BATTLETECH – Support Weapons
Another thing to consider are Support Weapons. Always try to put at least 1 Support weapon if you can because:
-They bump up your firepower to a significant degree for only a few tons. Albeit limited to close range.
-Increase your melee damage significantly. Even more weight efficient than Actuator upgrades.
-Support weapons counts as a separate attack when using melee, it removes an additional evasion charge.
Small Lasers will be your bread and butter support weapons. They do produce heat but at half the tonnage of a Medium Laser but does 80% the damage, this is the most damage/ton efficient weapon in the game. Its +++ Variant does a whopping 30 damage for 0.5 tons.
Machine Guns are my favorite Support weapons due to them not producing heat and it’s ability to frequently proc head hits. This is particularly useful for farming mechs, especially against Assault mechs. Pack enough MGs and you will deal head hits consistently enough to incapacitate mech pilots at a few salvos.
Flamers are really nice to have. Enemy AI is notoriously bad at heat management, if you see one of them go beyond the heat threshold, using Flamers against them will almost certainly make them shut down. Which is almost a free kill right there. However it weighs a whole 1 ton and is only useable for 6 attacks without the option for additional ammo.
If you are worried about stats like Heat Management, keep in mind that Support weapons are 90m only and even a 1 Heat Management mech will perform a lot cooler than it looks statistically in the MechLab due to how infrequent Support Weapons will actually be used.
