2705

I was just a little overpowered with my mech team and I found it all pretty much worked out. A lot of the intermediate story missions can just be overwhelmed by grinding a little up front and coming up with a better set of mechs and a few more levels of warrior skills.

2706

You explained it far better than I did.

edit: there’s something I don’t get…

I snuck a mech up behind the hill on the right, sensor locked on of the central turrets, combat starts, and the turret is no longer sensor locked…?

2707

Did a turn process? Sensor lock is lost at the end of a turn.

2708

This. Sensor locking when you’re out of combat instantly starts combat and ends the “turn” you were just on, killing the sensor lock.

The value behind sensor locking out of combat is to initiate long range combat, and you can then apply it again. I suggest putting your sensor lock Mechwarrior in one of your higher-initiative mechs, so nobody needs to hit reserve to take advantage of the lock (side note; if you’re locking a mech who is toward the faster side, waiting until after the mech moves may actually be to your benefit because the pips taken off get replenished by its next move).

2710

I got my fancy Highlander up on ridge by the convoy spawn spot and just lit them up when they spawned. It has the JJs. The main thing for me on the story missions has been taking some extra time to try and optimize my positioning before I break LoS and start the mission/timer. Gets more important later.

2711

yeah that was my thinking.

Doing quite well this run through, except the enemy Griffin, who has almost 0 armour or health, just meleed my Centurion mech, who has loads of armour and health, and somehow hit the head…

This isn’t the first time it’s happened either.

Memory is obviously fallible but I’ve had pilots incapacitated from head shots or head hits about 10 times now, and managed to get it in my favour about once…

begs the obvious question of whether or not there’s some magic rng going on…

EDIT: if this means the pilot - Behemoth - is dead, I will be very pissed off!..edit…she’s dead, very very dead.

2712

I’ve definitely delivered more pilot hits than I’ve taken, by a huge margin. Melee on head is obviously seriously bad luck. If you go with a missile heavy approach pilot injuries are a pretty common thing. You get a ton more chances to ping the head and then a guaranteed injury when they get knocked down. One head ping with a missile and two knockdowns is probably the most common way that I take down mechs, other than a CT blowout.

2713

So, I got my Highlander and it’s pretty cool, but besides the extra 5 tons of space for weapons (I assume because it has an endosteel internal structure) and Gauss gun, is there anything else specially about it? I ask, because I’m thinking of stripe it’s double heat sinks, and giving it to my Black Knight, and then putting an AC 5 to go along with the Gauss Gun.

2714

I think that’s it. I thought the panic (“Ah! They have SLDF mechs!”) from the Taurian (sp?) forces was over-the-top, given the in-game nature of those mechs. They’re a little better, not crazy better.

2715

Yeah, I was a little disappointed too.

Now, you can make a pretty kick ass mech with SLDF tech though. If any of those mechs had XL Engines and Double Heat Sinks built into the engine, that gives you a lot of space for kick ass weapons. It also makes Lasers and PPCs much better.

I think half the reason to hate Clan tech isn’t the weapons, but that they all have Double Heat Sinks, Endosteel and XL Engines. With that kind of weight savings, even Innersphere Mechs can be kick ass.

I wish the game designers had given us an awesome Heavy or Medium Mech instead of an Assault Mech. An Awesome Medium Mech would have given us some interesting choices in the late game, when you have to decide between a fast and awesome medium mech, or a standard Assault Mech, which is more powerful overall but probably slower and has fewer tactically choices.

2716

I disagree. They are significantly better. The Highlander can constantly perform an alpha strike with almost no heat gain. When using precision, it can blow through the torso of anything short of an assault mech in just one turn (and even the occasional assault). The Gauss rifle is a boom, headshot, game-over weapon that can strike from LRM range. I took down a 100 ton King Crab that way from max range in one battle.

The Atlas is a mech to be greatly feared anyway and with the double heat sinks the amount of damage it can output per turn is enormous. You can not quite alpha strike with it given the heat output but it is the equivalent of 2 normal assault mechs. Of course I stripped out the ER LLs and replaced one of them with jump jets because DFA with a 100 ton mech is just pure bliss.

So in the Battletech universe, where normal mechs are usually ill-repaired and held together by spit and string, seeing an undamaged shiny SLDF mech that has tech far beyond yours is something of a pucker moment. That is one of the reason Wolf’s Dragoons quickly became the most feared merc unit in the Inner Sphere. New mechs with better tech and better pilots is the kind of thing that even House Kurita could not deal with.

2717

Interesting point. I think that would have worked only if they varied some of the later game missions to incorporate the increased movement capable of a medium or light-heavy mech.

Still, getting an Exterminator would have been an awesome reward. For those who do not know, an EXT-4D is a 65 ton mech that goes 6/9/6 with the XL engine, carries a LRM 10 and 4 medium lasers with anti-missile tech on it. For comparison sake the very maneuverable Wolverine is a 5/8/5 and weighs 10 tons less. Just give me the ability to swap the weapons load on it and that would be a fun toy to play with in later missions because it can quite literally run circles around an assault mech (most are 3/5/0 or 3/5/3).

2718

Well the upside of that mission where behemoth died is that I got another Dragon.

I now have 4 of the things, an orion, a ShadowHawk (for long range stuff) and a firestarter, becaue I like them.

I am thinking though that the 4 mech limit feels more and more arbitrary (yes, everything in a designed product, e.g. a computer game, is arbitrary yeah yeah) and i would rather they’d have used tonnage as your limiter, because that way you might actually try running 4 light mechs, e.g. 4 firetsarters, with a couple of heavier mechs.

Man that’s be quite the fun, jump jetting Firestarters everywhere and heating mechs up, then smashing into them with a heavy mech.

Also, is it just me or ought there to be a Mech named Goliath?

Not just because Goliath was historically big, but also because of Starcraft!

So, I finally figured out you could travel random places, and I am now, quite literally, milking low skull missions. I’m settling into a very nice groove now, with just over 3m in the bank.

Going full salvage has netted me 3 mechs in 2 missions. One of them was a griffin, didn’t seem all that special to me. Thoughts?

Also, rough edges around the game, like a mission briefing talking about a super heavy mech…which turns out to be a Vehicle.

Or dropships picking up escaping convoy trucks as if by magic.

And battlemaps seem to be a bit on the small side. OTOH, if they were larger maybe long range stuff would be even more powerful.

Lastly, lasers? Good for???

2719

Keep in mind that the Shadow Hawk deals bonus melee damage.

2720

The total damage output, per turn, of the stock Highlander is low for a 90-ton mech. That’s partly why it doesn’t gain much heat. I’d say it’s heat profile is overkill, as I think it’s more efficient to run hotter.

I don’t find the gauss rifle to be crazy better than a good PPC++. The gauss is 17 tons, with ammo, 75 damage/40 stab/5 heat. A PPC is less than half that weight at 7 tons and can have 50-60 damage/20-50 stab/40 heat, some accuracy reduction on the target, and has a little bit less range. Those 10 extra tons buys a lot of heatsinks. The gauss is better, mostly because tonnage is a lesser constraint in assault mechs, but not crazy better.

When I say a little better, I’d put the Highlander at 10%-20% better than an equivalent 90T mech that you could put together in the game with the non-SLDF tech. Definitely better, but not what I would call crazy better. Personally, I think that’s a good thing, for balance reasons. I just think it fell short of the “oh crap!” that they elicited. Now, facing an assault lance from your scout mech, SLDF or not, is an oh crap moment.

Finally, I recognize that the fiction has most mechs running around in bad shape, but I was comparing in-game stats for SLDF vs. non-SLDF top of the line mechs.

2721

Same.

2722

I’m not following why you prefer low skull missions. Maybe it’s because of the fact that I upgraded the hell out my Argo, but my monthly costs are HIGH. Because of that, I prefer big payout missions and minimizing planetary travel. So I’m doing the opposite of you—I hit the highest skull missions, other than the dreaded convoy ones. Am I missing something?

Medium lasers are pretty good, though admittedly, I prefer SRMs for the short range role, because of the STAB damage. I usually max out my SRM slots with SRM6s and then fill out my short range brawlers with the MLs.

2723

I am a little confused too. Selling off extra mechs as you complete them should make it pretty easy to stay cash flush. I wouldn’t worry about having a large cash reserve and generally optimize for salvage.

2724

I assume the low-skull-milkers are early in the game and can’t do high-skull missions yet. Because yeah, the rewards from high-skull missions mean much higher efficiency in grinding, for cash income, XP, as well as mech upgrades and parts.

2725

I usually do all the missions on a particular planet and just head off the the next mission that will pay my bills, although almost all my missions so far have been for the Resistance Movement (or whatever that is called).