Good question. Focus-firing on spots is always beneficial, but you can burn up your points pretty quickly if you use the special abilities to do so. With that in mind, positioning your mechs to attack from the sides or the rears to limit the potential spots you’ll connect with can be an efficient way of pulling this off. An attack from the left, for instance, will hit the head, left arm, left torso, or left leg. So if you’ve already weakened one of those with opening salvos, run around to that side to take better advantage. Of note, you also want to shield your own wounds via such positioning.
- Knock off a leg? The enemy mech falls over, losing an initiative stage for their next turn and causing an injury to the pilot (they can only take so much). Mechs which fall down can then have their parts specifically targeted at no penalty/use of special abilities. If you take out the second leg, the mech is disabled. If the mech is still going, its movement speed is greatly impeded with a wrecked leg.
- Knock off an arm? Most mechs have weapons mounted on arms, so this takes those weapons out of the fight (mild warning note: if you destroy a weapon, it becomes unavailable for salvage). Subsequent hits from that side which would have hit the arm will hit that side’s torso, which often has ammo (this goes boom on a critical hit after the base armor is gone and can wipe out the mech) and heat sinks.
- Head shots are awesome … but hard. If you hit the head, the pilot is injured. If you destroy the head, the mech is disabled but otherwise perfectly intact and ripe for salvage. This is where “death from above” comes in handy. This maneuver requires a mech with jump jets to physically attack the enemy by landing on them. It damages your own legs, but the chances of hitting the head are much better than standard shots, and the amount of damage can be quite significant.
This one’s decent, although I believe the summary of mechwarrior stats at the bottom are slightly out of date (they got tweaked a bit).
Mechs are “dead” when one of the following occurs:
- head destroyed
- both legs destroyed
- center torso destroyed (note: this is the most common yet leaves less salvage than the other two)
If you see a red hex on the map, something is going to land there, soon. That’s a warning; DO NOT GO THERE, as any mech is instantly lost if it shares the space when whatever arrives…
Chance to hit
When targeting an enemy, you’ll see the percent chance each weapon has to hit. Note that missiles fly in a cluster; launch 20 with a 70% chance to hit, and you’ll likely have 14 land somewhere on your target.
Heat
All weapons generate some heat. When you are aiming at an enemy, those weapons which can fire will contribute a specific amount of heat and this is shown via a horizontal bar on the left side of the screen. If your heat is going to get too high, you’ll have minor internal damage and potentially shut down until the mech has a chance to cool. You can choose to disable weapons which will cause too much heat (or to preserve ammo) by clicking on the circles by each. Note you can use flamers (sadly quite short-range and limited ammo) to add to your enemy’s heat and potentially shut down their mechs.
Attacks from behind
Rear armor on all mechs is MUCH less than front armor. As such, make sure to not put your back to the enemy if you can help it. On the flip side, if you can hit your enemy from the rear, light 'em up!
