MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is finally out after nearly two decades of waiting. Naturally, fans are going to want to jump in immediately. Here are some quick tips and tricks to get you on your way ASAP.
Walk around in circles
In MechWarrior 5, you’re gonna get shot at. A lot. All the damn time. You can’t strafe in a mech, so you’re going to want to move in a circle when engaging foes. That should be enough to make it harder to hit you. Just like other games in the series, individual parts can get destroyed, and the last thing you want is to lose one of your main weapons permanently. Plus, getting a leg or two destroyed will severely slow you down, making your evac all the more complicated.
Do your best to get out of harm’s way to limit things like this from happening and you should be good.
Don’t underestimate the little guys
I get it, you’re in a mech, so what harm can tanks, helicopters, and sentry guns do? They might not do a lot of damage, true, but there are typically a lot of them. It can be tempting to try and ignore them and just focus on your objectives, but doing so can weaken you and your squad. It can also lead to more broken parts.
The easiest way to handle them is to make sure you always bring a missile-capable mech with you. Using these, you can often spot enemy positions before directly seeing them. Just lock on and let the missiles fly. You’ll find your enemies destroyed fairly quickly.
Use ballistic weapons on buildings
A good deal of MechWarrior 5‘s mechs don’t have the capacity for ballistic weapons, but if you’re on a demolition mission, they’re much better for laying waste than energy weapons or missiles. Lasers, for instance, do very little to a big building. Meanwhile, shooting one with a cannon can collapse an entire section. If you want, you can also just straight-up walk through a lot of buildings, which is amusing and useful in its own right.
Check your components
It’s easy to repair a mech and not notice that some of its components have been destroyed. There will be a little icon that tells you this, but if you don’t know it’s there, you might not see it at all. Believe me, you do not want to enter a mission and waste ten minutes before realizing that one of your mechs is getting its ass handed to it because it’s missing weapons. It pays to make sure each mech has received the all-green before sending them out into battle.
Take the most expensive salvage if you don’t need anything
There’s plenty of valuable salvage you can gather in MechWarrior 5, such as missile launchers. Certain components are simply worth much more than others – and even if you don’t need them, you can still sell them. You can sell off your inventory at any marketplace you come across, so don’t feel like you need to horde things. Having cash on hand for higher-quality mechs and parts is always a good thing.
Don’t neglect less valuable components, though
Bearing the previous tip in mind, you also don’t want to never take less valuable components. Machine guns and flamethrowers are worth a lot less than certain parts, but you’re gonna need a bunch of them just the same. And just because you have a ton of cash doesn’t mean you’ll be able to find any of those components on hand in the marketplace. You do not want to be caught with unarmed mechs just because you didn’t stock up on lower-tier weapons when you had the chance.
Pick a faction and stick with it for a while
MechWarrior 5 will see you take missions from different factions, and the more the faction likes you, the better it will reward you. Therefore, it’s better to prioritize one faction over another. Two will often be at odds with each other, and there’s no sense in getting mediocre payouts from both of them just so you can do both of their missions without worry. Either way, there are plenty of missions to go around, so go ahead and pick and choose.
Aim for the cockpit
As you’re probably aware, each mech has a cockpit where the pilot resides. You can blow up any part of an enemy mech you want, but destroying a leg or arm won’t take them out of commission. If you can destroy the cockpit, however, that enemy mech will stop functioning completely. That makes it the best place to concentrate your damage.
Watch out for better mechs and components
Some marketplaces in MechWarrior 5 have higher quality items for sale. The map icons will let you know when this is the case, so make sure and check out what they’ve got when you come across them. Any advantage you can get can be worthwhile, and you can always resell them later. As such, it’s a solid idea to snatch these up when you can.
Hire pilots with better growth potential
The pilots you can hire in industrial hubs all have variable skill ratings. You really don’t want to waste valuable experience on a pilot that can’t get any better. For instance, if their energy weapon skill is 1/1, they won’t ever get better with energy weapons, no matter how long you keep them around. And having a pilot like that will only increase the chances of their demise.
Repair in industrial hubs when you can
Repairing your mechs costs more and takes longer when you do it in conflict zones. Still, depending on how expensive your repairs are, that may be preferable to spending 100,000 C-bills or more to travel to a hub from a conflict zone and back again. So, plan accordingly, but don’t feel you necessarily need to go out of your way to do this.
Get out the way
Depending on how you disable an enemy mech, it may explode. If you’re standing next to it when it does this, you’re going to get hurt. You’ll be warned before this happens, so when you hear that warning, hightail it on out of there before you get caught in the blast.
Evac asap if you need to
Many of MechWarrior 5‘s missions will have the evac shuttle show up as soon as you complete your primary objective. Aside from warzone missions, there’s no reason to stick around and risk incurring more damage when you can make a beeline for the evacuation point and get back to base in one piece.
And that’s it for our tips for MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. If you have any others, make sure to leave them in the comments below.
Published: Dec 11, 2019 11:00 am