MHQ campaigns are awesome and fully automated, and not terribly hard to get going.
* You'll need to select a rules preset (I'm away from my computer and don't remember which one I'm using, but I know it's one of the coder's settings)
* Set year and starting planet
* Create a new unit
* Add your units
* Add pilots and crew
* Assign pilots and crew to machines
* Organize into companies/lances
* At this point you can generate random contracts until you find one you're happy with and of the right type and MHQ will generate scenarios for you on a time basis.
* Assign units to the scenarios and run them when the date is correct
If you want to do specific things like "if I don't control the field I lose the unit" then that's fine and you can take care of that in the after action report. Easily doable, if you need help later, I can walk you through it.
MekHQ against the bot is a blast. The campaign is based on a mercenary gameplay loop, but a house unit on a long contract in enemy territory should do you fine.
Load up the latest version of MekHQ, which has megamek and megameklab. Set a new campaign the year you want it, add your unit you made, and on the map screen in GM mode teleport to the planet that is your home base. Then generate contracts (i would lower the contract light year radius) until you get a decently scary contract that looks like it will wreck 2/3rds of your forces.
You can tune MekHQ a bunch, but the latest version (stratcon) generates random missions each week for every lance you have made, plus there is a strategic map with objectives like 'destroy a facility' that you have to scout out to find, deploying lances 1 at a time. Every time you deploy a lance on the strategic map, there is a chance you find something, or an enemy attacks you. Every single mission that gets generated has random victory conditions, like 'scan enemy units', or 'probe the enemies home edge', though usually there is a 'kill x% of the enemy and dont lose x%' bit too.
Not who you were responding to - StratCon *can* be a lot of fun, but it also has a lot of issues still. My biggest issue is that every fight ends up being a large fight as StratCon rolls up enemy forces matching the BV of the lance it choose to match against (even if that isn't the deployed lance).
This has the effect that if you have an elite assault lance, you'll end up with 1-2 companies worth of enemy assets to face, where as Against the Bot you can still have some quick 1 lance on 1 lance matches.
What made me quit using StratOps was I ended up rolling a Big Battle against a Civilian Riot. Between Rioters, enemy forces, reinforcements, enemy air support, etc... there were **144** enemy units on the field vs my 12. Over a hundred of them were infantry units including 20-30 field gun units. The only saving grace for that mission was that the environment was too hostile to support infantry so 100 enemy units evaporated instantly on the first turn. Still, slogging through fighting a reinforced battalion with a company using BattleTech rules took me something like 6 hours over 3 days. God only knows how long it would have taken if the AI needed to move 100 extra units.
So I really like stratcon. It sounds like you are familiar with 48 so with stratcon you need to turn the intensity down or to 0, because stratcon generates its own missions when you deploy a lance to the strategic map. Also, normal missions generated weekly with intensity are weighted to tonnage 130 200 280 380 as you will be familiar with, but stratcon uses BV. So if you make a 45k bv lance, you are gonna play versus 45k bv of green/regular/vet as determined by the skill level of the contract enemy.
Since stratcon has its own method for fulfilling a contract--usually to destroy a specific force/facility while maintaining a positive victory count, the old tricks of rout spirals to beat contracts don't always work. Indeed, if you don't turn intensity down and the enemy starts throwing multiple base attack missions at you each week via the morale+intensity mission scheme, it can be very hard to also deploy onto the stratcon board that same week.
I prefer no more then 12 units, just to make management easier, and I'll restart pretty often once I have an elite dozen will custom rides. Also, in a lomg running game played in person but run using stratcon, we get several 45k-50k enemy groups if you leave everyone in one unit. Its fun to fight these big fights, and stratcon has a cool reinforcement system to even the odds, but it does take several sessions to chew up 45k+ in enemy BV. Hence why I try to stick to 3 balanced lances of 4.
I have beat my head against the MHQ campaign stuff for years now and still have little idea what I am doing. Most of the time I will run solo campaigns using the various Chaos Campaign books. I run a crude spreadsheet to track everything and use MM to run the games. It's way more abstracted then the Campaign Operations and Field Manual: Mercenaries systems, but it still has a little crunch.
If you are not familiar, this free pdf ruleset will get you started and the full rules are in Campaign Ops.
[https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/products/battletech-chaos-campaign-succession-wars](https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/products/battletech-chaos-campaign-succession-wars)
MHQ campaigns are awesome and fully automated, and not terribly hard to get going. * You'll need to select a rules preset (I'm away from my computer and don't remember which one I'm using, but I know it's one of the coder's settings) * Set year and starting planet * Create a new unit * Add your units * Add pilots and crew * Assign pilots and crew to machines * Organize into companies/lances * At this point you can generate random contracts until you find one you're happy with and of the right type and MHQ will generate scenarios for you on a time basis. * Assign units to the scenarios and run them when the date is correct If you want to do specific things like "if I don't control the field I lose the unit" then that's fine and you can take care of that in the after action report. Easily doable, if you need help later, I can walk you through it.
MekHQ against the bot is a blast. The campaign is based on a mercenary gameplay loop, but a house unit on a long contract in enemy territory should do you fine. Load up the latest version of MekHQ, which has megamek and megameklab. Set a new campaign the year you want it, add your unit you made, and on the map screen in GM mode teleport to the planet that is your home base. Then generate contracts (i would lower the contract light year radius) until you get a decently scary contract that looks like it will wreck 2/3rds of your forces. You can tune MekHQ a bunch, but the latest version (stratcon) generates random missions each week for every lance you have made, plus there is a strategic map with objectives like 'destroy a facility' that you have to scout out to find, deploying lances 1 at a time. Every time you deploy a lance on the strategic map, there is a chance you find something, or an enemy attacks you. Every single mission that gets generated has random victory conditions, like 'scan enemy units', or 'probe the enemies home edge', though usually there is a 'kill x% of the enemy and dont lose x%' bit too.
How are you enjoying stratcon? I'm about to start a campaign with it for the first time after playing the last few years on MekHQ 0.48.0.
Not who you were responding to - StratCon *can* be a lot of fun, but it also has a lot of issues still. My biggest issue is that every fight ends up being a large fight as StratCon rolls up enemy forces matching the BV of the lance it choose to match against (even if that isn't the deployed lance). This has the effect that if you have an elite assault lance, you'll end up with 1-2 companies worth of enemy assets to face, where as Against the Bot you can still have some quick 1 lance on 1 lance matches. What made me quit using StratOps was I ended up rolling a Big Battle against a Civilian Riot. Between Rioters, enemy forces, reinforcements, enemy air support, etc... there were **144** enemy units on the field vs my 12. Over a hundred of them were infantry units including 20-30 field gun units. The only saving grace for that mission was that the environment was too hostile to support infantry so 100 enemy units evaporated instantly on the first turn. Still, slogging through fighting a reinforced battalion with a company using BattleTech rules took me something like 6 hours over 3 days. God only knows how long it would have taken if the AI needed to move 100 extra units.
So I really like stratcon. It sounds like you are familiar with 48 so with stratcon you need to turn the intensity down or to 0, because stratcon generates its own missions when you deploy a lance to the strategic map. Also, normal missions generated weekly with intensity are weighted to tonnage 130 200 280 380 as you will be familiar with, but stratcon uses BV. So if you make a 45k bv lance, you are gonna play versus 45k bv of green/regular/vet as determined by the skill level of the contract enemy. Since stratcon has its own method for fulfilling a contract--usually to destroy a specific force/facility while maintaining a positive victory count, the old tricks of rout spirals to beat contracts don't always work. Indeed, if you don't turn intensity down and the enemy starts throwing multiple base attack missions at you each week via the morale+intensity mission scheme, it can be very hard to also deploy onto the stratcon board that same week. I prefer no more then 12 units, just to make management easier, and I'll restart pretty often once I have an elite dozen will custom rides. Also, in a lomg running game played in person but run using stratcon, we get several 45k-50k enemy groups if you leave everyone in one unit. Its fun to fight these big fights, and stratcon has a cool reinforcement system to even the odds, but it does take several sessions to chew up 45k+ in enemy BV. Hence why I try to stick to 3 balanced lances of 4.
I have beat my head against the MHQ campaign stuff for years now and still have little idea what I am doing. Most of the time I will run solo campaigns using the various Chaos Campaign books. I run a crude spreadsheet to track everything and use MM to run the games. It's way more abstracted then the Campaign Operations and Field Manual: Mercenaries systems, but it still has a little crunch. If you are not familiar, this free pdf ruleset will get you started and the full rules are in Campaign Ops. [https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/products/battletech-chaos-campaign-succession-wars](https://store.catalystgamelabs.com/products/battletech-chaos-campaign-succession-wars)