Been interested in doing runs for Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries for quite some time now. Excited to see that there has been some activity here, as last time I checked it out it was a dead zone. Hoping that the most recent activity implies there is still some interest in the game. Before I start doing official runs, I'd like to bring up a few general thoughts:

1. I would like to pose that the Titanium Edition of the game is tracked separately, as there are significant differences that could lead to a large gap in times - specifically a bug that disables death via overheating.

2. I'm wondering if it would be worth it to create a "Mercenary Commander Glitchless 100%" category, or if the general consensus is that it would not be different enough from the Mercenary 100% category to warrant a split. My stance is that the freedom of choice withing the Mercenary Commander mode is significant enough that it could be considered a different category altogether, but I'm willing to discuss.

3. Would there be any interest in starting a Discord for Mechwarrior 2 speedrunning? Would love to discuss strategies and guidelines with the folks that are interested.

A "100%" Mercenary Commander run would simply be a skipless run, and wouldn't be different enough from 100% Mercenary for it to matter. You can't even complete all the missions in a single Mercenary Commander run, as there are diverging paths in the mission sequence.

Mercenary Commander Any% exists as a glitch showcase, beating the game as fast as possible using every glitch available.

Mercenary 100% completes every mission in its sequence, disabling glitches that skip missions and demonstrating far more gameplay.

We have a channel in the MechWarrior 2 Discord. We don't need more than that. https://discord.gg/M6PXF35

Thanks for linking the discord! I didn't know one actually existed already.

I have done some testing of different missions in the last week. What I've found is that SOME missions completed in Commander mode have the potential to be significantly faster than if done in Mercenary mode. Reason being is mainly the ability to hire pilots earlier, though I have not gotten far enough to see if it would make a difference in the long run. Mercenary mode is definitely faster in other missions due to the quick, easy, and free Mech Lab feature.

The rules for the Mercenary Commander 100%/glitchless would be to simply complete all of the "main" campaigns (the ones that the Mercenary mode follows) with each mission ending in a "Success" state, save for a few exceptions that are impossible in the Mercenary mode, such as the final Gravenhague mission where you have the option to betray the Draconis Combine.

I'll continue to do a bit more testing and submit a run for Mercenary 100% before going much further with this idea.