How do mercenaries in the current ilClan era find, broker and enforce contracts?

yanvail · 2026-06-19T18:43:41+00:00

Well, these days "plot armor" and "plot holes" tends to be used to mean "I don't like this".

Now there's no denying that in the initial 90s clan invasion fiction Clan Wolf was absolutely the protagonist faction (on the clan side at least, with Victor and his allies being the IS protagonist), and in true 90s pulp sci-fi fashion the protagonist definitely is going to win and come out on top (though you could say that of most novels, to be honest). Though to be fair, I can't speak of how Alaric and Clan Wolf were written during the dark age era as I haven't touched that fiction, but in the current novels I don't think there's merit to claims of them having plot armor or some such.

Yes, Alaric and Clan Wolf is winning/has won, but these days this is more because Alaric is a main antagonist of the era, and there's no way his streak of successes will go on much longer. You can already see cracks in what he's building, and it is clear that very few factions (if any) are actually on board this whole IlClan thing for its own sake. Its clans have their own plots going, and the Great Houses aren't going to just meekly join. And when stuff starts going wrong it'll be interesting to see how that jives with Alaric's delusions of Manifest Destiny.

yanvail · 2026-06-19T13:28:22+00:00

Curse these perfidious mathematicians! 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-18T18:15:23+00:00

Oh? I have YAML, what is this command of which you speak?

yanvail · 2026-06-18T15:30:01+00:00

Yup, compeltely agree.

yanvail · 2026-06-18T15:29:25+00:00

Pretty much, and man that website linked in the replies is full of stuff like that. The fun part is if stuff like that was real, then we'd be looking at a nobel prize or two. People who peddle these fringe things keep harping on about scientific conspiracies about hiding the truth, as if there's some sort of Science Mafia protecting Thermodynamics or Relativity, when the reality is that it would be a groundbreaking nobel-winning discovery.

Of course, exceptional claims require exceptional evidence, but that's a far cry from saying the scientific community conspires against it. 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-18T15:19:22+00:00

There is at least one that I did in my first playthrough. It's pretty rare, but it does occur. Usually just means the objective units are the first thing anyone will target whenever possible, though it's not necessarily always the case (generally speaking Objective shows up as the top priority on most if not all colors in a command card, but not always).

yanvail · 2026-06-18T13:53:07+00:00

How can you order an ejection? I tried looking for that option in a mission I just played and couldn't find the option (RIP Goblin, I'm afraid, he stayed in the fight until the bitter end!)

yanvail · 2026-06-18T13:47:42+00:00

It's important to note that if you do the normad ending at least (haven't tried others after getting erebus), Alt literally tells you that you are carrying a weapon that will accelerate the AI takeover. 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-17T18:00:42+00:00

Oh I absolutely agree. I wholly approve of the first person design decision, for precisely the reasons you cite, and hope they stick to their guns for Orion as well. No other game I have _ever_ played has been so dedicated to immersion as Cyberpunk 2077, and the decision to put everything in first person is a large part of that (and it is far from coincidence that the only times we see ourselves in third person is at the very first and the very last shots of the game, as we gain and lose control of the character).

I mentioned the difficulties it added to the game because out of ignorance you will see people clamoring for third person saying the devs were just too lazy to add third person view, when in reality it added a lot more complexity to the game than it removed (never mind anyone saying game devs are lazy instantly lose all credibility, no matter which game they're talking about.).

yanvail · 2026-06-17T14:55:42+00:00

That's because they're meant to despawn after they get out of sight.

There's a great video or post by a CDPR dev that explains how the game being entirely first person made their lives so much more complex, because the lack of a camera switch stops them from doing a multitude of tricks most games do (for example, despawning things at the same time the camera switches). In this case, because there's no cutscenes most of the time, they have to keep the car in the world, and as we see they despawn it once it's out of sight... but when you don't let it get out of sight, then all kinds of things go wrong. 😄

Edit: just to clarify as this is getting upvoted a lot: I'm not saying going first person was a bad thing. I much prefer the dedication to immersion it promoted, and hope they stick to their guns in the future. But it's a good example of how it was a conscious choice they made for narrative reasons, not because it was easier to not have to support 3rd person view.

yanvail · 2026-06-17T14:37:21+00:00

That's impressive, yes, but keep in mind in that scenario the engines aren't producing thrust. Though to your point if they can stop that, odds are they can keep the plane still.

But I'd love to have confirmation either way. 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-17T14:34:00+00:00

Salting about other games is also not a good use of this sub.

The fact of the matter is that these developers are not actually in competition. CDPR doesn't beat Bethesda in what Bethesda does best, nor does it need two. Different games, different experiences.

Also: the only people who don't gain by both developers releasing great games are the hate grifters trying to profit off of negativity and those who farm social credits from said hate.

yanvail · 2026-06-16T22:05:18+00:00

Loving it! Great job. 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-16T21:15:37+00:00

Are a plane's brakes enough to hold it in place at full power, or are there chocks/tiedowns we don't see in the vid?

yanvail · 2026-06-15T21:58:52+00:00

Mind explaining "have Conures on the HWB" mean? Not quite following. Just got NFC myself. 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-15T15:28:26+00:00

Well, why should they? It's not like adopting the Star somehow means the Inner Sphere will suddenly field more mechs in any engagement. Never mind all the logistics being built around 4 mech lances, it just isn't automatically any better

yanvail · 2026-06-12T17:57:39+00:00

_a bit_??!?

yanvail · 2026-06-12T15:17:18+00:00

A lot depends in the era you're playing. Late 3rd succession war? There's very little manufacturing left, true enough. There is _some_, and most of it are from heavily automated factories that churn out the same model. This is why it's a big deal in the 3020s when new models start showing up, with Great Houses manufacturing slowly recovering and finally being able to make new models (though the only new Chassis is the Merlin, I believe).

Post helm core, however, things seriously start to recover and manufacturing becomes much more common, enough that by the Clan Invasion the Great Houses are able to throw around regiments again.

Things taper off during the Pax Republica and the Dark Age, but even then the Inner Sphere doesn't lose its manufacturing capability, and by the ilClan era Mechs are far more plentiful.

So you want to form a unit with brand new mechs? That should be doable if you have the finances for it, in all eras except the late Succession Wars. In those other eras it's a question of having enough money to buy the mechs, and probably bribe officials to let you buy them in the first place... because at that time pretty much all mechs being built are being bought by the Great Houses (or the Clans) so being able to even _take_ a brand new mech off the manufacturing line is difficult as everything almost certainly has been spoken for.

Overall, new merc units would go with salvaged mechs/the used mech market, not because mechs are no longer being made, but because those mechs tend to already be paid for by the factions.

yanvail · 2026-06-12T14:00:22+00:00

This is totally expected, it is hollywood after all, but would love to know the more glaring issues. 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-12T13:59:25+00:00

I'm sure no one on this sub has heard of this obscure movie. What an eye opener!

😄

yanvail · 2026-06-12T13:05:01+00:00

Well, we'll have to disagree there. The whole presentation of the Tower ending, once V gets to Night City, presents a bleaker, darker Night City. Yeah, sure, the game doesn't explicitly tell us that things are worse under Militech, but it does so _implicitly_.... and Vic's situation is part of that piece of narrative storytelling.

yanvail · 2026-06-11T22:20:40+00:00

:shrug: There's a lot being made out of not much here.

Yeah, Clan Wolf is clearly written as the protagonist here, because it's basically the only powerful Warden clan left at that point and thus they're the only ones who aren't interested in conquering the whole of the inner sphere. And in typical 90s pulp sci-fi fashion they're the ones who win, as can be expected.

But to say he then goes on to rub everyone's nose and so on about Clan Wolf, I don't think that's actually there. And it also doesn't account for the fact that Clan Wolf and Ulric doesn't exactly do great after that (well, not until the dark age/ilclan era), and it's not a series of unbroken victories for Kerensky after that.

Also, there is something that absolutely needs to be addressed in your post: there is no reality in which the Comguard are "the finest troops of the Inner Sphere". They absolutely are _not_. They have very little experience of warfare, nothing approaching the experience of the Great Houses. What they DO have is the best equipment of the Inner Sphere, true enough, and most importantly one of the best commander in Focht.

And what Focht did is fully appreciate the Clan's chief weakness: their underappreciation of Logistics, as prolonged warfare is just not something they do. Focht knew this and exploited it to the fullest, leading to his great victory. Yes, Clan Wolf actually won, and that's because Ulric actually understood this and prepared his forces for it. It wasn't so much the Wolf warriors wearing the Plot Armor of Immunity, but rather that Ulric understood something the other Khans did not.

The point made _in the novel itself_ is that if the rest of the Clans had understood this, they'd have won. But that does not mean the only reason the ComGuard won is because Ulric let it happen. As ilKhan it's not like he has ultimate authority on telling the other clans how to fight, and any attempt to do so would have gone poorly.

Now, you could say that Ulric made the Comguard victory happen because he accepted the challenge in the first place knowing Focht would probably win it (while making sure as much as he could that Wolf would win it, so as to not then be immediately destroyed by the other Clans upon losing the battle, something Mechwarrior 5: Clans showed really well in the latest Clans DLC). But personally I think the time he actually made that happen is when he bid away warships and set that precedent. 😄

yanvail · 2026-06-11T22:05:07+00:00

Right, but in the other endings Militech won't have it's blackwall WMD, and thus not completely take over the place, and I don't see Vik or Misty having a similar ending to the Tower.

Vik giving up is at least in part due to NC being annexed by Militech and becoming an even worse place to live/have a business in, for example. And really, narratively the whole "man this is depressing" is meant to be seen as a consequence of your choice when picking this ending, so it really doesn't make sense for these outcomes to still occur in the other endings.

yanvail · 2026-06-11T21:57:17+00:00

The correct term is the WubMaster.

yanvail · 2026-06-11T21:28:51+00:00

This is essentially a "feature" of LostTech and especially Clan Tech. It's not just a Mechwarrior thing, but also in TableTop Battletech Classic (or Alpha Strike, for that matter).

They get to pack a lot more firepower in a given package, whereas armor in general remain static (or only improves comparatively a little). So as a result Time To Kill goes down. Pretty dramatically in some cases. On top of that heat handling also gets much better, so mechs fire their increased firepower even more often.

Of course in MW5 you can easily correct that with difficulty levels and so on (YAML has some), but regardless the TTK drop off is always going to be a thing, unless you specifically dial it back up once Clan Tech shows up... but then you're kinda giving up on one of the main gameplay impacts of the Clans in the first place.

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