borderline Utopian society. Seriously? Yea, you need to read about the War of Star League aggression, er I mean "Reunification Wars" where billions of people died on the periphery trying to stop the Star League from annexing them unwillingly. It sets up the whole Amaris thing.
also setting up what is in every practical way a feudal empire, a system that inevitably leads to civil war. imagine if amaris killed the executive of a different kind of star league and the whole inner sphere just fucking ignored him and chucked him in jail. no lightning strike with his own forces because any he could potentially manipulate would still be tied into the rest of the star league logistically and politically so his war would be tiny pathetic and incredibly short lived (think the wagner group in russia). no taking over the reigns of government, no one would follow his orders and the actual next in line for executive would just step up immediately. basically the formation of star league itself caused the fall of humanity in the setting.
Go tell a Taurian or anyone from the Periphery the Star League was a Utopian & you'll give them a good chuckle or they'll punch you in the face (at best).
Since you didn't bother with anything before the Coup, you didn't read on the Age of War, which introduced the Ares Convention, Battletech's version of the Geneva Convention. While it fell out of favor during the Reunification War and the Amaris Coup, the ferocity of the 1st Succession War was so bad it was unofficially brought back. This reduced the use of nukes and orbital bombardments, but the Inner Sphere still did plenty of conventional fighting. While the size of deployed forces shrinked over the the centuries often seeing planets garrisoned by only a battalion of mechs, there were still limited cases of large scale troop formations like Operation Freedom, the Battle of New Aragon and the Galtor Campaign. By the 4thh Succession War and on, the InnerSphere was regularly engaging in multi-regimental invasions. The Battle of Tikonov had Davion dropping all 8 Regimental Combat Teams of the Crucis Lancers (almost 90 regiments plus independent battalions) to engage the defending 80 regiments. The SLDF in exile meanwhile traveled far beyond the periphery and then almost immediately consumed themselves in 20 sided civil war. Kerensky went through a second exile, where he converted his loyalists into the clans before returning and recapturing the SLDF remnants. This wasn't that hard because the warring factions had nearly fought their way too the stone age. The Clan traditions are born out of those dark days. The purpose of the Batchall isn't really about bragging rights an honor, The Batchall is all about conserving forces. Making sure that you don't commit forces you can't afford to lose. Inter Clan fighting was largely done by Trials which made sure losses were kept relatively low. Besides the occasional Trial of Annihilations (Sorry Wolverines) large scale losses were practically unheard of for more than a hundred years. The whole Clan way of War was lightning fast Even in the first three waves of the Clan Invasion, they had such an advantage that they were able to overrun Inner Sphere defenders before prolonged supply was an issue. Most invasions were effectively completed in days (for major combat). But in the 4th Wave you did see the Clans forced into prolonged combat (and losing) on Twycross (FC vs Jade Falcon) and Wolcott (Draconis vs Smoke Jaguars). Finally, it's important to remember the Clans at Tukayid were not just fighting against Comstar, but they were also competing with each other. The victorious clan would be the Il-Clan and the leaders of the reborn Star League. So most of the Clans bid away forces and supplies to get an early landing and were counting on shock and awe to destroy their forces. When they were instead drawn into relatively prolonged fights, any advantage they had was gone. Diamond Shark only bid 5 clusters, the rough equivalent of a Galaxy. Wolf by Comparison landed more than a week later with 5 full galaxies and all the ammo they could carry. The Ghost Bears and the Jade Falcons each had experienced massive fights with large scale Great House deployments and thus sent 3 elite Galaxies each. All of them realized that being first on the ground was useless if you didn't win. Coincidentally all three either won or tied. The fatal flaw for the defeated clans was they underestimated the ComGuards & Focht and they were blinded by the prize.
Tks for your Excellent elaboration on the Clans mode of conflict. That's why Victor Davion wanted to show the Clans what the true horror of war was when he led the new SLDF to annihilate Clan Smoke Jaguar (bloody assholes).
@@eseetoh technically jaguars (and Khan of Goliath Scorpion and his honour guard) were smoked by Focht (who showed them true war), second SLDF just came to cook them a bit more.
@@eseetoh and after operations Birddog, Bulldog, Serpent and Damocles jaguars managed to survive until Dark Ages. And all clans mistook them for Clan Wolverine. Talking about embarrassment.
For an imaginary history created to explain why an interstellar civilization fights unending wars with large, trippable tanks on the surface of planets instead of with spacecraft, it's a surprisingly well developed, believable, and deep chunk of "lore".
The thing about the Clans losing because they didn't know how to fight a war is NOT actually unbelievable. You have to remember that Clan society was highly engineered and they were VERY idealistic and not REMOTELY pragmatic in the way they approached things. In their society, when one side of a conflict demonstrated clear superiority by defeating their opponent on the battlefield, the losing side would concede defeat and basically accept that they had lost and were subject to the demands of the victor. When they came to the inner sphere they absolutely wrecked house initially. But then the inner sphere did the unexpected and didn't surrender... Their heavily ideology driven culture wasn't prepared for that. They literally didn't know how to engage in "total war". Even when they were fighting ComStar on Tukayyid, they technically "won" many of the engagements, but ComStar would fall back and draw them into an ambush, or simply refuse to concede. It's ironic because the Clans were definitely "crazy" in some ways, and had a very dysfunctional society, but it was their incredibly idealistic view of war that was their undoing.
The thing you have to understand about the clans is that at their core, they have an obsession with efficient warfare; this is why they have bachalls, bidding and trials as well as their entire goal of seeking as much honor as possible on an individual basis. As such Conflict within the pentagon worlds rapidly became about smaller engagements that were resolved more quickly. As a result, when the clans went a full year being undefeated and just eating everything the inner sphere put in front of them because in a stand up fight the IS rarely had a chance unless they vastly outnumbered the clans (Clan strategists put an even fight at 2:1). Comstar had the time to observe this and the way their mechs fought and were able to deduce that they couldn't handle a long fight as well due to their focus on high intensity conflict. It's also important to note that despite how a lot of players envision it, Tukayid wasn't a victory lap; while some of the clans did indeed get slapped others were either able to earn partial victories (like clan ghostbear) or Full victories (Clan wolf) and it did indeed cost comstar severely. Also worth noting: this would be pretty much the one and only time that comstar would take a stand and fight and win a battle as part of their own initiative; over the next 80 years they'd expierience a schism, be made to kiss the ring of Devlin Stone and finally be annihilated during the dark age for dipping back into the crazy juice.
Their obsession with efficient warfare - fighting with the minimum possible force, on agreed terms - looks to me like a way to minimize collateral damage. But, if Big Daddy Kerensky wanted to teach a deep-seated concern for efficiency, he probably saw that teaching them to think in practical terms wouldn't get the same result as having efficiency tied to a deeply-ingrained sense of honor and prestige.
@@danielcamacho1913 The issue is that this wasn't really a concern during Nicholas' time; after they subjugated the pentagon worlds (and vindicated clan doctrine) there wasn't any real major threats that would force them to think about larger scale engagements or the idea that they would have to fight an opponent that vastly outstripped their logistical abilities to the point where they could afford to fight *inefficiently*. Maybe if Kerensky hadn't died solidifying control over this nascent society they could have laid the groundwork for a larger scale invasion. Maybe if things had gone another way the clans would have made better use of their Capital ships (which would have neutered the IS since they didn't have anything that could credibly fight them in 3050). But it is what it is.
The clans make a bit more sense when you take into considering it's roughly 300 years later and they don't have the resources to fight wars the way the inner sphere does.
And that they're a cult of personality founded by someone who was more than a little on the bonkers side before he suffered brain damage as a result of a severe fever.
yes and no. the clans actually had massive amounts of resources to conduct the Innersphere invasion. however, only Clan Wolf brought stockpiles and set up hubs for resupply and repairs. the other invading clans didn't.
@@bruced648 Th e Clans never had "massive" amount of resources. The Wolves handled logistics better than the other Invading Clans, but none of the Clans ever put much emphasis on manufacturing capability and the Homeworlds had significantly less population and infrastructure than the Inner Sphere.
@Macrochenia from the information presented in the clan sourcebooks, I'll agree to disagree. while clan space was less developed than the innersphere, they had 225 years (2825-3049) of establishing society and installing infrastructure. according to the published material, they were ready to invade at the year 3000, but due to political differences, they sent in spies (Wolf's Dragoons) instead.
@@bruced648 The problem was, as detailed in the Wars of Reaving sourcebook, that the Clans had NOT spent 225 years installing infrastructure or growing their economies. The Clan way of fighting Trials for everything meant that none of them felt a great sense of interest in expanding their material production because if one Clan built a new factory, another Clan could just come in and take it away in a Trial of Possession. End result was that there was very little investment. The Crusader Clans were "ready" to invade the Inner Sphere in 3000 because they were chomping at the bit to do so, not because they'd gathered enough materials to succeed. All the Clans that went to Tukayyid got mauled so badly that it took them the better part of the next decade to recover, and the Jaguars never actually did because they, as the strongest and foremost Crusader, had also been the Clan that had most heavily neglected their resources and infrastructure because they believed that they could always win whatever they needed from trials against weaker Clans.
The timeline of the setting really started with the 4th Succession War with everything from the moment the wedding that started it happened being the setting moving forward and everything before it being the setting being filled out after the fact. The oddities of the setting make a lot more sense when you look at the setting that way, with the Dark Age having had a disproportionately large number of books that fleshed out that era despite it being generally the most disliked one. The oddest par of the setting tend to be one off planets that are insanely different from the rest of society, and some of the tidbits of information from the Periphery that remind us why the Inners see them as backwards savages (they are)
while Battledroids introduced the game at the end of the 3rd succession war, they also immediately introduced a full timeline (stardate magazine march/April 1985 and re-published at the beginning of Mechwarrior rpg 1st ed 1986 - Fasa 1607) the Stardate magazine predates the release of battletech 2nd ed. this makes the beginning of game play as 3025. this predates the 4th succession war (3028-3030). I mention this because when we started playing in 1984, it was a huge deal when FASA published the information for the Steiner-Davion wedding. it wasn't until the '20 year update' (1989 FASA 1639), that we learned of the full realization of Rasalhague Republic and then the war of 3039. as players, the clans didn't exist yet and we didn't even conceive of their arrival. everything was new and we felt the game evolving as we were constantly getting more information.
Moderately insane? *Moderately?!* I will not hear such slander! The clans are *way* more than moderately insane. They're like, only a step or two below the wobbies.
the Blakist Kerfuffle, the Dark Ages, the Republic of the Sphere, and the IlClan era are all highly underrated. The IlClan era is the moral grey of the 3rd succession war with all of the cool toys cooked up during/after the Clan Invasion and beyond.
screw you alaric you incest baby with mother issues created to spite the inner sphere. and Catherine steiner, rot in hell. I hope you watched each time vlad cucked you.
They understood logistics. But they understood ware and combat in the same way as the Samurai did. The way they fought was not WAR, they way they had fought for centuries under their own rules was very ritualistic. They had so many rules and honor codes that they were not ready to fight someone that was just going to ignore them when push came to shove. They had no idea what a war of attrition was cause in their battles the fought the fight, drove the other person from the field and it was over. It has a lot of similarity to how some muzzle loader Napoleonic battles went. Or how some medieval battles like the 100 years war were fought. Its not that outlandish cause we have moments in history that mirror the clans. They were not a MILITARY society, they were a WARRIOR CASTE society. Again like SAMURAI, then the Europeans showed up.
Yep. The Great Houses' way of fighting was all about logistics, and the means of production. I think the Clans had some idea that they couldn't stand up to that kind of warfare, because they went to great lengths to hide the locations of their home worlds. Their whole invasion plan depended on _not_ having to protect their supply chain. And when the new Star League's forces showed up at Huntress, the ilKhan knew that the party was over.
The Inner Sphere nuked itself into a primitive state. The Clans grew from a society of barely surviving warriors stranded in deep space. Kerensky’s Exodus forces even had a massive civil war themselves. The Clans are survivors of a second exodus. Battletech needs an explanation why everyone in a thousand years is fighting with relatively primitive weapons. They found one for the Inner Sphere and for the Clans. It’s just that the Clans’ primitive society happened to be a bit more advanced.
The reason the Clans went to the ritual combat was to preserve what was left afterwards...barely nothing....they used the same NBC weapons in their civil war that were used during the Inner Sphere civil war. This is one of the reasons the Clans use genetics , to breed more humans after they nearly wiped themselves out of existence...not enough people left to sustain a society.
The inner Sphere nearly nuked itself to a primitive state but stopped themselves before they went all the way. The Clans DID go all the way. The Clans rebuilt from essentially Mad Max level barbarity.
One thing that did the clanners in was their battle doctrine; clan warriors focused more on single combat, only choosing one target at a time, while Inner Sphere pilots were more accustomed to picking multiple targets at once. Anothing thing was their disdain for their Inner Sphere enemies because they were born naturally and not the product of a eugenics program. You tend to not bring your A-game against those you look down on.
For anyone that wants a deeper dive into this lore check out The Black Pants legions videos. Grab something to drink, pop some popcorn & buckle your seat belt bucko!
I dont think you called them Space AT&T even once, missed opportunity for lulz. The point you are missing about Tukayyid completely is how clan society developed, yes the society was geared to wage a war, but in order to not end up like the inner sphere they developed a weird honor based system of hyper proud warriors and space AT&T just took advantage of how stupid the system was.
I'm aware of the background of the clans culture, my point was just that a system with a weak point that prominent was never going to be sustainable during wartime. That makes the direction the clan society went in a little unintuitive at the surface level, even if the story fleshes it out and explains it well, which it seems to.
One day I realized Battletech lore has a lot of parallels with Game of Thrones. Among other things, the Cameron nobles and heirs got suckered into a big event (Red Wedding) where they were massacred. A few years later, winter came early to House Amaris. Nobody could agree on who should be in charge, so they had a War of the 5 Kingdoms on and off for 300 years. Everybody needed the messenger ravens and nobody messed with the Maesters that kept them. For the rest of the Inner Sphere, the night was dark and full of terrors, and here and there people's hope was a descendant of Kerensky (i.e. the Prince Who was Promised) would show up and sort things out.
I love BattleTech & have played MechWarrior since the late 90s & I admit it really takes some suspension of disbelief that a warrior based society didn't realize that logistics & the fact that quantity has a quality all of its own or that a stronger industrial base & hordes of humanity were key elements in fighting a protracted military campaign.
Also, if you learn BattleTech as you're starting engineering school the "science" of the stompy tanks is laughable, and only looks worse as you learn more. Suspension of disbelief takes *shibari* skills.
The clans had a political divide (wardens and crusaders) and half of them were secretly trying to protect the inner sphere, even bringing the leaders of the warring great houses together to put aside their differences and join forces for the first time since basically the star league. It was the clan wardens (wolf’s dragoons specifically) that taught the inner sphere’s leaders the tactics they would need to defeat the clans at their own game.
tukayyid 1- The clan were Planning for a quick victory against Comstar. Logistics were cut in their ritual biddings for Honour to be first, second etc. 2- Inter clan rivalries were rampant as they believed only there should only one ILkhan (great khan) conqueror of Terra 3- Comstar were armed with star league tech and the clans believed that they had Succession war tech (old crap tech) 4- Tukkayid was prepared ahead of time by the Comstar General in charge of the battle, giving defensive positions, depots, underground communication, random motorcyclists, pigeons. 5- Dams were rigged. 6- It was considered good to actually offer losing challenges to the clan who would waste time responding to them. We forget that 200 years ago, we did not shoot officers.. Kerensky's army had devolved into a warrior society of raids and single combat.
The clans are like that cos their homeworlds were really harsh & they needed to not let inevitable internal conflicts cause serious losses to their smaller population, so they developed this highly ritualised system of fighting. They did that for 300 years & by the time theyd got back they weren't ready for real war
I've been working on making a battletech super lore playlist that has memes interspersed with TRO readings and longer content like Tex-Talks-Battletech, Big Red 40tech, and Sci Insanity among many others. I think this will fight right in.
In the early days of the clans in exile, they did not have abundant resources, so they fought battles in highly ritualistic manner to avoid waste. Over the centuries, this ethos took on a life of its own. I find the sociology of this to be quite believable.
By the Battle of Tukayyid, the Clans had already encountered many Inner Sphere dirty tricks, but they got fooled by Comstar anyway. This was because Comstar was a remnant of Star League with 'mechs painted SLDF white and they formally challenged the them to a proxy battle. They thought they had finally met an honorable opponent. They also had cut a huge swath through Inner Sphere, making them arrogant. Some of them though that it was primarily going to be a competition with other Clans to see who gets the most glory, rather than exhausting guerilla campaign it was. Only Clan Wolf saw it coming.
The problem with the whole clans storyline was that the people writing it could not simply let the inner sphere get wiped out. This whole storyline happened as a novel series, after all, and it already had at least 20 novels that dealt with the inner sphere. The inner sphere was the established lore. Having the clans win would have basically wiped the board, and it would probably have upset the fans quite a bit at the time. Even with the clans losing at Tukkayid, some people still hate the clans today, 30 years later. So they had to find some way to make the clans lose. And Michael Stackpoles utter inability to write protagonists that aren't complete Mary Sues did not help selling it in a more believable way either.
As others have said the clans were out there for something like 15 generations (~20 year cycles). The good Kerensky saw his organization fall, decades of war, about 5 years of failed politics, a desperate exodus to try to save the people from his force's skills and weapons, years of lonely travel with increasing questioning of his command, his people fought amongst each other, his wife died, and then he died soon after. His kid was a sociopath who inherited power violently and formed the clans into a military personality cult. He grew up in a warzone hearing about how his daddy was a hero, he wanted to be a hero too. But with no war to fight he had to make a perpetual internal war to maintain control. It's what all fascists do. He did class it up from the usual race war by instead handing out animal themed jerseys and setting rules for engagement. Those rules of engagement somewhat... differed... from what the inner sphere was doing. Those rules also included minimal family contact and eugenics because if you combine all of the bad ideas together you get something good. A lot of the lore writers have the clans loosening their restrictions and making exceptions for practical reasons from the get-go. Especially when they make contact with inner-sphere civilians. They don't take kindly to the clan bullshit so it's pretty hard for them to hold their conquests. (part of the supply line issues you mentioned)
The Clans being shit at war while being incredibly good in battle actually makes perfect sense. The Clans are not an united front, they are highly divided factions that constantly fight each other. What's more they were not created by Aleksandr Kerensky the super cool, very competent leader that defeated Amaris. They were made by his dipshit son Nicholas Kerensky, a brain damaged narcissist psychopath who used mixture charisma, his daddy name and absolute ruthlessness to take over and created the Clans whole cloth to fulfill his warrior fantasies. The book Betrayal of Ideals is really good overview of how he created them, but also his greatest failure in thinking through the society he was creating. See the main reason why the Clans do not understand logistics is because he went out of his way to squash the use of knowledge of it. To point that one of the Clans, he created, was exterminated by him for the crime of using common sense, basic logistics and not licking his shoes. That means that even after his death you have 300 years of super militarized and oppressive regime that saw any attempt to wage anything more then ritualised small skirmishes as a heresy to be stamped out. It's not like the Clans were incapable of logistics and strategy. It's just those were skills you have to hide if you don't want the rest of the Clans to turn on you and try to annihilate you. Clan Wolf would face near destruction later on, just for being known to plan and think before they acted. The rest of the Clans declared that they had been corrupted by the Inner Sphere influence and had to be cleansed. They lost their holdings in Clan Space and survived by going in the Inner Sphere as Wolf-in-Exile. As a whole the Battletech lore is a treat as it's very tightly written. If something does not make sense, it's less some type of a huge plot hole and most often missing details.
Really loving this channel. If you're interested in trying your hand at another tabletop mech property, you should give Lancer a shot. It's a tactical TTRPG with a wide range of mechs. Each manufacturer makes a different style but it still feels somewhat cohesive. Ranging from simple mechs that shoot nails to impale their enemies to war machines that weaponise interdimensional travel.
The Clans where Fantastic at Tactics and Masters of Strategy, the Military Cast just forgot how to do Operations, leaving that up to the Merchant Cast who they didn't hold in high regard so who where summery ignored at practically every turn.
In my own way, am touched and adored by such things as Mechwarrior and Warhammer, because this is literally what would have happened in Dune if it hadn’t literally had 3.5 people to babysit the whole universe for several millennia
the battletech historical timeline is well documented and you are woefully uninformed! I will present this as Era's with sub Era's: Age of War 2103-2313 Terran Exodus - Terran Alliance 2271 Free Worlds League formed (House Marik) 2314-2549 Terran Hegemony 2317 Federated Suns formed (House Davion) 2319 Draconis Combine formed (House Kurita) 2341 Lyran Commonwealth formed (House Steiner) 2350 first industrial mechs 2367 Capellan Confederation formed (House Liao) 2412 Ares Convention (due to massive use of WMDs during the various houses expansion. Starleague 2550 Starleague formed 2560-2650 reunification war 2630 first HPG 2766-2781 Amaris coup 2785 Kerenski exodus Succession Wars 2787-2821 1st succession war 2830-2864 2nd succession war 2866-3022 3rd succession war 3028-3030 4th succession war Clan invasion 3049-3052 Clans invade 3052 Battle of Tukayyid 3058-3061 2nd Starleague Civil War 3062-3067 House Steiner and House Davion civil war Jihad 3068-3085 Comstar/Word of Blake civil war 3081 Republic of the sphere formed Dark Age 3132-3150 most HPG communications fail Ilclan 3150+ current day
Wait til you cover iLClan era.. my knowledge of the franchise stemmed from the old MechWarrior2 /mech commander 1&2 pc games. Just getting into the tabletop as i can now afford it and international shipping is a boon. iLClan era is where it's at.
How do you do, fellow "fans". How about this. Next time you want to do a lore breakdown, do a lore breakdown and leave your winging out of it. You're not going to get a lot of positive attention from fans of something if you admit to never reading anything about it and start trashing it.
Might I remind you how that special 3 day operation in eastern Europe is going on for 3 years? That's how it is possible to pretend to be a top dog in war while being a total inept
borderline Utopian society. Seriously? Yea, you need to read about the War of Star League aggression, er I mean "Reunification Wars" where billions of people died on the periphery trying to stop the Star League from annexing them unwillingly. It sets up the whole Amaris thing.
also setting up what is in every practical way a feudal empire, a system that inevitably leads to civil war. imagine if amaris killed the executive of a different kind of star league and the whole inner sphere just fucking ignored him and chucked him in jail. no lightning strike with his own forces because any he could potentially manipulate would still be tied into the rest of the star league logistically and politically so his war would be tiny pathetic and incredibly short lived (think the wagner group in russia). no taking over the reigns of government, no one would follow his orders and the actual next in line for executive would just step up immediately.
basically the formation of star league itself caused the fall of humanity in the setting.
Go tell a Taurian or anyone from the Periphery the Star League was a Utopian & you'll give them a good chuckle or they'll punch you in the face (at best).
@@harvestblades Call a Taurian a 'provincial Davion' while you're at it!
Sensing some BLP particles in the nomenclature here...
bro fell for the classic blunder of thinking the great house sourcebook he bought was unbiased and just a lore synopsis for the setting
"I haven't read about anything before the Amaris civil war."
Oh man, you're missing out on some cool shit.
The Lumberjack Canadian who conquered Terra... 'nough said.
@@MrDecelles McKenna and the canadian space empire.
Comstar isn't the least favorite phone company, it's the only phone company.
"You mean to tell me a society preparing years for war forgot how to wage a war?"
*Sweats in Russian*
Since you didn't bother with anything before the Coup, you didn't read on the Age of War, which introduced the Ares Convention, Battletech's version of the Geneva Convention. While it fell out of favor during the Reunification War and the Amaris Coup, the ferocity of the 1st Succession War was so bad it was unofficially brought back. This reduced the use of nukes and orbital bombardments, but the Inner Sphere still did plenty of conventional fighting. While the size of deployed forces shrinked over the the centuries often seeing planets garrisoned by only a battalion of mechs, there were still limited cases of large scale troop formations like Operation Freedom, the Battle of New Aragon and the Galtor Campaign. By the 4thh Succession War and on, the InnerSphere was regularly engaging in multi-regimental invasions. The Battle of Tikonov had Davion dropping all 8 Regimental Combat Teams of the Crucis Lancers (almost 90 regiments plus independent battalions) to engage the defending 80 regiments.
The SLDF in exile meanwhile traveled far beyond the periphery and then almost immediately consumed themselves in 20 sided civil war. Kerensky went through a second exile, where he converted his loyalists into the clans before returning and recapturing the SLDF remnants. This wasn't that hard because the warring factions had nearly fought their way too the stone age. The Clan traditions are born out of those dark days. The purpose of the Batchall isn't really about bragging rights an honor, The Batchall is all about conserving forces. Making sure that you don't commit forces you can't afford to lose. Inter Clan fighting was largely done by Trials which made sure losses were kept relatively low. Besides the occasional Trial of Annihilations (Sorry Wolverines) large scale losses were practically unheard of for more than a hundred years. The whole Clan way of War was lightning fast Even in the first three waves of the Clan Invasion, they had such an advantage that they were able to overrun Inner Sphere defenders before prolonged supply was an issue. Most invasions were effectively completed in days (for major combat). But in the 4th Wave you did see the Clans forced into prolonged combat (and losing) on Twycross (FC vs Jade Falcon) and Wolcott (Draconis vs Smoke Jaguars).
Finally, it's important to remember the Clans at Tukayid were not just fighting against Comstar, but they were also competing with each other. The victorious clan would be the Il-Clan and the leaders of the reborn Star League. So most of the Clans bid away forces and supplies to get an early landing and were counting on shock and awe to destroy their forces. When they were instead drawn into relatively prolonged fights, any advantage they had was gone. Diamond Shark only bid 5 clusters, the rough equivalent of a Galaxy. Wolf by Comparison landed more than a week later with 5 full galaxies and all the ammo they could carry. The Ghost Bears and the Jade Falcons each had experienced massive fights with large scale Great House deployments and thus sent 3 elite Galaxies each. All of them realized that being first on the ground was useless if you didn't win. Coincidentally all three either won or tied. The fatal flaw for the defeated clans was they underestimated the ComGuards & Focht and they were blinded by the prize.
Clans fought for glory and honour, ComGuard (for the first time in Battletech history) for finality.
Tks for your Excellent elaboration on the Clans mode of conflict.
That's why Victor Davion wanted to show the Clans what the true horror of war was when he led the new SLDF to annihilate Clan Smoke Jaguar (bloody assholes).
@@eseetoh technically jaguars (and Khan of Goliath Scorpion and his honour guard) were smoked by Focht (who showed them true war), second SLDF just came to cook them a bit more.
@@ShardDeVir and they didn't learned a damn thing so they got cooked real Good!! Lol
@@eseetoh and after operations Birddog, Bulldog, Serpent and Damocles jaguars managed to survive until Dark Ages. And all clans mistook them for Clan Wolverine. Talking about embarrassment.
For an imaginary history created to explain why an interstellar civilization fights unending wars with large, trippable tanks on the surface of planets instead of with spacecraft, it's a surprisingly well developed, believable, and deep chunk of "lore".
The thing about the Clans losing because they didn't know how to fight a war is NOT actually unbelievable. You have to remember that Clan society was highly engineered and they were VERY idealistic and not REMOTELY pragmatic in the way they approached things.
In their society, when one side of a conflict demonstrated clear superiority by defeating their opponent on the battlefield, the losing side would concede defeat and basically accept that they had lost and were subject to the demands of the victor.
When they came to the inner sphere they absolutely wrecked house initially. But then the inner sphere did the unexpected and didn't surrender...
Their heavily ideology driven culture wasn't prepared for that. They literally didn't know how to engage in "total war". Even when they were fighting ComStar on Tukayyid, they technically "won" many of the engagements, but ComStar would fall back and draw them into an ambush, or simply refuse to concede.
It's ironic because the Clans were definitely "crazy" in some ways, and had a very dysfunctional society, but it was their incredibly idealistic view of war that was their undoing.
There Autism was their undoing...
The thing you have to understand about the clans is that at their core, they have an obsession with efficient warfare; this is why they have bachalls, bidding and trials as well as their entire goal of seeking as much honor as possible on an individual basis. As such Conflict within the pentagon worlds rapidly became about smaller engagements that were resolved more quickly.
As a result, when the clans went a full year being undefeated and just eating everything the inner sphere put in front of them because in a stand up fight the IS rarely had a chance unless they vastly outnumbered the clans (Clan strategists put an even fight at 2:1). Comstar had the time to observe this and the way their mechs fought and were able to deduce that they couldn't handle a long fight as well due to their focus on high intensity conflict.
It's also important to note that despite how a lot of players envision it, Tukayid wasn't a victory lap; while some of the clans did indeed get slapped others were either able to earn partial victories (like clan ghostbear) or Full victories (Clan wolf) and it did indeed cost comstar severely.
Also worth noting: this would be pretty much the one and only time that comstar would take a stand and fight and win a battle as part of their own initiative; over the next 80 years they'd expierience a schism, be made to kiss the ring of Devlin Stone and finally be annihilated during the dark age for dipping back into the crazy juice.
Their obsession with efficient warfare - fighting with the minimum possible force, on agreed terms - looks to me like a way to minimize collateral damage. But, if Big Daddy Kerensky wanted to teach a deep-seated concern for efficiency, he probably saw that teaching them to think in practical terms wouldn't get the same result as having efficiency tied to a deeply-ingrained sense of honor and prestige.
@@danielcamacho1913 The issue is that this wasn't really a concern during Nicholas' time; after they subjugated the pentagon worlds (and vindicated clan doctrine) there wasn't any real major threats that would force them to think about larger scale engagements or the idea that they would have to fight an opponent that vastly outstripped their logistical abilities to the point where they could afford to fight *inefficiently*.
Maybe if Kerensky hadn't died solidifying control over this nascent society they could have laid the groundwork for a larger scale invasion. Maybe if things had gone another way the clans would have made better use of their Capital ships (which would have neutered the IS since they didn't have anything that could credibly fight them in 3050).
But it is what it is.
The clans make a bit more sense when you take into considering it's roughly 300 years later and they don't have the resources to fight wars the way the inner sphere does.
And that they're a cult of personality founded by someone who was more than a little on the bonkers side before he suffered brain damage as a result of a severe fever.
yes and no. the clans actually had massive amounts of resources to conduct the Innersphere invasion. however, only Clan Wolf brought stockpiles and set up hubs for resupply and repairs. the other invading clans didn't.
@@bruced648 Th e Clans never had "massive" amount of resources. The Wolves handled logistics better than the other Invading Clans, but none of the Clans ever put much emphasis on manufacturing capability and the Homeworlds had significantly less population and infrastructure than the Inner Sphere.
@Macrochenia from the information presented in the clan sourcebooks, I'll agree to disagree. while clan space was less developed than the innersphere, they had 225 years (2825-3049) of establishing society and installing infrastructure. according to the published material, they were ready to invade at the year 3000, but due to political differences, they sent in spies (Wolf's Dragoons) instead.
@@bruced648 The problem was, as detailed in the Wars of Reaving sourcebook, that the Clans had NOT spent 225 years installing infrastructure or growing their economies. The Clan way of fighting Trials for everything meant that none of them felt a great sense of interest in expanding their material production because if one Clan built a new factory, another Clan could just come in and take it away in a Trial of Possession. End result was that there was very little investment. The Crusader Clans were "ready" to invade the Inner Sphere in 3000 because they were chomping at the bit to do so, not because they'd gathered enough materials to succeed. All the Clans that went to Tukayyid got mauled so badly that it took them the better part of the next decade to recover, and the Jaguars never actually did because they, as the strongest and foremost Crusader, had also been the Clan that had most heavily neglected their resources and infrastructure because they believed that they could always win whatever they needed from trials against weaker Clans.
The timeline of the setting really started with the 4th Succession War with everything from the moment the wedding that started it happened being the setting moving forward and everything before it being the setting being filled out after the fact. The oddities of the setting make a lot more sense when you look at the setting that way, with the Dark Age having had a disproportionately large number of books that fleshed out that era despite it being generally the most disliked one.
The oddest par of the setting tend to be one off planets that are insanely different from the rest of society, and some of the tidbits of information from the Periphery that remind us why the Inners see them as backwards savages (they are)
As opposed to the Great Houses which are backwards medieval nobility.
while Battledroids introduced the game at the end of the 3rd succession war, they also immediately introduced a full timeline (stardate magazine march/April 1985 and re-published at the beginning of Mechwarrior rpg 1st ed 1986 - Fasa 1607) the Stardate magazine predates the release of battletech 2nd ed. this makes the beginning of game play as 3025. this predates the 4th succession war (3028-3030).
I mention this because when we started playing in 1984, it was a huge deal when FASA published the information for the Steiner-Davion wedding.
it wasn't until the '20 year update' (1989 FASA 1639), that we learned of the full realization of Rasalhague Republic and then the war of 3039. as players, the clans didn't exist yet and we didn't even conceive of their arrival.
everything was new and we felt the game evolving as we were constantly getting more information.
Moderately insane? *Moderately?!* I will not hear such slander!
The clans are *way* more than moderately insane. They're like, only a step or two below the wobbies.
Got to admit, this was pretty good. You hit the broad strokes and kept it funny.
7:45 this segment was really great, it got a chuckle from me
Man, this is the Battletech lore that makes sense. The later stuff is bonkers.
If there’s another big shift, things might go into full-on Super Robot territory.
the Blakist Kerfuffle, the Dark Ages, the Republic of the Sphere, and the IlClan era are all highly underrated.
The IlClan era is the moral grey of the 3rd succession war with all of the cool toys cooked up during/after the Clan Invasion and beyond.
screw you alaric you incest baby with mother issues created to spite the inner sphere. and Catherine steiner, rot in hell. I hope you watched each time vlad cucked you.
They understood logistics. But they understood ware and combat in the same way as the Samurai did. The way they fought was not WAR, they way they had fought for centuries under their own rules was very ritualistic. They had so many rules and honor codes that they were not ready to fight someone that was just going to ignore them when push came to shove. They had no idea what a war of attrition was cause in their battles the fought the fight, drove the other person from the field and it was over. It has a lot of similarity to how some muzzle loader Napoleonic battles went. Or how some medieval battles like the 100 years war were fought. Its not that outlandish cause we have moments in history that mirror the clans. They were not a MILITARY society, they were a WARRIOR CASTE society. Again like SAMURAI, then the Europeans showed up.
Yep. The Great Houses' way of fighting was all about logistics, and the means of production. I think the Clans had some idea that they couldn't stand up to that kind of warfare, because they went to great lengths to hide the locations of their home worlds. Their whole invasion plan depended on _not_ having to protect their supply chain.
And when the new Star League's forces showed up at Huntress, the ilKhan knew that the party was over.
The Inner Sphere nuked itself into a primitive state. The Clans grew from a society of barely surviving warriors stranded in deep space. Kerensky’s Exodus forces even had a massive civil war themselves. The Clans are survivors of a second exodus.
Battletech needs an explanation why everyone in a thousand years is fighting with relatively primitive weapons. They found one for the Inner Sphere and for the Clans. It’s just that the Clans’ primitive society happened to be a bit more advanced.
The reason the Clans went to the ritual combat was to preserve what was left afterwards...barely nothing....they used the same NBC weapons in their civil war that were used during the Inner Sphere civil war. This is one of the reasons the Clans use genetics , to breed more humans after they nearly wiped themselves out of existence...not enough people left to sustain a society.
The inner Sphere nearly nuked itself to a primitive state but stopped themselves before they went all the way. The Clans DID go all the way. The Clans rebuilt from essentially Mad Max level barbarity.
Really thought you'd mention how the Terran hegemony was founded by boris Johnson in a round about way
One thing that did the clanners in was their battle doctrine; clan warriors focused more on single combat, only choosing one target at a time, while Inner Sphere pilots were more accustomed to picking multiple targets at once. Anothing thing was their disdain for their Inner Sphere enemies because they were born naturally and not the product of a eugenics program. You tend to not bring your A-game against those you look down on.
For anyone that wants a deeper dive into this lore check out The Black Pants legions videos. Grab something to drink, pop some popcorn & buckle your seat belt bucko!
I dont think you called them Space AT&T even once, missed opportunity for lulz. The point you are missing about Tukayyid completely is how clan society developed, yes the society was geared to wage a war, but in order to not end up like the inner sphere they developed a weird honor based system of hyper proud warriors and space AT&T just took advantage of how stupid the system was.
I'm aware of the background of the clans culture, my point was just that a system with a weak point that prominent was never going to be sustainable during wartime. That makes the direction the clan society went in a little unintuitive at the surface level, even if the story fleshes it out and explains it well, which it seems to.
One day I realized Battletech lore has a lot of parallels with Game of Thrones.
Among other things, the Cameron nobles and heirs got suckered into a big event (Red Wedding) where they were massacred. A few years later, winter came early to House Amaris. Nobody could agree on who should be in charge, so they had a War of the 5 Kingdoms on and off for 300 years.
Everybody needed the messenger ravens and nobody messed with the Maesters that kept them.
For the rest of the Inner Sphere, the night was dark and full of terrors, and here and there people's hope was a descendant of Kerensky (i.e. the Prince Who was Promised) would show up and sort things out.
I just finished watching your previous batteltech video and saw this was just uploaded, awesome content! You got yourself a subscriber
Thanks for watching!
I love BattleTech & have played MechWarrior since the late 90s & I admit it really takes some suspension of disbelief that a warrior based society didn't realize that logistics & the fact that quantity has a quality all of its own or that a stronger industrial base & hordes of humanity were key elements in fighting a protracted military campaign.
Also, if you learn BattleTech as you're starting engineering school the "science" of the stompy tanks is laughable, and only looks worse as you learn more. Suspension of disbelief takes *shibari* skills.
The clans had a political divide (wardens and crusaders) and half of them were secretly trying to protect the inner sphere, even bringing the leaders of the warring great houses together to put aside their differences and join forces for the first time since basically the star league. It was the clan wardens (wolf’s dragoons specifically) that taught the inner sphere’s leaders the tactics they would need to defeat the clans at their own game.
7:45 I just want to commend this entire bit. Excellent script-writing!
tukayyid
1- The clan were Planning for a quick victory against Comstar. Logistics were cut in their ritual biddings for Honour to be first, second etc.
2- Inter clan rivalries were rampant as they believed only there should only one ILkhan (great khan) conqueror of Terra
3- Comstar were armed with star league tech and the clans believed that they had Succession war tech (old crap tech)
4- Tukkayid was prepared ahead of time by the Comstar General in charge of the battle, giving defensive positions, depots, underground communication, random motorcyclists, pigeons.
5- Dams were rigged.
6- It was considered good to actually offer losing challenges to the clan who would waste time responding to them.
We forget that 200 years ago, we did not shoot officers.. Kerensky's army had devolved into a warrior society of raids and single combat.
The clans are like that cos their homeworlds were really harsh & they needed to not let inevitable internal conflicts cause serious losses to their smaller population, so they developed this highly ritualised system of fighting. They did that for 300 years & by the time theyd got back they weren't ready for real war
I've been working on making a battletech super lore playlist that has memes interspersed with TRO readings and longer content like Tex-Talks-Battletech, Big Red 40tech, and Sci Insanity among many others. I think this will fight right in.
In the early days of the clans in exile, they did not have abundant resources, so they fought battles in highly ritualistic manner to avoid waste. Over the centuries, this ethos took on a life of its own. I find the sociology of this to be quite believable.
By the Battle of Tukayyid, the Clans had already encountered many Inner Sphere dirty tricks, but they got fooled by Comstar anyway. This was because Comstar was a remnant of Star League with 'mechs painted SLDF white and they formally challenged the them to a proxy battle. They thought they had finally met an honorable opponent. They also had cut a huge swath through Inner Sphere, making them arrogant. Some of them though that it was primarily going to be a competition with other Clans to see who gets the most glory, rather than exhausting guerilla campaign it was. Only Clan Wolf saw it coming.
Ghost Bear and Jade Falcon at least tried to hedge their bets, but only Wolf realized what they were getting stuck into.
I enjoyed this. Quick and fun. Im sure if I read 100 dated novels I'd find some err, but this is enough to know why I dakka.
The problem with the whole clans storyline was that the people writing it could not simply let the inner sphere get wiped out. This whole storyline happened as a novel series, after all, and it already had at least 20 novels that dealt with the inner sphere. The inner sphere was the established lore. Having the clans win would have basically wiped the board, and it would probably have upset the fans quite a bit at the time. Even with the clans losing at Tukkayid, some people still hate the clans today, 30 years later. So they had to find some way to make the clans lose.
And Michael Stackpoles utter inability to write protagonists that aren't complete Mary Sues did not help selling it in a more believable way either.
" So they had to find some way to make the clans lose. " And they found a really solid set of in universe explanations that logically follow.
Pretty good as a basic overview, gives all you need to understand the setting.
Of course there's a LOT of depth available for those interested.
while it does have a large content of information, only about 40% is near the published sourcebooks information for accuracy.
As others have said the clans were out there for something like 15 generations (~20 year cycles). The good Kerensky saw his organization fall, decades of war, about 5 years of failed politics, a desperate exodus to try to save the people from his force's skills and weapons, years of lonely travel with increasing questioning of his command, his people fought amongst each other, his wife died, and then he died soon after.
His kid was a sociopath who inherited power violently and formed the clans into a military personality cult. He grew up in a warzone hearing about how his daddy was a hero, he wanted to be a hero too. But with no war to fight he had to make a perpetual internal war to maintain control. It's what all fascists do. He did class it up from the usual race war by instead handing out animal themed jerseys and setting rules for engagement. Those rules of engagement somewhat... differed... from what the inner sphere was doing. Those rules also included minimal family contact and eugenics because if you combine all of the bad ideas together you get something good.
A lot of the lore writers have the clans loosening their restrictions and making exceptions for practical reasons from the get-go. Especially when they make contact with inner-sphere civilians. They don't take kindly to the clan bullshit so it's pretty hard for them to hold their conquests. (part of the supply line issues you mentioned)
The Clans being shit at war while being incredibly good in battle actually makes perfect sense.
The Clans are not an united front, they are highly divided factions that constantly fight each other. What's more they were not created by Aleksandr Kerensky the super cool, very competent leader that defeated Amaris. They were made by his dipshit son Nicholas Kerensky, a brain damaged narcissist psychopath who used mixture charisma, his daddy name and absolute ruthlessness to take over and created the Clans whole cloth to fulfill his warrior fantasies.
The book Betrayal of Ideals is really good overview of how he created them, but also his greatest failure in thinking through the society he was creating.
See the main reason why the Clans do not understand logistics is because he went out of his way to squash the use of knowledge of it. To point that one of the Clans, he created, was exterminated by him for the crime of using common sense, basic logistics and not licking his shoes.
That means that even after his death you have 300 years of super militarized and oppressive regime that saw any attempt to wage anything more then ritualised small skirmishes as a heresy to be stamped out.
It's not like the Clans were incapable of logistics and strategy. It's just those were skills you have to hide if you don't want the rest of the Clans to turn on you and try to annihilate you.
Clan Wolf would face near destruction later on, just for being known to plan and think before they acted. The rest of the Clans declared that they had been corrupted by the Inner Sphere influence and had to be cleansed.
They lost their holdings in Clan Space and survived by going in the Inner Sphere as Wolf-in-Exile.
As a whole the Battletech lore is a treat as it's very tightly written. If something does not make sense, it's less some type of a huge plot hole and most often missing details.
6:30 Arquebus would make a big laugh of those guys... Or any AC Corporation, actually.
Really loving this channel. If you're interested in trying your hand at another tabletop mech property, you should give Lancer a shot. It's a tactical TTRPG with a wide range of mechs. Each manufacturer makes a different style but it still feels somewhat cohesive. Ranging from simple mechs that shoot nails to impale their enemies to war machines that weaponise interdimensional travel.
7:44 you've missed the reason for this. .Nicholas Kerensky
If you're not sure how to pronounce Tukayyid, just know that there's a town on that planet called Humptulips
The Clans where Fantastic at Tactics and Masters of Strategy, the Military Cast just forgot how to do Operations, leaving that up to the Merchant Cast who they didn't hold in high regard so who where summery ignored at practically every turn.
In my own way, am touched and adored by such things as Mechwarrior and Warhammer, because this is literally what would have happened in Dune if it hadn’t literally had 3.5 people to babysit the whole universe for several millennia
If human history was not a tragedy, it would be a comedy.
Your voice sounds a lot like mine lol. I'm trying to figure out battletech, but am so confused where to start. This sounds pretty good :)
A little reductive representation of Tukayyid and the Clan defeat.
Not all clanners are trueborn, just the majority of the warrior caste.
Atleast that makes it hard to corrupt.
...and that's the way we like it.
the battletech historical timeline is well documented and you are woefully uninformed!
I will present this as Era's with sub Era's:
Age of War
2103-2313 Terran Exodus - Terran Alliance
2271 Free Worlds League formed (House Marik)
2314-2549 Terran Hegemony
2317 Federated Suns formed (House Davion)
2319 Draconis Combine formed (House Kurita)
2341 Lyran Commonwealth formed (House Steiner)
2350 first industrial mechs
2367 Capellan Confederation formed (House Liao)
2412 Ares Convention (due to massive use of WMDs during the various houses expansion.
Starleague
2550 Starleague formed
2560-2650 reunification war
2630 first HPG
2766-2781 Amaris coup
2785 Kerenski exodus
Succession Wars
2787-2821 1st succession war
2830-2864 2nd succession war
2866-3022 3rd succession war
3028-3030 4th succession war
Clan invasion
3049-3052 Clans invade
3052 Battle of Tukayyid
3058-3061 2nd Starleague
Civil War
3062-3067 House Steiner and House Davion civil war
Jihad
3068-3085 Comstar/Word of Blake civil war
3081 Republic of the sphere formed
Dark Age
3132-3150 most HPG communications fail
Ilclan
3150+ current day
Hah, T-mobiilized. Subcribed!
Wait til you cover iLClan era.. my knowledge of the franchise stemmed from the old MechWarrior2 /mech commander 1&2 pc games. Just getting into the tabletop as i can now afford it and international shipping is a boon.
iLClan era is where it's at.
Game of Thrones in space (actually just Dune).
Boom. Done. Summarized. See ya.
How do you do, fellow "fans".
How about this. Next time you want to do a lore breakdown, do a lore breakdown and leave your winging out of it. You're not going to get a lot of positive attention from fans of something if you admit to never reading anything about it and start trashing it.
In this channel we hold a firm anti literacy policy 😎
@@tlee3205 Doesn't matter. I've seen what you have to offer and will not be returning.
I'm emotionally devastated. You seem like such a pleasure to have around!
Might I remind you how that special 3 day operation in eastern Europe is going on for 3 years? That's how it is possible to pretend to be a top dog in war while being a total inept
Remember, Canopus has bioengineered Monster Girls!!!
The Magistracy is the best place in Battletech! Catgirls, drugs and blackjack!
I know whose lore I'm researching next. 🤔