>>63345953
>How revolutionary were excel spreadsheets to tabletop BT?
Not very. Other spreadsheet and ledger programs already existed. All the math involved is basic, junior high level stuff for an eighties kid, some of which ironically got dropped from curricula because Excel exists now.

>>63346198
>gonna be honest I don't know how guys ran IRL campaigns in the 90s and early 2000s by hand
Some guys had computers, and the math was a lot simpler in the old Mercenaries' Handbook/Mechwarrior 1-3 campaign rules. The new people hired by the shitbirds running the company have a bit of a complexity fetish. As the other Anon said, MekHQ is a little arcane but it works well for automating all the modern GM-side stuff. Before that you pretty much just role-played out-of-mech and rolled on a few charts for supply and missions
>Takes you like half the day to play a turn anyways.
The last time I played an 8-hour game there were ~80 units on the table. With a lunch in the middle. It's a hell of a time investment for a lot of people these days, I'll grant. With a bit of practice you can get company-level games down to a couple hours, however, and playing real scenarios instead of slapfights makes everything that much faster again. It's all relative to whether or not you have people who practice for larger games and know the basic rules.

>>63346198
>Building a mech now is much easier and very simple. Doing it before used to be basically impossible
I used to do that shit on my lunch break on the back of a napki-
>unless you had severe autism
Fair. But it's still just memorizing weapon crits/weights and a chart of engine weights by power. The other stuff is all simple percentages or fixed weights; the mech creation rules in 1-4th edition were literally 1-2 pages in the rulebook and the chart that listed weapon stats. Now calculating how many points something is worth? That's the heavy lifting. BT was an asymmetrical pointsless historical wargame until the late 1990s

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Would battletech style ablative armor actually be desirable compared to all-or-nothing armor where a plate is essentially not impacted at all by hits…