If you’ve played this game a while you’ll notice the AI is severely crippling to the overall experience. Most of the time enemies are stuck in a walk allowing you to easily kite them away. To make matters worse they seem to be completely incapable of target switching and will often lock onto the first mech they see and stay locked until their die or you die.
These two AI defects make it extremely easy to kite away any class of mech by sending a bait mech and then just running it past the rest of your lance.
There are a few solutions.
- (Highly recommended) Install the official mc2 patch. The patch contains a ton of features including badly needed weapon balancing (ballistic weapons take up less space, lrms do less damage, prices and recycle times overall tweaks). Most importantly it patches the
data\missions\corebrain.abxfile which I believe is responsible for the majority of the AI. After this patch enemies will target switch more readily and actually RUN. This can make even light mechs like the fire ant more useful to the npcs. Keep in mind this will make the game significantly harder! Payouts for objectives have also been reduced significantly so money isn’t unlimited like it was in vanilla. Prepare for a challenge.
Download link 1 – Sarna.net
Download link 2 – local mirror - Play the Mechcommander Omnitech mod instead. With the release of the MC2 source magicX has created a standalone game built on MC2 that is available for free with no DRM. It has a separate campaign, better AI as well as dozens of additional mechs and weapons. The mod also makes the game more like a battletech based game – weapons aren’t infinite and need to be purchased and can be destroyed. Same with mechwarriors. https://www.moddb.com/mods/mechcommander-omnitech
