Abandoned explosive fuel trucks, destroyed coolant exchanger buildings, and broken electrical transformers that disrupt targeting will drastically change the battle as you go.Įlectronic Warfare - The return of these lost technologies will forever change the 31st century battlefield. Every building in the new urban biome is fully destructible, so you’re never more than a few salvos away from a new line of sight, or the defensive cover of high-rise rubble. Urban Warfare - Street brawls introduce new tactical gameplay challenges as ‘Mech combat moves from wide-open natural landscapes to vast urban sprawls. With new urban challenges, the return of lost technologies, new ‘Mechs, vehicles, encounters and flashpoints, Urban Warfare takes the BATTLETECH experience to new, gritty heights.
Weigh the hazards and benefits before going into urban battle, though - explosions, floods and more await. Those are the main differences you'll likely notice (as noted, the career mode has a few other significant changes that come earlier, notably the option to start with a random lance instead of the default lance, and the new Flashpoints).City combat is center stage in this expansion, introducing new street features including blocked lines of sight, collateral damage rules, and all sorts of new destruction. Those buildings are also destroyable and quite fragile though, so they can be easily destroyed, which causes significant damage to any mech standing on it (I had a mission where I was supposed to destroy a marauding lance of mechs raiding the area the "Mission Success" screen included the employer saying something along the lines of "the citizens of can now rest in peace with that threat removed," which amused me because I'm pretty sure I destroyed a half-dozen major buildings during that mission, so a lot of those citizens are probably now homeless). There are tons of buildings, both blocking sight-lines regularly and also offering places for jumping mechs to stand on and rain down fire from above. If you head to a system with Urban biome (I believe you can filter these on the map), you'll likely have several random missions on those maps (although note that some people have reported terrible performance hits on those maps they work fine for me, and it seems to be hardware specific, but be advised), which play quite differently.
There are a few new mission types to look for: Battle+ (which generally involve you getting involved in a battle with multiple enemy factions, which might be allied with each other, with you, or mutually hostile the random missions have names like "Clash of the Titans," which involves two Assault Battlemechs fighting each other, while your much lighter lance hides and then finishes off the survivor in order to salvage both, or "Spoiler" which is similar but with somewhat weaker enemy lances) and Attack and Defend (in which you need to destroy an enemy base before their swarm of hostile reinforcements destroy your base these are extremely difficult). As noted, the Flashpoints won't spawn until after the scripted campaign missions, if you do a campaign instead of a career-mode game, which means no Ravens (which require the relevant Flashpoint to spawn) and no Hatchetman (which are in the Flashpoint DLC, with the same requirement). Click to expand.If you have the DLC, you'll probably run into 30-ton Javelins (both the N and the F variety) fairly regularly on low-star missions, which are a DLC mech.