What is Classic BattleTech?
Classic BattleTech (or BattleTech for short) is a game designed to simulate warfare between BattleMechs, combat vehicles (tanks, helicopters, et cetera) and infantry units on a wide variety of terrain. Introduced by FASA Corporation in the early 1980's under the name "BattleDroids," the game centered on five vast interstellar nations each vying for dominion over one another in the year 3025. These nations were the shattered remains of a long-dead interstellar alliance known as the Star League. The Star League, founded in 2571 with the signing of the Treaty of Vega, had existed for almost two hundred years before internal pressures and civil wars sundered the alliance. Following the collapse of the Star League, the commanding general of the Star League Defense Force (SLDF) Aleksandr Kerensky, took over eighty percent of the surviving military personnel, their dependants and equipment on an exodus from known space. He knew that the Star League's surviving member-states would use the military might of the SLDF for conquest and personal gain, rather than to protect the people whom they had sworn their lives to defend.

For almost three hundred years since, the nations that once banded together in the cause of peace and prosperity fought against one another in a series of catastrophic conflicts known to historians simply as the Succession Wars. These interstellar wars witnessed the indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons in conjunction with chemical and biological agents on thousands of worlds across human-occupied space, while space-faring WarShip fleets used orbital bombardment to raze vital industrial complexes and economic centers, claiming untold billions of human lives. The seemingly unending series of wars brought uneasy political alliances of convenience and cost humanity several precious, irreplaceable technologies. Constantly maneuvering for position, the leaders of these five warring nations assumed the greatest enemy they would ever face was each other.

They were wrong.

The Return
In the year 3049, an unknown military force appeared on the outer fringes of human-occupied space. Sweeping the region's defenders aside with little difficulty, these unknown invaders conquered world after world in a devastatingly effective blitzkrieg that spanned a front of over seven hundred light-years. At first, these unidentified invaders appeared to be from an alien civilization hell-bent on exterminating the entire human race. It did not take long, however, to realize that the invaders were not an alien army on the move, but instead the descendants of the long-vanished Star League Defense Force. Calling themselves the Clans, they declared their intention of seizing Terra (Earth) and re-forming the Star League in their own image. Wave after wave of Clan assaults continued unabated, executed with blinding speed and ruthless efficiency. Within a span of a few months, the Clan invaders controlled over a hundred worlds. Faced with a common enemy, the nations that had spent the past three centuries fighting each other united against the threat, establishing a new Star League in 3058. Victorious in 3060, the Star League halted the Clan invasion and a new era of peace seemed to loom over the horizon. But the precarious unity they forged in the face of the Clan threat is evaporating quickly as the Successor States seek any excuse to re-open old conflicts. From border skirmishes to punitive raids to civil war, the conflicts of the Inner Sphere seem destined never to end. And the Clans, born and bred as warriors, will not suffer peace lightly.

This is but the eye of the storm.

Originally written by Dan "Albatross" Schulz for The Clan Wolf Archives

More information is found in the Brief History of the BattleTech Universe which deals with a short history lesson and What is BattleTech which deals with the most important technology found in the Battletech Universe.

Other sources you should visit are first and foremost the Main Classic Battletech Universe Website. There you will find all that you need in order to get introduced to Battletech.