Are higher ton mechs tied to the difficulty skulls or time?

[Siven80]

In Career mode is the chance for enemy mechs to be medium/heavy/assault tied to the difficulty skulls or by time?

I think when i played campaing it was a bit of both and how far you were in the campaign?

 

[Critter667]

Skulls as far as I know.

 

[mjbroekman]

It's tied to difficulty. In career mode, this is tied to your Mercenary Review Board rating

 

[ronhatch]

It's tied to difficulty. In career mode, this is tied to your Mercenary Review Board rating

Nope. They considered that and rejected the idea... difficulty is static and will not change in career mode. Varies by system only.

Oh, and the higher tonnage mechs have always been tied entirely to the skull rating... it just happened that in campaign mode, advancing the story would increase the skull ratings of systems.

 

[stavern]

Depends on what tonnage you drop with too i think. Had a assasination mission with two reinforcements and it was to much for my Quickdraw, Jaeger, two Dragons. Reloaded mission and put my LRM Shadowhawk on Lance and mission had two lights. Much easier second time.

 

[ronhatch]

Depends on what tonnage you drop with too i think. Had a assasination mission with two reinforcements and it was to much for my Quickdraw, Jaeger, two Dragons. Reloaded mission and put my LRM Shadowhawk on Lance and mission had two lights. Much easier second time.

Luck of the draw, man.

I've heard that people have examined the code and proven that lance selection does not vary by drop weight.

 

[mjbroekman]

Nope. They considered that and rejected the idea... difficulty is static and will not change in career mode. Varies by system only.

Oh, and the higher tonnage mechs have always been tied entirely to the skull rating... it just happened that in campaign mode, advancing the story would increase the skull ratings of systems.

System ratings are static and don't change in career mode. That, from my understanding, was the only thing that changed.

The thing that made me question was seeing a Game Tip that says:

In Career Mode, your mission difficulty rises as your rating with the Mercenary Review Board rises.

 

[mjbroekman]

Depends on what tonnage you drop with too i think. Had a assasination mission with two reinforcements and it was to much for my Quickdraw, Jaeger, two Dragons. Reloaded mission and put my LRM Shadowhawk on Lance and mission had two lights. Much easier second time.

That could also be a case of a new lance being rolled up when you dropped the second time (correlation =/= causation). The contract descriptions are created when you load up the contract screen and the OpFor is created when you are "Preparing for Combat" in the loading screen. If you deploy the same contract twice (by going back to a different save, for example), there is no guarantee that the OpFor will be identical.

 

[yrrot]

As I recall, Kiva mentioned a few different options they considered for gating the progression of mechs encountered, but I think they settled on just using the mission difficulty (including the +/- 1/2 skull actual difficulty variance bit). I think the MRB rating was probably implemented before they finalized the patch, but that tool tip made it in.

I will mention, though, that you may get a higher tonnage mech with armor debuffs or a single higher tonnage mech in place of what would normally be two lower tonnage mechs (ie, a battle mission vs a lance with 1 heavy and two mediums in a 2 ish skull mission). There are also two tiers of armor debuffs, so you can get a much higher total tonnage OpFor but with paper thin armor as well.

Some of it also seems to fall into "cultivated procedural content" based on the mission such that the random possible enemy lances are sometimes skewed towards one of those factors above as well.

 

[ronhatch]

System ratings are static and don't change in career mode. That, from my understanding, was the only thing that changed.

The thing that made me question was seeing a Game Tip that says:

Interesting. As others have said, I believe that slipped in accidentally, since at one time that was the plan.

Pretty sure I saw a setting in the JSONs that controlled that. I'm going to have to go find it again...