Catalyst just announced the three newest BattleTech products – a new Core Rulebook, Starter Box, and Core Box. All three are supposed to launch at GenCon later this summer. These are the results of several months of playtesting done from late 2025 to early 2026, and you can read some of our thoughts on the playtest in these two articles: Playtest Packet 1 Final Thoughts and Playtest Final Thoughts. In short, we’re big fans of almost all the changes that were tested. From what I can see with these new products Catalyst is walking a bit of a tightrope – keeping BattleTech fundamentally the same (all the record sheets, maps, and so on from the last 4 decades are still completely compatible) while at the same time trying to move BattleTech forward in a way that hasn’t really happened before.

Battletech Starter Box, courtesy of Catalyst Game Labs

The Starter Box

The smallest of the new releases is the Starter Box, replacing the older Beginner Box. Gone are the Griffin and Vindicator, we’re firmly in the ilClan era with the Hammerhead and Kontio. This clearly reads to me as CGL deciding (correctly) that players don’t need introtech to learn – it can be helpful for a game or two to get the absolute basic mechanics down, but players are smart and can handle more complexity quickly. In my teaching games I see a lot of players coming in from other game systems, whether Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer 40k, and they’re all prepared for more straightforward complexity – learning about pulse lasers and double heat sinks isn’t hard.

Kontio, painted by Porble, image provided by Catalyst Game Labs

While I can’t fully see the half sheet record sheets included from the provided image, it doesn’t look like they’ll show the advanced armor, TSM, or AES that these mechs have. There’s a new Uziel 9S half record sheet shown here and building it in out in megamek leaves several tons free, which I’m guessing is advanced equipment. If that’s the case, I’m assuming the pilots of the Hammerhead and Kontio get adjusted to balance them out without counting on those features. One side of each record sheet should be a relatively basic version with the other being more advanced, which should mean we finally get a new Hammerhead and Kontio.

Battletech Core Box, courtesy of Catalyst Game Labs

The Core Box

Next up is the core box, which is replacing both A Game of Armored Combat and Clan Invasion. This, even more so than the starter box, cements that the introduction to BattleTech is firmly in the ilClan era, with a mixture of Inner Sphere and Clan tech, and various components that would formerly have been considered more advanced. In this box we’ve got eight mechs, two from each weight class – a Solitaire and Hollander for the lights, an Eris and Uziel for mediums, a Rakshasa and Vulture Mk IV for heavies, and a Regent and Mad Cat Mk II for assaults. Rather than being all classic 3025 mechs like previous starters, these have been pulled from a variety of sources that previously made Battletech popular – MechWarrior 4, MechWarrior: Dark Age, and the Recognition Guides from the last few years.

Especially when we look at the starter box as well we’ve got a pretty wide variety of advanced tech. Assuming all standard variants (except the regent, where the mini pictured is clearly the A), these mechs have ferro-lamellor armor, PPC capacitors, partial wings, hardened armor, actuator enhancement systems, stealth armor, triple-strength myomer, and physical weapons. This, I think, shows a new level of respect for players and how they’re able to learn the game. I’m sure there will be some progression through what tech gets introduced in some introductory missions in the core rulebook, but you’re not going to be expected to play multiple games before seeing a pulse laser or clan tech, and I think that’s a very good thing.

Rakshasa painted by Raymond Cracker, image provided by Catalyst Game Labs

One thing I’ve clearly seen when teaching people is that having things happen is important to keeping them interested and invested. Succession wars and introtech era games were not where that happened – armor vastly outstrips damage at that point, and mechs are slow, so you’d spend many turns missing or doing minimal damage, and a lot of what happens would be based on getting lucky with through-armor crits or head shots. Not a quick game, and while that moment was good it wasn’t always enough to hold interest. Using more advanced units meant units are taking damage, getting crit, and getting killed at much higher rates, which tends to keep people invested in the game if they’re new to it.

I think (hope) that this is going to force a few notable changes for both pickup games and events. First, I anticipate fewer pickup games and events to be set in earlier eras. The mechs in this box (and the starter) spread from Clan Invasion to ilClan, and new players are going to want to use the mechs they have. If I try to run an event or play a pickup game set in an earlier era I’m locking these new players out of my event/game, and that’s not a good path for growth (yes, proxies, blah blah – in my experience most newer gamers prefer to use their minis as what they actually are rather than as proxies, it’s a big chunk of the reason why they’re playing a tabletop game rather than on the computer). Second, I think that these mechs are going to cause an increase in both list construction and player skill. Many of these mechs are very good – the Eris 2N, the Kontio, the Hammerhead (a mech we generally consider the best medium mech and one of the best overall in the game), the Uziel 8S, the Vulture Mk IV D, the Rakshasa 1Ar, and the Regent prime/B. These are mechs that new players will be fielding, because those are the mechs they have – so people are going to need to get better at the game rather than falling back on avoiding mechs that are too good.

Mad Cat Mk II painted by Erik Berg, image provided by Catalyst Game Labs

One last thing in this box that I’m very interested in seeing is the Sagas lore booklet. It looks to be similar to the primer included in A Game of Armored Combat, but potentially in more depth. It’s supposed to include a guide to choosing a faction and a style of play, an interesting choice when factions haven’t been a part of any core rules, and the box is an eclectic mix of mechs that don’t all overlap in faction availability. Advice about styles of play I do think will be interesting, especially if along with these mechs being good leads to players learning to construct forces with a plan.

The Core Rulebook

This third announcement, the core rulebook, is the one we all expected to see. It’s built off Battlemech Manual, not Total Warfare, so it will only have rules for using Battlefield Support Assets for vehicles, infantry, and aerospace, not the full record sheets. Personally, I’m a fan of vehicles as a supporting asset to my mechs, rather than as full units (at least most of the time), so this doesn’t bother me, though it may leave some people using Total Warfare for those rules for a while. CGL have said that full rules for those units aren’t going away and will be in an upcoming sourcebook. I’m less of a fan of using BSP battle armor, but fortunately those rules are most coherently available in the Clan Invasion rulebook, available for download here.

All the playtesting that was done between late 2025 and early 2026 fed into this book. There’s a new Core Rules Changes document that can be found on Catalyst’s website here that provides a history of the process of playtesting and an overview of all the changes being made. As we’ve already reviewed the playtest packets I’m not going to go back through those changes, but there are quite a few changes being made that were never playtested. Here are a few of my favorites:

Unequal initiative is switched to being front loaded. This was a pretty common house rule, and while I don’t think it changes anything for balance, it’s more comfortable for a lot of people to fight against a larger force when using this. If nothing else, it should cut down some worries about force size parity.
Roads reduce level change costs by 1MP. Another pretty common house rule, especially when playing on the Tukayyid Pozoristu Mountains, Grasslands E and B, and the city Plaza, Business District, and Shopping District neoprene maps.
Partial cover is no longer negated by elevation. This makes some maps, like Sinkholes, actually usable and generally opens a little more tactical flexibility in positioning. Getting up on a hill still has advantages in line of sight, but now there’s reason to stay on the ground.
Charge damage is now based on TMM rather than hexes moved. This might be the biggest of these non-tested changes and is huge for fixing charges. Charges have rarely been problematic for units moving up to 15ish hexes but rapidly become a problem after that, and by basing charge damage on TMM that’s drastically cut down. After 10 hexes the next TMM increases are at 18 and then 25, so mechs are needing to move a lot further to increase their damage and aren’t getting as big an increase. The super-fast units are still potentially charging from outside visibility, but probably won’t be doing anywhere near as much damage.
Ammo explosions now only do one pilot hit. Along with the explosion damage change (which is going to work a little differently than in playtest, but in an unclear fashion as of yet) this seems like it’ll make ammo explosions still a big deal, but something you can fight through and continue playing with a heavily damaged mech. I’m a big fan of gradual degradation rather than a single roll immediately deleting a mech, so I’m happy here.
Consciousness checks only happen once per phase, rather than multiple times if multiple pilot hits are taken. Along with the ammo explosion changes I think this is great for making sure there’s still meaningful risk, but it doesn’t escalate quite as exponentially.
Skidding is removed. This rule sucked, almost nobody I know played with it, and I’m glad it’s gone.
There are new Light and Heavy plasma rifles.
Escalating failure (MASC, Supercharger, Radical Heat Sinks) is now one standard set of numbers that matches consciousness checks. So much simpler than remembering that for some reason radical heat sinks are different, and now you can reference the target numbers against a record sheet.
Semi-guided missiles don’t ignore as many modifiers but also don’t cost BV anymore. I think this is probably a good change – I played into a list using them this weekend and it was very boring and easy to counter, so making them a little less effective and free means they can get used, but as an option rather than something you build an entire list around.
MASC is no longer an automatic crit in each leg and is instead a critical check in a random leg. This pulls it back to rough risk parity with the supercharger and goes a long way to fixing a ton of mechs with MASC where the risk of blowing out both hips and never functioning again was too high.

Based on these changes it seems like a lot of little friction points beyond just what was playtested have been worked on, and it leaves me feeling extremely excited. This isn’t a whole new game, but it is going to change up how the game is played in a way that I think will be extremely beneficial.

Uziel and Vulture Mk IV painted by Oliver Schlich, image provided by Catalyst Game Labs

The Future

These three launches leave me incredibly excited for the future of BT. Moving the entry point away from the Succession Wars I think gives new players a much more interesting place to start. They’re immediately engaging with the new content being released without feeling a need to slog through older eras playing catch-up, and I think ilClan has the best gameplay. It’s a little more complicated than earlier eras with special armor and more advanced weapons being common, but there’s more meaningful counterplay. It’s much harder to find something that you can just say is the unambiguous best, and there’s much more ability to play multiple different styles of list effectively.

I hope that we do relatively quickly see a replacement for some of the old Beginner Box and A Game of Armored Combat mechs, as there’s currently no other way to get a plastic Commando, Vindicator, Wolverine, or Battlemaster, and the variant available for the Catapult is very visually distinct. Even playing in ilClan those are mechs people will want in their forces, so hopefully we get them back soon.

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Tags: Adepticon | Battletech | mechwarrior | New Release