3
That generally boils down to exposing oneself as little as possible (poptarting or otherwise exposing oneself as little as possible, then firing, then backing up to safety).
For fast lights vs very slow assaults, this can also be accomplished by staying behind the enemy assault
In that case heat efficiency is paramount, but so long as you aren't so hot that you shut down, dps is still king.
Since you're trying to minimize your exposure time, you might as well go for a high alpha build, heat be damned- so long as you don't shut down in plain sight of the enemy its okay, and sometimes even then its worth it.
In fact, even in a slugging situation, the same incentives and goals apply, its simply that heat efficiency matters a bit more because you don't want to take an unfortunately timed nap.
Punishing alpha striking with the same weapons will just make people alpha strike with different weapons.
If you punish alpha striking with weapons of the same type (energy for example) that will:
1: Disproportionately punish certain variants, not to mention stock mechs.
2: Give an even more gigantic advantage to people who camp together in a huge blob and focus fire down enemies as they arrive.
6 ppcs hurt whether they all come from one mech or from 6.
This would in turn lead to an incredibly boring metagame.
If the current meta is like the Napoleonic or American Revolutionary wars, this meta would be like World War I, minus the devastating artillery fire (when it hit, anyway).
3: Work against the current control scheme- we'd need an MW2 style control scheme with commands for switching between groups- preferably something bound to a mousewheel (so for example, you could have 2x llas in one group, 3x srm6 in another, 2mlas in another, and an ac/20 in yet another, and have a hope in hell of using that loadout effectively with a 2 button mouse and keyboard).
Likewise, any heat-centric solution to this issue is going to fail for the simple reason that the underlying incentives to play the way we currently do aren't addressed. We want to hit as hard as possible in as little time as possible, while not getting hit ourselves.
If we really want to fix things, we may need to look to a speed based solution.
Bottom line, if you want a more "mechwarrior experience"
You need different types of things to shoot at- if not vehicles and buildings and whatnot, then at least make the weapons more specialized so that you NEED to take a variety to effectively deal with lights, mediums, heavies, and assaults.
IMHO the speed cap (which is not really the dev's fault, AFAIK) is a big part of this problem. If there wasn't one, fast lights would be a terror, and would require more specialized tools to deal with them effectively- other weapons COULD be used, but it'd be more difficult. Its sort of like that now for certain weapons, but not enough so to really have an impact on the meta.
If they could tweak mech movement speeds more freely, what they could do is have at least 1 weapon in each class (energy, ballistic, missile) that is best for combatting each type of mech (light, medium, heavy, assault).
Missile spread could be adjusted to achieve the desired results: LRMs should move faster but scatter across/around their targets- not so much so that they'd be like a cartoon shotgun, though
.The bigger the LRM launcher, the larger the spread.
Also, you should NOT be able to snipe an LRM mech to death simply by peeking over a hill, firing, and then moving back/to the side 2 steps, over and over. There has to be some sort of compromise so at the very least the sniper is forced to find a new location at which to pop up... the missile user certainly has to. Bottom line, it shouldn't be a one sided beating, where only one side is able to hit the other.
The Artemis upgrade would narrow the spread of SRMs and LRMs, increasing their effectiveness vs their intended targets and making them better at taking on mechs from the next weight class down (or up).
Narc would be more of an anti-heavy/assault tool, although if you could hit a light with it it should function just fine. Tag would be more of a general purpose tool. And if you can Tag a Narced target...
Tag, Narc, and Artemis would all shrink the spread of the LRMs, making the more effective vs smaller and smaller mechs, but not making them all hit CT or anything like that.
If need be, SRM flight speeds could also be tweaked (although I'd be leery of that). That would apply both to SRMs and SSRMs.
Likewise, LBX crit damage could be amped up, while regular damage could be made poopy due to a large spread. This would make them useless vs heavier mechs until their armor is stripped, and even then one would need to close to point blank range (which should be relatively dangerous).
On the other hand, since lights have relatively little armor and a tendency to get legged (and with faster lights legs should be harder to hit, except with rapid fire weapons like MGs, ac2s, and spread weapons like LBX), or to spread damage across their torsos, the LBX spread would function nicely.
Autocannon rates of fire should serve nicely to make weapons specialized: The slower the RoF, the more misses are punished. Again, this would really depend on removing the speed cap...
For lasers its pretty much the same deal. If need be, they could give Large Lasers back their old duration (which, while inefficient, made them seem pretty badass- a continuous beam of destruction! All that was missing was the sizzling sound of armor, complete with doppler effect as the laser scores its way across your mech).
Something along the lines of:
The end idea would be to encourage having multiple classes of weapons, and also differentiating them in terms of their performance in battle.
I guess since the speed cap is such a difficult problem to solve, we could explore other ways of making this the case... tweaking the beam durations of lasers and the recycle times of pulse lasers, ppcs/erppcs, and ballistic weapons, as well as making the missile changes listed above.
Bottom line though, things should be based around the relative speeds (and sizes) of the target mechs. If need be, the mechs should be resized appropriately.
Otherwise we will end up with mechs that, even when given a small number of each type of weapon slot, will optimize all of those weapons for the best quasi alpha strike* (or at most, for two situations). Anything else would put them at a severe disadvantage against anyone who did.
*Like putting llas/mlas, srm6s, and an ac/20 on an Atlas. That design is pretty much designed to dump all of it's ordnance more or less at the same time rather than using each weapon for a specific purpose. You can use the Llas for a bit of ranged DPS, but thats not the strength of the design...
If absolutely necessary (and I'd keep this as a last resort) they could give heavier mechs some form/degree of damage resistance to the lighter weapons, at least on their front armor (but not on their rear armor, their internal structure, or components).
Oh, and jump jets should be jump jets, rather than Gundam style verniers that allow you to pirouette and poptart.
You should be able to shoot while in the air but you should have an arc... there needs to be more lift so you don't end up clotheslining yourself on obstacles that are a bit taller than you thought they were, but also your mech needs a sense of weight (as opposed to being like the Master Chief when he jumps) and needs more of a pause when making contact with the ground.
as opposed to
Edited by Sephlock, 03 May 2013 - 11:13 PM.
