[Mod Release] BattleTech Advanced 3062 has been released!

[bloodydoves]

The Civil War has come to BattleTech!
​

What Is All This Anyway?
BattleTech Advanced 3062 (BTA) is a full overhaul for the game to enhance the tactical game experience with new systems, to minorly modify the strategic game experience, and to vastly deepen and detail the amount of mechs and gear players can encounter and use in the game. Featuring more than 500 mechs, dozens of new weapon systems, an entirely overhauled combat experience, a completely different mechbay system, and an amazing new mech assembly mechanic, BTA aims to be nothing less than a fundamental sea change in how you experience and play BattleTech.

BattleTech Advanced 3062 began with a dream and a madman. The dream was to provide an experience halfway between the lighter overhaul mods like BattleTech Extended 3025 and XLRP and the full-power experience that is RogueTech. The madman decided that just porting in new mech models wasn't enough work and took on the prospect of creating this overhaul. Incorporating the work of more than a dozen incredibly talented modders and standing on the shoulders of giants, BattleTech Advanced is the work of literally months of off-and-on effort to create an experience worth sharing. Tested and tuned on livestreams for much of that time, BTA has finally reached a point that I am happy to share with others. It is my hope that you give it a try, and hopefully enjoy it as much as I do.


What You're Really Reading for: the Feature List!
Created with the help of many brilliant and amazing people, BTA touches many aspects of the tactical game and a few aspects of the strategic game while keeping a friendly-enough learning curve that someone familiar only with the vanilla game can adapt to BTA's environment quickly and with ease. Included are the following, among many other, changes:

• More than 500 mech variants! More than 200 tanks! Fight something new every mission!.
• Dozens of new weapon systems including but not limited to: working LB-X autocannons with multiple fire modes! Working Rotary autocannons! Working artillery with AoE effects! Multi-shot lasers! Deployable LRM minefields! Inferno, smoke, and thunder ammunition!
• Improved AI that actually can pose a challenge!
• Reduced head injuries so you can actually stay in a fight!
• A searchable star map so you can find that one planet you can never remember where it is!
• A totally overhauled mechbay that replicates real tabletop BattleTech rules and lets you change *anything* about your mechs!
• A totally different movement system! Now you can sprint and shoot! Evasion doesn't go away when you're shot at! Light mechs are survivable now!
• An improved heat system that checks for ammo explosions and can even force shutdowns!
• New salvage system that doesn't force you assemble mechs if you don't want to.
• Performance fixes so good you'll wonder why they're not in vanilla!
• ***COMING ONCE UPDATED*** A completely overhauled visibility system that changes combat as you know it utterly!
• ***COMING ONCE READY*** A rarity system that means that certain factions only have specific mechs! You want that Jagermech? You better fight the Davions to find one!
• ***COMING ONCE READY*** A dynamic shop system that puts all the new toys into shops naturally!
• And more!

How do I Get It?!
You'll need to move on over to the Nexus (I'd drop a link but can't do that here). You'll need to follow the installatioin instructions on the mod page and download the most recent Community Asset Bundle along with the mod. It's pretty self-explanatory but if you have any issues, feel free to hit me up here and I'll answer anything you'd like to know about the mod or installing it.


Thanks for reading, hope to see you on the battlefield!

 

[unclecid]

will definitely hit this up when i am ready to go 3050+
sounds stupendously fun

 

[bloodydoves]

will definitely hit this up when i am ready to go 3050+
sounds stupendously fun

Sounds like a good plan, man. BTA is pretty fun in my experience. I'll be streaming it tonight and for the next few weeks at minimum if you're interested to see it in action. You can find the stream and its vods on Twitch at 7 PM EST, name there is bloodydoves. Come say hi, check out the modpack, have your questions answered live!

 

[unclecid]

@bloodydoves
Would love to see the live stream but I work overnights so am getting ready for sleep at 7pm

 

[bloodydoves]

@bloodydoves
Would love to see the live stream but I work overnights so am getting ready for sleep at 7pm

Hey man, I understand, I've done the late night work thing myself. There are VODs for the most recent two weeks worth of streams on the channel's video page, maybe you can check those out just to see some BTA material when you're able. Thanks for the interest in the mod though, appreciate it, hope you get a chance to check it out sometime!

 

[Eximar]

Looks like a tremendous amount of goodness.

Really glad you're still making content for this game.

 

[unclecid]

I love the mech mods you have done.
And I make it a habit to rotate thru the overhaul mods (xai, xlrp, ccc, btex 3025)
Now I'll just add yours to the roster.

 

[bloodydoves]

Looks like a tremendous amount of goodness.

Really glad you're still making content for this game.

Thanks! I've fallen off the mech wagon for the time being, life got busy, though I'll still be updating my work to 1.6 as I get the chance.

I love the mech mods you have done.
And I make it a habit to rotate thru the overhaul mods (xai, xlrp, ccc, btex 3025)
Now I'll just add yours to the roster.

Sounds good, my friend. I hope it stands up with the others!

 

[Amechwarrior]

What did you change for the AI and what kind of approach did you take? Tune them for "Fight to live" vs "Fight to cause damage" and so on.

Did you need to make any specific adjustments to the AI due to the combat changes in the mod pack?

 

[Madranis]

From your CBT behaviors article:

"The big change though is that tactical missions are *always* in combat turns. This is a requirement to make the mod work properly as far as I'm aware. You get used to it, and even come to like it, so don't sweat it too much."

I'll mention that I have a fix for this in CBTMovementCore to make always being in combat optional. A fairly small alternate solution fixes the buggy fire-after-sprinting checks so that you don't have to be in combat/interleaved mode all the time to avoid hangs when allowing fire-after-sprint. If the CBTBehaviors devs want it, the fix should be easy to lift out of CBTMovementCore and add to CBTBehaviors.

The always in combat behavior breaks at least 1 campaign mission. I assume BTA 3062 is supposed to be career only? I didn't see that specified anywhere.

 

[bloodydoves]

What did you change for the AI and what kind of approach did you take? Tune them for "Fight to live" vs "Fight to cause damage" and so on.

Did you need to make any specific adjustments to the AI due to the combat changes in the mod pack?

I'm simply using BetterAI as you made it. I talked to you about including it if you recall. I don't know enough to custom write new AI myself, that's beyond my knowledge. Credit for BTA's AI improvements go to you entirely, my friend.

As for the AI adapting to combat changes, it seems to me that it manages it on its own. CBTMovement seems to be something the AI just sort of naturally adapts to (I know for a fact I've seen it sprint and shoot for instance). Again, your work is the key there. You're a champ, man.

I'll mention that I have a fix for this in CBTMovementCore to make always being in combat optional. A fairly small alternate solution fixes the buggy fire-after-sprinting checks so that you don't have to be in combat/interleaved mode all the time to avoid hangs when allowing fire-after-sprint. If the CBTBehaviors devs want it, the fix should be easy to lift out of CBTMovementCore and add to CBTBehaviors.

I was unaware of a fire-after-sprinting bug. I've been using CBTMovement since it was released and never seen that bug. I would recommend though that if you have a fix for a bug, contact the CBTBehaviors team, I'm sure FrostRaptor would be interested in talking to you about that fix. I will say on a personal level though that I actually prefer always combat turns. If it can be kept while fixing the bug you're talking about, that's something I'd be interested in talking about.

The always in combat behavior breaks at least 1 campaign mission. I assume BTA 3062 is supposed to be career only? I didn't see that specified anywhere.

...so I'll admit that I haven't played campaign in a really long time and did not know there was a campaign break. The intention is for BTA to be compatible with both career and campaign. Can you give me some more details on that so I can make a note of the issue and warn users?

 

[Madranis]

Sorry I should have been more clear. The always in combat/interleave mode was the original fix for a bug in battletech when allowing fire-after-sprint. The base game in theory has code to allow fire-after-sprinting just by toggling a single value. But the code in the base game itself is buggy, probably from code-rot from HBS not actually using the mode in the released game. There isn't any hang or bug with the current CBTBehaviors behavior that I know of other than it breaking the Locura mission in campaign mode.

Unfortunately, the always in combat/interleaved mode has to be disabled for the Locura mission to work and be finishable. Some part of the mission seems to be coded to look for the entering and exiting of combat.

 

[bloodydoves]

Sorry I should have been more clear. The always in combat/interleave mode was the original fix for a bug in battletech when allowing fire-after-sprint. The base game in theory has code to allow fire-after-sprinting just by toggling a single value. But the code in the base game itself is buggy, probably from code-rot from HBS not actually using the mode in the released game. There isn't any hang or bug with the current CBTBehaviors behavior that I know of other than it breaking the Locura mission in campaign mode.

Unfortunately, the always in combat/interleaved mode has to be disabled for the Locura mission to work and be finishable. Some part of the mission seems to be coded to look for the entering and exiting of combat.

Ah, I see. Interesting. Thanks for letting me know about that issue with the Locura mission. Is your CBTMovementCore compatible with normal CBTBehaviors (i.e. can I run them both and get the other parts of CBTBehaviors while still getting your CBTMovementCore fix)?

 

[Amechwarrior]

I'm simply using BetterAI as you made it. I talked to you about including it if you recall. I don't know enough to custom write new AI myself, that's beyond my knowledge. Credit for BTA's AI improvements go to you entirely, my friend.

As for the AI adapting to combat changes, it seems to me that it manages it on its own. CBTMovement seems to be something the AI just sort of naturally adapts to (I know for a fact I've seen it sprint and shoot for instance). Again, your work is the key there. You're a champ, man.



I was unaware of a fire-after-sprinting bug. I've been using CBTMovement since it was released and never seen that bug. I would recommend though that if you have a fix for a bug, contact the CBTBehaviors team, I'm sure FrostRaptor would be interested in talking to you about that fix. I will say on a personal level though that I actually prefer always combat turns. If it can be kept while fixing the bug you're talking about, that's something I'd be interested in talking about.


...so I'll admit that I haven't played campaign in a really long time and did not know there was a campaign break. The intention is for BTA to be compatible with both career and campaign. Can you give me some more details on that so I can make a note of the issue and warn users?

Yeah, I totally forgot until today, but was hoping you may have tossed in some changes. I'm always looking to collect new ideas I can use for later. BTX3025 started making adjustments recently and I was wondering if the expanded tech levels and such might have left the AI lacking in how to handle a new environment.

Also, the AI props really go to HBS. I just tune the machine they built. Handling the wildly different combat setups from stock to all the various mods is only possible because they built an incredibly resilient system without too many hard limits.

 

[Madranis]

CBTBehaviors and CBTMovementCore would conflict and cause weird behavior since they do some of the same things. They both started with code from the original CBTMovement mod. In fact, I need to go back and add a flag to the CBTMovmentCore's mod.json to make sure they won't both try and run.

If I knew where to contact CBTBehavior's devs, I'd be happy to offer my fix to them.

 

[bloodydoves]

CBTBehaviors and CBTMovementCore would conflict and cause weird behavior since they do some of the same things. They both started with code from the original CBTMovement mod. In fact, I need to go back and add a flag to the CBTMovmentCore's mod.json to make sure they won't both try and run.

If I knew where to contact CBTBehavior's devs, I'd be happy to offer my fix to them.

Do you have a Discord? If so, I can put you in touch with FrostRaptor, who I believe is maintaining CBTBehaviors right now.

Yeah, I totally forgot until today, but was hoping you may have tossed in some changes. I'm always looking to collect new ideas I can use for later. BTX3025 started making adjustments recently and I was wondering if the expanded tech levels and such might have left the AI lacking in how to handle a new environment.

I have not done custom adjustments yet. I wouldn't mind doing so eventually though, especially about artillery to make the AI smarter about not shelling themselves (as funny as it is to watch a Catapult hit itself with an ArrowIV round). Add it to the long list of "stuff to eventually learn how to do". XD

Also, the AI props really go to HBS. I just tune the machine they built. Handling the wildly different combat setups from stock to all the various mods is only possible because they built an incredibly resilient system without too many hard limits.

HBS really did do a great job with this game. Sometimes it seems like they're a little disorganized but I can't argue with the quality of the game we have to work with. Still playing it a year after release and plan to play it for a long time to come. They're champions.

 

[KMiSSioN]

Btw, you are using ME which have dedicated engine, you can also use CAE and make AoE reactor explosion on destruction.

 

[bloodydoves]

Btw, you are using ME which have dedicated engine, you can also use CAE and make AoE reactor explosion on destruction.

Yeah, I'm aware of CAE which is pretty amazing work (CAC is a requirement for me to play now, I can't play without it, it's so good). I just haven't gotten to including CAE. It's on the list for investigationg and possible inclusion.

 

[KMiSSioN]

sorry for bothering but i like stackpoling too much and trying to promote it

 

[bloodydoves]

sorry for bothering but i like stackpoling too much and trying to promote it

Oh, it's fun alright! The occasional stackpole is a good time! (except for the poor bastard who explodes)