Howdy everyone and welcome to something a bit different! BattleTech is a very old game, stretching back to 1984 in its precursor form as BattleDroids. Over the 41 years of this game’s life, there have been countless books, products, additions, and bits of supplemental content. Today we are going to look at a really interesting thing that I stumbled across while looking for old Traveller adventures.

Introduction

Challenge Magazine was a roleplaying game magazine from Game Designers’ Workshop (no relation to Games Workshop) covering a range of RPGs, Wargames, and Board Games from the mid-80s through to the mid-90s. Challenge started life as the Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society, a dedicated supplement for their Traveller RPG, which is great. If you like BattleTech, odds are good that you would like Traveller. A couple dozen issues in it rebranded to Challenge, expanding to cover other games, but it kept the numbering of JTAS. As a result, issue 25 is the first issue of Challenge.

The relevant bit for today is that Challenge also covered games not made by GDW, which, in the year of our lord 1987, included the first article about competitive optimization that I have ever seen for BattleTech. In issue 30 (which also featured some neat Twilight 2000 stuff and an insanely 80s cover of what looks like a Soviet BMP flying a Jolly Roger) we got the article “Building the Perfect ‘Mech” by Kevin Stein, a guy who apparently wrote a ton of stuff for both GDW and FASA but who I can’t find any decent information on. This article is an in depth look at optimizing custom mech designs for what we now call “Intro-Tech”. This is pre-Clan, pre-LosTech BattleTech, pure 3025 with no other additions. Let’s see how his advice holds up nearly 40 years later, and get a view into what people at the time thought made a good mech.

An important note before we carry on is that BattleTech, at the time of this article being written, had no points system whatsoever. The only balancing mechanisms were either tonnage or raw vibes about what would make a fair fight. This has some pretty huge ramifications on optimization. The first points system wouldn’t come until after the release of the Clans, as far as I am aware, so there is a pretty significant period of the game’s life where there just isn’t anything to balance games with.

“My ‘Mech Is Bigger than Yours”

I am stealing his section titles and I am going to be pretty heavily paraphrasing here for brevity. I’m 90% sure these are all 80s pop culture references I am too young to get. I don’t remember 9/11; I definitely don’t know what random movies these all come from.(There’s some Top Gun in here; some Dirty Harry. Real generic stuff for the time. The 80s don’t get to claim “The bigger they are.” – Ed.) The article is worth a read; you can get an official PDF of Issue 30 from Drive Thru RPG for like three dollars. The article goes more or less in order of how you would create a mech in broad strokes, so we start out by picking a weight. He notes that movement speed is not technically tied to tonnage, but that certain tonnages will have issues with getting to certain speeds. His broad point with this section is that A: you should always have a plan when building a unit and stick to it, and B: according to this article there are three fundamental mech designs.

Type 1 is small and fast without much armor or gun, type 2 is slow with a ton of weapons and armor, and type 3 is really 2 types. He separates type 3 into either hyperspecialized medium mechs or medium mechs that act as generalists. This view does leave out certain higher speed heavy mechs such as the Quickdraw and Dragon, which makes sense, the base models that would have existed at the time were pretty bad. Intro-Tech 5/8/0 heavy mechs are pretty dismal overall so it makes sense to not really consider them from an optimization standpoint.

Another interesting aside is that he completely fails to separate assault and heavy mechs from one another in this section, and that persists for the rest of the article. He seems to view them as broadly interchangeable in role, and to be honest in Intro-Tech the only substantial difference between a heavy and an assault is whether you are 4/6/0 or 3/5/0, so this is not that unfair of a view to have taken at the time. The combat difference between a Battlemaster and a Warhammer isn’t huge in a pre-clan world.

“I Have a Need for Speed”

Love these section titles. This section is focused on light mech optimization. Here we first see a quirk of this article. He consistently refers to mechs by their walking speed. Instead of the more modern 6/9/0 or 6/9, he refers to mechs as having “Speed 6” or “Speed 3”. I am reasonably certain that this is due to how the rules were laid out at the time, with the walking speed being what you paid tonnage for, with the running speed being calculated from that walking speed. (Jack: At the time this was written, MASC, Supercharger, and Hardened armor didn’t exist, so there was never a situation in which the run speed would be non-standard.) He notes that the average light mech of the time moved 6, with a handful moving 8 and a single official example, un-named here, only moving 2 (it’s the Urbanmech, but before it had any notoriety or its current meme status). He also notes that the majority of light mechs jump, which was true at the time. Out of the original 12 TRO:3025 light mechs, only two, the Locust and Commando, don’t jump in their base variants.

He points out that a light mech needs to spend comparatively little of its tonnage on engine and structural components, but also that the limited total tonnage heavily restricts what you can mount on them, which is true. Where I disagree is on his assessment that only the medium laser and various SRMs are good on light mechs, and that light mechs in Intro-Tech can’t stand up in combat against heavier units. He states that a light mech should carry roughly half of its weight in weapons and armor, which is quite a lot. The Jenner 7F, probably the best Intro-Tech light mech, carries only a third of its tonnage in gun while being more or less best in class when it comes to light mechs of the period. He is of the opinion that light mechs should only bother to carry weapons for swatting other light mechs, and not bother with engaging heavier units without support.

This is light mech erasure. The Jenner is underwhelming from a modern, BV based perspective, but in raw tonnage it is insanely good at outgunning and overwhelming contemporary heavy mechs at point blank range. Panthers are less good in a world without BV but can still absolutely slap around some medium mechs or gang up on a heavy.

In the last section he notes that most light mechs don’t need extra heat sinks beyond the “free” 10 that every mech gets. I agree with this…. Once we have Double Heat sinks around. Energy weapons are the best things to mount to light mechs from a raw power perspective, as much as I love trying to cram an UAC/10 into a light mech. In Intro-Tech picking up two or three extra heat sinks can let you carry that 4th medium laser or some extra SRMs. In the battle of trash bots, that makes a huge difference.

Overall I don’t really find myself agreeing at all with his take on light mechs. In Intro-Tech mechs like the Jenner and Panther are remarkably good, even when balancing with tonnage. A pair of Jenners can completely shit-cannon a Warhammer that has the same total tonnage, outgunning it substantially and easily ripping it to pieces. If the only light mechs you use are Stingers and Wasps you are going to come away with a pretty low opinion of them, but there is some real power hidden in Intro-Tech light mechs that I feel he wasn’t fully appreciating. For 1987, though, there are a few kernels of good advice in here. The big one is him pointing out that jump jets are insanely light for light mechs and you can easily carry a full complement of them. This is good advice and to this day I am always annoyed when I see jumpless light mechs that easily could spare the 4 tons to fill out that capability.

“The Bigger They Are”

He talks about Heavies and Assaults before mediums; I dunno why. He calls out that heavy mechs can’t afford to use speed for fighting, they need to lean on their armor and guns because of how much weight a big engine can take in one of them. He does have a weird opinion here that large mechs either move 2, 3, or 4 (2/3, 3/5, and 4/6 in modern terms), but calls out the average move speed as 3. This would be true if he was talking about assault mechs, but he has lumped both weight ranges together and there isn’t a single heavy mech in TROL3025 that moves slower than 4/6/0.

He separates large mechs into two categories. Well, he says two but then lists three. The first is, “a long-range fighter that uses missiles and autocannons exclusively,” followed by an all-rounder that, in modern terms, we would call a Trooper or Brawler. The secret third category is specialized mechs, with him pointing out the Charger as an example. It is interesting that he calls out specifically that the Charger is, “Built for melee attacks.” Even this early people had realized that the whole “scout” thing was a lie and the purpose of the Charger was to beat people to death with your hands. That is very interesting to me.

Another thing that is interesting to me is that his categories completely leave out the Awesome and also kind of don’t exist. We will get to this later, but Mr. Stein seems to hate the PPC. The only mechs from TRO:3025 that meet his definition of “Missiles and Autocannons exclusively” are the Zeus, Orion, and Dragon. The Zeus is the only one that super fits into this definition though, with the Orion being an all rounder and the Dragon apparently not existing due to fast heavies being imaginary. He might be referring exclusively to custom mechs or optimized mechs, but this is still some weird language to use.

Here we start to get some of his views on weaponry after laying out these types. He says that the ideal weapons for a long range mech are the LRM-20 and AC-5, as they have good heat to damage ratios. This isn’t entirely wrong, particularly for the LRM-20, which is my personal pick for the best long range weapon in Intro-Tech. However, he states that “PPCs and large lasers generate too much heat to be at all effective in [a fire support role],” which is just more Awesome erasure. It is completely fascinating to me that he seems to actively dislike the Awesome, or at least not consider it particularly optimized. The Awesome is often seen as one of the best 3025 assault mechs from an optimization standpoint due to it being a big brick of armor with no explosives and reasonable damage output.

The next section I do broadly agree with though, which is that the best use for PPCs and large lasers is as the big/main guns on a Trooper mech, here called an “all-range ‘Mech.” He calls out that their advantage lies in doing large bits of damage to specific areas, while the AC/5 and LRMs tend to spread damage across a mech instead. He seems to be of the opinion that the heat load is unreasonable though, and requires the mounting of additional heat sinks. There doesn’t seem to be a fantastic understanding of bracket firing here, the idea that the first PPC is basically “free” from a heat perspective because you aren’t often going to be firing it with all those backup lasers you are taking. He calls out that optimized big mechs from the period should only really use their medium lasers and SRMs as backups. He doesn’t list a reason clearly for this, but in my experience big Intro-Tech mechs just lack the initiative to get in close and use their point blank guns.

The number he gives is that a big mech should have roughly 63% of its weight dedicated to weapons, heat sinks, and armor. If we look at the Warhammer 6D, one of the better optimized canon Intro-Tech mechs, it comes out to 58% of its weight, very close to that number actually. He would probably hate it though, seeing as it mounts 2 PPCs. I personally probably would have rounded that to 60%, and his math really seems to support that being the median, so I have no idea where that extra 3% is coming from.

Overall this section’s advice is weird. There is no mention of the larger-bore Autocannons, he seems to hate PPCs and large lasers quite a lot, and the understanding of Bracket-Firing as an optimal play pattern for Intro-Tech doesn’t seem to have taken hold. Intro-Tech mechs just don’t have enough heat sinking to build good heat neutral designs and still manage to kill anything; you really need to have two sets of weapons that don’t overlap in best ranges that time-share your heat sinks. LRM-20s and medium lasers are a great pairing for this, as are PPCs and medium lasers. AC/5s are really not fantastic weapons in a tonnage balanced system until you get special ammo types around a decade after this article is written. They do make a lot of sense though as 1 heat weapons when you are just hitting the big red button and shooting everything every turn. So in the end he is giving the good advice that a close range heavy/assault is a really bad idea from a BV perspective in Intro-Tech, by simply not mentioning it at all.

“A Happy Medium”

This section is weird. It is the shortest of them, and he has some weird takes. The first is that a medium mech can walk up to 7 hexes (7/11) and have jump jets, which is also known as “Being an Assassin Disease” and is generally terminal. His opinion is that as you don’t have the severe weight crunch of a light mech but also don’t have the firepower potential of a heavy mech, you can afford to split the difference and play around whatever advantage that gives you, which is genuinely good advice.

He points out that a medium mech needs to spend a comparatively low amount of tonnage on its armor, though the lower bound that he gives at 10% of their weight is extremely low, roughly Panther grade for most mediums. He says this lets them carry comparatively more weapons by tonnage ratio than a heavy or light mech, which is actually true; I had just never thought of it like that before. The max armor load on a medium mech being fairly low means you don’t need to spend nearly as much on it while still having a reasonable amount of weight left over for firepower.

He continues that unlike heavy mechs, a medium mech can be built for literally any role you want, not being (in Intro-Tech) pigeonholed into fire support or all range juggernaut duty. He does fail to mention slower mediums at all, such as the Centurion, Vindicator, and Hunchback. The majority of medium mechs that would have existed at this time were 5/8 or faster though, so this isn’t completely unreasonable.

Overall this sections structure is a bit odd but the advice does mostly stack up. Medium mechs are the do-everything machines of BattleTech for a reason, and that is just as true now as it was then. You can build one to do literally anything you need it to, there is not a single weapon or strategy that requires you to be bigger than 55 tons.

“It’s Not the Size of the Gun That Counts”

This section covers the entire list of weapons that were available at the time, and is very enlightening to how the author felt about the overall balance between them at the time.

“Zap! You’re Dead!”

He goes over each energy weapon in this section, and another piece of his view towards the game shines through here. He seems to view building heat as completely inevitable and unavoidable, mentioning that firing energy weapons will build enough heat to “Put a stop to a fighting ‘Mech before the enemy does”, which is not true if you are exercising good bracket firing and not just firing everything every turn.

In order, he views the Small Laser as “practically worthless”, which is fair. The Medium Laser is, quote, “easily the best weapon in the game”, and it is interesting to see someone get that very right so early. In Intro-Tech the medium laser is king because you will often get to close in to use it and it has the best damage to weight ratio in the whole tech level. The large laser was apparently a “Popular weapon on many heavy ‘Mechs” at the time, which is interesting because well optimized Intro-Tech mechs don’t tend to carry as many of them nowadays due to them not really fitting in with the bracket-firing centered meta. He does point out that the poor range is noticeably a problem when fighting mechs with LRMs and AC/5s, but again fails to mention the PPC. He also points out that the Flamer is basically not a gun, which is very funny.

The PPC meanwhile gets the longest section here, and he does not like the PPC. He views it as a potentially powerful weapon completely hamstrung by heat buildup and high weight. While he is right that a lot of designs are better off with the large lasers and extra heat sinks, you 100% can make frighteningly effective mechs that mount a pair of PPCs in Intro-Tech, followed by a massive blast of medium lasers once you are in minimum range and can afford to swap over.

“The Most Powerful Handgun in the World”

Oh hey I know this reference! This section is on Autocannons, and he points them out as questionable weapons to use on an Intro-Tech mech. Wait a fucking minute, he called them out as the ideal weapons for fire support earlier in this article?? I have no idea what is going on here.

In order, he views the AC/2 as “almost totally worthless,” which is a fair assessment. The AC/5 is quote “The favorite weapon of many mech designers, and [it] is used nearly as often as the medium laser.” This was true at the time, there are a lot of fucking TRO 3025 mechs with AC/5s for main guns. He points out the low heat buildup as a big plus over the PPC, while also admitting that the damage is a lot lower.

The AC/10 is called out as having “excellent damage and range”, which was true in Intro-Tech, and also makes the correct call that it can only really be mounted en masse on heavies or assaults, or as a single main gun on a medium. I am also happy to see that he points out that you only really need 1 or 2 tons of AC/10 ammo, over-ammoing is a huge risk in Intro-Tech due to the lack of CASE making each additional ton of ammo just more chances to blow the fuck up.

The AC/20 is called out as the most powerful weapon, worth mounting if you can swing it because of its capacity to one-shot a lot of medium and light mechs of its era. The weird thing to me is that he doesn’t mention its incredibly poor range, or even call it a short ranged weapon at all. This is a strange omission and I am not sure what this says about how he views the weapon and the game.

Oh, the Machine Gun is only here but the only relevant note is that he does point out that the ammunition will instantly kill basically anything if it explodes, which has always been a really funny part of the weapon.

“Incoming!”

This section is all about missiles, and might somehow be the section I have the least complaints with. He does point out that you should never only mount LRMs without backup guns, which is solid advice, and that missile weapons spread damage out so you might want something else to open holes.

The LRM/5 gets a call out as a decent backup weapon for long ranges, the LRM/10 is seen as best used on a medium mech. The LRM/15 section is interesting though, with him not really seeming to like it, preferring to either mount 3 LRM/5s to save weight or an LRM/20 to get higher potential damage. I actually really like the LRM/15 when Artemis exists, because the Artemis bonus makes it do around the same damage as an LRM/20 on average while weighing slightly less, but in a world where that system doesn’t exist this is not an unfair reading. He really seems to like the LRM/20, calling it out as being very worth it to mount, though he does weirdly say that only a heavy or assault mech can mount one and enough ammo. Homie if you can fit an AC/10 into a medium mech, you can fit an LRM/20.

SRMs are pointed out as being good backup weapons for literally any mech of any weight, which was true then and is still true now. He also mentions that they see a lot of use being fired at the same time as medium lasers, which is true I guess? There is no mention of the main reason in the modern day that you bring SRMs though, which is for crit hunting. Crit hunting is the practice of spamming out a ton of individual, low damage hit rolls to try and find a location you already opened with a big gun, just to generate more critical hit attempts.

Overall his advice on weapons is weird but not completely detached from reality. The detached from reality bit doesn’t hit until the next section.

“Tink Tink Tink”

Oh god here is his perfect mech, and the reason I wanted to write this article. Instead of walking you through all of his reasoning, let’s look at the final product in a more familiar format.

Mech Overview: Lucien

The Lucien comes in two variants due to the fact that the math is wrong in the original article. He calls it out as being an 85 tonner that moves 3/5/0 with a measly 10 tons of armor, two AC/10s, two LRM/20s, an SRM/6, six machine guns….

Oh god. It’s him. Infantry Guy. In all his horror. 1987, Kevin Stein, the first manifestation of Infantry Guy taking hold of someone’s body and making them put mass machine guns on a mech that should not have them.

The two variant necessity is a quirk of the fact that all that gun doesn’t fit in an 85 tonner with 10 tons of armor. It is 6 tons overweight. This might be the result of a construction rule changing, or something else, but I don’t know. I have split it into one variant with paired AC/10s, downgrading the LRMs to LRM/10s, and another that downgrades the AC/10s to AC/5s to keep the LRMs as 20s. I am designating these the LC-2 and LC-1, respectively.

LC-1

The LC-1 comes in at 1375 BV with its AC/5s and LRM-20s. It is undersinked with only 10 SHS, with its long range firepower coming out to 14 heat plus movement. 10 tons of armor is very weak for an assault mech of its weight, but it is barely adequate if laid out as above with 20 on the CT and side torsos, 15 on the limbs. He doesn’t give any specifics for where the guns should be mounted, so I made my best guess and tried to make it as symmetrical as I could. It has a fucking lot of explosives in it, which are not behind a very thick armor belt on a mech this slow.

Between poor heat management, poor armor, insufficient LRM ammo, and way too much ammo in general, I do not have a high opinion of the LC-1. It could be more functional if it had precision, and 1375 is remarkably cheap for an 85 tonner, but overall I can’t really recommend it as a particularly optimized mech. The machine guns are hilarious though, and mounted in high enough numbers that they might actually do something if someone is dumb enough to stand next to you.

Peri’s Rating: D

Not a great showing for the LC-1; let’s see how its brother does.

LC-2

The LC-2 comes in at 1281 BV, much more reasonable, and is a vastly different animal to the LC-1. Keeping those AC/10s around hilariously doesn’t actually make a big difference for heat management, with the LC-2 also building 14+movement against only 10 SHS. The difference is in the weapons. You can fire either the AC/10s or the LRM/10s and be heat neutral with either set, and the AC/10s plus the SRM/6 only build movement heat. This mech is way better set up as a bracket firing mech, with LRMs to shoot while it closes in. That close in punch is pretty great with 2 AC/10s, and the poor armor, while it does hurt, is more than compensated for by the low price. This mech doesn’t want to shoot all its weapons at the same time like the LC-1 does, and I would argue is a lot closer in use case to the intended 1980s Lucien that comes out badly overweight.

I would genuinely take this in a game, it is cheap, does good damage, and wouldn’t be drawing too much fire. It doesn’t fall into the usual category of Intro-Tech optimized mechs, and from a tonnage optimization standpoint it badly needs more heat sinks and medium lasers. In a world of BV though, this somehow comes out as a pretty usable trooper, if one with a bit less armor than you would prefer. It’s like a Loki that has the decency to be cheap. It has more Structure than armor on the CT; it’s nuts.

Peri’s Rating: C+

The Forbidden LC-3

Just for fun, lets go over what my optimized version of the Lucien would look like.

It isn’t normal.

The LC-3 costs 1632 BV and was designed to simultaneously include what is, in my opinion, the exactly optimal weapon load while still feeling like this ridiculous shitbox. The armor is substantially increased to 30 on all torso locations, and we carry what is in my opinion the fundamental set of optimized Intro-Tech guns: A pair of PPCs with six medium lasers for backup. This is a perfect bracket firing setup, with both sets of weapons being heat neutral with a reasonable load of 22 single heat sinks. This gives you the ability to proc a PSR at range, while switching to a pretty nasty laser array when people get too close.

So the machine guns. The mech already mounted a ton of them and they are one of the funniest parts of the design, and they are dirt cheap from a BV perspective. The LC-3 carries 22 machine guns, 16 pointing forwards and 6 pointing backwards as backstabber insurance. This gives it even more damage if it can somehow get point blank next to someone, and gives it a 3 hex radius of “don’t fucking try it” where you have a max damage potential of 62 assuming all the little guns hit. Barring an engine hit the LC-3 really shouldn’t be building heat, and with only one explosive crit on the whole mech it is very unlikely that it dies to a TAC or general crit before losing a location.

I’d run the hell out of this if it was a canon sheet. It is tough, reasonably priced, has good damage at all ranges, and is incredibly funny with great crit seeking potential.

Peri’s Rating: B+, would love to make it 4/6 but the machine guns are funnier.

Conclusion

Overall this little look back into BattleTech’s history was very interesting. While I disagree on a lot of points it is surprising how much people were getting right, even in 1987. This is probably the one piece of remaining evidence that we have of what the mech optimization meta looked like before the Clan Invasion, at least it is the only thing I can find from so long ago. Now, the final product he creates from it is A: Illegal and B: Completely fucking deranged, but it is really interesting to have a look back at things like this.

The most interesting thing to me is how there is no mention of bracket firing or how good bracket firing designs are in Intro-Tech. They border on being mandatory if you want to really optimize the hell out of the tech base. Seeing a flash of infantry guy was also extremely funny, and machine guns mounted in huge numbers are genuinely not bad weapons in Intro-Tech, canon mechs just don’t mount nearly enough of them for it to work.

Also, come on CGL, the Iron Cheetah got canonized after showing up in a random magazine 30 years ago, throw the Lucien a bone. It would make a fantastic precursor design to the Loki as an underarmored and undergunned lunatic mobile.

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