The Chimera

The Chimera

In Greek mythology, the Chimera is a monster, depicted as an animal with the head of a lion, the body of a she-goat, and the tail of a dragon. In MechWarrior 4, the Chimera is an Inner Sphere Medium Class battlemech weighing in at 40 tons.

While it may have a lion’s spirit and it seems to have lost its tail, this battlemech leaves me wanting. It is obviously an older design with a only a minor touch-up change from MekTek’s MekPak 3.

Over the years, I have tried very hard to like this mech and to make good use of it, but it or me have always come up short when paired together. Maybe after taking a closer look, I can give you a good reason. Ready? Ok then. Lets go look at the Chimera.

As I mentioned, the Chimera is a 40 tonner. This is good weight for league play where often the weight is limited. The stock config has jump jets and a speed set at 102kph. Fast and jump capable, both are things I like. The pre-loaded weapons consist of a standard Inner Sphere machine gun, a MRM20, a Medium Laser and a Large Laser. The Endo Steel frame is loaded with 10.5 tons of reflective armour.

The Speed range is from 82 to 112kph. Pre-set is 102 and this is a good speed for the Chimera. 92 or 97kph are still ok if you need the extra tonnage for that one weapon you just have to have but cant get it installed without the tonnage. LAMs are an option as well as Advanced Gyro. Ol’ Vettie suggests the LAMs especially if ol’ Lion Head is heading into missile friendly ground.

If you max out the armour, the Chimera holds 12 tons of Reflective or Reactive Armour or 8.1 tons of Ferro. Here is part of the problem, at least for me. The Chimera has proven to be a rather weak mech. Using Spec Armour improves the durability and life span but reduces the amount of free tonnage available for weapons. If you load Ferro, you have 16.9 tons and if you max either of the Spec Armours you are left with only 13 tons for weapons. There are folks that do well in a Chimera and if you are one of those, Ferro Armour is probably fine for you. For me? Well, I have to use the spec amour and hope I pick the correct one.

Let’s go with a Ferro version and a speed setting of 102kph with jump jets for now. The Chimera can make a very good jump sniper if you load a CapPPC and a Mini Gauss Rifle. You would need to shave .1 ton of armour from somewhere, but this gives a good punch from 850 meters. Whats that? You say you like the close up game better? Ok, then drop the jumpies and lower the speed to 82kph. Install a Heavy Gauss Rifle and 3 Light Machine Guns. Nasticus. Or, if prefer, load an Assault Laser and an AC20 or LBX20. Ouchies. Then there is the 4 Medium Laser, 3 Heavy Machine Gun (double ammo) SRM6 version I call the lil’ stripper. If want a little more range, you can load up 2 LAC2s and 2 Large Lasers with jump jets.

The Chimera looks to me to be an old design. When I say old design, I mean that all the weapons types are/were separated distinctly to different parts of the mech. One arm had 1 type of weapon, the torso had 1 type, but different for the arm and the other arm had yet a different type. Up until MP3, it had a 3-slot ballistic arm, a 3-slot missile rack in the center torso and a 4-slot beam rack in the other arm. After MP3, the only change to the slots was that the 4-slot beam rack was changed to a ‘D-Slot’ or direct fire slot that could hold either beam weapons or ballistic weapons. I think this was a good change in that allowed the Chimmy to carry ballistics on either or both sides of the mech.

The Chimera is a fairly agile mech. Considering it has jump jets, it climbs well even if you leave the jumpies off. The turn radius is good and relatively fast. The decel / reverse speed is very responsive. The accel rate leaves a bit to be desired, especially for a 40 ton mech. Otherwise the Chimera handles good and is easy to drive.

The problem is the body of the mech. The Arms hold the majority of the punch in most configs and they are very weak. A mere 18 points of damage takes then away. The CT and side torsos aren’t much stronger. In fact, if you don’t run spec armour, this mech dies very fast unless you completely avoid enemy fire. The Chimera is easy to strip and easy to leg. Running passive in lots of cover is its best friend. It doesn’t hold up well against its own weight class. Heavier Class mechs use the Chimera for target practice and don’t even heat up.

For me at least, the best use is as a door stop or paper weight, uh, I mean as a jump sniper. Stay away from the enemy and peck away at them choosing your shots and targets with care, Be very patient and run passive. Remember, BAP capable mechs can pick you up passive at 600 meters so stay outside of that range and zap your opponents, get closer and, well, it may be a short battle for you, it almost always is for me.

You can probably tell that Ol’ Vettie is not a big fan of the Chimera. There are players that like them and that is great. There are some folks that play well in a Chimmy and that is great too. Whether or not I like a mech ahs nothing to do with how I arrive at the rating. Remember, this is my ‘view’ on a mech. I give it a good run and I put it through lots of paces and lots of different types of fighting. I even try some of them (most) against live opponents to see how they perform and what I can do with it. This is one mech I cant do much with. Jump Sniping seemed to be the best thing I could do with it.

Rating time. As mentioned, I am not a big fan of the slots or the slot layout for the Chimmy. The best weapons would be loaded in the arms and the arms are very, very weak. If you cant protect them then you wont have any offensive firepower outbound. I don’t like this one as a missile mech because it doesn’t have BAP and it really only has 1 3-slot rack. Up close, you can put some smack on it but it cant take the return fire. Its too easy to strip and the profile, although not very tall is too wide. I rate the Chimera at 2 minutes. Poor for any mech.

The Rifleman

I have been wanting to do this review for some time. I have liked this mech since way back in the MW2 days. If I recall, back then, you could put on jump jets? I also seem to remember being able to load 4 ERPPCs. Maybe not, its been a long time since MW2, and a lot of water has passed under my bridge.

Let me start by saying that I am not one to knock the work of another, especially if I am not able to do better (and prove that I can do so). I do not have the knowledge (yet) on how to ‘draw’ or model mechs in a way similar to what we will use in our game. The artist of MekTek and others are very talented folks and they do a damn good job. Each generation of mekpaks brings us more details and beautifully ‘done’ models.

When I first saw the MW4 incarnation of todays mech, I had some mixed feelings. My apologies up front, but Ol’ Vettie simply shoot straight and lets you know his thoughts on the topic. You don’t have to agree and I don’t expect anyone to, I am just giving you ‘Vettie’s Views’ on things. Now where was I? Oh yeah, when I first saw the MW4 version of the Rifleman I thought it looked stupid. The Artist that created it did a damn good job and the details on this mech are spectacular, but I just thought it looked dumb. I did not care for the way the radar array was tilted overhead, nor did I care for the look of the array. I thought the arms stuck out to far from the body and that the weapons barrels on each arm were way too long. I also didn’t care for the animation. When the mech walks or runs, it looks like it is leaning back, way back, almost to the point of falling backward. Again, this is just Ol Vettie’s opinion on the ‘looks’ of the mech. It has nothing much to do with the performance.

Stepping into the wayback machine for a moment, I believe the Rifleman was created to counter air strikes and turrets mounted very high on buildings or mountain sides or even on the plateaus of mesas. Out of the wayback and back into current day, MekTek did a great job of recreating this ability. The Rifleman can shoot almost straight up and it has a 360 degree torso twist. Very nice.

Lets take a quit walk over to the Mech Lab. I think the techs have a Rifleman in there right now and they would be willing to show us what one of these is made of. Careful, watch your step, those crates contain live ammo, we don’t want any accidents in the lab. Ok, here we are, come on in, don’t by shy. You can learn a lot in the mech alb and these techs? Well they are professionals.

Wow, standing beside of one of these things really gives you a feel for how big they are. Maybe we should go into the control room where the configurations are laid out on the computer. These parts are big and I would hate if one fell of and ewww, I don’t even want to think about what would happen if a piece fell on you. It would take the clean up crew quite a while to get the stain off the floor, so follow me.

All right, here we are in the comfort and safety of the control room. You can still see the mech from here and you can customize the load out and equipment all from here. I’ll show you how all that works in a moment, but first lets see what a Rifleman comes with. Here, click that tab on the screen and it brings up a picture of the mech and tells you some info. See how easy that was? Ok then, well it shows here that the Rifleman is an Inner Sphere Heavy Class Battlemech weighing in at 60 tons. From the factory, the standard equipment includes ECM and LAMs, with 2 heat sinks and top speed of 79kph. If you click that center tab, the one called weapons, it shows you the current weapons load. This one has a Large Laser in each arm as well as an AC5 in each. The Chin Rack is pre-loaded with 2 Medium Pulse Lasers. Finally, by clicking on the Armor (they spelled it wrong) Tab you can see that the Rifleman is loaded with 10 tons of Ferro Fibrous Armour on an Endo Steel Frame.

Lets strip the weapons (its simple to do, just click the ‘strip’ button) and lets max out the armour (also simple, just click the mis-spelled max armor button). This gives us 11.9 tons of armour. The Rifleman is capable of carrying one of the best suite of electronics in the game. ECM, BAP, LAMs and IFF are all offered. Excellent. Maxing the armour and taking all the electronics offered, gives you 28.1 tons to use on weapons without any engine upgrades. The speed ranges are from 64kph to 104kph. Pretty nice overall.

Moving on to the weapons load out, I was somewhat disappointed in the last set of changes MekTek made to this mech. Looking at the slots available in todays Rifleman, we can see each arm has a 3-slot beam rack and a 2-slot Direct Fire rack. The D-Racks house either ballistics or energy weapons only. The Chin Rack has 2 single beam racks. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember the arm slots being different prior to MP302b.

Seeing these slots, the 1^st thought that comes to mind is that the Rifleman is set up to be an energy based platform. In our puretech world, this mech can hold 2 PPCs and 2 Large Lasers with 4 heat sinks. Problem is that the Rifleman is not the most heat efficient mech. With a heat capacity rating of only 42, it just doesn’t do well with lots of heat weapons. Those PPCs generate 11 pts of heat (in a spike) each every time you fire one. It doesn’t take long for the Rifleman to shut down from heat problems if you don’t choose your shots carefully and your coolant flushes too.

A nice config is to load up 4 Large lasers, 4 heat sinks (or 2 and use the other 2 tons for a speed upgrade) and to load up 2 small coolant pods. This gives you a nice blast and the 2 coolant pods can be used to remove 10pts of heat each time you use 1 of them. They take a bit to recycle, so if you heat up before recycle use the mechs coolant flush or just slow down on your alphas.

IF you slow it down a little, you can load up 2 PPCs and 2 Mini Gauss Rifles. With all the electronics, this mech makes for a very nice sniper. 2 Light Gauss and a PPC is another good one but it does require very slow speed or careful shaving of armour. Another one I like is 2 HVAC 5s with double ammo and 2 large lasers. If you like to experiment, 3 Large X-Pulse lasers and a coolant pod with a crap load of heat sinks is also a nasty that can apply some pain to your enemy. IF you don’t mind getting a little closer to your opponents, 4 LAC5s and 2 medium lasers will keep them rocking. IF you like to ping them from long distances, then drop the LAC5s and load up 4 HVAC2s. Keep the 2 medium lasers in case somebody gets close to you. The HVAC2s have a 1200 meter range and the BAP will allow you to ‘see’ some targets at that range. The Rifleman can also carry 4 Large Continuous Beam Lasers to chew through some armour. There are lots of offensive options for this mech and they all don’t have to be centered around beam weapons.

The Rifleman is a very mobile mech. It climbs very well, not as good as some, but it will get you where you need to go. I already mentioned that you can fire straight up and the 360 torso twist, both big pluses when it comes to combat. What I didn’t mention was that this battlemech had one of, if not THE fastest torso twist in the game. For me this is a plus and a minus. The mouse I use to play this game is very sensitive and if I give it a slight twist either way the mech responds and the torso twists quickly to the where ever I am pointing. This is also bad when fighting an opponent that has weapons with heavy knock as your torso gets knocked to the side easily.

The accel and decel rates for the Rifleman are also good. It hill humps with ease. The most important par of this is the decel rate. This allows you to reverse direction quickly. You can move up to a hill or the edge of a cliff and fire and back off with out taking return fire (if you are fast enough). For me, using a Nostromo, its just the push of a button, and I am going forward or backward, push it again and I am going the opposite. The Rifleman handles this smoothly.

Defensively the Rifleman is surprisingly tough for a 60 ton mech. It is fairly small in stature and the electronics package including IFF make it a hard target to pick up on radar or through any type of fog or ground cover. The “head” or radar array on the top of the mech tend to get blown of quickly and I personally would just prefer that ‘box’ not be up there, but I understand the reasoning and the function. I mentioned earlier that the arms ‘stuck’ out a bit far making the Rifleman a wide target. The arms are obvious targets because of this and the fact that they hold the weapons load out. The arms hold up surprisingly well considering that they only hold 1.4 tons of Ferro Armour.

While in the control room of the mech lab, I mentioned to you that the Rifleman was built on an Endo Steel frame. Over the years of playing this game and slapping some vicious alphas on enemy mechs I have learned at least one thing. Let me give you a bit of insight to what I do know about the frames types before I go on here.

As we know it, there are basically 2 types of frames used in MW4 Mercs. Standard and Endo Steel. There are some significant differences between them and it DOES matter. I may be way off on this but I will tell you what I THINK. Standard chassis have standard internals and they are much ‘tougher’ to blow out once the outer shell of armour has been destroyed. The Standard internals are also easier to allow for engine upgrades (lower tonnage cost to speed up your mech). The Endo Steel Chassis types take more room inside and they spread damage much faster inside the mech once a panel or arm is blown out. It also cost more tonnage to upgrade the engine (go faster) overall. At least, that is what I think. I hope that if this is wrong that someone will post a comment and correct me.

Now back to what I was getting at. Maybe its just me, but in playing this game as often as I do I have noticed that mechs with endo steel frames seem to be harder to register initial damage. Once you actually blow out a panel or destroy an arm, if you keep hitting that spot you see the mech begin to take damage elsewhere pretty quickly, but it seems to take forever to get that initial damage on them (unless of course you hit them with an outrageous alpha). I have noticed this on the Shadow Cat, the Canis, the Rifleman and others. Compare them to same weight mechs that have standard frames and you will see what I mean.

Back to the Rifleman and apologies for the ramble. It just seemed applicable. The Rifleman can take some punishment. The right and left torsos seem to be the weak spots, but more or less that is ok as those spots contain no armaments.

This concludes our visit of the Mech Lab and the control room. Did you notice how neat and clean everything was? I told you, those techs are pros and they do a good job. I forgot to mention, if you have decide on a config, in the control room, on the chassis tab, click that little button on the lower right that is named ‘Save’. That sends a printout to the techs and they will configure your mech to order. Nice huh? Follow me folks.

Here we are in my office. This is where I review all the mechs. This is also where I play a few games online. Yes, there are many computers in this room. That one? Yes it is running Microsoft Vista (trouble free I might add) and yes it is the server where The Blood Pearls practice their trade. This one? Well, this one is my gamer and review machine. The others? One of them is used by my kids to do homework (yeah right) and the other is one I am working on and trying to decide whether to make it a Windows 98 machine so I can play around with all the MW2 stuff and get the MW3 stuff or whether to rebuild it as my next gamer. Oh don’t touch that, that’s the wifeys laptop. She left it down here for me to run the weekly upgrades / updates and defrag / virus checks on it for her.

Ok, well this is the part of the review where I actually rate the mech. I like the Rifleman. It has some really nice features and it holds up well under fire. There are a couple of things I don’t like. The Rifleman doesn’t do heat well (kinda tough for an energy based mech) and its hard to get a big alpha on it. The Rifleman is one of those mechs that you need some patience to drive it and to do a good job offensively. IT doesn’t need spec armour and if you did fill it with spec armour, you would be even more pressed to get a good weapons load on it. The mech holds up well and maybe that is because it is not the obvious target because of the electronics or because of the lack of devastating alpha. The Rifleman CAN hurt you. Patience is the key. Vettie’s View of the Rifleman? I rate this mech a 4. Its solid and it can get the job done. As with all mechs, learn to use it. Find a load you are comfortable with and practice with it. It’s a nice ride.

The Cauldron-Born

The Cauldron-Born

Today’s review comes to me with mixed feelings concerning this battlemech. It can carry one of the most devastating load outs in the puretech game. It can be one of the most brutal missile boats and it can be an excellent range fighter or support mech. It has speed and slots and decent electronics all contained in a low profile. The best part is that it only weighs in at 65 tons, very useful to drop commanders in league play. Crap, I forgot to tell you what mech. The Clan Cauldron-Born.

Well, I sort of gave away the theme of this review, but what the heck, I will give you the review anyway. The Clan Cauldron-Born weighs in at 65 ton from the Clan Factory carrying only Enhanced Optics (EO), pre-set with a top speed of 86kph and having 2 heat sinks. The armour for the Cauldy is Ferro Fibrous (FF or just Ferro) and is nearly completely full with 12.5 tons. The weapons load out leads you to believe that this mech is an infighter with long range support. It has twin LBX10s, dual ERMLs and two LRM15s (all Clan weaponry, of course).

The Cauldron-Born offers BAP, LAMs, EO and Advanced Gyro and a standard frame that holds 13 tons of Ferro Armour. The speed ranges from 68kph to 104kph. It is pre-set (as mentioned) to 86kph and this seems to be a very speed for the Cauldy. Drop down to 80kph buys you another 1.5 tons or speed up to 92kph for 2 tons. These three speeds are all decent and still allow for good handling.

The slots on the CB allow for many varied load outs. I will discuss some of them in a bit, but first lets look at the slots. Each arm is a 3-slot omni. The right torso is a 2-slot energy and the left torso has a 2-slot ballistic. There are twin 2-slot missile racks on top of this mech as well.

Just sitting in the mech and studying the slots, one of the first configurations that comes to mind is to make this puppy a brawler, a brawler truly from the cauldron. I have this image from one of Shakespeare’s writings where the witches are stirring their cauldron and saying something like “…toil and trouble…”. I see them stirring and hauntingly laughing as a Cauldron-Born crawls out of the boiling pot… Oh well, sorry.

As a brawling machine, the Cauldron-Born can carry one of the most devastating load outs in the game. Put a LBX 20 in each arm, a LBX 10 in the left torso and a Heavy Medium laser in the right torso. If you lower the speed to 80kph and shave 1.1 ton or armour you can add LAMs and AG. Of course, you can skip the LAMs (for in close fighting) and fill the armour and keep the Advanced Gyro. AG will keep the Cauldy from being knocked over (except for the most extreme alphas) and reduce the amount of incoming knock a little. This particular weapons load give the Cauldy a 76point alpha every 6 seconds. The LBX 10 and HML both recycle at 4 seconds, so they make a 20 point follow on shot to the original alpha, pretty nasty. At 65 tons there are not many mechs in the game that can carry that kind of load making it very useful if you think think things are gonna be tight, especially useful in a city setting. (There are mechs that can carry bigger alphas, the same or even more of a brawling load, but not too many at 65 to 70 tons.)

We all know a brawling Cauldron-Born is nasty and that it can even chase down some mechs and smack the crap out of them., but what is this talk about missiles? Well, keeping the armour full, lowering the speed to 80kph, a pilot can put 4 ATM12Es on board with double ammo. OR, if you prefer being a little closer, change the ATM12Es to ATM12Ms and add BAP (for long or short range fire). Prefer standard CLRMS? Good news for you. The Cauldy can take 4 CLRM20 (with double ammo) and 2 CLRM10s. Ouch. You like MRMs you say? OK, the Cauldron-Born can be loaded with 2 CMRM40s (double ammo) and 2 CMRM10s with BAP at 80kph and full armour. Still want to get closer? Fine. Load this beast with CStreak4s and CStreak6s and add a couple of machine guns for fun. 2 CStreak5s and 6 CStreak4s fit nicely and will knock down a lot of mechs in a knife fight. The machine guns will strip away bits of armour as the missiles ‘streak’ across the battlefield into your opponent. CStreaks and CMRMs have this auto lock thing, kinda like a wire guided shot. No need to wait for the missile lock sound, just aim and shoot and shoot and shoot. I almost forgot, the CB can take Arrows and Clusters too…

I heard some talk about using the Cauldron-Born in a long range support role with no missiles. Of course you can do that. Bump the speed up to 92, select BAP, LAMs and AG, shave tiny bits of armour and load up with 2 Clan Gauss Rifles and an ERLL. Now the Cauldy has the same load as the infamous Thor with more speed, with the exception of ECM and jumpies. It is faster and using Bap can locate the enemy on radar faster. Lower the speed to 80kph, remove the AG (keep the BAP and LAMs) and shave a little more armour and the Cauldy can carry 6 CUAC2s. This makes for a very nice 1000 meter machine gun with more umph. Need to go on a cold map? How about 2 ERPPCs, 1 LtPPC, 92kph with all the electronics goodies offered? Sure, we can do that and have a 75% heat efficiency rating using 11 heat sinks. Lasers are better for you? Then I say load up 3 ERLLs and 2 CUAC2s with 6 heat sinks at 86kph and all the toys. Or drop the CUAC2s and add 2 CLRM15s and a few more heat sinks and you still have a very good range support mech.

Needless to say, the Cauldron-Born is a very useful Omni mech. It can be used in many different roles, from knife fighting to precision range strikes, or anywhere in between. The tonnage is big enough to take on any Heavy Class mech and many assault class mechs and walk away the winner. At 65 tons, the CB is often called into use on limited tonnage drops, especially in league play. Offense is not a problem with the Cauldy. What then?

The problem I see with the Cauldron-Born is the chassis. The Cauldy is built on a standard frame, but it is very weak. The center torso and the arms take the majority of any fire. You would expect that in a good fire fight for the CT to take the most hits because most pilots will aim for the CT to get to the core quickly and put the mech down. The Cauldy’s CT holds 2.10 tons of FF armour and can take 63pts of damage before exposing the internals to fire. Each arm houses 1.2 tons of armour (FF) and can take up to 36pts of damage. Many times, the weapon is destroyed in the arm before the arm is completely removed. I cant reveal the amount of internal armour for the arms or the CT but if you strip all the armour from the mech the lab will reveal the amount of armour left (you also need to remove the weapons, electronics and lower the speed). This gives you a rough idea of the internals but you need to account for the special slots.

The Cauldron-Born just seems to be weak when taking incoming fire. It really wants to die to fast. Now there are some players that are very good at spreading damage and even avoiding damage and making a mech seemingly last forever, but overall, the CB goes down fast.

The Cauldy does handle well. The turning radius is a bit small, but the accel and decel rates are very good. This mech is one of the few that can hill hump with little effort. The CB has a bit of a bounce to it when it walks, almost a cocky strut. The visibility from the cockpit is excellent looking forward or to either side. I guess the key to a good CB, no matter what the load out, is to kill first and be quick about it.

During our days in NBT, we stole several Cauldron-Borns and we used them in many street fights and as missile boats. They seem to be a popular mech in MechCombat League. It is easy to see why, they fit many roles and the weight is not so much that you cant get another heavy (or 2) into the line up depending on the ladder.

Back in NBT, Hacksaw and Buddha were our CB specialist. In MCL, Buddha and Wilson seem to be the CB lovers and both have been very effective. In our first match in MCL against a team named 1FSAC, they used a pair of CBs against us. I believe that Hogsback was the map. We started in relatively close drop zones. When ‘go’ was called and confirmed, we started out for their drop zone in hopes of catching them trying to climb some hills and taking them down one at a time. 1FSAC apparently had other ideas and went a different way than we expected. We chased each other around the map for about 27 minutes only making contact a couple of times. With less than 3 minutes to go, we topped a hill to find the enemy set up in a very good defensive position around a small lake or stream. They had 2 Cauldron-Borns and a couple of other mechs. The CBs were loaded with ATM12Ms or CMRMs and they hit Cow and I as soon as we popped the hill. I spent about 2 minutes of the last 3 under water. Cow died pretty quick as did one of our other pilots. We discussed it before deciding to go in. We both knew we should have just backed off, waited the clock out and gone on to the 3^rd map. We had won the 1^st map. We knew better but decided to go in because we were set up for brawling and felt like we could take them down. We also thought they were set for a ranged fight. We knew better. We really did. We went in anyway. When the clock expired, they had killed 2 of our guys (not me, lol) and we had only killed 1 of theirs. I was working on the 2^nd CB and had him cored and blinking in every critical slot. I wasn’t in much better shape. The clock ran down and 1FSAC won the round, 2 to 1. It was brutal, fast and furious. The Cauldies they had played a big part in their win of that map. I should mention here that they also won the 3^rd map, Avalon Pro, giving them a match win at 2 maps to 1. 1FSAC played a good game and won the match.

I will say that if you are in a 55ton medium mech set to brawl without LAMs (what was I thinking?) that cresting a hill to see 2 Cauldron-Borns pointing their noses right at you is not a pleasant sight. Oh well. We gave them a hell of a fight and they knew they had been in a close one. I didn’t die, but 2 of my team mates went down to missile fire (and supporting fire) before we took out one of the CBs. Maybe if we had gone for the smaller mechs, who knows. Any way, the story is written. The CBs were king for the moment.

If you haven’t tried a Cauldron-Born there are only a few reasons why not. You don’t have the Microsoft Clan Expansion Pack, you don’t like the way a CB looks, you had rather drive assaults or you don’t have the Microsoft Clan Expansion Pack. Did I mention that you may not have the Microsoft Clan Expansion Pack? For those of you that don’t have the expansion pack, you are missing out on a real sweet ride in the Cauldy. It packs a lot of whoop ass and handles itself very well.

It is a shame that the CB (and some others) are only available in the Microsoft Expansion Pack. Actually, these mechs are included in your copy of Mercs, the pack merely unlocks some codes and allows you to use them. I cant tell you how to do this without them packs (even if I knew), but I would suggest running down a copy of the packs to get the extra mechs. I do not suggest paying 50$ or more (US Dollars), but the packs are fun to have. I just did a quick search and they are still available. The Clan seems to be more expensive than the Inner Sphere.

I cant believe the prices on EBAY for these things. I have 3 separate copies of these things. The most I paid was 14.99$ retail while vacationing in New Orleans some years back. As little as 2 years ago, I bought my 3^rd set (both discs) for a total of 15.98$ including shipping charges. Wow, who would have thought that they would be 50 to 80$ for only 1 of the 2 packs now? Used at that! Unbelievable. Maybe, if I decide to retire in the next year or so, I can just sell my copies and use that as my retirement fund, lol.

Sorry, I was distracted at the Microsoft Packs prices. Hopefully, XPlosive Brand or someone will pick up the rights to sell these things and get the prices back to where they need to be, 8 to 10$ each.

Back to the Cauldron-Born. If you can play with on, try it. The CB is a fun mech with lots of options. Protect yourself or die quick. The weak CT and Arms keep the rating down. Vettie’s View? A solid 3 ½ minutes. Very versatile mech and dangerous in the right hands.

The Ryoken

Before I get into the normal review of my choice for this week, I want to say a little about the pic I have chosen as a visual for this edition. My friend Mechnut, a mechwarrior from the great state of North Carolina 'makes' mechs, or I should say, he makes 'mech models' from game screen shots. I cant give you the details, but you can see the finished product here. I have my very own Victor! It st stands about 14 to 15 inches tall and looks like you reached inside your monitor and pulled it out. I keep my near my monitor at all times. Mechnut is very detailed right down to the exhaust for the jump jets!
IF you live in the U.S. and you are interested, make a post on here of what mech you want and I will pass it on to him, or you can send the details to him via email.
Mechnut@earthlink.net
They are very nice. His price is very reasonable considering each model is hand made and takes 2 to 3 weeks to complete.
Anyway, on with the review!


The StormCrow as it was known in MW2 days, is a 55 ton, medium class, Clan Tech, semi-omni mech. This piece of machinery is one of the Clan’s most potent weapons. It offers many pluses for the drop commander or star commander when choosing his load out for the impending battle. I want to take a close look at the Ryo as we know it today and maybe even give you a story or two about how these things became a feared weapon in league play.

Lets start by giving you the vitals and then move on to what the Stormcrow / Ryoken can do for you. From the Clan Laboratories, this mech comes loaded with BAP, 11 heat sinks and a pre-set speed rating to 84kph. Loaded with 8.5 tons of Ferro Armour, the Ryoken has a pretty nasty load for a medium mech. Each arm is loaded with an ERLarge Laser and an ERMedium Laser, while the torsos are each loaded with a CLRM15 missile pack.

Removing the heat sinks, weapons and all the armour yields some 37.6 tons of free weight to build your nasty config. Maxing out the armour (using Ferro) shows us that the Ryoken will hold 11.1 tons. I suggest that you go ahead and strip away .1 ton leaving you with 27.5 tons of free weight for speed and weapons.

The Ryoken offers Jump Jets and Enhanced Optics along with the BAP. I like the Jump Jets (for 3 tons) but the EO is a personal preference. I don’t use zoom very often so the extra ton for me is better spent on a heat sink or speed upgrade, but Enhanced Optics are great for you snipers or missile heads out there, allowing you to pin point a certain spot on your enemy and hit it over and over from a good distance.

The speed of the Ryoken varies from 64kph to 105kph. The speed increases are relatively cheap and this is due to the fact that the Ryo is built on an endo steel frame. This makes the body of the mech very tough and it seems to take a lot of damage before breaking, but once it breaks, the damage spreads internally very quickly like gas spilled and lit on hardwood floors.

During the NBT days, the Ryoken came to fame as a (jump or pop) sniper mech for the Clans. This little puppy could hold four ERLarge lasers with jump jets and enough heat sinks to keep it cool. At 800 meters, it was a tough bird to bring down and it was fast enough to stay at range and never let an IS unit close enough to fire at it. You never saw just one. There were always 2 or more. One would jump and fire and as it started coming down another would jump up and fire at the same target. This would go on and on until the target was dead.

I stole my favourite Ryo config from a team known as Red Legion. Some of you may remember those guys. They were good, damn good. The config I used from their armoury was pretty basic and simple. Four ERLarge lasers with jumpies and BAP, 7 heat sinks, all set to a 91kph speed. This config works and it works well. Keep yourself hidden using favourable terrain and jump snipe the crap out of anyone that you pick up on radar using your BAP. The speed is fast enough that if an ECM equipped enemy closes, the BAP will pick them up around 600 meters (I think) and you can quickly move away while still hitting them with a full alpha.

The Ryo climbs very well and moves very well. The torso twist is great for jump sniping back away from you while you continue to put range between yourself and the target. But, jump sniping is not all this mech can do. If we look at the slots, we see that each arm holds a 2-slot energy rack and a 2-slot omni rack. The right and left torsos each hold a 2-slot missile rack. This mech, loaded with BAP makes a great medium missile platform capable of carrying four of the Clans most deadly missile system, the ATM12Es. Im not going to give you the specifics for this load out because we all ‘shave’ our armour a little differently depending on our own style of play, but, this mech will hold 4 ATM12Es with decent speed and BAP. If you don’t like the ATMs, but you still want range, The Ryo can hold four CLRM15s and two ERLarge Lasers while maintaining (almost) full armour, jumpies and BAP all at a good speed.

The missile abilities for the Ryo is outstanding for a medium class mech. The Ryo can be used in a support role as a jump sniper as we touched on or as a jumping missile mech. This mech can also do other things. Load in a couple of CLBX10s, two Heavy Medium Lasers and a pair of CStreak 4’s and you having a jump capable brawler that can knock you around pretty good.

I am sure many of you (if not all of you) have played the single player campaign a time or two. Solaris is where the Ryoken meets you (if I recall correctly). Some name player has a Ryo loaded with CStreaks and so much ammo he never seems to run out. I also believe he has reactive armour, but I could be wrong. All I know is, he does die, but he is tough to kill. Again, I haven’t played the single player in sometime, but it seems like if you continue to play the Solaris medium matches, you run into a few more Ryos and one of them is a brawler loaded with CUAC10s as well as a couple of ERMedium lasers. Again, another nasty that does die but is hard to bring down.

During our (The Blood Pearls) time on NBT, we faced many teams using Ryos. Red Legion was probably the best (not to knock any one, but to give credit where credit is due). The Clans seemed to know how to use the Ryos probably better than anyone. That four ERLarge version is simply a great config. I know that on some of the colder maps, the Clans would switch their armour from Ferro to Reflective making the Ryo even tougher to returning fire from our lasers and PPCs. Being pirates, we did manage to steal a few of these and even salvage some. One of our own pilots, AC, became very adept at using the Ryo as a jump sniper and I would have to say that he was just about as good as any of the Clansmen we faced.

I personally was never as that good with a Ryo, but I have always like the mech for the way it handles and the performance. When the Lt.PPC came out, it actually gave some new life to the mech allowing the pilot the splooge effect as well as an extra 75 meters of range. I can pilot one and I can do alright with one but there are many who can do better.

Back in the MW2 days, it took me awhile to take to the Stormcrow. I simply didn’t like the way it looked. The load out ability was great and I could pack a lot of weapons on it with really good speed. It seemed to handle well enough, but it just looked funny to me. OF course, I was a Nova fan in those days. The Nova, the Summoner and the Timberwolf were my favourites. After I played a few mission using the Stormcrow, I began to really like it. I think the MW4 version looks a lot better but I don’t think I can pack as much on one as I could in MW2.

The weaknesses of the Ryoken are obvious. The Arms hold the majority of the weapons for this mech and if you don’t protect them, they get blown off right away. People know that’s where the power is and they target those arms. The secondary weakness is the legs. The Ryo has long legs and they are very easy to hit. Even when fully armoured, the legs will come off easy enough slowing the Ryo down to where it can be killed much more easily.

I like to see battles with weight restrictions for the team. Not per pilot, but for the entire team. What I mean is, to see a map come up with a 400 ton limit for the team. This forces the use of smaller mechs and if done correctly, most will be in mediums or heavies. Yes, you will see some lights and even some assaults, but they wont dominate the drop dec. This does a couple of things. It makes assaults more like assaults, something big and powerful and hard to bring down. It also makes the regular fighting last a bit longer because you don’t have 200pt alphas blazing across the battlefield. You take damage and you maneuver to inflict damage, it takes more than 3 shots to kill something. IT brings out the strategy in the game. To me, that is fun. You don’t see that on Sunder because everyone likes to take the biggies, and those that don’t, end up taking bigger mechs more so to stay alive than because they want to. Don’t get me wrong, Sunder is a blast and mission play is its own style of play that I certainly enjoy as much as anyone, but I do miss the weight leveled battles of league play.

Back to the Ryoken. This Clan beast is a very good mech. IT has weaknesses and it has it strengths. It doesn’t take very long to learn to use a Ryo, but it does take a bit to learn to be effective. I suggest you try one out, maybe ol’ Prawnie it make it mech of the month soon. They are a hoot to use and they can be deadly. I give the Ryoken a 3 to 3 ½ minutes rating. Very good for a medium mech. This thing is powerful and deadly when used correctly. Try one today.