Let our bloody colours wave

 What is the best Battletech system and why is it Alpha Strike on a hexmap?

The best interpretation of Battletech is that it is not a game but an amalgam of different mechanics that may be mushed together in different shapes as though they are play-dough.

Don't like the initiative system? Switch to the cards.

What a little bit more freedom from the hexmap? Use the open field and terrain rules.

Even the emblematic weapons phase of classic Battletech can be swapped out for Alpha Strike's without changing anything much else about the game.  There are just so many systems to place on top of each other. Some of them are irredeemably broken, but some of them are fun as hell in the right context.

But what if I told you that there was a best combination of rules?  You could still change it up if it got stale.  But still, a certified best ruleset.

Friends, I am here to tell you that that combination exists and it is, clearly, Alpha Strike on a hexmap.

And there is only one point I have to make to prove it:  eyeballs.

Alpha Strike on the hexmap lets you just use your eyeballs for pretty much everything.  Not sure how far to move?  Don't get out your tape measure, just quickly count the hexes. Not sure which range bracket you are in? Just look at the hexmap.  Is it more than 3 and less than 13 hexes? BOOM! Medium range.

And, with some elbow grease you can speed up the line of sight rules to just your eyeballs too!  I found 3d printable hexes and had my brother 3d print a bunch of them for me. Now for Line-of-Sight I just use the rules from regular Alpha Strike (getting behind my miniature and seeing if it can view its target).  No fuss.

Its a combination of rules that makes the game so fast you wonder if it will achieve liftoff.[1]

More Systems

Battletech is a nexus of rule systems, and that means that we can start from the base I described above and build on it.

The first thing we can do is inject a little bit of uniqueness into the mechs you field, effectively countering the more abstract nature of Alpha Strike.  For that I recommend using the design quirks in Alpha Strike Companion.  Possibly with SPA/SCAs if it's not too hard to track.

Once you are dealing with hexes, the regular TMM rules sort of break suspension of disbelief.  It seems kind of cheap if you can move a single hex, go hull-down and get the full benefit of your TMM.  This is further compounded if any of your mechs has the low profile/narrow quirk and has partial cover.  So using the variable TMM rules is important as well.

I have other systems I'd like to try as well.  There are advanced maintenance, rearm and repair rules in Alpha Strike Companion, and this whole pop-up blog is probably leading up to an Abstract Combat System match.  So maybe watch for those in the future.

What was it like?

I have only ever played Battletech/Alpha Strike by twisting someone's elbow into it.  Mostly my wife's. Regular Battletech didn't work for us.  It just took too long. I even incorporated some of the usual "hacks" to speed the game up.  None of those worked for us, and that is when we tried Alpha Strike. My wife--I don't want to say she liked it--but I think she enjoyed playing with me.  About once a year, an Alpha Strike match is usually something we would do when we didn't have the kids for a weekend.  Then for my birthday we tried the basic Planetary Invasion Chaos Campaign outlined in Alpha Strike.

My wife is the smartest person I know.  She won the campaign.  She wins everything we play.  I never stood a chance.  And she's lukewarm on playing at best.  I'm probably not the average wargaming type (see my very first post for more on why), I'm absolutely not good at them (or most games, really).  I am so grateful to have someone who will indulge me, even as I make boneheaded decisions the whole time.

I will write more about this next time, but a month after we tried that Chaos Campaign my wife was diagnosed with cancer.

Scale and blandness

There is another way the Battletech systems overlaps.  There are different levels of scale.  From the individual units of Classic Battletech all the way up to Inner Sphere At War. So it seems only fitting that we discuss commodification as our cultural touchstone for this post.  Investopedia describes commodification as "taking something that previously was not available in the market and making it so, for instance the commoditization of the food chain has brought many more foods to the market, but has left small producers behind in favor large, low-cost producers."  More than that, commodification "often removes the individual, unique characteristics, and brand identity of the product so that it becomes interchangeable with other products of the same type."

It should be abundantly clear that Battletech is not a commodity.  Table-top gaming on the whole seems to resist commodification, outside of maybe some of the genre tropes that sci-fi and fantasy games employ. But there are some really good examples of commodification both in the battletech rules and in the battletech universe itself.

I recently had the in-universe discussion about commodification done for me.  Tex made an entire video about the commodification, without naming it, of the Battlemech in his recent Warhammer video.  The gist of it is that the Warhammer's focus on being "good enough" is what allowed it to succeed and proliferate as a weapons platform.

The example I have from the ruleset is in the Tukkayid Supplemental.  On page 25 the Supplemental gives rules for constructing a Comstar formation according the Strategic Battleforce rules.[2]  Notice how they abstract away most of the particularity of Comstar's unique military structure.  

"ComStar does not actually use this organizational scheme, but it is used here to meet the Strategic BattleForce standards for a Formation size and how many Units can deploy in an area. Three of these ComStar Strategic BattleForce Formations (IIIa, IIIb, IIIc) together make up a single Level III."

So in order to make Comstar "fit" into Strategic Battleforce, they must be shoved into company style units.  More than that, the Level IIs all have their units homogenized, instead of being a mix of different until types.  This is evident in the example divisions given in the appendix of the Supplemental.

This abstraction is probably necessary to make larger scale combat work.  And this is the catch-22 of commodification.  You make things more homogenous or they don't work.

Its not much, but my other hobby is canning.  Making jams, jellies, and the like.  When I do this, I am careful with the produce I use.  I am not skilled enough to make my own recipes, but I am incredibly choosy with the ones I make.  Perhaps, a little bit of balance is--ironically--the salve for culture that depends somewhat on homogeneity.

Next time, we wrap up our preamble to Luzerne!  Hope to see you then.

[1] Also, there is no need to have a bunch of terrain
[2] Strategic Battleforce represents companies as a single unit on the game board, at a higher time/space scale than Classic Battletech