At long last, the continuation!
After that kind of massive battle, the repairs are going to be annoying. Even if I didn't deploy many units, the ones that I did deploy got kinda messed up. The Awesomes are okay, for the most part, with just a little internal damage each. The vehicles, on the other hand... well, in those cases, what we're doing is stripping them of useful equipment and then selling the scrap for what we can get out of them. That means stripping any working weapons, the engines, and any armor left on the chassis before selling what's left.
I also need to get my people who were injured back on their feet. Everybody in red on that list has an injury of some severity. All of them see the same doctor, our resident deathfun, and heal one hit per day on a result of 7+. This is mostly hands off, and there's nothing I can do to accelerate the process.
As you can see, deathfun has his work cut out for him.
Luckily, the first day sees most of his patients back out the door with nary a scratch left on their little heads.
Here's what my hangar looks like after the fight. White entries are 100%, yellow is damage of any sort, red is crippling or incapacitating damage, like missing legs, engines, or heads. Whatever the reason is, a 'Mech in red can't deploy, whereas if I'm getting desperate I can send one of the yellow boys into the field with only minor degradation of capabilities. Brown is unrepairable, and only good for stripping parts.
The view from the repair bay condenses all that into everything I need to know to conduct repairs on my damaged units. In the top left, there's a display for what still has work orders out on it, and what state the unit is in, including how many parts are missing and how many individual tasks are still needed.
The bottom left displays the currently selected damaged machine, with everything that's wrong with it. This example comes from our commander's Awesome, proving that even if you don't get that ****ed up, your machine still needs a lot of work to get back to 100%.
The big display in the middle shows exactly what needs to be done, what level the repair is, and how long it'll take to do it. If the part is missing, this is where it tells me that. I select a job here, and then scoot over to the right hand side of the display to pick a tech to carry it out.
The fastest way to fix things, ironically, is to take your time doing it. Each level of taking your time improves the target number by one. On a 2d6 bellcurve, that's a whole damn lot.
Especially when things are going to have 10s or 12s without it. Hell, some repairs have 10s or 12s
with taking my time. A little more on that later.
There's a distinct advantage to having Green and Regular techs around, and not just all veterans. If a Green tech fails the roll, the job gets bumped up to Regular difficulty, and a Regular tech can try to fix it, and if he fails the Vets get their crack at it, etc. However, if a Vet tries a random job, the difficulty if he or she fails is automatically set to Elite. You want Green techs in order to get the most attempts out of every repair. It saves you money, if not time. They're much more likely to fail, however, so you'll probably end up using your regulars and vets anyway. Plus, it gets your greenies some good experience under their belt, and they'll likely advance faster, which is a good thing.
Not all repairs are created equal. This one is still pretty easy compared to how difficult some of them can get, like repairing center torsos. When repairing the Vindicators legs, which is the subject of that previous picture, I actually failed the first attempt on each leg, but thanks to having multiple tech crews, they got fixed on the second attempt.
One of the powerful tools in repairing 'Mechs is overtime. You don't have to finish the repair in the current day in order to attempt it, and instead you can start it now, and eat up whatever time your tech has left. He or she will finish the job tomorrow, or the next day, or even the next day, however long it takes. Things like engines, repairing torsos, or repairing huge amounts of armor (like here) take more than a day to finish.
Taking all this time makes it easier to succeed, but what it doesn't do is make a failure sting any less. If my veteran mechanic (who shouldn't even be doing 'mech repairs at all, but does sometimes in a crunch) fails on a repair, I have to scrap the component and start over from green. This can get expensive fast with things like weapons, though actuators and body parts are actually pretty damn cheap. Plus, if it gets to that point, my techs have to go find a suitable replacement part, which isn't always a sure thing.
Fortunately, it's not
too difficult either, but a fail means I have to wait another day to conduct the repairs.
Repairing carries on in this fashion all the way up until I run out of minutes on my techs.
Kind of like that. Techs run out of minutes fast when they take their time, so this repair process could take days. The Vindicator may well take several weeks to get back up and running. As of this writing, actually, both Awesomes and the Crab are finished repairing, and I've managed to strip all but the engines and things I don't want off the vehicles and the Vindicator is
still struggling with accepting a pair of new arms.
I hit the Advance Day button and see what happens. Like I showed earlier, most of the infirmary patients are good to go, while the one overtime event I had yesterday is a success. Woo. Repairing goes on in this fashion until everything is finished.
Now that repairing is already rolling, I need MechWarriors. I have two new 'Mechs that I don't yet have pilots for, and I want them up ASAP. That means I'll have to do some targeted recruiting. For 100,000 c-bills, I can target specific kinds of recruits. MechWarriors, unfortunately, get a -2 to the roll, being a D rated unit another -1, and my lack of a HR admin gives me another -2. What does that mean? Well, the number of recruits I get is directly related to the roll result. If I get 3 or less, I get no recruits despite the spent money. Higher than that, and I get at least one potential recruit. With a good unit, a good HR admin, and a good roll, I could conceivable attract up to six. Odds are, though, on one or two at most at this point.
The result ends up a 5, which gives me one recruit. Worth it. This particular recruit comes to me as a Regular pilot and no 'Mech. Good, I had extras for him anyway. His skills come up as 4/6. Not stellar, but Dragon proved pretty conclusively that 4/6 can still **** **** up.
Everybody welcome Corporal Jean "Werewolf" Vidal, new pilot of the Crab CRB-20, to the company. He'll be assigned to the 11th to replace the downed vehicles until more become available.
I think that's a good wrap for now. Not exactly action packed, but it's a pretty damn important part of the game to keep your equipment running.
Until next time.