Editing BattleTech (section)

===Meanwhile, In The Inner Sphere===
...Of course, when the Clans returned to the Inner Sphere with the intent of liberating it from the feuding Great Houses, those same great houses <s>said "okay" and handed over the reins</s> put aside their differences and fought the Clans to a stand-still.  This was an incredible show of camaraderie, and the most cooperative the houses had been since the Star League fell.  It was all quite touching, really.

Okay, not really.  The Clan invasion was getting bogged down and while they were making progress towards Terra it seemed like the new normal would be just constant unending war because they couldn't manage to put any of the successors away for good.  The problem the Clans had was that their society had ritualized combat to the point where they expected the enemy to just fight them head on, all the time, always.  Even the Lyrans weren't thick enough to play down to this standard (usually), meaning the unstoppable clan juggernaut kept getting stopped by dishonorable, cowardly tactics like flanking, backfield raids, and straight up running away from fights you can't win.

ComStar, the self-serving treacherous pricks that they are, decided that something needed to be done and so made the Clans a bet.  The deal was, come to Tukayyid and fight our best in one big PROVE YOUR WORTH honorduel smackup.  If the Clans won, ComStar would stab all the successors in the back, disconnect their HPG access and throw the doors to Terra wide open.  If ComStar won, the Clans would agree to a fifteen year armistice.  

The Clans, being honourable glory-seeking meatheads, agreed and converged on Tukayyid, dividing up objectives between Clans thinking that this was the beginning of the glorious endgame.  All the while blissfully unaware that ComStar are every bit the cheating bastards you'd expect of an ISP in space with their own army.  The Battle of Tukayyid wasn't a complete shutout for the Clans but it definitely illustrated that while the Clanners were good at winning '''fights''', they still had a real problem winning '''wars''' ''(where the enemy can go anywhere and do anything)''.  In most of the engagements the Com Guard pounded the Clanners like discount tenderloin and because of their stubborn honourable ways the Clanners were obliged to abide by the cease fire by the logic of no-takey-backsies.  

And then once the Clans were wrapped up behind a truce line it was time to get back to good-old inter-house wars.  In an ultra-brief summary: There was the FedCom Civil War, kicking off the <s>Fifth Succession War</s> Word of Blake Jihad, the religious fanatic (well, moreso than usual) faction of ComStar went crazy over the entire Inner Sphere with cyborgs and nukes, until some dude named Devlin Stone got everyone to work together and kick them off Terra, then went on to form the Republic of the Sphere, essentially a re-establishment of the Terran Hegemony. In the meantime, the Clans got a bug up their asses over ideological purity after their Scientist Castes tried to take over, and all the Clans who invaded the Inner Sphere got kicked out of Clan Space to live there instead. Eventually someone forgot to pay the phone bill and the interstellar faster-than-light communication network went down. This ushered in the last era in the fluff known as the "Dark Age."

This is also considered the second ruination of the franchise by some.  Many long-time fans think highly of the Succession Wars era of Battletech, right after the fall of the Star League.  Marching around the field with walking tanks so expensive and rare that it's better to lose a pilot than a weapon is a powerful fantasy.  It's often described as being "Mad Max with mechs."  Of course, the blasted hellscape of the post-apocalypse is hard to maintain when the Clans invaded with their own brand-new shiny toys. The shift from "squabbling tribes with rusty guns" to "courageous defenders with shiny factories" is often considered the first ruination of the property ''(while a vocal minority, ie the clannerscum, hold it up as the only reason they got into it)''.  When the squabbling of the Inner Sphere was broken up again by quasi-religious zealots and BattleTech was forced to stitch in apocrypha from its bastard child, the miniature game MechWarrior: Dark Age, people considered it the second collapse of the franchise.