Board 8 > Mercenaries 5 Unveiling Topic: Now Hiring! [New Game]

(+) Yeah! (+)

2g-iiiii. Conditional Abilities Don't Cancel Base Effects

If an ability fulfills a conditional ability's condition for activation, the latter ability cannot invalidate the former unless its text explicitly says otherwise. For example, a Pre-Battle ability that KO'd the first enemy to KO the Pre-Battle user's allies would not prevent the KO that spawned it - the Pre-Battle ability would activate once the KO had Hit (IE, once it is guaranteed to KO its target if they are vulnerable to it), but before it had Resolved.

bazett merc confirmed
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...I just went to check the Mercs CE wiki, and the whole thing has been deleted

well there went every single one of my Merc builds
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Johnbobb posted...

KanzarisKelshen posted...

unbought mercenaries who would normally be rostered for that week's match

what is this referring to?

That should say 'would normally be rosterable'. Aka mercs you don't have to pay down to use.
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emailed pbworks support, wish me luck
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Johnbobb posted...

...I just went to check the Mercs CE wiki, and the whole thing has been deleted

well there went every single one of my Merc builds

A certain site of logs should have you covered, I think.
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KanzarisKelshen posted...

Johnbobb posted...

...I just went to check the Mercs CE wiki, and the whole thing has been deleted

well there went every single one of my Merc builds

A certain site of logs should have you covered, I think.

oh good thinking

time to go scour over a years worth of topics to find whatever was on there (at least that I made, the one's skyridge started with might be permagone)
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here's what I could find post-film mercs
https://pastebin.com/C4CkC7Yd

gonna try to hunt down the pre-film mercs ones
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kamek made a Joker (P5) build but didn't post it in the topic, only linked to it
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so this'll actually be hopeless because logs only go back as far as March 2017

by that point it had already moved onto film/tv mercs; most of the Mercs CE builds were posted before that
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Great, another chance for me to post that Noctis build I made!!!!
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man I really hope there's a way to recover those

just offhand I know I had made:
Jin Kazama
Cole MacGrath
Xehanort
The Hunter (Bloodborne)
Ogre
Nightmare (Kirby)
Crunchling
King of All Cosmos PS
Asura PS
Lou (Guitar Hero) PS
de Blob PS

and a bunch more I'm not remembering, including a bunch of reworks
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I need an example of the bounty thing to understand it better
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ScareChan posted...

I need an example of the bounty thing to understand it better

Alright. Let's say you and I are on the same pool and it's looking like you'll have to fight me this week on mid tier. I have Samus and will likely bring her to the fight, so in Peacetime, you post something like putting a Bounty on Samus, paying 3gp in the process, then PM the admins a merc of your choice you wanna hire to counter her who is available (say Sora). I pay Samus down for 6gp, and come wartime I declare on you. At this point, the bounty kicks in, and the admins reveal Sora is hunting Samus before I defer, awarding you +1 AP to use on Sora's abilities. Now we play the match out. If you roster Sora or use his abilities, you pay another 3 gp, regardless of you winning or losing, at Results. Is this clear enough?
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Does Sora take a normal slot?
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Johnbobb posted...

Does Sora take a normal slot?

Yes. This is a mechanism to temporarily gain a deeper bench and a bit more ability power, not make paydowns into a super trap.
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And in this sora is in unbought pool yes
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ScareChan posted...

And in this sora is in unbought pool yes

Bingo, nobody's bought him yet in this scenario.
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rip CE mercs
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Yeah, I get emails about once a year or so for the various Mercs wikis saying that they'll reclaim them unless I click a link - fortunately, I haven't missed any yet. I think it happens when there's not any activity on a wiki for 8-12 months.
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Okay so in this scenario how does it resolve when 2 different people bounty buy Sora at the same time
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Maybe one of them turns out to be Roxas
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GANON1025 posted...

Maybe one of them turns out to be Roxas

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But seriously we'd resolve it by timestamp of the bounty post. First come, first serve.
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Then you have the issue of people sending in their stuff to mods before peacetime
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Paydowns are still awful. I hate the idea of like, Diablo hanging around Mid and now no one cares about anyone in that midtier match except Diablo
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someone setup a Diablo vs Armstrong topic and lets get this over with
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ScareChan posted...

Diablo vs Armstrong topic

We already had this on like week 7 of mercs 4.

I think a jeep was involved but it was basically Diablo vs Armstrong.
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Few thoughts on stuff posted recently:

1. Supply sounds like a subversion of the greatness of the AP system unless mercs don't always have a supply value. I think it should be a perk to selecting certain mercs that need a bit more value than something a merc always has. At the same time, being a supply slave sounds boring, so I feel like supply would be more interesting if there was some limitation to using it. Like, a merc must battle to regain their fatigue from supplying, or a merc must use their ability once per being used for supply, or something like that.

2. Bounties seem very close to a good solution to the paydown issue. I'm not entirely sure I understand how they work, however, and they might cause a lot of bookkeeping overhead for you (if two leaders PM the same bounty hunter, for instance). Let me see if I get this, in any case:

- You put a bounty on a dude, for half the paydown cost. It comes with a free AP that must be used on the bounty hunter. If you use that AP, you pay the remaining half of the paydown cost.
- You get mercs equal to their roster slots. So a bounty on a 6 paid down to mid = two bounty hunters.
- You DON'T get extra roster slots to field these bounty hunters
- You CAN'T get mercs that themselves would need to be paid down, for example, hire a 6 to fight a 6. You could hire two 5s.

Assuming these things are all right, the combination of the 3rd and 4th point seem like they would mitigate a lot of the use of the bounty hunter.

So right now I'm of the feeling that supply is going to need to be managed very carefully as a mechanic to not bring the game down, and that bounty hunting seems like a really cool idea on paper but execution may need fine tuning. Basically optimistic about bounty hunting and pessimistic about supply.

Ability primer is like 4 screens long so I don't wanna read that right now.
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Yeah, I liked that idea a lot better when you could counter a buydown by bringing in extra people to fight that buydown. As is, meh
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Supply sounds like a subversion of the greatness of the AP system unless mercs don't always have a supply value.

They do not, don't worry. 'Stat sticks' who are there to fight only don't give AP. A character has to offer powerful ability hax to grant it, and then you lose that hax for a solid chunk of time in exchange. It's a thing you use when you really need it, not something you spam (at least that's what we want. We might fuck up but we'll try to be conservative with supply values).

This said, 'has to do something to regain the ability to supply' is not a bad idea...it kinda makes sense that you have to field your mercenaries to get them to engage in boring drudge work. They didn't come here to move around crates like Sokobans!
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2. Bounties seem very close to a good solution to the paydown issue. I'm not entirely sure I understand how they work, however, and they might cause a lot of bookkeeping overhead for you (if two leaders PM the same bounty hunter, for instance). Let me see if I get this, in any case:

- You put a bounty on a dude, for half the paydown cost. It comes with a free AP that must be used on the bounty hunter. If you use that AP, you pay the remaining half of the paydown cost.
- You get mercs equal to their roster slots. So a bounty on a 6 paid down to mid = two bounty hunters.
- You DON'T get extra roster slots to field these bounty hunters
- You CAN'T get mercs that themselves would need to be paid down, for example, hire a 6 to fight a 6. You could hire two 5s.

Quick notes on this:

-If you roster the bounty hunter you also pay the other half of the paydown cost (and generally speaking, if you use their abilities they cost money, not just if you use the AP. This is to encourage actually USING the AP instead of trying not to do so in edge cases, it should be a selling point!). The idea is that if the bounty hunter is doing something for you, it's assumed they're making themselves worth the extra cash instead of serving as a deterrent. Sorta like how you pay the full paydown cost on rostering a paydown even if you lose, because the game assumes you made good use of the paydown instead of being a dumbass.

-You get mercs equal to the EXTRA slots a paydown takes. So, one merc for a 6 in mid, two mercs for a 7, etc. This is because otherwise, paydowns turn into a complete trap early on. One 6 vs two top shelf 5s (assuming you bought one of them) is interesting. One 6 vs THREE 5s tends to go the way of the 5s pretty hard. Like you don't take Master Chief to beat Sora and Wesker and Ratchet, that's just too much power to overcome.

-Correct, you don't get extra slots. This is because it turns the bounty hunters into a 'double advantage' option. Not only do you get another merc and more AP, you even get them for free! 6v4 (in the example of paying a 4/6 down to the tier below them) is super hard to overcome unless the leader that put up a bounty is fielding a squad of jabronis.

-Correct, you have to get on-tier mercenaries. You can grab Sora to fight in mid for you if you put a bounty up, but you can't grab Id. It's a way to allow people who want to stick to low and mid tier characters to do so, not a way to fight paydowns with paydowns.

Something I'm noticing is that the mechanic of hidden info and conditional costs is proving a bit hard to track. There's a way to simplify it, which is you instead put out a 'generic' bounty on a given upkeep for X mercenary. For example...

Putting a bounty on 6/weeks. Sora, wanna come and kick some paid down ass?

This has the advantage of removing the burden of hidden info and need-to-be-there the current bounty system puts on the admin team, and we can simplify the rules on costs (pay X cash, get half back if you didn't use abilities from the bounty hunter or roster them). The disadvantage is it requires a cost adjustment upwards, because it's much more flexible than the current system, so for fairness' sake a bounty would have to cost a bit more than a paydown (something like...6-8 for bountying a 4/week, 12-14 for bountying a 5/week, 8-10 for bountying a 6/week, etc. etc. etc.). This is because low/mid heavy teams have the advantage of facing lower upkeep costs compared to high-heavy teams, so their econ can (in theory, anyway) take more of a licking when it comes to fighting money with money. Thoughts everyone?
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Yeah I dunno. Seems a bit undertuned then except in the very early game where rosters are thin. I somewhat agree with you about free slots being a bit much but it becomes necessary for it to be worth bothering with once rosters fill up. So it needs... something extra for it to be an effective check vs paydown warz later game. GP for an extra ability use on a sub optimal conditional merc choice isn't ideal. Perhaps you could let them join without costing slots but give them the Agent 47 clause of only going after their contracted hit and leaving when the job is done, or something.

Generic protection against 6/weeks sounds more the work of a bodyguard than a bounty hunter, on a flavor note.
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Lopen posted...

Yeah I dunno. Seems a bit undertuned then except in the very early game where rosters are thin. I somewhat agree with you about free slots being a bit much but it becomes necessary for it to be worth bothering with once rosters fill up. So it needs... something extra for it to be an effective check vs paydown warz later game. GP for an extra ability use on a sub optimal conditional merc choice isn't ideal. Perhaps you could let them join without costing slots but give them the Agent 47 clause of only going after their contracted hit and leaving when the job is done, or something.

Generic protection against 6/weeks sounds more the work of a bodyguard than a bounty hunter, on a flavor note.

Agreed on that note about how we lose some of the cool bounty hunting flavor by switching to the generic antipaydown setup. The flavor can be retained if they leave on kill though, maybe - need to think about it.

I want to note two things on the value of an extra merc that costs a slot though: the first is that we are aiming for a much, MUCH less limited pool of pickups in general. Weeks 1-5 will feature a lot more mercs because losing due to every good merc getting bought out that early is super lame, so there should be solid mercs left to grab even after everyone is done setting up their teams, unlike what happened in M4 where we were down to the dregs pretty early on.

The other is that even in the deadass lategame of M4, most people couldn't field a 'dream team' roster for a given tier. I didn't have five 5s (and mid was, by a lot, my strongest tier), Jeezy couldn't field a full team of 3s in low, Gravy's squad was the most well rounded and still had holes, and Boko's was a skeleton crew that relied on abilityhax and cheating Lightning in to win. The value of getting to field a full team of elite fighters for a given tier isn't something that can be underestimated because we have never seen anyone get so rich they could have a perfect roster in every tier.

This said, there might be some way to compromise. Maybe you get to bring the bounty hunter in without taking slots if they don't use abilities? Or maybe you DO get extra slots, but only against the 'strongly overtiered' characters like 5/weeks in low and 7s in mid? I'm open to ideas here, because I do want to find a happy medium where both paydowns and antipaydowns are reasonably viable as a teambuilding choice.
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Another problem with this is that unbought mercs are unbought for a reason. Either they have terrible abilities, which means that the extra AP that you can only use on them isn't much of a help, or they're super obscure guys who won't be any help in a fight because nobody knows what they do. You aren't getting Sora as your bounty hunter, you're getting the main character of some obscure RPG only 10 people played.
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I still kinda like the Agent 47 mechanic idea. Maybe make it so they can only use abilities on themselves or the bounty target too.
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Mewtwo59 posted...

Another problem with this is that unbought mercs are unbought for a reason. Either they have terrible abilities, which means that the extra AP that you can only use on them isn't much of a help, or they're super obscure guys who won't be any help in a fight because nobody knows what they do. You aren't getting Sora as your bounty hunter, you're getting the main character of some obscure RPG only 10 people played.

We're gonna try to avoid the former, but I'm not gonna lie and say that this system won't favor people who can do the research, yeah. Maybe the bulletpoint bios we'll be giving every merc will help some with that?

Lopen posted...

I still kinda like the Agent 47 mechanic idea. Maybe make it so they can only use abilities on themselves or the bounty target too.

The latter might be too punitive (paid down mercs aren't always who you wanna target with abilities), but maybe the former might work. Maybe we should test it? I'm not totally sure how though, since it requires drafting up two full teams and making them go at it.
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About a third of the way through the abilities paste bin.
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I have never claimed to be the greatest strategic mercs mind ever, but the original proposal of bounty hunters doesn't sound like something I'd be likely to bother with. I do like the idea of being able to snag one generically, though.
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Lopen posted...

I still kinda like the Agent 47 mechanic idea. Maybe make it so they can only use abilities on themselves or the bounty target too.

See, this is more fun. You insist on paying down Diablo to ruin everyone's midtier, I get to slot Sora without cost for the express purpose of beating him and then going away.

Even that is heavily weighted in favor of the buydown since no one is going to take Sora over Diablo in a fight, but it's something.
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Well it's nice because Sora is a bonus unit. He doesn't need to beat Diablo, he just needs to make him weakened enough that your team of mid tiers can be competitive with the team. I feel like it would generally work out assuming the free agency has some competent men. At least in mid. I'm skeptical it would be enough in paying a 5 to low or a 6-7 to low. Maybe with the right ability use but you only get 1 AP. You might also want to supply this with giving 1 AP per unit brought-- then at least in low you could slam 6/week buydown with like 3 abilities.
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DeathChicken posted...

Lopen posted...

I still kinda like the Agent 47 mechanic idea. Maybe make it so they can only use abilities on themselves or the bounty target too.

See, this is more fun. You insist on paying down Diablo to ruin everyone's midtier, I get to slot Sora without cost for the express purpose of beating him and then going away.

Even that is heavily weighted in favor of the buydown since no one is going to take Sora over Diablo in a fight, but it's something.

Would you take that over Sora sticking around to wipe everyone else, even if he takes a slot? I ask because to me, the tradeoff seems intuitively a little slanted in favor of the version where he stays around to wrap up the rest of the fight, but maybe I'm wrong here.

EDIT: Also, would you be OK with this even if you had to pay a bit of extra money over the paydown's cost (to make up for the fight your squad has lower upkeep costs in general)?
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Lopen posted...

Well it's nice because Sora is a bonus unit. He doesn't need to beat Diablo, he just needs to make him weakened enough that your team of mid tiers can be competitive with the team. I feel like it would generally work out assuming the free agency has some competent men. At least in mid. I'm skeptical it would be enough in paying a 5 to low or a 6-7 to low. Maybe with the right ability use but you only get 1 AP. You might also want to supply this with giving 1 AP per unit brought-- then at least in low you could slam 6/week buydown with like 3 abilities.

It's a tricky thing because you don't want to hand out too much AP since it turns into 'buy a working KO/mission killer, kill the paydown for no cost, next' which is lame. Obviously no amount of 3/weeks is gonna stop a 6/week though, but like, Juliet Starling + Amaterasu vs Wesker is interesting because that isn't a match Wesker just wins flat out to me, necessarily. Maybe give 1 AP per tier the paydown is above the fight? So you get 2 AP to use against 'gross' paydowns like Diablo to low, but Wesker to low you have to win a bit more fairly.
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Honestly I think this Bounty Mechanic with Agent 47 mechanics has some cool use as something that uses your own mercs rather than just hiring stuff. It would be a good way to reward people who are stacked in low or mid when facing opponents who are just trying to win that fight with paydowns.

Like say for low tier I have Ryu Ken Chun Li Amaterasu Tidus Auron Rikku

We fight in low against some clown who pays down I dunno, M Bison and Luca Blight

During my ability phase I can say "Hey Ken join the fight to help beat up Bison" and "Hey Auron join the fight to help beat up Luca." This has no cost other than I can no longer roster Ken and Auron normally.

Then if Bison is rostered by the opponent, Ken joins without a slot and Agent 47s Bison, same with Luca for Auron. I can still send a full roster of Ryu Chun Ammy Tidus Rikku on top of that. You probably wouldn't want to give bonus AP for this mechanic, however. But I think it could be cool.
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But that turns it into less of a bounty hunter mechanic and more into a, I get to slot more people in if my opponent buys down.
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The main issue there is it doesn't work early on as a counter to paydowns. No matter how much money we hand out, there's no chance people will start the game with enough mercs to have some extras left over unless they go all-in on buying 'mook' type mercs (I think I posted a very simple build for the Doom Cyberdemon once - think stuff like that). Bounties have to work even early on as a counter to paydowns or there's no point. Scaling into the lategame is important too, of course, but not being SOL when Diablo gets paid down is of paramount importance.

(I will say though, if people really do prefer 'targeted' no-slot bounty hunters, we might be able to work on that. It doesn't seem impossible to balance into something workable.)
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Yeah that's true. I think maybe you could do both mechanics. Basically you get 'free' bounty hunters if you build your team in a certain way but you can pay for them as well with unbought merc pool mercs. I would say that the free ones should only work if you don't pay a merc down or hire a bounty hunter.

But yeah I dunno. I really like the idea I just think we need to really fine tune the execution to make the mechanic work in a functional and fun way. I'm just tossing out raw ideas here as I tend to do.
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https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/77091214

New topic, continue pitching ideas here
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ok
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I'll do that if I have any
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play mercenaries
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