What's wrong with the CUE system? (Genuinely curious, I haven't played with it yet.)
My only experience has been with Anarchy which as I understand they tweaked a few things. It's been awhile since I read through them so I don't have specifics, but here's some of the things that bothered my group.
- Anarchy had a GM, but as I understand, the Cue system doesn't regularly. Even with a GM, a player could make changes to the game to some level. An example used is a player(not the GM) deciding that an extra security team comes bursting in that the players now had to deal with. Why would anyone do this? It's one thing if a player cracks a joke about it, and the GM says, "hey good idea!", but to give the players that kind of control over the GM's world? No thanks.
- Initiative is left to right around the table.
- There is no cash. Gear is bought with XP. Gear is also supper generic. This works for some RPGs, but not what my group wanted in a shadowrun game.
- You could upgrade your gear while you played. I don't mean by RPing out going to a store. I mean mid fight. I forget how it worked, but one example from the book was a player deciding mid fight that their gun had an attached grenade launcher now. I fear how this would work in in a battletech game. "turns out my SRM6 was a clan streak model this whole time!"
Now to be honest, I've never actually played a game with the Cue system. My group got as far reading through the rules and making characters one night and when we were done, no one had any desire to actually play, ever. On the other hand, when I recently had players make a character for AToW to use in a Total Warfare campaign they were all eager for some out of mech action too. (which I am totally unprepared for :o )