I like bugs. Bugs being 1 mechs out of every 5 makes sense to me. they are the light cavalry ridden by minor sons of the nobility, the raiders with elan, the ones that mess with your supplies and burn your villages, not the frontline heavy cavalry of the French that comes thundering at you in pitched battle.
Excellent comparaison of Light 'Mechs toi cavalry elements.
My GM was a longtime wargamer who applied real war elements to campaigns, where scouting was crucial to the success of any battle. Most BT players consider scouting missions as boring, due to the use of swift Light Mechs. They don't realize how crucial to intel scouting missions are in a campaign. Inversely, most BT players have no concept of cavalry screens -units whose primary mission is to prevent enemy scouting elements from getting close enough to their main body to gather crucial intel. These screening elements are called piquets (also picket), whose duty is to act as a tripwire to spot enemy elements in order to alert the main body. A realistic campaign would be a continent-sized double-blind battle of dueling intelligence gathering.
Example:
Force A sends several fast scouting elements five km ahead of its main body.
Force B travels as a single unit, without any screening elements.
Force A's scouting elements locate Force B and at extreme range, report size, weight, numbers, speed, direction and location of that unit. Suddenly, Force A has a significant intelligence edge over Force B and may plan to ambush, interdict, etc., by calculating Force B's future location, and literally choose the field of battle. During the wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, such intel also allowed multiple forces to converge on a smaller unit, as Napoleon discovered in Russia, where Cossacks were literally
everywhere and watched every move
Le Grande Armee made, and those Cossacks literally chased the French all the way to Paris, annihilating stragglers and looting while in pursuit.
While infantry and vehicles can be decent substitutes, what vehicle has the ability to travel through varied terrain than a 'Mech? VTOLs and Hovers are fine in Earth-like environs but what about on an airless moon or planet with very thin atmosphere? The same would prevent ICE engines that have to breathe to function. I recall a campaign where my opponent fielded scout infantry on light Jeep-like vehicles, desperately searching behind my lines to find my artillery units. I never spotted them physically but determined their use of secondary roads and carefully laid mines near blind turns, where they would have the least ability to spot them while on the move. The fragility of the unarmored scout vehicles resulted in the loss of several teams and likely prompted them to use cross country movement, which hampered their effectiveness. Needless to say, it wasn't until my opponent started deploying UAVs did he come close to threatening my artillery elements. The UAV overflew my Chaparral battery and from the next room (which is how we handled double blind ops) I heard the distinct sound of a forehead slamming into a desk -He had rolled snake eyes on the most critical roll of the campaign. I explained that the DCMS operator was probably watching hentai at the time...and was momentarily distracted. It happens, especially in the BTU.