made notes of this superb developer Q&A (October 11):
The single-player story covers a bunch of hand-crafted, very detailed, story-driven missions of the kind that you more or less expect from HBS. Filling in all of the wander around the galaxy getting in trouble mercenary stuff are a huge ***-ton of ad hoc content that you can do - take contracts for great houses, take contracts for local planetary governments. The purpose of those is to level up your guys and get better equipment. Making money is the whole point of your mercenary outfit. Some of these jobs pay better than others, some of them are more above-board than others.
You're helping Kamea reclaim her throne. To do that, you're the elite MechWarrior force that she is going to use for missions that are too dangerous for normal troops. You're also going to support her armies in taking key planets away from the Directorate. So this leaves you with a lot of down-time to roam and to grow your mercenary outfit from a small band of a few MechWarriors to a fully-fledged outfit that can help her in the war effort.
There will be randomly generated characters.
Every pilot that you hire has actually gone through a life-path style career progression. You know where they come from, you know what kind of education that they had, you know what twists and turns their career has taken. They might start out as a commoner but fall into a life of crime and end up as a convict but then get recruited into a pirate crew after coming out of prison. There can be nobles, disgraced nobles, wealthy traders and businessmen who are looking for excitement and adventure. There are disgraced ComStar adepts as a possibility, Solaris gladiators. When you're looking at a character, you're not just looking at their stats, you're looking at their dossier - it's their resume basically, which shows the things that they've done and all of the things that you can count on them for. That life-path process doesn't just generate their stats - it also generates all of the tags and descriptive personality traits that key into the event system and other systems to basically flesh that person out. An example is Bob Kurita the pilot, who is a former tech, he knows a little bit about 'Mech maintenance, he's hot-headed and kind of rebellious - all of those things will influence the kinds of content that Bob ends up doing getting pulled into on the ship.
I think that one of the pilots that you start with developed contacts in prison and became a hired killer when she got out of prison.
Onboard the Argo, your mercenary outfit's morale is a number on a scale from 0 to 50. In combat, morale is a number on a scale from 0 to 100, so it's possible to start combat with the morale bar half-filled. Your mercenary outfit's morale affects the kinds of events that you will get. If you keep your morale in the toilet, you have MechWarriors who will want to leave, who will come to you and say "Look, I got a better offer." Rebellious MechWarriors will become mutinous. Conversely, if you keep your morale really high, you will get benefits from that. You will have MechWarriors who are eager to join you, MechWarriors who are helping each other out more. Individual MechWarriors can have things that make them happier or unhappy. A very militaristic MechWarrior who is used to military discipline is probably not going to be entirely happy if you set your spending levels to the highest level of extravagance. Conversely, a MechWarrior who comes from a wealthy family and is used to being treated well is going to be really upset if you're forcing them into spartan accommodations. Specific MechWarrior personality traits can end up applying high or low morale to that MechWarrior, and when they go into battle, if they have high or low morale, that changes the amount of morale you have to spend to activate those abilities. With a MechWarrior with high morale, you can pop off those abilities like crazy. A low morale MechWarrior is going to be a struggle to get all of those abilities to work, and you're going to end up paying for it in the long term.
There are 5 levels of expenditure that you can set, that affects your expenditure across the board, for maintenance, for salaries. There is a whole set of events that only happen when you've got your finances turned low (spartan). If you crank your expenditure all the way up to extravagant, there's a whole set of events that only happen when you are at extravagant. Those expenditure levels give you morale. Every quarter, you get morale or lose morale based on what you've set that expenditure dial to.
Money is the only way that you can lose this game.
Buying expansions for the Argo allows certain events to occur. The Argo starts out gutted, with just some engines and maybe some partially functional Mech Bays. It's a garbage place to live. You can spend a ton of money, resources and time on the Argo. That lets you build things like zero-G pools, hydroponic farms, and cool stuff like that, that your MechWarriors like, and that unlock specific events related to those things.
Contracts have encounters which are a building block of content. Scenarios include a simple battle or defend a base. "Defend a base" can have some different moving parts to it. The base could have turrets. The turrets could need to be turned on. There could be 1 wave of enemies, 2 waves , or 3 waves. The spacing of those waves could be different. How tough the buildings are that you are protecting can vary. We build all of that variation into the encounter itself. What is this base? Is it a maintenance base that you are defending? Is it an ammo depot? What kind of forces are attacking it? Are they elite Kuritan assault 'Mechs? Are they garbage pirate 'Mechs that they have scavenged from a battlefield? The contract can say this is going to be 1 wave of enemies, no turrets, and you just defend it, or you have to turn the turrets on, you have to defend the techs and the APCs because there are going to be 3 waves and the third wave is going to just kick your ass - it's going to be hugely difficult to beat them. The person writing the contract can basically use the encounter as a toolkit to build the piece of content that they want.
There are 8 different types of objectives possible in contracts, including:
Defend a base.
Capture a base.
Destroy a base.
Assassinate a target.
The employer and target are randomized. We look at who owns the system. We look at the kind of people who live there or who have an interest there. We look at the potential targets for that system. For example, the local government that owns this planet needs you to wipe out this pirate base. The Davion forces that are looking to destabilize the Taurian government of this border-world have asked you to go and sabotage one of their munitions factories. The contracts available depend on where you are in the game-world, where you are in the story, and random chance. If you have a high enough reputation with House Davion, then a special contract comes up.
The sim game is entirely data-driven using json files.
You can't talk directly to MechWarriors in your employ.
There are 2 types of story (Restoration) missions. You have to help the Restoration either take or keep an important planet. One of the founding Houses of the Aurigan Reach. When you're responding to one of those missions, it is time sensitive. If you ignore those missions, they will eventually conquer the Restoration.
Contract rewards are money (C-Bill payment), salvage, and reputation gains. If you are under-budget on both money and salvage, you will receive bonus reputation.
Most planets have a very limited selection of items available, and they're also slightly randomized.
Reputation unlocks the really hard stuff, and it makes shopping or generally working with that faction cheaper. They're more friendly to you. They give you better deals.
There is a difficulty scaling that determines the kinds of 'Mechs that spawn, the kinds of opposition forces that you're going to face, and that's based on a global scale that progresses across the course of the entire story. So when you start out, you're going to face lances that are like a Locust and a couple of vehicles. When you're at the end, you're going to face Steiner scout lances. When you take a mission, you might take it as a difficulty 3 mission early on in the game, and it's just a bunch of low-end light 'Mechs. The same mission at difficulty 8 is going to be a bunch of heavies and assaults.
The difficulty range is variable. When you go look at the contract list, you'll see there's a 3-star one, there's a 4-star one, here's a 2-star one - that one is going to be really easy. You'll be able to set how hard you want your content to be by just taking the easy contracts - they pay less, the salvage is not going to be as good, the reputation gains will be lower, but if you're limping along, that might be the right choice for you. Gradually over time, those really easy ones are going to fall off the bottom end, and more high-end stuff is going to appear. Different regions of the game-world are harder than others. If you go do missions at the Davion-Taurian border, that's a hard area, you're going to see some pretty serious stuff there, because that's a flash-point, that's where some conflict is happening. If you're doing missions for local yokels on a backwater planet in the middle of the unsettled part of the Reach, that's going to be low-end content, you're going to be fighting pirates who have scrabbled together lances out of spare parts.
MechWarriors get to choose 2 specialization skills (that determine your level 5 abilities), and gain expertise in one of those specialization skills. When your expertise skill reaches a value of 10, you become elite which causes you to help other people level up faster. You unlock class names such as Sharpshooter.
MechWarriors do not come with 'Mechs.
You can rename MechWarriors. You can change their first and last names. You can change their callsigns. You can change their pronoun. You can change their portrait. You can rename your 'Mechs.
The salary of a MechWarrior increases as they level up. It's always cheaper to have someone that you trained up yourself. Points that they gained while they were in your employ are cheaper to have rather than points that are gained before you hired them. MechWarriors that you train up yourself will have a salary about two thirds that of a premium MechWarrior that you hire.
You will make the Argo much more expensive to operate over time as you upgrade it. Fuel price does not fluctuate.
When you negotiate for salvage, you're negotiating for both a total amount of salvage, let's say 8 (items), and an amount of priority salvage, let's say 2 (priority items). They're negotiated at the same rate, so it's 4 & 1, 8 & 2, 12 & 3, etc. When the salvage comes up, what's in the available salvage is literally what was on the 'Mechs that you killed. The game tracks damage and destruction. If you blow up (destroy) a Panther's right arm, you can't get the PPC as salvage because it's gone. Anything that you actually blow off or destroy or reduce to scrap, you can't get as salvage. You need to be careful with your killing. Everything that wasn't obliterated is in the salvage pool. You get to take first pick (of 2 priority items) out of everything available. Then your employer randomly gives you some of what is remaining up to the amount of salvage that you got (6 items randomly chosen by your employer). The employer keeps the rest. Some contracts will offer you up to 20 salvage (5 priority items chosen by you and 15 randomly chosen items). The lowest salvage possible is 4 (1 priority item). The employer and the kind of mission determine the maximum amount of salvage that you can negotiate for. If you're doing a snatch-and-grab where you're rescuing someone from a base and running to an evac point where you're going to be met by a Leopard, you probably aren't going to get much salvage from that mission because you don't have time to hang around and loot the place. If it's a destroy a base mission where you go in and level everything, then you'll get to pick through everything that is left, you'll probably be able to negotiate for more salvage.
In the development branch of this game, there has been tuning of weapons. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of changes that people either hate or love.
Q: "Will there be melee weapons?"
A: Not at launch, but in success, all things are possible.
Q: "Does the employer negotiator (the person that you're actually negotiating with) reflect on your ability to negotiate a contract?"
A: No. In the future, we hope that you will get to see more of them.
You can't actually work directly for the Directorate during the single-player campaign. If you don't do the Restoration, eventually the Directorate will win, and then they become another faction that you can take jobs from.
You won't be able to battle underwater but you will be able to battle in a vacuum on the surface of an atmosphereless planetoid (you won't be able to battle in space though).
The event system has shore-leave events in it.
The loan system will be similar to the loan system in the video game Cities: Skylines.
You won't be getting double heat sinks.
If you're in Taurian capital worlds where it's super high-tech and they have massive weapons factories, it's pretty reasonable that you could find specialized weapons. Specialized weapons are by manufacturer, which means that the manufacturers have Houses that they are associated with, so you will need to go to the right area of space to get that manufacturer's weapons.
Q: "Will side torso destruction with the arm falling off make weapons in the corresponding arm unsalvageable?"
A: No. The arm is not actually destroyed - you just blew it off.
The combat tutorial is a fairly short and sweet primer on how to move and shoot with your 'Mechs and it also sets the ground-work for the story. The combat tutorial is in the story.
Q: "Will there be stand-alone scenarios like famous battles from Total War?"
A: Not at launch, but in success etc. etc.
