Battletech (The Company You Keep)

Hey Game Fans, we’re back with an idea about one of our favorite games around the office, Battletech.  It’s a wonderful board game (with customizable pieces and a depth of units so big it has its own website) of giant robots fighting on futuristic battlefields across any of the thousands of inhabited worlds in the future of the human race.  Often described as Game of Thrones with giant robots instead of swords, Battletech has much more to offer than just the Succession Wars.  With 30+ years of books and stories written about the universe and computer and video game adaptations, there are a million different stories you can experience playing Battletech.  

However, that depth of information can be crippling for a new player to get into the setting.  So how does one get into the game?  

Well, there are a host of ways you can dig into the setting, but if you want to experience the tabletop game, i suggest 3 purchases to get started.  The Battletech Introductory Box Set (if you can find it), has all of the basic rules you need to learn how to play the game and gets you a collection of giant robots of your own to get started.  From there, the new BattleMech Manual gives you the rules you need to play more complex games with the units you have and scales up the rules to add more complexity and variety to the game.  Finally, the new Technical Readout (TRO): Succession Wars will greatly expand the units you can play with on the tabletop.  Once you have played some games and had some fun with it, change up your units a little and see what works for you.  This is a game that offers virtually unlimited options and choices for combat units, so you could literally play for years without exhausting the potential.  

I think i want to play Unit X or Faction Y?

Battletech’s lore is full of great stories of epic battles and clashes between armies flying dozens of different banners.  If you want to get deeper into those units that are parts of those stories, that’s wonderful.  I hope you find something that draws your attention, like the Genoysha of House Kurita, or the Fox’s Teeth from House Davion, or even legendary mercenary commands like Hell’s Black Aces or the Grey Death Legion.  Find a group that you enjoy the lore and the stories of, and see where that takes you.  The resource at Sarna.net is full of ideas, color schemes, and histories for units from all of the eras of Battletech.

What if I want to do my own thing?

That’s perfectly cool too.  Mercenary forces are extremely common in the Battletech Universe and you can create your own unit history and background for your force and start working out the particulars of their units, their personalities, and their colors.  You can do the same thing with a House unit as well, it’s really not that different of a process.  What you’re going to spend most of your time considering are the faction you want to play as a member of, and how your unit fits into that.  Another consideration (and this is more important in the later eras of Battletech) are the units available to a faction, so if you’re looking to use a specific Battlemech or configuration, then you might check and see who has access to it.  

Company’s Coming

Now i always suggest that you start looking at putting together your own force at the company level first.  There are a lot of reasons for that, and i’ll dig into those in a minute.  Battletech’s long history has a number of extremely decorated company sized units that have stories and legends written around them.  Sorensen’s Sabers, the Fox’s Teeth, and the Black Widow Company all occupy a special place in the lore of Battletech, and because of that, Companies will always be a good functional starting point to develop your own force.  

Variety

A Company of Battlemechs (I’m going to presume Battlemechs in all of these, but if you want to use different units, that’s always a choice) contains 12 units, organized into 3 lances of 4 Battlemechs each.  This gives you a lot of flexibility in picking your units and organizing them into groups that make sense.  If you want four battlemechs that carry long range missile packs, that’s a viable choice.  If you want four lightweight scouting battlemechs, that’s also possible.  With a company, you can make some choices about what you want to play with at a manageable scale.

Playability

Most missions/campaigns/scenarios have a cap to the number of units you can bring.  It’s usually expressed as a fraction of your overall force (⅓ for example) or a point value for other permutations of the game.  A company sized force lets you select a specific lance for a specific situation (and gives you time to get that mission finished in a reasonable amount of time) or if you’re playing Alpha Strike for example, gives you enough units to meet your point cap and still be able to field a decent sized force.  

Customization

12 battlemechs gives you enough units to be able to play a lot of different situations while giving you the options to customize your Mechwarriors with their own Callsigns, customized options for their mechs, and even special abilities.  There are mechanical rules for doing so (and i think we’ll put a couple more examples of how to do that) and you have a couple of different ways to make that work.  Company level forces work very well for this, because you only have to worry about 12 units to work with.  The next scale up, the Battalion, triples that number.  

Record Keeping

Battletech is a game that’s very much in love with its charts, graphs, record sheets and record keeping.  At a minimum, you’re going to need a Mech Sheet for each of the units you field (12 sheets), and depending on the detail you’re playing with, Company record sheets, Mission logs, and several other sheets for determining contracts and other long lasting effects.  Managing 12 is a lot easier than trying to manage 36, or even more units.  12 is an effective sweet spot for having enough detail to keep track of the game without getting buried under all the paperwork.  

Lore

Battletech has a long and fairly detailed history for most of its major conflicts.  It does have an interesting blind spot, because the writers don’t really look at any units smaller than a battalion when they write the history books.  We know which regiments were where, and so on, but there’s always the possibility an extra company of house troops, or mercs, or pirates were at that battle in addition to what the history books say.  

Conclusions/Food for Future Thought

There are dozens of options for putting together a unit of your own for Battletech, and we honestly think Company sized units are a perfect starting point.  We’ve got the reasons we listed above, and some others we’ll talk about when we put some more thoughts on paper.  Companies are fun sizes to play campaigns and other linked games with because you can get very heavily invested in the narrative of the story you’re telling.  Battletech is ultimately a universe of stories to experience, and being able to drop your own company into the heart of those stories is just one way you can experience that fun.  We’ll be back with some more ideas next week, Game On, Game Fans.