Hey everyone, bloodydoves here with a BTAU update for you, sadly not a good one.

As I'm sure many of you know, PHP is having a bit of a "main character of the day" moment today and much of the internet is being taken offline until vulnerabilities with PHP can be patched. This sadly includes the BTAU wiki, which does make use of PHP and has been taken offline until such time as we can get it patched. We're working on it now but it's gonna take us a bit due to small team size and a general unfamiliarity with the process. We'll get it done and when we do I'll be back to let folks know it's back online.

Sorry for the trouble, hope we're back up sooner than later!

Which mechs have you had the most success with in melee? And which ones have you been able to combine into a lance? They can be mechs with or without melee weapons.

Feel free to share your builds if you’ve modified them.

I know this happened a few updates ago, and is a super simple one, but the quality of life impact the simple Barracks mod of highlighting pilot skills that are ready to level up in green is phenomenal. No more clicking on every single pilot to see if they're ready to level up. Thanks bloody and the btau team.

I just completed the campaign for the first time. Now what? Is it just an endless career mode? I have all the DLC. Do i just go for the Flashpoint missions?

Just trying to see if I want to continue or try career mode.

But I know I'm not even CLOSE to the best. I'm unsure how to crack that Elite ceiling.

Am using a 5120 x 1440 resolution.

In steam, click on snowflake symbol -> properties -> Launch Options

-popupwindow -screen-height 1440 -screen-width 5120

For me this worked to fill the screen (no idea why, lol):

-popupwindow -screen-height 2000 -screen-width 7420

I just booted the game after not having played in like 5+ years and the interior of the ship looks like this, is this normal? The missions didn't have this kinda red stuff, it keeps moving. Not sure which settings would help.

Edit. I seem to have gotten it fixed by updating my drivers.

Even in vanilla I love JJs since Darius' dumbass loves putting mechs on mountains, but with the mechanics and accuracy modifier changes in BTAU, JJs are even more valuable. Every one of my heavies and assaults have JJs and won't go back.

Get a shitty spawn in a killzone with mechs on both sides on a battle/assassination mission? jump jets save the day, can split your lances up and gain elevation

mech taking too much damage? JJs are a cheat code for breaking sightlines or facing your mech a specific way to mitigate/shift damage

dealing with fast lil scouts? gain elevation to negate evasion stacking and the weight difference penalty

Easy side/back shots while being able to face your mech in a good defensive position you normally wouldn't be able to from a sprint? check

Accuracy penalty goes both ways, gaining height not only makes you significantly more likely to hit but also significantly harder to hit. I can slap down lances of assaults all day with very minimal damage with lances of just heavies due to positioning.

Get a cold map/or ones with water? I got 12 heavies jumping around like spider monkeys melting torsos and arms.

Even on relatively flat maps I can get some good value out of terrain avoidance and specific positioning. Especially for retreating fire. Sometimes extra lances get spawned near a mech that's too far from your main force. Being able to retreat towards the main battle line while maintaining a flat profile towards the enemy instead of exposing your side/back while keeping up damage is incredibly useful.

Personally I'd rather lose a large laser(or a weapon of similar weight) to fit JJs + armor/add heatsinks over the extra damage simply because the utility provides significantly more value.

It's been years and I decided to get back into one of my favorite games, a game I Kickstarted almost exactly a decade ago, and...the fucking cutscenes won't play. I get about two seconds of audio and a glimpse of visuals and then it just goes dead.

Google's dumb AI says this is a known issue but I've been searching this sub and the Paradox forums and coming up with nothing. I've updated my drivers, tried installing open-source codecs, and deleted the profiles.dat file in my users folder, and still nada. I'm pretty sure my PC hardware isn't the issue with this eight-year-old double-A game, so...any thoughts?

I'm having a hard time not being annoyed that out of the million mods out there to add this or that mech to the game, or turn the characters into Pokemon or whatever, not one addresses this. You wonder what the point of a big fandom is if it can't even manage that kind of thing.

In my current BTA career, I started with a MON-70 and also had Raza5 for hire in my starting system (he specializes in the Mongoose). Naturally, this early combo became a core component of my team, eventually taking the Ace Pilot ability to wreck house. I used to be leery of light mechs, but he was so successful as a scout and backstabber that I carried Raza5 and his Mongoose into the mid and late game, supplemented by several other lights that I would have never tried otherwise: I've got Amid in a Cicada, Wolfbanes in his Commando, even got a Flea in regular rotation.

My last mission was a simple one: 4.5 skulls but only up against 4 assaults total. The mission before that had 5 simultaneous assault lances, so this was a cakewalk by comparison. Raza gets out front and positions himself to reserve down and backstab the enemy Atlas in the next round. I kept him well outside of melee range of course. The Atlas has a gauss rifle, Raza has 11 evasion pips. There are several slower targets that the Atlas will almost certainly go for.

Welp, this was an urban map, which means extra movement along roads. And for the first time in my life, I witnessed the OpFor use a charge attack. That's right, instead of using his gauss rifle, that 100 tons of Atlas sprinted up to Raza for a physical attack... and the hit connected. Charge attacks scale with the attacker's tonnage and hexes moved, which had to have been his max. I think the damage numbers were triple digits, but I don't honestly recall because I was so gobsmacked. Raza's character icon is now a blood splat.

I imagine how that would have looked in real time, with both mechs charging at full speed toward each other, the Atlas pivoting directly into the Mongoose, and the Mongoose disintegrating like an epic Nascar blowout. Props to the Atlas pilot for a one-in-a-million maneuver, I guess. Maybe we should hire that guy.

Instead, every mech in my team ditches finesse and focuses their wrath on that Atlas until it's ground down to a smoking crater (1 salvage, lol). Then we attack ground on his corpse a little just to ease the pain. The rest of the OpFor is mopped up with ease.

Miraculously, Raza5 managed to punch out and doesn't even have any injuries. (?!) But his beloved MON-70, the core of the company from day 1 and inspiration for my current light-focused company composition and playstyle, was lost and unsalvageable. Fully kitted with stealth armor, endo steel, ECM, double heat sinks, improved sensors, all gone. That mech belongs on the company's in memoriam roster.

Thanks for reading my after action report. I try to keep all my pilots in their preferred mechs, so my new priority is to find Raza a royal Mongoose!

I was away from the game for a long while, but a friend started playing himself and it made me crave replaying again. I had heard that BA in the BTAU mod had been significantly overhauled, but the times I've tried to use it so far it's felt absolutely worthless.

I was lucky enough to get a clan light omni pretty early on since I didn't start with any other ways of bringing the ISS BA I started with. So with it finally mounted and in tow, I started to run some missions and immediately ran into two major problems. The first I was able to somewhat solve, being that deploying the BA cost the entire turn of the deploying mech, potentially leaving it in an extremely vulnerable position as well as removing its firepower for a turn since I can't move or fire prior to dropping the armor. I somewhat solved this by just playing games with the initiative so the mech would drop the armor late, then go again early before enemies could attack it.

The second problem is the BA seems 100% worthless. Unless I deploy it literally right next to an enemy unit, it just doesn't do anything. Literally nothing. It doesn't shoot, or try to chase units, or move at all. It just sits there inert, maybe absorbing a couple shots, then either dies or gets left behind as the battle moves on. If I drop it literally next to an enemy, it will then swarm said enemy. But if it happens to get knocked off and the enemy leaves or is otherwise destroyed, once again the BA just sits in place for the rest of the battle.

Am I doing something wrong with it? Or is this somehow intended behavior? It seems like they're a complete waste to bring and use.

A few days ago I made a post talking about the mechbay glitch where your friends join you but are stuck in the mech bay and can’t even pause the game etc. I sold my whole mech inventory (minus heros which I’ve been told mech count isn’t relevant but did it anyways) and sold all of my equipment except a few dozen of each clan tech and kept about 200 double heat sinks and I had a friend join me last night. Hope this helps for anyone and everyone that needs it!!!

Nearly a decade since I bought this game, and I just learned that I can click the orange chevrons under the turn sequence numbers to help me prioritize kills. But you have to be pixel-perfect with hovering the tip of your mouse on the chev.

Completely new to the game and currently on the third story mission.

When arming the 'mechs, do i make sure that all armour sliders are filled, or does it differ from role to role?

All my frontliners have a ton of evasion and I try to keep my gauss snipers back, but if they get sensored or the enemy gets a glimpse of them, they get focused really fast. I can't seem to make these slow move type mechs work.

Okay, so it's kind of a meme that Darius is trying to get you killed. He's very bad at gathering intel and often drops you in really suboptimal places. Like I don't understand his thought process, but it feels like he frequently wants to place my troops in valleys or at the lowest elevation areas he can find so as to completely waste the advantage of an aerial drop. You know, real Darius tactical genius.

I can forgive him not having complete info on enemy lances, but I decide to do a mission this morning. Attack an enemy base.

Darius chose to drop in a valley. In this valley is a river acting as a moat that will cut me off from the base, so if I want to advance on the base, I have to cross the river. The base is armed with six heavy turrets, all of which can fire on my drop point starting on the first turn, and of course they're shooting downhill at a bunch of mechs being slowed by a river crossing. The base was also heavily populated by enemy mechs, and there were unexpected enemy reinforcements in hills beyond, but the important note is that EVERYTHING was uphill from me, and thus had elevation advantages to kill my ass.

I tell Darius I'm bailing on this mission as soon as I land, and he marks my extraction point as being THROUGH enemy lines, because that's where he always wants to do emergency extractions from. My heavier mechs got trashed immediately, and the lighter mechs that got across the river in time still had almost nowhere to maneuver because they were obligated to run uphill into thicker enemy opposition.

If anyone had survived this drop - and nobody did - I wouldn't have held it against the team if they doused Darius in flamer fuel and boiled the man's flesh clean off his bones one limb at a time. There are "mistakes", and then there's Darius, obviously having been paid off by the Tuarian OpFor. I can only assume that after everyone in the outfit died, he found himself a cushy job sending their people on a one-way ticket directly to Hell, and I guess what I'm asking is: is there anything other than the Rougetech mod that will allow me to take this authority to kill my entire lance away from Darius and let me choose where I drop so that there's no risk of me dropping in objectively the WORST location in the entire map?

We were attacking a STATIC location. The base did not get up and go anywhere. The river valley Darius dropped me into to be murdered in was not moving around or acting as an unknown factor. That was 100% a Darius choice. Even if it had ONLY been turrets, it still would have been an attempted murder on his part. I could put that man on trial and any jury in the galaxy would convict him for this.

I must be missing something here, panic doesn't trigger until the mech is damaged to a single salvage anyways? I tried burning them out, surrounding them and peppering with lighter damage weapons to avoid taking off limbs, these guys are pretty stubborn to stay strap in.

I would use vehicles from time to time, but nothing regular. There is nothing that could be at the same level of effectiveness Mechs.

But I think I stumbled upon a gem: DEMOLISHER 2x Gauss !

Demolisher has 2x AC20 as standard and it requires it to pass relatively close, this (Gauss) solves this problem of being able to hit enemies across the entire map and the combination with the right pilot perks makes this extremely effective.

pilot perks: Sideslip- When activated it allows you to climb any mountain or building and take a sniping position, Intensify Firepower - gain +30% damage this turn if it doesn't move, Perfect Targeting-gnore 2 evasion on enemies (massive bonus) and Overwhelming Aggression- +10% flat bonus to damage!

This is one of the best sniper builds in my opinion regardless of whether we are talking about Mechs or Vehicles.

Which vehicles do you use and in which roles? I know about the possibility of putting Meck on VITO, but that tactic has always seemed like cheating to me

Alpha testers wanted: BattleTech mod that lets an AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Local LLMs) play the game, fight you as the OpFor, and more - Windows and macOS

I've been building BTBridge, a mod that lets an AI agent play HBS BattleTech through the game's own logic rather than clicking the screen.

It can:

- Read your company, mechbay, storage, and the mechlab while you build, including unsaved edits.

- Refit and repair mechs using the game's own validation and work-order systems.

- Run the campaign loop: contracts, negotiation, missions, salvage, travel, events, pilots, stores, finances, and Argo upgrades.

- Command a lance in combat on your side.

- Command the enemy OpFor against you.

- Read mission dialogue, radio chatter, objectives, and campaign story conversations.

- Chat with you through a small in-game overlay, with an input box so you can talk back during play.

This is not screen-reading or mouse automation. BTBridge hooks into BattleTech's actual game logic and exposes structured game state and actions to an AI agent.

It works on my Windows machine. Now I need other people's setups, especially macOS players, because I do not own a Mac and the Mac build has never been run on real Mac hardware.

Downloads - v0.1 alpha:

Windows:

https://github.com/PStryder/BTBridge/releases/download/v0.1-alpha/BTBridge-v0.1-alpha-windows.zip

macOS:

https://github.com/PStryder/BTBridge/releases/download/v0.1-alpha/BTBridge-v0.1-alpha-macos.zip

Release page, notes, and checksums:

https://github.com/PStryder/BTBridge/releases/tag/v0.1-alpha

Project:

https://github.com/PStryder/BTBridge

REQUIREMENTS

- BattleTech 1.9.1 on Steam

- Vanilla game

- ModTek v4.5.1

ModTek:

https://github.com/BattletechModders/ModTek/releases

BTBridge will not currently work alongside RogueTech, BTA, or other major overhaul packs, so use a clean install.

Back up your saves first, as with any alpha mod.

WINDOWS INSTALL

1. From the ModTek zip, copy winhttp.dll, doorstop_config.ini, and the Mods folder into your BattleTech folder.

   On Steam this is usually:

   C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\BATTLETECH

2. From the BTBridge Windows zip, copy the BTBridge folder into:

   BATTLETECH\Mods\

3. Launch BattleTech to the main menu.

4. The version text should end in:

   /W MODTEK

5. Check:

   Mods\BTBridge\BTBridge.log

   It should contain:

   BTBridge 0.1.0 initialized

MACOS INSTALL - EXPERIMENTAL / UNVERIFIED

I do not own a Mac. The macOS paths and packaging have been implemented and tested synthetically, but this has NOT yet been run on real Mac hardware. I especially need Mac testers.

1. Install ModTek using its macOS instructions. ModTek launches the game through its script, configured as the Steam launch option.

   The Steam game folder is usually:

   ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/BATTLETECH

2. From the BTBridge macOS zip, copy the BTBridge folder into ModTek's Mods folder, normally:

   BATTLETECH/Mods

   next to BattleTech.app.

3. If macOS quarantines the mod, run:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine BATTLETECH/Mods/BTBridge

4. Launch BattleTech to the main menu.

5. Check for:

   Mods/BTBridge/BTBridge.log

If any of those paths are wrong on your Mac, please tell me. Confirming the real-world macOS layout is one of the reasons for this alpha.

Each zip also contains a fuller INSTALL guide.

WHAT TO SEND BACK

Whether it works or not, please send a comment, DM, or GitHub issue with:

- Windows or macOS

- For Macs: Intel or Apple Silicon, plus macOS version

- Mods/BTBridge/BTBridge.log

- Mods/.modtek/ModTek.log

- Mods/.modtek/battletech_log.txt

If BTBridge.log does not exist at all, that is useful information too. It means the mod never loaded.

CONNECTING AN AI

The release zips contain the BattleTech mod itself.

Connecting Claude, ChatGPT, a local model, or another MCP-capable agent uses the MCP server included in the GitHub repo. Setup is described in the README.

For this first alpha, my main goal is simply getting BTBridge to load cleanly on more machines and finding the assumptions that only worked on mine.

It is alpha software. Things may break.

When they do, the logs are exactly what I need.

Thanks!

Hired a 3/2/2/8 for his called shot bonus, but the idiot hardly gained any XP. 7 deployments, 8 mech kills, 3 vehicle kills and 112 days and only gained 320 XP. Time to dump the chump?

So I had my most experienced MW glassed by a centurion rolling double head hits in one attack, one with the ac10 and the other a laser. Freak tragedy but thats okay we can pull through this... next mission a shadow hawk DFA's my storm giant crushing the cockpit and killing my 2nd most experienced MW. This is my first modded playthrough and im just curious if this is the intended lethality or am I wildly unlucky?