If you're finding the game too easy, there are quite a few things to tweak to make it harder.

The following are all located in the file Battletech_data\StreamingAssets\data\simGameConstants\simGameConstants.json.

Simply open with any decent text editor (e.g. Notepad++), find the bit you want to change (e.g. from the below), make the change and save.


Salvage: {}


Here you can tweak how much salvage you get from missions, supposedly adjusted by mech destroyed. More importantly, the "DestroyedMechRecoveryChance" is the chance of your own mechs getting recovered if it gets cored out.

"DefaultSalvageRights" : 1.0,
"DefaultSalvagePotential" : 8,
"MaxSalvagePotential" : 32,
"MinSalvagePotential" : 0,
"VictorySalvageChance" : 1,
"RetreatSalvageChance" : 0.5,
"DefeatSalvageChance" : 0.2,
"VictorySalvageLostPerMechDestroyed" : 0.05,
"RetreatSalvageLostPerMechDestroyed" : 0.20,
"DefeatSalvageLostPerMechDestroyed" : 0.25,
"DefaultChassisWeight" : 5,
"DefaultWeaponWeight" : 6,
"DefaultComponentWeight" : 3,
"DefaultMechPartWeight" : 6,
"RetreatRewardModifier" : 0.5,
"DefeatRewardModifier" : 0.2,
"PrioritySalvageModifier" : 0.25,
"DestroyedMechRecoveryChance" : 0,

For the above, the only changes I made was set "VictorySalvageLostPerMechDestroyed" to 0.05 (was zero before), and the DestroyedMechRecoveryChance to 0 (was 1 before).

For the first one, I'm not sure whether this applies to enemy mechs destroyed or your own. If enemy mechs destroyed, then I assume it counts "destroyed" as "CT destroyed"?

For the second one, this means your own mechs will never survive if it gets destroyed. I assume this only applies to getting cored out (CT gone), and not losing both your legs. I can definitely confirm that getting cored out with this setting to 0 means losing a whole mech now, as I just had it happen on the mission I tested this on! I still had so much salvage though that I received a replacement mech straight away from that same mission (it appears the mech parts you receive from enemy mechs are unchanged). It definitely doesn't apply to ejecting - that way the mech still survives.

Anyway, there's a ton of stuff in this file, way more than I've listed here - including stuff like shop prices for mech parts etc. If someone has any interesting tweaks (whether in this file or elsewhere), let us know!

I only ever lost a single mech so far in battle. Not super skilled or anything, I just use every defensive advantage that I can. I thought about adjusting this value to increase odds of total loss of a cored mech but that one cored mech wound up taking about three months to rebuild at low priority on the bottom of the queue. A three month rebuild seems like a reasonable enough punishment to me although I am not opposed to some chance of permanent loss of mechs.

Increasing the quantity of enemies while adjusting heavier mech frequency to be rare seems like a better way of increasing difficulty. To prevent breaking the economy the number of components required to build a mech could be increased, perhaps doubled to six. Too many heavy and assault mechs just results in power creep and reduced difficulty by giving too many powerful salvaged mechs.

That's a good idea actually, especially for people unlike me who are more careful with their mechs. I thought I had found something allowing us to set the number of mech parts required to build a full mech, but I think I may have been mistaken since I can't find it anymore.

Changing how mechs appear in a contract needs to be edited either in contracts/ or lance/ - the latter specifies lance composition per difficulty and lance type, but it's pretty broad - it just uses mech tags to determine what types of mechs show up. Contracts is also broad, I think it mainly adjusts things such as how maintained they are (e.g. "ramshackle" etc.).

I thought about the reduced difficulty too, however it's not long before you're up against multiple lances full of heavies. At least in some 3-3.5 star missions so far. I've only encountered a few assault mechs (2 (!) Atlas mechs - luckily they were "ramshackle" so not much of a challenge).