BattleTech

BattleTech is a 2018 turn-based tactics game from Harebrained Schemes, based on the tabletop wargame of the same name, and funded on Kickstarter. You command a mercenary company of BattleMechs, giant piloted war machines, operating from a dropship across a region of space. A story campaign follows a deposed heir trying to take back her throne.

Between battles you run the company: contracts to accept, monthly running costs to pay, damaged mechs to repair, pilots to heal, and salvage from each battle to claim. In battle, mechs take damage to individual parts, build up heat when they fire, and can be knocked down by enough damage to their legs.

Its company management is one of the best of its kind. The tension between a contract that pays well and one that offers good salvage is constant, and losing a pilot you have trained for months is a real blow. Battles are slow but deliberate, with damage to individual parts and heat as real constraints.

Battles can drag, especially early. Its expansions and the community mods that followed added much of the variety the base game lacks.

BattleTech is Jagged Alliance 2's mercenary economy in space: money, contracts, injuries and named people, with machines in place of guns. Its strategic layer is closer to Jagged Alliance 2's than any other recent game's, without the island to liberate.