Mercenaries rule issues/clarifications

I've just been kind of happily reading the books from the Mercenaries kickstarter as they've become available, waiting to see if some concerns were going to be addressed in later drafts or books. So far, I haven't seen changes to some of the systems in the updates, so I thought I'd mention them and see if I'm the only one worrying about them.

First, while there is an entire section of the Specialist Forces book dedicated to Armored Infantry/Protected Forces, they don't seem to get the complete treatment I had been hoping for. For one, they offer no resolution bonuses. No bonus to the Combat characteristic, no modifier to casualty rolls, no flat benefit to resolution. In adventures battledress is very powerful, but in the more abstract systems, they are a massive cost sink with no benefit. Sure, you can double the cost to hire the unit, but that's about it. Battledress, particularly with modifications, can gain benefits for sensor, stealth, and so on, and doctrine such as close assault is possible, but since all of those are available without using battledress, it's hard to see those as benefits of using the expensive battledress. And of course, there's a unit trait specifically to counter armored infantry.

And in return for increasing the fee, you need a ton of support. The base support facility provides up to 96 total points towards maintenance at 52 tons on a ship. This supports 96 suits of combat armor, 32 suits of power armor, or 16 suits of battledress--not even a full platoon. The "recalibration and rearmament cycle" referenced in the description takes 5D+30 minutes, so an hour at most, and it would make sense for suits to be rotated through the base support facility and then into storage racks. But that isn't really indicated to be the case within the rules.

Armored infantry--even just combat armor, apparently--also has the highest supply modifier of any unit type, with a x10. Even heavy tanks have a lower supply modifier, at only x8. Of course, vehicles--particularly grav vehicles--do suffer an enormous basic maintenance requirement, as described in Book 2. The Cougar battle tank from the Vehicle handbook is a 15 ton tracked vehicle, so it needs 75 material per month. If bought at the best bulk price/space (1000 material for MCr6 and 75 tons), it needs 450,000 credits of material/maintenance per month, requiring 5.625 tons of cargo space. That seems pretty bad for a Cr640,000, TL 6 vehicle... The 15 ton Liberator G/Carrier from the Vehicle Handbook is also 15 tons, and 7.24 MCr. It needs 150 material per month, at a cost of Cr900,000 and 11.25 tons.

How have we gone from the Vehicle Handbook saying that maintenance is only .5% per month (3200 and 36,200 credits per month, respectively) to such high costs and particularly storage requirements? It makes it virtually impossible to use mechanized or armored forces without significantly increasing ticket payouts or adjusting the maintenance system ourselves.

I was also kind of disappointed that there's no way to build plasma weapons in the Field Catalogue, but meh.
 
The Material support system is deeply flawed and as you state there is no advantage really in fielding higher TL forces quite the opposite, the Material issue has been raised on the Kickstarter chat and a fix has been promised. It is worrying that so much does not make sense. The whole point of the Mercenary books are the points at issue. Without fixes it all becomes pretty useless.
 
Eh, I think that it's a useful base to start from and I can always homebrew from what we have. Balance, deeper mechanics, it's all stuff that we can fix. They have presented us with a lot of new systems to use, they just need some work, still.
 
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