Build An Early LRM Boat - A Battletch Guide (2018)

BATTLETECH - In this mini-guide we build a very early LRM boat and discuss how to best operate it, using indirect fire to support your lance!

Game Information:
Title ► BATTLETECH
Dev ► Harebrained Schemes

Video Info:
Render Mode ► 1440P HD @ 60 FPS
Addtl. Music ► Courtesy of Epidemic Sound and used with permission.

Who Is Mal?

I am a geek who has been playing games my entire life. I have a keen interest in RPG, Strategy & Tactical games. On my channel you will find Indie as well as AAA titles but I do try to bring light to smaller, worthy projects whenever I am able to. My videos will typically take the form of First Looks, Let's Learn or Let's Plays (and will always include analysis).

[joaogaldao]

I'm new to this game and I'm loving the game and the series! I guess now I'm gonna have another series to watch while I wait for Thursday

[HeadHunterSix]

I think it might be more efficient to use a pair of LRM-15s if you can get them. I think it saves you a ton, that could be used for another jump jet or more armor.
Remember that hiding in the back is only _usually_ safe. You can't always tell where reinforcements are going to come in from, and there have been times that my rear-echelon missile boat suddenly found itself on a new front line.

[HalIOfFamer]

I used this as an in your face brawler with shotgun ac5 2medium lasers and 2 srm 6, it had max front armor and a lot of back armor and the guy who was piloting it had a callsign slaughter. I used it to the very end of the campaign before moving to rougetech and experimenting more. this is definetly one of the strongest chasis in the base game.

[mbchudno]

arms dont have any equipment, probably good idea to move armor around to reinforce RT and legs to esure you dont loose lots of launchers or legs. Also, i am not 100% sure indirect mech needs jump jets. It will spend most of its time sitting in cover in some forest or entrenched far from everyone dumping loads of missles all over the map. If you remove them you can beef its armor or maybe even throw in more ammo. Besides that its an awesome build.

[knightowltoo]

Nice mini-guide Mal!

I too make that first free Centurion a missile boat. Since in my lance compositions the artillery mech (LRM missile boat) is the only truly long range mech I have, and my short range mechs will generally draw all the enemy fire, I get by with a lot less armor than you used. And I generally add a medium laser or two just in case I goof and let someone get close too, but then my LRM boat is standing alone away from my other mechs, where yours would have the company of two other mechs.

I'd also like to mention to newer players what I think is the ideal pilot build for the LRM boat... the Lancer. (see my reply to Edgar Robinson's comment in yesterday's Part III episode for a full list of pilot builds) The Lancer has Multi-Target, Breaching Shot, and Bulwark for talents. The key talent here is Breaching Shot -- it will bypass cover, entrenchment, and guarded on an enemy mech as long as you target it with only one weapon. For example, if you have 3 LRM 10 missile launchers as Mal's Centurion build does, you could actually target 3 guarded mechs with one launcher each, and do full damage instead of half damage (or 3/4 damage if they're only in cover) on each. Bulwark isn't really as important as Breaching Shot is, but I find it nice when I'm standing behind some solitary piece of cover and don't want to move out from behind it, thus giving me guarded.

[macdallanzero]

If you can find an Assassin you can make a pretty decent, and fairly early, missile boat. The trade off is that you have to give it zero armour to maximize damage output while keeping jump jets for mobility.

Strip all the armour and load up as many jump jets as it will handle, top up your tonnage with LRM launchers and make sure you have at least a couple tons of ammo for them and... that's basically it.

Keep it away from enemies - and it's not that hard since it's fast, has jump jets, and it can indirect fire at a decent range. The fact that it ignores 3 evasion makes it viable for quite a while as a LRM boat, and it's great if your pilot has multi-target because they can reliably land hits on fast mechs with 3+ evasion and also remove one evasion on each target. That's why you want multiple LRM launchers instead of just one LRM-15 and some armour. I went with four LRM-5 launchers so if I was heating up I could shut one or two off and still dish out some damage - and strip evasion from enemies.

[knightowltoo]

OH, Mal, just wanted to be sure you knew that with the 1.1 patch you can now customize mech pilots as long as they aren't ronin or patreon backers of BattleTech, you can even choose their voices! If you want to get a few of your key supporters in the game as pilots, you probably want to hire some non-ronin pilots and rename and customize them as early as possible so you don't waste XP on the generic guys you start with. (they're all ronin unfortunately)

[wandererdragon]

I guess several people might have already mentioned that, but killing mechs by firing into center torso (CT) might not be a great idea from a credits perspective (at least in vanilla game). If you keep CT intact and destroy mech by damaging left/right torso, or knocking it down several times you'll get 3/3 mech parts, while destroying CT will give you only one mech part.

[Wolfenacht]

Is there a reason to not have the ammo in the torso? I'm still new at this, so this may be completely wrong, but I like to store the ammo with the weapons. This is the reasoning. If you lose a leg, you lose half your ammo. Where as if you lose your shoulder, all your weapons are gone and your ammo is useless. This is the reason why I put them together, as one without the other is useless. Again, I could be wrong with that assessment, but that's what I currently do with my Mechs. Also, the LRM boats are really good at setting Mechs as "unbalanced" or just straight up knock them down. This is amazing for fighting!

[macross]

i use a 1 lrm boat allmoust allways in a lance, great for knocking down mechs and taking off turrets in a base just sensorlock and boom 1shot. for med i use trebucket-n, heavys catapult-c4, assault stalker..allways use a multishot pilot in it...

[AzureFayt]

is there a roguelike campaign to the game? While i like "story mode" its not really what i want to play with this game...

[timothyhansen]

Huh. Thought this was going to be about Mechwarrior 5, not BattleTech.
Well, this is awkward, as I don't have BattleTech. If this had been about MW5, I'd have said a good EARLY LRM boat (Provided you have YAML going & use the cheat that has all of the equipment available from day one.) would be a Locust 1M. Sure, it's only a 20-tonner, but give it an XL engine, some Structural Endo (C), a Small Cockpit, & a Stabilized UL Gyro, & you have enough space to put an ECM (C) in there on top of a pair of LRM-5's, which means you can equip it with an Armor Stealth or Armor NSS. Do that, give it a TAG rather than an energy weapon, & have it run the Missile Boat Role, & you've got a little dude that'll be running around the map shooting things with its missiles & being unable to be targeted by Mechs that aren't in Melee range.
Especially if you also throw an Advanced UAV Drone in there, as well, so the Mech itself can stay out of range of return fire.

[Sgt_Colt]

You could also whack an LRM20/15/5 on instead of LRM 10/10/10. Just have to sacrifice a bit of armour to do it