I backed the Battletech Mercenaries Kickstarter and have [at long last] received the box and add-ons. The box, as sold on the shelf, contains 8 mechs and 4 support vehicles. Because I was a backer, I also got a few bonus support vehicles (some tanks and airplanes), a nice collector coin (which I use as objective markers in various games), and some branded dice. This is my review of the product.
The Kickstarter resolution was pretty rough around the edges. Apparently, Catalyst wasn't able to adapt for the overwhelming success of the campaign. Even when they made the effort to communicate with backers, their messages were poorly written with nonspecific assurances, confusing internal jargon, and consistently failed promises. I don't think it's entirely Catalyst's fault. Kickstarter itself does nothing to help creators communicate expectations to backers. Kickstarter is a blank slate, blithely hoping that every creator will have the foresight, experience, and communication skills to provide meaningful reports to backers. Luckily, and despite the antagonism between backers and Catalyst, the project was brought to completion.
Mostly, anyway.
At the time of writing, several stretch goals have yet to be delivered. I assume they'll never be delivered, and that possibly they were never intended to be fulfilled. Several unlocked stretch goals were identified as (and I'm quoting exactly) "unlocked for pledge levels and as add-on purchase". I took this to mean that if you were a backer at a pledge level, then you would receive the stretch goal item. For some stretch goals, they did constrain the reward to a specific level ("Veteran level backers..."), or for all backers ("All backers will receive...") So I had assumed that, had they intended only to deliver some items to backers at a specific pledge level, they'd have identified the level by name. To me, the phrase "pledge levels" meant all people who pledged as backers as opposed to late backers (which are not pledges to support the campaign, but a purchase after the campaign has succeeded.) I didn't receive the ForcePacks unlocked for "pledge levels", and I'm too disenchanted with Catalyst's customer relations to follow up with them about it.
Suffice it to say that between this project and Shadowrun Takedown (in which one pledge level promised an "executive's briefcase" that has turned out to just be a cardboard box with a handle), I'm avoiding Catalyst Kickstarter campaigns in the future.
The Mercenaries box is an expansion to Battletech Armored Combat and Alpha Strike. I didn't understand this at the time of the Kickstarter, so backing this project was technically a mistake on my part. I don't own the Armored Combat rulebook and I didn't understand that I needed it for Mercenaries to be useful. I don't blame myself entirely. Catalyst is bad at communication, and it's no help that all campaign info is just text embedded in an image!
I may invest in a Battletech rulebook in the future, or I may just use other mech wargame rules. Truth is, the reason I backed the project at all was really for the mechs.
I remember comparing Battletech mechs to Voltron as a kid and thinking even then that Battletech mechs felt like the machines a real world military would build. Voltron felt like science fantasy, while Battletech felt like "actual" science fiction. I've got nothing against Voltron, but anime-style mechs are very often too pretty for this world. Battletech is ugly, in a good way. Battletech mechs are boxy, bulky, and highly functional, with no thought given to design æsthetics. These are the mechs designed by military minds, constrained by costs, devoid of inspiration, and optimised for practicality.
The 8 mechs included in the Mercenaries box are, in terms of design (I'll talk about quality later), exactly what I'd expected. They're beautifully clunky machines with few embellishments beyond more firepower. You can almost hear them move across your tabletop. They look like they're controlled by loud gears, dangerous pneumatics, and really inefficient power sources. These are not Imperial Knights or T'au Battlesuits from Warhammer 40,000, and they're not Gundam or Voltron. This is Battletech, basically walking versions of the aircraft carriers and airbases I used to hang around as a kid (not by choice; I was a military brat.)
The Mercenaries box also contains 4 support vehicles (tanks), and as a backer I got a bonus Visigoth and Shilone aerospace fighter, 4 Savannah Masters (tiny grav tanks), and 2 random vehicles (in my case, a Drillson and a Behemoth tank). That's 8 mechs and 10 or 12 (depending on how you count the really tiny tanks) support vehicles. I'm happy that the support vehicles were included, because that'll add variety to an otherwise common mech battle. It's fine to have mechs slug it out, but it's also fun to add some threats of a different variety.
The tallest Mercenaries battle mech in the box is about 50mm tall, which is about twice the size of a 28mm miniature (the common baseline human size in miniature wargaming.) Some are shorter, depending on the type of mech. I don't believe the support vehicles are entirely proportionate, but they're close enough. In other words, this is a different scale of wargaming than human-focused wargames like Warhammer or Firefight or Hail Caesar and so on. That's significant because in Warhammer 40,000 a similar mech is 1900mm tall, because it must tower over a 28mm human miniature. Humans in Battletech are probably 5mm or 8mm, which frankly is close enough to the 12mm scale of Epic Warpath, which means I could use the assets from one game in the other.
In terms of the sculpts, I was disappointed in the quality of the mech miniatures. Battle mechs are mostly boxes and panels with a few cylinders to represent the barrels of cannons, so I'd expected a pretty clean sculpt. To be fair, I know nothing about manufacturing miniatures, so I admit that my expectations may have been unfair.
These miniatures are closer to Wizkids or Reaper quality than, say, Games Workshop, Mantic, Victrix, or Wargames Atlantic. What that means is that detail is muddy, and sometimes it's difficult to tell where one component ends and the next begins. Even a small Imperial Knight from Citadel is so detailed and so clean that you can easily locate every ball and socket joint, every actuator, every individual panel. You know the different between frame, chassis, and mounted gear.
With Battletech miniatures, some things sort of melt into others, the way Wizkid and Reaper miniatures do. You can tell what the sculpt is meant to suggest, but it's hard to pin it down for purposes of painting or even just for "reverse engineering" the fiction of the thing. How does this mech work? You'll never be able to form an informed fiction about it, because you can't tell what's armor plating or core infrastructure, what's an access panel or what's a door or window, how or whether a gun attaches, or anything else. On a practical level, this also means it's up to you to literally fill in missing information with paint, which means you get to try to freehand paint detail where none exists (or conceal it with painted-on shadows, or some similar trickery.)
From a certain perspective, this isn't as bad as it sounds. As long as you can accept a miniature's limitations, a low quality sculpt actually makes for easy painting. There's no point, at least to my mind, in trying to be a careful painter when there are no lines to colour in. Just slather your mech with two thin layers of base paint, and then highlight any of the key elements that actually manage to stand out from the rest of the sculpt, give it a wash with Nuln Oil or Agrax Earthshade, and you're done!
It took me about 12 hours to finish all 12 miniatures, and in the end I was happy with the result. They look good on the tabletop, and to be honest that's as close as I need to get to them, 90% of the time.
To put it charitably, the Mercenaries expansion set has not been the box of mechs I'd expected, but it is the box of mechs I needed. If I hadn't seen the Mercenaries Kickstarter, I'd have probably explored adopting Legions Imperialis or Adeptus Titanicus, which would have meant more models on my shelves, meticulous painting, reading new rulebooks, and so on. With just 8 mechs and as many vehicles, I've got everything I need for mech battles with half the investments.
Whether I use Battletech rules or not, the assets are good enough to be used in several different game systems. There's a quick start for Alpha Strike available free online, but what I'm most excited for right now is adding them as super-heavies to Epic Warpath, because I've read and enjoyed those rules.
Despite an unpleasant Kickstarter experience, impenetrable onboarding to the game, and disappointing sculpt quality, I probably would nevertheless recommend Battletech Mercenaries to anyone thinking about playing a mech battle game. Like its own in-world mech design, Battletech doesn't offer you anything fancy but it does provide you with plenty of functionality. You get some mechs, you get a battle map with hexes, data cards, and dice. You don't get rules, but there are plenty of mech battle rules online, including free Alpha Strike rules from Catalyst. For a relatively low investment, you get some suitable assets in the distinctive Battletech style. Painting them is easy, and then you get to use them in all manner of games.