PDF attached below (you must be logged in to see it). Document updated 5 December (v2).
Planned for late next year, the MechCommander's Handbook is intended to be one part small-scale campaign book (rooted in Chaos Campaign), one part overview of warfare and tactics (i.e. both in-universe and pure gameplay), and one part a guide to the product line and world of force building. It's a standalone book, not meant to replace or require any other book (besides a rulebook). This is all still tentative as it is a work in progress, but that's the plan anyways.
The part I want to discuss with you all is the era overviews. Planned at the moment are five or six chapters of this type:
Early Succession Wars (tentative: a more obscure era playwise, and we'll see if there's enough mech selection available to make this interesting)
Late Succession Wars
Clan Invasion
Jihad
Republic
IlClan
Chapter Goals
I have multiple aims for these chapters.
1) Provide a quick overview of the era in question. The focus is high-level, light on lore, looking primarily at military developments. As you'll see when you check the preview, any dedicated era sourcebook does a far better job. The idea here is simplicity--enough to place the rest of the material in the chapter in some sort of context. This is aimed at new players.
2) Provide a quick guide to the products available for that era. BT's product line is deep, and there's a lot of questions as to what is relevant to when, especially for the many new players we've picked up in the past five years. This will guide readers to the books and PDFs available, for those who want more depth for that era.
3) Provide a guide to mech-based force building for that era. This will give players a way to create Battlemech Formations applicable to the tabletop that are simultaneously faction-, role-, and era-appropriate. The focus is low-level, aiming at gameplay you can finish in a single session: 8 mechs on a side maximum (and even then, that's only if you want to fight an IS vs Clan battle; otherwise the focus is 4-6 mechs per side). The idea is that this is for helping set up pick-up games. As with the era overview, a dedicated faction or era book will tend to do a better job than this. For example, this will let you make a DCMS force, but it won't guide you to making, say, a Sword of Light force. And as the Clan Invasion chapter is a snapshot of the year 3050, it won't do 3057's Operation Bulldog anywhere near as well as a book on that conflict. So things like the Force Manuals will be far better at their specific job than this comparatively broad and high-level approach, but this covers a lot more ground.
Forcebuilding
The forcebuilding is the most complex part of these chapters, so I'll spend a bit more time on it. Forcebuilding is broken into three methods, in order from least to greatest complexity.
1) RATs. Generally works as normal, except I've scaled them like I have my fan RATs by making them ordered from low to high BV. Beyond that there's no rhyme or reason, other than an attempt to create faction distinctiveness whenever possible. The idea is if you're rolling on a random table, you're not after accuracy but speed. The BV beside each mech lets you get the quickest idea of balance, and instead of rolling a flat 3D6 you can roll 2D6 and apply unit quality modifiers if you're vaguely aiming at a dirtbag militia force or something top of the line. If you're looking for granularity beyond that (especially with the Clan RATs, which freely mix first- and second-line mechs), you want one of the next two methods.
2) Standard Formations. These are pre-built lances, Stars, and Level IIs, appropriate to the faction, era, and formation type. What units belong in a Formation is largely determined via roles (Ambusher, Brawler, Juggernaut etc, as seen on the MUL). All Formations of a given era are balanced by BV against all other Formations of that era and type (to within 2%). So, for example, all assault lances in the preview chapter aim for 6,000 BV. While Clan and IS Formations are slightly different in category as well as composition, this has been also scaled against Clan equivalents: all Clan Assault Stars aim for 12,000 BV, so that two IS Assault lances equal out to one Clan Assault Star, two IS Cavalry lances equal out to one Clan Cavalry Star, etc. Many Formation types use the same point totals, so that you can be more free in mixing and matching opponents. For example, all lances of the Heavy Battle, Heavy Fire, and Cavalry types aim for 5,000 BV, and all lances of the Medium Battle, Medium Fire, and Support types aim for 4,000 BV. This means that you don't have to limit yourself to the same Formation types if you're aiming for balanced matches: my Heavy Fire lance can fight your Cavalry lance.
A bonus for most Inner Sphere lists are the faction lances: upgraded lances meant to reflect a faction's preferred style. These also are designed to match up with enemies, in this case with the BVs from taking standard lances but with Gunnery 3. For example, a Gunnery 3 Marik Assault lance is the equivalent in BV to an upgraded (but still G4) Lyran Assault faction lance; again, quick mixing and matching was the goal. The Clans don't have these special Formations, and instead of giving Gunnery 3 BVs, they have values for Gunnery 3/Piloting 4. Those only mix and match amongst other Clan forces, as the BV multiplier for G3/P4 is too different to make it swappable with IS forces.
Formation types are something you may have seen in Campaign Operations, but while those are broadly used here, the Formation building criteria for this book (found in the Introduction) are much simpler than the rather granular requirements of CO. This is to make it easier to use method 3.
3) Availability. Okay, you're tired of the Standard Formations. Or you have certain minis and you want to swap those in for others you don't have. Or you want to make your own Formations from scratch. Or you're just plain curious as to what's common and what's not in a given faction. This section is for you. The most specific and time-consuming, it provides four categories for chassis: Iconic, Common, Uncommon, and Rare. Each chassis generally available to a faction in that era is listed and put into one of those four categories. If you're building your own Formation, you choose from the number of slots for a given rarity level given to each Availability category, written besides each category. For example, if building a lance, and assuming the faction has one Iconic unit for that era (not a given: most faction/weight categories don't have one):
1-2 slots can be Iconic (min 1, max 2)
2-3 can be Common (min 2, max 3)
1-2 can be Uncommon (min 1, max 2)
0-1 can be Rare (min 0, max 1)
Not every Each Iconic pick takes the place of a Common pick (so if I take one Iconic, my Common picks are now 1-2 instead of 2-3). Salvage lets you take any other faction's Iconic or Common units (but as it's a Rare choice, you can only take one, and that means giving up your own faction's Rare).
The Availability method requires the MUL to use properly, as while it gives the mech chassis, it doesn't give the specific variants/configurations, and doesn't list the roles for all those chassis, which you need to use to keep a given Formation type legal (no slow Juggernauts in the Pursuit lances, sorry). This method also works a little different from the MUL, in that the aim is more of a faction feel than what the MUL provides. The Availabilities are thus more restrictive, in the interest of flavour. The Introduction explains all of this at length, so the only thing I want to add is that this isn't a rival/alternate MUL: it's doing a different thing. The MUL remains the one true determinant of canon for BT unit access. So when you see, say, the Lyran Availability section single out the Centurion -AL as a faction unit, that's just a suggestion that if you're going to take any of the available Centurions at that time, you should focus on the -AL if you're particularly interested in being fluffy; it's not trying to override the MUL which says everyone has the -AL (since "focus on" and "available in general" are different metrics).
Of course, you don't have to use this method strictly as intended. You can just take a quick look at the rarity listings it provides, go "hey, the Dracs apparently like Jenners", and start partitioning your pile of minis if you feel like it. It can be as simple as an off-the-cuff guide.
What's It All Mean?
The most important part here is that this book does not in any way signify a change on the part of CGL towards how the game is "supposed" to be played. As anyone who has been part of BT for any meaningful amount of time knows, this is a game filled with choices: choices of scale, choices of rulesets, choices of rules within rulesets, choices of unit types, choices of era. The MCH simply gives you a few more. In particular, people have been asking for this sort of list-building advice for a good 20 years (if not more). So here it is. But in the same way that the release of Interstellar Operations did not signify a shift on the part of BT to an all-mass combat game, the MCH's listbuilding element is meant simply to give BT fans one more tool in the chest. Even after the release of this book, you can continue to ignore all faction, era, and role requirements and just thrown down whatever you want at the table. But if you did wish for guidance on how to play the game in a more lore-accurate way, or simply wished that there was a readily available source of pre-made fluffy, BV-balanced table-scale formations available, now you'll have that. The tl;dr is that this gives list-based support, but does not mandate list-based play.
The Introduction chapter, not included in the preview, spends most of its time explaining the core concepts, so the preview will be somewhat unclear in a lot of the finer details. Feel free to ask questions if something is vague, but otherwise if I didn't cover it here it's probably outside the scope of what I want to talk about and so I may just say "you'll have to wait and see". Feedback, errors spotted, ease of use suggestions, ways to make it better (within scope/practicality): it's all welcome. Previews like this are as close of a beta as the book is liable to get.
Feel free to spread the preview around, but this is the only place I'm collecting feedback on it.
Final content may differ strongly from what you see here.
