It has been so long since I played I forgot about the turrets at bases. I had a 1 skull mission last night to raid a base that wrecked my lance pretty well. While I was dealing with the lance guarding it they were able to target me with the turrets. I ended up losing 3 pilots, but they finished the mission.
Still on my first playthrough. I seem to have plateaued with low end heavies/high end mediums. Main lance is a T-Bolt, a Quickdraw, a Dragon, and a LRM boat Centurian. Cant seem to break into the better heavies.
But man do I love it.
Pro tip for you, that Dragon and, to a lesser extent, that Quickdraw are hot garbage. If you have one of the top end mediums still in the bay it’s better to run that. Maybe a nice shadow hawk or kintaro. The T bolt is solid and pretty common so you just need to grind away at 3-4 star missions and collect parts.
Is LosTech available at all in the career mode?
At some point I need to fire up the RogueTech mod. They seem to have a ton of mechs in that.
Yes there are lostech rewards in career mode
Is the campaign linear, or can you travel between locations as you see fit?
IIRC there are certain story missions you have to complete to move it forward, but I don’t believe there is any limitation on you running around doing whatever you want until you decide to finish them.
Awesome, thanks.
You can travel around as you see fit, within a relatively circumscribed part of the Periphery - you don’t get access to the Inner Sphere part of the map until you finish the campaign. The campaign missions themselves are in a linear order, but they show up as contracts at various locations that you can do when you feel ready to do so. Note: b/c the campaign missions provide hefty cash payouts, I often felt a positive incentive to do them rather than wait, but there was not actual pressure.
Edit: the part of the map you can travel to during the campaign is actually pretty varied though - a good range of low, medium and high-ish difficulty planets. So basically, it’s fairly open, with the campaign as a narrative spine.
As an aside, I do recommend doing the mission on Artru as soon as you have a solid medium lance (and by solid I mean good 50/55 ton mechs). It can be a bear but is also a pure joy in terms of reward.
Someone that has played the campaign more recently should chime in though :)
I suspect an open world total conversion mod would be cool. But the Shadowruns were moddable too and nobody really was that ambitious, AFAIK.
Never mind. I’ll shut up.
So this expansion continues the Urbie love: I saw a new model today, the 90R, whose loadout was:
Small Laser
Medium Laser
Medium Laser
PPC (!!!)
With 480 armor and 3 jumpjets, it’s a tough, jumping, PPC-your-ass garbage can. At 30 tons that’s pretty bad-ass. I assume it overheats like Old Faithful but you can’t have everything.
Noob, but I successfully used the Dragon as the “scout” for in the campaign. It got a bit underwhelming on damage, but I had a silly strategy of a Jager using the spotting for 4 LRM10 pain. Since it was piloted by Dekker, the Dragon got headshoted while nearly pristine in part 1 of the last mission. I can’t complain, I ran another silly config in the campaign given assault, 2xAC20.
He’s right, though (on 1.5). There isn’t much need to do many more missions than the ones needed to unlock the next story bit, since those flush you with cash, but you have enough map to do whatever.
The real meat is probably in the career, which I’ll move to at some point. I imagine it would punish my reliance on gimmicks.
Yeah, we hit reply at about the same time. I was just saying to YakAttack that someone besides me should chime in, but it looks like I was talking abut Sharpe.
The problem with 60 ton mechs is that the engine is so heavy that the carry less weapons/armor then a 55 ton mech, plus there jump jets weigh more and they have lower initiative.
Note, this is only true for the ones in game. The slower 60 ton mechs (like the good old rifleman) or future mechs with XL engines don’t have this issue.
True. My intent was to increase my drop weight so maybe I’d great some big opponents to take down. Not sure if that logic is true in the game however. I think I was just making the game extra hard.
That said I’ve had fun. Give a Dragon some arm mods and go rock-em-sock-em robot. Run a lance with 2 Dragons, Quickdraw, and LRM Centurian for lots of difficulty.
Unpopular Opinion Corner:
The Vindicator is the true trash can. The Urbie is one of those little bins you set in the corner of the bathroom.
The Vindicator looks more like a toilet to me.
I’m wondering whether to get this or Mutant Year Zero.