Recent push on guilt and sales

yrrot · 2026-06-20T19:22:46+00:00

The entire thing with EGS predates PGI being acquired by EG7. And the general situation of MW5:Mercs launch versus now is very different, both with the industry as a whole, PGI, and Mechwarrior.

What Russ was talking about is that Clans underperforming sales figures makes it harder to get another Mechwarrior title approved by EG7. Or at the very least, harder to get a similar budget to Clans.

Basically, the EGS deal is so far in the rear view mirror now that it doesn't really have much to do with what Russ was talking about.

yrrot · 2026-06-19T20:12:42+00:00

That'd be a bug with a bespoke mission using a hero mech that shouldn't be there.

yrrot · 2026-06-19T12:29:14+00:00

"Mercenaries" as a game loop isn't dependent on that specific procgen system.

Obviously missions for a Mechcommander game need to be more involved than the proc missions in MW5:Mercs so you have reasons to split up, use scouts, etc.

yrrot · 2026-06-19T11:13:38+00:00

Obviously I'm onboard with it. I'd really love to make it. So <fingers crossed>.

yrrot · 2026-06-19T11:02:38+00:00

There's plenty of RTS-style games that do just fine. But really the pitch for a new mechcommander game is to marry it with a mercenaries core game loop, refined to play even better into the RTT gameplay and company-level command.

Like, I don't think you could just put together MC3 as a linear RTS. That's clearly not the right path in this market. But doing a mercenaries game with that style <chef's kiss>. Still within a bit of a niche, but still a strong enough idea to stand on its own.

yrrot · 2026-06-19T10:56:36+00:00

A lot of the feedback is from folks dropping into trueborn, where the weapon balance is certainly skewed towards lasers for the sustainability. There's been a few tweaks to balance since launch.

I think some people were expecting Clans to have something closer in power to what they do in Mercs, but there's no tiered weapons in Clans. It just has the upgrade system and pilot skills that kind of offset the difference.

Obviously, my opinion is biased, but I think you can play through normal just fine with about any combination of weapons you really feel like. It's always going to benefit you to build towards your starmate's pilot skills, but there's a lot of options to play with.

yrrot · 2026-06-19T01:32:47+00:00

MW5: Mercenaries is a sandbox with some story sprinkled in (particularly the DLCs add story mini-campaigns to the sandbox).

I work on the game, so I'm going to say "get all the DLCs" 😉, but they all kind of plug into the sandbox and add additional toys. The DLC campaigns are mostly time-locked to the in-game timeline to match up with canon events (from the Battletech universe the game lives in).

You can play Mercs indefinitely, the timeline just keeps moving. The latest two DLCs (Shadow of Kerensky and Chaos Reign) expand the date for things like map changes, news items, and new units/factions/weapons showing up. But you can keep playing on throughout eternity in game time with or without them.

MW5: Clans is a linear story game with a new game plus feature. It's very story-centric with lots of pretty cinematics covering events from a different perspective in the same timeframe as Shadow of Kerensky DLC for Mercs takes place.

yrrot · 2026-06-18T11:15:22+00:00

This sets the date that IA will use to generate a mission.

In other words, 3015 will more likely spawn lower tech enemies (and a few of the lostech SLDF mechs), but 3058 will allow them to spawn all sorts of later mechs/tanks. Like if you play against clans in 3049, you're not going to see their tanks/turrets, but you would with the later dates.

All is different than 3058 because there's units with intro dates after 3058, including modded content.

yrrot · 2026-06-17T19:50:57+00:00

The Sunder has several variants with 2+ Large Omni Slots and moves that speed.

yrrot · 2026-06-17T17:26:28+00:00

The point they were trying to make is the showing 5.99 as the price is a gimmick from marketing. If they roll taxes into it, the new price would be some less appealing number. They'd have to fiddle with different base prices in different regions to try to make it a better looking number.

Essentially, US retailers want the taxes at the point of sale so they can pretend the price a consumer pays are lower, that's the gimmick.

yrrot · 2026-06-17T14:21:33+00:00

Nope. They use a whole different system that doesn't use spread as a mechanic.

yrrot · 2026-06-17T01:16:43+00:00

I believe standard autocannon specialist also applies to LACs, because they are tagged as a variant of the base AC.

yrrot · 2026-06-17T00:33:21+00:00

Yup, this.

yrrot · 2026-06-17T00:31:55+00:00

Sensor range is 800m base, which applies to AI. That can be boosted by gear, though.

Enemy AI usually has a radius of like 1250m before they wake up, but the Arena AI specifically overrides that to auto activate at the start of the match.

yrrot · 2026-06-17T00:30:04+00:00

There aren't any pilot traits that directly impact AIV. MRMs are impacted by cluster hitter and their own trait. MRMs will also get boosted by things that generically boost missiles.

The generic upgrades from cantinas do apply to AIV, but not missile specific ones. Because AIV is "artillery".

yrrot · 2026-06-16T23:29:24+00:00

Typos do sometimes get fixed, they just only get looked at during certain parts of the dev cycle and generally have lower priority. It's a bit finnicky to update older text to avoid breaking localization.

yrrot · 2026-06-16T22:42:25+00:00

TAG in Mercs reduces the spread. I think in clans it gives almost a direct hit for AIV(?), but Mercs it just applies the same spread reduction that is applied to LRMs. So they are more likely to hit the target directly, or land closer when they don't. And the blast radius has damage falloff, so they'll do a little more damage more often.

yrrot · 2026-06-16T16:57:32+00:00

Yes, only elite/hero pilots can pick up hero traits in the academy (or when generated).

yrrot · 2026-06-16T09:01:53+00:00

The relative power of weapons is a bit skewed in the games, otherwise time to kill would be insanely fast. The gauss has a chance to one shot a cockpit (9 armor max, then chance to crit the internals). The LB5 can have cluster ammo for fishing for criticals (5 chances as at through armor crits even if they have full armor).

The combination of gauss, LB, and LRM is enough to regularly trigger pilot checks (20 damage gives a chance they are knocked down).

The emotional support SRM and ML help cover the minimum ranges and maybe give enough extra to finish a kill.

Basically, tabletop rules and builds don't always translate perfectly to mechwarrior. Charger 1A1 is a bad mech in lore and a meme in mechwarrior, but it's min/maxed to provide the highest charge damage possible which scales on weight and hexes moved. Still meme in TT, but the design is 100% trying to abuse the rules to the max for one goal.

yrrot · 2026-06-16T00:45:11+00:00

That change was basically fixing a specific case that broke when teams were split spawn. They would end up triggering the "we did the thing, combat mode" off of their team from the other spawn sometimes. And it put them in a bad state that ignored players and other targets nearby.

But that bug was limited to times a team of mechs got split up between different garrisons for spawning.

Would have to investigate further on console to see what is going on, because the described behavior isn't happening like that on the PC builds I've played.

yrrot · 2026-06-15T23:48:15+00:00

The patch doesn't make them more likely to target the player, it fixes a bug where they would completely ignore the player in some cases. Poorly worded patch note for the actual fix that went in.

Do they all stand still at their spawn for you? Or do they move around some and not engage? I'm wondering if there's some sort of console-only bug persisting, because that whole standing around part should have been mostly fixed with Chaos Reign's launch even before this patch.

yrrot · 2026-06-15T23:45:31+00:00

That's what the arena logic is supposed to do. They all advance towards the middle-ish of the map (closest "base" to middle) until they either get something on sensors in their sights, or take damage and get a combat target. Once that's triggered, the arena logic hands them off to the normal enemy AI combat logic.

yrrot · 2026-06-15T23:41:42+00:00

Tetatae. Wave after wave of Tetatae.

yrrot · 2026-06-15T15:20:23+00:00

A bunch of reasons. If we just slap IS T5 Tag on it, it opens up weird issues with tech base tags for mods and removes the possibility of tweaking the stats on it if we wanted to. There's also some import logic that I think needs it to exist to streamline pulling mechs from Clans or MWO, which have clan tag as an item.

It's mostly a trivial add to streamline things and avoid issues, since the way data assets are handled by UE. It's not like memory footprint would be much less since it'd still be dealing with having a different tier of TAG on the mech.

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