BA Grab Bars on Vehicles

OK, gonna need mag clamp BA then.

Yes, but the Skimmer is faster and cheaper, enough to make mag clamp BA the financially superior choice for grabbing territory as far as I can discern.

OK, something's weird because in megamek a squad of foot infantry with rifles costs ~150k cbills, but in mechhq it costs ~30k.

The 30k in MekHQ is just the cost of the weapons and equipment for the squad without the expense of the soldiers or their training. You have the additional initial expense of hiring the soldiers and the ongoing wages that CatfishKailen mentioned.

Your skimmers with mag-clamp BA concept definitely has the potential to be cheap way to quickly take lots of territory, but bandits may cause some problems. Whether the rewards of quickly claiming territory is worth the risks is something you will need to decide for yourself.

If we assume a 1/20 chance of encountering bandits when entering an unclaimed location then with their 17 movement each Skimmer/BA team is going to have frequent bandit encounters. The average number of battles for a given number of grid squares captured is going to the be same as with slower forces, but because of your speed you will be having those battles in a shorter period of time. The bandits will be scaled to the battle value of your force and with your better human thinking you should be able to defeat Princess, but the Skimmer/BA teams are going have problems due to the damage they receive from occasional bandit shots that hit. The loss of a small number of suits would leave a team unable to claim territory and the skimmers are very vulnerable to motive systems hits or complete destruction.

Another long term issue would be the lack of decent salvage, since the battles will be scaled to the low bv of the Skimmer/BA team. The skimmers can take a lot of territory, but you will need to consider how you will defend it in the future. I expect most of the bandits encounters would be with something along the lines of a single infantry platoon or squad of BA infantry and a small tank or infantry fighting vehicle. Sometimes they might have two small vehicles or there might be small protomech instead of a vehicle. Salvage taken from bandits is a way to grow your forces significantly more quickly than your taxes alone would allow, but you won't gain much of value if your salvage is mostly the weaker units encountered by your Skimmer/BA teams.

I will give the experiences of a couple of my units to provide some firmer information for you to consider. My starting force had no infantry or BA, but an early purchase was a couple of infantry platoons that I deployed on my third turn. One of those platoon is currently in a fast transport being escorted by two small hover tanks and an attack helicopter. The slowest vehicle has a movement of nine and the total BV is about 1500. From the unit's two bandit encounters I have salvaged and repaired for my own use a Cicada Battlemech, an Orc Protomech, a Hunter (ERLL Variant) and a Hipparch Hover Tank. In addition to the repairable vehicles they have also captured a pair of Badgers that were only fit for scrap, the equipment from two jump infantry platoons and claimed a 500,000 c-bill bounty that was on the pilot of the Cicada. Similarly their sister platoon in a slower (move 7) and weaker (about 1000 bv) force has from two battles salvaged two Scorpion light tanks, a Rock Rover half track, the gear from two infantry squads and a flatbed truck. They also reinforced a battle that one of my other units had triggered. So while they haven't claimed as much territory as Skimmer/BA teams may have done, together they have managed to salvage almost a company of various mixed units and their escorting forces have gained valuable combat experience. There has also been significantly higher quality salvage captured by the 1500bv force when compared to the 1000bv force.

As another example, one of my initial units was a platoon of Ibex RV(Gauss) support vehicles that are used as a very light ground recon force. This unit keeps finding trouble and their battles are probably decent examples of the lowest tier of bandit forces. Their first battle was against a Flatbed Truck(SRM) and an old primitive wheeled APC. The next battle was with a Darter Scout Car (ECM) and Gabriel hovercraft. Most recently they encountered a single Achileus BA squad.

It would be possible to use a variation of your original idea that has the BA riding on fast combat vehicles, maybe with some VTOLs as escorts as well. You could go to the purchase unit window in MekHq, enter your desired minimum speed into advance search and then sort by price to narrow down a list of options.

Oh wow, now that is a well thought out search pattern right there. Only possible issue that could crop up is the battle force encountering hostiles early on a bad roll and thus having their movement stopped while the speedy capture force continues after the fight (since iirc from the rules, reinforcing units continue their move after while the unit(s) that triggered the battle do not) but that's less likely and nothing's going to be perfect. I'm super glad I signed up for the forums and wasn't shy about asking questions, I'm getting some really good advice and ideas!

It seems like each of us has been following the information we had and I can't be certain which is currently correct. I'm sure when Kris has a spare moment he will see the conversation and give a clarification.

PA(L)'s are so fun. Kinda makes me want to start a BA thread in general. Ignoring the obvious elemental superiority.

Hella got off track here.

Just to pick up on Bobby traps..It's a ridiculous weapon that shouldn't be in the game, and at 100k a pop with those stats, an immediate fun and balance ruiner.

That's a hard no from me. I'll be blunt and state if this fun weekly battletech mail in game we're playing is going to devolve to throwing cheap suicide bombs at each other because its clearly the most effective, cheap and accurate artillery piece available, I'll be voting with my feet.

Have fun with the BA though, because they certainly are fun 😁

Yeah in regards to big explosions the Booby Trap is hella Sus.
Now the Davy Crockett-M at 1 million c-bills is definitely on the table. HAHA

I totally get it for a thematic addition that the admin may torment us with however!

catfishkailen Should a reinforcing unit with a transport and infantry lose the transport while reinforcing a fight the infantry still appear in their final destination (as if the transport existed), and without the transport for the next turn. Yes, I see how that could be a problem, but it will be how it is done so we don't have to keep emailing back and forth for changes.

catfishkailen and garyp - Artillery units can reinforce any combat that is in range, I can't keep track of where your artillery is, but each artillery "unit" can reinforce ONE (1) combat scenario per turn only, with a max of FOUR (4) artillery per combat scenario. When artillery reinforce salvage is possible as it is now a pseudo recon&combat mission. Basically no one wants to salvage a field where artillery is raining down, so if you are victorious you hold the field with arty as your ace in the whole till 'someone' (pretend) can get there to protect the invisible salvage teams.

This was a mistake admin lmao.
There’s an old saying in D&D that if you stat it the players will kill it.
Boss Battle!!!!