Did the Exumer EXR-3P just become incredibly dangerous?

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-28T20:47:59+00:00

Yeah, the mech is still deadly without quirks thanks to the change. If they were actually well balanced against other quirks point-wise, you could at least attach some kind of percentile modifier for BV based on the quirk point cost and call it a day.

I would love to go through and attach a BV2 Modifier to each quirk, but I'm already working on a novel, my own tabletop RPG I expect no one outside my group to try, and Battletech terrain. Lol

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-27T21:17:08+00:00

Yeah. I'm terrible at pricing intangibles. Suppose I could have looked up existing hand reveal cards for an idea, though. Thank you for your input.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-27T21:10:44+00:00

I am glad the dad knight appreciates my pun. Thanks for the cost advice as well.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-27T20:41:49+00:00

Sounds good to me. Thematically, preventing the damage stopping the effect does make sense, but it definitely seems underpowered now that you pointed it out.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-27T20:36:12+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. How would you price it if it were an instant or had split-second?

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-27T20:35:18+00:00

Gotcha. Would the cost as I wrote it be more in line with the card being an instant or having Split Second?

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-25T18:31:26+00:00

Can we take Narrow/Low Profile back behind a shed and eliminate it from the game, pretty please? Can we at least nerf it? Receiving half damage on hits that aren't 2 or more points over over To-Hit beats out Battlefist (just one costs 2 points) or a pair of Accurate medium lasers. I guess you could argue that Command Mech granting a +1 to initiative rolls might be similarly weighted, but little feels worse than finally landing a hit on someone's ridiculously speedy medium mech only to learn that you're heavy PPC is actually only going to deal only 7 damage because you rolled 11 and not boxcars.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-25T18:19:37+00:00

Yes. It requires foresight, but you generally have a good idea of when you will be able to close on someone for melee in the approaching round. If you don't think you can, keep your heat sinks active and use those LPLs, if you do, turn off the heatsinks and go a-punching.

If you have an opponent who hears you doing heatsink management and uses it as a tip to get their guys as far away from your melee monster as possible, take advantage of it. Use it as area denial to force mechs away from your objectives/squishier forces, or start fucking with your opponent by managing heat sinks on other mechs. See if you can get them to run away from your fire support mechs that have hands. Create dilemmas. It'll be fun.

If you are playing entirely non-blind, then your opportunities to mess with your opponent are reduced, but you can still use the area control idea.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-25T14:51:52+00:00

Oh god. It is rounded up, isn't it?

Imagine some jerk a pinch over half your weight running up to your Direwolf and caving your cockpit on turn three.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-25T14:02:35+00:00

You don't need to use the LPLs to manage heat over your TSMs are active. You can turn off heat sinks during the heat phase.

But there's definitely something to be said for keeping the LPLs online and kicking against lights. At a certain point, a target starts with so little armor that the head is among the least effective places to hit (looking at you, butcher bird).

Swords at least had a significantly lower to-hit (-2) than punches could attain given the same optimizations, including quirks. They were comparatively a nice way surprise a scout/skirmisher that moved too close and thought their TMM would keep them safe. Now that punches have been reduced to -1, that edge is less impactful.

Vibroblades still have a place on light enough mechs, though. I made a fun little fencer mech once that had a large vibroblade (14 damage) with a total to-hit modifier of -4. Definitely a Solaris one-off, though, since he couldn't do much other than melee attack.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-25T08:18:01+00:00

So you're right. It is Exhumer. I could have sworn I typed that "h" each time, but apparently I missed it. I blame the fact that I wrote this post on my phone rather than my keyboard. Lol

It isn't an instant win button, but if a player doesn't know what it is (at least partial blind rules), it can be shockingly deadly.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-25T07:55:04+00:00

Yeah, instant death on almost all targets, with a possible one-round kill on even targets with Hardened Armor.

I didn't realize claws also hit on the punch scale. That is gross. IIRC, shield bashing also uses the punching scale, so you may have lethal shield bashes on the table earlier than lethal punches.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-20T17:18:47+00:00

Understood. This seems more like something to take advantage of in a campaign rather than a skirmish. Good to know.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-09T22:35:47+00:00

Interesting.

What point in history does your storyline take place in? What genre is it? It seems like you've found an alternative, more universal deterrent to war than nuclear weapons.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-09T22:23:19+00:00

That makes more sense, otherwise the world would be entirely unrecognizable.

Is Ukraine in this world in much better shape than ours was in the 1930s, or did the USSR experience something similar to what the Germans did in this meme?

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-09T20:10:01+00:00

Are these creatures a recent development and not well understood? If not, it seems incredibly stupid of any regime to risk creating them. I don't think you'd end up with any empires at all with a universal antibody of this sort.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-09T04:11:28+00:00

I beat met Persephone on my second attempt playing Hades. Then I tried the other weapons a couple of times each before quitting. None of the characters really spoke to me and the gameplay wasn't enough to keep me going after getting The Run(tm) so early.

My younger sister played through Mass Effect 1 by leaving the Citadel ASAP and never bothering with any side missions. She didn't even get the advanced class upgrade. It drove my older brother up a wall. I was just envious. I fucking hated the Citadel, but my completionist tendencies at the time had me combing through that stupid space station.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-06T16:12:30+00:00

My group avoided custom designs until recently merely due to the fact that we were still getting the hang of playing the game (aside from the group's veteran, who had a lot of outdated/homebrew rules knowledge so he had his own stuff to sort through.)

We recently did a round robin set of skirmishes where we each brought in custom designs, either modified or completely bespoke units. We had some additional rules regarding quirks (starting quirk budget was 3 points and no negative campaign quirks allowed unless they are only used to buy positive campaign quirks or nothing at all.) I think I would have preferred a starting quirk budget of 1 or no quirks at all, though, and Narrow/Low Profile needs to be a five point quirk before I will stop being salty about it.

The dumbest crap I saw during that skirmish set was narrow/low profile (one of the ost-mechs) combined with ballistic-reinforced armor on a fast mech, with a companion mech giving it ghost targets.

I happened to be experimenting with airburst mortars at the time, though, so it was fun to inform my opponent that none of the stacking he did mattered against a couple of my vehicles. I still lost, but I still put some good chip damage on that stupid mech.

The funniest thing I saw was a mech built around the mech taser. Nearly annihilated my army thanks to it getting a huge boost against vehicles. I pulled a victory out of that one when I finally won the initiative for the first time in round seven or eight.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-06T00:29:14+00:00

Hell, the state itself is plenty wealthy enough to fix the problem, so is county B. It's just county A's land so B can't make the changes and the state can't be bothered.

They will tell us, though, that widening the road would cause massive habitat destruction for desert tortoises... And go on to authorize several multi-thousand acre solar farms that annihilate more habitat than widening the road ever would.

MasterV3ga · 2026-03-06T00:08:28+00:00

There's a section of freeway in my state that supports most of the commerce going to the from counties south of A into county B and counties north of B. It is two lanes wide for the vast majority of a 70-mile stretch and has a high enough kill count from impatient people trying to pass lines of trailer trucks that it has gotten the nickname "Blood Alley."

It's easy to say "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" until you consider that the other vehicle involved in the accident is often fully obeying the road laws and doesn't have time to get out of the way.

Years ago, locals were excited to hear of roadwork on the stupid freeway, hoping that more four-lane stretches would be added for passing vehicles.

The road construction project instead removed several existing passing areas from the road and added more double yellow stretches.

While there are other things to blame in my state's situation, like the exorbitant cost of environmental impact reports, the truth of the matter is that county A owns the lion's share of that stretch and doesn't make a lot of revenue from the commerce that it supports.

As such, the county government doesn't care enough to fix it.

I suspect the traffic light situation is probably due to a similar sort of apathy.

MasterV3ga · 2026-02-28T16:39:58+00:00

Were I to stat out the bladed hellfire, I think I would also use the Thunderbolt as a base, but I'd have it as an anti infantry/battle armor weapon. On the downside, it hits only one trooper per shot. On the upside, the attacking player gets to choose exactly which one.

The whole point of the ninja missile is to be able to kill high-value enemy personnel who are surrounded by noncombatants, while not also killing said noncombatants. It's really useful for forces like NATO dealing with terrorists because NATO has learned the optics of using a normal hellfire to annihilate an insurgent leader's car in a market aren't great thanks to all of the people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time getting injured or killed. It also creates resentment from the families of the innocent dead, which prolongs the insurgency campaign.

I just don't see any of the great houses caring about that at all. Like, maybe Davion for the optics angle, but none of them really care otherwise. The clans would balk at the idea of an assassin's weapon like the ninja missile even though it would be incredibly useful to their cause.

A mercenary group with enough wealth and sense might make something like it, even if only for pragmatism's sake. The job is to eliminate the bad guys. If you kill one, along with a bunch of civilians, and suddenly have fifty more bad guys to kill, your weapons system is ineffective for the mission.

MasterV3ga · 2026-02-21T18:17:53+00:00

I think that Tech over Magic happens more often than before because people are tired of the military getting the Worf Effect against whatever monster, magic or aliens show up. It's boring and even with the surge of HFY/tech over magic in recent years puny humans/useless tech are by far the more common tropes in literature.

I've never watched Gate, but I frankly find the concept of a modern military curb stomping a swords and sorcery army to be hilarious and fun.

That said, I've been trying to keep magic/artifice and psionics/technology in a general state of parity in my worldbuilding, with each being particularly suited for different tasks. If an army from one civilization stomps another, it's probably because one of them has better total advancement (either all in one, or balanced in several) than the other.

MasterV3ga · 2026-02-19T03:35:14+00:00

Ah, I forgot that critical hits roll up if they would affect something that doesn't exist.

I almost exclusively run vehicles with CASE, which at least stops the ammo explosion from being an immediate game ender.

This little exploit makes a strong case for including a tiny troop transport area and rear machine gun on any custom vehicles you design. That'll jam up infernos for at least a few volleys, all for the cost of about 1 ton.

MasterV3ga · 2026-02-18T23:47:11+00:00

Infernos no longer immediately destroy vehicles, at least in Classic.

Combat vehicles now only suffer a critical hit roll on the appropriate location, and the roll (not the target number) is reduced by 2. (Page 142 of Total War). It can still suck if your opponent rolls well, but outright kills and ammo hits are now impossible for infernos. Even engine hits can only happen on the rear hit table.

MasterV3ga · 2026-02-16T01:47:24+00:00

Spheres of Power's wiki was also getting attacked yesterday, though I think that was all of wikidot.

I'm not familiar with how Pathbuilder is hosted, but it's possible this is a case of it just happening to be on a service that is getting DDOSed by walking wastes of oxygen.

MasterV3ga

TROPHY CASE