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[DuckFlux]

Casual Mercenary Experience

My knee jerk reaction to mercenaries with a play through of RC12 was that they cost a lot, and a year long contract isn't very long.

I did hire one mercenary to get a better feel for the cost-benefit tradeoff during the mid part of the game. In that time with the mercenary I did a scanning mission, surveyed a couple of systems and did a story quest to the edge of the sector. The year long contract expired in what felt like no time at all, since surveying systems can take several weeks each depending on how thoroughly you explore, and the travel times to the edge of the sector add up really quickly.

In the time with the mercenary I engaged in one story battle, and just a few pirate battles. I didn't feel that having a mercenary is worth it as a part of normal game play, as you aren't likely to get into enough fights to earn back the XP worth of SP spent to hire the mercenary, including bonus XP. Also just a few mercenaries aren't likely to impact the DP ratio of a battle very much. However it is nice to have a few more ships in the fleet boosted by an officer.

Mass Recruiting

Towards the end of a play through of RC12 I was having trouble with optimizing a fleet for the end game threats such as Remnants, primarily due to not deploying enough fast cruisers, destroyers and frigates to spread the battle out to avoid getting surrounded, and with the unfavorable DP ratio due to lower officer counts, which I had trouble addressing during the battle due to the lack of fast ships to contest and reclaim points.

I decided to try to tackle the DP disparity by hiring as many mercenaries as possible.

As per the title. I visited almost all of the colonies in the core sector, avoiding colonies that are hostile. I hired every mercenary encountered that wasn't cautious or timid. I got a little side tracked in the middle of this to do a main story mission in one of the core sectors. But it took 6 in game months, visiting a total of 45 colonies, to collect 8 mercenaries.

There were four level 4 mercenaries, one level 5 mercenary, and two level 6 mercenaries.

Campaigning

With the mercenaries hired, I tried to cram in as many battles as possible to see how much of the investment could be recouped, and how the higher officer count affects the battles.

It took just over 12 months from the time that the last mercenary was hired, before the first hired mercenary left the fleet. This 365 day contract ended up lasting roughly 18 months. I believe that mercenaries will only leave the fleet when visiting a non-pirate non-LP colony. For much of the campaign I was resupplying by raiding pirate and LP bases, so there wasn't an opportunity for the mercenary to leave the fleet in that time.

In those 16 months I engaged in 16 battles and earned just over 9,000,000 experience inclusive of bonus XP (enough XP to get 9 story points back at level 15). I did waste some of this time getting distracted and exploring a system for a Buffalo(TT) blueprint that some pirate told me about.

Of these battles there were:

• 8 named deserter bounties, ranging from 9-12 officers (vs my 16), which gave me 60 - 58% of initial DP.
• 1 named pirate bounty with 10 officers, giving 60% initial DP.
• 2LP and 1 pirate base. 60% DP of course.
• 1 pirate armada of 4 fleets, with 56 ships and 22 officers, giving me 50% of initial DP.
• 3 remnant battles with officer counts between 9 and 14, giving me 60 - 54% of initial DP.

A high officer count made most of the bounty missions trivial. The high initial DP ratio meant that the opposing fleets couldn't hold more than one point at a time, and only briefly, and the individual effectiveness of each of the player ships coupled with the DP induced force strength advantage meant that the opposing fleet almost always gets bottled up near their reinforcement entry point. As a player in these battles I didn't care about contesting the points, nor did I need to issue orders.

The battle against the pirate armada was arguably the most fun. The pirate fleet was able to contest points and spread around the map. Since they weren't bottled up in one corner, and could constantly replace losses up to a reasonable level of constant force strength, the battle felt engaging up until the last of their reinforcements were spent. It was still a relatively easy battle given that there was a lower density of officers spread across their ships, and pirate ships are generally weaker per DP than reasonably optimized player ships. However despite being easy, it 'looked' relatively balanced at each stage of the battle and didn't collapse into an obvious rout. Contesting points still seemed important, and care needed to be taken when piloting.

The Remnant battles were certainly a lot easier. Individual Remnant ships are still strong, and they have a high officer density. So even with the DP ratio in the players advantage the battles are still interesting. Definitely a lot less stressful than when the player starts with 40% DP.

Thoughts On Hiring These Mercenaries

I do like the feeling of having mercenaries in the fleet. It is fun to build a ship to match the particular set of skills and disposition of a mercenary, and the fact that you will have to replace them in time means that you have a reason to reconfigure your fleet to work around their replacements. Any reason to try new fleet compositions is good for the game in my opinion. I think that it is good that you don't have the full freedom to pick and choose when it comes to mercenaries. The mercenary officers have more personality than my own officers since they come prepackaged, and I have to work around them.

Officers have a large impact on the effectiveness of a ship. For completeness sake it is nice to have most of your combat ships officered, and it is also nice to be able to put officers in ships other than the most impactful ones. Normally I would struggle to find a reason to put an officer in destroyers when they are otherwise so needed in carriers, capitals, missile support, frigates, etc. Limited officer counts have the effect of devaluing some classes of ship.

However I think it takes too much work to make mercenary officers work in vanilla. It takes a lot of time and drudgery to travel around and recruit a sufficiently impactful number of mercenaries. Even if you keep the number of mercenaries in your fleet small, the feeling of how quickly their contract runs out compared to normal gameplay activity makes finding replacement mercenaries feel not really worth the effort.

In this example I only earned enough XP to cover the SP costs of hiring the mercenaries, and so in this case one of the primary benefits of fighting battles is consumed in its entirety by those mercenaries. Depending on how many battles you fight per year, and the difficulty of those battles you may only be able to sustain 2-3 mercenaries in your fleet.

Testing Different Settings

I've recently tweaked my settings so that mercenary contracts last for 3 years instead of 1, and very slightly increased the mercenary spawn rate such that they spawn as often as non-mercenary officers.

I have found that it is possible to maintain 8 or so mercenaries this time, where the frequency of having to find replacements seems fairly reasonable, and the amount of time it takes to find a replacement mercenary isn't so onerous. It feels like I have to visit 4-5 colonies now to find a usable mercenary, and I think that is a reasonable amount of effort. Three years may sound like a long time for a contract, but in practice it still seems like I'm having to replace a mercenary after every couple of expeditions.

These values feel really good to me as far as fleet building is concerned, as I can have officers in backup cruisers, and most of my destroyers, and most of my frigates. And it is nice to have it balanced such that I can engage with the mercenaries feature and it feel like it is worth the time investment.

My gut tells me that the break even point for contract terms where mercenaries are worth the investment would be around 2 years.

However with these values giving the ability to sustain having 8 or more mercenaries over long periods of time, I think the impact on the balance of the game is far too great against many of the opponents. While it is very advantageous to have officers in the majority of deployed ships, starting with a 60% DP advantage against the opposing fleet causes a huge impact on the ability of the opposing fleet to provide an interesting challenge. A DP disadvantage for the AI ends up trivializing the game, and mechanics such as capturing deployment points degenerate, since the DP disadvantage means that the AI can't reasonably participate. However one exception to this is against large Remnant fleets, where even having 16 -18 officers in your own fleet you are still outmatched by their 20-22 officers. In this case a high mercenary count offsets the DP disadvantage and leads to less stressful and more fulfilling battles.

Final Thoughts

In my experience with the game so far I've had the most fun when the initial DP ratio has been close to 50:50, as it seems like objective points are always relevant as a means of getting ahead, but where it is still reasonably possible to fight back after loosing all of the points. Though I also want to be able to have multiple mercenary officers in my fleet. Given the choice I think I would much prefer the game if we had more ready access to mercenaries, and if neither officer count or fleet size impacted the initial DP available to each side. And that once each fleet is over a certain size threshold, say 200 DP then their initial DP caps out at 150 or so for a 300 battle size.

[Alex]

Hi! Wanted to say thank you for the well thought-out and nicely written feedback - I really appreciate it! Some stuff to think about, for sure; extending the contract duration to around 2 years seems reasonable.

As far as deployment point limits, that's something I'd like to think about more. I feel like "how many DP do you feel comfortable starting with" is as much a playstyle choice as it is a balance consideration; it's definitely possible to win starting at 40% but it's just a different style. So I've been half-thinking about a skill letting you get some extra starting DP, so that if someone really feels strongly they want more to start with, they can pick that up, and if not, well, they don't have to! And, yeah, how mercenaries (and AI cores) factor into that all ties together, too. Well, nothing concrete to say here, just... thinking about it!

[torbes]

Agreed that DP should just be split equally between fleets. I understand the thinking behind bigger fleets get more DP but I believe that lead to current situation where officers became the determining force in DP calcs because players were just bringing multiple caps end game to either balance or gain an advantage.

My initial reaction to DP bonus in a skill is negative, feels like it would be must have or a gimmick challenge run option. Maybe add the unequal DP option as a difficulty modifier. I think if capture points continue to add DP it should be bonus up to a limit. If AI DP advantages must be a thing I think it should be limited to end game challenges or specific enemies/scenarios with equally boosted rewards and ideally something the player is aware of and can chose when to engage with.

This is also to say of course that early mid game the player could still be outnumbered as they may not have enough ships to hit 150 or 200 DP.

[Vanshilar]

I think it really depends on how much you're actively doing fights. When you're exploring the sector or something you wouldn't really need them; but for example if you're farming [REDACTED] fleets then you can easily do around 4 fights per month. Note that later on there's a way to travel around the sector quickly, so travel time becomes negligible (including going back to the core worlds to dump your loot before you head out again).

For the DP disadvantage for battles, it seems like whether or not the player stocks up on mercenaries is already the mechanism by which the player can choose whether or not they want to fight at that disadvantage, so I'm not sure why a skill for it would be necessary -- they're basically using SP (as opposed to skills) for it. For what it's worth, for me initially I found it difficult to work with, but after a while I figured out that I could almost always get 2 objectives early on, and typically that means I'll be at 55% of the battle size. So I set the battle size to be 100%/55% of my combat fleet, and once my fleet's arrived, I don't have to worry about the objectives anymore. So I don't really see it as much of an issue nowadays. My using a small (low-DP) fleet means I get a huge XP bonus anyway, which is fine by me.

[Chozo]

As far as deployment point limits, that's something I'd like to think about more. I feel like "how many DP do you feel comfortable starting with" is as much a playstyle choice as it is a balance consideration; it's definitely possible to win starting at 40% but it's just a different style.

During the officerpalooza of early .95 where you were always going to be at a DP deficit I personally found the optimal strategy (running a relatively balanced spread of destroyers/cruisers/capitals) to be:

1. Order your entire fleet to defend the nearest comm relay, ideally one closer to your deployment edge than the opponent's: this is both to ensure you get the point, and also keeps your fleet concentrated so your ships don't wander off and get destroyed in detail.

2. If there's a second comm relay, and depending on its location, send maybe one or two fast frigates/destroyers to cap it.  You're not going to hold it, but ideally you capture it long enough to bring in reinforcements with the bonus DP before your runners get bullied off it.  Otherwise the only time you'll be able to hold two comm relays when starting in the hole is when you've destroyed much of their fleet and are mopping up, at which point the bonus DP don't really matter because you've either won or been obliterated before then.

Rinse and repeat for basically every bounty and/or REDACTED fleet.  It's winnable, but starting at 1-2 capitals worth of DP deficit forces a very specific set of tactics that honestly started to wear once I realized that there was (pre patch) no practical way to force parity before the battle started.

I feel that, like ECM, part of the solution will probably involve tightening the maximum possible spread: 80 DP is a pretty significant hole to dig out of and turns battles into what I described above if you're in the hole or a ROFLstomp if the AI is.  In RC 15 I'm getting +/- 20 points above or below the baseline at 600 DP battle size, which maintains some reflection of qualitative fleet difference without making every battle strategy "camp the comm relay".

[Lucky33]

Been there done that. You can make that less painful by doing story first and gate-hopping later. But its a burden anyway.

[dreamdancer]

it's definitely possible to win starting at 40% but it's just a different style.

IMHO, 40% to 60% or a 2:3 ratio is too much. I have adjusted the settings file for 45%. That's still a 22% advantage for the larger fleet, but IMO makes combat more reasonable.

CR ticking down and missiles running out is already a substantial disadvantage for the smaller fleet, even without the huge deployment disparity.

[robepriority]

PPT can be restored via clean disengage, but I usually find that too troublesome and boost battlesize.

[Histidine]

One potential balance factor on DP split that I didn't appreciate before:

I've commented before that in 0.9.1, player was also frequently at a 2:3 DP disadvantage against bloated endgame fleets (particularly mod ones), and I had to build my fleet to win such encounters. (You get that DP share back if enough enemies die, but that requires being able to succeed against the 2:3 odds to begin with).

However, what I didn't note was that in 0.9.1 the enemy ships were significantly inferior on an individual basis to the player's (due to officers, Loadout Design 3, and superior custom ship fits), so it's actually a pretty fair fight until the PPT runs out. In 0.95, with many to all of the enemy ships having officers, the quality gap is much narrower. Although it gets widened again by S-mods — usually, with something like the Remnant Plus bounty the S-mod advantage goes to the enemy if anything.

[Daynen]

What if we could negotiate longer contracts with the mercs?  Maybe we use some battle data as some sort of reputation score for mercs to look at and if they think we're good we can talk them up to a longer contract?  Perhaps if their tenure with us is profitable enough and we don't lead them to crushing defeats they even offer to stay on?  It's not unheard of for mercenaries to permanently join an outfit they like and become regulars.  They'd fit into your regular officer cap, sure, but it'd be a decent reason to hire mercs before you hit that cap AND a way to keep a merc you like...if you deserve them.

[coldiceEVO]

well you don't have to avoid hostile colonies, the comm is still open and hiring is no problem. Both regular and merc. even for LP and pirate station.
I'm planning something similar as well, living among non-core stations and doing bounties afar.
To my suspicion, only one officer can leave at each landing, because there is a time I hired two merc in the same station, but I don't remember both left at the same time, but you probably knows better due to more aggressive hiring spree. Have you ever seen more than one merc left at a time?

[Lucky33]

I don't.

[DuckFlux]

I've never seen two officers leave at once. I'm not sure I've seen two leave in the same month either.

I was half expecting a second officer to hop off at the second station visited when I first got back to the core worlds, especially since they had all been in the roster for at least a year at the time. But it took them quite a while to before they eventually trickled out of the roster.
I can't remember very well how long it took, or how many stations needed to be visited before they all eventually left.

[Sarissofoi]

You can go to settings and increase mercenary duration contract(and how much XP is refunded both for hire and contract extension).
You can also increase chance of spawning first or/and 2nd officer and probability for them to be mercenary.
You can also fool around with officer/mercenary max level.
Praise Alex for making this fully customizable.
The only thing its missing is respec button for officers.

[Lucky33]

And "suspend" button. And "template" screen.