Referring back to
this post again, we’re going to go ahead and generate our mechwarriors and support personnel.
In the Marketplace dropdown, there’s an option ‘Hire Personnel in bulk’. We choose that one, select 12 Mechwarriors and hit Hire. We then select Mech Tech in the Type dropdown, adjust the number to 10 and hire them as well, followed by a single doctor and single Admin/Logistical.
As you can see on the right, we now have a list of new members to the unit. Now, strictly speaking, the first person hired is the Captain, the second through fourth are the Lieutenants, and the rest are the regular Mechwarriors. We won’t be entirely following that, as some people’s backgrounds call for a veteran or even elite character, and others are very clearly green or ultra green recruits.
Mmm…. No. This screen shows our characters, ordered by rank, then skill. If we followed the rules blindly, our officers, even after adjustment, would be green. One of them even starts ultra-green. Instead, I’ll be adjusting characters based on the bios written by everyone to match what they’ve described more closely.
In this case, the two ultra-green characters will be the basis for Xidonius, the former pirate slave, and Martin, the gambler who made it big. Both of their bios make it clear that they barely know what they’re doing in a mech (for logical reasons).
We have 2 veteran templates, 3 regular, 5 green and 2 ultra-green. With our current PCs, this breaks down to:
Veteran 1 – Jack “EuchreJack” Eustance
Veteran 2- Konrad “Little Dog” Lai
Regular 1 -Han “Rebel” Zoku
Regular 2 – James “Knave” Brenner
Regular 3 – Roger “Raptor” Williams.
Green 1 – Zhou “Anvil” Smythe
Green 2 – Alexander “Thermo” Roberts
Green 3 – Kevin “Neonivek” Collider
Green 4 - <unclaimed>
Green 5 - <unclaimed>
Ultra-Green 1 – Xidonius “Lil Brother” Oniislyvia
Ultra-Green 2 – Martin “Lucky Bastard” Johnson
Now, this is where you sit down with the instructions and/or spreadsheet and customize everyone. The captain gets a +1 to both piloting and gunnery, and the lieutenants get a +1 to the weaker of their piloting or gunnery skills. If those are equal, they get to choose (in my case, I’d stick the bonus in gunnery every time.)
To do this, you right-click on a character, scroll all the way down to GM Mode and click on ‘Edit…’
Now you see why I wanted so much information from you! In addition to bonuses to their fighting skills, the officers also gain random bonuses to the leadership skills strategy, tactics and leadership. I check these three skills at 0 for all of the officers, and then roll 1d6 to see where the bonus falls. The captain gets two bonus points, the lieutenants one.
Strategy – For the unit commander, defines the maximum number of combat or scout lances that can be deployed per week (starts at 3 with 0 points). In combat, it reduces the number of turns needed for friendly reinforcements to arrive by 1 per point of strategy skill for the lance commander.
Tactics – Applies to the lance leader, each point allows one reroll of the battle conditions, and also gives a bonus to the initiative rolls.
Leadership – For the unit commander, each point increases the number of combat or support personnel in the unit before people start feeling crowded and looking to retire or change units. In combat, each point increases the percentage of friendly units that must be destroyed before we admit defeat in a fight by 5%.
For characters generated at Veteran or Elite, or manually promoted there, you need to manually roll for and add a special ability (or two if elite.) In addition, I’m adding a houserule:
There’s two special abilities that are very rare, Natural Aptitude (Gunnery) and Natural Aptitude (Piloting). Now, in principal only a veteran or elite character can generate with this ability, but instead I’m rolling twice for each character. On a 99, they gain the Gunnery trait, and on 100 they gain the Piloting trait. I don’t expect anyone in the company to gain either – it’s a 1% chance, after all, but I think it simulates the possibility of natural talent better then only a veteran or elite pilot having that skill.
And having just typed that, I went down the list of templates, and Xidonius’ Ultra-Green template rolled up Natural Aptitude for Piloting.
Anyway, the commander boosts to Han Zoku’s template pushes him to Veteran, and his random roll gave him the ability Pain Resistance. This reduces the feedback damage taken from an ammo explosion to 1, and gives him a +1 bonus on the die roll to stay conscious after falling or having his mech take a head shot.
Changes complete, I adjust the portrait and that’s one mechwarrior complete.
I’m not going to go through the details for every character, so let’s cover the highlights:
Jack “EuchreJack” Eustence – Innate Tactics +1, gained Strategy +1, Veteran Special Ability: Weathered (no initial -1 penalty due to weather conditions)
James “Knave” Brenner – Regular -> Veteran (Officer bonus), gained Strategy +1, Veteran Special Ability: Pain Resistance
Zhou “Anvil” Smythe – Gained Stategy +1
Xidonius “Lil Brother” Oniislyvia – as stated above, rolled Natural Aptitude (Piloting) (roll 3d6 on piloting checks, keep the best 2)
Konrad “Little Dog” Lai – Veteran Special Ability: Weapon Specialist (Medium Laser) (-2 to the difficulty check for making shots with this particular weapon)
I had to laugh a little when I rolled that one. Given that his Mech is all medium lasers, all the time… Well, he’s going to be exceptionally deadly.
Martin “Lucky Bastard” Johnson – Adjusted age by one year. Given our starting year and his birthday on the 29th of February, 21 wasn’t possible with that day. He’s now 20.
Kevin “Neonivek” Collider – Innate Tactics +1
So with that done, at least at the time of the writing, there are two NPCs that need to be generated for our campaign. The excel spreadsheet for AtB uses the following rolls (which is what I’ve asked of you)
Random origin – 1d20
1-6 – You come from a world in the periphery or a mercenary origin
7 – You come from one of the three major Periphery powers – The Magistracy of Canopus, The Outworlds Alliance or the Taurian Concordat. I roll a 1d6, with 1-2 begin the Magistracy, 3-4 being the Aliance, and 5-6 being the Concordat.
8 – You come from a mercenary background, and possess a custom mech. I don’t know why I read this as a Solaris start, but it fits well as the arenas there are a great source of custom designs.
9-10 – Lyran Commonwealth (or that portion of the Federated Commonwealth)
11-12 – Free Worlds League
13-14 – Capellan Confederation
15-16 – Federated Suns
17-18 – Draconis Combine
19 – ComStar or Word of Blake
20 – Clans
The last two results aren’t allowed prior to 3055, so rolling them gives you a Mercenary/Custom Mech start.
Random mech – 2d6
2-3 – No mech, you start Dispossessed
4-6 – Light
7-9 – Medium
10-11 – Heavy
12 – Assault
Now, the Captain gets a +2 on this result, ensuring he never starts without some form of Mech. Lieutenants get a +1, so they have only a 1 in 12 chance of not having a mech.
What happens if one of the officers rolls high and gets a 13 or 14 as a result? Glad you asked! You get to roll on the Star League tables instead of whatever your origin is.
Finally, I use
Xotl RAT (Random Assignment Table). The guy making it did so well he ended up being invited to help work on the Master Unit List for Battletech, not bad eh?
Anyway, in this table, you roll 1d1000 and look it up for your Mechwarrior’s nation of origin and weight class. Going back to the Star League thing – most Star League Mechs aren’t any better or different than other Mechs. You might get a rare(er) design, and some might make use of double heatsinks or Ferro-Fibrous armor. Except that 1 in 6 of the Star League’s Mechs was a Royal design. The Royal units were drawn from the Hegemony, the central core of the Star League, and were equipped with the best technology possible. The vast majority of the Mechs went with the SLDF into exile, and their advanced technologies formed the basis of the Clan’s technical superiority.
For my purposes, I roll 1d6, and on a 6 the Mechwarrior gets to roll from the Royal table. For fun, after I had rolled up Han Zoku, I did a second set of rolls… getting a Star League result, then an Assault result, then Royal… and ending up rolling high enough on the 1d1000 for a
PLG-3Z Pillager. While fun, that would have been a bit too over the top. Once we can buy them, they’re amazing assault Mechs, capable of jumping and alpha striking each and every turn and never having to care about heat issues.
Getting back to the topic at hand, for the two NPCs, I use the ‘Life Modules’ rules in development in AtB 2.31 to build up highlights for the two characters.
Character 1 – Starting Stats Gunnery/Piloting 8/8
Affiliation 1d6 – 1 gives us Capellan Confederation
Class 1d6 – 4 gives us a Mercenary brat, with a -1 to the mech roll.
Education 1d6 – 3 gives us Graduate, which gives -2 Gunnery, -1 Piloting (6/7)
Career 1 1d6 – 6 gives Covert Ops (-1 Gunnery, -1 Piloting, extra skill) (5/6) (+2 years to age)
Extra Skill 1d6 – 4 gives Green skill as a Tech
Career 2 1d6-1 – 2 gives Training Battalion (-1 to highest skill) (5/5) (+1 years to age)
Career 3 1d6-1 – 1 gives Paramilitary Service (1 to random) (4/5) (+1 years to age)
Mech Roll 2d6-1 – 10 gives a Heavy mech
Type 1d1000 – 858 gives a
GLT-4L Guillotine.
So our first NPC was born in the Capellan Confederation to one of their mercenary units with a long-running contract. She (generated) graduated from a military academy and served a two year tour of duty doing covert operations for the Maskirovka. She was obviously successful enough to not be terminated at the end of her tour there, but her following assignments, first to a training battalion and then relegated to a militia showed clearly that her once-bright career was at an end. She took her trusty Guillotine and fled the Confederation. Because of her paranoia, she and some carefully vetted astechs are the only one allowed to work on her Mech, and she has learned basic tech skills to do so.
Our second NPC doesn’t have such a great life – born in the Federated Suns, he’s also a mercenary brat, but unlike NPC1, he ends up dropping out of school. He serves a one-year tour of duty before spending another two years guarding corporate assets before striking out on his own. His Mech rolls gives him a
HNT-152 Hornet, the lightest Mech on our roster.
With our MechWarriors generated, I assign them their appropriate ranks by right-clicking on their names, and selecting the correct rank from the ‘Change Rank’ option.
Done with that, it’s time to assign our mechs to the unit and their owners. The first step to this is to click on the Marketplace > Purchase Unit dropdown.
This part is pretty easy, you select the weight class, enter part of the name or model number, select the right mech and click the Add (GM) button to add it directly to our forces at no cost.
Once you’re done, you can close that screen, right-click on each Mechwarrior to choose Assign To Unit > As Pilot > their unit.
With piloted mechs in hand, we go back to the TO&E Window and set up our force. By default, you have a main unit titled ‘My Campaign’ that you’ll want to rename. Right-click on it and click ‘Change Name’ to give your unit a proper name. You can also change the icon by right-clicking and choose ‘Change Force Icon’.
Now, we’ll also need Mech lances. Right-click and click ‘Add New Force’, and you’ll get a popup to name it. I’m a sucker for conventions, so I name our current Lances the Command Lance, Battle Lance and Recon Lance.
Now, right-click on one of the shiny new lances, and under Add Unit, choose which Mechs you want to assign to which Lance.
Our forces are as follows:
We’re a bit unlucky with our tonnages at the moment – Battle Lance just edges into the ‘Heavy’ category, and Recon Lance likewise is 5 tons overweight for the Light category. This means they’ll face stiffer opposition then they’re really meant to until force composition changes.
Our next stop is the Finance tab.
The setup guide suggests that you start with liquid assets equal to 1/10
th of your physical assets and that you immediately take out a loan with 100% collateral and quarterly repayment. As a D-ranked mercenary unit, we can take a loan up to 25% of the company assets. I… didn’t know this, so I’ll let us stay with the 10m I wrote about in the Interlude and put it down to our two Rasalhague companions pulling some strings.
10% of our physical assets comes out to 2,497,775 C-Bills in liquid assets.
As you can see, we all chipped in however much we could.
Before we go further, we want to turn on the financial portion of the game, to do so go back to the Campaign Options > Finance Tab and check just about everything.
That done, Confirm and close the window again, and we’re ready to buy things. But what do we need? For that, we can look at the Overview > Parts in Use screen.
That’s… certainly a lot. However, we’re not buying one of everything, but picking up common parts that it will be handy to have in the field. Unless we choose contracts such as a Guerilla campaign, we’re have access to supplies while on contract, so things like mech limbs and torso slots aren’t something I’m worried about, and a starting mercenary company wouldn’t likely have on hand anyway. Here’s what I’ll be picking up:
- 3 full reloads for every ammunition bay, excepting machineguns (1x reload), SRM-2s (2x reload) and LRM-5s (2x reload).
- An equal amount of armor to what we have equipped. Armor comes in 80-point lots, so 1600 / 80 = 20 lots.
- A quarter of the heatsinks we have in use, so 11.
- A quarter of the jumpjets in use for each size, rounding down
- A quarter of the weapons in use, rounding down
To purchase parts, I go to Marketplace > Purchase Parts
Here using the filter and Buy and Buy in Bulk buttons, I get our initial parts arranged.
Once done, if we look at the Warehouse tab, we can see the list of parts that are in transit.
To deliver everything now, select it all, right-click, GM Mode > Deliver Part Now
Done with our purchases, we go back to the Campaign Options > Repair and Acquisition Tab and change the Acquisition skill to Administration. It will now be our sole administrator’s job to arrange for any parts we need (at two attempts per day) – probably a good reason to hire more as we can.
Now for final things the guide doesn’t mention:
In the Hanger, right-click on each Mech, choose Assign tech. You want your most experienced techs doing maintenance, as they have the best chance of not screwing something up, or even to improve the part to a better state of quality.
Our sole Veteran tech is valiantly maintaining 7 mechs on his own. 4 more are being picked up by a regular tech, and for RP reasons, the Guillotine is being maintained by a Green tech.
Under the Marketplace menu, go to the Astech and Medic Pools and bring the teams up to strength. This gives our professionals their needed teams of assistants to do their job.
Finally, we go to the Marketplace > Contract Market and we can look into accepting our first contract.
There are two available currently, both being offered by the Federated Commonwealth.
Let’s do a bit of tutorial about what the values in the contract stand for.
Employer and Enemy are pretty simple, the first is who’s paying us, the second is who we’re being paid to kill. The mission type is a brief idea of what we’re expected to do. In an Extraction Raid, we’re trying to either rescue or kidnap someone from the planet. Pirate hunting involves tracking down some offending pirates and kicking the crap out of them to make them stop what they’re doing.
Location tells us what planet the contract takes place on, and distance lets us know how far away it is from us – in this case, the pirates are 3 months and 12 jumps away, while the target in the FRR is 104 days and 13 jumps away.
Ally Rating and Enemy Rating gives us an idea of the quality of our allies and who we’re fighting. The FRR is tougher then the pirates, and while our allies are decently trained, the forces being thrown at the FRR aren’t quite as well equipped as those going pirate hunting.
Start Date is when we’re expected to arrive, which will automatically be adjusted if we’re a little late due to travel. The contract length specifies how long we’ll be busy with this particular assignment.
Overhead Compensation is the cost of negotiating the contract… I think. It’s a minor amount against the total.
Command Rights: This determines the amount of support our employer assigns to us. In order from most invasive to least:
Integrated – two AI-controlled bots attached to each lance
House – one AI-controlled bot attached to each lance
Liason – one employer unit attached to each lance, under your control
Independent – no attached units.
Now, on one hand, the bots are handy – more targets to shoot at, more firepower on your side. But you receive penalties if they go down, and the AI is suicidally brave, so they’ll happily take a Locust against an Atlas and try to kick it in the shins from the front. Too many penalties and no matter how well you’re doing, you receive a failed contract.
Transport Terms: What percentage of the transport costs the employer will pay
Salvage Rights: What percentage of the sweet, sweet salvage we’re allowed to lay claim to. The higher the better, as anything we can’t use, we can sell.
Straight Support: A straight payment to us to cover support costs.
Battle Loss Compensation: What percentage of our own losses the employer will pay to us.
Required Lances: How many lances you’re required to deploy per week to not go in breach of the contract.
Finally, you’re given a breakdown of what’s offered and what your estimated profit will be. I’m in favor of the Pirate Hunting contract – it pays more, the opponent is easier, it’s slightly closer by, and the salvage terms are far more generous. Normally I’d put this to vote, but I know people are eager to get the shooting started, so we’ll start voting from the next contract.
Poll
4 (100%)
Author
Topic: Let's Play MegaMek (Against the Bot campaign) (Read 74721 times)