Some of the things I really like:

1. The random issues that take place on your ship. Problems that sometimes need dealing with especially concerning mechwarriors. One I particularly liked was when we actually caught a mechwarrior stealing stuff. I had to decide whether to keep her or sack her. Normally, I would have sacked her, but was desperate and couldn`t afford to hire a new guy. Sometimes they get bored, or break things, or even have accidents you have to deal with. This kind of thing makes Battletech feel a lot more like how it should be; a war game that deals with an essential component- Human Beings and how they are. i`ve always wanted this in flight sims and sub sims, but no one seemed to care citing nonsense like #, "This is a sub sim, not a social worker sim!"

They miss the point that a Commander has to deal with the crew in war and keeping them happy or sad affects the fights they`re in. It`s not just about the hardware at all.

2. The battle mechs are quite well realised. The animations could be slightly better. For instance, more falling over animationss in the natural direction they`re leaning and some ragdoll, instead of set moves. I`d also like to see bubbling water and great gouts of steam when an overheating mech steps in lakes.

3. i like the chances you sometimes have to take for a big win. Took on a difficult mission and was even warned that I didn`t have a strong enough force for the job. But I was desperate.

Had to protect a convoy. Managed to fight off 3 mechs with 3 tanks until the convoy made it. Killed two mechs and all the tanks while damaging the other mech. Just as the convoy were boarding, 4 more mechs arrived behind us, several panthers against my shadowhawk, urban mech, flamer mech (damn useful it was) and a missile mech (forget name).

What followed was a running retreating battle (fighting through one mech still infront of us) to the dust off point where my mechs were hit several times and my Urban mech (being slow) nearly bit the dust, but we made it and the reward set us up nicely for the next 5 months!

Certain mods really make the game here...

1. Skip intro.
2. Innersphere map. Opens up the map, gets rid of the crap story and starts you right at the Argo.
3. Random campaign start. start with more random people and random early mechs, not just the same burned in people every time. Much more interesting.
4. Random travel contracts.
5. Ammo cook off. Get too hot? There`s a chance your ammo might explode, works for AI too. Configurable.
6. Basic panic system. there`s a chance your men (or the AI) might eject out of fear. Configurable. I suggest reducing the base chance by 20 as default makes them eject way too soon.

All from the Nexus site. https://www.nexusmods.com/battletech/mods/148

I`m planning on adding a couple of mods myself.

Despite my annoyance with the silly sjw nonsense like pronouns, which can be mostly ignored, now the base fighting game and sandbox stuff is good.

Those are all good things yes, but to be fair after playing Roguetech for a while now almost all those features are bundled together in Roguetech.

So uh lol, just download Roguetech. Or add mods compatible with Roguetech, to Roguetech.

Basically the end all answer to most of this is download Roguetech. Ehhhhh...

It can be entirely ignored too, by not caring lol. It never comes up ever besides a single screen.

Like I know, you probably have a vast array of reasons why it's nonsense, or silly, or annoying, but you could also just simply take a breath, and not care.

Ignoring this stuff is why it`s creeping into our games and movies. Don`t ignore it, call it out wherever you see because that one tiny thing, will grow until you can`t go one second without it being shoved in your face. Don`t stick your head in the sand.

FYI, if you want to make sure that you don't get "non-binary characters" appearing as hireable mercs, you can edit the file <Battletech_install_dir>\Battletech_Data\StreamingAssets\data\simGameConstants\simGameConstants_base.jso n with a text editor, and adjust the following fields:

"MaleGenerationWeight": 44,
"FemaleGenerationWeight": 48,
"NonBinaryGenerationWeight": 8,

and change it to whatever you want, e.g.:


"MaleGenerationWeight": 52,
"FemaleGenerationWeight": 48,
"NonBinaryGenerationWeight": 0,

and you will no longer be confused by voices not appearing to match their picture in 8% of hireable pilots.

You'll miss out on some unique hireable NPCs, though judging from the bios I've seen I'm not sure I'd want to hire them (irrespective of gender).

Lol alright, you're uh....really not getting that I genuinely don't care though.

It's not something that bothers me, or I need to care about (and before you instant jump in your mind to "yes it is", no. No it is not.), or is some world ending apocalypse unto gaming. It's not something shoved in my face because when I see it, I go on with life. I don't stop in my tracks going "Whoa! Wait one second here! This is right in my face and hugely offensive! How DARE you be inclusive you disgusting developers! This is quite literally standing in front of me as a wall to being able to play this game!"

Like, you're saying "Oh it will grow into this monster, believe me...heh" and yet that's just theorizing and assumption. It isn't 10 years from now yet. There's no way to know for certain if that's even a possibility that will collapse all of gaming as we know it to the point there's nothing good to play. If that literally happens then I tip my metaphorical hat because you were completely right to be deathly afraid of this.

Right now though? There's really no reason to care unless you're transphobic...

But if you want to be really open and just plainly say "Hey, trans people in fact weird me out and I don't like them in gaming" then you'd at least have the honesty leg to stand on. I'd be like, ok at least you're not pretending it's something else like thousands of people usually do who are utterly lying about why it bothers them.

I realise you're not replying to me here, but I sort-of sympathise with people in this case. Not because it actually bothers me, but because it just seems kind of unnecessary. This is primarily based on my assumption that transgender people tend to want to transition from one gender to another (and therefore be labeled as the new gender, whether when the transition is complete or when they begin said transition). While people who identify as neither male nor female do exist, my understanding is that these are a very small minority within a community which is itself already a small minority.

While I could be totally wrong about the above, I have yet to see any evidence that extra genders are in fact necessary (though I am aware that discussions around this topic have been around for quite some time).

However, out of all the things worth complaining about with this game, this "issue" ranks very, very low (for me), and I agree with you that it's a strange thing to pick on (while simultaneously wondering what the point of its inclusion is). Also however, it provides handy ammunition when remarking on the quality/optimisation of the game - for some people it seems strange that a priority was placed on something like this, instead of other UI fixes/optimisations (although this "feature" would have likely taken mere minutes to add, so it's highly doubtful it would have actually impacted any other development in any meaningful way whatsoever).

If/when crew events are written that take gender into account, then the inclusion of this pronoun (or any pronoun for that matter) may make more sense.

It's also likely that people may blame this "feature" for the overall writing quality (or lack thereof), which could be seen as SJWs taking over games and putting their crappy views across in a clumsy manner.

Personally I don't think the writing is bad because the writers are SJWs - it's more logical to assume that the writers are just crap, and these particular crap writers just happen to be SJWs. While the former is a disappointment (the Shadowrun games were much better, even HK), the latter is irrelevant - unless of course the politics of the writers was a bigger hiring factor than their writing quality...

OK that rant was WAY longer than intended, especially since the TL;DR version is:
- don't see point of this extra pronoun
- don't really care either
- writing quality is the actual issue - better writers can integrate whatever social/political issue they hold into whatever medium they work with, without it seeming "forced". That's not the right word, it's not "forced" really, it's just this (and other) "incloosive" stuff just sticks out because there's not much actual substance or quality around the writing.
- But hey it's a strategy game, the plot isn't the most important part of the package.

Wait? I thought that was a bug. You mean they intentionally made males sound like females? ???

Yes exactly, and I've been thinking this for like two months at this point.

Instead of things a gamer should actually care about, like bugs, game breaking problems, or performance, a ton of people actually rank this up at the top of their list of cares.

To which I scoff and feel incredibly sorry for their existence due to. Like geez, that is really sad.

I'm also in the camp that didn't find the Arano plot incredibly bad. It wasn't amazing, but people are acting like it's the worst plot ever....in a game where gameplay was the primary focus and the plot was only there to progress things. So again, not worth caring that deeply about. Frankly, it would be nonsense to not assume a lot of it had to do with Kamea (a woman) being the main character essentially. It really does come down to being that blunt and basic usually in the eyes of the lowbrows. They can't stand stuff like that. Mass denial though if confronted. Same old story.

It's also why Roguetech is legit. No plot. No imaginary evil agendas to be super paranoid about.

I sort of assume that the first big expansion will have a better designed / written story line. That was the case with Dragon Fall vs. the original Shadow Run.

It might, or it might not.

I'll frankly take whatever is handed to me as the player since I already accepted the first plot and kind of liked a couple moments in it.

Like, it would be pretty nuts to me if they ended up making a worse plot. It can only in my eyes be more of the same or in fact better.

I'm really more interested in mechs and weapons though lol. There's plenty of Battletech novels if we wanted plot faps.

I think it likely that these are not male or female, but "non-binary" characters - which means they have "non-binary" voices. Since I doubt there's a separate category for "non-binary" voices (???), at a guess I'd say the voices are chosen randomly from both male and female voice sets.

By default, around 8% (less than 1 in 10) of pilots available (on average) will be non-binary, so I'd expect on average half of those to be the opposite gender of the portrait (I guess less than 1 in 20, or around one every 4 planets or so). So I guess this kind of thing is really popular in this part of the Battletech Universe.

OK while I agree with the rest of your post, I have to disagree on this point (above). I seriously doubt it has anything to do with Kamea being a woman, and more to do with the fact that she was written like a naive idiot who doesn't know the first thing about warfare, tactics or politics. That and the bad guy was written as Space Hitler, with his daughter not being much better.

So basically, evil uncle usurps throne, turns peace-loving freedom-loving monarchy into totalitarian police state, then peace-loving deposed Queen fights to recapture throne (but it's for the people, not because I was born to be Queen, honest!).

True, her advisor is more pragmatic - so it's possibly intentional that she be a bit on the naive side. A bit more dialogue involving the two of them wouldn't have gone astray to flesh out both of them a bit better.

I think some of the negatives of the plot aren't necessarily due to the plot itself - similar (or much worse) plots are easy enough to find in any medium - it's to do with the way HBS advertised the game. Specifically, they stated that this game was like "Pacific Rim meets Game of Thrones in Space" or something to that effect, so I suspect many people thought there would be some kind of intrigue or other political machinations present and able to be participated in, as opposed to the very black and white "Snow White vs Space Hitler".

In the end, mission plots don't really matter though - either way we're still blowing up a bunch of giant robots and salvaging as much stuff as possible to build more giant robots to blow up even more giant robots. Which is the most important (and fun) part.

Sorry, I haven`t responded, got arrested for being politically incorrect and accused of `hate` speech for pointing out logic and reality...



...just kidding.

Thanks for this.

I only ever played the two old games on PC, it wasn't in those either - not a surprise since this kind of thing wasn't really talked about during the '80s. Apparently this section of the galaxy is a bit different from the core part of Battletech (the parts with the original Houses, like Steiner, Kurita, etc.), yet this only explains the religious/cultural diversity (which would also appear forced if it were not in line with the lore in that region), and not the gender stuff. It seems really clumsy to me, to just sort of whack this "issue" in there, with no in-Universe logic given - especially at 8%, which seems incredibly high.

Interestingly, there don't appear to be any non-binary main characters from what I've seen.