johnstark
09/28/07 12:14 PM
24.198.92.226
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So I run a lot of mercenary games. This means my players need to know things like: how many jumps do they have to make to get from point A to point B (they still have to write checks for payroll after all) and so forth. I had to houserule the negotiation phase of contracts in FM:Mercs because the mission pay for anything outside four jumps from Outreach ceased to be enough to cover the costs of the unit. I understand that salvage is supposed to be the big moneymaker for merc units, but it'd be nice if the contract pay at least covered expenses.
anyway, I've been plotting jump routes by hand but I seem to remember there being a program or utility that did this for you. Is there anything like this, to anyone's recollection? How do you all handle moving people across the entire Inner Sphere in less than a year? Many Periphery contracts require that a Merc unit spend MONTHS in transit to a job they usually complete in a month or two and then MONTHS coming back. All the while they're incurring 50,000 c-bills per jump, per dropship expenses (partially compensated by the employer) AND having to meet rent and payroll for their personnel and things like office space back on outreach, etc, etc. The piddling paychecks they earn from such jobs just doesn't justify the contract's existence in most cases.
There's got to be a better way, or perhaps just some houserules to make it possible for periphery contracts to be accepted?
Sound off, what do you guys think?
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Dester
09/28/07 03:54 PM
216.57.96.1
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Have you thought of having them look for contracts before their current mission is done? So instead of always going back to outreach ( and waiting for them to get there) to get a new contract, Have an "agent" on the look out for contracts, particularly ones close to their current contract location. A few HPG messages is a lot cheaper then moving the whole unit 1/2 way across the sphere just to go right back to the same area.
That or just lower the pay and say "employer pays for all travel expenses". When I GMed players with merc units I tried not to let the travel stuff interfere to much with the game. If they were going to go belly up it was from death on the battlefield, not in the red tape of finances. To accomplish this, i streamlined all the support, and parts expenses as best i could. Think i came up with something like 5000 c-bills per mech, 2500 per vehicle or infantry unit per month.
Just don't let the paperwork detract from what the game is really about. Woopen butt on the battlefield.  hope that helps you some.
Dester
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Nightward
09/28/07 07:48 PM
203.206.76.167
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Pryde Rock Industries has a couple of files in its Downloads section that lets you plot Jump courses. In my game, I generally plot the jump, then halve the amount of Jumps made to figure out how many weeks it takes to get anywhere. This is a little unrealistic as it assumes your employer is setting up partial Command Circuits, but the other option is bankruptcy and a very slow haul across the Inner Sphere.
It doesn't so much matter for my personal unit, which has integral DropShips and I have the Dragoon Points to get 100% Jump coverage, but would be killer for smaller units.
The other option is that you stay near Outreach all the time, which isn't too unrealistic given all the fighting that goes on over who controls the Terran Corridor and the fact it's only 3 or 4 Jumps to any one Great House from Outreach any way.
Yea, verily. Let it be known far and wide that Nightward loathes MW: DA. Indeed, it is with the BURNING ANIMUS OF A THOUSAND SUNS that he doth rage against it with.
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Cray
09/29/07 12:55 AM
72.188.105.234
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Mercenary work is not a high-profit industry. The military of the Inner Sphere is, frankly, fairly starved of cash.
If you want to turn a profit as mercenary, you need to look beyond the boardgame and milk the setting for what it's worth. Screw salvage. You'll be guarding planets with (on average) 3 billion people. What profits can you make from a reality TV show about your merc unit? Can you secure a book deal when your merc unit settles on the planet? If you market your story on the local planetary computer net at 1CB profit per download and secure 10 million downloads...
If you have a jumpship...well, yeah, you have to pay 50K CB per jump but, Christ, jumpships are extremely rare in the Inner Sphere. If you charge a reasonable rate for civilian freight shipping (like 100CB per ton per jump), have an Invader-class jumpship, then 3 Mules hitching a ride on your unit's jumpship will net you 2.4 million CB per jump. What are they going to do, bitch that you're extorting them? It's not like jumpships grow on trees, and some planets are lucky to have jumpships visit once a month. Turning your merc unit's jumpship to freight service when you're not using it ought to bring in mega-bucks.
If you don't have jumpships, do you have dropships? Those should be able to turn some profits, too. An Overlord emptied of mechs and fighters should be able to carry at least 4200 tons of freight. If the planet you're guarding is the only one for a couple of jumps making the latest of microchips recovered from the Helm memory core, you should be able to use your dropships to turn a tidy profit by taking them to market.
And then there's investments. Why buy new 'mechs when you can sink profits into landholdings turn solid 5% profits? Landholdings don't march off to war to get shot up. Healthy stock markets should give even higher returns.
A merc unit that only looks at battlefield salvage and contract payments for profits is missing the bigger picture. The Inner Sphere is awash in mind boggling amounts of cash because it has trillions of people (about 4-6 trillion) and an average income of about 10,000CB per person (even though it has fewer soldiers [merc and House] than 20th Century Earth). The Wolf Dragoons were smart - they took over a planet (Outreach) with about 100 million people and milked them for taxes, profits from other mercs, profits from military production and profits from technology licensing schemes.
If you're scrabbling around for 50K to pay for a jump containing tens of millions of CB of military hardware, then you're going dread combat (30K per ton of LRMs...). The real profits are elsewhere.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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johnstark
09/29/07 02:01 PM
24.147.122.27
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Re: Cray
Yeah I had a group that did a lot of that. See the boardgame section, I wrote about them in the 'Dear God Moment' thread.
My concern isn't on them rolling in cash from Merc work. My concern is that merc work isn't even remotely financially viable from the get-go. Everything you've pointed out are fantastic reasons to run anything BUT a mercenary unit which then just becomes a cash sink on the business which makes its money elsewhere.
There then comes a problem of character motivation and psychological plausibility when it comes to the existence of such units in the first place. I'm not saying mercs should go out, do a job, and then consider themselves mindblowingly wealthy, I was just remarking on the inconsistency. It seems like they should, at a minimum, be able to pay the bills.
It also seems that the most important part of the contracts, then, should be transport, battle loss, and salvage rights - all else being cosmetic and luxuries afforded by larger units with illustrious histories and the like.
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Cray
10/02/07 10:48 PM
97.97.243.184
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Quote:
There then comes a problem of character motivation and psychological plausibility when it comes to the existence of such units in the first place. I'm not saying mercs should go out, do a job, and then consider themselves mindblowingly wealthy, I was just remarking on the inconsistency. It seems like they should, at a minimum, be able to pay the bills.
There are a lot of talented, able people in the world who end up in jail or shitty jobs because they don't settle down to make an honest buck. BT mercenaries are, very often, military personnel on the run from serious military committments, some psychological problem relating to prior committments, or just have some asinine aversion to knuckling down and working for a serious House military.
"Look, Ma, I got me a mech. That makes me better than everyone else, so Ima gonna run off and form me a merc-uh-nary unit."
If you're not willing to knuckle down and deal with the reality of BT, you end up broke. ISTR the failure rate of mercs is about 4 out of 5 units in the first year. The real successful units like the Kell Hounds and Wolf Dragoons had massive external support, and both ended up running planets with massive tax bases available to support their military operations.
The folks hiring mercenaries know these folks are often desperate, so they can always dangle that, "Well, I heard about this other group of foo-...er, capable military professionals who could beat your quote by 10%, so let's talk about cutting this offer back a bit."
Kurita used to deliberately run "company store" mercenary contracts that left the mercs deep in debt to the Combine, just so the mercs would be incorporated into the DMCS by their weight of debt. While Kurita was notorious about the program, the pay structure of mercs suggests the Combine wasn't alone in its habits.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
Edited by Cray (10/02/07 10:54 PM)
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johnstark
10/02/07 11:57 PM
24.198.92.226
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Quote:
There are a lot of talented, able people in the world who end up in jail or shitty jobs because they don't settle down to make an honest buck. BT mercenaries are, very often, military personnel on the run from serious military committments, some psychological problem relating to prior committments, or just have some asinine aversion to knuckling down and working for a serious House military.
This is is a salient point for why Mercenaries are constantly broke all the time anyway. I don't think it relates to the general topic at hand, however. More on this below:
Quote:
If you're not willing to knuckle down and deal with the reality of BT, you end up broke. ISTR the failure rate of mercs is about 4 out of 5 units in the first year. The real successful units like the Kell Hounds and Wolf Dragoons had massive external support, and both ended up running planets with massive tax bases available to support their military operations.
This is true on all counts, but you grabbed outliers for your exemplars. The failure rate you cite is canonical, but to assume that those merc units failed because of their finances is a generalization that I don't think is in character of the context you pull that citation from. The sidebar that mentions that certainly makes plain that there is a multitude of threats to a new merc unit. I would expect that combat deaths wipe out more than half of those units, and legal seisure of property as a result of contract violations (because the unit didn't properly understand the contract and didn't hire a lawyer to suss it out for them) probably claim another quarter of what's left. I'm perfectly fine with combat losses meaning mercs get put out of business. But my point in this particular topic isn't that mercs should be rich, it's that it shouldn't cost 3,750,000 C-bills to travel to a periphery job that only pays 500,000 or so. (A single lance of mechs makes next to nothing, despite having 'mechs because the contract pay is based on their salaries, not on the actual value of their hardware. It seems to me that the units battlevalue should weigh more heavily than it's payroll, but I'll make a separate topic for that once I finish here.) (I also think that, given the starving economy of the Inner Sphere that jumpships making 50,000 C-bills per jump is a little overblown, but I was wondering what a more reasonable figure might be.)
On paper, not accounting for losses, the unit should be able to at least pay the bills by the contract's terms. Once battle losses begin to mount, well the reality of the Inner Sphere is that good military men can do well, and bad military men do poorly.
Since you cited the Kell Hounds and WD, (I would add GDL to that list) I counter with examples like Avanti's Angels.
As for the company store thing, it looked to me like that was a function of the DCMS simply refusing to sell replacement parts and whatnot to the mercs at market prices and exploiting their control of local markets. Mercs could, in fact, bring in replacement parts from outside the DC but at HUGE markups. And why do that when the DCMS would give you some parts right now? Hell, you wouldn't even have to pay for them, they'll do it on credit.
What kills merc units in that situation is that you're buying and taking credit from the person who can send you into battle at their beck and call. And if you think Mercs are going to get the easy objectives, you're just not paying attention. Your employer sees you as disposable, you get the rough jobs that they don't want to send valuable house units after. That doesn't require that you get raped up the wallet by Jumpship transit en route, though.
nor does it require that they be sneaky at all on the contract. That's just the merc's life.
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Tripod
10/03/07 08:18 AM
192.94.94.105
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let me know if im missing somehting here...
it's said that it takes months to make a few jumps. i dont see this. sure, it takes weeks to burn from a planets surface, to a zenith/nadir jump point... but if your crossing 5 systems on a single jumpship there should only be two burns 2 and from the planet. the only other time spent in transit should be for recharge/jump calculatuions witch does not take weeks to do, like what, 48 hours? 24-12 on a hurried calculation? unsure on the recharge time. anyone know?
TBA
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johnstark
10/03/07 09:42 AM
24.198.92.226
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Quote:
let me know if im missing somehting here...
it's said that it takes months to make a few jumps. i dont see this. sure, it takes weeks to burn from a planets surface, to a zenith/nadir jump point... but if your crossing 5 systems on a single jumpship there should only be two burns 2 and from the planet. the only other time spent in transit should be for recharge/jump calculatuions witch does not take weeks to do, like what, 48 hours? 24-12 on a hurried calculation? unsure on the recharge time. anyone know?
The recharge time for the batteries on a KF drive varies by star type. The 'average' recharge time is about two weeks inbetween jumps.
It's why jumpships are sitting ducks. 20 jumps = 40 weeks = almost a year.
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Dester
10/03/07 11:15 AM
216.57.96.1
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average rechage is 7 - 10 days, not 2 weeks.
This is why transportation costs are a big sticking point in negotiations. The transport re-imbersment chart in the merc handbook blows.
Just remember, no merc unit would accept a contract that pays less then expenses. There-for, if a far flung periphery world wants to hire mercs, its gona have to pony up more more C-bills to at least let a merc unit break even on the contract.
Just remember your the GM... adjust as nessary
Dester
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Cray
10/03/07 05:25 PM
97.97.243.184
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Quote:
Just remember, no merc unit would accept a contract that pays less then expenses. There-for, if a far flung periphery world wants to hire mercs, its gona have to pony up more more C-bills to at least let a merc unit break even on the contract.
Just remember your the GM... adjust as nessary
That's well said. If a planet (which probably has hundreds of billions of CB available for defense spending, but that's another topic) wants to hire someone 20 jumps away, then they should anticipate paying realistic transport fees. Aren't there "GM's discretion" clauses in the mercenary payment rules?
In any case, this might be worth bringing to the attention of the writers. You could ping them for their input on www.classicbattletech.com . The "Ask the Writers" forum would get feedback from more writers, while the "Masters of the Universe" might eventually get feedback from the line developer.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer
Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.
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johnstark
10/03/07 05:41 PM
24.198.92.226
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Quote:
In any case, this might be worth bringing to the attention of the writers. You could ping them for their input on www.classicbattletech.com . The "Ask the Writers" forum would get feedback from more writers, while the "Masters of the Universe" might eventually get feedback from the line developer.
That's a really good idea! Thanks for the links!
Also: Dester, yes, I am the GM. I am going to adjust, I was just figuring I'd see what the btech playing community might have come up with to face this problem in the past.
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Tripod
10/04/07 10:33 PM
12.49.227.77
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command circuts seem like the answer. in the example of 20 jumps, if you had 20 jump ships lined up, charged and calculated, the dropships would only need to redock 20 times and in 2 weeks, could make the same return trip. who has access to 20 jump ships?
TBA
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johnstark
10/04/07 11:08 PM
24.198.92.226
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Not the periphery, who are the only people that far from Outreach who a low-level unit would get that kind of handling from
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