This is another last-minute replacement article because doing the research on Engine stats and how they relate either to the risk of critical hits or their ability to reduce damage received just keeps being too big no matter how I slice it or narrow the scope. Those are still coming, but it’s going to be a bit.

Instead, I thought I’d share something I’ve been doing with weapons for a while now. I call them “Weapon Sets” in my spreadsheets, but really all that means is that I’ve done the math for how many of a certain weapon I need to mount before they’re sure to use an entire ton of ammo before 10 rounds is up.

I don’t like exploding, I don’t like taking more ammo to a fight than I need, and I like having as much gun on a ‘Mech as possible. In-universe, I like to imagine that this is how my mercenaries min/max their loadouts for high intensity, short duration combat. They’re in to do a job, deal maximum damage, and leave.

If you were playing a campaign where you might not have the chance to reload or repair between missions, then you could land yourself in a situation where you’re dry on all your guns and you’re praying for some melee. If you’re playing a house military, or a faction that needs to defend a location for more than one encounter before reloading, then this won’t be good news for you.

I take ranges into account, and just sort of guess how many rounds during those 10 rounds of combat I’ll actually be able to fire the weapon in question. Even when you’re looking at very long range stuff, like LRMs or Gauss Rifles, how often do you end up spending a turn getting into position or holding fire because enemies just aren’t in line of sight? Exactly. On the opposite end of that, how often are you not attacking with your short range weapons because you’re just too far away? Same issue.

When it comes to my long-range units, meaning anything that’s got ranges of 6/12/18 or longer, I assume they’ll be able to get at most 8 shots off per game with those weapons. ‘Mechs mounting weapons ranging 4/8/12 to 5/10/15 I expect are going to get in 7 shots. Short range weapons, meaning 3/6/9, are probably only going to get 6 attacks off within 10 rounds, maybe 7 if they’re particularly fast. And I’ve just never worried about weapons with shorter ranges than those, because that’s Machine Guns and Flamers. But, yeah, probably even fewer attacks for those.

Now let’s take a look at some of these weapon sets and compare them to an energy weapon in their same range band. Here’s a table of 3/6/9 weapons:

Seen here are loadouts that allow for 6 rounds of attacks from an SRM 4 or SRM 6 and 5 rounds of Streak SRM 4 and Streak SRM 6s. Since attacks with Streaks that miss don’t expend ammo, you can afford to run with a little less ammo for them. On this table, I’ve compared them to the humble Medium Laser, 7 of which costs 21 heat.

Admittedly, to get the most out of SRMs, you reeeally have to commit to them in numbers. But if you do, you can see some decently high efficiency out of them. This isn’t a perfect comparison, since SRMs have their damage spread out and lose some penetration in favor of crit-seeking. But this does give you an idea of how to optimize for SRMs1

This range bracket really doesn’t have a lot. MRM 10s and 20s work well in sets of 3s, but they’re not exactly great weapons. So the only really important one to look at in 5/10/15 is comparing Light AC/5s to Large Lasers:

Shockingly? Light AC/5s are really good even when using standard AC ammo. I did also include a line showing estimates for efficacy of precision ammo as well. This does assume the new rule of 0.6x ammo instead of 0.5x and my usual estimate for estimating average damage increase based on to-hit bonus (1.43x for -2 to hit). And… yeah. I would gladly take three Light AC/5s over large lasers. That slight tonnage efficiency on the Large Laser doesn’t really carry over when you consider the Light AC/5s don’t use up all of a ‘Mech’s available heat.

The 6/12/18 range bracket is pretty well dominated by PPCs, but also the Thunderbolt 5s and 10s work with this concept of weapon sets. So here’s a comparison on those!

Again, Thunderbolts give a better showing here than people might have expected! Admittedly, what’s happening here is you’re trading minimum range for an awful lot of chance to explode. So that’s a for you decision!

Up in the 7/14/21 range band, there’s really not a lot of competition with energy weapons. But we’ve got the ER PPC, so we’re using it.

I wanted to have more to say about this range band… but… I really don’t. ER PPCs are great space savers, but that’s no surprise. The LB 5-X AC in this example is assuming cluster shots are being used, because that’s why you bring an LB-X.

Here we’re comparing 8/16/24 and above range bands. The only energy weapon I have for comparison up here is the RISC Hyper Laser. That’s not really a great measuring stick, but it’s what I’ve got.

And the moral of the story is… Light Gauss Rifles are good.

This may not be true for everyone, but for me BattleTech is most fun when I’m running in and getting into the fight rather than holding back and cautiously placing difficult to land shots at range. Building your ‘Mechs in this way really pushes you to get in closer faster and make those shots connect.

And, something I wasn’t expecting when I started working on this article, but the usefulness of this advice really drops off as you go out to longer and longer ranges. Although, I admit, it is a really cool way of seeing how to get the most out of your SRMs, Light AC/5s, and Thunderbolts. Which are all weapons I love to see on the table!