Video Game / BattleTech (2018)

aka: Battle Tech

BattleTech (stylized as BATTLETECH) is a Turn-Based Tactics/Team Management Sim Mecha Game based on the classic tabletop game of the same name, developed by Harebrained Schemes (founded by franchise co-creator Jordan Weisman), and published by Paradox Interactive. The game was funded through Kickstarter, reaching all goals with the total of $2,865,422, including PayPal.

Three years ago, you were part of an escort for Princess Kamea Arano for her coronation as the ruler of Aurigan Reach, but her Uncle launched a coup to overthrow her. Outnumbered and outgunned, her fleeing dropship was shot down from the air while you were forced to eject from your mech. Saved by mercenaries employed by the loyalists, you fled to the no-man's land of the Rimward Periphery Frontier, where for those three years you worked with and eventually took charge of a down-on-its-luck mercenary company barely making ends meet. Until one day in 3025, you get hired by the not-so-dead Kamea Arano to help her reclaim the throne from her uncle.

Apart from the turn-based tactical combat involving the series' iconic BattleMechs, players also have to manage their company's finances and operations in between missions to survive. The game, with a one-player-vs-one-player, lance-on-lance multiplayer mode and a story campaign subtitled Restoration, was released on April 24, 2018. The story trailer can be found here.

Three DLC expansion packs followed: Flashpoint in November 2018,^note Introduced the Hatchetman, Cyclops, and Crab BattleMechs, and the "Flashpoint" mission type: Small mini-campaigns set on a single world with multiple missions and Consecutive Deployment, where players run several fights in sequence without a chance to repair between them Urban Warfare in June 2019,^note Introduced the Raven and Javelin BattleMechs, several vehicles, an urban biome with fully destructible buildings, and ten new flashpoints and finally Heavy Metal in November 2019.^note Included eight new BattleMechs: The Annihilator, the Archer, the Assassin, the Flea, the Rifleman, the Phoenix Hawk and the Vulcan from BattleTech canon, three of them Unseen (BattleMechs that were formerly Exiled from Continuity due to the now resolved legal dispute with Harmony Gold, the US distributor of Macross), the entirely new Bullshark, numerous new weapon types that are Lost Technology and the entirely new COIL weapon, and the Heavy Metal campaign which is playable during Campaign or Career Mode. Update 1.8, which came out at the same time, also brought two more Unseen (the Marauder and the Warhammer) to the fold The final update for Battletech, 1.9, was released in February 2020.

No sequels have been announced, and with the near-total disbanding of HBS, future releases from the studio seem unlikely.

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This game provides examples of:

• Ace Custom:
  • The Flashpoint DLC introduces a handful of unique variants of regular 'Mechs that can't be obtained anywhere else. One is the BSC-20 "Big Steel Claw", a special CRB-20 Crab that sports a ballistic hardpoint in its claw; this 'Mech is always received upon completion of its mission chain. Two others are a Custom Jaegermech armed with two Gauss rifles, and a Custom Thunderbolt carrying an array of powerful LosTech laser weapons (note the "Custom" is actually part of their names). These 'Mechs can only be salvaged by headshotting the respective pilot, and they're also mutually exclusive.
  • The Heavy Metal DLC adds on a campaign featuring two Legendary MechWarriors from the tabletop canon, Natasha "The Black Widow" Kerensky, and the Bounty Hunter. In the final mission, you wind up not just fighting them, but the Lances they command; 8 MechWarriors, each with unique names lifted straight from the sourcebooks, piloting BattleMechs that feature all sorts of LosTech. It's by far one of the hardest fights in the game.
• Achievement Mockery:
  • If you manage to somehow destroy one of your own mechs due to structural damage from overheating, you get "Is it hot in here?"
  • Completely missing a called shot nets you "Had your chance".
  • Simply losing any mission against the computer unlocks the "Learn from Your Mistakes" achievement.
  • You get "In Over Your Head" if you withdraw from a contract before any of your 'Mechs are destroyed, and "Run Away Faster!" if you do it ten times.
  • Similarly, you get "Save the Meat!" for ejecting your pilots five times and "Coward of the Periphery" for doing it 20 times.
• Achilles' Heel: A few 'Mech stock configurations have the massive flaw of carrying ammunition in their center torso, and often also in their side torsos. Thunderbolts and Shadowhawks are particularly prone to spontaneously exploding after minor structural damage to their torso set off a chain reaction of exploding ammo bins. This also means that a single Gauss Rifle hit to the torso can take these 'Mechs out of commission instantly if the through-armor critical torches their ammo stores.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Wallo in the Yang's Big Score Flashpoint is actually a little impressed by the sheer audacity of you not only using him as a distraction, but with Meyer giving him technical advice in the middle of the heist. Because of this he lets the Team keep one of the Mechs they stole.
• Adaptational Badass: Most of the 'Mechs featured in Heavy Metal have additional auxiliary systems that give them improved performance compared to their tabletop incarnations, technically qualifying all eight of them, but two in particular are standouts. The Assassin, notorious in the rest of Battletech media as a very underwhelming 'Mech in every department but speed and agility, now features an Intercept System that allows it to ignore most of a targets Evasion, making it the go-to Light 'Mech killer in many lances. Likewise, the Flea now includes a pair of Targeting Baffles which effectively give it two extra Evasion, making it pretty hard to hit, even before you factor in its ridiculous ground speed. Arming either of them with a COIL weapon system truly turns them into nightmares to face, as the former can run down and delete anything trying to flank your heavier units, while the later can do just that to score an extremely powerful back shot that'll make most Assaults nervous.
• A.I. Breaker: The ECM system introduced in Urban Warfare, especially if you get a stand-alone version you can install in something more durable than the Raven, provokes the AI into engaging in certain hard-coded behaviours to counter the ECM. While no longer the "I Win" button it was on release (when the AI had no idea how to deal with it), once you learn the how the AI is hard-coded to respond to a visible ECM (focusing undue attention and sensor locks on the ECM carrier and always attempting to rush into melee to pop the ECM bubble) that behaviour can be ruthlessly exploited with the right lance construction.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • Victoria starts out as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, loyal to her father's vision. The atrocities she commits under his orders have lead to her guilt eating away at her sanity. Even at the end she believes in the ideals she fights for, believes that the Aurigan people must follow them to survive in the cut throat arena of Inner Sphere and, especially, Periphery politics. Her dying words are filled with despair; everything she had done, everything she had betrayed or sacrificed is likely to come to naught because the Aurigans were so weakened by recent events that there was a good chance they would be annexed by their neighbours.
  • Similarly, Samuel Ostergaard commits warcrimes and wants Kamea's head on a pike for one reason — to avenge the death of his son, who was piloting the smuggling vessel that Kamea ordered destroyed. In his final scene in the game, the Iberia is crashing onto Coromodir and Samuel, surrounded by flames, looks down at a framed photo of him and his son, the glass of which cracks from the heat before the ship crashes.
• Alliance Meter: Your standing with the Great Houses. Don't expect, for example, to safely work for House Liao after working against them under House Davion's employ. There's also a general one with the Mercenary Ratings Board, which is required to hire certain pilots and accept certain contracts, preventing a light crew from accepting missions way out of their ability to handle.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Before heading to the Star League cache, Lord Karosas explains that he recovered the code breaking technology from the dead body of a Comstar Precentor who had been visiting the Reach. However, the question of why a senior Comstar official was exploring the Reach is left unanswered. The background lore reveals that Comstar was actively keeping the Inner Sphere and Periphery in a low state of technology via Operation Holy Shroud, which included locating and destroying bases left behind by the Star League Defense Forces.
  • Catalyst Game Labs later published the House Arano - The Aurigan Coalition sourcebook for players of the tabletop game. This book includes a more complete history of the region along with detailed descriptions of each of the planets that make up the Coalition and the Houses that rule those worlds.
• All Up to You: Played with. Several of the earlier story missions involve the player's lance taking on objectives that are support missions to the Arano Restoration's primary objective. However, there are also several missions, particularly towards the end, that have the war effort hinge on the player's efforts. The last two missions are of particular note, with the second last one involving the player capturing a comm relay to transmit Locura up to Ostergaard's ship to bring it down, and the last being a lance on lance duel between Kamea and Victoria.
• Alpha Strike: The Trope Codifier returns! Mechwarriors will even explicitly call out that they are initiating an alpha strike when firing all of a battlemech's weapons at once. The two limitations on this is that 'mechs with different mixes of weapons rarely have all their weapons in equally good ranges (making it impossible or simply improbable to hit with everything) and that it causes heat and/or recoil build up from firing them all at once (forcing immediately subsequent shooting to be more restrained.)
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Interestingly, the game makes it so the Player Character cannot die during the campaign, they merely get wounded badly enough to be laid up in medical for months.
  • The tutorial and the lower-difficulty missions tend to make it easier to down enemies by afflicting them with the 'shoddy armor' debuff that ensures they have very thin armor.
  • Salvaging 'Mechs is rather more simplified than in the classic tabletop game — Rather than needing to collect intact body parts and weapons to assemble, you merely need to collect Salvage Parts of the mech in question after defeating it in battle (kneecapping or headchopping a mech to defeat it will guarantee more salvage) and let your techs piece it back together — the resulting salvaged mech will not only be completely intact, but also come with a full set of its loadout's weapons, unless you choose to turn that option off with the Flashpoint DLC's menu.
  • The MechBay's functionality is streamlined and made less of a die-roll than the original tabletop version - You never need to roll dice against the skill of your engineers to determine repair or refit times, and structural repairs for your 'Mechs can be done without needing to either scrounge replacement parts from shops or salvage, or by ordering replacement parts from factories and waiting for delivery. Presumably Yang is just that good and responsible of a MechTech that he does not suffer mishaps that delay repairs.
  • As in the tabletop game, you don't need to keep the ammo bin for your ballistic/explosive weapons in the same body part as the weapon itself — Nothing stops you from keeping the SRM ammo for your launchers in the left/right torso (or the AC ammo for the cannon on your arm) in the legs of your mech.
  • Unlike the tabletop game, here critical hits to the Engine and the stock Gyro of your mech are not simulated/modelled. If you do install an improved Gyro, that is still vulnerable to crits. On top of that, the game does not roll piloting checks for jumpjet operation even with a damaged leg, instead modelling the difficulty as Stability damage. Likewise, Through-Armor Criticals simply aren't a thing.
  • A lot of difficulty rolls are either outright smoothed out or not used. No worries about piloting checks against slipping on smooth ferrocrete floors. The "Seatbelt Check" (dice roll to see if a pilot is damaged by their 'Mech falling) is now a guaranteed injury to the pilot, but no additional damage to the mech is incurred. Instead of falling if you can't get the height needed for a jumpjet maneuver, you simply land back where you started. Furthermore, recovering from falling over is much easier than in the classic tabletop, as you no longer need to make Piloting difficulty rolls against recovering that only get harder if you're short a leg (failing such piloting rolls triggers another Seatbelt check, so it was entirely possible to literally die from Seatbelt Checks struggling to get up from being tipped over).
  • Death From Above attacks inflict less self-damage than in classic tabletop Battletech, simplified to the damage it inflicts on the opponent divided equally between both of the attacker's legs.
  • Under traditional tabletop rules, internal ammo explosions result in damage equal to the ammunition being torched being done directly to the affected component, which will also 'overflow' into adjacent components (This can mean that a CT-mounted SRM ammo bin cooking off can result in the explosion going up and into your cockpit, with predictably lethal results). As depicted in this game, battlemechs play as though they already have CASE ammunition protection integrated ; ammo explosions "only" destroy the body part they are located in and wound the pilot from the shock of the blast. (In Classic 3025 Battletech which takes place in the same time frame, CASE is considered Lostech in the Inner Sphere and would not resurface in a big way until some time after the Helm Core is recovered and the technology propagates once more.)
  • When a 'Mech returns to the Leopard/Argo with damages that didn't penetrate its armor, repairs are done instantaneously and cost nothing. Otherwise the game would pretty much grind to a halt every time you return from any battle, and its economic side would be even more unforgiving. Similarly, all ammo bins are refilled for free following a return, even during Flashpoints. Buying ammo bins cost money, but keeping them topped up is covered by your monthly costs no matter how much you shoot.
  • Most side contracts require you to reach a far-away evac zone once your objectives are completed, but if you manage to wipe out all enemies on the map (or have done so already), Sumire picks you up on the spot without you having to waste a dozen turns stomping to the EZ.
  • Though limited by the Morale Mechanic, Called Shots gives your 'Mechs a tool to use against high-dodge units by flat-out improving accuracy by 20% whether you're hitting the 'Mech part you're aiming at or no. This is in contrast to the tabletop, where they required a dedicated Targeting Computer and decreased overall accuracy. You're also allowed to Called Shot the cockpit, which you're not allowed to do in tabletop.
  • Ultra autocannons (introduced in the Heavy Metal DLC) use standard autocannon ammo of the same type rather than dedicated Ultra Autocannon ammo.
  • The 1.9 update introduced two gameplay options to this effect. One significantly increases the rate at which the in-game time passes while in story progress mode (like when you're travelling between systems), thus saving you a lot of real-life time. The other cuts the Argo's upgrade and maintenance costs by 50%, which is perfect for players who wish to focus more on their 'Mechs and less on managing their company's finances and logistics.
• Anti-Mutiny: In the penultimate campaign mission, the Taurian Concordate pulls out of the Aurigan Civil War and orders Samuel Ostergaard and the Iberia to return to Taurian space and cease hostilities against Arano Restoration forces. Since Ostergaard's involvement is personal, he deserts with the intent to use the Iberia's considerable firepower to avenge his son and kill Kamea Arano. A significant portion of his crew has no interest in going along with his barratry and stages a mutiny with the intent of bringing the ship back under Taurian control. While Ostergaard narrowly retains control of the ship, the struggle dooms the ship when it's infected with the Locura. While the Argo survived due to its crew being united and sharing a common cause of surviving the chaos the virus caused, the Iberia's crew was divided and led by a madman more concerned with revenge than survival and was thus unable to contain the damage the Locura did.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You're limited to no more than a single lance (four 'Mechs) at a time, regardless of how many active mechs and pilots you have available. Naturally, the computer has no such restriction; Both times you drop on Smithon, you have to fight twelve — along with numerous support vehicles. This is somewhat justified, especially earlier on, first by the fact that your mercenary company is based completely on a hardscrabble Leopard (which can only drop four 'Mechs), and later by the fact that the Argo isn't a "DropShip" in the traditional dropping sense, so the Leopard has been repurposed to be just the deployment vessel... which still limits you to four 'Mechs per drop. The only hitch is that a Leopard can carry up to six 'mechs if it's been modified to have its fighter launch bays removed (which your Leopard has), and you can get to the point where you'd be able to afford a second Leopard and you have dock points for at least one more... but you can only ever have the one. Tha later sourcebook, House Arano (The Aurigan Coalition) gives something of an explanation - the Multiple Docking Collar System the Argo uses to carry the Leopard can reshape the Kearny-Fujita Drive Field around another ship but not truly extend it such that each ship mounted to the MDCS requires at least one empty K-F Drive Boom (and the associated docking hardpoint) on the JumpShip. Since the Argo already blocks one docking collar on a JumpShip, piggybacking one Leopard simply offsets the blocked docking collar. Though presumably this could still be handled by simply increasing the jump fee if you acquired another Leopard since you'd be using more of the JumpShip's docking collars (the JumpShip depicted in-game is an Invader-class, which has at least four docking collars, which can sometimes be seen in use by other ships when you jump).
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: Contracts occasionally slap you with tonnage restrictions that force you to stay either below or above a certain limit. The more restrictive ones are for individual 'Mech tonnage, others allow you more freedom of choice by capping your combined lance tonnage instead. Flashpoints in particular are infamous for doing this on a fairly regular basis, and virtually all of these contracts have you seriously outgunned as a consequence. We're talking stuff like "your four 50-tons 'Mechs against twice your number in the 75-tons range" here. Have fun.
• Arm Cannon: A few 'Mechs with actual arms have ballistic hardpoints on at least one of their forearms that usually look like this if you make use of them. Probably the best example is the Battlemaster by virtue of looking unspeakably badass with two giant autocannons mounted on its left arm.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • Uniquely, Gauss Rifles deal three types of damage: 75 ballistic, 40 stability, and 5 points directly to the internal structure regardless of armor. These five points will rarely pose a substantial survival risk to even the lightest 'Mech, but it's sufficient to trigger critical hits and thus disable weapons or blow up ammo bins, or two such hits can take out a turret without fully depleting its armor.
  • The Breaching Shot skill instead of bypassing a 'Mech's ablative armor, bypasses the target's cover bonuses and Bulwark skill when attacking with a single weapon. As any enemy with Bulwark can have 60% damage resistance while in a forest or other cover, a Breaching Shot attack can ignore a lot of defenses. It also combines with Multi-Target, meaning a pilot can make Breaching Shot attacks against up to three enemies or against one or two while unleashing everything else against another target.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • During the early missions, as you flee from the forces attempting a coup on the noble you're working with, your character's 'Mech suddenly starts overheating as you prepare for a last stand. The Dragon mentions that a lot of Royal Guard 'Mechs have been having similar problems today. Your mentor's response:
  Sir Raju: You outnumber us, and you've resorted to sabotage... and you're gloating about it?
  • The "Bourbon & Battlemechs" Flashpoint gives the following description of the target building:
  Mission Control: The Stratford Narwhal is one of Garrilac's favorite watering holes. It's also a cesspool of vice, corruption, and terrible music.
• Artificial Brilliance: Ever since the game was updated, the AI has become awfully adept at positioning its 'Mechs so that even if their shots miss the intended target, they're very likely to hit another of your 'Mechs instead.
• Artificial Stupidity: The AI in this game, while quite smart, and capable of giving you quite a hell of a time, often makes questionable moves:
  • Having a light 'mech stand still while shooting or getting into melee range of one of your heavier 'mechs.
  • Bracing with their backs turned at your units. This is actually caused by several conditions at once affecting their behavior — the AI intelligently attempts to angle to present the side with the most armor, even if it is the rear, and they tend to brace to get rid of Unsteady status to defend against knockdowns. Put the two together, though, and they end up bracing uselessly with their rear armor facing you after a certain amount of damage has been done.
  • Bracing while they are at melee range.
  • Keep firing all their weapons and get themselves overheated, although this might be a last-ditch effort at downing one of your 'Mechs.
  • Sensor locking one of your units but then choose to fire at another unit instead.
  • Attempting to fire LRM and PPC weapons at near point blank range.
• The Artifact:
  • A large number of playable mechs are heavily based on or are essentially their MechWarrior: Online depictions. The Urbanmech is one such example. It has four ballistic hard points, but cannot use them all because of its maximum tonnage of 30. In MWO, the 3 extra hard-points are for mounting machine guns, which isn't possible in this game because machine guns can only be placed in a support hard-point, which the Urbanmech does not have on that arm (it does, however, have two on the arm that mounts energy weapons).
  • The hard-points themselves are also an import from MechWarrior: Online, as they do not exist in the original BattleTech game rules or lore, which is why situations like the Urbanmech example happen.
• Ascended Meme:
  • As of the 1.3 update, a secret achievement can be unlocked by keeping notorious Doom Magnet pilot Dekker alive through the entire campaign, which may or may not include having him fight in and survive the Final Battle.
  • The Urban Warfare Flashpoint "Siegebreaker" acknowledges the popular "Steiner Scout Lance" meme^note House Steiner's obsession with heavy 'Mechs has led to people joking that even Steiner scout lances consist of four Atlas 'Mechs. The first mission tasks you with hunting down a Steiner scout 'Mech, which of course turns out to be an Atlas.
• A Taste of Power: When you fight your way off-planet after visiting the SLDF cache through a Taurian task force, Kamea and three of her officers stage their breakout with Royal-grade SLDF BattleMechs complete with LosTech toys such as a Gauss Rifle, Pulse Lasers, ER Lasers and ER PPCs, with Kamea personally piloting an Atlas II Assault 'Mech. The taste of power became even stronger after the developers implemented engine-integrated double heat sinks for the SLDF Royal 'Mechs in the version 1.9 patch; now all the SLDF 'Mechs can cool themselves off as quickly as you heat them up. This is Downplayed compared to most examples, as Kamea actually gives you one of the SLDF 'Mechs after this mission, a Royal-grade Highlander 732-B. You'll have to wait until the postgame (or money grind and access to black markets) to get your hands on the Atlas II.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Some SLDF weapons can come as this. The ER Large Laser has better range than normal ones, but generate more heat. Likewise, the M Pulse deals more damage but also generates more heat than a normal Medium Laser, and you can actually find a rare variant of the Medium Laser which does the same damage as the M Pulse but without the heat issues.
  • Allying with any faction gives you access to their special stores and... well, that's about it. These stores offer great equipment, but they're few in numbers (no more than three) while the black market does the same, is present on dozens of worlds and can be unlocked without pissing off half or more of the game's major powers. There's also no Lostech made available for purchase by forging any alliance. The Flashpoint DLC gave the alliance mechanic at least some value by unlocking the faction-specific Flashpoint mission chain that often does reward Lostech, but if that's enough to make up for alienating more or less all other Houses comes down to player preference.
  • The Banshee assault 'Mech is often considered this both In-Universe and out. Sure, it's the second-heaviest 'Mech in the game, and it's surprisingly fast for its 95 tons, but its huge engine leaves it ridiculously undergunned compared to every other assault 'Mech ever. The standard 3E model only has two energy hardpoints, one ballistic hardpoint, and four support hardpoints, and one of the energy hardpoints and one of the support hardpoints are each in the head and thus mutually exclusive. Between the sparse hardpoints and anemic tonnage allowance of the 'Mech, it has firepower that would be uninspiring on a 65-ton 'Mech, much less a 95-tonner like the Banshee. The 3M model can mount lots of energy weapons but has such terrible heat management that it doesn't change much overall, leaving specialized melee builds as the only even remotely viable configurations, and that's always a risky approach even with something as heavily armored as the Banshee.
  • The Mech Mortar. The only area-of-effect attack you have access to in the entire game, allowing you to nail an entire lance at once if they're clustered close enough to each other. It doesn't generate heat and doesn't explode when it takes a critical hit. But you only get one shot per mission, two if you're using the Bull Shark's Thumper Cannon, the thing weighs seven tons (ten for the Thumper), you have to be able to see the target zone, and because the damage is calculated within a window rather than a set amount like literally every other weapon is, you can wind up doing Scratch Damage to the targets, meaning you've just sacrificed a great deal of other armor or equipment for a single-shot weapon that may have barely scuffed the paint. And unless the enemy is bunched up (which in most situations they won't be) it's hardly worth using anyway.
  • Ultra autocannons, especially the UAC/10 and UAC/20 do tremendous damage, but they generate twice the recoil of normal autocannons, twice the heat, and chew through ammo incredibly fast. As such, they make for incredible alpha strikes, but have serious problems in prolonged battles.
• Awesome McCoolname: Moderbjorn from the "Of Unknown Origin" flashpoint. While initially just an option that will be responded to, the crew unanimously decide upon it the moment they all realise it (rather appropriately) means "Mother Bear".
• Bad Boss: Most Space Pirates have them as their leaders, in one story mission you can hear Grim Sybil shoot one of her subordinate for trying to run from you.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: And a lot of the time, the Bad Guys are you. Even outside of Flashpoints, you're usually hired as denible assests to do what your employer doesn't want to be connected to.
• Balance Buff:
  • While the game mostly keeps to a fairly strict conversion from Battletech rules (most TT stats have been exactly multiplied by 5), it has slightly buffed long-range direct combat (due to the bigger maps) by increasing the damage on low-calibre autocannons compared to their tabletop baseline^note an AC/2 now hits like an AC/5, AC/5s now hit like an "AC/9", AC/10s like an AC/12, and AC/20s, mercifully, remain unchanged and nerfing missile damage (although missiles remain incredibly good in the view of many; see the YMMV page for more details).
  • Mech cockpits now rate for a total of 61 hitpoints worth of Armor and Structure — only a Gauss Rifle, an AC/10+ (damage), an AC/20, a UAC/20, an ER PPC+, Large Pulse Laser++, sufficiently-charged COIL (five charges on a COIL-S, three on a COIL-M, or two on a COIL-L), or an extremely lucky punch from a sufficiently massive mech can instantly destroy it in a single direct hit outside of cover, and of those weapons that are capable of destroying a cockpit in one shot, only the AC/20 is remotely common and the rest are rare variants, LosTech, or rare variants of LosTech. Certain 'Mechs feature design quirks that expand the list of viable headchopper weapons for those particular 'Mechs. In particular, the Warhammer has a 20% boost to energy weapon damage that allows any damage-boosted PPC and any Large Pulse Laser or ER PPC to take out a cockpit in one hit, and the Annihilator has a 20% boost to ballistic weapon damage that allows it to use any AC/10, UAC/10, or AC/5++ (damage) as a headchopper.
  • Version 1.1 improves heat performance of most weapons, so as to make them more competitive against medium lasers.
• Ballistic Discount: A close variant in the first mission after the Justified Tutorial. You're hired to stop a MegaCorp from taking over a mining operation by force, but when it's done, the miners you just helped try to help themselves to your BattleMechs instead of paying. Of course, this verges on Too Dumb to Live given that A) they only have a few turrets and tanks and B) they're attacking the Player Character.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Done subtly. 'Mechs are designed to operate in vacuum environments, but tanks are not. This does not stop Scorpions, LRM Carriers, or Demolishers from showing up on planets with Martian or Vacuum environments.
• Beam Spam: Several 'Mechs are designed to facilitate energy-heavy builds, like the Black Knight (which sports room for multiple Energy weapons and typically comes loaded with Laser cannons of all sizes and a PPC), the Battlemaster (which defaults to carrying a PPC and has 6 medium lasers in the side torso sections), the Hunchback HBK-4P variant (which trades the Hunchback's infamous AC/20 for six additional medium lasers and ten extra heatsinks, which actually increases its firepower^* (8x medium lasers = 200 damage, while 2x medium lasers + 1x AC/20 = 150 damage)), and the Grasshopper (which can mount multiple Energy and Support weapons, allowing you to set it up to bristle with Small and Medium lasers for maximum ammo-free sandblasting power). Remember to load up heatsinks for such 'Mechs.
• BFG: Aside from all the giant guns carried by the 'Mechs and other ground forces, several huge artillery pieces make an appearance one way or another. Commodore Ostergaard's Fortress-class DropShip mounts a Long Tom artillery cannon that is shown in action during a main story cutscene. Even larger naval guns occasionally come into play when you complete a Target Acquisition contract to destroy a hardened fortification, with a naval PPC that's part of a Flashpoint mission being the most memorable example.
• Bitter Sweet Ending: The Directorate is defeated, Santiago is arrested by the Concordant and is all but guaranteed to be executed for his crimes, and Kamea retakes her rightful place on her throne, but countless innocent lives on both sides were lost in the war, Kamea herself was forced to kill her once-beloved cousin in what was essentially a Suicide by Cop on the latter's part, and the restored Aurigan government is still under potential threat from its power hungry neighbors.
• Black Comedy: The "Bourbon & Battlemechs" Flashpoint doesn't take itself nearly as seriously as the rest of the game (the name itself should be a good indicator already). Aside from the humorous contract briefing leading up to a drop to destroy a Bad Guy Bar of all things, the mission steps away from the neutral "enemy reinforcements" designation and calls them "Belligerent Drunks" and "Hostile Inebriates" instead... which you'll murderize in creative ways with your Humongous Mechas regardless.
• Boom, Headshot!: Destroying a 'Mech's cockpit kills the pilot and instantly disables the 'Mech while leaving it mostly intact for salvaging. The cockpit is also the squishiest part of any 'Mech, with less than 70 hitpoints combined. The real trick is actually hitting it. Even the best crack-shot pilots have an 18% chance at best to pull it off with a Precision Shot, so it mostly comes down to dumb luck and the Random Number God unless you're actively running specialized strategies. The Annihilator or Marauder are particularly good at it, with the Marauder's special systems giving it a doubled chance to land headshots, and the Annihilator able to load up horrifying amounts of heavy autocannons, each of which can one-shot the cockpit and rig the lottery in its favor by sheer brute force. Weapons capable of taking down a fully-armored 'Mech head in one shot like Gauss Rifle, damage-boosting versions of AC/10+ or ++, and the AC/20 are often referred to as "headchoppers".
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Just like on the tabletop game, Medium Lasers. They are plain, mid-ranged energy weapons that do 25 damage per beam. However, they are also small and lightweight (1 ton and one critical slot per Medium Laser), and a majority of 'Mechs have plentiful Energy Weapon mounts, so you can use a lot of them on most mech builds and they can be squeezed into any leftover space not used by larger weapons. Not very flashy, but this humble green laser will be your bread-and-butter weapon for most gameplay purposes. They originally generated 10 heat, but in patch 1.1 they were nerfed slightly by increasing their heat to 12. Even post-nerf they are still one of the most efficient and practical weapons.
  • The AC/5, LRM-10, and SRM-4 are their respective weapon types answer to the Medium Laser. For a few tons extra, they will nearly or definitely double the damage of the lowest weapon size of their class, while still having easily manageable heat, and decent ammo per tonnage. Sure, you might have to unequip that second default AC/2, LRM-5, or SRM-2 to make it work, but that just means you now have more space for ammo, heat sinks, and most likely more medium lasers, or the very least more armor and modules.
  • Cockpit reinforcement upgrade modules; these can cost a bit but even the cheapest variant could prevent your mechwarrior from spending 2 weeks in the infirmary just because that Striker scored a lucky hit on the cockpit or getting the 'mech knocked down by an SRM carrier. They also weigh nothing so you should put it in all your 'Mechs that doesn't need anything else in the head slot.
  • Heatsinks. Well, yes, they are vital to prevent overheating, but having a few extra heatsinks beyond the ten free ones embedded in your engine to keep your mech running warm or even cool rather than hot can mean big dividends for your damage output, letting you fire more weapons every turn without overheating and taking damage for doing so. Each 'sink only weighs a single ton, and basic heatsinks take up a single slot in loadage bulk so you can carry quite a few extra. Doubly so their LosTech double variant, which weighs the same, but sinks twice the heat at the cost of being thrice the size. It's nowhere near as flashy as other LosTech like ER lasers and Gauss rifles, but they're so practical that, once the Helm Memory Core is recovered (after the game), they quickly become commonplace, and even standard on many new 'Mech designs and variants.
  • TTS targeting computers. All they do is improve your accuracy with a specific weapon class by a small amount, but it does make your damage-dealing capability more reliable, and can even let you use weapons with slightly less penalties from being a little too near or far from your target due to effective weapon range bands.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: You can avoid the final battle of the "Bourbon & Battlemechs" Flashpoint by paying the target 250,000 C-Bills, which is the money he was owed by the guy who sent you after him in the first place. Seeing how this battle has a rather low tonnage restriction on your lance, giving him the money still leaves you in the black after factoring in your contract pay and the 'Mech repairs you won't have to make.
• Bring It: Taking minor damage often prompts your more enthusiastic pilots to taunt their enemy to do better. Naturally, Glitch takes it up to eleven.
  Glitch: Is that it? I'm barely scratched!
  Glitch: That the best you got? Give me a real opponent!
• Bullying a Dragon: In your first mission as a mercenary, your employer decides that A) they aren't going to pay you and B) they're going to take your 'Mechs. They're enforcing this plan with several turrets that are powered by a generator that you're standing right next to when they choose to tell you this and a couple of light vehicles. The results are predictable. It's especially blatant because they specifically hired your lance to deal with corporate security forces that they couldn't deal with themselves... and whom were also much more poorly equipped than your lance as well.
  Interestingly, depending on the amount of damage taken in the previous fight and the number of casualties and injuries before this, it's still entirely possible to lose a 'Mech or two to the betrayal. It's entirely possible that your employers put up the contract with the hopes that either the mercenaries would win and be too weak to fight back or be wiped out but do enough damage to their enemies that they could finish the job, allowing them to salvage all the 'Mechs and vehicles involved in the fight. Naturally, they never anticipated that the mercenaries would finish the "contract" without much difficulty and could fight back, so they let their greed get in the way of common sense.
• Butt-Monkey: The planetary governments of worlds in the neutral zone just can't catch a break. They aren't part of any faction, so running missions against them is an excellent way to farm reputation without losing anything in return. Conversely, helping them doesn't net you anything in the long term aside from slightly above-average pay. They're also by far the weakest opponent in the game.
• Call-Forward: The Heavy Metal campaign features a derelict ship drifting into the Rimward Periphery from beyond known space, loaded up with all sorts of technology that was either long lost or had never been seen before, and a Star League era AI has a very keen interest in tracking where it came from, as she believes it might be a relic from SLDF commander Aleksandr Kerensky's famous Exodus. As any BattleTech fan will recognize, it's heavily hinted to be a Clan Wolverine ship, based on the insignias painted on it, and how consumed Natasha Kerensky (an undercover Clan Wolf warrior) is on destroying it, as the Clans are sworn to do with anything related to the Not-Named Clan.
• Calling Your Shots: There are three ways to get a chance to aim for specific parts of enemy mechs:
  • The ability Precision Strike improves your chance-to-hit and lets you make a called shot at the cost of Resolve.
  • Knocking down an enemy 'Mech by rocking them off-balance with PPCs, ballistic weapons (autocannons and gauss rifles), and explosives (Long and Short Range Missiles) or kneecapping them will grant you a chance to declare called shots on their prone frame until they pick themselves back up.
  • Rarest of all is having an enemy 'Mech overheat to the point of shutting down, rendering it a sitting duck for your lance (though hitting an enemy 'Mech with enough sprays from flamers can force this condition.)
• Canon Foreigner:
  • The Aurigan Reach, the Coalition which governs it, and its related characters like Kamea have never been discussed or referenced in previous BattleTech lore before. In early 2019 an official House Arano: The Aurigan Coalition sourcebook, which HBS employees helped write, was released, canonizing the Aurigan Coalition, House Arano, and the events of the game.
  • The Argo is a similar foreigner — advanced Star League explorer ships definitely existed, but none like the Argo has ever been described before. Though much like the Reach, if the game does well it could easily find its way into the wider canon. The game does mention that the Argo was one of only two such ships ever made to explain its rarity; the second, the Myrmidon, was broken down for parts before being completed, as the shipyards were repurposed for war materiel manufacturing.
  • The Heavy Metal expansion introduced the BSK-M3 Bull Shark assault-class 'Mech, an entirely new custom chassis of stock 'Mech. Given the advanced equipment the model you're given in single player carries, it's implied to be made by Clan Wolverine given that the game explicitly notes their insignia on the one your crew acquires in the course of the Heavy Metal flash points. Another strong hint is given how Natasha Kerensky is so single-mindedly dedicated to destroying it and all the other technology found with the Dobrev, given how each Clan is sworn to the complete annihilation of anything related to Clan Wolverine.
  • Heavy Metal also introduced the Contained Overflow Inertia Linkage or COIL beam. Available in large, medium, and small sizes, the COIL is a relatively light but extremely large weapon with relatively low base damage, but which increases its damage output (and heat generation) for each evasion pip the 'Mech using it has accumulated by walking that turn. The COIL-L can easily surpass an AC/20 in raw damage output when carried by a light 'Mech like a Firestarter or Jenner and may even surpass a UAC/20 on flat terrain, and the COIL-S can make for devestating melee combos. No remotely similar weapon exists anywhere within the tabletop game or otherwise within previously-established canon. Like the Bull Shark, it's all but explicitly stated to be a Clan Wolverine design.
  • To a lesser extent, the game also introduces a few new variants of existing 'Mechs, like the aforementioned Big Steel Claw. The most notable of these, the Hatchetman 3X, was consciously built around the computer game's melee support weapon mechanic and patched into the game at the time of the final DLC due to widespread criticism from players that the original version's canon loadout and hardpoint types didn't synergize with the hatchet quirk.
• Canon Immigrant: The PPC-equipped R90 Urbanmech variant is neither from the original tabletop game, nor yet another design unique to this game, but rather originated in the semi-official third party magazine Battletechnology (though it has since been fully canonized via the in-house magazine Shrapnel).
• Cargo Ship: Yang says if you told him that Graves from the Flashpoint Yang's Big Score, spends 10 hours a day apply oil to the Mechs in his collection he would believe you.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Vent Coolant ability causes a pilot injury in return for venting all heat from the 'mech at the end of the round (before overheating would kick in). Following complaints from players about the ability's lore inconsistency and general uselessness, it was later changed to "vent a lot of heat instantly, then gain a bit of extra heat each round for the next three rounds" instead.
• Centrifugal Gravity: The Argo has a gravity centrifuge ring with three pods. Initially, the Alpha Pod is the only one capable of holding an atmosphere (the other two are damaged and/or empty from the ship's crash and dereliction). The pods also pivot, so their "Down" direction is in line with direction of thrust while in G-exerting transit, or outward when in orbit.
• Challenge Run: Version 1.1 adds several optional difficulty modifiers that make getting shot down more unprofitable, like the "CT destruction = mech totaled" rule, a salvage slider to make missions more or less profitable in general, and a "cockpit destruction is always lethal" rule (the default setting gives pilots a difficult Guts roll to survive having their cockpit totaled around them, toggling this rule makes it always lethal). And of course there's the Ironman Mode — only one save, no backpedalling, all decisions final, and losing any priority mission is an automatic Game Over.
• Character Shilling: Much of the Heavy Metal-only Flashpoint campaign revolves around the Bounty Hunter and Natasha Kerensky, two of the baddest badasses in BattleTech lore. The problem is that to casual players, they're just another bunch of incredibly arrogant and condescending Arc Villains that you're certain to defeat should you ever cross paths. Sure enough, although they are without a doubt very challenging opponents, neither is nearly as deadly as your command crew's incessant whining makes them out to be.
• The Chessmaster: The Magistracy's leadership is backing Kamea's revolution for a handful of reasons.
  • First, having a neighboring star system's ruler in your debt is never a bad thing.
  • Second, Kamea's usurper uncle seems to think Stefan Amaris is a positive role model.
  • Leading to the third, as the Aurigan Reach's neighbors are in a Cold War, and she's concerned that some shortsighted move from Espinosa will turn it hot, so she'd prefer to avoid that by backing the usurped ruler that has a cooler head in a Civil War, giving the neighbors time to cool down further.
  • Espinosa proves himself to be one in the opening mission — not only was he able to turn the majority of the Royal Guard against Kamea, he and his daughter also arranged for the engineers to sabotage any Mech belonging to someone not part of the conspiracy. Raju calls Victoria out for her Evil Gloating given that she won through subterfuge instead of a stand-up fight.
• Chest Blaster: Some 'Mechs can mount guns in their central torso. The Zeus' stock configuration for instance has a medium laser crammed in there for a textbook example.
• Chewing the Scenery: Bogdan "The Steel Beast" Tubbs from the flashpoint of the same name speaks like a Solaris VII gladiator (i.e. a professional wrestler in character) all the time, complete with pompous declarations and every other word being IN LARGE CAPS.
• Chicken Walker: Most of the less humanoid 'Mech designs have digitigrade legs.
• Chunky Salsa Rule:
  • A bloodless version, but still quite disturbing: 'Mechs can actually be shot to pieces if the central torso takes a truly massive amount of damage. The result is a scattered field of blackened scrap metal pieces with only superficial resemblance to what they had been some seconds prior. Lighter 'Mechs have a higher chance of suffering this fate than heavier ones, but no model is immune.
  • Chatting with your XO nets you a story about a costly campaign your merc company participated in some years back. They lost over a dozen pilots back then, most of which had to be "hosed out of their cockpit".
• Collateral Damage: Originally, missed shots in the base game would never hit anything but the scenery even when there was an another Mech in the way; they'd just pass through it without any effect. That changed when the Urban Warfare DLC rolled around. Now missed shots will hit world objects - including other Mechs - regardless of affiliation if they're in the projectile's randomly determined path. This can have hilariously destructive consequences on urban battlefields (for instance, an Awesome misses with its PPCs and instead brings down the downtown high rise behind the target). It also makes it inadvisable to cluster Mechs together as shots that miss the intended target are highly likely to hit the one next to it instead.
• Combatant Cooldown System: The Turn-Order system, which consists of five phases, which count down from 5 to 1. Light Mechs go on Phase 4, Medium on Phase 3, Heavy on Phase 2, and finally Assault mechs on Phase 1. The Master Tactician passive specialist ability allows the 'Mech being piloted by the Warrior with said ability to act one phase higher (i.e., Light on phase 5, Medium on 4, and so on). Any 'Mech on the battlefield targeted by a Precision Strike or subject to a Knockdown is penalized by being pushed one phase later for their next action (the two can stack; a precision strike that also knocks down its target pushes the unfortunate 'Mech back two entire phases). Within the phase, "I Go, You Go" is used along with the One Activation per Phase. Also, mechs lighter than Assault can be reserved for later use in later phases, while any 'Mech already on Phase 1 cannot be pushed back any further.
• Company Cameo: Among the available emblems for your merc company are the Harebrained Schemes rabbit mascot and the Paradox Interactive platypus fossil.
• Competitive Balance:
  • Ballistic and explosive weapons have advantages over energy weapons in heat/range/damage/crits, but are vunerable to ammo explosions and take more tonnage, while energy weapons generate a lot more heat. Ballistic weapons also generate Recoil that reduces their accuracy during prolonged firing.
  • Multi-shot/volley weapons can hit many, many times and have more opportunity to score crits, but the attacks tend to spread out across a mech's body rather than concentrate on a single part, unless using Called Shots. Also, Missile weapons can only ever hit the Head once per attack, and only with their first shot; if that first shot doesn't strike the head, none of the others will either.
  • Short-Range Missiles can flay enemy armor at medium range, but their launchers cap out at 6 missiles per volley and they generate a lot of heat.
  • Long-Range Missiles can reach out and hit enemies from extreme range and can be launched in indirect arcs in huge volleys with the largest launcher being able to fire off 20 missiles at once, but do half the damage of SRM warheads and the launchers take a lot of tonnage, and as the ammo stacks contain 120 warheads per ton, this means a LRM-20 launcher has just six volleys per ton.
  • Autocannons hit hard, deal a respectable amount of stability damage, and are heat-efficient, but the higher-caliber rounds have less range and they all take a lot of tonnage. The AC/20 in particular has only the effective range of the Medium Laser and each ton of ammo is only worth 5 bursts, but in exchange it is a fearsome headchopper and can obliterate Light 'Mechs easily while stripping lots of armor at once from heavier 'Mechs.
  • Gauss Rifles are hard-hitting, accurate, long-ranged, and always do at least a little structural damage even if the target's armor holds, but they only get 8 slugs to the ton ammo-wise, they have a minimum range twice that of a PPC, they're very heavy and take a staggering five critical slots (except the ++ variant, which "only" takes four) and their capacitors are volatile, so critting the weapon itself will cause an internal explosion (though unlike other ballistic weapons, their ammo isn't volatile and won't cause explosions if hit). Oh, and they are also LosTech, meaning they're very rare and expensive.
  • Lasers and PPCs are light on tonnage and need no ammo, but generate loads of heat, and PPCs have a minimum effective range penalty on top of that. In exchange, PPC shots are the only energy projectiles that can inflict stability damage — and they also inflict a minor, non-stacking accuracy debuff on anything they hit. Conversely, instead of stability damage, laser weapons have an inherently higher accuracy and no recoil penalty.
    • Some energy weapons (PPCs and Medium Lasers in particular) generate even more heat than others. Heat values are roughly three times higher than their tabletop counterparts, which means a PPC should generate 30 heat compared to tabletop and a Medium Laser should generate 9 heat, but instead they generate 35 heat and 12 heat, respectively.^note They originally generated 40 heat and 10 heat, respectively, but this was changed in patch 1.1. Meanwhile, the Large Laser, which should generate 24 heat compared to its tabletop counterpart, only generates 18 heat instead, making it a more heat-efficient alternative to the PPC.
  • Support weapons are light, combo with melee attacks, and generate minimal heat, but Vehicle Flamers have extremely limited ammunition, Machine Guns have volatile-if-plentiful ammo (200 bullets per ton, 5 consumed per burst) and do tiny amounts of damage normally, and Small Lasers only hit once and only do 20 damage. In exchange, Vehicle Flamers can force enemies to overheat, Machine Guns have extremely high critical hit rates, remove another stack of evasion on top of the melee attack, and are distressingly effective at hitting the cockpit, and torching ammo, and Small Lasers are the most heat-efficient (in terms of damage-to-heat) energy weapons available. On top of that, all of them are only effective in knife-fighting range, although this is further compensated by them being able to bypass the evasion charges built up by a running light mech.
  • Light mechs are vunerable to withering amounts of gunfire and have limited tonnage for weapons, but in exchange they can mount many more jumpjets and run and soar across the battlefield easily. Their naturally high Initiative lets them easily outmaneuver heavier mechs.
  • Heavies and Assaults are walking walls of firepower and armor, but in exchange trade off mobility and Initiative. Furthermore, some Heavies trade off armor for more firepower, while some of the 'faster' Heavies and Assaults have a heavy engine that takes up more of their tonnage resulting in somewhat reduced armor/weapon tonnage availability.
  • Heat has been changed to a 0-100 percent-like scale, with all Mechs sinking a default of 30 Heat per turn. Overheating starts at 60 Heat, but this can be adjusted by the pilot's Guts skill and certain equipment; Guts can increase the Threshold to 75, then to 90, whilst Heat Banks increase both the maximum heat reachable (meaning a mech can shoot for longer without shutting down), and the damage threshold. Double Heat Sinks, while they are certainly twice as effective as regular heatsinks at heat dissipation for the same tonnage, take up triple the space in equipment slots due to their sheer bulk and are quite rare in the time period the campaign's events take place in.
  • Melee attacks can be used freely without the need for ammo and generates absolutely no heat by itself, complete with an attack of opportunity with your Support weapons, but you need to get dangerously close to your opponent to do so. Nevertheless it remains effective, as vehicles are extremely weak to melee, and evasion is completely ignored when you haul up and punch, kick, or tackle an enemy mech; furthermore, a successful melee hit will break the defensive stance of a mech bracing against attacks, and heavier mechs can punch hard enough to even pop the target's head/cockpit instantly if their aim is good.
• Composite Character: Several Mechs have hard points not used in their default loadouts that allow you to refit them like variants that are distinct entities in the original tabletop game. For example, the main character's Blackjack has a pair of support weapon mounts that can be used to affix S-Lasers, which combined with replacing the jump jets with more heat sinks turns it into the 1DC version.
• Computer Virus: The "Locura", a computer virus that was found in the Star League base and named after a local superstition on the planet it was found on. It was a fragment from the experimental Space Defense System from the Star League; an AI component that went awry and effectively became a malignant virus. It was quarantined on the Star League base to analyze what went wrong with it and was abandoned and forgotten when the League collapsed. The crew of the Argo find it, the Argo is nearly destroyed before it's quarantined in an air-gapped computer bank, and then is later deliberately unleashed on Colonel Ostegaard's heavily armed dropship.
• Conspicuous Consumption: Any interstellar communication is this In-Universe. Only the ComStar-controlled HPG stations can enable realtime data transfer between star systems, and C-Bills are basically cell phone minutes. Only they're not minutes, they're miliseconds. A one-hour chat with your friend/partner/grandma therefore clocks in at 3,600,000 C-Bills; more than your merc company gets paid for the most dangerous contracts the MRB offers anywhere on the map, more than many Battlemechs. Unsurprisingly, only the rich and powerful can afford to make regular use of it — and even they prefer not to, because they're entrusting a creepy technology-worshipping cult with their communications. Most people just use heavily compressed data bursts to convey their communiques through ComStar's HPGs. When a client early on in the campaign is willing to shell out for an HPG message specifically to get in touch with the Marauders, Darius immediately points out that it proves they must have lots of money to burn.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Whenever you accept a Target Acquisition contract, Mission Control will chime in at the halfway point to remind you that yes, your time is running out. It gets annoying fast.
• Cool Starship: The Argo, the first (and at this point, only) example of the Argo-class DropShip, originally designed as a Star League planetary exploration vessel and repurposed by your mercenary crew into being their home base. It's got three rotating habitation modules that fold in when it's going to accelerate, room for 57,000 tons of cargo, room enough for a proper, full-service Mech Bay including scaffolding and advanced automation, a docking collar which allows it to deploy your lance of 'Mechs from an attached Leopard-class DropShip (and would theoretically have room for more) whilst also allowing it to carry said Leopard along via JumpShip without the Leopard having to dock to the JumpShip directly (something not seen in the series or lore until now), and machine shops and hydroponic gardens allowing it to operate for months at a time without resupply. Now, the poor girl has seen better days when your crew first finds her and some of those aforementioned features aren't working, but if you're willing to spend twenty million C-Bills upgrading and repairing her, she'll be the equal or better of even an Overlord-class DropShip (which are the big, expensive command ships in BTech lore).
• Cool, but Inefficient: Heavy Metal introduced COIL Beams, a special type of energy weapon that multiplies its base damage rating by the number of evasion chevrons the carrier 'Mech accumulated before firing, which is a pretty cool concept especially for light 'Mechs. Alas, the weapons are so heavy and bulky that most light 'Mechs can only carry one or two of them, depending on weapon size. COILs are also Made of Explodium and generate an inordinate amount of heat, and the fact that only basic ground movement can charge them (so no extreme-range jumping or sprinting for you) makes them much less efficient than they appear to be at first glance.
• Coup de Grâce: Invoked by how support weapon follow up attacks work. The weapons will still fire, even if the target was already killed by the melee attack, giving the appearance that your mech is doing this. Of course, there's no real reason to do this beyond Rule of Cool, so you should probably turn your support weapons off when punching a mech that's already heavily damaged so as not to waste ammo and/or heat.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Specializing 'Mechs in one weapon type has numerous advantages and just as many drawbacks. Energy-focused 'Mechs can be very powerful but often end up crippled in hot biomes due to their excessive heat generation. Ballistic 'Mechs deal tons of damage with little heat buildup but are at risk of running out of ammo in prolonged battles, plus their explosive ammo bins make them much more susceptible to incoming hits. Both also fare poorly on hilly or urban maps where it can be hard to get decent sight lines on the enemy. Missile boats don't have this problem, but their lack of precision targeting makes it difficult to bring down hostile 'Mechs quickly and efficiently, and trying to do so with headshots is all but impossible. All of this is less of a problem if you build your lance so that your specialists cover each others' weaknesses.
• Critical Existence Failure: Unlike 'Mechs, vehicles and turrets aren't susceptible to Subsystem Damage, so they're either fully combat-ready or dead.
• Critical Hit: Once you breach armor, it is possible to score direct hits on your enemy's weapons and subsystems. Getting a lucky hit to the head/cockpit can result in pilot wounds or even outright death. It takes one crit to destroy a heatsink or jumpjet, and two crits to destroy any weapons — the first crit damages the weapon and makes it hard to aim, the second outright totals it. It also takes two crits to torch ammunition — the first prevents it from feeding, the second ignites it (Boom!).
• Crosshair Aware: You'll sometimes see red "Dangerous" tiles on the map that warn you about any unit that stands on them being at risk of destruction. Sometimes these tiles are even encompassed by a huge red hexagon on the ground. True enough, once whatever is targeted there comes down (DropShips, artillery strikes, explosive ordnance, what have you), any 'Mech that's caught in the blast is destroyed instantly regardless of tonnage and affiliation.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff:
  • Vehicles take double damage from melee attacks by mechs. Unless the mech is very light and the vehicle is very heavy, odds are good that a melee attack will outright destroy the vehicle in one hit.
  • Heavy Metal introduced the NARC missile beacon and TAG targetting laser, which makes the target take additional damage from certain weapons (NARC boosts missile damage and TAG boosts laser and ballistic damage)
• David vs. Goliath: An achievement can be unlocked by having a light 'Mech punch out an assault 'Mech with a melee strike.
• Deadly Euphemism: Some of your assassination contracts don't outright call for the mark's heads and instead use more interesting code words to imply that inhumation is the desired result. You might be asked to, for example, "add live-fire exercises" to someone's military training drill.
• Death by Falling Over: Pilots get wounded if their mech falls over in battle. Naturally, this can be eventually fatal as injuries pile up, and in any case a mech that has been tipped over is a sitting duck for Called Shots until it gets up. Losing both of your mech's legs, thus falling and becoming unable to get back up, counts as a mission kill and can be potentially lethal to the pilot too.
• Death by a Thousand Cuts: Machine guns, SRM and LRM missile launchers don't do much damage per individual warhead, but they have several advantages thanks to their burst-fire:
  • As ballistic/explosive projectiles, they inflict stability damage to 'Mechs, eventually making them unstable and vulnerable to knockdown.
  • As they hit multiple times per volley, there is a chance some of the missiles might hit the cockpit and wound/kill the pilot.
  • Once you breach armor, each hit has the chance to inflict critical hits on exposed subsystems, and possibly even torch ammunition stores.
  • Hostile SRM carrier vehicles sport ten SRM-6 launchers, and can sandblast your armor away with a withering barrage of sixty Short Range Missiles that has a good chance to knock you flat on your back.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: Can be done with Death From Above. If a pilot is killed they are permanently killed while a 'Mech, even if all its components are wrecked, can be repaired. So a crafty commander can have a 'Mech that's on its last legs use DFA to do damage to a mech, thus knocking it out of the battle, while leaving its pilot injured but alive. The alternative are having the pilot punch out without do any damage, or risk the 'Mech being cored and the pilot dying.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: 'Mech customization is a major part of the game and loosely based on a simplified version of the tabletop game's construction rules, though it is limited to what was possible in 3025 — so no OmniMechs, very limited LosTech availability (especially without the DLC), the anti-lore addition of hard points, and hard points limited by weapon type. This actually gives some of the variants described in the various Technical Readouts a bit less of a purpose, as the addition of hard points prevents them from being properly customisable. Interestingly, some 'Mechs actually break the game's own construction rules - in particular, the SLDF Black Knight has three double heat sinks in each leg, taking up nine critical slots per leg when each leg only has four critical slots.
• Destructive Savior: 'Mech battles in urban environments invariably cause staggering amounts of property damage. A couple of stray shots is all it takes to turn entire high-rise buildings into piles of rubble and nearly every step destroys several cars, so even if you're contracted to protect something inside a city, the collateral damage you'll cause in the process will outweigh your pay a hundred times over.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • It's virtually impossible to make use of every single weapon hardpoint a 'Mech has and still have a combat-viable build. However, if you pull it off through modding or just plain craziness, all weapons will be visualized on the 'Mech's chassis, although it tends to look a bit funny in most cases. For example, hanging four autocannons off an Urbanmech UM-R60's side or strapping five lasers to a Wolverine WVR-6K's right arm while the Urbanmech's model is clearly optimized to look best with one or maybe two autocannons and the Wolverine's with two or three lasers. It even works (to some extent) if you increase the number of hardpoints through file editing, but the game will eventually give up if you take it too far. Additionally, the game only has a limited number of models prebuilt for each mech, and attempting to load a mech built without a model available will cause a crash (e.g., adding energy weapons to a location on a mech with no models that have energy weapons in that location).
  • In the final battle of the Heavy Metal DLC's mini-campaign, Natasha Kernesky and the Bounty Hunter are both immune to headshots, keeping you from being able to eliminate them with a lucky (or called) shot. Or breaking canon by killing them.
  • In addition, in the Heavy Metal campaign, apart from the very first set of missions, you're not operating under contract with any of the nations around. You're doing this on your own and with the minor assistance of a Star League AI. As such, none of the Flashpoints, or their missions, offer you a monetary reward. However, since you're not under contract, you have nobody you need to share salvage with, and though you still can't get everything, you can pick up more than you can in even the vanilla campaign missions. Hilariously, the Draconis Combine contacts you literally just after last mission to try and contract you to find the Dobrev... which has been destroyed. Your rep is much put out by this news as his superiors are not very understanding, but offers you a quarter million c-bills for the location of the crater so they can confirm your intel. You happily take the free money.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance:
  • Dropping a Cyclops Z as part of your lance increases the entire lance's initiative by 1, which can let your assault 'Mechs act in Phase 2 or even 3 if the pilots are also Master Tacticians. However, dropping multiple Cyclopses doesn't improve your initiative further (and most non-suicidal Cyclops builds are too lightly armed to make this a viable strategy, anyway).
  • Comm Systems work similarly. No matter how many of your 'Mechs are equipped with one, only the highest-rated upgrade will contribute to your Resolve gain, so the best you can get is an additional +3 Resolve each turn.
  • The MRB rating seems to work along these lines, too, by comparing your current rating with the difficulty of the contract you're about to sign. Accepting a contract that has more skulls than you have MRB stars nets you a lot of points, assuming you can even accept it in the first place. Conversely, running low-difficulty missions with a high MRB rating gets you barely anything, which means by the time you hit the 900 points threshold, making further progress to the maximum of 1,000 points turns into a chore because you only gain ~2 points per successful 5-skull contract.
  • Since targeting computers only affect one weapon type each and even the best ones weigh one ton and take up two slots, it's often advisable to build mechs solely around one type of weapon.
• Dirty Coward: At the end of the prologue, Mastiff lays this accusation against Victoria Espinosa — and her father Santiago, by extension — for coming after him with not only a huge lance at her back, but also sabotaging the Royal Guards' mechs (as the player's mech had just suffered a crippling reactor failure) to ensure the loyalists would be helpless during the coup; all while having the temerity to indulge in Evil Gloating.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The Icebox's guards' Jagermech and Trebuchet can count as this — the former can mount multiple hard-hitting autocannons and deal heavy damage from long range, while the latter has a pair of LRM-15 launchers. Unfortunately you only get 5 choices of salvage in this mission, so you have to pick one and hope the randomized salvage picks the parts of the other you didn't choose.
  • If you got lucky (or unlucky) in random Assassination missions, you may end up facing some tough enemies with good 'mechs. As soon as you complete the first story mission, it is possible to face some otherwise late game 'mechs in combat like the Grasshopper, Orion, Trebuchet, Dragon, etc if you know where to go or which missions to take.
  • A certain mission which you play as Kamea will not only give you an SLDF Highlander with Gauss Rifle, but if you know what you are doing you will also salvage one of the 3 Assault 'Mechs you face which consists of an Awesome, a Zeus, and a Battlemaster. Potentially 2 if you got lucky with the salvage roll.
  • A later update introduced a special contract, "Clash of the Titans", which is bound to show up at the very beginning of a campaign. It revolves around cleaning up two mutually hostile assault 'Mechs plus their supporting lances. Play your cards right and you can salvage up to two assaults all the way up to Atlases and Annihilators in the first week of your campaign. It'll take months to refit them if something goes wrong, but having this level of tonnage at your disposal when everyone else is running medium 'Mechs at most is a massive shot in the arm.
  • The Marauder BattleMech added in a free patch features head-capper weapons like PPCs and larger autocannons, and has a special component that gives the pilot a bonus to called shots. Paired with Tactics 9 Called Shot Mastery, this boosts you to a 35% chance when you call shots on the head, making the Maurader absolutely lethal at blowing the head off of a BattleMech and, on default settings, letting you salvage them in totality.
  • When starting Career Mode with the Heavy Metal DLC installed, you're given a free Heavy Metal crate that contains two random weapons and one random BattleMech. Most of the time you'll just get something small, like a Vulcan, but it's still possible to get an Annihilator or Bull Shark at the very start of the game.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Inverted for the Atlas and Atlas II. They were extremely different looking in the original artwork but look identical in this game, apart from slightly different weapon placement.
  • Similarly, the LRM and SRM carriers are depicted as distinct entities in the tabletop game while here they appear to be the exact same vehicle with different weapons equipped.
• Dramatic Irony: At one point during the events of the Heavy Metal DLC storyline, your command crew waxes nostalgic about the possibility of back-tracing the Dovrev to its SLDF-in-exile sourcepoint, because they surely settled down in peace and maintained the Star League away from the Inner Sphere. Any long-time fan of BattleTech knows that Kerensky's successor-state started fraying almost immediately upon settling down, and broke down completely upon his death, causing his son to famously reform it by force into the Clans, the least peaceful people in the entire setting. Long after the events of this game, the Clans returning from the Deep Periphery to wage war on the Inner Sphere quickly dismantles the romantic mythology built up around the disappeared SLDF.
• Drop Pod: 'Mech deployment on urban battlefields is usually facilitated through drop pods instead of Leopards. The reason behind this isn't touched upon, but it's certainly not for lack of landing zones. Cities are more than spacious enough to safely land Leopards almost anywhere.
• Early Game Hell: The first few missions after the tutorial can be brutal from a management standpoint, as the player's mercenary company is trapped in a section of the Periphery (due to some below-the-board shenanigans by less than legitimate Loan Sharks the company is in debt to) with very slim contractual pickings that payout very little. The contracts may not be particularly challenging, but the pay is low enough that the company cannot afford to spend too much on repair and recuperation, both in C-Bills and lost time that could be used taking more contracts. The mechanics of the situation drive the theme of the opening act by giving the player a sense of the desperation of down-on-their-luck mercenaries working contract-to-contract in a struggle to stay in the black.
• Easy Logistics: You don't need to pay for fuel for your DropShip, that being rolled into "transport fees" if you travel to another system or covered by a Contract that pays for you to relocate. You don't need to buy food or other necessities, those being rolled into your monthly operating costs. Even armor and ammunition (sort of) aren't tracked: 'Mechs that take armor damage in a mission automatically have it repaired, and ammo is automatically reloaded (presumably munitions and armor expended during a contract are billed to the client.) Extra tons of ammo are only used when altering 'Mech loadouts to add weapons and/or their ammo, you don't need to replenish every bullet or missile. Weapons that were damaged but not destroyed by crits can be repaired back into good working condition, too, and improved weapons don't lose their improvements from such repairs. On the other hand, maintenance fees from keeping your medical bay running explicitly include paying for the medical staff to oversee your recovering pilots in addition to medical supplies, and a fully-upgraded Argo's monthly C-bill cost is formidable.
• Effortless Achievement: You get achievements for things like losing a battle to the AI, modifying your 'Mechs a couple of times, or watching the entire credits reel from beginning to end^note which takes about half an hour, so this might actually be the most demanding example on the list.
• Egocentric Team Naming: Markham's Marauders follow the BattleTech tradition of naming mercenary bands after their commanding officer. They get renamed after the Time Skip into [Your callsign]'s Marauders. You can edit the name, logo and colors at that point.
• Ejection Seat: There's a button on the user interface to have the pilot of a 'Mech eject from it. This destroys the 'Mech's head (along with anything equipped to it) and takes it out of action, but it has its uses, such if you have a time limit to get your 'Mechs to the evac point but one sustained a broken leg. The pilot will be retrieved by your ship, and the 'Mech's headless body recovered for repair. In the campaign, the PC ejects from their Blackjack when it's disabled during the Justified Tutorial.
• Elite Mook: Assassination missions tend to have the target 'mech be a lot more valuable than its escorts, so it will usually have superior tonnage. Expect to see early Heavy and Assault mechs... or a lone tank of appropriate tonnage.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: During the Grave Robbing mission, you command a lance of SLDF Royal-model 'mechs that Kamea and three House Karosas mechwarriors commandeer. These were top of the line machines meant for the Hegemony-native member regiments in the Star League Defense Force (as opposed to those native to the other five great realms of the League). Kamea keeps the Atlas for herself and replaces her Succession Wars-grade Kintaro with it, while she gifts the Highlander to you.
• Emerging from the Shadows: A variation. After launching the Argo, a shuttle docks with the Leopard, the airlock door opens to reveal a very much alive Kamea.
• Enemy Mine: A light example. In the Red Hunt Flashpoint, once you defend your Draconis Combine employer's base from the attacking Gray Death Legion, an elite Draconis Elite Strike Team unit arrives, drives away your liason, and starts shooting at everyone they see, including you. Grayson Death Carlyle, the leader of the GDL, and your character basically agree that the DEST is well known to Leave No Witnesses and that only by working together can you escape the planet.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: The Magistracy of Canopus is bankrolling Kamea's Civil War. While she's a genuinely decent sort who wants to restore the "constitutional" part of her country's constitutional monarchy, the Canopians are more interested in the fact that Santiago Espinosa's political moves are increasing tensions between The 'Verse's superpowers. The Canopians have no appetite for another galactic war and think Kamea can return things to the status quo ante if she's restored to her throne. It backfires briefly when the Espinosas trick the Taurian Concordat into entering the war on their side, turning the whole thing into a Proxy War for a little while, but the Taurians withdraw when they figure out they were duped.
• Escort Mission: Several missions involve escorting a convoy. Some missions also have you escorting Kamea, but then she is usually controllable, and in one mission when she isn't, she is actually your reinforcement rather than escortee despite the objective states that she has to be kept alive. A third variant lets you fight alongside an allied lance that needs to be escorted to an evacuation zone, although in this case it's sufficient if one of their 'Mechs survives, and they tend to give as good as they get.
• Everything Breaks: Every urban map is an Everything-Is-Smashable Area full of fragile buildings to raze and civilian vehicles to stomp. Said buildings heavily restrict movement and the use of direct-fire weapons, and the easiest way to get around this is to spare a few 'Mech weapon discharges to clear the path forward. Cities also contain numerous transformer stations and thermal exchangers that can be targeted to spawn unique Geo Effects that affect sensors or heat levels in their vicinity.
• Evil Is Hammy:
  • The captive Victoria Espinoza impotently rages at you from her cell on the Argo before she's handed over to Lord Karosas for safekeeping. A dialogue option is available to say she sounds like a cartoon villain.
  • From one of the Flashpoints, you have Professor Mencius Horvat, an extremely flamboyant and odd man who refers to his Lord Humongous Expy of a second-in-command as "my man-monster, Calamar Gigante", talks about his own jacket with disturbing enthusiasm, and is running a rigged bloodsport tournament in an abandoned city. He's a bloodthirsty pirate, kills any "winners" of his tournament who don't measure up to his standards, and has a weird fetish for UrbanMechs.
• Evil Uncle: Lord Santiago Espinosa, the uncle of Kamea Arano, staged The Coup against his niece during her coronation after her refusal to dissolve the legislative body and consolidate the central authority. Other than his authoritarian goals, he is also not above bombarding civilian centers and committing subterfuge during his revolt. Or sending dissenters to the most Siberian prison available to him.
• Explosive Instrumentation: The only explanation why 'Mech cockpits always explode violently when they're destroyed, regardless of the weapon used.
• Famed In-Story: "Famed" might be a bit of a stretch, but your mercenary outfit is already well-known throughout the galaxy by the time the story begins. By the end of it, and especially if you finished the Heavy Metal Flashpoint campaign^note which ends with you defeating two of the most famous MechWarriors in history, followed by a massive reputation gain across the board, you're the go-to problem solver for all Great Houses and anyone else who can scrounge up the funds to hire you.
• Finishing Stomp:
  • If a 'Mech is told to attack a prone opponent in melee, they'll invariably do so with a mighty stomp on the hapless target that, depending on the angle of attack, is highly likely to destroy the downed 'Mech if the stomp hits the head or the CT. It's one of the reasons getting knocked down is something most players try to avoid like the plague, as the AI has an uncanny talent to exploit it immediately.
  • Depending on weight differences, any physical attack on a vehicle by a 'Mech becomes this, or at least deals heavy damage. Melee damage is doubled against vehicles, and the only attack ever done is a stomp that pile drives the 'Mech's lower leg right into the top of the vehicle.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Yang says not to let the name of the Grasshopper battlemech's name fool you in his run-down on the chassis. The stock Grasshopper is a solid well-cooled laser-specialized heavy mech that is typically fairly durable and has extra mobility from jump jets, yet its namesake is an insect; a naming theme typically used on light mechs.
• Fog of War: Part of the gameplay, a notable addition not present in the tabletop. Units exist on three levels: Hidden by the fog (untargetable), on sensors but not in visual (untargetable, can be sensor locked), and within visual range (can be targeted). The fog of war makes light 'mechs (who can see further both on sensors and visuals) have a role as battlefield scouts, and also makes certain weapons (particularly PPC and small-calibre autocannons) less useful than on tabletop as units will usually begin exchanging fire at much closer ranges.
• Forced Tutorial:
  • Mastiff makes you take your Blackjack for an unskippable shakedown run at the start of the campaign. This is justified, as he requested your 'Mech be repaired quickly and in short order so he wanted to make sure it was properly patched up before you went on duty.
  • A much subtler one occurs immediately after the mission to capture the Argo. You receive a Centurion that had been undergoing refit in the Pirate base and had only a medium laser installed, thus forcing players who had been using nothing but default loadouts up to that point to familiarize themselves with the Mech Bay.
• Foregone Conclusion: Kamea Arano narrates the Framing Device as the High Lady of the Aurigan Reach, so obviously she wins and gets her throne back.
• Flawed Prototype:
  • The Argo was the first of her line (and also the only one ever launched before the fall of the Star League) and as such has a number of quirks, chief of which is that the chassis isn't designed for atmospheric entry and making the company dependent on your Leopard for deployment. The centuries spent downed on a moon in the Periphery hasn't improved matters. The Argo's Multiple Docking Collar System was itself a flawed prototype, as accourding to the sourcebook House Arano (The Aurigan Coalition) (which made most of the events of the game part of official BattleTech canon), each ship docked to it required a docking collar on the JumpShip be left empty due to the peculiarites of Kearny-Fujita Drive Field manipulation. While perhaps another several decades or centuries of research could have created a version that could attach an arbitary number of other ships or possibly even daisy-chain, the model that existed at the time of the fall of the Star League (and thus, the model on the Argo) only really offsets the fact that the Argo like other particularly large DropShips blocks a docking collar in addition to the one it actually docks with.
  • The Raven prototype found in-game carries a prototype ECM that weighs three times that of the original Star League model it's based upon.
• Fragile Speedster:
  • Light 'Mechs, and due to how the initiative works they can take advantage of their speed in a pseudo-Extra Turn fashion using the Reserve option. Can move right up to Glass Cannon territory when using powerful weapons like PPCs or LRM-20s to turn them into hit-and-run snipers.
  • The Locust in particular is the lightest and fastest mech in the game. It's also very fragile, and must rely on constantly moving to gain evasion to survive. The 1M model in particular has a decent long range load out, but can easily be destroyed by medium lasers and AC/2's.
  • COIL weapons directly weaponize this, as they convert a 'Mech's speed (measured by how many evasive charges it builds during regular combat movement (jump jets and sprinting do not generate usable COIL charges)) into firepower (and heat), making a light 'Mech that carries one not just a fragile speedster, but also a Glass Cannon. Their massive heat output when used by a 'Mech that's built up a great deal of evasion also encourages hit-and-run tactics, as a light 'Mech can't reasonably hope to sink that much heat in one turn and would only be putting itself at undue risk by staying in the fight between shots. A Firestarter or Jenner carrying a pair of COIL-Ls can melt a 'Mech twice its weight, but woe betide that same light 'Mech if anything else connects a hit with its own weapons.
• Framing Device: The campaign mode is framed as Kamea Arano, High Lady of the Aurigan Reach, looking back on the civil war she waged to regain her rightful throne.
• Frontline General: Aside from you as captain of the mercenary company taking the field, Kamea will also insist on being planetside in her own 'Mech on a few of the story missions.
• Frozen in Time: Despite the fact that the game can allow you to work contracts for decades if you so choose, the game will always behave like it's circa 3025 in the BTech universe — there are no events related to going further up the timeline, house politics will continue to behave like it's pre-Fourth Succession War, your characters don't age, Kamea and her liberation army will wait for you to act, et cetera.
  • Averted in Career Mode, which takes place specifically between 3025-3028. The goal is to become as successful a mercenary as possible before the Fourth Succession War breaks out.
• Fun with Acronyms: The newly introduced COIL Beam energy weapons are shorthand for Contained Overflow Inertia Linkage.
• Gambit Pileup:
  • One side mission is to extract a scientist for the local government. The scientist is apparently playing both sides to the point that your XO has lost track of how many layers of betrayal are going on — it's at least four.
  • A new Flashpoint added in Urban Warfare, "Prototype." An unruly vassal state of House Marik has secretly gotten their hands on a brand-new, highly-secret, cutting-edge piece of Capellan technology: a Raven light BattleMech, outfitted with top-of-the-line ECM technology. House Liao sends an invasion force to reclaim it, House Marik hires you to bring it to the central government, and during the first mission, House Steiner lands a strike team to try and finish off both sides and claim it for the Lyran Commonwealth. The gambits keep piling up because after the first mission, Marina Liao, the Capellan mercenary liason, contacts you to basically say "we will pay you very well if you return it to us." And then Darius mentions that the Draconis Combine rep Shugo Yamaguchi is calling to inquire with you about selling it to them. And of course you're also free to Take a Third Option and keep it for yourself without much of a backlash.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Sometimes your lance may stop carrying out move or attack orders. You can still give the orders, and the pilots acknowledge them, but their 'Mechs stay where they are and their turn never ends. This seems to be related to excessive Save Scumming and can usually be fixed by closing and restarting the game.
  • The "Flattened Earth" Flashpoint for House Liao apparently had its outcomes switched up during development. Wiping out the dissidents eventually results in a random event that praises your crew for saving all those helpless innocents, coupled with a minor reputation loss with the Capellans. Conversely, refusing the contract triggers a different event that makes your crew feel bad about what they did. It's nothing critical in the larger scheme of things, but still.
  • Unique 'Mechs like the special "Big Steel Claw" CRB-27 Crab are very likely to disappear (read: turn into their standard version) if you put them into storage.
  • The AI controlling friendly units in escort missions has a notoriously buggy pathfinding ability. It's all-too-common to have one of the units you're escorting decide that it's unable to see your 'Mechs even if you're right next to it and simply stop moving. The developers are aware of the problem and have promised that the 1.9 patch will feature both an overhaul of the escort mission AI and add an extra victory condition for killing all opposing units, regardless of whether the escorted units make it to the evac zone.
• Game Mod: Starting with version 1.8, the game officially supports mods and has an integrated mod loader. Previously the use of a community-made mod loader called ModTek was necessary to load mods and many larger mods still prefer to use ModTek rather than the game's own mod loader, which is relegated to enabling or disabling certain optional components of those mods. There are three particularly popular and large mods for the game:
  • RogueTech or RT, which taking a cue from Roguelikes, relies on procedural mission generation and much greater gameplay challenge. It also overhauls 'Mech customization for even more control and a closer-to-tabletop experience, with options such as being able to change 'Mech engines and having to deal with repairing or replacing individual actuators. RogueTech is not set in any specific time beyond being after the Clan Invasion and is lore-flexible on 'Mech inclusion.
  • BattleTech Advanced 3062 or BTA is less punishingly difficult than RogueTech but use the same advanced 'Mech customization system. As the name suggests, BTA is set in 3062, during the FedCom Civil War and features lore-friendly 'Mechs and technology for that period.
  • BattleTech Extended 3025 - Commander's Edition or BEX aims to stay closer to vanilla mechanics and uses the vanilla MechLab and retains full compatibility with the standard campaign. As the name suggests, it starts in 3025 like the unmodified game, but it tracks the passage of time and implements tables of equipment and 'Mech availability to make new 'Mechs become available (and other 'Mechs to become less common) as time passes with a final year of 3057. This also includes territorial changes as time passes and the Clans invading in 3049.
  • All three share certain elements like using 'Mech and pilot quirks to make specific 'Mechs and pilots more distinct and giving pilots expertise in 'Mechs they frequently pilot, limiting jump jets to 'Mechs that have them in lore, slowing pilot progression, implementing pilot fatigue, and making balance adjustments to tone down the 'Mechs from Heavy Metal, 1.8, 1.9, and 1.9.1 (for example, the Annihilator loses its bonus to ballistic damage, the Marauder loses its bonus to called shots, and the Warhammer's energy damage bonus is reduced from 20% to 5%) and help improve underperforming 'Mechs (for example, the Shadow Hawk is given a 10% bonus to ballistic damage and the Victor gets the same enhanced jump jets as the Phoenix Hawk),
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • The ridiculousness of the Local Pirate Organization having access to so much high level tech is subtly addressed in the randomly generated battle missions where the enemy Lance you are contracted to fight is reinforced by another from its main allies in the fluff (Steiner is reinforced by Davion, Taurians by the Directorate, etc.) If the Pirates are the main enemy their allies will turn out to be none other than Comstar.
  • It's possible (unless you turn it off in the difficulty settings) for a pilot to survive their 'Mech being cored by passing a guts check, which is exactly what happened to Raju.
  • Inverted in the short story Almost Sounds Like the Guns Themselves, taking place shortly after the events of the main campaign. In a flashback to the events of the game, a customized Shadow Hawk (from the description it appears to be the "Shadow Hawk Umbra" bonus skin) performs a Coup de Grâce on what's left of the cab of a Missile Carrier it just DFA'd with a Small Laser, mimicking the game's support weapon mechanic.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: There are a few contradictions between campaign cutscenes, descriptions and actual gameplay as far as 'Mechs are concerned.
  • Lord Madeira describes Victoria Espinosa's King Crab 'Mech as more or less unique in the Periphery, but chances are good you've already fought a dozen King Crabs by the time he makes that claim.
  • The Steiner-affiliated Flashpoints make a point about the Hatchetman being a brand-new design that no-one but the Lyrans can field... while one or two lances of Hatchetmen are already gathering dust in the Argo's cargo hold after you salvaged them from pretty much every faction there is. Even if you haven't yet, they'll start spawning in shops and on the battlefield from the moment the Flashpoint ends, and in different variants, to boot.
  • Similarly, the Raven is added to battlefields and shops after the end of the "prototype" Flashpoint, despite being a one-of-a-kind prototype that your merc company can abscond with, to boot. Canonically the Raven wouldn't be fielded by the Capellans until the Fourth Succession War. What's more, they enter general encounter tables after the flashpoint is completed.
  • The Bull Shark is added to random encounter tables after the completion of the Heavy Metal mini-campaign, despite never having been produced in the Inner Sphere and being almost certainly a Clan 'Mech that is beyond even regular LosTech. Even if there was more than one example aboard the Dobrev, it's hard to believe many would have escaped to the larger world or would last long before being hunted down by Natasha Kerensky.
  • The Annihilator is described as extremely rare ^note the original Annihilator was designed in the Inner Sphere, but every prototype left with Kerensky's Exodus and only the Clans know how to build it; it was (re-)introduced to the Inner Sphere due to Wolf's Dragoons being equipped with them while the Bull Shark is an outright unique 'Mech design of Clan Wolverine origin that nobody in the Inner Sphere has ever seen. Both spawn as part of regular assault lances once the unlock conditions are met.
  • The sheer amount of high-end 'Mechs in the Rimward Periphary is not particularly lore-friendly. Nearly every planetary government and pirate organization can field multiple assault lances with rare and expensive 'Mechs like Atlases, Annihilators, King Crabs, and Highlanders. If not for the needs of gameplay and providing challenging opponents, most of the independent worlds would be lucky to field even one full assault lance.
  • Since 'Mech-specific quirks and certain types of equipment weren't added until the first DLC, many 'Mechs in the game lack features they canonically have in the tabletop version, such as the Royal Griffin missing its electronic warfare suite (you can buy one at faction or black market stores or get it as a random Flashpoint reward if you have the Urban Warfare DLC) or the Spider being able to use the eject command normally despite its cramped, partially torso-mounted cockpit being too small to accommodate an Escape Pod. Conversely, because of the way "quirks" were eventually implemented as non-removable equipment, the Hatchetman still loses anything mounted in its head when ejecting despite having a Full Head Ejection System since all 'Mechs only have one head equipment slot, which would have rendered the FHES worse than useless as adding it would prevent the head from being used at all.
  • Flashpoints can have reputation consequences that don't really reflect the dialog that just happened. For example, the dialog for completing the Flattened Earth flashpoint for the Volkovites (which involves breaking your contract with the Capellan Confederation) and not selling them out afterwards implies that you'll be permanently blacklisted by the Capellan Confederation. In actuality, you just lose 12 reputation with them, less than you might earn (or lose) for completing a single high-skull mission for (or against) them.
  • The Banshee BNC-3S shouldn't really be present at all, as the variant was introduced in 3026 and the game is set in 3025. Even if prototypes rolled off the line before then, they'd still have to filter their way across half the Inner Sphere from the Lyran Commonwealth to the Rimward Periphary.
• Gathering Steam: COIL Beams multiply their mediocre base damage by the number of evasion charges the carrier 'Mech accumulated before firing, so the farther you move, the harder they hit. COIL-L can potentially deal more damage than a U/AC-20 at a very decent range, although naturally it all depends on the terrain.
• Gatling Good: Ultra Autocannons look like giant triple-barreled rotary cannons regardless of caliber.
• Genki Girl: Fan favorite Ronin Glitch has an incredibly bubbly personality for a hardened killer. Her voice set is actually called "f_overload01".
• Geo Effects: The terrain has a large impact on a fight. Rough Ground can make it difficult for a BattleMech to keep its footing, making it more vulnerable to Stability Damage and thus Knockdown. Forested areas and sandstorms can serve as soft Cover, allowing a mech to take reduced damage and impeding enemy vision. Water is difficult to ford, but it also serves as an easy way to shore up your heatsinks, allowing for more sustained fire. Marshes are difficult to wade, but improve your stability damage resistance. Geothermal and Radioactive ground impede your ability to vent heat, while fields of exposed minerals can interfere with sensors and make it difficult to aim into and out of them. Hills, boulders, and large buildings can obstruct shots. On top of that, the climate of the battlefield affects the performance of your heatsinks, with cold weather being the best and thin, hot Martian atmosphere (and lunar vacuums) being the worst. Finally, frozen ice deposits greatly help your heatsinks keep your mech cool, but are slippery and make it easier to take stability damage.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Both the LRM Carrier and especially its shorter-range, more brutal sibling the SRM Carrier. Both tanks can be disabled by a few well-placed shots, but Crom help you if they actually get you in their sights: the SRM Carrier, with 10 SRM-6 launchers and a staggering damage potential of 480, is capable of one-shotting everything up to medium-weight 'Mechs and knocking over everything else.
  • More broadly, pretty much all non-'Mech vehicles. Vehicles can easily be nearly as offensively threatening as a 'Mech of similar weight, but they're not able to carry as much armor, have fewer hit locations, meaning that when they take fire, it's more concentrated, and they take massively aggravated melee damage, allowing nearly any 'Mech to simply stomp on nearly any vehicle if it gets close enough to do so.
  • Of the stock 'Mechs you can take, the JM6-S Jaegermech is a classic example of this. A heavy 'mech, it slots two AC/5s and two AC/2s alongside an array of Medium Lasers that lets it alpha for about 150 damage at an extremely long range and with practically no heat buildup. Because these weapons weigh a lot, however, it has a tiny engine and armour that would look bad on a medium 'Mech.
  • Both versions of the Victor assault 'Mech are similar in this regard - good mobility and considerable firepower, but armor protection that most heavy 'Mechs would scoff at. To a lesser degree, the Annihilator is also noted to have extreme damage output, but poor protection for a 100-ton 'Mech.
  • Any 'Mech can be this if you reduce its armor points in favor of more weapons and other equipment, but those designated as "fire support" 'Mechs like the aforementioned Jaeger and Annihilator tend to have lower armor in their stock configurations than is typical for their weight class and hardpoints that encourage devoting more weight to firepower at the expense of armor. As a general rule, if a 'Mech has guns for both hands, eschews humanoid arms altogether for turrets and/or is built around a default ballistic weapon that isn't an AC/10 or 20 it's probably best to keep them out of close combat at all costs.
  • Enemy (and occasionally friendly) 'Mechs and vehicles may have the Makeshift, Shoddy, or Ramshackle debuffs, which starts them with three-quarters, one-half- or one-quarter of their full amount of armor. This does not, however, diminish the effectiveness of their weapons, so a Ramshackle Hunchback can still headchop you as well as one in good repair.
• Giant Foot of Stomping: Giant steel feet are part of the equipment of every 'Mech by virtue of being large walking war machines. 'Mechs use these giant feet to stomp on vehicles and knocked-down 'Mechs in melee combat.
• Global Currency: C-Bills are the universally accepted currency in all parts of the BattleTech 'verse. It's backed by ComStar, the only reasonably neutral faction in the galaxy, and valued at one millisecond of HPG time^note meaning that one second of interstellar communication costs 1,000 C-Bills.
• Good Feels Good: A random event that may crop up while in time-pass mode aboard the Argo is a distress call from a transport ship about to explode. If you rush in to the rescue (as opposed to caution or apathy), you can get +1 morale (as well as +1 rep with the local faction). It may occasionally backfire and result in the Argo taking minor damage, though.
• The Good Kingdom: The Aurigan Coalition follows this trope as close as the morally grey BattleTech setting allows: It's a tiny, peaceful and generally inoffensive Elective Monarchy consisting of a dozen Periphery worlds under the mutual protection of a set of wealthy merchant families, ruled over by a High Lord or High Lady of the Arano line. True to the trope, the Coalition is almost immediately put in a distress role thanks to the Espinosa family's coup, and the main campaign is devoted to restoring it.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: 'Mechs can slug it out with each other like in the tabletop game. Furthermore, a new feature to melee is that your MechWarriors can now follow up a successful melee attack with a barrage of light ranged weapons — machine guns, flamers and light lasers — at no additional cost except for heat and ammo. Naturally, 'Mechs with actual hands will have a natural close combat damage advantage over similar 'Mechs in tonnage, and 'Mechs with greater tonnage than their targets can throw their weight into the grapple to do even more damage.
• Goomba Stomp: Death From Above, also known as DFA for short, is a Jumpjet-assisted melee attack where you fly above your enemy and drop on them hard. You will take damage to your 'Mech's legs, but this attack will hurt if it connects correctly. Also when performing melee attack on vehicles or knocked out mechs. Of particular note is the Highlander Assault mech, whose version of the DFA is lovingly nicknamed In-Universe "The Highlander Burial" and awards an achievement of the same name for performing it on a light 'Mech.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: It seems to be an oddly prevalent phenomenon among players to consider collecting at least one of every 'Mech in the game a high priority on their what-to-do list, to the point that affectionate terms like "PokeTech" are making the rounds in forums. That you actually earn an achievement for completing your 'Mech collection only reinforces this drive. You also gain significant amounts of points in Career Mode by doing this.
• Green Hill Zone: The unaffiliated Periphery star systems in general are on the lower end of the difficulty scale, and the ones where you start out in the campaign even more so. It can be quite hard to find contracts with more than three skulls there even in the late game, as only a few systems even rate that high to begin with. That said, you can still get your ass kicked out there if you're not careful.
• Guest-Star Party Member: Kamea joins the lance in her Kintaro for the planetside trip to the SLDF cache. Yang rides rumble-seat and complains about her "aggressive" piloting style. Earlier, in Weldry, she smashes one of the Icebox's walls to attack the Directorate lance from behind. Later, she joins certain missions, including the final campaign battle in the SLDF Royal Atlas II she recovered from the SLDF Outpost Castle on Artru.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Salvaging the 'Mechs they want is probably what causes most players to Save Scum the most. To get a complete 3 'Mech pieces as salvage, you need to knock out the pilot somehow without causing any structural failure (AKA destroying the CT or both legs). This is mentioned nowhere in the game. Save for a lucky Boom, Headshot! from an AC 20 or PPC, there are a few ways to deplete pilot HP: Scoring a hit to the head (even MG and LRM glancing blows will do), destroying either of the side torso, causing an ammo detonation, and knocking the 'mech of its feet. It is not mentioned as well that you can get a complete 'Mech even if you destroyed both torsos and one leg.
  • There's a looong list of lists that control what type of shop spawns what types of 'Mechs and items, influenced by things like faction affiliation, campaign progression and, most importantly, the various planet tags like Manufacturing, Research, Mining and so on. Most items require very specific combinations of these tags to spawn, but neither this mere fact nor exactly how this works is mentioned anywhere in-game.
  • Missions contain a "Danger Rating" indicating how difficult and risky the mission is likely to be, but that is an In-Universe estimate based on your best available intel, not an absolute calculation. As a result, certain campaign missions can often be a lot more challenging than their rating would suggest, and some foresight is often very helpful in getting through them without a significant likelihood of loss.
  • To reach the highest rank in Career Mode you must have maximum positive reputation with four factions and maximum negative rep with four others when the campaign ends. What the game doesn't tell you is that not all factions count for this requirement. Only the ones you can ally with are eligible, which can screw you over pretty badly if you thought Kamea's Arano Restoration or the Aurigan Directorate count when you forge an alliance, only to discover that you suddenly lost 10,000 points for nothing.
  • The achievement list contains a host of secret achievements with requirements so outlandish that few players will ever unlock them by accident. Many require very specific combinations of 'Mechs and weapons to pop. Others force you to eject pilots or retreat from contracts a considerable number of times, something any half-decent player is unlikely to do. The "You Can't Kill Me" achievement, which requires one of your 'Mechs to survive being headshotted, knocked down and overheated in the same mission, is a pain to get even when the entire deployment is set up for no other purpose. Last but not least, "Eck's Gon' Give It to Ya" is a viral achievement that can only be gained by battling another player who already has it, so good luck with that one if you don't know about it beforehand (and even if you do).
• The Heist: The flashpoint "Yang Virtanen's Big Score" is a 'Mech heist in which you first attack one 'Mech collector to distract the real target who has a rivalry with the first party you attack, and then while he's busy, another team of your pilots steals either a heavy or light lance of 'Mechs. The light 'Mechs are rarer variants, while the heavies are more common models. Ultimately, circumstances conspire such that you can only keep one 'Mech, which can still be quite a boon in career mode.
• Heel: Bogdan "The Steel Beast" Tubbs from the "The Steel Beast" flashpoint is constantly in-character in a larger-than-life wrestling persona and is explicitly described as a heel by Darius. He's a clear "Chickenshit"-type heel, talking a big game about how badass he is, but relying on dirty tricks and cheating, such as challenging you to a one-on-one duel and then bringing a whole lance of 'Mechs to back him up. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the holo-vid of him being taken down draws big interest and Darius is able to make the company a great deal of money by selling the footage.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Heavy Metal finally introduced area-of-effect weaponry in the form of 'Mech-scaled field artillery pieces. The Bull Shark's base configuration carries a Thumper Cannon on its back that hits every target in a circular 180m area for considerable damage, and you can occasionally purchase Mortars that can be mounted on any 'Mech to similar effect.
• Hollywood Hacking: Mostly downplayed.
  • Dr Farah Murad uses a purpose-built Codebreaker decryption tool given by Lord Karosas to unpack a SLDF memory storage drive, but she also needs to individually decrypt the contents as well.
  • The Locura berserk drone AI is able to spread itself throughout the Argo's computer systems after being accidentally unpacked and executed. Farah is able to ultimately quarantine it inside the SLDF storage drive, but it also means that the contents of said drive are no longer safe to access.
  • Late in the campaign, when the fight for the Restoration finally reaches Coromodir, Farah still requires direct access to a Directorate communications relay so that she can use an open channel there to directly upload the Locura onto Ostergaard's dropship.
  • Most generic bounty missions that require you to pull off a data theft heist require you to get physical access to the target location in order to copy out the files the clients want. This often requires you to secure the site first by eliminating hostiles.
• Hufflepuff House: The section of the Periphery the game takes place in was selected as the narrative setting because the amount of lore that had been written about it across the franchise's long history was sparse, only covering it in Broad Strokes while being touched on but not currently dominated by many other major powers from the setting. This made it an ideal place to craft an original campaign narrative within its own particular regional politics and history.
• Humongous Mecha: It's BattleTech, so yeah, loads of 'em in all shapes and sizes.
• Immigrant Patriotism: The player characters' family came to the Aurigan Reach from places ranging from the Inner Sphere to the Deep Periphery with their family BattleMech being their major possession, being passed to the player character upon their coming of age.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Sufficiently high Evasion can make pilots nearly break reality so they can miss their shots. The shooter can stand close enough to their target to touch it, yet their shots can go wide to such a ludicrous degree that, if the Random Number God wills it, some wayward laser beam or autocannon shell may narrowly miss the camera. For an almost literal example, it's also not unheard of for every single missile from an LRM-20 salvo to impact all around the target instead of hitting it, leaving it standing without a scratch in a ring of blackened soil or concrete.
• Implacable Man: The Annihilator's unique Ballistic Siege Compensators, aside from increasing its ballistic damage, add an additional 40 points to its maximum stability, making the towering behemoth very difficult to unbalance, let alone knock down.
• Impoverished Patrician: The player themselves can be one based on choices made during character creation — in all cases, you are somehow separated from your family, and many choices leave your family in ruin. In addition, many impoverished mercenaries in general come from nobility.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Bounty Hunter and his lance have a special perk that gives them near-perfect accuracy with Called Shots, and they use almost nothing but.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • Believe it or not, the humble 70-ton Grasshopper can be turned into one of the most devastating damage dealers in the game. Capable of wielding seven Medium Lasers and six Small Lasers for an Alpha Strike damage of 425 points when equipped with "+10 damage" versions, it out-damages the Atlas II by a considerable margin. A bunch of Double Heatsinks and Thermal Exchangers give it near-perfect heat efficiency even while using its jump jets regularly, and at close range it has a very high chance of decapitating any 'Mech in a single Precision Strike. If that's not possible or desirable, the Medium Lasers alone can core most heavy 'Mechs with a single PS to the center torso at medium range. If all else fails, jump behind the offending 'Mech and blast out its rear torso. Not even an Atlas or King Crab can survive that.
  • With the addition of the Marauder to the game, you've got another option for this trope. Instead of having obscene damage output from a massive number of relatively weak guns, it mounts by default an AC/5, two PPCs, and a couple of Medium Lasers... and a piece of mech-unique equipment that greatly increases Precision Strike accuracy to the point where a Mechwarrior with Called Shot Mastery would get just over a 1/3 chance on headshots.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The Atlas II, your reward for finishing the game. As far as the Inner Sphere is concerned, it's the last known one in existence. And it might actually be the only one outside of Clan space. You can get more, though, if you're lucky to find them on the black market and have the funds to pay for it.
  • With the Heavy Metal DLC installed, the 100-ton Annihilator can outperform the Atlas II in every way that matters. Give it five LB 5-X++ autocannons to destabilize up to three 'Mechs of any kind more efficiently than even a dedicated LRM missile boat could. Deck it out in five Ultra AC/5 and giggle maniacally as you watch it core one assault per turn from over 500 meters away, all with perfect heat management and protected by near-maximum armor. Mix and match as you feel appropriate. Even better, unlike the Atlas II, Annihilators aren't unique LosTech 'Mechs, so they're much easier to acquire. Their only disadvantage is their lack of indirect fire capability.
  • The 1.9 update introduced several new SLDF Royal Division versions of existing 'Mechs like the Warhammer, Battlemaster, Crab, Marauder and some others, all of which come with LosTech equipment, copious spare tonnage and an innate 60 points of heat sinking instead of the 30 points of regular 'Mechs. These 'Mechs universally serve as the absolute best you can get in their respective weight class and/or battlefield role, but the only place to find them is the black market, so they're appropriately rare and expensive. The upgraded heat sinking capabilities were also retconned onto the original SLDF versions of the Griffin, Highlander, Black Knight and Atlas II, giving them even more of an advantage over the base models. It also allowed the Atlas II to reclaim its title as the most powerful asset on the field, with more firepower than an Annihilator^note although it usually can't bring all of it to bear at once until it has closed the distance and up to 22 tons of armor at the same time^note its CT alone can carry more armor than most light 'Mechs have on their entire frame.
• Info Dump: The game as a whole is quite text-heavy. There are few voice-over lines, most of the dialogues are given purely in text form, and those often contain highlighted sections that, when moused over, bring up another wall of text full of additional background info.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Fans who know the lore will wonder why the Leopard's Mech Bay has expansion slots for carrying 12 more BattleMechs on top of the initial six. Lorewise, a Leopard Dropship can carry a maximum of four Mechs and two Aerospace fighters or six Mechs if the fighters are removed. Those extra slots are for expanding the Argo's capacity.
  • The game also does not allow you to take jobs from The Taurian Concordat during the course of the game despite their obvious presence on the map, because of a secret alliance with the Directorate.
  • Paying attention to the enemy's move order can often clue you in to what 'Mech classes you're up against long before your sensors can pinpoint the actual tonnage. Likewise, knowing the tonnages and watching their LRM, Autocannon, or PPC fire can identify 'Mechs to you purely based on their sensor tonnage, turn order, and weapon loadout.
  • Contracts will often have you ambushed by enemy reinforcements, usually from a direction that lets them attack you from behind when they catch up to you. Thing is, the very fact that you'll be ambushed and the exact location of said ambushers is often shown to you before you even make your first move, which defeats the whole point of an ambush and allows you to plan your approach and positioning well in advance.
• Inventory Management Puzzle:
  • The player's mercenary company has no absolute limits on how many 'Mechs and spare parts than can own. However, they can only ever have a limited number of 'Mechs in a combat ready state at a time. This is justified by their Signature Team Transport only having enough space in its service bays to accommodate about six 'Mechs, though that number can be expanded with bay upgrades. Sending a 'Mech to storage requires stripping it of its equipment and partial disassembly, and bringing it back into a combat ready state requires some reassembly and refitting, which takes time and C-Bills, so the player has to make some choices and try to anticipate their later needs. In addition, keeping 'Mechs in combat ready state also costs money, giving another layer of the puzzle. It is not a good idea to get the maximum bay size quickly and filling them up as soon as possible when you are short on cash.
  • Outfitting your 'Mechs when customising them is a matter of balancing weapons, armor, jumpjets, and heatsinks to their tonnage and weapon hardpoint limits.
• It's Personal:
  • The motivation for Samuel Ostergaard, whose son was piloting the ship smuggling weapons to Espinoza's forces, which Kamea ordered destroyed after he'd refused to surrender.
  • Several Flashpoints are given less on behalf of some state, but more on your liaison's own initiative because they have some personal beef with the contract target.
• Jack of All Stats:
  • Numerous 'Mechs have stock loadouts that cover a wide range of situations on the battlefield, enabling them to act no matter the circumstances while failing to do anything that more specialized 'Mechs couldn't do better. The Shadow Hawk for instance is specifically noted to be such an all-rounder by Yang. It slots several different weapons (an AC/5, a medium laser, an LRM-5 and an SRM-2) that makes it able to fire at practically any range and condition, but its Alpha Strike damage is atrocious because of its lack of weapon overlap. It also has average armour, and pretty average mobility from its four jump jets. The Orion, Highlander and Atlas are basically the same, only a weight class or two heavier and appropriately more powerful, though much less mobile on average.
  • The Bull Shark BSK-M3 is a 95-ton assault 'Mech that sticks out thanks to its four ballistics hardpoints, four energy hardpoints and four missile hardpoints plus enough spare tonnage to give you a vast range of options, from specialist builds to ones that carry a bit of everything. If you need any kind of heavy hitter that doesn't need to move quickly, look no further than the BSK-M3.
• Joke Character: The Cicada CDA-2A has a mighty six tons of free weight available if you strip it down to the bare bones: It is physically incapable of maxing out its available armour, and to add insult to injury has a ballistics weapons slot when the lightest ballistic weapon takes exactly six tons to wield without ammo (somewhat mitigated if you have the Heavy Metal DLC, which adds the LBX version of the AC/2 which only weighs five). Sure, it has all the speed of a Locust, but it's less offensively capable despite weighing twice as much and being an entire weight class above it, and will lose a straight-up battle with just about any light 'mech short of the Locust or the Spider. By contrast, the CDA-3C model is slower but still quite fast and can perform simple tasks like carry the maximum amount of armor for a 'Mech of its weight class.
• Jump Jet Pack: Jump Jets are used far more prominently here than the tabletop game, with all 'Mechs having between two and eight hard points for them, even if they aren't mounted in their default loadout and even if no previous canonical Jump Jet equipped variants of the 'Mech existed. Considering the larger maps and greater verticality compared to the tabletop game, not to mention other adaptations like the MechWarrior series, using them is practically essential for any 'Mech that isn't a long range missile boat.
• Karma Meter: Your reputation and reliability, in the form of your ComStar Mercenary Review Board rating (which indicates how reliable you are on contracts, not how 'respectable' your missions are). Not everybody wants to hire a nobody, or a known contract breaker. Equally, you have one with each possible employer, showing how much they, personally, trust you.
• Kick the Dog: Raju "Mastiff" Montgomery is a loyal guard/Mechwarrior to Lady Kamea in addition to being the player character's mentor. His call-sign "Mastiff" is an allusion to a breed of dog popular with nobility with hunting and more notably as a war hound, guard dog, and being known as very loyal to their masters. When Victoria tries to stop Kamea from escaping the coup, Mastiff intervenes to defend Kamea. His mech is destroyed along with him presumably while she and the player character make their escape. So in effect Victoria metaphorically kicked Kamea's dog. Mastiff survives the destruction of his mech, but is captured and tortured by Director Espinosa's forces for three years and later dies in a planetary gulag shortly before it was liberated by Lady Kamea. Effectively kicking the dog twice.
• Kill It with Fire: Although Not the Intended Use, flame weapons deal a tiny amount of physical damage and can thus be used to destroy a 'Mech directly instead of through Overheating. It is highly unlikely for this to happen, but if you do manage to pull it off, you're rewarded with the "Flame On!" achievement, plus potentially the "Trash Can Fire!" achievement as well if the smoldering target happened to be an UrbanMech.
• Knee-capping: Blasting out a mech's leg will cause it to suffer an immediate knockdown, makes the mech vulnerable to further knockdowns by reducing its maximum stability threshold, and reduces its movement speed to a limp. Shooting out both legs incapacitates the pilot akin to a cockpit snipe, allowing you to salvage the mech intact. In fact, destroying a leg with a called shot earns an achivement called "Kneecapper".
• Know When to Fold 'Em: At the end of the campaign Director Espinosa surrenders unconditionally once his trump card is removed from the equation, as he knows his defeat is only a matter of 'when' and further fighting will only weaken the Reach further.
• Lampshade Hanging: The "Headhunting" Flashpoint culminates in hunting down either one of two pirate gang leaders, both of which pilot 'Mechs equipped with various LosTech weapons (one wields Gauss Rifles, the other prefers lasers). Some of your command crew start arguing about who of the two is more deserving of what's coming for them, but Yang just flatly mirrors most players' opinion on the matter: that the choice comes down to what type of LosTech you want to salvage.
• Last Chance to Quit:
  • In the semi-final battle of the Campaign, Espinosa offers Kamea to walk away with the rest of the Aurigan Reach but to leave him Coromodir and claims he'll destroy her if he tries to take the planet. Kamea calls his bluff and invades anyway... Only for Ostergaard to show up with the Iberia and enough BattleMechs to turn the tide, neccessitating you to deploy to stop him from outflanking the invasion.
  • Given to you as a choice in the final moments of the Heavy Metal campaign; beaten by you at every turn, Notker Baumann just wearily offers you 2,000,000 c-bills to go away and leave him the Dobrev. Given that two of the setting's most legendary MechWarriors are on their way to kill you (and each other), some of your command crew really want to take the offer. Accepting denies you the chance for rare LosTech salvage from the Black Widow Company and Bounty Hunters (you can't salvage any of their BattleMechs themselves, just their guns and other equipment) and the post-campaign rewards from the fight (250,000 c-bills, a full level to your MRB ranking, and 15 points of reputation with every faction in the game), but also lets you avoid what is probably the hardest single fight in the entire game.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • The Urbanmech. While it has terrible mobility for a 30 tonner, it also has disproportionately high armor tonnage for a light 'Mech, can pack a nasty concentrated punch with its AC/10 primary weapon, and still retains a high Initiative. The Urbanmech also was never seen under enemy control due to AI issues until those issues were fixed and is still extremely rare to face outside of certain Flashpoints.
    • A variant of the Urbanmech added in the Urban Warfare patch replaces this AC/10 (and two tonnes of armour) with an AC/20, making it the lightest 'Mech to naturally mount a gun commonly used by assault-class 'Mechs.
    • Another variant specializes the Urbie in energy weapons, which enables builds that can alpha for ~250 damage with next to no heat buildup at close range. That's more firepower than most heavy 'Mechs and even some assault 'Mechs can bring to bear in their stock configurations.
  • The Banshee BNC-3E. It moves as far as most heavies, but it has low available tonnage (14.81 tons with maximum armor) due to its huge engine and its hardpoints^note one ballistic, two energy, and four support (and one of those support hardpoints is mutually exclusive with an energy hardpoint as they're both head hardpoints) would be uninispiring on a medium 'Mech, much less a 95-ton assault 'Mech. However, due to its 95-ton bulk and fists, it has a respectable 130 damage base melee attack, only surpassed by the Altas, and its arms are wide open for melee attack buffing accessories. As a fully melee-specialized 'Mech, it can potentially put out a terrifying 270 melee damage plus four support weapon attacks for as much as 180 more damage. The 3M variant can lean even further into the melee gimmick. While it isn't held back nearly as much by hardpoints as the 3E variant, it still only has 14.81 free tons when its armor is maxed, meaning that actually configuring it to use all of its numerous energy hardpoints leaves it dangerously prone to overheating and with no real way to sink all the heat it makes it every bit as much a joke in conventional combat as the 3E. However, it has an additional two support weapon slots allowing an even more deadly melee-support combo, following up a massive 270 damage melee with as much as 270 more damage from ++ model small pulse lasers. Of course, this gets right back to the BNC-3M's original problem of overheating - six small pulse lasers put out a lot of heat and the 'Mech has very little spare tonnage for heat sinks (6 or 7 tons, which is only even potentially adequate with incredibly-rare LosTech double heat sinks, and in fact the entire build is highly dependent on LosTech as the best support weapons (ER small lasers and small pulse lasers) are also LosTech).
  • The Cicada CDA-3C - it shares a chassis with the truly useless CDA-2A, but thanks to downrating the engine, can actually max out its armor, and at its lesser-but-still-impressive speed it can make pretty terrifying use of a COIL and take a hit a little better than a Jenner or Spider.
• Lethal Joke Weapon:
  • Machine Guns, previously a Joke Item in other MechWarrior games. It still deals Scratch Damage like before, but since the amount of HP and damage have has been scaled down in this game (ie lost a digit) compared to Mechwarrior Online, Scratch Damage actually hurts a lot more now; these things fire in bursts of 5 for 3 damage per hit, with the only downsides being their very short range and volatile ammunition stores. On top of that, they also also extremely light (half a ton per machine gun, 200 bullets per ton of ammo) so you can make room for more armor/weapons/components alongside them, and they will fire automatically to support melee attacks, making it likely that once your punch/kick/DFA strips armor the guns can crit on the exposed internals or hit the enemy's cockpit.
  • Flamers have similarly received a minor boost: While one flamer is still a prime example of Video Game Flamethrowers Suck, with its 5 damage and heavily limited ammo, mounting six of them on a support-weapon-heavy 'mech like a Firestarter and charging into melee will often force your target into overheat-induced shutdown right after you've punched it, preventing it from retaliating.
• Level Grinding:
  • The only way to max out your MRB rating is to complete countless contracts. The exact mechanism isn't clear, but rule of thumb says that for each skull in a contract's difficulty rating, your MRB rating increases by 1. It maxes out at 1,000 points, which means 200 5-skull contracts or the appropriate number of lower-ranked missions. And when you finally get there, you receive... nothing, not even an achievement. It's a pure Bragging Rights Reward for you alone.
  • Somewhat mitigated if you have the Heavy Metal DLC, as beating Natasha Kerensky and The Bounty Hunter will net you a huge bonus to your rating.
  • The Career Mode works similarly not only for the MRB, but also for several other counters. For instance, you get 50 points per contract difficulty skull, so a 5-skull mission is worth 250 points. You need to reach over 70,000 points if you're shooting for the coveted Legendary or even Kerensky rank, which equals at least 280 successful missions of the highest difficulty. Don't forget you're running this on a timer...
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • The Banshee is one of the fastest assault 'Mech available, but its massive engine leaves little room and tonnage for ranged weapons. However, speccing it entirely for melee combat, with arm mods, jump jets and up to six anti-personnel weapons, can turn this 95-tons machine into a terrifying close combat fighter that can rip through even an Atlas' torso armor in one punch to core it with the follow-up barrage. Sadly, this strategy is often highly situational and can backfire spectacularly if the battlefield conditions aren't favorable, which often sees the Banshee sidelined as an Awesome, but Impractical novelty asset in favor of more reliable 'Mech designs.
  • Combine this trope with Glass Cannon and you have the Phoenix Hawk PXH-1b, a LosTech version introduced alongside the 1.9 update that boasts twice the default heat sinking capability, which perfectly complements its all-energy loadout. A fully upgraded 1b can jump up to 250 meters, sprint for almost 300 meters, and can pack almost 300 points worth of heat-neutral firepower. It's fairly fragile for a 45-tonner, but this doesn't change the fact that this thing is a nightmare to face on the battlefield, capable of moving farther than any other 'Mech while packing enough punch to headcap or core anything from behind in a single Precision Strike. Put an Ace Pilot in it, who can exercise the atypical talent of firing then moving, and it can become untouchable as it can leap away out of harm's way immediately after firing.
• Loan Shark: Part of the setup of the early game after the prologue is that you've fallen prey to these — you've ascended to command of the mercenary band that saved you, but you guys have ended up heavily in the red, and a lot of the banks at the point where they'll be happy to repossess your Leopard. The big turning point is the 1-2 punch of finding the Argo and meeting up with Kamea again, who offers to settle all your loans in return for committing yourself to her cause.
• Lost Technology:
  • Thanks to the massive destruction of scientific knowledge and manufacturing infrastructure across the settled parts of the galaxy from various Succession Wars between major houses after the fall of Star League, a BattleMech became valuable enough that a family owning and operating one would be considered an equivalent to a knight. In addition, the game encourages you to disable enemy BattleMechs with minimal damage (or destroying the cockpit) in order to build yourself a new one from salvaged parts.
  • The truly crazy advanced technology that has been lost entirely to the fires of the Succession Wars — Gauss weaponry, super-light fusion engines, WarShips, myomer muscle replacement units, double-strength Heatsinks, what have you — is called "Lostech" in-universe.
  • Part of the reason the Argo is such a big deal is that it IS a giant LosTech vessel — quite simply, outside of the Behemoth-class (which is, despite its size, a very simple design) nobody builds DropShips that big anymore in 3025, and certainly not with features that extensive. Hanse Davion and the NAIS would certainly like to, but in-universe that sort of thing is still decades off. The ability to "daisy chain" DropShips (docking the Leopard to the Argo and take both through a Jump) is a potentially game-breaking development as well, though the sourcebook House Arano (The Aurigan Coalition), which made most of the events of the game canon in the larger universe, gives an explanation that the Argo's Multiple Docking Collar System still requires the same amount of free hardware on the JumpShip as if whatever is docked to the Argo was docked to the JumpShip and thus only really offsets the fact that the Argo is so large (like a Behemoth) that it blocks a second docking collar on the JumpShip in addition to one the Argo actually uses. That said, if JumpShip production itself wasn't also LosTech, the MDCS could still be a boon if allowed to proliferate, as JumpShips with more K-F Booms (the component that actually extends the K-F Field around docked DropShips) than docking collars could presumably allow practical daisy chaining.
  • The cause of all tension in the Heavy Metal DLC campaign is a derelict ship drifting into the Periphery carrying both LosTech and other marvels literally never seen before in the Inner Sphere. Multiple different groups want to track that ship down for different reasons; Notker Baumann, the criminal overlord who has it, wants to keep selling its tech on the black market. The "Mother Bear" AI wants to trace it back to where she believes it came from, the SLDF-in-Exile. Natasha Kerensky, an undercover Clanner, wants to destroy it, as it's hinted to be a Clan Wolverine relic.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • The true difficulty rating of a mission can vary slightly from the stated amount (As missions are rated in 'skulls' for challenge rating, the listed skull count can be slightly off positively or negatively). This is justified in that the intel for any given contract may not be entirely accurate, and can result in surprise early appearances by Heavy and Assault Mechs in the early game, or surprise reinforcements for or against you.
  • The whole Career Mode is one to some extent. For instance, you get points for collecting one example of every light, medium, heavy and assault 'Mech in the game, with bonus points dispensed for completing each class and for finding everything. Thing is, both enemy lance composition and store contents are heavily randomized, which can result in players going the full 1,200 days without even encountering certain 'Mechs, let alone salvaging enough parts to rebuild one for their collection. That the game doesn't have an internal 'Mech list you could consult for reference only makes this worse. If you aren't intimately familiar with the game's lineup, you probably won't even know which 'Mech(s) you're missing. The various DLCs make this even harder, since DLC 'Mechs don't count for this purpose. Obtaining a Marauder, Warhammer, or Phoenix Hawk may be a great personal acheivement (because they're awesome), but won't affect your "'Mechs collected" score.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Particularly with SRM and LRM-equipped tanks, and the game demonstrates just how lethal this can be in the second contract mission for Kamea. Dedicated missile boat loadouts are always highly sought-after by the player base in an effort to return the favor, with some 'Mechs being capable of launching 80 missiles in a single salvo. The Cyclops P takes it to its extremes with its ludicrous seven missile hardpoints.
• Made of Explodium:
  • All ammo bins except Gauss ammo explode upon suffering a critical hit, wounding the pilot and destroying the 'Mech location they're installed in. This is why you never ever carry ammunition in the center torso.
  • Vehicles always explode spectacularly when destroyed, even when they were merely stomped on by a 'Mech. BattleTech militaries apparently aren't big on workplace safety.
  • As of the 1.8 update, Gauss Rifles explode like ammo bins when destroyed, just like they do in the tabletop. Given the weapon's rarity, this should rarely be a problem beyond losing the weapon, though.
  • Similarly, COIL Beams react badly to critical hits.
• Mana: Although part of the game's Morale Mechanic instead of actual magic, Resolve acts more like this in combat — a blue bar that regularly refills to allow you the use of special abilities.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: The player's mentor, Raju "Mastiff" Montgomery, performs a Heroic Sacrifice in the prologue in order for the DropShip carrying Kamea to escape and protect the player character, who had to eject from their sabotaged 'Mech. At first it looks like it was All for Nothing where Kamea is concerned, but this happily turns out to not be the case.
• Meta Fiction: A bizarre case; how many videogame universes do you know of where it's acknowledged that people play videogames?
  • The training simulators that the player can purchase for the Argo are identical to the real life BattleTech Tesla Pods at Battletech Centers. Your mechwarriors go bananas over these, as such systems are effectively Lostech, especially on the Periphery (and yes, they're Lostech in real life as well; the first was built in 1990, and there's a shortage of replacement parts).
  • One that looks like the designers laughing their heads off is that you can build an arcade on your Cool Starship. It boosts morale, but occasionally you'll catch one of your mechwarriors killing time with an RPG about a mercenary group on the Periphery, focusing on the financial and tactical elements instead of piloting individual mechs — in other words, the exact game this trope page describes. You can offer advice on playing it, or shoo them back to the training simulators... and play it yourself.
  • An optional event prompt available before the training simulators come online additionally allows you to supervise "pen-and-paper exercises" to help your Pilots see the bigger picture beyond their cockpit. In other words, they're playing the tabletop game that started it all.
    • Relatedly, the interface for choosing your outfit's color scheme, name and logo suggests that the player character spends their private time painting miniature figurines of 'Mechs.
• Metal Slime: Heavy Metal introduces rare variants of the various conventional vehicles carrying DLC-exclusive weapons like LBX Autocannons and Inferno Missiles.
• Mid-Season Upgrade:
  • Multiple 'Mech designs are essentially just up-gunned, up-armored and usually slower versions of lighter 'Mechs. The Atlas plays exactly like a heavier Orion, the Stalker is a Catapult on steroids, the Highlander 733P is a seriously beefed-up Panther, and so on. If you enjoy a particular light or medium 'Mech for its playstyle, chances are good that you'll find a heavy or assault 'Mech that behaves virtually the same later on.
    • This trope is apparently canonized in what little official writing we see concerning the events of the Aurigan Civil War. Shrapnel issue 6 features a story depicting the Liberation of Itrom that includes a mechwarrior implied to be the Player Character using a Jagermech (presumably the one salvaged from the Icebox garrison), which does indeed have a similar weapons loadout to their default Blackjack.
  • "Early Season Upgrade": Getting the Argo. You can expand your 'Mech bay capacity to have 12 different 'Mechs ready for missions, and add numerous other features to help yoru progress in all aspects of the game (improved thrusters to make travel faster and reduce the downtime between contracts, training pods to level up your benched MechWarriors so have skilled pilots if one of your first-line is injured or killed, reductions in the time needed to repair and refit 'Mechs, and so on).
  • "Late Season Upgrade": Storming the Outpost Castle. At the end of a rather difficult pair of missions, you're rewarded with some LosTech salvage and a Highlander HGN-732B fitted with such goodies as a Gauss Rifle and double heat sinks (at this time, this version of Highlander is extinct in the Inner Sphere, outside the ComGuards at least). Expect this 'Mech to see you through pretty much every battle from here to the end of the campaign.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • The Bulwark perk down the Guts skill line did this upon release, by giving 'mechs a 50% damage reduction provided they stood still. The perk was later rebalanced to add 20% efficiency to cover or when using the brace action, which makes it a lesser example as you can now move and use it, but your movement is effectively limited to cover.
  • As in tabletop, the heavier a 'Mech gets, the more it tends to be this (though some Heavies and a rare few assaults are designed to be more of a Lightning Bruiser). Particularly classic examples include the Awesome in all of its variants, the Atlas, and the Banshee BNC-3S, which removes the incredibly heavy engine of the E and M models in favor of freeing up weight for more weapons
  • Stock Urbanmechs are an odd case - on an absolute scale, it isn't particularly well armed or armored, but for a light 'Mech, it is very well armored and packs pretty frightening firepower. At the same time, it's not just slow for a light 'Mech, but slow for an assault 'Mech.
• Mirror Match: The showdown with Natasha Kerensky and the Bounty Hunter has this feel to it. Both command lances of powerful 'Mechs stuffed to the gills with LosTech and other top-tier components that are usually only available to the player. Given how difficult this fight is, chances are your own lance setup won't be a perfect copy of theirs, but close enough to it to make the battle feel like you're fighting yourself.
• Misapplied Phlebotinum: The Vulcan, added in the Heavy Metal DLC, was originally designed as a dedicated anti-personnel weapons platform, despite there being no infantry in this game.
• Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode: Going off the Steam Achievement stats, the game's multiplayer is not popular at all. All of the game's achievements with the lowest global completion (0.1% is as low as the tracking goes) are tied to the multiplayer, with no more than 0.1% of players having even earned the achievement for winning 25 online matches. Hell, even the achievement for having played a mere 5 online matches, win or lose, sits at only a global 0.7%! Quite simply, nobody bothers with multiplayer.
• Mood Whiplash: Due to Story and Gameplay Segregation, some particularly heavy moments in the game's story will shift to typical after-action reports, including any new 'Mechs that you acquired in the previous fight.
• Morale Mechanic: Not to the point of retreating if things go poorly, but having over 50% morale grants a combat buff, and it can be used to make a Precision Strike or activate Vigilance, which grants the effect of Guarding while allowing full movement and weapon firing (unlike the passive Bulwark or the order to Brace, respectively) while letting the 'Mech act one turn earlier in the next round.
• More Dakka: Mostly provided by ballistic weapons.
  • Ballistics-heavy 'Mechs can dish out enormous damage with very little heat build-up, and the smaller the caliber, the longer the range and the higher the amount of shells they release per action. The JM6-S JagerMech with its four ballistic hardpoints excels at this. And then the 100-ton Annihilator showed up with its four heavy autocannons.
  • The Heavy Metal DLC introduced Ultra-Autocannons of all calibers, among other things. UACs basically work like two regular ACs of the same type fused into one weapon, meaning they fire twice as many shots for twice the ammo consumption, twice the heat generation and twice the recoil. Under absolutely no circumstances do you ever want a King Crab dual-wielding UAC-20s get close enough to use them.
  • The 1.9 update finally added two lines of +/++ machine guns, one of which fires twice as many shots per attack as the base model (10 instead of 5). This adds up to a total damage rating of 30, the same as Small Lasers, but with the advantages of zero heat generation and a much higher crit chance. The ++ version is even completely weightless, to boot.
• Mugging the Monster: In the mission Grave Robbing, the team Lady Kamea has at the Star League base gets ambushed by the Taurians. She, Yang, and three of her mechwarriors are the last survivors who managed to lock themselves in the main mech bay. At the start of the mission's second part, a mechwarrior in a Taurian Commando, a 25 ton Glass Cannon that due to its small size isn't much of a cannon, is busy gloating about how they're going to crush Lady Kamea when he notices the mech-bay doors are opening. And then realizes that the "helpless" folks have a lance of mechs. A lance of Star League Defense Force mechs. He basically soils himself.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Quite literally, as you choose the MechWarrior's background. The only constants are that you come from a noble background, experienced a major life-changing event on your sixteenth birthday, and were trained by Raju "Mastiff" Montgomery, who later recruited you into the Royal Guard.
• Must Have Caffeine: There's a random event where your pilots start fighting over the last of the coffee. If you resolve it by forcing them to split it, you'll turn around to see Sumire standing there with an empty cup, and she mentions she's going to go talk to Darius about shopping priorities.
• Mutual Kill: Death from Above attacks deal heavy damage to the attacking 'Mech's legs, so it's entirely possible to destroy both the target and yourself simultaneously this way. You even get an achievement named "Blaze of Glory" for it.
• Mythology Gag:
  • When starting a mission, a female announcer will say "Commencing deployment. MechWarriors, prepare for combat." Just like in MechCommander.
  • One of the backgrounds on player's origin includes Deep Periphery as one of many homeworlds. While it's vague enough that you can "just" be from a truly podunk world out in the middle of nowhere, it's also easy to interpret as a Call-Forward to the origin of Wolf's Dragoons and the later Clan Invasion two decades later into the timeline of Battletech (and even leaves enough room for your character to be a second-generation Clanner agent).
  • The displays on the screens in the background of the MechLab and Barracks are formatted like BattleTech and MechWarrior character sheets. Similarly, the area of your quarters where you customize your company has a bunch of miniatures and a brush for painting. A large mini of an Atlas is even used to demonstrate your color scheme. The model of the Atlas is itself another reference, being nothing less than a modernized take of the infamous Armorcast Atlas, a titanic foot-tall resin model kit worth several hundred dollars.
  • The player can have their character say "No Guts, No Galaxy!", the tagline from the infamous cartoon, during an early staff meeting.
  • Sumire Meyer's hatred toward birds comes from growing up on a planet with a large population of avian species. This is a nod to Far Country, a particularly infamous novel in the series which featured a planet with sentient birds.
  • The tutorials say that the Space Is Cold trope doesn't work for 'Mechs; vacuum actually causes even worse heat buildup than volcanoes. The trope being played straight was a common fan complaint for MechWarrior 4: Vengeance.
  • The loading screen blurbs sometimes reference quotes from the Mechwarrior games or the Battletech novels and cartoon. At least one of them directly references the Somerset Strikers.
• Naïve Newcomer: The pilots you find in Hiring Halls can have the Naive trait. Its only discernible purpose so far seems to be a random event in which the pilot gets pranked by their fellow MechWarriors into asking Yang to install a balloon on their 'Mech. You can either observe silently or explain the joke to them, which results in them gaining the Low Spirits debuff for a while. Alternatively, if you ask Yang for the same thing for your own 'Mech, catching him completely off guard, the gullible pilot gains the High Spirits buff instead.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Sumire positively loses her shit during the Heavy Metal flashpoint campaign as you receive communications from two of the most legendary MechWarriors in BattleTech Lore, the Bounty Hunter and Natasha "The Black Widow" Kerensky. Their prowess is absolutely reflected in game; both have complete headshot immunity, special abilities that are completely unavailable to you, and are accompanied by their canon command lances, each of whose MechWarriors have names straight from the tabletop sourcebooks, passive special abilities, and BattleMechs loaded up with all sorts of LosTech and improved (+/++) weapons. Winning the fight against these two legends (which is a bit easier as they're just as interested in killing each other as they are you) earns you 15 relationship points with every faction in the game.
  • Another flashpoint has you come up against the Gray Death Legion, commanded by Grayson Death Carlyle. Yes, his middle name really IS "Death". It's a family tradition, apparently. Like the example above, the fight against them is extremely unpleasant, particularly because it is also a Base Defense mission and you'll have multiple lances of veteran MechWarriors straight from the GDL's fluff lineup (with appropriate 'mechs wherever possible ^note Davis McCall pilots a Jagermech instead of his usual Rifleman, and Grayson himself is in a Black Knight instead of the Marauder he should have at that point in the timeline because neither 'mech was in the game yet at the time that DLC was released) approaching from all directions in an extremely hostile environment.
• Never Found the Body: The case for both Kamea and Raju after the first mission. One is alive and well, hiring you to fight for her throne, while the other is also alive... but has just passed away in a Hellhole Prison before you could liberate it.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Either you or Sumire can end up guilty of this if you don't pay attention to the red-marked "Dangerous" tiles on the map. Sumire will land the Leopard there whether you have 'Mechs in the area or not, resulting in a One-Hit Kill for anything caught in her Weaponized Exhaust. Neutral DropShips can inflict the same hurt in Escort Missions for instance, and the campaign has similar hazardous areas in multiple missions (marking incoming artillery fire or the AoE of something Made of Explodium), but in these cases it's always your fault if you take losses from them.
• No Endor Holocaust: The penultimate campaign mission results in a giant Fortress-class DropShip performing a decidedly uncontrolled landing from high orbit on Coromodir. The entire process including the final impact is shown in a cutscene, but the horrific aftermath of such a massive object free-falling onto the surface of a densely populated planet is never brought up.
  • Addressed in a Shrapnel magazine short story taking place shortly after the events of the game that mentions the planet is suffering a "Little Ice Age" as a result of the impact which is straining its food supply.
  • It should be noted that In-Universe a Fortress-class dropship weighs 6000 metric tonnes, which is about the tenth of the weight of a Real Life supercarrier and not even a decimal point to the mass of a 'planet killer'-class stellar object. Even if you were to drop the USS Enterprise (no, not that one) onto Earth uncontrollably, any speed that wouldn't make it bounce off the atmosphere or see it simply disintegrate into shrapnel means it simply doesn't have enough kinetic energy to be much more than a primitive nuke on impact.
• No Indoor Voice: The Steel Beast, Arc Villain of the titular Flashpoint, is a 'Mech gladiator whose dialogue texts are about 50% all caps. Gets lampshaded by your amused crew when they ask him if he always talks like that. He doesn't get it.
• No Macguffin No Winner: Toyed with on Artru. Nobody got the SLDF cache full of 'Mechs, which could have tipped the balance of the war completely, because Yang blew it up to keep it out of Directorate hands. However, you did escape alive, admittedly short one Leopard dropship, and picked up a lance of SLDF Royal 'Mechs in the process, although you only get to keep one.
• Non-Entity General: Averted, unlike the MechCommander games; the player character is a MechWarrior who can take the field, just like any of the other MechWarriors under their employ.
• Non-Indicative Difficulty: The stated difficulty of missions is based almost entirely on relative 'Mech tonnage, which is one of the least helpful ways to determine how hard the mission will actually be.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • The various autocannons (other than the AC/20) have names that only indicate their function in loose terms (bigger number means more damage, bigger and heavier weapon, less range, and less ammo per ton). First off, most damage values in the game have been multiplied by five relative to their tabletop versions, where the number in an autocannon's name indicated how much damage it did. Second, all autocannons smaller than the AC/20 have been buffed from this baseline - the AC/2 does 25 damage instead of 10, the AC/5 does 45 damage instead of 25, and the AC/10 does 60 damage instead of 50. This means that by tabletop nomenclature, the AC/2 is actually an AC/5, the AC/5 acts like a hypothetical AC/9, and the AC/10 acts like a hypothetical AC/12.
  • The double heat sink's name refers to its performance, but not its size - it sinks twice as much heat as a standard heat sink at the same weight, but is three times the size.
  • The Grasshopper's name implies it's a light or medium 'Mech or at least quick for its weight class, like other 'Mechs named for an insect. It is in fact a 70 ton heavy 'Mech with relatively typical movement range and jump capability for its weight.
• No One Could Survive That!: Said almost verbatim about Raju "Mastiff" Montgomery, who took a core shot to his 'mech during the Action Prologue. 3 years later, he's found... having just passed away in a Hellhole Prison.
• No-Sell: Certain important characters are immune to head hits. Any shot to the head of their 'Mechs is randomly redirected instead. The Final Boss, notably, is not immune to head hits, but Natasha Kerensky and The Bounty Hunter are.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: The Taurian Concordat is basically a Banana Republic by the standards of the Inner Sphere. In the hardscrabble Periphery, however, their backing of the Directorate is downright nightmarish for the Restoration. Similarly, in the Inner Sphere Ostergaard's Fortress DropShip is formidable, but hardly the instant "I win" button it's treated as here. But against the backwater militaries of the smaller Periphery powers, the sudden arrival of a heavily-armed and armored assault DropShip with a monstrous artillery cannon and a combined-arms battalion would completely swing a battle.
• Not the Intended Use: The Argo becoming your merc headquarters. The Argo was perfectly capable of carrying a few 'Mechs for protection of ground crews, but it was meant to be an explorer vessel, not a den of cut-throat robot-piloting badasses. Needless to say, your crew makes a few changes to her that more accommodates their needs (and fills that hold with 'Mech weaponry instead of the intended colonization equipment) and she ends up carrying a much bigger 'Mech compliment than was intended.
• Oddly Common Rarity: At the time and location the game is set, intact, fully functional BattleMechs should be rare and hard to keep running. Not only is this not the case (otherwise the game would be boring and frustrating), but mechs that are normally only used by factions on the exact opposite side of the Inner Sphere are very common (for example, a K suffix in a model name generally indicates Draconis Combine or House Kurita origin, and similarly, an S suffix generally indicates Lyran Commonwealth or House Steiner origin, both factions nowhere near the Rimward Periphary), Star League 'Mechs can be found with some frequency, and Royal Star League 'Mechs that nobody should even have heard of can be bought on a semi-regular basis in the Black Market.
• Oh, Crap!: During one plot mission the Taurian Concordat have this moment. They go from telling you to stand down and then mid sentence realizing that they're now facing down a lance of Heavy and Assault SLDF mechs. Including the super rare and powerful Atlas II. They immediately start screaming for reinforcments on the radio.
• One-Man Army: You get an achievement called "One Mech Army" for completing a contract with only one 'Mech. It usually gets subverted, though, because the easiest way to do this is to drop a Spider on a Recovery contract, sprint to the pick-up zone, hope the 'Mech survives standing still for one turn, and then make a beeline for the extraction zone without ever firing a weapon.
• Original Generation: Aside from the human characters, which is par for the course with games set in the Battletech universe, the game's last DLC introduces a wholely new and original mech: The Bull Shark, a 95-ton assault mech with an integrated Thumper Cannon that may or may not share some properties with Clan Omnimechs. However, it's still considered apocraphyl content, and therefor only tenuously canon at best, until it appears in other media.
• Overclocking Attack:
  • Thanks to the overheating mechanic (see below) it is entirely possible for a 'mech firing too many heat-heavy weapons at once to blow right past its Power Limiter which would shut it down and actually take itself entirely out of commission as the internal structure melts and the 'mech falls over, not to rise again that battle. The player actually earns an achievement for doing this.
  • Exploited by a Lethal Joke Character build for the Awesome dubbed the "Sleepy Awesome" (or alternatively, "the Siestanator"): It is intentionally loaded up with as many heat-intensive PPCs as humanly possible, and using them all in one round, which fries its insides and forces it to spend every other round shut off. Because a shutoff dumps all your heat, the Sleepy is back up the next round for another 300 damage Alpha Strike.
• Overheating: A classic game mechanic. Weapons (and jumpjets) produce heat during use. Heatsinks (and cold weather/water) help leech heat. Trapping too much heat in your mech will cause structural damage as you flat-out melt from the inside, and in severe cases it can cause the safeties to kick in and shut you down until your heatsinks can get rid of the excess heat. Heat Banks and Thermal Exchangers also help mitigate overheating, the former by providing more tonnage to carry waste heat and thus improving your maximum heat threshold, and the latter by making weapons just that little bit more heat efficient and reducing the amount of heat produced per shot.
• Overrated and Underleveled:
  • The end of the "Baying of Hounds" flashpoint can see your 'merc company linking up in battle with Morgan Kell, a Retired Badass who's the founder of the Kell Hounds mercenary band and canonically one of the greatest MechWarriors of his generation. His stats are above-average but nothing special (and due to the MBR needed to get his flashpoint you'll likely have better in your stable), and due to lore reasons (he's supposed to be Locked Away in a Monastery) he's using a custom Orion with a bizarre loadout instead of his signature Archer.
  • The final mission of the Heavy Metal bonus campaign leads to a boss fight with two lances led by Natasha Kerensky and The Bounty Hunter. While their 'mechs are fearsome and decked out in Los Tech, their AI isn't any smarter than the rest of them. The Bounty Hunter is allowed to use Called Shots, and will do so if given the chance, but every A.I. Breaker that works on your average Joe Schmoe pirate lance will see them equally flummoxed.
• Player Headquarters: At first, a ratty little Leopard DropShip (the smallest kind of 'Mech-deploying DropShip, typically used as a full headquarters by the poor and desperate in a mercenary context). Early in the main plot, though, your crew stumbles upon an old Star League-era exploratory super-DropShip that has definitely seen better days, but is an absurd upgrade over the Leopard, and more importantly, thanks to salvage laws and a little support from Kamea you own that sucker. Over the course of the game you can restore and upgrade it into a proper Cool Starship.
• People's Republic of Tyranny: After his bloody coup, Espinoza decides to rename the Aurigan Coalition into the Aurigan "Directorate".
• Permadeath: Although any and all MechWarriors except for your Player Character can die in battle, the generic ones respawn indefinitely and are easily replaced. Ronin and Kickstarter Backers, however, are unique pilots that can only be recruited once. If they're killed in battle or fired, they're gone for good.
• Plot Armor:
  • Some major opponents in the Restoration campaign, as well as the Heavy Metal Campaign, cannot have Called Shots aimed at their cockpit. Victoria, Natasha, and the Bounty Hunter are headshot-proofed, as are some of the other major 'confirmed' enemy waves.
  • Of the 'Plot Ejector Seat' variety. Your Player Character has a special Commander rank that prevents them from being killed in action during the campaign — even if your Center Torso gets cored, your ammo gets torched, or someone shoots an AC/20 right into your cockpit and headchops you, you'll somehow survive that anyway (but not without injury. It usually takes three or four months in the medbay before you can walk it off even after its been upgraded).
  • Kamea Arano and Victoria Espinosa are also fairly hardy — Kamea can get wounded in certain missions, then shrug it off easily (especially during the mission to recover the lost SLDF cache, where she can get wounded badly braving the SLDF drones, then later be completely fine piloting an Atlas II to stage her breakout just a few hours later — amusingly this also applies to the Atlas II she pilots after recovering it from the cache, as it can lose limbs and weapons during missions, but somehow at the end of the campaign when Kamea gifts it to you all the SLDF Lostech weapons and Double Heatsinks are fully restored). Victoria, like the player, cannot be killed in action until her final battle at the end of the campaign — Even if you core or headchop her mech, she'll somehow eject first.
• Power Equals Rarity: The player's mercenary company has a finite supply of weapons and equipment to mount on their 'mechs, with components being lost due to being sold off for money or wrecked in combat. Getting more of those components requires either salvage or buying them from a local planetary market. However, thanks to different levels of economic infrastructure and industrial sophistication between planets exacerbated after the collapse of the Star League, some uncommon manufactures with better facilities or access to materials are capable of manufacturing higher-grade versions of 'mech-scale weaponry than might be more commonly found. These are marked with a + or ++ sign in the inventory and generally enjoy higher accuracy or better damage than their more easily rolled out equivalents.
• Private Military Contractors: Who you play as. You will encounter other mercenary groups during your career.
• Punch-Clock Hero: Enforced. You can play your Commander as having Undying Loyalty to Kamea Arano, but you have to do at least one regular contract mission between the "Priority," story missions. Kamea will often dismiss you with instructions to go out, finish contracts, earn money, and grow stronger before calling on you again. You can take this up to eleven through both conversation choices and by blowing off priority missions for months (or years) to take whatever random contracts are available (though better gear becomes more common as you advance through the story).
• Purposely Overpowered: The SLDF Royal Battlemechs that you can use in the campaign (in particular the Royal Highlander that Kamea gives you) have superior tonnage capacity compared to regular battlemechs and superior SLDF-grade weapons like the Gauss Rifle (which hits harder than an AC/10 and has the range of a AC/2), ER lasers and the ER PPC (ER meaning extended range, so they have better maximum effective range), and Pulse Lasers (which are more accurate at close range and hit harder than regular Medium lasers), but above all, they also have the fabled Double Heatsinks, which reduce 6 heat per turn instead of 3. Of special mention is your Royal Highlander, which can carry its full loadout while having maxed armor and maxed jumpjet loadage at the same time, making it superior in firepower, durability, and heat efficiency.
• Railroading: One specific instance: while you're free to work for anyone else, you cannot decide to betray Kamea and work for Santiago and his Aurigan Directorate; for story missions, you'll always be working for Kamea's army to restore the Coalition. This does at least have some justification — between being Raju's student, being sabotaged in the tutorial mission, and having sided with Kamea during the coup, Santiago wouldn't be terribly inclined to trust you (and vice-versa), and also, if you betrayed Kamea, she'd just sell all your loans back to the banks and sharks, who'd come after you HARD for the incredibly valuable Argo — but it is still the one path players are notably forbidden from taking.
  
  Similarly, joining (and leading) the Marauders in the first place. When you first meet Darius, he notes that you could work off the debt incurred by his rescuing you and repairing your 'Mech, then find a place to call home somewhere out in the Periphery, or you could join the Marauders. Gilligan Cut to three years later and you're running the Marauders, who are now named after you. Then again, settling down for a boring life on a frontier world wouldn't make for a very exciting 'Mech combat game.
  
  Other than that, anything goes. You can even potentially ally your company to the Taurians if you can find the contracts, even though they're allies of the Directorate and enemies of Kamea's ally the Canopians.
• Randomly Generated Levels: While the campaign missions are the same on each play-through, side contracts are randomly generated with different maps, enemies, and mission parameters.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: 'Mech stats are tracked primarily via bar charts that top out at an arbitrary rating of 10, beyond which the bar doesn't move any further. It's possible to create 'Mechs with a damage rating of 20 or more^note corresponding to a total damage output of >800, more than twice that of a top-notch Atlas II, but you won't see it reflected in the visual stats due to this restriction.
• Recruiting the Criminal: MechWarriors can have the Criminal tag that enables some special events to pop up under certain conditions, most of which have beneficial outcomes. Two of your four starting Ronin, Glitch and Behemoth, are noted to have a chequered past, and you're free to recruit more criminals as you see fit.
• Recurring Boss: The Professional is a mercenary who appears in a number of randomly generated contract types. If he spawns as an enemy, he does so as a MechWarrior with a ridiculously long list of beneficial traits that make him almost as dangerous as Natasha Kerensky or the Bounty Hunter. You can't kill him permanently, so there's always a chance of this guy coming back to crash another of your top-tier contracts.
• Recycled with a Gimmick: The gameplay can be fairly accurately summed up as XCOM: Enemy Unknown WITH HUMONGOUS MECHA! You run Turn-Based Tactics battles with your 'Mechs and have to manage the daily logistics and finances of your company and build out your mothership between drops.
• RPG Elements: In addition to the Skill Scores and Perks mentioned below, the campaign does have some of these elements. Your character isn't a full-bore MechWarrior RPG character — they lack things like Learning (from oldschool MW), Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma (from later or universal) stats — but the background you choose for your commander will influence dialogue options, events and a few other things.
• Rule of Cool: Sumire's In-Universe justification for why Argo totally needs a low-G swimming pool. She usually tries to justify the ship's quality-of-life upgrades in some way ("we need a lounge so the kitchen staff have a chance to clean the mess hall, the Mechtechs could really use a library for their technical manuals, and so on...) As for the pool:
  Sumire: A low-G swimming pool? What's there even to discuss about?
• Sadistic Choice:
  • The method of combat targeting and Salvaging is a brutal choice for the player to make. For the combat, you need to draw a line between going carefully for knockdowns, kneecapping, headchopping, and otherwise aiming for mechwarrior kills, or brutally shooting down mechs heedless of component destruction; this can affect the salvage you get, as component destruction guarantees less filler weapons/heatsinks/jumpjets, but kneecapping/headchopping/mechwarrior kills means more actual mech parts to salvage, and drawn-out combat means more potential damage will be taken by your lance, increasing the risk of armor breach and weapons losses or mechwarrior injuries due to unlucky cockpit hits. Likewise, selecting your guaranteed salvage picks can be brutal if you opted to have a higher C-Bill payout - do you take home the improved (++ grade) weapon(s) for improving your current ride, choose enough salvage to complete the Medium mech you have in storage for your lancemates (or resale), or roll the dice and take one or more of the Assault mech parts and hope your employer tosses you the rest?
  • Flashpoints frequently force you to choose between 1) two equally lucrative options or 2) one morally sound option that may piss off your employer, or the pragmatic choice that gets you paid. The "Extracurricular Activities" Flashpoint has a particularly good example: do you evacuate the civilians you unknowingly endangered with your battle first, earning House Steiner's ire in the process, or do you ignore their pleas for help and trample them underfoot when you engage your designated targets as your employer demands?
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • One of the advantages of being a mercenary is that the player character can pick their battles, and sometimes that means they can pick when they have had enough of a particular battle and can abort it at their discretion. However, if they fail to achieve their contracted objective they will not receive the full payout for the mission, and if they fail to achieve their contracted objective and fail to even significantly damage the enemy the Mercenary Review Board will consider that a "Bad Faith Withdrawal" and dock their reputation for agreeing to a contract they clearly had no intention of seeing through.
  • The targets of Assassination contracts may decide to make a run for it rather than fight you if you seriously outgun them. This can happen regardless of the target 'Mech's tonnage and can actually cost you the mission if said 'Mech is faster than yours or the terrain is stacked against you. This became particularly dangerous when a new type of Assassination mission was added that puts the target in a Fragile Speedster, usually a Locust or a Cicada, which immediately bolts the moment your lance is spotted. Good luck catching the thing once it starts running.
• Sensor Suspense: If a unit's within your Mechs' sensor range, but you don't have visual contact, it's depicted as a blip with information on what type of unit and how heavy it is. If it's at the edge of your sensor range, you don't know anything about it except whether it's a 'Mech or a vehicle.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • The Cataphract, a mech designed by the Capellans in 3025, is present in the Periphery, in the hands of non-Capellan interests, the moment it rolls off the assembly line. Perhaps not totally impossible, but being part of the standard encounter table is still questionable.
  • The release builds of the game featured the Griffin-4N, a Dark Age Era mech from 3083. This was a typographical error: it was clearly supposed to be a GRF-2N, an SLDF Royal 'Mech, and has stats accurate to the 2N aside from omitting the Guardian ECM suite. This oversight was eventually patched, so the 'Mech is now correctly labeled as 2N, and you can even add the ECM suite if you have the Urban Warfare DLC.
  • The Banshee BNC-3S variant introduced in Heavy Metal was only built by the Lyrans beginning in 3026, a year after the beginning of the Campaign, and yet is present in the Periphery in all encounter tables from the beginning of the game.
  • Three of the planets that the mercenaries can visit for work are named for people who died in the Word of Blake Jihad, which began in 3067.
  • The Heavy Metal DLC introduced a lot of items long since extinct in the Inner Sphere by 3025, including LB-X autocannons and Snub-Nose PPC weaponry. Many of them can be purchased from faction stores belonging to Great Houses, which canonically would consider these weapons Lost Technology and jealously hoard them for themselves. Justified: the weapons are actually salvage from a derelict Clan Wolverine JumpShip that have been sold by the arms merchant who found it, and a mini-campaign added in the DLC involves tracking the weapons down at their source before the big players do.
• Serious Business:
  • Any rumor of a newly discovered cache of LosTech will send everyone including the Great Houses scrambling, but the "One Man's Trash'' Flashpoint shows that this obsession goes far beyond stuff like high-tech 'Mechs or weapons - it tasks you with securing a Star League stapler factory.
  • The local pirate organization may contract your company to steal the newest season of some popular holovid show a few weeks before its release, claiming that fans will pay through the nose for early access. Darius wearily notes that if the series in question is Rough Riders, Yang must not learn about it lest he blow the entire contract pay on it.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • Pretty much the entire venture to the SLDF Outpost Castle on Artru. A great deal of time, energy, and lives are lost, and the only things the Restoration gains are new enemies that completely outgun them and (at most) a single lance of high-end Mechs.
  • In a fairly unique twist, Victoria's motivation for the game past the prologue is largely ensuring that the Directorate itself doesn't become this. Especially once she agrees to Santiago's plan to attack Perdition in a False Flag Operation to get the Taurians on the Directorate's side, she absolutely has to win, no matter what, because otherwise killing Mastiff, killing the people of Perdition, and deposing the woman who was basically her beloved sister for most of her life would all be for literally nothing and she'd be nothing more than a monster. When Santiago prepares to surrender, she completely loses it, as it really begins to look like even her dad didn't really believe the things he was telling her. Her Last Words are basically her bitterly choking on the fact that ultimately, all her fears have come to pass and she'll just be remembered as a monster.
• Shoot the Hostage: The Player can choose to fulfill a mission contract in a Flashpoint by blowing up a building full of hostages. No one among the crew likes it, but they accept the logic that otherwise every Op For will take hostages if people believe they will never fire on a hostage taker. Even outside of the Flashpoint, you sometimes have to blow up bases that has your employer's men in them to prevent them from being interrogated.
• Shooting Gallery: The first campaign mission starts in one of these, with the protagonist testing their newly-overhauled mech's targeting systems by shooting up a couple of written off Urbanmech hulls as a framing device for teaching the player the basics of combat.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The Heavy Metal-exclusive LBX autocannons and Snub PPCs are 'Mech-scaled shotgun versions of their regular counterparts^note LBX cannons technically fire shrapnel shells, but it still boils down to launching a wall of low-damage pellets at the target. Both deal significantly more direct and stability damage, tend to be lighter and less heat-intensive. Snub PPCs have slightly lower range than normal PPCs, a minor drawback that LBX cannons don't share. Their increased damage output comes at the cost of their scattershot behavior making it nearly impossible to focus all the damage on a single 'Mech component. They're incredibly dangerous weapons regardless, capable of sandblasting armor and knocking 'Mechs down faster than anything else, plus their countless pellets absolutely devastate a 'Mechs internal structure once it's exposed. And that's not even getting into the very high chance of at least one pellet hitting the head to injure the pilot.
• Shoulder Cannon: Some 'Mechs with weapon mounts in their side torsos carry these weapons on their shoulders instead. The Shadow Hawk, Griffin, Hatchetman and Thunderbolt are all good examples, but arguably the most impressive one is the HBS-original Bull Shark, a 95-ton monster carrying a huge back-mounted artillery piece.
• Shoulders of Doom: A great many of the more humanoid 'Mechs like the Atlas or the Battlemaster sport massive shoulder pads. With purpose-built missile boats like the Catapult or Stalker, the appearance is there, but it's technically the 'Mech's arms creating the effect.
• Shout-Out:
  • One set of achievements references Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as they center around the quotes of the Black Knight as he loses limbs:
  Tis But a Scratch — Remove one arm
  It's just a flesh wound — Remove both arms
  I'm invincible! — Remove both arms and a leg
  We'll call it a draw — Remove every limb
  • A very subtle one; one of the voice sets for pilots is referred to as 'm_vizzini01' in the game's files, and sounds — surprise — like an imitation of Wallace Shawn's portrayal of Vizzini in The Princess Bride.
  • A random callsign that can show up on hires is "RAT PARTY", after a very memorable asset you can purchase in a Shadowrun Returns: Shadows of Hong Kong mission.
  • One of the callsigns that can come up for random hirable mech warriors is "Red Comet".
  • When Sumire is describing her home planet, she says that if her homeplanet had a motto, "it'd be 'Squawk.'" Squawk is/was the battle-cry of the Word of Lowtax, the MechWarrior Online player group from the Something Awful forums. At least one of the devs posts on the SA forums, mostly in the thread about the game, and confirmed it is a reference to the WoL and SA at large.
  • Refitting a 'Mech with only ballistic weapons unlocks the Bullet Farmer achievement.
  • A mission to assassinate a diplomat may be named "Aggressive Negotiations".
  • The Royal Griffon from the SLDF cache is painted in Kolchima Special colors.
  • Yang Virtanen is a burly, cynical gearhead of partly Chinese heritage with a mechanical arm who went into the mercenary business after a falling out with his superiors at his old job due to an incident that cost him his original one.
  • One of Glitch's possible barks when executing a "Death From Above"-move is "BOOT TO THE HEAD!"
    • Another, which appears when you target multiple opponents is You get a headshot, and YOU get a headshot!
  • Medusa, meanwhile, gets "SHOW ME YOUR WAR FACE! as one of theirs.
  • Alexander mentions having spent time in exile on a planet called Zathras.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Using Melee attacks on Vehicles. Nothing simpler than hitting an object with a much heavier object. Nothing quite as satsfing as stomping something and watching a fireball erupt from it.
• Skill Scores and Perks: While RPG elements will not be as extensive as in HBS' Shadowrun games, pilots will have skills and/or perks tailored to specific 'Mech weight classes.
• Snipe Hunt: A random event aboard the Argo may see one of your MechWarriors asking Yang to install a "B A eleven hundred N" on their 'Mech, saying another MechWarrior told them it will greatly improve stability. Watch it play out, and Yang hands over the appropriate requisition form. The hapless MechWarrior gets halfway through the N in "BA1100N" before realizing they've been had.
• Sniping the Cockpit: Possible to do through the 'Precision Strike' action, and also notable for being much easier than in the tabletop game with the right Perks. The 'Called Shot Mastery' perk allows almost one in five attacks to hit the head, making it possible for certain 'mech builds (especially those that can mount large amounts of support weapons and lasers) to reliably knock a 'mech's head clean off in a single Alpha Strike. The game even offers an achievement, "Surgical Extraction", for killing a pilot without destroying his mech.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Inverted during the Epilogue, as Kamea erases all the debt she held for your Merc company, grants you the Argo as a base, and even throws in her Atlas II mech for good measure, as she'll be seated on the throne more than a jumpseat now.
• Space Cold War: Due to being set three years before the outbreak of the Fourth Succession War, this is the game world's current state in a nutshell. All Inner Sphere superpowers plus the various Periphery realms are constantly probing each others' borders with deniable attacks carried out by mostly unaffiliated mercenary outfits like the one you're playing as, but for now none of them are willing to openly declare war yet.
• Space Is Cold: Averted; hard vacuum is even less efficient for sinking heat than desert environments. The heat sinks work mainly by conducting waste heat off its vanes and into a fluid medium (water, atmosphere) which then convects away from the mech. If there *is* no fluid medium, all it can do is radiate, which results in a glut of heat to dispose of.
• Space Pirates: Common early game enemies, and one of the possible character backgrounds for your protagonist. They continue to be an acceptable target for missions throughout the game, especially in areas with only one active faction (e.g. post-campaign Restoration territory). However, carefully cozying up to them has the serious advantage of making gaining/retaining access to the black market much easier and cheaper.
• Spoiler Opening: Kamea Arano dies in the prologue mission! OH NO!... well, this would certainly be a twist, except that the initial opening of the game has Kamea narrating to you as Queen of the Reach, talking about her campaign to take back the throne, and your part in it, in the past tense. So it's not exactly a huge shocker when you find out she's alive.
• Starship Luxurious: After the first act, the Argo is a beaten-up derelict, barely restored to spaceworthiness, with only about a third of the ship habitable, much of the hull and super structure compromised, the power system jury-rigged, and most of its subsystems off-line. But the ship is built to handle a much higher capacity, and with enough time, effort, and money, the it can have such amenities as a full hospital, gymnasium, library, hydroponic vegetable garden, even a video arcade and a low-gravity swimming pool.
• Status Quo Is God: The balance of power in the game world beyond the Aurigan Civil War will never shift no matter how long you keep playing or how many contracts you complete in favor of any one particular faction. You can neither trigger wars nor conquer planets or star systems for whomever you're supporting. Granted, your small merc outfit alone wouldn't be capable of doing something on this scale anyway, but the whole game outside the campaign has you fighting half a dozen wars by proxy, so it wouldn't be unreasonable for at least one of them to eventually go hot. Not even the various Flashpoint missions change anything about that despite claims to the contrary in the DLC's advertising, probably because the many possible outcomes would threaten the game's future canonicity.
• Stone Wall:
  • The Banshee, a 95-ton assault mech. Armour? Second-highest in the game after the Atlas. Mobility? It has an engine large enough to make it keep up with mechs 30 tons lighter than it is, and is the only mech that can mount four A-class jump jets. What else would it need for Lightning Bruiser status? Weapons? Well, that engine does take up some space. The Banshee has the lowest available free space and weapon slots of any assault class 'mech, and can be comfortably outgunned by several heavy 'mechs. In-Universe this low offensive ability for a mech of that size has made the class something of a laughingstock.
  • 'Mechs can gain up to 60% damage reduction by stacking the Cover, Guarded and Bulwark buffs. Even the lightest 'Mechs can soak up an astonishing amount of damage this way without falling (even more so when combined with their high Evasion), and assault 'Mechs like the abovementioned Banshee become next to invincible for as long as the effect lasts. They pay for this level of protection by forgoing any offensive actions.
• Strategic Asset Capture Mechanic: Some missions require you to capture an objective, typically by getting one or more of your mechs into a specific location next to a building, or by escorting a friendly unit to an area and protecting it while it's there.
• Subsystem Damage: Mechs are divided into several major body parts (Head/cockpit, Left/right/center torso, arms, and legs), with your heatsinks, ammo bins, weapons, and jumpjets mounted on specific parts of the superstructure. It is possible to take damage to your subsystems and lose them, forcing you to swap in replacement parts. If you're extra unlucky, a crit can cause an internal ammo explosion, which can be potentially lethal to the pilot. Destroying a body part will outright eliminate all components attached — hitting the Right Torso will also take their Right Arm alongside it, plus all weapons stored in both body parts. Especially severe damage to the torso can bleed through to connected body parts, like the head/cockpit, resulting in more pilot wounds and possible death. One way to protect ammunition and vital weapons is to "pad" the body section with extra systems and components like heatsinks, jumpjets, and "expendable" weapons (like Medium/Small Lasers), reducing the chance you'll lose your more precious AC/20.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: Enemies that aren't the target of an Assassination contract will never retreat, surrender (unless the mission objective is to prevent them from reaching an extraction point) or eject, even if they're being utterly crushed. Expect to see destabilized, half-wrecked, weaponless 'Mechs stumbling up to your lance to perform melee attacks. This is a huge example of Gameplay and Story Segregation, as a key element of the setting is "Life is cheap. Mechs aren't."
• Support Party Member:
  • The CP-10-Z Cyclops assault BattleMech introduced with the Flashpoints expansion has a unique Battle Computer built into its head that increases your entire lance's initiative by 1. Due to its oversized engine it also has one of the worst tonnages available for an assault 'mech and will be heavily outgunned by even heavy 'mechs 20 tons lighter.
    • The HQ version that was introduced with the 1.9 update takes this to another extreme. Its support systems give multiple buffs to the whole lance, but this 90-ton behemoth's pitiful firepower (less than 150 points in total) would make most medium 'Mechs laugh their steel asses off. One can build 30-tonners with almost twice that much punch.
  • The RVN-1X Raven light BattleMech from the Urban Warfare expansion comes with a 7.5 ton Electronic Warfare suite built into its left torso. This takes up a massive amount of space and weight for such a light 'mech and heavily restricts the Raven's engine size, armour and weaponry, yet it's by far the most reliable option for bringing Beagle Probes or an ECM into battle since it counts as both at the same time.
  • Finally, the MAD-3R Marauder heavy 'mech introduced alongside Heavy Metal as FLC is a downplayed example. Its Lance Command Module reduces all damage dealt to your lance by 10%, but in between its decent armour, Called Shot bonus and excellent tonnage for a variety of weaponry, the Marauder is also an all-around excellent heavy 'mech on top of it.
• Take Your Time: Despite being depicted as a fast-moving civil war, all of the main story missions for Kamea will wait for you to take them, and waiting to do so has no negative impact. The game doesn't even really acknowledge if it's gone beyond 3025 in terms of time taken.
• Talk Like a Pirate: Not in the game itself (sadly), but the achievement you get for allying with the local pirate organization is named "Yar Har Fiddle Dee Dee".
• Tanks for Nothing: Only played straight with weaker tanks like the Scorpion. This is actually averted the first time in the series. The Bulldogs which were just annoying pushover in Mechwarrior 2-4 and MechCommander are significantly more dangerous here, are quite capable of knocking out mechs if they manage to get flank/rear shots, and a stomp from a light mech is often not enough to destroy them. The previously laughable Striker is now capable of indirect fire. Heavier ones like the Schrek, Alacorn, Demolisher, and Zhukov should always be treated with caution due to their firepower. The missile launcher vehicles, meanwhile, are now completely terrifying.
• Tank Goodness: Players can encounter friendly and hostile tanks in the field. While many are significantly weaker than Battlemechs, some like the Demolisher tank and Schrek PPC carrier are formidable vehicles in their own right that can dish out significant damage against Battlemechs if underestimated. (To the sadness of some players, you cannot purchase or control your own tanks.)
• Target Spotter: Long-range missiles can be fired over terrain obstacles, letting them hit targets out of the 'mech's line of sight if another friendly unit spots for them. This can be taken further by equipping your spotter with a TAG module or NARC beacon to allow for long-range bombardment that deals increased damage to the painted target.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: During the priority mission on Tyrlon, the moment you take out the third target building, the Directorate drops a full lance of three mediums and one heavy 'Mech in the middle of the street just south of Target Charlie. The map layout makes it highly likely that most of your 'Mechs will be near this spot one way or another when it happens, and at least some of them will be doing so with their back armor within knife range of the enemy reinforcements. Priority missions in general love spawning additional enemies out of nowhere, but this example is easily among the worst ones.
• There Was a Door: On various missions, you could guide your Mechs through the gate...or you could simply blow a hole in the wall and storm through to catch the enemy at a favorable angle. Besides the downsides of wasting a Mech's turn and possibly limited ammo if you're using ballistic or missile weapons, there's no reason not to, especially in the tight confines of urban maps. Kamea does this herself on Weldry, coming through the opposite wall of the prison like the Kool-Aid Man to provide reinforcements.
• Timed Mission: A fair share of the campaign missions have strict turn limits that range from okay-ish to outright sadistic, depending on how well-equipped you are going in. Finding the right balance between 'Mech speed and combat prowess is key. Side missions can also have hard limits^note Target Acquisition runs on a turn timer or soft ones^note Destroy Convoy fails if the convoy escapes, the chances of which largely depend on the map layout, coupled with the speed of your 'Mechs.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • The SLDF Highlander you are given halfway through the game. It is perhaps one of the most powerful Mechs in the game..... And it's full of Lostech that you literally can not replace. You will never lose the Mech itself but its one of a kind equipment can and will be lost just through attrition. This becomes downplayed with the Heavy Metal DLC, which significantly increased the rate at which LosTech equipment and mechs show up in the black market and consequently make it easier to repair and replace them.
  • The Bull Shark's Mortar is a powerful weapon that deals damage in a large area, but it holds only two shots. It's no biggie when the OpFor spawns clustered together, but when they don't it can be agonizing to decide when and where to launch those precious shells.
  • Some of the really rare pieces of equipment can be like this- an ER PPC +++ might be amazingly powerful, but it's also so expensive that if it's damaged you're going to lose out on the contract you're playing through, if you can even find a replacement for sale at all.
• Treacherous Quest Giver:
  • The first employer who hired you turn on you as soon as you are done. Darius implies that not all of your employers later on will be giving you the full story of who you're fighting or why, but none of them ever betray you and, as Darius points out, most of them really do want you to succeed.
  • Played With in the Red Hunt Flashpoint from Urban Warfare. Shugo Reynauld Yamaguchi hires you for a standard base defense contract on behalf of a Kuritan noble. However, that noble, Duke Hassid Ricol, didn't tell him that you're just bait to lure the real target, the Gray Death Legion, into a trap, and that the elite DEST lances dropping are well known to leave no one alive.
• Trojan Horse: In the Heavy Metal DLC campaign, the Bounty Hunter gives you some salvage as a peace offering after he beats you to the punch of getting to the Dobrev. Your command crew immediately recognizes and states the possibility of the trope, but they don't track down the transmitter until the final mission of the campaign... at which point it's actually useful to you to lure the Bounty Hunter to where you are, as you're facing off against Natasha Kerensky, who he famously has a Blood Feud with.
• Turn-Based Tactics: Like the tabletop game it is based upon, though unlike the defunct Tactics game, it is not a straight copy-paste cloning of the tabletop rules to a computer game.
• Units Not to Scale: Mostly averted. Even the shortest 'Mechs are several stories tall, behemoths like the Atlas are twice that size, and the buildings you often see on missions generally reflect this accurately. Tanks, however, are all utterly dwarfed by any 'Mech no matter their respective tonnage.
  • The LRM carrier gets the worst of it. It's depicted as barely larger than a Trebuchet's foot, despite being equipped with three missile launchers that are supposedly bigger than the one that takes up half its torso.
• Universal Driver's License: You'd expect a fast and nimble light 'Mech to be vastly different to pilot than the lumbering wall of firepower that's an assault 'Mech, but your MechWarriors are equally adept at piloting anything you put them into. That said, certain pilot skills are more effective when combined with certain 'Mech classes - a constantly moving light 'Mech won't get much use out of skills that require it to stand still.
• Unstable Equilibrium: The Early Game Hell is an ongoing effort to strike the balance between "no damage but not enough payout to upgrade your mechs" and "loads of C-Bills but you only have one pilot left." And it goes up to eleven after you get the Argo; upgrade the hell out of it and you can repair trashed mechs in days, recover from injuries in the same amount of time, and new pilots will line up like ducks to live on a Starship Luxurious. Don't and the bank will repossess your flying junkyard.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Normally averted: Any intact piece of equipment left in enemy wrecks ends up on your salvage list, and you gain 'mech parts from said wrecks as well (the more intact the 'mech was at time of destruction, the better). Played straight with Victoria's King Crab, and the majority of equipment carried by The Bounty Hunter and Natasha Kerensky's lances — despite being decked out in endgame equipment and LosTech, neither their 'mechs nor most of their 'mechs' equipment is legally salvageable.
  • There is also a bizarre case of Unusable Enemy Color. Aurigan Directorate forces feature a unique metallic green as their primary color, which the player is absolutely forbidden from using in their own scheme, even outside of Story Mode.
• Urban Warfare: The Urban Warfare DLC revolved solely around this. It featured a new biome (densely packed urban battlefields, natch), two new 'Mechs that specialize in this sort of environment, a host of corresponding hardware to enable or counter the advanced ambush tactics common to urban warfare, and a new mission type where you must destroy an enemy base that churns out endless streams of reinforcements, while at the same time protecting your own base from the onslaught.
• Use Your Head: 'Mechs with no grasper arms, such as the Player Character's starting Blackjack, often headbutt their targets if ordered to make a melee attack.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Several Flashpoint campaigns give you the option to divert from your contract in order to help people without getting much (or anything) in return. Usually part of a Sadistic Choice, given the risks involved, and almost always a form of Self-Imposed Challenge. Of course, you're a mercenary commander, so nobody will seriously complain if you refuse to get sidetracked by a couple hundred helpless civilians.
• Violation of Common Sense: Any achievement hunter will have to, among other things, voluntarily destroy one of their own 'Mechs through structural damage caused by excessive overheating. The chances of this happening by accident are so remote that you'll have to actively try to accomplish it by abusing purpose-built 'Mech loadouts far beyond the boundaries of common sense. Worse, this is a secret achievement, which gives you even less incentive to attempt something so stupid unless you know about it from an outside source.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Grim Sybil is probably the first opponent you face who uses a heavy mech against you. Downplayed since her mech has a poor armor debuff to make it easier for you to defeat it, and the Quickdraw doesn't have any particularly dangerous 'can opener' weapons like a large autocannon or PPC.
• Was It All a Lie?: Namedropped by Victoria to her father in the leadup to the final battle in the game.
• Was It Really Worth It?: As revealed in the opening cutscene, Kamea does reclaim her throne and become High Lady of the Aurigan Coalition. However, the Reach has been greatly weakened by the civil war, and though the Directorate was a certainly amoral regime with its gulags and false flag terrorist attack, things were better for people on the core worlds (at the expense of others though). It remains to be seen if Kamea's civil war saved the Reach from a tyrant or doomed it to the predations of its — far stronger — neighbors.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Inverted. Your Player Character cannot die in combat even if their cockpit is sniped (land in the hospital for months, yes), and having their mech be knocked out during a mission is not a game over.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Director Espinosa really does want what he thinks is best for the Reach, and had Kamea followed his advice and seized power, would have followed her unconditionally. His coup was an attempt to wipe out the bureaucratic gridlock that had led to the Coalition's decline. However, some of the actions undertaken by the Directorate certainly cross the line, namely the Icebox on Weldry and staging a massacre in the Taurian Concordat that was blamed on the Federated Suns to make the Concordat more open to an alliance with his country to fight Kamea's Restoration. This is reaffirmed at the climax of the game, where he surrenders peacefully after Ostergaard's ship crashes, and desperately tries to talk Victoria out of her duel with Kamea, as Kamea's death would result in anarchy within the Reach.
• What a Piece of Junk: The Argo, at first. When you first find her, she's... bigger than the old Leopard, at least. And her engines work... once Murad furiously beats them with a wrench, at any rate. And, hey, you own her via salvage laws and via Kamea's support. So that's, y'know. That's cool. Saying anything about her beyond that is going to require a non-zero amount of C-bills.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Kamea chews out Yang for blowing up a perfectly intact SLDF base. Something that is almost a Holy Artifact with how valuable it is. Yang points that they are escaping by the skin of their teeth here, and that the Directorate would gladly loot the place to use against them. Kamea isn't happy about it, but she doesn't argue the point.
• Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: The Space Pirates in this game are organized in small-ish clans, don't seem to have a real central command and don't seem to control any territory or manufacturing capabilities worth mentioning, yet they field the same materiel as any other faction, up to and including the heaviest assault 'Mechs, in considerable numbers. In a world where tech like this is exceedingly rare and valuable, it makes you wonder where they get all this stuff, especially since pirates are easily the most ubiquitous contract targets. The Heavy Metal expansion finally explains it: they found what is very heavily implied to be a Clan Wolverine Warship that suffered a misjump. In other words, they got their hands on literal tons of LosTech and Clan technology.
• Where It All Began: The final fight begins on the same planet as the story started, and beyond that in the tournament grounds that Kamea and Victoria were supposed to have a friendly spar before The Coup put a stop to those plans.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Once you complete the main story campaign, you can keep playing with your mercenary team basically forever if you wish, with randomly-generated merc missions popping up all over, although the actual world-state won't truly update past 3025.
• Wolverine Claws: The Shadowhawk Umbra adorns the mech's iconic chameleon-like grippers with three wicked looking spikes protruding above the main three claws. Sadly, since the Umbra version is a purely cosmetic skin, they don't actually improve its melee damage.
• Wolverine Publicity:
  • Flashpoints introduced flashpoints featuring Morgan Kell and Justin Allard, two major characters from the lore.
  • Heavy Metal introduced flashpoints where you are introduced to Natasha "The Widowmaker" Kerensky and The Bounty Hunter (or the Succesion Wars-era one anyway). All three are major characters from the Battletech-verse. Their introduction also coincided with the introduction of their respective signature 'mechs, Natasha's Warhammer and The Bounty Hunter's Marauder. ^note Strictly speaking, they are each other's signature — due to a kerfuffle in the backstory, The Bounty Hunter stole Natasha's Marauder and Natasha responded by stealing the original Bounty Hunter's Warhammer.
  • Of course during the mission you encounter them, it makes sense, at least for Natasha and The Bounty Hunter. Natasha is honor bound to destroy anything and everything related to Clan Wolverine, and the Bounty Hunter wants to spite her.
• Written by the Winners: One of the themes of the campaign is this — that history, as people perceive it, is dictated in part by those who succeed, perhaps even without their meaning to dictate it. Kamea grapples with this idea, and the public perception of her virtue and heroism versus the failures she believes she is responsible for but get glossed over. More interestingly, Victoria is also keenly aware of this — a large part of her motivation later in the game is ensuring the Restoration fails, because if the Aranos return to power, everything she'd done would be All for Nothing, and she would be remembered as a monster.
• Xanatos Gambit: Director Espinosa pulls off a pretty good one with the smuggler dropship Newgrange that's not directly pointed out. If the Restoration ignores it, it continues supplying Directorate forces unimpeded. If they destroy it they kill its pilot, the beloved son of a very powerful Taurian noble, making it clear why he chose this specific ship. Director Espinosa also seems to have arranged for Lord Karosas to have a reason to want this particular ship destroyed and made sure the ship will not stand down when confronted, laying all the pieces for this gambit to work.
• You Call That a Wound?: Any pilot (other than the player character) can be killed in action if they become incapacitated during combat. However, having a higher Guts skill and better quality medical facilities available to you increases the chance of them surviving that state and eventually returning to the cockpit (after a long convalescence.)
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Discussed after a mission liberating political prisoners from the Icebox, as Madeira points out that Espinosa's Propaganda Machine will paint it as a terrorist attack on fine, upstanding military members which unleashed thousands of cutthroat criminals back into the Reach.

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