How to build the “ultimate” or “meta” mech, with exacting detail and explainations. Hopefully this should enable you to turn any mech into a deadly fighting machine. Except the turkey, just sell that one.
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Note, a couple of the figures in the DPT table are misaligned or contain ammo calculations, the correct base figures are here:
WeaponSystem Damage/Ton
M Laser 25
SRM2 16
SRM4 16
SRM6 16
LRM5 10
L Laser 8
LRM15 8.57
PPC 7.14
LRM20 8
LRM10 8
A/C 20 6.1
A/C 5 6.625
A/C 10 4.44
A/C 2 4.16
This is why I love how HBS gave us all the different types of 'brand name' weapons with mods on them that make an otherwise useless weapon useful. A PPC with -2 mass or +10 damage or +20 stability damage or +4 accuracy or some combination of these…definitely fun to find things like this in game to change things up from SRM/MLaser wars.
Medium lasers have the best damage to ton ratio
Small lasers: am I a joke to you?
this guide was great, really helped me iron out some things about my mech design, however i never add jump jets, instead i go for extra heat sinks so i can churn out a higher rate of alpha strikes (specially on hotter mechs like the black knight). do you think that offset is worth it? (firepower>mobility)
And also, you didnt cater to PPC's much, i kinda have atleast one on every mech, got 2 ppc's on a dragon atm, is that worth it?
is there going to be an up-to date version of this? would be really interesting to see how things have changed
You forgot rule number 1. Scrap your Dragon before wasting time on any builds for it.
This is easily my favorite vid on builds. Right or wrong ill be following this guide. I've been indecisive up to this point on builds and its been driving me crazy.
I drop in with 200 tons and face 8 mechs on normal level and I am only on second campaign mission auto cannon 10 dropped more of mechs than any other weapon one thing don't count is ace pilot and can change that in settings all I been facing is cliffs and hard ground and guy had no jumps so had wait get to way point
This is lovely. I wonder if you have additional thought about the range of weaponry? Light lasers are great, but you have to get in range of every single one of the enemies weapons to bring them to bear (double moves notwithstanding). On the other hand a PPC mech with a good rangefinder means the PPC's effective damage per ton is infinitely better than an enemy with MLs because the MLs have to get in range. As you have demonstrated, a Panther may be the most fearsome mech in vanilla.
Very cool and extremely helpful especially for a new player like me.
I'm new to the Verse as well so I don't have a vast knowledge of what mechs do what yet.
As long as I build out whatever mechs I get in the correct manner I should be able to take on whatever the game throws at me.
Thank you for putting this out and giving us insight into how you personally build out your mechs…
I know this came out a while ago, but is there a text version of this? No offense to you, but I can read a lot faster than you can speak, and it's easier for me to break down things that I don't understand in text than in a video.
Watched video twice. Learned a lot. Thx.
This video is really good thank you. Unfortunately I got to it just after having refit one of my mechs (badly) and now Iâll have to refit it next play session.
Thank you very much for the video, i just recently bought Battletech because i love TBS games, but was having trouble with how to setup the mech, and your explaination made it a cakewalk. I was losing so much mech parts in each mission it was getting annoying, and now i can put my lance against 12 other mechs, and they at most lose an arm only.
Totally changed how I'm looking at my loadouts and lance composition. Great tutorial.
Hi Edmon! what would you recommend to use as a strategy in early game in "Base Defense" missions against the long range Jenners. They seem to be destroying my base buildings faster than I can do anything to them… Their evasion and the pace of drop ships flying in, is just a bit too fast and too much… They ignoring me and it's hard to relocate my mechs fast enough to block their LS.
I like a ballistic sniper in hot or standard biomes. They can keep firing every turn as the heat buildup is far less than any other weapon type. Direct fire snipers also like jumping, which is heat. Most mechs can't jump and fire much in the desert, but a ballistic sniper would be cold enough. Of course you want to find a nice big AC with pluses on it, and have a great gunner before this becomes effective.
These are my findings anyway, I just started the game and am nearing the end game of my first campaign. I really wanted to slap big cannons on everything at the start, but now I think I have a better idea on when and how to use ballistics. Which is, rarely. I have basically hot and less hot versions of every role, and I use them according biome and if the available pilot has some heat talents or not. The only "cold" mech I currently have is a Yager with 2 AC 10's and jump jets. It's been great, though it would probably be pointless in a cold biome.
Also, an AC 10 with dmg+ can headshot most if not every mech I've come across, and my sniper pilot has the chops for it. She is very likely to get me the last mech of the battle intact, without much of a hassle.
I like having a lance of mixed long-range and brawler. 1: If I need to swap over, It's way more armour. 2: I don't need as many tons on heatsinks. For a mech, it is probably inefficient but for an entire lance built that way it's probably better. If it's not more efficient, then it's at least a safer build strategy. Crusader is my favourite mech. Also the ammo in the legs or arms idea is to avoid TAC.
Hmm… I ended up with 10+20 LRM and 3 ammo crates on this one plus one heat sink to cooldown for jumps while raining LRMs. Quite like this build so far. In 2-2.5 skull missions it's pretty efficient.
@theedmon do you have any plans to update this guide for heavy metal? I did your calculations on the new weapons and found that coils are nearly as efficient as medium lasers assuming 3 pips of charge up. I think this could make energy hard point poor mechs more viable
Thank you for the detailed explanations. Learned a lot here. And got some new ideas for mech building. đ
I find it valuable to get jumpjets every time to be able to jump cliffs, buildings, etc restrictive terrain which would be impossible to sprint even with fast mechs.
A really good video that covers a lot of important points. Couple of things that I would have mentioned with specific reference to campaign/career builds:
1 – Bulwark + Cover or Vigilance/Bracing massively increases the already powerful effect of armour.
2 – Precision Strike & Tactics 9 pilots significantly increase the utility of weapons that concentrate damage later on in the campaign. Magna +10 damage medium lasers, AC 10s with +5 or +10 damage, + 10 damage large lasers etc. all start to edge out LRMs and SRMs in some situations at that point.
Also, some questions on the gear unique to Campaign/Career mode:
You should obviously always use cockpit and gyro mods whenever you can get them (they are all upside) but how do you value Comms Relays/Rangefinders/Pilot Armour and Hit Defence/Stability Reduction/+ Melee Hit?
Where do Arm Mods fall on your Brawling scale of Support -> Energy -> Missile -> Ballistic?
Do you use TTS ever? What about Heat Banks/Heat Exchangers?
Excellent video, thanks for going into this in such detail.
Oh man, its painful to see you suggest max back armor. I'd only do that for dedicated brawlers. Snipers and LRM boats do not need heavy back armor. Its an easy way to shave some points off to fit in some more weapons. In fact, if you drop back armor to 25 and shave off 10 points of armor from your torsos and legs, you can upgrade 1 LRM 5 to an LRM 10. With 2 tons of ammo that gives you 12 shots of 20 LRMs + 3 ML for 28 heat, which is still within that heat delta of 20 – 30. Pretty good for a support mech.
As for jumpjets, what you really want them for is the free turn face and an easy way to max your evasion. Its best to fight the enemy near hills that can block line of sight or rough terrain the enemy is forced to move through. Having jump jets just gives you a lot of options as a light/medium mech.
Great Video.
1. Interesting calculations on the armour value. =)
2. Doesn't it make more sense for the brawler to use the order:
support, srm, ml, ballistic
instead of:
support, ml, srm, ballistic
?
SRMs have a better efficiency per heat-ton, so you just use the MLs to adjust to the delta you want, instead of the SRMs in your example. Because for a given heat delta, damage per heat/ton is the relevant factor and MLs free up more heat per damage lost.
Thanks for the great guide.
Congrats on your reward on PDxCon. It lead me to your awesome channel and this video came at the exact right time, since I am diving into Battletech. Keep up the good videos, informative guides and interesting content.
reminds me of what we did in NBT back in the mw-2 MERCS days where the deadliest mech on the battlefield was a 65 ton clan chassis with MASC and 3 medium pulse lasers.. max armor and everything else was heat sinks, with only one of the clan 35 ton chassis doing all the same but with only 2 medium pulse lasers. It allowed players to never stop firing (remember real time, not turn based.. so your weps would recycle faster then you could cool off.. way faster. the ways we set up allowed us to keep the volume of fire up)