#BATTLETECH TACTICAL OPERATIONS MANUAL#
In regards to required rulebooks, Total Warfare (mixed military) or Battlemech Manual (mech vs mech) covers the majority of players' needs. Unfortunately for myself, I don't think I'm capable of "TLDR". If you play a lot in those eras, then, the Advanced Units and Equipment half of TacOps may prove useful. Like with the Advanced Rules, the Advanced Units and Equipment are mostly too rare or too involved for regular play, but a lot of it also show up in Jihad-or-later units. and also some variant number-tweaking rules like Fractional Accounting (so you can shove in a couple extra points of armor) or Patchwork Armor (so you can protect your head with Hardened Armor while using the lighter Ferro-Fibrous for the limbs, etc.). The Advanced Units and Equipment in Tactical Operations include construction rules for railway vehicles, satellites, large naval vessels (naval as in actual-water, not "black-water," as the space-going WarShips are in Strategic Operations), mobile structures, artillery, unusual/experimental BattleMech weapons, more types of alternate ammunition, more types of armor, supersized engines (a 500 XL engine weighs more than two Atlases), extra extra light engines, torso-mounted cockpits, etc. The Advanced Rules in Tactical Operations cover things like "how to play in a blizzard-tornado during an earthquake," "when to turn a dying 'Mech into a deadly fireball," "how to build a Star League-era super-fortress," or other general expanded rules for gameplay, most of which either are rare enough not to feature in the main rulebook or typically bog the game down too much for usual play. Total Warfare has all you need to play normal-level combined-arms games, and the Tech Manual covers the creation process for most custom TW-level units (including not just BattleMechs, tanks, and infantry, but also things like Aerospace Fighters, DropShips, and even non-combat IndustrialMechs).