BattleTech: Mercenaries will allow for bigger, faster fights with tanks, flyers, and artillery

polygon.com:

In 2019, Catalyst Games rebooted the nearly 40-year-old BattleTech tabletop franchise with two stellar boxed sets. Later, in 2020, it launched the BattleTech: Clan Invasionboxed set at retail — alongside nearly 100 new plastic BattleMech miniatures. Now Catalyst’s legion of big stompy robots is gearing up for all-out war with BattleTech: Mercenaries, a new boxed product and an expanded ruleset that hits Kickstarter today. Get ready to fight alongside ground vehicles, flying machines, infantry, and more in the game’s next incarnation. Polygon sat down with managing developer Randall Bills to learn more.

BattleTech began as an elaborate miniatures wargame in 1984, created by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock. Only later did it morph into a tabletop role-playing game, a long and beloved series of video games, and a destination pre-VR arcade experience. Bills’ Catalyst took the reins of the tabletop game some years later, relaunching the entire line in 2015. Since 2019, the publisher has sold nearly nine million miniatures — a huge number for anyone other than a company like Games Workshop.

BattleTech: Mercenaries will expand Catalyst’s line of plastic miniatures even further, but it will do so with a new unified ruleset that emphasizes combined arms warfare — that is, BattleMechs, ground vehicles, air assets, and infantry all working together. In so doing, Bills said that his team has solved two fairly intractable problems that have plagued BattleTech for years now.

“One is that there are ways in which vehicles can start to overshadow BattleMechs,” Bills said. “So we have now taken the non-stars — the secondary guys in the wings — and allowed them to eclipse our stars. And that’s a potential problem [that this new ruleset