20 replies to this topic

[Midgie]

I thought it would be fun to theorize on how the upcoming power draw system which will replace ghost heat might be designed. Everything below is conceptual, so the numbers used are just meant to give an idea of how things might work.

To begin, a power bar would be placed near the target reticule opposite of the MASC bar. This would give an indication of the engine power available to fire weapons. Let's assume when full it has 100 "points" of power. Each weapon would have a power usage or "draw" attributed to it. So you could say that an I.S. small laser draws 8 points of power to fire. Since we have the requisite power available, the weapon fires reducing available power to 92. If a small laser and a medium laser (power draw of 12) are placed in a weapons group and fired instead, the power draw would be 20. Firing those lasers would thus bring the power available down to 80. Due to the engine, those spent power points would regenerate over time until returning to 100.

As long as the power bar stays above 50 points of power, the mech is running in what is called "power excess" mode. In this mode the mech behaves just as it does currently in game. However, if weapons fire brings the power level below 50 point, the mech begins to operate in "power deficient" mode. While in this mode, excess waste heat or "ghost heat" is produced as the engine increases the fusion reaction to meet the power demand. As the available power nears 0, the rate of ghost heat added to the mech increases. Power regeneration in power deficient mode would most likely be similar to that in power excess mode.

Additionally, there must be enough available power to cover all the weapons in a weapons group. If we use the same small and medium laser weapons group as used above, we would need 20 power. If the mech is at 18 available power the weapons will not fire. The pilot would have to either fire just one of those weapons or wait a moment until the engine generated another 2 points.

With this design in place, several interesting things happen. You could change how quickly power regenerates based on engine size or change how weapons draw their power. For example, PPCs might draw all of their power at once while lasers would draw their power over their burn time. Gauss rifles might draw power while charging to fire and return that power to the power pool if the weapon isn’t fired. Additionally, there would be strategy to firing alpha strikes versus spreading weapons fire over time to try to keep the mech out of power deficient mode and building ghost heat.

So feel free to add your pie in the sky dreams to the post. I’m curious as to what other people would like to see, or how others think PGI might implement the system. All told, I feel this will be a major change and nice improvement to the game.

[Elendil]

Pretty sure it'll work thus:

• Firing energy weapons draws power.
  
• The power pool is small and regenerates quickly, so it can easily keep pace with chain firing, but not alphas.
  
• When power gets low, lasers do less damage or simply don't fire (so your alpha of 6 lasers would only fire the 4 you have power for, or they'd all just do half damage or something).
  
• I don't know if the power pool would adjust based on the engine, or the mech, or the class of mech, or simply be the same for everyone.

Basically exactly what you said, but without ghost heat (I think they're trying to remove it). But maybe it'll still be there.

Edited by Elendil, 03 May 2016 - 02:39 PM.

[Midgie]

Thanks Elendil. I'll give this one bump to see if anyone else wants to add to it.

[VinJade]

which is stupid with doing this, the Reactor puts out the needed power like it is doing now, adding power drain and garbage like that when it is common sense that reactors put out what it needs to and does not need any extra drain on it as it puts out constant power as from here it states

Quote

A BattleMech can only use so much power... trying to force it to use more provides no extra benefits and simply does not work.

.

Which means it does put out only what is needed to power the machine itself and its weapons so only the normal cycle time should be there.

Also the Battlemech's engine has two ways of creating power which means that there is no way that it would need to have this system in place as it makes no sense at all.

Does Russ and his people know nothing about reactors or how they work?

Edited by VinJade, 06 May 2016 - 11:25 AM.

[Elendil]

VinJade, on 06 May 2016 - 11:23 AM, said:

Does Russ and his people know nothing about reactors or how they work?

It's not about following BattleTech rules and mechanics, or even common sense and logic.
It's about nerfing lasers, and alpha-strikes with lasers.

Frankly I think it's a decent idea. Lasers do need to be "adjusted" a bit, and introducing a new mechanic like this to apply the nerf is way better than a (lazy) straight-up nerf.

[Spleenslitta]

Good guess on how it could work OP. Ballistics such as AC's could have a power draw from the gyro needing more power to keep the mech on it's feet due to recoil.
Missiles could have a power draw from the high amount of missiles that has to be placed in the launcher.
Yeah...the missiles needs something that would draw more power than just a clunky complex reloading machine.
Neither ballistics or missiles should have as much powerdraw as energy though.

I'm quite optimistic about the upcoming heat system.

[Hotthedd]

If they want to limit alphas and large groups of weapons being fired at once, it isn't heat that will do it, it isn't power that will do it, it is accuracy that will do it.
But PGI will never let that happen.

[VinJade]

What people do not realize is that the ones that will really be hurt will be the Clans as you know he will make sure that it will have a larger power drain than any others.

As to it having nothing to do with BT or the rules and common sense should be part of it.
this is just a band-aid nothing more,

They don't want to do actual balancing instead just throw in a system that even further moves it away from BT.

and Yes I have every right to say BT because they are using Battletech as part of their game, yet they are doing everything they can to push themselves away from it ether directly or indirectly.

if this system does go on then they have no right to use Battletech and have to call themselves something else, after all the fact that we have how the power plant works and ignore it shows how little they respect the very thing they are using to draw players in, they actually don't know how anything works, or they lack the capability to actually balance things without nerfing or screwing up things.

[Spleenslitta]

Hotthedd, on 06 May 2016 - 02:07 PM, said:

If they want to limit alphas and large groups of weapons being fired at once, it isn't heat that will do it, it isn't power that will do it, it is accuracy that will do it.
But PGI will never let that happen.

If this new system won't work then that might be the next alternative. They have tried many other options so why not?
I got another theory on what the new system might be. I would like to make a point that i like the power drain system better but this might also be what they are going for.

Everytime you fire a bunch of weapons that collectivly go above a certain damage level you suffer internal structure damage.
Or some other variant of that.
Again i say that i like the power drain idea much better. Just thought i'd offer up another idea of what the new system might be.
All we can do i speculate.

[VinJade]

@SP
However that is not how the Engine works, the plant produces no more power than what is needed, thus this power drain system is as stupid as nerfing the clans because Russ is bias and hates the Clans.

the Power Drain should not go in to effect, if they want to balance it out then shrink the range of the Lasers to where they should be, get rid of Laser quirks, & get rid of Modules that affect how quickly weapons cycle.

right there would solve some of the problems if they put the ranges back to where they belong.
(IS) ER Lg Lasers (19) is only 1% longer range than a Std PPC (18) which is longer range than the (IS) Lg Pls (10) while the ER PPC has the longest range (23) of them all which if changed in PC game range it would still be the same.

While the Clans the ER PPC (25) out ranges every one of their Energy weapons including the IS counter parts but we don't see this reflected at all.

And no I don't use Clan mechs as I use a Stalker.

[Rogue Jedi]

the simplest solution to large Alpha strikes is to remove the sliding heat cap and leave it at 30, but double rate of cooling, that would mean firing 2 ERPPCs or 6 ML while moving would cause your Mech to overheat unless you override, and overriding every shot would soon cause problem, but waiting just half a second would mean you would not overheat.

a power draw system would make sence, possibly with severe heat penalties if you try to draw more than your reactors rated power draw.

I could be misunderstanding it but I was under the impression that all reactors can output the same amount of power but larger reactors allow the Mech to move faster because of thicker/heavier shielding protecting the reactor, meaning it is safer to draw larger amounts of power, a 60 rated reactor can produce as much power as a 400 rated reactor but doing that with a 60 would ether damage the reactor or produce a lot more heat than the 400 rated reactor, it would thus make sense that if you try to draw too much power from an engine it would cause excess heat or damage the reactor (or torsos).

the power draw system makes a certain amount of sense to me but it should be much easier to achieve the same effect by just stopping heat sinks from increasing the heat cap.

[VinJade]

I posted a link to the reactor and how it works above and there is no power drain issues, the cycle time & heat is what is the true balance of weapons.

The more you fire the quicker you run the risk of shut down but outside of that the Reactor does not suffer a 'power drain' only fools who don't know how a Reactor works would implement such a stupid system for a band-aid fix.

Edited by VinJade, 07 May 2016 - 07:44 AM.

[Midgie]

VinJade, on 07 May 2016 - 07:43 AM, said:

I posted a link to the reactor and how it works above and there is no power drain issues, the cycle time & heat is what is the true balance of weapons.

The more you fire the quicker you run the risk of shut down but outside of that the Reactor does not suffer a 'power drain' only fools who don't know how a Reactor works would implement such a stupid system for a band-aid fix.

I agree that having a lower maximum heat and having heat sinks increase the amount of heat the mech removes would be a good way to handle the problem. However, I don't think modifying the fictional scientific fluff surrounding how mechs work is necessarily a bad thing if it creates a mechanic that improves the game. Any conversion of an art from one medium to another (for example, book to movie or table-top game to action-sim) is going to require some changes to be made.

[VinJade]

the Fusion Reactors are more realistic than one might think, and changing how something set in stone like the Fusion reactor is like changing how a Light Saber works.

[Radkres]

From What I Was thinking about the power scale would be a reverse Heat scale. You would start at 100% power as you use power, fire weapons, moving about you lose a set amount of power equivalent to the amount of heat doing that would generate.

So What I predict is the heat scaling would also affect Energy draw and if you draw too much Your mech stops just like over heating I guess they will use the power off feature to restart your mech after a power stall.
Anyway my thoughts.
Be Safe

[Midgie]

VinJade, on 07 May 2016 - 07:19 PM, said:

the Fusion Reactors are more realistic than one might think, and changing how something set in stone like the Fusion reactor is like changing how a Light Saber works.

It's a fictional universe. How is anything set in stone?

[EmperorMyrf]

I've been hoping for a system like this for a good long while. Still use the heat system to control longer-term DPS, and use a power draw system to control short-term bursts of damage. However in the latest town hall Russ had mentioned that the engineers had deemed this difficult to implement well, my assumption is that this is due to server-side verification of power values either not always lining up with the client or even a significant delay to fire after you pull the trigger.

My idea for the power draw system was fairly simple, do not allow anything more than 20 (pinpoint) damage to leave the mech at any point in time. The amount of power drawn per weapon would be a function of damage, range, and how "pinpointy" it is. For example a weapon with lower damage per power draw would be the Gauss rifle as it is a longer ranged, pinpoint weapon, while a weapon with higher damage per power draw would be an SRM as it is shorter ranged and spreads its damage. The rate at which power is restored would be a function of the size of the mech (not the engine) with an offset, so that an atlas can restore roughly twice the power as a locust per unit time. This is to make sure that every weight class has a limit that's realistic given their expected damage output, but assault specialist builds are restricted the most.

That said, since it looks like we're probably not going to get the power draw system I'd like to see an overhaul to ghost heat. Instead of restricting the amount of a particular weapon that can be fired, apply this to all weapons via some value. When you pull the trigger, add up the total of this value of all weapons being fired, then if it exceeds some limit apply ghost heat. The amount of ghost heat incurred would be dependent on how much the weapon group went over the limit. Ideally this would come with some quick interface changes, like changing the weapon grouping selections to red if the group will apply ghost when heat fired at whatever point in time. As it stands players have no visibility to whether or not they'll be hit with ghost heat outside of the mechlab, so I'd like to see some ui component to it.

[VinJade]

@Midgie
do you know anything about BT, its tech, and lore at all?

I posted the link to how the engine works and yes it is set in stone, the way it works is canon thus set in stone.

here I will repost the link again, scroll down to o7.1
That is how they work, word for word from the canon source.

@EM
I wonder if there was actually outside pressure(by those that own the game) to get them to back down from changing the canon of at least how the engine and power works?

[EmperorMyrf]

VinJade, on 08 May 2016 - 08:38 AM, said:

@EM
I wonder if there was actually outside pressure(by those that own the game) to get them to back down from changing the canon of at least how the engine and power works?

It sounded like it was purely their internal engineers that said it's not feasible, not so much that it's lorebreaking. From a theoretical game design standpoint the system held up.

That said, I don't see anything lorebreaking by adding an energy reserve. Outside of the reactors there could exist some futuristic form of a supercapacitor that stores energy that could be quickly released for weapon discharging. The fusion reactors, as part of their energy output, would fill these capacitors up as needed, controlled by the same power controller used to dictate what components on the mech need power and when they need them. This does not at all interfere with the concept of a fusion reactor, in canon or in real life, and would be a somewhat "realistic" (as realistic as walking robot tanks can be) approach to distributing energy for weapons.

So while canon never really mentions anything about energy reserves existing, it also never really mentions that they don't exist (that I'm aware). In either case, I know I'd much rather they make the game better than try to adhere too closely to real engineering.

[VinJade]

@EM
unless written or stated other wise by Herb or Loren then it doesn't work that way.
if they really want to fix the problems then they need to go to the source, and that is the quirks, it is their own fault that there is even a problem.

remember it is the quirks & the mods that let them cycle faster and they are the ones to implement them so they have none to blame for these problems than themselves and had they even bothered to think about these issues long term then they wouldn't even be in this mess.

get rid of the quirks & Mods and you get rid of the problem it is a easy as that.
because if you test a mech with mods & or quirks that allow weapons to fire faster against those that lack both of those you will see a noticeable difference.