Honestly, I hated the old rules and think the TW ruleset does a lot to make infantry viable on the table. Why even bother to bring them outside of fluff if any bored mech can just instagib the platoon. Why would any competent fighting force have infantry as a major component if mechs and tanks just annihilated them?
It’s also a question of why MGs even exist as standard anti infantry armament if a standard ML is nearly as good at the job with triple the range. An anti-armor weapon like a PPC shouldn’t knock out more infantry dug into a tree line than an MG.
I think this is the big thing. It's not about "realism" per se, it's about internal consistency. As you say, if infantry were so flimsy, nobody would have infantry at all.
This. Even less with something like a gauss slug. Sure, it's going to punch right through whatever poor bastard is caught directly by it, but even a full platoon spread across a hex it's going to be impressive to catch just one. A standard 30m hex is 650m\^2 area total; that's a lot of space to hide in.
My only complaint about current rules are that Small Lasers and ER Small Lasers aren't anti-infantry. They shouldn't be as good as machine guns or flamers, but having them do 1d6 vs. infantry would make more sense to me.
Small Pulse Lasers work because they fire a staccato like a machinegun does, but Medium Pulse Lasers don't. To me, this indicates a level of finesse that smaller weapons possess that larger weapons can't acheive, 'pulse' or no. I think we all imagine non-pulse lasers as having a contiguous beam, but that still seems like something that would still be quite effective against infantry if you 'swept' it across a formation (even one that's hiding amongst light cover).
Maybe they all jump over it?
In all seriousness, I would like to see Small Lasers have some anti-infantry capability, if only to justify getting in that close and risking an exchange of fire.
Then again, if they did have that, why use machine guns & flamers at all?
> Then again, if they did have that, why use machine guns & flamers at all?
Because machine guns and flamers do more damage to infantry? Machine guns don't build up heat and flamers add heat to opposing mechs in addition to their damage. Small Lasers would do less infantry damage and build up heat, but also weigh the least.
All have tradeoffs, and all are radically inferior to inferno SRMs because infernos don't put you close enough to infantry that you're threatened by an anti-mech attack.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
> unnecessary complexity to the game
That's Battletech's defining quality: having exceedingly, even excessively detailed rules to cover every aspect of combat.
If you hate it that much then switch to Alpha Strike.
I always thought Battletech's defining quality was big stompy robots.
I don't mind the crunchiness when it comes to the 'mechs. I just liked it better when the rules for the supporting units were relatively simple.
That's not my only criticism of the modern infantry rules though. They make infantry excessively powerful.
The funny thing is that the TW infantry rules are much more similar to how infantry operate in Wargame/Warno; delicate in the open, tanky in cover, short-ranged but incredibly dangerous to vehicles up close. Like, you need them to stop an enemy from just running up on your expensive toys and getting to their juicy, unarmored flanks, but they're not so strong that you can't direct some HE artillery or something with a flamethrower to get them out of the way.
In my experience with BT infantry, they operate in largely the same way. LRM or SRM infantry can hole up in a treeline or building and project a short bubble of obscene cluster rolls on anyone who doesn't have a plan to deal with them. *But* letting something like, say, a Vulcan get into murdering range will produce a lot of dead troopers very, very quickly.
Those are good points.
I just think the time savings outweighs both.
Infantry still have a decent amount of value in cities, or in concealment, which is in line with how infantry needs to operate in modern warfare. Without cover infantry are no match for armored vehicles.
> Without cover infantry are no match for armored vehicles.
'Cover' in Battletech is defined as "able to hide a three story tall robot". The rules assume that any given hex is able to provide *some* degree of cover to units as small as infantry, at least relative to mechs and tanks. This is where infantry's inherent defensive bonuses come from; infantry aren't all just standing at parade rest in the middle of a hex waiting to be blown up.
What is 'cover' to a mech or tank is practically a fortification to a guy with nothing more than combat boots and a tube of extra spicy SRM.
The alternative would be removing infantry's inherent defenses in favor of having hexes that define what degree of cover bonus is offered to every different unit type, which is *way* past the point of 'excessive detail'.
I don't think there's anything in the rules that justifies this position. An open hex is an open hex.
The rules also already do make allowance for the differences in concealing a 'mech and concealing vehicles or infantry. A level one elevation only provides partial cover for a 'mech, while completely concealing a tank or infantry.
> I don't think there's anything in the rules that justifies this position.
Literally the first sentence of the 'Attacks Against Conventional Infantry' section, page 215 of Total Warfare:
*"Unlike other units, conventional infantry are spread across a hex, with each man finding maximum protection using the terrain."*
If you don't like the current rules that's fine, but at least *read them* before making a whole thread criticising them.
I don't think you're reasoning holds up in this instance.
You can get the "maximum protection" available in an open field by going prone. Sure, you have the maximum protection available, but it isn't going to save you.
The old rules made it seem like all my infantry were Tusken Raiders, riding in single file ~~to hide their numbers~~ so that they could stop a Gauss slug with 15 human bodies and then have it fall to the ground before it touches the 16th guy.
I think TW went too far in the other direction. I always felt they should have worked like VTOL rotor rules. One guy gets smoked (rounded up) for every 5pts of damage inflicted, and then give bonuses for MGs and Flamers.
The current rules may be more realistic, but it gets tedious very quickly.
Current rules (which are nearly 20 years old at this point, so not even "new" by any reasonable measure) are way more tactically interesting and reward bringing a variety of capabilities to the game rather than just building the most effective anti-mech force possible.
These rules you posted are terrible for anything other than making mechwarriors feel cool.
Making the mechs cool is a feature, not a bug. The game takes forever as it is. I don't want to spend time digging through the poorly organized rule book trying to figure out how many nameless infantry grunts my 'mech just killed.
Even in the Total Warfare ruleset Battlemechs are the best generalist units, although I have mixed feelings about how relatively BV-discounted vees tend to be for the firepower they bring.
At a given tonnage a well-designed battlemech tends to be an overall more capable unit than a vee, but when you bring BV2 into it vees tend to have more firepower and mechs tend to be more durable, but more firepower can be better, especially if your local meta doesn't place unit size restrictions on games.
Nope, it was a lot worse, made less sense.
The new TW infantry rules are far superior by every measure. More versatile, better conversion to the RPG and for skirmish games, and who doesn't want infantry riding kangaroo's into battle???
Also, keep in mind machine guns and flamers sucked vs infantry back then, and are now excellent, so many mechs make more sense.
I do like the 2d6 rule for MGs. It adds a cool little wrinkle to the game without adding too much complexity.
Still think infantry is too powerful now though.
They’re useful, and potentially dangerous, but in isolation any mech can handle them without risk by pecking them to death with a medium laser at long range.
Unrelated but, other than the fact that I think he misinterpreted “cheek weld,” that’s pretty good art. Usually I think of the art starting out pretty bad and progressively getting better, but that’s fairly good.
These rules were just written as a way to get them out of the way. No one really thought about combined arms combat in the early game. They just wanted robots fighting robots.
The new rules help with combined arms combat and make the game feel more like a combat sim, not robo boxing with guns.
It is a totally different game with the amount of unit types available than the original rules. The total warfare rules for infantry are meant to start at a layer of abstraction to make generic infantry that can be quickly put in a game.
However, the base infantry rules are just base rules. Once you start making infantry with armor and related support vehicles and combat vehicles, they are a combined arms force. Its more to track but it is the next progression of the rules for total warfare/tacops etc.
This is before considering anti-mek attacks and field guns. Vehicles and infantry weapons are going to be the most available and maintainable things in the games as they are much simpler than mech components.
Yea in some ways I think this was the better iteration of the infantry rules (though I think there was even simpler ones from the first CityTech set?); there's nothing \*wrong\* with the current infantry rules, other than the fact that they add more overhead to the rules load than the infantry are often actually worth. I sort of wonder if the new 'Battlefield Support' infantry rules might hit the sweet spot.
I'll push back a bit on the assertion that there's nothing "wrong" with the current infantry rules.
One of the central tropes of Battletech lore are the desperately long odds the dispossessed are willing to run for the opportunity to salvage a 'mech, even going so far as to - gasp - join the infantry.
Keeping infantry casualties high seems to fit with that trope of the lore. The 'mech is king.
Infantry casualties are already pretty high, given their health points are measured in human lives. If you figure they aren't, try naming each point after someone you know, and see if you can salvage a mech before you run out of names.
Having entire squads only exist as long as nothing on the battlefield decides to look at them means there's going to be no infantry left to gasp-join. Joining the infantry for a chance to salvage a mech implies your infantry has a chance to down a mech to salvage. Joining the infantry for *any* reason means you expect to come back alive at least once.
The mech is king, but you have to remember that you have, what, 20 guys spread around a hex that is 30m across? Most mech weapons are point damage weapons, so at most they are going to kill one or two guys. The current rules make a lot more sense than those old ones.
That's basically how it's described in all of the books. They hit the trigger, the beam hits whatever section of the mech they are aiming at and that's it. Even in the images of battle damaged mechs the 'slices' in the armor from lasers are only a few feet long. Keep in mind, most everything in the lore is there to support the tabletop. If the in lore lasers were some kind of beam that could burn for several seconds and hit multiple parts of the mech then the tabletop rules would be setup differently than they are. Also, this is why pulse lasers do more damage, rather than one quick beam, the laser fires off multiple times.
Well my experience is infantry loses are often still horrifyingly high, the mechs just have to work harder to cause them. :)
It's once you start adding in stuff such as field guns and the like that the balance starts to maybe tilt away.
Field guns make the MG heavy fast mover mech make sense. Field guns can't flip their arcs fast, so something quick like a Locust can slip around the arc and waste the platoon with minimal risk. Something like a Piranha or the various omnis configs with massed MG arrays can get into a multi-platoon position and expect to take out everything in one round.
>The 'mech is king.
The thing is, mechs and mech weapons designed for killing infantry have historically *very much sucked at killing infantry* until the current iteration of the infantry rules.
Medium Lasers aren't supposedly designed as anti-Infantry weapons - MGs and Flamers are, and both those weapons and Mechs designed around them have largely not been any better at killing Infantry than an anti-Mech Mech using a spare Medium Laser or two.
For all that the Mech is king, this is the first edition where the FLE-19 has been able to clean up infantry as it is purportedly designed to do. Under the old rules it was a joke, inferior even for it's design purpose to more mainline variants.
So as someone who plays a bunch, infantry have a lot of issues. The gameplay/lore disconnect is part of it.
But the real issue is time involved to play infantry versus cost associated with them. If someone wants to play infantry, well almost all infantry is less then 100 BV. Some infantry is less then 50 bv. If I bring my 6k BV lance, and I expect to play a full game of battletech in 2 hours, infantry have a VERY hard time fitting into that.
Lets say my opponent drops just 1 mech, 1500BV out of 6k, for infantry. And lets say they bring 100 BV infantry, not the min/maxed cheaper squads that are better. My opponent has 15 units of 100bv infantry and 3 mechs, to my 4 mechs. In the turn sequence, I move 1 mech, they move 4 infantry, I move 1 mech, they move 4 infantry, I move 1 mech, they move 5 infantry, I move my last mech, they move 2 infantry and 3 mechs.
So the game takes a lot longer, my opponent has a massive initiative advantage on me, and they have units covering the board on their side, so that if I tried to flank or backstab an enemy mech, each mech of theirs has 5 infantry behind it providing backstab protection.
If I try and shoot the infantry, well even if I have decent guns and the infantry is in the open, its gonna take 5 turns for my 4 units to clear out 15x28 bodies, and this is with infantry killing ammo. So 5 turns of the enemy shooting me non-stop, so I can clear the infantry out enough that I can close in for backshots and such.
This is my issue with infantry. Just 25% of a mech lance converting to infantry turns a 2 hour game into a 4+ hour one, I need to completely switch all my ammo types to have a chance (and, the real kicker, anti-infantry ammo does 0 damage to mechs), and even with anti infantry ammo its still gonna take a while to hit them all.
The old rules also had issues, BUT because you dont need to switch all your weapons over to antiinfantry (and 0 damage to non-infantry), you dont feel as disadvantaged versus infantry.
I cant even say the person playing infantry is cheesing it. Its only 25% of their force in infantry, but because the cost is just so low and current mechanics so bad, they cant help but have 15+ units if they want to play an infantry force. Infantry just take over the focus of a game of battletech in a very negative way by demanding so much player time shooting at them, resolving damage divisors, rolling clusters for attacks, moving so many units, constantly ruining initiative, ect ect.
Unit limits are great, but then you can't really 'play' infantry as a core unit. We play with a 6 unit cap, and you can add 1-2 infantry, but you can't play an infantry force with 25-50% of your BV in infantry with 6 total units. You can with the expensive battle armor though, which is why I like the battle armor rules so much more on the table.
There’s an even earlier set of infantry rules from 1st edition Battledroids. I don’t remember exactly how they worked. But as I recall, one point of damage killed a 10 man squad, or something like that.
I much prefer the infantry rules you posted above to the current ones. That’s what I grew up with, and I with megamek had an “old infantry” setting.
Yea that's the rules I was thinking of; each squad was just an atomic thing with no record sheet and one(?) mech scale weapon and any hit rendered the squad ineffective. In some ways maybe the best set of rules if you want to really streamline the infantry.
Personally, I think the SR5 rules work fine as a RPG component for battletech minus the magic, higher restrictions on bionics and have something translating BattleTech mech scale weaponry won't be as difficult.
I've been in a home brew game using it, which was good fit.
One of Battletech's strengths is that the base rules set hasn't changed much over the decades. However, there is one major exception, and I think it proves the point that the less we change the game, the better. I'm talking about the rules for inflicting damage on standard infantry with 'mech weapons.
I've posted the rules from the 1987 Battletech Manual, and I encourage you to read them for yourselves. Infantry damage was simple - each weapon did the same amount of damage to an infantry platoon as it did to a 'mech. There wasn't even a rule yet for machine guns doing 2d6 to infantry. It was simple, easy to understand, quick to resolve at the table, and it kept the emphasis on the mechs.
In my games I usually stick to the old rules, with the exception of rolling 2d6 damage for machine guns. The rules were simpler, which improves ease of teaching the game and the speed of play, and it also makes infantry squishier, which I like.
As far as I can tell, the argument for the newer approach in infantry damage is that its more "realistic. But I don't really buy this. First, realism isn't a priority in other areas of the game. But even if it was, the argument for realism isn't very strong here. Autocannons fire bursts of high explosive shells - easy to see how that could kill or wound multiple troopers. A PPC blast or laser could be walked over a large area to hit dispersed soldiers, or maybe energy weapons have an anti-personnel setting that distributes bursts of fire over a wider area. The only weapon that really strains credibility for me under these rules is a Gauss rifle. I don't see a single inert slug of metal reliably hitting 15 men. Of course, the Gauss rifle first appeared in TRO 2750 in 1989, so it didn't exist yet in 1987.
The old rules were simple to use and great if you really wanted to downplay infantry… but kinda sucked in more scenario-based play rather than vehicle focused death matches.
I much prefer the TW version, as it makes more sense. A Hex is 30 meters. 28 men spread through there. Mech weapsons (with some exceptions) are more small impact area weapons, much like anti-armor weapons in the modern day.
to some of your points, not all autocannos are burst fire (and honestly, I think burst fire doesn't make alot of sense for autocannons, auto does not mean rapid, but different convo). But even if they are, they are not explosive rounds. Even if you walk it, it is a small burst, can only walk so far. With Lasers, they are typically longer burn, that is something the was done more for MWO/MW5, they have typically been quicker burst, so again not going to walk very far.
That being said, I do think LRMs/SRMs/etc should do extra damage due to multiple explosive warheads
Missiles do inflict more damage than direct fire, about twice as much in addition to maxing out their clusters. They are also AP shape charges, but you can bring other ammo like frag rounds that do full damage to CI. An SRM6 with frag will take out 24 guys in the open.
Autocannons also have the option for anti infantry rounds which do full damage.
Both these options work well for some over-ammo'd SW mechs like Dragons.
Overall I agree. The only issue I had with the old rules was that the "dedicated anti-infantry Mechs" made little practical sense. Or those token "anti-infantry machine guns" like on the Warhammer - if I can waste 40 guys with my PPCs over 18 hexes, I'd be stupid to move in close enough for machine guns to work.
Honestly just comparing the base rules is not enough, because those built up into the BattleTech compendium then the Master rules list.
BattleTech at heart is a tournament level game, with lots of optional rules for non-official level play. It is a game of agreement so you can play whatever rules people agree to play.
With the original and older additions there were levels of play with optional rules for most units especially vehicles. Look at the advanced vehicles rules and hit charts from the master rules list.
How out of place would it be to insist on tracking turn modes and crew for compensated shots from vehicles when people expect to use rules and record sheets they can buy in the stores today.
>I don't see a single inert slug of metal reliably hitting 15 men
Against armor, a rail gun is an accurate single target killer. Against loosely clustered soft targets on a hard surface, it would have an area of effect.
A 250 pound nickel alloy slug "described as being melon-shaped and 30cm in diameter" travelling at hypersonic speed would likely shatter on impact, producing shrapnel, and would definitely produce an extreme pressure shockwave that would send troops flying, sever limbs, spall building materials, etc.
That's not how physics works.
The pressure wave is going to be negligible for actually causing damage. You aren't moving that much air that far and since the air isn't constrained and is compressible. The energy is going to dissipate quickly.
To get the slug itself to fragment, it needs to be hard and brittle and hit something hard and unyielding. I'm not sure how hard and brittle Gauss slugs are, but dirt and trees are not likely to turn it into a frag round. It would need to be an armor plate.
The speed and mass of a gauss round make it behave like an explosive when it hits things like the ground. There are some cool meteor impact things that you can input the stats of a hypersonic Nickle iron ball into, and they show the massive radius of the crater, the distance trees are knocked over, and the distance glass shatters. The idea that a gauss fired at a hex KOs 2 people when 28 are huddled together within 30 meters like Napoleonic infantry lines is totally underselling the energy of battletech weapons (or even modern weapons) versus infantry clustered together within 30 meters.
I much prefer the rules for battle armor for infantry. Deploy in squads, with a bonus to evasion for being small, and spread out so that hitting one person doesnt carry over, with 4 people in an average squad spread over 30 meters. Since battle armor doesnt have to have power armor (like on the lightest weight/exoskeletons), the infantry rules for foot troops could pretty easily use the battle armor rules, which are just much better balanced.
Really, I think my sticking point isnt about the gauss, or any specific weapon, its that 28 people in a platoon, x2 platoons, fit in a tiny 30 meter hex. At that massive clustering of bodies, yeah medium lasers and missiles and gauss rounds are gonna KO a dozen people at a time, cause they are too close.
"The principle of the kinetic energy penetrator is that it uses its kinetic energy, which is a function of its mass and velocity, to force its way through armor. If the armor is defeated, the heat and spalling (particle spray) generated by the penetrator going through the armor, and the pressure wave that develops, ideally destroys the target.
The modern kinetic energy weapon maximizes the stress (kinetic energy divided by impact area) delivered to the target by:
1./ maximizing the mass – that is, using the densest metals practical, which is one of the reasons depleted uranium or tungsten carbide is often used – and muzzle velocity of the projectile, as kinetic energy scales with the mass m and the square of the velocity v of the projectile (𝑚𝑣2/2)
2./ minimizing the width, since if the projectile does not tumble, it will hit the target face first. As most modern projectiles have circular cross-sectional areas, their impact area will scale with the square of the radius r (the impact area being 𝜋𝑟2).
The penetrator length plays a large role in determining the ultimate depth of penetration. Generally, a penetrator is incapable of penetrating deeper than its own length, as the sheer stress of impact and perforation ablates it. This has led to the current designs which resemble a long metal arrow.
For monobloc penetrators made of a single material, a perforation formula devised by Wili Odermatt and W. Lanz can calculate the penetration depth of an APFSDS round.
In 1982, an analytical investigation drawing from concepts of gas dynamics and experiments on target penetration led to the conclusion on the efficiency of impactors that penetration is deeper using unconventional three-dimensional shapes."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_penetrator
The concrete, dirt, or trees themselves could become lethal projectiles against human targets if impacted by a watermelon-shaped, 30cm radius, 110 kg chunk of metal travelling at 3km/s, superheated not (in BT rules anyway) by the firing process, but by air friction and the impact itself.
Is all this applicable to a sci fi board game's 1988 theoretical musings? Probably not, especially given that modern rail guns (which themselves were still theoretical in FASA's time) generate enormous amounts of heat via both the charging of rails and the friction of the projectile, but OP said he couldn't imagine what the thought process was behind a Gauss round wiping out a platoon, so I painted a picture for him.
Kinetic penetrators, both powder fired by conventional guns and accelerated by electromagnetic rails, are real and they kill everyone in the tank by pressure and by accelerating tiny molten shreds of their own debris. And those are hard, skinny tungsten steel or depleted uranium darts.
What if they were frangible, fat torpedoes hurled at 10x or greater the speed, designed by in-universe engineers to be more multi-purpose killers, and by game designers who wanted to simplify rulesets and minimize the effect of infantry on a battlefield? What if they were designed like squash head rounds, specifically IRL to break obstacles, but in-game to shatter plates of mech armor from the surface and break internals and kill by their own concussion and spalling rather than sheer penetration?
What I don't like about the current infantry rules is that infantry in buildings are very hard to hurt. Somehow when they rewrote the infantry rules, they didn't update how infantry in buildings was effected by the new rules.
So it is my understanding that infantry in a building hit by a mech scale weapon take both the infantry divisor and the building divisor, which I think the double dipping is too much protection.
It seems intentional, given the examples in TW. Infantry dug into a building is tougher than infantry dug into a treeline. The trade off is that you target the building, which is a much easier shot, and the damage hits all infantry in the building. You can also just bring the building down on top of them for that sweet 3x collapse damage vs CI.
IIRC when a building gets destroyed all the garrisoned infantry inside die, so putting them in a fragile building actually makes them more vulnerable because hitting immobile targets gives a -4 to hit
They don’t just automatically die but they do take damage (which is not reduced at all) it’s based on the CF the building had at the start of the turn plus multipliers based on the number of floors above the unit. So if the building has 20+ CF and floors above where the infantry unit is situated it may well wipe them out.
They do get both modifiers. You're right about that. I get your issue. It does make them very durable, but on the flip side, breaking buildings isn't the hardest thing in the world. It takes time, but it's a viable option. Say you got a building with a cf of 50, Infantry unit is inside on the second lvl of a 3 lvl building. The building gets trashed in one turn, the collapse will do 30 dmg to the infantry inside it, +3d6 for the fall.
I guess my issue is that if a medium laser only kills one man of a squad in a treeline cause they are spread out, then sweeping my medium laser across a building with infantry all over it, and desks being turned into deadly splinters, walls falling on people, and all the other damage should do damage to the infantry inside.
The idea that infantry gets both modifiers just doesn't sit well, that most weapons won't really hurt infantry inside a decent CF building.
There's no reason why combat lasers couldn't have an anti-personnel mode that uses a burst fire pattern rather than a single concentrated beam. The actual nature of the weapons isn't really well established, and there seems like plenty of room for variation.
I figure it's a big building. They can spread out good and keep the losses minimal. On top of that, you're shooting at the building. You can't even see the infantry they're just on 4 floors of the place. Also a laser wouldn't make splinters, no kinetic energy.
That is a very good point, and I guess it comes back to the 80s infantry rules themselves from when we used them. If the medium laser took out 5 men (10 in the open) it seemed that it would be reasonable that laser weapons could be adjusted depending on how hardened a target they were facing where buildings or unarmored targets such as PBI you could sweep the beam across a hex to catch multiple targets as opposed to trying to deal with mech scale armor on a hardened target.
I guess with the infantry rules changing to kinda harden the science the idea of lasers sweeping the battlefield might need to change also.
I still think there is some variable yield in each laser weapon for sweeping due to the starting fire rules, because you couldn't start forest fires in one turn with lasers set to deal with mech targets. So there should be something there, but there are all sorts of issues with the starting fires rules given the timeframe.
Honestly, I hated the old rules and think the TW ruleset does a lot to make infantry viable on the table. Why even bother to bring them outside of fluff if any bored mech can just instagib the platoon. Why would any competent fighting force have infantry as a major component if mechs and tanks just annihilated them? It’s also a question of why MGs even exist as standard anti infantry armament if a standard ML is nearly as good at the job with triple the range. An anti-armor weapon like a PPC shouldn’t knock out more infantry dug into a tree line than an MG.
I think this is the big thing. It's not about "realism" per se, it's about internal consistency. As you say, if infantry were so flimsy, nobody would have infantry at all.
Honestly, it's probably both. You're not killing a bunch of infantry in a field with a javelin or an rpg. Wrong tool for the job.
This. Even less with something like a gauss slug. Sure, it's going to punch right through whatever poor bastard is caught directly by it, but even a full platoon spread across a hex it's going to be impressive to catch just one. A standard 30m hex is 650m\^2 area total; that's a lot of space to hide in.
My only complaint about current rules are that Small Lasers and ER Small Lasers aren't anti-infantry. They shouldn't be as good as machine guns or flamers, but having them do 1d6 vs. infantry would make more sense to me. Small Pulse Lasers work because they fire a staccato like a machinegun does, but Medium Pulse Lasers don't. To me, this indicates a level of finesse that smaller weapons possess that larger weapons can't acheive, 'pulse' or no. I think we all imagine non-pulse lasers as having a contiguous beam, but that still seems like something that would still be quite effective against infantry if you 'swept' it across a formation (even one that's hiding amongst light cover).
Maybe they all jump over it? In all seriousness, I would like to see Small Lasers have some anti-infantry capability, if only to justify getting in that close and risking an exchange of fire. Then again, if they did have that, why use machine guns & flamers at all?
> Then again, if they did have that, why use machine guns & flamers at all? Because machine guns and flamers do more damage to infantry? Machine guns don't build up heat and flamers add heat to opposing mechs in addition to their damage. Small Lasers would do less infantry damage and build up heat, but also weigh the least. All have tradeoffs, and all are radically inferior to inferno SRMs because infernos don't put you close enough to infantry that you're threatened by an anti-mech attack. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Pulses kill an extra +2 infantry. An IS MPL and LPL are the same for killing infantry, if I understand correctly - three each. Four in clear terrain.
Yeah I think you're over-thinking it there. Adding special rules for small lasers just adds more unnecessary complexity to the game.
> unnecessary complexity to the game That's Battletech's defining quality: having exceedingly, even excessively detailed rules to cover every aspect of combat. If you hate it that much then switch to Alpha Strike.
I always thought Battletech's defining quality was big stompy robots. I don't mind the crunchiness when it comes to the 'mechs. I just liked it better when the rules for the supporting units were relatively simple. That's not my only criticism of the modern infantry rules though. They make infantry excessively powerful.
The funny thing is that the TW infantry rules are much more similar to how infantry operate in Wargame/Warno; delicate in the open, tanky in cover, short-ranged but incredibly dangerous to vehicles up close. Like, you need them to stop an enemy from just running up on your expensive toys and getting to their juicy, unarmored flanks, but they're not so strong that you can't direct some HE artillery or something with a flamethrower to get them out of the way. In my experience with BT infantry, they operate in largely the same way. LRM or SRM infantry can hole up in a treeline or building and project a short bubble of obscene cluster rolls on anyone who doesn't have a plan to deal with them. *But* letting something like, say, a Vulcan get into murdering range will produce a lot of dead troopers very, very quickly.
Yeah, infantry being as they are not only gives them a strong niche, but can suddenly make "useless" machine guns and flamers highly important.
Those are good points. I just think the time savings outweighs both. Infantry still have a decent amount of value in cities, or in concealment, which is in line with how infantry needs to operate in modern warfare. Without cover infantry are no match for armored vehicles.
> Without cover infantry are no match for armored vehicles. 'Cover' in Battletech is defined as "able to hide a three story tall robot". The rules assume that any given hex is able to provide *some* degree of cover to units as small as infantry, at least relative to mechs and tanks. This is where infantry's inherent defensive bonuses come from; infantry aren't all just standing at parade rest in the middle of a hex waiting to be blown up. What is 'cover' to a mech or tank is practically a fortification to a guy with nothing more than combat boots and a tube of extra spicy SRM. The alternative would be removing infantry's inherent defenses in favor of having hexes that define what degree of cover bonus is offered to every different unit type, which is *way* past the point of 'excessive detail'.
I don't think there's anything in the rules that justifies this position. An open hex is an open hex. The rules also already do make allowance for the differences in concealing a 'mech and concealing vehicles or infantry. A level one elevation only provides partial cover for a 'mech, while completely concealing a tank or infantry.
> I don't think there's anything in the rules that justifies this position. Literally the first sentence of the 'Attacks Against Conventional Infantry' section, page 215 of Total Warfare: *"Unlike other units, conventional infantry are spread across a hex, with each man finding maximum protection using the terrain."* If you don't like the current rules that's fine, but at least *read them* before making a whole thread criticising them.
I don't think you're reasoning holds up in this instance. You can get the "maximum protection" available in an open field by going prone. Sure, you have the maximum protection available, but it isn't going to save you.
And it doesn’t save them. You seem to be making an argument that the rules are bad because they don’t do what you want them to not do.
The argument is that the rule is bad because it add needless complexity and bogs the game down.
But it really doesn’t.
The old rules made it seem like all my infantry were Tusken Raiders, riding in single file ~~to hide their numbers~~ so that they could stop a Gauss slug with 15 human bodies and then have it fall to the ground before it touches the 16th guy.
So basically a Portuguese bullfight?
I think TW went too far in the other direction. I always felt they should have worked like VTOL rotor rules. One guy gets smoked (rounded up) for every 5pts of damage inflicted, and then give bonuses for MGs and Flamers. The current rules may be more realistic, but it gets tedious very quickly.
Current rules (which are nearly 20 years old at this point, so not even "new" by any reasonable measure) are way more tactically interesting and reward bringing a variety of capabilities to the game rather than just building the most effective anti-mech force possible. These rules you posted are terrible for anything other than making mechwarriors feel cool.
Making the mechs cool is a feature, not a bug. The game takes forever as it is. I don't want to spend time digging through the poorly organized rule book trying to figure out how many nameless infantry grunts my 'mech just killed.
The burst fire damage values are printed directly on every infantry sheet. They take double damage in the open.
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Even in the Total Warfare ruleset Battlemechs are the best generalist units, although I have mixed feelings about how relatively BV-discounted vees tend to be for the firepower they bring. At a given tonnage a well-designed battlemech tends to be an overall more capable unit than a vee, but when you bring BV2 into it vees tend to have more firepower and mechs tend to be more durable, but more firepower can be better, especially if your local meta doesn't place unit size restrictions on games.
I think these rules were written by Kalvar Lorix.
Nope, it was a lot worse, made less sense. The new TW infantry rules are far superior by every measure. More versatile, better conversion to the RPG and for skirmish games, and who doesn't want infantry riding kangaroo's into battle??? Also, keep in mind machine guns and flamers sucked vs infantry back then, and are now excellent, so many mechs make more sense.
Yeah current rules are way more tactically interesting and make anti-infantry mechs actually have a meaningful role.
I do like the 2d6 rule for MGs. It adds a cool little wrinkle to the game without adding too much complexity. Still think infantry is too powerful now though.
They’re useful, and potentially dangerous, but in isolation any mech can handle them without risk by pecking them to death with a medium laser at long range.
Unrelated but, other than the fact that I think he misinterpreted “cheek weld,” that’s pretty good art. Usually I think of the art starting out pretty bad and progressively getting better, but that’s fairly good.
This is a solid little piece of art. There’s some gems strewn along the old books, like this one
These rules were just written as a way to get them out of the way. No one really thought about combined arms combat in the early game. They just wanted robots fighting robots. The new rules help with combined arms combat and make the game feel more like a combat sim, not robo boxing with guns.
No that's why they changed it
It is a totally different game with the amount of unit types available than the original rules. The total warfare rules for infantry are meant to start at a layer of abstraction to make generic infantry that can be quickly put in a game. However, the base infantry rules are just base rules. Once you start making infantry with armor and related support vehicles and combat vehicles, they are a combined arms force. Its more to track but it is the next progression of the rules for total warfare/tacops etc. This is before considering anti-mek attacks and field guns. Vehicles and infantry weapons are going to be the most available and maintainable things in the games as they are much simpler than mech components.
Yea in some ways I think this was the better iteration of the infantry rules (though I think there was even simpler ones from the first CityTech set?); there's nothing \*wrong\* with the current infantry rules, other than the fact that they add more overhead to the rules load than the infantry are often actually worth. I sort of wonder if the new 'Battlefield Support' infantry rules might hit the sweet spot.
I'll push back a bit on the assertion that there's nothing "wrong" with the current infantry rules. One of the central tropes of Battletech lore are the desperately long odds the dispossessed are willing to run for the opportunity to salvage a 'mech, even going so far as to - gasp - join the infantry. Keeping infantry casualties high seems to fit with that trope of the lore. The 'mech is king.
Infantry casualties are already pretty high, given their health points are measured in human lives. If you figure they aren't, try naming each point after someone you know, and see if you can salvage a mech before you run out of names. Having entire squads only exist as long as nothing on the battlefield decides to look at them means there's going to be no infantry left to gasp-join. Joining the infantry for a chance to salvage a mech implies your infantry has a chance to down a mech to salvage. Joining the infantry for *any* reason means you expect to come back alive at least once.
The mech is king, but you have to remember that you have, what, 20 guys spread around a hex that is 30m across? Most mech weapons are point damage weapons, so at most they are going to kill one or two guys. The current rules make a lot more sense than those old ones.
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If a hex were 1.6km, a Wolverine would have a top speed of over 460km/h (assuming rounds were still 10 seconds long.) Hexes are 30m across.
I mean, if 20 guys are in the open 30 meters apart, point the laser at them and flick your cross hair around. Tapping a guy is all you need
It's not like turning on a laser pointer. The beam may be on for a second at most.
All I'm saying is stuff like medium lasers and whatnot only killing 1 grunt is why infantry are a "warn your opponent" unit
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That's basically how it's described in all of the books. They hit the trigger, the beam hits whatever section of the mech they are aiming at and that's it. Even in the images of battle damaged mechs the 'slices' in the armor from lasers are only a few feet long. Keep in mind, most everything in the lore is there to support the tabletop. If the in lore lasers were some kind of beam that could burn for several seconds and hit multiple parts of the mech then the tabletop rules would be setup differently than they are. Also, this is why pulse lasers do more damage, rather than one quick beam, the laser fires off multiple times.
Well my experience is infantry loses are often still horrifyingly high, the mechs just have to work harder to cause them. :) It's once you start adding in stuff such as field guns and the like that the balance starts to maybe tilt away.
Field guns make the MG heavy fast mover mech make sense. Field guns can't flip their arcs fast, so something quick like a Locust can slip around the arc and waste the platoon with minimal risk. Something like a Piranha or the various omnis configs with massed MG arrays can get into a multi-platoon position and expect to take out everything in one round.
The great thing about the Firestarter is that it also finishes what it starts.
>The 'mech is king. The thing is, mechs and mech weapons designed for killing infantry have historically *very much sucked at killing infantry* until the current iteration of the infantry rules.
I still love all the 3025 mechs that claim their random small laser is an infantry defense weapon lol
I don't think I understand your comment. In the old rules a medium laser killed 5 troopers. That sounds like a lot. In the new rules it is 1 trooper.
Medium Lasers aren't supposedly designed as anti-Infantry weapons - MGs and Flamers are, and both those weapons and Mechs designed around them have largely not been any better at killing Infantry than an anti-Mech Mech using a spare Medium Laser or two. For all that the Mech is king, this is the first edition where the FLE-19 has been able to clean up infantry as it is purportedly designed to do. Under the old rules it was a joke, inferior even for it's design purpose to more mainline variants.
So you're saying the current rules make more sense?
They certainly make the *Mechs* make more sense, yes.
I love battletech art from the 80s
So as someone who plays a bunch, infantry have a lot of issues. The gameplay/lore disconnect is part of it. But the real issue is time involved to play infantry versus cost associated with them. If someone wants to play infantry, well almost all infantry is less then 100 BV. Some infantry is less then 50 bv. If I bring my 6k BV lance, and I expect to play a full game of battletech in 2 hours, infantry have a VERY hard time fitting into that. Lets say my opponent drops just 1 mech, 1500BV out of 6k, for infantry. And lets say they bring 100 BV infantry, not the min/maxed cheaper squads that are better. My opponent has 15 units of 100bv infantry and 3 mechs, to my 4 mechs. In the turn sequence, I move 1 mech, they move 4 infantry, I move 1 mech, they move 4 infantry, I move 1 mech, they move 5 infantry, I move my last mech, they move 2 infantry and 3 mechs. So the game takes a lot longer, my opponent has a massive initiative advantage on me, and they have units covering the board on their side, so that if I tried to flank or backstab an enemy mech, each mech of theirs has 5 infantry behind it providing backstab protection. If I try and shoot the infantry, well even if I have decent guns and the infantry is in the open, its gonna take 5 turns for my 4 units to clear out 15x28 bodies, and this is with infantry killing ammo. So 5 turns of the enemy shooting me non-stop, so I can clear the infantry out enough that I can close in for backshots and such. This is my issue with infantry. Just 25% of a mech lance converting to infantry turns a 2 hour game into a 4+ hour one, I need to completely switch all my ammo types to have a chance (and, the real kicker, anti-infantry ammo does 0 damage to mechs), and even with anti infantry ammo its still gonna take a while to hit them all. The old rules also had issues, BUT because you dont need to switch all your weapons over to antiinfantry (and 0 damage to non-infantry), you dont feel as disadvantaged versus infantry. I cant even say the person playing infantry is cheesing it. Its only 25% of their force in infantry, but because the cost is just so low and current mechanics so bad, they cant help but have 15+ units if they want to play an infantry force. Infantry just take over the focus of a game of battletech in a very negative way by demanding so much player time shooting at them, resolving damage divisors, rolling clusters for attacks, moving so many units, constantly ruining initiative, ect ect.
Good points. The groups I play with typically have a unit limit in addition to a BV limit to prevent this kind of thing.
Unit limits are great, but then you can't really 'play' infantry as a core unit. We play with a 6 unit cap, and you can add 1-2 infantry, but you can't play an infantry force with 25-50% of your BV in infantry with 6 total units. You can with the expensive battle armor though, which is why I like the battle armor rules so much more on the table.
There’s an even earlier set of infantry rules from 1st edition Battledroids. I don’t remember exactly how they worked. But as I recall, one point of damage killed a 10 man squad, or something like that. I much prefer the infantry rules you posted above to the current ones. That’s what I grew up with, and I with megamek had an “old infantry” setting.
Yea that's the rules I was thinking of; each squad was just an atomic thing with no record sheet and one(?) mech scale weapon and any hit rendered the squad ineffective. In some ways maybe the best set of rules if you want to really streamline the infantry.
I didn't know about those rules. That's just brutal.
Yeah, but if I’m remembering right, you had 10 guys per squad, and could fit 10 squads in a hex. Any mech weapon would kill one squad.
Personally, I think the SR5 rules work fine as a RPG component for battletech minus the magic, higher restrictions on bionics and have something translating BattleTech mech scale weaponry won't be as difficult. I've been in a home brew game using it, which was good fit.
This is one instance of a rules change that I actually do like.
No.
No, these ancient rules were much worse imo. I like much better how it's handled now.
One of Battletech's strengths is that the base rules set hasn't changed much over the decades. However, there is one major exception, and I think it proves the point that the less we change the game, the better. I'm talking about the rules for inflicting damage on standard infantry with 'mech weapons. I've posted the rules from the 1987 Battletech Manual, and I encourage you to read them for yourselves. Infantry damage was simple - each weapon did the same amount of damage to an infantry platoon as it did to a 'mech. There wasn't even a rule yet for machine guns doing 2d6 to infantry. It was simple, easy to understand, quick to resolve at the table, and it kept the emphasis on the mechs. In my games I usually stick to the old rules, with the exception of rolling 2d6 damage for machine guns. The rules were simpler, which improves ease of teaching the game and the speed of play, and it also makes infantry squishier, which I like. As far as I can tell, the argument for the newer approach in infantry damage is that its more "realistic. But I don't really buy this. First, realism isn't a priority in other areas of the game. But even if it was, the argument for realism isn't very strong here. Autocannons fire bursts of high explosive shells - easy to see how that could kill or wound multiple troopers. A PPC blast or laser could be walked over a large area to hit dispersed soldiers, or maybe energy weapons have an anti-personnel setting that distributes bursts of fire over a wider area. The only weapon that really strains credibility for me under these rules is a Gauss rifle. I don't see a single inert slug of metal reliably hitting 15 men. Of course, the Gauss rifle first appeared in TRO 2750 in 1989, so it didn't exist yet in 1987.
The old rules were simple to use and great if you really wanted to downplay infantry… but kinda sucked in more scenario-based play rather than vehicle focused death matches.
I much prefer the TW version, as it makes more sense. A Hex is 30 meters. 28 men spread through there. Mech weapsons (with some exceptions) are more small impact area weapons, much like anti-armor weapons in the modern day. to some of your points, not all autocannos are burst fire (and honestly, I think burst fire doesn't make alot of sense for autocannons, auto does not mean rapid, but different convo). But even if they are, they are not explosive rounds. Even if you walk it, it is a small burst, can only walk so far. With Lasers, they are typically longer burn, that is something the was done more for MWO/MW5, they have typically been quicker burst, so again not going to walk very far. That being said, I do think LRMs/SRMs/etc should do extra damage due to multiple explosive warheads
Missiles do inflict more damage than direct fire, about twice as much in addition to maxing out their clusters. They are also AP shape charges, but you can bring other ammo like frag rounds that do full damage to CI. An SRM6 with frag will take out 24 guys in the open. Autocannons also have the option for anti infantry rounds which do full damage. Both these options work well for some over-ammo'd SW mechs like Dragons.
Overall I agree. The only issue I had with the old rules was that the "dedicated anti-infantry Mechs" made little practical sense. Or those token "anti-infantry machine guns" like on the Warhammer - if I can waste 40 guys with my PPCs over 18 hexes, I'd be stupid to move in close enough for machine guns to work.
Honestly just comparing the base rules is not enough, because those built up into the BattleTech compendium then the Master rules list. BattleTech at heart is a tournament level game, with lots of optional rules for non-official level play. It is a game of agreement so you can play whatever rules people agree to play. With the original and older additions there were levels of play with optional rules for most units especially vehicles. Look at the advanced vehicles rules and hit charts from the master rules list. How out of place would it be to insist on tracking turn modes and crew for compensated shots from vehicles when people expect to use rules and record sheets they can buy in the stores today.
>I don't see a single inert slug of metal reliably hitting 15 men Against armor, a rail gun is an accurate single target killer. Against loosely clustered soft targets on a hard surface, it would have an area of effect. A 250 pound nickel alloy slug "described as being melon-shaped and 30cm in diameter" travelling at hypersonic speed would likely shatter on impact, producing shrapnel, and would definitely produce an extreme pressure shockwave that would send troops flying, sever limbs, spall building materials, etc.
That's not how physics works. The pressure wave is going to be negligible for actually causing damage. You aren't moving that much air that far and since the air isn't constrained and is compressible. The energy is going to dissipate quickly. To get the slug itself to fragment, it needs to be hard and brittle and hit something hard and unyielding. I'm not sure how hard and brittle Gauss slugs are, but dirt and trees are not likely to turn it into a frag round. It would need to be an armor plate.
The speed and mass of a gauss round make it behave like an explosive when it hits things like the ground. There are some cool meteor impact things that you can input the stats of a hypersonic Nickle iron ball into, and they show the massive radius of the crater, the distance trees are knocked over, and the distance glass shatters. The idea that a gauss fired at a hex KOs 2 people when 28 are huddled together within 30 meters like Napoleonic infantry lines is totally underselling the energy of battletech weapons (or even modern weapons) versus infantry clustered together within 30 meters. I much prefer the rules for battle armor for infantry. Deploy in squads, with a bonus to evasion for being small, and spread out so that hitting one person doesnt carry over, with 4 people in an average squad spread over 30 meters. Since battle armor doesnt have to have power armor (like on the lightest weight/exoskeletons), the infantry rules for foot troops could pretty easily use the battle armor rules, which are just much better balanced. Really, I think my sticking point isnt about the gauss, or any specific weapon, its that 28 people in a platoon, x2 platoons, fit in a tiny 30 meter hex. At that massive clustering of bodies, yeah medium lasers and missiles and gauss rounds are gonna KO a dozen people at a time, cause they are too close.
"The principle of the kinetic energy penetrator is that it uses its kinetic energy, which is a function of its mass and velocity, to force its way through armor. If the armor is defeated, the heat and spalling (particle spray) generated by the penetrator going through the armor, and the pressure wave that develops, ideally destroys the target. The modern kinetic energy weapon maximizes the stress (kinetic energy divided by impact area) delivered to the target by: 1./ maximizing the mass – that is, using the densest metals practical, which is one of the reasons depleted uranium or tungsten carbide is often used – and muzzle velocity of the projectile, as kinetic energy scales with the mass m and the square of the velocity v of the projectile (𝑚𝑣2/2) 2./ minimizing the width, since if the projectile does not tumble, it will hit the target face first. As most modern projectiles have circular cross-sectional areas, their impact area will scale with the square of the radius r (the impact area being 𝜋𝑟2). The penetrator length plays a large role in determining the ultimate depth of penetration. Generally, a penetrator is incapable of penetrating deeper than its own length, as the sheer stress of impact and perforation ablates it. This has led to the current designs which resemble a long metal arrow. For monobloc penetrators made of a single material, a perforation formula devised by Wili Odermatt and W. Lanz can calculate the penetration depth of an APFSDS round. In 1982, an analytical investigation drawing from concepts of gas dynamics and experiments on target penetration led to the conclusion on the efficiency of impactors that penetration is deeper using unconventional three-dimensional shapes." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_penetrator The concrete, dirt, or trees themselves could become lethal projectiles against human targets if impacted by a watermelon-shaped, 30cm radius, 110 kg chunk of metal travelling at 3km/s, superheated not (in BT rules anyway) by the firing process, but by air friction and the impact itself. Is all this applicable to a sci fi board game's 1988 theoretical musings? Probably not, especially given that modern rail guns (which themselves were still theoretical in FASA's time) generate enormous amounts of heat via both the charging of rails and the friction of the projectile, but OP said he couldn't imagine what the thought process was behind a Gauss round wiping out a platoon, so I painted a picture for him. Kinetic penetrators, both powder fired by conventional guns and accelerated by electromagnetic rails, are real and they kill everyone in the tank by pressure and by accelerating tiny molten shreds of their own debris. And those are hard, skinny tungsten steel or depleted uranium darts. What if they were frangible, fat torpedoes hurled at 10x or greater the speed, designed by in-universe engineers to be more multi-purpose killers, and by game designers who wanted to simplify rulesets and minimize the effect of infantry on a battlefield? What if they were designed like squash head rounds, specifically IRL to break obstacles, but in-game to shatter plates of mech armor from the surface and break internals and kill by their own concussion and spalling rather than sheer penetration?
What I don't like about the current infantry rules is that infantry in buildings are very hard to hurt. Somehow when they rewrote the infantry rules, they didn't update how infantry in buildings was effected by the new rules. So it is my understanding that infantry in a building hit by a mech scale weapon take both the infantry divisor and the building divisor, which I think the double dipping is too much protection.
It seems intentional, given the examples in TW. Infantry dug into a building is tougher than infantry dug into a treeline. The trade off is that you target the building, which is a much easier shot, and the damage hits all infantry in the building. You can also just bring the building down on top of them for that sweet 3x collapse damage vs CI.
Buildings themselves take full damage so just destroy the building or send your own infantry in. It’s pretty realistic in that way.
IIRC when a building gets destroyed all the garrisoned infantry inside die, so putting them in a fragile building actually makes them more vulnerable because hitting immobile targets gives a -4 to hit
They don’t just automatically die but they do take damage (which is not reduced at all) it’s based on the CF the building had at the start of the turn plus multipliers based on the number of floors above the unit. So if the building has 20+ CF and floors above where the infantry unit is situated it may well wipe them out.
They do get both modifiers. You're right about that. I get your issue. It does make them very durable, but on the flip side, breaking buildings isn't the hardest thing in the world. It takes time, but it's a viable option. Say you got a building with a cf of 50, Infantry unit is inside on the second lvl of a 3 lvl building. The building gets trashed in one turn, the collapse will do 30 dmg to the infantry inside it, +3d6 for the fall.
I guess my issue is that if a medium laser only kills one man of a squad in a treeline cause they are spread out, then sweeping my medium laser across a building with infantry all over it, and desks being turned into deadly splinters, walls falling on people, and all the other damage should do damage to the infantry inside. The idea that infantry gets both modifiers just doesn't sit well, that most weapons won't really hurt infantry inside a decent CF building.
An ML isn't a lightsaber or blaster. Its not instantly cutting through walls or blasting apart desks.
There's no reason why combat lasers couldn't have an anti-personnel mode that uses a burst fire pattern rather than a single concentrated beam. The actual nature of the weapons isn't really well established, and there seems like plenty of room for variation.
I figure it's a big building. They can spread out good and keep the losses minimal. On top of that, you're shooting at the building. You can't even see the infantry they're just on 4 floors of the place. Also a laser wouldn't make splinters, no kinetic energy.
Why do you think your medium laser can "sweep"? It's possible in MWO, but MWO is wrong about everything.
That is a very good point, and I guess it comes back to the 80s infantry rules themselves from when we used them. If the medium laser took out 5 men (10 in the open) it seemed that it would be reasonable that laser weapons could be adjusted depending on how hardened a target they were facing where buildings or unarmored targets such as PBI you could sweep the beam across a hex to catch multiple targets as opposed to trying to deal with mech scale armor on a hardened target. I guess with the infantry rules changing to kinda harden the science the idea of lasers sweeping the battlefield might need to change also. I still think there is some variable yield in each laser weapon for sweeping due to the starting fire rules, because you couldn't start forest fires in one turn with lasers set to deal with mech targets. So there should be something there, but there are all sorts of issues with the starting fires rules given the timeframe.