Battletech released on PC in late April 2018 and the game is a fantastic dedication to the turn based mechanical game mechanics with combat the closest to the original Crescent Hawk’s Inception version of the game that I have seen since it’s release in 1989. The new version of the game however makes use of a lot of in-game combat cinematics which temporarily take over from your turn and force you watch walking, jumping, shooting…etc. Unfortunately this can draw out combat which can already last between 20-30 rounds and making a long campaign battle taking 40+ minutes for a single battle you don’t need the extra 3-5 minutes in cinematics delaying you between making your moves.
Fortunately you can tune those combat cinematics down to reduce or virtually eliminate those delays at the cost of watching those cool action moments that act like a highlight reel. Here is a video talking about the combat cinematics which can be adjusted in your Battletech Game Settings.
One thing I wish you could still do is speed up opponents turns for combat when playing AI, it can be slow watching them walk on the map or the red dot bounce around just at the tip of our radar on their turn. They should have a way to have 2x or 4x animation speed when playing against AI so that you don’t have to wait while up to 8 AI opponents each take a turn that involves walking then shooting, as you can spend a lot of time waiting on the slow AI walking animations and firing animations before it gets to be your turn again.
Hopefully they will add a feature that you can speed up enemy combat turns so you can get back to taking your turns faster.
Either way, Battletech is a fantastic game and if you are fan of rich combat mechanics where equipping your mech to tune for weight, armor, heat management and making every shot, ammo and enhancement count this game is perfect. The management of crew, costs, damages and salvage is handled well and I have over 167 hours into Battletech so far and counting.
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Update: Saw that Redditfolk posted how to turn on debug mode and update Battletech to make everything move 5x faster. This involves adding this DWORD registry key, open Regedit and navigate to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Harebrained Schemes\BATTLETECH]
Then add new key with DWORD name and value as seen below:
“last_debug_state_h176629417″=dword:00000001
Load your save game then hit Control+Left Shift and Minus (the one next to your backspace not the numpad) Click the speed button to make things faster then just hit control+left shift and minus to close the debug window.
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