BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Systems => General BattleTech Discussion => Topic started by: Gray_Noton_4lfe on 22 April 2024, 14:32:35
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Can you blow your 'Mech up on purpose? You could use explosive ammo in your hull plus the 'Mech its self as AE damage
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You can always stackpole (engine destruction) but it's hard. Always why would you want to when you can just deposit that ammo somewhere then hit it with a laser?
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There is a self destruct rule
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Why would you want to?
Let's say you're in melee combat against 2 or 3 'Mechs, you know your 'Mech is going to be destroyed anyway, why not blow it up and damage the 'Mechs attacking you?
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Going to try to avoid spoilers here... I know it's a book, and it's a Stackpole book, but Kai Allard Liao did this with one mech he was piloting at one point. It seemed to work pretty well too!
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... I wouldn't call it Mechacide only because allot of other phrases end with -cide but it's really situational though has occurred in rare scenarios. Setting the bar low and using Battletech the Animated Series as a example; Ciro Ramirez purposely override his mech and overloaded his reactor to buy some time for lance mate to escape though there was no evidence that this damaged his opponent at all. Maybe he was supposed to be charging the enemy mech but it wasn't in the animation budget. Andrew Steiner did something in the last episode of the show; got into melee range and the overheated mech look to have also cooked off the ammo on his Axman 2N, actually taking out his opponent while he ejected.
The later I'll admit to doing in the game just for laughs and to see what would happen. You need to use allot of optional rules but Stackpole+Ammo Explosion while grappling gives you that satisfying "with my last breath, I spit at thee!" moment that does more than scratch the paint.
Keep in mind: My table also had a guy get out of his downed mech, grab a SRM from the ammo bin, and then charged a mech on foot screaming (Just for laughs)
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Can you blow your 'Mech up on purpose? You could use explosive ammo in your hull plus the 'Mech its self as AE damage
There's two different ways to do this. One is the Stackpole Rule already mentioned, the other is by outfitting your mech with a Booby Trap.
In general, this is frowned upon because in the 31st Century, life is cheap... but Battlemechs aren't!
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Can you?
Generally yes.
Should you?
Generally no.
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Going to try to avoid spoilers here... I know it's a book, and it's a Stackpole book, but Kai Allard Liao did this with one mech he was piloting at one point. It seemed to work pretty well too!
It worked because the canyon he was in had been lined w/ explosives already by combat engineers.
And he was lucky enough to not have the enemy unit just shoot him as soon as he crested the hill.
Not normally a situation you can count on.
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Can you?
Generally yes.
Should you?
Generally no.
This
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Just realized I'm regurgitating the post above this one. Nothing to see here, move along.
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I Know it's probably a bad idea to blow up the Mech and eject especially if you are playing a BT Rpg (all those C-Bills gone to waste), however I still think you could deal a fair amount of damage to the opposing players.
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I Know it's probably a bad idea to blow up the Mech and eject especially if you are playing a BT Rpg (all those C-Bills gone to waste), however I still think you could deal a fair amount of damage to the opposing players.
It's theoretically possible, but it's unreliable. It's also the sort of tactic that causes your enemy to stop taking prisoners.
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It's theoretically possible, but it's unreliable. It's also the sort of tactic that causes your enemy to stop taking prisoners.
Yeah, that very true.
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The idea of booby traps is a problematic one. The problem is that they are too effective. Same with stackpoles done on purpose. Dealing 40 AOE damage with a big expensive unit might be a waste, but what about cheap purpose build drone delivered explosives? Well you quickly develop something pretty cheap that does really hard to avoid explosive damage. The bullet suicide drone and buffalo drone bomb pack a 120 and 175 engine with a booby trap on canon designs. The bullet costs 73 bv, the buffalo 269.
The kamikaze attacks being efficient methods of dealing with massed troop formations isnt part of battletech ficton, aside from the 1 explosives filled canyon with Kai so I shy away from weaponizing exploding mechs/other units.
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Also in universe fusion engines are expensive and rare. not something you throw away with a sucide attack
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I think blowing up your mech is almost always a bad idea. It worked out VERY well once. And only once as far as I can tell and in that circumstances you had:
1: an entire enemy force in a deep canyon that had been mined with bombs that just needed one explosion to set off.
2: the only allie force was a single mech.
3: That mech had a second person in the cockpit to pull out the relevant circuits at the exact right moment becuase they were not located for easy mid-combat access.
In that one very specific circumstance it was the right choice. Under almost all other circumstances it is just a bad idea. MAYBE if you are engaged in melee against a single target who REALLY needs to die for greater reasons than meerly tactical, and you don't value your own life much. Even then there are probably better ways to go about it like just ignoring the heat scale and letting nature take its course.
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Kai did it in BLOOD LEGACY and it was a borrowed hatchman
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Also in universe fusion engines are expensive and rare. not something you throw away with a sucide attack
It's not a suicide attack, it's a Mechacide attack :wink: The MechWarrior would hopefully eject.
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But like I said before what if you're trapped by three Mechs and they are in melee range, you know you're going to be destroyed either way.
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It would (in my opinion) be better to risk exploding the Mech, then let the enemy salvage your Mech for their purposes after you're dead. But like BrianDavion said before, the engine is expensive, so guess it depends on how you look at it.
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Ideally, you wouldn't want to be in any situation where you're options includes blowing up your ride. It's only appealing in the tt because most matches turn into death match grinders. If you are playing objectives, you lose more than you gain in a act of desperation.
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And only once as far as I can tell and in that circumstances you had:
3: That mech had a second person in the cockpit to pull out the relevant circuits at the exact right moment becuase they were not located for easy mid-combat access.
And 3.1: The 'Mech had a full-head ejection system so the second person wasn't left behind.
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Going to try to avoid spoilers here... I know it's a book, and it's a Stackpole book, but Kai Allard Liao did this with one mech he was piloting at one point. It seemed to work pretty well too!
It only worked because the walls of the canyon were rigged to blow with an unstable explosive.
Also, Stackpole.
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Didn’t Dan Allard self destruct his Valkyrie to try and kill/disable Yorinaga’s Warhammer?
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Didn’t Dan Allard self destruct his Valkyrie to try and kill/disable Yorinaga’s Warhammer?
Yeah, but again, that's another Stackpole classic. He really loves having action sequences reach an explosive climax.
Outside of the logic of early BT novels, it's the kind of tactic that is more likely to get you a discharge from whatever unit you're in, assuming you survive the ejection. Plus, at maximum you're looking at 40 damage applied LRM-style against anything adjacent to you (and then 20 the next ring of hexes out, and 10 at the next ring), which isn't likely to do much unless your opponents are already as bad off as you are. But hey, if someone wants to start a trend of being the BattleTech equivalent of the Pokémon player who spams Self-Destruct, more power to them, I guess.
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it's also presented as something really hard to do. you have to not only disable safeties and force the thing to operate at unsafe levels, then physically damage hardware. kai had to have a passenger literally pull control boards in the cockpit right before ejecting the head, while Dan allard was planning to let his mech be shot up to the same end. and in his case he was gambling that he'd get the result we wanted, it wasn't certain.
the only sure way to get the result is to install boobytrap hardware. but as mentioned.. except in a handful of cases like the bullet drone, its usually way too expensive for what you get.
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I Know it's probably a bad idea to blow up the Mech and eject especially if you are playing a BT Rpg (all those C-Bills gone to waste), however I still think you could deal a fair amount of damage to the opposing players.
You can also deal a fair amount of damage to your own forces.
I had a scenario, many years ago, where the Stackpole rules as well as the Ammo Explosion = AE damage were in place, I forget what the specifics of all those rules were, but its been in fiction that when an ammo bin goes up, it can take out things next to it IIRC.
As happens on the tabletop there started to be a conga line/gang up as units moved into melee range.
I want to say it was a Valkyrie that went up first which managed to cause the mech next to it, then the mech next to that, etc etc.
In a single turn that Light, 2 Enemy Heavies, and the CO's Assault mech all atomized as they were hit w/ AE damage to already ripped open armor as 1 mech after the other went up down the line.
Taking out 2 enemy heavies was nice & all but losing the CO's Assault was painful as well.
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I want to say it was a Valkyrie that went up first which managed to cause the mech next to it, then the mech next to that, etc etc.
That's sick
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It's not a suicide attack …
It is for the reactor…
(I suppose “murder”) but the result is still expensive and hard to replace equipment lost at very high risk to the pilot.
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It's not a suicide attack, it's a Mechacide attack :wink: The MechWarrior would hopefully eject.
If you read the rules for both ejection and self-destruct, it's still suicide. There is absolutely no way for a pilot in a tabletop game to eject from their mech and get out of the blast radius before it blows. Eject or not, you're just deciding if you want to be a puff of ash in your mech's wreckage, or a puff of ash next to it.
...okay, there's *one* way. IF there's a hardened building within two hexes of the warrior's landing point(which is always the hex immediately behind the mech they just abandoned), AND they didn't pass out or die from injuries during the ejection, it's possible to get in there and be protected from the blast. I do mean hardened, too. Anything less and the damage will still kill the warrior inside. Better hope the folks already in there are friendly.
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The only TWOB seems to have the booby trap system to make it quick and easy. So in the Jihad it was done but not common .
During the Succession Wars it doesn't make sense because you can recapture battlefield salvage in a counterattack from a battlefield that did not enemy infantry present to start immediately salvage operations.
During the Star League it was done frequently in the Reunification wars using Fire Ship to wreak jump and warships . Normally done by one side that knows it is a forgone conclusion that they are going to lose . The reason is strategic . If the cost of victory is so high that it would take centuries of occupation to break even and if the insurgency is too active you never break even on an invasion when those forces leave the next potential invader gets vetoed from within by the fiscal bean counters of the nation . It is at best a deterrent for the future not a successful strategy for The Now as anyone you already fighting has too much treasure invested to stop .
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Sure, but you're better off running away or surrendering, unless you're a pirate facing Clan units, the mech Knights whose name escapes me, or the Colonial Marshals. And if you have jump jets you can always I am Jade Falcon someone or death frombabove.
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Let's say you're in melee combat against 2 or 3 'Mechs, you know your 'Mech is going to be destroyed anyway, why not blow it up and damage the 'Mechs attacking you?
Both times I've stackpoled in a game it was because I had a 'Mech on its last armor points and had been surrounded by the other players' 'Mechs who were gloating a bit too much over the upcoming coup de grace. Yes, yes, lean those 'Mechs a bit closer...
But that's out-of-character, gamer thinking. I wrote "The Great Myth" sidebar in Tech Manual because The Stackpole annoys me from a physics perspective (in and out of game).
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Can you blow your 'Mech up on purpose? You could use explosive ammo in your hull plus the 'Mech its self as AE damage
Self Destruct rules already exist