Battletech Alpha Strike

Had a fun game of Alpha Strike over the weekend, courtesy of a friend who supplied all the mechs you see below. There's always a challenge balancing detail of representation with speed and ease of play. In my mind, Starfleet Battles is the epitome of the detail oriented, rules heavy games of the 80s that took tedious hours to set up, and where the ability to process paperwork was a key skill. Battletech was similar, and both of these games with heritage and lineage going back to that era have also modernised by coming up with simpler and faster rules - Federation Commander for SFB, and Alpha Strike for Battletech.

The question is where on the spectrum between complexity and playability a game should pitch itself to achieve that goldilocks state of fun, fast, and also meaningful. Ideally, a game that was complex would also be more accurate in its simulation of real-life (though "real-life" in both these cases is a fictional world, that nonetheless has consisted rules), offer more nuance in its mechanisms and effects, and give players a more meaningful experience in terms of rewarding good play and punishing bad play. At the other end of the spectrum, a more playable game would emphasise simpler mechanisms, faster gameplay, and ideally more fun and fast action. I say "ideally" because complex doesn't always mean less fun - there is sometimes a certain fun to be gained from navigating and mastering complex systems - and fast doesn't always mean trivial and meaningless. And we can all think of rule systems that were
complex, but tedious, boring, and somehow still arbitrary despite the level of complexity in simulation.

All this to get to the point that Alpha Strike seems to me to err on the side of too simple. Part of the fun of a game like Battletech is the interactions between unique weapons systems, and the optimisation of Mechs in choosing different load outs or variants. In Alpha Strike all the weapons are abstracted into a single attack at three ranges, and that means a lot of the colour and fun has gone. The game is no doubt simpler and easier to play, so what you lose on the complexity you gain on the scale - more games can be played in an afternoon, and more mechs can be controlled by a player.