Last Wednesday on Mecha Mondays, Austin and Rob were able to salvage a Jagermech! Specifically, a JM6-S model. During the show, Austin asked for any build suggestions and that we should go to the forum to start the discussion. I couldn’t find another topic so I decided to make one and share my favorite way to run this mech. I’ve attached a screenshot from my game, which, admittedly, is in the post-game phase multiple years into a campaign. But the overall idea works with even basic parts, so here goes:
First thing you should know: I hate ballistic weapons. I hate the recoil penalties, the ammo restrictions, the possibility of ammo explosions, and the underwhelming feeling of AC 2s. With the limited tonnage of the Jager, if you want to fully mount up on ACs, you have to sacrifice so much armor and mobility that its arms just get shredded off in 1-2 hits (just like Rob mentioned). But onto the Pros and Cons!
Pros:
For an early game heavy mech, the Jager can mount a MASSIVE amount of armor as well as a good number of jumpjets and small weapons. So after stripping all of the ACs off, I realized that a Jager-S could serve very effectively as a front line brawler, including DFA attacks.
By sacrificing some of the back armor and adding probably more than one unnecessary heat sink, this Jager build has full front armor and can perform 2-4 DFAs per mission or leap-frog around the map, getting up close and personal even with heavy mechs. Because small arms will fire during melee/DFA attacks, you always want to include 4 of them for that extra power. I prefer machine guns, because if you DFA or melee you’re almost guaranteed to strip the armor off of at least one section and then each machine gun has 5 chances to crit and disable/destroy a weapon/ammo box, so if you’re packing 4 machine guns, that’s 20 chances to crit!
The laser weapons you put on can be pretty mix and match depending on what role you want the mech to play, but through some experimentation I found the 1 Long and 3 Medium Lasers to be perfect with this many heat sinks. If you’re going on a desert mission, you may want to go 4 Mediums and a couple extra heat sinks to be able to Alpha Strike every turn.
Great pilot matchups include those with Piloting and Tactics, as the pilots can get extra evasion off of the jump jets and doing a precision strike right in front of another mech (or behind them if you can mange it) will do major damage and pretty much guarantee a crit on big enemy weapons (like AC20s).
Another great thing is that there is nothing mounted on the arms, so if they get blown off, the Jager doesn’t lose any firepower or utility.
If you don’t have a rangefinder laying around, don’t worry about it. Rangefinders are great on front-liners and scouters so that’s why I included it on this mech.
Cons:
Jager is a great early game grab, but they don’t scale well compared to some of the heavies and assaults you can grab later. But, this is true of all of the light/early game mechs in this game, so don’t worry about it too much. Short list of other cons:
Jager’s can be pretty slow
The effective range is very low
TL;DR Great front-liner tank, great heat efficiency, good melee and DFA damage, machine guns are g00d.
Please share your mechs or criticisms, and feel free to hit me up on twitter @szczechowski.
