Let's Play Battletech

You ladies of lubricity

That dwell in the bordello

Ha-ha ha-ha, ha-ha ha-hee

For I am that kind of fellow

 - Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

BattleTech is almost as old as I am. Polygon did a cute little oral history of the game a few years back, which I enjoyed. I'm also fairly sure that Warhammer 40,000's Imperial Knights are stolen directly from BattleTech, and possibly a lot more; various other mech-related games also owe them a debt. Battletech is one of those things that's always been there; I've been aware of it for as long as I've known anything about wargaming, but I never got a chance to play it. Now that Catalyst Games has restarted the franchise, so to speak, and I'm getting back into smaller-scale miniature games, it was finally time to change that with their Beginner Box.

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The Beginner Box is a cute little set that's very cheap. It comes with two mechs, a fold-out hex map and a couple of leaflets, including a small set of "getting started" rules.

The biggest disappointment in all of this is the fluff. There are decades of material and backstory and whatnot to Battletech - but you'll find none of that here. There's one little foldout with a galaxy map, and barely any material at all to get a handle on anything. I don't understand how you get your hands on an intellectual property like Battletech and then make this little effort to immerse people in it.

If you want the opposite experience, there's the PC game Battletech, which does great job getting you into the fluff and everything - and then absolutely refuses to explain how anything in the actual game works, or provide any kind of manual. Is it a law of Battletech that you can have either the fluff or the rules explained to you, but never both? The game itself was all right; I wasn't really that impressed, and the hardware requirements were brutal for my poor laptop.

I have been reading up on the fluff on sarna.net, though, and one thing I'll definitely say for Battletech is that it's not often you get to play a wargame as the telephone company. So I think purely in honor of that, I have to paint at least one mech in ComStar colors. As it happens, that means white, and as I found when I got back into painting miniatures with Star Wars: Rebellion, I love painting dirty white. So I've decided to paint the Wolverine that came with the starter box as a ComStar mech.

I am delighted to note that the Wolverine has been produced by, among others, a company called Bordello Military Goods, Inc. I wonder if the people responsible for that knew what a bordello is.

The other mech in the box is a Griffin, apparently originally from an early 1980s anime, but also Soundwave. Looking into the fluff, I find that like in so many other fictional properties, there's a girls' faction. I had a House Escher gang in Necromunda, I'll have a Magistracy of Canopus, um, lance? in Battletech. Delightfully, the uniform color for the Magistracy Armed Forces is turqoise and black, which I intend to fully embrace. Here's my first shot at a color scheme.

This Griffin represents my mechwarrior mercenary company, the 11th Riedquat Rangers (Electra's Own).

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My first proper Battletech experience, however, happened at our friendly local game store, which hosted a Battletech event earlier this month. I grabbed myself a Hunchback from the mechs on offer, and ended up facing an Enforcer.

I was given a record sheet, and we started rolling a whole bunch of 2d6s. I had some success firing my giant autocannon at the Enforcer, eventually destroying its left torso completely. The Enforcer's return fire knocked my mech down, but I got up again.

The rules were actually pretty simple, certainly with an experienced player to walk me through them, and actually kinda fun. Although my superior firepower was having an impact, I wanted to have an appropriately Warhammer ending and try the mêlée rules: my Hunchback charged in.

The rest of the battle could hardly have gone more dramatically: our mechs traded blows on the roof of a building, until my Hunchback punched my opponent's mech in the face, killing his pilot!

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I very much enjoyed my first Battletech experience, and I'm going to try to play more. There's whole oceans of rules, fluff and miniatures to get into here, and the Epic player in me can't help but notice all these tanks and infantry and whatnot, all in a very familiar scale...

Why Sanna Marin and her cabinet weren't all that

Earlier this year, Finland had a very miserable election. Our prime minister, Sanna Marin of the social democrat party, had become an international celebrity, but her party lost the election, and she is stepping down as party leader. This has surprised people around the world, because she cut a very progressive and popular figure. Sadly, I'm here to tell you that she was not exactly a great prime minister.

First, there was our pandemic policy. Finland had a world-class response to Covid and we were doing a great job suppressing the virus - until we quit. In September 2021, Marin and her cabinet decided to lift practically all suppressing measures, including things like mask recommendations. Since then, thousands of people have died. I did another post on the subject, with the statistics. So when people say Marin's cabinet handled the pandemic well, I don't entirely agree. They did, until they decided to stop.

Another failure was the Sami parliament act. Finland has been reprimanded several times by the UN for our failure to implement proper representation for the Sami indigenous people, whose lands Finland continues to colonize. The Marin government was supposed to change that with a new bill on the Sami parliament. However, the cabinet allowed the agrarian party, which resists indigenous rights, to sabotage the bill, and it failed to pass. This is absolutely disgraceful.

The most colossal disappointment of the Marin cabinet, though, was their environmental policy. It was sold to us as a "climate cabinet". What they did was the total opposite.

We can start with peat. Finland produces approximately 5% of our energy by burning peat, which accounts for 10% of our greenhouse emissions, while peat extraction is immensely destructive. It's an incredibly dirty and wasteful fuel. So obviously it receives huge government subsidies and tax breaks into the hundreds of millions of euros.

In 2021, the end result of a huge budget battle with the obstructionist agrarian party was that the Marin cabinet handed 70 million euros of additional subsidies to peat production (IL). 

Later that same year, the social democrat minister for communications, Timo Harakka, called a new motorway "a climate act" in a tweet. The same minister oversees domestic flights, which have received additional subsidies of tens of millions of euros during his time in cabinet. There's so little demand for the flights, that some have flown with single passengers, or even empty (Yle).

When the invasion of Ukraine made electricity prices spike, our government rushed to subsidize households by dropping the tax on electricity. Most of the subsidies are going to well-off households that spend large amounts of energy (Yle). Similarly, when fuel prices rose, the government was there to subsidize diesel fuel (Yle).

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Marin's cabinet spent millions upon millions of extra euros subsidizing fossil fuel consumption, sometimes in the stupidest possible ways, propping up tiny, moribund industries like peat, or ridiculous boondoggles like flights with no passengers on them.

It just so happens I've taught the 1973 oil crisis quite a few times already. Finnish Wikipedia has quite a nice list of energy-saving measures the government of the time implemented, which ranged from regulating indoor temperatures to shop window lighting. The prime minister was also a social democrat, by the way: Kalevi Sorsa. Fifty years later, it did not apparently even for a moment occur to his successor that something like this could be done. Instead, as with every other crisis and policy question, Marin's answer was subsidies for fossil fuels.

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I've lived in Finland for almost 40 years, and the media persecution of Sanna Marin was like nothing I have ever seen before. The misogyny was absolutely hysterical. One of the main precepts of Finnish journalism is that no criticism of it can ever be justified, so there will be no post-mortem, as it were. All our major medias are busy reassuring each other that they did a great job. This is deeply depressing, especially since we all know full well that they're going to spend the next several years worshipping the ground the new right-wing government walks on.

We also suffer from the same disease as Britain, as explained by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis: our media doesn't understand macroeconomics at all, and believes the right's austerity fairy-tales. This was also painfully obvious in this year's election, which was dominated by all our major medias and the ministry of finance battering us into submission with their austerity agenda of billions of euros of cuts.

However, two things can be true at the same time: Marin can be the victim of concerted misogynist media persecution, and a terrible disappointment as a prime minister. Her cabinet let thousands of people die needlessly in the pandemic, cheerfully trampled over indigenous rights, and faced the escalating climate and biodiversity crisis with millions upon millions of subsidies to fossil capitalism. Yes, misogyny was a large reason why her party lost the election. But so was the fact that the policies of her cabinet were absolutely terrible.

Let's Paint Fallout: the Board Game

Several unidentified aircraft were spotted flying over the REPCONN Test Site by a local crackpot. He spoke to a toy bear near one of our microphones. "It's ghouls, I tell you. Religious ghouls in rockets, looking for a land to call their own. Don't you laugh at me! I know a spell that'll make you show your true form! A cave rat taught it to me."
- Radio New Vegas

Even though our board gaming has mostlt been on hold because of the pandemic, we did really enjoy Fantasy Flight's Fallout board game, and I got to thinking that I really should paint the miniatures. So here we go!

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Super Mutant

I've gone for the Fallout 3 super mutant look instead of the classic green, because it's so much more interesting and will, I hope, make the model stand out a bit. The skin was done in Flat Yellow, the rags in (I think) Saddle Brown, and the metal bits are Gunmetal Grey and Brass. I then gave the whole thing a wash with watered-down Black Glaze, Skin Wash and Smoke to make the dude look appropriately grimy, and I think it worked pretty nicely!

This model was fun enough to paint that I'm seriously considering getting some Mödiphius Super Mutants.

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Vault Dude

Of course the Vault guy had to be among the first models I painted as well!

His skin is Burnt Umber, and the hair is Black Grey. The vault suit is Dark Blue, with Saddle Brown, Gunmetal Grey and Copper accessories, with a little Smoke wash.

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Mister Handy

I'm skipping ahead to the New California expansion here, but Mr. Handy had such a memorable debut in our first attempt at the co-operative New California scenario as a drug-dealing murder robot that I felt I had to paint him.

Of course, a robot is also kinda easy to paint! The upper body is Natural Steel and the lower Gunmetal Gray, and the eyes are Silver; the body got a wash of Black Glaze and a little Smokey Ink, and there's some Light Green to represent the drugs, and some Scarlet for the murder.

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Ghoul

The ghoul was the MVP of our first co-op attempt and a past winner as well, so he was definitely next.

His shoes are black, the pants are London Grey and the vest is Light Grey; the shirt is Ivory. I painted the skin Tan Earth, gave it a light drybrush with Green Sky and a sort of wash with Sunny Skin Tone, followed by some watered-down Smokey Ink. I'm very happy with the result!

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So here's the first batch of Fallout characters; there'll be more.