Valhallan, on 19 September 2017 - 07:44 AM, said:
How do you budget money for refit in mekhq? also the failure types, how did that even happen? are those new features? in the version i'm using i don't see any budgeting it just checks if you have the parts (or is this + the maintenance and salaries the budgeting?). Also when i fail at most i just end up with double refit time, is the "fun" stuff critical failure? (if so man i'm glad i didn't let my techs near refitting till they got good by just repairing armor and stuff.)
Most of it is Mek HQ, and some of it is "Mechwarrior RPG referencing" in order to get the full compliment of Customization rules (Battletech RPG also works but it isn't as harsh and the inclusion of Clan crap makes it a bit confusing too as opposed to the far more straight forward Mechwarrior RPG 1st edition).
You know how it shows the presets when you start an HQ campaign?
Those are just collections of settings. First I started (the very first time) with Total Warfare standard and then tweaked. I now have my own preset, of course. Most important is to have literally EVERYTHING checked under Repair (notice the "Use quirks" tidbit? It also makes it prone to giving bad quirks to bad repair jobs when combined with damage/destroy parts by margin of failure.). Maintenance, do not check "only damage parts of the worst quality (important). Must log maintenance rolls in log file as unless you have some scripting skills, you'll need to do some of the work with a rulebook and by hand.
Sucks I know.
Tech limits, do not disallow extinct (the game treats them very poorly so that precious gem is precious). Do not allow purchasing of foreign parts (as applicable) as this prevents accidental confusion of buying "the wrong stuff." Did that once, got **** all ****** up. Allow only canon units for purchase and limit units and parts by year.
This ramps up the difficulty with 'new' tech and ensures you don't accidentally end up with a refit kit roll if you do 'perfectly' replicate an existing mech in your cache. Refit kits are a LOT easier than developing a brand new design, and so once making that Jenner I'd get a refit kit making the next time much easier. This is why I had to reload every time to remove it or I'd have to do a new design every single time.
Personnel. Check everything here. Procreation is optional. If you have it included, "parental" concerns can come up and require your techs/jocks/etc. to take a leap of absence. Usually in pairs. Had one time where some unlucky dog had knocked up 7 different women in less than 3 months. Lets just say it causes a LOT of problems... but makes **** fun. Just remember if it auto-picks display avatars for children, don't be surprised if the child looks like they're 50+. It's...disturbing. Base salaries are fine, or modify using "Mechwarrior" RPG 1st through 3rd, or using Battletech RPG for the most current rules. I use Mechwarrior 1st edition salaries. They're less...generic and apparently can result in some infighting and unhappy people if they don't get raises when they go up in skill (as opposed to rank; I have no idea why it is based on skill instead of rank, but that kinda makes sense. Probably because of the "experience" multipliers. Work your ranks around experience and it fits better.)
MAKE SURE YOU HAVE AN ADMIN/HR. Without that, unhappy employees are prone to leaving without any chance to meet their needs. And when they leave, they STEAL your ****! Even if your Admin/HR sucks, you'll at least get a reason when they leave. Otherwise it just says either "Leaves" or "Defects". That's boring; so you need an Admin/HR skilled person for the cool reasons. Sometimes you even get that "X wanted to leave because of (reason), but was talked out of it." (or talked out of it with condition).
Finances: Check everything. People can't get unhappy unless they're earning wages! Note: I prefer to play with limit loan parameters by rating, however, that whole exercise I did would be impossible if it was checked for the experiment. Even if I did just get the money by the default "Rich uncle." Percentage based maintenance costs is optional, but it makes more sense than the default method. Which reminds me, "reverse status letters", because "A" for terribad trash and "F" for pristine condition are confusing as hell.
Budgeting your refit is the cost of the parts, the cost of the maintenance, the cost of transportation (excluded in my example since I God Modded it into my warehouse.), cost of overhead (to "own" a mini-factory in order to make the attempt has quite the overhead cost and so I rented one at 2.7 million a month and kept overhead down by literally just having what I needed to achieve the experiment; so if I had a real unit with all the fixings, I'd be broke during this experiment), cost of personnel salaries and finally cost of overtime (remember I said I allowed them to overtime so that each technician was performing 60 hour work weeks. This helps produce fast work but stressed employees. Stressed employees are unhappy ones that will make mistakes. Very important if you want the fun stuff.)
Also recall that "Skill" = hefty multipliers to salaries, and with Mechwarrior first edition's own multipliers and wages, Techs make a LOT when they are god-tier skilled. This and overtime is part of the extreme cost [and anything less than god-tier would have be a lot more likely to flop and fail], and when it wasn't enough to counteract the stress, Scotty stole the mech we worked so hard on and he quit. Thus why I dedicated that extreme budget [you dedicate a budget by having set amount of money on hand to cover expenses and you stop continuing even if you didn't succeed when you run out of money, hence its a "budget"] for the "third" attempt to make sure they were getting paid enough to not quit on me before they were done.
I had two god-tier Techs named Scotty the engineer and Miles O'brian the tinkerer of...things. Yes his callsign was "The Tinkerer of...things." (Deep Space Nine reference to a condsecending nickname) No, I didn't include his wife or the daughter as that would have added even more issues to making the change. Though it would have been interesting.
Mercenary tab: Whatever you want.
Skills. Do not touch.
Special ability. Do not touch for normal play. Though I did create a couple to help make less work in referencing the book on technician rolls and to make sure the log informed me by announcing that the special ability was used. And if it was used, the ability had the name of the book I had to reference and the page for what to do. That way I didn't have to manually hunt for them and remember every little thing.
Personnel Market: Strat Ops, FM: Mercenaries Revised, or Dylan's Method. ATB is far too forgiving and nobody likes Random. I used Dylan's method.
The ATB tab is optional. I use it for single player and multiplayer against the bot, but for experiments like that Jenner from STD armor to Ferro, it's best to leave ATB off.
Books required: Mechwarrior RPG (any edition) or Battletech RPG. A large chunk of what you need, how you need it, etc. is found there. I used 1st edition for most of the rules that I went by and customed in as "Special Abilities".
Apps required: BT Dice Roller. (Handy for handling dice rolls that Megamek itself doesn't handle without creating specific skills/traits for your techs to handle them for you; surprisingly it isn't frequently needed). Mech Factory (detailed references). (Sarna works, too, but between the two Mech Factory pulls its stuff direct rather than having a bunch of wiki-nerds change each other's work every other day)
Don't forget you also need to set your Megamek options to include most of the rules, too, otherwise you'll have issues when dropping onto missions like the flawed design quirks not having any effect.
And finally, some notepad edits to give mechs starting design quirks, as for some reason the game isn't inclined to give mechs design quirks if they don't already have some. Combine this with TROs and Mech Factory to come up with them.
Design quirks must be enabled in both Megamek HQ and Megamek in order for them to be assigned on failures. And if for some reason it doesn't do it on its own you can always manually do the rolls (I used to have to do this and because manually doing it was prone to a limited selection of flaws, I had to create my own tiered dice system so the first roll would denote the flaw level and the second would denote a flaw within that range. For the Jenner experiment though I did not use my own system and instead used the Mek HQ + Mechwarrior 1st edition rules. Otherwise the flaws and issues might have been more varied as the number of flaws the base thing will actually use is very...very limited. And sometimes it gives benefits...which doesn't make any sense, how do you fail at something and make it better?)
Edited by Koniving, 19 September 2017 - 09:58 AM.
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