Then the ****** Clans came. Everything "cool" about the Clans is by right of primacy a Kurita theme. Every Clan fan out there should have been a Dracophile, and what's REALLY aggravating is when they don't even know it.
I have to admit this is the case. The Clans are just House Kurita turned up to eleven, and consequently left House Kurita without a real place in the setting. They just spun their wheels for a long time, unable to find what to do now that the Clans had usurped their role.
There's a reason why I always want stories where the Kuritas go and defeat the Clans. House Kurita are the most consistently skilled anti-Clan house forces in the Inner Sphere. They killed the Smoke Jaguars and they killed the Nova Cats. They've even gotten to stalemate or only-slightly-lose to the Ghost Bears, which considering the Bears' infuriating invincibility, I still have to rate as pretty good.
The samurai of House Kurita are the most skilled individual MechWarriors in all of human space - and I cheer every time we go and remind the Clans of that fact.
That said, I personally go for the FedSuns. When I first encountered BattleTech my instincts were actually the Lyrans, but the thing about that was, not only did the Lyrans constantly lose, the Lyrans didn't even seem to
want to win that much. The history of the Lyran Commonwealth is a long, slow process of trading away worlds for time, just letting the borders be eaten away as long as the Protectorate of Donegal is prosperous. It wasn't just that the Lyrans couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag. It was that the Lyrans
didn't even try.
Sod that. So instead I found what I wanted in the Federated Suns. Say what you will about the Suns, but they try. Their heart is in it. House Davion is always in it to win it, and even when they lose, as they more-or-less have been consistently since 3028 (a few Jihad bright spots aside), they always make a decent accounting of themselves. The Suns don't want to lose. More than that, they're not ashamed of winning either. I always instinctively root for the underdog (it's an Australian thing), but there is something valuable for me in the reminder: it's okay to win. Victory is not something to be ashamed of. The Federated Suns remind me of that.
But it's not just their fighting spirit, nor even the fact that their national mythology is one I really like (I'm pretty into medieval literature, yay Arthuriana!). It's also their
creativity. The FedSuns are dynamic. They come up with new ideas and execute them. I suppose I could have been a Capellan fan, but even leaving aside that firstly
I don't like playing villains and secondly, despite what Capellan fans have told me, I find them just another predictable tinpot dictatorship, the unfortunate fact is that Capellan stories are often very predictable. Who are they fighting this week - oh, the Davions again. Or maybe the Republic. I want a bit more creativity and diversity in my story options than
yet again the Glorious Patriotic War of Reclamation. Okay, I get it, reclaim our 'ancestral worlds' from other people - what else you got? It can seem like the answer is 'not much'. But House Davion can do a lot of different things.
So far in the game's run, the Federated Suns has gone to war with pretty much everyone imaginable, including themselves, multiple times. Further, inside the Suns, you don't find a single culture. You find a wide range of diversity: unlike the Japanese Kuritas, German Lyrans, or Chinese Capellans, there isn't a single state culture overlaid on everyone. The Suns and the League have this internal diversity, but where for the Free Worlds League that internal diversity is crippling to the extent that the League barely even gets to do anything outside its own borders, for the FedSuns you can emphasise it or de-emphasise it as much as you like. Plus I suppose I like space feudalism more than I do parliament shouting at each other. If I want the latter, I can just turn on the television. ;)
Basically, the Suns give me everything I want. Neo-feudalism and march politics, internal diversity without ruining its capability for offensive action, a wide variety of potential foes and potential allies, involvement in lots of interesting different types of story, real fighting spirit and a determination to always do their best, and a lot of mythological/historical allusions that I'm personally really into.