Contents
The MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries game guide focuses on tips and tricks for managing pilots and skills. While writing this instruction, we are collecting a lot of information for you from several sites. We hope this guide helps you.
How to manage pilots and skills
Pilots have two costs: a quarterly salary and an initial connection cost. Connection fees will be deducted immediately, while their salary will be deducted along with all other invoices every 90 days. If you hire a pilot right before a quarterly bill, you will still owe them their salary. If you release a pilot at any time, it will be done immediately at no additional cost.
Pilots have six skills, which you can see on their pilot cards. They all have a current and maximum proficiency rating in all six categories:
- Ballistic: Increases bonus damage when using all ballistic-type weapons.
- Energy: increases bonus damage when using all energy type weapons.
- Missile: Increases bonus damage when using all missile type weapons.
- Shielding: reduces incoming damage from all weapons.
- Heat management: reduces the heat cost of all weapons and increases the cooling speed.
- Dodge : Reduces enemy accuracy.
Note that the first three skills do not increase accuracy. Additionally, the first three skills are about bonus damage. In other words, even if a pilot has a 1 in a given weapon skill, it doesn’t mean that using the weapon will do virtually no damage. Weapon power is always important, and placing a novice pilot in an extremely powerful robot will always come in handy.
The six skills are “use-based skills”. So, for example, the more a pilot uses and connects with ballistic weapons, his ballistic skill increases. More experience points are given for kills than for simple shooting. If you’re trying to get a particular pilot to get a particular skill, give them a robot where the majority of the weapons are of the type you want to lift. After the missions, one of the debriefing screens will show which skills, if any, have been increased or partially increased.
Skills and gains don’t seem to be affected by the difficulty of the mission, and you can use it to your advantage. For example, if you are desperate to improve a pilot’s ballistic skills, you can do an easy mission at the start and put them in a robot that only has ballistic weapons and then have them do most of the work.
All pilots have a maximum rating and different pilots at different star systems will have different maximums. Typically, pilots with higher current skills will have higher connection fees, and pilots with higher peak skills will have higher salaries. No pilot will be better than Commander Mason, who is the player character.
The overall “skill” rating on a pilot card is calculated only by the sum of all their current skills and the sum of their total maximums.
Pilots can be injured or even killed if their robot’s head is broken or if there is an ammo explosion. You should always have at least five pilots and get them in and out so that they are well trained. During multi-mission operation type contracts, it will be good to have half a dozen or more pilots to cover injuries.
MechWarrior 5 – How to recruit new pilots
You evacuated your recent raid in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries with a heavily damaged robot and a half-dead spear, so now you need to recruit new pilots. As long as you can reach an industrial hub, you can replenish your ranks.
Pilots cannot be recruited from Conflict Zones – they all contribute to Internal Warfare, so you need to go to an Industrial Zone if you want to hire new talent. Find the systems connected by a dotted line and walk over to one of them. Once there, access your Barracks menus and select Pilot Hire.
In this menu you will find a list of drivers looking for work. Their skill level is the cumulative total of their six skills across Ballistics, Energy, Missile, Shield, Heat, and Evasion skills. The higher their general skill level, the higher their individual skills will be. You’ll always want to review the six skills themselves (a pilot with ten in ballistics will get more difficult content if their evasion is two). The higher number is their skill cap, and the lower number is where they are currently seated (meaning you will need to upgrade new pilots in order for them to reach their maximum potential).
After the skills, you will notice the cost of hiring and the salary of the pilots. The rental cost is the initial charge required to bring a pilot to your lance, while their salary is the one that will be added to your quarterly bill along with the maintenance of the mechs in your active hanger. The fees aren’t too bad, everyone said, but the best pilots cost more to hire and support over time. You will eventually have to eat that cost, because the harder the missions, the better your pilots must be. I promise you: hiring and paying a pilot is cheaper than fixing a robot and replacing damaged equipment.
At any time you want to remove a driver, go to your driver list and delete the driver you want to remove. You can do it from anywhere, no industrial hub is needed.
This is how you hire new pilots in MechWarrior 5. For more guides, keep an eye on our guides page.
