Combat Manual:Kurita and CM:Mercenaries are sourcebooks geared towards AS play though the production line for it appears to be in limbo. Strat Ops might be the next step up though not necessary at all. None of this is scary or out of the norm for the game, where players routinely experiment with what rulesets and play flow works best for them.Īlpha Strike: Commander's Edition (complete/comprehensive on its own) and Campaign Operations will go well together in my opinion.
Smashing them together is certainly possible and it would be a bit of a Frankenstein's monster depending on what systems you chose to implement and which to adapt into what you already like in Alpha Strike. TactOps is my favorite supplemental book but it augments specifically the Classic Battletech ruleset, whereas the others could conceivably augment or add to the Alpha Strike experience since they're at different scopes of play. The Salvage rules originally in Strat Ops and being moved to the Campaign Ops reprint are probably the only major part of Campaign Ops that wouldn't totally gel with Alpha Strike at the nittiest and grittiest level of detail, but I think you could adapt them to fit as needed.īacchic is right: "Adaptation" is the key word here. A lot of the advanced rules in Tac and Strat Ops, by comparison, are specifically designed to be the kind of hyper-in-depth edge case rules that Alpha Strike is kind of pulling back from. Since Interstellar and Campaign Ops are both about pulled out strategic level play, it's less of an issue to integrate Alpha Strike.
BATTLETECH INTERSTELLAR OPERATIONS ONLINE HOW TO
Campaign Operations even has a section on Alpha Strike Formation types and how to convert forces from the various rules systems (including the now mostly obsolete Battleforce rule set). Interstellar Ops and Campaign Ops are both written in such a way that they can be used with either CBT or AS, whichever the player prefers. Tac Ops and Strat Ops both predate Alpha Strike, so they won't directly mention it or interact with its rules. You decide which of them you want to play with and which of them seem like more hassle than fun." Overall though, the general approach to advanced rules in Battletech is "We'll provide you in depth rules for everything we can possibly think of. The biggest overlap that I recall is that the advanced rules for Salvaging and Maintenance are in Strategic Operations, so if you want to play the campaign variant where you carefully manage the TO&E of a unit, you might want Strat Ops as well.
BATTLETECH INTERSTELLAR OPERATIONS ONLINE SERIES
Campaign Ops consists mostly of a series of possible frameworks you could use as the structure of a campaign, and they are generally self sufficient enough frameworks. So to answer your specific question, no, you do not need anything besides Total Warfare to make most of Campaign Ops work.
Usually in those cases The book in your hands will provide a fairly abstract set of rules for a situation that is covered in one of the other rulebooks, then say "If you want to play with more detail in this regard, see _ Ops pg. You don't strictly NEED the whole set to have each individual book to operate, though sometimes they will refer to each other for some specific concepts. Basically the entire "_ Operations" series of books are a collection of interlocking advanced or special rules that supplement the base gameplay rules in Total Warfare and/or the Battlemech Manual. The Battletech "Core Rule Books" are kinda weird.