MHLoppy

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:

• The seemingly most-common download source for the patch, Sarna, just describes the file as “MC2 patch” (which isn’t that helpful for a file already called “mc2_patch.exe”).
• The Game Engine uses the term “official mc2 patch” and encourages installing it to improve the AI, improve weapon balance, and reduce mission rewards (since MC2 generally gives you way too much money by default).
• A post on fuckmyusers.com about installing MC1/MC2 includes instructions that recommend using the patch mostly for its AI improvements, though it doesn’t explicitly call the patch “official”.
• An upload of the patch on speedrun.com uses the term “Official patch 1.1”, saying that it “fixes AI, rebalances ballistics, and introduces a host of new bugs, among other things”.

However, having spent a few more hours than I’d planned to looking into it, I’m now quite confident that this is not an official patch at all.

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 OS, including Windows 11, so I have no idea what happens if you try these steps elsewhere. This information largely duplicates / collates information that you can already find elsewhere and is minimally unique.

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 is spread across areas adjacent to the hit — apparently even including to the firing mech if the target is close enough to it.

Combining this information with weapon stats, the expected outcome is a variant of ACs that does more raw DPS, but with less “punch” or penetration because the damage gets distributed across more areas of an enemy mech and so will tend to hit armor instead of managing to deal internal structure damage. That seems like a reasonable-enough tradeoff especially given that they have more generous ammo reserves than the non LB-X versions.

In reality, their DPS is actually atrocious, and I don’t know why.

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 the light mechs (except for the expansion-only Stiletto) claim to share the same 27 m/s movement speed, Ullers and Commandos always outrun Firestarters, Cougars, and Ravens – even if controlling for possible acceleration differences. I wanted answers, and every source I’ve been able to find parrots the same 27 m/s figure with no note about “btw the in-game value is wrong” or anything, so I tried (and spoiler: failed) to figure it out myself.