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Low orbit requires constantly zooming around the planet, you don't get to hover in space until you go far out enough for geosynchronous orbit. And if the fortress isn't on the equator you don't even pass over the same spot on every loop around. But inaccurate orbital mechanics in fiction is the defacto standard for everything other than hard sci-fi novels, so we can let that slide. As for Yang, if he's not willing to pilot a mech in combat either because he lacks the skill or because he considers it heresy to field a lance with more than four mechs he could get extra mechs ready so if the active mechs were damaged they could walk back inside, swap the pilot to a new mech and walk back out.
Eject, remech, eject came to mind here too. The entire thing was badly thought out and Then there are the ships. There is your leopard which was supposed to be cruising around for pickup while the operation was active, not docked with the Argo. There's the one that gets shelled, which belongs to Kamea's group, the one that picks up Kamea's group is also hers, not yours. That leaves two unaccounted ships that could have done something prior to the Iberia making planetfall. There's text that mentions they got taken out, and the one waiting for us is the only one that didn't get spotted.
How it wasn't spotted with that scout lance walking right by it.. Not that I'm disagreeing with you I was quite disappointed by both this, and the final mission of the campaign. Honestly like Griffin's and would love to have had it as an end game scout, but out of everything in the mech cache, it was a bizarre thing to grab!
It's an icon and also a very useful SL mech. On balance, I would've taken it over the Highlander or the Atlas for my own group if I was given the choice. Why risk operational security by telling more people? That place was secret. Even if we got hit by the Locura, there is still plenty of time to fix the Argo and make multiple trips to loot the place. Those other ships were overkill, and useless. Kamea doesn't understand loose lips, sink ships. I wish we'd kept it quiet from her until we were done.
Was it Farah going off task and downloading shit instead of staying focused on hacking the door open? Her being there really gimped my Lance. Her Kintaro was a mech I'd retired 20 tons or so before. And her mech team was a joke. They knew a dropship was inbound and it sure didn't look like they were hustling out gear. It gets worse during Locura - Ostergaard mentions a full regiment of mechs on-board the Iberia - the thing can't even carry them. Given that the player regularly faces 10 mechs in a 5 skull with IS mechs, actually fighting and holding off the Concordat's forces would have been a good scenario to play out.
Also most of Taurian "Elite Mechs" he sends have "makeshift" debuff to armour. True that, which struck me as absolutely bizarre as they are one of the largest periphery states to the point of being able to actively shoo the Federated Sun's out of their territory with regularity. Well he did go AWOL on his own nation, and probably had to make do with what he had left at an arm's length.
This part somehow makes sense story-wise. Still, the Nautilus-Debacle is highly face-palmish. Let's not forget the three back to back missions!
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That'd have done it, fight your way to the Iberia, punch out Ostergaard, then execute him with the long tom he was bragging about. Maybe some modders could branch the campaign to allow us to fight there - but I think given that era, if it became known that Arano Restoration looted an lostech facility of that scale, the major houses would drop in on that little civil war like the fist of god.
IIRC the dialogue says that they break out with all mechs they could make battle ready in the short time, thats why no Steiner Scout Lance. It says that Yang only had time to get four mechs online. It wasn't a matter of getting more of them ready. If you want to try to rationalize so hypothetical why's of the mechs they chose, it might be garage placement. They couldn't get the 2nd Atlas I out because that Griffin was in the way.
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None of the automated systems were working, they just had to take what was in the front. Every single point you made is countered by the fact that everyone else, including your main lance, are busy keeping the Locura under control. The Leopard was unavailable until the secondary LZ objective pops up The Locura also shut down base defenses hard. Well, not the Locura itself, but definitely whatever signal Farah used to gain access. All it takes is one lucky shot The dumbest part, is that our Lance had no business being sent back to the Argo other than Kamea either being arrogant or greedy.
The Leopard inserted my lance. Sure, once extracted I suppose there are problems. Even in the modified fiction of the game, that drophship has a combined arms batallion. On average, that means 12 mechs, 12 vehicles, and 3 platoons of infantry. A platoon of infantry, incidentally, can be dispatched by applying 3 total flamers or machine guns worth of fire.
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What I actually faced leaving was the vast majority of the battlemech complement that dropship had. By normal scaling, that means I'd be perfectly willing to bet those 10 mechs against 20 - 30 mechs and vehicles. But why did I extract in the face of a crisis that left a member of my company - the most valuable member at that - in harms way? Arano stays there to drool over her new army and wait for her drop ships to land and start extracting it.
Meanwhile mercenary done their job - bye bye. The pre-mission brief informs the player of two key facts that make this point fairly unlikely: The arrival of said dropship was a given, and while the exact nature of said dropship might not have been apparent, it certainly wasn't friendly. The point of all of this is that the game goes to fair lengths to establish the imminent danger, then raises the stakes with the virus issue.
Everything through getting into the vault works. It is the second mission in the chain where logic falls apart. With an imminent threat on the ground, your lance leaves to help with a problem in space that said lance is entirely unqualified to solve. Extracting you so that you can offer what help you may means keeping the Leopard - which happens to be full of people who probably would be useful for that problem in space - from being in space and helping out. Having been extracted, the imminent threat of a combined arms battalion actually becomes a very real threat.
While this might seem necessary given that we don't want Lady Arano to have an entire regiment worth of SLDF mechs and an enormous cache of advanced and incredibly valuable weapons it does make it a little hard to believe she's the underdog in that case , there was literally no need for the place to have been that well stocked.
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From a storytelling standpoint, leaving your lance on the ground and making those SLDF mechs the only ones present works a hell of a lot better. Even if the game mechanically cannot support the player having more than 4 mechs at a time, you could simply split that escape mission in two, with your lance smashing through one entrance to reach a drop zone and draw some forces away and then Arano's lance punching through the heavy mech presence at the back door. That route means that there isn't a good argument for making a hard stand because rather than collecting a mere pittance, you've got everything of value that the place contains , and it doesn't require the incredibly stupid choice to ignore the imminent threat on the ground in favor of the one in space.
Not to mention, it does a better job of raising the stakes in the second half with the player's extraction option being indisposed dealing with the problem in space. The fact that it was heading for exact same planet location where her entire fleet is hovering over, and they can't even make out what kind of ship it is, points to the later - they are telling you about a target in space that's so far away they don't even have full sensor readings on it. Which in space would need to be pretty far. And if that was the case, Arano might have reasonably made the mistake of relaxing once the facility was breached and secured - she had 5 ships in orbit, already established control of the facility and knew the outcome of that first fight, so didn't have to worry about possibilities like 'what if we take huge casualties just getting in and that ship has more mechs on board than we' and at end of that first mission, they had 1 potential enemy blip on the radar.
It would make total sense at that point to lift your lance out to Argo where it could start getting repaired so as to be ready ASAP for however situation develops. They are thinking of it as potential risk in terms of - if we dally and they somehow manage to interfere with our potentially sensitive operation and stall us, we might get caught out here behind enemy lines when their reinforcements arrive. Arano thinks she has overwhelming advantage at this point - 5 ships against enemy 1, primary target already pacified.
She is sure she can take the one enemy in a fight, and if they won't fight, than she can extract the cache before anyone comes to help them. Primary merc lance banged up from the fight - sooner they can get started on repairs the better. Blip is identified as major threat. I don't remember them saying that ship was like already descending through the atmo when you started first mission.
The actual dialog was something to the effect that your team really needed to hurry if they were going to beat that contact to the ground. It was clear that planetfall was imminent. Your version necessarily requires that Arano needlessly rolls the dice on several factors just to get your lance out of the way. While a perfectly plausible explanation for the sequence of events we see, it is the sequence of events themselves that are the problem.
With relatively minor tweaks to the story change the art in the cut scene to display the four mechs we end up with, have Sumi pull the Leopard out to help with the crisis on the Argo and the addition of one mission segment your lance breaking back out the front door through a screening force of medium mechs and some vehicles having had their weapons reloaded and armor repaired but maintaining all critical damage collected up to that point , we're no longer presented with a scenario where our otherwise perfectly competent leadership proves to be temporarily incompetent.
With those changes we no longer have the questionable decision to pull ground forces off the line so that they can "assist" with a problem they're not qualified to help with, and we no longer have a good argument to slug it out with that mere battalion in the first place. There is no way to do an extract of six mechs total. So no backup for you. Also, the Leopard has a weight limit Of my seven pilots, exactly zero of them had a background in Aerospace. None of us were of any consequence beyond being extra hands, and at that point, I had quite a few extra hands. I don't think those mechtechs or medtechs were doing anything with empty med bays and vacant repair queues.
The weight limit would have allowed me to field both spare mechs. As far as the difficulty of launching those other two mechs, sure, I'll give you that one. But Yang had time to pull four mechs out of mothball. I think the mech techs could have put 2 active service mechs into the field considering that I kept those two mechs in the drop bay because I regularly made use of them.
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Her importance is irrelevant to the point, because the point is that she's not at any more risk in the second phase than the first. There were spare pilots aplenty and enough firepower from my lance alone to buy them a hell of a lot of time in the Castle. The entry point for said Castle is almost ideal for that stand anyhow. Terrain makes it all but immune to indirect fire, and the narrow opening negates the advantage in numbers. Without repairs or reload I'm completely confident that my lance could knock out at least the first lance without so much as risking armor breach.
Once that SLDF lance comes into play, it isn't even a fair contest. Put someone in that nearly pristine Kintaro and I've got the better part of a very heavy mech company to put against a very average weight mech company in a game that regularly asks me to go against 2 or 3 times my own tonnage.
The bottom line is that the threat presented by that dropship is only slightly worse than the one posed in any other mission. I did that without so much as losing a weapon system. What you destroy, in fact, is a scout lance and an assault lance along with a few vehicles. And what is this risk for? Sufficient resources to fight the entire war. Hell, there's enough packed away in the Castle to change the fortunes of a superpower. In the hands of a Periphery power, that's even more of a game changer. The Castle is a blank check to write the future kind of power. Risking the odds for that is sensible and in character for all involved.
Without that symbol to rally around, the Restoration will literally die in a snap. A symbol backed by power is a hell of a lot better than a symbol backed by an army so pathetic that a single mech lance is what it takes to turn the tide. If things were that desperate, they'd had left my lance on the surface and gone to help rather than, you know, coming to pick my entirely unqualified to help group of pilots up so that we could get in the way.
You can try and defend this narrative turn all you like, but it doesn't hold up. The forces available by verifiable fact are 9 mechs, 10 pilots. I had a further 3 mechs and 3 pilots immediately available my two spares plus the Kintaro, three benched pilots. The forces opposing were 12 mechs, 12 vehicles, and odd infantry.
The terrain makes infantry irrelevant for a lot of reasons. The forces not obviously available were stored on the other five Leopards. Five Leopards could pretty handily kill a single Fortress, and if we aren't willing to risk those expensive dropships, one has to assume they were ferrying mechs.
That is, after all, what Leopards are for. That means that our faction could call on just under a mech battalion in total. Would I bet 31 mechs against 12 mechs, 12 vehicles and 3 platoons of infantry?
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I don't get odds that good in any mission regardless of difficulty. You bet your ass I would. Can you imagine that second mission with your own lance, still a bit dinged up from the first mission, having to team up with kamea's lance of lostech mechs, against some serious opposition? The AI would probably make a mess of it, but a proper 8vOpfor say 10 mechs plus 6 vehicles, not all at the same time slugfest would have been good fun. I had a Grasshopper, Stalker, and Lurmboat Jaeger. If not for Kamea, I'd have had an Orion there too. Especially considering Farah went off task and start downloading shit instead of managing the door.
Personally, I think the castle's more important than Kamea.
Frankly, I'd rather let that fall into enemy hands than destroy it. I think yang can pilot, if a marine can steal a fighter jet and go for a joy ride, yang can move a Mech and at least be a bullet shield. A valid defense for sure, but a properly written story doesn't need defending at all. Unless it's some multi-layered Nolan-esque plot with twists and revelations afterwards, the motivations of the characters should be clear.
Even if everything can eventually be explained away, this mission has too much "but y tho? Yea it was a really dumb mission that only works by handing the good guys the idiot ball since apparently the Restoration brought half a dozen dropships but no support troops except for your merc lance? The game also has a real problem with making 'marines are attacking us' an unbeatable off screen threat. Somehow this one Taurian dropship that couldn't possibly be carrying more than 40 or 50 marines has them able to storm a massive SLDF facility.
Did the Restoration bring literally no soldiers to secure what they knew was going to be a LosTech trove? I agree, but leaving the Castle with 4 Battlemaster Bs would have trivialized the rest of the game. The final mission wasn't the final mission, really. Showing 1 - 15 of 44 comments. Wantoomany View Profile View Posts. I dont expect its in the game. Well damn, you just crushed this man's dream. Anyway the reason I thought it was in the game is that I've been going off a spreadsheet that lists all the mechs.
Seems I've seen pretty much all of them in game except for the bl-6b. Last edited by Prismbot ; 11 May 4: Lmatt View Profile View Posts. According to the files, there is indeed a 6b for the black knight. It is a rarity 5 mech so there is an extremely rare chance of it spawning on a mission.
Probably similar spawn rate of something like a king crab. The in game description is as follows: It did everything the 6 does, but better mostly thanks to its Double Heat Sinks, which are basically nonexistent these days. Last edited by Lmatt ; 11 May 4: There is a mission where you get temporary control of some really sweet lostech. One of them is a BlackKnight. Althought I cant honestly remember if it is this special B version, but I suspect it is.
The problem is, as far as im aware, you dont get to keep it beyond this one singular mission. Originally posted by Wantoomany:. Originally posted by Prismbot:. By file editing, do you mean you just decrease the rarity so that it spawns more often? Opened a few other mech jsons and don't see that entry on those.