OBT Forum

1. make it possible to play a good sized battle in a realistic amount of time. Say company v. company in 2-3 hours. In fact, I would build the standard battletech game to be played at battleforce, or quickstrike, scale. I think we should still have rules for one on one battles that would equate to the same level as battletech (dueling rules), but a slightly larger scale would be better.

2. streamline the mech designs in common use to 50 or so, with many, but not all, faction specific designs. I would make omnimechs standard technology for all militaries and just run a handful of chasis per faction (say 4-6 for 8-10 factions at most) with several general purpose designs used by all houses. Currently there are way too many mech designs in the game.

3. streamline the factions to say around 8-10, either removing most of the clans or radically altering their culture. The clans were cool in the 90s but they are now very stale.

4. I like the shades of grey feel that battletech has, but I miss having a truely black hat faction (well I guess WOB fit this description to some extent). I miss the old Combine, space Japs were wonderful antogonists. They were an enemy that you could respect but loath at the same time. Teddy ruined this feel and I hope the DC heads back to their traditonal values.

5. Reestablish Mechs as the kings of the battlefield. The newest rule system gives vehicles too much surivability. I miss the days when heavy tanks could stand toe to toe with mechs, but could just as easily go up like a roman candle from a luckly SRM. 

 

I think most of these changes will be good for the brand. I have some more specific ideas but they are less marketing involved. Thoughts?

Quote from: Knightmare on October 26, 2012, 01:51:17 PM

Quote from: JPArbiter on October 26, 2012, 01:36:52 PM

I would like to point out battletech.com DOES direct to the tabletop game and shares tabletop news

Glad someone caught that. 

I vain hope that people think a little bit more where BattleTech currently is I tried to find a good proxy for fan base wallet size and interest towards game universe itself.

I used battlecorps keyword. Battlecorps importance lies in fact that it is not directed towards computer game but only towards setting itself because it provides short stories, in-universe news and occasional unit description. It is unfortunately very noisy (the 0 values point towards very low initial interest) but there is staggering 95% loss rate over last decade. Lot of this loss can probably be attributed to poor quality. There is also the fact that amount of material Battlecorps publishes now is far less than initially.

However, combining above with fact that single faction source books are no more economically viable I am pondering if the game universe itself is now less marketable than before. This is just my gut feeling but I get an idea that amount of table-top supporting content has generally been increased in material compared to game universe orientation. Has anyone made actual statistical analysis on this?