indie game dev, AI and narrative design researcher, playwright
profile and header by HexedBoy
trans nb lesbian ace pilot
it reminds me a lot of MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries except like 50 years earlier so they don't start you with the worst possible mech, the Owens. The Owens is basically a tiny awful Catapult. Instead of 2 LRM 15s and 4 medium lasers, you get... 2 LRM 5s, 2 small lasers, and a medium laser
I love this piece of garbage, it is adorable and the MW4 animations have it prancing about
My partner and i recently figured out we both in fact like Battletech as a general thing and also have very similar taste in BattleMechs. I never really thought about the Phoenix Hawk until she started raving about it to me. Friends, i have invented an absolute terror in the Hair Brained Schemes game.
So the base loadout of a Phoenix Hawk is 2 medium lasers and a large laser plus all of the jump jets. It does a lot of damage and moves so goddamn far while running obscenely hot. I saw the 1X variant has some unused energy hard points in that configuration. So i did the thing you would do in MechWarrior Online, take the bigger weapons off and stuff more smaller weapons in. Let me tell you, the 3 medium laser, 2 small laser with the saved weight going to extra armor is a terror within 90 meters. Its first outing it two shotted a Thunderbolt (65 ton heavy mech) and has just generally become something completely unmanageable to the AI. Did i mention it gets 20% bonus damage on an attack after it jumps?
The other MVP of this campaign has been the Marauder 3R. It's one of my favorite mechs even if its base loadout is a bit meh cause of the AC/5. So i did what i usually do, further specialize the loadouts. Off came every existing gun, on went two large lasers to replace the two PPCs, the AC/5 became an AC/10 with two tons of ammo, some extra heat sinks and basically maxed out armor. Again, this thing instantly became a terror, coring basically anything lighter than it if all three weapons hit. It has also one-shot a thunderbolt from the front thanks to an ammo explosion.
These games and setting are hilarious and this is why you should try and not mask your ND interests so hard