Highlander

Why it earns its tonnage

Ninety tons at walk three is slow, and on most assault machines that is the compromise you accept for armour and guns. On a Highlander it is not the compromise at all, because the thing does not need to walk anywhere. It jumps ninety metres. Over the building, onto the roof, across the river, into the flank you were not watching.

That is what makes it different from every other assault we have covered. An Atlas has to arrive. A Highlander turns up.

The weapons are laid out for a ranged fight that it expects to end up close. The M-7 Gauss rifle is the centrepiece and it is a genuinely nasty thing, stripping a ton of plate at a time with no heat worth mentioning. The Holly-20 covers the approach. Two Harmon mediums and a Holly six-rack are waiting for whatever survives to close.

Twelve single heat sinks looks light for ninety tons until you notice what it is carrying. A Gauss rifle and a missile rack barely register on the heat scale. The old readouts say it can keep up a nearly continuous barrage without taxing the sinks, and they are right, with the caveat every pilot learns eventually: that changes the moment you start jumping. Jets make heat, and a Highlander that has been using them is a Highlander with less margin than the brochure promised.

Five centuries, and it nearly did not make it

Within a few decades of 2592 nearly every BattleMech regiment in the Regular and Royal armies had them. Then the Star League fell and the Highlander very nearly went with it.

StarCorps' plant on Son Hoa was wrecked towards the end of the Second Succession War and the original HGN-732 became virtually extinct. What kept the name alive was an arrangement between StarCorps and Hollis to rebuild wrecked chassis from scratch using whatever technology was still available, which is how the HGN-733 came about: a Highlander with an autocannon where the Gauss rifle should be, because there were no more Gauss rifles.

Production did not properly restart until the mid-3030s, on Son Hoa and Corey, and even then they were managing barely a dozen a year. A dozen. For the entire Inner Sphere. The Capellans and the Lyrans got most of those and tended to put them in lances alongside Exterminators, Victors, Grasshoppers and Catapults.

Meanwhile ComStar had been sitting quietly on a large stock of Star League Highlanders that nobody knew about. They handed some to the Draconis Combine during the War of 3039, and the sudden appearance of all those supposedly rare 733s, plus a few genuine 732s whose technology got past ComStar's own screening, did serious damage to Lyran morale. Finding out the enemy has a museum piece is one thing. Finding out they have a dozen of them is another.

The Northwind Highlanders were the exception to all of it. Through the Succession Wars they and ComStar were the only forces keeping large numbers of the machine running, and they have a reputation for the Burial that the rest of us are still hearing about.

By 3057 Son Hoa was at full production again, turning out original-spec Highlanders for Lyran units just in time for the FedCom Civil War. And one last detail I enjoy more than I should: some of the leftover chassis got repurposed into a firefighting mech called the St. Florian. Ninety tons of siege machine, retired into putting out fires.

How these are rated

Every verdict below is against other Highlanders available in the same era, not against the rest of the game. Worth saying up front that no Highlander variant fails the Trap test, which is the first chassis on this site where that is true.

Only the Trap tier is calculated. It is worked out from the variant data rather than decided by me, which means it is falsifiable: to argue with it you only have to name something the cheaper machine gives up. The other three are my opinion and you should treat them that way. 0 of the 13 Highlander variants fail the Trap test. The full rating scale is here, including what it deliberately does not measure.

The variants worth arguing about

All 13 are in the table further down. These are the ones that change how the machine plays.

On the table

Piloting one. Stop thinking about the walk speed. Three is irrelevant when you can put yourself ninety metres away in any direction, including up. Use the jets for position, not for escape: a Highlander that lands behind a firing line has just ruined somebody's afternoon. And yes, the Burial works, and the legs are built for it, but do the arithmetic first. Death from above hurts you too, and at ninety tons a failed attempt puts you on the ground in front of everybody.

Fighting one. The awkward thing is that it does not have to come to you and it does not have to stay away. Deny it landing ground if you can. Water and rough terrain are your friends. If it commits to a Burial and misses, that is your window, because a fallen assault mech is a stationary assault mech for a turn. Against the HGN-694, the one without jets, you can play it like any other slow assault, which is exactly why giving up the jets was a mistake.

What I see go wrong. People save the jump jets for emergencies. That is backwards. The jets are the weapon system; the Gauss rifle is just what it carries. And people attempt the Burial on targets that are not worth it, which is how a two thousand Battle Value machine ends up prone next to a dead Locust.

Against OpFor Command

If you run solo games with our AI opponent, the Highlander splits almost down the middle between two role tags, and they play very differently.

• 6 variants are tagged Sniper, including the HGN-732 itself. Long range weighting, negative aggression, and it will use the jets to hold a good firing position rather than to close.
• 7 are Juggernauts, including the HGN-733, HGN-734 and HGN-738. Short range weighting and the strongest aggression modifier in the engine. Those will come at you, and they can jump.

An enemy Juggernaut Highlander is one of the more uncomfortable things the engine can field, because the usual answer to an aggressive assault mech is to stay away from it and that does not work here.

All 13 variants

Damage figures are the Alpha Strike short, medium and long values. BV is Battle Value 2.0.

Where and when you can field it

Availability for the HGN-732 by era, straight off the Master Unit List. The gaps are the story: this is a machine that spent centuries being rare.

The rest of the Highlander family

Other machines that do the same job

Take it to the table

Common questions

Stats on this page are generated directly from our variant database, which is reconciled against the Master Unit List for Battle Value, introduction dates and per-era faction availability. Alpha Strike damage values are the standard card figures. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.