MWO video discussion

[VF5SS]

If they seriously want to have ROLE WARFARE

then don't even have a Mechlab

we have role warfare in real life, it's called use different vehicles that have defined roles and not walking weapon slot damage sponge boxes

[VF5SS]

http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/5404-h ... me-camper/

viable tactic!

[Purple]

Why not? Personally the kind of gameplay I would like to see in this new game is the kind of gameplay I got in MW4 from my custom Puma. Basically, I striped out all the armor and turned the tonnage into heat sinks and engine bust. The result was a light mech that could dance circles around enemy heavies at 200m and newer be hit whilst it slowly caps their knees with a pair of ERPPC's.


On that note. It would actually be fun if they would turn light mechs into the kind of lightning bruisers that assault mechs with their slow turning and aiming can't hit. That way you could use them to draw enemies away, single them out and destroy them even if its Puma vs Atlas. That in turn would foster formations and team warfare as the assaults would either have to bunch up or use some sort of more agile vehicle (medium mechs) to play a screening role for them. And that in turn opens up heavies as a viable ambush force to surprise enemy mediums. All it would take is to adjust assaults ans heavies so that they rotate to aim way slowly.

Also, does this sound like WW1 era naval warfare to you too?

[Stark]

You mean like in games that aren't crippled by servicing 40 year old obsessives

And man listening to you talk about mw is like messages from another world
A wod where mw games are totally different lol

[Stofsk]

Split from this thread in testing from a point where a video interview was put in and the discussion stemming from that.

[Purple]

You mean like in games that aren't crippled by servicing 40 year old obsessives

Pretty much yes.

And man listening to you talk about mw is like messages from another world
A wod where mw games are totally different lol

From the earths orbit actually. More specifically from a cube that is the size of a small family car on the outside but fits an entire universe in one of its smaller internal rooms.

Although in all seriousness the Puma modded with no armor was epic. Won the championship match with it. Just don't get shot by anything, not even a machine gun. And LRM's are your worst nightmare. On the plus side 2ERPPC's were great at knee capping.


If only the game designers had the guts to go with something completely different.

[VF5SS]

Just equip the Laser Anti Missile System to solve your problems, right?

Again, Armored Core just has that exact kind of system installed on every robot by default with options for more countermeasures in the later games. Also the mobility of the machines allows the player to outmaneuver them just like airplanes do in real life.

Like I said in the previous thread, I understand fully where the "tons of missiles" thing comes from, but it's the most ignorant interpretation of the "Itano Circus" that rose to popularity because of Macross. Most of the time in robot shows, people are firing multiple missiles because countermeasures to missiles are far more effective than real life ones even though the destructive power of a single missile is roughly the same.

The MW interpretation is "well we have uber armor right so we have to hit with all the missiles!" even though all the random tabling in Btech, this rarely happens in the board game.

http://www.sarna.net/wiki/CBT_Tables#Nu ... _Hit_Table

It basically makes an LRM20 useless.

Of course, if you don't have access to effective countermeasures or any kind of agility, it would seem that missile weapons would have to be only effective as weak, sure hit weapons but that is not the case.

********* (I got this from the Highlander)

So Stark and I were discussing somewhere else, what is the purpose of the Clans in Btech as far as game mechanics? Is it more guns per robot? I'm honestly confused because Clan tech always unbalanced the PC games to the point of brokenness.

Given how MWO (which I totally reserved my name for) is set in 2049 with a real time day system, you know they're planning to drop the Clan invasion like a year into the game.

[VF5SS]

http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/5214-r ... e-weapons/

Well they have no plans for melee combat at this point (too powerful lawl)

but we have lots of room for thinly veiled xenophobia :3

[Vendetta]

If they seriously want to have ROLE WARFARE

then don't even have a Mechlab

The way to have "role warfare" is to have practical and accessable ways to win matches that aren't "shoot all the other mans". It doesn't matter whether you can spreadsheet your own robit or not, if you win matches by shooting all the other mans then the biggest damage sponge with the most guns is always the right answer to the question the game poses.

Chromehounds did this, in a loltastically bad way, you could win a match by mounting some spikes on a basic wheeled chassis and charging madly at the enemy base to kill it whilst the enemy were all distracted by shooting at your mans. Pity they never intended that to happen* and it was total cheese city (And because Sega haet Chromehounds they never patched or balanced it)


*The way the damage code worked out was that the melee weapon that was supposed to be for taking down other mechs was the best base killer, whereas the intended base killer took three times as long to do the job, but was murder against mechs if you could hit them because it could stunlock them.

[VF5SS]

I remember someone talking about that exact problem with Chrome Hounds.

Again though

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Break

Can't we just import this :3




Man how much more interesting does this look and it's from two years ago.

And still have more model kits than Battletech even did!

[CaptHawkeye]

Vendetta is totally right about these games too. As long as the only objective is a K/D ratio then the only weapon systems that matter at all in the games are those with the most DPS and defense with the highest HP. This is why I feel the game industry needs to do away with the purely hit point based damage modeling and go with per-pixel damage/ballistics. It'll never happen though because that takes work to implement, and worst of all, it's different. So conservative dorks will whinge over it. Yet again, Chromehounds made an effort to change things up a little by throwing in HEAT and splash damage types, but that game undermined itself in like 100 other ways so it was a really pyrrhic design.

The base killing mechanic in Chromehounds was totally undermined by the fact that the bases always spawned in one of 3 pre determined positions. This meant that a heavy gunner could just memorize an azimuth and range at a given location and kill an enemy base in 3 salvos before any Hounds saw one another.

I know i'm such a broken record about it but just a few things would have saved Chromehounds from its own idiocy.

A. Giving units with proportionally small mass inherently low HP and armour values. Fuck the Naqa legs.

B. Having a weight and balance mechanic that wasn't completely useless.

C. Removing cockpits. Tanks don't have big open windows you can shoot out. Why should a giant robot?

[VF5SS]

C. Removing cockpits. Tanks don't have big open windows you can shoot out. Why should a giant robot?

Because some 'murcans keep bleating on about how awesome the Mad Catz is obviously

like guys I know ED-209 is awesome but he has this giant microphone thing for a face, not a window

also

http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/5413-sim-vs-game/

I really don't want to join the discussion here because oh man

At least some people understand what a simulator is but not enough seem to realize MW ain't one of them :3

Also do you guys think that even with more realistic ballistics on stuff like AC20s, you think any of that would matter? Especially considering how an AC20 shot disappears after 300 meters right.

[Stark]

You gotta remember that 75% of what they're saying is marketing driven to pull in the 'legions' of people so blinkered they only notice a robot game if it's Battletech branded. They have to repeat all this bullshit, and threads like that jus reinforce that for them.

It's doubly amusing because the shooters they decry as simplistic or for console babies largely solve the multi-role, team-reward problem nearly a decade ago, after the MW franchise died. Maybe they're just faking how simplistic and primitive their game is.

[VF5SS]

I have never seen so much macho posturing over a munchkiny tactic like legging.

[CaptHawkeye]

Change is scary.

[VF5SS]

It's also rather profitable. When you add up the change, it turns into dollars.

You think some stuff would have been fixed if they'd just made the number of nondescript holes on the robots they stole correspond to that number of single shot high-damage rounds?

Because we all know you can't fit 240 LRMs inside those robots but oh the realism

[Stark]

People there are totally ragging on HITPOINTS FOR BABIES

Hello MW is built on fucking hitpoints. If it had 'realistic' armour it'd be WAY BETTER.

[VF5SS]

Yeah that and the constant repetition of the "walking tank" metaphor. Like have you ever seen someone walk? Do you know how to walk yourself? That squiddamn Thor in the old Mechwarrior 2 video had more agility than anything in MW4 ever did.

They just kind of jauntily jog around the battlefield. Ain't much walking most of the time.

[Alkaloid]

All you would really need to make light mechs useful is to change LRMs so they are actually pretty lethal, and can be used out of line of sight if they get a signal from a target designator. Then you could have light fast mechs hunting for assault mechs, but instead of engaging them directly just light them up for a missile truck on the other side of the map to rip apart.

You could actually use that to make laser boats less absurdly overpowered.

If you have the option to mount jamming systems or actually effective LAMS systems on the mech that tap into the energy generated by your powerplant, which lasers need to fire, and generate heat, a massive laser alpha strike is much less feasable.

Actually, thinking about it I would change the whole overheating system. If each chassis has a basic level of heat it can deal with, and all the operating systems (sensors, coms, HUD, whatever) you have generate heat simply by running, so say if a chassis can run at up to 300c simply turning all that shit on will bring it to 100c, but give the option to have different systems turned on or off. You could choose to have your lasers on, in which case they might bring the heat up to 200c before they even fire, or shut down, in which case they don't increase the heat but have to be turned on to fire, which means a 5 or so second delay before firing, or turn off your radar instead, so you can run lasers all the time but don't have a radar to pick targets. You could increase the heat tolerance of your mech by adding heat sinks, but when it overheats, instead of an auto shut down, it ejects a number of heatsinks, based on how overheated it is, to bring it back into the mechs operating range, so you can keep going now but will be less capable for the rest of the battle. If you ever eject all your heatsinks and it is still carrying too much heat, it shuts down, can't be overridden and you have to choose systems to disable to keep the heat generated below max operating capacity.

Then you might actually see different loadouts for different roles even if the only objective is kill em all. Mid range mechs with a few lasers, close range brawlers with MG's and Autocannons, lightly armed scouts with bucketloads of jammers and target designators, long range artillery with loads of missiles (Madcat I'm looking at you) and dedicated support mechs, medium or heavy platforms that are lightly armed but can extend nearby mechs sensor range, jam enemy missile locks in a bubble around them, mess with enemy targeting and generally be an electronic warfare platform.

Of course, it goes against the whole battletech 'fire missiles when you see the whites of their eyes'but would be a better game.

[VF5SS]

I see what you're doing, but adding more cockpit fiddling just slows down the gameplay. A realistically designed machine would probably have those kind of redundancies automated in case of emergencies.

Even later Armored Core games had optional automatic weapon and equipment purging.

[Vendetta]

Some things are fairly trivial to solve if you abandon Battletech mechanics.

Laser Boats got you down? Change the armour/damage mechanics so that each location has multiple layers of hitpoints with different resistances/vulnerabilities to certain types of weapons, such that you have to mix up your damage types to score a kill (hell, that even promotes team based effort, because different weapons have different target mechanics, travel time, bullet drop, etc. having a laser boat becomes a role, you can't just blow legs off and trollface at people, but you can burn off their reactive armour so that your squadmate with the missile racks can pulverise them, and you both get equal rewards for doing it. (Holy shit, did I just invent teamwork!)

[Alkaloid]

It wouldn't need to be complex. They already have a toggle for active or passive sensors, just add a few more, jammin on or off, ECM on or off, HUD on or off. Target designators would be a weapon group, and once you designate a target any mech with the appropriate setup gets that target added to a list they can just scroll through to fire a missile at, Mech A paints Mech B at Gridsquare, select, fire and forget. Maybe make the mech stop to fire some models of missile.

Even later Armored Core games had optional automatic weapon and equipment purging.

Make it not optional. The real reason lasers are so good as it stands is there is no real cost to using them, what is meant to be the cost, rapid heat build up, is neutered by just being able to override the shutdown so lasers are really just powerful weapons with unlimited ammunition and a slightly longer cool down than listed. Make an auto shutdown less common, take away the ability to override so it is actually serious, and if you manage your heat poorly you get a mech that looses functionality over time and ends up barely able to run its basic systems and shuts down on you if you do much more than move.

There would be more fiddly bits, but it would all be in the mechlab trying to get a good balance of heat dispersal, effective vision and defence and getting the right gear to do your job, whatever it may be. Which should solve the 'mechlab is so simple' complaints. Not that those people wont complain. If you do it right you could actually get a teir system based on more than your chassis, because expensive power plants and components run colder and give more power than cheap ones so provide a huge leap in capability.

Some things are fairly trivial to solve if you abandon Battletech mechanics.

Laser Boats got you down? Change the armour/damage mechanics so that each location has multiple layers of hitpoints with different resistances/vulnerabilities to certain types of weapons, such that you have to mix up your damage types to score a kill (hell, that even promotes team based effort, because different weapons have different target mechanics, travel time, bullet drop, etc. having a laser boat becomes a role, you can't just blow legs off and trollface at people, but you can burn off their reactive armour so that your squadmate with the missile racks can pulverise them, and you both get equal rewards for doing it. (Holy shit, did I just invent teamwork!)

Yeah, that sort of deal. I'd go for more complexity than that, I still see the problem with your setup of the mech with the most guns is still always the best option, if you have a setup where an Atlas packing only LOS weapons can be taken apart easily by a Jenna spotting for a Longbowman or whatever it's called before you can even see it then you get a game where that Atlas can still be dead handy, but needs to be backed up by someone who can jam those missiles or has an effective air defence bubble you can hide in.

[VF5SS]

Some things are fairly trivial to solve if you abandon Battletech mechanics.

Laser Boats got you down? Change the armour/damage mechanics so that each location has multiple layers of hitpoints with different resistances/vulnerabilities to certain types of weapons, such that you have to mix up your damage types to score a kill (hell, that even promotes team based effort, because different weapons have different target mechanics, travel time, bullet drop, etc.

So you mean like the separate energy and solid weapon defensive ratings for parts in Armored Core XD

[Vendetta]

Some things are fairly trivial to solve if you abandon Battletech mechanics.

Laser Boats got you down? Change the armour/damage mechanics so that each location has multiple layers of hitpoints with different resistances/vulnerabilities to certain types of weapons, such that you have to mix up your damage types to score a kill (hell, that even promotes team based effort, because different weapons have different target mechanics, travel time, bullet drop, etc.

So you mean like the separate energy and solid weapon defensive ratings for parts in Armored Core XD

Almost, Chromehounds did have the same thing, but it still means that one type of weapon is generally best because more parts will have one type of defence better.

I'm talking about something similar to what Mass Effect 2/3 do, where you actually have layered health bars. Your lasers can strip off the first health bar but they do almost nothing to the second one, so you need more than one damage type, you don't just become less best against certain things, but less best against everything at a certain point.

[VF5SS]

Have you guys ever seen the basic rule set for the original version of Battletech, Battledroids (lol lawsuit right outta the gate XD)?

Also please disregard the barely alteredMacross kit and Dougram kit artwork and the repackaged Dougram kits XD

The game actually started as a much less finicky skirmish game but they quickly forgot about the pick and play rules for the more high resolution bullshit.

I feel like though, if you completely neglect the canon laser or missile boating Mechs (since most are variants made after the initial set) you will find most of them are designed with basic "one or two weapons per arm and one weapon per torso location" than the typical "glue on moar guns" approach we get later. It's almost as if they designed the internal structure and critical hit rules without considering their own basic designs. This applies both to the illicitly borrowed ones and their own originals that are heavily based on the former.

The only laser boating thing in the old 3025 TRO is the Charger with its six useless small lasers.