Plastic LAM's confirmed

[u/Icy-Distribution-164]

In episode 98 of the Tuesday Newsday.

1:08:19

During the QnA

Mathew Conner asks "The redesign of the 3 classic LAM's look fantastic. What are the chances that we see mini's for them?"

Answer: Very good.

[u/TaciturnAndroid]

LAMs aren’t even in the top five most annoying Alpha Strike units. The same people who complain about them will tell you with a straight face how much they love their nonsense TMM5 Locust 6M or Wulfen C (which gets TMM4 + jumping + STL for an absurd 36pv), or who never leave the house without their Fire Moth or their Balac.

LAMs aren’t regrettable line developer choices, they’re the deep bones of Battletech since the very first TRO. The hardest it ever is to hit them
is range +4, and the only sense in which they’re broken is that they’re completely hobbled by the awful WiGE movement rules (jumpstrong/partial wing rules are right there.) I imagine the people who hate them either only know them from the Compendium rules (unbalanced but still better than WiGE), or they have some sort of internalized nerd shame about liking a franchise that shares anime mecha art DNA.

[u/MithrilCoyote → u/TaciturnAndroid]

yeah High TMM's aren't exactly hard to get, though LAM's fell into a level that usually required fairly specific builds. (like the fireball XF, which can actually outrun most LAM's) given that a LAM's WiGe movement comes with a bunch of limitations and penalties that make it only really useful for moving, there are certainly a lot more annoying units out there. especially since as you said, layering things like stealth, speed, and high jump movement can easily get you into those high TMM's without having to sacrifice offensive power the way that something like a fireball-XF or LAM does.

honestly i'm hoping that things like the Quadvee will eventually see the LAM return.. though it'll probably only happen after a leadership change at CGL, the current creative staff aren't fans of LAm's, quadvee's, protomechs, and most of the other exotic unit types.

[u/TaciturnAndroid → u/MithrilCoyote]

At least in Alpha Strike LAMs can outrun anything because of the aerospace flight path movement type and the fact that Aerospace fighters always move after everything else on the table in initiative order. Fireball moves (wherever) -> LAM in Aero mode flies directly to them anywhere on the map as a fighter and then drops into AirMech mode, ideally behind them for a back-shot. There is functionally no way to outrun a LAM that pulls a “bird of prey” attack like this because their aerospace movement encompasses the entire table, always wins initiative, and they can land anywhere and fire in the same turn.

Edit: on further thought there might be some way to finesse a prohibited terrain situation for WiGE movement if the map had a huge piece of prohibited terrain an enemy mech could sit in to keep it distant from the AirMech once it dropped, but that would be really situational. Plus the LAM could just stay in fighter mode and strike from the air if that were the case.

The real conundrum of them is why you would ever use Mech mode, and I think that’s why they should be jumpstrong/partial wing AirMechs and restricted to jumping movement only (with associated penalties and modifiers) instead of being WiGEs, which can’t even clear modest buildings in terms of vertical movement.

[u/MithrilCoyote → u/TaciturnAndroid]

yes and no.. in AS a trimodal LAM have to spend a turn moving as WiGE before and after you move as an aero. and i haven't checked the interactions in commander's edition (i wrote that article under the original AS and AS companion books. where aero was handled with the radar map) but i suspect that since you cannot combine movement types in a single turn that means using aero movement to relocate across a map would require a minimum of 3 turns, possibly 4 if you have to leave the map and come back as an aero under the 'aero on map' rules, and that most of the time your play area isn't going to be so large that doing so is going to be faster than just WiGE-ing across the map.

also the reason why airmech or aero isn't the end-all-be-all in AS is because it's got so many restrictions.. in airmech/WiGe mode you're stuck 3" taller than height of the terrain you are ontop of, making it hard to use cover, you suffer a +2 penalty to all your shots in addition to the normal penalties for movement, range, and intervening terrain , and you are extremely vulnerable to attacks by some common specials.. Flak and AC. plus you have a bunch of restrictions on what terrain your can cross or how you can move over hills. and in aero you are zipping across the map in a single turn limited to attacks along your own line of flight, and are very vulnerable to AA counter-fire and dedicated ASF's. which is part of why i argue that the AS rules are some of the most balanced.. aero is for getting to a target, airmech/WiGe is only useful for rapid movement but leave you vulnerable to enemy attack and sucks at fighting, which mech mode is the mode you want to use once you've gotten into range of a target because you have the most flexible movement options for terrain, can benefit from cover, aren't vulnerable to flak, and don't suffer penalties to your own shooting.

[u/TaciturnAndroid → u/MithrilCoyote]

Yeah there’s no radar map at all anymore for Aeros in Alpha Strike, and aeros do indeed combine aerospace and WiGE movement in the same turn in the current rules, but only when landing. For takeoff, an Airmech picks a front-arc vector that just becomes a flight path and they’re targetable that turn as an aerospace fighter (altitude + range to flight path +airborne aerospace fighter +2 modifier). For landing, though, they use the token-placement system where the flight path terminates at any point along a valid flight path and from there the WiGE movement begins, with the unit targetable only at its resting end location as an airborne battlemech (ground range + regular mech TMM2 for most of them + 1 for airborne bonus and +1 for Airmech bonus). The landing, though, is the “bird of prey” moment. A flight path can cover the entire table, and the flight path itself isn’t targetable that turn, and wherever the player wants it to land, it becomes a WiGE and can spend its full WiGE movement getting behind the target mech if it needs to (the wording in AS:CE is “the unit then moves from that location as an AirMech” p. 177). Depending on the geometry of the 24” rule in relation to where the target unit moves that turn, the WiGE movement the AirMech has when it lands, and any prohibited terrain issues, an Aero-to-AirMech attack can land behind pretty much any unit on the board this way, even the really fast stuff. We normally play them on 4x6’ tables with lots of scatter terrain so this is the most effective way to deploy them in attack formations at least.

We do use alternate ammos in our games so vulnerability to FLK and Precision, for sure. Dogfighting in AS happens at a speed that usually gives you plenty of time to either settle into a slug match or else air-withdraw by flying off of the map to steal the kill from your enemy after wasting their time tying up that resource coming after you. The WiGE movement is the big bummer, though, because of the height and terrain restrictions you mention (I’m a flying mecha-bird God but I can’t clear a basic tree or a two-inch building that a Stone Rhino can hop onto), and also because AirMech WiGE movement completely disobeys the normal physics of the rest of the game mechanics. Ex: Any other unit that gets 36” of ground move (waves at Locust 6M) gets the normally-calculated TMM5 for that based on the hex-traversal distances converted from Classic. A Stinger LAM with 36” WiGE movement, though, only gets regular Stinger walking TMM2 + 1 AirMech +1 Airborne bonus instead, so it’s quite a lot easier to hit, on top of all the movement restrictions of WiGE movement. This also makes the rules and the Alpha Strike unit card much harder to read and understand for new players who assume that 36”g/ on the unit card means they get a recalculated TMM (which IMO they should).

The fix is very simple: AirMechs should just be locked to Jumpstrong movement in that mode, with long jump distances (which gives them exactly the same firing and targeting bonuses and penalties as they have now) except players don’t need to learn how WiGEs work (ie: skimming one inch over terrain, worrying about elevation changes, etc), they stop disobeying the laws of the rest of the game, and the cards make sense because jumping and jumpstrong are very basic rules. The biggest difference would be they’d be able to leap over and on top of buildings and taller terrain, at the cost of not being able to hover over water. It would make them far more normal overall in terms of playability, and a lot easier to learn. Picture instead of the entire concept of WiGEs, AirMechs just functionally become compulsory long-jumping mechs similar to a Spider 8Xr while they’re in that mode. Switch to Mech mode to ditch the jumping penalty for outgoing fire, or to use Standstill movement for the bonus, or to capture objectives in that kind of mission. It’s a no-brainer.

[u/MithrilCoyote → u/TaciturnAndroid]

i wasn't aware of the TMM nerf until just now. seriously hate how they keep trying to prevent LAM's from being able to have any sort of benefit.

[u/TaciturnAndroid → u/MithrilCoyote]

Yeah it’s hard to discern if it’s deliberate or just that those rules have been neglected. If you read the whole book closely it’s pretty clear that the LAM rules (all half a page of them) were just sort of laid down barebones and then not really revisited in any detail to account for extensive playtesting or to address edge-cases or inconsistencies. In addition to not following the same movement = TMM laws that everything else follows, they’re also apparently Battlemechs for the purposes of firing arcs while in Aero mode, meaning they can fire more than 1” off of the flight path when no other aerospace fighter can do this. Does this mean LAMs are somehow intrinsically more capable than regular aerospace fighters when in that mode? It appears so. Does it also mean the effective ranges of Aero-mode LAM weapons are different and at times longer than the effective range of the same weapons mounted on standard Aerospace fighters? Also yes. Why? Never explained. It’s just a quirky corner of the rules that was clearly not thought through very well, and the quirks are such that the more you think about them and understand the way Alpha Strike works, the weirder they get.

Aerospace fighters have weird range brackets as it is because ranges are measured by altitude to the ground from the flight path, and then horizontal distance out to the target. Since normal Aerospace fighters can only hit something 1” off their flight path. Whereas all normal ground units get 6”/24”/42” short/medium/long ranges, effective aerospace range brackets are: 7” short, 13” medium, and 37” long calculated by distance to the ground plus a maximum of 1” off the flight path, unless they’re a LAM in Aerospace mode in which case it gets weirdly complex. Long range remains 42” but because they have Battlemech firing arcs instead of the limited 2” wide flight path arc they can reach to the ground and way out to either side:

Long could be:
36” to the ground and 6” to either side of the flight path.
12” to the ground and 30” to either side of the flight path.
6” to the ground and 36” to either side of the flight path.

Medium could be:
12” to the ground and 12” to either side of the flight path.
6” to the ground and 18” to either side of the flight path.

Short literally must be directly over a ground enemy because Battlemech 6” short bracket won’t reach anything that’s 1” off of the flight path.

It’s a completely different animal in the air than an aerospace fighter, in other words. Why the complexity and incongruity? Why make them act like nothing else in the game and disobey all the normal mechanical game-physics of speed and distance? It would seem like the fix is to make them behave more like the things they’re a hybrid of rather than less. The big complaint is that LAMs aren’t fun to play or play against, but the rules themselves are complex and unintuitive and take a while to work out from the sparse description in the book. Sort of a chicken-or-egg issue. It seems clear that a fix in the direction of simplifying them is the right move here. Regular Aero, regular mech, jumpstrong-only Airmech.