a bit of hobby fatigue but have been pondering a bit on the options available for playing games of Battletech.
First up, there's the options for which rules to use. I've touched on this before as Battletech appears to be very scalable with options being available for everything from single mech on mech combat to stellar conquest and everything in between.
Thus far, I've played a couple of games of basic Battletech and enjoyed it with it's simulation approach where you have to worry about ammunition expenditure and so on and once my map sheets arrive, I hope to try out some of the slightly more advanced rules such as critical hits, heat and so on but have a suspicion that playing more than a lance a side will take considerable amounts of time.
I've also played several games of Alpha Strike, which is more of a traditional wargame but keeps the feel of Battletech but streamlines the rules quite a bit. It reminds me of Epic 40k somewhat with the simplified and quick gaming but still tactically satisfying.
I think I have space for both rulesets in this project as they both excel at different elements with Alpha Strike working really well for combined arms and larger clashes without requiring tons of record keeping while classic Battletech is great for the feel of giant mechanised walkers pounding each other with all manner of weapons.
At present I'm using paper counters to represent my mechs and so on and feel it's a good way to play but there's still the visual appeal of using actual miniatures to be considered.
New 3d Mech Designs
I've been holding off picking up any for several reasons, partially due to expense but also because quite a few of the existing sculpts are really showing their age having been around for about 30 years now. Handily the new sets do have plastic mechs of a quality previously unseen with Battletech and it looks like revised sculpts are going to slowly appear.
Until recently the advent of 3d printing seemed to have been a golden opportunity to get new designs but with Catalyst asserting it's IP Games Workshop style, this seems to be something that is going to be a real issue.
Sadly the new sculpts don't seem to be making it to the UK and import duties for getting even small quantities (let alone postage costs!) mean getting them is going to be ruinously expensive which leaves me in a bit of a quandary. Do I use the old figures with their sometimes dated appearance, not to mention the scaling issues many of them have or pay through the nose for US imports?
I know a lot of folks want there to be plastic mechs released for every design but I cannot see how that would work as there are just so many designs for each era that producing plastic sprues would be incredibly expensive. If each faction only used say 4-5 designs, I could see plastic boxed sets coming out but that's just not how things work in the Battletech universe with literally hundreds of designs to choose from.
In the short term, I shall continue using the counters I've made as they do the job but I shall keep an eye out for developments in the coming months.
In game related news, I've spent a bit of time developing the background of my upcoming Rynn's Steading campaign and have got some units printed out and ready to colour in and have also been playing around with some warband style skirmishing with papercraft infantry.
Sadly I'm still waiting on my map sheets but once they are here, I shall be cracking on with some skirmishing so watch this space!
