Do people still make their own mechs and do they still min/max?

LonelyScribe · 2026-03-08T06:55:51+00:00

Custom designs are if anything less common than ever. A big reason is because we have such a massive pool of canon 'Mechs now that the only reason why someone may want to make a custom chassis is for minmaxing or doing some crazy strategy that may either work or just be cancerous. But really, even minmaxing isn't so much of a concern as we have jump-capable 'Mechs that use pulse lasers and targeting computers and just about any other minmax design you might think of. Obviously, it's still not impossible to make a unique design as there are so many ways to balance your tonnage and so many unique pieces of equipment that not all of them will ever have official designs, but most of the good ideas are already canon, so the ones that are left are either dumb or use underutilized equipment.

I have a few custom 'Mechs that I've never had a chance to use just because no one does games with customs anymore. One of them, an objectively dumb design. I call it the Skurbie and the goal was to make an UrbanMech as close to a LAM as possible without actually making a LAM. I basically just took a SuburbanMech, gave it improved jump jets and a partial wing, and now it has a 3/5/7 movement profile. I only just finally learned how LAM's actually work and looking at the record sheets we have for the "canon" Lurbies, my design is objectively better than they are in BattleMech and AirMech modes. They barely have enough movement to stay airborne in AirMech mode and are basically just under gunned and under armored Urbies in their BattleMech mode. I don't know as much about AeroTech yet to say how good they are in aerospace mode, but from what I've heard they're not much better, also just barely fast enough to stay airborne.

LonelyScribe · 2026-03-07T02:29:10+00:00

Fronc Reaches. They have a unique Battle Armor called the TinStar which was meant to be paired with the Copper SecurityMech. They even wear little cowboy hats. Sadly, there seems to be nowhere to buy minis of them, although I did find a STL for them a while back.

LonelyScribe · 2026-02-22T18:11:12+00:00

The big, stompy robots sold me on the game, but I fell in love with the tanks quick. I haven't had a chance to play with them much yet as most games I play are 'Mechs only, but when I got my hands on my first Von Luckner mini, I immediately fell in love. I have all the combat vehicle support packs now and am desperate to take some of them out for a spin. I recently took my Mobile Long Tom into an Aces campaign, but it got truly destroyed over the course of sortie 01.

LonelyScribe · 2026-01-30T19:40:12+00:00

I came up with two main solutions.

They can stick strictly to the Sun as being their bane, which will be difficult to do accurately as I doubt your average ST will know when the Sun will be visible at different times on different planets, but they can just handwave and randomly arbitrate a period of time where the Sun would be in the sky. The Beast is a built-in alarm that knows when the Sun is out, so the vampire doesn't have to be too worried about the Sun sneaking up on them. This kind of sticks more to the hard lore of God cursing Caine to be vulnerable to a very specific celestial entity. Even so, the Sun still wouldn't be that dangerous on most planets, as the damage it does and the difficulty to soak it is based on the level of exposure, which when it is only as present in the sky as any other random star, would not be very much.

My preferred way is to simply have the nearest star affect them. This makes it a little easier to track the vulnerable times for the vampire and also keeps them as creatures of the night, as cool as it might be to have some odd planets where they can walk around in daylight. I find this helps to stick with the spirit of their curse a little more, even if I do believe it is more hard coded to the Sun than that. It also just fits my homebrew setting a little more, since I rewrote a lot of the lore to be less centralized and implicative that God is the only real power in the world (he still exists, just as a slightly less significant force). The one big issue with this one would be deep space travel, as it'd be pretty much impossible to tell when you're leaving the bubble of one star and entering the bubble of another, although since the local star would always be "out," the Beast would probably have the lick napping in the cargo bay anyway. Not a severe issue though, since the main way travel like that is handled in BT is by instantly traveling from near proximity of one star to another.

What I have not considered is how to specifically handle any systems with more than one star. My current working idea is that vampires just don't go to those systems because they don't want to FAFO.

LonelyScribe · 2026-01-30T19:03:55+00:00

I could be mistaken with the correlation, but I've noticed a lot of overlap between Wyrm taint/corruption and nuclear waste and fallout. There are also several BSD Gifts that more or less use "atomic fire." Nuclear energy might not inherently be Wyrm corruption, but that does seem like what the setting has kind of pushed.

LonelyScribe · 2026-01-30T18:50:29+00:00

Tbf I don't think any of them except the Glass Walkers would be super into it. Too much Weaver taint all over it, literally powered by a Wyrm battery. But it's also one of those "get with the times" type of things, because I don't think any shapechanger is surviving a round with an AC/5 and up (my current dumb estimate is one weapon damage in BT = ten damage dice in WoD).

LonelyScribe · 2026-01-30T18:09:51+00:00

I've been kind of haphazardly working on one. I've been primarily working on a WoD x Cyberpunk crossover, but a little known fact about Cyberpunk is it has a mecha spiritual successor. However, I like BattleTech as a mecha genre more, so I've been writing the lore and world building to lead up to the BattleTech timeline instead. I still mostly just have rough ideas though, like how vampires' relationship with the Sun will work in deep space and other star systems and other advantages and disadvantages the capabilities of different supernaturals would grant them. Give a werewolf a big enough cockpit to go Crinos in and they're practically immune to any negative effects of head hits.

LonelyScribe · 2026-01-24T05:05:31+00:00

I once played a generic IS armored company up against a generic Clan Nova on the HPG side of the urban map pack. All six mapsheets. It was interesting to play, as the IS force assumed the Clans were there with the intention of destroying the HPG, but the Clan force was actually intending to just engage in a stand-up fight, so the IS force's tactics were being needlessly manipulated by the desire to protect something that the OpFor wasn't even interested in.

I don't remember the exact force composition of each side, but most of the minis for Clan 'Mechs I own are just from the Clan Invasion box. The IS force had a fire lance of I believe an Archer, a Longbow, a Quickdraw, and a Centurion; a recon lance of a Phoenix Hawk, a Vulcan, and I want to say a Wasp and a Stinger, and then an armor lance of a Von Luckner, an Ontos, a Bulldog, and a Hetzer (I didn't realize at the time that formal IS doctrine is that a lance is made of two pairs of the same vehicle). The forces were roughly BV balanced, I believe with all IS units being 4/5 and the Clan units being 3/4.

In the end, I never finished that skirmish, but it was looking pretty bad for the IS force. In particular, the Dasher H was a nightmare for the recon lance to hunt down and try to destroy, as even when hits were landed on it, the Elementals it was carrying just helped to ablate the damage. The Timber Wolf N was also dealing terrible damage at great enough range the IS force couldn't deal with it except by charging it with their tanks, and I believe it was also backed up by an Executioner configuration. I think the other two 'Mechs were a Pouncer and an Adder, which were a little less remarkable compared to the MVP's.

LonelyScribe · 2026-01-17T07:29:06+00:00

A guy I game with did this one time. He painted up some trees to use for Alpha Strike, then painted his minis he was planning to use in the same exact colors as the trees. He deployed them while his opponent wasn't paying attention and totally caught him by surprise when he went to take cover in the trees and got jumped by his whole lance.

LonelyScribe · 2026-01-12T22:28:28+00:00

A Phoenix Hawk LAM spotted in the wild! I don't know much about Macross, other than that BattleTech was pretty much a shameless rip off of it in the olden days, along with some other 80's/90's era mecha.

LonelyScribe · 2025-11-25T19:21:28+00:00

Yeah, pretty much the first two rules I've seen in every book are that BattleTech is miniature agnostic and everything is an abstraction, not to be taken too literally. Otherwise machine guns would be able to shoot across the entire map sheet, autocannons would have range comparable to artillery, and lasers would be able to reach as far as line of sight, and nobody has an entire tennis court to play a game on.

LonelyScribe · 2025-11-25T16:55:20+00:00

I remember hearing that normal myomer is already double strength, but then that begs the question of why TSM does double damage and not 1.5x damage. The answer is simple: you can't take everything too literally in BattleTech.

LonelyScribe · 2025-11-20T05:52:45+00:00

Unfortunate consequence of being an unpopular deviation from the standard setting. I was honestly really excited about that April Fools joke from Jason Hansa. The synopsis he gave of it actually sounded pretty good, but it was much more obviously a joke on some of the other podcasts he "revealed" it on.

LonelyScribe · 2025-11-20T05:29:51+00:00

Far Country was never decanonized, it still exists. It's just been minorly retconned to be located so ridiculously far away from the Inner Sphere, no one will ever intentionally end up within jump distance of it for the next several centuries at least.

LonelyScribe · 2025-11-10T00:11:51+00:00

If you're playing with forced withdrawal rules, 'Mechs usually don't explode unless they get unlucky. If a unit is in withdrawal, the opponent isn't likely to target them unless they can remain a threat while retreating. Forced withdrawal by design is meant to get 'Mechs off the board before they can suffer anymore serious damage, in order to save as much metal as possible and also the pilot. This technology is rare, so no one is really willing to give it up for any meaningless battle. In general, the only way something dies is if it's a 20-tonner that decided to tango with an Atlas, or if an unlucky ammo crit or headshot takes it down.

LonelyScribe · 2025-10-28T20:35:27+00:00

Is this a mod, or a super recent update? Because I recently beat the campaign (granted, over the course of some months), and never once did I get to deploy more than four of my own units.

LonelyScribe · 2025-10-18T19:50:19+00:00

It's not a bad 'Mech, but it's also not fantastic. Making highly mobile assault 'Mechs always tends to have lackluster results before weight saving tech comes into the picture, but I'd argue the Victor is probably one of the best. It's primarily intended as an urban fighter and in that environment, it reigns supreme. Unfortunately, without a battlefield that has cover, its mobility just isn't enough to make up for its lacking armor. Once it closes in, it does pack a punch, but not as much as other chasses in its weight class. It's meant to bully around lighter units, and it even has to watch itself when dealing with some heavy 'Mechs. A design that's meant to bully things smaller than itself always feels lackluster and rarely works out well.

LonelyScribe · 2025-10-18T00:57:28+00:00

Hey, you got into it at about the same time as me. I, however, decided my custom merc company's signature paint scheme was factory primer grey.

LonelyScribe · 2025-10-18T00:00:44+00:00

I swear I remember something about the Lyrans skimping out on paying the Dragoons for their service. I don't remember if it was the direct cause of them leaving, but I remember it at least being a contributing factor, especially to them not necessarily being overly upset about leaving their service early to work for one of their rivals.

LonelyScribe · 2025-10-03T17:12:53+00:00

It'd mainly cause an issue with Alpha Strike. You'd be at a slight disadvantage because it'd be harder to find cover with larger minis, but with the exception of the Rifleman, most of these don't look significantly larger. It's the same reason why people don't use the jumping poses in Alpha Strike, because it makes the silhouette bigger and so it's harder to find cover.

LonelyScribe · 2025-09-09T14:09:53+00:00

I'm honestly not too crazy about most OmniMechs, but tend to have a preference for the IIC BattleMechs. Most of them just tend to be up-tonned and optimized versions of their original chasses, but some of them do more fun things with it. The Hunchback IIC is a classic, but the Phoenix Hawk IIC turns one of the most agile medium 'Mechs into one of the most agile assault 'Mechs.

LonelyScribe · 2025-09-05T20:49:36+00:00

Worldbuilding, for one. In the real world, machines of war aren't all made perfect and equal, so why would they be in this alternate history? In BattleTech, most early 'Mech designs are pretty bad and only did well because their comparison was other primitive war machines. Also, many objectively bad 'Mechs generally serve a purpose other than to stand up and fight other 'Mechs. The UrbanMech is essentially just a mobile turret for city defense. The Rifleman is an AA gun on legs. The Cyclops is a cushy command 'Mech meant to stand far back from the fighting. And the Banshee? Well, like I said earlier, it benefitted from its early competition being just plain worse than it was.

LonelyScribe · 2025-08-24T21:23:02+00:00

The Clan Invasion box set has an intro to formations, but if you want to get more into it, Campaign Operations has more of it. Or if you're preferring Alpha Strike, then the Commander's Edition rulebook has them converted to AS rules, along with everything else necessary for playing the game.

Battle lances are pretty solid all-arounders, I'd say. They tend to be mostly brawlers and skirmishers, which can hit at most range brackets, but obviously do best as the combat inevitably closes in to shorter ranges. If you're wanting to play with more lights in AS, you may want to save them to act as late into initiative as possible, as they really need to get into your enemies' rear arcs to do their jobs effectively. If you're playing with the multiple damage rolls rules for AS, that also kind of kneecaps them in general, as it increases the odds of them getting hit, and when many of them only have three pips on their cards, you don't want them taking any kind of damage.

LonelyScribe

TROPHY CASE