YMMV / BattleTech (2018)

• Anti-Climax Boss: Victoria and her lance in the final mission. While three of the four mechs in her lance are assault-class (the only non-assault Mech in her group is the JagerMech, the weakest of the four), the mission has a Good Bad Bug in that her lance will not move forward to engage at your lance while you are outside their sensor range. If you've brought long-range weaponry like PPCs, Large Lasers, and LRMs for your mechs, you can happily plug away at Victoria's lance while they'll just stand by and do nothing. You can simply manage your heat levels by bracing and repeating the process for several more rounds until Victoria and her lance are eliminated. Then you can sit back and watch the epilogue and credits roll.
• Breather Level: "Liberate: Itrom" is significantly easier than the other priority missions before and after. Your objective is the capture of three mineral silos in an area where sensors don't work properly, allowing you to sneak up on the silos' garrison forces until you're in the perfect position to spring your ambush. The silos can't communicate with each other, so it's always just a 4v4 battle instead of the usual 8v4 or 12v4 simultaneously. You do have a turn limit of 5 to prevent each garrison from blowing up their silo, but since speed and maneuverability aren't necessary you can just steamroll everything with a 400-ton assault lance. Last but not least, only a single silo needs to be captured intact for a mission success (the others "merely" give a considerable cash bonus), so you basically have three attempts at completing your objective in case something goes wrong.
  • Amusingly turned on its head in a short story in Shrapnel magazine taking place shortly after the events of the game, about a Shell-Shocked Veteran who was on the other side of the battle.
• Broken Base: There's some base-breaking over the way the game implements a few of the classic TT BattleTech/MechWarrior systems. The biggest one tends to be the way salvage works: you don't completely salvage a 'Mech chassis bit by bit, but gain "parts" as a kind of amalgamated whole, and once you have three parts, your 'Tech crew slaps together a functioning, fully armed 'Mech out of all the bits you've salvaged. Some players, particularly veteran players, think this is absurd, both from a lore perspective, as lore-wise it is very hard to maintain and build a 'Mech, and a gameplay perspective, as the player will quickly accumulate a large arsenal of 'Mechs. Proponents of the system, however, contend that a more complicated salvage and repair system would just bog the game down with micromanaging mech salvage and that having some 'Mechs in reserve is what makes sure that the player isn't put into an essential game over state just from losing one mission.
  • The developers took note of this and eventually amended the system by allowing players to fine-tune the salvage system every time they start a new game: The necessary components needed for a full mech can be increased to any number up to eight parts (one for each of the eight sections), and there are options to remove the free weapons from a newly assembled mech (forcing you to salvage or purchase any weapons you want to put in it as well) or to make newly assembled mechs need a final round of repair (they start out with no armour and 1 HP in every location) for a significant C-bill investment to finish it.
  • The Vent Coolant ability introduced with the skill rebalance became something of this. Fans praised its gameplay utility, replacing a useless ability in return for Power at a Price useful for energy weapon builds (letting you sink all your heat in reduced heat sinking for 3 turns), detractors pointed out just how incredibly lore-inappropriate this ability is for the setting and its inherent Fridge Logic.^Addendum The tabletop game would later include the Coolant Pod equipment that behaves similarly to the Vent Coolant ability, albeit at the cost of weight/space rather than the tradeoff of gaining heat the turns after use.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Because of the Fog of War and the way dodging and accuracy works as opposed to in the tabletop game (in tabletop Battletech, 'mechs gain dodge bonuses but suffer aiming penalties for moving; in the video game they only gain dodge bonuses), the Small Laser (support), Medium Laser (energy), SRM-6 or LRM-5/LRM-20 (missile) and AC/5 (ballistic) are, when calculating for damage/weight at 0 heat generation, the best weapons of their class in the game and the game heavily rewards "boating" (i.e. stuffing all available weapon slots with them in that order) all your 'mechs with them whenever possible instead of sticking to stock 'mechs. Similarly, some 'mechs are blatantly preferred because of their ability to "boat" the above efficiently, such as the Orion, Grasshopper and Stalker. Since all 'mechs can install jump jets (even chassis who canonically have no variants capable of such, like the King Crab), expect any recommendation on 'mech building to involve a full complement of jump jets as well.
• Cry for the Devil: Both individuals mentioned under Alas, Poor Villain on the main page get this treatment.
  • Samuel Ostergaard's last moments in the game show him surrounded by flames as the Locura virus tears his ship's systems apart, a framed photograph of him posing with his son while sporting a proud grin, the glass cracking from the heat just before the dropship impacts on Coromodir.
  • And verbally, Victoria Espinosa tears into her father for feeding her nothing but lies about his motives and how she'd used those lies to justify murdering eleven thousand people as part of a False Flag Operation. Her final battle is at the tournament grounds where she and Kamea would have fought on the day of the latter's coronation, had the Espinosa's not initiated their coup. Even Kamea admits pity at this point.
• Demonic Spiders: Heavy vehicles, notably Manticore, Demolisher, Schrek, and Missile Carriers. Why?
  • Manticore: A 60-ton Heavy-class Tank armed with a PPC, a Medium Laser, an SRM6, and an LRM10. Manticores are well-armoured and are deadly at all ranges.
  • Demolisher: An 80-ton Assault-class Tank armed with not one but two AC/20s. Capable of dishing out 200 damage if both shots hit, Demolishers live up to their name. They can instantly kill, 'headchop', 'kneecap', or 'core' many mechs. And with the most recent patches and DLC, there's an LBX version, meaning most or all of your armor can disappear in a single turn.
  • Schreks are 80-ton Assault Tank/'Mech Destroyers mounting three PPCs and, in tabletop, enough heatsinks to fire them constantly. Thankfully this isn't true in Battletech, but Schreks are still capable of dishing out some painful long-range fire; 150 damage per volley, with no ammo limits. Anything they hit will take a minor accuracy penalty until the next turn too.
  • Finally, Missile Carriers. Formerly the laughing stock of the 'Warrior and 'Commander games, they're back with a vengeance. Both varieties are 60 tons, and dish out 60 missiles per volley (using three LRM20s or ten SRM6s), whilst having enough ammo reserved for multiple volleys (LRM carriers have a potential Alpha Strike of 240 damage and SRM carriers have one of 480 damage. For comparison, the Kintaro medium 'Mech, a highly missile-specialized 'Mech can mount half as many SRM-6 launchers and thus has half the alpha strike potential of the SRM carrier). Anything that one of these monsters decides to aim at will drown in a Macross Missile Massacre, almost certainly losing most of its armour and getting knocked on its ass in the process. The worst part? LRM Carriers don't even need to be able to see you to do it, as they are capable of indirect fire.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Glitch, one of the starter pilots, is quickly becoming popular on account of having a perky, almost kid-like voice and personality, and a borderline-unhealthy zeal for her work. Read her bio and you know she is the closest thing to a Token Evil Teammate, a contrast to Medusa, the guy you have in reserve.
  [On a polar map]: "After the mission, let's make snowmen!"
  [On a Martian/desert map]: "Hey, look! [Beat] Rocks!"
  [When using the Multishot skill]: "You get a headshot and YOU get a headshot!"
  [After delivering heavy damage]: "When I shoot you, you'll take and LIKE it!" or "Did you see that? DID YOU SEE IT?"
  [When a retreat order is given]: "WHAT? We're running away?"
  • Shugo Reynald Yamaguchi, aka "Bob Kurita", your company's liaison in the Draconis Combine. In complete opposite to how House Kurita is normally presented in the lore, Yamaguchi is a snarky, alcoholic hedonist who is treated as the resident Butt-Monkey amongst the Great House liaisons. As a result he comes off as possibly the most likable of all the liaisons, even more so than Force Commander Singh.
• Gamebreaker: Thanks to the ballistic/missile weapon damage buffs in terms of damage scaling, Auto-Cannons and SRM and LRM launchers are amazingly effective. AC/2 guns, despite being the smallest calibre of Auto-Cannon, hits as hard as a Medium Laser, and AC/5 is just 5 points shy of PPC damage, and both of them are very nearly just as accurate (barring recoil penalties) and do incredible damage per shot (AC/10 does 60 damage, and AC/20 does 100 damage but is short-ranged and has only 8 shots per ton). SRM missiles hit for 8 damage each, while LRM missiles hit for 4 each, and their launchers fire multiple warheads per volley, so SRM-6 launchers do up to 48 damage total (just 2 damage shy of matching a PPC shot if all missiles connected with a single body part) and LRM-20 launchers do up to 80 damage total per volley (Hitting harder than AC/10 shots on average), and all of them produce less heat than Large Lasers (40 damage for 30 heat) and PPCs (50 damage for 40 heat). A LRM boat-style mech configuration throwing dozens of missiles in a single volley can easily sandblast enemies and stack so much stability damage that knockdown-based pilot kills are highly viable, and the sheer volume of hits makes them likely to score crits once you sandblast off the target's armor.
  • Where they get really crazy is in the rare upgraded variants; high-end SRM models gain +4 damage, a 50% increase. Any mech with 3-4 missile hardpoints can put out upwards of 200-250 damage (plus 90-120 stability damage; 'Mechs fall over at 100 instability) in a full volley with such launchers. Only the heaviest Assaults like Victoria's King Crab or Kamea's vintage SLDF-era Atlas II can really hope to withstand that kind of firepower more than once or twice. For raw power, a Kintaro can mount five SRM-6++ launchers and hit an Alpha Strike potential of 360, while a Stalker has the tonnage to carry 4 LRM-20++ launchers for a truly impressive alpha strike potential of 480.
  • The whole shebang was turned up to eleven when the Heavy Metal DLC introduced LB-X autocannons, Ultra Autocannons and the 100-ton Annihilator 'Mech with its five ballistic hardpoints and copious spare tonnage. LB-X ACs deal even more stability damage than LRMs with much better ammo and heat efficiency. Ultra ACs are basically two normal autocannons of the same caliber for the price of one weapon hardpoint. An LB-5X++^note which deals up to 60 stability damage apiece Annihilator can keep entire enemy lances unsteady or knocked down almost continuously from up to 540 meters away, while a UAC/5++-wielding Annihilator can one-shot anything up to Atlas 'Mechs over the same distance^note with a total damage rating of 450 for the cannons alone, and 520 or more if you bolt on some Medium Lasers for emergencies. Both designs can be built to be heat-neutral and carrying near maximum armor plus a targeting computer and even an ECM suite. Sure, they're as slow as a glacier, but with such withering long-range firepower, who needs to move quickly?
  • Speaking of the Urban Warfare-exclusive ECM suite: this humble little system makes anything friendly in a decent radius immune to indirect fire and impossible to target with any weapon unless they attack/sensor lock an enemy, an enemy uses Sensor Lock on them, the enemy launches an Active Probe (which AI 'Mechs never carry) or enters the stealth field. That alone is incredibly powerful when used right, but it's the upgrade's A.I. Breaker effect that breaks the difficulty in half. Due to the targeting restrictions mentioned above, the AI either wastes its turns sensor-locking your ECM carrier 'Mech to no effect, or it charges its 'Mechs full throttle into your ECM radius. All you have to do is field two to three long-range assaults that keep pounding the approaching enemy to dust, and a close-range assaults that mops up anything that makes it this far. If you field a lance of three Annihilators and a UAC/20-wielding King Crab and equip any one of them with an ECM suite, you basically got an "I win" card on your hand for any mission that doesn't require mobility.
  • Called Shot Mastery, the level 9 tactics ability, immensely boosts your ability to take called shots. Hitting the center torso from the front goes from 33% to around 82%, legs go from around 14% to 68%, and headshots go from 2% to 18%, letting your crew reliably kneecap or One-Hit Kill enemy 'mechs with a single alpha strike. The nerfs to the morale system and stability damage reduced how often you could take advantage of it, but it is still an extremely powerful ability for certain Alpha Strike builds.
  • The 1.8 patch made Called Shot Mastery more ridiculous by introducing the Marauder heavy 'mech, which grants a bonus to Called Shots. A Marauder pilot with Called Shot Mastery has a 35% chance of a headshot, and as a 75-ton heavy 'mech the Marauder can wield several headchoppers at the same time (AC/20, PPC++ or AC/10++). Even in a stock build, a Marauder pilot with Called Shot Mastery can set up a merc commander with salvage for life.
  • Stability damage isn't a Gamebreaker on its own. But 'Mechs that designed to take advantage of it can be. Any time a 'Mech is knocked down, the pilot takes damage, and if the pilot takes enough damage, they die and you can get full salvage of their 'Mech (pilots also take damage from head shots, left and right torso explosions, and ammo explosions). Any 'Mech that specializes in throwing a ton of missiles at an enemy will inflict a lot of stability damage, making the Trebuchet one of the most valuable early 'Mechs, and the Catapult (especially the C4 variant, which is actually anachronistic) one of the most sought after. Mounting them with LRM racks that inflict extra stability damage without increasing actual damage makes them 'Mech Scavengers: just pick the enemy mech that you want and pummel it with missiles (and maybe a punch or two) to knock it down and get full salvage. There's still some luck involved (you can still core out a 'Mech by accident, and ammo explosions can rip through a 'Mech's core without warning, especially since missiles have the second highest crit rating in the game), but for the most part, LRM boat 'Mechs are the best way to build up your arsenal.
  • The Highlander Mech acquired roughly halfway through the story is considered Purposefully Overpowered and with good reason. In addition to + and ++ weaponry by default, it comes equipped with a Gauss Rifle. With a good enough called shot, the Highlander can potentially one shot other assault mechs (and with the Gauss Rifle being an Armor-Piercing Attack, can destroy enemy Thunderbolts in one shot to the torso, as they store ammunition there). It also has good armour and mounts jump jets by default. The game's difficulty decreases significantly once this mech is acquired. The only real downsides are that, in the base game at least, a destroyed Gauss Rifle is LosTech and, thus, next to impossible to replace, and that like all Highlander variants, it has rather low movement range.
  • With the release of the Heavy Metal DLC, the standard game difficulty in the campaign has been shattered by the Black Market. Provided you don't offend the pirates too much and can scrape up some C-Bills by farming quests, you can rack up enormous amounts of high-end Mechs and very powerful weapons and equipment that were nearly impossible to find in the base game very quickly. Bringing SLDF mechs and lostech weapons to early campaign missions makes it staggeringly easy to win.
• Goddamned Bats: SRM and LRM Missile Carriers- they don't necessarily do a lot of damage on their own, but they can quickly stagger a 'mech through a Macross Missile Massacre to the point of knockdown, which renders them sitting ducks for further attacks. Plus the damage from each missile is randomly applied across the entire 'Mech, so if even one missile hits the 'Mech's head, your pilot will suffer an injury.
  • Some light mechs, most notably the Panther and Jenner with PPC, LRM variants of Locust, and of course the Firestarter. The Jenner JR7-D is practically designed to be this, with its high speed, high initiative, cardboard armor, minimal heat sinking, and powerful alpha strike that does as much damage as an AC/20.
  • The Armoured HQ and Swift Wind Scout vehicles both carry ECM systems and are either well-armoured (the former) or incredibly fast-moving (the latter). While their offensive abilities are nonexistent, they show up as convoy targets you have to destroy during 'Ambush Convoy' missions. Due to their ECM they require you to either Sensor Lock/Active Probe them (wasting one of your precious activations) or get into melee range (putting your 'mech at risk), and catching up to the latter is nigh-impossible for any 'mech slower than a Jenner.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Amusingly, if you have sufficiently strong Leg Servos that decrease the self-damaging recoil of Death From Above attacks, it actually repairs your mech's legs if the self damage is reduced to a negative sum.
  • Occasionally enemy units spawn outside the map. When this happens the enemy AI becomes completely confused and will refuse to move those units anywhere leaving them sitting ducks.
  • Assassination missions will sometimes spawn a Demolisher tank for the target instead of a 'Mech, due to a programming oversight that selects the target based on tonnage without regard to the actual vehicle type (see Memetic Mutation). No question, Demolishers are mean, but can still be easily killed if one of your 'Mechs can get close enough to Goomba Stomp it.
  • It has since been removed as of patch 1.9, but turning on Mech Destruction in the pre-game options and deliberately getting your own Mechs cored and your pilots killed allowed you to salvage the hard-wired unique bonus equipment in certain mechs. This allowed you to place them in other mechs, leading to some utter Game-Breaker builds, such as an Assault mech that can't be hit after being equipped with the evasion-boosting gear from a Flea, an Awesome with the bonus to energy weapon damage of a Warhammer and the called shot bonus of a Marauder, or a Royal Crab with the Phoenix Hawk's enhanced jump jets.
• Heartwarming Moments: The Heavy Metal Flashpoint chain that begins with "Of Unknown Origin" is a long and grueling experience that turns out completely different from what anyone expected. That includes Shugo Yamaguchi, your hedonistic Kurita merc liaison and one of the few decent people in the game. Once the dust has settled, the whole affair leaves him so shaken that he invites your command crew over to his ship for some drinks and relaxation because, as he puts it, they're the closest thing to friends that he has this far out in the Periphery. Given the vast social gap between him and your company, that's really touching.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Bulwark was considered bad at launch because its effects (gain 50% damage resistance if you stand still) was generally considered too powerful for how little investment it needed and made the entire mobility tree somewhat obsolete. This was especially in the late-game where the benefits of moving (evasive pips) were generally useless anyway because assault 'mechs are slow and all pilots have high gunnery, leading to a gameplay meta of immobile gunnery platforms standing still and trading shots with each other. It also made the level 8 gunnery ability, Breaching Shot, near mandatory in order to counter it. The skill was eventually re-designed for this reason, and now gives a flat 20% bonus to defense if you brace (for 40% damage reduction total) and lets you combine cover, brace and Bulwark for a maximum damage reduction of 60% (which is where Breaching Shot starts to become incredibly useful), while also activating even if you move, discouraging stop-and-shoot tactics.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • At launch, light 'mechs in single player. All their advantages of high speed and initiative were made irrelevant beyond early game as they died too quickly to any decently armed enemy mech, and the Evade mechanic that is supposed to favor light 'mechs was not enough to compensate for the eventuality that they would get hit by something, often leaving them half dead. This was eventually fixed in later expansions, where skill trees were reworked and more options favoring light 'mechs were added.
  • Due to the game both being set pre-Fourth Succession War (locking out important modernization options found later in the timeline) and how it handles combat mechanics, certain mechs that were already considered subpar for their weight class due to a focus on speed and melee combat are laughably bad, with the stupidly expensive Banshee taking top billing due to its speed and armor being near useless thanks to a combination of enemies usually outnumbering you 2:1 or more late game and stability damage - in conjunction, it lets nearly every enemy on the map knock it to the ground and kick it before you get to stand it back up, unless you play it like a 95 ton scout mech, which requires using up even more of its precious little available tonnage on jump jets.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Dekker, the pilot who seems to get killed the most often either due to coring or getting headchopped. This is partially due to him tending to end up the Light Mech pilot in your lance, meaning that he is more vulnerable to combat damage, and it certainly doesn't help that In-Universe he was once nearly killed while piloting a Locust and only Mastiff's intervention saved him from a pirate about to curbstomp his cockpit. He also seems to have a disproportionally high chance to trigger negative outcomes in most events he stars in, leading to players just firing him out of frustration or annoyance if they can afford to. Either way he'll probably leave your employ rather sooner than later. This was noticed by Harebrained Schemes, who added a secret achievement in 1.3 for finishing the campaign with him still alive and in your employ.
  • Darius is considered incompetent at intelligence gathering, usually because of how the skull rating of missions fails to take into account how certain map and/or 'Mech compositions can make even low tonnage opponents in lower skull ratings incredibly frustrating to fight against. Then there are the missions where the twist is fully intended, with Darius Tempting Fate by expressing how the Commander should have little difficulty before the start of certain missions and only warning your lance about him spotting enemies after they have already fired on you. Some fans have concluded that he's trying to get you killed, as nobody could be that incompetent by accident.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • An ever-growing pool of jokes about Assassination missions describing a heavily-armed and decorated mech as the target, only for it to actually be a Demolisher tank, are making the rounds. This is due to an oversight in the target definition files, which use a tag system; it states the target must be a mech and of a certain weight class but it doesn't specifically exclude anything with the tracked, wheeled, or vehicle tags. Computers are only as smart as you tell them to be, unfortunately.
  • "Dekker's dead." For reference, Dekker is the pilot of you starting Spider 'Mech, a Fragile Speedster that, because new players aren't great at using light 'Mechs very well, frequently gets shot and wounded early on. Since the AI focuses on damaged 'Mechs, that means that once Dekker's Spider gets damaged, everyone dogpiles on it and often kills him.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The Espinosa family not only committed atrocities during their creation of the Aurigan Directorate, including the murder of Mastiff and countless dissidents in the Icebox, but by orchestrating the Perdition Massacre they quickly make themselves into utter pariahs on a combined Periphery and Inner Sphere-wide scale when the truth is revealed.
  • Samuel Ostergaard crosses the line when he shows that he will quite cheerfully commit war crimes and massacre civilians in order to sate his desire for vengeance on Kamea for authorizing the death of his son; even Calderon agrees that should they manage to arrest him, he would be executed for his deeds, and it is clear during the liberation of Coromodir itself that at some point off-screen the crew of his Dropship clearly had a mutiny against him due to his actions.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Although it probably uses the same sound file as any other 'Mech component destruction, the resounding crack of an enemy 'Mech's cockpit exploding is always a very satisfying thing to hear for any number of reasons, but especially when it's the only section to go up in flames.
• Nintendo Hard: Like X-COM, you probably shouldn't get too attached to your MechWarriors. They'll often scrape through with injuries rather than deaths, but the game isn't shy about punishing mistakes, and there's always a chance for an unlucky crit. Similarly, you'll have to take a certain amount of care not to get critted once you start fielding more valuable weapons, as they might be difficult to replace.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Hits on a mech's head, whether damaging to the cockpit or not, will cause an injury to the mechwarrior inside, and each shot that hits has a small chance of hitting the head. The problem is that the chance applies to each individual hit: While an Obvious Rule Patch prevented LRM racks from doing this (limiting it to one chance for a head hit per rack), every other multi-shot weapon (like machine guns and SRM racks) still get multiple chances to hit. The result is that any time you face an opponent lots of SRM racks like the SRM carrier, you can expect at least one of your pilots receiving a wound, regardless of actual damage your mechs receive. This can be mitigated later in the game by using a part that allows pilots to ignore 1-3 such wounds.
  • The reinforcement system in multi-lance battles. Reinforcements are triggered by an enemy lance taking sufficient damage or by the player's lance advancing to a certain point in the battle map. When reinforcements arrive, they are immediately given a full round worth of actions, provided their initiative pass hasn't happened yet, and share line-of-sight with existing units on the map. Since movement or damaging an enemy 'mech usually happens at the end of a 'mech's turn, this means said 'mech can arbitrarily and suddenly trigger an entire extra lance's worth of LRM or PPC fire coming in from an area of the map you have no vision of yourself, which is especially bad in the lategame where practically all 'mechs are assaults and your last activation suddenly doubles the enemy lance size. Also, Darius will usually only chime in with "I've got eyes on enemy reinforcements" after the first barrage has hit home.
  • The entire alliance mechanic swung into this. Most players won't bother to ally with any particular faction as it locks in many if not most other factions as enemies, which severely cuts down on the available contracts. The faction stores are underwhelming compared to the Black Market, making it hardly worth the effort to officially ally with any faction beyond unlocking the respective achievement.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Some players opt to 'forgo' the ease of instantly readying salvaged mechs by immediately storing them so that it would take time to refit them properly. Others ignore the black market or the store entirely in favor of making do with battlefield salvage only.
  • Can also be done more "officially" by adjusting numerous setting during campaign setup. Only two options (Ironman Mode and the number of 'Mech parts required for puzzling together a new 'Mech) are necessary to unlock achievements. Anything else falls under this trope.
• Shrug of God: A lot of things in the story are deliberately left ambiguous.
  • Was the player character ever loyal to the Arano cause? Or were they simply desperate for cashflow?
  • Was Karosas' intel correct and Newgrange actually a gun runner, or a refugee transport like the captain claimed? You only have the word of a marginally trustworthy character to back up either. Having a member of the Taurian military commanding it indicates it was used for arming the Directorate, but no definitive answer is given either way.
  • The Espinosas. Well Intentioned Extremists or Complete Monsters? It all depends on how much you buy into their rhetoric.
  • On the flipside of that: Tamati Arano. The Good King who cut back on military spending to avoid provoking his neighbors, and wisely invested the money in social programs to improve lives? Or a weak leader who ignored looming military threats and opportunities to secure his borders in favor of buying appeasement from neighbors and subjects alike? And relatedly, was his interest in the Argo part of all this? Or was he simply chasing LosTech fantasies while neglecting other aspects of his realm?
• That One Achievement:
  • Single-player: "You Can't Kill Me", for depending entirely on dumb luck. One of your 'Mechs must survive being headshotted, knocked down and overheated in the same mission. Unless you're extremely lucky in campaign or career mode, prepare to grind a lot of rigged skirmish matches to facilitate this situation.
  • Multiplayer: "Eck's Gon' Give It to Ya" can only be gained by defeating programmer Chris Eck or another player who's earned this achievement. Chris was the champion of an in-house tournament at HBS shortly before the game's release.
  • All multiplayer achievements, actually, for the simple reason that nobody plays multiplayer. The highest global completion percentage multiplayer achievement on Steam ("Good Start", for winning your first multiplayer match) is still only at 2.3%, while the achievement for having played even 5 matches, win or lose, ("Rookie") drops to 0.7%. By the time you've even got as far as "Champion in the Making" (25 wins) you're in the 0.1% range which is as low as stat tracking goes, so the number of players worldwide with "Legendary MechCommander" (100 wins) would be inconceivably low.
• That One Level: Liberation: Smithon. You face off against two full mech lances (ranging from light to heavy mechs) and 4 turrets backing them up, all of which will be within range of your mechs by about round 3 or 4 of combat. Essentially, the enemy will get three rounds of combat to your one until you start picking them off, so be prepared for long, long periods of just hearing your mechwarriors complain that they're getting shot. Oh, and the enemy has *tons* of missile and autocannon units, so be ready for casualties. You can blow up ammo crates to heavily damage enemies around them, but lighting off more than two decreases the reward you get at the end of the mission. And on top of that there is another secondary objective to destroy two fleeing trucks, one of them activating very soon after the start of mission which forces the player either to field fast light mechs that are already too fragile at this point of the game, or rush at least one heavier mech to it, also bringing the mech at the line of sight of the enemy much sooner.
  • You will learn to hate that planet, especially during the second mission there; Defense: Smithon. The above scenario? Reverse it - except you're still outnumbered. You have to fight ten enemies ranging from light to assault mechs, and they are attacking dropships evacuating the planet's civilian population — unless you let them wail on you instead.
    Enemy Commander: I take no pleasure in this, Lady Arano, but we're under orders. You can end this by surrendering to Commodore Ostergaard. Until you do, your people will suffer for you.
  • The Marik Alliance flashpoint. Your first mission involves dropping a light-medium lance against a base with heavy turrets and two lances of heavy 'mechs, with the evac point right next to the base. After that comes a consecutive deployment with the same tonnage restriction - which means depending on how much of a beating you took destroying the base, you might not even have enough 'mechs to complete the mission - in which you destroy a convoy with an escort again comprised of heavy and assault 'mechs...with the evac point right where the convoy started, meaning you must push your way past them if you want to get out alive. Fortunately you have the option of lifting the tonnage restriction after that, and the recovery mission that follows isn't that bad. But it leads into another consecutive deployment, a target acquisition mission in which you face up to five lances at once, one of which is from House Kurita, meaning the OpFor essentially gets another turn to shoot at you. The Alliance flashpoints all tend towards the difficult side, but the Marik flashpoint is positively grueling.
• That One Sidequest: Two, actually, as far as the randomly generated contracts are concerned - the always unpopular Escort Mission, and the Target Acquisition missions. The former sucks because enemies always go straight for the convoy you must protect, and although the vehicles can shoot back, their resilience is absolutely no match for the level of firepower arrayed against them. It's depressingly common to lose half the convoy or more in a single turn if you didn't manage to aggro all hostile mechs on your lance immediately. Target Acquisition is a pain in the behind because it's a Timed Mission against overwhelming opposition, leaving you the choice between going in with fast 'Mechs and get hammered, or going in with assault 'Mechs that can take the beating but have a hard time even reaching the target zones before the timer runs out. You can often call in a supporting lance from your employer in these missions, but even they don't help that much when the hostile 'Mechs stubbornly ignore them to stomp your lance flat instead.
  • It's possible that you can get an early Ambush Convoy mission with four factors working against you: first, the convoy starts on one corner of the map and is trying to get to the closest other corner of the map, and it's all on the far side of the map from you; second, the convoy is all equipped with LRM attacks, which means once you engage the escorts, the convoy will continue running to their destination, while also pelting you with missiles that you can't do anything about; third, the enemy 'Mechs all have +1 initiative bonus, and since it's early in the game and they're all light 'Mechs, they're all moving before any of your 'Mechs, and they will pummel you; and fourth, one of the convoy vehicles has an ECM, forcing you to put one of your 'mechs on Sensor Locking duty or to run down the Convoy. Even if you manage to take out the escorts, chances are the convoy will be too far away to catch before they manage to escape. And given the way that missions are created, this type of mission is almost guaranteed to show up within the first few days of a new Career mode playthrough, looking like an innocent Ambush Convoy mission with a 1 skull rating and a below-average payout.
  • Base Defence Missions, especially once you pass a certain weight, become almost unwinnable on certain maps. The heavy number of LRM weaponry combined with having to battle three lances that scale in offensive firepower much faster than the buildings you're defending scale in hit points means it's all but inevitable you'll lose your buildings before you're able to respond to the reinforcement lances. Note that this is heavily map dependent, as the different defense maps have different layouts and time the reinforcements differently (some drop lance 2 and 3 simultaneously and on on opposite sides of the base in full view of it, others drop them sequentually and lance 3 so far away they're unable to start attacking for several rounds).
  • Convoy Escort missions have a good chance of one of the convoy vehicles going off-course, getting stuck and permanently flagged as 'non-escorted', meaning it will refuse to move for the rest of the mission. At that point your only option is to restart the game, Withdraw, or pray the AI decides to destroy the vehicle without touching the rest of the convoy or your lance. Recent patches have set the convoy escort missions to auto-complete if you wipe out all the enemy forces, presumably to address this specific issue.
• The Woobie: The "Of Unknown Origin" flashpoint gives us Moderbjorn, a Star League era limited AI tasked with disaster response, that has been trying to look after the city of New Vulci and await help after its nuclear accident. But since they're calling to the Star League for help, nobody is answering and help will never come. Despite this, Moderbjorn still tries to help people, and is responsible for guiding the Dobrev to the system upon detecting it. By the end of the flashpoint they have recognised that their attempt to save anything from New Vulci has failed, and have to report to Star League, the only available remnant of which is a broken ship they can't even find any more and asks the crew to dissassemble the station they live in so their memory core can be moved to help with the search for the Dobrev.
• Ugly Cute: The always-popular UrbanMech lost nothing of its strangely endearing ugliness in its transition from the tabletop, despite looking more than ever before like the "walking trashcan" Yang describes. The folks at HBS seem to agree and added a bunch of achievements plus an entire Flashpoint that revolve solely around Urbies.

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