What does the “official” MechCommander 2 patch actually change?

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.

• Mobygames (which is usually pretty good about collecting this type of information) has no patches listed for MC2. Neither does PCGamingWiki.
• Archives of the official dedicated MC2 page are useless because they rely on Silverlight, but a more general official page for MC2 does not feature a patch under its downloads section (just a trial version).
• An archived Microsoft Support page for Windows games features links for patches for other Microsoft games from the era, but not for MC2 (even though it has information for games both older and newer than MC2).
• I couldn’t find any era-appropriate source describing the patch as “official” or detailing what it did.

But really, it should be pretty obvious that the patch is not official. The updated corebrain.abx file (“brain” being the term used in MC2 to describe AI logic) has a byline in it: “by Magic: [email protected]”. Look around a little bit and you’ll find that this is the same name shared by the modder behind the MechCommander [2] Omnitech mod. On ModDB they go by magicX, but in some other places they go simply by magic. The email address is dead (I was curious enough to check), but you could always contact the modder to verify this.

But even beyond that, answering the question in the title also makes it pretty obvious to me that this wasn’t an official patch. Beyond the many AI changes (AI is generally better and can both run and switch targets instead of only walking and tunnel-visioning), the patch makes several drastic changes, many of which seem to have the goal of making it much more like MC1 in several ways:

• Alongside reducing the height of ballistic weapons (and Thunderbolts) by 1×2, weapon stats are reverted back to MC1 values (!!) for all weapons present in both games (which if you think too long about it doesn’t really make sense to do because MC1 didn’t use a heat+size system, only payload (tonnage)). In-game you might not notice this because the equipment tooltips aren’t updated, but if you actually compare the game files or run in-game tests, the actual changes are easily verified. The changes are also more-or-less reflected in the in-game “Mechcylipedia”,¹ though it does do some rounding on the stats.
  • This revert-to-MC1-values includes the ammo for weapons, so welcome back instantly-out-of-ammo Heavy Ultra Autocannons and vastly-inferior-to-PPCs-for-the-player Gauss Rifles.
  • Some of the weapon art for the not-the-weapon-itself has been tweaked slightly, but that might be for practical reasons rather than because Magic specifically preferred it that way.
  • A few bad weapon entries were included, maybe by accident.
• Machine Gun Arrays were changed from 1 damage / 4 RoF / 72 ammo to 0.5 damage / 10 RoF / infinite ammo.
• Because of the weapon changes, many default mech loadouts were updated.
  • Not all of the updates were done correctly – one I noticed is that the Razorback isn’t properly equipped and will complain if you remove its weapons.
• Every mech now has basic sensors, more or less like how it was in MC1 (even though MC2 was explicitly designed to have a few scout mechs with sensors, and the rest of the mechs without – though it’s probably a bigger chance for the AI than for the player).
  • The color of the added sensors is different for IS (blue) and Clans (red).
  • The Uller is given better sensors (but the Cougar.. isn’t).
• Roughly half of the pilots from the main campaign are effectively deleted (including Rooster!? Muh precious MC1 throwback!).
  • Because Hacksaw is one of the deleted pilots, the pilots you use in the first mission also change, with Twitch substituting for the now-deleted Hacksaw in the second Bushwacker.
  • The shallow pilot roster makes field-salvaging (which, tbf, is a completely broken strategy in the game’s economy) much harder to do for more than a couple of mechs or so, and I assume this effect was intentional.

• Mission rewards seem to be reduced to 10% (i.e., are reduced by 90%) across the board (though I didn’t check every mission).
• Some missions have less starting RP.
• Some ranges are changed, notably weapon ranges change from S/M/L 60/140/200 to 80/160/250.²
• Headshots were made harder to hit in multiple ways, and the accuracy of aimed shots in general were significantly nerfed.
• Mech salvage chance (instead of core explosion) was reduced from a value of 40 to 5, which I assume are percentages but I didn’t check.
• All clan mechs — and a few non-clan ones too, don’t know why — look like they’ve been removed from the purchase options (clan weapons still look like they’ve available for purchase).
• Difficulty settings have changed. I assume due to some combination of the AI being harder and Magic disliking the “unfairness” of uneven weapon damage between player and enemy, both player and enemy mechs now deal 100% damage at all difficulty levels (instead of both of these scaling lower or higher than 100% based on difficulty), and “skills” for the player and enemies scales differently. I didn’t check what that means, but if I had to guess, pilot accuracy seems like a likely explanation.
• The tutorial missions are broken and can’t be loaded with the patch, I’m guessing due to the AI changes.

There might be a few more changes hidden in there, but I’ve now diffed a pretty representative slice of the 936 files distributed in the patch against their unpatched counterparts, and to be honest, have lost interest in playing after seeing the scope of the patch’s basically-undocumented changes (yet knowing that without them I would be stuck playing against the worthless AI with way too much salvage and nearly unlimited funds). I think the patch does correctly identify several problems with the base game, but I don’t personally like how it addresses them.

For example, with the patch you have to live off of salvage for your economy, because the money you get from missions has been completely gutted. That correctly identifies that (1) the player has too much money and (2) salvage is too strong, but instead of making post-mission salvage less profitable, and/or making field-salvage more expensive, it mostly forces you to keep using salvage for your economy anyway, because otherwise you’ll be broke.

By default, MC2’s weapons mostly fire for ~110 seconds before running out of ammo (with a couple of exceptions), which is long enough to not need to refit between every single fight, but short enough that you’ll run out before the end of all but the shortest missions. Somewhere between these two extremes (such as the 110s figure) encourages tradeoffs between ammo-using weapons supported by resupply (from refit trucks and repair bays). Unfortunately the MC1 values for the Ultra Heavy Autocannon³ mean it can only fire for <24 seconds – it can literally run out in the middle of a fight starting from full ammo. Imo this level of ammo negates the viability of these weapons, offsetting the smaller-size buff they received.

You can crunch the numbers for heat and size to calculate slot efficiency; a heatsink gives +4 heat for 1 size, meaning that a 3 slot, 12 heat weapon and 3 heatsinks is effectively just a better version of a 2×3 slot, 0 heat weapon (better because its shape is more flexible despite using the same number of slots). Since mechs come with some heat (and thus heat should not be treated as a 4:1 ratio against size because otherwise you can fill out slots without making use of a mech’s built-in heat), I’ve opted to provide a discount on the “heat compensated size” by treating 5 heat as equivalent to 1 slot. This is probably slightly too generous towards size > heat given that mechs tend to have more heat than size, but it’s close enough that I can accept it for the sake of simplifying calculations.

Experienced players will know that a weapon with good punch and moderate raw DPS is far better than one with good DPS but low punch because the former will actually destroy equipment / break limbs / core mechs etc. Thus, I’ve calculated damage with a (4/3) exponent, which favors weapons having punch over just raw DPS.

I can also weight weapons by range (short gets a 60% weighting, medium 75%, and long is full value) and by how long the weapon can sustain fire before running out of ammo (for my MC2 calculations I chose to put a proportionate penalty for weapons that fired for less than 3 minutes, reflecting my experiences in MC1 and MC2 combat). This 3 minute number may be a bit on the high side, but remember that refits cut into your RP, and cutting into your RP means less airstrikes, less salvage, less sensor probes, less artillery, and so on. I’m not saying it’s a perfect value, but I think it’s a reasonable approximation of how much worse it is to have ammo run out vs have enough ammo to not run out or simply not use ammo at all.

Using this “punch DPS” vs heat-compensated size calculation with weighting for weapon range and ammo usage, basically only 3 weapons are worth using with the patch: Clan Heavy Lasers, Clan Heavy Large Lasers, Clan ER PPCs, and then Clan ER Large Lasers are a runner up for fourth, but only if you can’t fit one of the first three weapons there instead (like if you want long range but only have 1×2 space spare). These weapons are 50~100% more effective per weighted, heat-compensated slot than all of the other weapons in the same range bracket, which is even worse than before the weapons were patched. In MC1 this wasn’t as bad because:

1. Weapons aren’t unlimited once unlocked, meaning if you get a couple of Clan ER PPCs one of your mechs become powerful, not all of your mechs.
2. MC1 has no concept of slot size, which was not compensated for when blindly porting the MC1 weapon stat values to MC2!!!
3. The heavy lasers didn’t exist in MC1, meaning that their values in MC2 aren’t balanced properly vs the MC1 weapon values (as the heavy laser stats haven’t been updated on account of there not being MC1 weapon values to copy for weapons that didn’t exist in MC1/MCG).

So yeah, no thanks! I could spend the time making my own patch for a few things like weapons — and I actually started on that before deciding to double-check what all the other undocumented changes were — but I just kind of don’t care enough anymore and am a little tired of spending more time patching the games I want to play than playing them.

If you’re wanting to play MC2 and looking for advice on what to do after reading this, I’m sorry to say that I don’t have a clear action to recommend to you. I do know that I’m probably more sensitive to game balance than you are though, so maybe you can consider playing your choice of unpatched or patched and just living with the worst parts of whichever one less offends your sensibilities. I guess you could also check out Omnitech, though having not seriously looked at it I can’t comment on how well it handles the default MC2 campaign.

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The main article is over. Here’s a dump of some misc related things that didn’t fit into it neatly so that I can close all of this stuff I have open but still mention them.

• The rate of fire stat in MC2 seems to be based on how many times a weapon can fire in 10 seconds; the compbas.csv file which MC2 uses⁴ actually has stats based on weapon recharge, and the rate of fire stat is instead a derived number.
• The way the patch works relies on how the game reads its packaged files (e.g., .fst files) vs how it reads the “loose” files used by the patch. Empirically, it seems to be about the same as how MC1 does this.
  • As far as I know, a few of the files in the not-official patch are redundant (they’re the same as the packaged pre-patch versions) – I’m not sure why they’re included.
• One of the best places for MC2 info / discussion seems to be the Hard Light forums, which has boards (sub-forums?) for:
  • MechCommander and Freelancer (bit of a weird thing to combine into one place lol)
  • MechCommander [2] Omnitech, Magic’s big MC2 overhaul mod thing.
    • There’s a post in there that relates to using Magic’s updated AI in the original (MC2) game. I haven’t looked into it further.
• For me personally, removing vidcard.csv, badcard.csv and imagehlp.dll (as you’ll find advised in several places) were useful steps for getting the game running properly, and I personally found it easier to use the “RIP” versions with movies and music transplanted from the non-RIP version, even though I did eventually get the non-RIP version running.
• Some tools which can’t mount Alcohol 120%’s .mdf disc image format can actually mount it if you rename it to .iso lol.
• A few years ago a Ukrainian guy worked on a modernization port before the age of vibe-coding, and he seems to have done a pretty good job, though it’s not a complete ready-to-play re-implementation yet.

 

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1. This is what it’s called internally, rather than “Mechpedia” which would probably be more natural in modern parlance.
2. Which I think makes the Sarna page for MC2 equipment wrong? But I don’t want to spend the time to verify it so am not personally updating the page.
3. Semantically I prefer “Heavy Ultra Autocannon”.
4. Recall that MC2 was made mostly source-available in order for Microsoft to use it as a demo for XNA Build.