BATTLETECH - Enemy Reinforcements begin in play

[Contemplative Sparrow]

One line summary of your issue
Enemy Reinforcements begin in play

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
The enemy forces in random missions will, if they have reinforcements, deploy them immediately upon the start of the mission, meaning that the battle is against the entire enemy force from the beginning of the mission, making battles extremely difficult to carry out without substantial repairs and medical leave being necessary.

Steps to reproduce the issue
Play random missions between story missions until you encounter one in which the enemy has reinforcements

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[BanhMi]

Just ran into this bug myself. Quite annoying and frustrating when your one lance is up against 2 lances plus a handful of vehicles SMH

 

[BanhMi]

This happens to me as well. I'm not sure if it happens 100% of the time or if certain conditions trigger it. It makes the likelihood of completing some missions rather dubious.

3 Skull mission, and I ran into a dragon, 2 quickdraws, 2 hunchbacks, 1 thunderbolt, 1 cataphract, 2 griffins, a panther, and a demolisher tank (dual ac/20s) all moving as a single pack.

Ah Hah! This pirate mission was similar to what I ran into. Literally they ambushed me then the pirate king walked down his mountain and engaged my lance with all his homies at once. Ended up like the Alamo did rage quit and loaded an old save game.

 

[alanschu]

I had this happen twice. Once it wasn't a huge issue, but another time is was a super challenging mission.

 

[Drasius]

Just adding my voice to the already loud chorus.

Reinforcements work fine in the story missions, but any proceedural missions with reinforcements always dumps them onto the map T1/T2 (sometimes they're already on map, other times they walk on from outside the map borders. Fighting a heavy/assault lance with 3x mediums and a heavy is do-able, fighting a heavy/assault lance and a medium/heavy lance at the same time with 3x mediums and a heavy is not.

I like the challenge, it keeps things interesting, but having 8 pilots in the med bay from 2 of these occurances in a row is less fun than you'd think.

I'd just assumed that the reinforcements being on map was a design descision until I had Darius (still makes me double-take every time I see his name since it's so close to my handle) tell me that reinforcements were coming after I had blown up the reinforcements 6 turns ago. Turns out it was just because I'd finished off the main forces. This is ~ 50/50 to trigger when they're spotted or when you kill off the primary target, so I'm wondering if it's sometimes meant to have early reinforcements and sometimes meant to be only once you've dealt with the primary threat and it's just a coding snafu causing them to always deploy early?

 

[Harabeck]

This happens to me every single mission that involves reinforcements. At least 4 out of 7 of the missions I played tonight. It's extremely frustrating, to try and maintain profitability when I have a mech or two to repair after every mission.

 

[Kellcat]

It’s not all missions that have this problem, though.

I think I’m getting these contract names right...

Had a “SimpleBattle_LetterOfMarque” mission and the reinforcements arrived the instant I saw the opfor, along with Darius warning me of reinforcements arriving after I’d finished them off - when I killed off the last of the target lance.

Had a “DestroyBase_Liberation” mission and the reinforcements for that mission arrived when expected - that is, I killed off the garrison, turrets, and base and was making for the exit when the reinforcements showed up.

Went and looked at the JSON for the two missions in question, and didn’t see anything obviously triggering the reinforcements one way or the other, so either the trigger isn’t wholly in the JSON, or it’s just sufficiently nonobvious I’m not seeing it...

Suppose I should be glad I’m not experiencing any crashes or what have you - and I am; the game is a blast - but this has been bugging me.

 

[Vanu Kaos]

Has there been any word from HBS confirming this as a bug? I am finding it extremely tricky in some missions but put it down to me being poor at gaming.

 

[Drasius]

Finally had a random mission where reinforcements appeared as per timing instead of turning up in the first 1-2 rounds. Was a Convoy Escort mission on Mechdur if it matters.

Unfortunately, enemy reinforcements materialised out of nowhere directly in LoS of my guys (one of the bad guys was a demolisher and the surprise round really was a surprise). I loaded up the same mission once I was done and played it through again and the reinforcements popped into existance in the exact same spots.

While I'm glad I finally got a non-story mission to work with regards to reinforcements, I'm also a bit sad that they just spawned at preset places on the map regardless of LoS, rather than walking/driving in from offmap or at least from out of fog of war.

 

[GermanPartisan]

BTW I know its painfully obvious and I dont want to insult your intelligence - but for the time being a good way to approach said missions where this is happening to you is to hunker down in a pocket or corner where the enemy only really has one way to approach you (where possible - I know not all maps/dropzones allow for that). Then you move out with the fastest mech you have so you are barely in sensor-range for them and kite them into your pocket - the AI will usually just trickle in one at a time and you can shoot them down 4v1 mostly.

You will still take massive damage (from sensor locks and LRMs mostly) but its a little more manageable and makes for some nice heroic last stand scenarios - I had the AI really focus one of my Centurions in a scenario where I had to hunt down a veteran and his reinforcements before he could take command of a pirate lance. Was just nice to see it take such a beating - really tanked there (lost my AC10+ SRM6+ SRM4+ and my Gyro++ there, but ejecting out of that Centurion with only armor on the head left, and no arms, was damn epic

 

[Harabeck]

I had one last night where the reinforcements started directly adjacent to the LZ. They got a turn to shoot at me before I could do anything.

 

[Harabeck]

It’s not all missions that have this problem, though.

I think I’m getting these contract names right...

Had a “SimpleBattle_LetterOfMarque” mission and the reinforcements arrived the instant I saw the opfor, along with Darius warning me of reinforcements arriving after I’d finished them off - when I killed off the last of the target lance.

Had a “DestroyBase_Liberation” mission and the reinforcements for that mission arrived when expected - that is, I killed off the garrison, turrets, and base and was making for the exit when the reinforcements showed up.

Went and looked at the JSON for the two missions in question, and didn’t see anything obviously triggering the reinforcements one way or the other, so either the trigger isn’t wholly in the JSON, or it’s just sufficiently nonobvious I’m not seeing it...

Suppose I should be glad I’m not experiencing any crashes or what have you - and I am; the game is a blast - but this has been bugging me.

Hey, I just looked through these two jsons as well and I noticed something that could be the difference. In the SimpleBattle_LetterOfMarque, the objectives "Destroy Enemy Units" and "Destroy Enemy Reinforcements" both have the "isPrimary": true key-value pair. In DestroyBase_Liberation, the "Destroy Pirate Reinforcements" has "isPrimary": false. I wonder if primary objectives are being incorrectly spawned immediately.

Edit: I'm now fairly convinced that my guess is wrong. The mission I'm on has a reinforcement wave with isPrimary true reinforcements but they consistently spawn on turn 4.

 

[artyspoor]

Almost all mission with reinforcmend do bug (((((

in one of many it worked most of the time you face a lot of mech s 9 or so

 

[AgentAlaskan]

i can back this up. in procedural missions enemy reinforcements deploy almost immediatly makin the mission a lot harder

 

[Carl_Bar]

Huh that would explain all the horrifically challenging missions i've been having, i thought i was just in over my head but i mean every time i do a mission thats a battle, i end up facing 2 lances at the same time, something which is less than pleasant.

Yeah i didn't realise this was a bug. I actually have an in mission save of one especially brutal example of this where it spawned me in a corner with mountains to my right opening into a flat area with the main force to the right of that and the reinforcements come in from 180 degrees the opposite way allready spawned in. Thanks to spawn location and terrain i couldn't avoid getting into a crossfire between the two and had to save scum roughly 4 times to pull it off and still took a ton of damage doing it.

I'd have to get my game working again to provide it, (suffering access violation errors on bootup atm), and then go through the manual saves to find it as it's several hours of playtime backwards.

Also seen 1 example where the reinforcements spawned off map and refused to move on map, had to abuse sensor lock and LRM's to get the kill.

 

[Franky1234]

I have put the game on hold until we get an official answer from the devs:
Is this a bug or working as intended ?

 

[Tennyson]

I'm pretty sure it's a bug, but I didn't realize it until I finished the mission (basically by kiting them around the map) and Darius said "Oh, look, reinforcements are coming in" right before he told me he was coming to pick me up.

That was a brutal mission and I'd hate to repeat it. I only finished it because I told myself I was gonna reload from before the contract anyway.

 

[Dark Radiance]

I ran into this today on the mission "Settling a Grudge" on Kimi. It was a 2.5 difficulty mission asking me to destroy a group of mechs. As soon as I spawned, reinforcements were already present making about 8+ mechs on the field as soon as it began - 1 Locust, 1 Jenner, 2 Wolverines, 2 Cicadas (1 w/ PPC, the other w/ ML/SL), 1 Vindicator, 1 Shadowhawk, but I managed to beat it at exorbitant cost. After all the enemy mechs were downed, I got the message "Watch out, reinforcements incoming", and the mission was completed immediately.

 

[Wintermist]

One line summary of your issue
Enemy Reinforcements begin in play

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
The enemy forces in random missions will, if they have reinforcements, deploy them immediately upon the start of the mission, meaning that the battle is against the entire enemy force from the beginning of the mission, making battles extremely difficult to carry out without substantial repairs and medical leave being necessary.

Steps to reproduce the issue
Play random missions between story missions until you encounter one in which the enemy has reinforcements

Upload attachment

Came here to report this as well. It's as close to a gamebreaker as it can get, even if you do win, eventually you will just find no way to go on anyway due to repair cost and injuries and deaths because you're so often fighting completely annihilating battles.

 

[Kairos]

1.0.1 shouldn't go live without a fix to this. I don't care about random crashes or wrong textures, this problem destroys game progress.

 

[Black_Shade]

Game is basically unplayable because of this bug. Needs hotfix ASAP.