Battletech

Campaign tips

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

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

Scrapping is not the same as storing. If you have a sellable mech, first store it then sell it to get ~30% more cbills.

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

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. If you have a lot of stability damage, just knock down the mech and/or destroy side toros to keep it intact. Always negotiate for 3 salvage if possible, you never know when you'll want to reconstruct a rare mech you run into!

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

Feel free 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.

Drop in your heaviest mechs every time. You only need one full lance plus one or two backup mechs to use while one's in the shop, so swap out lighters for heavier as you progress and store/sell extras.

Generally, you want 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. Highly recommend to keep/use: firestarter(mg), hunchback, centurion, kintaro, catapult(ac20), grasshopper, and the overall best mechs in the game are the atlas, highlander and king crab.

For the late-campaign defend-against-APC mission, you can stand in the doorway to prevent the APC getting to the finish line in two turns.

Fitting Tips

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

Remove weak weapons so they mostly fire in the same range and then stay at that range. Take Jumpjets on everything. At least 4. Generally, default mech fits are bad and really weak on armor. Take out those tiny LRMs/ac5s and max front torso armor with the extra tonage. 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.

Tactics

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 so 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 to bulwark, then piloting until you get extra sprint distance, then 4-5 gunnery, 9 tactics, then piloting/guts to taste. You'll never need more than 5 gunnery.

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. You can rotate your mech as your move action without losing brace and side attacks are more likely to hit arms.

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 to both you and your enemy. Use it as a finisher.

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!

Morale is amazing. Use called shots to core mechs in one volley or vigilance (after moving) for a free brace + stability + go earlier next round. Killing an enemy lends you almost enough morale to use an ability, so use them often (but stay above 50 morale for the +1 hit if possible)

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. Note that you can't salvage destroyed weapons so watch your fire if you see something you like!

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,