rpg

Lancer is great. It is complicated, not as complicated as battletech though. Which to me is great for getting new players in.

The best way I've found to teach people in that system is to create a new character in their character sheet/compendium website, comp/con. And then have a GM to run the game and help with concepts. License Level 0 (starting level) is very restrained. The next level (LL1) opens up interesting opportunities. And then LL 2 is where your options become a bit opportunity heavy.

The official discord is active and there are several other side discords that are active. I'm currently both playing and GMing. There is a reprint of their physical book coming out next year.

As for the lore, there are 4 manufacturers. The post office, anime, luxury cars, and cthulhu mechs.

With the online tools it's free for players, GM pays for background information and npc stats. There are foundry and roll 20 that can run this for online play.

Combat is fundamentally an easy concept. D20 to see if you hit and D6's for damage. Although if you have 5 players you can easily spend a session on just one combat, which from what you said is a downside.

I've only played Lancer, it's very much d&d with mechs: you customise your equipment, roll d20s, and have tactical combat on a grid. Great fun, but not everyone wants combat to be the main focus. Also the stats aren't that complex, simpler than d&d!

I've not played the others, but in my experience FitD has good mechanics but isn't all about combat and you won't be rolling dice all night, and PbtA is a very freeform narrative game where you occasionally roll a die. Probably best choose based on what sort of game you and your table are looking for before you get into settings and rules!

I haven't played any of these but in terms of prominence of online mentions they go Lancer > Beam Saber > everything else in my experience

Personally, I love Mekton Z. It shares a lot of mechanics with old school cyberpunk if you ever played that, and has an awesome and expansive system for building an entirely custom mecha. I still use it with a ton of homebrew conversion rules for my World of Darkness campaign (why are Mecha in my WoD game? Don't ask, it's complicated.) It's got a lot of the same intricate style and flare as cyberpunk 2020 and it's chrome books, so if you're into that, highly recommended.

MechWarrior: Destiny

BattleTech is originally a tabletop game, but MW: Destiny is their latest PRG ruleset and is designed to play like a narrative driven game like FATE system. No need for maps, minis, or anthing like that. The rules can also be blended with the various systems, Classic BattleTech tabletop, AlphaStike quick miniatures rules, and the various other MechWarrior RPG editions, to find a balance you & your players are looking for.

More importantly, the BattleTech universe has decades of lore development with hundreds of sourcebooks and novels spanning many, many, many different major eras of the universe.

One of the genius things the original authors did was write in many different mysteries into the lore. Many of those have been answered over the years of development, but some still remain and if you're players are not familiar with the universe, you can just utilize any of them as the center of a campaign.

And of course it has Giant Stompy Robots.

Off the top of my head I'd think a campaign where your players are MechJocks/Mercenaries for an Interstellar Expeditions team trying to track down the origins of the Minnesota Tribe in the deep Periphery would a good possibility.

The game also has ties art-wise back to the Macross/Robotech transformable Valkyries. They literally exist in BattleTech as the Phoenix Hawk, Wasp, & Stinger Land-Air-Mechs. They're not popular in universe, and generally poor units for tabletop, but there's nothing really holding them back in the MW: Destiny rules and I could see the flexibility they offer would make sense for an Interstellar Expeditions team.