Battletech can be really hard sometimes. Especially, but not exclusively, in procedurally generated missions.
You do get an estimate on the difficulty before you accept a contract (1-5 skulls), and you get some idea what you might be fighting (based on which you negotiate your payday by emphasising money or salvage rights) - but that can be off by a pretty good margin. Which is intended design, sometimes mercs get shitty intel and it screws them. So you might be expecting to fight one lance of mechs, but it turns out its actually 2 with armor support.
You can always withdraw from a contract, and you have to wrap your head around the fact that sometimes, that's what you need to do. There are situations that are virtually unwinnable. If you kill at least one opponent before you do the Merc review board calls it a good faith withdrawal and you don't get a reputation hit. You obviously engaged and gave it a fighting go. No kills - bad faith withdrawal, no pay and lose rep.
And you will lose pilots eventually, unless you savescum a lot. A single wound can already put someone out of action for 3 weeks easily, and operating costs escalate continuously the more people and machines you have available. I run fixed costs of about 500K C-Bills per month at the moment, so it's always a hard choice deciding between salvage and money. "I could get my monthly budget covered by this one mission. OR I could take a measly 50K in cash, and get salvage rights for 14 pieces of equipment, with priority pick on 4... *HNNNNG*"
I'm having fun is what I'm saying. Benkei's Roughriders are tearing it up in the periphery!
