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KickStarter BattleTech Pre-Release Thread

Vaarna_Aarne

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I don't understand why FASA even felt the need to licence designs or artwork from the japs originally when Battletech was originally written.
It's the rule system what makes the game work.
Who really gives a shit what the robots exactly look like or what names they have.
They certainly didn't need to be licensed from some obscure japanese cartoon.
Dumbest decision ever.
I suppose the simplest way to explain FASA licensing artwork from Macross, Sun Dougram, and Crusher Joe is to simply ask a rhetorical question...

Have you ever seen Technical Readout 3025? That's really the answer, BattleTech has/had absolutely mortifyingly hideous artwork in its books when they used original art (most likely authored by office coffee boy's ruler and a hobo they kidnapped).

Actually a much bigger shame than the copypasta Unseen being lost back when the lawsuit with Harmony Gold happened was FASA's decision to drop their third-party artwork bought from Victor Musical Industries, which incidentally was the best artwork produced for BattleTech (specifically their Locust IIC, Phoenix Hawk IIC, and Rifleman IIC) until relatively recently after the MWO facelift the aesthetics got, with HBS' promo artwork being probably the best in franchise history.
 

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Did anybody asked them why they don't have a simulated ballistic system in the game?

I cant wait for this game to come out as a bland piece of shit so the apologists would rally and cry out in unison that it is because it was their first battletech game and that they learned from their mistakes
 
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https://www.pcgamesn.com/battletech/battletech-rules

BattleTech shows why adapting board games takes more than copying the rules

battletech%20header.png


There have been more than 20 BattleTech videogames since the board game was released back in 1984. Each time the game has been adapted to the screen its core elements have been chopped and changed - it’s a process the game’s creator, Jordan Weisman, embraces. “When a game goes from one genre of game to another, there's an adaptation that needs to be done,” he tells us. “We see that in movies and television all the time.”

In the tabletop version of BattleTech, you command a lance of mechs in battle against another commander. You both select your mechs based on their weight class and then kit them out with armour and weapons that dictate their abilities and modifier rolls. How you perform on the battlefield depends on your tactics and your dice rolls. It’s a tense, tactical game in which you need to manage your mechs’ heat and outflank your opponent to cause real damage. You are, after all, commanding multi-story, walking tanks.

However, when it came to MechWarrior games - a series of games that adapted BattleTech into a first-person shooter - there had to be some fundamental changes. While the mech design and heat systems remained, all the dice rolls were thrown out.

“The difference between a twitch-based game and a tactical game is pretty big,” Weisman says. The reward for players is skill-based, not tactical. “You're trying to hit something that's physically moving as you're physically moving. It becomes a real skill you have to develop,” he adds. With that in mind, MechWarrior recognised the change in perspective, from looking down on the table to being in the cockpit, and rewarded players for focusing their fire on individual limbs. “In the twitch-based game, being able to target specific areas of the body becomes a rewarding skill you build as a player,” Weisman explains.

In the BattleTech board game, you can only single out limbs or the cockpit of an enemy mech after it’s been knocked to the floor, because, as Weisman points out, “there is no skill that has to be developed on the part of the player to successfully shoot at legs.”

Weisman goes further, explaining that if you put limb shots into the tactical take on the game “we end up with one of two things. Either: a) the odds to hit were so low that you missed a bunch of times and it became frustrating, or b) the percentage chance to hit let you hit a number of times, in which case mechs were destroyable much too quickly.

“You're just clicking on a headshot and rolling for your lucky headshot number. Or you'll take their legs out really quickly,” Weisman summarises.

battletech%20art.png


Currently, Weisman’s studio, Harebrained Schemes, is working on a turn-based tactical videogame version of BattleTech called… er, BattleTech. Despite it being much closer to the board game than, say, MechWarrior, it is still an adaptation.

“Tabletop play is very different from computer game play,” Weisman tells us. “You have the inherent socialness of people at the table, you have the tactile nature of the table and the pieces, and the tableau of the game.

If you simply take the rules of BattleTech and make them work in a videogame those aspects of the board game don’t carry over, Weisman explains. However, the biggest loss is a small thing in principle but a major one in practice: rolling a dice.

“There is an inherent drama to a die roll that doesn't exist in a computer game,” Weisman says. “You can put little dice rolling across the screen but it's not the same because tabletop gamers know for sure that they can psychically control dice. They've known this forever. And we don't believe we can psychically control digital dice.

“I think it's true of any game that uses a dice roll and a table. That's not reproduced by a percentage number on the screen.”

We saw this first-hand with Full Control’s recreation of Space Hulk, when Tim and I played we found the game had no tension and the outcome of moves were frustrating.

space%20hulk%20impressions.png


Knowing these issues himself, Weisman and his team didn’t aim to reproduce the ruleset: “We set our goal as to reproduce the same tactical considerations and the same unit identification. If you're talking about a particular mech, that mech should feel the same in our game as it did on the tabletop. We wanted to recreate the tactical considerations, the strategic considerations, the lore, and the feeling of it, but not be concerned with reproducing the exact mechanics.”

It’s not only that a vital part of the game would be lost, though. As well thought of as BattleTech is, Weisman is quick to point out that the “design is 35 years old. So it's not even a modern tabletop game, it's one from another era. In all entertainment things change, things evolve. A 35-year-old design is pretty archaic.”

As Weisman puts it, in BattleTech “everything was a modifier. It was all one grey long continuum of modifications to the risk/reward relationship. More modern games try to present players with more discrete, actionable choices, that have more clear risk/reward relationships.” While the team don’t want to lose what made BattleTech the game it’s recognised as, they did want to infuse the old game with some modern thinking.

The relationships between the game’s systems was always what made skirmishes in BattleTech compelling, you were always weighing up the payoff of your plans. You could charge your mech up the battlefield, firing all its weapons into the chest of an enemy machine, disarticulating its limbs, but doing so would likely overheat your mech, leaving you unable to act in the next turn - exposing your mech to a counter-attack. But a more cautious approach that leaves your mech active might see you attacked by the mech that the aggressive approach could have finished off.

“How weapons, armour, and heat sinks, all those things interact and the balance they have in the tabletop game, that was very important for us to maintain as closely as possible,” Weisman says.

In bringing the game to PC, Weisman’s team has deepened the relationship between the systems of heat, stability, and armour. “When you get yourself too hot you're actually physically wounding the mech, not just providing modifiers, like it did in the tabletop, but actually wounding the mech itself,” he says. The most recent update added flamethrowers to the game, so now you can overheat any mechs to shut them down and cause massive internal damage. The stability system means that as mechs take hits they become unstable and, if they become too unstable, fall over. A downed mech is particularly vulnerable, and one of the few times you can call a shot on a specific mech body part. The system encourages risky moves, like getting a mech up close and personal for a melee attack, which can knock a mech down better than any gun shot.

“You get a nice triangle relationship between damage, stability, and heat,” Weisman says.

battletech%20cliff%20shot.png


Each time BattleTech is adapted it moves away from the original design, but it also brings the core tenets of the series into sharper focus. No BattleTech game would be complete without heat management, nor the interplay between the different mech weight classes and, despite being in different genres, BattleTech and MechWarrior all give you similar breakdowns of the differences between a Mad Cat, an Atlas, and a Firefly.

It’s a fascinating process to see; like the mechs at the heart of the BattleTech, every aspect of the series can be stripped out, altered, and replaced, but the chassis remains intact and recognisable.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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https://community.battletechgame.com/forums/threads/9167?page=8

As I recall...

  • AI 101 opener
  • Showed off AI decision tree complexity
  • Showed example of influence map (Helps AI decide what to do)
  • AI has different roles, but there's no 'special' AI (Rookie, Hero, etc)
  • AI does have special states (Wounded, panic, etc)
  • AI doesn't actually have overall 'team AI.' Goal is to make it so each AI's decision making helps them work together without 'talking'
  • Mitch said to stop asking about quads, threatened@Juodas Varnas
  • Ingame 'Codex/TRO' a goal, but likely near the bottom of the To-Do list
  • EDIT: There will be no 'Extended' contracts, where you have multiple battles before resupply. There will be contracts series
  • EDIT EDIT: They said the AI was being programmed to be fun, not necessarily smart (Which is good)

And then there were these....

fa26fc965da8a6fdfd04e955218f070437cf16361546a0c04765924ac2bc5bd2u1031.PNG


b205f752aff9afb62191c85a10adc2b93d1eda9ed413a3e011cac2df34c472e8u1031.PNG


1ecc71fdb55f5b2fd60a2f3aaf94c366945abc0a6268391cffcc9aaa5100f0f0u1031.PNG


A pair of Behavior Trees and an Influence Map!
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
https://community.battletechgame.com/forums/threads/9901
Next Wednesday, October 11 at 12pm PT is the second of the month so it's Dev Q&A time!

For our last Dev Q&A this year, Mitch will interview our Lead Designer, Kiva Maginn, about the Sim Game during the first half of the hour (so post your questions about the Sim Game below!) and then he and Mike will take questions live from chat.

We'll be hosted on Twitch by our friends at No Guts, No Galaxy once again!

edit.
https://community.battletechgame.com/forums/threads/9904
I'm really disliking the rage mechanic. Had a multiplayer match last night where the other guy got 5 or 6 rages over the course of the battle. What is the point of taking out a target mech, when that just means he's going to get a free, 100% shot with a HBK-4P? Where is the strategy when a magical "I win" button actively punishes strategically targeting and disabling enemy mechs?

The rage mechanic is "okay" for single player. For multiplayer though, it feels way too gimmicky.

Short answer: to prevent snowball matches and to give a losing player an opportunity to make a comeback.

Baseline unit morale will affect how much starting Inspiration/Fury you go into battle with, and potentially how quickly you fill the Rage-o-meter.

Individual pilot morale ain't happening.

That's what's amusing me about this. In the scenario I was in, I lost my Centurian in round 3. (Poor movement on my part, excellent movement by the other guy. Props to him!) After that, I was trying to dig myself out of a hole, but where he got the 5 or 6 uses over the battle, I think I got a third laaate in the fight. Every time it felt like I could "get out", BOOM! Another rage for him. It felt like beating my head on a wall.

EG: Finally beat down his Quickdraw. WOOPS! There's a rage. Finally popped his commando, WOOPS! There's a rage. Tried a hail mary DFA on his -4P, WOOPS! There's a rage. The last three rounds was literally a Rage, a standard shot, then one more Rage after my DFA. It was stupid.

I'm right there with you, @Cabusha. But I also find it almost insulting from the losing side of things. Yeah, it's a magical button that not only gives a free 100% shot but also ignores braced and cover conditions. I don't like the artificial "comeback" explanation from the devs. It also doesn't make sense. My lancemate died and we're getting pounded but it's OK because I have divine inspiration and all of my shots will be precision strikes! If anything I would think morale is going down, not rising into some death or glory bloodlust, except maybe if you're Kuritan, I think they like that kind of stuff. I've hated the mechanic for a long time. If I'm losing, either let me dig out myself or let me lose. I don't want a crutch.

But the further problem is (to me) you are forced to use the mechanic in a close match. Why? Because if you don't, the enemy invariably will and use it multiple times. In a close match, if you don't retaliate in kind, you're going to lose. It also doesn't help if you really are getting hammered. If someone is roflstomping you, this does nothing at all to prevent the continuation of said stomping. So to me it's a poor mechanic based on a poor premise that you're forced to use.

What the hell is HBS doing?
 
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Sounds like the mechanic needs more balance.

Not sure I understand how this works. A limit break-type ability to help losing players make a comeback isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if they're just handing them out whenever a mech gets hit hard, mathematically that's probably going to be more useful for the player who has more mechs on the field left to lose, ie the likely winner. Why not just do it based on the difference in power between the two players?
 

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Yeah, if suffering losses on one side causes the match to snowball that you need button awesome to bounce back up, then there's something wrong with the system. I've seen CBT matches before where people losing one or two mechs early on were still able to come out on top of the other with good positioning. Why fix something that's not broken?

On a side note, I've heard some good things about Alpha Strike, which is a more streamlined version of CBT that reduces simulationist minutia, but still retains many core mechanics. Was hoping they'd take some inspiration from there.
 
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Exactly. If Lamebrained were in charge of Unreal Tournament, the player who is killed would spawn with a shieldbelt and minigun to prevent snowballing. :D
 

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https://www.pcgamesn.com/battletech/battletech-harmony-gold-lawsuit

How anime landed BattleTech and the MechWarrior games in legal trouble

battletech.jpg


The real-world story of the BattleTech series is more confusing and impenetrable than the space politics of its fictional universe. It’s seen several partial buyouts, more than three decades of intellectual property changing hands, and a confusing and largely confidential legal struggle over two countries' copyright and trademark laws. And it all started with anime.

There's no sign of BattleTech's legal trouble ending soon: there are two BattleTech games due out in 2018 and both of them are being sued for copyright infringement, despite the fact that one of them is being made by BattleTech’s original creator.

It all started with anime
The trouble started for Jordan Weisman, creator of the BattleTech board game, in 1992 when his company, FASA Corporation, was sued by Harmony Gold. FASA had been selling the BattleTech board game since 1984 without trouble. Towards the end of the '90s FASA began branching out into tie-in novels and licensed videogames - including a pair of BattleTech tactical RPGs from Command & Conquer creator Westwood Studios.

In 1992, FASA tried to license a toy deal with US manufacturer Playmates. The negotiations fell through, but then Playmates went on to design a new robot for its ExoSquad toy line that looked a lot like BattleTech’s iconic Mad Cat. FASA sued Playmates for copyright infringement but lost the case, opening themselves up to a countersuit from one of Playmates’ partners: Harmony Gold.

s56ELr1.jpg


Harmony Gold, then chiefly a television and film distribution company, alleged that several mechs in BattleTech were copies of robots in an anime series it owned the rights to, Super Dimension Fortress Macross. These mechs date back to the earliest days of BattleTech.

At first, it seems like Harmony Gold is just throwing around muscle, but it may have had a point. While FASA designed many of their mechs in-house prior to 1996, BattleTech also included designs licensed from an American model kit import company called Twentieth Century Imports. That company in turn licensed those designs from Japanese anime studio Studio Nue, which was working with anime juggernaut Tatsunoko Production on - yup, you guessed it - Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

Harmony Gold had licensed rights from Tatsunoko to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which (along with two other anime series) they adopted for American syndicated television as Robotech. Harmony Gold claims they hold exclusive rights for any merchandise based on Macross outside of Japan.

macross_vf1d_takani.jpg


When FASA sued Playmates it drew the attention of Harmony Gold, of course, who looked at the mech designs the company had licensed from Twentieth Century Imports and claimed they were derivatives of Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

The legendary ‘Unseen’
FASA ended up settling the lawsuit out of court, and in 1996, as part of the confidential settlement, stopped using any of the robot designs that were also used in Macross. Because of the settlement, it’s never been cleared up whether FASA was in the right. There’s a chance that Twentieth Century Imports didn’t have the right to sell FASA the designs.

After the settlement, the designs Harmony Gold singled out came to be known to BattleTech fans as the "Unseen": while FASA books could refer to their existence, any art featuring them was removed.

Warhammer_0.jpg


Even though the settlement between FASA - including Weisman - and Harmony Gold has never been made public, the risk of accidentally violating it has loomed over anyone dabbling in the BattleTech series ever since, as you can see from Activision's MechWarrior games. The settlement with Harmony Gold came at the tail end of FASA Corporation's agreement with Activision to publish MechWarrior 2 and its expansions. MechWarrior 2, developed by Activision and published in 1995, included the designs disputed by Harmony Gold. However, 1996's MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, Activision's final MechWarrior game, did not. Even Activision's lawyers were wary of crossing Harmony Gold.

In 1999 Microsoft bought Virtual World Entertainment Group, the company that owned FASA Corporation and FASA Interactive (the game licensing arm of the business), and appointed Weisman creative director of Microsoft Games. Along with this buyout, Microsoft got "exclusive and perpetual electronic rights to the BattleTech property," although FASA Corporation continued to exist and retained all other non-electronic rights. FASA Interactive, now named FASA Studios, went on to develop MechWarrior 4, MechCommander 2, an unreleased MechWarrior sequel named MechWarrior Prime, two MechAssault games for the Xbox, and a handful of other games before their closure in 2007.

None of the titles developed by Virtual World Entertainment Group or Microsoft's FASA Studios included the ‘unseen’ mechs.

The lawsuit expands
screenshot-10.jpg


Microsoft closed down FASA Studios shortly after the release of Shadowrun in 2007. Weisman left Microsoft and formed a studio called Smith & Tinker, licensing the rights to MechWarrior from Microsoft. Weisman then teamed up with Piranha Games to pitch a new MechWarrior game, but, because Microsoft wouldn’t let any future MechWarrior game release on the PlayStation 3, they had difficulty finding a publisher.

Piranha eventually struck a deal with Infinite Game Publishing, who stumped up the money to buy the licensing rights to MechWarrior from Weisman’s company, and fund development of MechWarrior Online.

Almost as soon as the project was announced the problems started. The first trailer for Piranha’s MechWarrior featured the Warhammer, one of the ‘Unseen’ mechs based on licensed art that FASA and Weisman agreed not to use in 1996. Harmony Gold objected, even sending IGN a cease-and-desist letter demanding they stop hosting the trailer. Piranha claimed at the time that Harmony Gold "had no impact whatsoever on development or signing a deal for MechWarrior," but Harmony Gold did insist on the removal of that particular Warhammer design, which was based on the original art used back in 1984 by FASA.

MWO-Project-Phoenix-Mechs-570x293.jpg.optimal.jpg


Then, in June 2013, Piranha announced "Project Phoenix," a new four-mech addition to MechWarrior Online. All of these mechs were loosely based on ‘Unseen’ mechs that hadn’t appeared in any BattleTech videogames since the Harmony Gold lawsuit. Despite this, Harmony Gold didn’t seem to have a problem with it, but when Piranha contacted Harmony Gold to get their approval on two more proposed designs - the Warhammer and the Marauder - the company rejected them. Piranha was forced to redesign the two machines, eventually releasing them in September 2015.

Around the same time as Piranha’s trouble with Project Phoenix, Harebrained Schemes launched the Kickstarter for BattleTech. Still close to Weisman, Piranha allowed Harebrained to use art and in-game models for many of the battlemechs appearing in MechWarrior Online. Shortly after the Kickstarter, Piranha announced MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. Notably, no ‘Unseen’ mechs feature in either game.

Even though neither MechWarrior 5 or Harebrained Scheme's BattleTech game feature any of the original 'Unseen' mechs, in March Harmony Gold filed a suit against both developers. They claim the redesigned 'unseen' mechs in MechWarrior Online infringe on the Macross designs, and that the same is true of the mechs used in Harebrained Schemes.

The suit goes further, though, including designs based on anime series that Harmony Gold have never owned the rights to - mechs such as the Locust and Shadow Hawk - and original designs first created by FASA, such as the iconic Atlas.

mechwarrior-online-zwiastun-atlas_4bb6.jpg


After 25 years of doggedly chasing BattleTech in whatever form it pops up, it appears Harmony Gold is expanding its reach over the series. With the cases against Harebrained and Piranha games due to go to court in the new year, there is no sign of this legal tug of war coming to an end anytime soon.

Weisman and a representative for Harmony Gold both declined to comment.
 

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It never ends.

Fun factoid: The part where the legal matters go absolutely nuts is when one considers that Harmony Gold bought their Macross license from Tatsunoko, but a later lawsuit in Japan by Bandai resolved that Tatsunoko never had rights to sell the license, and that the only thing Harmony Gold owns is the RoboTech stuff because of a US lawsuit which they claim lets them own Macross in US; so the insanity here is that Harmony Gold is suing HBS and Piranha over designs from Macross that they don't actually own but appear in RoboTech.

EDIT: Also, I think the article does itself disservice by starting the story in the first Harmony Gold lawsuit and not in that BattleTech originally licensed artwork from Big West/Bandai via intermediary which included Macross artwork.
 
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Did anybody asked them why they don't have a simulated ballistic system in the game?

I cant wait for this game to come out as a bland piece of shit so the apologists would rally and cry out in unison that it is because it was their first battletech game and that they learned from their mistakes
While I am fond of mech games, I don't really think the whole premise is a solid fondation for a simulationist approach...
 

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Well you simulate some parts and then pretend that other parts don't exist.

And you can simulate pseudo-science as well.
That is true, but mech armor as HP results in machineguns being able to damage one. It is much more offensive than not having accurate per bullet ballistic to me.
Moving to a Penetration vs Armor model would be much more important to me.
The ranges of engagement also makes it much less important to track where each bullet ends than in a close quarter fight.
Steel Panthers did not model trajectories either.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Well you simulate some parts and then pretend that other parts don't exist.

And you can simulate pseudo-science as well.
That is true, but mech armor as HP results in machineguns being able to damage one. It is much more offensive than not having accurate per bullet ballistic to me.
Moving to a Penetration vs Armor model would be much more important to me.
The ranges of engagement also makes it much less important to track where each bullet ends than in a close quarter fight.
Steel Panthers did not model trajectories either.
Might not be a good idea with BattleTech tho, the franchise has some sort of curse when it comes to trying to do anything but random location hits with locational HP. Even just ways to aim or limit location variation just ends up making everything break.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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https://community.battletechgame.com/forums/threads/9901?page=13

I made notes of this superb developer Q&A (October 11):

The single-player story covers a bunch of hand-crafted, very detailed, story-driven missions of the kind that you more or less expect from HBS. Filling in all of the wander around the galaxy getting in trouble mercenary stuff are a huge ***-ton of ad hoc content that you can do - take contracts for great houses, take contracts for local planetary governments. The purpose of those is to level up your guys and get better equipment. Making money is the whole point of your mercenary outfit. Some of these jobs pay better than others, some of them are more above-board than others.

You're helping Kamea reclaim her throne. To do that, you're the elite MechWarrior force that she is going to use for missions that are too dangerous for normal troops. You're also going to support her armies in taking key planets away from the Directorate. So this leaves you with a lot of down-time to roam and to grow your mercenary outfit from a small band of a few MechWarriors to a fully-fledged outfit that can help her in the war effort.

There will be randomly generated characters.

Every pilot that you hire has actually gone through a life-path style career progression. You know where they come from, you know what kind of education that they had, you know what twists and turns their career has taken. They might start out as a commoner but fall into a life of crime and end up as a convict but then get recruited into a pirate crew after coming out of prison. There can be nobles, disgraced nobles, wealthy traders and businessmen who are looking for excitement and adventure. There are disgraced ComStar adepts as a possibility, Solaris gladiators. When you're looking at a character, you're not just looking at their stats, you're looking at their dossier - it's their resume basically, which shows the things that they've done and all of the things that you can count on them for. That life-path process doesn't just generate their stats - it also generates all of the tags and descriptive personality traits that key into the event system and other systems to basically flesh that person out. An example is Bob Kurita the pilot, who is a former tech, he knows a little bit about 'Mech maintenance, he's hot-headed and kind of rebellious - all of those things will influence the kinds of content that Bob ends up doing getting pulled into on the ship.

I think that one of the pilots that you start with developed contacts in prison and became a hired killer when she got out of prison.

Onboard the Argo, your mercenary outfit's morale is a number on a scale from 0 to 50. In combat, morale is a number on a scale from 0 to 100, so it's possible to start combat with the morale bar half-filled. Your mercenary outfit's morale affects the kinds of events that you will get. If you keep your morale in the toilet, you have MechWarriors who will want to leave, who will come to you and say "Look, I got a better offer." Rebellious MechWarriors will become mutinous. Conversely, if you keep your morale really high, you will get benefits from that. You will have MechWarriors who are eager to join you, MechWarriors who are helping each other out more. Individual MechWarriors can have things that make them happier or unhappy. A very militaristic MechWarrior who is used to military discipline is probably not going to be entirely happy if you set your spending levels to the highest level of extravagance. Conversely, a MechWarrior who comes from a wealthy family and is used to being treated well is going to be really upset if you're forcing them into spartan accommodations. Specific MechWarrior personality traits can end up applying high or low morale to that MechWarrior, and when they go into battle, if they have high or low morale, that changes the amount of morale you have to spend to activate those abilities. With a MechWarrior with high morale, you can pop off those abilities like crazy. A low morale MechWarrior is going to be a struggle to get all of those abilities to work, and you're going to end up paying for it in the long term.

There are 5 levels of expenditure that you can set, that affects your expenditure across the board, for maintenance, for salaries. There is a whole set of events that only happen when you've got your finances turned low (spartan). If you crank your expenditure all the way up to extravagant, there's a whole set of events that only happen when you are at extravagant. Those expenditure levels give you morale. Every quarter, you get morale or lose morale based on what you've set that expenditure dial to.

Money is the only way that you can lose this game.

Buying expansions for the Argo allows certain events to occur. The Argo starts out gutted, with just some engines and maybe some partially functional Mech Bays. It's a garbage place to live. You can spend a ton of money, resources and time on the Argo. That lets you build things like zero-G pools, hydroponic farms, and cool stuff like that, that your MechWarriors like, and that unlock specific events related to those things.

Contracts have encounters which are a building block of content. Scenarios include a simple battle or defend a base. "Defend a base" can have some different moving parts to it. The base could have turrets. The turrets could need to be turned on. There could be 1 wave of enemies, 2 waves , or 3 waves. The spacing of those waves could be different. How tough the buildings are that you are protecting can vary. We build all of that variation into the encounter itself. What is this base? Is it a maintenance base that you are defending? Is it an ammo depot? What kind of forces are attacking it? Are they elite Kuritan assault 'Mechs? Are they garbage pirate 'Mechs that they have scavenged from a battlefield? The contract can say this is going to be 1 wave of enemies, no turrets, and you just defend it, or you have to turn the turrets on, you have to defend the techs and the APCs because there are going to be 3 waves and the third wave is going to just kick your ass - it's going to be hugely difficult to beat them. The person writing the contract can basically use the encounter as a toolkit to build the piece of content that they want.

There are 8 different types of objectives possible in contracts, including:

Defend a base.

Capture a base.

Destroy a base.

Assassinate a target.

The employer and target are randomized. We look at who owns the system. We look at the kind of people who live there or who have an interest there. We look at the potential targets for that system. For example, the local government that owns this planet needs you to wipe out this pirate base. The Davion forces that are looking to destabilize the Taurian government of this border-world have asked you to go and sabotage one of their munitions factories. The contracts available depend on where you are in the game-world, where you are in the story, and random chance. If you have a high enough reputation with House Davion, then a special contract comes up.

The sim game is entirely data-driven using json files.

You can't talk directly to MechWarriors in your employ.

There are 2 types of story (Restoration) missions. You have to help the Restoration either take or keep an important planet. One of the founding Houses of the Aurigan Reach. When you're responding to one of those missions, it is time sensitive. If you ignore those missions, they will eventually conquer the Restoration.

Contract rewards are money (C-Bill payment), salvage, and reputation gains. If you are under-budget on both money and salvage, you will receive bonus reputation.

Most planets have a very limited selection of items available, and they're also slightly randomized.

Reputation unlocks the really hard stuff, and it makes shopping or generally working with that faction cheaper. They're more friendly to you. They give you better deals.

There is a difficulty scaling that determines the kinds of 'Mechs that spawn, the kinds of opposition forces that you're going to face, and that's based on a global scale that progresses across the course of the entire story. So when you start out, you're going to face lances that are like a Locust and a couple of vehicles. When you're at the end, you're going to face Steiner scout lances. When you take a mission, you might take it as a difficulty 3 mission early on in the game, and it's just a bunch of low-end light 'Mechs. The same mission at difficulty 8 is going to be a bunch of heavies and assaults.

The difficulty range is variable. When you go look at the contract list, you'll see there's a 3-star one, there's a 4-star one, here's a 2-star one - that one is going to be really easy. You'll be able to set how hard you want your content to be by just taking the easy contracts - they pay less, the salvage is not going to be as good, the reputation gains will be lower, but if you're limping along, that might be the right choice for you. Gradually over time, those really easy ones are going to fall off the bottom end, and more high-end stuff is going to appear. Different regions of the game-world are harder than others. If you go do missions at the Davion-Taurian border, that's a hard area, you're going to see some pretty serious stuff there, because that's a flash-point, that's where some conflict is happening. If you're doing missions for local yokels on a backwater planet in the middle of the unsettled part of the Reach, that's going to be low-end content, you're going to be fighting pirates who have scrabbled together lances out of spare parts.

MechWarriors get to choose 2 specialization skills (that determine your level 5 abilities), and gain expertise in one of those specialization skills. When your expertise skill reaches a value of 10, you become elite which causes you to help other people level up faster. You unlock class names such as Sharpshooter.

MechWarriors do not come with 'Mechs.

You can rename MechWarriors. You can change their first and last names. You can change their callsigns. You can change their pronoun. You can change their portrait. You can rename your 'Mechs.

The salary of a MechWarrior increases as they level up. It's always cheaper to have someone that you trained up yourself. Points that they gained while they were in your employ are cheaper to have rather than points that are gained before you hired them. MechWarriors that you train up yourself will have a salary about two thirds that of a premium MechWarrior that you hire.

You will make the Argo much more expensive to operate over time as you upgrade it. Fuel price does not fluctuate.

When you negotiate for salvage, you're negotiating for both a total amount of salvage, let's say 8 (items), and an amount of priority salvage, let's say 2 (priority items). They're negotiated at the same rate, so it's 4 & 1, 8 & 2, 12 & 3, etc. When the salvage comes up, what's in the available salvage is literally what was on the 'Mechs that you killed. The game tracks damage and destruction. If you blow up (destroy) a Panther's right arm, you can't get the PPC as salvage because it's gone. Anything that you actually blow off or destroy or reduce to scrap, you can't get as salvage. You need to be careful with your killing. Everything that wasn't obliterated is in the salvage pool. You get to take first pick (of 2 priority items) out of everything available. Then your employer randomly gives you some of what is remaining up to the amount of salvage that you got (6 items randomly chosen by your employer). The employer keeps the rest. Some contracts will offer you up to 20 salvage (5 priority items chosen by you and 15 randomly chosen items). The lowest salvage possible is 4 (1 priority item). The employer and the kind of mission determine the maximum amount of salvage that you can negotiate for. If you're doing a snatch-and-grab where you're rescuing someone from a base and running to an evac point where you're going to be met by a Leopard, you probably aren't going to get much salvage from that mission because you don't have time to hang around and loot the place. If it's a destroy a base mission where you go in and level everything, then you'll get to pick through everything that is left, you'll probably be able to negotiate for more salvage.

In the development branch of this game, there has been tuning of weapons. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of changes that people either hate or love.

Q: "Will there be melee weapons?"

A: Not at launch, but in success, all things are possible.

Q: "Does the employer negotiator (the person that you're actually negotiating with) reflect on your ability to negotiate a contract?"

A: No. In the future, we hope that you will get to see more of them.

You can't actually work directly for the Directorate during the single-player campaign. If you don't do the Restoration, eventually the Directorate will win, and then they become another faction that you can take jobs from.

You won't be able to battle underwater but you will be able to battle in a vacuum on the surface of an atmosphereless planetoid (you won't be able to battle in space though).

The event system has shore-leave events in it.

The loan system will be similar to the loan system in the video game Cities: Skylines.

You won't be getting double heat sinks.

If you're in Taurian capital worlds where it's super high-tech and they have massive weapons factories, it's pretty reasonable that you could find specialized weapons. Specialized weapons are by manufacturer, which means that the manufacturers have Houses that they are associated with, so you will need to go to the right area of space to get that manufacturer's weapons.

Q: "Will side torso destruction with the arm falling off make weapons in the corresponding arm unsalvageable?"

A: No. The arm is not actually destroyed - you just blew it off.

The combat tutorial is a fairly short and sweet primer on how to move and shoot with your 'Mechs and it also sets the ground-work for the story. The combat tutorial is in the story.

Q: "Will there be stand-alone scenarios like famous battles from Total War?"

A: Not at launch, but in success etc. etc.
 

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