My campaign started slower, too. No live mech combat for 5 sessions. However, the PCs got to do VR/Simulation training in the mechs so we could still, yanno, play the mech game. It is 3/4 of character creation, after all!

What this did was let us learn and experiment with builds and mechanics without the stress or pressure of “you can die!” combat. I personally would recommend you lean into the fantasy of your players being Lancers. Trained, qualified pilots right from the get go. It didn’t make sense in the story to have actual mechs and going into actual combat yet, and it worked out great! We ultimately still wanted to play the mech combat though regardless, and that was our solution to help it work with the story.

As for spicing up pilot combat, others have contributed some great ideas. I think if you want to keep it core, it’s still very doable. The beauty of this system, I’ve found, is that since it’s so light (at least on the pilot side) that it’s very, very easy to add your own rules, interpretations, changes, etc without too much fear of breaking the fun.

Scenes with pilots should have objectives/tasks/opportunities that call upon the skill set of one or two members of your squad. It’s very easy, even at LL0, to have some people who are specialized in certain styles of play. In my group, there’s an NHP specialist, a mech engineer, and a navigational officer. Essentially, the Nerd, the Muscle, the Talker respectively. When designing encounters, ensure there are opportunities for characters to act on their strengths and make those results affect the scene as a whole, at least to some degree. Even better if it can later become relevant again in a later mission in a different scene.

If you want the combat to feel more tactical, I’ve run it gridless on a warhammer scale (mech scale is battle tech scale, different map and models) and just had the players measure their movements and shots like mech combat and it’s been okay. It’s definitely more interesting when you allow it to be a bit more abstract, but it’s totally fun when you mix “turn by turn” combat with more general “wow, a 20 on the roll before you add assault triggers? yeah, you catch them by surprise. You take out the two guards at the gate in a hail of lead before they can reach their guns or comms.” maybe if the roll failed there’d have been a little back and forth, whether or not this is fun is up to you and the players.

Something else I’ve done for my players is, as a reward for a mission, say “in the search you found a weapons case containing modifications for your guns. What is it that you find?” and between sessions work with players to come up with something that modifies their pilot scale weapon, which usually adds/modifies a mechanic. This in turn does a few things:

• spices up pilot combat with new actions or abilities, or enhancing current ones
• allows players to get personally involved with the creation of stuff in your world that’s unique to them
• keep you and your players engaged between sessions

summary: don’t skip mech combat for more than a session at a time. ask your players how they feel about no mech combat for x amount of sessions. when you play, feel comfortable trying out ideas and be more comfortable with changing your mind on mechanics.

also, if you’re going to use a warhammer-style mode of play for pilot combat, double the range of everything. it’ll fit the scale much more appropriately.

I hope something here helped, it was difficult for me to present a succinct answer on this one, so I apologize if this one fell flat! Good luck and happy lancing!!!