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

In 2019, Catalyst Games rebooted the nearly 40-year-old BattleTech tabletop franchise with two killer box sets. Later, in 2020, it launched the BattleTech: Clan Invasion box set in store – alongside nearly 100 new plastic BattleMech miniatures. Now Catalyst’s legion of big stompy robots are gearing up for all-out war with BattleTech: Mercenaries, a new boxed product and expanded ruleset launching today on Kickstarter. Get ready to fight alongside ground vehicles, flying machines, infantry and more in the next incarnation of the game. Polygon spoke to lead developer Randall Bills for more information.

BattleTech began as an elaborate miniature war game in 1984 created by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock. It wasn’t until later that it turned into a tabletop role-playing game, a long and beloved line of video games, and a destination pre-VR arcade experience. Bills’ Catalyst took the reins a few years later, relaunching the entire line in 2015. As of 2019, the publisher has sold nearly nine million miniatures — a huge number for someone other than a company like Games Workshop.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

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. With this, Bills said his team has solved two fairly intractable problems that have plagued BattleTech for years.

“One is that there are ways vehicles can overshadow BattleMechs,” said Bills. “So we’ve 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 solves].”

Another problem has been that previous implementations of similar combined arms rulesets have gotten out of hand with complexity. As a result, older versions of BattleTech containing non-mech units have taken hours, sometimes entire days, to play. This new approach, says Bills, speeds things up significantly compared to previous efforts.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

“If you read the fiction, the combined arms are great,” said Bills. “If you ever watch the video games, when the ‘mech runs along and just stomps on a vehicle as it runs through, you’re like Yes! Those are the cool moments. So you want the vehicles to be there, and you don’t want them to be totally floppy, but at the same time you want them to almost accentuate that the BattleMechs are the stars. So it brings a little flavor, almost an improvement to your game, but does it in a way that’s quick and easy.

BattleTech: Mercenaries costs $75 when it arrives in stores, and includes eight new ‘mechs – including fan favorites like the Flea, Firefly, Quickdraw, and the Starslayer. It also comes with two Galleon light tanks and two Maxim hover transports, plus rules to handle them quickly and easily at the table. More ground based and flying miniatures will be released over time. Together with the Mercenaries ruleset, players can create vibrant campaigns, including fully asymmetric combat pitting mechs against non-mech formations. With any luck, Bills hopes it will expand the BattleTech hobby even further.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygoon

“There’s a whole new group of people who are discovering and loving this,” Bills said, “but they don’t necessarily want to go beyond [with micromanaging those smaller units]. That’s enough for them. So then you basically do all the rest of BattleTech and bring it in, in a modern style.”

Along with this new release, Bills said his team is also working with his foreign manufacturers to improve the quality and durability of his miniatures. The goal is fewer mold lines, less warped arms and weapons, and easier painting right out of the box.

“We just worked with the manufacturer to get better at that,” said Bills. “The Clan invasion had to move at lightning speed and we had 100 resources to produce. And so I think we — all of us, including the manufacturer — just got better at making the lines cleaner, the material a little bit better.

The Kickstarter campaign for BattleTech: Mercenaries now runs through mid-April, before moving over to Backerkit for late pledges and fulfillment. You can join the launch party on Twitch at 11 a.m. EST.