Mercenary
Alert
Resource
Type
Power of Bounty Hunting
Always Paid For Winning
As an actor, after winning in combat, use this power to gain lucre equal to the opponent’s authority, in addition to normal rewards.
Legacy: Backer boons are equal to the dominion of the invader, rather than the backward’s ship count.
Gritty sellswords who roam the Cosmos looking for work, the Mercenaries know how to turn blood into money. They’ll take on pretty much any job, so long as they get paid.
Actor: Encounter
Mandatory
Wild Flare
As the defender, after winning an encounter, you may discharge this flare to gain a backer bonus.
Leader: Contact
Super Flare
When spending lucre, you may discharge this flare to spend any amount of lucre at once.
Any: Upkeep
Modifications
- Original Mercenary only gains a bounty as a leader or foreward. My version gains extra bounties as a backward as well, since the amount of gains Mercenary receives has been reduced overall.
- Since original Cosmic uses ship count to determine rewards, my version of Mercenary gains fewer rewards than vanilla as invader, defender, and foreward. As a tradeoff, it gains more when acting as a backward, and this value naturally increases over the course of the match instead of the number going down as Mercenary runs short on ships.
- Mercenary’s power is much more noteworthy in my Cosmic because of the fundamental difference in gaining lucre vs. boons. Instead of immediately getting pods or ships, Mercenary receive lucre, which can be either stockpiled or immediately spent. It can also be used as protection against compensation, to keep one’s other pods safe.
- Mercenary’s legacy makes everyone a bounty hunter, using the dominion of the opponent to determine the value of the bonus. This legacy favors aliens who prefer to participate as a sponsor rather than sit out and watch. Parasite loves this one to death, as it can potentially gain bounties and colonies every invasion, and the invader has to lose to prevent it. Remora is also a fan, for obvious reasons. Original Cosmic has no legacies.
Tips
- Mercenary’s power encourages it to participate in as many encounters as possible, with as many ships as possible. It can easily run short on ships this way, so it will likely want to match its ship count with its confidence level.
- Mercenary can finance its losses with its wins, getting back some of its lost ships to use to gain more bounties later.
- When opposing Mercenary, be wary of inviting it too often, lest you arm them to the teeth with powerful pods.
- Mercenary can be a major compensation magnet after it gets some wins under its belt, especially if it takes several dark pods, as these can be easily identified.
Development Notes
- Mechanically, Mercenary is similar to Ghoul. Thematically, it’s more like Warrior or Assassin. I made Mercenary a lucre-based power to distinguish it further from Ghoul, whose rewards are more immediate.
- Mercenary got me to rethink my entire bonus/reward system, both thematically and mechanically. Receiving a bounty for a kill makes sense, but it should be based on the “wanted” level of the enemy. This can be different from the Federation subsidizing backwards to provide incentive for aliens to help the defender, as otherwise the invader is the superior choice in most scenarios. Mercenary also got me to find a way to integrate lucre, a concept that didn’t quite pan out in original Cosmic due to trivializing the ability to gain ships and pods, which made powers like Zombie pretty worthless. I wanted to incorporate lucre as an alternative to immediate rewards, since it ultimately wouldn’t change the amount of pods/ships gained and would give me more freedom to increase the “cost” of certain resources.
- The original Mercenary can receive rewards from its power only to immediately give them away due to compensation. My Mercenary receiving lucre instead of pods can provide some defense against this weakness, since lucre cannot be taken via compensation unless there aren’t enough pods to snatch.
- Next to Merchant, Mercenary is one of the best aliens at obtaining lucre. This is noteworthy since my version of lucre is designed to be rather difficult to come by. By basing the amount of lucre gained off authority, Mercenary will be able to obtain 4-5 lucre per victory at the start of the match. This gain will drop off slightly in the late-game, but by then Mercenary will have benefitted greatly from the power. If Mercenary never wins a single encounter, it effectively has no power, which I consider the main counterbalance of this ability.
- Originally I used dominion instead of authority to avoid gaining too much lucre too quickly. After I nerfed lucre to make it less generically useful, I think authority is better to make it more in-line with the original power. Gaining five lucre shouldn’t be any more powerful than gaining four boons.
- It’s important to consider if lucre-gaining powers should be green or yellow alert. With Merchant, the lucre acts as a consumable resource that has to be managed properly. With Mercenary, it simply gains lucre when it wins. While lucre allows a user to do more advanced techniques like bribes and paying compensation, a new player can have a very simple game experience while playing as Mercenary. It can just be an extra resource for reviving ships or gaining pods/vouchers. Vouchers might be a more advanced mechanic in themselves, since several of them require understanding of the pod library, but the match can be played with vouchers off if they seem too complex.