OBT Forum

A little harsh but honest often is. I'm still going over the entire fanbook and I will say the art is astounding probably by far the best I've ever seen for such a project. I like the armor presented in the book but it is one dimensional with nations giving their own flavor on something that some else did. A little bit of overkill. Still the Tank Corps don't get much love and it is good to see so much here. However, many Mechs are retreads that I feel didn't deserve the space in this TRO. I would have liked to have seen more new models like the Praetorian for example. While it used established tech and follows in the path laid down by the Watchman and Sentry it is new. Don't get me wrong I liked the Champion but it is just a variant. I would have preferred where you were going with the Durendal I think as you make reference to the Davies using surplus Banshee chassis to create. Using the old to create the new (even though it isn't specifically mentioned in the fluff a missed oppurtunity) is a nice touch. Let me say the dedication to pull of this work is beyond praise worthy. The work and passion which was put in is clearly evident. I for one will use designs in my settings and appreciate its release.

MrsArbiter and I will be doing a full verbal review in the September podcast, but on until then I wanted to give some initial impressio s and open the floor for others to leave them.

my thoughts are in list form

1) Where the hell are the clans?  they are kind of an important part of the battletech universe, and the reasoning behind it presented in the intro are weak as hell.

The Clans are... simply not there.  It's a big book, originally intended to fill a noticeable gap in Vehicles for the IS, and it continued to expand in many directions.  But we thought it might be a good idea to leave the Clans out of this one.  Sorta keep the focus on the IS; big as it is, there's plenty to say.

2) most of the vehicles feel like uninspired Total Warfare Meta Gaming, designed to exploit the changes made to battletech rules.  you see a lot of small pulse lasers where machine guns once reigned.  the use of massive quantities of missiles and cluster weapons for tank busters

Uninspired?  Mmmm.  Okay, you got the TW meta down.  Absolutely!  And why not?  The TW rules changed the focus and the usefulness of a lot of designs.  We conceived of this just after TW appeared and one of the things that impressed me was that the Motive Hits Tables were an interesting way around massive amounts of armor.  I figured infantry could do with some cover over open ground, if they were ever to be used.  Thus SRM smoke launchers on IFVs.  And that business with the machine guns - if you *have* small pulse lasers, why *not* use them?  Especially as they don't explode when hit.  And do their share of damage to infantry and battle armor - which we saw as the up-and-coming threat in the new TW environment.

Did we tweak the designs to take advantage of TW rules?  Oh mais oui, yes.  Why not?  AMS on a lot of stuff, ERLL on a lot of other stuff, the ability to spam your way to victory.  If it works in-universe and is reflected in the ruleset, hecks yeah!  I don't consider any of it a gamebreaker after the back and forth we saw during playtesting.

3) Why not battle armor?

Battle armor in a book specifically intended for Vees and only later opened up to a touch of Aerospace and more 'Mechs... nah.  We weren't shotgunning it, we were filling in what we saw (five years ago) as a lack of Vees and some neat 'Mech designs.

4) many of the mechs are fantastic, sometimes to so, I noticed a lot of mechs that had the armor filled out by Solaris Skunk Works "use efficent maximum" button.

Ah well.  Some folks are unhappy with substandard designs that have flaws in them.  The flavor apparently doesn't translate to happiness on the tabletop, however fun it might be to see in the writeup.  Other folks are unhappy with machines that are min-maxed out the wazoo.  Such designs just seem like someone is gaming the system. 

If this were a roleplaying game, I would lean heavily towards the former.  If it were a pure war game, I would lean heavily towards the latter.  I leaned lightly towards the latter because I felt there were already enough 'flavorful' designs out there.

5) ERRORS ERRORS ERRORS!  wrong BVs, wrong tonnages, wrong criticals...

Brother, you got that right.  I fixed something like 30 pages of errors - two months back.  I am told these new errors are typical of a release, and to be honest, this is our first go at it.  The night before we were to go public, I punched in 15 pages of corrections.

Now we have lots more to fix, but not that bad, really.  My biggest embarrassment has been the degradation of the images.  We will get you a crisp, corrected version as soon as we can!

Wait a minute, 'wrong tonnages'?  Where did you see that?

6) all in all a good effort, GREAT fiction, but you can tell this is a fan work

Well of course you can.  We pasted a notice on every record sheet and all over the rest of the work, so no one would miss that this is a fan work. 

I think most of the reviewer's complaints are valid (especially the errors) in the context of comparing this fan work to a company book.  I think that is a mistake, mind you - the fan-made TRO:3063 is NOT a company work and, while we adopted the layout for familiarity's sake and kept the quality of the art and writing high, it was never meant to go head to head with a company work.  Even the date is in a 'dead' era so far as TROs are concerned.  It is a different kettle of fish entirely.

What, no comment on the art?

Regards,

Cent13

I think a big thing to remember is this wasn't a TRO produced to apply to a wide audience to sell a product.

It was something somebody wanted, and produced.

So while I love critiques, and could really use them in my record sheets, some things like "No Clans" or "No Battle Armor" aren't really all that applicable with TRO 3063.  Those same arguments could be said of tons of new canon products, heck IMO every TRO should have mechs/tanks/warships/dropships/fighters/infantry/etc.

I too noticed the very common things like CASE, Max armor, and kinda tweaked out weapons, but it is what the designer wanted, remember, this was produced by somebody as something they wanted to do, not to generate mass sales.s

As for BV/Costs/Ratings, I'll take the hit on those.  I didn't spend as much time verifying my formulas were correct before launch time.  I looked them over, and even have debug files how I came to those values, but I didn't check all the designs to ensure they were correct.  Same with weights, I have 90% of the code written to do just that, but haven't implemented to verify designs.

A month or so back we had a mass change when I determined that much of the equipment came out 5+ years after the TRO, and we went through and fixed quite a few units, so I guess it could have been a lot worse

The BV, Cost, and Tech Rating/Availability issues, as well as any record sheet issue, I will fix *immediately*.  Show me an error, I'll jump on it within hours, if not earlier, and probably have it fixed that day, if not the following.

If anybody has any idea on improving the record sheets I'm all ears.

And if you find *any* errors, simply point them out, we'll get em fixed and a new PDF out, which if you want to compare to canon, I'm pretty sure we have a monopoly on  incorporating errata quickly (and almost one on incorporating it at all, but we do have a new TW and TO out....).  CGL doesn't even update PDF only items with errata.

Personally, I like the art the best (though I *hate* the dragonfly/oculus, which Centurion13 is well aware of), some of the units look great, especially compared to official TROs. I don't think I've read the entire text entry for any unit, but I do have them all in my database for my site

I dunno about every TRO requiring Dropships or warships, or even aerospace fighters necessarily, but that is just me.

as far as the tech availability for TW weapons.  I was going to cover this in the Podcast but since your brought it up this could have been like TRO prototypes, where stylistically you figure that  the 3063 era, weapons like the PPC Variations, Light Autocannons, MMLs, Plasma Weapons and Machine Gun arrays were under development, but not quite ready for prime time (officially 3066-3070 were the deployment dates of these systems. which means you can figure R&D was going on for at least a decade prior)

Given the use the Binary lasers (an abandoned concept until WELL into the Jihad) and PPC Capacitors in a few designs I would not think tossing a heavy PPC and additional heat sinks into, say the BARS tank was too far fetched.

See?  Everybody is entitled to what they wanna see in TROs, while a pure inner sphere TRO in 3063 is kinda out of the ordinary, and the creators didn't want clan stuff, it is just how this TRO is different, and doesn't make it any better or worse.

There were quite a few units with the HPPC, which I think came out in 3067, but I complained as the TRO was 3064.  So we reverted to the PPCs with Capacitors.  Binary Lasers were prototypes in 2812, with no updates since, so it isn't "illegal" or anything, but those units become experimental.  Rocket launchers were another common item that came out after the units.  We had to update most of the years introduced once I got that code working (mostly!) as well.

There is nothing stopping *ANYBODY* from making a TRO, money perhaps if you need somebody to do the art, and some creativity for content, but anybody can make one.  I thought this one seemed quite a bit better than other incarnations I saw, and devoted my time to helping it get record sheets to a much smaller size and in so doing, made my own algorithms for doing this stuff much more accurate than those that are currently displayed on my site.

Originally I tried to use Megamek Lab and SSW files as a source to generate the RS files, but Megamek ended up being far more pain than it was worth (inconsistent data mostly) and SSW didn't support vehicles or fighters at all, so even though I had it mostly working I scrapped the whole idea of using those files, and started using flat data from my database (which I inputted by hand, so typos probably still exist) and then generating the files from that data.  I also probably haven't incorporated all errata, as it is in dire need of consolidation (Xotl is obviously doing his best, cudos to him for trying).

Also, at least some of these designs are on that site where you can get them 3D printed, which is really cool.  In a few months I will probably purchase a 3D printer (I need to learn more about them, and hopefully see some demos) and may try to do it myself.  I wonder if IWM would create any of the great looking vehicles in TRO3063 as new BT miniatures... There are some tanks I'd LOVE to get in my hands.

again though, given the idea of a testbed vehicle, (using the BARS example) makes incorporating tech before it's official production time viable.  LAW did not declare in January of 3067 "Lets make a Heavy PPC" and then churn it out before December.  there was a design process that had to of taken years.  just look at the R&D research dates in Tac Ops.

granted such information is absent in tech manual, I chalk it up to simply not being thought of during that books production.

The only Heavy PPC date (I just checked) is introduction, by the Draconis Combine, in 3067.  While you and I both know it was in R&D prior to that, we have no canon dates.  It could have had a month of R&D, or 30 years, we simply don't know.  So, in the absence of data, instead of assuming which leads to errors, I went with what was published.  I tried very hard to ensure this TRO didn't contradict with anything canon, add to it sure, but no direct contradictions (except the Thunderbolt, which I tried VERY hard to get Centurion to change it with no luck).

To me the goal in any fan product (AU stuff aside) is to make something that can work alongside canon products with no contradictions, and if something new comes out that creates a contradiction, update the fan product so it no longer violates the rules of the universe.

If this TRO had 6 legged mechs, 1000 ton tracked main battle tanks, and 10,000 ton transformable dropships that turned into giant maids with vacuums, would the fans take it seriously?  A single contradiction can make somebody shrew away from a fan product IMO.

Quote from: Bad_Syntax on August 31, 2012, 03:06:45 PM

A single contradiction can make somebody shrew away from a fan product IMO.

and thus is my favorite saying about the game

"The greatest threat to the Battletech Franchise is Battletech Fans"

Yeap, but you'll be very hard pressed to find a 25 year old franchise without dedicated fans like that.  Look what happens when some NFL team trades some player, or Call of Duty implements some broken weapon, etc.  Unfortunately to some, BT created an IP based on a *detailed* universe, where other games like 40K completely ignored the detail.  BT needs that detail to survive, and that detail requires a lot of attention to detail, historical lookups, etc.

IMO the downfall of BT won't be the existing fans, it'll be the lack of new fans as us old farts start to die out or get a life.

My biggest beef is their absolute avoidance of publishing something like mech production counts, but yet somehow we get a count of jumpships.  Or how there is no way we'll ever see all the planets detailed as they want writers to "have freedom", yet they'll print population counts on around 30% of the planets out there.  Or better yet, how they produce things like random equipment that are for marketing (so Herb said) but yet never put that into a book so we all know the numbers are crap.  Hypocrisy pisses me off in BT as much as it does in the real world, its one of the worst characteristics of mankind IMO.

But back to TRO 3063, sure, there are some holes, give us a few days and we'll patch em, think of this release as a "beta"

Well, how does it look now?