Battletech

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!

Scrap is not the same as store, if you have a sellable mech, store then sell, you'll get more cbills

You can reorder the refit queue. Don't go crazy trying to refit your first mech, refitting takes a long time and time is money. Remove/add a weapon here and there until you have a lull and can afford it.

In the beginning of the game it's really cheap to pay lavish for +2 morale every month, it's a lot more expensive later so build it while you can. Morale is amazing.

There's no reason to not drop the heaviest as possible every time, once you get heavier mechs you'll decomm your lighter, this is normal but a bit sad.

Mechs are assembled from parts and come fully equipped so if you got banged up bad it's probably cheaper just to scrap what you were piloting and use a newly assembled one.

Generally you want to pilot mechs at the top of the weight for their class. Some are better than others, there are steam guides if you are looking for specific good mechs and fits, also tweak weapons so they mostly fire in the same range and then stay at that range. Jumpjets on everything. At least 4.

Generally, their default fits are bad. Really weak on armor. Take out those ac5s and max front torso armor. Armor saves you cbills because it's repaired for free. Front torso armor should be maxed and back generally no less than 50% of the bar. Legs and arms 75% ish. No less than 50% unless the arm is empty and you really really need the tonage.

Don't do too many side missions until you get the argo, unless you really need cbills, consider yourself in the prologue and do story missions if they come up and you have the drop tonnage.

Expert tactics is by far the best skill. Allows you to go twice by delaying your turn to after they've gone, letting you reposition while firing every round and also remain braced. Bulwark is second. By late game you're not going to be able to dodge and agility isn't worth it, bulwark letting you take half damage and also fire back same turn is amazing. If they ever change the guts skill to brace on melee get that for your brawler but otherwise just spec everyone the same, get bulwark then go up the tactics tree

If you're not braced for half damage when the enemy fires at you or at least a lot of evasion, you're doing it wrong. If your first mech is over the hill and charging to medium range, maybe spend morale for that brace after moving so he doesn't get cored on the enemy return stroke! If you have low heat, jump jet in instead of sprinting so you can brace.

Your guys are going to get injured, comically and seemingly every mission from a head hit even if you perform flawlessly. It's a bullshit part of the game. Check market for cockpit mods to ignore a number of hits and you'll need a roster of 7ish to rotate the injured out. Once you get the argo research medbay asap.

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,