Any good rules for operational level play?

[saab14]

Are there any good rules--official or fan-made--for campaign play? Like, instead of just throwing mechs down on the board, something to let players choose their strategy to defeat the enemy force, determine objectives and how to sequence/prioritise them, which elements to send where, how to manage finite resources?

The campaigns I've seen so far railroad players too much for my taste. The Third Succession War Chaos Campaign is better, especially Death From Above Wargaming's adaptation, but they're still pretty limited. Hoping to find something with more flavour, something like a campaign-level play ruleset that ties into the tactical-level engagements.

I'd be happy to be the GM to make something like this work for my players.

[MyndkryM]

You can check out Campaign Operations https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/products/battletech-campaign-operations-pdf


I'd also check out Sartris's post "You bought the box set and are ready to expand your BT experience. Now what?", as it does a good breakdown of what is what.

https://bg.battletech.com/forums/general-discussion/you-bought-the-box-set-and-are-ready-to-expand-your-bt-experience-now-what/

[Frabby]

Back inthe 1990s, German FanPro house magazine Wunderwelten came up with a BattleTech campaign ruleset that basically scales things up to planetary level, and zoomed in to tactical play level whenever an encounter occurred. You move entire units across a strategic map where each hex is hundreds of kilometers across and each "turn" is hours or even days.
It's the system our group played back in the day. It looks great on paper but turned out to be a significant bookkeeping workload for the GM.


(To give two sample scenarios, Drachentrick was very good; Inselhüpfen is more wargaming and less RPG and may be easier to actually play, but we never played it.)

[Failure16]

An often overlooked, but very solid system was the one presented in the original Mercenary's Handbook. It is still available officially via PDF for 5-10 USD. Well worth the price, if you do not have it already.

Attached below are two, very old, personal systems that I have used with some success.

The first is really the Operational Game from the Tactical Handbook, cleaned up and made to work with a modified system that used BF2 stats for individual units (not unlike AlphaStrike today). While the TacHandbook took a lot of heat in its day, the Operational Game was and remains solid. It has been so long since I've looked at it, though, I will assume much of the text is taken from the source material so I cannot but assume the credit should ultimately go to the original authors.

The second file was a bit more successful. The first half deals with how to play the aforementioned TurboTech. Ignore that and skip to the campaign section and you may find something useful.

Then there is an Excel file with some spreadsheets designed to help the systems previously described. Along with a sample that would be handed to a player so they can build a force. There would have been another one (the companion to the file here would have been for a Kuritan force).

Take your time and skim them. They have been pretty heavily play-tested and work well, though as a GM there is an initial amount of work that needs to be done before the campaign can pretty much run itself.

[Weirdguy]

There is an older book called the Tactical Handbook that had some rules for a campaign to invade a planet from start to finish.   

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/63975

Even if you don’t use the rules, there is a flow chart of scenarios that is useful all by itself. 

[Descronan]

This is a fan made campaign guide for Alpha Strike. You might need to join the group.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/BattletechInternationalAlphaStrike/permalink/1600507497015037