Oh fuck yeah I remember that version of Battletech. Isn't it legit older than you? FASA banked heavily on goodwill with that system; when I played with my friends it was a good-faith effort to emulate the world. The one time I played with a different crew they all decided "hey let's wipe out kleinbl00 first and then sort it out" and I pointed out that heat penalties were assessed the next turn. They'd focus their fire on one of my mechs and kill it; I'd use that mech's lasers over and over and over again until everything within range was a slag pile. It didn't matter that the next turn my mech exploded because it was already dead. To the best of my knowledge that was the last time that group of friends every played Battletech. Needless to say the orbital assault failed.

The problem with modern games is the barriers to publishing are lower and the modern nerd cares much more about collecting than playing. Used to be "games" were this closetpile of neglected bullshit between the coats and the hats. Now they cover an entire wall of the "man cave" like your virgin uncle's vinyl collection. None of them are well-thought-out, none of them underwent any real beta-testing, and none of them are going to make it to V2.0 because the audience did exactly what it was supposed to: paid for it on Kickstarter, got their copy, put 5,000 copies in your local game store (holy shit what a concept! When I grew up there were two in the continental USA) and every single nerd will play it once just to say they did.

Used to be there were two ways to do things: Combined Arms or Candy Land and never the twain shall meet. But the Candy Land Crew saw all the farkle the legit wargamers got to play with and went "you know what game should be more complicated? Risk" and from that point forth, actually finishing a game became less and less essential to just hanging out in the rumpus room and pretending you were serious people as opposed to those losers who actually went on dates on weekends.