Classic BattleTech

[James Tiberius Kirk]

Im going to post bit by bit some of the CBT rules and method of playing. These are used in conjunction with lead figures on hex boards.
Mechwarrior mercenaries uses these as it base concept and a lot of the factors you will see in this thread carry through into the game you play today.
for starters ill post the front and rear cover.

[James Tiberius Kirk]

[James Tiberius Kirk]

[James Tiberius Kirk]

[James Tiberius Kirk]

[James Tiberius Kirk]

Of interest above is the heat point table and the resulting effect heat has on your mech. heat is very much part of the realism thats been built into the game.
No Heat or Unlimited Ammo (NH, UA) servers may be fun, but players who use them all the time tend to do very poorly when confronted with "reality".

[James Tiberius Kirk]

heres a Classic example:
you are confronted with an opponent running a hot mech, which often shuts down during play. this is because the mech has too many heat producing weapons mounted for its heatsinks to handle.
Stripping the mech of its arms and the weapons mounted there only makes the mech MORE efficient on the battlefield.
by removing some of the weapons that generate heat by stripping the mechs arms, the remaining weapons can now fire without the risk of the mech shutting down
But if you look at the heat point table on pg 29 you will see that an engine hit (a critical location hit) will add five points of heat per round to the mechs heat load, a second engine hit will increase this load to ten points of heat per round extra the mech has to deal with. this is caused by damage to the engines inbuilt heatsinks.
therefore its far better to core a hot mech than it is to strip it, by concentrating on the Centre Torso , you eventually do engine damage making an already hot mech much too hot to function.
this effectivly nullifies all the weapons on the mech by causing it to shutdown so often its no longer able to fight effectivly.

this happens in mercs, im sure youve all had situations where a mech that has no heat issues with its loadout, starts to have heat issues as you take damage, this is because your mech has sustained hits to its engine.

So in dealing with a Hot varient, try to core the chassis rather than strip it

[1heliguy]

Cptn. kirk, u know they made a new master rule book?

[James Tiberius Kirk]

Yes, that was the first one, and didnt include rules for clantech.
they were published later in various compendiums, its the nature of rulesets to evolve with play, for example my models are used to play CBT on a large scale, in doing so we discovered a need for mods to LOS rules etc as the resolution of scale introduced new variables. things such as a "blind shot" around corners become physically possible at this scale most of the mech can be behind the corner but one arm can shoot blind (add modifiers to the to hit roll). in return the mech is well covered so the to hit table is modified to reflect only those parts visable with LOS.