Even if you do manage to kill the rest of the vehicles, that lead vehicle extracts and you only get the good faith payment.TIL that there are 2 different versions of the Bullshark. I didn't have any LRM's and the lead hovercraft outran my Spider - it went from start to 'I'm in the extraction zone' in about 4 turns. Unless you have a Spider and 2+ LRM mechs who can rain indirect missiles, a hovertank in the lead position will rocket around that curve, be protected from most direct fire, and then sprint right to the extraction point. The road after the turn is protected by a ridge from your initial position. Particularly memorable was that lunar map where the Convoy starts near you, but only has to make one turn on the road and then straight shot through a narrow gulch to the extraction. They're so much faster than the stock MHQ's and tanks that some maps are just blatantly unfair and unwinnable. The biggest thing I've noticed thus far with BEX (aside from the expanded map and mech selection) is that the addition of hovercraft make the Intercept Convoy missions WAY harder. The rest were pretty garbage, but I lucked into an Assassin as my first Medium which has been pretty useful in swatting those pesky bugmechs. Got a lucky pull on the Heavy Metal box and got an LB-X 10 with a ton of ammo, which made a straight swap for the basic model on the Urbie. Still don't have enough small lasers for my favorite loadout, but running 6MG's off of one ton of ammo has been working fine. Firestarter is a great punchbot, but it took a bit to get it outfitted with 6MG's.

Probably my fault, since I gave myself a Periphery origin, and BEX rolls your starting lance based on origin faction RAT's. That's not the worst pull I've ever made on Career mode, but it's not great. Firestarter, Spider, Urbanmech, Wasp, Locust. (as an aside, it was an interesting puzzle to get the Community Asset Bundle installed properly - BEX's instructions are outdated.) So I installed BEX and fired up Career Mode. I still have to pick up fresh paint, as most of my old stuff has solidified with disuse. On a bit of a BT kick, but haven't been able to get my Kickstarter minis painted. if you can, in fact, deal with the fact that Sharks are really really deadly opponents. This makes it a convenient way to earn the achievements for defeating lances that significantly out-value your own. It, single-handedly, puts a lance into the no-limits weight class (25m+ C-Bills, and a Shark is worth 30m+ to an Atlas's 12m or so). However, there is one really dramatic exception to the 'mechs being 3025 ones: The Bull Shark is available for play. An equal-value force-on-force fight is noticeably more challenging than even the aggressively reinforced fights in the rest of the game. So you get perhaps one activation per battle tops.ДЄll of that dramatically impacts gameplay and can make for a humbling experience. And you only get 10 morale a round, you only have access to precision shot as a morale ability, and it costs all 100 of the bar to do it. The pilots are all mediocre at best - they all have two abilities, but only about 20 skill points, so if one's got the specialist ability in something they suck in all the others.

Basic 3025 guns only, and mostly 3025 'mechs. It's a fair bit closer to actual 3025 tabletop, since you don't have access to all of the toys the campaign or career throws at you. I've been poking around a bit with Skirmish.

Battletech heavy metal bull shark