Battletech Assault Mechs

[Terina]

Howdy and welcome back to Mech Overview. My story with the Banshee begins at a young age, where I rolled a 3E on an RAT and my opponent got a Devastator. He beat my entire ass. From then on I perpetually had in my head that the Banshee was a terrible mech; one of the worst assault mechs in the game. I barely ever got the chance to play BattleTech though. When I started very heavily and constantly playing this game a couple of years ago, I took a Banshee to a game because it had come in a box with a Centurion, a mech I really liked. I had painted them up as pirates and was introducing a new player to the game, so it seemed like a great time to use it. In my mind, the Banshee was terrible, but it was big, intimidating, and canonically a common pirate king mech. He would kill my big assault mech easily and feel cool, therefor wanting to continue playing the game. The Banshee proceeded to kick massive ass that game, punching off heads and refusing to die. It turns out that when you play the game on the table instead of in your head, the quality of mechs shifts around quite a lot and the Banshee is fucking awesome.

The Banshee is a tale of two mechs. There are the reject Banshees and the S series Banshees. The S series are all more conventional assault mechs with significant firepower and a juggernaut role. Non-S Banshees (or as I call them, the Badshees), are typically lightly armed for their weight and are anything but conventional, with weird designs and strange use cases. We will be starting with the non-S Banshees, as it is a smaller category and is where the design originated.

The OG (original gorilla) Banshee, the 3E is a meme mech and has been for a long time. For 1422 BV you trade the medium lasers of the 1E to go from 3/5/0 to 4/6/0. This is a pretty big deal, it is way easier for a 4/6/0 mech to get a +1 or +2 TMM than it is for a 3/5/0 mech, which has to move in a straight line over open ground to manage it. Only carrying a PPC and an AC/5 is rough though, that is genuinely low damage and normally I would complain, but the BNC-3E has the benefit of carrying assault mech grade armor, keeping it alive for a shockingly long time. The 3E also has assault mech weight, throwing 10 damage punches and dealing up to 60 damage on a charge attack if it has a good run up. All 3 of your ranged weapons are heat negative, so you have no reason not to shoot every turn forever. The weapons are also all mounted in the torso, and combining this, its heat neutrality, and its big punchies, the 3E can just run up to a motherfucker and start punching the hell out of them while plinking away at distant targets with its long range guns.

If you compare the BNC-3E with a stock 6R Warhammer, at long range they both do 15 damage per round. The BNC-3E does 15 every round, while the Warhammer alternates between 20 and 10 every other round to keep heat from building up. The BNC-3E has higher uptime, thicker armor, and excellent physical attacks, so you can easily win a fight against a Warhammer if you can get in close to it.

The 3Q combines incredible point blank threat with an AC/20 and two 10 damage punches with a bargain bin price and good armor. The 3Q draws a ton of fire, no one wants any Banshee in their face punching them and the 3Q adds an AC/20 to the equation, tearing chunks out of enemy mechs if it is allowed to. It is a gigantic fire magnet, eating incoming fire like nothing else because a smart opponent only needs to get within three hexes of one of these a single time to never do it again. The 3Q is cheap for how durable and big it is, so it is also just a good value piece to slot into a list to try and get lucky with the AC/20. Compared to a basic 4G Hunchback, you pay 300 more BV to double the durability and double the punching damage. This is a good trade off; Hunchbacks are very prone to blowing up on their way in and the 3Q is much more resilient.

Coming in at 1487 BV the 3MC trades the AC/5 and five of the heat sinks for an AC/10 with two tons of ammo. This is a simple change to the base 3E, but the removed heat sinks force the mech to drop the PPC every other turn to stay at low heat, keeping the DPS the same. AC/10s are quite good with precision ammo and two tons is a good amount to have though. Once you get up close this is significantly better than the 3E for roughly the same price and performance at range. Really solid little mech.

Canonically a series of prototypes and costing 2030 BV, the 11X is theoretically cool but practically mid. It has a lot of armored components and modular armor, a neat piece of tech that grants an extra ton of armor to a location at the cost of slowing the mech down. The issue is with the weaponry. It carries a silver-bullet gauss rifle, which is in practice an overcomplicated and too-heavy LRM-15, as its primary weapon. It also has two bombast lasers, which are terrible very bad no good weapons. It is very tough but for the price the other Banshees will outcompete it.

Oh god I grew up and became a Lyran. How the fuck did I get here? I was always such a Marik fan as a kid but every mech I like now is some cheap slab of assault mech with as much armor and big gun as possible.

The 8S is 2408 BV of screaming, incoherent rage. It is a 4/6/0 mech with an XL engine and TSM. This lets it get moving to 5/8/0, and the weapon load is basically perfect for micromanaging your heat, with an ER large laser, an LB10-X autocannon, a snub nosed PPC, two ER medium lasers, two medium lasers, an ER small laser, a small laser for a good fucking reason for once, ECM, a C3 slave, and the best fucking part, a goddamn hatchet. The 8S hits for 38 damage with that hatchet when it has TSM active. This is one of the best close combat mechs in the game in terms of the raw damage that it puts out and it deals significant damage with its guns.

The 9S2 is more of a remix of the 9S than anything else. For 2426 BV you get a 3/5/0 mech with a gauss rifle, heavy PPC, two light PPCs, an ER medium laser, and a targeting computer. This is a slight upgrade at long range at the cost of a significant drop up close, but the 9S2 does carry a boosted C3 slave unit. This is potentially a very scary long range combat mech if it is networked into a good C3 setup. It has the same light engine and XL gyro as the 9S. The choice between the two more or less depends entirely on whether you are going to use C3 or not. The 9S is better on its own, but the 9S2 can get very scary in a good network.

RATING: S-. Straight up an S-. I originally thought those PPCs were Clan grade and this was an S, but with the IS PPCs in mind there are a few really high end Clan assaults that pull ahead.

For 1853 BV the Vandergriff is an odd one. It moves 4/6/4 and carries two ER PPCs, two medium lasers, an SRM-4, and an LB10-X. This is a solid increase in mobility but I think the 5S is the better mech. Losing the gauss rifle sucks.

Tom Sawyer over here has a way better idea. For 2094 BV you drop a PPC and a heat sink compared to the standard 5S, but go up to 4/6/4. You also get your right hand back, allowing for those two regular accuracy 10 damage punchies. Rock solid upgrade to the 5S; slight BV increase but it gets better physical attacks, much better mobility, and reduced heat issues. The XL engine still sucks but the Sawyer is a good upgrade if you really want a 5S.

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One of the earliest and most enduring fire support BattleMechs, the Archer was built in 2474 to serve as an Assault-grade long-range brawler before being relegated to the Heavy category. One of the most common LRM-wielders in the Inner Sphere, the Archer is iconic for its internal shoulder-mounted LRM racks and the signature missile bay doors that protect the launchers until the Archer is ready to fire.

• Achilles' Heel: It has a few, but it's so practical nonetheless that nobody particularly cares.
• Ammo. Those LRM-20 launchers are ammo-hungry, and with only two tons each (enough for twelve salvos) the Archer stands a very real chance of running out of ammunition for its primary weapons. The ammo bins also lack CASE, meaning that a solid critical hit (through the admittedly tough side torso armor) can destroy the entire 'Mech.
• Overheating: The Archer's main issue is that its LRMs generate more heat than the chassis is capable of sinking each turn, leading it to have to fire in volleys (both LRMs twice, then only one to sink the excess) even when standing still and almost every turn if it's moving.
• Boring, but Practical: The most enduring Archer variant, the 2R, was based on a much more advanced 1A prototype with a lot of advanced electronics. The chief engineer made the (in retrospect very prescient) decision to tear most of the advanced stuff out in favour of a cheap, practical design using off-the-shelf components and built into a solid frame, and the 2R would go on to survive both Star League and all four Succession Wars due to its ease of manufacture.
• Cephalothorax: The Archer's cockpit is notable in that it protrudes out of its torso forward instead of having a distinctive humanoid head. Rules-wise it's no different than any other 'Mech, including the much bigger likelihood of an incoming shot hitting Center Torso than the Head.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: The original Archer is a member of the Unseen, 'Mech designs from the original Battledroids set that were licensed from Japanese anime (the Archer is the Destroid Spartan from Super Dimension Fortress Macross). As with most of the Unseen, legal issues with the license holder led it to be missing from official artwork for well over a decade until it had an original re-design that sidesteps this issue.
• Irony: Verbal. One of the largest and heaviest fire support 'Mechs is named for the lightest medieval missile launcher (compare with the Catapult (5 tons lighter) and the Trebuchet (20 tons lighter).
• Long-Range Fighter: A classic 'fire support'-class Inner Sphere 'Mech, the Archer fights best beyond 10 squares (or indirectly, from behind cover) where the long range of its LRMs outranges most 'Mech weaponry.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The archetypal Inner Sphere example, capable of launching 40 missiles per salvo. Later versions managed to take this even farther, adding SRM launchers or additional LRM launchers. The 5CS version that ComStar pieced together for the Battle of Tukayyid can fire 60 missiles every turn and keep going until the bins run dry.
• Mighty Glacier: The Archer is incredibly well-armored for a fire-support (carrying as much armor as the much more short-ranged Thunderbolt) and carries a lot of long-ranged firepower, but it has no jump jets, average ground speed, and heat issues that prevents it from moving around too much.
• Power Fist: It has Battlefists when Quirks are enabled, allowing it to (somewhat) reliably punch lighter 'Mechs who get within arms' reach.
• Ranged Emergency Weapon: As is typical of fire-support 'Mechs, the Archer carries as quartet of Medium Lasers for up-and-close defence, two of them being rear-facing. Certain variants (specifically the 2S and 2W) downgraded the missile launchers or stripped armor to add short-range missile launchers to provide for more close-in firepower.
• Shoulders of Doom: The original Unseen version had the LRM launchers looking like pauldrons.
• The Workhorse: One of the oldest Mech designs still in existence. Over a hundred thousand of them were built between the introduction of the design and the start of the First Succession War. Even after the recovery of lost technology spurred new variants being designed, the original 2R model was still being built in the Periphery.

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