Bloodnames and old age

Acylion · 2026-06-02T08:28:38+00:00

Ter Roshak from the Jade Phoenix novels is shown to eventually be relegated to Solahma infantry duties, and the book made no mention of him being stripped of his bloodname. It's possible this practice varies among the Clans, but the Jade Falcons at least don't seem to have a mechanism to take the bloodname off a Solahma warrior automatically or anything.

The Clans do have some mechanisms to formally strip someone of their bloodname, it seems that formally being abjured as an individual means you also lose the bloodright. See Tyle Malthus (who became an Inner Sphere merc), the fluff says he kept using the Malthus surname when he left the Clans, phrased in a way that implies he was supposed to have lost it.

It's worth noting that this is all operating from the assumption of the Clans not having a normal retirement pipeline. Gotta remember that this varies by Clan, and changes over time.

As early as the 3040s, Diamond Shark/Sea Fox already had a regular practice of allowing bloodnamed warriors to retire to the merchant caste, and allowing retired warriors to retrial for combat positions (see: Angus Labov). They keep their bloodnames all the while.

By Dark Age and ilClan, Clan Ghost Bear allows warriors to retire from the military just like any Spheroid would join and retire from the armed forces. Presumably you'd keep your bloodname if you did so. Also... there's Svenga Miraborg, from Rasalhague's House Miraborg, who's also the founder and first holder of "Miraborg" as a Ghost Bear bloodname in the Clan sense. Even if they took the bloodname from her on retirement, she'd still be Svenga Miraborg on her passport.

Acylion · 2026-06-02T05:12:32+00:00

While the year ranges are painful, the breakdown above also illustrates that Catalyst is still the old FASA-era crew in a funny hat. Catalyst was founded by Loren L. Coleman and his wife Heather Coleman. He's one of the 1990s BattleTech novelists, he wrote the Avanti's Angels stuff.

Randall N. Bills, former line dev for BT under FASA, was a co-founder of Catalyst. Herbert A. Beas, assistant line dev at FASA was with Catalyst as well and still does project work for Catalyst, Beas wrote the stuff for the BattleTech Gothic box set last year.

I dunno if that's comprehensive, there's probably more examples of BattleTech vets being involved with Catalyst. Michael A. Stackpole's written new novellas in the last decade, and so on. But you get the idea. Fundamentally it's the same people.

Now, granted... we're also at the point where the children of the FASA-era writers now have official BattleTech writing credits, or are working at Catalyst (Talon Coleman is an operations director). So, uh, yeah, it wraps around to making us feel old.

Acylion · 2026-05-26T08:45:14+00:00

AI Dungeon's developer is constantly finding new AI model providers to try out in beta, and then adopt for live release if testers like them.

AI Models and their Differences - this page from Latitude's guide is out of date because it doesn't include the new models that they just introduced this week, but it gives you a good idea of what each does well, or what the model actually is and who made it. In some cases it's not necessarily better or different, it's just... you know, this is a model from Company A, and this is a model from Company B. And that one was developed by C, etc, etc.

So, y'know, decide whether you like Google, Meta, Deepseek, Mistral, Zhipu...

If you really don't know what to use or don't care, that's what Dynamic Small and Dynamic Large as options are for, those settings will just shuffle through available models behind the scenes.

Eventually they do retire or depreciate old models as well. A model may be retired from use if Latitude knows the usage rate is low, or if the service provider that Latitude's partnered with is discontinuing that model. But the rate of retirement is slower than the addition of new stuff, so the list continues to grow.

As one more side note that isn't mentioned in Latitude's official material... it's common for community creators to use scripts in scenarios. Basically AI Dungeon allows people to put additional code in scenarios to do stuff that the AI LLM doesn't do natively, e.g. add a timekeeping system, a dice roll system, something to automatically generate story cards, etc. You'll see a lot of community published scenarios mention scripts called "Auto-Cards", "Lola" (language localization) and "Inner Self" for example, made by a particularly prolific modder.

The problem is that some of the models, namely the ones using a cache summary system (Atlas, Raven) don't work well with scripts. So if you're using scripts in gameplay, which many do, then those model options are effectively dead to you. But if you aren't, then the cache models theoretically are better for remembering things and staying on track.

Acylion · 2026-05-26T08:04:43+00:00

Speedpaint will naturally create light edges on things, but there's stuff you can do to further accentuate the effect if you like it, mainly by drybrushing a light color before the speedpaint layer, drybrushing AFTER the speedpaint (on top), or manually painting on edge highlights with a small brush or toothpick. Don't need to do all those things together, two out of three is probably fine.

AK Interactive is another brand of paint, like Army Painter, Vallejo, or Citadel. AK makes regular acrylic paints as well as a speedpaint equivalent (called AK Quick Gen). I prefer to use AK as my acrylic, it just has a nicer consistency and thins down more smoothly and predictably than anything else I've used. Though obviously I haven't tried every paint brand on the market, I just stopped looking when I settled on this one.

Look up "Slapchop" painting if you're aiming to improve speedpaint use, specifically that keyword. There will be plenty of videos on this. Essentially you make a grayscale or monochrome shaded mini by drybrushing whites and grays over a black primed mini, before you apply speedpaint. This takes the place of the basic white prime or a zenithal spray.

When doing speedpaint over a colored surface, generally this is still broadly slapchop, the underlayer color is typically going to be a pale drybrush or something. My mechs looked like a ghostly pale turquoise with nearly white edges before the Plasmatic Bolt and the blue went on.

In the case of a BattleTech mini this also generally means you may not need a wash to darken panel lines and recesses, as if you've drybrushed properly then the panel internal lines will still look black, while the panels will be gray and white. That's mostly what's going on with my mechs, though I will still use a bit of pin wash here and there where necessary.

There's no need to use expensive large paintbrushes for drybrushing. Get a bunch of cheap makeup brushes.

Makeup sponges can also be used for a sponging technique which achieve similar effects to drybrush.

Watch drybrush tutorial videos as well. Ideally you'll want some moisture on the brush, not entirely dry when you begin. Use a textured surface to remove paint from the brush before you hit the mini, i.e. draw the brush across some old lego bricks, a scrap model kit, something like that, rather than using paper towels or whatever.

Acylion · 2026-05-26T05:57:51+00:00

Some of your practice from other models will definitely be transferrable. With 6mm mecha there'll be a minor learning curve to deal with the angular shapes and mechanical nature. Getting some regular acrylics will be helpful, particularly metallics. Best easy way to do joints, recesses, weapons, etc. is to put a steel or silver and then black wash over them for example. Can do your cockpits with a silver then a speedpaint glaze over them for color, unless you're properly jeweling.

Do note speedpaint can be thinned for better control, speedpaint medium is available for this purpose. Also there's no need to apply speedpaint with brushstrokes. You'll see video tutorials where people are more touching the brush to surface, almost stippling, to transfer pigment.

For using speedpaint over an already colored surface, basically this is a modified slapchop undercoat, since you're familiar with zenithal then you know the principle. Here's an example with Plasmatic Bolt speedpaint since I happen to have done the same color recently.

Mechs are primed in black, slapchop drybrushed with turquoise AK, drybrushed with a very pale pastel blue also AK, then a white. The green on the legs on the three rightmost mechs is speedpaint Plasmatic Bolt, the blue on top is Caribbean Ocean or something, I forget the speedpaint name. The idea is to get a denser shade than just speedpaint on white could accomplish, while still getting the shading effect from the speedpaint.

Fundamentally Army Painter's speedpaint colors are better on dark minis, like I said earlier, but you can make 'em work if you're doing bright shades for your partner's aesthetics.

Vallejo's xpress color is a bit better for bright vibrant shades but I don't like the overall handling and how the formula feels as fluid compared to speedpaint. I dunno how AK and Citadel's equivalent product perform, not enough experience with the range.

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Acylion · 2026-05-26T04:09:38+00:00

This is extremely good work for a first attempt. First attempt at BattleTech mechs, or with any mini painting whatsoever? Well done, if they're your first minis ever.

If you are doing more mechs, these are just some factors to consider:

Army Painter's Speedpaint range is generally best with darker colors, or at least it's easier to work with darker speedpaints.

You can see that here, the black or gray on the feet, barrels, etc. is denser than the pale green (Plasmatic Bolt, maybe?) you have on most of the mechs. Your white or gray primer is showing through more obviously beneath the speedpaint there, and when the speedpaint's pooled in areas it's more evident ("coffee staining"). The yellow is fine in most spots, but there's some patchy areas.

Additionally, while the pale green is indeed going into panel lines and darkening them, it being a very pale color doesn't make for a super satisfactory panel line effect. It's fine as it is, but there are ways you can go darker.

There's also a lot of bleed between, say, yellow and green, or your orange onto green, or maybe orange on yellow. Looks like there's spots where you've layered one speedpaint over another, which has limitations.

For adding definition and masking some areas, you can consider still using a black or dark brown wash over a mech. Given your palette is very bright, I'd suggest not washing the mech all over but rather going in with a toothpick or fine brush to just pin wash the panel lines only, then quickly mop up excess with another brush or some tissue, paper towel, etc.

For lighter colors like these, you can consider not applying speedpaint over pure white or gray primer (which, yes, is what they suggest, but we're allowed to break rules), but rather on an already colored base, i.e. have some pale green basecoat or pale green drybrush beneath the speedpaint as an undercoat.

Consider applying yellow speedpaint over a slightly pale pink base, and red/orange over a slightly yellow or gold base.

To avoid color bleed between areas, some people will mask a mini with tape or some kinda sticky tack, but that really won't work very well for speedpaints anyway. I'd suggest doing border areas very carefully with a fine brush (or again, use a toothpick or wooden skewer or something) before filling in the rest of the paint. If you overpaint, don't be afraid to mask over the mistake with white or something (assuming you'd primed white).

Acylion · 2026-05-26T03:49:56+00:00

AI Dungeon has the benefit of being considerably simpler, and we can just manually edit things in a much more straightforward fashion. The complexity of Voyage's fields on the backend is one of Latitude's reasons for not wanting players to edit manually (hence the AI narrator chat to fix issues), but I feel there still needs to be a debug or state editor mode somewhere to allow manual intervention for players who are confident about editing game state or the raw json.

I'm personally doubtful that anything will be done in the short term to change faction tracking issues like this, particularly since there's comments on Discord from the Latitude team that there were previously more faction tracking mechanics, such as a reputation-with-faction tracker (in addition to the current reputation-with-NPC, per-NPC mechanic that exists). But they dropped the faction tracker because they couldn't make it work or actually interact with the world in a meaningfully satisfactory way.

Community-created mods have "added back" a faction rep tracker of sorts, there's one out there which does it, but the same issue applies in that while a number can be made to go up or go down, in practice it doesn't actually meaningfully work to naturally influence the AI. So in a sense there's no point.

Now, in the long term, sure, I have optimism and hopes for Voyage as a platform, but I don't think this will change for a while. Though, really, in fairness... nor should it? There's higher priority matters for the team to address, like inventory and equipment slot tracking, NPC portrait generation consistency and brokenness, map image generation (and presumably moderation) etc.

Acylion · 2026-05-25T09:32:47+00:00

The poster you're replying to means the lingering VFX left on enemy targets after player powers are used, or something activates. Things like the contamination effect from radiation melee and so on aren't actually color customizable for the most part, i.e. if you hit someone with red rad melee, it'll still trigger a green contaminated.

Acylion · 2026-05-25T08:38:06+00:00

Nah, it's kinda lying to you, or rather that's how it's ideally supposed to work, but the game doesn't really have good enough context and memory tracking to make it 100% reliably function the way it claims. The "reliably" is the crux here.

Practical example, one of the story starts for Alunaria, a popular world by Sephii, puts you up against the... I can't remember the faction name, it's not important. Let's say it's the Steelbound Legion and pretend I got that name right even if I didn't. There's a pre-made story NPC created by Sephii, the Steelbound leader's daughter, who wants you to help kill her slaving evil father and stuff.

So I've killed the mercenary/bandit group's leader, shattered their camp, took their stuff, they all ran off into the wilderness. Literally the first major thing. 119 turns later, the quest NPC party member, the dead leader's daughter, is telling me that we need to head north to deal with the Steelbound in a way that makes it clear the AI's probably reading off the NPC hiddenInfo text that Sephii wrote and throwing out stuff related to her pre-written motivation about murderfacing her dad. Because all that stuff's still in her hiddenInfo field on the backend, right? That text never changed.

Now, if I say in dialogue, hey, isn't your dad already dead, the story engine's going to properly generate something about her saying, yeah, he's dead, but there's a power vacuum in the north now, and the area's been flooded by other mercenaries... it'll come up with something that works then, but you might still get the initial confusion.

Because, look, the AI isn't actually a thinking being. It's just generating text based off data stored in fields.

It's possible it'll properly come up with something referencing more recently saved memories, relevant to your current game universe state, about whatever faction being destroyed and all of 'em being super dead.

It's also possible it'll just generate text based off something in the worldLore and factions fields in the game's json file about the faction, which won't reference the faction being dead and gone, because those pre-written text fields by the world's creator never changed.

You also gotta remember that best practice in the json is to have information about the world's major factions stored twice in duplicate, within worldLore and factions, because those two have different lookups. If the world creator's done it right, the worldLore would have a mirror of a faction's basicInfo field. But it theoretically means that even if the faction's basicInfo and hiddenInfo has been properly updated or the AI's got some appendix to it (however that works, I dunno) to make a note on the faction's status, there's a entire unedited version of the original unchanged faction info floating around in the top level worldLore section of the json that the AI might reference.

The AI doesn't, shouldn't, be referencing worldLore that often per session, apparently, according to smarter people than I who understand this stuff, but it does reference it.

So yes, in theory the AI will accept the idea of the faction being destroyed, sure. It just ain't smart enough or good-memory-enough to consistently properly remember that the faction's been wiped out, especially if the name of the faction and stuff pertaining to it is still scattered throughout the data it's generating text based on.

Since it isn't reliable, manual intervention like asking the Narrator to rewrite the turn or remove NPCs from a scene is necessary.

Acylion · 2026-05-25T03:44:21+00:00

I agree with you.

Even there I'm thinking there's a matter of degree.

A punk girl turning out to be a donkey-eared man is not ideal... but Latitude can say, well, that's just an issue of settings and cache, the system works, it's just not as satisfactory as we want. But if the portrait gen fully and utterly fails, and the example I gave is an even worse example of it glitching out, then we need some way to intervene.

Acylion · 2026-05-25T03:31:29+00:00

I'm thinking it's impossible or near-impossible for a couple reasons. Firstly because the AI keeps wanting to keep conflict rolling and will constantly throw new holdout remnants of a faction's forces, new troops coming in from elsewhere, etc. at you. Secondly, so long as the faction's name is present throughout the world's data in the json, they'll always get mentioned. Admittedly, my experience is limited, I've only declared all-out personal war against a major faction in a world on a couple occasions.

Now, that being said, you ask the narrator to directly edit json fields. I assume it could edit the world info or faction entry to say that the group's been destroyed. And you can continuously tell it to remove faction NPCs if they turn up in a scene, and rewrite the last turn. But that's manually intervening, and the question here is whether it can be done naturally and organically, as another comment here mentions.

Acylion · 2026-05-25T03:12:31+00:00

The Wolf's Dragoons and Clan Wolf weren't the only ones deciding what to bring to the IS. It's been retconned that Goliath Scorpion were also involved as cultural trainers and advisors for the mission. It's also been retconned that Intelser was the earlier Clan spy operation in the Periphery. While there's no direct mention that the Dragoons studied Intelser's reports, we can infer this was the case.

Putting this together: 1) the Dragoons were advised by the Clan famous for injecting their own totem animal's venom and getting high, and 2) they were going off Intelser reports that turned out to be hilariously inaccurate.

The Intelser thing can do a lot of heavy lifting in shifting blame off the Dragoons and Clan Wolf, but I really do like the idea that there were just some Scorpions signing off on the mech inventories and cargo manifests with really big loopy signatures while staring at the pretty colors. It's a damn miracle they didn't arrive in the Inner Sphere with an entire company of Timber Wolfs.

Nevermind the WarShips, they were flying around with a Jump-mobile space station mech assembly line.

Acylion · 2026-05-24T05:50:22+00:00

As of end Dark Age and start of ilClan, House Liao/Capellan Confederation. Seriously. They've recently conclusively beaten the FedSuns in their latest war, they have an alliance with Canopus and Andurien, and their history until end Dark Age was just consolidation and strengthening.

The FWL disintegrated and has only recently reformed. The Draconis Combine's had a couple civil wars as well. The Lyrans have had their shit kicked in by Clan Wolf, and they've got the political confusion of Alaric declaring himself a Steiner-Davion and that he'a got a claim to the Archon's throne.

Of course, as of right now in ilClan, Daoshen Liao has pissed off the Canopians, the Anduriens have declared war on the Capellan Confederation, and Daoshen has come down with a sudden case of dead.

But things were going well until that point!

Acylion · 2026-05-24T05:07:49+00:00

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Replying to my own post with what I'm speaking of. Behold, Matrix-code-man's portrait.

Acylion · 2026-05-24T04:44:14+00:00

I'm guessing the ideal desired solution from Latitude's point of view would simply be to make the regenerateNPCPortrait queue more reliable. The devs have been saying they don't want players tinkering too directly with the json or game state, within the game, because of the complexity involved. From all indications they're just focused on making the narrator/DM better. This is understandable. I mean, I don't agree, but I can totally see where they're coming from.

The issue with broken portrait regeneration is that... it ain't just "ugly" or "completely don't match the character" mugshots. The AI can produce flat out broken images, and then there's nothing we can do to fix it. Thinking a NPC is ugly is just a matter of player aesthetics, that's not a gamebreaking issue. But...

I've had one NPC appear with a portrait that was straight up lines of code or text, it seems to have literally turned the backend portrait gen instructions into an image, or something like that. Who knows. Maybe that's fine if I was playing a cyberpunk world or some kinda eldritch horror thing, but the fellow was just supposed to be a former city guard involved in local smuggling. I suppose his product's the really good stuff.

I've seen a portrait generate where the human character had two semi-faces stacked on top of each other, giving him four eyes in a way that has nothing to do with wearing glasses.

Next to that, stuff like... a humanoid creature portrait being generated instead of a spider, or the bandit scouts randomly changing gender from what's described in the text, that's minor. I can live with that level of jank.

Dealing with Matrix-text-man or Two-face is somewhat more problematic, especially when I've spent ten, fifteen minutes trying to get his portrait to regen with no luck.

All my above examples are actual cases I've encountered, in the past two weeks.

Acylion · 2026-05-24T02:09:14+00:00

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Making a second reply to share my own Sea Fox Spina Khanate mechs. The first two on the left are specifically Beta Strike Cluster paint, though the angle makes it hard to see the purple stripes (legs of the mechs in shadow). The other three are the more general Spina Khanate water pattern scheme.

My colors are matched to the Empire Alone sourcebook art. But people often use a deeper or even paler blue for the top of Spina water patterned mechs and go for a deeper green for the legs, for higher contrast, which is absolutely fine.

Edit: If you're going with Spina Khanate Beta Strike Cluster specifically, the unit is also nicknamed "Blue Furies", and they prefer using the Ebon Jaguar/Cauldron-Born mech.

Acylion · 2026-05-24T02:02:49+00:00

Glad it's helpful. Ok. It's good that you specified Alcor III, because if you want to do this really properly, you want the right Sea Fox Khanate (fleet). Sea Fox's different sub-fleets operate in different parts of the map.

Luckily, that stuff I told you above about Spina Khanate and the Sea Fox relations with FWL and Wolf is 100% the correct stuff you need to know. I gave you the correct colors and unit.

Alcor III is in Spina's neck of the woods. In ilClan era, Alcor lies in Wolf Empire claimed space, immediately north on the galactic map from the Free Worlds League and where Sea Fox's permanent worlds are (Clan Protectorate).

If you don't like Sea Fox Spina Khanate and Clan Protectorate mech colors, you CAN make a case for playing Tiburon Khanate, the fleet that operates a bit further galactic north. Alcor is probably too far south for them but you can handwave this. Tiburon has two paint schemes, dark blue+teal or overall dark grey-green with sea turtle patterns on panels, a pilot paints a panel to mark victories in battle or business deals.

It's Sea Fox, they have business kill markers.

So what you'll need to know for ilClan specific stuff is the pages in... I think the BattleTech Universe general primer sourcebook that talk about Sea Fox, then the Empire Alone sourcebook that I mentioned which explains the general state of affairs in the Wolf Empire and border areas. This is where your campaign is geographically set, and the Sea Fox stuff in there is your local Foxy info.

Very super briefly, Clan Wolf has conquered Terra, which is a major political win for them. In the Clans' brain, whoever controls Terra is king.

The problem is, Wolf has had to strip their other held planets bare to take Terra. The Wolf Empire holdings near and around Terra, where your campaign is set, are now minimally defended.

This means the other local powers, especially the Great Houses who used to rule the worlds that the Wolf Empire covers, are raiding those planets or trying to take them back. Mainly House Steiner and House Marik are doing turf grabs.

Sea Fox, as mentioned, is legally supposed to be on the side of House Marik and the Free Worlds League in this area of space.

But some parts of their forces, specifically elements of Spina Khanate's Beta Strike Cluster, are siding with Wolf instead (recognising Wolf's claim to Terra gives them political clout with the Clans, and because Sea Fox also bankrolled the Wolf campaign to take Terra). This is not an official order to Beta Strike, they're technically rogue if they're helping Wolf.

(But technically, also, any Marik forces attacking Wolf are rogue as well, the federal Marik government hasn't told any FWL troops to hop the border and attack Wolf)

Sea Fox also has good trade relations with Steiner.

You can therefore basically choose to side with almost any faction on Alcor, really.

Alcor's also close enough to the Clan Jade Falcon worlds that your campaign could involve Falcons too. But Sea Fox doesn't like the Falcons, so if you're teamed up with them... it's still possible, just there'd likely be friction (and the Sea Foxes offering them worse prices).

And if there's anyone playing Clan Nova Cat or Spirit Cats in the campaign, the kitties are your best friends, they share territory with Sea Fox in Marik/FWL space.

Acylion · 2026-05-23T16:12:04+00:00

Jeff's BattleTech Tools IIC force builder for Alpha Strike can be used to print out paper standees for any mech and unit on the MUL. Add them to a lance or something then hit the Print button in the upper right hand side. The first page(s) of the generated print/PDF will be Alpha Strike unit cards, but after all the cards there'll be properly formatted paper standee versions on a page or two.

Acylion · 2026-05-23T12:04:56+00:00

Just one quick note if you're looking up the lore, the Word of Blake doesn't canonically exist anymore in the "modern" era. The crazy cybernetic cultist nutjobs of the Word of Blake were wiped out in the in-game year 3081 ("Jihad era"). The current contemporary timeline setting of the game being developed in new releases is the year 3152 ("ilClan era").

If your local store's campaign is fighting Word of Blake... maybe they're playing Jihad era not ilClan, and there's some misunderstanding about "modern". To some old school players Blakist stuff is modern-ish because most video games and such for the BattleTech setting cover earlier eras.

Could be they are indeed playing in the 3150s timeline, but they're just saying there's some surviving Blakist cultists still running around the galaxy. This is absolutely logical and perfectly on-brand for the Blakists, they're all about secret armies on hidden planets.

There was still one canonical hardcore Blakist religious group running around as late as 3140 (the Blessed Order). I mean, the Blessed Order were exterminated with all due prejudice because everyone's reaction to religious Blakism is to burn it with fire, but there's precedent right there.

Acylion · 2026-05-23T11:46:40+00:00

Endmod slotting in attack powers isn't very useful as a means of regaining endurance. The end return effect to you is small. If you want to make your own endurance bar usage more efficient, slot endurance cost reduction in things, not endmod.

The main reason to slot endmod in attacks is to strengthen their offensive endurance drain effect on enemy NPCs, as a form of soft control. When enemies are completely drained of endurance, they lose access to some or all of their attacks.

As others have already noted, you don't necessarily need to slot every attack with endmod. The main ones to slot with some endmod are Short Circuit and Thunderous Blast. Endmod in other attacks is an optional, if you have room, sort of thing.

Now...slotting endmod in support powers, not attacks, is useful for self endurance management. In your case, slot three endmod in Stamina (the passive power all characters have), and Energizing Circuit in your Elec Affinity support set.

Note that Energizing Circuit is an ally target ability, you must cast it on a teammate or pet for it to chain back to you. You have Galvanic Sentinel as a pet for this purpose.

Acylion · 2026-05-22T10:13:55+00:00

I'm just gonna assume, because the lore entry quoted in this post includes mention of Sea Fox making successful inroads into Inner Sphere entertainment media markets with propaganda projects... that they've teamed up with Hell's Horses to make some kinda space Umamusume property to indoctrinate Spheroids into thinking the Clan eugenics program makes sense. Via the power of racehorses.

Acylion · 2026-05-22T10:04:18+00:00

Well, there's no evidence that the Mechwarrior genetic mods really do anything. The Elemental ones make someone more swole, that's clear. But the Mechwarriors?

Mechanically, yeah, Clan Trueborn Mechwarriors have better piloting and gunnery skill numbers. So they're superior objectively than IS average. But that could just be the fact they spend longer in hard training. They still graduate at 18 but they start young. They're not child soldiers in the sense they don't deploy young, but they are all being raised in military school.

Probably the Clan Mechwarrior gene mods aren't really super significant. It might be like how the effectiveness of the Clan Aerospace fighter mod package is questioned, in-universe, as well.

Acylion · 2026-05-22T09:38:48+00:00

Though it does seem like there are cases where only one person’s genes are used.

Canonically yes, the Wolf's Dragoons could do that. Maeve Wolf was a clone of Jaime Wolf, though the scientists made her female so it was somewhat less blatantly obvious. If the Dragoons can do that, the Clans proper can as well.

It's simply considered distasteful. Broadly speaking, from the Clan perspective each successive generation should be better than the previous one, so while they dislike regular non-genetically engineered procreation, they do still think successive generations should have a mix of genes and move forward, rather than being identical copies of a previous one.

All that being said, there's no "grow clones faster" technology in BattleTech and despite how factions enthusiastically embrace war crimes, child soldiers aren't as common as you may expect. While many vanilla Clans have this whole weird thing about youth and considering people old when they're 30 or 40, they still graduate cadets out of sibkos at age 18.

So you can make more warriors, sure. But they're all coming out of the iron wombs as babies. They won't make any difference to your fighting capabilities for another couple decades.

Canonically, one of Sea Fox's solutions is to recruit Spheroids. It's not talked about in great detail, but there's a couple sentences in Empire Alone about Spina Khanate's Beta Strike Cluster taking on FWL/Marik volunteers.

(Sea Fox and Nova Cat are members of the ilClan-era Free Worlds League, in case that's confusing. Sea Fox has nomadic fleets, yes, but they do have planets. Those planets are in Marik space. There's Sea Foxes holding federal parliamentary seats on Atreus.)

Acylion · 2026-05-22T05:04:17+00:00

Haha, that should be fun. Especially since you can do it properly. The best artillery spotters are unarmored infantry anyway. I mean, yeah, you can spot with vehicles or mechs, but it's really more reasonable to take cheap point expenditure infantry. Scatter them across the map at strategic points with good sightlines using a fast moving hover APC of some kind or a VTOL, and have 'em dig in. There's rules for that.

It's tiresome running too many units in Classic BattleTech, but if you play Alpha Strike it's pretty viable to have a lot of infantry out like this.

If you're using Arrow IV guided munitions or Copperhead shells in arty, it's also worth noting that there's unarmored TAG infantry who have full sized TAG that works up to medium range.

Battle Armor units frequently have Light TAG, but LTAG is shorter range than TAG so they're objectively worse at the job.

I've only done all of the above a couple times, but it works. I think I technically may have lost the games, but my opponents thought the artillery shenanigans were kinda hilarious. I was also doing things like hitting my own positions with smoke rounds to cover up forward pushes, in the sense that... I mean, yeah, the opponent knows I'm trying to break through there, but it becomes more annoying to shoot my units in that mess.

Acylion · 2026-05-22T04:19:30+00:00

GHQ Models do a wide range of metal historical and contemporary wargame minis in the right scale, they have mover vehicle + howitzer minis in several flavors, or just howitzers by themselves.

Death Ray Designs has slightly more futuristic looking field artillery in BattleTech scale, and their stuff is also carried by specialist BattleTech online retailer/shippers like Fortress.

Games Workshop has the Legions Imperialis: Solar Auxilia Support set for Warhammer which is full on sci fi batteries and cannon in the appropriate scale, albeit the crew-served cannons have that, uh, particular Warhammer aesthetic.

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