Episode: 2608
Title: HPR2608: BattleTech
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2608/hpr2608.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:29:30

---

This is HPR Episode 268 entitled Battle Tech and is part of the series Tabletop Gaming.
It is hosted by Tutoto and is about 18 minutes long and Karima Clean Flag.
The summary is quick introduction to Battle Tech Tabletop Game by Tutoto.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at an honesthost.com.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hackup of the Credio and your host Tutoto and today's episode is about...
Battle Tech is a 4-game tabletop game from the 80s.
You may know the franchise from the such games as the Battle Tech computer game that was released just recently and somewhat
older series called McVarrier, but this is the way it all started.
It's a game about big zombie robots fighting each other.
As it's a from the 80s, the game itself is pretty complex.
The tables open, tables open, tables and there seems to be more rules than you can take this together.
The game is clicked in various books and if you get over 10,000 pages over 200,000 pages.
But luckily you don't need all of those and I started the game with a free PDF leaflet.
That was a really pocket-sized.
The game is played on a hex map with miniatures, but only the hex map is important.
You don't have to have a size of miniatures you can play with counters or even photo caps or...
Basically anything that fits in the hex and can tell you what direction it is looking at.
The game has a rich law, it's over 30 years old.
It has a backstory that has been evolving all the time and it still keeps going.
There's a continuous story behind everything.
As I said, it's about big zombie robots, but while they are the focus, there's also all kinds of vehicles.
Fibs, fighters, tropics, civilian and military things.
Infantry and protomex, smaller mechs and battle armors that are just the power, suits of armor.
And what I like the game is that everything is built by the same rules. There's no gimmicky super units.
There's a fairly complex set of rules that actually come in a different book if you want to have those.
That tell you how to build units.
It's a component test system, so you take a...
There are cusses, susses and then you start in a motor and arm and weapons and sensors and life support and lot not you need.
That means that while it's possible to build a fully cool unit, or all units are covered with the same rules.
So there's a few features and there's somebody comes with a super unit saying that this is my favorite unit and that's why it's super cool, good and that's why it has these stats.
There's a reason behind the stats and that reason behind the stats or for each unit is the same.
It's pretty slow, game devlies, game play wise and there's a lot of records keeping.
Like I said, there's tons of tables and sometimes there comes a special case when you don't come up that often and you start living through the book.
And finding that okay, this rule applies here and this rule applies here and this rule applies here.
The rules in the main core book, total warfare, are pretty well-based and really that much of confusion.
They are very well laid out, they have always a good example in the books that coaches are in the book and some backward back stories there too.
But mistakes do happen, have happened.
So there's a erata online that fixes different kinds of mistakes that have been discovered between different editions of a rule books.
Like I said, there's a lot of record keeping, basically for example for every neck, neck, those big stuffed robots that meet the toll of the thousand tons.
For each neck, there's a 1A4 paper, so there's a 1A4 paper for each of those.
Usually in the game that we played, we had a from 2 to 6 on the side, on the side.
But I really loved how complex the game can be and how cool moments they can be like.
In one game, I had a neck that was running full speed on a pavement, a meter, and a meter tights during.
And at that point, the pilot was guiding the robot inside, didn't manage to keep the robot upright.
So it slipped full-down two times.
And because it was moving so fast, it started skidding on the pavement, grinding the metal against the pavement, getting more damage hit to the into a small building.
Went through from one wall, the building collapsed on top of the neck and the neck continued through the another wall and ended up on the other side of the wall.
Now, through the building, the fourth neck was pretty damaged after that.
And most of the units, well not most, some of the units, but the neck basically has to deal with the heat management.
That's another aspect that I find really interesting.
Next, I use it forward with fusion reactors in the game.
It is possible to have an organ of engines in them, but fusion reactors are the most common ones.
And they have a lot of patterns and other equipment and whenever the player is using that stuff, it produces heat.
And the neck has some heatsinks that dissipate the heat, but sooner or later the heat starts building up and the player has to keep track of that.
They actually have to keep track of how much they are producing heat, how much dissipating, how much it's building up over time.
And in the beginning, the effects of the heat are small, they don't affect much, then they start slowly slowing you down, make aiming hard.
And as the heat keeps rising, the more aggressive effects starts coming up, your neck might automatically shut down to prevent more damage.
Or if you are carrying a ammunition that might explode, making a huge mess of your neck, usually ending up, usually ending up in the test section of your neck.
There's some ways of getting around that, but that takes a space and weight that you won't always have.
And the game is pretty sandboxy, there isn't a multi-core book, there's a couple scenarios, there's an example that this is how you play the game.
It's nothing forces you to play that way.
It is possible to play one on one, one player against another player, or four player, two versus two, or four player versus other, or a big game.
The biggest games we have had, I think we had five or six players on our side, at least.
And I wasn't playing in that, I was just referring to that.
And it's possible to play players versus play master, play master.
The pretty much the limitations, that's the limits here.
And nothing forces you to play, fighting, if you rather have some sort of exploration type of game, that is possible.
Those aren't that common though, but the next can have all kinds of interesting equipment like chainsaws or combines for.
If you want to run a combine harvest, the spot welders, food guns, if you want to have a fire brigade mix and stuff like that.
There's a actually a completely separate class called industrial mix.
Battlemacks artists don't report swimming at each other, and industrial mix artists mix that are used in the, well they are basically just extensions of the construction vehicles.
The next logical step for illogical in some cases, but who want to have a big robot helping you lifting stuff when you're constructing a building for example.
And it's fun.
There's plenty of, plenty of expansions for the game.
The core rule book is more than enough, because it has, as I said, it has the robot, it has the vehicles and like wheeled and tracked and.
It has ships and like true, true weather ships fighters that fly in the air and in the space trop ships that are used to transport things from the orbit into the space and from the planet to the orbit and from the orbit through the space.
And civilian and military staff, there's an organ for infantry, problemics, molemics and battle armors.
And if you want to have even more, there's an extension book that I might talk, talk later, that they bring up stuff like battleships and tombships that are used to travel between stars and.
The trains, in one game we had a, that we played, we had a players had stolen an armored train that was laden with a gold and art and we're escaping with that through the desert.
So they have the train and then they have couple of mechs that are escorting that and they are being chased by the hovercraft.
And I think they were some light mechs and some real vehicles, so that's shipping through the, through the desert and at one point they had a really couple kilometer long bridge over canyon and special natural choke point because nobody was going to go around that or down the canyon and back up so they had to come over the tracks.
And in the end they had a property waiting where they wanted to stop and they had to actually plan in that line because it's a big train, heavy train, it doesn't stop, you know, short distance.
So they actually had to think, think ahead and start slowing down early enough so that they could stop where they wanted to stop.
They managed to escape in that game.
And while it's fun to play, fun to play a pick up games or one of games later game really changed to science.
It's a new start playing a campaign, there's a campaign books that you can purchase, there's some campaigns that are online or you can write your own campaign.
You can have, again, pretty free to do what to do.
These rules don't come with the corrupuk, the, the later, later extension of the, some mercenary related books that are somewhat old, that they talk about, they talk about all the stuff that goes outside of the battle field.
If you're running a mercenary company, you have to deal with the logistic accounting, maintenance, budgeting, human resources, health care and stuff like that.
We were running one game for one summer, I think, but it got pretty, pretty complicated, pretty soon and we ended up discarding that game.
But players actually had to think when to hire people to take care of the maintenance and when that time friend was tied what to fix and what to live for the next day.
Because it was fun.
And then there's a really long tax story in the game.
It actually starts from the modern time, they wrote, wrote how they came up with an interstellar travel, how they started colonization to callaxy.
And it's pretty interesting and if you like that stuff, quite a bit of that is available online and then there's, again, more, more extension books that deal with that, some, some are for specific era and some are for specific factions or units.
And they have stuff like they talk about insignia and customs and history and stuff and things like that, what next day preferent, what kind of industry that Arya has and so on.
While the game is about fixed on the robots, it tries to be somewhat realistic.
Like the faster than light travel is possible only with a special ships and those seats are extremely expensive and they spend extremely rare, but other than that it's sort of kind of plausible.
They try to come up with a different kind of reasons why things are like that.
One notable thing is that while they have been colonizing the galaxy, they haven't really encountered any, any intelligent life forms.
The humans are alone in the space.
They have encountered some life forms, but those are really that intelligent and factions are like they isn't clear cut that these are good guys, these are bad guys.
It's pretty much everybody are just finding so violent, doing what they think is best for themself, there's alliances and broken alliances and things like that.
If you are into such things, it's pretty interesting.
And one of the ourselves lost a lot of here.
Right, of attack or realism, this of course are cases that the realism doesn't really work.
For example, Atlas, one of those big hundred tonne mechs is when you do the math, it's actually so light that if you take a step on water, it will float on the surface, water it will sink in.
And later on if you are at some point the battleship side, when you start building pick-and-pick-and-pick-and-pick-and-pickle battleship side at some point, the efficiency of the motors, sort of flips and details, but producing more energy than they are consuming it.
There are funnable cases like that here and there, but most of the time they are really
noticeable and it's a game anyway, it's a game about big robots, so while it's nice to
have some sort of semblance of realism, you have to remember that these things don't
really exist, so there has to be some leeway there.
Because it's the child of the 80s, the future they are building about in the game, it's
the future of the 80s, like the computers are big and bulky and they have funny, funny
devices and that's part of the charm for me, but if you're interested in a temple, temple
of the game, where you can do that with a big robot, this is the fun to look at, just don't
get all the core rule books in one go because that would be pretty expensive and you don't
really need all of those, the solar warfare, the first one is enough to get you started
and keep you playing for a long, long time, but I do recognize that when at least for me
it was when I got the first book, then it was okay, this is really cool, so I want that
another book because it has some extra stuff, I might have to write this out about those books
later on, but that's about it, that's a quick introduction to the battle deck.
If you have any questions or comments, please hit me with an email or even better
record your own episode, I would love totally love to hear about your experiences in the
battle deck if you have played the game, okay, catch you later.
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org. We are a community
podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like
all our shows, was contributed by an HVR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public
Radio was founded by the digital dog pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club and is part
of the binary revolution at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show, please email
the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise status, today's show is released on the create of comments, attribution,
share a light, freedom of license.