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.
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 can consolidate on one version instead of splitting across Alpha 9 and Pre-Release versions. The changes that were pulled for the sake of timeliness have been pushed to later versions which will release as time and inclination allow.
Even this “lite” version — with many of its planned changes pulled — is substantial, probably the largest single update CBP has ever had, and is the result of a lot of unpaid modding / balancing / software development / testing / etc work which I hope a few people will still appreciate.
Early versions of CBP were more nerf-focused,1 sanding down a lot of elevated nation powers and unit stats and requiring nations and units to sort of “re-justify” why they might need the higher values in a modern meta that has evolved since the last official (intentional) balance changes from over 20 years ago. Now, finally, we’re getting more buff-focused changes, with a variety of targeted changes to help bring up some of the weakest rares / nations / units etc.
This update also includes important technical changes to how CBP works, including moving to a new mod format which better supports utilizing new “hardcoded” changes in the game’s code.
Patch contents
Balance changes: high (very high quantity, but mostly modest changes)
Bugfixes: high (very high quantity, but mostly small fixes)
