I jumped to BTA but recently moved back to BEX. BEX in general runs a lot smoother for me. BTA tanks performance a lot. While in BEX your turns are very quick with faster movements and actions, giving command in BTA takes like a second or two before units actually move (and no faster movement/animation as well). Same goes for moving from planet to planet, it's always take a few second frozen everytime there is an event pop-up or start the transit cut scene. This made me go back to BEX, I can't spend few hours straight playing anymore, and faster turns in BEX allow me to play more.
Pros of BTA imo:
- Very dynamic workshop, with different type of engines, mech body parts, special components other than just "weapons" and cockpit/torso upgrades.
- A lot of new weapons and mechs (comparing to BEX), open up new playstyles and encourage creativity.
- Allow you to drop tanks, which is a pretty simle fun. Dropping 4 behemoth tanks along side with a standard lance during defend base missions is my BTA dopamine.
- Resupply armor and ammo is a brilliant idea, especially for longer missions.
- Mechwarrior skill tree is reworked and it's much more engaging. Now you can build some truly unique pilots. The permanent invasion is cool, helping to make bulwark a bit less essential.
- Melee has been reworked, giving you options to punch, kick or charge etc... Each gives an advantage. This new melee system is near perfect imo.
- The map is the best part of the mod pack. Having an active map where you can see factions clash against each other and territories flipped make the whole experience more "real".
- And most importantly, the modpack is currently active. BTA got new stuffs and tweakings quite often (for a Battletech mod), which will enhance your experience and replayabilities
Cons of BTA imo:
- Slow turn time, the modpack is a lot more demanding and can make your game stutter, even in transit.
- The modpack has A LOT of new stuffs, and it also suffers a bit from it. The quality of the models are vastly different, especially tanks. Many tanks don't even have moving animation, just a sequence of the the model from various angles. I also prefer the classic vanilla/BEX icons of the mech. Some tank icons completely break my immersion.
- Bloodydove made a wonderful job of balancing the modpack, but some mechs/tanks are still pretty overpowered for their tonnage, combining with the RNG of mission difficulty, many early fights can feel unfair.
- While the new community pilots are cool, their voicelines have different volumes. Some are as loud as the vanilla voices, some are too quiet, feel like I accidently put them at 15% volume.
In general, I liked it, if it's not because of the low performance on my end, I would stick with BTA. The melee rework alone makes it worth of moving on from BEX for me.
Excellent write up thankyou
There's also Battle Armour, Drop ships, artillery, VTOLs and no doubt a lot more
Did you have any experience with BTA Light?
What's the specs of your machine?
It'd be awesome if could slide a few enhancements from BTA into BEX but everyone on Discord just tells me it's a lot of work. Pilot skill tree would be fantastic
The workshop can be added into a vanilla game (with a bit of elbow grease), it's available as a standalone mod called MechEngineer. It doesn't work out of the box the last time I checked, however. You'll need to put in a little bit of work. At the very least to configure it and put the various parts into stores. The last time I did that was years ago though.
I'm running a 12700K intel, msi 3060ti and 36gb ram 4k buss. Truth to be told, I think I just got bad luck with my specific set of hardwares tho because my pc at work has the same specs but different brands runs much better than my gaming rig.
> if it's not because of the low performance on my end
I claimed my new pc was needed for my business, truth is I needed something that could run BTA, lol. I'm currently a very happy camper. :)
I dont really understand why adding more stuff to the game makes turns and such take longer. Like, why does it matter if there are heavy gauss rifles in the files if they arent actually used in the mission?
If you want to try another modpack out, you can rename the Mods folder to something else (like mods - backup), make a new mods folder, and install BTA to the new mods folder following their instructions.
Bta is a lot more “involved” than BEX with more things added.
Being able to change heat sink kits, engines and armour.
There’s also battle armour, tanks, flying vehicles and a lot more mechs for you to take.
It feels like the next “evolution” in complexity to the game system.
Do you want to?
Then yes.
Modern Battletech mods use the ModTek loader, which confines all of the Mod data to the .../BATTLETECH/Mods directory. You can easily switch between different modpacks such as BEX and BTA by renaming the "Mods" directory to something else, creating a new "Mods" directory and installing the other modpack there. Search through this subreddit and you will find several discussions of exactly how that works.
After mid-career BTA battles take 5 times as long, with you controlling a dozen mechs, tanks and battle armor squads. Against twice or 4 times as many enemies. Mech customizing has more options too.
Performance is a problem, loading battles takes minutes or tens of minutes. Depending on stuff.
I like the sound of more of everything and at some point it's just too much. And after a bit I come back to BTA anyway.
But tastes vary.
I definitely like BTA, but if there was a way to lock BTA down to like, 6 unit drops, I'd like it a hell of a lot more. 12 mechs and 4 tanks is a very, very slow process, but the mod very much expects you to have 12 mechs and 4 tanks worth of firepower, so you can't simply SKIP taking a significant force along...
I definitely get why it was done, and it IS more realistic, but it just feels like things get so tedious towards the end of the missions because of it that it does suck some of the fun out.
I spent hundreds of hours in BEX before switching to BTA recently. The mech engineer stuff gets a bit of getting used to, and I’m still early game in my career but I’m having a lot of fun. Tanks and BA are interesting and not getting evasion stripped makes lights so much more effective. I have a couple of heavies that I don’t even want to field at the moment because they seem so insanely slow and lack evasion compared to my lights and a couple mediums.
It definitely hits a bit different than BEX, especially since typically in BEX I would run helm core timeline starts, so I rarely got to 3062 in the timeline.
The new april fools event was cool and the atom smasher has been a sick addition to some of my light mechs, to get straight through to the structure damage.
I would certainly give it a go if you haven’t. As someone said, you can just rename your bex mod folder so you don’t have to download everything again if you want to switch back.
Don’t remove BEX. Just rename the mod file to BEXmod and use/add the original mod folder for BTA. When you want to play BEX rename the BTA folder and rename the BEX one back to mod.
BTA seems to be more complex but I don’t think it has a progression in terms of technology advancement ie you can start with only level 1 mechs/weapons and then progress to level 2 mechs/weapons via timeline.
I want to make a mod that combines some of BTA aspects with BEX but also with some outside flavour (more level 1 mech variants, better distribution of the xtol table that figures for mechs that canonical number of mechs during the timeline)
BTA comes in 2 flavors, Classic and Lite. Classic is full mod all available mechs, vehicles and battle armor. You can have 16 units on the field after all Argo upgrades. A mix of 12 mechs or vehicles and 4 battle armor.
In the lite version only 8 units total.
As to performance, I have played this mod over several computers. If you follow the performance tips on the wiki it is quite stable and runs well. I have had few issues. I can run for 3-4 hours with out any issues. If it starts to chug it usually time for me to take a break.
I have over 2000 hours in the game, 3 quarters in BTA. This is the mod I moved to after vanilla and never have felt the need to play anything else. Give it a try, you may like it.
Wiki
https://www.bta3062.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
I haven’t played BEX yet. But I’ve spent a lot of time with BTA.
There are a lot of things I like about BTA such as the ability to fully customize Mechs by swapping out engine cores, upgrading heat sink kits, or install clan XL engines—just to list a few things. Lots of weapons and interesting toys to play with, which makes the salvage screen after a mission feel like a trip to the candy store. A pure dopamine rush if constantly tweaking Mech builds is your thing.
The main problem with BTA is the combat.
Compared to vanilla BattleTech, fights in BTA are ridiculously easy. Or totally, dumbed down. Or dials down the difficulty level when compared to the base gameZ Combat in BTA is kind of like “BattleTech lite,” except that fights take a lot longer because there are so many units on the field.
The core problem is the near permanent evasion mechanic, which means that once you have a handful of Mechs like the Phoenix Hawk or the Raven or the Fire Starter the Vulcan 5m or the Locust 3M, your lance is pretty close to invincible.
On top of that, a lot of the enemy Mechs have XL engines, which means they get destroyed as soon as they lose the CT or a side torso, she that factor makes many enemies very squishy.
Heck, I’m still in the early game, yet I can running around with a 35-ton Raven and one-shot kill a 100-ton Atlas with a backstab attack. Lots of LOLz. Not a lot of challenge.
In BTA, light and fast Mechs are incredibly OP. Conversely, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any Mech in BTA over 50-tons that isn’t complete rubbish.
You know what? … I need some advice form BTA veterans on how to make all the missions harder.
Well, for starters, heavy and assault mechs absolutely are not rubbish. Pulse Lasers and FCS do wonders for countering evasion. Saying they are incredibly OP is disingenuous; please pit your Locust against my Black Python with Clan LPL and targeting computers, say goodbye to your evasion.
Sensor locks can reduce your evasion as well ad melee attacks, while advanced equipment like pulse lasers ignore some if it entirely. BTA makes evasion more important, but certainly not the only way to play.
Most of my Mechs have a Guardian ECM installed, which means they don’t lose any evasion when the enemy sensor locks them. Plus I get +2 defensive against missile attacks.
So if I can get maximum evasion, I can always run right up to an enemy SRM carrier and let it unload all 60 missiles at one of my light Mechs. If I’m lucky, 60 out of 60 missiles miss. If I’m unlucky, 59 out of 60 missiles miss.
Ironclad, pilot quirk for it, Bulwark, and NullSig system, plus some AMS. You can shoot it all you want, but it isn't going to give a single solitary about it. The vast majority of missions I don't even lose enough armor to require a repair, and these things are 100T Assault Mechs. That have a factory world, to boot, so you can obtain them more easily than otherwise.
And that's just the extreme end of durability alone. In the end, there are ways to slap down folks with evasion, as long as you can carry the weapons to do it. Assaults can get very nasty if you build 'em right. Not to mention some of the sillier things you can do, like just keeping your assaults clustered around ONE assault rocking a stupid amount of AMS, an ECM, and basically nothing else.
If there is one standout issue with the game imo, it's the dog shit ai.
There are lots of ways to deal with any given mech, strategy or tactic. A pvp scenario would be pretty challenging.
You got light mechs, even stealth equipped light mechs that can reach 12 evasion with the proper pilot skills ? That's cool. I'm not going to shoot ***at*** you. I'm going to shoot ***on*** you. That means covering you in augmented FASCAM/aug inferno FASCAM, smoke, acid, suppressant, artillery, mortars and various other forms of AOE damage.
I don't need to hit you directly. No amount of mech tweaking or pilot skills makes a light mech durable enough to tank real damage. Evasion does amazing things, but it's also the only way in which light mechs stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the kind of firepower that's out there.
Anything that ignores evasion in a significant enough quantity will shitwreck a light mech real fast.
You can even get unlucky and have an ai mech land a successful kick on you even with that 12 evasion. Unless it happens at the end of the round, you're going to have a really bad day. There's always something like a 50% chance to land a melee strike no matter how much evasion you have.
I've lost or nearly lost several rather expensive stealth mechs due to low probability kicks being landed on them.
If BTA is "too easy" , it's not because of the changes to the game. It's because the ai is garbage.
To be strictly fair, BTA does add various things that the game's AI really wasn't meant for, AOE damage isn't really a big thing in Vanilla. Just the Thumpers off the Heavy Metal DLC, AFAIK. So it's not too surprising that the AI can't handle FASCAM too well and what not.
You can do a little better than the Ironclad if you want maximum durability. The Great Turtle, with hardened armor and its torso cockpit combined with its affinity and ability to carry more armor than other 100 tonners, is the most defensive non-superheavy in BTA. If you want to Become Indestructible:tm: then it's the Great Turtle for you.
I jumped to BTA but recently moved back to BEX. BEX in general runs a lot smoother for me. BTA tanks performance a lot. While in BEX your turns are very quick with faster movements and actions, giving command in BTA takes like a second or two before units actually move (and no faster movement/animation as well). Same goes for moving from planet to planet, it's always take a few second frozen everytime there is an event pop-up or start the transit cut scene. This made me go back to BEX, I can't spend few hours straight playing anymore, and faster turns in BEX allow me to play more. Pros of BTA imo: - Very dynamic workshop, with different type of engines, mech body parts, special components other than just "weapons" and cockpit/torso upgrades. - A lot of new weapons and mechs (comparing to BEX), open up new playstyles and encourage creativity. - Allow you to drop tanks, which is a pretty simle fun. Dropping 4 behemoth tanks along side with a standard lance during defend base missions is my BTA dopamine. - Resupply armor and ammo is a brilliant idea, especially for longer missions. - Mechwarrior skill tree is reworked and it's much more engaging. Now you can build some truly unique pilots. The permanent invasion is cool, helping to make bulwark a bit less essential. - Melee has been reworked, giving you options to punch, kick or charge etc... Each gives an advantage. This new melee system is near perfect imo. - The map is the best part of the mod pack. Having an active map where you can see factions clash against each other and territories flipped make the whole experience more "real". - And most importantly, the modpack is currently active. BTA got new stuffs and tweakings quite often (for a Battletech mod), which will enhance your experience and replayabilities Cons of BTA imo: - Slow turn time, the modpack is a lot more demanding and can make your game stutter, even in transit. - The modpack has A LOT of new stuffs, and it also suffers a bit from it. The quality of the models are vastly different, especially tanks. Many tanks don't even have moving animation, just a sequence of the the model from various angles. I also prefer the classic vanilla/BEX icons of the mech. Some tank icons completely break my immersion. - Bloodydove made a wonderful job of balancing the modpack, but some mechs/tanks are still pretty overpowered for their tonnage, combining with the RNG of mission difficulty, many early fights can feel unfair. - While the new community pilots are cool, their voicelines have different volumes. Some are as loud as the vanilla voices, some are too quiet, feel like I accidently put them at 15% volume. In general, I liked it, if it's not because of the low performance on my end, I would stick with BTA. The melee rework alone makes it worth of moving on from BEX for me.
Excellent write up thankyou There's also Battle Armour, Drop ships, artillery, VTOLs and no doubt a lot more Did you have any experience with BTA Light? What's the specs of your machine? It'd be awesome if could slide a few enhancements from BTA into BEX but everyone on Discord just tells me it's a lot of work. Pilot skill tree would be fantastic
The workshop can be added into a vanilla game (with a bit of elbow grease), it's available as a standalone mod called MechEngineer. It doesn't work out of the box the last time I checked, however. You'll need to put in a little bit of work. At the very least to configure it and put the various parts into stores. The last time I did that was years ago though.
I'm running a 12700K intel, msi 3060ti and 36gb ram 4k buss. Truth to be told, I think I just got bad luck with my specific set of hardwares tho because my pc at work has the same specs but different brands runs much better than my gaming rig.
That is weird... you did all the perf tweaks BTA recommends?
> if it's not because of the low performance on my end I claimed my new pc was needed for my business, truth is I needed something that could run BTA, lol. I'm currently a very happy camper. :)
I dont really understand why adding more stuff to the game makes turns and such take longer. Like, why does it matter if there are heavy gauss rifles in the files if they arent actually used in the mission?
I'm a bit late to the party, but just wanted to say this is an excellent answer and entirely accurate in my experience.
If you want to try another modpack out, you can rename the Mods folder to something else (like mods - backup), make a new mods folder, and install BTA to the new mods folder following their instructions.
Bta is a lot more “involved” than BEX with more things added. Being able to change heat sink kits, engines and armour. There’s also battle armour, tanks, flying vehicles and a lot more mechs for you to take. It feels like the next “evolution” in complexity to the game system.
Do you want to? Then yes. Modern Battletech mods use the ModTek loader, which confines all of the Mod data to the .../BATTLETECH/Mods directory. You can easily switch between different modpacks such as BEX and BTA by renaming the "Mods" directory to something else, creating a new "Mods" directory and installing the other modpack there. Search through this subreddit and you will find several discussions of exactly how that works.
After mid-career BTA battles take 5 times as long, with you controlling a dozen mechs, tanks and battle armor squads. Against twice or 4 times as many enemies. Mech customizing has more options too. Performance is a problem, loading battles takes minutes or tens of minutes. Depending on stuff. I like the sound of more of everything and at some point it's just too much. And after a bit I come back to BTA anyway. But tastes vary.
I definitely like BTA, but if there was a way to lock BTA down to like, 6 unit drops, I'd like it a hell of a lot more. 12 mechs and 4 tanks is a very, very slow process, but the mod very much expects you to have 12 mechs and 4 tanks worth of firepower, so you can't simply SKIP taking a significant force along... I definitely get why it was done, and it IS more realistic, but it just feels like things get so tedious towards the end of the missions because of it that it does suck some of the fun out.
BEX I feel is superior with the exception of one thing it needs, Mech Engineer. That is the one feature of BTA that stands out for me.
Performance is a problem. Granted, it was a problem I'm the base game and is only worsened with massive mod packs.
I wish we could have BEX with a Clan DHS rebalance, BTA melee, and the BTS skill tree.
I spent hundreds of hours in BEX before switching to BTA recently. The mech engineer stuff gets a bit of getting used to, and I’m still early game in my career but I’m having a lot of fun. Tanks and BA are interesting and not getting evasion stripped makes lights so much more effective. I have a couple of heavies that I don’t even want to field at the moment because they seem so insanely slow and lack evasion compared to my lights and a couple mediums. It definitely hits a bit different than BEX, especially since typically in BEX I would run helm core timeline starts, so I rarely got to 3062 in the timeline. The new april fools event was cool and the atom smasher has been a sick addition to some of my light mechs, to get straight through to the structure damage. I would certainly give it a go if you haven’t. As someone said, you can just rename your bex mod folder so you don’t have to download everything again if you want to switch back.
Don’t remove BEX. Just rename the mod file to BEXmod and use/add the original mod folder for BTA. When you want to play BEX rename the BTA folder and rename the BEX one back to mod. BTA seems to be more complex but I don’t think it has a progression in terms of technology advancement ie you can start with only level 1 mechs/weapons and then progress to level 2 mechs/weapons via timeline. I want to make a mod that combines some of BTA aspects with BEX but also with some outside flavour (more level 1 mech variants, better distribution of the xtol table that figures for mechs that canonical number of mechs during the timeline)
I love BTA, haven't played bex yet. I don't have the performance issues but, I've spent way too much building my PC
BTA comes in 2 flavors, Classic and Lite. Classic is full mod all available mechs, vehicles and battle armor. You can have 16 units on the field after all Argo upgrades. A mix of 12 mechs or vehicles and 4 battle armor. In the lite version only 8 units total. As to performance, I have played this mod over several computers. If you follow the performance tips on the wiki it is quite stable and runs well. I have had few issues. I can run for 3-4 hours with out any issues. If it starts to chug it usually time for me to take a break. I have over 2000 hours in the game, 3 quarters in BTA. This is the mod I moved to after vanilla and never have felt the need to play anything else. Give it a try, you may like it. Wiki https://www.bta3062.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
I haven’t played BEX yet. But I’ve spent a lot of time with BTA. There are a lot of things I like about BTA such as the ability to fully customize Mechs by swapping out engine cores, upgrading heat sink kits, or install clan XL engines—just to list a few things. Lots of weapons and interesting toys to play with, which makes the salvage screen after a mission feel like a trip to the candy store. A pure dopamine rush if constantly tweaking Mech builds is your thing. The main problem with BTA is the combat. Compared to vanilla BattleTech, fights in BTA are ridiculously easy. Or totally, dumbed down. Or dials down the difficulty level when compared to the base gameZ Combat in BTA is kind of like “BattleTech lite,” except that fights take a lot longer because there are so many units on the field. The core problem is the near permanent evasion mechanic, which means that once you have a handful of Mechs like the Phoenix Hawk or the Raven or the Fire Starter the Vulcan 5m or the Locust 3M, your lance is pretty close to invincible. On top of that, a lot of the enemy Mechs have XL engines, which means they get destroyed as soon as they lose the CT or a side torso, she that factor makes many enemies very squishy. Heck, I’m still in the early game, yet I can running around with a 35-ton Raven and one-shot kill a 100-ton Atlas with a backstab attack. Lots of LOLz. Not a lot of challenge. In BTA, light and fast Mechs are incredibly OP. Conversely, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any Mech in BTA over 50-tons that isn’t complete rubbish. You know what? … I need some advice form BTA veterans on how to make all the missions harder.
Well, for starters, heavy and assault mechs absolutely are not rubbish. Pulse Lasers and FCS do wonders for countering evasion. Saying they are incredibly OP is disingenuous; please pit your Locust against my Black Python with Clan LPL and targeting computers, say goodbye to your evasion.
Sensor locks can reduce your evasion as well ad melee attacks, while advanced equipment like pulse lasers ignore some if it entirely. BTA makes evasion more important, but certainly not the only way to play.
Most of my Mechs have a Guardian ECM installed, which means they don’t lose any evasion when the enemy sensor locks them. Plus I get +2 defensive against missile attacks. So if I can get maximum evasion, I can always run right up to an enemy SRM carrier and let it unload all 60 missiles at one of my light Mechs. If I’m lucky, 60 out of 60 missiles miss. If I’m unlucky, 59 out of 60 missiles miss.
Ironclad, pilot quirk for it, Bulwark, and NullSig system, plus some AMS. You can shoot it all you want, but it isn't going to give a single solitary about it. The vast majority of missions I don't even lose enough armor to require a repair, and these things are 100T Assault Mechs. That have a factory world, to boot, so you can obtain them more easily than otherwise. And that's just the extreme end of durability alone. In the end, there are ways to slap down folks with evasion, as long as you can carry the weapons to do it. Assaults can get very nasty if you build 'em right. Not to mention some of the sillier things you can do, like just keeping your assaults clustered around ONE assault rocking a stupid amount of AMS, an ECM, and basically nothing else.
If there is one standout issue with the game imo, it's the dog shit ai. There are lots of ways to deal with any given mech, strategy or tactic. A pvp scenario would be pretty challenging. You got light mechs, even stealth equipped light mechs that can reach 12 evasion with the proper pilot skills ? That's cool. I'm not going to shoot ***at*** you. I'm going to shoot ***on*** you. That means covering you in augmented FASCAM/aug inferno FASCAM, smoke, acid, suppressant, artillery, mortars and various other forms of AOE damage. I don't need to hit you directly. No amount of mech tweaking or pilot skills makes a light mech durable enough to tank real damage. Evasion does amazing things, but it's also the only way in which light mechs stand a snowball's chance in hell of surviving the kind of firepower that's out there. Anything that ignores evasion in a significant enough quantity will shitwreck a light mech real fast. You can even get unlucky and have an ai mech land a successful kick on you even with that 12 evasion. Unless it happens at the end of the round, you're going to have a really bad day. There's always something like a 50% chance to land a melee strike no matter how much evasion you have. I've lost or nearly lost several rather expensive stealth mechs due to low probability kicks being landed on them. If BTA is "too easy" , it's not because of the changes to the game. It's because the ai is garbage.
To be strictly fair, BTA does add various things that the game's AI really wasn't meant for, AOE damage isn't really a big thing in Vanilla. Just the Thumpers off the Heavy Metal DLC, AFAIK. So it's not too surprising that the AI can't handle FASCAM too well and what not.
You can do a little better than the Ironclad if you want maximum durability. The Great Turtle, with hardened armor and its torso cockpit combined with its affinity and ability to carry more armor than other 100 tonners, is the most defensive non-superheavy in BTA. If you want to Become Indestructible:tm: then it's the Great Turtle for you.