Very Minor Spoiler...

Ok, so I am going along doing missions, finally get my first 65t mech a Catapult, happy as can be, been a long and hard fought road, always doing the harder missions etc.

Well, suddenly I get to a mission where there is a pirate trap with an 80T Zeus in the middle of the lake... I haven't even seen anything larger than 75 yet, manage to get lucky as hell and pull off a 3 part off the Zeus and get my first Assault Mech.

The very next mission I ended up killing x3 Victorys, pick 2 parts and draw the 3rd. Sweet...

Next mission is the SL Castle, at the end they give me a Highlander (with a Gauss)... I'm thinking ok, now I have 3 in 3 straight missions...

The VERY next mission was a 4.5 face/skull mission, I end up having to fight x4 Assault, x2 Heavies and a PPC and Shredder Carriers (the one with x2 AC/20s)... 3 of the mechs happen to be Banshees, so beefy that I end up just knocking them over repeatedly and having the pilots get incapacitated... end of the mission rolls along, I pick x2 Banshee parts and then roll, I get x4 more.... One mission I get x2 Banshees.....

So without even seeing a Mech Larger than 75 I suddenly get x5 Assault Mechs in 4 straight missions (1 Story)...

Lucky as hell but still, feeling somewhat disappointed because ever since the missions have been a walk in the park... Not sure if either I was very unlucky before this series of missions or just happened to get very lucky now.

Oh, I just remembered that I saw and bought a King Crab Part in the store at Panzyr when I first got there, but that was only 1 part of salvage. Never saw an assault mech in a mission though....

Here is to hoping that for an expansion they add a true open campaign and integrate random map generation. I would love that, starting out with nothing and working my way up. I find the idea of having 24 mecgwarriors and x3 mech bays full goes to waste with the x4 unit limit. It really does, I wish it was setup on a mission drop weight capacity system vs fixed number so that it would make sense to use 2-3 light fast scouts to sensirlock in the distance etc. The way you field only 4 generally makes you run your 4 strongest me ha and pilots with the rest being discards. I don’t like that.

There are already mods out for that; check NexusMods. Some of the threads in this forum have some good mod recommendations. There's at least one mod that is a campaign with no story-line (just random missions), where the whole map is unlocked.

You can tweak a lot of things further to adjust difficulty/etc. - or check mods that do this for you. Join the club - I totally agree with you there. Four mechs is too small - sure 4 mechs is the standard Lance size, but we should be able to field two lances on a map (with enemies scaling accordingly). That way we can have 1 light scout mech per lance, or possibly one light-med lance and one assault lance (or something along those lines).

Unfortunately it appears the 4-mech limit is the one thing that isn't alterable via mods. The current modding framework provided by Harebrained doesn't allow this to be changed, so either Harebrained need to add this capability, or someone needs to do a crazy hack-job to enable this to be modded properly.

No offense, but I think it is actually a poor idea to rely on mods to make the core experience better. And I am not a fan of nexusmods…. Out of all the recognized and known mod sites why have the community go there... requiring an account, asking for money to sponsor the mods is a major gray area because unless the BattleTech license holder says outright that it is ok to profit off your mods then it is targetable by anyone wanting to put in a good faith dmca takedown notice... I (for example) could put in a dmca request on every BattleTech mod on that site if I felt like it. Definitely not cool in the least, so many better and more reputable sites out there than that pos...

Mods should be 100% free and available, period. They are made for the fun and enjoyment of others, that is it. Hiding behind registrations and a pushy paywall is crap.

<added> fyi, I have been involved with mods and modding since way back in the 90s, some small and some large, I was actually involved with the creation of the original Team Fortress on Quake back in the day. I've persisted to contribute and help with mods ever since in numerous games, most recently some sins mods and steam workshop support that was improperly setup.

Also I went through the setup process on nexusmods just the other day to grab the hardpoint removal mod as I loved mechwarrior 1/2 way back and hardpoints specifically caused me to request and return my MWO Ultimate Founders membership x2 (got for my son too) because of it. Unfortunately I have never gotten to play the tabletop games.

Anyhow the bottom line is I have strong feelings about this and am against patreon and other donation type services for mods as that is an attempt to skirt around making for profit mods. :/

Not that my rant is out of the way, heh.

There are some things that just seem weird to me and I hope they are addressed in time. Here is a quick list I am just tossing out right now of a few things that bother me deeply. Some are quality of life, some are just cheap design choices.

1) The mech targetting images. Even back in '95 for Mechwarrior 2 and probably mechwarrior 1 (I playe4d the SNES edition if I remember right) had a different targetting graphic with targetting points matching the mech type. So mid body cockpits on the Catapult and such aren't on the hud as the top of an standard humanform... lazy lazy lazy...

2) an extension of above, mechs had different mount points, such as hip mounts, on the shoulder mounts, etc with varying numbers of slots. In this game they just have a standard number of slots and cut/paste it for all mechs, trhat just seems cheap to me.

3) a simple thing such as an inventory system, shops, and more than aren't slow is super simple to make. People make websites that generate on the fly in fractions of a second and yet in this game they take awhile to generate. The fact that this game has difficulty in the inventory system is very poor programming, 2nd year compsci students can code it better ad far faster.

4) why in the world can you not repair and have the mekteks automatically replace damaged components with good ones if they are in the inventory? by extension, if I use the strip all command, then replace it should at minimum be able to detect if I am putting a heatsink on the same shoulder or leg or whatever and pull that one item off the list of pulled parts. just feels so sloppy....

5) I don't think it is a memory leak, but the constant refreshing of objects in the store and inventory degrades after a few missions, a simple save and reload makes them snappy and quick again. Why are they using objects for this limited set of items is beyond me, just make it a simple list and go from there. Not hard to do. Also compiling the json's vs leaving them in expanded format qould also help with the lag being caused.

6) The inability of mekteks being able to work on more than one mech in a day is cheap. if I do a simple task of swapping one heatsink location on a mech and then modify a second mech, the combined tek rating is well below the total of the mechteks daily, so they should complete both in one day, but no, they complete one task, then sit around smoking a joint before tackling the second the next day. really?

7) The argo expansions for the medbay actually bother me, why is it that when you add an entire secondary expansion and medteks that you only gain of 2. And the addition of full hospital facilities still doesn't add much over the base medtek rate... baffling...

8) I don't want to keep going and going so I will just state one more. they need to hide the mission salvage value better, at first I didn't notice but once I put two and two together, high value mission with low salvage amounts = valuable salvage it made things quite a bit easier.

9) a big pet peeve. The fact that the mech feet follow and angle the terrain is a spectacularly done effect, there is no reason however to not have the same code apply to bodies falling down. The disparity between the two is so huge it is almost hillarous to see the clipping.

I just want to say that I am still glad to be back in the battletech universe and this is a step in the right direction. I hope that in the future they may do a tabletop mode like this as well as offer a variant that is tailored to the pc abilities, i.e. semi blocked shots due to terrain where you are simply peekling behind objects and such, clipping fixes for weapons etc. would add to the game I think.

there are more tweaks and suggestions but that is just some I quickly threw out there off the top of my head. I really do like the game and the universe and hope that things can get smoothed over as well as some enhancements coming.

Well I assume if they're in breach of copyright or other agreement with respect to payed mods, then they can get taken down as you said - and that's on them.

Maybe I haven't noticed because I was registered on NexusMods for many years before this donation for mods was a thing, but I haven't noticed any push paywalls. Unless of course you're talking about the "suggestion" to use a payed server, which is easy enough to ignore (plenty of free servers, never had issues downloading).

I actually sort of agree that mods should be free, as they're generally done by fans for fans (ie they'd do it whether they get payed or not); however, if they want to ask for donations (and if this is legit) then I'm fine with that. In some cases modders spend vast amounts of time on their mods - good examples are some of the major bugfix mods for New Vegas, since Obsidian never managed to patch it properly (so without a few mods, IMO it's an unplayable piece of shit).

I also agree that in an ideal world, the game shouldn't require mods to make the core experience awesome; however if they make the experience better for the person downloading them (based on their preferences etc.) then why not go for it? The alternative is to hassle the devs of the game in the hope that your preferred changes are added (which in most cases is not realistic, and even if it is, it might take a while - so why not enjoy a modded experience in the meantime?). As long as you're not forced to pay for it of course (which should never be the case - Steam tried that crap once and it backfired).

Of course, there are tons of JSON files which are pretty much human-readable (and editable), so you can always make the changes yourself if you don't trust other modders to do it - sounds like you've got more than enough experience.

BTW, if not NexusMods, which modding sites would you recommend? I think I've only used ModDB (which is crappier UI wise IMO), and possibly a few other minor sites depending on the specific mod (like patches scrolls, though not sure I'd call that a modding site specifically although it allows mods to be hosted).

It was when I was registering, they listed all the paid options then at the bottom in a different color (almost the same as the background) was a continue... if you don't see that then you think paying is the oinly option. :/

Anyhow moddb was supposed to be coming out with a front end, a steam kind of thing, where you can add your games and use their system to automatically install/modify games according to the mods you choose, it would also maintain and update those mods accordingly. Pretty good idea and unsure why it weasn't done before now. For me installing and updating mods isn't a problem but for the masses, well that was what the steam workshop was for but that only works for steam and no one else.

Ah well, what is that phrase again? C'est la vie...

Nexus had (or still has? or has an improved version now?) some kind of mod loader thingy - not sure if it keeps mods updated automatically (but I assume it would, otherwise what would be the point?). Personally I like to do this kind of thing manually so haven't looked into anything like this.

I know that there is a modLoader tool (sort of a pseudo-mod) for Battletech, which helps when installing mods, especially if you're using more than one, since it handles mod order and conflicts AFAIK.