All good, I was mostly hoping to snaffle some sprites of the Bushwacker (my beloved ❤️) before getting curious about what the git upload *did* have in the sprites folder and what the promised mech files had in them.

I dunno that the speed/damage changes are material even beyond the suspicion that more people have played MCX than MC1; Elementals barely show up (probably because clicking them is so tricky), using Commandos/Ullers as the player is very risky and the AI doesn’t tend to “kite” with fast long-range mechs IIRC. LRMs probably deserved the nerf; they can be a bit oppressive as-is when deployed in bulk.

Though – some of it might also be to make them better at scouting vs the Raven, given that most Clan heavies are otherwise only marginally slower and have a massive edge in range and firepower.

Documentation is a bit scarce but that’s not unusual for minor games I think. It’s a wonder Rizzen kept and uploaded all the stuff they did. For ex. what the difficulty options actually *do* beyond make the game easier or harder doesn’t seem to be written anywhere either (appears to be salvage chance and bonuses/penalties to player and enemy pilot skill & weapon damage incidentally). Read something somewhere about how maybe the Mechcommander 2 ones add more enemies to missions or something but no clue.

I 100% get the “shouting into the void” effect; though the upside of doing it on a blog instead of a discord or smth is that someone with the right kind of brainworms can stumble over it on Google (or actually *find it* when trying to diagnose something – hate to imagine how much knowledge is getting hidden and lost on discords). Though IDK if I’d have said anything if it wasn’t so freshly posted.

Funnily enough Rise of Nations was another game that was a fixation for a while; though my main memories are obsessing over the Microsoft web page/encyclopaedia for it, watching the little dudes in the Industrial Age artillery picking up shells and throwing them into the breech, and destroying and rebuilding my own farms because some of the crops were different colours and didn’t match, which probably gives an idea of my age at the time. Though when (rarely) playing RTSes I still tend to spend too much time watching the little dudes do things, so it’s probably for the best it’s 99% single player. That and the slow reaction times, turtling, vibes-based tactics & strategy, and psychologically dividing the map into My Side (keep out!) and Their Side (where they belong)… I own quite a lot of RTSes for someone who’s not very good at them.

Rise of Nations was quite good for Little Dude Watching IIRC, compared to Age of Empires engine games. Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 ditto – which are dangerous because on the one hand the little dudes are clever and can look after themselves somewhat, but on the other it makes them more interesting to watch…

Thanks so much for checking it out and taking the time to share about it! I’m actually pretty surprised it did end up being a MC1 -> DM/MCG thing given that I have literally not seen a single mention of the expansion including those changes – would’ve thought someone would document it somewhere. I did wonder if somehow speed was ultimately defined by animations rather than the “listed” value (Rise of Nations has a not quite 1:1, but vaguely similar thing going on sometimes where an animation can effectively define a unit’s attack speed rather than their listed attack speed stat).

And yeah, as a balance tweak it does make some sense, though at the same time it kind of steps on the Stilleto’s feet a little? Idk, I guess it’s not really a big deal either way.

Weapon stats also being tweaked is very interesting 👀. I’ll put documenting the changes on the nebulous low-priority todo list.

I actually threw together some (not robust) basic tooling while working on investigating the MC2 patch, so based on that experience it seems like it might not be too hard to fix up. Whether that means “restore MC1 values for maximum nostalgia” or “update the tooltips so that the game isn’t lying to you” I guess could be up to the user. Thanks again for looking into it – I honestly threw up the MC1/MC2 posts assuming nobody would ever read them lmao.

Anyway on-topic, it appears that what you’re looking for here is actually the *animations* – the MCGExtracted collection doesn’t seem to actually have the sprites, but it *does* have a… metadata? that seems to be connected to how they’re stitched together ingame.

Commando run animation, line 251: https://github.com/oseparovic/MCGExtracted/blob/master/data/sprites/SPRITES.PAK/13.fit
Uller ditto, line 233: https://github.com/oseparovic/MCGExtracted/blob/master/data/sprites/SPRITES.PAK/8.fit

Both of these maintain a velocity of 36, which going by the numbers for these stats in the other mech files seems to be set to about 3x what a mech’s tabletop-rules speed is. This would have them running at 12 hexes/turn, or 129 km/h, 33% more than they officially should be, though their run-to-fall transition animations seem to start at 27 which would line up with a Commando/Kit Fox’s 97km/h running speed. I suspect that was missed when they tweaked it.

The Stiletto seems to be in under ‘firefalcon’ and is the same speed- as it should, speed being about all it has going for it -though the Desperate Measures mech entries seem to be a lot more bare-bones in terms of comments and descriptive text so searching them in VScode is a bit harder.

Line 254: https://github.com/oseparovic/MCGExtracted/blob/master/data/sprites/SPRITES.PAK/922.fit

I had a hunch, and you’re right that it’s the work of Desperate Measures/Mechcommander Gold; my install is from a cd I’ve had for ages so it should be ‘clean’, and I compared its sprite defs to the ones on the MC1 iso on ModDB (which appears to be German, annoyingly enough). The only difference in base-game mechs was the speed on these two.

I assume it’s a balance tweak, to make the Commando and Kit Fox less obsolete once you lay hands on the Firestarter and Cougar. Piloting any Commando variant on the Clan front is what might be called a low-survivability occupation, and the Kit Fox is slow for a Clan light and tabletop-wise has a reputation for its heavy weapons load (including a Gauss Rifle in one config) writing checks that its armour and speed can’t cash.

Copying the MC1 SPRITES.PAK into the MCX data folder appeared to have the mission 1 mechs all moving at the same speed (albeit getting hung up on each other somewhat). Though of course trying to launch the expansion campaign caused a crash due to missing data. Maybe it’d work fine right up until a mission with an added mech? Not really worthwhile.
“Fixing” this properly, if desired, would probably involve editing the relevant .fit files and repackaging them into the .pak, but while there’s a modding tool for unpacking, and Rizzen has a ‘blog’ entry on moddb describing the process of re-packaging the .pak, they don’t actually seem to have a tool for it up.

Separately, weapon stats appear mostly the same; LRMs got a 20% damage nerf, along with, possibly, Elemental lasers.

IDK what other changes there may have been though, just took a quick poke.