Player Skill: Can you win imbalanced tonnage v skull missions

[Captain Australia]

Not counting tricky mission objectives and knowing the maps, talking purely on the basis of tonnage in versus tonnage in the opposing force.

Anyone out there comfortable punching above their weight ?

I'm curious if there are players who can take in a 1 skull or 2 skull loadout and win against 3 or 4 skull opposition ?

I'd guess absolutely not, it's all about the chassis and how much punishment it can take versus how many weapons it can carry.

But is anyone out there confident and experienced taking on a force of heavies with a force of lights, or assaults with mediums, that kind of thing ?

Just curious ...

[Avataristche]

Well, one mission in the Steiner Alliance flashpoint restricts your mechs to be 50 tonns tops (that's 2 skulls). OpFor has 9 mechs clumped together, with Quickdraws being the lightest and Victor being the boss (that's 4,5 skulls). I did it without losing hitpoints or parts.
It's all about sitting in the forest with bulwark and scoring 18% headshots ^^

[Dakkon]

Can you win... sure. Will your team come back with maybe 1 mech with no arms an 1 functional leg left? Most likely. I have done a few under recommended tonnage missions when I started career mode. They are ROUGH, but possible. It gets easier to manage once your pilots are more skill tho as being able to hit consistently and do effective called shots make up the difference. But low skill pilots AND a few tons under the recommended amount and your gonna have a bad time.

Had a mission where all I had was light mechs an the assassinate target was a fully armored Orion-K (this was day 45 of my run an the mission was a 1.5 skull) he had an escort of locasts and commandos that took forever to kill. Then he came over the hill (after sever rounds of raining LRM 10s) literally spent the whole time kiting him so ke could only use 1-2 weapons at a time but I was spending entire rounds of focus fire only to do little to no armor damage. (didn't help the damage was getting spread evenly) finally got thru his leg armor an he started to run. (evac was really close too) got lucky an a full side attack with 3 of my gets managed to finish off his leg. From there managed to get the other leg before he managed to get away

[velocipeder80]

Yes. You can win but you need to prepare to trade a leg, arm or even a mech for it.

I did encounter a lance of 4 Heavies vs my 3 Mid and 1 light. It was a tough fight and 2 of my Mid mech lose his arm and torso (which included losing my weapons on the arms).

You had to use alot of the terrain and LOS to your advantage for tough fight. Try not to get many LOS on your mech by the enemies. Use the mountains and cliffs to break LOS.

[Revener]

If you can control the flow of the fight, sure.

[Widow Peak]

I took a lance of 4 Assaults with an Assault, two Heavies and a Medium

Does that count?

I managed to fight each Assault on their own. One King Crab chased me and I cored it with my Highlander. Then I ran around a mountain to fight a Highlander and a Stalker after that.

Lastly, the second King Crab. At no point did I have to face two Assaults at the same time, the others just harassed me with LRMs.

So...if you can split them, you should not have much problem, specially of you can call shots on their center torso and take them out with two mechs.

That being said,in that situation, things can go wrong VERY quickly. In my case, if the second King Crab had decided to advance instead of hang back, I could have very well lost my Highlander and the pilot with it...

[L37]

It is not only about mechs/tonnage.
Pilots, morale, good weapons matter A LOT. Once you have this, it turns out that fighting assaults with mediums is not that hard. There are flashpoints when you have to fight mixed assault/heavy lances with some bonus demolishers using <50T mechs, and surprisingly it is totally doable, even without any complicated tactical combinations, simply using brute force:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1586765246

[damian2472005]

very hard... i was slugging it out with a elite lance that was ahard enough containing 2 orions 1 shadowhawk(nearby impossible to kill) and a Centurion. they mangled my lance badly 1 thunderbolt had to jetision pilot out my jagermech was beaten and outa ammo and my battlemaster was in bad shape too. when the last mech felt the reinforcments came up. 2 trebuchets and 2 jägermechs it was over in 2 rounds for me.

[Kel'Ithra]

Like stated above if you can control the flow and where the fighting happens then yeah it's possible. But if you end up like me and end up face to face with a fully armored heavy lance (Orion and three thunderbolt.) and all you got are medium close range and 1 stalker. And you find out too late the mechs weights..... well lets just say, the stalker was the only one to walk away....

This was within the first 200 days of career mode.

Edit: that was the reinforcement lance... since I had decided to take a detour to make sure I wouldn't get pincered. On a 2.5 skull mission.

[SertanDoom]

Some heavy mech are easier to drop quickly than others- look for ammo in CT. attack from behind where armor is thinner - 1 ammo crit and BOOM! It's harder when you want to salvage them.

[Widow Peak]

Aye, but if you find yourself out-tonnaged, salvage should NOT be your priority.

It may seem obvious, but I have lost a few weapons when trying to hard to pop legs.

[Tand]

As the others say, it's doable, but you have to be cognizant of the weaknesses of the targets (where their ammunition is stored if they use ballistic / missile weapons) or their overall range on their primary damage dealers (preference for medium lasers, SRMs and AC20s, for example).

Just use tactics and positioning ... and if it means coring a mech, do it. Less salvage is better than no salvage from losing.

[RARESTKARMA]

imagine a firstarter jumping behind your 55 ton mech and delivering 4 small and 1 med lasers and two MG to an aimed shot center torso then ask how can alower tonnage kill higher tonnage put four maxy starters as i call em together and all four go for a single target its fricken unfair when they get closer they just vapourise their targets back you actually cant stop them at a sprint they take next to no hits and on the second round their nealy always in a rather horribly close position to the enmy and they jump and pump as i call it, game over! then rinse and repeat . maxi starter max armour except back 4x small lasers 2 x machine guns 1 x med laser full jumpjets a lance of thes babies will screw your day up

[salzlaender]

Can be done, can be done. Your mechs will likely be a mess afterwards though.

It helps to have the right mech (and pilot) for the job. I once had a mission in an all-light lance against 8 mediums and 65t Mech. Okay, they had only half armor, but my best friend was the moon. Firestarter with 6MGs was very effective here ^^ Jenner coming out, shooting, getting out of sight again. And so on. War of attrition. Was a bit boring in the end and I lost a leg and a side torso, but I got plenty of parts.

Still need to get full mediums, I started this career with 8 parts for a mech :D

[Daywalker]

Originally posted by Avataristche:

Well, one mission in the Steiner Alliance flashpoint restricts your mechs to be 50 tonns tops (that's 2 skulls). OpFor has 9 mechs clumped together, with Quickdraws being the lightest and Victor being the boss (that's 4,5 skulls). I did it without losing hitpoints or parts.
It's all about sitting in the forest with bulwark and scoring 18% headshots ^^

in that mission you have a npc ally lance that takes 90% of the enemy fire from you.

[Raga]

Skill of the player is not enough. You also need high skill of pilots, high morale and good weapons.

If you can deal a lot of stability damage or deal a lot of precision damage then you can win.

Before the patch lighter mechs were mostly useless but now my ace pilot Jenner is invaluable for focusing enemy attention.