32 replies to this topic

[ZnSeventeen]

It will be interesting to see how this team handles the Dark Ages in seventy years.

[DarkBazerker]

And here I almost named my pilot Ezekiel Crow lol Now I never played any battletech board games weather they where before my time or what ever, but theres somthing to be said for the simple fact that Dark Age is the only chapter books I own.

I will agree that theres not alot of mech battles till the end and even then the total number of mechs is less then ten. I guess i like the how the charactors ackully sound like people as opposed to other books i read. You can imagne my shock when i found out that people didnt like Dark Age and they went out of print.

Just goes to prove: If you like somthing they'll stop making it.

[NameTheftVictim]

With the Jihad storyline done, won't they pretty much have no choice but to continue the Dark Age line?

[ice trey]

For me, it was mainly an aesthetics issue.

I was used to seeing Battletech where it's all about the shooting. Melee combat was reasonably effective, but mostly rare. Old 'mechs looked blocky, but there was a vaguely functional look to them, like the outlines of a 1970s/1980s tank.

Suddenly, you get the dark ages stuff, where more than half of the 'mechs are canary yellow with chainsaws and shovels, sporting giant Combustion engines on the back. What was worse was that they took all the old designs I grew up with and loved, and... You can't even call it a "Facelift", more like a "Facedrop". Suddenly, if they didn't take old favorites and change them outright (Spider), they were horribly Beetardizing them into shadows of their former selves (Atlas, Centurion, Panther, Black Hawk, Koshi). Suddenly, 'mechs were walking about with ammunition feeds hanging out everywhere, with diesel exhaust pipes sticking out everywhere. It looked like the whole game was trying to mimic Warhammer 40000 - a game I never liked the aesthetics of - and fell on it's face in the process of doing so.

I wrote the clix game right off. I ended up buying some for bits (Due to a 50% off - "everything must go" sale), but that's the extent of it. Rather than buy into that, I bought the Battletech Master Rules in 2004 and haven't looked back, since. Even though I have to make new players for myself, I love every game of it.

[FryFry]

The game was only hated by hardcore CBT players. Blind boosters meant you could be getting any faction and needed to trade with other players. Plus no one is really an ICE Mech fan, and the early sets scale was all over the place. Not as many source books but they had a community portal that had INN updates. Which IMO was the best thing for the universe of MechWarrior. The content that was put out between the game, the books and the on-line sites was a thing of beauty. It brought in so many new players into a stagnant universe and forced Battletech forward. They also started to give special Faction specific Mech which were very interesting. It will be missed as some of the later models were much better then the Battletech versions.

[Sabre Howell]

Wizkids dropped the ball on a great many things for the dark age era, however i still know plenty of people who loved what it developed into, myself included. It is technically Battletech/Mechwarrior cannon so we might as well all come to terms with the idea that cgi will catch up to it within the next decade or so unless they reboot the entire universe. Since cgi has been clearing up most of the things that people were confused about in their source books recently (war of reaving, exact happenings of jihad, etc..) i think we can venture a guess and say DA/AOD is on its way in classic battletech.

I personally love the game, its was to play, no painting required, and now is so crazy cheap any one can buy a booster box for under $100 if they look for one hard enough. I only started collecting in 2009 (2 years after they discontinued everything) and i have managed to emass 1-2 booster boxes from every set, 1-4 of each battleforce set, and just recently acquired my 4th dropship. I run a campaign with a only a few custom rules with all the stuff and i def get more interest from people than the few battletech games that get run around campus.

[FryFry]

Sabre where about are you cause I still have one of every Mech and love diff rules for the system.

[HJ Maverick]

I too Collect dark age/Age of Destruction mechs (fav set is wolf strike) and have nearly all the sets complete, including officers club etc and gold based prize mech ( I have also managed to get hold of cases of war college) the later mechs ( i suppose from Falcons Prey) are fantastic and nicely detailed with moving parts etc ..I have also heard/rumour(cant remember what forum) the mechwarrior clicks series might be released again, has anyone else heard this? is ol JW starting up again

[Oswin Aurelius]

Loved the new 'mechs, hated the redesigns.

Stories were severely lacking in actual 'mech combat, although I loved how they made combined arms tactics a big deal again.

Wizkids seemed to show a blatant disregard for fans of BattleTech by their half-assed, nearly unbelievable storyline.

The Ares and it's variants. Just no.

[Peiper]

Well, I tried to stick with MWDA to the end, and I used to split cases with friends from the beginning.

The sculpts mostly sucked from the beginning, and improved in scale and looks in an inverse scale to the popularity of the game.

The fiction was off and on. I had some favorite books and stories, and others were absolute garbage. In any case, a lot of it was disjointed and off-kilter from what we CBT and MW2-4 players knew/believed.

The Jihad was skipped. I don't know or understand at all what that was about. Perhaps because I was out of CBT? Endgame was the last novel I read before MWDA came out. In any case, while I didn't totally understand the disarmament, I believed that it had to do with what happened during the Jihad, and so I let that be.

The first sets were way overpopulated with industrial ICE mechs. I never used them. I had at least a hundred of them. My friends and I ceremonially smashed them on the floor once while splitting a case. God, we were so pissed off when we'd open up boosters and we got six of those in a row instead of battlemechs. At $10 a booster, to get something absolutely useless means that after awhile I just went to Ebay for mechs and forgot the boosters all-together.

Fiction wise, the rarity of mechs, especially early on, didn't bother me too much. It meant combined arms and skirmish tactics. For clix games it was OK. However, as time went on, I found fielding one big or maybe two light mechs was just too little fun for me.

The collectable element of the clix game meant that you had to spend a lot of money, or be extremely lucky to get one of the good battlemechs out there. That meant, that unlike Battletech and MW games, you saw the same mechs played over and over at the weekly tournaments. If you didn't have the best pieces, then kiss your chance of winning goodbye. I had the math figured out, in my head, and would win every time except against like-thinkers, or if my dice failed. I would try to design games where we fought with lances, where only, say, one unique mech was allowed, and we all HAD to use some of the substandard mechs to fill out our forces. I had to run some of them against wizkids policies, but their tournament format enforced gambling on boosters to get certain mechs.

The artificially inflated value of some mechs, and worthlessness of most meant that 'vultures' populated that tournament crowd. In many tournaments, you could win elite/unique units or mechs which would be even better than the ones you already paid out the nose for in boosters. The vultures would be there not for the game, but for the profit they would gain from winning, and would go from tourney to tourney all week winning and taking the fun out of it for the casual player.

The game itself made it so cheap vehicles and infantry could overwhelm, capture, or otherwise out-do mechs on a point for point basis. (think of points as battle-value or weight. A good medium mech would cost 200 points, let's say, and 3 good vehicles could be bought for the same number of points) Because mechs were so hamptered by heat - yes, even walking would generate heat, and a mech that walked for four rounds straight and nothing else, would almost invariably shut down or blow up from ammo explosions. Vehicles and infantry had no such problem, and so 'mechwarriors' took a back seat to tank drivers, and suicidal charging industrial mechs and swarms of infantry. When MWDA: Age of Destruction finally came out, they allowed for mechs to do revolutionary new things like Move AND shoot in the same round! Though this caused mechs to heat up faster, at least they could ACT like mechs for a turn or two before they shut down or their ammo blew them into salvage. AoD also allowed for some minor mech customization and for the addition of mechwarriors who would enhance the base stats of the mechs and possibly give them special abilities. Likewise, factions meant something, as you were rewarded for fielding mechs of the same faction. Before then, units could be made up of any faction, despite the storylines. Who cares if your army matched as long as you won, right?

I still have a TON of mechs. My last aquisition was a present from an old friend of mine named RavenJJ - if you're out there, you know who you are. He had saved me Natasha Kerensky and her Widowmaker Dire Wolf. It is the jewel in my collection of mechs, but by the time I got it, I'd been out of the game for awhile, and the game was in it's death throws.

I created a few house rules that made the game faster and even more fun, along with units/pilots gaining experience and skills/buffs/perks. Unfortunately, the community was fractured by poor design (Wizkids rewarded wallet-warriors, and frowned on creativity). By the end, a couple friends and I had perfected the game through house rules to have a lot of fun with it, but the game was otherwise dying and we kind of broke up due to real life - holy crap, reality!

I remember one great disappointment was when I went I wrote directly to the developers with several suggestions for game rules revisions early on - long before AoD came out - and their response was they couldn't even READ it, because they were afraid of legal action regarding giving credit to someone outside the company - possibly out of fear that if they used my ideas, I might sue them for compensation for my brain-work. I didn't care about credit, or money. I cared about the game, the obvious problems with the rules, the contradictions against classic battletech and MW, and I really wanted to develop the hobby! I loved and still do love the battletech universe. A small fraction of my ideas were encorporated into AoD, but those ideas were too little, too late to keep the game afloat.

In the end, I'm going to blame Mage Knight, the first clix game. In it, they pushed collectability, and more importantly a game mechanic called 'pushing.' To keep one figure from dominating the game (and thus ignoring other figures all together), they made it so if you pushed a figure, it would take damage representing fatigue, exhaustion, or breaking down from too much activity. In MWDA, vehicles and infantry that walked, shot, or did both for two turns in a row would hurt themselves. Mechs gained heat, and the heat would only disappate when you did nothing. Mechs would gain heat from walking, shooting, or running. This is fine, but the ONLY way they could shed heat is by doing nothing. So, for example, a mech runs up, and does an alpha strike, (this would take two turns). The mech would then have to stop while the opponents army would smash it to bits. In Battletech or MW, you could keep running around which might not mean that you disappated heat as fast is if you just stood there, but your heat sinks could still disappate far more heat than you were gaining while you were shooting.

Because Mage-Knight worked on this premise, I think it was embedded far too deeply in the psyche of wizkids developers and thus, it absolutely ruined the game by crippling mechs, and by causing people to destroy their own units just to do what they were designed to do.

Edited by Peiper, 01 April 2012 - 01:33 AM.

[NameTheftVictim]

Does anyone know of any websites where I can get a good deal of Dark Age related lore and background? I'd like to make my own assessment.

[HJ Maverick]

I Liked the way the tanks and infantry were beefed up , I had always thought in BT they were a lil weak.. the heat thing did get to me too but like most, we did change the rules a lil bit (walking dosnt build up, running does etc sim to BT rules) the Ares mech wasnt one of the best either but lets be straight BT produced some ****** mechs too Urbanmech, and Imp (it looked like a walking cassette deck). I like a lot of the AoD mouldings,They are very good sculptures on a whole. As said before wizkids realized they made a mistake and tried to correct it but it was too late dmg was done... I do hope it comes back maybe with better rules and a lil closer the BT story line (dark age just sucked, after Flacons prey things were slowly looking up)

[Gremlich Johns]

ZnSeventeen, on 29 March 2012 - 05:54 PM, said:

It will be interesting to see how this team handles the Dark Ages in seventy years.

Thank god I'll be dead (despirte the fact that I have extreme longevity in my family lines)

Edited by Gremlich Johns, 01 April 2012 - 05:44 PM.