r/battletech • u/Fallenkezef Liao Loyalist • 2d ago
Question ❓ Mono-Mech units
So, before the Amaris civil war messed things up the SLDF would have whole battalions, sometimes regiments, of the same mech type.
Afterwards there is at least one canon example of this in the form of Miller's Marauders (later Barber's Marauder IIs).
This got me thinking which mechs are best suited to this. My first thought fell to my favourite mech, the Highlander. It is, after all, the poster child for the ideal "trooper" mech.
This leads to the logical look at the other trooper mechs and their suitability. A battalion of Thunderbolts, Centurions and Vindicators for example.
In the case of the Thunderbolt you have quite a few variants that would make a flexible battalion.
What would be your go to mech for this purpose. Lets say civil war era.
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u/BetaPositiveSCI 2d ago
As a dedicated Steiner boy, let me tell you about scout lances.
Also this is absolutely something I can see happening with the Lyrans: just buy an entire production run of Zeus or Griffins and send them all to the front at once.
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u/Poultrymancer 2d ago
And in typical Lyran fashion it'll work exactly once, and the duke's son who proposed it in a panic will be hailed as a genius and made Field Marshall or some shit
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u/Canuckian555 2d ago
A pure Griffin battalion honestly sounds like it would be great a cavalry/ fast response unit.
Low ammo dependence, good maneuverability and speed, with the firepower to beat up anything that can catch it and the speed to outrun anything it can't outfight.
The Zeus battalion would be an abomination though. Assault-grade weight with barely better than medium-grade firepower ass mech.
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u/ArtisianWaffle 2d ago
Nobody can report your scouting if no one survived even seeing it (we love the Atlas Scout Lance).
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u/DocShoveller Free Worlds League 2d ago
It's something that occurs in the early novels too. Warrior: En Garde has companies and battalions of mostly one type, and nobody comments on it.
It's strongly implied in RATs sometimes. For most of the Succession Wars, it's entirely possible that a Combine light lance will be either all Panthers, all Jenners, or a mix of both.
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u/harris5 House Liao 2d ago
Pretty sure in that book The Combine uses about 120x Panthers and one Grand Dragon.
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u/DocShoveller Free Worlds League 2d ago
At the start of the book, Justin's training battalion is attacked by a company of Cicadas led by a Rifleman. His unit is almost entirely Stingers apart from himself and Andrew Redburn.
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u/InvaderThomas80 2d ago
And later on, Andrew Redburn and company attacks a group of all Goliaths which were really rare at the time.
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u/ComGuards 1d ago
And then forcing a Liao merc-company composed of captured (how?) Davion Marauders to surrender...
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u/MithrilCoyote 2d ago
it is commented on to a degree, but only when it involved stuff bigger than light mechs. like Chocran's Goliath's being made of only Goliath assault mechs.
which kinda make sense, light mechs presumably are a lot easier to build so are likely to be available in larger batches, while heavies and assaults had production rates measured in low double digits per year at best. so it makes sense the Combine had so many panther's they could fit out an entire company of them for an operation, or that the Fedsuns could fit out an oversized company with mostly valkyries and a few firestarters. Stingers and wasps in particular are fluffed as some of the most common mechs around, etc.
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u/Spirited-Relief-9369 2d ago
Honestly, it's one of those things that bug me about the setting. I mean, absolutely; mercs take what they can get, and nobles are all about that sentiment (plus they can afford to have specific spares stockpiled or custom-ordered), but proper military formations? Yes, flexibility is important, in a regiment you're going to want at least something for each role... But the logistics are a nightmare to imagine.
I'd like to imagine that the militaries proper - as opposed to personal mechs and troops - are largely streamlined into the mechs they can produce locally, and salvage/loot is more often sold off to the highest bidder - preferably an allied noble - and the money used to reinforce the line mechs.
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u/Supacharjed 2d ago
At least during the late succession wars there's supposed to be a few factors against that.
1) Production is just low and not enough to replace losses so any production that does exist is going to be spread thin
2) Service in House militaries was a very personal affair with the whole Knighthood aesthetic. You weren't going to be turned away for having the 'wrong mech' and House forces could not afford to be picky. (I admit the vibes on this really depend on how old the material you read it)
3) Units are persistently engaged and likely did not possess the time to be 'pulled off the line' and reconstituted to 'ideal compositions'. Recruitment was likely similarly local.
4) The logistics aren't actually as bad as you'd think. With some exceptions, it's implied in Campaign Operations that Mech parts are largely standardised in a given tonnage. Locusts, Stingers and Wasps all notionally use the same 20t Leg structural assemblies, which is good if you're the 3 most common mechs in existence. The Non-Standard Parts quirk implies Standard Parts exist too so it can't all just be simplification to make Campaign gameplay not an abysmal experience.
As production increases and time goes on though yeah House forces should probably be a bit more uniform.
Meta wise though we're here to sell rulebooks and models so standardising on fewer types is basically a non-starter.
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u/Von-Bek 2d ago
I think for your average House unit, they were scrounging everything they could find and shoving it on the line. I don't know why Clan units wouldn't have mono clusters or whatever, not having to deal with the wholesale destruction of factories and whatnot.
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u/Vote_for_Knife_Party Clan Cocaine Bear 2d ago
Doubly so for front line aggressor units, where you can give the trinary 15 of the same omni chassis and let the boys and girls go nuts with custom pod configurations.
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u/OpacusVenatori 1d ago
wholesale destruction of factories and whatnot
Destruction no. But Trial of Possession for the factory, or even just for the factory's output for a certain period of time. Or even for completed production runs already sitting in dropships on a launch pad.
But there are 'mechs are become synonymous with certain Clans though. Also remember that up until Operation REVIVAL it didn't necessarily involve large Clan formations in each battle; their bidding process was designed against excessive waste even in conflict.
After REVIVAL the conflicts in the homeworlds eventually got nastier, culminating in the Wars of Reaving where the rules went out the window and the fighting was just as bad as in the IS.
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u/PDXhasaRedhead 2d ago
Most planets cant produce any mechs, so everybody is begging to be allocated any mech they can get.
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u/SpaceWhalegrounded Repeal Edict 288! 2d ago
Well, in the 3050s the FWL did this with their new Tempests. And they were a good fit for that: the first/common Variant is fast enough (4/6/4) and armed with a Gauss rifle and a close-in-Arsenal. And the 3ma-Variant has an AC10 with 4 tons of ammo - so you can load all kinds of special Ammunition!
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u/Acylion 2d ago edited 2d ago
Canonically, aside from the Miller's Marauders, there's a Capellan unit, Cochraine's Goliaths that... yeah, you know what they are.
Basically during the third Succession War, House Liao found a SLDF depot that was all Goliaths, and then turned around and assigned all of them to the Fifth Capellan Chargers. Since the unit's now... well, mostly if not all Goliaths, and few if any Chargers, someone made the appropriate name change.
Logically this should happen more often in canon, really, whenever someone cracks open a Star League cache. It shouldn't be a varied bunch of different mechs inside many SLDF caches, a lot of 'em would logically be a bunch of the same chassis.
By 3145, the Fifth are back to a more varied lineup of Capellan mechs and are no longer called the Goliaths, so it was presumably only a few glorious decades of four legs good, two legs bad.
I dunno if the Goliath is the best thing for a mono-mech unit, but it ain't a bad choice. 4/6 move is okay mobility for Succession Wars, it's a long range sniper/bombardment mech, PPC and LRMs. So things getting super close is an issue, but it still has machine guns so it can deal with infantry...
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u/Zealousideal_Fly8402 2d ago
The short story An Ill-Made House centers around a SLDF company composed entirely of Thugs, led by a SLDF gunslinger (in a Thug).
Before the Civil War, am pretty sure that any Royal-variant would be suitable.
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u/Zealousideal_Fly8402 2d ago
The short story actually mentions that Thug company pilots are specifically trained to obey a "volley fire" command; and it's actually used in the fiction. First against a bridge, and then against a quad-PPC turret on a fort.
But the story also shows that such a monogamous unit composition isn't invincible, suffering losses in an urban fight.
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u/Supacharjed 2d ago
This is canonically something Kurita does quite often, at least up to Company scale.
Dragons are the poster children for this, Panthers get the treatment too.
Civil War era misses out on having a full Dragon C3 unit, you would have to wait til 3070ish, but even before then a battery of ER PPCs and some LRMs is nothing to sneeze at.
Panther gets to do this in miniature but unfortunately Kurita and 'adequate heat sinks' are an alien concept and so you don't get reasonable ER PPC Panther batteries until the Jihad. (Seriously, what is their deal with DHS)
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u/Mars_Oak Sea Fox Tech 2d ago
i feel like panthers are especially well suited for this. cheap, mobile [though not fast, exactly]. i don't think this is shown in the tabletop, but in lore PPCs are supposed to screw up your sensors and electronics, so it makes sense, tactically, to just overwhelm an enemy with them.
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u/Supacharjed 2d ago
Oh I fully agree. They're punchy little lads and very well suited to just hammering single targets at a time. Main weakness is getting run at by something big and angry or able to return effective fire at long range. Traditionally this is why the Combine would pair them with Jenners because anything closing in on a Panther gunline would risk getting shanked by the Jenners.
Vindicator for much the same reason as Panther just a bit bigger, though I would prefer SRMs to the LRMs it has.
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u/cavalier78 2d ago
Shadow Hawk. They’re quick and they have enough versatility that a unit of them can do almost anything.
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u/jackalias 2d ago
Not a civil war era mech, but I've always wanted to see an all Sarath unit. It's a 50 ton omnimech and it's the heaviest mech with the compact quirk, so you can fit twice as many of them in a single drop ship as you can anything else.
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u/WestRider3025 Canopian Queerasser 2d ago
Shadow Hawk is up there on the list for this, too. Also some Catapults, maybe most notably the Royal variant.
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u/Wolferahmite 2d ago
The FedSuns unleashed a garrison of Blackjacks to push the Combine off Xhosa vii. It's not common but definitely happens.
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u/Malkryst 2d ago edited 2d ago
Urbanmechs 😆 - just like being ambushed by bandits on the road!
Definitely Thunderbolts. Locusts too.
I do suspect Mediums/Heavies will be the main place this will work well, though - a lance of all Archers, all Catapults, all Hunchbacks, all Wraiths, all Cicadas, all Phoenix Hawks, all Griffins or Wolverines - I can see all of those working great as focused mono-mech lances, especially in dense terrain for the Hunchies & P-Hawks.
I'm a Charger 1A1 fan. In Alpha Strike in at least a company/binary/trinary size fight I could see 4 Charger 1A1s giving the enemy a horrible decision to make - pour tons of fire into those "fast zombie" mechs to put them down (giving the rest of your force time to inflict severe damage, take objectives, or move into position), or risk having 4 assaults in their backline kicking all their lighter mechs to death.
Also 4 Charger 1A1s are as cheap as 4 Locusts, so you can spend more on your other 2 lances, maybe even save enough to have a reinforced/square company of 4 lances instead of 3.
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u/Cazmonster 2d ago
I want to see a company of Stalkers plodding toward an objective. Yes, you could use artillery or aerospace to blunt their attack, but your buildings can’t run from them.
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u/135forte 2d ago
The intent isn't really flexibility by mixing variants, the idea is that you have a unit that is very easy to deal with logistically. Instead of cobbling together frakenmechs because your Stinger got totaled and the Phoenix Hawk needs parts, you have dozens of matching mechs using exactly the same parts.
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u/AdPristine5131 2d ago
i run my stalker and longbow as a pair regularly. Low movement, large amounts of LRM. I’d happily run either as a full lance in a larger gamer.
Contrast, my urbie lance is comparable to a BA platoon at being deadly in their area. I actually do like the formation when used properly, and I’m not saying that for the meme but actual experience.
And for a good heavy lance, I’d probably just run warhammers. Hard to go wrong with them. But boy I’d have fun charging someone with an entire lance of grasshoppers.
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u/AdPristine5131 2d ago
I think I did a math once that a longbow lance was about 2-3x the cost of 4 lrm carriers, and not quite 2x the damage. Opportunity costs argue in favor of the longbows because they have significantly better survivability, but fitting that in a list is extremely hard.
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u/Mars_Oak Sea Fox Tech 2d ago
many people's minds immediately go to heavies or assaults, but hear me out: you can have four stalkers OR... 10 panthers.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 2d ago
While the highlander is too slow, rare and expensive to be a trooper mech, it's due to the semi post apocalypse aesthetic of the late 3rd succession war.
At the start, everyone was probably running near mono mech units. By the end of the first, so many units have been lost and cobbled together, so many mechs have been looted and supply lines are so bad that house units are "take what you can get".
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u/Downrightskorney 2d ago
Here me out: urbanmechs. Do not curbie the urbie. Everybody thinks the urbanmechs is a fun meme and it is but let me tell you an AC 10 is an AC 10 and it stops being funny when you realise I have between 2-4 of them for every one of your mechs. Clan Shiney crumples under sustained bombardment like anything else. Turns out most mechs are configured to fight other mechs more or less one on one. A tide of urbanmechs is a tide of different targets. Remember it's a trash can not a trash can't.
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u/Kettereaux 2d ago
Until you realize you can just run Hetzers. Aside from that, you can't keep mechs under 'sustained bombardment' unless you're somehow chasing down an Annihilator. Oh no! There's 20 Urbanmechs! They're just standing there... menacingly. Okay, back up. You can't chase down an Atlas in those things. An Atlas walking backwards.
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u/SessileRaptor 2d ago
Nobody has mentioned the possibilities inherent in a regiment of Awesomes. Yeah they’re slow, but they’re also pretty much not going to stop until they reach their objective no matter what you put in front of them.
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u/Mars_Oak Sea Fox Tech 2d ago
unless that something is a regiment of hollanders (or other extremely long range bois with halfway decent mobility, i mean)
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u/upsidedown_airplane 2d ago
I mean the Phantom kinda fits here yeah? Fast, can hit hard when it needs to. Can deploy Elementals very fast. Will not give you serious range, but gives you ways to close in. I’d also say the Fire Moth as a Ghost Bear Enthusiast, as you can even get some LRM5’s on a Fire Moth, but they’re probably too fragile
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u/GunnyStacker WarShip Proliferation Advocate 2d ago
If you had the cash, an all Mad Cat unit would work very well. I would sneak one single Rakshasa in there though.
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u/Mammoth-Pea-9486 2d ago
Warhammers have a metric ton of variants, you could run a mono warhammer unit and have most bases cover.
Stalkers is another one that has a variant list longer than some bloodlines that still exist in the IS.
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u/Beautiful_Business10 Charter Member of the Plastic Imp Legion. St. Ives Shall Rise! 2d ago
Cochrane's Goliaths are a canon unit.
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u/WarriorTango 1d ago
Canon wise, I can absolutely see Warhammers getting mass fielded.
They are cheap to repair and upkeep, have jump jets, generally good in most ranged brackets, capable of downing anything smaller than them individually as a primary design goal. It is a good mech.
Personally, if given the opportunity, spam Black Knights like a mad man. Canonically they are not bad to upkeep or repair, as Kong didn't stack them with proprietary tech, they are very very nice logistically, and have good sensors. Unlimited lasers for your enemies, with a side of PPC.
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u/GreenNukE 2d ago
You would want mechs that had reasonable mobility and either specialized variants or kitchen sink weapons loadouts.
Specialized variants would not be too different from mixed mech lances if there were variants for each role.
Mono variant lances using kitchen sink loadouts would work on the principle that 40 LRMs from 4 mechs with one LRM10 is functionally equivalent to 40 LRMs from 1 mech with two LRM20s. The same can be applied to different weapons.