First Impressions: BattleTech

 Daddy Warbots

BattleTech is one of those ancient grandpas of old-school wargaming which always gave me pause. Its nascent first edition ("Battle Droids") was published half a decade before I was alive. There is such a tremendous amount of history in the development of the game, not to speak of over three decades of continuously updated lore-- I felt I needed some degree in archaeology to even start figuring out what the game is, what it was about, and why it had such enduring appeal.

I'm not sure what caused me to turn a corner and hurl myself face-first into the game, but I think it was a combination of a) a friend's Golden Retriever-esque enthusiasm, b) the relatively low cost-of-entry on Catalyst Game Lab's A Game of Armored Combat boxed set, and c) a global fucking pandemic.

So what's going on with BattleTech anyway? I'm gonna skip the behind-the-scenes frippery (how the IP rights get tossed around like a football, lawsuits over the creative designs of some 'Mechs, etc.) mostly because that stuff deserves its own post. Also because I don't want to. I'm my own boss here, no matter how much I'll degrade myself for even the hint of social media approval.

What you need to know, from the get-go, is that BattleTech long ago ceased to be just one thing. It started off as a fairly traditional hex-and-chit style wargame; it has since evolved into a hex-and-minis wargame, a traditional tabletop wargame, a pair of RPGs, a series of video games (tactical mech fighting, turn-based strategy, PvP arena shooter), and more. So choose your poison, I guess. This blog article (blarticle) will be about the hex-and-minis wargame.

A Universe of Possibilities So Long As Those Possibilities Involve Giant Robots

The setting of BattleTech fascinates me and not because it is well written. It isn't not well written, at least not all the time. I mean they've got Michael J. Stackpole writing their novels and he's one of my favorite Star Wars Expanded Universe authors.

Rather, the setting fascinates me because it's deeply invested in a kind of material culture; what exists in this universe is well-defined. Often excruciatingly well defined. The in-setting technology is scrupulously tracked and updated with efforts to keep it coherent within the parameters of itself. They didn't have to do this, by any way of looking at it-- the premise is space-feudalism with multi-story walking artillery. You don't have to pretend that makes sense. But BattleTech has such a sincerity and straight-faced enthusiasm for its subject that I found myself suckered in.

You can break the setting down into four major eras.

1. The Succession Wars - The galactic hegemony of the Inner Sphere falls apart, and a bunch of successor states slapfight each other to see who will be top-dog. They do this like four times in a row. No one really wins.

2. Clan Invasion - Some folks who left the galaxy when that hegemony fell apart, return. They've since gotten really into some Klingon-esque "blood and honor" bullshit and, consequently, want to beat the bejesus out of the entire Inner Sphere. They do a pretty good job.

3. "Jihad"/The Dark Age - The galactic AT&T, which is a religion, is unhappy with the outcome of the Clan Invasion and expresses that dissatisfaction with lasers, nukes, and 'Mechs. Most everyone beats the bejsus out of them and gets a galactic service outage for their trouble. Make note of the weird use of the word 'jihad' here, I'll come back to that.

4. Il-Khan - This is the current era and in many ways resembles Clan Invasion 2.0; it's also incompletely written. Catalyst Game Labs' recent Kickstarter has, as far as I can tell, promised to flesh this part of the setting out.

On the whole the setting plays out like some version of Dune as written by a Cold War fetishist in their bunker. It has the feeling of a tipsy uncle at a holiday party who is excited to tell you about a history book he just read and feels extremely qualified to regurgitate; as the use of the word 'jihad' up there might indicate, maybe Uncle Victor could use a more nuanced view of things though.

That's one of the main things which I felt hold the setting back, for me. As fiction written thirty-five years ago, there's some shit in there which just hasn't aged well-- "jihad" is a word with very specific cultural connotations. Its further a word whose specific cultural connotations have been broadly and repeatedly misunderstood, often with an Islamaphobic lens.

It's not the only place where BattleTech has plucked out cultural items as though they were mere aesthetic cargo, either-- the Draconis Combine falls squarely on the 'excited white guy with a flea-market katana who once read part of the Hagakure' side of the How Badly You're Gonna Fuck Up Japanese History & Culture spectrum.

The setting is replete with cultures and nation-states which evoke recognizable ones-- and those are the weakest parts, to me. At best, they feel like homage to cultures these writers clearly have affection for. At worst, they feel like they were written with one-hand and a national anthem droning in the background. Especially for a setting which seems deeply invested in a kind of nu-feudalism (MechWarriors as an ennobled warrior-caste through most of these cultures), the nationalistic elements are weird to me.

In conclusion-- the writers of this setting took themselves very seriously, but you don't have to.

Battle of the Bell Curves

Now let's finally turn towards the game. I had the opportunity to play with my brother, my father, and my cousin's boyfriend, and we tried out a scenario from the Game Of Armored Combat boxed set I linked above. The boxed set seems like a really good introduction to the game-- a 56-page rule booklet, some handouts, record sheets, minis, and hex-maps.

The miniatures paint up nicely

The gameplay has not changed overmuch through the decades-- errata here, streamlined there. Tweaks and edits, not major edition changes. The underlying paradigm is largely untouched from the early 80's.

These 'Mechs are walking battleships. Massive, ponderous war-machines stuffed with more ordinance than common sense. Your job is mostly to manage their heat; while trudging around accrues nominal heat, discharging your bevy of lasers and boombangs will see your 'Mech end up hotter than a young hot Christopher Walken.

Remember when I said not all wargames are about war? This one isn't. This one is about management. You manage your speed, balancing how your movement fucks with enemy targeting even as it disrupts your own. You manage your ammo, hoping to deplete a couple missile-bins before a critical hit causes them to explode inside you like an undercooked gas-station burrito. You manage your facing, to present whichever side of your 'Mech has the most armor (or the most weaponry).

Record sheets will be the bane and boon of your existence. They're tremendously useful once you learn how to read them. Until then, they're emblematic of a game design ethos which only considers streamlining in the sense of fictional aerospace craft rather than player-facing complexity.

This is your god now.

Now, I'll say we had fun. The scenario we played had each of us controlling a single 'Mech; I was tasked to lumber my 85-ton assault-class roboboi past a picket of three lighter ones. The asymmetry was interesting-- I outclassed each individually, but the demand that I keep moving and the fact that I was outnumbered/outmaneuvered kept my attention firmly split.

The whole thing took a little over 2 hours, and while it was the first time playing for all involved, we had a) read the rulebook, and b) are not exactly novices in these kinds of games. Managing a single 'Mech wasn't so straightforward that I was hankering to manage four or five (the more usual size of a game of BattleTech). I'm fairly certain that's going to be A Big Ask if I want to get these same players to have another go. It's likely I'll give Alpha Strike a try, as it promises a bit more abstraction than BattleTech is interested in.

That said-- I like the crunch. When I said that this is a game invested in the material culture, the lack of abstraction is what I mean. It may be process-heavy, but this is a game which will tell you what happens when your 'Mech's leg actuator gets destroyed. It has rules for your ammo cooking off, for what happens when your pilot gets concussed. It asks a lot of you, but it gives back as much as it can. Its output is tremendously tangible, tremendously grounded in terms that you can easily understand (even if the mechanical input process is not particularly elegant). The devil is in the details, and this devil makes some of the details downright sexy.

My 'Mech won the scenario, but only just. Its right leg and arm had been devastated as my opponents harried me like a wolfpack trying to hobble my movement. I'd wasted precious time earlier by dumping all my weaponry into a single opponent-- freeing up a lane of escape but nearly shutting down from the massive heat-dump. In refusing to abstract wherever possible, the game kept me busy and invested. It was a lot of fun.

Neat game. Check it out.