I'm teaching one of my friends how to play Battletech. He's got the system down fairly quickly, but he has one particular hangup. I like to kite my smaller units around him quite a bit to force his to hit modifiers as high as they can possibly go.
Occasionally, this means my Mechs may turn a loop, cut a diagonal, or otherwise move in a less than straight line to achieve a high modifier.
He is a competition shooter in real life and argues that from an attacker's point of view, it matters more how much actual distance is covered by a target than how much that target may or may not move within a given bit of terrain, especially something as big as a multi ton engine of destruction.
I'm fairly certain that the answer is total hexes moved, (as that is how I've always played it, for years) but I can't find anything specific in TW to prove the point definitively enough for him.
So, if by drawing a straight line, a total of five hexes is traversed, but counting the hexes a given Mech actually moved in, there are seven hexes traversed, which counts towards the movement to hit modifier?
