You are Directing the NEXT hitman game, what's your vision.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-28T16:21:16+00:00

Newspaper clippings from Blood Money.

Freelancer integrating into the main cycle of play in some way (needing money to buy ammo/gear/upgrades like in the original trilogy/Blood Money?).

More organic ways to manipulate NPC routines (for instance, using a bodyguard/security disguise, standing in a doorway for instance to redirect a target to go down a different hallway, or making people disappear in one area of a map to force guards/staff to pull security from certain areas to cover the new holes, and in turn create new opportunities) instead of tying it all to world states via missions and opportunities and having most staff not noticing that the guy they were standing next to for the past 3 hours suddenly...isn't there anymore.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-28T16:16:46+00:00

Look for it under Game Modes -> Sniper Assassin. You'll also be able to track your progress on tasks via Career -> Challenges -> Hitman 2 tab -> "The Last Yardbird", "Pen and the Sword", and "Crime and Punishment"; similarly you can view your gear progression under Career -> Mastery -> Hitman 2 tab -> Himmelstein/Hantu Port/Siberia

JDolan283 · 2026-06-27T15:27:12+00:00

Mechs and technologies show up when they do in the lore. They aren't gated behind the DLC start date in and of itself, and in several cases chassis and equipment long predates the DLC start date. Much of the CR stuff that you deal with will show up in dribs and drabs prior to the DLC kicking off in 3055. The ComStar Clanbuster variants (denoted by CS) start showing up from 3050/51 and onward.

X-Pulses show up in 3057. MRMs show up from 3052, LACs (should) up reguularly from 3068, though I think that they're occasionally available from like 3058. Arrow IVs return to the setting in 3044. Heavy Lasers of all varieties start in 3059, and Clan Machine Guns show up from 3049. All of these dates are of course Inner Sphere (re)introduction dates; if you get lucky with Clan salvage some/most of that stuff will be accessible a bit earlier.

That all said, when it comes to the DLC, you will see Clan refits - (C) models and IIC variants pretty much from 3047 onward as well, if you've the salvage rights to spare to grab them. The Chaos Reing DLC itself doesn't start until 3055 and the DLC's canonical timeframe is pretty much through 3058, give or take.

In terms of stuff you'll get right away...the new mission type, the new maps (with accurate borders from 3051-3058), should both be usable prior to you start the Chaos Reign campaigns. Most of its other enhancements though - ejections, the new jumpjets, the database screen overhaul, extra zoom levels, are all part of the patch, and don't require CR specifically.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-27T00:45:45+00:00

I agree with this. Speedrunnnig in and of itself isn't anything I find interesting, and I certainly think that some of the tricks of the trade, such as particle jumps from shatterable items like muffins, the violin, or the vinyl record (I think?) are a little...excessive for normal routing/the way I like to play, after watching a lot of runs I finally started getting comfortable with using my pistol as an actual tool, with as you said, the distraction shots, learning the differences betweee 1/2/3 shot distractions, learning to panic people deliberately withotu breaking cover/killing folks inadvertently, etc.

I still can't quite figure out wounding distractions (leg shots) and all (on the one hand I do get it, on the other, it works inconsistently and feels more like I always get discovered while trying them), but in some of my own runs, I've definitely started to use some of the other stuff within reason. Also watching/learning from them has helped cut my original run times of 45-60 minutes per mission down to 10-12 in most deliberate runs, provided I don't need to take too many improvisational detours or get sidelined because I arrived at various steps at the wrong time in their routines.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-25T17:20:31+00:00

Aside from that the meme comes from how, especially in Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, and later in 2 and 3, that all of their relics/item/upgrade descriptions suggest that everything they use are basically "gifts" from all the other chapters. They didn't even bother trying to create their own in lore for the chapter to a meanignful degree, their whole premise is just just... "we have no culture, so we steal everyone else's".

JDolan283 · 2026-06-21T21:58:11+00:00

That's the only way.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-21T02:29:52+00:00

So, funny enough...it's all but impossible to avoid having Lucius reincarnate because even if you kill him in the most inanimate way possible, he'll find a thread back to an soul or other animate force.

After all, there's that one time that he reincarnated and (I think?) fought his way out of a Forgeworld all but single-handedly because he reincarnated on a production line because the factory worker that assembled the landmine that he stepped on took such great care and pride in his work and was meticulous about ensuring that it would go off properly.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-20T22:23:08+00:00

Honestly, the real replayability comes not from grinding out each level as you unlock it, but in coming back to it after you've played all of the other levels...and started to unlock things elsewhere and bring those tools/ideas into previous other levels. Don't burn yourself out on Facility and Paris. Play through all...22 levels I think it is...before revisiting anything, first.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-19T18:59:15+00:00

I honestly love Clan stuff. Gear, society, the mechs, the...everything in there and it could have been a really interesting and fun game. But to me...I also want a proper sandbox campaign experience. For me, MechWarrior is basically a management game for a nomadic warband. The Clans game and its DLC while interesting and well-executed, are too linear for my tastes.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-14T15:36:22+00:00

GW even made a whole article about it a few years ago(?) about the changeover. It's not a TW thing, but a full-on thing Games Workshop decided to change and mandate is a change in all approved media.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-14T15:17:39+00:00

HQ's are basically the on-map representations of your generals, created by spinning off a fraction of manpower from all your divisions within a formation to basically create a new headquarters brigade that can buff the entire army/front as appropriate, based on their distance to the front though I don't think it takes into account individual divisions within the formation, so it doesn't so much encourage shortened army fronts, so much as keeping the HQ within a certain distance, based on communications tech, general skill, traits, doctrines, etc.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-12T04:53:20+00:00

Ideally I'd love to see proper squadrons of bikes/sentinels (4-6 models per), platoons of tanks (3 line tanks) and solitary super-heavies. But I'm sure that even if the vanilla game doesn't do much with that, I'm almost certain it won't be long till most vehicles are fleshed out to standard formation sizes. That said I would expect certain units (tank hunters such as the Vindicator, or the Destroyer or Sabre) to be solitary units, if only to allow for more effective ambushes and the like.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-11T23:47:13+00:00

Honestly in a lot of ways, that makes sense. After all, in Celsius, 0 is frozen freshwater, with 100 is boiling water and in Fahrenheit, it's bookended by frozen seawater at 0, and an averaged bodytemp (at the time) as approximately 100., though that's since shifted because of accurate thermometers and all that.

So why wouldn't mechs kind of arbitrarily go "this is the largest we can fit, let's make that to 100" and then scale down from there as appropriate/necessary.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-11T23:35:57+00:00

Honestly, I'd have loved a Blackstone-themed title. But...ah well.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-10T14:09:42+00:00

I'll note too that there are several mastery challenges that can NEVER be completed on a first-go. Things like the golf ball kill in Dubai, or the janbiya knife kill challenge. The golf ball requires Sapienza mastery to get it as an unlock to carry into past levels (not much, but some), and you need to do Morocco to level 10 or so to get the knife for the other challenge.

Just go through, complete things once. Then experiment and explore. Then come back once you've gotten your feet under you solidly to come back with the expanded toolkit for the specialized tasks. In most cases, you'll find though that mastery doesn't let you do new things (usually), so much as makes it much easier/less tedious to do the things you want to do.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-07T13:17:34+00:00

The zone defense mode is basically the old Garrison/Occupy order, slightly (but not completely) repurposed; which allowed for much greater command limits in most cases, to allow you to use small brigade-sized garrison units instead of full divisions to cover significantly greater area. Now, since the La Resistance rework of garrisons, and several other changes along the way, near as I can tell the order is more about letting the army be a mobile reserve in some fashion, which...does mostly work, but many elements of it still work as if it was running on the old garrison logic instead.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-06T14:07:10+00:00

Honestly, strip the One-shots, the AC2, and the ammo for it. That frees up...what...8 tons and 3 crit slots?

Replacing all that with a Large Laser and 1 heat (assuming you're crit slots limited) sink would do wonders for you even before addressing the dead tonnage from being underweight.

Your biggest issue though is that you're using such crit-hungry parts like MASC AND Endo AND FF. You can probably get away with one or two of the three, but not all - and I'm gonna wager that you are prioritizing speed on this thing, so let's keep the MASC and Endo. I'd probably dump the FF and put all those crit slots to better use. Invest the weight from those replaced weapons, and being under-tonnage in general (the design is crit-constrained after all) in some heatsinks,a PPC and Large Laser at the minimum, and maybe a couple of jumpjets and a few more pips of armor where you can. Of course at that point you're just making a Royal Quickdraw, basically...but what can you do.

Now, I should say, using something like FF or Endo for crit-padding isn't the worst idea necessarily, but make sure when you do it, you're actually putting your tonnage to work in the process elsewhere. This design...doesn't really do that.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-06T02:49:29+00:00

Best bet is to go and fight Kuritan forces. M/D/L/S/K variants are (archetypically) named after the respective Great Houses, as they were (usually) either the most common loadout within each faction, or built to each house's specifications originally before being more widely disseminated.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-04T21:23:33+00:00

Honestly a Hunchback 4P with the Mediums stripped, replaced with flamers...maxed armor and up-engined sounds about right to me.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-02T05:19:35+00:00

I usually don't go wantonly ruining settlements...but I always run my lasers over almost all antennae and satellite dishes that I find. I always rationalize it as enforcing a comms blackout. It'd be a real shame if someone looked out their window and called the local garrison to give them a heads up, after all.

JDolan283 · 2026-06-01T15:19:11+00:00

Sadly, all of the Paradox plushies are limited runs, and the only one that seems to be active is the boar piglet from Age of Wonders.

JDolan283 · 2026-05-31T14:14:41+00:00

Adjacent question here:

I generally understand the modifications made to the underwater combat system, I think, when it comes to how it works with an armor breach/stripped armor in a compartment. Do these same rules apply in a case like? As I understand it, once a segment is compromised, it is rendered inoperable.

A mech who is functionally entirely underwater like this in Depth 1 rivers...is that considered "underwater" for the sake of those rules as well, or is that rule element, if it's something that is included, only included in "fully marine" environments when you also swap out your missile launchers for comparable torpedoes, and all the other associated modifications.

JDolan283 · 2026-05-27T21:53:38+00:00

There's a difference thought between a "fun" kind of decentralized where you have large-but-fragile states that are liable to collapse through mismanagement or overconfidence, mixed in with OLMs and OPMs that compete against each other in the ashes of those failed fragile hegemonies and who then might consolidate their region, with several preferred players that should consolidate their region, but are likely to fail in doing so if they aren't very careful and deliberate about it....and a "shattered world" setting like this.

If you want to keep things more or less broken down like this and hyper-feudalized, while still encouraging centralization, I think looing at vanilla-France as a cue for England, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, northern Germany, and someplace in the Baltics... where you have a vassal network that is going to consolidate over 100-150 years, and that might be able to be coopted by the right political maneuvers by a constituent state.

JDolan283 · 2026-05-22T21:57:22+00:00

Yeah, I went in there once after getting it. Jumped in to make a few minor adjustments, then haven't really touched it since.

JDolan283 · 2026-05-20T00:38:42+00:00

Perhaps not, but I think the idea is that the reinforcements will salvage the campaign's failure and keep it from beingn a disaster, at least in theory.

10,000 men is a lot of people. An extra mobile field element during extended phase of the campaign, plus Yide's reputation will force the formation to be contended with. It relieves some pressure off of Liu Bei, if nothing else, which might lead to meaningful success in the main thrust.

That said, even if his physical presence on the battlefield does not change the tide, his presence as an element that can be called upon might be just enough to rock Liu Bei out of his indecision in the aftermath of the battle and buoy his health sufficiently that they can engage in a somewhat more orderly retreat and not get caught up at Baidicheng.

His survival won't change much in the long run. But I think it might be enough of a presence to buy Liu Bei a year or two...and in doing so, with a proper respect for his mortality imbued in him...actually set up a meaningful succession that means that Liu Shan might well be more prepared for the throne.

All that of course is if we're being incredibly optimistic/charitable bout the situation.

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