I've been making an effort on my current BTA playthrough to minimize reliance on assault-class mechs (the big dudes). Normally I'm very much a Steiner Scout Lance sort of person. On this run I'm basically sticking to max one assault mech, under 90 tons. (This isn't, like, a challenge in the sense of difficulty, it's just a fun constraint to make myself try different builds.)
BTA currently allows "artillery canons" which are sawed-off, direct-fire versions of artillery, of which the largest is the long tom. It does 90 damage +/- 50 and has the same range as an AC/5, which is pretty far. In addition to damage being a dice roll, artillery is also subject to scatter and massive recoil, although the recoil is mostly offset by the again non-canon chassis quirk on the Helepolis. (Basically a hardwired stabilization gyro.)
Default ammo is AOE, but there's also a "shaped charge" ammo type with no AOE effect but a 150% damage bonus, which I assume is the most damage it's possible for a single weapon to deal in one attack in BTA. And the Helepolis still has room for a bunch of M lasers that it can fire...occasionally, without overheating.
With good pilot stats and the (again, non-canonical) artillery FCS, it has okay accuracy (anecdotally, similar to an LB20X firing slugs?) and it can really just churn out Atlas headshots. (Although as a turnkey solution for demolishing mechs, it's still not peak performance)
