[/lurk]
I might have racked up 140 hours in two weeks. What is sleep?
Deep into the post-campaign, I'm developing a new love of the Grasshopper. I've got one loaded to the gills with medium and small lasers, jump jets, and heat sinks. With that loadout and Dekker at the stick, I send it bounding around behind the enemy to slag rear armor. Single-volley assassinations of heavy and assault mechs are
a thing™. With the Ace Pilot ability, if the first volley doesn't get you, the second one will, before it leaps to safety.
In a base capture mission, I had my three assault mechs advancing on the base, with Dekker wandering about on the left flank in a Grasshopper, looking for some backs to stab. Unbeknownst to me, this was a mission with no mechs on the map, and a dropship reinforcement trigger set at a fixed distance from the objective. When the assault mechs triggered the reinforcements, the lance dropped directly on top of Dekker. Dekker got three kills--all of them mechs. My assault mechs were really just there to mop up the base turrets.
I suspect humans are better about dealing with flankers than the AI. Still, it's fun.
Escort missions are the worst in this game, especially later on when your Mechs can't really keep up with Vehicles at all.
I learned pretty early on to try to identify the convoy extraction point, before spawning the convoy. (There's often a landing pad or a place where the snow is inexplicably melted away or some other visible indicator.) If you can get your slower mechs posted up around the extraction point, before having your fastest mech (or LRM boat) spawns the APCs, then keeping up becomes a non-issue. It would be nice if the APCs would stay behind your lance, though, as the in-game dialogue implies they will, so that it wouldn't be necessary to find a wacky metagame solution.
It also seems like the hostile force will use lighter mechs than it will use on other mission types with the same difficulty rating, so you may be able to get away with using lighter, faster mechs for escort missions than the rating might suggest.