Mercenary
Alert
Resource
Type
Power of Bounty Hunting
Always Paid For Winning
As an actor, during payoff after winning in combat, use this power to gain lucre equal to the opponent’s dominion plus one, as a reward.
Legacy: Whenever aliens gain backer boons, all of them are converted into lucre.
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: Payoff
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 during upkeep, you may discharge this flare to make an additional purchase.
Any: Upkeep
Modifications
- Original Mercenary only gains a bounty as a leader or foreward. My version gains lucre as a backward as well, since the amount of gains Mercenary receives has been reduced overall.
- 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 receives lucre, which can be either stockpiled or immediately spent. Lucre can be used as compensation protection, or it can be spent in increments of three to gain vouchers, which can be used to obtain unique perks like an artifact of choice or a random technology.
- 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 changes the timing such that it gains lucre after paying compensation, preventing its lucre from being stolen if it doesn’t have enough pods to pay out.
- Originally I used authority instead of dominion to give Mercenary more of an advantage. I wanted to make sure the power doesn’t gain too much more lucre than Merchant over the course of a match. Using authority as a metric would mean that Mercenary gets 5 lucre from one win. If it gets backer boons, it could even convert one of its backer boons into more lucre for 6 total lucre as a backward. While Merchant can also gain lucre from backer boons, it would take 5 invasions just to match the amount of lucre Mercenary gets from one win from power alone. Assuming a match takes about two cycles, that would be anywhere from 10-20 invasions. Mercenary would need to win 2-4 times total during those two cycles to match the amount of lucre Merchant would get from its power alone, which is quite unrealistic. Mercenary would likely be winning anywhere from 4 to 10 to times over two cycles, depending on how much it gets commissioned. While authority won’t hold consistently, it will likely still be getting 3-5 lucre from each of those matches, not counting backer boons.
- I think using dominion plus one works much better for giving Mercenary a relatively steady stream of lucre in combination with what it can get from backer boons. The amount of lucre it earns will keep going up over the course of the match, and it is incentivized to help other aliens gain dominion to increase their bounty. I think it also works much better for the “reward money” of other aliens to keep going up as aliens get closer to victory, rather than making them less wanted as they become more dangerous.
- 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.