Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5: Single player inside!

You mentioned everything I am rocking including the no weight limit one. Plus these below:

VonBiomes

Mod compatability pack

cockpit glass with weather effects

Classic mechs!

Stacked crates- better loot scattered around

Oh those look terrific, thank you.

So I tried a bunch of the houses and found that, for me, the Cicada of House Liao was the easiest one for me to get a handle on, so I’ve started with them. Pretty fun so far.

Nice! More added

From the comments on Nexus, there can be some conflicts between Coyote’s mod and VonBiomes, some with YAML, though many of these are occasional and usually relatively minor (mission won’t end, enemies don’t spawn, etc.). Haven’t tried it yet.

That’s interesting, because I’ve been pretty impressed by my lancemate’s AI so far. But then, I haven’t played an MW game in 15 years. In particular I like that there’s no hidden rubber banding that I can detect, if I send three of them after a target they kill it just fine. Lots of games seem to prevent anyone but the PC from finishing significant opponents.

I’ve figured out the base loop at this point, so now I’m in the happy space of being able to grind money or progress the campaign. It is pretty stingy on new, decent mechs though. I have PPCs in my inventory but nothing that can try to use them. No worries, I’m still barely through the intro.

Last comment, I’m feeling no desire to move off of mouse and keyboard, but I’m also not feeling consolitis, which is another compliment.

Base loop is indeed a happy space for me. I gave up on getting anything good from salvage in this early game, but that ended up being just fine.

Once you have 10 or 15 million you get to go shopping, and I like that bit, other than the animation.

Last night I found a rare Stalker for sale. It has 4 double heat sinks, 2 L ER Lasers, 4 M lasers, 2 LRM15+s and jamming. Only 9 million.

I finally figured out LRMs with this one. They work well, but the animation for them is just so unsatisfying. Perhaps a mod?

You may want to look at the Hellfire and Brimstone mods. They have separated them out to PPC (which I like) autocannon (which I’m so so on) and the missiles (which I personally find makes it almost impossible to see, but you can tweak the settings).

There’s also a free mech you can pick up(wolverine iirc),that’s pretty nicely kitted out and will really help anyone in the early game

spoilered for those that would rather find by themselves:

Search for the valentina system(kurita space). Go there, look at the transmission. Collect mech. Happy dance!

Okay, so to make sure I haven’t messed anything up with mods, is it normal to get mechs on the salvage list where it takes far more shares than I have access to in order to salvage them? I thought I was being SO good with keeping them as intact as possible, but apparently that was just to make someone ELSE happy.

edit - I’m only four missions in with as many mechs & three pilots including myself, so perhaps more shares unlock as I go up in the ranks?

ya, that’s normal.

As you gain rep, you’ll be able to put more points into salvage, which will give you more salvage shares. Also, multiple-part missions help a lot with this (though they’re probably too hard for you right now). You’ll see some missions will offer +25 -75% bonus shares (and that applies to each stage of the mission, so it can be quite lucrative). At the beginning, you’re probably better off just getting as much money as possible, but at some point, its more lucrative to go with salvage. Also, in general, i think the campaigns have better quality salvage than the generic, so i’d recommend focusing on salvage for them more than the random missions (this is especially true of the dlc).

Also keep in mind that the more damaged the mech, the less picks you need to salvage it.

The better shape it is in, the more shares it will cost you.

Later on when you have more picks it can be more advantageous to headshot/leg a mech you really want.

The higher your relationship with a faction, the more negotiation points you get. More points of course translates to more shares if you spend them there. There’s a “more shares per point” mod (several actually, I think), but it doesn’t make it so that you avoid that early period where you need to rep up.

Higher difficulty missions also have higher maximums you can allocate points to. Eventually you will be able to salvage whole mechs.

It’s a faction thing mostly, once you have a good standing with a faction, you’ll have tons of extra negotiation for scrap where you can grab the big boys. Around Rep 6 I found myself with way more mechs than I needed and not enough money.

Ain’t this the truth. Once the mechs started flowing I went Pokemon crazy with the idea of doubling up the ones I really liked.

I noticed my payment rose to 1.5 million and realized I wasn’t nearly rich enough to play that game.

I’m old and salty now with a distinguished rep of 9. Gotta say, some of these inner sphere campaign missions are really tough.

I’ve found that vanilla game is much more costly than I remember from the last time I played.

Partly the enemy ai is better, so I tend to have more damage taken.

The increased size of available mechs also increased the maintenance costs quite a bit.

Late game my costs are around 7 million a cycle.

Which has led to me paying much more attention to finances than before.

YAML mod has toggles for allowing you to salvage mech parts after battels along with whole mechs. Sliders to adjust amounts as well as frequency/chance for whole mechs. I have mine set on 8 mech parts to produce a mech. Each part cost one salvage point each. How many mech parts is determined by luck and how much damage was done. So legging/HS produce more parts on AVG. Mechs put together this way still are damaged so there is a cost to fully fix them up. I may adjust this as I play more to see if I need to increase it but so far so good.

Ya, that’s probably the only aspect of YAML that i dont fully like. I prefer getting a mech and restoring it/salvaging it, and find that more interesting that just assembling a bunch of parts (which then i mostly scrap anyways).

Part of it too is that it just doesn’t feel ‘right’. My lance just killed 24 enemy mechs. Parts, components and whole mechs are littered about the landscape. I can now select 10 crappy parts, or 2 mech pieces to claim. So i’ll need to fight like 3 battles just to be able to get one mech out of it…

It works in conjunction with looting full mechs and is completely optional and customizable. The way I have it setup its more like I can get that one full mech, that nice weapon and a few mech pieces to build toward another full one eventually. So the parts replace lame components/weapons as meaningful loot for when you don’t blow your allotment on a full mech. I believe you can turn this feature off as well and just use vanilla salvage? Lots of settings to dig through.

As @morlac noted you don’t have to do that. You can turn off partial mech salvage, put it on and have whole mech salvage/etc side by side. It’s highly customizable, down to tweaking component damage/destroyed chances IIRC.

Yaml is seriously one of the best mods I’ve used in any game ever.

Oh, i’m aware - i was trying out v2 for a while, and that’s the bit i found i didn’t like - i think i favor the v1 where you can get whole mechs, notable bits, and then salvage pieces that aren’t as finicky (though i presume that they allow a lot less precision when salvaging a mech, since it you put 18 pieces (or whatever it takes) to put together a battlemaster, you’ll just get some generic variant, whereas v2 allows you to piece together a specific variant).