'Mech-only or combined arms?

[pokefan548]

If you thought disposable weapons were bad, you should check out what they've been giving us in Shrapnel.... 

Oh, I know. It's ridiculous.
But, disposables at least have official BVs.

[Daryk]

Ugh... I suppose I'll have to learn BV to make my threads on those weapons more useful... 

[pokefan548]

Ugh... I suppose I'll have to learn BV to make my threads on those weapons more useful... 

To my knowledge, no official formula or guidelines for weapon BV have ever been made publicly available, sadly. I think there have been some attempts to reverse-engineer some of that?

[Daryk]

Hmmm... well, thanks for the heads up at least! 

[Colt Ward]

Combined arms, minus conventional infantry and aerospace.

Minus conventional infantry because I play pickup games and neither me, nor my mate I mostly play against, have found them particularly useful. Even with buildings on the table to make them more survivable they don't seem to bring much to the party that BA doesn't. We're planning on trying ways to bring them in though, by building them with APCs and other support so they aren't just such a tacked-on part of the force.

Bolded for emphasis . . .

Try field guns.  Field Artillery . . . capturing buildings- particularly bunkers with just a above ground entrance as part of a scenario, basically use the boarding rules from . . . Combat Ops was first, not sure where it is now.

[Daryk]

They were in StratOps at one point, but the recent division of that book leaves me wondering too.

[pokefan548]

For buildings, it's pretty much regular combat... but in a building. For landed DropShips and a few other unit types, it's in TacOps. StratOps has an addendum for capital-scale large craft.

[Colt Ward]

For buildings, it's pretty much regular combat... but in a building. For landed DropShips and a few other unit types, it's in TacOps. StratOps has an addendum for capital-scale large craft.

You can, but you also run into stacking rules.  But having practiced clearing hardened buildings, you can get a lot more folks in there than the stacking rules- and the spaces get a lot smaller.  Which is why for objectives like . . . 'get your troops to the bunker entrance, clear it, and hold it until your intel troops can arrive' . . . especially when it is a point that IF I was doing a RPG session would expand into a whole interior map of the facility . . . maybe down a elevator shaft.  IE, the lay out is going to be a lot like the interior of a warship or dropship than a open warehouse- which is what the regular combat supposes.

[SteelRaven]

I'm not saying that this is bad advice, but it does reduce the infantry to barely more than MacGuffin cargo.

It's how me and my friends play it as we play BT for the mechs. It doesn't help every discussion on the forum regarding the logic around how infantry is implemented in TW has not help see it as ether fun or practical for our PU game other than the current RP session using a completely different rule set.   

[CVB]

To my knowledge, no official formula or guidelines for weapon BV have ever been made publicly available, sadly. I think there have been some attempts to reverse-engineer some of that?

Rick Raisley presents an online Weapon BV Calculator tool on his web page. It's not official, but maybe it helps to reverse engineer infantry weapon BVs, too.

[pokefan548]

Interesting, did not know HeavyMetal included a weapon generator with BV calcs!
That being said, not sure if it'd be in line. IIRC, last year a lot of infantry weapons got tweaked, and there was also the 2019 BV update (though that mostly was mostly just unit- and force-scale calcs).
I'll have to run some numbers later and see if everything still matches up. If so, I may need to dig up Heavy Metal and see if I can make a writeup to do the calcs by hand...

EDIT: Looks like it's from 2004, so it's definitely out of date.

[Daryk]

Thanks!  I'll take a look after work tonight. 

[Daryk]

He uses a drop down for the damage value, so you really can't do infantry weapons unfortunately... 

[pokefan548]

He uses a drop down for the damage value, so you really can't do infantry weapons unfortunately... 

If someone has the decompiled HMP code somewhere, we could look through that to find the formula.
Alternatively, might be able to do some funky stuff by editing the page source.

[Daryk]

That would be a time investment rather beyond my resources at the moment... 

[CVB]

Sorry, I had simply stumbled over and remembered it and thought it might be possible to reverse engineer the approximate BV formula by playing with different values. Never used it because I don't use BV.

[Suboptimal]

Alternatively, might be able to do some funky stuff by editing the page source.

Inspect element and editing the contents of the <option> tags seems to work fine as long as you change something the normal way to force a recalculation afterwards.

[nova_dew]

If all the stars and all the pirate jump points aligned, i'd play combined arms, i'd also play a huge map, like 100x150-ish map sheets and double blind and Aero on table and a lot of the optional rules because i like complicated as much as i hate it 

[Colt Ward]

Let MegaMek do all the work . . . table top for me, is for pure fun . . . I use MM to simulate/wargame using the advanced rules and campaign set ups.

[Daryk]

Sorry, I had simply stumbled over and remembered it and thought it might be possible to reverse engineer the approximate BV formula by playing with different values. Never used it because I don't use BV.

No worries!  I don't use that system unless I have to.

[Empyrus]

Gotta comment on the BV calculator that it seems to be extremely accurate for most part. It doesn't account for certain additional adjustments, whether due to special effects like plasma weapons, or otherwise such as VPSL that appear to get BV discount.

[Dayton3]

In my opinion whether to play "mechs only" or "combined arms" is a matter of practicality.

If you want to play "mechs only" and the company is your preferred force size you can basically campaign with just 11 other players.    But if you want a company sized force playing combined arms you basically need another 12 players on your side to handle the aerospace fighters,  armor, and infantry.

Just my opinion.

[Weirdo]

Why? A company that includes tanks or infantry is still just a company. Adding a second company of conventional assets on top of a mech company would be a completely different thing.

[Colt Ward]

A player can control more than a single piece at a time?

[Charistoph]

A player can control more than a single piece at a time?

A player CAN'T control more than a single piece at a time?

[pokefan548]

It is as Weirdo says.

Also, a few notes. For one, this doesn't apply to the limitations of a campaign setting. This is- in a perfect world- exactly the way you would like to play. Secondly, there's no rule that, in a campaign setting, each player must play only one character. Granted, especially if you want to get really in-depth nitty-gritty with it, it does help keep everyone in-character and reduce the odds and ease of metagaming, but if you're running a vehicular-scale, say company-level campaign with RPG character creation and advancement, plus RPG-exclusive stats and rules to enhance such a campaign, there's nothing to stop you from saying that each player may create and control 2-4 MechWarriors. In fact, in these sorts of campaigns, I tend to find that dual-character play helps keep players engaged even after losing a character to an unfortunate death (especially if they die at the beginning of a session). So yeah, no, you shouldn't need 12 players for a 'Mech company or 84 players for an infantry company.

[Daryk]

I've considered a lance of vehicles and two platoons of carried foot infantry to be a company for a while now... 

[Colt Ward]

It is as Weirdo says.

*snip*

Or just . . . NPCs can be on your side too?  Hey, I am a lance commander . . . having my subordinates be NPCs sort of works.

[Daryk]

All units MUST have NPCs in them.  A full tech team is SEVEN (one Tech and six AsTechs).  And SOMEBODY has to walk the perimeter at night... 

[Wrangler]

The small problem with combined arms is time taken to move the units and deal with the extra headaches that come with them.  MegaMek solves some of the problems. I wanted to see the newer system such as the abstract combat system using aka the alpha strike rules but with the cards per Lance versus individual units. I think that having them wrapped up like that would be better than doing it tabletop record cheap style.

If I were to do use it for sale of time, I'd do Capellan style reinforced Lance. Those are basically demicompany of six units with either 4 mechs and two supporting units like pair combat vehicles. There a reverse version of combat vehicles/ battle armor and two mechs