Best books to use for a Merc Campaign

[Xephan]

I am trying to figure out which set of rules to make use of for campaign tracking, and wanted some input on the pros and cons of each and which books to use.
My group is dividing up the record keeping by admin roles, we are not looking to use the chaos campaign or simplified war chest points.
Not opposed to mixing and matching stuff as well.

[Mendrugo]

Honestly, it's old, but the original Mercenary's Handbook had a pretty decent system set up to track the overall course of a campaign in which your merc unit is only playing a small part, so you can see if the overall battle for the objective is going for or against your employer's task force.

The only tweak I'd make to those tables would be to base the modifiers for success or failure of a raid on the units' average speed, rather than weight.  Going by weight alone, those tables make UrbanMechs unstoppable masters of lightning raids.

[Daryk]

Campaign Operations is solid and meshes with A Time of War pretty well.

[Failure16]

Dollar for dollar, I [still] feel the original Mercenary's Handbook (FASA 1616--available officially as a PDF still) has the best campaign system for the BTU. Mendrugo got it in one. It is able to track multi-regimental operations--and develop the opposition from a broad stroke down to individual elements or squads as desired--and still keep track if your character got wounded off-screen (again, as you desire). But there is room for some slight, almost idiosyncratic, tweaks, that is true as well.

But yes, as Daryk says, CO is the go-to nowadays.

[guardiandashi]

one of my personal favorites is mercenaries handbook 3055, its not necessarily the best, for the actual campaign tracking, but IMO it has one of the best writeups for supplies, and upgrades.
plus it actually explains how units NOT at an actual factory site got upgrades (essentially there were factory designed standard refit packages that the factory would send out all the parts and plans to do a refit from for the sake of argument upgrading a PHX-1 phoenix hawk to the PXH-3M (granted that would be essentially assembling the new endosteel chassis in an adjacent mech bay and then migrating the saved parts from the old mech to the new mech but shrug.