12 replies to this topic

[HammerSwarm]

Dear PGI

I was thinking about the heat scale and what system could replace it, after ask the devs 45 (charging gauss) and some additional reading I came across this thread.

[color=#1155CC]http://mwomercs.com/forums/topic/133231-a-more-proper-2ppcgauss-solution/[/color]

Now that isn’t a fleshed out solution so I wanted to flesh it out here.

A good system needs understandable values, feedback to the user letting you know what has happened, and to achieve the goal set for it. Ghost head fails this because there isn’t good feedback and it has run into a number of unexpected consequences. (Rapid Fire + AC2 = Pain) Some people have suggested ways to implement ghost heat, or full on different heat systems. My system is neither.

I propose a completely new system called fusion energy. (An action points system) (in addition to heat/mana) Fusion Energy would recover at an incredible rate (100 pts per second). The pool would do as much as anything to negate instant alphas. It would be visible and have feedback as you would see the bar full, see it decrease and then rebound. This solves several problems.

Ghost Heat seems to be trying to blend action points (actions per turn) with heat (weapons fired per turn, per turn) and it fails because it is mixing two game systems with no way to explain itself.

How it works?
Without ghost heat it eliminates high alphas by putting a hard cap on the number of weapons you are able to fire at once(via the heat pool). If the Fusion Energy pool was set at 100 action points any weapon you wanted to be fired in groups of one would use 51+ action points. Depending on the delay and regen time you would use a value between 51 and 100.

How it’s shown?
A seperate bar next to heat that starts at 100% then drops depending on the action taken. Recovers at a rate of 100 per second.

Example:
Lets say you have a 6 PPC stalker. You have not fired recently and you see an enemy set up for you like a t-ball, Fire 2, Delay .25 to fire 1 or .5 to fire 2, Fire 2 Delay .25 to fire one, or .5 to fire 2. If you qued 3 up to fire it would fire 2 and give you visual feedback, Screen blink “Low Energy” and the weapons that didn’t fire because of this would flash in your weapons group.

The Maths:
100 Fusion Energy Points
Fire 2: 100 - (2 x 34) = 32 in reserve
Wait 0.52 seconds = Regenerate 52 points for a total of 84
PPC 1-2 (3.46 Cooldown remaing)
Fire 2: 100 - (2 x 34) = 16 in reserve
Wait 0.52 seconds = Regenerate 52 points for a total of 68
PPC 1-2 (2.92 Cooldown remaing)
PPC 3-4 (3.46 Cooldown remaing)
Fire 2: 68- (2 x 34) = 0 Energy Remaining
You still have 2+ seconds before you can fire again while energy regenerates at 100 per second so you will be at full again well before you can fire again.

Questions:
What about other weapons?

A/C 20 is another offender in this area. You can decide what is a reasonable gap to fire again and make that the spread between the numbers. If we want a .5 delay if no other weapons were fired between A/C 20 shots it would be 75. If you wanted other weapons to be firable while you were cycling dual A/C/20s you could set it at 60 or 51. This would desynchronize A/C 20 firing.

What about Other Weapons?

A/C 2 are suffer a heat penalty at 4 concurrent firings so we need to make them cost 26 points to cap the firing at 3. This is a bit strict in my opinion but this is an example and not meant to be the finished numbers to balance these weapons.

You could fire 3 x A/C 2 with no delay on the first shot.
You could chain fire any number of A/C2 in perpetuity with a delay of .26 and as the delay approached 0 the number would shrink. 0.2 seconds of delay would be 13, 0.15 would be 7, 0.1 would be 5, and 0.05 would be 4.

This obviously would underpower the A/C 2 but would mirror the current maximum fire as set by the heat scale. with a .25 delay (setting the maximum chain fire a/c 2s at 2) you could fire off a ton of ammo before over taxing the system.

Fine; that’s all well and good but how about a laser?

Lets look at the often boated medium laser. This suffers a heat penalty at 6 concurrent firings. So 100/6 is a start at 16.6.

This would limit the alpha strike of that weapon to six. You could stagger them at an interval of .166 and fire into the sunset forever, but more realistically you would want 14.5 this prevents firing seven at once but reduces the recycle time under .15 second to fire them consecutively forever. Since the current ML recycle time is four seconds and the current maximum of 9 medium lasers (9*.15 = 1.35) renders this moot. chain firing medium lasers and running out of fusion energy would be hard.

What about mixed weapons?

If we take the value of any weapons we group fire and subtract them from 100 (so you could eliminate any weapons group for high alpha you want from the metagame.)

Too harsh dude:

This is a valid criticism. The scale is such that you could set it up to be limiting in any number of ways. If you wanted to be able to fire up to 4 PPCs at once you could move the value to 21 and then set the gauss rifle at 60 so you could eliminate the 5 ppc meta and the 2 ppc + gauss meta.

How is this scale different than heat?
It’s not affected by environment; it recharges much faster so that this is just a cap on alpha damage not long term damage output.

The way I see heat scale is that it is a long term cap on the damage output of mechs affected by heatsinks. You can set yourself up to have rapid heat dissipation to make your 6 medium lasers heat neutral. This system would still limit you to firing six at once. This is the short term fix, to that long term problem without compromising either system.

Yeah but...what else?

You could have a module or a perk upgrading maximum energy like the ones already existing for heat, or a fusion battery to emulate cool shot. You could introduce items making you choose between heat and energy, additional fusion batteries or heat sinks? Engines with a higher Fusion Energy Cap but fewer internal heat sinks. etc.

This separates the two systems that ghost heat so ineloquently makes one.

Okay so give me some samples

This is based on my personal preferences, this could be updated pretty easily by PGI. It’s a jumping off point to show relative weapons balance.
LRM 20 = 50
LRM 15 = 33
LRM 10 = 15
LRM 5 = 10
SRM 6 = 33
SRM 4 = 22
SRM 2 = 11
AC 20 = 75
AC 10 = 35
AC 5 = 26
AC 2 = 26
LB X 10 = 35
UAC 5 = 34
Gauss Cannon = 65
Machine Gun = 1.6 per shot or 16 per second.
ERPPC = 44
PPC = 34
LPL = 34
ERLL = 34
LL = 34
MPL = 14
ML = 14
SPL = 7
SL = 7

What else could be solved with this system?

Well you could effectively curb jump sniping by having jump jets take a slice of fusion energy off limiting the amount of weapons you can fire in the air per second. This wouldn’t impact small things like a jenner or a spider as much as it would a highlander because the highlander has more weapons it can possibly fire where as a spider has 2 or 3.

I am a clanner so what about me? freebirth scum.

This is totally applicable to clans too. You just need to set the action points to a level where the game still feels fluid but the alpha damage output is limited to the extent you want it limited.

But alpha strikes are canonical. You’d do away with them?

No this is where that alpha strike button comes in, you would alpha strike with all of your weapons causing your mech to shut down, like the engine was cut. This would stack with whatever heat penalties you’d suffer given your heat generated and the heat state at firing. You’ve heaved all you’ve got but you also shutdown leaving yourself vulnerable. You could start back up again but you've been down a second or more.

It’s not canon?!?!

Nope. We can’t have 100% reliance on canon and have a real time game. The rules aren’t real time and thus we have to do what works.What works in this case might not be strictly canon.

If this idea has been proposed before, sorry for the repetition.
As always PGI may use this idea in part or in whole with zero compensation to me. (A gift never hurts, I won’t tell anyone pgi)

[HammerSwarm]

This is all of the space the visual information conveying this to the user would take on the screen. It's so much simpler to explain than ghost heat through visual feedback.

[HammerSwarm]

The Fluff:
So if you need fluff to help explain it explain it like a battery that you use to fire high energy weapons or multiple weapons simultaneously. This is far easier to stomach than whatever explanation ghost heat takes. Why would A/C weapons need a battery? That’s simple because it takes a lot of power to stabilize the firing platform. Missiles too? Yup, they are being ignited and fired, so they require power to stabilize the mech. Anything else? Anything else you want. You could do this for Accelerating, Moving, Jump Jetting, whatever.

Is all of this necessary? Yeah otherwise PGI will utilize other mechanics such as screen shake, ghost heat, gauss delay, weapons balancing, double armor, etc. to balance what should be a simple and straightforward change to limit the actions per turn or actions per second.

[Telemonian Ajax]

Well thought out and seems to give a viable way to help control the 'stupid' alpha builds that are currently possible. Hopefully, the devs will take a serious look at this. Thanks for your work Hammer

[HammerSwarm]

Telemonian Ajax, on 27 August 2013 - 07:53 PM, said:

Well thought out and seems to give a viable way to help control the 'stupid' alpha builds that are currently possible. Hopefully, the devs will take a serious look at this. Thanks for your work Hammer

Thanks Ajax. I think it is both a way of curbing stupid alpha builds and moving forward with a system where new weapons can be added and you can curb new alpha builds before hand.

This can compensate for clan tech, IS replicas of clan tech, etc. It can also deal with other systems being added to curb undesired tactics. (jump sniping) (Large Weapons on a Tiny Mech with a Tiny Engine)

[Lex Peregrine]

I've also posted some sugestion threads here, one of them covering the same subject, different idea.
But I like your solution too!

[HammerSwarm]

If you wouldn't mind helping me refine my idea, what do you like and not like about it Lex?

[Lex Peregrine]

Think you misunderstood me, I like your idea too, as I think its more logical than the thing PGI came up with, sorry I dont have more time right now for a longer post.

The one I came up with you can find it here:
http://mwomercs.com/...oting-mechanic/

[WaywardMind]

I like the idea, to an extent. To me it takes away from what Battletech and MechWarrior board games were designed as, or video games for that matter. The game was to manage heat vs weapon fire in those games and as this is a recreation of all that you should manage heat here too. Though I see some value to the idea. I think it should just be adapted to the current heat system to keep the feel of the game.

[HammerSwarm]

WaywardMind, on 05 September 2013 - 11:14 AM, said:

I like the idea, to an extent. To me it takes away from what Battletech and MechWarrior board games were designed as, or video games for that matter. The game was to manage heat vs weapon fire in those games and as this is a recreation of all that you should manage heat here too. Though I see some value to the idea. I think it should just be adapted to the current heat system to keep the feel of the game.

This was my intention, my system is a layer on top of heat. Heat is a long term cap on damage and if you aren't trying to alpha strike you won't ever run a foul of my system. My system is designed to make ghost heat unnecessary be rendering it obsolete. Then you would still have heat from weapons limiting your long term damage. I can over heat my blackjack 1 shooting 4 large lasers and never shooting all 4 at once. This would just prevent me from shooting more than 2 at once by limiting that with a capacitor system instead of just throwing extra heat on my mech.

[HammerSwarm]

(Bringing this idea back as I still think it's a good one)

[Navid A1]

HammerSwarm, on 26 August 2013 - 08:25 PM, said:

...

Okay so give me some samples

This is based on my personal preferences, this could be updated pretty easily by PGI. It’s a jumping off point to show relative weapons balance.
...
...
ERLL = 34
LL = 34
...

the idea is generally well thought out but sometimes i want to be able to fire all four LLs on my atlas RS (and accept the heat penalty) rather than waiting for two of them to complete their fire period so i can fire the next two.

[HammerSwarm]

Navid A1, on 15 October 2013 - 06:30 AM, said:

the idea is generally well thought out but sometimes i want to be able to fire all four LLs on my atlas RS (and accept the heat penalty) rather than waiting for two of them to complete their fire period so i can fire the next two.

This is the point again where some tweaking could happen, The number of large lasers fired at once could and should be 4. I was just trying to reflect ghost heat values. Ultimately this system is trying to curb that burst damage that PGI seemed to be trying to curb with ghost heat.