1. Ultima V - PC2. Ultima VI - PC3. Might and Magic VI - PC4. Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny - PC5. Pool of Radiance - PC6. Curse of the Azure Bonds - PC7. Secret of the Silver Blades - PC8. Pools of Darkness - PC9. Gateway to the Savage Frontier - PC10. Treasures of the Savage Frontier - PC11. Champions of Krynn - PC12. Death Knights of Krynn - PC13. Dark Queen of Krynn - PC14. Into the Breach - PC15. Lords of the Realm - PC16. Dark Sun: Shattered Lands - PC17. Lords of the Realm II - PC18. The Alliance Alive - 3DS19. Shattered Steel - PC20. Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition - PC21. Battletech - PCSo those of you in Slack are probably sick of hearing about this, but Battletech is awesome and I highly recommend it to every fan of turn bases strategy games. By all accounts the game is doing fantastic and we are likely to get more entries/DLC campaigns. I can only hope that this plus MechWarrior 5 later this year help revitalize the overall IP.
Battletech is a turn based strategy adaptation of the original board game, though it is a pragmatic adaptation. It is set in 3025, and the timeline doesn't advance even though the days advance (don't expect to hear about the Capellan Confederation getting reamed if you wait three in game years). It is set in a piece of space in the Periphery, between the Taurian Concordant and the Magistracy of Canopus, called the Aurigan Reach. You play the part of a mercenary company hired to help during the conflict, though you will also be doing a lot of other missions for other powers in the region. The basic gameplay loop is for you to do missions for random employers until the conflict has progressed to the point that they need your special skills, then you get to do a story mission to advance things. Eventually you bring an end to things and are given leave to explore the entire map and work for anyone (prior to that you tend to be restricted to portions of the map).
The game has a pretty extensive management system for your company. You have monthly maintenance and salary costs, it costs money to customize your mechs (both to purchase items and to place them), and the major expense is fixing mechs that have taken serious damage. Additionally, it takes time to do all the work on your mechs, and you can only work on one mech at a time, so it helps to have a few extra chasses in storage. Additionally, you hire pilots who can take damage in battle and will be laid up in the infirmary, though they heal in parallel. Over time your pilots gain experience and gain stat boosts and special skills. With the skills you have to pick and choose, as you only get three (two first tier, one second tier of the same line as one of the first tier ones), so you'll find yourself customizing pilots to types of rides. When you take a non-story contract you also have the ability to negotiate the terms of the contract. You get two sliders to set how much you want the payout to be in cash and how much you want to be salvage rights; raising one lowers the other. You do also have the option to take minimal amounts of both for a large reputation boost with the faction giving the contract, which gives you more access to contracts (better contracts need someone who likes you) as well as shop discounts. The salvage rights at a minimal level are 0/2, which means you get 0 priority picks and 2 random picks. But if you max them out, they can be 2/10, 3/14, or 5/18 (depending on the contract), which not only gives you more raw salvage, also gives you a number of first picks. These are important for getting mech salvage, as you need to have three mech parts to get one mech. Whole mechs in stores are both incredibly expensive compared to your income and incredibly rare, so building out your company comes through salvage. Balancing cash payouts vs. salvage is one of the major management aspects of the game.
As for the actual turn based strategy part, the game is inspired by the original tabletop but does its own thing. The original tabletop had a cadence of each player moving one mech at a time (with the person who loses initiative going first), then everyone attacks at once (damage is marked but doesn't take effect until all attacks are resolved). This game is a more traditional turn based, but it is split up into several phases. There are five phases in a turn, and inside a phase the factions alternate one unit at a time. Units are sorted into the phases based on their size (light units are in a higher phase than heavy units), with the very first phase reserved for the lightest units that are piloted by someone who has a special skill that bumps their phase up by one. When your turn comes in a phase you can either move a unit or have all the units in that phase wait until the next phase; this gives you the opportunity to force moves for your opponent while your units still have their stacks of evasion or cover. When you move a unit you can have it move and then attack, move and melee, move and hunker down (increase defense), sprint (move half again as far, but no action afterwards), and if you have jump jets you can jump instead of moving in all of the above (jump and melee is the Death from Above attack). The movement is very based on the tabletop; the game is a hex grid, and every unit has a number of (hidden) movement points, though if you know the tabletop game's stats you won't be surprised. An interesting thing is that turning from one hex side to another costs a movement point, same as moving from one hex to another. This means that jump jets (which at max can only be equal to your walking movement points) can sometimes let you go further; generally when you're looking to go side to side or when there are harder terrain in the way (forests).
As for resolving combat, it also is mostly ported straight from the tabletop with one change that's mostly because computers are faster at computations than people by hand. When you target an enemy unit you will get to pick what weapons to fire, and then every weapon rolls a chance to hit, and then if it hits it rolls a location to hit. Mechs have eight locations that can be hit, and if a part takes too much damage it can have its components damaged or be entirely blown off. Some weapons also deal damage to a stability stat; when this gets too high you first become unsteady and lose any evasion bonuses. If you take full stability damage while you are unsteady (so it always takes two attacks on an empty bar) then you fall over; this deals damage to your pilot and moves you back a phase for your next action. Also, while you are knocked down you are now vulnerable to called shots; you get to pick a part to focus your attacks on and it increases the chances that to hit rolls hit that part. This stability system replaces the system in tabletop of just taking enough damage in one turn you have a chance to fall. Missiles is the big change from tabletop; instead of rolling once for hit, then a second time for number of missiles that hit, then grouping those missiles into clusters (number in a cluster depending on the type) and rolling location for each cluster, now it rolls once for every missile for hit and hit location, with the caveat that a given launcher only gets one chance to hit the head, and only gets a fixed number of missiles in the salvo that do hit the head if it gets the head roll.
Now, all that damage stuff sounds good, but there's also a management aspect to things; ammo and heat. If you take low hit probability attacks you risk running out of ammo by battle's end. But more important is heat. Everything you do generates heat; standing still generates none, moving generates a little, sprinting generates more, jumping generates even more. Every weapon (except machine guns) generates heat when fired. If your heat gets too high you first take internal damage (which can lead to bad things), and eventually shut down (which also makes you vulnerable to called shots). Combating this is your heat sinks; in a given turn you will automatically get rid of so many points of heat. So balancing when to run hot and when to pull back is another aspect of the strategy. And sometimes it can be worthwhile to go into shutdown to get that last bit of damage in before things go completely south for you.
The random missions come in varying types; you have basic "kill all the dudes", but then a series of missions that have some mission objective that you can do and then bug out to an evac zone, though you also can get a bonus for wiping out enemies. You might have to assassinate an enemy commander, wipe out a base, ambush a convoy, or extract something from a location. The story missions are also pretty varied, and they tend to evolve over the course of the mission.
The game definitely has a "one more mission" quality to it. The finances are balanced incredibly well, such that you never really get into a situation of having a runaway coffer and you stop caring about money; things are pretty much always tight (and if you run out of cash at month's end that's game over). There's a great power curve both through the mechs you salvage and your pilots getting better, and sometimes you can get lucky and get something big early from something like a risky assassination mission; it will become the cornerstone of your lance. I put in a good 45 hours over the past week and really had trouble putting it down.
Blizzard Entertainment Software Developer - All comments and views are my own and not representative of the company.
