Thanks, and I agree with you, there are very few series that have such an extensive backstory as this one.

It is fairly obvious you have never read all of the Lore of Middle Earth.... Here is a hint, there is a LOT of it. Tolkien detailed the entire history of Middle Earth from its creation, right the way through until after the War of the Ring, and most of that was not published until well after his death as it was more or less locked up in his private papers.

Forget 40k... Battletech is Lorehammer

@@alganhar1 I mean, in fairness, there is more raw *stuff* for Battletech than there is LOTR. But Tolkien was one man. Battletech has had multiple authors working on the IP for going on 40 years. And a lot of the stuff in Battletech doesn't come close to the quality level of Tolkien's work. And a lot of stuff in Battletech is highly derivative. Tolkien pretty much forged the modern version of the fantasy genre on his own. So yeah - there's probably more raw stuff in Battletech, but that doesn't mean it's more impressive.

Where did he get the animated maps? HE MADE THEM.

The setting is absolutely massive. And I'm glad we're getting the new Battletech Universe book with and after the Mercenaries kickstarter. It'll finally give an overdue overview of the entire setting from start to finish; something crucial for anyone hoping to get into this lore and doesn't want to buy or wade through 50+ disparate sourcebooks.

That story was junk

No problem. It was an enjoyable project to work on at my end but the reception has been fantastic and inspires me to try ever grander projects. Hoping that the Star League Civil War will be the best ones yet.

This was just an appetiser for the Civil War series. If I don't make any cuts, it has the potential to be 4x as long.

You need not wait. The first six chapters are already out. Hoping to get the seventh part out next weekend.

My feelings on the Star League have flip-flopped as I dove more into the lore. Initially I too shared the delusion that it was a peaceful Golden Age, but researching the Reunification War I realised just how imperialistic and all-round awful it was. The dysfunction of the so-called "Golden Age" and subsequent downfall cemented that idea. But now that I've finished reading about the First Succession War in detail, I feel like "no wonder they all wanted to go back." Despite its many problems, it really was a utopia compared to what followed.

@@SvenVanDerPlank Or the Age of War prior to the League's formation.

This is the genius of the satire that is the battletech universe; it so closely resembles humans history, because it expands on human history, and the dangerous tendencies toward imperialism, but with lasers. And I gotta say, I agree with Sven on the flip-flopping. The star league sounds like an idealistic paradise until you realize their "peaceful utopia" and "golden age" were not only won off the back of a broken promise of peace and a hundred million deaths, but that it ultimately became corrupted by infighting and betrayal. Because it was not a peaceful union, it was simply a leash for the Inner Sphere powers. In the vacuum that followed the star league, humanity was brought to its darkest place; utter depravity of power for no reason other than to stick it to everyone else who might take what you've claimed. A whole galaxy of nations glassing entire worlds because they were finally let off the leash and they could. With enough real estate, mutually assured destruction becomes a theory, and nukes and viruses become practical strategic assets. The Reunification war was just a little war exercise by comparison, and after that any period of war would sound like a better age. That, and they destroyed most of their economies and technological capabilities in the process, so they literally went backwards as a society in so many ways. The real bitch of it is that Ian Cameron's obsession with his dream of a unified humanity, by any means, ensured that once his vision died humanity was guaranteed to never be unified again, but would fight over the idea of the league as power, and only for the purpose of keeping anyone else from getting it first, until forever. Because that's ultimately what every major conflict since had really been about; bringing back the power of the star league, and unity and cooperation be damned.

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it.

It's sadly an article of faith and a pillar of their "bible" that the Coordinator/Combine have a destiny or mandate to rule all of humanity. It's even in the full title of their head of state, "Coordinator of Worlds". It's only a few steps beneath 40k's "Emperor of Mankind" on the arrogance scale. Even if the leadership didn't want to be so hostile, the sheer cultural and historical inertia within the Combine prevents any serious attempt to give that up permanently without setting off coup attempts or civil war.

@@MoreEvilThanYahweh yeah but the difference is the emperor is a demigod behind the arrogance, where the coordinators, are not.

@@MoreEvilThanYahweh the emperor of mankind literally powers the astronomicon while he fights the 4 chaos gods and watches over all of mankind while the coordinators have the same power as a governor of a sector

@@generaldelasmontanas2699 I'm talking about the arrogance the title itself has, not the person bearing it.

It's like you have never even read anything from the setting lol. Comstar did nothing to help the Combine and a LOT to see them attacked constantly. The Combine was just that strong militarily that no one could take them on and win for long. Hell at the start of the Succession Wars they bodied their neighbours HARD and only really lost momentum after Kentares, if they have nuked it instead they very well might have taken over the entire Federated Suns!

No problem, glad you've been enjoying them.

Actually during the Jihad the Blakists tried to turn HPG's into weapons. But according to the lore books they had to abandon their research as it wasn't practical. The Society though managed to use the HPG to insert so called SLOTH viruses into Warships making them jump or go haywire at the most inoportune moments

Thank you, that's very high praise considering we've got some tremendously talented people in the community.

@@SvenVanDerPlank same here, as a historian, this fact-rich documentary format is ideal for me. Keep it up!

Heard the name and i knew there was going to have at least one comment about it!

I can't tell you how much it bugs me that I mispronounced Butte. Wasn't a word I'd come across before so I just assumed it was a joke name.

Thank you. Sorry it took so long. Hopefully the next series comes out a bit quicker.

I'm not sure that offer was even on the table. It was join as lower-class citizens or die. Likely the Member States would not have agreed to a proposal if Calderon made one.

@@SvenVanDerPlank I mean, does it need to be for a what if scenario? And I only mentioned that specific example because I thought of it during a part of the video where you were talking about the TC. xD

This is the one and only time I rotated the map but I doubt I'll do it again. I don't really have a favourite faction. Any of the great houses except Liao I guess. I like Fed Suns because MechCommander and Davion Guards were my introduction to the series and Sword & Dagger my first book. Lyran Commonwealth seems like the only decent place you'd want to live if you were a regular person. I like reading about the political makeup of the Free Worlds League but they're pretty absent from the 3025 setting and books. And my favourite characters come from the Draconis Combine. I like how the same set of rules and ideals can create both principled and monstrous individuals, that's interesting to me.

@@SvenVanDerPlank I would venture to posit that most sets of technologies and ideologies, be they military or civilian, political or religious, are tools and markers that tend to highlight a person's personal priorities; they thus tend to emphasize a person's personality traits, be they good or ill. Battletech highlights this both in the way in which 'Mechs are utilized by individual Mechwarriors and (as you have pointed out) in which both heroes, villains, and people in-between spring from all regions of the Inner Sphere and beyond. It's probably this reason why Battletech's characters and setting feel so damn HUMAN to me in spite of its sci-fi setting.

While I can understand not liking Kurita, I feel like Liao and Amaris are worse.

@@Korraganitar The problem with House Kurita is that they have the military might to exercise their brand of crazy across the Inner Sphere, while Liao is more restricted. As for Amaris... It's hard to get a read on the family as a whole, especially as Stephan's actions burned the whole line. It's be interesting to see how a line that began as Hegemony Loyalists turned so completely against the League, and the Camerons in particular.

Thank you.

Thank you. Hopefully I made the work day pass a bit quicker for you.

@@SvenVanDerPlank You've made time fly way too fast. I'd be happy to listen to those forever.

Well you've probably seen already but there's another 10+ hours of this series on the channel.

Well thank you, that's very high praise indeed. And yes it is, stay out of it.

There are scenarios in the back of Era Report: 2750 for the Second and Third Hidden Wars but I doubt it's on par with the clan invasion.

@@SvenVanDerPlank shame, it would be interesting to play out some of these battles

@@RyeFields You might try digging through old issues of the various BT magazines, almost all of which are free pdfs on Sarna. There were a lot of odd little scenarios of varying degrees of canonicity in them back in the day.

I get my art from the Digital Deluxe artbook so they might be better quality than what's in the game. Plus I've tracked down few of the artists' personal pages and found higher quality versions there.

Going live in 24 hours.

I'm also looking forward to the Fall of the Star League. Really hope I can pull off the things I've been imagining in my head these past 5 months. I've always been clear when people have asked me before, I'm not planning on covering clan history until they reappear. Plans may change but I'll probably finish the clan invasion series circa 3052 at Tukayyid (or soon after) and then jump back to 2785.

@@SvenVanDerPlank Alright. Can’t wait to listen to it.

Glad you're enjoying the series. C-bill is actually a term that predates the Star League in universe. When it was first used in the 1986 MechWarrior RPG sourcebook, it represented the ComStar currency as you say, but it existed alongside the "House bills" such as the M-bill or S-bill. Later sourcebooks have explained that the Cameron-bill (C-bill) was already a term in use during the Age of War, and that it's use continued after the introduction of the Star League dollar.

Yes but I don't plan to change my approach of going through the timeline chronologically. It will be literally years before I reach 3150. Sorry.

​@@SvenVanDerPlank no need to be sorry, i love this stuff, no matter what era! keep it up!

"Chapter II: Arms" of my latest series on the Fall of the Star League actually addresses that issue directly at one point. In short, the SLDF would have had an extremely hard time taking on the Member-States. If they tried to fight all at once they'd be annihilated, and if they tried to remove just one at a time, the others would immediately see what was going on and declare war, resulting in the same outcome. They only maintained their numbers advantage as long as the others played ball, and the only reason they did that was because it was better for them to be a part of the League. Furthermore, the SLDF can only be maintained at it's massive size if they continue to rake in the vast amounts of money that comes from a united Inner Sphere. Take that away and it crumbles, plus you've got a war that easily rivals the First Succession War.

All of that, and while it was called a League, it was a monarchy, an Empire. If the Great Houses all voted again for a new First Lord when the last one died, it might have stuck longer.

Please correct me, how is it said? Like "Beautiful?"

LOL the D is silent!

I share my maps here: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tquGOMT_K_XJvqi6GpV-DLOSmDNd4QNc?usp=drive_link

It is not the last BT history. If you were following my channel for the C&C lore, sorry to say that I'm not looking at doing any more in the near future. I still have a few ideas but simply not had the desire to work on them. I didn't have the best time working on them (probs cause I was still new to that kind of video) and I was never super happy with the end result. Not saying I never will but I've no timeframe for it at the moment. Sorry if that's not what you wanted to hear.

@@SvenVanDerPlank That sucks then. Yuck!!!!

It's the same (minus a few tiny corrections and changes). When I finish a series I usually upload them into a compilation as it's easier to share.

This isn't the beginning. If you go to my channel you can find a playlist of the entire series which has them in order. So far I've covered the years 2000-2821. The Succession Wars are 2784-3040, Clan Invasion is 3049-3061, so that's still quite far off for me.

Working on it. It's the Star League Civil War first and the first part of that should be coming out within the next week.

It was one of the most common bits of feedback I got. They were due for an overhaul anyway so I remade them with the dark background as requested.

I make them myself. I believe I linked them in the description for my latest video.

It's just one of the central themes of the BT universe. Faster than light travel and communication is heavily restricted in BT, so the idea is that it was functionally impossible to operate a democracy at anything more than a planetary scale. So over the centuries, humanity regressed back into a feudal system, bringing with it those archaic terms and titles.

Sorry, I must have missed this one. I do try to upload my script as subtitles for each of my videos but frequently forget as it doesn't work until after the video is done processing. I'll try to remember when I get back from work this evening.

That should be the subtitles uploaded now. I just insert my scripts into auto-sync so not sure how effective that is. Let me know if you come across any problems and I can try to manually correct them.

I answer that at the beginning of the next episode.

The video has four chapters. The first is 2600-2650.

Sorry you're having that trouble. That's unfortunately something I can't really influence or fix. Don't know what's going on behind the scenes there.

The lesson there is that if the Capellans were more openly villainous, then people would respect them a lot more.

More folk asked me to play Generals first so I've been playing that instead. C&C3 won't be for a long time yet I'm afraid. Sorry.

@@SvenVanDerPlank oh... Just know that GLA postal service isn't responsible for damage goods