Well its been a while, and I haven't done crap for Battletech. Maybe I got played out at Gencon, maybe its because I stopped playing with my local group (hard to justify playing a game when over 90% of a turn is spent with other people doing stuff without being affected), or maybe all my other hobbies, but for whatever reason my progress on everything has been minimal.
But first, I did get the 2 new products, the The Operation Revival, and the Record Sheets Industrialmechs.
For the first time in a really long time, out of all the Battletech products I've purchased, I can honestly say these two were 'meh', and cannot recommend anyone purchasing them unless they just want to throw money at the Catalyst folks.
The Revival PDF, well, *I* never cared about the trials of the clans in 3048 in determining who invaded, but maybe somebody did. The only thing in this book even closely useful in my opinion were random tables for mechs/fighters/tanks for the clans in 3048. Aside from that.... well, 'meh'.
Then we have industrial mechs and exoskeletons. I think this is the way many may have felt about the TRO Vehicle Annex a while back. Its a bunch of units, mostly without any combat capability, that I have a hard time thinking anybody gives a crap about. I'll eventually enter them into my site, and will undoubtly find tons of issues like I always do, but it'll be reluctant as they are almost without a doubt stupid. I'm sure somebody may want to plop one on a tabletop, and use a MWDA figure, but 'meh'.
I still have not heard back from Randall about my forum access. At first I'm like "wtf, do these people not read email??!?", and then I found an email I sent a year or more before I got banned that I sent him and never saw a reply to either. Then I did a bit of research and found some dubious character flaws on the CGL side, and just said "fuck it, their loss".
So here is what all I've done in the last month or so since gencon:
- Assembled my RRT miniatures from the free core box I got. I'm happy with them, so some are a serious pain to assemble. I'll get them painted up soon and post some pics.
- Got my Battle Systems Sci-Fi kickstarter stuff. Squares a bit smaller than I would have liked (why the hell don't we have HEXES for this stuff??? squares are stupid and inaccurate) but its decent quality.... for a paper product (and thus not real durable). I paid about $400 for 140 card sheets of terrain... ouch.
- Got my Wasteland Game Studio kickstarter stuff in. I got 6 VTOL platforms and 20 bunkers (which fit perfectly in a heroscape hex). Good quality stuff.
- Got all of my Heroes of Normandie stuff in, well, the stuff that wasn't moved to another KS as a crappy "wave 2" move. It was quality stuff though, and looks like a pretty cool game. I was looking forward to the Sliterine PC version, but now it looks like that may be just for iPad, so oh well.
- Bought another 32 little $0.37 clamps at home depot. These things ROCKED for putting miniatures together. Also got a few plastic things to make into 6mm buildings. And I got a "cracked ice" cover for lights that I'll paint sea blue and hope that it looks like good water.
- I went through all my books and inserted the posted errata out there. 28 pages for the Alpha Strike Companion, sheesh!
Ok, back to Battletech!
I do update my data when I see errata so things stay *mostly* updated. However, until CGL learns about data consistency there will never be a good, accurate, designer for all units. I tried to help with this a few years back when Peter Smith sent me an email about it (Herb went ballistic internally about the errors in the record sheets). It seemed to go somewhere, then I presented the amount of data that was currently missing or inaccurate and never heard from them again. I think they have implemented some method internally though, as record sheets over the past couple years have gotten better. However, we still don't have things like building construction, warship construction, protomech construction, RPG "construction", support vehicle construction, mobile structure construction, etc, etc, utilities. I am closer to most on this, but it requires me do up a pretty web interface and my motivation is pretty small :(
My real time battletech game, dead. Why? Well, I got bored I think. I wanted the world to move and rotate around the mech, instead of the mech moving in the world, so it was a major change I just wasn't ready to bite off. I still think folks would like it, especially if I can make it run on a phone. Dead though, but I may play with it at some point later.
Alpha Strike Card Utility. I wanted to do this, then the Alpha Strike Companion came out. It implemented a few more things which I fixed in the code. The part that killed progress was, well, the interface. I had it very close to workable, and may still finish it, but I need to basically mentally start over from scratch. Too long of a break and I forgot my thought process at the time. Not dead yet, but not being worked currently either.
Battletech Engineer Encyclopedia site. This still works, and I make occasional changes to it. Every time somebody posts a bug I go try to fix it. Well, almost every time. Somebody submits a bug with just a mech name that doesn't match the one on the screen. They've done this like 20 times, and I don't know what the actual error is. My best guess is they are using some old index or something. If you are that person, please add more information to the little blank, or throw in your email in there (that email is NOT saved anywhere, I'll have to manually reply back) so I can actually resolve any issue.
Ok, what am I doing?
Well, played some Deadpool the last few days, as well as quite a few hours in FireFall. Watched Person of Interest the other night, even with all the new shows out this is the BEST SHOW ON TV (yes, better than game of thrones, but granted not any boobies).
Ok, what are my plans?
Well I still love Battletech, and if a new *good* product comes out I may jump right back into it. In my head right now I'm thinking we *REALLY* need a strategic game, but with Interstellar Operations due out sometime in the near future any work I do may become invalidated. So the Alpha Strike Card Maker, or minor updates to the BTE site, are probably all I may do.
BUT.
I am thinking maybe I should just write my own Mecha based game, with my own universe (which I wrote up a long time ago), that would be much like battletech in some ways, and fulfill that desire for big robots, but make more sense and have better written rules. I'd do up the rules, playtest the crap out of them, make a mini-tro with great art (and associated 3D models) and a miniature line (with those 3D models 3D printed). I don't have a lot of desire to do this, but it has been in my mind and may see some fruition.
As it stands now though, my interjection of Battletech desire has been pretty darned low. If I got an email saying I could get back on the forums, or a huge number of people show support for me doing BT stuff, I would start doing Battletech stuff again, but without that interjection my motivation is just really low.
My forum is pretty dead too. I blame myself for not posting to it constantly and keeping people engaged, but that all falls back to my declining motivation for Battletech :(
Feel free to offer up any ideas to motivate me again, I feel like I'm in hobby limbo until my 16 boxes of Robotech RPG Tactics show up.
