Interesting thoughts and logic from Kiva as usual, great! (And thanks to twitter-scribe from another non-twit.)
And the DestroyedMechRecoveryChance tunable seems quite interesting, especially if turned on later in the game (even post story) to keep things challenging when you have a stable of mechs and warriors (and only fielding a mere 4 at a time, despite the stable size). Hmm, or possibly even immediately unless Cbill balancing is going to be radically different from what I've seen so far. Thanks to Kiva for letting us know about that option!
Plus it puts back the idea that mechs are replaceable, total mech losses do happen, and (in the source material) are not necessary company-ending at all. I do disagree with a characterization about mech availability and supposed "irreplaceability".
Mech loss in the source material (TT) is not the end of the your company and Mechs are not actually these ancient artifacts for which more were never made, like they are all penny black stamps or something. So there is no real contradiction in the source material rules & lore. Cored Mechs happen. Now you get to struggle some to buy a replacement somewhere. There are factories pumping mechs out at some rate per year (ok 100s until the Clans come, then 1000s). This is why the source material in the Techinical Readouts can assign "reasonable" C-Bill costs for mechs.
For example the Spider is 2.7-2.9 million C-bill base cost depending on variant. And that's for a mech that stopped full production of main variants roughly 100years before this game's period. The Thug lists as 7.7mC-bills. The "Mech Data" box of your mech record sheet should show a C-bill cost at the bottom. Replaceable.
But expensive; especially in the numbers needed to forward a House's internal and external agendas. Expensive for mercs as well, but not certainly company-ending (as related in plenty of source material prose), not even for all merc companies that are operating in the periphery and paying double or more for complete mechs. But despite the (imo) incorrect view of mech irreplaceability the HBS game looks very compatible with buying complete mechs at source costs + periphery markup--probably due to good economic balancing already in place!
Why are the mech costs so "cheap"? (1) there were loads made, (2) there are still loads around, (3) there are newer mechs being made every week in the as-yet undestroyed factories which cause price competition for last year's (century's) models, (4) not so cheap in the Periphery you can be sure. Can everyone have one? No, stop it. Are they always ancient artifacts? No not always. Some are, and some are 100s of years old (that Spider might be 500 or only 100 years old), and some get passed down within families; but someone is buying the new mech production. If they were only ancient artifacts, they would be priceless and there is no Battletech universe and certainly Clan invasion goes just a little differently.
The fact that there are lists of factories (factories is plural) destroyed during the Succession Wars--leaving enough to continue producing after the 3rd SW and into the Clan invasion--also puts to rest this notion that mechs are "irreplacable artifacts of a previous era". It just simply isn't the case in the battletech universe, from the Age of War right through the Jihad. Factories. Some millions of Cbills. Losses in the 100s and later 1000s. Not irreplaceable, not necessarily of a previous era (your specific backstory may differ).
The source material did examine--and also had trouble with--some of this balancing issue as well if you consider the Combat, Battle, and Point Values assigned to mechs for various rulesets.
Not that any of that blather matters, the HBS game looks awesome from what I've seen (6-10 hours of early campaign, thanks for allowing quality streamers!) and I suspect the balancing will be great as the result of hard work of Kiva's and others at HBS. And I'm fine with trivial diversions from rulesets, lore, etc, and am ready to buy dlcs or sequels or whatever that are of similar quality.
