While our Mech Overviews default to looking at a game played with floating through-armor criticals, not everyone plays this way. Last week Valk looked at reasons to play with the standard rule – a through-armor crit hits the center torso, right torso, or left torso purely depending on the arc it’s being shot from. This week Perigrin is taking a look at why you might want to play with floating TACs.

Howdy everyone and welcome back to BattleTech! This week we are going to be talking about the other side of an argument started in our recent article about the core, non-floating through armor critical rule! You should read that one first, Valk goes into the history of the two rules a bit and makes a good argument for the standard Tac rule… during the Clan Invasion, which was 35 years ago.

Clan Smoke Jaguar Mad Cat. Credit: Jack Hunter

Most of Goonhammer plays using the floating TAC rule, though judging by tournament packets and local groups we hear about it is a roughly even split between using the rule and not. That is about as close as a rule gets to standard without actually being standard. For what it is worth, in my and Liberty’s local meta, Floating TAC and one-armed prop are the only optional rules in common use. In fact, I was the primary figure pushing for floating TAC due to my dislike of the standard TAC rule. So, why have we (mostly) and a lot of other groups, formats, and events chosen to use this optional rule?

Gameplay

Let’s start out the analysis here with how Floating TAC actually works. Put simply, after rolling the critical hit location on the to-hit chart, you roll a second time to see where the crit lands rather than just applying it to the side appropriate torso location. This means that criticals become very random, and can cause wildly unpredictable consequences. You still have to roll to confirm the critical, so it isn’t a sure thing that it will break something.

This means that no location is safe from being critted, and you can’t try to deliberately crit a specific location by moving into a specific side arc. This is a noticeable downgrade to mechs with leg/arm explosives, as that would normally be completely safe until the armor broke. In my experience with both crit rules, it ends up being net neutral for mechs with explosives in side torsos, as you lose the ability to force the opponent to not be in that arc to crit you if you win initiative, but your opponent also loses the ability to get into that arc to specifically crit you if they win initiative.

Dawn Guards Argus. Credit: Jack Hunter

The common complaints with Floating TAC is that you can get your cockpit critted out from a random crit getting lucky, or that mechs with gauss rifles become unusable due to the sheer amount of explosive crits they jam in your mech. In addition, there is the possibility of losing a leg or arm to a Limb Blown Off crit result.

Let’s break these down in order.

Cockpit Crits/Heads being severed is vanishingly rare. You need to roll a double 1 to get a crit, a double 6 to hit the head, an 8+ to get a crit (or another double 6), and then hit the specific cockpit location. That is a fraction of a fraction of a percent chance. In all of my time playing with the Floating TAC rule (about 2 years of 1-3 games a week) I have seen that specific interaction happen 3 times from anyone at our game days, events, weekly open tables, anything. If it happens, that is an absolutely legendary story to tell, not a problem with the rule, as far as my mindset goes.
Gauss Rifles already have being made of C4 as a significant downside, and Floating TAC doesn’t make that much worse. For mechs with Gauss Arms it is a fair bit worse, but not in a way that particularly bothers me, most mechs that carry Gauss can survive one blowing up in the arm. For mechs with torso Gauss, floating TAC makes them possible to hit from the front with a TAC, but conversely it also makes it possible to not crit them from the side with a TAC. Having played with both rules, skating around the side of a Thunder Hawk with some crit-seeking nightmare mech when you win initiative is a very strong strategy and will lead to a significant mortality rate on those sorts of mechs.
My counterpoint to the possibility of a leg/arm blown off result is simply that while that does cripple you, getting triple critted in the CT with the same result will typically either kill or cripple a mech anyway. Getting 2 to the engine and 1 to the gyro (assuming nothing is padding the CT/there is no CT ammo) is just about the only result that doesn’t kill you or put you on the ground forever, because triple engine is instant death and 2 or more to the gyro is instantly being condemned to the ground the same way that a severed leg is. A severed arm is straight up something you can walk off and still be a real mech, it might sting to lose that firepower but it is better than being dead or on the floor forever.

Liberty: Regarding the second point, the amount of ‘Mechs I like that can have the issue of Gauss rifles in their arms going off is a long and extensive list but most notably we can look at the Jagermech DG, or as Peri and I refer to it ‘Minimum Viable Gauss’ for example: The DG is a hilarious machine that operates at the razor margins of what can be considered a ‘Mech while still carrying a pair of Gauss rifles in the arms. There are only 5 structure pips of tolerance between this machine and death from Gauss explosion, I would still rather have the chance of one of the guns popping for free than having the gyro clipped early. The same goes for the Nightstar, Thunderbolt 7SE, or Highlander 732.

For complaints with the standard TAC, I kind of made my point in that last point. It is godawful to take crits to the CT, the second worst place after the head. The best you can hope for is hitting a random CT gun/heat sink, or a single engine hit fucking up your heat math. Anything more than that has an extreme chance to completely ruin a mech’s ability to function in a game, either through a Gyro hit instantly putting most mechs on the ground or a pair of engine hits seriously ruining the heat math on 90% of mechs. These results can still happen with the Floating TAC rule, but not making them the only practical option has positive effects on the game. More things stay on their feet for more time, and while the occasional 3050s GOOD IDEA variant with boom next to an XL engine gets worse, those mechs are already either completely terrible, have better variants that swap for light/standard/clan engines, or they are still worth taking due to their low cost.

For example, the Thunder Hawk Valk uses as an example in her article has a variant you can swap to that swaps to a light engine over an XL at a minimal cost (a few backup guns), and it is actually cheaper than the shitty 3050s one.

Thunder Hawk. Credit: Valk

Refutation

To elaborate a bit further on that last point, I think that the principle argument for standard TACs is rooted in a world that no longer exists. As the intro implied, during the Invasion when there was a meaningful difference between the mechs on the Clan and IS sides, Valk is more or less right, standard TAC is worse for Clans and floating is worse for IS. However, that was 35 years ago. Even 1 Era after the invasion the Kingfisher is on IS General along with a huge list of other full fat Clan Omni-Mechs, and the Clans tend to have the good Royal/Star League variants of a lot of the cheaper IS mechs. There is no functional difference between a Kingfisher painted up as a Jade Falcon or one painted up as Sword of Light. As an addition to this, bluntly, most of the mechs that exist during the Invasion are terrible. They are either first model Omni-Mechs with glaring flaws, Intro-Tech shit boxes, or 3050s Helm Core “upgrades” that actively make the mech worse than the older version was. The handful of great mechs seem to be assigned at random and by accident.

I am generally not a fan of Era restrictions. An AC/20 fired in 3151 is just as scary as one fired in 3025, it is still a huge chunk of damage, and as we have stated repeatedly and often in our overviews, what makes a mech bad or good is era-agnostic. 3H Stalkers and 3S Banshees are still great in 3151, the Iron Cheetah is one of the most horrifying record sheets ever printed and is around in the 3050s. Bad mechs are bad, good mechs are good.

The world of the invasion doesn’t exist anymore, and with the proliferation of CASE, CASE II, and the total collapse of the tech base as of IlClan where everyone has whatever Clan stuff they want, Floating TAC doesn’t punish anyone more than anyone else. Floating TAC instead keeps you from taking scads of early gyro hits, and makes the crit result an exciting bit of anarchy, chaos, and pandemonium that will usually tag some heat sink or hand actuator but it has the slim chance of fucking up your mech, instead of the pretty high chance of fucking up your mech that a CT crit generates.

The argument that ballistics and missiles become unviable in a world of floating crits is also not true. As long-time readers would know, we have a huge soft spot here for mechs with the various flavours of AC/10 (particularly the Clan UAC/10) and with ATMs/MMLs/LRMs. Ammo explosions are a real downside, but the BV system accounts for this, you get a rebate for each explosive crit on top of the huge weight of these weapons typically meaning that you carry less weapons to begin with, meaning less BV spent. A mech with paired UAC/10s is going to be hundreds of BV cheaper than a mech with paired Clan ERPPCs, and that chance of getting a bad floating TAC to an ammo bin is more than made up for by the price difference.

Blood Asp, Wolf's Dragoons, Alpha Regiment

You will note that Liberty has won a few tournaments now in articles he has written with mechs that are absolutely packed with ammo, the GMGM having gauss rifles, RACs, and lots of ammo on mechs with IS XL engines that still won him an event with floating TAC, and his Fronc Reaches list being absolutely full to the gills with AC/20 ammo. Ballistics are perfectly viable in a world of BV even with the chance of instant floating TAC death, because it just doesn’t happen as often as taking a gyro crit from a non-floating TAC.

In conclusion, the Floating TAC rule exists to fix a problem of constant gyro hits and mitigate the power of a TAC result by making it (often) float to a part of the mech that isn’t the second worst place to take a crit. While this makes some mechs, particularly bad/old ones, more vulnerable to death by ammo bin explosion, this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce the amount of mechs that randomly get taken out of the game by engine/gyro crits. Not every mech has ammo that will kill it, but (nearly (Ryoken III)) every mech has a gyro that will punk it out of a game on a crit. Make some mechs worse to make all mechs better, that is a good trade in my book.

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Tags: Battletech | opinion | Through Armor Critical | Floating