Just out of curiosity since I only dipped a toe in before running screaming to properly complete Ironman/Commander in War of the Chosen (still working on it)…
-Can player mechs ever be completely destroyed?
-Can player characters ever die?
-Is there a “game over” screen?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” I’m sure I’m about to hear some justifications as to why that’s actually a great thing, and I’m looking forward to those justifications – they’ll be fun to read!
Whew. So I did the first main story mission (Argo) and did fine. But the only contracts available after this were 2.5 skulls. This is after only having done half skull contracts before. Oh well, I think, how bad can it be? :)
So I go into one with my best team, which is a Blackjack, Vindicator, and two Shadow Hawks. It’s a destroy mission, and I’m facing… a Cicada (ah, a new one!), a Quickdraw (uh oh, that looks nasty) and a Thunderbolt (WTF, a heavy mech… RUN!). Well, the Shadow Hawks take on the lone Cicada, which steadfastly refuses to die. The other two take on… the other two. My Blackjack (with my main Mechcommander) gets the focus of the attacks and soon gets killed. The Vindicator loses an arm and a torso, but manages to eventually destroy the Quickdraw. And the two Shadow Hawks, after taking down the Cicada eventually, manage to whittle down the Thunderbolt (it dies after 4 pilot injuries incapacitates the pilot).
Well, I survived, but holy heck, the repair bills are nasty - basically wiping out any earnings, and now I’m short quite a few components to replace the ones destroyed, not to mention the three months to get my main guy back online. So I’m actually incapable of taking on anything more than a milk run contract now, or I just have to jump to a system with a store (naturally the one I’m in doesn’t have one) and go on a shopping spree to get my mechs kitted out again.
Or I could reload and find another contract instead. But no, I shall resist!
I generally don’t reload in these sorts of games, because I like to see how I can work through adversity, but I did have to reload this time. I wound up with Glitch dead, and all but one or two pilots on multi-month recoveries, all but two 'Mechs in the shop, and a lack of spare parts to fix all of them. It was just ugly. Almost tempted to start completely over.
I do think pilot injuries are overdone, a bit. Seems it’s nigh-on impossible to not have one of your four people out for weeks after every battle.
I don’t know if they can be “completely destroyed” as in you get nothing back after the mission screen. I had a Shadow Hawk come out of a mission that was essentially just the SRM and a collection of broken metal though. It went into storage because fixing it was going to take until the heat death of the universe.
The player you create can’t be killed, but all of your other pilots can be. My character is about the weakest pilot in my unit because I’ve spent so long in hospital that everyone else has out-leveled me.
There is a game over moment, if you bankrupt your Merc outfit. The biggest danger for bankruptcy seems to be having to wait through two payment cycles to bring Mechs and Pilots back after an especially bad mission.
What happens if you completely fail a mission, all your mechs are destroyed and all your pilots killed? I presume you just lose everything you sent on the mission? That would be painful.
Granath
1650
I think I may have the answer to my own question. There is not a Mechs-R-Us store in this universe because most of the mechs produced are snapped up by the various Houses. So finding an intact mech for sale should be a rarity, correct?
There’s a planet in the Periphery that says it has a Star League presence and that planet had a complete Griffin and a complete Commando available for me to purchase.
The Griffin was a bit over six mill, if I remember correctly.
Eventually you get upgrades that make this better (and also deaths less likely) but, yes, compared to mech repair (it takes only 10-15 days for my current setup to repair a battered up assault mech) pilot healing times are way too long. I think it’s to incentivize having many pilot available, but because for the leveling up it is also not really viable until you upgrade other parts of your ship.
I think I’ve reloaded 2 times so far. Both of them due to the reinforcements-already-there bug giving me some really stupid fights (although I do fight those and if I win (no matter how battered) I don’t reload. Winning a fight when you have 7 enemy engaged mechs in visual range (only 2 lights and 2 mediums) is great.
My most fun mech so far is a Jagermech full to the brim of lasers and nothing but armor in the arms. The arms double as shields and the thing is a beast close range for it’s tonnage (8 lasers, good heat efficiency and alot of armor).
I’m finding that I need to keep about 6 pilots on the roster so I have four healthy ones available at any given time. They’re all advancing at a good clip so it’s definitely doable.
Same thing with Mechs - having backups in the roster helps, though i can’t wait until I have more than 6 ready mechs to choose from.
Even so I find I have a week or two of downtime waiting for healing or repairs…
The player Mech can be destroyed (mine got squashed by the Leopard), but you get the chance to repair it. It’s expensive though. My Griffin cost over 500k C-Bills to repair, not including weapons and equipment…
By the time you get more slots you need to start fielding exclusively heavies or assaults, which you won’t have…
I have 18 mech slots open but only 4 viable mechs for 90% of missions I engage in.
I assume you’ll be able to cobble together heavies and assaults from the salvage, if you’re facing them all the time?
I have about 10 heavy mechs at 2/3 parts and 3 assaults at 1/3 (I got 2 assaults through cobbling together, but I get one part per mission). Mediums I’ve sold a dozen and still keep a collection of 6 in the hangar. At this point I think I will get a new assault or heavy mech a mission (not that many I don’t have parts for still), so I might be able to have more viable loadouts soon.
My most fun build so far is also the dumbest - I got a Griffin back from a mission with virtually all its parts wrecked and I was a little too far into the gin, so I put five jump jets on it, two flamers, two SRMs a medium laser and all the armour it could handle.
I wait for an enemy mech to get some heat build up and then can jump the griffin in behind them from a mile away and hit them with SRMs and flamers from right up close. Next round I smash them with a melee attack and the flamers and then they usually have a significant hole in their armour somewhere, so I can jump out to optimum range and precision strike that point.
ShivaX
1658
Yep. I’ve gotten a few heavies that way and tons of lights and mediums.
When you start selling them, throw them in storage first, it gives more money from what I’ve seen.
Too long? Maybe for a game, but how long does it take a person to recover from, say, a car accident? Do people want some realism, or just to be “entertained”?
Enidigm
1660
Good Mediums are almost always better than a mixed Heavy/Assault lance. I skirmished a couple of times vs an “Assault” lance vs four Power Mediums and always won.
I beat the first Arano mission post Argo with… 3 Mediums and the Orion without sustaining any losses of structural damage other than a couple of pips. And i could have easily swapped the Orion.
Mediums shoot first. Four Mediums will all shoot before the Heavies. You can really concentrate firepower and fragmentation losses with Mediums. But don’t close range until your opponent has been worn down as you’ll lose in direct short range attrition.
Timex
1661
No, it’s definitely not a fault with Unity3D itself… The game itself is just poorly designed.
The gameplay itself is solid, but the performance for the game is pretty poor. I’m running it on a GTX 1060, with a i7-7620HK, and I’m still seeing framerate stuttering and very long load times. There’s nothing going on here that should be pushing the machine that hard.
That being said, the game itself is good, and worth the money.
Also, I find it amusing that seemingly the fastest moving thread in this forum is about a Battletech game. I would not have expected that.
I’m assuming Harebrained is doing the development here, right? It’s not PGI, is it? I had thought (hoped) that the only thing coming from PGI were the mech models.
spiffy
1662
In tabletop we used the point totals, which made more sense than mech limits. That way you could pit 2 Assault mechs against an oodle of Lights and have a balanced match. How does mulitplayer work in this game without point totals, won’t everyone just bring 4 assaults all the time?
It took me several story missions after the Argo one to get more than one heavy. Hell, I only have 2 heavies and 2 assaults so far.
But at some point due to the length of missions and number of enemies (not unusual to face 8-12 mechs) mediums just don’t cut it endurance wise. Even light heavies (I’m looking at you, Dragon) do get whittled down way too fast (I have to eject 2 pilots on average).
I have a really old graphics card, but at lower settings, everything runs smoothly. I wonder if the game is overly optimized for lower end machines?
