Why is Dark Age/Age of Destruction disliked?

[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

  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.

[Sartris]

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

[Renard]

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.

[ActionButler]

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.

[DarkSpade]

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.

[ActionButler]

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.

[DarkSpade]

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.

[worktroll]

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.

[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

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.

[Major Headcase]

  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.  :)

[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

  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...

[Mecha82]

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. 

[Wrangler]

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.

[grimlock1]

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.

[Mecha82]

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.

[worktroll]

Mecha in general are impractical design choices. They were, I assume, channeling the power of the Rule of Cool ;)

[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

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.

[DarkSpade]

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.

[Major Headcase]

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.

[Wrangler]

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.   

[Robroy]

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.

[grimlock1]

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.  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? :'(

[Renard]

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.  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.

[Mohammed As`Zaman Bey]

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.

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.

[James Bedford]

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.

[Mecha82]

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.   

[vaderi]

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.

[James Bedford]

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.

[Renard]

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?

[worktroll]

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 ;)