2726

One thing to note is that different areas will have different mech types more commonly. I haven’t looked to close into this because I didn’t want to spoil anything. But if you’re loading up on Dragons you might want to roll to another area.

2727

I need to find the area where the Catapult CPLT-C1 are then.

I only ever find the K2 variant.

2728

The Griffin (particularly the 1N) is great in TT because it is fast enough and has JJ’s so it can’t stay at range a lot and chip at other mechs. It is not as advantageous in this game although I imagine you could make it work if you wanted to.

2729

Low skull ops mean easy ops, mean little damage to my mechs (repairs are…expensive) and give pretty similar XP if I’m not wrong.

Going for full salvage and being the superior force on a low skull mission means I can usually get the salvage easily.

Having 3 heavy mechs at close range blow off the legs of a downed mech means more salvage means more cash.

Last mission netted me very little cash but got me 2 mechs which I sold for 800,000.

My Argo isn’t highly upgraded mostly because imho apart from the mech bay upgrades I don’t need much.

I only have 3 pilots other than my main character.

Running costs are a shade over 300000.

Plus low skull missions allow me to experiment.

Bear in mind I’ve only just now started milking them.

I did a 1.5 skull mission and will do 2 and maybe 3 skulls.

Hope that makes things clearer.

2730

Maybe the confusion is because there’s more than one way to tackle this? I’ve tended to pop around taking lower skull missions and picking up heavies as chance allows and I’ve now got, well, an absurd amount of money. So, I’m now picking up higher skull stuff to see about getting a few more mechs I want to look at, and when story missions come up I head in the general direction of that mission more promptly than I have in the past.

I probably could of done this a lot more efficiently by taking higher skull missions earlier, but I was just enjoying bopping around doing lower ones.

2731

Oh sure, I think I was mis-interpreting the term ‘milk’ to mean grinding through a lot of 1-2 star missions which just isn’t generally needed. That said, the right way to play is the way that you like to play :)

2732

I do have a question since my meandering hasn’t resulted in me running into an assault yet. How many skulls do I have to sign up for to get a shot at these? I’ve been recently taking 3’s, do I have to take 4’s to get assaults to show up?

2733

Around 4.5 yeah. I think around the center of the Taurus area.

2734

Yeah, I’ve seen them on 4 and up. I seem to have the best luck with Battle and Base Defense missions. Sometimes Assassination, as the target always has high tonnage, but is sometimes a vehicle. By contrast, Base Offense, Convoy, and Escort missions seem to have a lot of lower-threat targets, vehicles, and turrets, rather than assault mechs (I just did a 5-star escort mission and faced three easy waves of mechs, nothing heavier than 70T.)

2735

I find the med bay and morale boosts to be a big help. Tech points obviously help you mess around with refitting your mechs, more. I think the jury’s still out on whether the drive upgrades are worth the bother, because that only saves you money by allowing you to get more missions in per month.

2736

Eventually I just upgrade everything for the hell of it. On another play through maybe I’ll try a minimalist route.

My current merc group is “Honey Badger’s 57th Hussies,” an all-female outfit. Yeah, it’s silly, but I wanted to have some sort of theme other than the typical ooh-rah “fill in macho sounding name here” bunch.

2737

I did it the opposite. I had my all-girl crew first: Vampire Brides. Now I have the macho crew on my second run through the campaign. LOL

2738

Yeah, my next one will be something like “Butch Davion’s Regimental Hand-to-Hand Combat Team” or something.

2739

I just got out of a mission with SRM carriers, and PPC and LRM boats, which were prefaced with a lance of heavy mechs. If you can’t get to those tanks in time, it gets ugly, fast.

2740

AI observations:

  • Enemy units seem to move and fire individually, and each makes its own individual choice of what to shoot at. They may wind up focusing on a convenient mech target by chance if it is in range, but they don’t seem to deliberately focus on one mech at a time. No doubt this is to reduce player frustration. Of course if you hang one of your mechs out to dry close by a bunch of enemies they will naturally all target it. But this generally means the player has a huge advantage in concentrating fire when the AI doesn’t bother even trying.

  • When an enemy mech wants to attack a player mech that’s out of range, it will often keep moving toward it for multiple turns even when other targets are available. So if your LRM mech aggros something in very hilly terrain, you can keep retreating it around obstacles while still firing and any enemy mech that’s chasing it will basically be out of the combat while it’s chasing.

  • Once in a while the AI pathing fails and its units either get stuck or start wandering aimlessly for a while. Recently I met the reinforcement lance first in a scenario. The main lance approached the next turn, but instead of actually engaging, they wandered off again. How convenient!

  • The AI has no interest in using water to vent heat, and it only seems to enter woods and defensive terrain by accident.

2741

My lance is named “Schurem’s Schorem” (schorem is dutch for scum)

2742

In over 100 hours of game play I can not agree with many of these.

  1. The AI makes targeting choices individually. This may not be looked upon as an AI flaw as each would be piloted by an individual mechwarrior who would make independent decisions. If the AI made group decisions the missions would have to be entirely redone as that is the advantage that the player has to overcome the greater odds. I believe it is more realistic for the AI to use individual targeting. This solo AI is also used for movement and strategy.

  2. I have never seen a mech “chase” another to the extent of ignoring other targets. I have had a mech pursue another and unduly expose itself but never ignore another in lieu of attacking. The AI will sometimes ignore smaller targets in lieu of larger ones (which makes jumping in with a firestarter a whole lot of fun).

  3. This happens rarely and most often there is a good excuse for it. I have seen it hold and wait for reinforcements. I have seen it approach and back off due to the greater firepower it faced. On great occasion I have seen it wander for a turn or two but this is a rare occurrence.

  4. It does not use water. It does use woods quite a bit and not by accident.

The AI is not great but much of that is due to the first point of each mech being its own entity. One thing it does not do is coordinate attacks and strategy. So in one mission I set up a kill zone 150m behind a ridge. The enemy mechs kept coming over the ridge in 1s and 2s and were quickly blown apart by the massive firepower on the other side. It was a turkey shoot. Of course, it needed to be. I had 4 assault mechs. They had an entire company of 6 or 7 assaults, 4 heavies and 3 80 ton Demolishers. If the AI treated that as one large group that mission would have been impossible for my 4 assault mechs to win. So while I would not mind seeing a bit more lance-level coordination from the AI, if it was significantly better many missions would be unbeatable.

2743

Had my first crash today. I was confirming salvage. Lost the whole mission since my last save was before it.

Unfortunately it was the first part of the final mission so I will have to replay it knowing the script. I also had one of my pilot’s heads blown off by a turret in 3rd turn which made the win a little more epic. Even though it is not me doing it on purpose, it feels cheap to do it again most likely clean.

50+ hours in and that’s the first bug of consequence I have had, but a trash time to have it!

2744

In re the AI, I have to agree mostly with Granath; the AI is serviceable, and mostly logical. Yes, the enemy will hound your wounded or damaged 'Mechs mercilessly, but while you can exploit this, it isn’t a bad tactic at all. The enemy will also sometimes split fire, hitting multiple targets, sometimes with good effect (stability vulnerability), sometimes not. It will also, in my experience, break off chasing and shooting at a wounded enemy if someone gets it its rear arc, or it sees a chance to roflstomp a downed 'Mech. All in all, the tactical AI is “ok,” in my book. The AI does a good job of LRMing the hell out of you from beyond visual range, if it gets spotting, I can tell you that.

What I don’t like is the weird scripting, which quite often has me engage the primary enemy force, plus reinforcements, up front, then when I get to the objective, I get the message about reinforcements arriving, followed immediately by victory and evac. Not a huge issue, just…odd.

2745

That happens when you engage the reinforcements first. The script for the reinforcements does not trigger and thus you get it at the end of the mission.