Since the battle occurred on Sunday, we don’t have any time to fix up the Recon Lance before they could potentially roll up another fight on Monday, so I pull them out of the rotation entirely for this week. We’re still fine on the contract because while we have to deploy two lances to missions, they’re fine if one is a training run as long as the other is a combat patrol.
So, we have the rest of Sunday to handle repairs before we roll up the new week. The first thing I do is keep my promise and adjust the AtB settings so the AI no longer (fails to) use VTOLs. Heh, the tooltip for the checkbox says “the AI does not yet have full support for VTOLs”. That’s an understatement.
I also adjust the maintenance cycle to 7 days and the modifier to -2. We’ll see how the Regular techs handle this, but I think it might be the happy spot for using Regular techs for this work.
I then go through our list of mechs and make some reassignments. Every Regular and Veteran tech is now taking care of one or two mechs, meaning they spend an hour or two per day on maintenance, but it frees up our single veteran tech to handle any problems a regular can’t fix. (Hopefully.)
Now that we have some work to do, let’s look at the repairbay in more depth.
Mechs are color-coded by their damage. Yellow indicates that there’s work to be done, but the Mech can be deployed if needed. Red means that whatever damage it has, it’s in no state to be piloted.
Our Hornet has 25 minutes of work to be done, mostly stocking up its ammo after the fight and fixing a few plates that got knocked off in the last battle.
Now here’s the thing – all tasks, even the most simple, requires a Green tech or better. That one ultra-green tech we have? She’s a leach that’s useless, and we’ll be firing her later. I could keep her around and hope that at best, she rolls for and gets the monthly experience bonus five months in a row. Or I could fire here in the confidence that we’ve already found one regular mech tech as time passes and more will appear who can actually do their job.
Or… I could just leave her be. When I go to sack her, the game informs me that I have to pay her a 10k golden parachute to get the hell out. She’s paid 480 C-bills a month. For those who don’t like math, that’s about 21 months salary in one shot. I guess we’ll keep her around and put her to work if she ever gains enough experience (5) to be useful.
Getting back to the task at hand, select a task and whatever techs are fit to do the job are displayed. The name highlighted in green is the tech assigned to service this particular Mech, but dealing with simple repairs is one of the ways you skill up green techs, so I select Chih-tui Ge and tell him to reload the mech and fix that armor. Reloading ammo is always a success, and simply takes a little time. Repairing the armor is roll against 9, -2 for being an easy task, and -2 because the armor was maintained to a high quality. He succeeds on the roll, and that’s one mech down.
Xidonius’ Phoenix Hawk was mauled fairly badly, sustaining some internal damage to the right leg and with armor damage all over. Other than that, it’s in OK condition.
Our Green techs do a good job on everything but one of the armor replacements, and a regular picks that up easily. Two down, two to go.
Konrad’s Jenner was also banged up, with internal damage to the left arm and right leg, but otherwise fine. Our Green techs are exhausted, but the Regulars pick up the repairs and finish off the Mech.
Jack’s Wolfhound is another question. Currently it’s not mission-capable, with two engine hits even moving will slowly drive it towards a forced shutdown or explosion, and the gyro makes staying upright a challenge.
Our Green techs were done for the day after the first three mechs, and one of the regulars screwed up the gyro replacement, so Ultac Rehani, our veteran tech uses his remaining time today to get started on the work, and will finish it up tomorrow.
If he fails, since we have no elite techs we’ll have to scrap out the gyro, order a new one, and replace it entirely. No pressure, Ultac!
They also fail on the Fusion Engine fix, so the Wolfhound might be down and out for a while.
Our last mech, the salvaged Phoenix Hawk from our mission, definitely is going to be in the bay for a while. For one thing, it’s missing its head, which leads to the acquisition screen.
One thing to note is that if you replace the entire head, you can see the (sensors, life support) tag – this means that replacing the head also replaces these two items, so we only need to order the head and a lower leg actuator (joint).
We succeed on both rolls, and have sourced a new head for the Phoenix Hawk and the leg actuator. However, the head will take 8 days to be delivered and the actuator 4, so we have a while before it’ll be in usable condition. We also need to purchase some jump jets to replace the destroyed ones, but our admins fail their check to find the parts today, and will try again tomorrow.
In the meantime, the techs get to work on what they can fix, unfortunately due to a lot of failed rolls, Ultac has plenty of work ahead of him on this mech. I end up reassigning all his maintenance duties to regular techs given his future workload already.
Having done what we can for the Mechs today, we then check up on the people. You can see now that there are potential patients for our doctor, and that healing on their own, they’ll make a check to recover every 15 days. Assigning them to the doctor changes that to every day, significantly speeding up recovery times. I assign our two wounded MechWarriors and the three injured prisoners to our doctor, and we’ll see tomorrow how they do.
Finally, a nice touch – we’re paid a bounty for taking prisoners, 50,000 a head. At the end of the campaign, I’ll remove them from the unit, to simulate turning them over to the Federated Commonwealth to stand trial for their crimes. Until then, we’ll keep them in the stockade.
The following day rolls around, and being a Monday, it’s personnel day.
Well, she’s certainly a child of the melting pot that is the Inner Sphere. Asian features, French double-first name, and Dutch last name. We hire her – we have a Mech that should become available at some point, and until then she can potentially sub in if someone gets seriously hurt and isn’t mission-ready for the next week.
The doctor makes her heal checks, and one of the prisoners and Xidonious are released, fully healthy. Jack and the other two still need more time, however.
The admins find two jump jets, to be delivered in 4 and 8 days, and Ultac fails his roll, meaning we’ll need to get a new gyro before the Wolfhound is usable.
This is where things get expensive – a new gyro is 900k C-bills. This hurts our bottom line, but nothing to be done. It’ll be delivered in a few days. At least Ultac gets the fusion engine fixed without incident.
Our mission for the week is a Hold the Line (Attacker) mission on Tuesday, featuring Battle Lance and a FedCom Centurion against a light mech lance and a light vehicle lance.
We need to destroy four of their units, they need to destroy two of ours. Whoever wins gets control of the battlefield and the salvage.
We advance to Tuesday, the doctor heals another prisoner, but Jack still has one wound. The techs salvage the cockpit out of what Konrad left of the Phoenix Hawk’s head, but fuck up the engine, leading to it needing to be scrapped. This hurts, because we’re not allowed to order engines on a whim, so this leaves Phoenix Hawk #2 as a hulk until we come across a 270-rated engine as salvage. We’ll keep it around at the moment, but if we need money we’ll sell it for the 900k C-Bills it’s now worth.
I really wish we had an Elite tech by now – they give one last (and best) chance to fix things before they go to scrap.
Oh well, if wishes were wings, we’d have land-air mechs.
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Topic: Let's Play MegaMek (Against the Bot campaign) (Read 74996 times)