Howdy pulse laser enthusiasts and welcome to a different sort of article. Recently me, Liberty, and associates went to the Eastern Assault Classic BattleTech tournament at the Richmond Open. I won’t spoil how it went; there will be a separate article about the event itself going out tomorrow dealing with all of that. What I am here to talk about is the process we used to create the lists that we took to the tournament, what those lists ended up looking like, and how we are improving the process for the next event. Let’s get started, after a short break to look at this kickass Templar Diorama.

Tournaments in General

Preparing a tournament list is a very different animal to making a list for a pickup game. Tournaments are a hell of a lot meaner by their nature, and you don’t have a local meta to fall back on. You are going to encounter people with a wildly different set of expectations and views of what is and isn’t good, and you will inevitably get hit by a mech you have never even heard of at some point or another. It is insanely difficult to prepare for all eventualities at a tournament due to the sheer breadth of available units, with even the most restrictive rulesets frequently having more than a thousand units to choose from. It is still important to build in such a way that a bad map or an unexpected list build doesn’t completely screw you.

Step One: The Packet

There isn’t a lot of standardization between tournament rule packets for BattleTech, with every packet having its own restrictions, rules, and missions. The first step in making a list is, obviously, to look at the packet. For this event, the following list restrictions were in effect.

• 7000 BV2 maximum.
• Only introductory or standard rule mechs or
  Battle Armor.
• Select from a single faction’s MUL with no era restrictions.
• Minimum three units, maximum six units.
• Maximum of two of the same chassis, but the
  variants must be different.
• No alternate ammo, except for LB-X
  standard or cluster and ATM standard,
  extended range, or high explosive.
• Gunnery/Piloting cannot go below 3 or
  above 6 for either skill (any combination
  between is allowed).
• No mech quirks/SPAs.

The skill restrictions are broadly pointless as, for reasons I will get into in a moment, skills are a bad purchase at an event unless you have already maxed out on units. The most notable distinctions are the restrictions on special ammo, which bans out Inferno SRMs and Precision autocannon ammo, and the faction restriction. Infernos and Precision ammo are a big part of our local meta, but losing them isn’t an instant death sentence or anything. It will make Battle Armor more annoying, which is a surprise tool that will help us later.

I don’t often play at 7000 BV, but it does mean that you are pretty pressed on points to cram the full 6 units into your list. It also limits the amount of very expensive Clan mechs you can bring, but it doesn’t completely rule them out as options the way that 5000 BV does.

When it comes to faction restrictions, particularly when you can pick from any era, well, what faction has the best MUL availability?

Factions

It’s Free Worlds League. The Flashman 9M is exclusive to them and is insanely strong, and they get a wide range of Word of Blake bullshit, clan omni mechs, good M series variants of mechs, and access to the pretty potent IS general set in the Civil War and IlClan eras. They are not ahead by a huge amount though, with several other contenders also making a great case. The Rasalhague Dominion has a very powerful Clan Availability list, with the Kodiak as a particular standout, but they suffer from only existing in the republic era on and not having as deep of a past pool to draw on. Mercenary is very strong simply because you can build any list you can think of with them, with a hugely wide availability set (including the Kodiak). Jade Falcon would be stronger than FWL if this tournament was allowing advanced technology, because of their Partial Wing/Improved Jump Jet/Ferro Lam bullshit that they get up to in the Dark Ages, but without those tricks they are a pretty generic Clan list.

Finally, we have Draconis Combine. The only reason the Draconis Combine isn’t in first is the Flashman 9M. It is a deep availability, present in all eras, with a huge pool of mechs that are more or less exclusive to them. Kuritan K variants also tend to be strong, typically having increased armor loads while dropping ballistic weapons for energy ones. I ended up choosing Draconis Combine pretty early on due to their density of quality assault mechs and fantastic light mechs. I already mostly play DCMS, so it was a happy accident that they happen to have exactly what I want.

As for the rest of the people I went with, Liberty really attempted to get a Colonial Marshals force to work but struggled heavily with them only really having one standout unit on their availability, the Marshal 6FR. Capped at only taking one of them, he couldn’t get a list together he was happy with around that stupid thing. He ended up playing Davion. For another one of our friends, Jessie, we all threw a list together off of the Marik availability and it ended up working so well it didn’t get refined much at all over the course of our practice games. Our other associate ended up finding the Titan TI-1Aj somehow, a truly deranged standard fusion engine 100 ton assault mech with two ER PPCs, seven medium lasers, and five SRM-4s. He ended up using the Merc availability to build around it.

Liberty: Note that for the next tournament I will be using a Marshals list. This is due to the next iteration of this packet including specialty ammunition, notably Precision ammo. The pool of good bruisers the Fronc Reaches get gets a lot bigger with special ammo on the table. This is another thing to take into account when building your lists: What else can a unit do for you? Is BA present with Special ammo allowed? Well then you might want something with a fistful of SRM6 packs to try and burn the pesky bastards away. Are you allowed to take Precision? Then suddenly those big boys suddenly look even better with the capacity to have bootleg pulse on their cannons, at least against moving targets.

Missions

Another big part of reading the packet is identifying the missions you will be playing. Sometimes a tournament won’t share the missions ahead of time, but this one did. It had six missions, each of which incentivized slightly different sorts of mechs. However, only three of them would be in use at the event, rolled randomly day of. This meant that you wanted a list that was at least passable at all of the missions, because you couldn’t ensure that you would play the one your list was best at.

Identifying what sort of mech you need for each mission is an important skill, so let’s go over all of them in broad strokes. An important note before we begin is that all of these missions were played on two standard sized paper map sheets, moving in from along the long edges. In addition, every mission would end when a player scored 100 total points, split between objective and kill points, but the theoretical maximum score was actually 140, with the specific scoring system allowing for players to score more than 100 points in a game, provided all points over 99 were scored on the final turn.

Mission 1: Gray Monday

We called this one “King of the Hill” while play-testing it. This was a pretty typical King of the Hill scenario, with a central point to fight over. Victory points were scored from both kills and for having more units on the central point. You would max primary after seven turns of having more dudes next to the central point. This mission, obviously, incentivizes big bastard mechs who can sit still and slug it out at point blank range while holding the point. With the point only being six or seven hexes away from where you entered the table, the typical poor mobility of that sort of mech is heavily mitigated by them only needing a single turn to get into position around the mid point.

Mission 2: Stand Up Fight

This was just a kill mission, and we called it “Kill” for shorthand while doing practice games. Bring mechs that kill good. Literally every mission had kill points for secondary scoring, so this was good advice in general for the event.

Mission 3: Communication Suppression

We called this one “Stand On Points” while practicing it. This mission had the players alternating placing a total of three objectives along the centerline of the table, scoring 10 points each time they end a turn with a unit on an objective, separately scored for each objective. At a maximum of 70 points, this means that if you can swing it, you can max primaries in three turns and then turn this into a kill mission. This is the first mission where the intense value of Jump 8 to this packet becomes clear. Depending on whether you win or lose initiative, you can put one or two of these objectives within eight hexes of your table edge and sling an 8 hex jumper onto them, scoring immediately and putting your opponent behind right out the gate. In playtesting the best way to play this one was to use light mechs and battle armor to score the objectives while you used the rest of your list to score kill points.

Mission 4: Objective Raid

This mission was a very odd one. You placed objectives exactly like in the previous mission, but instead of them just sitting on the ground, your mechs could pick them up and run away with them. You were not allowed to jump or use a Supercharger/MASC after picking them up, but you could still run and haul the objectives away from your opponent. This further increased the dominance of the 8/12/8 movement profile, as that gave you enough jump to land on the objective semi-consistently, and enough running movement to book it the fuck away with it to hide behind the rest of your list. This mission was exclusively called “Boxes” while we were practicing, because the mental image of a mech running away holding a big cardboard box of objective points over his head was very funny to us.

Mission 5: Base Assault

This mission had players placing buildings along their deployment zone, with the goal being to blow up the enemy’s buildings by dealing 150 damage to them. This mission had a big issue that cropped up during our practice games, namely that certain official maps would let you hide the buildings where your opponent would need to stand directly next to them to shoot them. None of these maps were in use at the tournament however, so this wouldn’t have actually been a pressing issue. This mission, obviously, just incentivizes high damage, which is something you already should have due to the omnipresent kill points. We just called this one “Buildings”. We ended up under-practicing this one.

Mission 6: Take and Hold

This one had the name “Coinflip” while we were testing it, because fucking hell there isn’t a ton you can do to control whether you win or lose on primaries in this one. This mission functionally required you to place two buildings in a band near your deployment zone, and stand next to them to score points. Much like the King of the Hill mission, this one counted the number of mechs from each player to determine who scores that objective on a given turn. Assault mechs and Heavy Mechs counted as two mechs for control of these, unlike on King of the Hill. The major, glaring issue with this mission is that all four buildings started disabled, with them turning on in a random order during the game. This means that it was very possible, even likely, for your opponent to get both of their buildings in a row, scoring 30 out of 100 points before you could even score primaries once. These games only lasted two hours, so spending multiple turns without scoring was potentially ruinous. This means that you had to try to bum-rush your opponent’s objectives if you lost the coin flip for whose objectives turn on first, while they could just sit still and shoot you. We ended up under-practicing this game because we felt like it was up to random chance whether you won or not, but that was a bit unfair and we definitely should have practiced more.

Part Two: List Theory

So putting all that information from the packet together, what do our lists need? Well, the missions incentivize two sorts of mechs very strongly. Jump 8+ dorks, and juggernaut assault/heavy mechs with high durability and good damage. Poor movement on this second category is not the death sentence it often can be, because the objectives mostly force people together to engage around specific points. Being 3/5/0 isn’t the end of the world when you deploy 8-9 hexes away from the center point you will need to fight over for the entire game. Battle Armor is also strong in the format, as Infernos are banned and they are annoying as hell to clear off of a lot of these objectives as a result.

This packet also badly wants you to have all six units. With King of the Hill and Coinflip both encouraging you to have more units on points than your opponent does, having the maximum allowed number of units will give you an inherent advantage at those missions. This is another reason why buying skills is a poor choice. By not buying skills, you can frequently fit another mech or a couple units of battle armor in the BV that is freed up by just taking 4/5 mechs instead of 3/4 ones. The extra to-hit is nice and all, but having a whole other unit is almost always better. If you are already at your unit limit and have extra BV, I would only buy skills if there are no units you want to upgrade to better/more expensive variants.

In addition, with a two hour time limit and kill points on the table, any centerpiece mechs needed to have high damage that they can dump into the enemy very quickly. This event simply did not have the time to let something like a Goshawk or Horned Owl win a game, because they would simply take way too long. This makes Clan Tech assaults and Heavies much more appealing, because the one thing none of them lack is massive piles of guns. The IS Wall of Steel strategy could have still worked here, but I was very worried about not having the time to grind people down the way that that list archetype prefers to.

In general you want to build a list with a concrete gameplan for every mission, where every mech you pick supports that gameplan. A well tuned collection of mechs that work well together will almost always beat a random pile of assorted good mechs with no synergy. As an example, the Awesome 11H is a fantastic mech, but it needs something to stand near it to intercept and ward off any close range cavalry mechs that would otherwise really want to dive in to minimum range and bully it to death. So a Phoenix Hawk or Wolverine will make a better buddy for it than a Thunder Hawk would, despite the Thunder Hawk probably being a stronger mech in isolation.

My first proper, well thought out list was a pair of Kingfishers, a pair of Spiders, and a pair of magnetic Battle Armor suits to ride them. The Kingfisher is a mech we have talked about recently that we love for its sheer durability. As we couldn’t double up on variants, I went with a C and a B. This list was fantastic at not dying, as even one Kingfisher can be a lot for a list to deal with at 10k, much less 7k. The Spiders were a 9M and a 7K, 8/12/8 with a pair of MPLs or MVSPs is just a really strong loadout, particularly as both of those variants have exactly enough armor to be really annoying to kill. Draconis Combine availability has a shortage of good magnetic Battle Armor outside of the IS standard Magnetic, so I ended up trying out merc availability to squeeze in a pair of Fa Shih suits.

The theory behind how this list would work is that the Kingfishers would act as a near-indestructible anchor and base of fire, moving forwards towards any middle of map objectives. The Spiders would jump onto any objectives, drop their battle armor, and then flit around scoring me points where they could and backstabbing when they couldn’t. This separation into a battle line and flanking force is a very strong way to build a tournament list. If your opponent is mostly slow, you can easily get behind them with your flankers while they are busy with your frontline. If they are either mostly fast or balanced, you can get into a defensive position and park up, daring your opponent to close in with the big boys while your small mechs act to discourage enemy little guys from trying to backstab them, possibly even actively chasing down and murdering them if you have little guy superiority in a match. Cavalry heavy mechs are a bit of an issue as they can’t be discouraged by most light mechs, but with smart positioning you can force them into a honest fight that a good, heavy frontline will probably win.

Liberty was still trying to beat the Marshals into functioning at this point, and no list he built out of their availability was able to kill two Kingfishers while still doing objectives reasonably well. After switching to the Davion availability, he ended up making a list with a slightly different theory to mine. Rather than taking a large flanking force to support his beef, he just took mechs and battle armor that were so dangerous up close, with so many pulse lasers, that anyone who would dare to close in to flank would probably just get deleted from the face of the earth before they could do any significant damage. He still did have a Jump 8 dork to do objectives, but he left it at that.

Liberty: The GMGM Davion list I made is genuinely hateful. I do think, in retrospect, that the best of my Marshals forces would probably have done quite well at the tournament with their significant mobility and capacity to drag things that weren’t Kingfishers or Regents into the grave.

Part Three: Playtesting

It is very important to playtest and run practice games before a tournament. BattleTech has a lot of units that seem awesome in theory, but end up sucking horribly in practice. This can also apply to an entire list, where a set of units seems very good, but have issues when put together that are hard to see in isolation.

The way that we playtested this event was a bit imperfect. Rather than creating generic tournament style lists to practice against, we mostly just practiced against each other’s lists. This ended up turning out mostly fine, but there was a substantial risk that we would end up with a warped view of what the event was going to look like. Now that we have been to one of these events, we have a better idea about the sorts of mech that are common at BattleTech tournaments run by people who aren’t me. Lots of Awesomes and Fire Moths, mostly.

Going forwards for playtesting, it is good to keep a “Baseline” list around to test against and keep yourself honest, with a long range snipey mech, a brawly mid range mech, a couple of flankers, and a close range cavalry mech. Something like an Awesome 9Q, Wraith TR-1, Fire Moth P/H, a Thunderbolt of some sort, and maybe an Argus or Wolverine would be a good thing to test against. It has one of everything, so if your list can’t deal with any one thing in particular you will find out.

We played all of the missions multiple times in the leadup to the tournament, but as mentioned we ended up under-practicing Buildings and Coinflip due to them not being nearly as varied to play. Over the course of testing, both me and Liberty ended up figuring out a lot of problems with our lists, heavily changing them as a result.

Part Four: Adjust for Playtesting

This list was fine, but over the course of playtesting something became fairly clear. If the enemy had something like a Kodiak or another UAC/20 assault mech, they absolutely could kill the Kingfishers before the Kingfishers could kill them. At 2000+ BV each, this would rapidly lead to my opponent winning the game with kill points.  This massive concentration of points also made me very worried about getting my head drilled out with a gauss rifle or something. The tournament was using Edge rules where you could force the opponent to reroll a single headshot, but that was once per event, not once per game, and could not be counted on to protect two expensive mechs in all three games. The Spiders were quite good, but the Battle Armor did functionally nothing at all, weren’t nearly as essential as I thought for grabbing objectives, and the Fa Shih in particular has low damage and low armor, making them too non-threatening and easy to kill. I also badly wanted to get back on Draconis Availability, so I went browsing through their availability to find a mech that could combine the best parts of the Kingfisher C and B, and another mech that was big, threatening looking, and costed less than 2000 BV. I also wanted to free up the space for another light mech, as the Combine only really gets the Inner Sphere Standard Magnetic when it comes to decent magnetic battle armor.

So, I wanted to make my base of fire cheaper and more dangerous, while hopefully beefing up my flanking force.

Boy did I find exactly what I was looking for. My roommate had an unpainted miniature of a mech called the Tenshi, a dark ages Kuritan Omni-mech that looks sick as hell. It has a light engine, which does hurt durability compared to the Standard engine on the Kingfisher, but a quick look through the variants revealed the Tenshi OA, which is genuinely an S grade mech. It carries three Large VSPs, an MRM-30, enough heat sinks to fire all the VSPs, a pair of coolant pods to let it pitch in the MRM twice a game when a good shot presents itself, and it is only 1830 BV. LVSPs are some of the best weapons in the game, doing 11 damage with a -3 bonus up close, scaling down with distance. However, as mentioned, this packet really encouraged point blank range fighting, mitigating the range problem. As another bonus, two of the LVSPs were in flippable arms. This means that any light mech dork that tried to break through its monstrously thick back armor would probably get deleted from reality. The Tenshi OA is a genuine monster of a mech, one of the most powerful things I have ever put down on a table. This disgusting strength does come with problems, like poor range bands and slow speeds. At this specific event where a point blank ranged fight was more or less assured in all but two missions (Buildings and Kill), this thing was disgustingly strong.

This did leave me with a bit of a shortage of burst damage with the loss of that UAC/20 though. Fortunately for me, the Draconis Combine has another wonderful toy coming from the Inner Sphere General list, the Regent B. Costing a similar amount to the Kingfisher C, you might notice that I rated the Regent B lower than the Kingfisher C, and I stand by that in most contexts. The Kingfisher C’s flippable gun arms and lack of explosive components are very strong, but in this specific event where I was concerned with burst damage above everything else, the Regent B was the better choice. It functionally combined the primary weapons of the Kingfisher B and C onto one chassis with better armor and the same standard engine. As mentioned, being 3/5/0 wasn’t nearly as bad at this event as it would normally be, so losing mobility to combine the profiles of both of these mechs was a good trade. At roughly the same cost as the Kingfisher C, this slotted in nicely.

For the rest of the adjustments, I upgraded my Spider 7K into a Venom 9KC. The Venom is a mech with nearly the same profile as a Spider, including using the same model designation code of SDR. It is canonically a 5 ton heavier rebuild of the mech, and most Venoms really suck. All of them but the 9KC only mount single heat sinks, making it very difficult to get good use out of them. The 9KC though moves 8/12/8 with similar armor to a Panther, and it carries three MPLs instead of the Spider’s standard two. At less than 1000 BV, this is a fantastic deal. I exchanged the Battle Armor out for a unit of Inner Sphere Standard Magnetics and a Spider 8M, a substantially worse mech than the 9M or 9KC but it still mounted a pair of MPLs and was cheap enough to fit. I had to downgrade the skills on the Battle Armor pretty substantially, which didn’t really matter as their only purpose in life was to sit on objectives and score them.

This list, consisting of an insanely brutal firebase and a trio of obnoxiously mobile pulse mechs, was mean as hell and very good at the majority of the missions in this packet. The only ones that gave me much trouble were Coinflip and Buildings. Coinflip was rough because I didn’t have a squad of battle armor for both points, forcing me to set up a mech to sit on one of them. Buildings was just annoying because my big damage mechs were very slow and, if my opponent was smart and placed his buildings in places where they were hard to see, it would take me multiple turns to get into a position to fire on them. I was planning on going in to most games with complete superiority when it came to mobility, and a pair of assault mechs that could take an entire lists worth of shooting for an entire game and still sometimes fail to die.

The ideal tactic for my list was for both of my assault mechs to rumble forwards together, with the Tenshi positioned to be able to cover the Regent’s back arc as well as its own. While they slam forwards towards the mid point, my horde of jumpy bastards can exploit any mechs that pull away from the beef, chasing them down and securing kills that the big boys would otherwise have missed. They can also dive onto any objectives that the big boys clear off, scoring points on them while jumping around to maintain their TMM.

On accident, I created a very WW2 British ass list. I had my “Infantry” mechs in the Tenshi and Regent, which were slow, monstrously durable, and could easily crack anything they pushed towards wide open. Meanwhile my “Cavalry” mechs were able to exploit breakthroughs, secure objectives, pursue and eliminate retreating enemies, and generally support the “Infantry” as it pushed forwards. This was a strong strategy, though I didn’t actually realize the full implications of how badly I needed to keep the two assault mechs together until after my first game of the tournament. I generally think that this is a very potent way to construct a list for any sort of breakthrough or objective focused scenario.

Meanwhile for Liberty, he created the most aggro thing I have seen in this game. With a stock Nightstar acting as long range fire support, he brought a Templar III A and a Marauder 5T. He had a single Wasp on hand to serve as an objective dork, one of the 8/12/8 ones. The rest of his list was a pair of Grenadier II BA suits, specifically one set with an LRM-4 on each trooper and another set with an SRM-4 on each trooper. The SRM set was carried by the Templar and dropped near the front line to dump 16 SRMs into anything that didn’t immediately disengage from them. This formation was insanely powerful, capable of dumping out pulse laser shots, SRMs, and gauss shells at anything it felt like. After practice games he was able to determine that the optimal strategy was to hold his Nightstar back on a hill or ridgeline while pushing the rest of the list forwards, trying to pull attention off of the Nightstar with the problematic amount of armor and pulse that was slamming on to a mid point. The Wasp simply tried to secure some primary objective points before it was inevitably murdered by some enemy light mech hunter, but in practice it was typically able to earn more primary points than it was worth in kill points before dying.

These lists were arrived at after dozens and dozens of practice games and a pretty good understanding of exactly what the various missions were expecting of us, and while playing dozens of games is not really reasonable for most people, getting in 2 or 3 on each mission that the tournament could have will rapidly show you what sorts of things you are going to want to add or subtract from your list, and clarify exactly what they are incentivizing.

Liberty: The Corporate Enforcers fucked. People get real fuckin’ scared when the MAD-5T and the TLR2-OA get in their face at the same time. It’s a harrowing amount of ‘I’m hitting you and there’s little you can do about it’ to have to deal with if I’m honest. The only thing at any point that died was the Wasp, though the MAD came close one time. The Templar and Nightstar never even came close and no one, at any point, deigned to shoot at the BA because they were just that annoying. 

Also of note is the fact that a lot of people just don’t shoot at BA if they don’t have infernos and those Grenadier IIs are no exception. It’s a lot to chew through four dudes in 12 point stealth armor suits and most people will probably feel they’re better suited trying to knock out an actual ‘mech. Pair that with the fact that there were no points for ‘crippling’ the BA squads by killing some number of the squad and it feels even less worth it.

Don’t do what we did prep wise, it’s overkill. Eventually this just became the games we played on Wednesdays instead of our usual dumb pickup games. A good read through of  the packet, an email or two to clarify questions you have with the TO, and a fistful of games with each scenario will get you what you need to know to actually get a good list together.

Final Thoughts

We spent a lot of time playtesting and tweaking our lists in small ways, swapping one variant for another on a chassis, and ended up with some very optimized, extremely mean lists. Me and Liberty play an abnormally large amount of BattleTech (2-3 games a week most weeks), but even without that many practice games and that much tweaking, simply by taking a strong look at the packet, having a concrete game plan in mind, taking mechs with good synergy to one another, taking your maximum allowed amount of units, and doing 2-3 practice games on each mission to identify problems and correct them, you can substantially increase your chances at an event. This honestly goes for any wargame, but since a good chunk of the skill expression in BattleTech is just picking the right mechs for the job, it has a pretty substantial effect here.

If you want to know how the event ended up going for us, you should check out Liberty’s article, which will be going up tomorrow.

Cheers.

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