Epic Battletech

Premise

I have a lot of nostalgia for Battletech, but after playing it again recently I'm reminded how slow it moves. Crossing off armour pips is half the game, and while that level detail is enjoyable, I don't find it as fun as the strategic elements that emerge when you play games with much larger forces.

So I decided to convert the 3025 Battlemechs into Epic. There's no question in my mind that it would be the same game in any way, but I hope to maintain some of the individuality of the mechs even through the translation to the much simpler set of statistics.

Approach

There's a lot of ways to go about the conversion. The approach I took is to consider Battlemechs as approximately the same power as small Imperial titans and super heavy tanks.

Weapons

The first thing I did was convert the weapons. To preserve the familiarity of the original mechs, I've converted the weapons one-for-one into Epic stats. Machine guns, small lasers and flamers, however, only feature in firefights.

Movement

Movement I did very simply: Walk MPs x 5. If a mech has Jump Jets, it gets Jump Pack ability. This makes some battlemechs very maneuverable on the battlefield.

Armour and Damage Capacity

I wanted Battlemechs to have between 1 and 4 DC, depending on their size. At first, I thought this would be purely a function of tonnage, but after experimenting a bit, I realized I wanted something that produced a more faithful representation of each mech's ability to take damage in the original Battletech rules.

In Epic, the survivability of a unit depends on armour and DC, and you can work out the number of (non-macro) hits it takes to destroy a unit using these two values. For example, a 1 DC unit with 4+ armour takes an average of 2 hits to destroy it (the armour saves 50% of the incoming hits).

I worked out the hits-to-kill for various combinations of DC and armour saves. A DC 3 unit with 5+ Reinforced Armour, for example, takes an average of 6.8 hits to kill. (By the way, 4+ RA is nearly twice as good as 5+ RA.)

I gave each 'Mech a toughness score based on its armour and internal structure weight. I then tried to find a DC and armour save that would give it a hits-to-kill proportional to this value.

Some examples:

I've added Thick Rear Armour to mechs which have reinforced armour and which have more than 25% of their armour points allocated to rear torsos.

The critical damage effect depended on the number of critical slots allocated to ammunition. For those with low values, the mech staggers as a Warhound does. For mechs with lots of ammunition, a 'Mech-destroying ammunition explosion ensues.

Firefight Value

In my model, firefight value turns out to be the most complicated stat to calculate. Epic doesn't have a good way to represent Battletech heat. Heat, of course, is one of the more bookkeeping-intensive parts of Battletech, so eliminating the arithmetic is an important part of streamling game play.

The mechs, on the other hand, are balanced in a way that makes heat fairly important. If you ignore heat, the mechs that normally would run hot get a significant advantage. That would violate my intention of preserving the feel of the mechs as much as practical.

In the end, I settled on using Firefight as a way of representing heat. An all-out assault is the time when rate of fire is going to count most, so a penalty to a mech's epic firefight value seems like a reasonable (if gritless) way of representing the fact that overheating mechs have to stop firing periodically.

To calculate a mech's firefight value, I added up the damage a mech would do in an assault-type salvo (discounting weapons like LRMs and small lasers due to minimum or short ranges). I then calculated the corresponding heat (again, discounting so that weapons that aren't useful at short range are fired less often).

In Epic, you roll as many firefight dice as you have DC, so I divided both the salvo firepower and salvo heat by the mech's DC. These per-DC numbers I then fitted across a number of pips: a base firefight values distributed between 1+ and 6+, with a zero- to three-pip penalty for the heat it takes to generate it..

This produces some interesting numbers. The Commando, with its SRMs, winds up with FF 1x3+.

The Mechs

And here's the big chart o' 'Mechs.

All of this crap is Copyright © 2000-2006 Michael Prescott except
the registered trademarks of Games Workshop.