So I tried the Rougue Tech mod. Quite big and includes a simple all in one installer. TONS of changes and more than a few bugs that I found in my few hours of playing with it.

I really didn't like it and/or the few bugs I found, so I deleted the whole mod folder and tried going back to my existing (all 7k plus days of it! ) campaign and it was bugged and crashed. I reinstalled Battle Tech and my existing campaign was still there and worked fine.

Heck, we have a couple of months at least till something really new comes out , so I figured I would try a new Iron Man campaign. Interesting so far, have only played a few hours yesterday.

Is there a mod that puts the lost tech out there to find and buy? That's the glaring omission from the game.

Yeah I think a couple. Pretty hard to install for the most part, for me anyway. The Rougue Tech AIO (All In One) had a great simple installer and it had TONS of stuff I had never heard off, at least 3 different kinds of Gausses I saw in my few hours of playing. All kinds of armor, aiming aids, target painters, bizarre free flight missiles. Many, many weapons I had never heard of or seen before. You guys who know the lore might recognize them.

The mod wasn't unplayable, just really, really required a whole new learning curve. So much had changed, its a different game. No CTD's or anything like that, just a couple of interface visual bugs. I may try the newest Alpha version when I win or, die in my new campaign.

Battletech has a pretty decent reddit community, Roguetech is one of the more frequent topics. My understanding is that it’s a much harder game than vanilla.
Oh, and Dekker getting killed in action is also pretty common it seems.

I remember watching a video showing that compilation mod. I can’t remember everything in it, but I do remember thinking for each part that sounded good, there were 2 that seemed contrived and simply there to make the game overly complicated and remove the fun. Good game design is about more than difficulty and excessive details.
Fortunately, this isn’t a game that’s lacking out of the box and needs mods to force it to be good.

Yeah, the over complication and tons of new stuff to learn was what I disliked the most.

Start over with the New Iron Man. Good fun so far.

Nexus Mods:
Nexus Battletech mods



Red

I tried that and it was a buggy mess to load, overly complicated and felt "falsely" difficult. Hard to explain. I ended up ditching it and going vanilla and it was fun again.