MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries – How to run your company

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries kind of drops you into the deep end when it comes to how exactly you’re supposed to run your mercenary outfit. You can figure it out with a bit of time, or you can just read this handy guide and get a head start on building your company up the right way.

MechWarrior’s star map

Getting around is one of the most important things in MechWarrior 5, but the map can be rather intimidating. It’s basically divided into five different sections, each governed by a different faction. You can jump several spots at a time, which is handy when you need to go further away. Every jump costs money, with sectors close to you costing 50,000 C-bills a pop. Likewise, traveling to a place that’s two jumps away will cost 100,000. After hours of doing missions, this is chump change, but you’ll want to be careful in the early game.

Most of the missions available in these areas will be offered by either the governing faction or those in opposition to them. You can view intel on each area before jumping there, but there are also icons above each area circle that will tell you how many missions are available there. You’re going to want to prioritize traveling to areas with missions, as you’ll want all the income and experience you can get.

Each time you travel, multiple days pass, so that needs to be kept in mind as well. You don’t want to waste time traveling to places that don’t advance your goals in some way, so it can be beneficial to size up potential routes on your way to your destination. That way, you can do missions on the way while also having your repairs coincide with your travel time.

Negotiations

When it comes to making money in MechWarrior 5, negotiating is of the utmost importance. Each faction gives you a certain amount of negotiation points based on your standing with them. The more missions you do for them, the more they like you. The more they like you, the more negotiation points you’ll get. You can use these points to greatly increase a mission’s rewards, so you’ll want to focus on doing missions for one faction over their adversary. You can always balance it out later anyway.

There are three ways to spend these points. You can use them to increase your fee, to take more salvage, or for damage insurance. Practically speaking, salvage is probably the best investment, as you can often clear more for selling the unneeded items you get than by just taking money.  Putting your points in for insurance is the worst of the three, as the additional money you can get from the other two options greatly outweighs the amount you’ll save by getting insurance.

When going through salvage, you’ll also want to prioritize taking mechs. Not only can these be sold for more than the mission’s entire payout, but you can also strip them of their components and make even more that way. Plus, it’s always beneficial to have a few more mechs in cold storage.

MechWarrior 5 is a fairly complex game, but if you keep this information in mind, you’re sure to wrap your head around it in no time.