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The Mercenary Thread!

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Michaelh139:
Alright, Mercenaries (Not slaves seeing as no one ever mentions them otherwise) are a very unique feature of 2238.  They allow a person with the correct stats to "hire" (buy them off these people who brainwash them into slaves!) to do your bidding combat-wise.  If you choose the correct type, they can practically use ANY WEAPON you give them.  This creates really interesting squad-creativity.  Although sadly most tend to either go with full on rocket or full on EW squads.  (Which I promise is not the most effective squad out there, although they have their purposes).

Merc vs merc squads are also extremely fun if you ever have the rarest chance to do it, seeing as only 1% of the playerbase even bothers with them unless they're dual-logging.

However, they aren't very smart, although their brutality/numbers generally make up for this, they tend to do dumb things like running after the enemies into a building with no aps to save themselves from the obvious 1hex bursts of death.  They also tend to get stuck for no apparent reason in areas and you have to (What I like to call) "Refresh" them to get em moving again.  (Thankfully however I am told this will be fixed in next update/wipe).  Depending on the weapons, they can easily cause friendly fire to anyone, and with rockets/grenades/anyexplosiveszzz, kill themselves.  

There is also the problem of Grid/spawn camping which frusturates the playerbase the most.  Where you spawn in with mercs set to auto attack, insta killing or practically causing someone to piss their pants from the extreme lightning attack.  Or leave mercs Riiiiiiight at the grid on auto kill to kill everyone who enters.

So the point to this thread is....  What do you think about mercenaries?

P.s. please explain why/whynot.

runboy93:
I think Mercenaries are pretty useful at 2238, because mostly players are alone.
It's cheap (Depends) method to get guys to hunt/protect something.

Surf:
They are ok for a change and I tend to use "Merc Leaders" in Singleplayergames very often, as for a multiplayergame on the other hand, where the factor "competition" kicks in, it's a  fail to have such strong mercenaries doing everything for the player in the game. It's an ok-ish feauture and I get why people like that - but not in a multiplayer game.

avv:
Like said, grids and mercs just don't add up because there's too much abuse related when the two meet.
Having just one merc is fun because it's easier to keep control. When there's five mercs they might scatter all the hell over and then it's dumb to try to locate them behind walls because the leader doesn't have contours on them.

In the end the ammount of firepower one player can posess through mercs is rather over the edge. In my opinion skill should have the highest outcomes in pvp, however if someone happens to be in a big tc gang or farms alot caps he can just buy 5 rocketmercs and pwnish basically every individual player he encounters without even trying.

JovankaB:
They aren't doing everything, the powerful ones cost a lot, leveling them takes ages and you can lose them in less than 30 seconds if you do a mistake:




Using them (or slaves) is the only way for people who like to play a balanced, multi-purpose character (charisma, outdoorsman, crafting professions) to have a chance against pure combat builds from big gangs, who get weapons from craft alts, get to battlefields in taxi alts and get healed with drugs made by doctor alts and are unable to do anything else except shooting.

There is already a mechanism limiting their number - dynamic prices (or the time you need to gather new slaves). If it was so great everyone would just spend half a million (and eventually more) for 5 big gun mercs. In the long run nobody can afford to play this way all the time.

Yes, one player against one player with 5 mercenaries has little chance, but shouldn't he? He wasn't the one who spent 30 - 400k on them and he isn't the one who risks losing whole "investment" with one bad move. And he isn't the one who is a lot weaker without them because he needs extra 5-8 SPECIAL points.

The only thing I would change is removing equipement of new mercenaries, so you would have to equip them by yourself.

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