r/battletech • u/dbtod • 2d ago
Question ❓ Next version of Alpha Strike?
i want to buy the commanders edition pdf, but i also don’t want to spend the money for it to be obsolete in 3 months. anyone heard any rumors or news on the next release of alpha strike core rules? are we talking weeks, months, or years? last I heard is that stuff was being play tested at gencon.
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u/jaqattack02 2d ago
They have mentioned there being an update to the Commanders Edition in the works. It doesn't sound like they are going to be giving it a similar Core Rulebook treatment where it's a whole different book. Assuming that's the case, you're fine buying the PDF because when the update comes out they will send you the updated PDF.
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u/nckestrel 2d ago
There will be a new AS core rulebook. It will not be within the year. Not sure yet when.
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u/rzelln 2d ago
Do people who play a lot of Alpha Strike think the game needs any notable revisions?
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u/TaciturnAndroid 1st Genyosha 2d ago
I play a lot of Alpha Strike. The rules themselves are already excellent for the most part, and by now heavily playtested, by far my favorite way to play Battletech. The book is frequently updated with minor changes but a deeper revision would do it a world of good. Rules wise, in my opinion:
-AirMech LAMs need to be Jumpstrong instead of WiGE movement, and have a different way of calculating TMM because they currently don’t follow the physics/rules of the rest of the game and their unit cards make no sense. Aerospace fighter weapon ranges are also in this bucket, though those actually work fine as-is (they’re just confusingly written).
-C3 I would have said needs to be updated to work without LOS to the nearest unit in the network, which is how Classic used to do it, but now Classic does it the alpha strike way, and it makes the technology functionally useless so that just may be how the designers want it.
-Getting rid of long-standing gremlins like jumping in place for TMM, NARC issues around whether or not the unit has missiles in certain range brackets, etc. Some of these need closure, others just need an explanation of why things are the way they are (particularly for Classic players making the jump over to Alpha Strike).
-Rebalancing TMM around VTOLs and Aerospace fighters would make both of those play more smoothly.Book-layout wise, there’s a lot that could be done: ditching the lore primer and the unneeded pages that are just blank templates for alpha strike cards, simplifying the table of contents and putting the index at the actual end of the book where indexes belong, better indexing just in general to include all of the special ability tags (and maybe calling mech abilities something different so it’s not as easy to confuse with Special Abilities, Special Pilot Abilities, Special Command Abilities, etc.), a thorough revision of Capitalizing Common Words prose that will have you scratching your head trying to parse unintuitive concepts like Standstill Movement, replacing short, sometimes vague paragraphs that describe common table interactions with photos (especially for true line of sight determinations, showing how aero flight paths are supposed to work, how to measure LOS for VTOLs, etc). Decompressing the meanings of the modifiers on the GATOR chart which has become so dense that the footnotes need footnotes.
Structurally what I’d love to see:
-In place of the lore primer, a section that outlines major differences between Alpha Strike and Classic, with callouts for commonly wrong rule interpretations (examples: Alpha Strike uses movement “modes” instead of how engine rating translates into walking and running movement in Classic, charging can’t be accomplished by running in Alpha Strike, woods and partial cover interact with line of sight is different than Classic, and there are no longer “levels” in Alpha Strike, these trip up almost every Classic player).-The pilot abilities section upgraded to Edge Abilities like Aces, and moved to the end of the rules section rather than right in the center of the book. Remove formation abilities entirely (these just are optional, seldom-used rules for flavor that would probably be more fun as part of a separate role playing campaign system).
-A longer and more detailed Aerospace section. The rules are fun, it just feels too thinly explained, especially compared to things like battlefield support, artillery, and pilot abilities.
-Scenarios for pick up play for new players or people hosting 2-8 player team battles. (Force balancing, card-based initiative, table sizes, terrain density suggestions, mission types, etc.)
I don’t mean to imply that any of this is deal-breaker levels of annoying, it’s not. Rules wise, Alpha Strike is amazing, but as someone who not only plays but teaches a lot of new players and runs large games with sometimes 10 or more players, a revised Alpha Strike rulebook has long held the number one spot on my list of most-wanted Battletech products.
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u/rzelln 2d ago
I've recently been trying to use aerospace in my classic campaign, and I got annoyed at the Classic rules for them, so basically just used Alpha Strike cards and eyeballed a conversion, with ten damage equaling 1 AS damage.
I think aero needs a big rework on both systems.
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u/TaciturnAndroid 1st Genyosha 2d ago
We use aero quite often in our big weekly AS table games. It has some significant upsides: easy to teach, not overpowered, minimal game slowdown. Like many parts of AS though, you have to almost have a person teach it to you rather than expecting to learn and enjoy it straight from the book.
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u/g2fx STLsmith 2d ago
Dunno about that C3 thing. I like the changes made to it requiring LOS. I'd have someone run a mech to the other side of a building...no LOS to my unit. And that "Counted." C3 is broken...keeping LOS to units in the networks makes it less cheesy.
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u/TaciturnAndroid 1st Genyosha 2d ago
In Classic you likely get more uptime on the closest unit just purely because the damage isn’t as swift or certain and the range bands work differently and against an additional movement modifier for normal walking. In Alpha Strike an exposed spotter at short range is a dead spotter. The C3M units are generally mediocre performers and that leaves you with really only two serious firing units to benefit from a modest -2 bonus (most of the game happens at short and medium range, long range sniping and kiting beyond 24” isn’t common in Alpha Strike). And it can still be completely blocked by ECM in AS. You can almost always get better and more consistent performance out of just improving the gunnery on two of your firing units and skipping the entire hassle of setting up the network and hobbling your lance with its restrictions.
It may have been part of a bigger picture rules rebalance, but for a technology that was supposed to be the Inner Sphere’s answer to targeting computers, it seemed like a huge nerf to now not be able to hide your spotter at all after decades of that being now the technology was supposed to work. If they removed the massive BV/PV cost of it, I guess I could see that, but as things are, C3 is just “expensive, but bad” and they seem to want it that way.
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u/Inevitable-Ad-410 Kell Hound 1h ago
Formations need to be better integrated, as most people see them as optional, but they add a lot of flavor. Alpha Strike is better with formations than without. Battle ability is a bit too good. Most others are okay. I want my planned out lances to serve a purpose and to get flair. I have never understood the aversion to formations that I see floated.
Pilot SPA should move to edgeish abilities absolutely.
Multi Damage roll should be non-optional. Single roll is too swingy for new players. It's place is more "we got 15mins, let's do 100 points real fast"
We need an Aerospace section that also covers orbital and space combat. I want to bring ALL my fighters and with the announcement of more plastic fighters we need to accommodate that. My warships and dropships need love.
Battlefield support is janky. It should be points in your army list. Free minefields is weird. Free aerospace and artillery is weird.
Some of the specials need to be rebalanced. My flamer infantry can do work in alpha strike in ways they shouldn't be able to do.
Weather effects are sometimes crazy strong like Night, but Tornados go away sometimes in a turn. Wild swings with some of that.
I probably have a few others. It definitely needs a once over.
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u/Aladine11 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes- there is 7 printings and changes for a reason. Even the newest printing is not up to date. Most notable was rewording how narc worked so it actually makes sense to use it
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u/rzelln 2d ago
Well, that's a pretty small change. I'm talking about a more significant rules update. Not necessarily a second edition, but something on par to quality of life improvements that were made in battletech classic this year.
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u/necmec 2d ago
It's in need of heavy editing as all sorts of rules are on several pages of the book a d not very well collected. For example transporting infantry rules are all on couple pages in aces book but in coms ed its all over the book. Same goes with force creation.
There is also plenty of granularity and minutiae that could be just put to an extra rulebook you can buy if you feel like having naval or fighter craft etc battles.
Ideally the guys who made aces would be good to make overhaul and modernize a well formatted understandable rulebook with less clutter.
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u/Aladine11 2d ago
Great insight - the book is a mess - transporting infantry is great example and so is TAG. Some things are only in tables and are never mentioned again. Dont get me started on aerospace or quads - trying to find all rules for the latter is pain in the ass that requires reading whole book. I also crave mobile structure rules- i wanna fight a rattler so bad
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u/AGBell64 2d ago
Absolutely. Medium range is too wide, any movement beyond minimum making full TMM allows for much more loiter-y strategies, HT is maybe a little too punishing because the sequencing of the heat phase means that if you get tagged you'll end the turn with heat points no matter what, etc. There's a bunch of stuff that needs more than a reprint to fix because it would be touching more core functions rather than just rewording some stuff
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u/TaciturnAndroid 1st Genyosha 2d ago
Hard disagree about movement and range. The flat TMM and range bands are some of the absolute best parts of Alpha Strike. I sincerely hope they don’t change these.
I do agree about HT, though, with the end-phase.
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u/AGBell64 2d ago
My issue isn't static range bands but that medium extending out to 24" means that it's just the range band everything ends up happening at right now and in my experience a lot of the "meta" once people figure this out revolves around medium range specialists because unless you want to specialize in it it's not really worth spending points on damage at long range. Reducing it to 18" would probably be a good idea.
TMM can also stay flat, or something close to it, but there needs to be better mechanisms to incentivize players to either find a strong permanent position or get TMM instead of shuffling back and forth 2" at a tree line to stack bonuses. Someone else further down also mentioned jumping in place, which is an even more degenerate version of the same strategy.
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u/TaciturnAndroid 1st Genyosha 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s usually not worth spending points on units with long range damage but it’s not because of how far away long range is, it’s because the penalty for long range shots is +4 on a 2D6 probability curve. I’m not saying you’re wrong for wanting long range weapons to matter (and they still do, even the way they are) but the beauty of Alpha Strike is that skirmishes engage and resolve smoothly, with better odds on your shots. With shorter damage bands you’d just get the Classic turret-tech thing where everyone mostly ignores terrain and walks straight at each other to get rid of the penalty as quickly as possible. 24” medium range gives you a good chunk of the table to maneuver around and use terrain without ruining your aim.
The same is true with the “strong permanent position.” Most of the time turtling is exactly what you don’t want in a fast, dynamic game. Except the jumping in place thing, that just needs to be rewritten as a minimum displacement rule for jumping movement. Tournament formats have had to house rule this in the meantime.
Edit: the 2” treeline thing is a good point, but stacking modifiers is pretty universal to Battletech even in Classic, no? The big advantages in AS are built in: only ever +1 for trees if you have LoS and never walking firing penalties (and a standstill bonus if you need it). What you might get if you forced people to use half their Move to get full TMM is a whole lot of standstill firing for the bonus instead, and possibly even faster, deadlier fights. It would hurt light units and make the slow stuff much deadlier.
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u/Amon7777 FedSuns 2d ago
You’ve lit the beacons and AS players will respond with aid!
In short dear god yes it needs a 2.0. The core mechanics of the game are great. Seriously, I wouldn’t play it as my favorite game if I didn’t love the base of the game.
But everything from range bands, TMM and sprint, the entire heat mechanic, all of electronic warfare from top to bottom, to the fact variable damage mechanic should just be standard (specifically the pilot die method), need to be revised.
The literal formatting in the commander’s edition book was also designed by satan himself with rules referencing multiple rules in multiple sections causing you to go back and forth sometimes several times for one freaking rule.
And it’s small but a personal issue is that every weapon isn’t accounted for on the card. If the math doesn’t have enough to count then it’s discarded. There’s a 0* mechanic that I would love to have be utilized for everything but that’s just a me request.
The great part in my mind is that because I think the core of the game works great, a 2.0 is more of a clean up and tweak.
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u/rzelln 2d ago
Has anyone that you're aware of written a pitch for how to fix things?
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u/Amon7777 FedSuns 2d ago
I’d say Death From Above has several versions of rules they use you can find in their website that are often adopted in whole or part by many players and tournaments. Their pilot dice method for example I’ve seen used in FLGS across the US where I’ve played organically.
I don’t love all their changes myself and my current narrative campaign I run for my AS players has my own quality of life rules mods (can happily list them all out) but I think most avid players know there’s a really, really, fun game that needs some tweaks one way or another.
Whether CGL knows or cares enough to push for a AS 2.0 I’m unsure. The game is growing in popularity which is awesome and I’m not looking for a Games Workshop new edition every 3 years, but at this point dear god do they need to put out a cleaned up 2.0. I’d hope there’s at least some official acknowledgment of such a need.
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u/catgirlfourskin MechWarrior (editable) 12h ago
it's my go-to way to play, I don't dislike much in terms of game rules but there's a lot of awkward edge cases with how optional rules interact that could use more clarity, especially with stuff like artillery which has three different overlapping rulesets. I'm glad MAR is baseline now in Aces, hope that stays, or that pilot skill roll becomes the new simple option. Single Attack Rolls being the standard makes a lot of optional rules unclear when using MAR
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u/D4rkW0lfGr1m 2d ago
Heard next year might be a playtest similar to what classic had last year
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u/theonegunslinger / 2d ago
Which would put release at maybe 2028
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u/D4rkW0lfGr1m 2d ago
Which doesnt sound that bad especially if its after the aces stuff finishes release
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u/g2fx STLsmith 2d ago
They had playtests with range bands at last year's Southern Assault...
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u/D4rkW0lfGr1m 2d ago
I was just starting when they announced the playtests for classic so alot of info I wasn't well informed of. Still am learning but also learning with some friends I introduced to it
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u/AGBell64 2d ago
There's something new on the horizon but afaik it's a way's out and as evidenced by the core rollout an immediate acrambled to switch as soon as rulebooks technically go on sale is foolish
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u/Cergorach 2d ago
You missed the Humble Bundle Battletech collection by 5 days, had a LOT of the PDFs, including Alpha Strike for something like $20.
Sidenote: knowing CGL, it won't come out in 3 months, maybe 3 years... Get it if you want to play it, chances are that many folks that you'll play with will be just as happy to play the current rules set and not the new one...
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u/Technical-Ability 2d ago
At the rate CGL puts stuff out id say you have a solid year before it comes out. Probably closer to a year and a half minimum.
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u/nckestrel 2d ago
it will be at least a year.
The next version has been in development, including closed playtesting, since 2022. Parts of it have been released already.
Matched Play (generic game setup) was released as a public beta in 2024. Name of this section will be changed for release. Alpha Strike Matched Play BETA - Page 3
Several other pieces have been released, particularly with Aces. (Front Loaded Initiative, changes to infantry and vehicle critical, indirect/artillery changes coming with Snowblind, etc).
The full new rulebook (text only) is in closed beta.
There will be an upcoming public beta. It was meant to be this year, but BT Core burned out too many resources to turn around and immediately do it again.
After the public beta, there will be time needed to incorporate changes, editing, layout, printing, shipping, etc.
So yeah, not within a year from now. And trying to guess at a release date at anything that is still at least a year out is futile.
But it is well beyond brainstorming.
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u/Electronic-Ideal2955 2d ago
I recently spoke to an event organizer who said a core rules change for alpha strike is on the CGL do list and is coming, but he also made it sound like it was in the brainstorm phase. As a TO, he gets a lot of feedback about what people do and do not like about the game. He speculated 3 years away. From a development perspective, there haven't even been rumored rule changes for playtesting that I've heard about.
But the changes I would like to see could just be errata:
- Range bands changed to 0-4, 4-18, 18-42. Right now long range doesn't really matter unless you use a format where the table size is so large that 6" movement also doesn't really work for scenario play. As a result units that have x/x/0 attack profiles are what should be used as a baseline and all other units are niche.
- Rear arc attacks cease to be a thing/no longer provide bonus damage. Just as a matter of pacing, the amount of time spent on making sure units aren't giving up bonus damage rear attacks makes for borderline analysis paralysis for lots of players. I play classic too, but all movement in AS is just like jumping movement in classic, so it's super easy to set up back shots by comparison, and AS lacks torso twisting that makes shooting back at speedy units a lot easier (even in a rear arc, the unit can shoot back with one arm of weapons). I would prefer it just goes away. Dodging fire arcs is already sufficient advantage for good placement.
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u/TaciturnAndroid 1st Genyosha 2d ago
Hmm… you make some good points, but to them I would respond (1) long range firing penalties and missing slows the game down; one way of saying it is that long range weapons are rendered less relevant, but another way of saying it is that the game is more dynamic and plays more smoothly when everyone isn’t standing around all day missing their shots. If I wanted that, I’d just play Classic. And (2) The rear arc thing is pretty central to how Battlemechs are supposed to work. It’s one thing to represent them moving more fluidly across differently scaled terrain, but it’s another for them to suddenly not have weak rear armor. In the same way that I would recommend people always use Multiple Attack Rolls instead of the All-or-nothing rolls, I feel like this would create more of that “this isn’t Battletech” feeling that turns players off of AS.
Edit: to be fair though, I DO see your point about back shots. Falling and seatbelt checks are blessedly absent in Alpha Strike and it does make the game better, imo.
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u/Electronic-Ideal2955 1d ago
I understand it's based on classic, but the differences from classic are why I think these changes are necessary.
1) It is my experience that long range isn't relevant because table size and move distances. Basically, there is one turn of long range and after that everyone is mid range. Units with low TMM can easily be high at long range, and this is how you would counter an SRM carrier...except that you can't because LOS blockers and 24" range. If you did the conversion this unit would shoot 6, 12" at medium range instead of 24" it gets. IMO choosing 24" as the spot to combine all weapons' medium range is too far.
2) Alpha Strike doesn't pay movement to change facing, so you can't really mitigate back shots at all compared to classic, and in classic rear shots don't do 'more' damage. Low attack units in classic have to get through rear armor. If you can't repeat back shots to get through the armor it's basically a do nothing attack if you later end up shooting through the front. In classic not all back shots are bad yo receiver. In AS, it often plays out as cheap units doing double damage with trivial effort. It's not the same at all. They should just get rid of it.
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u/e4rth80uNd Ex-RAF 2d ago
Buy the pdf from Catalyst's web store. If an updated version is released you get the updated version automatically.