Starter guide to MekHQ/Against the Bot/Megamek

[NickAragua]

Currently, the game awards a 50k bonus per prisoner at the time of capture. You'll see it if you look at your finances log. There's a set of rules in the AtB spreadsheet for "prisoner ransom" which make the reward variable, which I'm following manually. The prisoners who defect, you can hire for free at your discretion. The prisoners who do not, you can pretty much just select all of them and "sack". The main exception is I like to run them through the infirmary first to give my doctor some practice.

On the plus side, I've contributed some code for the next release which will rework that mechanism to something more manageable.

[LordMortis]

Reset... Again, then had a guy up and quit on my after the first mission.

Can you always hire more people or do they need to come from the Personnel market? It's hard to know what you can change and what you can't, as GM mode doesn't actually turn everything off and on.

[NickAragua]

Teechnically, according to "strict" AtB rules, they should always come through the personnel market. Some events will let you "hire x personnel of your choice", then you can just hire them arbitrarily from that dropdown menu. If you're "off-contract", you can also use the targeted recruitment option in the personnel market. At 100k per week, it'll get you a good variety of random potential employees.

However, to be honest, if you just lost your only doctor or half your mechwarriors/techs to retirement, I don't see why you shouldn't hire some new guys to keep your company going.

[Madmarcus]

This is going poorly. We're barely winning battle but losing our integrated allies. The contract score just goes down and the salvage has been so so.

[LordMortis]

I took a short one month contract on my fourth attempt at the campaign. I took off the double vehicle option. I got through my month long contract!!!!! and then four of my mechwarriors wanted to retire with 5 million credit compensation after only making a profit of about 2 million credits after salvage.

I am disheartened.

[NickAragua]

You can always turn the retirement option off, or modify the rolls until they're 2+. But hey, progress!

To "repair" the damage after the fact, you can always GM Mode, set the payout to 0, then un-retire the mechwarriors.

[Madmarcus]

I just went with the non-share system. After my initial 2 month contract I didn't have any retirement rolls at all which seemed odd.

[LordMortis]

Not sure what I will do. There is so much to love about the game, especially when played through the eyes of Nick's AAR but there is also so much that is just so brutal and with such a high learning curve and tampering feels like cheating.

I sure have a respect for the way Nick is playing because I thought this was the game I was waiting for and boy do I suck at it.

[NickAragua]

It took me like five restarts before I felt comfortable enough to start up the AAR. The learning curve is pretty steep, but if you're not having fun then you should disable or dilute some of the mechanisms that aren't fun. The first couple of contracts are always the hardest, because you start out in debt or close to it, with a random pot luck of mechs and random pot luck of mechwarriors. Once you grow your company a little bit though, it gets easier (or at least, losses of various kinds are easier to absorb).