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Third edition: two color maps, a pack of record sheets, and fourteen 2' plastic miniatures of various BattleMech war machines.

First edition: two full-color terrain maps, 48 stand-up BattleMech counters, four sheets of playing markers, plastic counter stands, dice, and a rule book.

The name of the game was changed to BattleTech in the second edition because George Lucas and Lucasfilm claimed the rights to the term ' droid' the machines themselves were renamed BattleMechs from the second edition onward. The game was at first called Battledroids. History įurther information: List of BattleTech games Conception Ĭhicago-based FASA Corporation's original 1984 game focused on enormous robotic, semi-humanoid battle machines battling in a science-fiction feudalistic Dark Age setting. As rivalries and conflicts have dragged on, advanced technologies are redeveloped for the battlefield. Incessant warfare is generally blamed for the uneven advancement, the destruction of industry and institutes of learning over the centuries of warfare having resulted in the loss of much technology and knowledge.

Artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, androids, and many other staples of future fiction are generally absent or downplayed. Radically advanced tech mixes with seemingly anachronistic technologies such as internal combustion engines and projectile weapons. A handful of exceptions, notably faster-than-light interstellar travel and superluminal communication, depend on purely fictional or speculative principles. The universe is largely based in hard science fiction concepts - much of the technology used is either similar in advancement to that of the present day, or based on technology considered plausible in the near-future, such as the railgun. The level of technology evident in BattleTech is an unusual blend of the highly futuristic and the nearly modern. Interstellar and civil wars, planetary battles, factionalization and infighting, as well as institutionalized combat in the shape of arena contests and duelling, form the grist of both novelized fiction and game backstories. Despite one or two isolated encounters in novels, mankind is the only sentient species.Ībove all, the central theme of BattleTech is conflict, consistent with the franchise's wargaming core. Cultural, political and social conventions vary considerably between worlds, but feudalism is widespread, with many states ruled by hereditary lords and other nobility, below which are numerous social classes.Ī key feature of the BattleTech universe is the absence of non-human intelligent life. Individual lifestyles remain largely unchanged from those of modern times, due in part to stretches of protracted interplanetary warfare during which technological progress slowed or even reversed. Generally, BattleTech assumes that its history is identical to real-world history up until approximately 1984, when the reported histories begin to diverge in particular, the game designers did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, which plays a major role past 1991 in the fictional BattleTech history. Ī detailed timeline stretching from the late 20th century to the mid-32nd describes humanity's technological, social and political development and spread through space both in broad historical terms and through accounts of the lives of individuals who experienced and shaped that history, with an emphasis on (initially) the year 3025 and creating an ongoing storyline from there. MechWarrior: Dark Ages and its related novels take place in the mid 3100s.

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Most works in the series are set during the early to middle decades of the 31st century, though a few publications concern earlier ages. The game is played in turns, each of which represents 10 seconds of real time, with each turn composed of multiple phases.īattleTech's fictional history covers the approximately 1,150 years from the end of the 20th century to the middle of the 32nd.

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Typically, these are represented on the game board by two-inch-tall miniature figurines that the players can paint to their own specifications, although older publications such as the 1st edition included small scale plastic models originally created for the Macross TV series, and the 2nd and 4th edition boxed sets included small cardboard pictures (front and back images) that were set in rubber bases to represent the units. The combat units are roughly 12-metre-tall (39 ft) humanoid armored combat units called BattleMechs, powered by fusion reactors and armed with a variety of weapons. In its most basic form, BattleTech is played on a map sheet composed of hexagonal terrain tiles.

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