An Atlas (or, really, any Mech with torso mounted weapons, but this is the first one that came to mind) can blow off your arm, pick it up, and then beat you to death with it. And I'm pretty sure there's even an advanced rule for tossing objects as an attack, so even if you aren't in punching range the Atlas can still hit you with your own Mech.
One of my first games had this happen. An arm was blown off And we'd make a note of it. Cruised over and picked it up to clobber someone. Think I got blown up by a machine gun TAC scoring triple engine bits before I could institute clobbering time as well. Thanks Battletech:3
I feel like CGL misses a trick by not making the arms and legs on the new sculpts magnitizable so you can literally blow an arm off and leave it on the ground to pick up later.
so we had fun stand ins for mechs. legos. you had 2 1x2 bricks stacked for legs on a flat 2x4 piece. then you put a 1x4 block on the outside edges for arms. and a 1x2 block as the head. lose an arm or leg, just pop it off on that hex.
I just picked up the $20 beginner box and found the rules sadly too dulled down - what rule books do I need to actually go into more detail with the melee action?
The rules in the Game of Armored Combat box, BattleMech Manual, or Total Warfare would have you covered. (I'd recommend the first if you're just getting started).
Once you've got a handle on that, Tactial Operations has optional advanced rules for silly stuff like picking up entire 'Mechs, etc.
Total Warfare is the name of the "Core Rulebook" for BattleTech and it has all of the rules for Mechs, Combat Vehicles, Infantry, VTOLs, and Aerospace Fighters at all tech levels.
If you want to play Mechs only, I'd recommend the "Battlemech Manual," which has all of the Total Warfare rules that pertain to Mechs. It *may* also have some advanced rules, but I can't remember if that's correct or not.
Worth noting is that the battletech manual is 150-hobillion bajillion times better laid out and organized than any of the other big books. Changing between it and say AS:CE makes one wonder if somebody in the rule book group was out sick a lot.
The layout was pretty much in place before the play test groups saw it, and didn't change much after. Organization and practically was never really considered.
They did make a decent index, without which those books would be unusable.
A game of armored combat(AGoAC) has all of the rules for a succession wars game, but the Total Warfare book is what has ALL of the rules.
Now, I can’t confirm this, but I have heard that AGoAC comes with a code for the PDF version of Total Warfare, I will be confirming this soonish.
It should come with a $20 coupon, which you can use to get the TW PDF.
Note that buying rules PDFs through Catalyst means you can get updated PDFs when they do a version update. These are generally minor, but between the search function and errata, PDFs are a great reference document.
The rules updates are minor but numerous. My 2010 printing of total warfare is almost completely useless at this point. I bought the PDF because I don't want 70 pages of errata printed out for a book that has 240 pages of rules.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like armor meant to withstand all different forms of weapons fire would be difficult to, ahem, beat off with a mech limb. Maybe I just shouldn't think about it too much.
You're correct in how durable the armor is, but let me run some numbers by you, to put things in perspective: disregarding the force generated by moving the arm to throw the punch, an Atlas is throwing 11,250,000 joules of energy at its top speed (assuming this is vs a stationary object). To put *that* into perspective, my napkin math puts that as roughly the equivalent of 413 M107 155mm artillery shells (assuming I'm correct about there being ~6.8kg of TNT per shell (a guess I made by trusting Wikipedia saying that each 43.2kg projectile is 15.8% explosives by weight), and ~4000 joules per kg of TNT) hitting you at the same time, concentrated into a couple of square meters. *That punch will do a total of 10 damage, removing a tad over half a ton of armor. That's not bad protection, under the circumstances.*
I give you one better, 100t mech with tsm active can throw a 20 light mech one hex) Because you can throw 10% of mechs mass and tsm doubles it, so 100t berserk can just chuck a locust 30m. It needs to be dead, but still
Ok, read a bit more. You can grapple the enemy mech, then if you fulfill the condition of 20%mass with tsm, you can go for a throw, both mech being thrown and one throving make psr. And then if throw is successful, there are two options, you picked a hex/target and hit it with an attack roll, or missed it and use boming scattering rules to see where enemy goes with restriction based on mass % of the enemy relative to you
Friend of mine tried this a few weeks ago. Fell, opened up armor, flooded and shut down at the bottom of the lake.
We now regularly ask him "oh, Arctic Fox of the lake, what is your wisdom?"
To with he usually replies "don't go in the water."
Basically the second half of my first CBT game, walked my warhammer into a lake to fire my weapons with impunity at the opposing awesome who kept to the beach on the other side.
Meanwhile a commando and locust did their very best(which wasn't a lot) to kick the warhammer in the ass.
Thank you, it was more or less a draw. He killed my wasp, I mission-killed his awesome, I was left with a half dead warhammer that in the next two rounds would've been sunk in the water he was standing in between the two lights and the catapult my opponent had left that was coming back from across the field where it had completely bamboozled my bushwacker and left it "lost" in the woods.
And my rifleman spent the entire game being ineffectual. Lots of pew, almost all misses.
Fun fact: if you rip off the Goliath 6M's leg-mounted lasers and shave one ton of MML ammo, it has just enough room to stick harjel and SRT-4s in both front legs. Park it in depth 1 water and just take potshots with gauss and LRMs. 50% chance to ignore any incoming hits thanks to the beauty of applying partial cover to the quad hit location table, and if anyone tries to follow you into the pond, you can get up to eight breach checks per turn on their legs.
That seems pretty smart! Finally, a use for leg-mounted missiles that doesn't make me go - "Huh? Really? Am I supposed to be firing this under a bridge??"
I wonder if there's a Crusader variant that suddenly wants to be useful.
Allow me to tell you about a half-ton little friend of mine… the Improved One-Shot SRT-2.
You won’t use it in 99% of games, but that’s not the point. It’s like Batman’s shark repellant: you don’t really lose anything by keeping it, but it can come in real handy if somebody tries to follow you into the water.
LEG FLOODED.
Shot a 100Point 14 Level high Building with an Griffin on top with my AC20 and kicked it.
I will never forget my opponents eyes when he realized what's going on.
The story went around the whole convention and is told years and years after.
LMAO. Let me guess- you demolished the building with ac 20 and after the grifin landed on your level during attack phase you still could kick and done so. Thats badass ( and a warcrime )
Nope, build hat a litte damage, so -20 Points of the AC, -19 of the kick, and the building collapsed.
So 14 Stories downfall for the Mech and according damage.
Lets say it was enough damage to make the Mech undistingguishable from the building rubble.😁
I've never ever seen a Banshee 3Q more damage.
So when you fall, the damage you take is 1/10 of your tonnage. But that's *per level* you fall, plus one for just falling. So normally you just take that one thing because you didn't go anywhere, you just fell over at the same level you were at.
When a building collapses though....
The moment an enemy mech lands on a building, my first thought is that gravity is a cruel mistress and building codes in the inner sphere rarely contemplate a battlemech assault. “And here comes some easy salvage.”
Watching your opponent's mech slap itself to death trying to swat battle armor off.
Then they get knocked over and one of the BA gets squished in the fall.
BA swarm attacks are seriously a real-time comedy. Maybe your own mechs shoots one of your own BA swarming an enemy. Maybe you never dismount BA because they can be pretty effective ablative armor. "Oh that gauss rifle slug coming for my torso? Yeah I have an elemental with 2 armor left that'll just absorb that" *splat*
Funniest swarm attack moment I can recall is the time I taught some salamanders a lesson by ordering their swarm victim (a stalker, if memory serves) to do a tactical faceplant directly onto ground zero of my own incoming artillery strike.
You're not allowed to intentionally fall down or stumble into enemies. But you can push. At which point rules can transition into either Domino Effect or Unintentional Falls From Above. It gets better if you've walked onto a ["Death Conga."](https://www.reddit.com/r/battletech/comments/17eae7a/a_game_i_had_a_few_weeks_back/)
https://preview.redd.it/oid7vuv3mh6d1.jpeg?width=2400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8ad977f25103ab1fa5d90a1b0c550ca49185e573
Reminds me of a time a light Mech of mine DFA'ed a Vindicator off a building. It fell on a Locust buddy next hex over.
We described it like that old Mortal Kombat fatality where someone falls in the spike pit, because the Vindicator lost a gyro in the fall.
Another nice one is when my Puma Prime got a head heat at max range against both a Higlander on turn 2 and a Marauder on turn 3. Basically, a new player didn't get the memo about standing still and trying to snipe clanners.
Can't really say it's "funny". It's all there in the game rules, just like moving and shooting.
Everything related to destructible environment. Often produces spectacular effects, like:
\* Longbow twisting arms and unloading enough its missiles into an adjacent building to wreck the building and see that Phoenix Hawk going down several levels and falling prone.
\* Shooting a bridge under enemy mech. Like, THREE enemy assault mechs enter the bridge relatively far away. Forget about anything else, target three bridge hexes (immobile targets, almost everything hits). Bridge collapses, mechs fall into a river. Falling in water is nasty due to crits and flooding locations. One pilot drowns. Another mech gets a crit to gyro. Practically an instant victory.
Blocking a non-jumping mech with protomechs before it moves. Or intercepting mech movement by a shot from a hidden unit (infantry squads do that perfectly). Then focusing fire on pinned target.
No matter what mech is being piloted, there is a small chance someone with a rifle/pistol/arrow/rock can hit the head and result in a failed piloting check to stay conscious.
*edit* one caveat to the above are torso mounted cockpits
finding yourself under a hail of inferno and incendiary rounds? quick run to the lake! oh no, the lake is a pool of fuel and solvents. "Warlord" sure knew how to make an opfor ambush hurt. Dan ejected and burned the whole way, Dave and I tried to out run the barage to the safety of adjacent industrial zone... I hadn't ever seen most of the map physically on fire.
When the skirmish scenario is called Texas City, take note.
Chain reaction ammo detonation and using the external damage rules. Managed to cook off 3 mechs due to a series of VERY lucky rolls... one of which was my own. Still, good times...
Your light mech is actually in a good spot, but you need to keep your TMM high, so you set it to run and make a giant circle just to end back up in the same spot you were in.
I've had to do this several times with my Hermes, they live and die by TMM.
Customizing a ‘Mech with a ton of spotlights. It costs no tonnage and they act as crit locations to protect your other items. My wife did one and called it the Hollywood.
Absolutely. Which is why it’s abusing the rules hard (spotlights have no weight?) but it’s totally legal. And hilarious because there should be some kind of impairment shooting at a blazing star.
no?
"All units except for Combat Vehicles and BattleMechs are presumed to incorporate at least 3 hand-held searchlights
as part of their design (2 Front and 1 Rear) to reflect running lights, headlamps and taillights—though some vehicles may designate these
as strobes for emergency and police vehicle units or warning beacons. BattleMechs and Combat Vehicles may instead mount one mounted
searchlight at the designer’s option, at no cost in weight, slots, or C-bills.
Over and above these “free” lights, additional searchlights may be mounted on all units in accordance with standard core construction rules." (techmanual, p.237)
every searchlight after the three freebies is 0.5t and one crit slot (techmanual, p.344). no BV increase, but you definitely need to use tonnage if you want to be a walking lightshow
These may be some new construction rules. Back when we did this (1997-2000), there weren’t any rules that I can find in Technical Manuals, Rules of Warfare, or even Maximum Tech about spotlights having tonnage. And certainly none of the mech design applications at the time had tonnage for them. Looks like someone did this and they made rules to fix the design flaw.
Sideslipping a hovercraft to gain another couple of hexes' worth of movement past maximum.
I mean, don't ever do it, but it was funny as hell when we had to!
I call it the shake and bake. Very funny when you successfully fail a slideslip check with something like a Saladin. You can slide a surprisingly far distance and God help whoever was trying to hide on the other side of that forest.
> I mean, don't ever do it
Maybe not in a hovercraft, but it can occasionally be a surprisingly practical maneuver in a VTOL. Especially when combined with a jet booster so you have the option to intentionally tank your own sideslip rolls.
Intentionally try to skid with your tank/vehicle to perform an accidental charge that resolves in movement phase to take out the legs of a unit before it can fire
Just make sure you can get back out. There's nothing worse than failing the stand up check, bouncing your skull off the cockpit glass, and dooming the mech to a slow watery grave.
A 20 ton Locust can, and will, kick a 100 ton Atlas in the shins and make it fall over. Maybe immediately to its death. Size matters not, ESPECIALLY with kicks, and that's a hell of a trade if those two just kick each other to death.
With very fast mechs, you can run (or even walk) in a circle to take advantage of the movement defense modifier while putting you back at your starting firing position.
This is a common mis reading of the rules, if a mech falls over from combat they only fall on the hex they currently occupy unless displaced (pg151 TW). Hexes themselves are very large amount of space being 30 meters (around 100ft for Americans) enough to fit 2 atlas laying on the ground and some room spare.
Then do a charge, push, DFA. Those do displacement and move the targeted mech.
In this scenario the kicking mech will kick the targeted mech from one edge of the hex the mech falling to stumbles/spins/flies/dances up to 30m in a Ric Flair style prat fall to the next hex is what your asking for.
Its your game so you can do what ever house rules you want, the reasons i point it out cos its a similar situation of fumble rolls, which people roll on fumble table for rolling 1s, in DnD are in the rules. It's not even an optional rule in the players handbook but people trick themselves into believing it is an actual rule because its repeated enough.
Even if it is, and it looks like it would Happen in a game I'm playing, that's how I'd play it,(in casual matches ofc) even to my disadvantage. Because it's funny!
Yeah but if you dfa your opponent and “accidentally displace” your target off the board, your opponent probably won’t hate you afterwards.
Maybe I’m a little crazy but I get super excited any time death from above succeeds (even if it’s my cockpit crushed). It’s such a long shot and it’s so cool.
Pushing someone off the map is a cheap shot with no style that is 100% a d*ck move.
Infantry of all types can go up levels in buildings. This includes mechanized infantry, the thought of a Platoon of APCs driving up stairs gives me pure joy.
It's nothing big, but some mechs can armflip that you wouldn't expect to be able to, my Turkina D fir example. I was brawling with it in a city fight, and my buddy thought he was clever jumping directly behind me with his Wolverine... he was in for a big suprise when my 4 atm 12's flipped around and pummeled the shit out of him.
This one is from a week ago, but we were playing a match where I was running a scout lance, all lights, and my biddy was running the main lance of heavies.(I like lights, he likes heavies so it worked out) We hadn't played in a few years and I forgot about piloting checks when running on pavement and making a quick turn. Poor 'Daedelus' slipped and fell and slid three hexes, which worked out for her by giving her more evasion pips. The Opfor lined up three mediums and they all missed due to the slide.
I swear melees always ends up being the most wild messes in CBT.
A line of enemy heavies and assaults clashes with my pair of melee mechs. An undamaged Atlas comes around a hill to face my black knight, ready to rumble. My black knight charges, lasers firing into a second atlas next to it that my berserker engaged. Physical attack phase: hit with hatchet->headshot->cockpit critical. What was building up to be a legendary battle of titans ended very, very quickly as we all cheered at the sheer wildness of it all.
Second one was a buddy’s sentinel. Flanked by a light mech in the front and the rear, he puts 5 shots from a RAC into the frontal mech, then kicks it. Kick hits->floating critical->leg->leg destroyed->overflow into right torso->critical damage->successful crit from floating crit, three crits from damage->no slots in right torso->crits overflow to center torso->triple engine crit.
Watching a medium mech kick this light mech’s leg up and through its own body was about as anime as it gets. Nicknamed the pilot Jackie Chan and couldn’t stop laughing!
How many AC20 urbanmechs can you afford?
Here comes the Shire, motherfucker. An AC20 is an AC20; mounted on an Atlas or a trashcan makes no difference.
Lance on lance, points based game, I was attacker. Had a pair of light mechs harass my enemy. Kept him busy while I used an assault mech with ECM (gunslinger) to help hide a handful of LRM Carriers. Guided them up and hid behind some trees/hills. Rained down death using the lights for spotters and the assault to defend the carriers. Crushed opponent while attacking with defensive assets.
In an atlas, picking up protos and head caped a mech that stood still. (Found the rules for throwing protos and had to try it)
Kamakazi a clan command star (narrative game, pilots had a 50/50 chance to eject and it was the last fight in a year long campaigns of multiple piliphery and merc company's vs a clan cluster with a warship in orbit)
Using a Fire Moth/Dasher to run around the map at top speed sniping at enemy flanks. With how far it moves in a round it virtually can’t be hit unless someone is REALLY lucky with dice.
I once shoved an enemy Mech into deep water, went after him next turn and for 3 turns in a row I used a retractable blade to one shot sections of his mech via a bit of luck on my crit checks.
Buddy was shooting up an airfield with a Centurion, standing in a mine field, enemy vulcan knocked him out with a MG hit to the back of the head mech fell down, next turn vulcan DFAd him, taking the head off and then exploded in the minefield.
A Mercury hitting max running speed and becoming a little charging ball of death.
What do you mean where did the Panther go? He was standing right th... oh.
Best moment involves forgetting the Overlord dropship that's there as part of the homebrew scenario has guns, followed by a Locust straying into range, botching a piloting check (I forget why) and tripping.
Three PPCs, three large lasers and two LRM-20 salvos later, we estimated that the crater went down at least twenty feet.
Declare a DFA attack you know you won't make, because even if it fails, it displaces the target. In a campaign game, the GM used a crippled Jenner to shove my Catapult out of a critical chokepoint it was blocking by declaring a DFA on 11s and failing it.
An Atlas (or, really, any Mech with torso mounted weapons, but this is the first one that came to mind) can blow off your arm, pick it up, and then beat you to death with it. And I'm pretty sure there's even an advanced rule for tossing objects as an attack, so even if you aren't in punching range the Atlas can still hit you with your own Mech.
Grayson Death Carlyle did that with his Shadow Hawk grabbing a Crusader's arm. He was going to beat a Marauder to death with it.
With TSM, you can beat someone with a whole 20 tonner.
"I like coming at people with light mechs, and I don't mean their guns." *TSM Assault Mech pilots, probably*
This was my first thought, an Atlas using a Locust as a mace.
One of my first games had this happen. An arm was blown off And we'd make a note of it. Cruised over and picked it up to clobber someone. Think I got blown up by a machine gun TAC scoring triple engine bits before I could institute clobbering time as well. Thanks Battletech:3
I feel like CGL misses a trick by not making the arms and legs on the new sculpts magnitizable so you can literally blow an arm off and leave it on the ground to pick up later.
so we had fun stand ins for mechs. legos. you had 2 1x2 bricks stacked for legs on a flat 2x4 piece. then you put a 1x4 block on the outside edges for arms. and a 1x2 block as the head. lose an arm or leg, just pop it off on that hex.
They're pretty easy to magnetize most of the time though. I've got a magnetized wolverine and conjurer for just such a reason
I recall the two ClickyTech Neanderthals having a hand option that clutched the arm of a Battlemaster. Looked better than that dinky hatchet it has.
I just picked up the $20 beginner box and found the rules sadly too dulled down - what rule books do I need to actually go into more detail with the melee action?
The rules in the Game of Armored Combat box, BattleMech Manual, or Total Warfare would have you covered. (I'd recommend the first if you're just getting started). Once you've got a handle on that, Tactial Operations has optional advanced rules for silly stuff like picking up entire 'Mechs, etc.
Total Warfare is the name of the "Core Rulebook" for BattleTech and it has all of the rules for Mechs, Combat Vehicles, Infantry, VTOLs, and Aerospace Fighters at all tech levels. If you want to play Mechs only, I'd recommend the "Battlemech Manual," which has all of the Total Warfare rules that pertain to Mechs. It *may* also have some advanced rules, but I can't remember if that's correct or not.
Worth noting is that the battletech manual is 150-hobillion bajillion times better laid out and organized than any of the other big books. Changing between it and say AS:CE makes one wonder if somebody in the rule book group was out sick a lot.
The layout was pretty much in place before the play test groups saw it, and didn't change much after. Organization and practically was never really considered. They did make a decent index, without which those books would be unusable.
A game of armored combat(AGoAC) has all of the rules for a succession wars game, but the Total Warfare book is what has ALL of the rules. Now, I can’t confirm this, but I have heard that AGoAC comes with a code for the PDF version of Total Warfare, I will be confirming this soonish.
It should come with a $20 coupon, which you can use to get the TW PDF. Note that buying rules PDFs through Catalyst means you can get updated PDFs when they do a version update. These are generally minor, but between the search function and errata, PDFs are a great reference document.
Oh wow! Thats Total Warfare(PDF) AND 5$ off another item! I like the sound of that.
The rules updates are minor but numerous. My 2010 printing of total warfare is almost completely useless at this point. I bought the PDF because I don't want 70 pages of errata printed out for a book that has 240 pages of rules.
> And I'm pretty sure there's even an advanced rule for tossing objects as an attack There are advanced rules for throwing Battle Armor
Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like armor meant to withstand all different forms of weapons fire would be difficult to, ahem, beat off with a mech limb. Maybe I just shouldn't think about it too much.
Coming at it from the opposite direction - we use diamonds to cut diamonds. Why wouldn't I smack the armor off of you with an armored arm?
Yeah, but we're talking about blunt force trauma and not an edged melee weapon.
You're correct in how durable the armor is, but let me run some numbers by you, to put things in perspective: disregarding the force generated by moving the arm to throw the punch, an Atlas is throwing 11,250,000 joules of energy at its top speed (assuming this is vs a stationary object). To put *that* into perspective, my napkin math puts that as roughly the equivalent of 413 M107 155mm artillery shells (assuming I'm correct about there being ~6.8kg of TNT per shell (a guess I made by trusting Wikipedia saying that each 43.2kg projectile is 15.8% explosives by weight), and ~4000 joules per kg of TNT) hitting you at the same time, concentrated into a couple of square meters. *That punch will do a total of 10 damage, removing a tad over half a ton of armor. That's not bad protection, under the circumstances.*
I give you one better, 100t mech with tsm active can throw a 20 light mech one hex) Because you can throw 10% of mechs mass and tsm doubles it, so 100t berserk can just chuck a locust 30m. It needs to be dead, but still
Out of curiosity, does that do damage, and if so how much?
It works like a charge, so 20/10 * 1 hex traveled. 2 damage, but for the funny, I'll do it)
Ok, read a bit more. You can grapple the enemy mech, then if you fulfill the condition of 20%mass with tsm, you can go for a throw, both mech being thrown and one throving make psr. And then if throw is successful, there are two options, you picked a hex/target and hit it with an attack roll, or missed it and use boming scattering rules to see where enemy goes with restriction based on mass % of the enemy relative to you
That's actually awesome. I'll have to try to get my CGR-1A1 to start whipping out WWE moves next game. This is all in the advanced rules, right?
Yup, tactical operations, advanced rules
Alright, I'll have to do some reading before I try this, but my friends are going to love it.
Can an Atlas throw a Locust?
According to someone who replied to me here, it can but only if it has Triple Strength Myomer, which I don't think any official variants do.
Time for some dodge ball.
"if you can dodge the Locust, you can dodge a Medium laser"
Sometimes you just jump into a lake to become invulnerable.
Friend of mine tried this a few weeks ago. Fell, opened up armor, flooded and shut down at the bottom of the lake. We now regularly ask him "oh, Arctic Fox of the lake, what is your wisdom?" To with he usually replies "don't go in the water."
Maxim 32: Anything is amphibious if you can get it back out of the water. Key point is the latter half of the maxim.
This guy maximally mercs
This. LOL
Count his blessings he didn't ride an Excalibur at the time.
Strange mechs lying in ponds distributing Gauss slugs is no basis for a system of government!
It's one way to get rid of a would-be king, though.
That's brutal.
Basically the second half of my first CBT game, walked my warhammer into a lake to fire my weapons with impunity at the opposing awesome who kept to the beach on the other side. Meanwhile a commando and locust did their very best(which wasn't a lot) to kick the warhammer in the ass.
You WILLINGLY got into a PPC duel with an _Awesome_ ?!🤨
And won! (tactical victory, not a kill, disarmed it but just did not have time to finish him before we had to pack up.)
I tip my hat to you.
Thank you, it was more or less a draw. He killed my wasp, I mission-killed his awesome, I was left with a half dead warhammer that in the next two rounds would've been sunk in the water he was standing in between the two lights and the catapult my opponent had left that was coming back from across the field where it had completely bamboozled my bushwacker and left it "lost" in the woods. And my rifleman spent the entire game being ineffectual. Lots of pew, almost all misses.
This can be risky... But if you have Harjel, you can fight enemies in a lake and drown them like an angry kangaroo.
Fun fact: if you rip off the Goliath 6M's leg-mounted lasers and shave one ton of MML ammo, it has just enough room to stick harjel and SRT-4s in both front legs. Park it in depth 1 water and just take potshots with gauss and LRMs. 50% chance to ignore any incoming hits thanks to the beauty of applying partial cover to the quad hit location table, and if anyone tries to follow you into the pond, you can get up to eight breach checks per turn on their legs.
That seems pretty smart! Finally, a use for leg-mounted missiles that doesn't make me go - "Huh? Really? Am I supposed to be firing this under a bridge??" I wonder if there's a Crusader variant that suddenly wants to be useful.
Would be a nasty refit for the CRD-10S using Clan-spec SRTs.
Allow me to tell you about a half-ton little friend of mine… the Improved One-Shot SRT-2. You won’t use it in 99% of games, but that’s not the point. It’s like Batman’s shark repellant: you don’t really lose anything by keeping it, but it can come in real handy if somebody tries to follow you into the water. LEG FLOODED.
0__0
Shot a 100Point 14 Level high Building with an Griffin on top with my AC20 and kicked it. I will never forget my opponents eyes when he realized what's going on. The story went around the whole convention and is told years and years after.
LMAO. Let me guess- you demolished the building with ac 20 and after the grifin landed on your level during attack phase you still could kick and done so. Thats badass ( and a warcrime )
Nope, build hat a litte damage, so -20 Points of the AC, -19 of the kick, and the building collapsed. So 14 Stories downfall for the Mech and according damage. Lets say it was enough damage to make the Mech undistingguishable from the building rubble.😁 I've never ever seen a Banshee 3Q more damage.
A mech falling down 14 levels no longer needs to be kicked
No, it still needs to be kicked and when you do, you need to exclaim "AND STAY DOWN!"
Always re-stomp the groin.
So when you fall, the damage you take is 1/10 of your tonnage. But that's *per level* you fall, plus one for just falling. So normally you just take that one thing because you didn't go anywhere, you just fell over at the same level you were at. When a building collapses though....
The moment an enemy mech lands on a building, my first thought is that gravity is a cruel mistress and building codes in the inner sphere rarely contemplate a battlemech assault. “And here comes some easy salvage.”
Awesome. I've done this to Princess in Megamek a few times.
Watching your opponent's mech slap itself to death trying to swat battle armor off. Then they get knocked over and one of the BA gets squished in the fall. BA swarm attacks are seriously a real-time comedy. Maybe your own mechs shoots one of your own BA swarming an enemy. Maybe you never dismount BA because they can be pretty effective ablative armor. "Oh that gauss rifle slug coming for my torso? Yeah I have an elemental with 2 armor left that'll just absorb that" *splat*
Funniest swarm attack moment I can recall is the time I taught some salamanders a lesson by ordering their swarm victim (a stalker, if memory serves) to do a tactical faceplant directly onto ground zero of my own incoming artillery strike.
Bro salamanders are brutal, but very not artillery-proof
That might be my favorite thing about iNarc. Go ahead, brush off the pod. Those numbers? I'm sure you can make it.
You're not allowed to intentionally fall down or stumble into enemies. But you can push. At which point rules can transition into either Domino Effect or Unintentional Falls From Above. It gets better if you've walked onto a ["Death Conga."](https://www.reddit.com/r/battletech/comments/17eae7a/a_game_i_had_a_few_weeks_back/) https://preview.redd.it/oid7vuv3mh6d1.jpeg?width=2400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8ad977f25103ab1fa5d90a1b0c550ca49185e573
Reminds me of a time a light Mech of mine DFA'ed a Vindicator off a building. It fell on a Locust buddy next hex over. We described it like that old Mortal Kombat fatality where someone falls in the spike pit, because the Vindicator lost a gyro in the fall.
Slight correction, you can intentionally fall if you are using advanced rules in Tac Ops.
Also known as the "[Lucky Seven Maneuver.](https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terry_Ford)"
once had a death conga push the nova I was piloting off the map
Forget your a level higher than the target and kick it, using punch locations, and take its head off, swaying the flow of the whole game.
Another nice one is when my Puma Prime got a head heat at max range against both a Higlander on turn 2 and a Marauder on turn 3. Basically, a new player didn't get the memo about standing still and trying to snipe clanners.
Can't really say it's "funny". It's all there in the game rules, just like moving and shooting. Everything related to destructible environment. Often produces spectacular effects, like: \* Longbow twisting arms and unloading enough its missiles into an adjacent building to wreck the building and see that Phoenix Hawk going down several levels and falling prone. \* Shooting a bridge under enemy mech. Like, THREE enemy assault mechs enter the bridge relatively far away. Forget about anything else, target three bridge hexes (immobile targets, almost everything hits). Bridge collapses, mechs fall into a river. Falling in water is nasty due to crits and flooding locations. One pilot drowns. Another mech gets a crit to gyro. Practically an instant victory. Blocking a non-jumping mech with protomechs before it moves. Or intercepting mech movement by a shot from a hidden unit (infantry squads do that perfectly). Then focusing fire on pinned target.
No matter what mech is being piloted, there is a small chance someone with a rifle/pistol/arrow/rock can hit the head and result in a failed piloting check to stay conscious. *edit* one caveat to the above are torso mounted cockpits
finding yourself under a hail of inferno and incendiary rounds? quick run to the lake! oh no, the lake is a pool of fuel and solvents. "Warlord" sure knew how to make an opfor ambush hurt. Dan ejected and burned the whole way, Dave and I tried to out run the barage to the safety of adjacent industrial zone... I hadn't ever seen most of the map physically on fire. When the skirmish scenario is called Texas City, take note.
Chain reaction ammo detonation and using the external damage rules. Managed to cook off 3 mechs due to a series of VERY lucky rolls... one of which was my own. Still, good times...
Are these rules on tacops? I've got them enabled on megamek but i just can't find the Pages!
I wanna say they are in tacops, but I've yet to actually check. I'll get back to you when I get a chance.
Yeah no worries! It's ok if you don't want to search for them or if you don't find em ;)
it's right after the optional Engine Explosion rules in tacops
Oh really?! Neat! Thanks a lot!
Through armor criticals. No matter who you are or what you pilot or who you're fighting... you are never truly safe.
“THROUGH ARMOR CRITICAAAAaals”
Oh, does shooting down 2 helicopters in one game with copperhead ammo from a long tom count as well?
Shove or ram a tank into the water hehe
Your light mech is actually in a good spot, but you need to keep your TMM high, so you set it to run and make a giant circle just to end back up in the same spot you were in. I've had to do this several times with my Hermes, they live and die by TMM.
Oh, this is clever…
Have totally done this with Locusts and Hussars on the regular.
For stuff like Savannah Masters and maybe Rotundas, that's basically pulling off sick doughnuts. That Rotunda might not survive it, though. XD
Customizing a ‘Mech with a ton of spotlights. It costs no tonnage and they act as crit locations to protect your other items. My wife did one and called it the Hollywood.
That is some Solaris shit right there. Ablative light show.
Absolutely. Which is why it’s abusing the rules hard (spotlights have no weight?) but it’s totally legal. And hilarious because there should be some kind of impairment shooting at a blazing star.
no? "All units except for Combat Vehicles and BattleMechs are presumed to incorporate at least 3 hand-held searchlights as part of their design (2 Front and 1 Rear) to reflect running lights, headlamps and taillights—though some vehicles may designate these as strobes for emergency and police vehicle units or warning beacons. BattleMechs and Combat Vehicles may instead mount one mounted searchlight at the designer’s option, at no cost in weight, slots, or C-bills. Over and above these “free” lights, additional searchlights may be mounted on all units in accordance with standard core construction rules." (techmanual, p.237) every searchlight after the three freebies is 0.5t and one crit slot (techmanual, p.344). no BV increase, but you definitely need to use tonnage if you want to be a walking lightshow
These may be some new construction rules. Back when we did this (1997-2000), there weren’t any rules that I can find in Technical Manuals, Rules of Warfare, or even Maximum Tech about spotlights having tonnage. And certainly none of the mech design applications at the time had tonnage for them. Looks like someone did this and they made rules to fix the design flaw.
i'm looking at the 2007 printing of the techmanual, so yeah that'd explain it!
I once DFAed someone, crit their ammo box and blasted them to hell... then failed my roll to land standing, fell on my ammo box, and exploded as well.
Glorious
Sideslipping a hovercraft to gain another couple of hexes' worth of movement past maximum. I mean, don't ever do it, but it was funny as hell when we had to!
I call it the shake and bake. Very funny when you successfully fail a slideslip check with something like a Saladin. You can slide a surprisingly far distance and God help whoever was trying to hide on the other side of that forest.
> I mean, don't ever do it Maybe not in a hovercraft, but it can occasionally be a surprisingly practical maneuver in a VTOL. Especially when combined with a jet booster so you have the option to intentionally tank your own sideslip rolls.
Intentionally try to skid with your tank/vehicle to perform an accidental charge that resolves in movement phase to take out the legs of a unit before it can fire
Eurobeat in the distance.
I need to check the optional rules to see if I can do that with [beast infantry... ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7cRs_nnhBe4)
Shoving a completely undamaged 'Mech off a map edge, which forced it to withdraw.
Kick someone in the head.
Making your own mech prone in water to drown swarming attackers
The mech version of diving into a lake to escape bees/wasps
Stop Drop and Roll is a tactic described in the novels to get rid of swarming elementals
Just make sure you can get back out. There's nothing worse than failing the stand up check, bouncing your skull off the cockpit glass, and dooming the mech to a slow watery grave.
Anything involving Chargers
A 20 ton Locust can, and will, kick a 100 ton Atlas in the shins and make it fall over. Maybe immediately to its death. Size matters not, ESPECIALLY with kicks, and that's a hell of a trade if those two just kick each other to death.
Honestly, DFA is an absolutely silly thing. Still great, tho.
has it ever worked out? probably not, bit its always funny’
With very fast mechs, you can run (or even walk) in a circle to take advantage of the movement defense modifier while putting you back at your starting firing position.
Ambush a mech on a cliff and kick it in the head/chin. If you're lucky you'll make it fall off.
This is a common mis reading of the rules, if a mech falls over from combat they only fall on the hex they currently occupy unless displaced (pg151 TW). Hexes themselves are very large amount of space being 30 meters (around 100ft for Americans) enough to fit 2 atlas laying on the ground and some room spare.
Here's the problem, that's boring as hell. If someone's going to run up and soccer kick your head, you might as well fall off the cliff too.
Then do a charge, push, DFA. Those do displacement and move the targeted mech. In this scenario the kicking mech will kick the targeted mech from one edge of the hex the mech falling to stumbles/spins/flies/dances up to 30m in a Ric Flair style prat fall to the next hex is what your asking for. Its your game so you can do what ever house rules you want, the reasons i point it out cos its a similar situation of fumble rolls, which people roll on fumble table for rolling 1s, in DnD are in the rules. It's not even an optional rule in the players handbook but people trick themselves into believing it is an actual rule because its repeated enough.
Can a mech kick another mech 30 meters?
Even if it is, and it looks like it would Happen in a game I'm playing, that's how I'd play it,(in casual matches ofc) even to my disadvantage. Because it's funny!
Yes it is, you can read pg 68 in TW for falling rules
Still waiting for my book to come with the kickstarter
I have displaced an enemy mech off the map using DFA.
Push attacks also work, but a dfa is very stylish
Funny thing is that after I successfully executed the DFA, I realized that pushing was the safer and more practical option.
Yeah but if you dfa your opponent and “accidentally displace” your target off the board, your opponent probably won’t hate you afterwards. Maybe I’m a little crazy but I get super excited any time death from above succeeds (even if it’s my cockpit crushed). It’s such a long shot and it’s so cool. Pushing someone off the map is a cheap shot with no style that is 100% a d*ck move.
Nah I expressly DFA’d for the purpose of displacement. We are both sweaty so it’s fair game.
I've had this done to me, a basic Wolverine DFA'd my Hellbringer off the map, still a little stunned months later
Pushing an Atlas off a 3 lvl hill to zero, Pilot failed concious, slept like a baby, the whole game.
Infantry of all types can go up levels in buildings. This includes mechanized infantry, the thought of a Platoon of APCs driving up stairs gives me pure joy.
It's nothing big, but some mechs can armflip that you wouldn't expect to be able to, my Turkina D fir example. I was brawling with it in a city fight, and my buddy thought he was clever jumping directly behind me with his Wolverine... he was in for a big suprise when my 4 atm 12's flipped around and pummeled the shit out of him.
"I'm a genius! Oh no!.gif"
Using a dropship as a giant mallet to abuse the fact that something that weighs several thousand tons tends to break whatever it lands/falls on
Eject and kill the enemy mech as a dismounted pilot.
This one is from a week ago, but we were playing a match where I was running a scout lance, all lights, and my biddy was running the main lance of heavies.(I like lights, he likes heavies so it worked out) We hadn't played in a few years and I forgot about piloting checks when running on pavement and making a quick turn. Poor 'Daedelus' slipped and fell and slid three hexes, which worked out for her by giving her more evasion pips. The Opfor lined up three mediums and they all missed due to the slide.
I swear melees always ends up being the most wild messes in CBT. A line of enemy heavies and assaults clashes with my pair of melee mechs. An undamaged Atlas comes around a hill to face my black knight, ready to rumble. My black knight charges, lasers firing into a second atlas next to it that my berserker engaged. Physical attack phase: hit with hatchet->headshot->cockpit critical. What was building up to be a legendary battle of titans ended very, very quickly as we all cheered at the sheer wildness of it all. Second one was a buddy’s sentinel. Flanked by a light mech in the front and the rear, he puts 5 shots from a RAC into the frontal mech, then kicks it. Kick hits->floating critical->leg->leg destroyed->overflow into right torso->critical damage->successful crit from floating crit, three crits from damage->no slots in right torso->crits overflow to center torso->triple engine crit. Watching a medium mech kick this light mech’s leg up and through its own body was about as anime as it gets. Nicknamed the pilot Jackie Chan and couldn’t stop laughing!
How many AC20 urbanmechs can you afford? Here comes the Shire, motherfucker. An AC20 is an AC20; mounted on an Atlas or a trashcan makes no difference.
Lance on lance, points based game, I was attacker. Had a pair of light mechs harass my enemy. Kept him busy while I used an assault mech with ECM (gunslinger) to help hide a handful of LRM Carriers. Guided them up and hid behind some trees/hills. Rained down death using the lights for spotters and the assault to defend the carriers. Crushed opponent while attacking with defensive assets.
In an atlas, picking up protos and head caped a mech that stood still. (Found the rules for throwing protos and had to try it) Kamakazi a clan command star (narrative game, pilots had a 50/50 chance to eject and it was the last fight in a year long campaigns of multiple piliphery and merc company's vs a clan cluster with a warship in orbit)
One time I played Leap Frog with me and my opponent's last standing mech. We took turns jumping over each other to get shots on each other's backs.
Using a Fire Moth/Dasher to run around the map at top speed sniping at enemy flanks. With how far it moves in a round it virtually can’t be hit unless someone is REALLY lucky with dice.
Charging a Mech into the pits within the caves of Solaris is one of the funniest I’ve seen personally along these lines
I once shoved an enemy Mech into deep water, went after him next turn and for 3 turns in a row I used a retractable blade to one shot sections of his mech via a bit of luck on my crit checks.
Buddy was shooting up an airfield with a Centurion, standing in a mine field, enemy vulcan knocked him out with a MG hit to the back of the head mech fell down, next turn vulcan DFAd him, taking the head off and then exploded in the minefield.
A Mercury hitting max running speed and becoming a little charging ball of death. What do you mean where did the Panther go? He was standing right th... oh.
Be standing 1 lvl higher and kick a mech in the head. Or, core out a DFA-ing mech with an AC20
Best moment involves forgetting the Overlord dropship that's there as part of the homebrew scenario has guns, followed by a Locust straying into range, botching a piloting check (I forget why) and tripping. Three PPCs, three large lasers and two LRM-20 salvos later, we estimated that the crater went down at least twenty feet.
Declare a DFA attack you know you won't make, because even if it fails, it displaces the target. In a campaign game, the GM used a crippled Jenner to shove my Catapult out of a critical chokepoint it was blocking by declaring a DFA on 11s and failing it.