#Battletech flashpoint squire character update#

The titular flashpoints are multistage short stories for your MechWarriors and senior staff to tackle. I’m stuck in the assault weight class, and I’m having too much fun with the high-end stakes of these five-out-of-five-star difficulty fights to start over now. But I’ve come too far with my mercenary outfit to do that now. The enemies would scale up accordingly, and I can comprehend a world where I’d get a lot of use out of mediums and heavies again.

Then working your way up through fights that start at lower weights.

#Battletech flashpoint squire character update#

The only way I can see bringing the Hatchetman and Crab along for any fights at all is if you rerolled a fresh character, starting from scratch in Update 1.3’s new Career Mode. It wouldn’t last two rounds in the fights I’m in. Think bringing the heavyweight Hatchetman along to end game fights is dangerous for me? That problem is multiplied tenfold with the even-lower-weight Crab. Unfortunately, there’s a weight-class problem again. The Crab is a little guy that I’d like to try out. The one time I did have the courage, my Hatchetman went up for a melee attack and threw a kick instead, so I was unimpressed, though it did the same amount of melee damage with a kick as if it had swung the hatchet anyway. I’ve never felt safe running the Hatchetman up close to start swinging that axe. It’s a soft target, the enemy knows it, and so the bad guys tend to focus fire on it. I want to like the Hatchetman, but as a heavyweight in a game that is only throwing the heaviest-the assault mechs-at me, the awesome-looking Hatchetman is too squishy for me to take on most missions. I had to run it in zigzag patterns to keep it further out of harm’s way, and to allow its long-range weaponry do the heavy lifting. The Cyclops is not meant to go toe-to-toe with enemy lances. Too often I’d let it run ahead of the pack.

The Cyclops became an instant favorite for me, though I had to slow my roll and not take too much advantage of its swifter movement abilities. Then there’s the assault-tonnage Cyclops, the big brother of the three newbies, which is a little faster and a little bit more fragile than comparably sized mechs, but comes in two configurations poised for long-range combat in one, and medium-range combat in the other. The next is the heavy-tonnage Hatchetman, intended to be a guerrilla warfighter and close-range combatant, that, to the best of my knowledge, is the only mech to come equipped with a mech-sized axe in its hand. The three new mechs start with the medium-tonnage Crab, an all-energy-weapons platform designed at the tail end of the Star League era (a long-gone golden age). Altogether, those three elements make up the gist of the Flashpoint expansion: new mechs, new maps, new missions. The other being the introduction of flashpoints, back-to-back “high-stakes short stories,” as the ads have put it. One being the introduction of three new mechs. Flashpoint is a seemingly modest push in a few obvious directions for BattleTech.