BATTLETECH Beginner’s Tips and Tricks

This guide aims to provide valuable tips for beginners in BATTLETECH. The following tips cover various aspects of the game, including the campaign, fitting your mechs, and tactical strategies.

Campaign Tips

  • Prioritize story missions over side missions until you acquire the Argo. If you require C-Bills, consider yourself in the prologue and focus on story missions that match your available drop tonnage.
  • Expect your pilots to sustain injuries frequently, even with flawless performance. Check the market for cockpit mods that can mitigate the impact of head hits. Additionally, maintain a roster of approximately seven pilots to rotate injured ones out. Once you obtain the Argo, prioritize researching the medbay.
  • Differentiate between scrapping and storing mechs. If you possess a sellable mech, store it first, as selling a stored mech yields approximately 30% more C-Bills.
  • In the early stages of the game, it’s cost-effective to pay lavishly for a +2 morale bonus every month. However, as the game progresses, this option becomes significantly more expensive, so take advantage of it while it’s affordable.
  • Destroyed mechs leave salvage pieces that you can collect after the mission. It takes three salvage pieces to assemble a complete mech. Destroying the head or killing the pilot results in three salvage pieces. Destroying both legs leaves two pieces, while coring a mech (destroying the center torso) provides one salvage piece. If a mech has significant stability damage, focus on knocking it down or destroying its side torsos to preserve its intact state. When negotiating, prioritize obtaining three salvage pieces whenever possible, as you may encounter rare mechs that you’ll want to reconstruct later.
  • Mechs assembled from salvage come fully equipped. If your current mech sustains substantial damage, it may be more cost-effective and efficient to scrap it and use a newly assembled mech instead.
  • Don’t hesitate to withdraw from a challenging fight if the potential losses outweigh the benefits. If you manage to achieve one of the mission’s objectives before withdrawing, the client will consider it as acting in good faith and award you partial payment.
  • Deploy your heaviest mechs in each battle. You only need one full lance of mechs plus one or two backup mechs to use while others are undergoing repairs. As you progress, replace lighter mechs with heavier ones and store or sell the excess ones.
  • Generally, aim for mechs at the upper end of the weight range for their class. Some mechs outperform others, and you can find specific recommendations in steam guides. Highly recommended mechs include the firestarter (with machine guns), hunchback, centurion, kintaro, catapult (with AC20), grasshopper, and the top-tier mechs in the game: the atlas, highlander, and king crab.
  • During the late-campaign defend-against-APC mission, you can block the APC’s progress by standing in the doorway, preventing it from reaching the finish line within two turns.

Fitting Tips

  • You can reorder the refit queue, but avoid overly extensive refits for your first mech. Total refits consume significant time, and time is precious early in the game. Make minor adjustments to weapons until you have a suitable opportunity and sufficient funds for a complete refit.
  • Remove weak weapons to concentrate firepower within a specific range bracket. Equip jump jets on all mechs, ideally at least four of them. Default mech loadouts often lack optimal armor distribution, so consider removing small LRMs or AC5s and allocate the extra tonnage to maximize front torso armor. Investing in armor saves C-Bills since repairs are free. Maximize front torso armor and aim for at least 50% on the back torso. Legs and arms should have around 75% armor, unless the arm is empty and you require additional tonnage.

Tactical Tips

  1. The “Tactics” skill is highly valuable, as it enables you to delay your turn and take two consecutive actions after your opponents, allowing you to reposition and fire each round while remaining braced.
  2. “Bulwark” is another useful skill. As the game progresses, evasion becomes less effective, but Bulwark mitigates incoming damage by allowing you to take half damage while firing back in the same turn.
  3. In the late game, consider selecting the “Guts” skill for bracing on melee attacks, making it advantageous for brawler-type mechs. Otherwise, it’s recommended to specialize all pilots similarly, obtaining Bulwark first and then progressing up the Tactics tree to unlock Bulwark II. Next, invest in piloting to acquire extra sprint distance, followed by 4-5 levels of gunnery and 9 levels of tactics. Adjust piloting and guts skills based on personal preference, as more than 5 levels of gunnery are unnecessary.
  4. It is essential to brace for half damage or maintain a high evasion if the enemy is about to attack. If your first mech charges to medium range over a hill, consider spending morale to brace after moving, reducing the risk of severe damage from the enemy’s counterattack. If your mech has low heat, use jump jets instead of sprinting to reach your destination and brace. You can rotate your mech during movement without losing the brace bonus, and attacking from the side increases the likelihood of hitting arms.
  5. Melee attacks and Death from Above (DfA) engage all support weapons and deal significant damage to a single location. However, be cautious, as DfA can cause severe leg damage to your own mech and substantial stability damage to both you and the target. Save melee attacks and DfA for finishing blows.
  6. Melee attacks ignore evasion pips, making them effective against light mechs attempting to evade your attacks.
  7. Vehicles and turrets are vulnerable to double damage from melee attacks and DfA. Exploit this weakness to eliminate them efficiently.
  8. Morale is a valuable resource. Utilize called shots to core mechs in a single volley, or use Vigilance (after moving) for a free brace, stability bonus, and earlier initiative in the next round. Killing an enemy provides a substantial morale boost, enabling frequent use of abilities. Aim to maintain at least 50 morale for the additional +1 chance to hit, if possible.
  9. Hovering over a location on a mech’s paper doll provides information about the components located in that specific area. This feature is useful for identifying ammunition reserves to target or weapons to disable. Remember that destroyed weapons cannot be salvaged, so exercise caution if you come across desirable equipment.

Additional Tips

  • Enable the “Show UI during attack” option in the Settings menu. This feature displays the target’s paper doll when attacked and highlights the locations being hit.
  • The game includes pauses during attacks to ensure proper audio cues (“I’m hit!”, “Enemy mech down!”), which can make combat feel slower. However, you can eliminate these pauses to create smoother gameplay. To do so, navigate to the following folder:
    Steam folder\steamapps\common\BATTLETECH\BattleTech_Data\StreamingAssets\data\constants
  • Modify the following lines in the “audioconstants.json” file as shown below:
    • “AttackPreFireDuration”: 0
    • “AttackAfterFireDelay”: 0
    • “AttackAfterFireDuration”: 0
    • “AttackAfterCompletionDuration”: 0
    • “audioFadeDuration”: 0

Implementing this change is highly recommended for a more streamlined combat experience.

This guide about BATTLETECH was written by Geralt Of Rivia. You can visit the original publication from this link. If you have any concerns about this guide, please don't hesitate to reach us here.

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