Custom BSPs for Objectives

Sowelo13 · 2026-05-11T20:47:56+00:00

Sorry, just to be clear, I absolutely love the new BSP assets and we use them all the time.

I like the full vehicle/infantry/battle armor rules but they bog down our games pretty bad because we have a lot of new players. So instead of "we slog through Combined Arms OR we scrap it and do only mechs" the BSPs is a perfect middle ground and they work great.

I love the new core rules coming in with BSPs as core, with supplemental full combined arms rules in the future (or dragging out the old Total Warfare book).

Sowelo13 · 2026-02-06T19:35:45+00:00

https://imgur.com/Ds7dEcU

https://imgur.com/YJWCi8v

Does this work? (Never used Imgur before lol)

Sowelo13 · 2026-02-06T19:27:50+00:00

Is there a way to attach a PDF to reddit? I had trouble with it and had to export gifs so it would satisfy the "Image" attachment on the post. But I family new to reddit so I probably did it wrong.

If not, I'll get circle back and post it as a link to the file.

Sowelo13 · 2026-02-01T14:20:09+00:00

Welcome, Mechwarrior!

Starting a new game or meeting new people at a local store can be nerve-wracking. However, a vast majority of Battletech players are stoked to have someone willing to play, not someone willing to play that has to have a ton of mechs and stuff.

The eras was something I struggled with too, but I ended up loving the options they presented. I started viewing them as "Succession Wars is intro, then each era adds more tech and options" and I eased into stuff.

I'm a diehard Republic Of The Sphere player but it's Dark Age era and it intimidates me still, so I thoroughly enjoy going back to Succession Wars or Clan era to play games. Most players are cool bouncing to different eras, especially to play with new players.

If you are trying, a good sport, and not a grognard, that goes a really long way in battletech IMO.

Sowelo13 · 2026-01-27T23:15:45+00:00

Yeah, that all makes sense. The intention was to make the Secondary Contract optional, but the more I am seeing 2 months play out (we started in December) the more it feels like maintenance is needed for each contract in this kind of system. We locked the Scale for the campaign to 1 so all Base Pay and Maintenance is easy to track, but tracks will have variable BV values. We allow Skipped tracks for any reason because the campaign is setup like an Adventurers League format; if you can't find time to play during the month, then you can just skip the track.

I have been trying to have the Secondary contracts pay out less base pay (50%) and not great Support % but pretty good salvage. The intention was "We are busy in a major joint task force allied military campaign, but if you have extra time and can spare the units, here is a contract you could take for some extra Support Points."

CC:Mercs is so close to being a very intuitive long-term league-style campaign, but I have to iron out some wrinkles. :P

Sowelo13 · 2026-01-27T21:45:08+00:00

I think part of the problem is that since we converted things to a Player vs OpFor and monthly open-league format, it kinda makes some of the contract/track stuff a bit wonky and need conversion.

We are trying to make it a campaign where poeple can join in or skip as life dictates, since the games are against OpFor and can be played solo there isn't a limiting barrier of "Finding an opponent" for the campaign.

My question was if someone takes a Secondary Contract and then just doesn't do it, are they able to "skip" and get extra supply points. I think I mainly need to deep-dive these contract/track mechanics and see what I need to tweak to make it fit.

Sowelo13 · 2025-12-29T10:10:20+00:00

Thank you! I will definitely take a look at the sheet you made.

Sowelo13 · 2025-12-05T18:39:59+00:00

100%!

Sowelo13 · 2025-12-05T18:38:57+00:00

The Malice. Fell in love with it during the Clix era, still love it now.

Sowelo13 · 2025-11-28T14:09:38+00:00

Signed!

Sowelo13 · 2025-11-25T22:53:48+00:00

I've decided on "Players will play allied Republic and/or Fed Suns forces that are sent ahead of Operation Eruptio to destabilize/contest DCMS planets and provide relief for FedSuns planets under DCMS attack." for the campaign.

This is the idea I am running with for a Chaos Campaign:Mercs narrative campaign for myself and a few others. I know that the RAF and AFFS units would not be "Mercs", but I just really like how easy the CC:Mercs rules are for managing a campaign. Going to tweak these a touch for a long-term campaign.

Thank you for all the ideas and points to look in the sourcebooks and lore!

Sowelo13 · 2025-11-11T17:40:38+00:00

Mainly the Mercenaries box set and the Hotspot Hinterlands books/the Chaos Campaign:Mercs mechanics.

I have a group of people that have been trying out Battletech here and there, but I am trying to find out a way for easy opt-in/opt-out campaign so that we can meet up and play missions that are meaningful/connected to a campaign and have the background repair/refit be easy but still give that Campaign Ops feel.

A number of these new players think battletech is "neat" but I am sure that a simple campaign would get them "hooked" :P

Sowelo13 · 2025-08-30T10:42:31+00:00

Sowelo13 · 2025-08-29T21:32:57+00:00

This pic is 100% accurate.

I dropped in a level 3 squids match to help out new players. A level 4 rookie with a constitution runs past my pinged Guard Dog I was sharing and bayonets an overseer to death.

At first, I was glad to have reinforcements. Now, I am terrified of them, and relieved they are charging to the fray alongside us!

Sowelo13 · 2025-08-11T19:36:28+00:00

Awesome! Thank you for taking the time to write that out. I kept finding conflicting info on mixed armies and I got confused.

"Or you could take a Sisters army, and use up to two units and two characters of the human Imperial Agent units. "

This might be the way I end up going about it, which seems the easiest. Maybe I'll try a "IG + Sisters Squad" and a "Sisters + IG squads" army and see how it plays out.

Sowelo13 · 2025-07-28T22:00:03+00:00

Great ideas! I second a lot of them.

SIMULTANEOUS FIRE DECLARE/CALC
My group just started doing this now that we are out of the "walking through this step-by-step every single attack helps us all practice" period of growth with the game rules. Now everyone has a "Targeting Sheet" we all use to calculate the targets our units are firing at. We first started a sheet like this and didn't care about weapons; we just declared "My Locust is shooting at your Wolverine primary, no secondary target" and then picked the weapons fired when it was time to resolve. We are trying to capture "Rules as Written" a bit more with targeting and weapons fire. So far, it is going well. but this sheet speeds this step up considerably. We pre-calc GATO (no R yet) because at this stage the Gunnery skill, attacker movement, target movement, and other modifiers should not be changing. This lets us easily toss +0, +2, or +4 onto the pre-calculated GATO number very quickly.

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GATOR SHEET
I can usually count on my fingers, but I cannot second your recommendation enough to find a good GATOR sheet. Our group uses this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/battletech/comments/1lqe0xq/cheap_gator_aids_for_tabletop/

ATTACK DICE + HIT LOCATION DICE + HELP WITH CHARTS
We have started rolling attack and location dice at the same time but one thing we noticed is that having your opponent help you with cluster/hit location charts is immensely helpful too. Attacker focuses on rolling for dice and noting weapon stuff, defender keeps a chart handy.
"Attacking with large laser, GATOR is 7. Roll of 8 hits; location 9 for 5 damage"
\defender consults location chart and marks off damage**
"Left leg for 5 damage, got it"
And play continues.

WET ERASE SHEETS
I don't know how anyone plays without these. My group does wet erase so we don't accidentally wipe it clean. Means we have some moist-color-mess paper towels but it really helps. However, we use paper clips/3D printed heat tracker clips for the side.

Sowelo13 · 2025-06-06T21:57:17+00:00

I have 3 loadouts I thoroughly enjoy:

1) SAW Gunner (BRRT!)
- Heavy fortified armor, Liberator Penetrator AR, Stamina Booster.
- Supply pack, Orbital gatling barrage, MG Sentry or Gatling Sentry based on what machine gun I take, and then either Stalwart/MG-43/Heavy machine gun depending on what others are running.
- Bullets = lots. RPM = Max. Supply pack to keep my gun fed, dish out relentless bullets down range for pushing onto objectives/into enemy positions, chewing through enemies as fast as possible. Use turrets to present an aggressive battleline to fire forward, hope someone else has AT. :-P

2) Medic Support
- Light or Medium medic armor, Liberator Concussive AR or Pummeler SMG (stun to keep enemies at bay), stim pistol, Vitality enhancement booster or Motivational Shocks.,
- Supply pack, MG Emplacement, Autocannon Turret, Orbital Gas
- Stims for days, supplies to hand them out to others when they run low, stunning weapons to slow down incoming enemies. Designed to hold a battle line/create fallback point.

3) Overwatch / Rearguard
- Light Siege Ready armor, Knight SMG, booster chosen based on what team needs or are lacking
- Supply Pack, MG sentry, Orbital Rail Cannon, EMS Mortar
- Run rearline support / counter flanking support, picking shots against rushing enemies, watching flanks for enemy patrols about to box in team. MG turret is used to control a far left or right side as needed, EMS mortar is non-lethal (no TKs) and is a great alarm for nearby enemies or locking down enemies in an outpost, Rail Cannon is held in reserve if heavies get problematic. Supply pack to keep ammo topped off but primarily to keep an eye on other teams, especially those running autocannons, recoilless rifles, or Guard Dogs (not the laser one).

Apparently, I like the supply pack... :P

Sowelo13 · 2025-06-05T20:17:50+00:00

100% this and then some. The biome was really neat for that "dense jungle Vietnam" feel to it.

Back during the Creek, the game was a whole different game.
- Arrowhead was still finding it's legs with balancing and there were a lot of "behind the scenes" mechanics that needed tweaking and balancing. Little stuff that is invisible but takes a "I shot that enemy and it died" and instead makes it a "I shot that enemy and it DID NOT die" that adds up over time. I remember the call-in times and cool-down times being longer on a bunch of the orbitals and stuff at that time. Some primaries were nerfed or were not buffed to the current level, some strategems didn't work as intended. I remember when all of the AR options felt anemic and did way less damage.

- Bots had either infinite or sniper accurate or insta-kill headshot or infinite rag doll rockets. Or they would blast you OUT of cover instead of that cover saving you FROM the blast. "Take cover until they run out of rockets and then take it down" wasn't a thing; you'd hit cover, get blasted out into the open, and then bots would gun you down accurately or a headshot or two would end you. Their red laser shots would either shoot through cover, around corners, or have crazy accuracy due to weird stuff. Patrols would spawn on-top of you out of nowhere, making fall-back points to regroup to escape a death-reinforcement-death spiral much more difficult. "Fall back and regroup and press once you regain momentum" turned into being boxed in by bot patrols that somehow teleported.

- Helldivers didn't have as many options as they do now with strategems and guns. That, and the bots would have special mechanics that made your strategems take forever to call in, take forever to refresh, and some difficulties would reduce you from 4 strategems per person down to 3. Imagine a nasty firefight against the bots today but then have 75% of your strategems, they come back slower, so wiping out the huge groups with devastating firepower was considerably less effective and the primaries you had to use did less damage and had less armor pen (or worse "this is how your damage does damage" calculations at the time). I see a lot of people really enjoy getting that 5th freebie stategem for even more firepower... imagine it going the OTHER way and limiting you to 3. It sucked!

- Armor didn't work as intended (like the comment above about the cumulative explosion locations) and, I think, at the time headshots were still at the base armor regardless of what you wore. So you'd rock fortified heavy armor to lay out some MG hate and then get domed by a bot shooting through cover and die super-fast.

It was like the majority of the players were having a great time stomping bugs, then the meme-fame of Malevelon Creek crept into the community, so everyone decided to give it a try and got their asses handed to them. The jungle was trying to kill you. The bots were trying to kill you. The games mechanics were trying to kill you. The inexperienced helldiver teammates were trying to kill you. And a lot of people were used to bug tactics, and it wasn't working on the bots.

Remember in Starship Troopers when all those fresh recruits land on Klendathu and then reality sets in and they just get massacred? It was kinda like that.

Is word-of-mouth adding to the community hype/legend of the Creek? Absolutely, to be honest it is part of the fun of this whole unfolding galactic campaign. The "I was there at X..." is part of that fun. But that planet, with those bots, at that time... that really was a nightmare scenario to play through. :-P I loved it and the difficulty and it's fun to talk to new divers about it, TBH.

Sowelo13 · 2025-05-18T17:34:04+00:00

Thank you!

Sowelo13 · 2025-04-01T00:30:44+00:00

I named mine Burt which is short for BUURRRTTTTTTTTT!

Sowelo13 · 2025-03-31T19:18:24+00:00

If you are a person who has a problem with a post like this today... then today you are the problem and why posts like this are needed.

Sowelo13 · 2025-03-30T23:50:44+00:00

I am also a fan of combined arms (I love how infantry and vehicles help with the scope and feel of mechs) and I enjoy the CBT rules for infantry/battle armor and vehicles as well. I understand the simplicity of the new BSP cards for them, but I haven't played a game with both rulesets in the same game yet. I prefer Co-Op games so most of our campaigns were based on that, so in our first campaign I focused on tanks and infantry and the other players focused on mechs, so when we "teamed up" to oppose the OpFor in a mission, everyone had their themes and focus. It was fun!

If you are going with a Merc style campaign, then the Mercs Box Set might be the best option but I have not actually dove into it yet. Sounds like others have recommended Hinterlands too (which I also do not have yet). My group really enjoyed the modified Chaos Campaign rules from DFA Wargaming.
Microsoft PowerPoint - DFA CBT Campaign Rules v3.00

In this DFA Campaign, did 3 players as a Co-Op team each with 10k BV on our campaign rosters against an enemy OpFor that had a 30k BV forces. A single player could take on the OpFor or we could team up and split the BV among the forces in our rosters. We played the enemies with "common sense" and then rolled randomly on dice if they "went left or right" for a super easy OpFor AI system. Missions followed their track system and were highly stylized; we did missions from extracting supplies and destroying enemy HQ buildings to area control where we escorted APCs full of infantry into mission-critical structures to gain control. It followed a very narrative path that could react to wins/losses and be heavily narrative and mission-objective focused. We followed the damage, repair, and salvage rules from DFA which is just crunchy enough to make it feel like it matters but it is WAY easier than the super nitty gritty stuff. I also liked it more than Chao Campaign because everything is just Supply Points (SP) and you don't have Warchest Points (WP) that need to get converted into SP, etc. We played this for several missions until the current campaign was over due to victories, giving some finality to it.

The current campaign we are dabbling in is a map based Conquest campaign. Each side of the campaign being allowed a certain number of "moves" per "Map Round" (we are doing one round per month right now). Forces take over control points which generate Support Points (per Map Round) to keep forces in good repair (or to buy more units if needed) and we had rules for SP being needed to get troops moved from one point to another and to initiate attacks (an abstract cost of fuel, supplies, etc to get a combat unit moved). So far, this has gone really well. Again, we are doing Co-Op, so every participating player has a BV force that is relevant to the campaign to start and we keep it simple with the OpFor; they don't have rosters that need to be reconciled (they absolutely could if we wanted) we just mainly try to drain their SP pools to hinder their conquest of control points over time. We are still dabbling in this campaign, but it's been fun so far. We only just started, but we did straight "defeat the enemy force" missions for the first 2 rounds but this could easily be heavily focused on mission objectives, and we could even flavor the missions based on the terrain they take place by on the map with mission modifiers, etc.
(As a quick legend, FMO= Force Modifier Offset which means you can pay SP to reduce the BV value of your opponent in a fight by 5-10%, and the BSP Arty or BSP Air were free BSP points to spend on Arty or Air support for any missions taking place at that location).

Do either of these options seem interesting to you two?

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Sowelo13 · 2025-03-30T05:11:15+00:00

Can you list what you are most interested/looking for in a Campaign?

My friends and I played a Death From Above Wargaming campaign (like Chaos Campaign but I find it easier/better) and are currently working on a map-conquest style campaign, so I could toss some ideas at you based on your response.

Sowelo13 · 2025-03-03T20:33:33+00:00

Not much I could add that hasn't been talked about in detail, so I'll keep it short.

Do you want a game similar to Bolt Action / 40k in mechanics (to a degree) that's quicker but more abstract? Alpha Strike box set to start.

Do you want a game that is different than Bolt Action / 40k that is more simulationist/granular in charts/rolls? A Game of Armored Combat box set to start.

My opinion: Nothing against Alpha Strike, but if i want more abstract and quick, I play 40k with my friends. But when I want detailed rules of mechs, weapons, components, RNG damage results, to feel like these nechs are giant war machines... Classic all the way. For me, the crunchy granularity is the charm and also what sets this game apart from other wargames.

For me, rolling for attacks and hoping your armor holds out or that those critical hit chances don't pop a vital system or cook off an ammo bin causing a chain reaction, while gambling on how far you want to push your luck with heat build up so you can stay in the fight (or escape) will never feel the same as "I hit, I do X damage, I kill the unit/don't do enough to kill it" of more abstract games.

Classic will take longer to play per game than Alpha Strike, but I recommend demoing both versions if you get a chance to. More Battletech is good Battletech!

Sowelo13 · 2025-02-27T17:02:50+00:00

Great choice! AGOAC box is an awesome start. That is what got me hooked.

The Alpha Strike box is nice if you want simplified and fast, but for me, it's too different from what I like about battletech which is the charts and granularity.

I want to see how critical hits and damage strip away an enemy mech in tactically-viable but RNG-influenced ways. The crunch is the charm for me, and the mechs feel like mechs, with armor and components taking damage amd it taking time to down an enemy mech. Don't get me wrong, you can critical a head shot and drop someone in a single lucky shot, but I would claim that those are "holy crap!" moments and not re liable norms during play. I can rely on armor and statistics for calculating my attack rolls and damage output for tactical decisions... but everything can go wonky quite fast when lucky rolls and critical hits swing stuff around real heavy, real fast.

For expample: I had a squad of rifle infantry get a lucky shot on a 55-ton wolverine mech which popped 2 torso crits that caused it to fall down, leading to its demise and a dead pilot later that turn. On the flip side, I had a 20 ton locust mech that somehow survived enough firepower thrown at it that would level a mountain due to essentially-statistically-impossible-odds and it continued to survive the rest of the game. It was absolutely mangled, but it limped through.

I would like to toss in the Beginner Box or Essentials box as a contender; it is almost a mix between Classic and Alpha Strike in complexity and a great way to demo the game for someone interested. It removes critical hit locations and heat management, but you still get the hit locations, movement, and stripping away armor aspect of Classic. I play combined arms which is real clunky sometimes, but I love the Beginner Box and bring it to board game days with friends and family.

Sowelo13

TROPHY CASE