This video got copyright claimed because of the music I used in the opening. I can't control ad placement so hopefully there are not too many. Just so nobody is under any delusions, this chapter is mostly a recap of some fairly basic information. Wanted to have it all in one place that folks can refer back to as I won't explain it later on. Tomorrow's episode will cover the militaries of the Inner Sphere, then the fighting begins in earnest next Saturday.
@@HD-mp6yy in fact I absolutely would and then proceed to pontificate on the comment section (possibly alone) on how noobs talk tactics whilst chads talk logistic
I'm glad to finally get it out there. Not having internet able to upload large files meant it was difficult to motivate myself to work on this, but now those issues are resolved, we're starting to build some momentum again.
I’m glad your covering this, let’s us know how big this boogaloo is going to get. Also why the phase, ‘and then everything exploded,’ is such a relevant point.
I figured with the start of a new era (the Succession Wars) it would be good to do a "back-to-school" episode for anyone who might want to jump in at this point. With this being the largest and most destructive war, it felt especially important to make sure people understood where things stood at the beginning before it all goes to hell.
A brilliant narration of the set up for the beginning of the First Succession War, Sven. Thank you for putting the long hours of putting this together for everyone!
Tex goes deep. CRocket goes deep. Red goes deep with the narrator voice. Our man Sven? He's down there tapping geothermal. If he goes deeper, it'll be in the mantle.
Ha, are you talking about my voice or the depth of information? I always felt my voice was much too high to be a decent narrator (should have taken up smoking, lol).
One other thing about Lyran families in power: Not being the original ruling dynasty isn't limited to the Steiners. None of the member states are ruled by their founding dynasty, with both the Kelswa and Lestrade families being installed by Robert Steiner after the Steiner Civil War.
This makes me realise that I never did a video on the Lyran Civil War during my Dark Age series. I was going through the timeline much quicker back then, could probably do to make a few extras.
@@SvenVanDerPlankMaybe you could revisit it as a contrast to the Triumvirate Regency whenever you get to the second war? They're probably the two times where the Steiner dynasty is in the most danger.
There are actually a couple other topics I should have gone over in the Age of War series, such as the November Conspiracy, the life of Siriwan McAllister and the CCAF killing the Capellan Chancellor (why there are only Colonels). If I can think of an interesting topic for the Hegemony and Free Worlds League I might do a mini-series on the "Untold Stories."
House Marik-Liao, the dynasty that almost was... twice! Centuries before Sun-Tzu Liao got engaged to Isis Marik, Chancellor Jasmine Liao and Captain-General Simone Marik tried to broker a marriage between their relatives. It failed so spectacularly that it cost Simone Marik her position.
You and your videos are singlehandedly responsible for me getting interested in Battletech lore. I was just a casual gamer, playing some of the MechWarrior and Mech Commander PC games, for the longest time. I look forward to more!
Thank you. I was introduced to the series myself some 6-7 years ago through Critical Rocket's Lorewarrior series (after playing a couple of the video games as a kid) so it's always nice to hear that things have come full circle and new folks are having the same experience through my own vids.
This is what I love about your content dude, you boil down VOLUMES of stats, numbers, and doctrines into a fairly concise and well explained package so even us grunts can understand it
Jarnfork guys are probably making pop-corn for the upcoming nuclear firework shows, until the Clans came into the picture. My guess is that no one hears from them anymore is because they got by the Clans, since clanners came from the north
I'm not sure, but I think they might have been too far spinward for the clans to pass them during their invasion. I know ComStar later re-establishes contact but not sure what, if anything, happens beyond that.
You know, it would have been really interesting if one of the great houses had actually backed down, shored up it's borders and went. "Nah we're good." Attempting to sit out the succession wars would add a lot of interesting changes to the galactic stage, especially once warship production ceases entirely for the other houses. Though I guess thats basically what happened with the clans/comstar? Still think it would be a neat alternative universe idea.
Nobody goes to quite the extreme you're suggesting but both the Lyrans and Capellans do attempt a policy of staying out of the war at one point or another. I'll cover those in detail in later chapters.
That opening scroll is the motif of this whole series. As things get worse and worse, more and more columns get added to the opening, as you will soon see.
Succint and complete; the best snapshot I've seen of the state of the 'Sphere on the eve of war. Great work both representing each faction and distilling it down to a consumable size!
You say I distilled it down but it's precisely because I failed at keeping it short that I had to split it into two chapters this weekend 😂 Still, I'm happy with the result.
Interesting to see Coromodir as part of the western province of the Concordat. Puts an interesting light on the HBS game, as well as one of the fanfics I was following some time ago; probably need to re-read it with that in mind. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
the whole rimward region there was an influence battleground between centerella and calderon, even after creation of aurgian coalition, and if i am not wrong later on that part of space created its very own periphery power-Fronc Reaches(correct me if i am wrong plz) which had the famous colonial marshals
@@Aladine11 The Fronc Reaches were a joint Canopian-Capellan-Taurian venture called the New Colony Region that eventually went its own way... minus the industrial world of Detroit, the development of which was the whole point of the region. The Canopians kept that one.
Not gonna lie; I'm neutral about the Free Worlds League. But every time I see Kenyon Marik's face? For some inexplicable reason I want to slap it. Hard.
I do wonder if we'll ever get a Battletech series on the big screen or even on TV? I would like to think it'll be more likely if Gundam comes out with a successful live action movie. Battletech would likely appeal to wider audience who would otherwise only watch Gundam and/or Dune. Heck even series' like the Expanse and For all Mankind show how successful Battletech could be
Loved that intro! Was it created or from a show? As someone new to the BT game, watching all your lore helps me understand the intricacies of how the houses allied/warred with each other during the different eras.
I don't think there is anything groundbreaking in this video to get excited over. It's fairly standard stuff, but I just wanted to set the stage for anyone who is jumping in at this point.
You're welcome. A bit of a miserable point in the timeline to set a game. High probability of it ending with a nuke (possibly one of your own) being dropped on your head. Let me know how it goes.
It's unfortunate what happens to John Davion and his son, but out of the five lords, he was the best choice IMO. Never mind the regency, he looked at the position as a duty as opposed to the others, save perhaps Steiner.
The death of both him and his son in their own command bunker never made sense, especially with no hint of who or what killed them. It feels like the writer(s) just decided he was still too nice for his own good despite the shady stuff he did, and so they wanted him out so they could have a jerk (Paul) Davion on the throne instead. Is his son even named or known outside of the fact that he died in there too? They could've just made Paul his son instead and that would've worked just fine...then again, maybe that's one of those things already set in writing that they had to work around.
The Department of Military Intelligence not sharing information with others makes missing the naval lasers (which are very obviously there in the recon probe footage) in MW3 make more sense.
I see Sven, i hit like before the vid even starts. Well done good sir, I've said it before and i'm sure i'll say it again, yours are some of the rare vids i actually pause everything else to just sit and focus on 👍
It is true, but good luck trying to use that as an argument to claim ownership over any Cameron holdings. Suspect Marik would bring a swift end to any Regular upstarts.
Think you for continuing this series, the amount of work you have put into these documentaries is evident and superior. where do you get your IS maps? those are truly excellent.
I get the blank star map from the Sarna Unified Cartography Kit, courtesy of a user named Volt. I then add the colour and extras (capitals, industry, shipyards, regiments) myself as an overlay on top of that. You can find them linked in the description if you want to use them yourself.
Well done. You are also the first person I've seen to have a map with every nations provinces / regions marked and named. Is it possible for us to get your map of 2787 with all those names on it in one place?
I wish I had some better numbers to display in the video but I only have game values from ISW in the First Succession War sourcebook. I understand them not wanting to give concrete numbers because it so quickly starts to unravel the shaky economics of BT, but at the same time I can't just say "the Capellan Confederation has an industrial strength of 36" as if that means anything at all in-universe.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Trying to contextualize those numbers is one of the big challenges. But it DOES give you an idea of just how much strategic depth the Houses had at the time, which you did really well.
I hadn't heard of the term before myself, so perhaps I should have explained it, but it best describes the way in which the DC operates, with military Warlords having complete authority to overrule civilian government.
Just a heads up Sven, If Donegal in Lyran space is named after the place in Ireland, which considering the other names in the region it may be, it's pronounced done-knee-gaul (gawl) , not a criticism as Irish names are... interesting to pronounce... looking at you Maedhbh (mave) and Saoirse (Seer-sha) ;)
Thank you for the correction. My pronunciation of that one swings back and forth each time I say it but I'll endeavour to get it right next time I record.
@@SvenVanDerPlank no worries, extremely glad you do what you do so totally not an issue for a non native Irish speaker to say English words that are based of bastardised Irish 😉 ina different way... as i said we have a weird way of naming stuff 😉
Even if the IS leaders had 20-20 hindsight, this war was going to happen. They may have gone with a prohibition on Tech targets( like what happened during the 3rd war). However, the tech slide would still happen, compliments of COMSTAR.
I think that ComStar were able to hide their involvement because the others were targeting each other in that way as well. Had they been more reserved, the ComStar shenanigans would have been more obvious and led to an inevitable backlash. I do agree with you though that there was almost no way this war wasn't going to happen post-Star League.
@@SvenVanDerPlank I think ComStar would still get away with most of it, since they had the advantage of being able to read everyone else's mail. As for backlash, ask Hanse Davion what happens when you get hit with an HPG Blackout. It's going to be interesting when you do the lead up to the 2nd War, and everyone gets to see ComStars envolvement.
Yeah, fair enough. I think ComStar is less involved in the First Succession War than people assume. They're mostly in the background, doing only what they need to do to survive. It's only after Toyama takes over that things take a dramatic turn. I'm actually planning to gloss over 2819 events in this series and go back to it for the intro to the Second.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Sorry, didn't mean to imply that they where involved in the First. Now the 2nd through the Dark Age... And your totally right, once Toyama took over, it was a whole new ballgame.
@@gregdomenico1891 The backlash wouldn't necessarily have to be aggression against Comstar, just a refusal to spark any more wars or take part in any more massive ones, along with making efforts to preserve their tech.
Great work as always. ... Side note- Creators of BT draw most if not all of their stompy robots from Japan (in the early days) then write all the asian factions as the absolute worst places run by the worst people- all trouble in the history can be traced to either of these tow factions - what could the creators have meant by this? ^_^"
BT author Robert Charette has talked about this. There was definitely a lingering and unpleasant "yellow menace" in the background of some early characterisation. I think the way people joke about the factions, and the fact that all of the major players are inherently not good guys, hides the fact that the way the Draconis Combine and Capellan Confederation are characterised has evolved considerably from 1986.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Funny enough I never saw it as a 'yellow menace' per se but a deep aversion to the source of their own inspiration of the game. Fang of the Sun Dougram, Gundam and Macross - kind of self hating weeaboos before the term was popular. It's informed a bit , for me, from the deep insistence by a lot of older BT fans that BT isn't 'anime' inspired and some weird need to identify with more traditional wargamer seriousness in what is inarguably a very silly premise steeped in serious lore. Bascily i saw it as an inter-nerd superiority complex 'oh we're not that silly anime stuff like Mekton' (they weren't wrong per se) I've also wondered if that had anything to do with the slow vanishing of hands and humanoid shape from BT over the years. It's not all gone, and wasn't all human shaped tanks with legs (Locust I'm looking at You) Or maybe its just that BT dropped the ball, no pun intended, with anything handheld in the BT rules Sorry for the aside, but no I never thought it was the yellow menace trope, I thought it was more of a 'we're not THAT kind of nerd' trope
Hang on, *Finnmark* had its own interstellar nation? This may just be my favourite bit of Battletech trivia of all time. (Finnmark is the northernmost and least populated region of Norway, bordering Troms to the south, the Atlantic/Barentz ocean to the west and north, and Russia and Finland to the east. I grew up just next door to it.)
Always interesting to hear what corners of the globe people are watching from. The flag of the Finmark Free Republic was created by a viewer of the channel, Awesome-Autocrat, combining elements of Norwegian, Greek and House Amaris iconography.
@SvenVanDerPlank did not even know that was a thing. I only played the pc games. I can picture the cold calculation of war of trying to maintain your navy if you had warships and nuking planets you can't capture to deny use to enemy and doing raids and counter intel ops. Long-term high intensity near pear conflict is brutal - I can indersrand why we got to 3025.
I don't know if I agree. There is such a huge world and opportunities for that kind of storytelling in BT, but I don't think that potential is tapped into as well as GRRM does. Would that even be possible without the complexities of it all grinding everything to a halt? I don't know.
I'm 100% sure that GRRM was inspired at least in part by BattleTech - complex, multi-level politics, lots of similar/identical faction insignias... I'm positive that Katherine Steiner-Davion was the inspiration for Cersei Lannister rather than anyone from actual history
I have a question, if one of the great houses for examaple lets say Marik. Send a message to every one else, we don't care who becomes the First lord, not our problem. We are willing to trade with everyone like we are still memebers of Star League as long as we are left alone. Is there a chance their neighbors would accept this or out of paranoia would the still attack them? Becasue if so that great house would have a big advantage during the Second Succession War if they wanted to try it intead of ignoring all of that bullshit.
Well, if you border Kurita, that definitely isn't going to fly. They do not recognize the legitimacy of any government besides their own. And House Davion legit believes they are the rightful First Lord so they will come after you. Hypothetically it could make a cease-fire between Steiner and Marik, but the Bolan Thumb exists and that's basically unacceptable to the Lyrans, while the Mariks have spent centuries training a fanatical corps of shock troopers in the Bolan Thumb to fight Lyrans. Either way, ComStar would probably concoct a way to get you into the war. That's what happened to House Marik in the Second Succession War.
The problem is *that wasn't what they were fighting over.* despite the title, none of the Successor Lords had planned on actually rebuilding a Star League. They went into the Succession Wars with the belief that this was all-or-nothing. That if they didn't conquer the Inner Sphere, they would be subjugated as the others gobbled each other up. Kurita literally had this as their foreign policy, both prior and post-Star League. The fact that there were multiple Succession Wars never clued the leaders in that this wasn't possible. Sadly, the loss of the Terran Hegemony as a hub, a neutral power that could act as both a negotiator and as a counterbalance to any one House's power meant that nobody could fill the role the Camerons played. The only group to come close was the Republic of the Sphere, and that... was a failure, in most respects.
Others have already given you some great answers. Without spoiling things, one of the Successor States *does* try exactly what you suggest. You'll see why that doesn't go as you might expect when we reach that point in the second half of the war.
@@watchm4ker Comstar tried to fill this role, albeit as part of their facade once their own agenda got going, then more genuinely once they tried to secularize. But as most know, that also failed.
@@foenrik8941 The problem, ironically, is that Comstar wasn't powerful *enough* to accomplish this. The Hegemony wasn't just neutral, it had an army equal to any other Great House. So, it was placed to not only negotiate, but back up that negotiations with its own fleets and mechs against any side that betrayed the agreements. Since none of the other great houses trusted each other enough to properly ally - not until the creation of the Federated Commonwealth - that allowed the Hegemony to be a deciding factor in any House conflict. That's what allowed the Ares Accords to function in the first place. Comstar was instrumental in many negotiations and accords, certainly, but they didn't have the ability to act as a counterbalance to the other House Lords. Not only did they not have the military strength - At least, not in any form they were willing to use - but their economic power was surprisingly fragile. The Hegemony was able to offer new technologies and benefits as incentives for negotiations, while Comstar could only really threaten to withhold the services on which the Inner Sphere depended on. All stick, no carrot. Had Comstar been able to retain control of the core Hegemony worlds, and kept them out of the Succession Wars, there's a good chance they might have been able to create a more stable foundation for a second Star League. But defending such holdings in the face of what was to come would have been... difficult. They barely had the resources to do what they actually did.
Sorry to hear that my narration wasn't clear enough for you. I upload all my scripts as subtitles if that helps you better understand what's being said.
