Game runs kind of poorly and the AI seems underwhelming so far. Had a convoy of vehicles drive straight into my firing line. Haven't had much real mech combat yet so, is the AI going to be more of a challenge or is this going to be it? Reaching the end of my refund eligibility period so I might just wait a bit before buying for real.
All of the 'Mechs you fight early on have an armour penalty and are in general kinda garbo. I think it's supposed to get you used to the gameplay, and the whole "hit the weakspot" thing while giving you some leeway for mistakes.
Things get a lot more interesting once you start getting outgunned or straight-up outclassed. After the first, like, three priority missions (once you start accepting 1-star difficulty missions) you'll start to be tested a lot more, I think. Instead of taking out 'Mechs one on one, you'll find yourself facing a lot of approaching threats, and need to decide how to juggle them while still completing your objective with minimal losses.
The battles are only getting bigger though, so performance might become a larger bugbear for you if it's already struggling early on.
How do you folks negotiate contracts?
I've been sticking to "max salvage" basically constantly.
Partially this is because having salvage rights has been canonically extremely important for 'Mercs, much more so than hard cash. The other part is that i figured that salvage is likely much more valuable. Up-rated weapons are a big deal (though so far i've only bought some), and extra 'Mechs can be sold for cash as needed, or used as needed, having much more flexibility.
I should do "reputation only" contract to get an achievement but i need to find an easy mission for that. Hell, currently reputation doesn't seem to be terribly useful anyway, probably a late game thing really.
Reputation ties into what you pay at stores and what you're offered, so yeah it seems later-game. Darius even mentions that raising reputation is a potential long-term benefit. Haven't reached any rep thresholds yet myself, but I'll take a minor cbill or salvage loss here and there to boost it, all the same.
In terms of negotiation, I just weigh what I think I'll get. If it pays a lot of cbills up front, I'll push for more of those; but if it seems like a salvage-heavy (or valuable salvage) mission, I go heavier on salvage. Of course this has backfired and I've gone for 12 slots of salvage in a mission that ended with like 6, so yeah.
And now that I think of it, I should go heavier on salvage overall just for free replacement/refit gear... Hrm.
The thing I'm having most difficulty managing is morale right now. It's only been going
down which is worrying, long-term. And paying an extra 100k to boost it by one just doesn't seem economical in the long run. If a run ever goes bad, my wealth of cbills will evaporate too quickly.
