MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is your first foray into the mech genre, and you have no idea how to handle your speed as you haphazardly plow into an warehouse. There are a few keybindings and options you should know about, and they’ll make controlling your mech’s speed easier.
Use W and S to increase or decrease your throttle, or the numbad to pick a percentage.
W will increase your throttle, while S will decrease it or put you into reverse. The throttle indicator on the left next to your paperdoll shows what speed you are currently at, and each line represents a percentage. If you want an exact percent for your speed you can use the numpad to select one. It works as you’d expect: one is ten percent, two is twenty percent, and so on. You can use these to set a speed you are comfortable with during a fight, allowing you to focus on your movement, legs, and aim.
That all said, you can also hit the Add key on the numpad to enable Throttle Decay. What this does is make it where your throttle – your speed – will decrease automatically to zero after you let off the W key. This can be helpful for quick adjustments, but can take newer players a while to adapt to, seeing as you have to feather your throttle to maintain the speed you want.
Additionally, you can hit G to go at your lance’s current pace, though this tends to be max throttle. Use this to keep up with your lance, considering maxing your throttle is easy enough to do with W. Remember, your speed will drop when you walk into something you can’t plow through, but turning will boost the throttle back up to where it was. Same goes for walking through things: you’ll slow down as you wade through a building, but won’t need to throttle back up to your previous speed once you are through it.
And that’s how to control your speed in MechWarrior 5. For more guides be sure to keep an eye on our guides page.
