Battletech: Infantry, Armor, Plastech

Howdie.  I used some spare time to put together a combined arms package... in the course of this I encountered some problems related to infantry in Battletech, which I will discuss towards the end of this blog post.  First, I need to display the group I painted....

Its a fairly large group, representing a decade of collection (all of the vehicles were purchased at least ten years ago).

First are some tracked tanks, 2x Alacorn (nobody ignores triple mount gauss rifles) and 2x Patton/Rommel.... these are always interesting as they can be more than one thing... and, they have the distinction of being Battletech vehicles that actually look like tanks!

Then there are the hovertanks.... 2x Condor, 2x Drillson, and 2x J Edgar.  Now, for the Condor, because of the great lapse in time since I had opened the blisters, I lost one of the turrets.  I took a spare piece laying around and just glued that on top, hoping to 1) finish the miniature and 2) maybe make it look like the Davion version with 2x AC5s.  (shrugs shoulders)

Overall, I like how the vehicles turned out, I like some of my camo color choices, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I also painted a lance of Plastech miniatures in my mountain camo scheme.... Atlas, Trebuchet, Panther, and Hunchback.  Now, the old Plastech were a bargain in the day.... and some of the sculpts (in my opinion, the Locust and Atlas in particular) are good, where as some (in particular the HUGE Catapult) are not.  These do not paint up the same as metal figures, though as hard plastic are really better than the soft plastic sets that came out at different times.  Anyway, I have a bunch of these laying around from the late 90's, figures I could knock out these 4 quickly, and I was right.

Finally, the infantry.  This is a complete old pack of Kurita infantry.  The stands include a variety of weapons, I really did not know how to split them up.  AFTER I finished painting a few bases I realized I could have organized them better, but what the hell, these will work.  Basing... well, more on basing below.  I created 7 bases of 9 figures, and 3 bases of 7 figures.  Overall, I think they painted up quickly, turned out pretty decent.  Ironically, painting huge numbers of 6mm ancients helped make painting these a breeze.

OK, so now comes the infantry rules ponderings.... as I was organizing these, I realized it was not easy to determine how to base them.  Previously, I had no trouble basing 5 Elementals on a single base, because that works out great.  Infantry, however, in Battletech are organized into 28 man platoons (or 21 for jump infantry), and a platoon is treated as a single entity. 

I came across some pertinent musings on the Paint it Pink blog... I won't link to those, I am not sure of the etiquette of doing so, but essentially there were some very similar ideas being kicked around.  Paint it Pink went with small bases of 3 figures or so, creating going with a 1:1 representation.  I think I will also go with 1:1 representation, but (obviously) I decided on squad basings of 9 (or 7) figures.

On my Battlescape terrain, it is just possible to clump 3 bases together into a hex, though it could get a bit out of hand pretty quickly as they all drift across the hex lines... this method allows the rules to work as is, but also allows a proper 1:1 figure representation, and looks cool.... Paint it Pink pointed out that infantry are the only thing in Battletech not represented properly.

Now, this will not work on the hex maps, if you do not use Battlescape.  If you game miniatures without hexes at all, it would work perfectly as well, but on the maps..... you end up with a squad base in three adjoining hexes.  In this image you can see that, and also the way the game represents platoons, a single base/counter for the entire platoon in a single hex.  It just does not look right.

What I decided to go with, as reflected in how I based the miniatures, is an abstraction where one base is designated (and will have to be marked clearly somehow) as the platoon center.  This means all firing to and from the platoon, and movement, is based solely on this base, the other bases will be in adjacent hexes for visuals only.

In the above image, the forward central base is the "active" base.  This method has the ability to work with hex maps also.  And to continue the abstraction, you can remove a base when the platoon reaches 18 men, and another base when it reaches 9 men.

But why stop there?  It occurred to me that one way to give infantry a little extra oomph in games, and it is a very little extra, is that they fight as full bases regardless of casualties.  For example, the platoon would count as a full 28 men until it was reduced to 18 men... and a full 18 men until reduced to 9 men... and a full 9 men until completely eliminated. Its an idea I have not tried out yet.

Then again, at that point, why not let squads separate and fight independently?  A platoon becomes 3 separate bases of 9 man squads....

As much as I love the Battletech-verse, I admit there are glaring problems.  Number one for me has always been the ranges... I don't care about the excuses, it makes no sense to me, ha ha.  But the arrangement of movement and range makes the game work, so not much you can do about it, and you can squint your eyes and say its abstracted instead of literal (as in, this weapon only has a 450m range... what?!?@!?).

A different glaring problem is that question of infantry.  The armies are a few thousand men, and in game terms the infantry are potentially dangerous to mechs.... so why are the army numbers not more realistic?  I get the idea that most inhabited planets have low populations, so the armies would be small.  But there are worlds that are densely populated, meaning there should be millions of soldiers, not just a few thousand.  A world unable to field mechs would raise a million men armed (on the squad level) with readily producable anti-mech weapons.  Light, certainly, but effective en masse.

Well, I am starting to board the train to Loco City, so I better stop now.  I think I have decided on how to represent infantry in my games.... now all I have to do is convince my fellow gamers to let me try these ideas out.  SO I either have 2 regular platoons, 1 jump platoon, and 1 company command squad (per my ideas)... OR... I have 7 regular platoons and 3 jump platoons (per standard Battletech rules).

Either way, I can't wait to try them out.... and looking forward to seeing how well they do against some Clan Elementals (!!!!!!!!!).

Thanks for reading.

Chalfant