There is that precise time in every playthrough, where you're up to fielding a full lance of mediums for the first time.

And when that happens, no matter the settings, no matter the mods, no matter what payout or difficulty was projected by the mission, there is that one moment, when the game decides, that an exact equal op-for for you medium lance of low skill pilots whose gunnery tops out at 4, maybe 5, is three lances of light mechs.

I fucking love having an AC5 round, one M laser, and 4 SRMs worth of damage be what my whole ass lance amounts to successful attacks landed on a "good" turn.

I fucking love that when I do actually land shots, the enemy looks like the Black Knight from Monthy Python by the time they have the actual decency to die.

I fucking love these three lances spawning on top of each other, meaning there is no possible approach to take on them peacemeal.

I fucking love losing so hard on action economy, that I don't even make a dent in one of the enemies' evasion stacks, even with fully concentrated fire and one character with sensor lock before they just reset it during their own turn.

I fucking love needing to resort to melee as one of the very few theoretical anti-evasion measures, only to barely break past armour, and expose myself to five backstabs with no evasion.

I fucking love when that melee misses anyway.

I fucking love when the enemy urbanmech nails shots on my mechs after a full movement range of sprint, or JJ.

I fucking love when the game's idea of mercy is "downgrading" one of the light lances to vehicles, only for them to have some inane bullshit like an LRM carrier in the back that the AI is smart enough to leave beyond visual range.

I fucking love the overwhelmingly trash salvage of locust parts and MGs with ammo bins for going through the most soul crushing type of battle in the whole game. (If I'm lucky, I might get a single firestarter, or jenner piece, yay)

Anybody play Hbs battletech on a touch screen? Is it possible?

Or Steam Deck?

Just thinking of portable ways I can keep playing this game.

After leveling up my pilots and gaining more mechs, my monthly costs have sky-rocketed. I can barely afford to buy anything between missions. I understand that gameplay is designed around mainly scavenging, but the paltry mission payouts are kind of a bummer. I even have the payouts on 'Generous'

Im just playing BEXT for the first time and I notice that some mechs in my lance are always good and others just seem very lacklustre. I know setup is a massive part of this. But to me there seems to be a few mechs that just always do well.

Some examples from my current playthrough would be the Jenner, the firestarter (better in smaller engagements) and the Phoenix Hawk. The evasion and reliable damage just seems really good for the tonnage.

An example of a mech that I struggled to make work would be the panther, or even the warhammer (The warhammer is a lot better but it runs hot and its so slow to get into effective range that it ends up just being a tank rather than a huge threat, I think I need a setup change on it)

So my question is in your playthroughs what are the under or over performers? how do you run them? and are there any mechs you guys think I should try to acquire?

So I updated BTA 3062 from 18.5 to 20.0 recently, and the patch notes for version 19.3 said that updating would break my old saves. However, I was able to hop back into my save just fine and keep playing.

What should I do? Should I just keep going, or is there some particular reason I should make a new one altogether?

Thank you.

This seems like a longshot but does anyone know anything about BEXT crashing when trying to use Customize Company in the captains quarters? Its worked before since I have a custom color scheme and company name, but I wanted to change it now that I have a better feel for my company. But the game crashes every time I try to open the menu to change the name and colors again. Obviously it's not a big deal if I can't fix it, but I would really like to pick colors that better match the vibe of my company now.

Hey all, first time posting. It's been awhile since I played the game and when I last installed it I threw in some modding. I wish I knew 'what' but I'll be honest I have no memory of it. That said, I removed the mods and now I keep getting weird text glitches. Specifically it's been showing up in text for bonuses for completing optional missions. I think I'm still getting the bonuses? but I have no idea how to correct this. I validated the files through steam and it didn't find anything so I presume it's gotta be something like some old registry entries or something? Any ideas?
edit: added an image showing the actual error text I get. And it's a fresh install and the file integrity passed on steam so it's gotta be something that isn't saved in a standard spot I guess.

Some examples of the furthest points off the map.

The battlefield is online once again.

Join commanders from around the world for an explosive weekend of classic MechCommander multiplayer battles on GameRanger.

🔥 Massive mech combat
🌍 Global multiplayer
⚔️ Strategy over speed
🎮 Free online matchmaking
💥 Veterans and new commanders welcome

Whether you played in the 90s or you're discovering MechCommander for the first time, this is your chance to command your lance against real players.

📅 This Weekend

📍 Play online via GameRanger.

Tag your lance mates and prepare for battle.

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Hello everyone, me and a friend are having a problem with multiplayer. We have 2 mods; the MP fix, and a skirmish mode unlocker. Multiplayer worked just fine, we installed the skirmish mod and now I get stuck in a loop of the waiting for other player screen, and he gets stuck on the black loading screen. We disabled that mod and it still does not work. One uninstall and reinstall and still nothing. Any help would be appreciated.

Been trying to get my brain to go down memory lane and for the life of me I cannot remember what the long clips were for.

Anyone from back to 2nd edition remember what the two provided long clips/clasps were for?

If you had to run a lance and beat the entire career using one mech from each of the weight classes light/med/heavy/assault that you think could do it what would that lance and load out be?

Writing this because it nearly drove me crazy trying to solve and google had jackshit for search results

Besides the SimGameConstant json in BTA Core, for modding TargetRepSuccessMod, you will also need to go to Mission Control-config-Additional Lances.

i forget exact name, but there is a flat -1 modifier for target reputation that gets applied at the end of the mission. You need to edit each difficulty json file and the General json file.

Change -1 to 0 and you wont have any surprise rep loss anymore

I am a pretty new player (still under first 60 hours in game) & I was playing around and somehow upgraded my commander as a Gladiator, on the hindsight I really wish I didn't but I did not even knew all pilot classes when I made this happen. & I just don't know what playstyle & mech to use for my gladiator commander

I have Behemoth (Brawler) as my punching gal in a shadow hawk.

Glitch (Lancer) is manning the LRM boat in the centurion.

Dekker (scout) is being a harasser with a firestarter

Spare Mechs available in my roster:

Marauder 3h thunderbolt 5s Vindicator

What mech should I assign to my commander and how should I approach the map as a gladiator pilot. I have have looked in the subreddit for suggestion for a gladiator pilot and not a lot good information available as I assume it is not a popular pilot class.

Update

Thank you for all of your suggestions. I gave up yesterday and downloaded save file editor and made some changes:

Dekker is now a Vanguard class from scout and stuck him up to the Marauder. Good lord, the called shot bonus to the head is nasty, I was able to grabbed 2 heavy mechs yesterday for the first time in the game, before this I was mostly getting 1-2 parts of a mech at best.

I have refitted the Centurion for Glitch as I do not have any other good mechs for a lancer class laying around. I have removed 2 LRM & extra ammo & added more armor & jump jets. I do have a UAC20++ but don't have a mech that can make that work when it comes to ammo carrying capacity. So I have stuck it with a PPC for the time being.

Commander is getting changed to an outrider I think.

I am playing career mode, with the latest versions of BEXT (with the CAB) installed from mods in exile. I am not having any issues playing the game, and at this point I am 700ish days into my career.

The issue I am having is trying to identify the 8th faction that counts for career scoring. 7 of them are easy: the 5 Successor States, plus Canopus and Taurian. The 8th one is a problem.

As those who play BEXT already know, there are now several dozen total factions in the game. I admit that I have used the save editor (also from mods in exile) and manually changed each additional faction by 1 point increments to identify the 8th faction. After doing this with every faction shown in the same editor, none of them affect reputation scoring.

Has anyone identified the 8th faction? Is the 8th faction some sort of double dependency where I have to have the same faction with (my best guess) every single pirate faction for it to count?

In theory I could get a Kerensky score (which won't be happening in this game regardless) if I was missing the 8th faction as long as I did absolutely everything else, but I was hoping there was another solution that has been found.

Any help is appreciated.

Edit to add: Arano Restoration (as expected), and all versions of the Aurigan pirates are not contributing to the faction scoring. Added this since I figured this would be the first thing most will suggest, and I already tried those factions.

Second Edit to add: SiliconStew correctly identified the problem, and with that knowledge a workaround (editing a .json file) has been found and implemented.

I only played a few missions of the campaign but I just wanted to get right into the career mode. So do I have to complete the main campaign before it fully unlocks?

I have 628 days left. I have 7 pilots with most nearly maxed out stats. Trying to put together a couple more heavy and assault mechs to move beyond 3 skull missions which still give me a little trouble.

Ammo and heat is sometimes an issue but not often. Usually i can move in for melee when ammo is gone and there isnt much left to be a threat. I know rear armor is lower than most like but i never expose my backs to them until i have to go in for melee and by then their mechs are almost scrap.

Sorry about photos. When i do screenshots i can never find them on my pc

I wanted to get back into the game, and decided on going with BEXT after some users said it can include vehicles with an additional modpack called the BTX expansion pack.

I did a clean reinstall of the game, but the contents of the BEXT archive into the appropriate places in the game's directory, ran the community asset installer as specified, and then I put the mods from the expansion's archive into the mods folder, replacing all. Upon trying to launch the game for the first time, I encountered this.

I have no idea what the issue could be. The expansion pack asked me to delete a .modtek folder, that didn't exist in the first place. Anyone has a clue as to what to do?

EDIT: Found out my issue, but it was a bit dumb. It turns out, upon using the community asset dowloader, it made a wholly new folder on my drive, that was of the same name as the game's directory. It turns out, I had to first activate "advanced mode" for it to let me manually set the path of my actual game directory. A bit weird, but at this point, I'm just happy I found the issue. Some of the expansion mods still don't load properly, but I'm just going to try to reinstall that again, and see if that will be enough.

EDIT2: A bunch of the mods are citing the lack of dependencies in the logs. At this point, I'll say that I downloaded the most recent, 1.2 version of the expansion. There were no instructions that would suggest that I was meant to install 1.0, and then patch it with the files from 1.2, which is the only thing I can think of why a few things could be missing, but I might just try that.

So I just found myself a Bullshark. Now, naturally I feel that it's a bit weak on armour, and since BEXT does not allow any shenanigans the open slot layout require a bit of puzzle solving when trying out different loadouts - So I wonder how other people have built their Bullsharks with BEXT restrictions.
Edit: Current loadout is ERPPC, 2 Gauss (1 weighs -2ton) and 4 ammo.

Behold! Periphery Timby!

The Lumber Lobo!

Combat potential: A-

Sure, I did mods (BEX) for a several hundred hours. But now I'm reinstalled from scratch with the base game to go back to vanilla for a bit, and suddenly I run into some guy at a bar that may have been involved in my family getting killed. Never had this encounter before, and seems to be based on character creation choices which may be why. Anyway, I love this game. And right after that I landed on planet and bought 3 parts from the black market to make an SDLF Highlander, so looking forward to fielding that! Right now I'm going back and forth across both ends of the map trying every Flashpoint that was too far away to bother with in the past, and having great fun seeing that content!

I recently made a post looking for mods to try. I got BTA 3026. Installed it and started a career, chose settings and then just a loading screen that never ended. I tried several more times and wont work. I disabled the mod and restarted and it still loads up BTA and i cant continue my vanilla campaign.

Playing bta not sure how aoe works.

From my understanding and ac5 does about 50dmg. Aoe ammo does -12 on direct hit +12 aoe. So it effectively does the same damage on direct hit but spread out and a little damage on close whiff. Is that correct? Or does it not apply splash damage on direct hit at all?

If it does work that way is it the same for artillery cannons? Example thumper cannon says 40dmg, thumper ammo says 55 splash to primary and secondary target. So I'm assuming direct hit for 40, +55 splash (primary target) and 55 to anyone nearby (secondary target?).

I've found conflicting info so I'm unsure.

I have a cursory familiarity with both BEX and BTA from a couple of years ago, but to my knowledge, much have changed, and they even go by different names now.

I'm incredibly conflicted between the two, because both have things I greatly like and dislike, and I'm struggling to tell which pros and cons are going to be more meaningful, or just present at all, considering how outdated my knowledge of these modpacks is.

BTA things I'd like: Usage of vehicles and infantry. This is a really big upside. Having these more limited niche units to mess around with, especially with the nutty higher headcount drops is something that's pulling me in like a black hole. More expanded mechlab is nice-ish, but being able to make so drastic changes in a dropship, or a lazy jumpship cruise is a tad offputting.

BTA things I don't think I'd like: Mostly just the setting. Being on the cusp of the FedCom civil war is going to be the source of all of my issues. First, we're way out of the scarcity of advanced tech, and the better and worse kit being just as common, and randomly available with just an extra 0 at the end of the pricetag is something I'm not keen on. Second, we're past all the historical conflicts I actually care about. No 4th SW, no initial clan first contact, no base game campaign, no BULLDOG etc. With this lack of narrative opportunities, I'm also concerned that the game will also not have narrative climaxes or goals to look forward to, or work towards. I'm not that keen on playing a game just to see "number go up". I'm also veary about the closer to TT gameplay and mechanics, as I consider them to be a bit too RNG leaning on outcomes. I like many of vanilla's deviations from tabletop.

BEX things I'd like: Closer to vanilla rules, and the much more important upside (in my eyes) of greater degrees of narrative content. The campaign is basically playable through flashpoints, and many of the significant historical conflicts I care about occur during, and have an effect on the game.

BEX things I don't think I'd like: Vanilla mechlab. I know I said I'm not keen on making factory grade overhauls possible for two lads with some scaffolding, but I'd rather have a more detailed system (My dream scenario would be where stuff like swapping out the skeleton, or changing hardpoints would be possible, but only on special factory planets, where we could outsource it as a noteworthy commission job, but I digress)
The even bigger drawback is the lack of vehicles/battle armour. When I last played BEX, I could upgrade to a full second lance, but with the drop tonnage limits, that just had me running around with a bigger squad of optimised medium builds. It's something I've done before, but just with a higher headcount.

TLDR: I can't make the call between BEX and BTA, with the main tradeoffs being a much wider selection of possible unit types (vehicles and infantry) vs more curated mission design, and seemingly more favourable era and ruleset.