BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat

Other BattleTech Games => MechWarrior: Age of Destruction => Topic started by: RL Nice on 04 March 2013, 20:11:06

Title: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: RL Nice on 04 March 2013, 20:11:06
I've seen a lot of criticism directed towards MechWarrior: Dark Age on other forums. Not so much this board, but then again, it's probably because it's a board dedicated to the game and coming here just to trash it is what's known as trolling.

Anyways, I'm rather curious as to what BattleTech fans didn't like about Dark Age back in 2003. I'm referring specifically to the game's story and background, since I'm sure the actual game itself had balance issues and stuff like that. Is it because of the jump in time frame with no explanation or lead up to the Inner Sphere's current state resulting in the setting becoming almost unrecognizable? And what do you all think of it now, when the original game's timeline has almost (already?) caught up to the Dark Age?
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Atlas3060 on 04 March 2013, 23:49:13
It was a different time back then.
FASA was gone, the "Classic" line was hung up on the FedCom Civil War, and Endgame looked to be the last novel of the Classic line.
So when the new game was coming out people get anxious, hopeful, fearful, and other assorted emotions.

The fact that 80% of the HPGs shut down and we had no explanation so far, no novels, no sourcebooks factored into this at least for me.
Having the main focus on just the Republic, leaving the Houses unexplained during this time, also was a factor. There are some people who are just...dedicated to Houses and Clans to a scary degree.  :-\

The website's rosy outlook on the Republic, once again at least to me, smelled of a propoganda movement and I really wanted to see the other side to this faction. It was at Surrender Your Dreams when I finally saw how far the RoTS was willing to go.

It was a combination of many things: lack of immediate sourcebook information, a timejump to this new era and no extensive explanation at the time of release, and overall the game itself really was a big impact to some folks. This was a new game, new way of playing, and no way to port over our armies into it.

I guess some could look at it from a Star Trek ToS fan to first Season Next Generation. "Who are these people?" "Where are my favorite heroes and villans?" "What is this new ship?" "A group that we thought were evil now are friends?!" "Who are these new other races?" etc.

It was a lot of change at, to some, a very short time.

Now as things have caught up to the era some are excited, some aren't, and some just won't budge from their personal favorite eras.
We still have people who hate the Clans, hate the Blakists, even hate how Amaris took power for the short time he did.
This game has a passionate fan base and this era will serve it hopefully just as well as the other eras.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 05 March 2013, 01:00:16
The collectible blind booster format also wasn't what many existing BT mini fanciers liked either. Basically, you could say it was a "new Coke" reaction, except MW:DA was far, far more successful (for a shorter period) than BattleTech has ever been. Millions of minis (literally) were produced - at least 10, and possibly more like 50 times as many minis as has ever been made for BT.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Labyr on 05 March 2013, 08:50:14
A lot of people just hated how (some) of the mechs looked. Things like the Atlas having big spikes and exposed ammunition linkages irked them. Some people disliked it because it was different. Some who dug deeper really hated what the Jihad did to the universe and thought that the RotS was too mary sue. Some players didn't know about CBT continuing on with FanPro so they resented WizKids replacing the classic universe with what they considered a cheap reboot. Mind you not all Battletech veterans felt negatively about MWDA, but there was a vocal population who did. Very vocal in some cases.

Long story short MWDA had a different aesthetic than Battletech that made it unfamiliar and unwelcoming to some veterans.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: wantec on 05 March 2013, 09:46:29
Lack of information & change.

That's basically what it all comes down to. There were a lot of changes in the universe between the end of the FedCom Civil War and the Republic. Herb has said a few times that the Jihad in some form had been a part of their future plans before WizKids took over, but because those future plans aren't published, the general public didn't know this and it looked like a huge change in the universe. One company FanPro was shutting down (or had shut down, I can't remember) and a new one was taking over the universe. There were new people in charge of the new company, although folks like Herb and Randall were some part of the new company. The game mechanics and the overall feel of the first few sets was much different than the games of BattleTech that most folks remembered, loved, and still played. There were new looks to some of the units, which a lot of folks didn't like (just look at the unseen issues).

And the universe was initially focused solely on the Republic. This created the avenue for a lot more bits of misinformation that seemed like more big changes to the casual observer. At the time of the HPG blackout, many members of the Republic Armed Forces break off to form their own militias, looking to seize resources and planets wherever they can, and increase their forces. These militias had allegiances to larger powers in the Inner Sphere (or a large company in the case of one faction) and were given unique names to tie themselves to these factions. Some casual observers took this as a change in those factions, that WizKids was giving up on the rest of the IS and only focusing on the Republic and these new mini-factions. The rise of these militias led to a temporary, a temporary use of industrial mechs forced into service as combat units by the militia forces and the RAF. It makes sense to those who stop and analyze it closely. At a time when there few factories and few mechs in service with the RAF, an industrial mech, even an unaltered one, can provide some benefits in combat. If nothing else, it provides one more unit for the enemy to consider & target. As time passed, and the focus shifted out from just the Republic, factories came online, mothballed units came out of storage, and the industrial units were slowly pulled from service. One more thing was the drawn down in military forces, which many thought would never happen. The Jihad devastated planets and economies across the IS as well as the military forces of those powers. When you stop to consider things, it is easy to see that the focus for most powers would be to repairing their economies and their planets, consolidating their battered military forces.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Frabby on 05 March 2013, 10:29:21
MW:DA was far, far more successful (for a shorter period) than BattleTech has ever been. Millions of minis (literally) were produced - at least 10, and possibly more like 50 times as many minis as has ever been made for BT.
Sigh. To think that the huge marketing effort that has to be behind this could have gone into classic BattleTech instead...
But somewhere between the unseen situation and Roc shutting down the novel line, classic BattleTech as-is apparently wasn't promising enough to the financiers. No, we'll just take someting completely different and tack on the "BattleTech" logo to promote it and buy out the BT fanbase. I never understood that line of thinking.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Atlas3060 on 05 March 2013, 10:44:49
*Shrugs*
Ease of entry into a game is a selling point.
I remember some of the online videos praising the click dial as a way to play without "mountains of sourcebooks" which would promote fast and fun play.
I don't think that video was directed to Dark Age specifically, but rather WizKid's all around system for their products.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: wellspring on 05 March 2013, 11:05:31
I saw the point of a re-boot, but I didn't think it was handled very well.

I have to confess that I'm not a fan of the game mechanics as written, but I was horrified that they were jumping on the clicky-game bandwagon. It just didn't feel like it was worth playing. They figured out the problem, but it just wasn't the right solution.

They essentially wiped away the entire background so they could start over, but in doing so it felt artificial and childish. I mean that in several senses, especially in the sense that it felt like their target customer base was much younger than I. The HPG blackout seemed like one more annoying and arbitrary fiat.

Finally, as much as you say that fan loyalties to individual factions are irrational-- and they are-- that's kind of the point of having them. A good game developer wants to encourage this as much as possible, to get players invested in the game and its setting. So wipe all that away, and your customers are going to be offended and probably stop playing.

So it's a combination of things: the fact of the change itself, what they changed into, and how they handled the change process.

BTW, I didn't get angry, scoop up all my toys, and then stomp home. Honestly, if that had happened it would have been better for BT than what I did do-- at least I was still passionate about the setting in some form. Instead, I dabbled in 40k for a while, played a lot of FMA (a better BT than BT), and got back into roleplaying. I'd mostly forgotten about BT by then.

So what brought me back? I'd heard good things about CGL's handling of the property, mostly. On TMP they mentioned the Battleforce scale minis, which fit my dirtside collection better than standard BT minis. I got curious. I have to give a shout-out to Sarna on this. I hadn't bought a new BT supplement in over a decade, and having a free resource to pick apart to figure out if I wanted to get back into the game at all really made a difference.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Sigma on 05 March 2013, 23:00:03
And the grognard prophets in the year of 2002 said, "Ye, when this Dark Age has passed and the Unseen returned to us shall Battletech enter a new golden age." And in the year of 2009 this came true, just not how people had expected. It's been an uphill ride ever since.

But really, it was the fact that a booster cost more than a metal mech of your choice and you never knew what you were getting for that price. The stats were bound to the minis instead of the sheet. So even if you had a Madcat, because it was Angus Drumstick instead of Seka Ward, you couldn't use it for her stats in your Rusty Puppy army.

I wonder how many people remember how pricey Btech unseens got in that time too? I remember the highlight being that I thought $90 was a good deal for a Marauder in 2004 and Stinger LAM's went for around $55. Eesh.

Dark times, but DA makes a great corpse to pick over for N-scale gaming I tell you what! Nothing better than watching people clear out armies they spent thousands on and getting them for less than 10% of what they paid originally. You get to see what you're getting as well, and almost all the units have modern stats for use in current era btech. And if you do feel like grabbing some boosters, you can get them for about 20% retail nowadays.

Truly a glorious time we live in.

Oh, and a lot of that DA CG art was terrible. Not that it was a halcyon time for TRO art but man that stuff was beyond terrible.

As to the fluff, because of a lot of the people forget what it's like, remember this. Endgame was on bookstore shelves at the same time as Ghost War. Do you know what it's like to be wandering through BAM and the universe you've been following since you were 7 that just had it's last major war end with the hope for a new prosperity and continued Star League for all and then get slammed by Ghost War?

2nd Star League? Hah! That didn't even last a month after Endgame. By the way, a bunch of homeworld clans have moved into the Sphere for some reason and a couple combined with existing states. Oh, and the Terran Hegemony was reborn even though we're not going to explain it. They're also super awesome and all we're going to talk about. Something to do with Stone and those crazy techwizards. Mechs are really rare again, and most of your favorite designs are extinct. Those that are not, resemble nothing to their namesakes. Only CGL taking 6 full years to cover the Jihad actually worked things into something recognizable and create a decent bridge between the two timelines.

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: cavingjan on 06 March 2013, 10:13:23
Sigh. To think that the huge marketing effort that has to be behind this could have gone into classic BattleTech instead...
But somewhere between the unseen situation and Roc shutting down the novel line, classic BattleTech as-is apparently wasn't promising enough to the financiers. No, we'll just take someting completely different and tack on the "BattleTech" logo to promote it and buy out the BT fanbase. I never understood that line of thinking.
Not all that much marketing went into it. Mage Knight followed by HeroClix got the bulk of the marketing. MW was riding the coat tails of those two games. Most of the marketing seemed to be tied to the conventions (which WK goes to) and the weekly tournament series which was very effective for a collectible game but not so for a non collectible game.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: wellspring on 06 March 2013, 12:21:58
And the grognard prophets in the year of 2002 said, "Ye, when this Dark Age has passed and the Unseen returned to us shall Battletech enter a new golden age." And in the year of 2009 this came true, just not how people had expected. It's been an uphill ride ever since.

(...)

Only CGL taking 6 full years to cover the Jihad actually worked things into something recognizable and create a decent bridge between the two timelines.

Some of the creators of BattleTech's greatest triumphs and worst gaffes come from their oft-tortured efforts to preserve continuity. Wars of Reaving is an incredible supplement just on its own merits-- how much moreso when you realize the constraints GhostBear was working under.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: darkminstrel on 06 March 2013, 16:26:54
I think part of the need, yes need, for clicky'mech was that actual RPGers were getting old, dieing off, and not being replaced by a new generation. Gaming was going PC/console and away from the table. Clicky'mech filled a niche for fast gaming without the need to drop major bucks and time into reading. It gave the kids their miniature giant robot fetish fulfillment, yet introduced them to the BT world.

For my part I can say I got into it because I had a serious full time job and no time for the extended time commitment that the metal minis required. Then kids came into it and the clix game is serving to get them into gaming. But there were mistakes made. BT was in flux, people were annoyed that WK brought the clix out.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: The Hawk on 11 March 2013, 01:16:54
Another factor -- for some reason, not fully explained at the time, BattleMechs had become exceedingly rare, making combined arms a much bigger deal.  This was a key component of the early novels, where famously some planets were said to have two or three 'Mechs defending them in total.  In the Clix game itself, common wisdom in the early days was that 'Mechs were useless, and competitive armies would be comprised only of infantry and vehicles -- no 'Mechs.  For many BattleTech players who were into it for the big, stompy robots, they were left cold.

Unfortunately, like a lot of things with MWDA, it appeared that by the time these issues were identified and rectified, a lot of potential players had gotten fed up and moved on to other things.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Stingray on 11 March 2013, 09:50:07
At first it looked like that MWDA was going to replaced Battletech for good, and that rubbed people the wrong way, then you have the story changed, and then the Mechs.... No mech from the original expansion looked like their counterpart from Battletech... many had these spikes, or weird piston things, or other various things on them that looked silly. This was to many BT fans another punch in the face.

Along with what was mentioned above I think MWDA/AoD also caught flak because of some actions taken by WizKids themselves and how they handled the game. For instance it seemed like every set had that one or two overpowered units that was obviously broken, but wouldn't get fixed until 4 months after the expansion released. Also they were very rare even if they were not the unique from the set, and many times they were rarer than the unique from the game. Along with some funky rules (that made charging the best attack ever so Mech battles were often who could charge the other first) it seemed a little broken at times. Granted they would fix the rules, but it did make the game seem like it was constantly changing.


However the game was fun and MUCH more accessible than Battletech (mainly because you can play a game in a hour), and was good for simple fun.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: wellspring on 11 March 2013, 10:09:40
At first it looked like that MWDA was going to replaced Battletech for good, and that rubbed people the wrong way, then you have the story changed, and then the Mechs.... No mech from the original expansion looked like their counterpart from Battletech... many had these spikes, or weird piston things, or other various things on them that looked silly. This was to many BT fans another punch in the face.

Anytime a game world changes hands, the fans take it with some trepidation. The game developers almost always say "trust us", and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. But the worst time to ask someone to trust you is when you first meet, so to speak. I know several writers for some very well known RPGs, and they often gripe in private about petulant and whining fans. And it's hard to blame them, considering that the fans rake them over the coals whenever a new book comes out. On the other hand, I've see franchises badly damaged by mismanagement and bad creative decisions. There's a long list of RPG settings where a failed reboot caused long-term damage to the game's viability.

In the BT space, if Ben Rome said, "trust me" with a major setting change, I'd trust him. If joe shmo the fresh-out-of-starbucks artiste asked me to trust him, that level of trust would be significantly lower, even with Herb watching him. If BT was acquired by Comcast and the new creative team announced some exciting new changes, they wouldn't get an ounce of trust. Trust comes from a track record, and most of the wild changes to a setting come when a new team takes over (or old team, new management).

To me, CGLWiz Kids's wacky new setting was some guy in creative had gotten into the steampunk subculture and decided to make the game about that instead. That's not exactly what happened, but on this end (being a fan) it's hard to get the whole story when developers are close-mouthed and sometimes misleading about where they're going.

update: Fixed typo, with apologies.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: The Hawk on 11 March 2013, 22:24:47
To me, CGL's wacky new setting was some guy in creative had gotten into the steampunk subculture and decided to make the game about that instead. That's not exactly what happened, but on this end (being a fan) it's hard to get the whole story when developers are close-mouthed and sometimes misleading about where they're going.

ITYM WizKids, not CGL.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: YingJanshi on 11 March 2013, 22:45:12
For me it was mostly the randomness of the boosters. I have a very strong dislike to games that use this to sell (so CCG, Hero Clix). Also the art was just...horrible. Still don't like it but I can live with it.
I didn't mind the clix bases, I really liked how they worked in the Crimson Skies game.

One thing to remember is that WizKids (and the Clix bases) was created by Jordan Weisman.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 11 March 2013, 23:40:49
Who also created BattleTech, Crimson Skies, IIRC the Rogue Legion games, and did a lot of Traveller supplements in the Freedonian Air and Space Administration era. The man gets around!
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: wellspring on 12 March 2013, 09:58:54
ITYM WizKids, not CGL.

You're right. Thanks, fixed it.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Col.Hengist on 12 March 2013, 12:01:20
Personally, it just wasn't battletech as I knew it. I'm not all that bright and pretty conservative so i like things that i know. I tried the game. It was ok. I just had a problem with the whole collectable thing. The first 20 boxes i bought had nothing but industrial mechs and vees and infantry that i wasn't used to. Then i got a spider that didn't look like a spider. Things were just too different for me and the minis were odd and i couldn't bend things straight without breaking it...
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: mike19k on 12 March 2013, 15:19:31
I thought that it was OK, but to me it was not the "real" battletech more an a watered down game with the basic flavor or battletech. The issue bigest issue I had with it besides the collectible was that you could not play faction pure and have a army that could win at least not at the start and I did not play for long due to that. Factions are important to the background and the way it was being played just did not have it as far as I saw.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Orion on 14 March 2013, 15:22:50
I dislike the ClickTech games mechanism - too simplistic for me.  I have yet to see a ClickTech mech that I thought looked good at all, although I admit I stopped looking well before seeing even half of them.  I intensely disliked the increase in miniature size, preferring the old, old smaller scale from the late 1980s.  Having to buy something without knowing exactly what I was getting beforehand is a deal-breaker for me.  I hated collectible games, and refused to have anything to do with them.

With all this going against it, there is no surprise I didn't like WizKids and the direction they took.  And when I found out how they planned to change the universe, I gave up on them in disgust.  A completely new setting would have been okay.  A reboot to 3025 with some of FASAnomics fixed and a more cohesive setting would have been acceptable.  Instead, the setting had large changes made to it, very few of which I expected, and even fewer of which I liked.  It's not that the changes were badly done, they just went so far in a direction I didn't like that it isn't my Battletech any more.  Any change will be loved by some, and hated by others, and I unfortunately was not part of their target audience.  To my view, they didn't fix anything that was broken, but did break a lot of stuff that was working fine.  It's not that they went from Star Trek: TOS to Star Trek: NG, it's that they started doing Babylon 5 while claiming it was Star Trek, just better. 

The company came across at times as if they disliked or hated classic Battletech, wanted a completely different setting, but had to keep the old one around in order to keep the trademark going, or to score a purchase from the old fans.  We want your money, but we don't want anything to do with your game sort of feel.  Some of them still come off that way, unfortunately.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Boldrick on 17 March 2013, 17:48:23
I'll give an opposite vote.
I like Dark Age, AoD clicky tech thingy, its simple and effective. While some might have different opinion, it did
represent story line quite well, there was a power creep, but if you play pre AoD mech with pilots and gear cards,
you do get mostly equal mechs to new ones and some broken combos. Optimizing a army does take more time then
in classic battletech, because you use wider range of units. I might not field much of ICE mech any more, but with pilots/gear
upgrades you get a lot of fun swarm armies that can beat living crap out of most front line design.
Im a mechcomander/warrior,Dark Age, AoD and classic battletech player, and still enjoy all of them, when time gives
me a chance.
Plastic creck still hits, opening a boosters is a bliss, getting rare still puts a smile, just like double six does...
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Rimoran on 28 March 2013, 16:27:03
My overwhelming impression was that the primary source of dislike was simply Collectible Vs. Custom.  Battletech had a long tradition of providing a very customizable experience -- building your own individual mech designs, etc.  Whereas MW:DA was the blind collectible purchase model.

I remember being a RPG'er back in 1994 looking with distain (UTTER DISTAIN) at this new crop of gamers playing this "Magic The Gathering" thing at conventions.  And thinking, surely this scourge will play itself out in a year.  (*ahem* A year later I got my own cards... *sheepish*)

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Dragon Cat on 28 March 2013, 18:05:03
The collectible blind booster format also wasn't what many existing BT mini fanciers liked either. Basically, you could say it was a "new Coke" reaction, except MW:DA was far, far more successful (for a shorter period) than BattleTech has ever been. Millions of minis (literally) were produced - at least 10, and possibly more like 50 times as many minis as has ever been made for BT.

Largely agree although I didn't like getting random things in each box I did like the ease on which to get them.  I picked up dozens of booster packs - wasn't even a massive fan of game but I've used the minis for dozens of stuff - pre painted and built easy to use.

One thing my local shop said - MWDA was easy to get the "classic" stuff is a lot harder.

For me its largely what everyone said I didn't massively like the time jump past a massive war that shaped the future into tiny armies without much explanation.  MWDA website did go through lots of things but it's format felt a bit "wooden" not the rich universe I was used to with BattleTech.

If the "classic" line had stopped and MWDA had been the only format I'd have likely drifted away completely from BT purely because the fiction side had dried up - the DA novels were a nice touch and easy to get hold of but even they slowed and eventually stopped.  For me the fiction and the universe sells it always has probably always will.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Bergie on 10 April 2013, 13:09:23
I personally loved the game, though not all aspects of the game.

It was easy to pick up, I personally like MOST of the mini's (not all by any means), and it made battletech fun to play for me again.

That being said, there were some simply BROKEN mechanics, such as "Tank Drop" that broke the game for many people.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: GhostCat on 10 April 2013, 13:56:42
I personally loved the game, though not all aspects of the game.

It was easy to pick up, I personally like MOST of the mini's (not all by any means), and it made battletech fun to play for me again.

That being said, there were some simply BROKEN mechanics, such as "Tank Drop" that broke the game for many people.

I remember lots of complaints about tank drop, but it was easy enough to defeat.  Base the transport's loading arc so the passenger(s) can't escape, then salvage or destroy the vehicle.  The passengers are then eliminated if they can not touch the transport when they exit.

Worse than that was the Base-Break Attack, which was eventually cured by the Friendly Fire and Called Shot rules.  Nothing gives pain to a 300 point mech like a 13 point infantry on a hoverbike basing it and making whole formations safe from ranged attacks while they set up brutally close to the Big Mech.

I still love the Game and the Spirit Cat Black Hawk that made "Alpha Strike!" such an easy thing to Fear.

GC
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Maelwys on 11 April 2013, 03:45:05
I think part of the problem (for BT players) was that there were just a lots of little things that someone would eventually dislike.

If you didn't mind the time jump, you hated the fact that the early stories were focused on the Republic and the mini-factions instead of the Houses you were used to.

If you didn't mind the Republic then you hated the fact that you couldn't just buy the faction that you wanted to play.

If you didn't mind the random boosters, then you disliked that you couldn't customize something as part of the game. If you didn't mind the lack of customization, then you disliked the fact that`Mechs you were used to suddenly looked completely different.

If you didn't mind the `Mechs you were used to looking different then you had an issue with the early novels.

It wasn't really one big thing. I think it was just lots of little things that were all different for everyone.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: MOrab46019 on 11 April 2013, 04:24:58
I just could not warm up to it. A buddy of mine got into DA. Showed me minis. They looked ok. Im a fan of the unseen and TROs art. Just did not feel right to me. Merc units I love. when it looked like being a merc unit in DA was not going to be in the game just turned me off. When I heard that classic was coming out I was happy and supported  that line. I still do. Glad this game did not end up like others dead.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: StCptMara on 11 April 2013, 04:36:09
I played MW:DA/AoD. I liked the game, more or less.

But, I can understand where people could end up disliking it. Alot of those reasons got addressed in the updates
from DA to AoD, mind you.

First, 'mechs were no longer the kings of the battlefield. An all Infantry army would take down an all or mostly 'mech
army most of the time. In fact, you could take a 'mech out of the fight with an infantry unit with Reactive armour most of the
time. This was because those ballistic weapons that did not have a minimum range either had low damage values, or nothing
that could get through the armour, and 'mechs could not do close combat attacks without a melee weapon in the original
rules.

Second, was the fluff that we were getting. I mean, we had the Stackpole short story about the kid trying to mount a weapon
on his agro mech, and then it being revealed that in his farms silo was a Victor, and it being made to sound like actual BattleMechs
were rare, and had to be hidden away. Then you got the initial round of INN stories, all talking about the golden age of peace,
how the Inner Sphere did not practice war anymore because of Devlin Stone's Republic making all the Houses beat their swords
into plowshares.   Sure, we know now that was just propaganda, but at the time, this was what was forming people's information
about the setting.

Third, 'Mechs just didn't seem like 'mechs. They couldn't do close combat unless they had special equipment, they couldn't move
and fire, they couldn't protect themselves from infantry.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: GhostCat on 11 April 2013, 12:38:15
Quote from: StCptMara
... and 'mechs could not do close combat attacks without a melee weapon in the original
rules.

I'd like to direct you to page 20 of the original Dark Age Rule Book. 

Quote from: Close combat damage
. When a ’Mech makes a close combat attack, it usually must use its primary damage value. If, however, the ’Mech’s secondary damage value has the (melee) range type, its controller may choose to use the secondary damage value instead. This decision must be announced prior to rolling the attack dice. On some units, the (melee) range type might be associated with the primary damage value; these units may use only their primary damage values to resolve close combat attacks.

From Day One, Primary Damage value has always been the default melee attack.  The Melee range type was a game mechanic that allowed possible use of special abilities like "Rapid Strike" or "Heavy Punch", but all mechs were able to close combat without using ranged attack weapons.

What might have confused many players is this:

Quote from: RANGE TYPES
There are three range types: ballistic (*), energy (*), and melee (*). A unit’s range type appears next to its damage value and can affect how that unit’s attacks are resolved and how its damage is scored against different targets. Infantry and vehicles each have only one range type. ’Mechs may have up to two different range types, and ’Mechs are the only units with the melee range type.

Even Infantry could melee with close combat attacks, they just weren't allowed the special abilities, and 'Mechs had two weapon slots printed on the dial.

Quote
Third, 'Mechs just didn't seem like 'mechs. They couldn't do close combat unless they had special equipment, they couldn't move and fire, they couldn't protect themselves from infantry.

Assault Orders to "Move and Shoot" was built into the second rule set "Age of Destruction".  As for protecting themselves from infantry, that's an issue that developes in any game with a "Point Value System" that promises to 'balance the game'.  Build an army with half your points in One Big Monster that can only fight one thing at a time, and it will always lose to the hoard of Ankle Biters that can attack it many times (sooner or later, one of them gets lucky, and the rest swarm in for the kill).

GC
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: StCptMara on 11 April 2013, 23:49:34
Interesting...GhostCat, I will say my areas Battlemaster actually ruled until AoD came out that 'mechs could not do
close combat unless they had the melee damage type.

Also, I did not count things that were put in under AoD rules because the initial taste of the game that set people's opinions
was not AoD but was DA.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: GhostCat on 12 April 2013, 16:45:27
You'd be surprized at what players and Battlemasters got wrong simply by misreading the Rules or counting on someone else to do that for them.

The Wizkids forums were very active with new questions about poorly written rules or other misunderstandings about new units and their abilities.

GC
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: darkminstrel on 12 April 2013, 19:12:23
You'd be surprized at what players and Battlemasters got wrong simply by misreading the Rules or counting on someone else to do that for them.

The Wizkids forums were very active with new questions about poorly written rules or other misunderstandings about new units and their abilities.

GC

Now that you've said this, GC, I've been able to remember the one thing that I didn't like about the game; inconsistency of rules. AoD did close a ton of loop-holes, but in the DA times there were some situations that were head scratchers.

I was very active in the tourney circuit in my area...untill two very poor interpretations of the rules by two different BMs soured me on the entire game. I even sold off my minis because I was upset enough at the situation. When AoD came out I took a chance and started up again, and was blown away at how the balance was better with the rules revision. I think that fix was way too late to save the game and keep it strong.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Greywind on 13 April 2013, 03:09:58
It was a nightmare from the Envoy's side of it, too, for the longest time.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Ryumyo on 13 April 2013, 04:33:23
Seems like a funny opinion  " disliking " the MWDA clix. I had a rather fun time playing  the system. The Vanguard expansion is as far as I got.
 But I guess to each their own.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: StCptMara on 13 April 2013, 20:44:23
Seems like a funny opinion  " disliking " the MWDA clix. I had a rather fun time playing  the system. The Vanguard expansion is as far as I got.
 But I guess to each their own.

You have to remember: it is not that people in general disliked the game, it is that a lot of old time BattleTech players did not like
it, and, as such, since they did not like the game, their dislike of the game transferred to the setting.  Or maybe it was they did not
like the setting as portrayed by WizKids, and, as such, their dislike transferred to the game.

Frankly, the only thing I never liked about the DA/AoD game was that 'mechs were nothing more then bait.(Seriously: in the games
I won, I either did not use 'mechs, or I used 'mechs as a huge distraction, and won with my infantry and vehicles)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: GhostCat on 13 April 2013, 21:40:22
Frankly, the only thing I never liked about the DA/AoD game was that 'mechs were nothing more then bait.(Seriously: in the games
I won, I either did not use 'mechs, or I used 'mechs as a huge distraction, and won with my infantry and vehicles)

I liked the Game from start to finish, though it was sometimes annoying to try to make sense of a rule before it had been properly play tested.

Lots of players had different tactics for their armies.  Charge Monkeys and Walls of Flesh were pretty common along with 'Bait and Switch' teams.  Sure, I used infantry to win, but it was part of the whole force. 

My best 'tent pole' army was 300 points with a SCat Blackhawk armed with "Alpha Strike" and a 9AV, and supported by 9 CBAs equipped with Flamers.  'Base-and-Break' maneuvers allowed me to touch the target with an infantry unit, and then move the rest of the army to set up a Ranged Attack Formation with the mech as the 'Big Gun' and a few infantry to help modify the Attack Value.

The basing infantry unit would break away from the target, and the formation would hit with an incredibly easy attack value.  The Target (usually a Big Mech) would take massive damage and Heat from the Energy attack, then get based (as the final action with three orders per turn) by a formation of (jumping, flaming battle armor) infantry that could capture an overheated assault mech that would almost certainly shut down even if it succeeded in Pushing to Run as far away as it could get.

The Hasbani Atlas could only count on one Highlander hoverbike for support, and often treated it as 'filler', Jonah Levin's Atlas (Dark Age) made not needing 'filler' seem like an improvement, but it still had to fight a jumping mech and a swarm of infantry without help using only one order per turn.  You can see the disadvantage it has already.

Base-Break might seem like a simple game mechanic, and it is, but many players did not learn something even more basic.  Anticipate what your opponent is going to do next, and have a plan to deal with the possibilities.  It takes a few turns to feed basing infantry to a Target, move the formations into range, and then rest pushed units before the attack can succeed.

GC
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Ryumyo on 14 April 2013, 02:15:08
Well then, let it be known that I am one of those old-school Battletech players. I initially balked at the Dark Age system based on what the base set sculpts looked like, but with the release of the Fire For Effect expansion ( and the really sweet looking Mad Cat ) I threw lots of support ( cash and time ) behind it. Hey it's Battletech, right? Besides I really wanted the dossiers as there wasn't a TRO for this series until now.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: The Mighty ACHOO on 13 May 2013, 18:45:19
I never played the game, but knew a lot of people that did. I did not hate the game, I just had to make a choice. Spend my limited funds on BattleTech mini's of Clicky Tech boosters. I choose the mini's.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: 455_PWR on 05 June 2013, 03:46:32
I played BT for many years, as well as playing the mechwarrior 2 and mechwarrior 2 mercs games when I was younger.  That was what I grew up with and was used to.  I got into MWDA/AOD just because my brother did, but hated the mechs.  Everything was way different asthetically from the whole BT universe I was ued to.  I do have to say that wizkids started making the mech closer to BT style in the AOD era, which was a plus.

To answer the question, I think the bigget complaint is the same reason the 04-06 Pontiac GTO's flopped. The world wanted retro-ish styling and Pontiac made it look like a cavalier (I still like them, I'm a huge pontiac guy).  The gto simply wasn't a gto, and wizkids construction mechs just weren't mechs...

If wizkids had made the mechs look mopre like BT mechs, I think the game would have been much bigger.  Still a fun game though and it's always fun to mod the minis! 
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Daemion on 07 June 2013, 15:02:53
Wow. I had no gripes with story or background at the time, and still don't even now.

I only had gripes with the game and its presentation on many levels.

Millions of minis (literally) were produced - at least 10, and possibly more like 50 times as many minis as has ever been made for BT.

So, there really should be no reason of parts shortage.  >:D
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Daemion on 07 June 2013, 16:10:15
Since others expounded on the game, I will add a little facet that ties both to game and fiction:


One of the things that I both liked and disliked at the time was that a lot of the early mechs, mostly the one-ofs, like the Atlas, Jupiter, etc. (Y'know, the uniques), were all named characters.

I liked this because I saw a character in a ride and it gave me ideas for if I were to run a campaign in this setting, even back then. I was looking to the Dossiers to find stats to see if they were stock designs or if there was something different.

What was really neat was that after a couple sets, they started actually coming up with custom configs for the unique characters. They had personalities (...that seemed to run to the dark moody side, with lots of black this, dark eyes and hair that. Don't believe me? Read up!) and a rank and a doctrine. They could be used as allies or enemies for a more custom force.

I had been planning from the very beginning to run some DA era games in BT.

But, I gave the game its fair shake, and this one thing I liked was also a big drawback. I couldn't inject a 'character of my own' into any of the more appealing rides. I either decided it had to be one of the nameless 'green-shirt' designs, or my guy was simply off the battlefield, running things from his ride.

Secondly, each unit had a rank, but that unit belonged to a specific faction. This, too, finally became an issue as they started adding more factions to the table. They were running out of room to add something of equal value for everyone, and had to cut back on certain factions, almost to the point of complete exclusion.

So, not only could I not get a ride that fit a personalized character to lead or fight in my army, I couldn't get the stats I wanted either, even of the limited selection, without flying enemy colors.

It was then that I learned that I'm more of a story-driven player, more likely a real role-player, than I am a war-gamer. I couldn't connect with the forces I was wielding, regardless of whether I liked a faction or not. I couldn't inject myself into a piece, using one in a true player-character capacity.

That wasn't what drove me away from the game completely. That came down to bad rules and game mechanics which kinda forced a trend in army design.

I couldn't play my desired style, especially with one or more BattleMechs and expect to win often, even by merely outplaying a person or getting insanely lucky. I couldn't expect to win at the tournies, and even when I knew I was just playing for the comeraderie, the constant losing to refined winning armies of the month still had a slowly growing venomous effect on my attitude.

It didn't help that it wasn't really at all like its name-sake in execution in any regard, only minor trappings in nomenclature. (Until BT, I only played family and standard card games with regular abandon. I cut my teeth on true game with BattleTech and it is my first true gaming love, and will never be usurped, though I do dabble in others. This thing that that was using familiar names and the same story and history was not even close.)


I find it sadly amusing that one of my friends likes the classic BattleTech, and he got started in MechWarrior Dark Age. He stuck with it almost all the way to the end, but his vehemence over the game structure and the shoddy patchwork WizKids did to fix balance had turned him from an avid player to one of its most venomous critics. I even bring it up, I get no positive response.

He, however, does not think that CGL needed to go the way they did with Total Warfare, either, beyond new equipment. So, when I play at his table, it's mostly B:MR and AT:2. With the stats for the new Dark Age units.



Now, an interesting tangent I'll leave you with: People talk about the propaganda of the Republic. I find this kinda funny, especially if you look at the general faction selection from the start. There were no republic units beyond a special mail-order or some special prizes. And, those were Knights and a Paladin. Interesting that you could only really collect the pirate factions with any regularity, especially if the Republic were supposed to be the good guys. I know some of my friends flocked to the banner and bought the propaganda whole-heartedly, as soon as republic units came out. But, not everyone. Was the connection with the other factions as your place to go supposed to be intentional?
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mohammed As`Zaman Bey on 07 June 2013, 22:37:36
  I attended a local convention because it anounced that a BT demo was scheduled. It was DA and nobody was interested in playing. Nobody. The rep there said they brought cases of DA stuff that won't sell.

  I found the DA universe disappointing -The same, tired, old factions were there but with new packaging aimed at 12 year olds.

  As a campaigner, it looked like BT sold out to WH40K-style rules and play. Unit customization has always been a key element in campaigns, DA lacked that.
  BT has evolved to more of a wargame while DA appeared to be a step in the opposite direction of tactical wargaming.
  Most of the other flaws have been pointed out, such as the random units, the designs and the rules.

  I have never hated a game but DA was too much like WH40K and I had absolutely no interest in playing it.

  One of the guys in my gaming club has literally thousands of BT metal minis... I have a large collection of leads as well, including original LAMs still in blisters...who needs DA when you already have every BT publication, inlcuding copies of BattleTechnology Magazine?

  In short, what made DA attractive to 12-year-olds are what I found undesirable in a game.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Captain of C-21 on 07 June 2013, 22:58:00
Now, an interesting tangent I'll leave you with: People talk about the propaganda of the Republic. I find this kinda funny, especially if you look at the general faction selection from the start. There were no republic units beyond a special mail-order or some special prizes. And, those were Knights and a Paladin. Interesting that you could only really collect the pirate factions with any regularity, especially if the Republic were supposed to be the good guys. I know some of my friends flocked to the banner and bought the propaganda whole-heartedly, as soon as republic units came out. But, not everyone. Was the connection with the other factions as your place to go supposed to be intentional?

The Highlanders were supposed to be the stand-in for Republic forces.  I remember hearing the initial idea was to just have Paladin and Knight pieces represent the Republic while the Highlanders filled in all the other gaps.  By the Death from Above expansion though the Republic was just made a regular expansion.  Storywise this was explained away by saying that the Republic's military was completely caught off-guard, but whereas other space-nations didn't have any internal or external trouble going on and could set themselves back on track, the Republic immediately festered with pirate and splinter factions, and thus just started slowly dying after Grey Monday.

I can agree with your points on army composition and lack of cool non-unique mechs as sore points.  By the last few expansions, Wizkids was making non-uniques of every unique piece (Mad Cat mkIV, Marauder IIC, even the Atlas III), but I was always sad I couldn't snag a Jupiter or Hellstar for my faction.  Heck, I wish the Battleforces would've gotten to Clan Nova Cat, 2 Shadow Cats, 2 Wendigos, and 2... Jupiters maybe?  Already had Nova Cats and Avalanches represented as non-uniques.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: 455_PWR on 08 June 2013, 06:09:49
You sir are correct, unit customization is key.  You needed to pull a blind uber rare to do awesome in the tourneys (I pulled a wolf's dragoons cygnus at a tourney and did very well :) ... The fact that the bet mechs and uniques mechs were rares/very rares made those who could pend more or with blind luck better.

In wizkids defense, they started to fix this towards the end as they made better/named mechs more available to all factions.  They also tried to make the game more customizable with pilots and gear.  Finally, I'm glad the factions started to return to CBT factions (steel wolves... blah, yay clan wolf!)

All in all it was a good game and I still have a whole bin of the minis, but it (mechs and gameplay) were too simplified to compare to good ol CBT.

I'm a bit biased though as I love the modeling aspect of CBT as well (CBT is what got me into 40k).
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: PGaither84 on 11 June 2015, 16:14:26
Sorry to necro such an old thread, but there is a reason:

I was huge into Battletech and the Mechwarrior franchise for years. however, after the Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries computer game expansion and the Annihilation Wizkids expansion, the game seemed to die out where I live and I was also getting into the card game magic the Gathering. i was recently reminded of Battletech and after doing a google search, i found this site and this thread talking about Dark Age and felt compelled to register and reply.

==============

so, my opinion about Dark Age was that Wizkids did a poor job of introducing their game and transitioning players into it. I felt that the Dark Age story line and flavor wasn't so bad, but the timing couldn't have been worse if they tried. For example, Dark Age should have been an expansion... an advancement of the story line rather than the launch set.

You see, Wizards of the Coast and their Magic: the gathering card game understands what it takes to make a successful collectable game. One key component is a competitive tournament scene, which I never saw in my local area of Northern California, or in California at all for that matter, and "formats." you see, in Magic: the Gathering, there is what we call "standard" and "eternal". Every two sets comprise "standard" and older sets rotate into the eternal formats. Look it up for more details. It is fascinating and well thought out to keep people interested and buying. Anyway, when Dark Age came out, veteran players were opening boosters and asking "Where are the mechs? What is this industrial mech doing here? Why should I care? Why does my Atlas have spikes?" and so forth. Had the game already established itself mechanically, and the story of the republic thematically, then an expansion and the start of the Dark Age would have been a much easier transition for players. Instead, it was too harsh of a transition. So, right from the get go, Dark Age alienated fans, and I don't think it ever truly recovered.

=====================

As a gamer and a fan of the fiction and war games, i really liked the concepts behind this clix based game. I loved that infantry and vehicles became a meaningful part of a universe that was once dominated by battlemechs. On the original WizKids forums, I had my own House rules that inspired a sub forum of their own for a "Galactic Conquest" campaign you could play with your friends. Rules about how to earn credits, buy things on the open market and black market, the risks of buying things on the black market, the cost to repair units, so on and so forth. It gave real depth to this skirmish based game that people seemed to enjoy and gave great feedback on. I really miss that, but life goes on.

=====================

As someone who has pretty much fully transitioned over to Magic the gathering (playing where the players are), I have to say that another core problem with all miniatures gaming comes down to physical play space, properly protecting, storing, and transporting your armies. It doesn't matter what game it is, miniatures take up a lot of space and are impractical. don't get me wrong,i love them, but they are impractical. compare them to collectable card games where you just need a deck of around 60-100 cards sleeved up in a small box, and a play mat you can roll up. If you have cards to trade, they take up a simple binder like we are all used to using as kids in school. If you want to play miniatures, you have terrain pieces, a large table space, and your bulky miniatures. At least where  lived, the convenience of cards alone won the battle for what people wanted to spend their time and money on. they had fun when we played with my collection of mechwarrior figures, but not enough to get them to buy product.

NOTE: I would like to edit this post and add some more later, but I have to go to work now. :)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 11 June 2015, 17:32:09
so, my opinion about Dark Age was that Wizkids did a poor job of introducing their game and transitioning players into it. I felt that the Dark Age story line and flavor wasn't so bad, but the timing couldn't have been worse if they tried. For example, Dark Age should have been an expansion... an advancement of the story line rather than the launch set.

One of the things easily missed in this discussion, was that WizKids did not actually intend MW:DA to take over the BT playing audience. It was a very deliberate attempt to combine mecha and the Clix mechanic, and launch this to a whole new audience.

Why? Face it. The BT player base is small and niche. It's been wild-ass guessed that there are around 10,000 BT "fans" worldwide. This number is made up of people who
- play the game(s) - board, alpha strike, aerospace, BattleTroops, BattleForce, etc etc etc
- collect & paint minis
- play the RPG
- nostalgically collect books
- came in from the PC games & stuck around
- etc etc.

The number of that 10,000 who actually buy stuff is some fraction - 10%, 25%, 50%, whatever. That's the BT purchaser pool.

WizKids - and Loren Wiseman, who was one of the parents of the game - wanted to access an entirely new, much larger audience. They had to, to make the game profitable & sustainable. So they made a number of decisions to target a new audience. Love these decisions or hate them, they included:

- pre-painted miniatures
- faster-playing, simpler game system
- a new period in history so people wouldnt' feel daunted by the 30 years of BT history - a common comment by new BT fans.
- collectable miniature game with random boosters.

Did their decisions work? Clearly, and for several years, yes. Put it this way. Another wild-ass guess, there are probably about 100,000 BT metal minis out there in total, globally. From Ral Partha, IWM, RPE, etc. At the time WK published their "Technologies of Destruction" coffee-table book, WK had produced over seven million DA figures. That's two orders of magnitude more, and they weren't finished.

Ultimately WK got bought up by Topps, and ultimately DA died as a production game. It now is another niche game, with probably an equal number of fans, but a lot more plastic minis out there (just check my bitz drawers! ;) ).

***

The assumption that WK botched a transition for BT fans into their game is unfortunately inaccurate. WK as a company was enormously supportive of Randall and first FanPro, and then CGL. I know, I was on some of the inside for that. WK gave concessions and more or less creative freedom, and did a lot to help BT stay alive. If that deosn't indicate they weren't trying to absorb the BT base, I don't know what will.

Alas, there seems to have been an expectation 15 years ago that "MW:DA is the new BT!" It was never meant to be. It was a new form of expressing the fictional universe we all love. it was never meant to replace our game of armoured, stompy giant robot combat.

Cheers,

W.

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: YingJanshi on 11 June 2015, 19:39:36
Alas, there seems to have been an expectation 15 years ago that "MW:DA is the new BT!" It was never meant to be. It was a new form of expressing the fictional universe we all love. it was never meant to replace our game of armoured, stompy giant robot combat.

The main trouble is, that wasn't communicated well enough. Yes, FanPro continued the "Classic" stuff. But for quite a period in the early days of MW:DA that didn't really get around. Had three game stores in my area at the time and all three were saying MW:DA was all there was. Honestly, I don't know whether that was just because they didn't bother to check info, or whether WK/FanPro didn't announce it (eventually they did). And even back in the day, the way Weisman talked, it sounded like this was going to be it.

In hind sight, WK could and probably should have handled the whole thing better. The rollout, advertising the fact that FanPro was still continuing CBT from the beginning. Perhaps giving a greater overview of the universe from the very beginning instead of focusing so much on the Republic (didn't even need to include any units for the houses, just give more info on them so older players wouldn't have felt left out).

I think, in the end, what burned so many of the CBT players is that it felt like WK was going after new players so hard that it didn't feel like WK cared about them at all.  Which is a shame, because it's actually a pretty fun game (random boosters notwithstanding). And in the end it did bring a lot more players into the fold, so it does deserve it's place in the history of the franchise.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 11 June 2015, 19:48:02
Was it WizKid's job to advertise FanPro? I don't believe so.

FASA is probably the larger culprit. They announced they'd closed. Many people saw that. When FanPro licenced the IP from WizKids, it was FanPro's responsibility to market/advertise.

WizKids was out to make WizKids successful. That they took the time to encourage and assist Fanpro is a matter of record. Not many other companies would have been as helpful in a similar situation. But ultimately, WK was not responsible for the success, or otherwise, of BattleTech the game.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: YingJanshi on 11 June 2015, 21:54:07
Was it WizKid's job to advertise FanPro? I don't believe so.

FASA is probably the larger culprit. They announced they'd closed. Many people saw that. When FanPro licenced the IP from WizKids, it was FanPro's responsibility to market/advertise.

WizKids was out to make WizKids successful. That they took the time to encourage and assist Fanpro is a matter of record. Not many other companies would have been as helpful in a similar situation. But ultimately, WK was not responsible for the success, or otherwise, of BattleTech the game.

Perhaps advertise was the wrong word. I merely meant that Wizkids should have said "Look, the classic is still there". I don't honestly see much competition between them, they were marketed to different types of players. At the very least it would have reassured the CBT crowd. Anyway, they didn't and a lot of CBT folks gave up before FanPro got up to steam. If they had said from the beginning: "We have this great new way to play BattleTech (oh, and yeah, FanPro here is still releasing stuff for CBT)", I think it would have been an easier transition for people. That's all I was trying to say... 
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 11 June 2015, 22:59:00
Ah, but FanPro didn't even exist at that point in time. Randall was recovering from the shock of FASA's closure, and trying to put together the alliance with FanPro Germany that made FanPro LLC (US) even possible.

FASA basically just said "Whoops, we're out." WK had their own business to start. Could it have been planned better? Indubitably. If FASA hadn't been quite so pre-emptory. That's what damaged BattleTech the game and lead to the perception of it's death - FASA killing it.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Atlas3060 on 11 June 2015, 23:06:14
Quite honestly if WizKids didn't come into play with their plastic minis I doubt Battletech would have survived like it did.
Love or hate the Dark Age click game, it was the floating piece of furniture we floated on until FanPro and Catalyst rescue boats came to collect the survivors of the FASA. (They said she would never sink, stop me if you heard this before)

Now we're back, we are strong, and even though WizKids doesn't produce any Dark Age stuff anymore they did make money on it.
So to them it was a successful line, even if they aren't continuing it right now.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: PGaither84 on 11 June 2015, 23:10:52
Thank you for that great replies.

=============

On the topic of clicky mechs, I had never played mage knight or hero clix at the time. I thought the idea of click mechs was pretty neat. A quick and simple way to keep battles moving without having to deal with stat sheets and piles of books, and then being able to reset games in a hurry by simply clicking them back to their starting spot.

One of the problems I have always had with the game was the constant use of a ruler, picking up and putting down pieces, and so forth. I personally think it would have been much better to stick with Hexagonal play mats. I don't know how practical that would have been, but I am a gamer first, and a battle tech fan second. The core game play was obstructive, imprecise, and overall clunky. From my time playing the Star Wars miniatures game when it was still alive, which used one inch squares, I can say that counting squares or counting hexes is so much faster, easier, less argumentative and more tactical than what the clix games ever had. Debating what is and isn't in range, covering the center dot that you couldn't even see, maneuvering and adjusting the placement of bases as to not touch difficult terrain... it was all a big mess in my experience. I don't know if hexagonal play would have been a better solution, but it just never felt right to me or people I played with. Oh well.

=================

I am putting this in a separate section, but it is still related to game play. Something else that put me off was implantation of ranged combat. The range of weapons compared to movement speed was a joke. At the time, 14 inches was the maximum shooting distance, but a mech with 7 speed (not even the maximum speed, which I think was 10) could start outside the range of an LRM launcher and then charge and end in base contact without reprisal. There is a difference between tactical movement and being able to run across open ground like that. On the original WK forums (are there archives of that somewhere I could look up?) I remember writing about a suggested rules change where you could double your maximum range but at a reduction of your attack value.

Games had a consistent pastern of starting well out of range, maneuvering around, maybe firing opening shot and then ending up in base contact with everyone, punching it out until the game ended.

=================

Don't get me wrong or think I am just bashing the game. Personally, I loved buying the pieces and trying to get games going, but I found that I spent as much time on the forums and formulating house rules for game play and campaign settings than i ever did playing the vanilla game.

I have no artistic skills and painting my own miniatures was something I never wanted to do. I was happy to be able to buy professionally painted miniatures that I could just pick up and play with. I had lots of fun 3 player battles with my two good friends. Alliances were made, backs were stabbed, and memories are still shared. That is what any game is really all about.

=================

As I have said before a few times, the core game was pretty unimpressive and a bit of a disappointment, but I spent a lot of time creating house rules (many of which became real game rules later on, weather they read my threads on the old message boards or not I'll never know) and adjusting the game to make it much more enjoyable for myself and my friends who just wanted a fast passed tactical miniatures game. We wanted armies to clash and things to blow up.... and they did repeatably.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 11 June 2015, 23:31:04
One completely real problem many BTers had with the game was, that it didn't play the way we were used to BT playing. That's more an artifact of all the Clix games. One of my sons got really into Mage Knight, and I could never find a good "rythm" - I kept on moving first, and getting shot at as a result.

An "I move all my stuff &/or shoot, then you move/shoot all your stuff" game is different. I like "I move, you move, we all shoot together!" ;)

Players not used to BT's uncommon turn sequencing wouldn't have had that problem, but I did.

W.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: StCptMara on 14 June 2015, 03:23:12
I remember one time on the old WK forums, I mentioned that you could enlarge a BattleTech mapboard to 2.5 times the scale,
and it would be perfect to use the MechWarrior miniatures to play BattleTech. To me, this seemed a great thing, as, at the
time, my group was actually using a big map-board to play. It made BattleTech much easier for people to see, and had a lot
of plusses, plus used readily available miniatures, so made it easier for people new into BattleTech, and actually encouraged
in my group people buying and trading boosters from WizKids to get units in their faction colour schemes. Their reaction was....to erase the post. They didn't even give a warning or reason, it just vanished.

WizKids eventually did this for their Solaris game, but..if they had done this from the beginning? If they had either made
or allowed to be made, large scale map-boards? I think they would have had a better time economically. If something
can be used for more than one thing, it is getting both player bases(see: RoboTech Tactics and how many people are
getting the minis for that so they can get the Unseen). And, I think if they had done more than the record sheet book
RIGHT THEN, they could have pulled in large numbers of new players. I mean, I recruited players for BattleTech by
using that big map, and telling them "So..this is MechWarrior, you already know this..however, here is BattleTech,
which is far more detailed."

My over all feeling s that the problem was that MW was, essentially, treated poorly by WizKids. It was very much
like they could not figure out what to do with it. They did not keep a focused design team, and it was plagued with
issues like the Non-Unique Rokurokubi that never made it to people who ordered them,  and their poorly handled
"set retirement" sequence that got done in such a way as for people to see it as a cash grab, not a "We are trying
to find a way to make the tournament circuit fair for new players" move.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Von Ether on 14 June 2015, 10:44:15
Just my two cents, I think a lot could have been forgiven if the plastics had been closer to the goofy non-"scale" of CBT metal figs, which is all levels of irony.

If the scale had been more of a match, CBT players would have adapted to the economics of collecting/second market to use the figs in CBT. And then some of them might of played to either find new recruits or simply troll in person. At the time, they would have been a drop in bucket revenue-wise, in the end, though, CBT endured.

I also think that few CBT players were fooled when WK claimed that the new scale was to standardize the figs with a market of terrain that was more expensive and never really used by the company in marketing or tourneys. Most had figured out that the decision was based on manufacturing/art needs and some felt that spoke volumes on it's own.

Another bit of irony is that even though I come off as a huge CBT fan from that time, but I was quite the opposite. Local CBT fan snobbery made me feel that the boys had pretty much reaped what they had sown.

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: jacobite2 on 18 June 2015, 15:00:23
I'm not permitted to talk about clickytech  but I did say at the time the rules would work for star trek and 7 or 8 years later they did put out a star trek clicky game the rules work great the minis are not so good not up to dark age standers more in line with heroclix
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: False Son on 18 June 2015, 15:26:22
While trying to be as objective as possible, MWDA faced several challenges that derivative franchises face.  It calls upon a previous association, but also has to forge a unique identity.  MWDA was borrowing on the premises of classic BT, even using a few characters and so on, but had to establish itself as something different while not going too far into the territory of unique identity.  The execution was not the best at keeping the loyalty of classic BT players.  But, from a commercial perspective, if the choices made to establish MWDA as a standout IP brought in more new players than BT players it eliminated those choices were the right ones to make.  I don't blame anyone for being offended at the notion that a for profit company would choose potential new customers over old loyal customers.  Likewise, I don't fault the reasoning behind the creation of MWDA or the narrative/philosophical reasoning behind the setting or time jump.  The execution failed to hit the mark with the group that is active on this board.  Contextually, that is what matters.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: jackpot4 on 18 June 2015, 17:56:19
One completely real problem many BTers had with the game was, that it didn't play the way we were used to BT playing. That's more an artifact of all the Clix games. One of my sons got really into Mage Knight, and I could never find a good "rythm" - I kept on moving first, and getting shot at as a result.

An "I move all my stuff &/or shoot, then you move/shoot all your stuff" game is different. I like "I move, you move, we all shoot together!" ;)

Players not used to BT's uncommon turn sequencing wouldn't have had that problem, but I did.

W.

I loathe the gentleman's warfare concept.  Battletech's concept is applicable in the real world.  One has to like and be able to play along such strict rules in order to be competitive.  I cannot even grasp the concept of standing there and hoping the enemy misses me.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Bloodknight on 06 July 2015, 16:55:16
Quote
It's been wild-ass guessed that there are around 10,000 BT "fans" worldwide.

Is that the "current day" number? Because back in late 90s BT was, at least in my country Germany, a huge thing. It was the game everybody played, and 40K only overtook it in its 3rd edition. We had several thousand players in clubs, doing organized play, chapter fights and such. I drove through the republic quite a lot. I would have expected BT's fanbase in the US to be bigger by an order of magnitude, not to forget the rest of the world. 100K minis seems to be lowballing it, too. 10 minis per guy? 3000 minis a year? I must be 30 people. :D
Yes, the blisters vanished from the shops a while ago, but still. It used to be quite the seller. I'm actually astonished to hear that they made so much MWDA stuff and that it sold well. I only noticed MWDA in the bargain bins very quickly at the time. The only game that I remember that went from full price to 70% off quicker was AT-43 when Rackham went prepainted before they went bust.

But if 10K players is roughly what's going on today, I think I have to be super happy. I'm with the Mekwars people, and apparently we've been able to keep 10% of the fans playing the game - not at the same time, but that seems to be our player pool. And yes, we do advertise the books when people have questions. We want Catalyst to get our money, even if us old grognards are stuck in our timelines. I'm only interested in 3025, for example, but once in a while I'll buy something else so people whose work I value get a little something.

Anyway: I did not get into MWDA because I really hated the blind booster mechanism. At the time I did not even mind the time jump much. We were playing in the clan period anyway, so one step deeper into the madness was ok. But the awful clicktech and not being able to buy what I want put me off badly. For the same reason I never got into CCGs. I don't like the way they play and the terrible "pay to win" that's behind it all. I also missed the elegance of hexbased games. There's never an argument over "you're 1/8" short" "no, I'm not" as in other tabletop games (which I enjoy, but for other reasons). Hexes don't lie. BT's turn order is still, 30 years later, great, one of the best in the industry, IMO. The IGOUGO We Shoot system is brilliant. Particularly in 3025, that's what makes the game great, it puts more of the games decisions into the hands of the player instead of the dice; good movement is really important there. Classic IGOUGO with sequential damage means you're dead after a bad turn usually.  I can see why people don't like FASAnomics, but as a 3025 player, I don't feel that much. There aren't so many clusters around (I hate massive clusters in the later timelines because they invite Headplink spamming and thus put too much emphasis on list building and getting lucky), and those are the biggest time wasters. I can usually play a 4 on 4 in an hour, and that's ok with me, even without the computer doing the dice rolling and dumpling filling. Less than that and I wouldn't feel as if I had gotten a game, if you know what I mean.

Well, MWDA didn't have any of the things I liked, and a lot that I didn't like, I guess. Never spent a penny on it. And yes, I thought CBT was dead at the time and went to play WH40K and WHFB (the latter is just now going through an MWDA-like reboot, including a terrible information policy and a ruleset with no balancing mechanics). Only in 2010 did I discover that CBT was still alive. I get why Fanpro couldn't keep up with the advertising, the German branch was like a dozen people and they were always very short on money. It's still a shame, though. And I agree with the people who say that both games could have sold more if they had been marketed paralelly. As it was, it looked like MWDA existed mostly to piss BT fans off. Bad fan communication indeed. And stuff like that can make or break games. If you shoo away your veteran players, it's difficult to recruit new ones. Not only because a flourishing community draws newbies (nothing promotes a game better than it being easy to get a game, no matter where you are), but also because the veterans will be bitter. They will try to get the new players to play a different system. They will badmouth your new stuff.
And yeah, gamers can be harsh customers, often tight-fisted and petulant and hard on the devs. I wish the guys at Catalyst the best, so far they've been handling it all really well. Thank you, Catalyst (and also the Forum staff here. I don't read here very often, but I'm thankful for the time you guys put in to make this an enjoyable place on the web).

 
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 06 July 2015, 17:37:14
Yes, that's a post-2010 estimate. In the wake of releases in the MW computer games and suchlike, there would have been big spikes. I have no numbers to relate the number of MWO or MWT players to the old PC games, but my gut feel is not as many; we've had useful spikes in new membership on this forum following their releases.

Plus Germany seems to have been a stronghold of BT, due to an active local licencee, organised fan activity, and possibly smaller distances with easier transport options. The Essen Spiel shows the sort of energy existing in that region, albeit for a range of boardgames past the Monopoly level.

And welcome back, Bloodknight!

W.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Bloodknight on 07 July 2015, 02:54:39
That makes a lot of sense. Particularly the influence of the Mechwarrior series (when I started playing BT, the Crescent Hawks' Revenge was the newest BT computer game *lol*). MWO bled over a little into the Mekwars scene, but not as much as we hoped.

As to MWDA again, I follow a couple other tabletop forums and I noticed that a lot of people who build BT armies repaint the old models and use them to play tabletop games with them, the inches variant. That looks actually quite nice.

And thanks for the welcome :).
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: False Son on 07 July 2015, 11:32:26
I loathe the gentleman's warfare concept.  Battletech's concept is applicable in the real world.  One has to like and be able to play along such strict rules in order to be competitive.  I cannot even grasp the concept of standing there and hoping the enemy misses me.

Don't get too ahead of yourself.  Battletech supposes that both forces have the time to line up shots at roughly the same time.  It doesn't take into account initiative to the point of pulling the trigger first means the enemy doesn't get to shoot back.  The shooting phase all resolving at once is itself a gentleman's agreement.

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: jackpot4 on 07 July 2015, 16:58:07
Don't get too ahead of yourself.  Battletech supposes that both forces have the time to line up shots at roughly the same time.  It doesn't take into account initiative to the point of pulling the trigger first means the enemy doesn't get to shoot back.  The shooting phase all resolving at once is itself a gentleman's agreement.

It isn't even close to the same as the American Revolution, 40k or warmachine which is all gentleman's warfare.

As soon as the weapons reload/recharge everyone fires in Battletech.  It isn't I stand there let your atlas shoot me, then I shoot back.  We both shoot each other as our weapons are ready.  Each turn is nonstop weapons fire. 

When your gauss slug tears my arm off my PPC in that arm is already in the air coming at you etc. Etc.

Two different concepts from my point of view
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: GhostCat on 08 July 2015, 08:03:36
It isn't even close to the same as the American Revolution, 40k or warmachine which is all gentleman's warfare.

I think it's a lot closer to the conventional war of the 18th century than you think.  Ranges are short, weapons not very accurate, and collateral damage was minimal.  Even though empires expand across many worlds with large populations, ecology's (plural, not possessive, see spell check) are still fragile on most of them, and resources still need skilled people to assemble them.  These huge war machines able to inflict massive damage, were generally designed to fight each other, not local farmers and factory workers.  Of course, there were still incidents like Kentares IV and Mallory's World that prove Destruction is easier than Domination.

False Son's reference was about the Game Mechanic.  Everybody gets a final shot from his dying swan, even if it's not very effective.  Pretty neat concept, even after thirty years of playing many other games. 

GC
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: PGaither84 on 22 July 2015, 02:31:54
Instead of starting a new thread, I was wondering what any of you might think of the following house rule ideas I have had:

1) Adopting you choice of the "I go-You go-We attack" system talked about here, or what I am now accustomed to, which is the Star Wars Miniatures combat system which is the same as Dungeons and Dragons. for those unaware, you have a choice of moving and then attacking, attacking and then moving, or moving twice. This is similar to the "Assault order" rules for Mechs in the Age of Destruction rule book. In fact, it is more powerful. I personally feel it is game changing in a positive way.

2)Extended range combat.
Here is a house rule my friends I and  used going back to 2002 when the game came out. The laughably short printed range values just ruined the flavor of combat for us. As I talked about in my previous reply, when 14 inches is the maximum range for LRMs, something just doesn't feel right. Our solution was to allow you to make an attack of up to double the printed range of the unit. however, this would grant an additional +2 the the target's defense value. All other restrictions applied, such as indirect fire, cover, and so forth. The flavor here is that the maximum printed range value was instead the effective accurate range value with the weapon. We agreed that we didn't want players shooting at each other from their command zones across the table, but when the average range for units is roughly 10 inches (less than one foot), there is a problem.
Source: http://www.warrenborn.com/Values_by_Faction.html (http://www.warrenborn.com/Values_by_Faction.html)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mindwiper on 19 April 2016, 10:36:06
Sry, for gravedigging... :D

Quick question: Who developed the MWDA timeline?

Was it already laid out by Randall back in the days, before Wizkids took over?

Or was it a new brainchild to come with the new gaming system in 2002-2003 and with it a Jordon Weissman hickup??

We have a small discussion at facebook and a guy says it was all Randalls or Herbs fault...Which i think is ridiculous. I only remember it this way that Herb took the pieces Wizkids/Topps left and formed our Battletech Dark Age, which I really like. Sadly I can't find the original interviews or comments.

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 19 April 2016, 11:58:08
Short form, and this is personal recollection from an outsider, not Word of God, but Jordan Weisman (yes, the one behind the HBS game) was the source of the timejump aspect, but based his leap from the (then-)FanPro canon. Randall, Herb and other CGL employees were involved in fleshing out the details of the path from there, but as contractors/freelancers/etc working for WK

Mixed bag.

WK gave FanPro enormous latitude to develop the BT timeline in the gap, provided "no direct contradictions". So (for example) there was no way to extensively nuke Terra in the BT Jihad timeline, given it survived largely intact in the WK timeline. But other than that, WK were very good - eg. Herb, IIRC, added in the return of the LCS Invincible, because nothing in the WK timeline stated anything about it one way or another.

The one thing one can assign clearly to Jordan Weisman was the need to provide a jump-start, and the effort to make the MW game playable without having to have absorbed 20+ years of BT history. And the clix mechanism, which he'd invented, anyway. Long-term BT fans were not the target audience - there's only a few to several thousand of us, as far as anyone can guess. This did put some noses out of joint in the fanbase. But given the enormously larger reach, and commercial success, of the MW game over it's lifetime - did you realise they produced more than seven million minis for MW? - the decision was sound, financially, for him.

IMHO, YMMV, etc.

W.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: cavingjan on 19 April 2016, 12:09:36
Hellbie summed it up nicely.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mindwiper on 19 April 2016, 12:17:12
thx guys! :)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: wantec on 20 April 2016, 12:03:53
Hellbie summed it up nicely.
Me thinks you have the wrong blue battlemaster. But Worktroll's summary is a good one.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Atlas3060 on 20 April 2016, 14:22:18
Me thinks you have the wrong blue battlemaster. But Worktroll's summary is a good one.
Oh you know the blue ones look alike.  ;D
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: cavingjan on 20 April 2016, 15:16:00
They are the same person. We've never seen them in the same room together. Their posting habits are completely opposite each other. They are just good and hiding the evidence like using an Australian proxy to make it look like one lives down there.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 20 April 2016, 17:34:33
That's .... a new one, I admit. Fortunately Brian and I are not commensurate; he's known to engage in physical activity, unlike myself, and also appears in Washington DC/Virginia gameshops.

There is, however, a disturbing possibility that if I and Welshman ever shook hands, there would be a titanic explosion ....
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: JadeHellbringer on 21 April 2016, 08:03:18
Plus everyone knows my alter-ego is actually Brian Posehn.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Stoobert on 22 April 2016, 16:38:30
I played MW: Dark Age from the beginning, was an Envoy, then a playtester for MW: Age of Destruction, then I quit.

To answer the OP, "Why disliked?" I think it can be summarized as:

1. Blind boosters artificially inflate the value of certain rarer units, making the game cheap to enter, but unnecessarily expensive if you want a chance at winning (or simply not losing every game). 

2. The rules were wildly different from BT, and in some cases simply unbelievable.  Example: Mechs could initiate an unopposed 'charge' at ranges several inches longer than any direct weapon system could fire

3. As is the case with collectible games, the rules and "meta" change rapidly with each new release, making it more complicated and expensive to keep playing

I stuck with it in hopes some rules would be changed, but many did not, and when they introduced more nonsense in the form of Pilot and Upgrades in AoD I simply had had enough. 

The 'organized play' system and giveaways were actually cool, which got people playing the game faster and more often than without such a system.  Playing a mech game in 45min is also cool.  But then discouraged by the above 3 points players began to fall away.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: SpaceCowboy1701 on 02 May 2016, 10:36:16
I wonder sometimes if the game would have lasted longer if it had actually started with the AoD rules, or at least the customizable 'mechs, with no significant V 2.0? I feel like the cards allowed the game enough flexibility to keep it going and changing without just power-creeping (not saying that it didn't power-creep, just that it didn't have to). I guess the related question is whether it would have lasted longer keeping the old format and doing something else to shake it up ... ? Locally, we probably had some of our largest play groups post-AoD, but they fell off somewhere after Domination, if I remember correctly ... but then our area is weird ...
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Hptm. Streiger on 02 June 2016, 04:54:04
I just had the idea to bring BT to my son - I fear the overcomplex calculation of BT might be a problem. MWDA seems to be ok.
I like the fast pace combat - its much faster as Alpha Strike (because in my eyes Alpha Strike kept the "calculation" and dropped the "cool" Micromanagement)

Perfect for a boy of 4 year  ;D - hey of course I'm joking he didn't understand the game - but he rolls the dice (never roll dice against a child - you are loosing.....triple or double six all the time) - and he counts the eyes and he is even able to do some minor calculation. And in our first game he destroyed me.

Anyhow, I think MWDA was disliked mostly because WizKids tried to create something completely new factions. Swordsworn, Dragon Fury bubble gum, neon colored factions.

The second might be the micro management. Lucky I have the TRO3145/3150 now, but without it i would have a hard time to imagine the game. So this Sekhemet, just energy weapons? But it is supposed to have missiles and AP gauss either...

Otherwise its a great and simple combination of combined arms - with lots of options to "create" house rules.

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: GordonBlackhammer on 16 January 2017, 20:29:42
I've seen a lot of criticism directed towards MechWarrior: Dark Age on other forums. Not so much this board, but then again, it's probably because it's a board dedicated to the game and coming here just to trash it is what's known as trolling.

Anyways, I'm rather curious as to what BattleTech fans didn't like about Dark Age back in 2003. I'm referring specifically to the game's story and background, since I'm sure the actual game itself had balance issues and stuff like that. Is it because of the jump in time frame with no explanation or lead up to the Inner Sphere's current state resulting in the setting becoming almost unrecognizable? And what do you all think of it now, when the original game's timeline has almost (already?) caught up to the Dark Age?

I'm probably a rarity, but I enjoyed the clix game a lot.  I could get almost half a dozen 300 point clix battles in in the same time it took to run one company vs. company battle in Battletech and there wasn't as much fiddly minutia to deal with either.  Plus, the clix game made it a lot easier to field combined arms units and use them effectively (though I admit that infantry seemed almost ridiculously overpowered early on).  It was a different kind of enjoyment than I had playing Battletech, but it was still enjoyable.  Plus it was easier to teach and easier to get people involved in as a quick pick-up game compared to some of the long drawn out game sessions of Battletech. 

I paid very little attention to the backstory for the most part other than knowing what the factions were representing and the overview of how we had gotten to the point where we were in the story.  The clan invasion of 3050 storyline was not something I enjoyed much in Battletech.  I had a lot more fun with the 3025 era, though I did run a game during Star League's War of Reunification and a few alternate timeline versions too.  3039 was the last Battletech era I enjoyed because of the return of the Star League mechs and the development of the Grey Death datacore.  So perhaps my mindset towards the MWDA timeline and its more balanced opposing factions was going to be more appealing than the incredibly mismatched IS vs. Clan battles of the early Clan era. 

I get few, if any, chances to play either game anymore, and I know of very few Battletech players in my area and none who seem to want to play anymore.  So the clix make it possible for me to run a quick battle when I have an hour to spare, even if it a solo battle.  It's not much, but it is better than nothing at all.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: pensiveswetness on 16 January 2017, 22:51:44
Ahh, memory lane (with all the dents, pot holes and beer cans littering the roads with it)... I remember being the first one on DropShipCommand.com(Now defunct) to coin the derisive term "Dorkage" for what most of us called 'ClickyTech'. It really summed up my feelings for the game, even though I did support it briefly. I guess it didn't help that, at the time [2003], I moved from Norfolk, Va (which had a reasonably strong gamer community fed from both Military, Military Contractor and College Student pools) to Oxnard, Ca (which did not). There was only ONE comic book & gaming store in the Ventura area & they rarely played MW:DA. Asking about BT was likened to expressions about BT's demise. There was one time I played a pick-up BT at someone's house. The end result was that my mini's gathered dust in my cases for the remainder of my time in California and were in storage until after I retired from the Navy.

Everyone else has given very good reasons why they disliked the game. It literally took reading current content (Era report/Field Manual 3145 as well as the current TRO's) to get me to appreciate the setting better but to me, the games will always be separate & unequal.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: jackson123 on 19 January 2017, 10:39:09
I believe it was disliked because they tried moving away from mech vs mech and more to combined arms combat.
I dont think a lot of the fan base was ready for that type of move.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 19 January 2017, 16:08:39
Essentially the combo everything.  The shock of the end of FASA WAS a thing.  Then rise of WizKids and their purchase of Franchise.  Now if it weren't for them, our current game company who keeps the torch alive for original branch of entire franchise would not be here.  They saved and "unfortunately" re-branded it Classic Battletech.

As its been mentioned above as years (Gaud this thread so old  :o) sudden changes that new company were bring into the franchise. Combined Arms, Goofy art work that littertly changed how old designs were going to look like, seeding new fans with possibly bad info, feeling of the dumbing down of the franchise from how MWDA was rolled out, not mentioned other things including pure protectism.  I myself had initially had bubbling hate for it, because i was seeing franchise being altered in way that could mess with new fans and potentially ruin the game as whole for the sake of quick sell for WizKids part.

In end WizKids didn't survive, fortunately the staff managed to save entire franchise.  However the damage was done, many the things introduced into the game in MWDA years had to be added to canon because it WAS canon due to way it was declared so many years ago.

NOW: Things are better, Dark Age was managed in manner that made sense and the material made it rough to handle was merged and made less of a problem.   

Hopefully, in the coming year (pray to the Battletech gods) new era begin. 
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: roosterboy on 19 January 2017, 16:17:10
I remember being the first one on DropShipCommand.com(Now defunct) to coin the derisive term "Dorkage" for what most of us called 'ClickyTech'.

Watch out, Oscar Wilde!
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 19 January 2017, 16:20:15
Just want to remind people that the ones creating the "the dumbing down of the franchise" had names like Randall Bills, Herb Beas, Ben Rome, etc.

The hacks :)

I get it. Some people didn't like MW:DA. That doesn't mean it was a bad thing for everyone. I don't like W40K, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game - a heck of a lot more people passionately love that game than love ours.

Accept we're niche dwellers. Embrace our niche, let go the need to hate others for not being our niche.

And - as Wrangler points out - we wouldn't be here if WK hadn't actively done a heck of a lot to allow our game to live on. I was inside the curtain on some of that - literally, it was "As long as you don't directly contradict anything, do what you want", and for way under commercial licencing rates.

W.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: cavingjan on 19 January 2017, 18:56:51
WT: don't forget the ring leader: Jordan Weisman
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 19 January 2017, 19:38:02
To be honest, I don't think Jordan had any involvement in the writing. Full credit to him for a) wanting to popularise the BT IP via the game mechanism he developed, and b) being incredibly supportive of FanPro and then IMR/CGL.

An unkind person might point out how each time he actually succeeds in getting something new off the ground & successful, he loses interest & moves off to do something new, and the old project grinds down. But I should be as successful as he is ... face it, he's the only person I can think of who's made money off the BT IP, and done so more than once.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Adun42 on 02 February 2017, 01:26:08
I'm bringing this up again as I'm coming back to bt.
I couldn't get into bt, and mind you, I played adv squad leader and was a big avalon hill fan.
But all the paper work of bt....

Mwda comes out without the need of an advanced degree in battletech! Awesome!!

But the best armies, you know, didn't have any...you know...actual mechs...in them.

Kinda like an aircraft carrier being rendered ineffective by a motor boat.

The economics got me, why would you field this multi million c-note tool of war to have someone on a moterbike hold it still for artillery.

Worse yet you could take that expensive warmachine and walk..walk..not fire...not run..across the board and have it blow up.

I dont even want a car that I have to pull over every couple of blocks and let cool before I continue on my way to work, much less the ultimate machine of war..
And I'm looking at you swordsworn.

I could outrun a laser...huh?
Right, my effective laser range for is 6"
My movement is 8"
Wait, let's talk about high intensity beams of light...or not...it just didn't feel...right
So the entire game system didn't seem right, and yes the spike bits on the Atlas... I've had wire cutters in hand...ready to "fix".

But now I've found alpha strike and seems to convert well to "n" scale, those minis are back on the gaming table.
Yay bt!

 

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: JDbigmoney on 09 March 2017, 22:47:56
You could sum up three web pages of sepporit comments like this......

MWDA was a reboot that never should have happened.

CBT is a game that REQUIRES an attention span......I mean that exactly how you read it

The world does not work that way anymore, in fact, an attention span is the last thing any seller of anything wants you to have

Even wonder why the newest Star Trek series of movies is another rehash ( don't ignore the fact that in order for the stories to flow they litterally have to check in with "another demension" for answers ) and you have two glarring examples of why attention spans are bad for buisness

CBT or as I prefer to call it....Battletech, is a game built around the concept of a fantastically massive story line that was created in the time when computers were just a step above type writers. It took an investment of time to just understand what you were looking at.

Then it happened

F.A.S.A. died

And just like everything else ever.....rather than let it die and we mourn over it's grave while remembering the good times, someone decided to make a zombie and try to resurect a corpse.

It's never the same as the original and the shammans who shake the rattles just want you to forget that fact but still shovel over money in the hopes that you might get back what you lost.

And in the case of Battletech....they did it twice
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 10 March 2017, 00:10:06
Mate ... give it up. MW:DA wasn't meant to be BattleTech. And it had wildly more players, over the period it was supported, than BT ever had.

Didn't appeal to you? No problems. Cool. You're allowed to have your preferences.

But crapping on those people who did enjoy it - not necessary. Let it go ....
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: JDbigmoney on 12 March 2017, 22:42:37
Dude

It is suppost to be battletech....hence using the name

And it was garbage.....want proof? Try and find a game.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: YingJanshi on 13 March 2017, 11:00:28
Dude

It is suppost to be battletech....hence using the name

And it was garbage.....want proof? Try and find a game.

Try finding a game of BattleTech....  ::) 8)
(Or even better, try to find a game store that actually stocks BattleTech...)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Easy on 13 March 2017, 11:51:39
cleanup
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: cavingjan on 13 March 2017, 15:23:32
(It was looted by it creator so I'm not sure how much it could be called looted.)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Talen5000 on 22 March 2017, 19:24:16
For me...DA had problems because it got rid of the established factions, didn't provide enough answers on tje nackgrou d quickly enough and had the RNG aspect.

The game itself was decent and the models great; it was a pity they weren't to the same scale as minis but you can't have everything. But the background with its lack of established factions and some silliness in the story...including the IMO awful Fortress Republic deus ex machina...turned me off the DA.

I also dislike the idea of destroying factions. These are entities players become invested in and which have a history. I don't like seeing the Comguards wiped out, I want the missing Nova Cat ships to turn up in the Protectorate and reform the Nova Cats and I didn't like the idea of the Free Worlds League being gone.

So....there was nothing truly major about why I didn't like DA. It was a decent game with much to recommend it. But it also had enough small irritations that it put me off.

And it wasn't BattleTech. So...in addition to the problems with the universe and background, it also wasn't the same game.


 
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 23 March 2017, 07:21:31
Functionally is was decent game for fast fighting.  I believe at heart one of the problems was handling of fixing rules or mechanics during its run and ultimately need for more profits at heart of it.  They had to come up more units to add to the game.  Admittively for me i like the mystery in the box thing, it added more buying the game trying get what you wanted.   

However, as normal Battletech player, alot of liberties were taken with what older units look liked.  That completely didn't meet the aesthetics regular Battletech.  Example the Panther.  It went from sleek and attractive Light Mech to something rather blocky and certainly not very good looking at all.  By CHANGING that unit's appearance, due to way CGL and franchise works  our good looking machine HAD to become that outright ugly thing of the future.   Before method/mechanics were inplace, alot of Clan OmniMech units part of the initial introduction of the game were rendered into normal BattleMechs (this is before fluff was made to explain why they weren't Omnis)  because the game mechanics didn't handle them.  I had HUGE problem with MWDA for that, which in-turn made this CANON fact.  Thus why initially it appeared suddenly there were NO more (visually in the DA Novels) no OmniMechs to speak of or dared mentioned in fluff.  Why confuse new person with concept they can't touch?  Also, the first batches of releases of units that included that Dossier (some that didn't) for the mechs, had bad tendency on very very new design to undergun those units Battletech stats wise verses MWDA.  On the Dial despite being undergunned in Total Warfare, the unit firepower was reasonable if facing likewise similar unit that may have been better armed.   Look at the Storm Raider or the Cuirass of examples of these.

IF that stuff hadn't messed up Dark Age related stuff, i won't have had as many issues with the game.  It was effect and handling of it by WizKids that i had the initial issues with it.  I got over some my problems with it, collected and played the game off and on until it's demise.




EDIT: Sorry, if my initial post was messed up. My normal computer isn't with me and this crap box i'm using interface is really lousy so it posted before i was done typing.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Giovanni Blasini on 23 March 2017, 11:04:02
Dude

It is suppost to be battletech....hence using the name

And it was garbage.....want proof? Try and find a game.

Technically, it didn't use the name "Battletech". It used the name "MechWarrior".  And, much like the video games aren't often the most literal adaptation of the Battletech tabletop game rules, MWDA took liberties.

Personally, the game itself, in its first incarnation, was a bit odd in terms of rules, but that wasn't entirely surprising for a new game out of the gates.  I think what did it in for me mainly was the change in aesthetics for some of my favorite units, but even more than that the nature of being a collectible miniatures game.  There was nothing quite like the feeling of buying a booster pack (I had about $200 into the game when it debuted), opening it, thinking, "c'mon, Panther..." and getting another ForestryMech (non-mod) instead.  I wanted to be able to build my own army my way, which was a pain in the neck with a CMG, requiring more effort than, in the end, I was willing to put forth on a game that had a number of other areas where I found it questionable.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Death by Lasers on 26 March 2017, 19:53:35
  Am I the only one that didn't have a problem with MWDA?  I bought a booster pack, thought it was kind of neat but never got into it.  I never begrudged its existence though.  Truth be told I was mostly happy they were still making Battletech novels.  I thought the first MWDA books were meh, but the later ones were actually very good.  Admittedly, I was also fine with Mechassault even though I've never played it and enjoyed the Battletech cartoon :P. 

  I'm even *gasp* ok with the Republic.  Yes, the Republic was written for the Dark Age as a noble faction of knights and paladins but once the Dark Age clixgame had its successful run and Battletech began to inevitably absorb it into canon I knew it would get a more three dimensional treatment and the sourcebooks did not disappoint.  I've pretty much been waiting since a Bonfire of Worlds to see what happens to it.  So far its been a decade but I'm hopeful the next decade we will see a conclusion/continuation Republic story arch.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 26 March 2017, 20:21:54
No, you're not the only one. Far from it.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: JDbigmoney on 13 April 2017, 20:23:49
Don't give me this "technically not Battletech" crap

Mechwarrior was and is still a registered trade mark....you know....what evidently murdered FASA in the first place.

It is/was a do-over in attemp to make a re-envisioned game without having to find a market

Imagine a terrible knock off of 40k and calling it Space Orks

Same shit, different pile
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: YingJanshi on 13 April 2017, 21:13:27
Don't give me this "technically not Battletech" crap

Mechwarrior was and is still a registered trade mark....you know....what evidently murdered FASA in the first place.

It is/was a do-over in attemp to make a re-envisioned game without having to find a market

Imagine a terrible knock off of 40k and calling it Space Orks

Same shit, different pile

Um...Just to be pedantic here, FASA closed shop before Jordan Weisman (you know, the guy that created BattleTech in the first place) started WizKids.

Also, however I feel about how MW:DA was run and played, it's undeniable that we would not be buying brand new BattleTech products right now if it MW:DA hadn't kept the franchise going. In fact they gave FanPro the licence to finish up the few products that FASA had left and then after a year or so to create brand new product (at least, that's how I understand the deal to have been). And FanPro was the direct predecessor to Catalyst.

Also, Weisman had invented the "Clix" mechanic...why shouldn't he use it as another avenue to keep his universe alive? (He did the same thing with his Crimson Skies universe as well, to better effect I think though.)

At the end of the day, who has more right than the creator of a game/universe/intellectual property reimagine/redo it? We can argue till we're blue in the face about the merits of the game (personally I still think it was very badly handled in some ways); but I do believe in giving credit where credit is due: and WizKids/MW:DA saved BattleTech.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: E. Icaza on 18 April 2017, 08:10:43
As an avid fan of HeroClix, I was excited about the prospect of "Mechwarrior Clix".  I bought a starter box and a crapload of boosters.  What killed my enthusiasm was the massive number of IndustrialMechs you got in the first wave or two of boosters.  Also, the factions seemed very much watered down or completely contrary to the ones that I have come to love (or love to loathe) and the backstory wasn't presented very well IMO.  I read the novels up to "Scorpion Jar" (which was actually very good), but by that point my interest had waned.  Most of the novels leading up to "Scorpion Jar" were pretty terrible and one novel wasn't enough to salvage my interest in the game.

I still have all of the minis though and will break them out from time to time to use in Alpha Strike and the like.  CGL has done more to get me interested in the DA/AoD time period than all of the materials from the Clix game combined.  While I still have some problems with certain aspects of it, I find it entertaining and engaging at least.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: trboturtle on 18 April 2017, 17:27:19
As an avid fan of HeroClix, I was excited about the prospect of "Mechwarrior Clix".  I bought a starter box and a crapload of boosters.  What killed my enthusiasm was the massive number of IndustrialMechs you got in the first wave or two of boosters.  Also, the factions seemed very much watered down or completely contrary to the ones that I have come to love (or love to loathe) and the backstory wasn't presented very well IMO.  I read the novels up to "Scorpion Jar" (which was actually very good), but by that point my interest had waned.  Most of the novels leading up to "Scorpion Jar" were pretty terrible and one novel wasn't enough to salvage my interest in the game.

Ironically enough, the novels get generally better after The Scorpion Jar.....

Craig
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Talen5000 on 18 April 2017, 18:10:25
MWDA was a reboot that never should have happened.

There's nothing wrong with a reboot if done right....and it easn't exactly a reboot.

Next time there is a time jump, however, I think it needs to be a good bit longer than 60 or 70 years. 6 or 7 hundred, allowing time for major changes, people to die off, technology and setting to change and so on would be better.

One of the big reasons for such a reset would be to remove a big barrier to entry so new players can join up without feeling overwhelmed by the games history.

Of course, in a game like CBT, the downside would be that the existing playerbase would want the existing timeline to move forward and eventually you'd have the dreaded "kill off the factions" moment.

Maybe the cold virus could mutate and wipe out a huge portion of humanity. We could call it the Snow Plague and have the nations go back to building hovertanks.

MWDA as a game in its own right....worked.
It was relatively fast and simple, it had nice minis, it looked good, played well and essentially saved the franchise. It had flaws...but it worked.

But....the existing BT crowd was not its target audience. And it showed. There were new factions, poorly explained. The game emphasised combined arms....not the King of the Battlefield.

Which is good because more varied units makes the game more interesting. But some didn't like it. But if I were to be honest....the King of the Battlefield probably should be the tank. Even in 3150.

There were a lot of niggling minor points that irritated many BT fans. Some more than others. There wasn't any one smoking gun as to why many BT players didn't like MWDA...

But it can be boiled down to.....it was simply a different game with different factions and different gameplay.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: E. Icaza on 18 April 2017, 21:36:43
Ironically enough, the novels get generally better after The Scorpion Jar.....

Craig

Oh, I know.  The problem was that I got pretty much disillusioned with the setting and stopped reading them.  I'll try to find the later novels and read them someday, but it isn't high on my list of priorities.  A big factor is I pretty much hated all of the "iconic" characters, with the exception of Tucker Harwell.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 20 April 2017, 09:14:32
All the later novels were superior to most the earlier novels. They found their nitch and were written by folks whom wete more intuned with both games and how they work so they make senses to readers whom play.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Death by Lasers on 21 April 2017, 16:29:51
  That's the thing about the Dark Age timeline is that it wasn't made for old Battletech fans but to gain new fans for its Clix-Based system.  It seems pretty standard that old franchises tend to separate themselves from the established canon to build a new fanbase.  Star Trek did this with TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise and Mechwarrior: Dark Age did this as well.  As far as I can tell it did this in two ways, by isolating itself from the old factions (like Voyager) by centering its stories in the Republic and by jumping the timeline forward (like TNG).

  Truth be told it probably would have made more sense to get rid of the old factions in the time jump but I think this would have been too traumatic for the Battletech player base.  Making the Republic the setting of the universe and allowing the rest of the factions to exist outside of the main setting was an elegant solution.  I have a feeling the Republic was meant to be primary scope of the universe as it was in the very first novels but it wasn't very long before it shifted away from the Republic to the old factions we know and love.

  As to Battletech's future I'm not sure if a time jump is the best plan.  It depends on if the goal is to try and bring in new people or appease on old fan base.  A large time jump could streamline the setting and cut into the huge log of technology that exists now (seriously how many kinds of laser are there at this point?) and bring things to a point where huge amounts of prior knowledge aren't necessary to understand what is going on.  The problem is you then alienate the older fanbase because now their massive collection of miniatures and dusty rulebooks are effectively obsolete in the brave new world of Teltatae Phaser Firing Grav Tanks™ and 10,000 ton Wolverine Light Sword Wielding MegaMeks™.  I don't have a dog in this fight either way but I imagine its a tricky position to be in when deciding what to do with a well established franchise like Battletech.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: cavingjan on 21 April 2017, 17:34:42
The Republic was supposed to die after two years.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Empyrus on 21 April 2017, 17:48:20
The Republic was supposed to die after two years.
What?
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Death by Lasers on 21 April 2017, 17:57:35
The Republic was supposed to die after two years.

  I had no idea :o.  Considering it's fifteen years later and the Republic is still alive (for now) I wonder what changed. 

P.S. Was it also the plan to shift the story from the Republic splinter groups (Dragon's Fury, Storm-Hammerers, Highlanders, Spirit Cats, Steel Wolves, Swordsworn) to the Successor States and Clans? 
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: cavingjan on 21 April 2017, 18:44:30
They became popular. They were not intended to get any game pieces except a few LEs in the first few sets. No regular game pieces were originally intended for them. Obviously they changed plans and slowed the destruction.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Empyrus on 21 April 2017, 18:50:06
So, basically the idea was kind of let the players to experience the dissolution of the "Star League", perhaps? How curious.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Nanhold on 17 June 2017, 19:33:45
I personally loved the game, though not all aspects of the game.

It was easy to pick up, I personally like MOST of the mini's (not all by any means), and it made battletech fun to play for me again.

That being said, there were some simply BROKEN mechanics, such as "Tank Drop" that broke the game for many people.
Yeah, the "Tank Drop" went a bit too far for my suspension of disbelief as well, even though it at least seemed to be somewhat realistic when done with heavy transport VTOLs. But a light wheeled transport vehicle being able to pull a 100 ton tracked tank as if it was a mobile home? That just ain't how it's supposed to be!
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Marc C on 09 August 2018, 08:06:20
For someone who had no clue what BattleTech AND had never bought a miniature wargame before, was it was a great entry point. Sure the game had issues but you could start playing in 15 minutes. No glue no paint. We had tournaments going in stores. It was great fun for a good two years.

We solved the random booster problem by doing group buys of booster crates, then opening each booster individually and splitting by faction. One faction per customer.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: koalabirb on 10 August 2018, 00:21:04
We solved the random booster problem by doing group buys of booster crates, then opening each booster individually and splitting by faction. One faction per customer.

I kind of think this was the idea. My assumption as a kid was that they were trying to build the same kind of community that you find in MtG.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: wolfcannon on 12 April 2019, 10:01:51
my problem with the Fedcom civil war, Jihad and Dark Ages was the general lack of design quality of the new units being produced, and seemingly lack of maintaining current looks of many of the favorite 'Mechs such as the Panther, Firestarter etc.   And the general idea that after hundreds of years of warfare that even the vaunted SL couldnt change, all the sudden everyone drinks kool-aid and voila everyone is turning swords into plowshares Clans and Great Houses, was something i couldn't understand and felt was a concept being pushed over what all the great fans of this game was expecting.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 12 April 2019, 12:37:36
my problem with the Fedcom civil war, Jihad and Dark Ages was the general lack of design quality of the new units being produced, and seemingly lack of maintaining current looks of many of the favorite 'Mechs such as the Panther, Firestarter etc.   And the general idea that after hundreds of years of warfare that even the vaunted SL couldnt change, all the sudden everyone drinks kool-aid and voila everyone is turning swords into plowshares Clans and Great Houses, was something i couldn't understand and felt was a concept being pushed over what all the great fans of this game was expecting.
The looks were changed, since people in Wizkids wanted in my opinion to change it up. Effectively uglified classic mechs, canon wise were stuck with them.  Some came out ok, most did not.  Thankfully were out those woods.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Orin J. on 26 April 2019, 21:15:44
i'm literally always surprised reading this thread. locally, i saw no problems with the game, but the community......eegh. i always assumed that the thievery and scammers were game-wide and it was bad blood that made most people dislike it, excluding those people that were just against the game system (unfair) and the blind-box practices (fair).
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: James Bedford on 19 July 2020, 06:44:08
I don't think anyone who actually played this game disliked or had serious problems with it.  I remember complaining about playtesting, or new abilities not being thought out enough, but never outright dislike.  Dislike seems to mostly come from the old BT grognards who didn't like it because it was a new thing.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: DarkSpade on 19 July 2020, 08:43:57
From what I've seen, a lot of the hate seems to come from people who gave it little more than a quick glance.   You hear things like, "they threw out the original factions," and complaints about how it ruined battletech.  Or my favorite, "this isn't want the creators of battletech would have done!" oh really?  ;D

     I played it through it's whole run, and me and a friend even tried to come up with our own 3 edition rules after it it was canned.  Through that we figured out that the clix game's greatest weakness was the dials and there was nothing we could do to fix that.  Not the mechanic of the dials, but rather what was printed on them. 
     Every unit in the game had a glass jaw.  If you took too identical units and had them fight it out, whoever got the first hit was very likely to be the winner because the wounded unit would have a harder time hitting back, do less damage if it hit, and be easier to get hit again.  Lose of any specials would make this even worse.
     This is why tank drop, VToL swarm, pog spam, the twins, and almost all the other cheese was so powerful.  They let you get that first hit in.  It's also why you rarely(not never) saw assault mechs.  One decent AP hit and they weren't any better than a medium that costs half as many points.  True, there were gimmick dials, like the wolf hunters, where that first hit would make you better, but most players knew where the sweet spot was on the dials for the popular units and would make sure they knocked you right past it.


     I think what hurt the game early though was they over did the ICE mechs. The first set had 24 of them!  I remember hearing from a few people who were really curious or even excited about the game, but lost all interest when their first 3 boosters were all ICE mechs.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mohammed As`Zaman Bey on 19 July 2020, 10:54:26
  Personally, anybody who "hates" a game has far too much time on their hands. I played WH40K when it came out as a RPG with a simple tabletop combat system. That combat system took off in popularity and they dropped the RPG aspect and began revising the rules every few months in order to sell books and figs -which I saw through after a friend spent insane amounts of money, bought sets of minis, and GAVE me hundreds of figs he didn't want...eventually, dropped playing the game and pointed it out as a scam to other players and sold off my painted figs.

  Some of my friends played MWDA and after playing a couple of games, I saw how much it resembled all the features of WH40K and MtG that I didn't particularly like, so I chose to decline playing (especially after a tournament where I witnessed rampant cheating, and almost got into a fist fight with some little cretin's father).
  I've been a wargamer since the 1960s, and for a while, I even lacked interest in BT, due to its SCI-FI theme and only consented to play when a GM begged me to help a struggling campaign where the players lacked a wargaming background and treated tabletop battles as if they were playing D&D (another genre  in which I had little interest, but applied Squad Leader principles successfully), and eventually turned the unit around, which attracted more players to the campaign.
  I don't hate any game -I even played the football and baseball simulation games, even though I would never waste my time watching the actual sports or devote brain cells to remembering key players. Despite all the invitations, I declined participating in the seasonal leagues and tournaments, as they may as well have been in Greek to me.

  Lack of interest is not hate, as hate actually requires more effort than these activities are worth.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Sartris on 19 July 2020, 12:13:09
Blind box collecting and lack of a local scene killed enthusiasm for me. It was also in the middle of my lowest point of BT interest and when MtG was eating all of my money

Had it crested in popularity a few years later when I had an actual job and lived in a bigger city, I might have given it a shot

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Renard on 19 July 2020, 14:17:40
If I had to put my finger on it, it's that I always thought of Battletech as a pretty strategic game comprised entirely of the BT Manual or RoW Compendium.  The TROs and minis were cool but not necessary. If you had the stats tables and record sheets, you could play with scraps of paper if you wanted. The "collectible" nature of MWDA feels more like MTG or something. Your enjoyment is limited by how much you want to pay into it, and there's not as much to nerd out about. I got into the game because I loved the TROs and record sheets/mech-tinkering and minis. My friends were into D&D or WH40k/Necromunda, and I just preferred the military sci fi setting so much more. Filling out record sheets with a sharpie, photocopying, and then carrying out these big battles was amazing. No awkward roleplaying or creepy/gross lore, just a fun sci fi veneer over a fun strategy wargame. And plain six sided dice instead of all the exotic icosahedrons.

The MWDA thing doesn't even register as Battletech for me.  Alpha Strike is dangerously close to falling off my radar.  Like, if we're not keeping track of hip actuators and how many autocannon rounds are left or wincing at headshots, it feels like a different product. The clix system mystifies me.

The other reason people might care is that the lore bleeds over into all of the battletech universe, so some of the hate for that gets displaced onto the game? Pretty much every other IP from James Bond to MTG to D&D to comic books have alternate universes or reboots to take risks and experiment with new story beats or mechanics, and attract new fans by offering a simple on-ramp into the larger product ecosystem. I don't know why Battletech is married to a single continuity. It would be fine to develop different sourcebooks/product lines in different timelines or universes or whatever with unique mechanics, or abandon the idea of a rigid timeline that progresses in these 5-10 year increments altogether. Then people don't have meltdowns about FWL or Nova Cats or the Republic or whatever, and you don't have to worry about in-universe faction bloat. The core idea is big robots bashing each other, not the retro-futurist feudalism or retro-futurist republic or retro-futurist religious crusade.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: ActionButler on 19 July 2020, 15:24:03
Age of Destruction could have been the best thing to happen to this game if not for a few design decisions.

First, the blind guys are a non-starter. When I’m trying to build an army, I want what I want. I want the mech I want for the faction I want. It would be one thing if you could blind buy for specific factions, but just rolling the dice on maybe getting a decent unit for a faction you like was a killer.

Second, the factions were weird. I don’t have a problem with the Dark Age or the new mechs, but the overlap of a new era, a new story, new mechs, and completely new factions were all just too much When combined together. There was nothing familiar that I could hold onto. We’re the Steel Wolves basically just Clan Wolf? Of course they were. THEN WHY NOT JUST LET THEM CLAN WOLF!?

That being said, the actual gameplay was very solid. I like the Clix system. Is it different from CBT? Yes, but different isn’t bad. In fact, that Clix system has been wildly successful for many years, so someone was clearly doing something right.

If we could go back and do it all over again, I’d like the see the Clix system as an Inner Sphere vs Invading Clans dynamic. Mechs are classed to one of two factions (IS and Clan) and any mech, vee, or infantry can be added to any army of its faction. Maybe let subfactions (Great Houses, specific Clans, and mercenaries) come into play at the commander level. Like, 1 in every 10 blind buy boxes has a special commander unit that has slightly better stats and gives your army special faction rules if used as the leader.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: DarkSpade on 19 July 2020, 16:07:08
From what I understood, the new factions were to keep things simple for players new to the fiction.  Smaller number of them and with much shorter history to learn.  The intention always was to bring the real factions in later.   As someone who had only dipped his toe into battletech a few times before clix was a thing, I can honestly say it made catching up easier for me.

And the Steel Wolves weren't exactly Clan Wolf from what I remember.  More like a bunch of Clan Wolf wannabes that had just enough trueborns with them to fake it.  In the end, the whole faction broke up into several mercenary groups of various sizes and success.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: ActionButler on 20 July 2020, 17:11:46
I seem to recall reading the rationale for the factions somewhere else. I suppose it makes some amount of sense, and I’m glad that you benefitted from it, but I guess I’m still unconvinced.

For instance, what if we started the game from scratch? Keep it set in the Dark Age, but only give players the option of the original Great Houses. Each is fairly simple to understand. Each is fairly easy to parse. The introduce the Clans, one at a time, just like (I think) they did with the actual game.

I’m not saying what they did was wrong, I’m just saying that I really think it could have been done in such a way that the original factions were preserved.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: DarkSpade on 20 July 2020, 17:44:36
Having Stone jumble up all the factions within the Republic gives a lore plausible reason for any two factions to fight too.  Also, the great houses were supposed to be mostly in favor of the RotS(at least on publicly) so it makes sense that they wouldn't want to start picking fights with it on day one.

But for a long term player, I can totally understand how it would be very off putting.


I do wonder how much of people's dislike, or even hatred, was actually out of fear?   As I recall, the future of battletech was a on pretty shaky ground around the time the clix game came out.  I imagine to some, the clix game looked like a threat to something they held dear.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 20 July 2020, 17:53:11
Fear, plus change - "this isn't the game I've invested so much of my emotional energy in!"

But it repeats saying - WizKids were incredibly supportive of then-FanPro, and offered them much lower commercial terms on licencing, etc than anyone else in the industry would ever have done. Their dictats were limited to "don't contradict anything we say" - fair enough.

But Jordan Weisman wanted to do a thing, so he did that thing how he wanted to do it, until the thrill was gone and he moved onto his next thing.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mohammed As`Zaman Bey on 20 July 2020, 19:41:33
I do wonder how much of people's dislike, or even hatred, was actually out of fear?   
  No, it's a game. More gamers fear chess as there is no luck involved at all. I enjoy chess but don't devote time or memory to the many terms or named scenarios or various Masters of the game. One of my friends, a regionally rated player, earns money teaching chess. If I could do that with BT, life would be golden!

  I've always wondered why there wasn't a WW2 Clix game; Considering how well Flames of War has taken off (I call it WH:WW2, that is, WH with WW2 minis) you'd figure people would jump for a simplified, fast-paced game that was easy to play and you didn't have to paint armies. In one store, FoW outsold WH as most of the players were WW2 buffs. After playing a couple of games, I decided it wasn't worth my time or investment, although I did inform players that there were several sites that sold cheaper, better quality minis, and if they wanted larger armies at a fraction of the cost, they could mold their own using resin.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Major Headcase on 21 July 2020, 00:36:53
  I've always wondered why there wasn't a WW2 Clix game; Considering how well Flames of War has taken off (I call it WH:WW2, that is, WH with WW2 minis) you'd figure people would jump for a simplified, fast-paced game that was easy to play and you didn't have to paint armies. In one store, FoW outsold WH as most of the players were WW2 buffs. After playing a couple of games, I decided it wasn't worth my time or investment, although I did inform players that there were several sites that sold cheaper, better quality minis, and if they wanted larger armies at a fraction of the cost, they could mold their own using resin.

  While not a clix game, there was the Axis & Allies blind box minis game with simple card stats. That was very popular around Eugene and Portland where I lived. I remember buying far more of those blind boxes than i should have at the time... especially once they released the Navy version of the game! I must have had a dozen Akagis!!  ;D
  I still use my very large collection of rebased and repainted MWDA clix mechs for larger scale Alpha Strike games. I liked the clix game at first, but 1: the blind boxes were too stingy with the good mechs; there's only so many Agomech MODS and Koshis you can get before you got frustrated... 2: the game had terrible power creep and new rules exploits in each  new expansion. Unfortunately selling new boxes as fast as possible trumped quality game design.
  I'm glad they made it though. It actually helped bring me back to Battletech after not playing since 1996 or so. I LIKED the new but recognizable factions and the fresh start to the Timeline. A d for the cheap price I didn't mind the less than stellar quality of the minis. As for ugly designs?? For me personally, they were no worse than half the designs from TR 2750 or PP, so I was okay with a few ugly ducklings.  :)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mohammed As`Zaman Bey on 21 July 2020, 03:21:30
  While not a clix game, there was the Axis & Allies blind box minis game with simple card stats.
  A&A...Risk! for adults... My chess instructor friend would invite me to play that and several other more esoteric board games, including one simulating the Punic Wars where he claimed Carthage would always lose....before I beat him, but it was based on running a lot of numbers -The Carthaginians had to wage a blitzkrieg and keep the Romans off balance. Since Hannibal was the best commander until Scipio shows up, he has to force the Romans into as many field battles as possible, before they Roman legions grow too large. Hannibal's weakness is siege warfare. If Romans hole up in cities and towns, they are nearly invincible. There are also event cards that help or hinder each side, like extra troops or siege machines, which make sieges much easier. My victory was total luck...I gambled my army on 50/50 odds in battle and never lost. One bad battle could have changed a lot of things but I was taught to play aggressively and it usually works.
  My gaming group...Axis & Allies...I'm the one with the beard...
(https://i.imgur.com/2OLeJXW.jpg)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mecha82 on 21 July 2020, 10:40:52
From what I have seen some dislike MWDA/AoD because how different that era that it introduced is from what I had used to as well as having those minor factions. Of course there is some dislike for game system being so simple and miniatures being in blind boxes. So really there is no single reason why people dislike MWDA/AoD and it depends from each person why they dislike it. 
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 21 July 2020, 14:51:42
I think part of the initial dislike was from people who felt MWDA was going end up replacing Classic BattleTech with dumb-down version of the game.

Stats which came with Dark Age, became canon.  Like very few weapons found on the Cuirass and the Mjolnir (Mech). Which were done by marketing people for Wizkids.  I remember that vividly that it was fear, espcially the uglification of older Mechs, like Panther and the DA Atlas, with it's tusks and cartoonish appearance.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: grimlock1 on 21 July 2020, 17:57:44
My connection to the setting has always been more about the fiction.  The characters.  If the characters don't matter to me, the setting doesn't matter. Why should I care which side wins a war without Alice and Bob to make it relevant?  The jump to Dark Age opens with 90% of the Alices and Bobs you cared about are dead with no basically explanation.

I empathize with the people who read the Warrior Trilogy then had to deal with the jump to  to 3050, but for the most part, all those characters from the 4th War were still around and were mentoring a new generation.

Between the lack of legacy characters, massive changes to to the geopolitical landscape, the only thing I could latch onto that said, "This is Battletech," was that waste heat was a thing to be managed. Beyond that it felt like late-80's and early 90's of Gundam where it was like they would just paint the hero's mech white with blue trim, slap a V-fin on it and call it Gundam Something-or-other.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mecha82 on 21 July 2020, 18:11:31
I remember that vividly that it was fear, espcially the uglification of older Mechs, like Panther and the DA Atlas, with it's tusks and cartoonish appearance.

I always found odd that some DA mechs had ammo belts and heat sink visible. It seemed like inpractical design choice.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 21 July 2020, 18:22:31
Mecha in general are impractical design choices. They were, I assume, channeling the power of the Rule of Cool ;)
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mohammed As`Zaman Bey on 21 July 2020, 18:45:49
Mecha in general are impractical design choices. They were, I assume, channeling the power of the Rule of Cool ;)
  Agreed, the target demographic was the younger players, so the figs had to appeal to them over design practicality.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: DarkSpade on 21 July 2020, 20:12:22
That Atlas wasn't too bad once they removed all the spiky bits.  What killed the panther for me was that weird pose it had and the fact that the minis were supposed to have been in scale with each other, but the panther was huge for a light mech.  Don't think they ever really got light mech scale right until the owens.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Major Headcase on 22 July 2020, 03:49:26
I posted these a long time ago I think (it might have been on Lead Adventure forum...  ???)
But this is what I did with all my MWDA clix minis....
...And then I bought lots of them after the game ended. I got a full case of 48 booster boxes for $50. I had an addiction.
I sorted out all the Battlemechs (dumped all the Industrial mechs and Industrial MODs and vehicles and infantry in a box and ignored them) and sorted them into 9 companies of 12 and 4 binaries of 10. I intended to repaint all of them but I only got about 1/3 done when I put them in storage during a move 2 years ago... I should get them out and finish them.
We played giant size Alpha Strike and giant size regular Btech (on a large 4x6, 3 inch hex grid mat I bought).
**I discovered that there are a bunch of the MWDA dial stats online in a column format, so you can still play the clix game but with the stats on a card or printed sheet and just cross off columns as it takes damage.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 22 July 2020, 07:58:37
I understand it was being marketed to perhaps a younger crowd.  I think they made a lot bad chocies.  I think the later mechs they came out with were much better and less cartoonish. 

Art work was done of the Classic & Dark Age Atlas (AS-7K2 stuff not the Atlas III) fighting side by side, i can for life remember which book it art was from.

DA had its good points, such as it did push CGL/FanPro with new technologies which was essentially from everything i saw wasn't coming out (i mean no new experimental weapons, much new tech (not all) came from the Tech Card/Upgrades you used on your Mechs.  Heck, we won't have gotten the Quadvees or even the SuperHeavy BattleMechs if wasn't for Dark Age/Age of Destruction.   
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Robroy on 22 July 2020, 08:37:53
I posted these a long time ago I think (it might have been on Lead Adventure forum...  ???)
But this is what I did with all my MWDA clix minis....
...And then I bought lots of them after the game ended. I got a full case of 48 booster boxes for $50. I had an addiction.
I sorted out all the Battlemechs (dumped all the Industrial mechs and Industrial MODs and vehicles and infantry in a box and ignored them) and sorted them into 9 companies of 12 and 4 binaries of 10. I intended to repaint all of them but I only got about 1/3 done when I put them in storage during a move 2 years ago... I should get them out and finish them.
We played giant size Alpha Strike and giant size regular Btech (on a large 4x6, 3 inch hex grid mat I bought).
**I discovered that there are a bunch of the MWDA dial stats online in a column format, so you can still play the clix game but with the stats on a card or printed sheet and just cross off columns as it takes damage.

You want to get rid of those Industrial mechs, vees, and infantry I will take them. Seriously, PM me I will buy them.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: grimlock1 on 22 July 2020, 09:22:19
I always found odd that some DA mechs had ammo belts and heat sink visible. It seemed like inpractical design choice.
Oddly, exposed heatsinks are potentially more practical. Radiators need air flow to work.  So, with some clever engineering, those big fins might be more effective than the radiator banks suggested in the Mad Dog cutaway (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/File:Mad_Dog_-_interior.jpg).  I suspect that those fins are actually housings for radiator banks with vents to pull air inside them. The advantage over a more conventional design is that the entire assembly has more surface area, thus contributes a bit more efficiency.

Exposed ammo belts?  Yeah. I got nothin'. And exposed feed chute like on a USN CWIS is one thing, but stuff like the Legionnaire? :'(
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Renard on 22 July 2020, 11:11:58
Oddly, exposed heatsinks are potentially more practical. Radiators need air flow to work.  So, with some clever engineering, those big fins might be more effective than the radiator banks suggested in the Mad Dog cutaway (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/File:Mad_Dog_-_interior.jpg).  I suspect that those fins are actually housings for radiator banks with vents to pull air inside them. The advantage over a more conventional design is that the entire assembly has more surface area, thus contributes a bit more efficiency.

In favor of your hypothesis, the 3025 fluff for the Hermes II explicitly says the "wings" on the heels are exposed heat sinks.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mohammed As`Zaman Bey on 22 July 2020, 15:10:11
I understand it was being marketed to perhaps a younger crowd.  I think they made a lot bad chocies.  I think the later mechs they came out with were much better and less cartoonish. 
  Marketing is everything. Many players love the fiction and fluff, while I find it a useless waste of space in a rule book. WH40K fluff was always useless, tongue-in-cheek garbage and more than once, a whole book would be devoted to nothing but fluff, which is why I sold my WH minis and tossed the books after shooting the company hate mail after the 6th rewrite of their rules which required buying certain minis. It turned WH40K in a "pay to win" scam when the Eldar became gods on the battlefield for a while.
  I consider all random collection games "pay to win" as it rewards the players who spend more cash to gamble on getting the rare, powerful items that change the balance of play.
  When I played MtG, one of our group always had a briefcase with over $30,000 worth of cards he'd buy on auctions and he'd play with a 200 card deck filled with ultra rare, hyper expensive cards, yet he NEVER won a game. I'd crush him with a simple, 60 card land destruction deck as a large number of cards dilutes the value of those high-power cards by making their chance of being drawn less likely. I eventually learned that it was better to buy full boxes of card packs and resell them on Ebay a year or so later at quadruple to ten times the purchase price.

Quote
DA had its good points, such as it did push CGL/FanPro with new technologies which was essentially from everything i saw wasn't coming out (i mean no new experimental weapons, much new tech (not all) came from the Tech Card/Upgrades you used on your Mechs.  Heck, we won't have gotten the Quadvees or even the SuperHeavy BattleMechs if wasn't for Dark Age/Age of Destruction.
  Agreed. DA allowed the game to push the envelope to introduce tech the BTU was reluctant to touch...which made DA an excellent Alternate Universe setting.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: James Bedford on 23 July 2020, 08:06:20
I'll agree with you that the biggest weakness was the 'hit-first' problem of the game.  Given that dials degraded so quickly, one 4 or 5 damage click was all it took to win.  My one friend and once tried a house rule where we dealt all damage at the end of the 2nd player's turn, I think it improved the game dramatically, as the 2nd player had a chance to strike back before before damaged degraded that stats.

If the game were to ever be reborn, (Which requires Topps to give the rights back to Catalyst, who then could license it to Wizkids), a couple things would need to be changed to make it more fair and interesting.

1 - Dials that stay the same or only slightly degrade throughout time (I believe Heroclix has done this more recently, which causes people to complain about 'power creep', but if it keeps players in a game, what's wrong with that?)
2 - Redesigning the defense stat concept.  Defense should be a measure of how hard a unit is to hit, with armor features to reduce damage (So lights should have tons of defense, with heavies and assaults less).  If dials are more stable, defense values shouldn't matter as much, because an assault that takes 5 or 6 damage will be able to hit back just as hard.
3 - Keep damage values more reasonable.  Lights should do more than 2, with rare exceptions of 3 or even 4 (But other stats would suffer), Mediums no more than 3, Heavies 4 or 5, and assaults 5 or 6.  As the game was now, there were plenty of mediums with 4 or 5 damage and it made you wonder why play a heavy for 50 or 60 more points instead of the cheaper option?

A rebooted clix game would be great.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Mecha82 on 23 July 2020, 15:44:12
While Mech Clix had it's issues it was still fun to play dispite those issues. And WK must had done something right with it because so many people enjoyed playing it.   
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: vaderi on 24 July 2020, 02:01:51
While Mech Clix had it's issues it was still fun to play dispite those issues. And WK must had done something right with it because so many people enjoyed playing it.

This is the important thing, it was relatively fun to play and it brought people into the community. I know for me at least, while I found Battletech first, I wouldn't have joined the Battletech community without the first step of Dark Age and Age of Destruction.

I find it kind of funny that my favorite AoD mech (the Neanderthal) looks far better in AoD than the IWM model we got(which I'm super happy exists at all) given that most of the Clickytech mech designs feel very exaggerated compared to Battletech designs.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: James Bedford on 24 July 2020, 11:27:36
while some clickytech designs were terrible, I still would take them any day over most of the original BattleTech designs, which were literally just "boxes on top of boxes, here's a canon".  The Dark Age designs gave character to a lot of the mechs, which made games more interesting.  Even when I see a lot of the old BattleTech metal minis, it just looks like bigger and smaller versions of boxy robots, unappealing to my eyes.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Renard on 24 July 2020, 12:31:54
while some clickytech designs were terrible, I still would take them any day over most of the original BattleTech designs, which were literally just "boxes on top of boxes, here's a canon".  The Dark Age designs gave character to a lot of the mechs, which made games more interesting.  Even when I see a lot of the old BattleTech metal minis, it just looks like bigger and smaller versions of boxy robots, unappealing to my eyes.


I love the original designs. They're obviously big stompy war machines. I always thought of the names as idiosyncratic descriptions of the appearance of the mech. Like there were few or no deliberate aesthetic choices, but many mechs came out with different little touches, and that garnered them nicknames. Like the Jenner is mostly legs, gets nicknamed after a famous runner, or the Hermes has the wings on its heels, gets nicknamed after the messenger god.

The protomechs are probably my least favorite. They look too anthropomorphic.  They're very deliberately sculpted to look like something.

The closer the sculpt gets to Evangelion, the more I'll dislike it. Just the association makes me gag a bit.

It seems like IWM has gone in a bigger, more shaped direction with their sculpts so that the W40K style transfers more easily. With more curved surfaces, the highlighting and shading effects look more natural than flat surfaces.

Do you like the new agoac sculpts and the looks for the clan invasion box?  Or are those still too boxy?
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 24 July 2020, 13:47:49
My nephew does W40K, and I haven't really seen W40K in the new AoGC sculpts. I like the look of them - and most of the KS art we've seen for the minis not yet released. Things I like about the new minis is that the greater size does make them easier to work on; the greater definition means that simple techniques make them look really good, far more easily than some of the older minis; and being plastic, they're much easier to mod.

OTOH, the MW:DA minis behave pretty similar. I'll always be happy to use a DA Phoenix Hawk on the table on a 1.25" hex base ;)

Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Kyryst on 19 August 2020, 15:35:20
For me, it boiled down to the fact that I thought the Word of Blake won. I had been reading Battletech novels for a while, played Mechwarrior 3, 4, and X-Box, MC:1 and MC:2, had some background documents... And after reading the few MechWarrior books I could get my hands on, my thoughts were, "Holy S***, the Blakists won."

 I had read the Fedcom Civil war books, and the breaking of the 2nd Star League, where the WOB went crazy, and it had seemed like a steady decline in plausibility and continued breaking of in universe "rules" to force events according to an overarching timeline that twisted characters and arbitrary granting and removing of intelligence and character traits. Katherine Steiner-Davion, and Sun-Tzu Liao, Victor Steiner-Davion, Kai Allard-Liao, Isis Marik, Jaime Wolf, the WoBbies, so many characters suddenly had hyper-competency or incompetency, in multiple fields that they always or never had. I could not understand, it was a grinding uphill fight after centuries of stagnation and backsliding, but we had new weapons and mechs, and even warships!

But somehow, ignoring all restrictions on factories, warships, the loss of all military structure above regiment level, research and development, infantry support weapons or transports, the long grind to elite piloting, you had all of these arising from a faction that was usually regarded as incompetent and inexperienced. And even if you gave them an elite intelligence service and a small corp. of veterans, there is still no way to go from have a security branch penny-packeted around the Sphere with a Navy that kick-started itself at the discovery of the clans, to having what appeared in the Jihad. I mean, everybody remembered roleplaying as mercenaries and how much it sucked going from green or regular up to veteran. Not to mention the holy grail of elites (usually resulting in the BM/GM ruling that your "elite" pilot went on to greener pastures, leaving your mercenary band behind, because "elites are OP").

And this all happened in 20 years, from the discovery of the clans to the Word of Blake Jihad. The thought of what was the next incarnation of the Stefan Amaris Coup, winning... between that and IRL issues, kind of alienated me from the setting. I thought all the tech, and even the combined arms doctrine was cool, but the Republic drove me away.

You have the momentum of centuries, proud traditions of mercenaries, and then, it was all gone. No neat expanded universe, it was play in the sandbox of the republic or else. Reading the novels, it was like seeing major government propaganda everywhere, and these fanatic Knights of the Sphere, "Doing what must be done to uphold the Republic." Exarch Stone, who came out of no where, as far as I could tell, was upheld as the saviour of the Republic. And the Republic seemed to be an expanded Word of Blake Protectorate (Which seemed to eerily mirror the lost Terran Hegemony), the knights seemed to mirror the Manei Domini right down to the fanaticism, self-righteousness, equipment that seemed very Wobbly, and what seemed like cybernetic enhancements to me. Every body was disarmed, mechs were rare, nothing seemed to have gotten better in the civilian sector despite decades of peace (honestly seemed worse then worlds were a hundred years prior to me).

I didn't really notice the Hero clix Mechwarrior stuff, and certainly didn't realize there was background info explaining the jihad and formation of the Republic until later. And even then, all it seemed to be to me was a board wipe of everything that was being built up prior to the Jihad. I didn't really like Devlin Stone, David Lear, or the architects of the Republic- and I hated what Victor Steiner-Davion turned into. All I could see was how it killed anything I liked about the setting. And I walked away.

That is is why I dislike Mechwarrior: Dark Age. It was the final straw that ruined Battletech for me. I lingered, and watched the boards, and read anything that disregarded or took place prior or altered the Fedcom Civil War/ Breaking of the Second League. I completely ignore the Republic of the Sphere even now, which is why I don't even bother with AoD. I had tabletop games going before this whole COVID-19 mess, and a fair size collection of minis, and I would rather not acknowledge the existence of the Sphere in order to continue to play. Because, to me, the existence of the Republic of the Sphere, or something close to it, is why the WoBblies started the Jihad in the first place (Jihad, build up industry in the Protectorate, smash everybody else, Create nation, Profit?).
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: S2pidiT on 19 August 2020, 21:10:30
It's interesting to see other peoples views of Dark Age/Age of Destruction.

When I played, I was in middle school. A friend's dad invited me to join, told me about the factions (Steel Wolves were their favorite, and became mine during my time playing), and gave me a bunch of units they didn't use to get me started. As I'd only heard of BattleTech in passing, I thought this was some sort of spin-off. I had no background information on what was going on, just that there were big, stompy robots that shoot each other. We'd play matches at their house, and they were awesome enough to drag me along hours away to tournaments!

I think that was what made it good to me. I had a community that welcomed me, even though I was (and probably still am) a mediocre player.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: MegaZipp on 27 October 2020, 09:29:06
While I would admit I should have been on here much sooner than now, I guess its never too late.

I was, like most a fan of Mechwarrior from their early video games. In early 2000's I took a much needed break from video games and ventured into Tabletop gaming. Beyond a star wars game, I was introduced to AOD version of the clix game and I absolutely loved it. Now, to my credit, I didn't even know about the battletech universe till I started playing the clix game, so I didn't really have much of a history beyond the video games. I did finally see some others play CBT at the same venue and I found it to be ok, but a far too long of a game to play. I could play 3 matches with the clix game and the CBT crowd would not even be close to a halfway point.

Knowing what I know now, I can understand why some may not like it. I still have all my figures: about 300+ or so. Can't recall exactly, but I won a factory set at a tournament and got a huge amount of the Raselhaque Dominion figures from others because they disliked the faction dials. It became one of my favorite factions to play as a result and I won a decent amount of matches because people underestimated me rather than the mechs themselves.

So, I have been thinking these past few month about trying to resurrect this game to some extent. Now, I am not talking about new figures or anything like that, but a new full set of rules.. House rules if you will, that will take all the best traits of the original game, but allow someone to play them without the worry of the clix side of things. The reason I say that is because a good portion of my own clix won't turn. My goal is to preserve the skirmish side of the game, but give it more flair and easiness to get into. These rules can also be applied to battletech minis as well, so it won't matter. Obviously since these will be house rules, they will be free for anyone to use as to do anything else would require licensing and all that kind of stuff. I would love to get feedback on this idea. My initial plan will be to create a Github project to put these alternate rules in, so anyone can see what I am doing and provide feedback.

I am doing this for a few reasons. 1. Because I like the idea of a skirmish style game, and I don't want to spend hours going through the existing books and trying to understand all of the current BT rules. I have some of the books already. 2. Because I have all these figures and I don't want to get rid of them. 3. One part of these new rules is a way to do single player, so it will include an AI element to it. In our current situation, not everyone can get together and play.

What do you all think?
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 27 October 2020, 16:19:04
Welcome MegaZipp.

There is a skirmish style of Battletech.  Essentially, Alpha Strike. Heck you could use your AOD figures with it since the hexless version rules of the game works.

Not all players are into Alpha Strike, there version of the game where more units can be played with less time taken up. 

BattleMech manual can help you if you want do more traditional rules game, but with only the basic.  A 1 vs 1 or 2 mechs vs 2 mechs may not take as long as you think.  It's when get bigger.

There is only line simulator for Battlech made by fans called MegaMek you may want check out as well.   
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: MegaZipp on 27 October 2020, 22:22:37
I will check that out. I am familiar with Alpha Strike, but haven't read it yet. I mostly want to take the rules for AOD and DA and enhance the good parts and get rid of the bad. I have the Battletech Manual.. atleast the slightly older version and I picked up their free pdf's also. I am still in the planning stages at this point, so I haven't started creating documents or anything.

To be honest I have been a little hesitant to do this as I know it will be a lot of work to get where I would like it. I have some other tabletop games that I want to play as well, so its a matter of finding the time. I also was seeing how many people here were even interesting in the idea. I was going to put it on Github in document form, maybe have some people test it on their own time, even have contributors as well.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: DarkSpade on 28 October 2020, 17:54:50
Me and a friend tried that.  After a few drafts and several playtests, we gave up.  The Shallow dials gave everything such a glass jaw that we couldn't control how powerful a first strike could be without the pain of record keeping for simultaneous damage.  And even that didn't help much.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Wrangler on 29 October 2020, 05:52:56
Yay. Megamek is able to most things played in the tabletop game. Including manage the campaign. Alphastrike and its associated spins off haven't yet been done.  There limit programers volunteers to keep it going. Megamek does all the work rules wise.

Skirmish wise I'd say it Alphastrike what u like. Unfortunately u would need Tabletop Simulator to actually run it.  Its why i hope Megamek get additional stuff added to it. The Larger BattleForce type rules and ASC rules is basic Alphastrike long epic level. With. Megamek sor5 game managing the game phases. It makes it overall more playable.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Jhousdan on 31 October 2020, 15:10:38
For me it was a lot of things.  First, the new setting was not very well explained AT ALL... you opened booster packs, looked the dossiers and said "spirit cats? Swordsworn? Stormhammers? Who the hell are these guys?" Then there was the randomness of the packs, which did nothing but scream "money grab" like a collectible card game would. The creators lost a lot of honor in my eyes with that one. Lastly were the designs... almost universally,  the mech designs took a serious dump in quality and ingenuity.

The game mechanics weren't terrible, but I was past the idea of getting used to table grind, or how long it took to resolve each weapon in an alpha strike... it seemed oversimplified to me, I felt like I lost some of the finer controls I had over my mechs.

Characters I couldn't get invested in, in a time setting I couldn't reconcile with the setting I was used to, with mechs that looked (for the most part... this includes the project phoenix redesigns) like they were designed by third graders, I just didn't see the merit. It felt like progress for the sake of progress without a real goal for the franchise in mind.

It felt like an attempt to recapture the grittiness/ mad-maxism of the late succession wars that FASA slowly spent the 90s walking back to something gentler. (The irony being, theyd eventually do the same thing with DA "well, maybe things weren't reallyTHAT bad...")

The early novels didn't do anything to help either, and by the time they found their stride and gained any traction, most of us were dusting off second/third edition, digging out the compendiums, and getting back to legacy("classic") battletech.

I'm less ambivalent toward the setting now (since a progression has been established through the jihad, etc... not great work, but not terrible either), but i now have zero interest in learning who the ilclan will be. It feels like a story event that is happening about a hundred years too late to matter. It feels like taking the gold medal in the 100 meter dash in the summer Olympics after the stadium has been bombed to hell and the competition is too injured or lame to even race.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: MegaZipp on 03 November 2020, 14:14:52
Thanks for the feedback. At this point I am not sure what I will do with all of these figures. I have been looking at the new Clan Invasion stuff and I may just look more into Alpha Strike, or even consider taking a dive into Battletech. I have some of the older books, so I will read through all that, plus the free pdf's that are out. Alpha Strike may still be an option for me as well, whether I use my AOD stuff or get new stuff.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Jhousdan on 03 November 2020, 18:58:41
Alpha strike would be great for those figures... they also fit on a standard hex base, even if they're larger than their ral partha/iron wind counterparts. One of the guys at our table uses a few DA figures that he's re-based and repainted.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Darzoni on 07 December 2020, 11:03:14
In my case, I didn't dislike ClickTech.  I was extremely confused about the setting and the gap because there wasn't much to go on.  There was an availability issue with most non-RPG hobby games in my area at the time, so getting anything outside of MTG or D&D was very difficult.  Clix of any kind were just really hard to come by, and my main issue with ClickTech was I didn't get enough stompy robot figures in the boosters when I could get them.

I do remember being very stoked at how cool the Bannson's Raiders Centurion looked though.  I admit to being very pleased to see that design get canonized as the Centurion Omni.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 07 December 2020, 13:13:52
The earlier paintschemes were very well done, IMHO, for commercial pre-paint. Bannson's, Highlanders, Capellan, and civvy factions for Kurita & Steiner, all very attractive looking, with base, contrast, metallic detailing, and a little dirt shading on the feet/legs.

The later cartoonish jobs (Feds & Lyrans) - bleh!
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: PuppyLikesLaserPointers on 08 December 2020, 12:49:57
Well. The setting is neo-feudal worlds, but there was a rule. And the Blackout throws the whole world into a 'real' dark age. Ha, I don't think that most of you will enjoy the situation. No HPG to communicate? No one to trust? Some Factions are struck hard with no hope arise? Oh....

I think that that's enough to earn the hatred. If you heard that 'the world you have seen is no more' then most of you will say "What the hell?" first.

Also, the concept of Blackout and the chaos in Inner Sphere resembles the sencibility of end of the 20th century era, that post-apocalypse was a thing. Such genre do exists, but it's out of fasion right now. Also, if you want this you may play the early horror of Succession War era instead. Then you heard that 'your furture is now butchered.' So most of you will say again, "What the hell?"
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Valaska on 09 April 2021, 19:12:17
It's pretty simple...

Classic Battletech is pretty high fiction, with amazing political intrigue and deep characters and stories that make sense. Up until the Jihad (the beginning of the fall of BattleTech writing standards), you can literally track armies, characters, and mercenary outfits across the galaxy and through the timeline and it is a damn near bang on. And then in Jihad, we enter the starting comic book writing...

BattleTech (age of war) to Civil War are seasons 1-6 of Game of Thrones. Jihad is a weird mix of season 7 and 8 at the same time... Dark Age is season 9 and the showrunners doubled down on the worst aspects of S8.

Jihad.

The bad.
Jihad you see wholesale destruction of everything build up before the series, and this was in the new creative directors whacky/zany attempt to "revitalize" Battletech, which at the time was doing fine still. It wasn't growing but it wasn't dying... but someone figured a shakeup would create growth. Instead of keeping Battletech at a sustainable interest level, it ended up beginning the slow march to BattleTech's death. The director dubbed "the lord of nukes" would go on to turn factions like Jade Falcon into comic book villains, random clans would completely about-face and would become completely different entities. The deepest characters with amazing potential and ongoing stories were all killed in a shitty peace summit scene, the best 'Mechwarrior in the galaxy at the time was wiped out in a shuttle explosion on said summit (Diana Pryde) with every single fan reading her story now left with "she died in an explosion."

All while the "lord of nukes" literally gleefully laughed when he admitted he forgot about the GDl and wiped them out with a nuclear-armed Urbanmech... because he forgot they existed. Jihad put a knife in the collective back of the longtime fans. It turned into comic book writing, and comic books are crap. It read like cheap fan fiction and the intent was clear. The "lord of nukes" had no idea how to continue the setting and was not the correct creative director of the setting. If you need to destroy everything people loved just to start your own fan-fiction level storyline maybe you shouldn't be the one taking creative control.

It represented a complete knee-jerk reaction from morally grey characters, realistic politics, to unrealistic one-note comic book villains. MOST factions turned into either GI Joe or Cobra. There wasn't the same nuance as there was before. I'm going to use Jade Falcon as an example again because they were the faction to suffer the worst at this hands. Jade Falcon was a Crusader clan and they were pretty agro, they went after the InnerSphere, they wiped out garrisons, AFFCs, they were involved in very shady politics and tore Wolf into two factions with Marthe Prydes brilliant maneuvering. But InnerSphere populations didn't mind being under them very much... why? Because despite being Crusaders they were pretty chill with civilians. They even had a merchant cast, Marthe Pryde made a semi-elite unit with Freebirths and even gave a Freebirth Mechwarrior the go-ahead (and a pep-talk) to fight for a blood-name. They even came to a diplomatic resolution to stop attacking the Lyrans to the Tukayyid line so long as they had a planet to fight with the Lyrans over, the planet changing hands month after month depending on who won the fight that month. They had some nuance to them before the Jihad, they refused to outright nuke or slaughter civilians and they HATED Smoke Jaguar for doing so.

And then the Jihad happened and you had Jade Falcon slaughtering civilians left and right, wiping out all of their scientists (despite the fact they specifically set bloodnames aside for scientists and Marthe Pryde had a deep relationship with a scientist caste member and respected her greatly), crashing Soyuz' into planets and nuking people. Some of the competent writers tried their darndest though, more on that later. They had some Falcons' objecting, and they tried to make believable justifications for their actions... but they all fell far short because none of the reasons given were believable for one of the most nuanced political entities to slip so far into GI Cobra territory.

The good.

Later. Jihad kept a few characters alive... not all the best ones mind you, those were wiped out not for narrative integrity but to make it easier to start new storylines. This was... awful. But enough characters that were recognizable and many who already had satisfying ends to their stories were kept around and now forced to get back in the saddle. Enough of these were good, and some of the competent writers did their best to keep the old spirit of Battletech alive. Luckily enough was recognizable that some fans stuck around but without denial, this was a massive population loss in Battletech. Tournaments, MegaMek, etc, you saw a lot of Battletech fans leave.

Dark Age.

The Bad.
My god... the bad. That's... putting it lightly. Where Season 7/8 of Battletech had some redeeming qualities of a few notable characters and a bit of nuance left to the story. Dark Age saw fit to completely wipe any nuance out of the setting, to erase every remaining character, and to be a shameless cheap marketing tool to sell gacha-level plastic. Honestly, Dark Age was made to be the most predatory and hellish version of a tabletop. I saw people spend more on Dark Age models than they did for WH40k, IN A MONTH... in a desperate attempt to get just a playable unit down on the field. Scalped figures online were insanely expensive, there were normal Battlemechs on ebay for Dark Age which was brand new, outselling Ral-Partha lead models. Dark Age was extremely effective at a short-term success, though we saw how fast the tournament and playing scene died for it (In Germany I can only find venues running Dark Age for 3 years max, where-as Classic BattleTech is still played to this day.)

And the entire fiction/canon was written with one objective. Sell. Plastic. To. Teens. That's it. There was no nuance anymore, there was no political intrigue, there were no grey characters etc, I know people tease Michael Stackpole for black hat and white hat characters and he deserved some of that teasing for his work in CBT. But Dark Age was so black hat vs white hat it was embarassing. It was like reading a cape hero comic book about stompy robots. I wasn't a teenager anymore but a young adult.

Dark Age didn't mature with its audience, it immatured. In an attempt to attract younger players instead of adults it kiddified the stories and simplified the characters, and invented extremely predatory sales tactics that I have still never seen a board game ever replicate in the same way Dark Age had. There are D&D miniatures sold in blind boxes right now but they are ASSURED to at least have one useable model in them. I wasted $800 and got NINE useable battlemechs. To this day I feel like a complete sucker and an idiot for doing that, especially since I hated how the game played and I hated the stories I hated the novels I hated everything about Dark Age but I wanted to get a little bit of that old Battletech glory and feel... I love Battletech, more than any other fiction ever. I have re-read Freebirth, Falcon Rising, Exodus Road, Grave Covenant, Operation Audacity, Prince of Havoc... many times. I have some of my favourite BattleTech books on display to my left right now. I feel that Dark Age was an outright betrayal.

Let's go back to Jade Falcon as an example. There were justifications for what they were doing to the scientist class in the Jihad, however weak they may have been. They were still not evil, not by a long shot, but they were getting there into the comic book levels of evil. Jade Falcon in the Dark Age are sunday morning cartoons evil in Dark Age. Seriously, Jade Falcons feel like a 6 year old pitched these ideas.

"We will have some bad guys, with birbs, the birbs are big'an green with a sword. They are the bad guys. This girl, she's evil and nasty, girls are gross, and she becomes the boss of the jade falcons. So they launch these missiles at ALL the planets and they go like KABOOM and wipe out everything! And now they just stop because they have no space ships now but they blew up everything'an now the good guys they are going to build up their good guys faction and the good guys they are gonna go beat up the bad guys who wait, and there will be like the traps and more big missiles and giant robots twice the size of other robotts and then they fight and the evil girl will be really mean to all the people and then KABOOM blow up HER OWN PEOPLE! An then the good guys win a few fights but she get away."

Tell me that's not exactly what happened. Someone talked to their 6 year old and asked them what they would like to see in BattleTech and the kid said exactly that I guarantee that's what happened. The entire direction of the story feels like it's directed by a 6 year old. And no matter how many competent writers you hire to handle the meat of it, if the foundation is ridiculous and comical then it's always going to seem like a pale imitation of what we once had before the Jihad era of battletech. Whereas Jihad could be redeemed with re-writes and re-direction, there's nothing salvageable in Dark Age, and I will never- in my life contribute a singular damn cent to Dark Age ever again.

Also, I sold those 9 battlemechs for $80 apiece and the huge bucket of pointless worthless units for $100 so I at least made my money back on plastic. I had to just throw the books out for Dark Age. They were the first books in my life of any kind (including instruction manuals, I have instruction manuals for things I don't even own) that I literally just threw in the trash. But seriously... $80 a piece, that's how awful Dark Age's business model was. It actually taught me a lot about buying limited edition/rare things and selling them for a profit, I am sitting on over $40,000 of pokemon cards right now. So I'll thank Wizkids for that at least it was a very valuable lesson.

Actually, it taught me another lesson. Never to really love any kind of fiction that is an ongoing series. Because it will become awful. It's why even though I really enjoyed game of thrones I could never get into it and love it because Jihad and Dark Age are always in the back of my mind. Dark Age literally killed that youthful love of stories and writing for me. I wanted to be a writer even after Jihad uselessly killed characters like Diana Pryde off with. I wanted to do better. When I read Dark Age... I literally lost all the will and love in writing, I didn't even use my scholarships for English literature, I went into the military and criminology after that.

Luckily I actually recovered that, eventually. It took a long time for me to trust any written literature after what Dark Age did to me... I write for video games now, and I promise any of my readers I will NEVER betray them as Jihad or Dark Age did. We authors have a MASSIVE responsibility and duty to our fans not to completely and outright backstab them. The "lord of nukes", D. Benioff, D.B Weiss, O.S. Card, never learned that lesson. I remember "the lord of nukes" even laughing at people when they said how hurt they felt about the Jihad and how they erased their favourite characters for seemingly no reason. That taught me to respect my readers... respect the audience. Because it could be like BattleTech, and kill the love people have for your franchise off. Just like that Star Trek discovery show or, the JJ Abrams movies, or the new star wars movies.

It's a late post... but Battletech is the most important bit of fiction to me and was the last time I could let myself fall in love with fiction the way I did. So, I really needed to get this off my chest.

I believe it was disliked because they tried moving away from mech vs mech and more to combined arms combat.
I dont think a lot of the fan base was ready for that type of move.

Err... no? Everyone in our club was playing combined arms. Almost a quarter of the players at my club actually only played infantry and armour, without any battlemechs at all (a Hells Horses and FedSun player). Even as a FedSun, then GDL, Jade Falcon, and Fedsun player, I rolled combined arms in every single outfit.

Try finding a game of BattleTech....  ::) 8)
(Or even better, try to find a game store that actually stocks BattleTech...)

Multiple venues kept running BattleTech here, it was ironically Dark Age that killed BattleTech games. It gutted us, the entire community of loyal fans. We felt like nothing more was coming for BattleTech and at the time were right, there was nothing going to come no progression, no new models. We felt abandoned, so we moved on to WH40K, Heavy Gear, etc.

But guess what? BattleTech started to pop up again. Annual games kept it alive, then we started doing it every once in awhile, and tournaments kept going. Dark Age lasted 2 years in North America for tourny scene here, three years in Germany which is a far more concentrated and dedicated market. Guess what? BattleTech tournaments and venues never stopped in Germany. Here in Canada we're still playing it. So yeah, I can find a game of BattleTech. I can't find find any for Dark Age... and to be honest, that's a good thing in my eyes. Dark Age killed my favourite universe and board game.

I didn't really notice the Hero clix Mechwarrior stuff, and certainly didn't realize there was background info explaining the jihad and formation of the Republic until later. And even then, all it seemed to be to me was a board wipe of everything that was being built up prior to the Jihad. I didn't really like Devlin Stone, David Lear, or the architects of the Republic- and I hated what Victor Steiner-Davion turned into. All I could see was how it killed anything I liked about the setting. And I walked away.

My gosh, I don't even want to get started on what they did to Victor Davion... I don't think it's hyperbole to say that literally, every decision with the canon they made was trash writing only rivalled by how terrible GoT fell apart. There are MANY series that have worse writing etc, but few take something so amazing, so fun, so well thought out and deep... thought-provoking, and then just... ruin it. Completely, and without any regard or care for what they are doing. And then you have people going "hey don't be mad about this! You're just being sour!" You're darn right I'm being sour. And when people go "it didn't kill Battletech!" no it literally did, do you not remember how long Battletech just languished and slept until this Kickstarter directly after Dark Age? It was MEANT to kill BattleTech, I have no doubt about that. It was MEANT to erase BattleTech, and it nearly did.


/// EDIT ///

I wanted to, after quoting that last quote in an edit... I was too glum in the ending. I am now for the first time really hopeful that BattleTech can once again rise above the damage that Dark Age has done. I'm introducing avid Warhammer40k players to both CBT and Alpha Strike and they are coming around. Ten players here backed the Kickstarter, and I not only backed Galaxy Commander pledges, but a merchant one just to give people free lances and starts that are local to get them into the game. And keep all the extra goodies for myself of course... haha.

My dream would be for them to completely retcon all of Dark Age, move it off into its own universe. And begin re-writing the Jihad era from the end of Civil War, don't just kill off people's beloved characters. Don't betray their backstory and make them into completely new and alien people either... and don't make factions go nuts for little-to-no-reason. Honestly, there's an easy way to jumpstart this series again from Clan Invasion and move into Civil War again.

You could write new books in the Civil War era easily without interrupting too much with the core framework. And then re-do a Jihad era, move it way WAY, way forward, and don't just have WOB win as they did, have them needing to ally with someone who would align with their goals *cough* Liao *cough cough* Capellans *cough* and write in political divisions and maneuvering between the two factions and give them more solid motivations than the WoB was written to have in Jihad. Ditch the all-out "nuke erases this inconvenient character/faction" and give people the endings they want for their characters. Archer Christiphori died, and it was a FANTASTIC story and an amazing narrative element to it. Characters can die but it has to be earned.

I'm sorry to fans of Dark Age... but some people even here are suggesting we treat it like an "alternative universe." Hell yeah, I'm down for that. Let's do that.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Colt Ward on 29 June 2021, 09:18:02
So . . . most of what you wrote is wrong, but yeah it is those misconceptions that caused the problem.  So really a good example all in all.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Frabby on 29 June 2021, 14:17:30
So . . . most of what you wrote is wrong, but yeah it is those misconceptions that caused the problem.  So really a good example all in all.
I was going to say the same thing. Only one thought to add: It doesn't matter why people are unhappy with how the Jihad and Dark Age played out - they have that reputation now and CGL is wise to rush into uncharted territory with the ilClan era for a fresh start.

And I know that I am in the minority here, but I have to say this once again: For me, the BattleTech became stale and broken no later than during the Civil War era. I (unwittingly) skipped MWDA completely and came back just after the Jihad had started. I opened the first book and saw Wolf's Dragoons finally getting their teeth kicked in for good. I was sold immediately!
As a reader of fiction, that is. When it comes to boardgaming, I rarely venture beyond 3025 and if I were to start a new BattleTech RPG campaign I'm dead set on the late Succession Wars. Jihad and Dark Age didn't improve the game for me. But I liked the Jihad story as it unfolded, even when it just backfilled the holes left by the weak DA storyline.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: mvp7 on 29 June 2021, 17:04:57
I was going to say the same thing. Only one thought to add: It doesn't matter why people are unhappy with how the Jihad and Dark Age played out - they have that reputation now and CGL is wise to rush into uncharted territory with the ilClan era for a fresh start.
Indeed, literally suffocating the last vestige of Jihad/Dark Age with a pillow to to usher in the ilClan era does seem like an act loaded with symbolism ;D.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: deogg on 16 April 2023, 21:08:36
Now, I'm one of those that actually liked DA/AOD. I saw it and was like "hey, more Battletech. I'll take it!" (For further context, I also played Mage Knight and Heroclix before DA hit)

The problem: I was the ONLY person in my area that played anything Clix at the time. So, for me, it died out merely due to nobody else playing at the time.

The thing I REALLY dislike NOW about DA/AOD: I've had to deal with a lot of stuck dials (both stats and heat dials) and stat decals (especially the heat ones) peeling off from the dials. I've had to pop open and fix a lot of dials over the last few years.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: CranstonSnord on 17 April 2023, 08:49:07
I haven't gone thru mine in years, but I wonder if you've noticed any oily residue leaching out of the plastic? I've heard that's become an issue with the Aurora dropships, so I'm curious if they used better plastics in the minis...
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: worktroll on 17 April 2023, 15:14:14
Never ever seen that, and I have and use several hundred or more DA mi is.

I expect the Aurora was made differently.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Colt Ward on 17 April 2023, 15:28:45
Yeah, I have them sitting in boxes and sitting out on the shelf . . . heck, I have painted up some tanks and BA for TW use.  No problems with them.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: DarkSpade on 17 April 2023, 15:51:05
The Aurora was made out of some of the driest and most brittle plastic known to man.  I can't imagine anything ever leaking out of it.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: JAMES_PRYDE on 01 August 2023, 08:51:40
As a collector, more than a miniature player, I mainly liked DA/AOD miniatures because they were bigger, and we relatively easier to get in a pre 3d printing world.

And also they were easier to paint as they were bigger lol

And now certrain models for collectors can be worth quite abit, kind of like original Star League Source Books and original Clan Invasion Battletmech blueprints
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: TimberwolfD on 13 February 2024, 02:31:17
I both like and hate MW:DA. AoD fixed many of my biggest complaints, but I still prefer BT/TW rules.

The rules and balance for clickywarrior still annoy me to this day. The DA rules made infantry so over-powered relative to Mechs. Later, it was artillery that caused issues, particularly the application of the armor piercing special ability to artillery. There were so many points in DA rules that AoD showed could have been better from the start. Things like pilot and equipment cards added that bit of customization that made clickywarrior feel more like BT.

The more I've thought on clickywarrior over the years, the more I think the idea could have been better implemented and created less animosity. One place things could have been better implemented is in the scale of Mechs' life. The default 3 inch Mech dials only have 17 useful clicks (click 18 is always death). So everything from a Locust to a Jupiter has to fit into those 17 clicks and that makes it very hard for assault Mechs to feel heavy and powerful when a Locust might have 8-10 clicks. Especially when vehicles could have up to 11 useful clicks (12 was always death). Imagine two different size Mech dials, the standard 3 inch dial for lights and mediums and a four inch dial with an additional row for weapons and more clicks (~28 by my guestimate) for heavy and assault mechs. Something similar could have been done with vehicles for the big bois but I don't think vehicles were ever as problematic as Mechs life-wise. Another place things could have worked better would have been to better develop the split of defense, armor, and clicks/life.

Ultimately, my friends and I got together a couple of times a year to play clickywarrior for years after the game died. Eventually, I got most of them into BT/TW play and now we play some big games (>20,000 BV) every couple of months.
Title: Re: Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?
Post by: Knightmare on 22 February 2024, 10:23:53
And now certrain models for collectors can be worth quite abit, kind of like original Star League Source Books and original Clan Invasion Battletmech blueprints

This is true. I still have an Ares and an Aurora NIB, and they're worth a decent penny these days, and don't get me started on the limited edition three Ares box set. I'm still looking for one.