Data-driven decision making is the only way to go
MechCommander 1 has an annoying quirk where it shoves all of a mech s biggest weapons into its left arm. If your mech is kitted out with mostly/only big weapons, then losing that arm means you basically lose the mech. Normally this issue doesn t have much impact on the outcome of a mission. Specifically targeting individual Continue reading "Patching MechCommander s left arm bug for fun and…
Having finished MC1 / MCG (complete with noticing a couple of gameplay quirks), I decided to move onto MC2. Several sources provide and/or recommend installing the official patch for the game before playing it: However, having spent a few more hours than I d planned to looking into it, I m now quite confident that this is Continue reading "What does the official MechCommander 2 patch actually…
Before I forget what I did, I m infodumping how I personally (eventually) got MechCommander Gold (MechCommander 1 + Desperate Measures expansion) singleplayer running nicely on my own Windows 10 system. These instructions were written for me-and-friends with that level of detail in mind. No effort has been made in the instructions to support any other Continue reading "Getting MechCommander…
Desperate Measures, the expansion for MechCommander 1, introduced LB-X versions of Autocannons. Exactly how they work is a bit nebulous, but combining the in-game information, the official strategy guide, and player-created guides, it seems that each shot either connects or doesn t (there aren t separate hit chance calculations), and then if the shot does hit, damage Continue reading "Something…
With the years-long CBP Alpha 10 done I finally had some spare time/energy and so sat down to revisit MechCommander 1, something I haven t played since I was a kid (and very, very bad at it). After first playing through much of the original campaign in my revisit, I noticed that even though all of Continue reading "What s up with the Commando and Uller (Kit Fox) s movement speed in MechCommander?"
After slightly too much work and slightly too many whiplash-inducing pivots about what the patch s contents would be, what formally started in 2023 as a small bugfix patch but which slowly evolved into a gargantuan patch has now been split up slightly so that a cut-down implementation of Alpha 10 can be released and players Continue reading "CBP Alpha 10 Patch Notes"
RoN has a lot of undocumented gameplay elements where it s ambiguous whether the in-game effect is a bug or not. Using all available context, we can try to make subjective judgement calls about which of these are probably bugs and which of these are probably intentional (just with missing tooltip info). Some examples of this: Continue reading "Red Patriots getting craft from Forage techs is…
A few days ago I had half an hour free while burger was messaging me about adding new nations to the game, so I decided to see what error message I would get if I tried to add new nations to the game. It appears I have failed the task successfully. As it turns out, Continue reading "Quick notes: Accidentally adding new nations to the game"
Ye olde Beta 2 release includes a lot of interesting things, including a score.xls file which notes how scores are calculated. Since nobody has bothered to share that anywhere except on an advertising platform, I figured I d dump its contents here. I ve named the categories myself, but these are grouped in the spreadsheet already. I Continue reading "The probably-outdated formula for RoN s score…
As part of a uni unit on public policy, I had to complete a 750 word policy briefing based on the report Fossil fuel subsidies in Australia 2025 by The Australia Institute. Instead of trying to be maximally efficient and doing a good job relatively quickly, I made the mistake of getting genuinely interested in Continue reading "Fossil fuel subsidies in Australia FY2024-25: some notes"