Starter guide to MekHQ/Against the Bot/Megamek

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Wed Aug 30, 2017 10:42 pm

Seems there's a considerable amount of interest, so here's a guide to creating a Battletech mercenary company using MekHQ. This only covers starting up a company in MekHQ and not using MegaMek, which is how you resolve the actual tactical battles. To start with, my starting point was this, but I've discovered over time I prefer to play with slightly different settings, and I've house ruled a few things:

Battletech boards post

So, part 1, setup:
Grab MekHQ from here. I'd use the "stable" release, the "dev" release has a bug in it where mechs can jump through buildings which is a pretty big bug. Unzip and fire it up. Start a new campaign, and pick your starting date. Want to have the map and tech levels look like they did at the start of the 2nd succession war? Go for it. Classic Star League? Sure. It makes a difference in terms of tech availability and what the map looks like. Pick AtB Official for the preset. Now you're in the options screen.

Repair and Acquisition:
You can leave it as is. You'll be adding most of your start-up stuff via "GM Mode" anyway. For your first campaign or beginning, I'd recommend unchecking 'Make maintenance checks'.

Tech Limits:
I would suggest setting Max Tech Level to Experimental/Unofficial, and 'Allow Purchasing of Clan units and parts', leave the rest as is.

Personnel:
Leave as is, with the exception that I play with all the "procreation" options off, and I've got 'randomize number of hits' and 'tougher healing' turned off.

Finances:
Leave as is, although "use percentage based maintenance costs" means you'll be paying through the roof for maintenance, so you may want to turn it off.

Mercenary, Experience, Skills, Special Abilities, Skill Randomization, Rank System, Name and Portrait Generation, Personnel Market:
Leave as is.

Against the Bot:
You can leave it as is. I personally play with "Allow enemy VTOLs", "Use Dropships" and "Use planetary conditions". Get rid of "Instant delivery from unit market". The main thing with "Use [xx] conditions" is that it will pretty frequently give you nasty weather and night time conditions (sometimes in combination), so it means you should favor jump-jet equipped units if you use those options, as jump jets ignore most of those movement restrictions.

Ok, now you're done with the options. Let's create your company. This will require some manual dice rolling. Hit the "GM Mode" button in the top right.

1. Head to the Finances tab and add yourself a million bucks.
2. I'm going to get lazy here and copy+paste from the original post I referenced earlier, with some minor additions:
AtB rules spreadsheet is found in the docs\AtB Stuff subfolder. You'll need to look at it to figure out randomly determined special pilot abilities and for the mech tables, on the Company Creation tab. Whenever there's a need to change your mechwarriors' stats, you have to right click on the guy, hit gm -> edit and then make whatever changes are necessary. It helped me to write some of that stuff down.

Go to the Marketplace menu option and select "Hire Personnel in bulk." Hire 12 Mechwarriors. MHQ will automatically generate them for you. Some of them will have special piloting advantages (SPAs), most likely any elites or veterans you get.
- Your first Mechwarrior is your unit commander, who gets a +1 to both piloting and gunnery skills, as well as 2 points distributed randomly between Strategy, Leadership, and Tactics - but you'll need to add those manually. I add these on top of whatever points the commander may have started with (most often you'll see some starting MWs with Tactics points already).
-your second, third, and fourth Mechwarriors are your other officers and gain +1 in either piloting or gunnery, whichever is lower. If they are equal, you choose. These Mechwarriors also get 1 point randomly in Strategy, Leadership, or Tactics. Again, you'll have to manually figure that out and apply it.
-Any Mechwarriors that are elite after the bonuses are applied get 2 SPAs, which are rolled on the table found in the AtB rules - Company creation tab. Veterans get 1 SPA. These can be on top of whatever natural SPAs those pilots may have rolled. Any Regulars or Greens that happened to generate SPAs can keep those, as well. To generate a pilot's SPAs, you'll need to roll a d100, the look up the result on the Mechwarrior abilities table, then manually add the ability to the guy.
-Finally, when you edit your Mechwarriors, make sure all of your initial pilots get the 'Founding Member' check box marked. This gives them each an extra share and also makes them more likely to stick around at retirement time.
-Add your support personnel using the Marketplace menu as well.
-Add your Mechs. Use Manage Campaign -> Show GM Tools or your dice rolling method of choice, as you're going to need to do some manual rolling. You're looking for the "Rat Roller" section. If you want your mechs to come from a specific part of the inner sphere, you can first roll on the mechwarrior origin table for your mechwarrior, and look it up on the Origin table in the spread sheet. Otherwise, just use the Mercenary table.
- Then, roll twice on the "Random Mech" table for each mechwarrior to determine the weight and tech level. Your commander gets a +2, the three officers get a +1 on both rolls.
- Finally, use the rat roller to set the origin, weight class and tech level, then hit "add random unit".
- Repeat for each of your twelve mechwarriors.
-Assign your Mechwarriors to their Mechs by going to the Personnel tab, right-clicking on the MW, and choosing Assign to Unit.
-Also grab yourself ten techs, a doctor and an admin person. You'll wind up needing to "bring all astech teams to full strength" and "bring medic teams to full strength".

Now you can assign your Mechs into lances.

To do this, go to the left-hand window of the TO&E tab and right-click on the unit name to bring up a pop-up menu. Left-click Add New Force, then type in the name of the lance. You can create more than one lance. For each lance, right click on its name, then left-click Add Unit to add a Mech to that lance. You may need to double-click on the unit name in order to expand the organizational tree so you can see the individual Mechs and Mechwarriors in their lances. Lances must have at least 3 and no more than 6 units. Remember the weight limits:
130 is a light lance
200 is a medium lance
280 is a heavy lance
380 is an assault lance

That determines what kind of opposition you face when you deploy your lances.

Done with all that?

Good. Now you'll want to hook yourself up with some spare ammo and parts. Easiest way to do it is to go to the 'overview' tab and find the 'parts in use' tab there - scroll down through the parts you're using and buy/gm yourself some ammo and armor for sure. Maybe a few heat sinks. Spare limbs and actuators if you're feeling paranoid. Until you get some contracts under your belt and get your Dragoons Rating up, you won't be buying any high end stuff.

Now you're ready to pick a contract. You should have two or three to begin with. Pick one, go to the interstellar map to find your destination, and "begin transit". Hit 'advance day' until you get there. You'll need to deploy your lances to tasks once you start the contract. My advice is to keep most of your lances on 'defend', although if you have a bunch of green rookies and a veteran officer, stick the officer and the rookies into a 'training' lance. You'll be required to deploy some number of lances (via the 'briefing room' tab), and one for a specific task. Once you're done with all that, keep hitting 'advance day' until you get a battle. If a lance doesn't have a battle, and is a fight or scout lance, it can reinforce with 1/6 and 2/6 probability respectively. But I recommend against putting out scout or fight lances unless you're required to, because they have much higher odds of getting in a fight - and the easiest way for a merc company to make money is to sit there and collect contract pay without fighting.

Before you start your first battle, make sure you go into megamek options and 'allow invalid designs' under the 'Allowed units and equipment' tab. Then, you should be able to just click 'start battle', wait for all the units to populate and get to blasting!

dbt1949 · Post by **dbt1949** » Wed Aug 30, 2017 11:46 pm

Thanks! I might just give it a try.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Thu Aug 31, 2017 8:50 am

<3 I will trying to follow your guide this weekend.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 8:44 am

For hand holding purposes, which I often need.

After Against the Bot Confirm, which takes you the My Campaign.

I got as far as looking at the spreadsheet. I don't have Office on my gaming rig, so I'm going to have to hold off until I take the time to load openoffice or something.

I will try again later. Sad I didn't save my start before closing. My CO was green but had 7/6 before the manual additions you recommended.

Edit as I go

Got to "-Add your support personnel using the Marketplace menu as well."

I am going to base this on your start

as well as 10 mech techs, a doctor and an admin specialist (I take admin/transport as he'll help negotiate better transport compensation for our company during contracts, which is a pretty major component of price until we get dropships of our own).

The creating mech advice doesn't seem to apply. I can set the RAT roller to merc but the rest doesn't seem meaningful

- Then, roll twice on the "Random Mech" table for each mechwarrior to determine the weight and tech level. Your commander gets a +2, the three officers get a +1 on both rolls.
- Finally, use the rat roller to set the origin, weight class and tech level, then hit "add random unit".

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:32 am

LordMortis wrote: I got as far as looking at the spreadsheet. I don't have Office on my gaming rig, so I'm going to have to hold off until I take the time to load openoffice or something.

Google Docs/Sheets.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:19 am

You've convinced me to give this a try.

The problem is that I can't add any money. After hitting GM mode I have an add funds button. Hitting it allows my rich uncle to give me money but even though it shows up on the balance sheet I can't afford anyone at the bulk hire step. My Funds listed at the bottom of the window still says zero.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:58 am

Weird. As a workaround, you can always go into campaign options -> finances and disable "pay for personnel recruitment" and "pay for parts" for the time being while you set up your company.

LM:
The "Random Mech" and "Random Faction" tables are located on lines 69-101 of the first tab of the AtB rules. You'll definitely want to use google spreadsheets to open up the AtB spreadsheet, like Isg said.

Basically, you roll a d20 and look up the result on the 'random faction' table
Then you roll 2d6 once to determine mech weight, and once to determine mech quality. Your commander gets +2 on both 2d6 rolls, while your officers get +1.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 3:09 pm

Get things working with the trick in campaign options. We rolled well on the mech chart and have a bunch of starting yahoos in semi-decent Heavy mechs. Semi decent meaning I haven't played Battletech in 25+ years and barely remember anything.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 3:28 pm

First battle is a resounding loss with two mechs lost quickly without any real damage to the other side. Luckily I saved before the battle. Consider it a training simulation during transit for a rusty commander.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 5:30 pm

Yeah, it took me a couple of restarts to figure it out. If you're really having trouble, you can uncheck "double enemy vehicles" in Campaign Options -> AtB, and drop the difficulty down from Regular while you get the hang of it.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:02 pm

I think I have my company built and I accepted my first contract and jump and it tells me I should have 9 astechs. So it's off to learn what the roles do.

Thanks for the help. I'm already way ahead of where the video tutorial I could find took me from back when you started.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 6:19 pm

With astechs, there's a menu option to "hire astechs -> bring all tech teams to full strength" in the same drop down that you use to access the unit/contract market. You don't need to hire permanent astechs, you can just hire temp jobbers.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 7:06 pm

You'll be required to deploy some number of lances (via the 'briefing room' tab), and one for a specific task. Once you're done with all that, keep hitting 'advance day' until you get a battle.

Got it. So I'm on contract. I have three lances deployed. I have a mission/scenario pending. But if I advance the day it says "Failure to deploy will result in a defeat and a minor contract breach. Do you wish to continue?"

Watched an AAR tutorial. The briefing room showed one of his lances in the mission window. None of my lances are there and I don't seem to be able to add them. The video had him click on start game and my start game is greyed out. I think maybe I some how needed to assign a lance to the mission before the day of the mission maybe. Ah well.

Never mind. I had to go to my lance, choose a single mechwarrior and then deploy him.

and that worked out.... poorly....

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:11 pm

NickAragua wrote:Yeah, it took me a couple of restarts to figure it out. If you're really having trouble, you can uncheck "double enemy vehicles" in Campaign Options -> AtB, and drop the difficulty down from Regular while you get the hang of it.

I might have to switch at least to Green for a bit. My medium lance is ok but when I have to field my lance full of recruits in heavy mechs I get chewed up by vehicles.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 10:40 pm

Madmarcus wrote:
NickAragua wrote:Yeah, it took me a couple of restarts to figure it out. If you're really having trouble, you can uncheck "double enemy vehicles" in Campaign Options -> AtB, and drop the difficulty down from Regular while you get the hang of it.
I might have to switch at least to Green for a bit. My medium lance is ok but when I have to field my lance full of recruits in heavy mechs I get chewed up by vehicles.

I seem to be getting my clock cleaned at the opening. I'm supposed to be doing these easy contracts and then I'm huge out classed every time.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Sat Sep 02, 2017 11:34 pm

The opposition numbers depend highly on your lance weight. The brackets are 130/200/280/380 (all inclusive) for light/medium/heavy/assault. Light lances will face lighter opposition, medium lances will face medium opposition, etc. It's random, but within a range of what you've got, weight-wise. So you want to have lances that are at or slightly below their respective weight limits. Don't go over: your 135-ton lance will be treated as medium and probably get walloped. If you look at the spreadsheet, on the "battle" tab, there's a section on how to generate opposing forces that will shed some light on how those are generated.

Yeah, I forgot some missions require you to manually deploy your units.

There's also a mechanism that's not implemented, where, if one of your lances is slated for a fight and you have other deployed lances in "fight" or "scout" disposition, you roll a d6. Fight lances can reinforce on a 6, scout can reinforce on a 5+. You have to do the dice roll and deployment of reinforcements manually.

Or you can just ignore that and drop extra lances in anyway for more firepower while you're trying to get the hang of things.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Sun Sep 03, 2017 9:41 pm

I guess I have hit a manaul deploy mission. The problem is I have no idea what to deploy. Breakthrough (defender) has no text.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Sun Sep 03, 2017 10:18 pm

Your lance won't auto-deploy to a standard mission until the day of the mission. No text is kind of weird though. Mind posting the save somewhere?

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Mon Sep 04, 2017 8:01 am

I've sent you a dropbox link.

It is very odd. At least the Star League cache one had enough info to figure out it was supposed to be one one person to deploy.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Mon Sep 04, 2017 11:24 am

How do you end a battle when the victory conditions are met? They all seem to go until one side is completely exterminated. I suppose I could just flee but I'm not sure if that would get counted as a victory in the campaign.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Mon Sep 04, 2017 11:43 am

Madmarcus wrote:How do you end a battle when the victory conditions are met? They all seem to go until one side is completely exterminated. I suppose I could just flee but I'm not sure if that would get counted as a victory in the campaign.

I've never figured that out either. I assume there is an end the round and then you manually answer the questions. I have a tough battle coming up that I don't have time time to play where 4 of my crappy mechs are up against 8 good mechs and a shitton of vehicles and if I hit the victory conditions before the end I'm gonna wanna bail, probably losing a number of my founding members over it.

Do you guys play with vehicles? I got two as a reward and proceeded to sell them off. I don't really understand the larger mechwarrior world, which I suppose I am going to have to learn here.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Mon Sep 04, 2017 12:44 pm

Whoops, should definitely have explained that one:

If you reach the victory condition described in the scenario, type "/victory". Also, if you reach the loss condition, type "/defeat", and then "/defeat" again to confirm. MegaMek doesn't keep track of "custom" victory conditions, so you have to do it manually.

MekHQ also doesn't correctly assign kills for when a vehicle gets disabled or a mek falls over as a result of one of your attacks and kills itself, so I find it helps to have a notepad open and keep a brief battle log.

The bot uses "forced withdrawal" rules, which means that it'll occasionally spit out in the chat window something like "blah blah blah unit is crippled and withdrawing" or something like that. Usually happens when a vehicle gets immobilized through motive system damage or gets an armor breach, and there are also some conditions for mechs which are a little more complicated. The way I play, if an enemy unit starts to withdraw, I count it against the objectives. Otherwise, I'd be spending a lot of time shooting immobile tanks, which is kind of boring.

As for vehicles, I tend to avoid using them because they get immobilized really easily and have very poor mobility in the AtB environment (where you have pretty good odds of some kind of environmental condition that winds up making you move like two or three hexes a turn if you don't have jump jets). The main use for them is if you're hard up for spare armor or weapons, in which case you want to turn one of your mech techs into a mechanic or hire a spare one to strip off armor. Other than that, I sell them after conducting any "free" repairs (motive system, internal structure, nothing that requires spare parts).

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Mon Sep 04, 2017 2:29 pm

A save with a bugged scenario. I ended up removing it via GM mode and went on.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Tue Sep 05, 2017 10:46 am

You want to enclose your files in the [URL] tag, but I believe there was a bug like this that's been fixed for the next dev release.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Tue Sep 05, 2017 3:12 pm

Aargh, I post URLs so infrequently I keep forgetting that.

I just deleted it and moved on. The next special battle that popped but was a terrific Ambush. Three light mechs with so so pilots in the dark versus my second best pilot in a Griffin. I needed some 20 ton salvage!

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 7:24 am

I spent way too much time over the 3 day weekend playing this game. Of course that means I get to find all sorts of oddities. Right now my first merc unit is stuck. I've spent 6 months now waiting (plus a few GM generated attempts) and I have yet to get another contract that has a positive expected profit of more than 1 million c-bucks.

So I effectively disbanded them (stopped playing) and started over. This time I'm trying a company without shares. I'm also turning off maintenance rolls because they are just annoying.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 8:29 am

Madmarcus wrote:I spent way too much time over the 3 day weekend playing this game. Of course that means I get to find all sorts of oddities. Right now my first merc unit is stuck. I've spent 6 months now waiting (plus a few GM generated attempts) and I have yet to get another contract that has a positive expected profit of more than 1 million c-bucks.

So I effectively disbanded them (stopped playing) and started over. This time I'm trying a company without shares. I'm also turning off maintenance rolls because they are just annoying.

Once I got it working on Sunday, it took my entire day. I ended up hurting my old eyes and getting a headache part of Monday, so I put it away.

The game is very difficult for me. The scenario chooser puts me up against some very tough situations that I am not good enough to muddle through. The suggestion is that my lances are too tough but it seems I start the game with two light lance and one medium. Maybe I need to not commit all three to the contract briefing screen. I dunno. I tend to a light lance on scout and the other two on Training.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 10:10 am

Yeah, contracts are kind of a poorly documented feature. To improve your chances of getting a contract, you want to be at one of the following locations:

a) A border world
b) A "mercenary hiring hall" (Sarna
c) A faction capital world, where you're guaranteed a contract with that faction

To get *good* contracts, you'll want to put your "full might" on display. Meaning that you need to have all your units sitting in the TO&E tab, doesn't matter if half your mechs are missing arms, legs and engines. You'll fix 'em en route. Pay is also affected by your unit rating. It also helps if you have one of each type of admin personnel, with "negotiation" skill bumped up, because then you can re-negotiate individual contract items (not salvage, but other stuff). I like to give myself a 1% signing bonus for every re-negotiation roll I don't use.

Another trick I use is to mothball every mech en route to the destination, then take them out when I get there. It's kind of annoying to do that though, so I basically just turn off 'pay for transport costs' while traveling now to save myself the clicking.

Agreed that maintenance rolls are a pain in the butt.

LM: I would suggest you turn the difficulty down and disable "double enemy vehicle counts" on the AtB tab in the options. No need for masochism. Also, only deploy the required number of lances, don't deploy more - you're getting paid by the hour. So if a contract calls for one "defend" lance, just deploy that and leave the rest unassigned (although it's your call if you want to deploy a training lance with a vet officer and green mechwarriors for "free" XP).

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 1:40 pm

Thanks for the contract info. I paid to transport my unit to a wealthy world but since I don't know any of the Battletech lore I just picked a random one. I guess I should look into things a little more and figure out some of the capitals and the like.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 1:46 pm

LordMortis wrote: The game is very difficult for me. The scenario chooser puts me up against some very tough situations that I am not good enough to muddle through.

I found that going from Regular to Green in the AtB campaign settings made a significant difference. My first attempt ended up in an unwinnable battle quickly. I could have skipped the battle but that seemed to gamey to be worth it. My second career, using the green setting but still doubled vehicles, went fine until the end of contract money issues.

For my third start I've allowed myself a little edge in the form of rerolling until I got a veteran Captain. That might come back to haunt me in
the end as he'll probably retire as soon as I finish a contract.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 1:51 pm

Madmarcus wrote:I found that going from Regular to Green in the AtB campaign settings made a significant difference.

I may have to look for that setting. It's seems embarrassing to do this for a BattleTech Board game simulator but wow it seems like I end up so out classed in every battle it's not funny.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 3:45 pm

So for I'm slightly impressed with the bot player. It handles jump jets and initiative well.

Sent from my D5803 using Tapatalk

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 4:11 pm

Madmarcus wrote:So for I'm slightly impressed with the bot player. It handles jump jets and initiative well.

Sent from my D5803 using Tapatalk

Ditto.

xwraith · Post by **xwraith** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 5:06 pm

It make very few mistakes in open terrain and calcs modifiers very, very well.

An open field battle against a handful of Vedettes has been punishing.

Madmarcus · Post by **Madmarcus** » Wed Sep 06, 2017 5:45 pm

I find that I have horrible intuition on modifiers. Should I stand still, walk, run? How much do woods help? Do levels change anything on targeting rolls or only LOS and movement?

xwraith · Post by **xwraith** » Thu Sep 07, 2017 2:57 pm

Madmarcus wrote:I find that I have horrible intuition on modifiers. Should I stand still, walk, run? How much do woods help? Do levels change anything on targeting rolls or only LOS and movement?

Take a look here: http://www.sarna.net/wiki/CBT_Attack_Modifiers_Table

However, I'm not sure if this is the exact rule set that AtB has implemented -- I've seen some weather modifiers for instance

Isgrimnur · Post by **Isgrimnur** » Thu Sep 07, 2017 2:59 pm

URL tags required.

NickAragua · Post by **NickAragua** » Thu Sep 07, 2017 3:17 pm

Yeah, there's a whole laundry list of modifiers, but the most common are:

Attacker walked: +1
Attacker ran: +2
Attacker jumped: +3
Each hex of light woods in the way (including target hex): +1
Each hex of heavy woods in the way (including target hex): +2
Target moved 3/5/7/11 hexes: +1/+2/+3/+4 respectively
Target jumped: +1 for each odd number of hexes jumped
Target in partial cover: +1

Partial cover is basically a mech standing directly behind a level 1 hill on the same or higher level as the opponent.

The takeaway is that you should try to move or jump the magic number of hexes, rather than something in between, while not going over your mech's walk speed. Heavy woods are excellent cover. Also, you should consider putting more wood hexes between yourself and enemies that are not your primary target.

LordMortis · Post by **LordMortis** » Sun Sep 10, 2017 10:15 am

Getting a little better since learning /victory. It's hard to field 12 new mechs and pilots when you have to declare total victory every time. The downside is declaring victory without controlling the battle field and losing mechs anyway.

I will finish a first contract
I will finish a first contract
I will finish a first contract

xwraith · Post by **xwraith** » Sun Sep 10, 2017 12:40 pm

So prisoners,

I know from NIck's AAR that he is getting some sort of bonus from turning them over to his employer, but it isn't happening for me. Is it a RPed action?

I seem to be collecting quite a few.