General
- Pilot incapacitation does not necessarily mean death. They may survive the fight with heavy injuries; higher Guts skill increases this chance.
- Hit locations are heavily dependent on facing. Rotate your torso to expose heavily armored or lesser damaged sides. A valid tactic is to heavily armor an empty side of your mech to use as a "shield".
- Melee attacks and Death from Above (DfA) will fire all of your support weapons as well as causing heavy damage to a single hit location. Note that DfA can severely damage your own legs, and causes a hefty chunk of stability damage.
- Melee attacks ignore evasion pips, making them useful against annoying light mechs trying to run circles around you.
- Vehicles and turrets take double damage from melee and DfA. Stomp those tanks!
- Turrets are often (but not always) connected to a generator; take the generator out to disable multiple turrets at once.
- Autocannons suffer recoil penalties to their hit rolls if fired in consecutive turns. This penalty is not cumulative.
- The morale skill Vigilance can be used before moving, and does not take up an action for a mech's turn.
- Brace a mech that is at high stability damage! Enemies will relentlessly called shot your knocked down mechs.
- Hover over a location on a mech's paper doll to see the components in that location. Useful for finding ammo reserves to blow up, or weapons to destroy.
- Do not be afraid to withdraw from a tough fight that isn't worth the losses you'll take. If you can manage to accomplish one goal of the mission before withdrawing, the client will count it as "in good faith", and award you partial pay.
- Destroyed mechs leave salvage for you to collect after the mission; it takes 3 pieces to build a full mech. Destroying the head or killing the pilot will leave 3 parts. Destroying both legs will leave 2, and coring a mech (destroying the center torso) leaves 1. Be sure to negotiate for enough salvage if you are trying to obtain full mechs from a mission.
- It may be better to eject a pilot and be down a man than lose the pilot permanently. This will destroy the head of said mech, but save the pilot (and the mech). The eject button is a small red square on the bottom left of the screen, in the mech readout window.
- When refitting mechs, Yang will perform every action you take, in the order you take it, including shifting things around to make them fit. For instance, if you click "max armor" to see how much you can fit, then strip it to keep fitting things, he will apply all the armor and then remove it all when you finalize. This sucks up money and time; figure out what you want to do, cancel the refit, and then do it all with the exact movements and changes you need.
- Components will not appear as salvage if they are destroyed during the fight. If you want the AC/20 on that Hunchback, but he is doing work on you with it, blow out his ammo rather than the gun itself.
- Enemy targets will focus fire on whatever attacked them for 2 turns after the fact. Use this to protect priority targets and attract fire to your heavier armored units.
- You can stand in place and change facing by clicking on yourself with a move action. Changing facing in this way counts as remaining stationary as far as the Bulwark skill is concerned.
- Spiking heat, or maintaining it, above the "overheat threshold" causes structure damage to every location of your mech, ignoring armor. Maxing it out causes a shutdown; called shots can be made against a shutdown mech, and it takes their entire next turn to restart. Restarting clears all their heat though!
Suggested Tweaks
- Turn on "Show UI during attack" in the Settings. This will show the target's paper doll when attacked, and will flash the locations being hit.
- The game suffers from extended pauses during all attacks, which can severely drag out the already slower paced combat. These pauses are in place to make sure audio clips play properly ("I'm hit!", "Enemy mech down!"), but there is a way to eliminate these pauses and smooth combat out. This change is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
– Go to:
Steam folder\steamapps\common\BATTLETECH\BattleTech_Data\StreamingAssets\data\constants
– Change the following lines in “audioconstants.json” so that they look like this:
“AttackPreFireDuration” : 0,
“AttackAfterFireDelay” : 0,
“AttackAfterFireDuration” : 0,
“AttackAfterCompletionDuration” : 0
“audioFadeDuration” : 0,