(4) For some reason, the current holders of the license absolutely hate WarShips. I think if they could, they would grandfather it. I don't know why and I don't care why, but if you were to press me on the issue, I would have to say that their presence tends to really suck attention and credibility away from massed units of BattleMechs. As in, why send a battalion of 'Mechs down when you can bombard from orbit? Why ship large formations of dropships and such when a WarShip can interdict and destroy them with relative ease? In other words, the important work of enforcement can be done with WarShips and transports with infantry. The 'Mech is neither one, exactly - it's not credible to take over a planet of billions with a couple of dozen 'Mechs, and they don't really qualify as boots on the ground.
Get rid of WarShips, however, and you are pretty much forced to go the 'Mech Invasion route. At least that is the way I see things.
"Warships>'Mechs, so why 'Mechs?"
Battletech is a game about giant, stompy robots, for people who enjoy giant stompy robots. Warships were originally intended as some mysterious aspect of the Star League, and were not something the rules or universe were originally designed to support. Unfortunately, this meant as the universe was fleshed out, the topic of Warships were brought up from time to time, but as they were, very little thought was put into how they would effect the game or universe.
The very first appearance of Warships in the game were as broken, patched on rules for the original Aerotech that made them a form of hyper-armed super Jumpship. A number of designs were created for TRO: 2750, very few of which made any tactical sense, and all of which were overwhelmingly powerful by Aerotech standard, but that was fine, because they were all extinct aspects of the game's mythological dark age of technology. If the Star League could stomp a BattleMech regiment or six flat in a matter of minutes with their naval power, what did it matter? No one opposed them
because they could stomp everyone flat! The game was about 3025, and the awe-inspiring power of Warships was just a pretty piece of fluff for the background.
Unfortunately, when the Clans were introduced, the genie was let out of the bottle. While the authors of that era could have had the Clans have scuttled all their WarShips and buried the whole subject then and there, it was decided (logically, but not without detriment to the universe) that the Clans still all had their SLDF Warships! While that in and of itself was logical, the Clans were also fated not to conquer the entire Inner Sphere despite overwhelming orbital superiority, requiring an even more illogical fix.
"The Clans have Warships, but they don't use them to fight, it's dishonorable."
To the Clans, it seemed, Warships were something of a display trophy to inspire fear and awe, like a parade float covered in spikes and severed heads. Despite their ability to be used to instantly win the campaign for Terra and subjugate the entire Inner Sphere, (at least barring the Inner Sphere's whole-sale use of nuclear weapons, something that wouldn't just overshadow big stompy robots, but totally render pointless a skirmish scale tactical game), the Clans were arbitrarily declared to culturally dumb to make use of their own instant-win buttons.
Of course, this was not to last. Logic dictated that no matter how culturally backward the Clans were,
someone was going to eventually get desperate enough to use a Warship in combat. What's more, a growing number of fans were awed by the awesome firepower of these ships and demanded to see them used and see more of them.
Enter Battlespace. Now we had a brand new, but no better thought out, set of rules for Warship combat because there was a vocal enough portion of the fan base who really wanted to be able to fight with WarShips despite them being required to pass through a battleship-sized logic hole to not render the rest of the universe completely invalid. The thoroughly unsuited hyper-powered leviathans of TRO: 2750 were dusted off and brought out to supply the Clans, and to a lesser extent, Comstar, with the units necessary for play.
Unfortunately, this just increased the interest and demand in Warship combat in the universe. Players wanted to see fleet battles, and wanted the Great Houses to get in on the action! Unfortunately, in a universe where building 108 BattleMechs and assigning pilots to them is a herculean task for a interstellar government, and an attack by the same number of BattleMechs decides the fate of entire worlds, there really wasn't much room for any sizable naval fleets unless WarShips were to completely overtake 'Mechs as the force of decision in-universe; an unacceptable option, because the game universe exists primarily as a device for selling a game about giant, stompy robots. Alienating the popular giant stompy robot games' fans to create what would be a rather generic space battle game wouldn't serve the company's economic interests.
So we ended up with miniscule flotillas of Ãœber-WarShips being assigned to each faction. This compromise didn't please the hardcore WarShip fans who continued to demand whole fleet battles, yet still managed to create massive ripples in the bread-and-butter portion of the universe, where these WarShips began interdicting major planets, cutting off ground troops from orbital reinforcements, and generally doing things which are totally logical
and render 'Mechs impotent.
I know a lot of fans like to complain about how the Jihad devalued the BattleMech because major engagements were being decided by nuclear weapons, but WarShips had already devalued the 'Mech when they came into play in the Civil War era.
The WarShip genie had to go back into the bottle. The Jihad destroyed the vast majority of them and their manufacturing facilities. The 'Mech would have its crown again. The WarShip fans would lament, but ultimately they were a small minority of fans of a universe built around human beings dueling with illogical, bipedal walkers, and the fans of giant, stompy robots could not be put out, nor could the illogical economic principles that allow militaries of fewer than ten-thousand such devices to decide the fates of hundreds of worlds.
Ultimately, WarShips as written cannot help but overshadow BattleMechs. The game and the universe as written cannot reconcile both large WarShip fleets and worlds being conquered by 36 BattleMechs. If FASA, when writing the WarShip entries for TRO: 2750, would have had the foresight to have made them smaller and more in scale with the rest of the universe's combat units, we probably could have seen full battle fleets return in a way that didn't upturn the apple cart. Alternatively, if Catalyst decide at some point in the future to toss the current illogical economic model for BattleTech and allow the nations of the universe millions, not thousands, of BattleMechs, WarShip fleets could conceivably exist without rendering the BattleMech pointless, albeit not without the cost of MechWarrior's status as Demigod.
My hope for the future is that pocket WarShips will finally allow BattleTech to get it's naval aspect right. If we allow each nation-state a small number of the current Warships of the Destroyer and Frigate classes to serve as Battleships, and build fleets around them with pocket WarShips serving as the cruisers, destroyers and escorts of the fleet, then we conceivably could have naval engagements that don't instantly invalidate small-scale ground combat operations.
