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Trying to figure something out about converted characters/new special characters.
It says that their cost is equal to the Advancement Points spent on them. This has
lead to somethings I am not entirely sure on in the wording:

1) Advancement Points for their Mecha: Are you paying those points to be able to
upgrade that mecha with that pilot? Or are you paying those points for that
mecha, regardless of its normal point value? If it is for upgrade, do you pay
for every mecha the person can use, or just the best? For instance:
A pilot can be upgraded into a VF-1J,VF-1S, VF-1D, and Flight Lead YF-4.
Do you pay the Advancement points for all 4 mecha, or just the FL YF-4?

2) The role of these characters in general: Are these Special Options of their own?
or are they, like the pre-made special characters, upgrades? Or are these
units you pay for separately, without having to attach them to any squadron,
but also not counting as a core? If they are upgrades: why would even a level
1 character with just a VF-1J and NO BONUSES cost more then Ben Dixon? If they
are special option that come with their vehicle, though, why would a VF-1S or Flight
Lead YF-4 be CHEAPER then the unit if you were to buy it normally?

for 1) when you pay the advancement points for a custom character mech, you arent paying for what they can "pilot" you are actually buying that mech for your army, it gets added to a core force card instead of replacing an existing mecha. so in essence you just pay the cost of whatever mech you choose to have him/her pilot.

2) created characters are special force cards, as mentioned above, they are added to a unit.

the reason a blank character in just a vf1j costs more then ben dixon is ben being a premade character "replaces" the pilot of an already existing mech, so your just paying for the ability of his. a created character has to with his own mech so you are paying the cost for that mech to be added into your army.

the point costs for created characters are wonky at best. all the Pre made characters (the ones who cant be used in malcontents) are heavily point discounted when compared to equivalent options in the character creation. hell look at miriya for the zentradi faction (+2 leadership 35 points, re-roll all strike rolls 35pts, her cost? 10pts)

the character creation rules seem to be written in such a way as to be terrible to even consider being used in a game outside of a pure RPG scenario, which is highly disappointing since i would have loved to be able to make up the aces from Battlecry (video game) without then just being a carbon copy of existing characters and just being "renamed" since there is some content about having multiple of the same character in your army

hope my ramblings helped out in any way.

OK, so, Warmaster, if I follow you correctly: You could take a 30 AP special pilot, throw
give him a VF-1S, and then throw all the bonuses on him you like..and he would be better
then buying a VF-1S add-on...is that a correct understanding?

to my understanding yes, if you just stick to the 5 point upgrades the created characters seem to work just fine.

so for your example making a 30ap charater in a vf-1s would cost 15ap, so that would leave you a total of 15 ap you could spend on upgrades. the pilot would be stronger then a standard vs-1s pilot, but better comes per point of view.

i dont have my force cards with me right now so i don't know what the cost of a vs-1s add on is to a normal valkyrie unit, but im going to assume its less then 30 points, so you have to weight the advantages of a stronger pilot vs having those extra points you spent used somewhere else in the army.

VF-1S is 30 points. That is the reason for my confusion at these. It seems like the cost for a Mecha for a
home-made special is half the cost of the vehicle.

I am going to expect that in tournament play, home-made specials are going to be banned, since they seem
rather abusable in a competitive environment. I mean, if you had the choice of a VF-1S for 30 points, or
a VF-1S with +1 Defense, +1 Pilot, and +1 Gun for 30 points...which are you going to take? In tourney play,
people will be building for maximum efficiency of points, not for fluff or story.

I believe the intent here was to allow people to convert their RPG character into a campaign style game and to be able to replace the RPG style combat with Tactics. I agree that this should not be allowed in tournament play as it would be abused. In the RPG these conversions would be at the GMs approval. They would also make Player Mecha much more powerful, which would even things out a bit, because Tactics can be very harsh to a player character. Even Kevin agreed on that point. In the RPG your player character is the star of the show...In Tactics, they are just another unit on the battlefield.

The create your own character portion of the rules exists in the back with all the Campaign and RPG conversion stuff. I would say clearly intended NOT to be used in tournaments or even standalone games. However I could see it playing well into a campaign (non RPG) creating fun mission types or objective possibilities.

I need to get the old robotech rpg book

I read to mane that the process of creating characters used APs and that APs and the points from a units Point Cost are not the same. It seems to me that APs are something from the RPG and not from the TT. I came to that understanding when I saw that there was no suggested points AP for characters or how many Points a character would cost of the TT. I tried to "reverse engineer" the special characters in the rulebook and discover how many APs Roy Fokker was worth and it's impossible because he has abilities that do not exist in the conversion section. Additionally the sections heading read is "converting RPG characters" so it must require the RPG to utilize the rules provided to begin with.

I'm disappointed that there isn't a simple character builder based around the values given for those that already exist (Rick, Roy, etc). Clearly there's at least some vague idea of what those abilities should cost a player, there'd have to be in order to have assigned points values to them (unless they 'just winged it', which would not be heartening).

I won't be playing 'the rpg with tactics', so the character conversion rules, where a single mid level pilot might cost more than an entire VT squad isn't helpful to me, unless it's proportionally powerful for that cost (from my reading, that doesn't seem to be the case). I wanted to be able to design a low level pilot for 5 or 10 points and upgrade/enhance them/level them up over the course of games/campaigns as I saw fit (and not this 'roll d6x10 exp, subtract half, add for kills, etc, etc' that's in the book).

Also, where does it say that the points spent on being allowed to pilot a craft means they get the craft for free? Far as I know that's entirely the opposite of how special pilots are used in RRT: you pay for the craft, and then can pay points to put a pilot in them. It'd help reduce some of that excessive cost, but it's still a pretty significant disparity in character designs.

Agreed the pilot is an added element to a mecha already existing and paid for in your army construction.

I a confused by some of this here. I am in a tournament and must have a character as "overall commander of my force". I am looking at the Zentraedi and wonder why a Regult battlepod is equal to VF-1A.
In general when I was comparing this to the cards it seemed the cost are in favor of the UEDF but looked at the other side more.
The Glaug cost 20 AP as a special it cost 20 so your just paying for the extra ability.

In my case allowed only a one minor ability so 5 AP more.

Why can a female Zentraedi pilot a Glaug officer's pod? Azonia can!

Does the Recovery pod ability also work on a character in a different mecha they get the reinforcement ability.

What ability to Malcontent characters get.

I am of the opinion that the opposite is the problem. Let's face it, it's virtually unheard of for a Valk or Destroid pilot to have a PP of less than 16 which means that you start with a base P/G of 3. Let's say you've got a lv. 2 Destroid pilot, so 30 points to spend. Drop then in a Phalanx for 10, purchase +2 Gun for 10, +1 Def for 5 and Reroll one Strike roll for 5 and you've got an artillery platform that nail a Glaug or Monster 97.23% of the time and is as hard to hit as a Spartan.

-MaxGravity