7 replies to this topic

[Wolfways]

If you are not fighting for a House, Clan, or merc unit but you have a mech somehow (lonewolf) are you automatically considered a merc anyway?
Is there another type of unit/faction I'm missing?

[IceSerpent]

Wolfways, on 20 September 2014 - 12:36 PM, said:

If you are not fighting for a House, Clan, or merc unit but you have a mech somehow (lonewolf) are you automatically considered a merc anyway?
Is there another type of unit/faction I'm missing?

In the lore - no, you just have a fairly expensive piece of property. That doesn't make you merc or anybody else, you can be a farmer who just happens to have a mech stashed away in a barn. In CW - who knows.

[Wolfways]

IceSerpent, on 20 September 2014 - 01:03 PM, said:

In the lore - no, you just have a fairly expensive piece of property. That doesn't make you merc or anybody else, you can be a farmer who just happens to have a mech stashed away in a barn. In CW - who knows.

Do people just happen to have rare and expensive working mechs lying around? I would have thought that the military (or whoever finds it) would snap it up...at least for parts.

[KraftySOT]

Not really no.

Theres a few lore cases of planets far outside the space of the factions (remember theres a ton of houses in each faction, just one house, one family, is the monarch) sometimes having an old star league mech there and the farmers find it and use it or keep it or whatever...but theres not alot of cases of you having a mech, and not being aligned to someone.

It would be like having a suit of armor, but not being aligned to any specific faction in the middle ages.

You dont just find these lying around. And if you have one...someones eventually going to come along and "compel" you into service.

Especially depending on the faction. Under the Kurita or Laio...youre basically property of the state.

[LauLiao]

Wolfways, on 20 September 2014 - 01:07 PM, said:

Do people just happen to have rare and expensive working mechs lying around? I would have thought that the military (or whoever finds it) would snap it up...at least for parts.

In theory they could... Battlemechs were often handed down from generation to generation, especially in the pre-clan canon. Chances are if your family was rich enough to own a Battlemech, then they had money to send you to an academy to learn to be a pilot, but it's conceivable that a wealthy/royal family fell on hard times and someone ended up with a mech they couldn't use. Entirely possible as the family Mech would be the last thing someone would sell. There was great stigma attached to being "Disposessed".

[Spike Brave]

Lone wolves are mercs who don't belong to a unit like the Bounty Hunter in lore. The Mercorp faction is for mercs who are part of a unit like Wolf's Dragoon's or the Gray Death Legion in lore.

[Hoax415]

Since I think you want to know about CW.

Lone Wolf is just the default designation and will at least as far as we know for the release of CW function just like a Merc.

You have access only to IS mechs and you cannot fight on the side of clan factions.

At this time I don't think we've heard a single hint of information suggesting that playing forever as a LNW in CW is some kind of supported special gameplay type and I certainly don't expect it to be.

A more interesting question is if Clan Daggerstar aka Clan Loyalist will play more like LNW but for clan mechs/factions or will it be some kind of Clan version of Mercs?

Assuming that eventually Mercs are going to get their own gameplay path where they contract out to a?/some? of the IS houses and get paid and whatnot.

Edited by Hoax415, 20 September 2014 - 01:50 PM.

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

Lore-wise, a lot of the older stuff (pre-Invasion) treats MechWarriors very much like medieval Knights. You own a set of armor and a horse (your BattleMech), with whatever sergeants, armorers, pages/squires, etc. that your household can support (asTechs and the like), and you fight on behalf of your lord (pretty much every Great House has lesser nobles who control planets or regions and can draw upon the local MechWarriors for military service).

The later stuff usually focuses on the big-name regular military units and the more famous mercenaries, since so much of it became about IS-wide politics, the Clan Invasion, etc., and so the MechWarrior-as-knight sort of fell away a bit (though things like the Knights of the Inner Sphere of House Marik kept the references going, with that unit specifically being something of a deliberate callback to the earlier lore).