No doubt, Tikonov will be the site of a historic peace accord that will bring an end to bloodshed in the Inner Sphere and usher in an era of cooperation and comity that will survive a thousand years!
@@SvenVanDerPlank I share your hopes. I mean, this is the year 3025. If we've learned anything from recent history, such as the sudden and inexplicable appearance of the Wolf's Dragoon, we can only expect good things in our future.
@@Deridus The more of this "Second Succession War" business I hear about, the more I wonder if the Great Houses are all that serious about peace. Still, what are the chances they'd repeat the same, prior mistakes?
Edit: I just realised that I had the Liao Lancers disabled on all the 2835-36 maps. Doesn't affect any of the battles in the video but I'll make sure that's corrected before I upload the compilation vid. This marks the end of the first phase of the war. The next two chapters are dominated by the fallout between ComStar and the Free Worlds League. After that we get into the final phase of the war where things get much more political and there's less emphasis on launching as many offensive operations as quickly as possible. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I included the First Battle of Tikonov at the end of the last chapter and not just have them all in this one. Wouldn't have made that much difference to runtime. Oh well.
Damn, General Greer was done dirty. Imagine this: you are a high ranking General, with many years if not decades of leadership within your nation. You have been tasked with a near impossible goal by your leader to take and hold the capital of an enemy nation, with not nearly enough resources or time to do so. Predictably, you fail, and are forced to withdraw before all your forces are wasted in a fool's errand. And your reward for preserving your forces to fight another day? Demoted to busboy at a restaurant. Little details like this makes me love Battletech even more.
You know what would be really cool? When you’ve finally finished all this history, doing a giant time lapse video showing the entire map and all the changes across the various conflicts. That would be a great high level overview to show the ebb and flow, offensives and stagnations, etc
the longer this series goes on the higher my opinion of the capellans. they've got two of the most competent militaries in the setting attacking them and they still manage to hold out. really punching above their weight.
@@DenienNhonestly you could say that for practically any of the factions, the goal here is to make for an interesting story and good game scenarios. The capellan's story in the 1st and 2nd succession wars has been both of those for me, which is good enough.
love these videos! i have always been a big battle tech fan never played the table top but played all the video games and read the books religiously when i was younger but watching the time line play out in this fashion really shows how brutal this universe is!!!
Every time I see that starry opening now, I can't help but think of that quote from Star Trek:DS9 - *"Look out there, Quark. Millions and millions of stars. Millions upon millions of worlds. And right now, half of them are fanatically dedicated to destroying the other half. Now - do you think, if one of those twinkling little lights suddenly went out, anybody would notice?"*
Nicely done Sven. On a side note the RUclips algorithm recommended a Renegade HPG vid (never heard of them until it popped up) and I really enjoyed the vid with you and Tex. Is there any future plan of you doing a BPL podcast like Tex did with Big Red ?
Glad you enjoyed the video. Was good fun getting to chat with those guys, though it bugs me no end that I forgot to set up my mic properly before hand recording which is why my audio quality was so trash in that podcast we did. Maybe me and Tex will end up doing something together again in the future. We'll see.
It's really nice to see content based on this period in the setting. Far more stuff focuses on the 3rd Succession War (and beyond), which makes sense due to most books and video games being set during that time frame.
It's an oft overlooked era, but it all influences events further down the line. The 2ndSW is particularly interesting because it sees the metamorphosis of ComStar from communications company into the pseudo-religious fanatics we recognise today.
Not exactly. The Combine is going to see some changes in the next chapter, but the main focus is almost entirely on ComStar and the Free Worlds League.
I do make a note of that in a couple of chapters time. Very soon the only people who remember it will have been those born during the Star League Civil War and not the true Golden Age.
these get posted on the same day as the ww2 in real time series so I get battletech military history and real military history on the same day. It's great!
As bad a mess the first war was. The second so far is an even bigger mess. Damn you ComStar. And damn you Blake. Going with Kerensky was the better option.
Percentage wise, more people died during the Pentagon War than did in the Succession Wars. Unless you are on one of the border planets during the 1stSW, the Inner Sphere was the safer place to be.
Really? Kerensky not even could complete the journey and his son was a fanatic, he created a rigid hierarchical system, worse than the inner sphere, all clans were in the same page for while, but Nicolas rigid and brutal leadership lead to conflict between the clans, and they began to fight between themselves, like the Nobles Houses of the Inner Circle, in the end, Kerensky dream and exodus was in vain.
If his ultimate design was the wholesale murder of hundreds of top academics across every field of science leading to a mass technological regression and the indirect deaths of millions over the next two centuries due to lost medical understanding, then yes, it will soon be realised.
Blarg! I can't look... can we just skip to the 3150's already? 😜 As always, thank you Sven for this and I can't wait for the future installments (though take mental beaks when needed).
My physics may be off, but the thumbnail/17:20 doesn't look right to me - if they've already zeroed their orbital velocity to be able to come down vertically then isn't still thrusting down at that low an altitude going to leave a really heavy g-load for braking when they're low in the atmosphere?
Classic case of artists not thinking about how space travel works. If they've been accelerating from the jumppoint then they would be traveling far too fast to slow down now. Perhaps they were in orbit and decided to descend. When you've got fusion engines and fuel is just water, deorbiting wastefully by burning straight down instead of opposite your direction of travel matters less.
Is it just me, or does the Draconis Combine have the ability to strike much deeper into its neighbors territory than the other houses? Do their jumpships go farther, do they do multiple jumps, or do other houses just choose closer targets?
Many of those random deep strikes were first mentioned in the earliest lore where there wasn't a good understanding of what was where. The more recent sourcebooks that go into much more detail follow more conventional assaults along border worlds. But when somebody randomly appears half way across the Inner Sphere, there's a good chance they're just repeating something from the 1980s.
im writing this comment before watching the video i recently watched bigreds video on the warhamer iic. loved your appearences. do you have any plans to go that far in the timeline? i tried to find aterial post jihad to read as to why the map is so borked but its been difficult tracking down answers. i really like how you do these videos, it helps organise otherwise disconnected events. especially events in books written decades apart
I do indeed plan to cover that era. In fact, what you've described is the reason I started this whole series. There is a huge blind spot where the Jihad and Dark Ages take place that there is little material available for that I believe is preventing people from being able to pick up the modern ilClan setting because they've got a 80 year gap in their knowledge. At the moment I'm just continuing my chronological telling of the history so it'll be a while until I get there. For suggestions, I may be wrong but I believe both Big Red and MechFrog are both covering later eras in their own content and HPG Blackout has their own summary I noticed. Because I've only gotten to 3057 in my own reading, I haven't watched anything pertaining to that era, so can't comment on specific videos.
Oh awesome! I was going to stay either way, but now i will definitely keep watching. Its good to know im not just missing something incredibly obvious that everyone knows and thats why its not written down anywhere. I do follow big red and mechfrog as avidly as yourself, so i have picked up bits and pieces of the story but i could never tell if there was more yet. Thanks for a great episode, and i hope you have an excellent day!
Best to drop 12 regiments of mech directly onto the fortifications and accept the 50 percent force reduction. Then clear out any pockets with regiments of heavy arty..
Industrial cornerstones like Tikonov are such bastions for the same reason Hespherus II is. Leveling it would defeat the entire purpose of invading it, it's way too valuable intact.
@mathewkelly9968 I would expect that 50 percent of the facilities would be salvageable that coupled with massive stockpiles of parts and the salvage of enemy war equipment would more than make up for the 6 regiments worth of material expended... its called a decisive strike... what your plans cause is the failure to achieve anything, the expenditure of war material for no gain and leaving the construction facilities in enemy hands which allowed the liao state to exist... LMF boy... get good or get cleaning dishes..
@@janwitts2688 So spending massive amounts of functioning materiel to basically end up with what you had before the battle, minus a few thousand experienced troops, and no long-term gain because you conquered a ruin; it's a short term win for sure, since it deprives the Capellans of Tikonov, but part of why the 4th Succession War was so good for the Davions was that they finally took it intact, y'know?
Davion guard were caught loading onto dropships... so the kuritans jumped in at a pirate point? Minimum several hours at high G burn to planet... so we are supposed to believe that a guards division has no high guard mounted for its dropships onworld.. no asf patrols etc.. hilarious
No doubt, Tikonov will be the site of a historic peace accord that will bring an end to bloodshed in the Inner Sphere and usher in an era of cooperation and comity that will survive a thousand years!
I admire your continued optimism. Surely at some point things will play out as you say.
@@SvenVanDerPlank I share your hopes. I mean, this is the year 3025. If we've learned anything from recent history, such as the sudden and inexplicable appearance of the Wolf's Dragoon, we can only expect good things in our future.
Hahahahaha Never
@@NotThereJustGoneBlessed Blake, surely this is a sign of great things!
@@Deridus The more of this "Second Succession War" business I hear about, the more I wonder if the Great Houses are all that serious about peace. Still, what are the chances they'd repeat the same, prior mistakes?
Edit: I just realised that I had the Liao Lancers disabled on all the 2835-36 maps. Doesn't affect any of the battles in the video but I'll make sure that's corrected before I upload the compilation vid.
This marks the end of the first phase of the war. The next two chapters are dominated by the fallout between ComStar and the Free Worlds League. After that we get into the final phase of the war where things get much more political and there's less emphasis on launching as many offensive operations as quickly as possible.
In hindsight, I'm not sure why I included the First Battle of Tikonov at the end of the last chapter and not just have them all in this one. Wouldn't have made that much difference to runtime. Oh well.
You have a wonderful eye for detail.
Damn, General Greer was done dirty. Imagine this: you are a high ranking General, with many years if not decades of leadership within your nation. You have been tasked with a near impossible goal by your leader to take and hold the capital of an enemy nation, with not nearly enough resources or time to do so. Predictably, you fail, and are forced to withdraw before all your forces are wasted in a fool's errand. And your reward for preserving your forces to fight another day? Demoted to busboy at a restaurant.
Little details like this makes me love Battletech even more.
I agree. Battletech feels far more 'real' to me in the true sense than any other setting.
and it's another good point to show why the davions are full of it
Disagree. He had done the hard part and secured the major fortifications but when faced with an actual battle, he turned tail and fled.
Your mom was full of davion last night
You know what would be really cool? When you’ve finally finished all this history, doing a giant time lapse video showing the entire map and all the changes across the various conflicts. That would be a great high level overview to show the ebb and flow, offensives and stagnations, etc
I may do that, but I rebooted the maps
after the Reunification War so I'd probably have to start at the Star League Civil War.
And they all lived happily ever after
In perfect harmony.
Thank you so much for these lovely lectures. You are doing a wonderful service for all the battletech history fans!
Cheers, Harbinger.
Anytime Chopan is mentioned I think of the Tombstone scene with Doc Holliday " Frederick fucking Chopan"
Thanks for including maps with unit insignias while recounting the events. This is great content. Please keep up the good work!
Surely the creepy tech cult that's randomly decided to give me tons of intel couldn't have ulterior motives. Surely.
"Blood runs thicker than water" no longer applies once ComStar gets a hold of you.
Another excellent video Sven. Cant wait to see more. Thank you for these in depth videos on the succession wars.
You're welcome. Happy to hear you've been enjoying them.
Tikonov meatgrinder, let's go!
the longer this series goes on the higher my opinion of the capellans. they've got two of the most competent militaries in the setting attacking them and they still manage to hold out. really punching above their weight.
Welcome to the fold citizen
@@mathewkelly9968unfortunately impressive performance doesn't equal good pay.
it's just a plot armor for the broader story of this setting, you don't have to defend them
@@DenienNhonestly you could say that for practically any of the factions, the goal here is to make for an interesting story and good game scenarios. The capellan's story in the 1st and 2nd succession wars has been both of those for me, which is good enough.
love these videos! i have always been a big battle tech fan never played the table top but played all the video games and read the books religiously when i was younger but watching the time line play out in this fashion really shows how brutal this universe is!!!
Cheers. I'm in a similar boat. Never played the tabletop game but read many of the books and several video games too.
20:16
Seen that portrait heaps of times already, but I just realised that Jinjiro looks likeHugh Jackman
Another epic entry, thanks again Sven Van Der Plank!
Late night saturday dinner, playing battletech, eating and listening to this.
Love your work, getting a giggle of the game of what planets are in the wrong hands from circa 3025.
Well it's looking a lot more like 3025 now that the Terran Hegemony no longer exists.
Next time, Draconis Combine starts playing musical chairs, obsessions run high and the war continues
Every time I see that starry opening now, I can't help but think of that quote from Star Trek:DS9 -
*"Look out there, Quark. Millions and millions of stars. Millions upon millions of worlds. And right now, half of them are fanatically dedicated to destroying the other half. Now - do you think, if one of those twinkling little lights suddenly went out, anybody would notice?"*
That's a good quote.
@@SvenVanDerPlankThe guy saying it WAS an arms merchant. He'd be right at home in BT universe, especially during the Succession Wars.
I can't believe I missed this one! Well, great content. Even if I'm a bit late for this one
No worries, glad you enjoyed it.
Excellent work Sven!
You are the ultimate loremaster!
Nicely done Sven. On a side note the RUclips algorithm recommended a Renegade HPG vid (never heard of them until it popped up) and I really enjoyed the vid with you and Tex. Is there any future plan of you doing a BPL podcast like Tex did with Big Red ?
Glad you enjoyed the video. Was good fun getting to chat with those guys, though it bugs me no end that I forgot to set up my mic properly before hand recording which is why my audio quality was so trash in that podcast we did. Maybe me and Tex will end up doing something together again in the future. We'll see.
Great work, as always. Keep it up 👍🏻
It's really nice to see content based on this period in the setting. Far more stuff focuses on the 3rd Succession War (and beyond), which makes sense due to most books and video games being set during that time frame.
It's an oft overlooked era, but it all influences events further down the line. The 2ndSW is particularly interesting because it sees the metamorphosis of ComStar from communications company into the pseudo-religious fanatics we recognise today.
@@SvenVanDerPlank oh, for sure on both points.
Don't have anything to contribute,
Just here to help the algorithm
Keep it up!
And you rock for trying.
Whoof. When the Kuritans start making 'tough calls,' you know there's a Sven special coming down the line.
Not exactly. The Combine is going to see some changes in the next chapter, but the main focus is almost entirely on ComStar and the Free Worlds League.
@@SvenVanDerPlank Don't you threaten me with a good time!
awesome stuff man appreciate it
I cant thank you enough for this content
Lovin it
We are headed into the point in time where all living memory of the Star League will be gone.
I do make a note of that in a couple of chapters time. Very soon the only people who remember it will have been those born during the Star League Civil War and not the true Golden Age.
these get posted on the same day as the ww2 in real time series so I get battletech military history and real military history on the same day. It's great!
They complement each other like yin and yang.
Great work
Tikonov always was and always will be Capellan Land despite Davion and "Republic" claims
True... unfortunately for Tikonov.
Comstar working overtime, so far every engagement went like a wet fart for all parties involved.
It's about to come back to bite them in the next chapter.
Nice to see sunny Tikonov doing so well. 😊
The next AFFS operation on Tikonov would have been called Operation House Cat with the success they've had.
Good work
As bad a mess the first war was. The second so far is an even bigger mess. Damn you ComStar. And damn you Blake.
Going with Kerensky was the better option.
Percentage wise, more people died during the Pentagon War than did in the Succession Wars. Unless you are on one of the border planets during the 1stSW, the Inner Sphere was the safer place to be.
Really? Kerensky not even could complete the journey and his son was a fanatic, he created a rigid hierarchical system, worse than the inner sphere, all clans were in the same page for while, but Nicolas rigid and brutal leadership lead to conflict between the clans, and they began to fight between themselves, like the Nobles Houses of the Inner Circle, in the end, Kerensky dream and exodus was in vain.
All is proceeding in accordance with the Will of Blake. Surely his ultimate designs will be realised in the near future...
If his ultimate design was the wholesale murder of hundreds of top academics across every field of science leading to a mass technological regression and the indirect deaths of millions over the next two centuries due to lost medical understanding, then yes, it will soon be realised.
Blarg! I can't look... can we just skip to the 3150's already? 😜
As always, thank you Sven for this and I can't wait for the future installments (though take mental beaks when needed).
The CapCon doesn't have much to be proud of in the Second Succession War but you at least managed to hold onto Tikonov.
Zabu: "Maybe don't use nukes at the drop of a hat."
Kurita military: "Boooo! Lame! Kill him!"
The guy was no fun.
Stop teasing me 😂
My physics may be off, but the thumbnail/17:20 doesn't look right to me - if they've already zeroed their orbital velocity to be able to come down vertically then isn't still thrusting down at that low an altitude going to leave a really heavy g-load for braking when they're low in the atmosphere?
Classic case of artists not thinking about how space travel works. If they've been accelerating from the jumppoint then they would be traveling far too fast to slow down now. Perhaps they were in orbit and decided to descend. When you've got fusion engines and fuel is just water, deorbiting wastefully by burning straight down instead of opposite your direction of travel matters less.
Is it just me, or does the Draconis Combine have the ability to strike much deeper into its neighbors territory than the other houses? Do their jumpships go farther, do they do multiple jumps, or do other houses just choose closer targets?
Many of those random deep strikes were first mentioned in the earliest lore where there wasn't a good understanding of what was where. The more recent sourcebooks that go into much more detail follow more conventional assaults along border worlds. But when somebody randomly appears half way across the Inner Sphere, there's a good chance they're just repeating something from the 1980s.
im writing this comment before watching the video
i recently watched bigreds video on the warhamer iic. loved your appearences. do you have any plans to go that far in the timeline? i tried to find aterial post jihad to read as to why the map is so borked but its been difficult tracking down answers. i really like how you do these videos, it helps organise otherwise disconnected events. especially events in books written decades apart
I do indeed plan to cover that era. In fact, what you've described is the reason I started this whole series. There is a huge blind spot where the Jihad and Dark Ages take place that there is little material available for that I believe is preventing people from being able to pick up the modern ilClan setting because they've got a 80 year gap in their knowledge.
At the moment I'm just continuing my chronological telling of the history so it'll be a while until I get there. For suggestions, I may be wrong but I believe both Big Red and MechFrog are both covering later eras in their own content and HPG Blackout has their own summary I noticed. Because I've only gotten to 3057 in my own reading, I haven't watched anything pertaining to that era, so can't comment on specific videos.
Oh awesome!
I was going to stay either way, but now i will definitely keep watching. Its good to know im not just missing something incredibly obvious that everyone knows and thats why its not written down anywhere. I do follow big red and mechfrog as avidly as yourself, so i have picked up bits and pieces of the story but i could never tell if there was more yet.
Thanks for a great episode, and i hope you have an excellent day!
Best to drop 12 regiments of mech directly onto the fortifications and accept the 50 percent force reduction. Then clear out any pockets with regiments of heavy arty..
What and destroy one of the biggest industrial complexes in the Inner Sphere ? What would be the point of that "victory" ?
Industrial cornerstones like Tikonov are such bastions for the same reason Hespherus II is. Leveling it would defeat the entire purpose of invading it, it's way too valuable intact.
@mathewkelly9968
I would expect that 50 percent of the facilities would be salvageable that coupled with massive stockpiles of parts and the salvage of enemy war equipment would more than make up for the 6 regiments worth of material expended... its called a decisive strike... what your plans cause is the failure to achieve anything, the expenditure of war material for no gain and leaving the construction facilities in enemy hands which allowed the liao state to exist... LMF boy... get good or get cleaning dishes..
@Bomfunker91
Reply below...
@@janwitts2688 So spending massive amounts of functioning materiel to basically end up with what you had before the battle, minus a few thousand experienced troops, and no long-term gain because you conquered a ruin; it's a short term win for sure, since it deprives the Capellans of Tikonov, but part of why the 4th Succession War was so good for the Davions was that they finally took it intact, y'know?
I hope Traders Domain is still out there ....... Although i know its not
Gone by the end of the century :'(
Why you gotta tease us like this
Davion guard were caught loading onto dropships... so the kuritans jumped in at a pirate point? Minimum several hours at high G burn to planet... so we are supposed to believe that a guards division has no high guard mounted for its dropships onworld.. no asf patrols etc.. hilarious