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KickStarter BattleTech Pre-Release Thread

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014


They published an edited transcription after a month for some reason: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/312777/Inside_the_Harebrained_task_of_reviving_Battletech.php

Inside the Harebrained task of reviving Battletech

When it comes to the history of tabletop games and PC games, the Battletech series looms as large as a Mad Cat Mk II stomping over the battlefield. But thanks to shifting player demands and a screwy licensing history, the series has been absent from prominence for a few years now.

But late last year, the folks at Harebrained Schemes released the first backer build for Battletech, the Kickstarted turn-based tactical game that makes a stab at adapting the conventions of the tabletop series to video game format.

At the time, we were lucky enough to grab game director Mike McCain on the Gamasutra Twitch channel, who was able to discuss the game's development process while fielding feedback from the game's backers.

If you're in the business of making strategy games (or just love seeing the nuts and bolts of how they're made), you should watch our full conversation up above, but we've also taken the liberty to transcribe some key insight for your perusal down below.

Stream Participants

Bryant Francis, Editor at Gamasutra
Alex Wawro, Editor at Gamasutra
Mike McCain, Game Director of Battletech at Harebrained Studios

Surviving the "Indiepocalypse"
Wawro: I'm trying to get your perspective on being a successful indie developer. Because I think its real tricky, and you have to get a bit of luck in there too to do well. I want to know what you personally, how you feel about the immediate future of indie games.

This game's coming out next year. Are you concerned at all about questions of discoverability, about getting it in front of the right people? Do you have ideas about how to do that well, on YouTube or with someone else?

McCain: I'm concerned, I don't have any deep answers necessarily. I've read all the articles: "The Indiepocalypse is happening!" "The Indiepocalypse is a myth!" I don't know. I do think the market is more and more crowded, and I think players have larger backlogs on Steam, and there's there's properties that have been out for five years that are still relevant.

Shadowrun games are an example, for an RPG in the same sort of realm of turn-based combat and text-heavy, coming out today, they're still going to be competing against our Shadowrun titles from five years ago, or worse on Steam. So yeah, I'm concerned.

That said, we're really excited about the potential that Battletech has for both the core of Battletech fandom and strategy games. And so I think we're hoping to reach a broader [audience], maybe some people who like XCOM will like Battletech too?

So I think, between what Paradox really brings to the deal and the momentum and goodwill we've built within the Battletech fanbase, and the prestige of the Battletech IP itself, and the quality of our game, I'm excited to see all that come together next year.

Wawro: Yeah, it's funny, I feel like, from the outside looking in, it feels like a decade or so ago, the idea about a mech game, specifically about a semi-hardcore, tactical, turn-based version was sort of unpopular because it had such a niche audience, and nowadays now having such a built-in niche is a huge boon, because you don't have to worry about hoping that people will find you game, there are a certain number of people who only want this game, and you can count on them coming out for you, and if you make a good game they're probably spread the word about it.

So it's funny how that kind of thing flips, as more games enter the market, all of a sudden having that tiny little niche is a huge deal.

McCain: Yeah, it's how wide are you going versus how deep, or some combination, and just having the energy of the Kickstarter community around the game has been huge, and their excitement with the initial backer beta release. Hopefully their excitement with the launch of the game, not only does that mean a lot to us internally, but hopefully they're write a Steam review or two and spread the word.

Diving into fog of war design
Francis: A question from the chat asks, "I'm kind of interested in this fog of war thing that helps set up the encounter. Can you tell us how you feel, as a designer, about fog of war as a concept? Because I think it's sort of aside from XCOM?

It's fallen out a little bit in favor compared to the heyday of the 90s, when every strategy game and RPG was using Fog of War in some way, to create this sense of the unknown as you would do an encounter. But nowadays players seem to value having a lot of information going into battles. How, as a designer, do you see it working in your favor here, and what's has it been like working with it in this game.

McCain: It's definitely been one of the more challenging things to balance. How far can you see, what are you sensor ranges. It's a little bit or aggressively pulled-in in the current backer beta incarnation than what we have at this point in our development branch. So it's something that's been tuned back and forth quite a bit.

A couple of goal statements early on were to have a strong purpose for lighter mechs on the battlefield. This was one of the problems of early incarnations of the game, in that it really became a race to the heaviest possible mechs with the biggest weapons that you could field. It's a tough balance to strike because lighter mechs are cheaper, they're not worth as many points, so on one level it's not going to have value on the battlefield as a heavier, more expensive mech, but we also wanted to make sure there was a role there, to have a good lance, a couple of heavier mechs, and maybe a long-range mech and a scouting mech, a lighter, more nimble scout unit.

The few things in the built right now, I don't know if you've noticed the sensor lock ability. Some of the pilots have that available, and you can actually mark a radar blip out in the distance to essentially extend your line of sight out to that target and shoot at it. So there's a coupe of things like that in the game.

Also, a pilot with a better Tactics skill can actually glean more information about the radar blips they can see. So we think that there's some interesting play in that space between, I've got an enemy mech on sensors, and I've got actual line-of-sight on an enemy, and that's where we kind of tried to emphasize the value of scouting ahead, so you can make a plan of engagement against your enemy.

The value of turn-based game design
Wawro: I wonder for you personally, that you've been with the studio for quite a long time. Presumably you could have left to find a new challenge. What is it about turn-based games that appeals to you as a game developer?

McCain: It's very discrete? I'd largely come back to those constraints on creativity. I think having that discrete problem set to work with is nice, and being able to iterate on some of the learnings and concepts from Shadowrun has been exciting too.

Ultimately for me, I'm absolutely interested in other stuff as well, but I think that each type of game probably, at the end of the day, presents a lot of the same challenges and excitements in terms of what will be fulfilling about that development experience.

Wawro: Can you think of some specific examples of what you think you've learned from the Shadowrun games that you've applied to the design of this one?

McCain: That's a great question, because I did allude to that.

Wawro: No pressure. (laughs)

McCain: I've got to back it now! I might struggle for concrete... because it is such a different scale of game, I struggle for concrete examples. I do think there's sort of a gut sensibility for what will work or won't work, that I personally didn't have as much of at the start of Shadowrun development, I felt that I picked up a better sense of smell for turn-based games, if that makes sense, by the end of it? Having that sort of gut navigation in place for this one would be part of it, I think.

But yes, specifics, for this game, it's as many things as we decided to do differently as decided to be the same, because it's such a free, organic 3D world, as opposed to the much more grid-based Shadowrun, and mechs are an order of magnitude larger than people.

Wawro: Yeah. I wonder then, and we'll have to stretch back maybe for this, when you started in on the Shadowrun games, were there any preconceptions or thoughts you had about what makes a good turn-based game that you had to disabuse yourself with, or get over? I don't know the answer, which is why I gotta ask, I've never really thought about it before?

McCain: I don't know about what makes a good turn-based game in the abstract. We went through a lot of different iterations on Shadowrun as well, to find the right balance of complexity.

A good example, to start with action points on Shadowrun. We started with this classic, eight to sixteen action points, and spend those in much smaller, discrete chunks. Part of that was just coming into how we could get close to a Shadowrun experience, and all the different spells we'd want to weight differently? I think there was some Fallout thinking there too, in the early days.

Eventually we simplified it to two action points, eventually getting a third. I think it was just better. We weren't looking to say we were going to do it just like XCOM, but in some cases they solved the problem in a more elegant, systemic way, and I think moved the genre forwardly, frankly.
 

Cross

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McCain: I don't know about what makes a good turn-based game in the abstract. We went through a lot of different iterations on Shadowrun as well, to find the right balance of complexity.

A good example, to start with action points on Shadowrun. We started with this classic, eight to sixteen action points, and spend those in much smaller, discrete chunks. Part of that was just coming into how we could get close to a Shadowrun experience, and all the different spells we'd want to weight differently? I think there was some Fallout thinking there too, in the early days.

Eventually we simplified it to two action points, eventually getting a third. I think it was just better. We weren't looking to say we were going to do it just like XCOM, but in some cases they solved the problem in a more elegant, systemic way, and I think moved the genre forwardly, frankly.
:dead:
 
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PorkBarrellGuy

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Why are they trying to reinvent the wheel here? Why not just crib TT battletech rules and plonk them into a videogame? I know TT rules aren't perfect, but they're a good start at least.
 

Cael

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Making a TT game in computer format, with ALL of the TT rules built in and computer controlled opponents would be something that Battletech fans would pay good money for.

Something along the lines of Mechcommander, but turn based, hex based, with TT rules, weapons ranges, 'mech customising rules and the like. In fact, something like Fallout Tactics where it is RT until battle starts when it reverts to TB would be a pretty good platform to put the whole thing on.

And, of course, you will need to put in all of the stages in the round (i.e., move stage, weapons fire stage, physical attack stage, cooldown stage, etc.).

A game like that would be an instant hit with BTech fans, the storyline be damned, really. Throw in moddability and map/mission creator/editors and you will have fans buying and playing that game for the next 20 years. And all you have to do is release mission packs and stuff until technology advances enough for you to re-engineer the same game but with better graphics and speed. BTech has been around for 30+ years and still has legions of fans and players. There is no reason to "upgrade" the basic game in the slightest.
 

Black

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I'm tired of devs who dumb things down because they think their audience is too stupid.
Maybe next time try to make a game that's too smart for you and see how that works out instead of constantly cutting, re-inventing, simplifying and downscaling.
 

Kem0sabe

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Making a TT game in computer format, with ALL of the TT rules built in and computer controlled opponents would be something that Battletech fans would pay good money for.

Something along the lines of Mechcommander, but turn based, hex based, with TT rules, weapons ranges, 'mech customising rules and the like. In fact, something like Fallout Tactics where it is RT until battle starts when it reverts to TB would be a pretty good platform to put the whole thing on.

And, of course, you will need to put in all of the stages in the round (i.e., move stage, weapons fire stage, physical attack stage, cooldown stage, etc.).

A game like that would be an instant hit with BTech fans, the storyline be damned, really. Throw in moddability and map/mission creator/editors and you will have fans buying and playing that game for the next 20 years. And all you have to do is release mission packs and stuff until technology advances enough for you to re-engineer the same game but with better graphics and speed. BTech has been around for 30+ years and still has legions of fans and players. There is no reason to "upgrade" the basic game in the slightest.
It would be a sucess amongst fans and sell less than 10.000 copies.
 

Cael

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I am tired of dumb ass game developers, whether it is computer or otherwise, who reinvents everything all the time. If something works, stick with it. Just expand the damned story. People will buy the expansions. Haven't they learnt ANYTHING from book serials???

Wizards of the Coast is a bloody good example. They reinvented and World of Warcraft'd DnD when they put out 4th Ed. It takes a frakking big muppet to make a Diablo 2 in paper format, but they did it. Goddamned shit-for-brains. No guesses as to why 4th Ed lasted less than HALF the run of any of the previous editions.
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Making a TT game in computer format, with ALL of the TT rules built in and computer controlled opponents would be something that Battletech fans would pay good money for.

Something along the lines of Mechcommander, but turn based, hex based, with TT rules, weapons ranges, 'mech customising rules and the like. In fact, something like Fallout Tactics where it is RT until battle starts when it reverts to TB would be a pretty good platform to put the whole thing on.

And, of course, you will need to put in all of the stages in the round (i.e., move stage, weapons fire stage, physical attack stage, cooldown stage, etc.).

A game like that would be an instant hit with BTech fans, the storyline be damned, really. Throw in moddability and map/mission creator/editors and you will have fans buying and playing that game for the next 20 years. And all you have to do is release mission packs and stuff until technology advances enough for you to re-engineer the same game but with better graphics and speed. BTech has been around for 30+ years and still has legions of fans and players. There is no reason to "upgrade" the basic game in the slightest.
It would be a sucess amongst fans and sell less than 10.000 copies.
That pretty much sums it up. They dumb down systems because XCOM (for the most part) made it clearly obvious that it can lead to great economic success. Unfortunately, but that's how it is.
 

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New details about the campaign here: http://www.pcgamer.com/battletech-i...l-combat-game-and-an-absorbing-mercenary-sim/

Battletech is shaping up to be a great tactical combat game, and an absorbing mercenary sim
Harebrained's latest channels the spirit of tabletop mech adventure.

b5672LpZdvCGrdbE5aJkBJ-320-80.jpg


Dekker has fallen over. His 30-metre-tall mech is prone at a desert crossroads, flanked on two sides by canyon walls that do not—it turns out—prevent him from being shelled by artillery. I’d sent him in because his mech is the most armoured: his job was to tie up enemy firepower while my quicker mechs flanked through a lowland forest to the south.

I’m commanding a lance—a squad of four mechs—featuring designs and loadouts that’ll be familiar if you’ve ever played a MechWarrior game. BattleTech pulls the series back to its tabletop roots, focusing on strategic combat between mercenary outfits who dip in and out of star-spanning future wars to turn a profit. In this specific instance, I’ve been tasked with blowing up valuable buildings in two separate locations. As Dekker and another heavy mech approach the gates head-on, I’ve set up a flanking strike to eliminate the power generator sustaining the base’s turrets. At least, that’s the plan.

A bit of faulty reconnaissance on my part means that I didn’t realise that the enemy base defences don’t need line of sight to open up on my heaviest mech. Similarly, while years of MechWarrior games have left me wise to the dangers of overheating, I didn’t consider stability. Dekker’s armour repels the worst of the missiles that rain down on him from the far side of the hill, but their explosive impact is enough to send him off balance and, ultimately, crashing down to the floor.

It’ll take a two-part plan to save him. In the forest to the south, my two flanking mechs really need to take out that power generator. And Dekker’s wingmate—no small mech herself—needs to take out the enemy mech that is acting as a spotter for that distant artillery. Neither of these things go quite to plan.

Although you have a degree of real-time control over your mechs as they explore the battlefield, contact with an enemy causes the game to shift into a turn-based system based on each pilot’s initiative. In each phase of the fight you can choose a mech to activate and perform a move action followed by an attack. It’s a little like XCOM, but much more granular in a way that feels like a tabletop game. I choose one of my flanking mechs and instruct her to use her jump jets to reach a higher vantage point, risking her heat sinks in order to take the shot that might save Dekker. She opens up her medium lasers on the entirely stationary, very large generator—and misses.

Dekker takes another round of fire and loses his mech’s left arm. He stands and opens fire with all of his remaining weaponry, tearing chunks out of the enemy walker but overheating in the process. The next round of artillery fire incapacitates him—he has a chance to crawl away from the wreckage alive, but I won’t find out until the end of the mission (had I chosen to eject him rather than attack, I could’ve ensured his survival).

In response, Dekker’s wingmate charges the enemy mech and performs a melee attack—a first for a BattleTech game. Mechs don’t have melee weapons, and there’s nothing elegant about ramming them into each other—this is a sprinting shoulder-charge that smashes catastrophically into the enemy. I get lucky—the enemy pilot is killed, and their mech collapses. The artillery opens up again, but it won’t get to fire after that. I move another mech into a flanking position, and this time they can hit the broad side of a power generator.

There’s loads to like about BattleTech as a purely tactical game: you’ve got a lot of control over your squad’s positioning and weapon options, and achieving an advantageous position means carefully paying attention to altitude, heat and, yes, stability. This single combat encounter is a straightforward example of the drama that the game generates on the fly. Later on, I discover the thrill of using jump jets to deliver fatal drop attacks on tanks like an expensive metal Mario, and conduct the rest of the mission in this manner.

It’s the broader strategic layer that has me excited for BattleTech, however. The events of this mission are shaped by—and shape—a much bigger and more open-ended attempt to earn a dime as a mech-commanding space mercenary. For example: while Dekker-the-pilot was unable to escape the burning wreck of his mech, the mech itself was not completely unsalvageable. Yet the specific damage it took will need repairing, and if there were any expensive guns bolted to that left arm—well, it’s gone. That’s a potentially expensive loss that’ll need accounting for when I decide to take on my next mission. Also, you know, Dekker’s dead, and that’ll probably have an impact on morale.

Back on the ship (initially a small Leopard-class dropship, later a massive upgradable hulk called the Argo) there are loads of decisions to make. Each of your pilots has a randomly-generated personal history, which influences their outlook and connections. You’ve got your own baggage too—you create your main character through a questionnaire at the beginning of the game that reminds me a little of the Mount & Blade series.

These factors influence the types of missions that will be made available to you beyond the confines of the story-led critical path. When you take on a mission, you can choose to emphasise payment, salvage rights, or forego either to make factions like you more. Salvage rights are deliciously specific, too—what you get depends on the outcome of the battle that is subsequently fought, so if you’ve chosen to take your payment in the form of scrap then you’d better be sure that you only blow the bits off enemy mechs that you don’t want to keep.

You might choose to take missions in tundras or wetlands where the environment can be used to keep your mechs cool and able to sustain their firepower for longer, or head to the desert with a more lightly-armed contingent that can exploit the temperature to their own advantage. You might try to curry favour with one of the great houses of the BattleTech universe, or slum it with pirates and steer clear of interplanetary war.

You’ve got loads of freedom to refit each mech to your specific needs, but these changes take up both money and time. A week-long refit will be broken down into subtasks, and if you choose to interrupt work to get a mech into the field in a hurry you may find that your engineers have finished fitting the new gun but not, say, loaded its ammo. As time passes you’ll occasionally be presented with shipboard events, mini choose-your-own-adventure digressions with consequences for morale. And morale, in turn, influences your pilots’ performance in battle.

There’s a lot of XCOM to this structure, but unlike XCOM the stakes in BattleTech aren’t quite as high. Certainly your employers would like you to succeed, but you’re not trying to save the world—you’re trying to make a living. Taking heroic risks (like, for example, wandering your biggest mech unsupported into the line of fire) isn’t always the right call. To reflect this, missions don’t have a straightforward success or failure state: if you choose to retreat from a mission with only half your objectives completed, that’s not necessarily an outright disaster. Depending on exactly what you managed to achieve, you may come away with partial payment and a slight knock to your reputation but—crucially—a ship full of pilots who are still alive and mechs that don’t need expensive repairs, which is its own form of success.

This feels like underexplored space for this type of game. I’m really taken with the idea of a campaign system that discourages save-scumming by giving you more freedom to make the best of a bad situation. And the detailed links between BattleTech’s galaxy-spanning ‘sim game’ and on-the-ground combat are something I’d like to see much more of—being a good space-war businessperson isn’t just a matter of making the right macro-scale decisions, but of optimising your efficiency on the battlefield, too. There’s loads of potential for interesting stories to come from these systems—and, yes, like XCOM, you can rename all of your pilots after your mates. And apologise to them in person when your bad decisions result in them falling over and exploding.
 

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Well it tends to vary from game to game and even within the same game depending on map. For example IIRC the manual for MW4 says Atlas is 13.whatever meters tall (IIRC the TR stated height), but in urban maps it's clearly taller than that (around 20 meters I'd estimate off memory) and in maps with trees it's probably over double its stated height... That's without getting to the fact that every vehicle is very very tiny compared to 'mechs if we go by stated 'mech heights.

In case of MW3, IIRC in some contexts the mechs were SHORTER than their stated heights or those were some really big-built one-story houses.


EDIT: Personally I call it the "must be able to step on things" problem for visualizing impressive size.
 

Infinitron

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My understanding is that the ship is built out of segments that rotate around a central shaft (to produce gravity, I guess). He's explaining that different segments rotate in different speeds and directions.
 

Grotesque

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My understanding is that the ship is built out of segments that rotate around a central shaft (to produce gravity, I guess). He's explaining that different segments rotate in different speeds and directions.

but it has no sense what is saying.

if the central section of the ship rotates (by whichever means that are not relevant), because of Newton's third law, the after and maybe the forward sections of the ship (depending how the ship is built) would rotate in the opposite direction and they would rotate slower because they have more mass and thus have more inertia.

this contrarotation would be an effect and not necessary for the ship to actively spend energy to sustain it like the tweet leaves to believe.




"the drive section contra-spins to counteract the spin"

no,
the drive section contra-spins because of the other section actively spins

also how did he ended with the cca. "1/3rd the speed" value?
the central section looks/could have the same mass looking at the video.

the same pseudoscience is used here it seems like when calculating mech weight/mass etc :)
 
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Brancaleone

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My understanding is that the ship is built out of segments that rotate around a central shaft (to produce gravity, I guess). He's explaining that different segments rotate in different speeds and directions.

but it has no sense what is saying.

if the central section of the ship rotates (by whichever means that are not relevant), because of Newton's third law, the after and maybe the forward sections of the ship (depending how the ship is built) would rotate in the opposite direction and they would rotate slower because they have more mass and thus have more inertia.

this contrarotation would be an effect and not necessary for the ship to actively spend energy to sustain it like the tweet leaves to believe.




"the drive section contra-spins to counteract the spin"

no,
the drive section contra-spins because of the other section actively spins

also how did he ended with the cca. "1/3rd the speed" value?
the central section looks/could have the same mass looking at the video.

the same pseudoscience is used here it seems like when calculating mech weight/mass etc :)
Oh, come on. If His ship
big__captain-future-vol-1-review-001.jpg

was able to time-travel just by spinning some of its bits, I don't see why you are being so difficult with the Argo, and on top of that going by the questionable authority of a guy who couldn't dodge an apple to save his own life.
 

Cael

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Did the idiots actually READ Battletech lore? Grav decks are in JumpShips and Warships, not DropShips. And NONE of the ships have exposed rotating decks because ALL of them are armoured against meteorites. The rotating decks are INTERNAL.

What are they doing? The last hope for BTech fans and HBS is kicking them in the nuts! My nuts!!!
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Man, watching grognards sperg out about minor fluff is truly

:kingcomrade:
Fictional technology of fictional space ships that use a fictional means of FTL travel in a fictional far future where fictional humanoid mecha built using fictional components with fictional weapons are the actual main element of the fiction is serious business.
 
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almondblight

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if the central section of the ship rotates (by whichever means that are not relevant), because of Newton's third law, the after and maybe the forward sections of the ship (depending how the ship is built) would rotate in the opposite direction and they would rotate slower because they have more mass and thus have more inertia.

this contrarotation would be an effect and not necessary for the ship to actively spend energy to sustain it like the tweet leaves to believe.

The two sections aren't connected from what I can see. So one section rotates clockwise exerting an equally strong counterclockwise rotational force X on the main body, and to counter that they have another section rotating counterclockwise exerting an equally strong clockwise rotational force X on the main body. Unless I'm missing something?
 

thesheeep

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Oh boy :lol:

I don't get the problem, when a mech is low on health and receives a high damage hit, going far into the "negative" health region, increase the chance of total destruction.

If it was just a random chance on death to be destroyed or not, it would be annoying indeed.
But making it based on overkill damage would sound reasonable to me. It would also introduce some more strategy - do I make a strong attack on that almost-dead one to create some casualties for the opponent* or do I hit a different unit for max damage?

*Would only make sense if there was any point in doing this (higher reward, actual downside for an enemy faction, etc.).
 
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