Posted 26 December 2012 - 07:27 PM
The tabletop has weapons firing once every 10 seconds, which would be incredibly slow for this kind of game and mean it leans heavily toward alpha-strike builds. To that end I certainly support the doubled armor, doubled structure (it's not actually double, I know), and roughly doubled rate of fire, give or take (often tripled, I know). However, it would be nice to see weapons that pay dearly for their hole-punching or crit-seeking quality (AC-20s in particular) see some kind of improvement to compensate for being a lot less good at their job of creating exposed locations.
The ranges in tabletop are artificially low for the sake of making the game playable on a normal table. What PGI has done with with regard to the extra range, but half damage beyond normal range seems perfectly acceptable to me. It better follows the spirit of the background where the tabletop had to compromise.
The 1.4 heat sinks outside the engine seems silly to me. If they just want to stop people from boating lasers for alpha purposes, like the 9 medium laser hunchback, then do it some other way. For instance, if lasers that fired simultaneously generated huge amounts of additional heat (re:blazer) then it wouldn't be such a problem, I think (and it would encourage sequential fire which looks more like what you see on the tabletop). Bringing a fully loaded Hunchback from something like 50 dissipation down to 44 doesn't seem like it's worth the one-finger salute to designs that are canonically heat-intensive, like the AWS-9M.
Doubling fire rates without doubling heat dissipation makes a number of mechs look silly, but does get us the intended effect of making heat more relevant. Removing or vastly reducing the heat effects that come before shutdown (slowing, penalties to hit things, and possible ammo explosions) while effectively shrinking the heat scale somewhat seems like an acceptable compromise to me. It brings a somewhat more intuitive understanding of heat in the context of this user interface. Still, I wish that heat-slowing were a part of this game as it does come up in the background quite often.
I understand the difference in how LRMs function, including the increased difficulty of connecting with a target combined with easier indirect fire and more damage per missile (but spread out over a wider area). I think they're a bit too strong right now in games where the opposition has no ECM (and too weak in games where the opponent does have ECM), but that's a complaint about the number, not the format.
Limits to radar for the purposes of increasing the effectiveness of stealth seem reasonable to me. I don't like ignoring the 360-view that mechs are supposed to have, but I can deal with it if it makes for games that are more entertaining.
The scale of mechs is off compared to tabletop. In the board game, mechs are all roughly the same size regardless of their weight. The mass is just a function of how durable the skeleton and muscles, not how physically large the vehicle is. However, not only is this huge difference between the scale of an Atlas and a Jenner more intuitive, but gives light mechs an advantage in durability that they don't have in the tabletop (smaller target). Closing the gap in power between assaults and lights is a good thing in the context of this kind of game, so I don't mind the deviation there.
Taking Narc (for the most part a piece of junk in the tabletop) and kicking in the nuts repeatedly before handing to the MWO community perplexes me. Even if it had an infinite duration and lasted as long as the section it was attached to it would still be pretty bad in MWO. That's a place where abandoning the tabletop has me scratching my head.
They re-write for a lot of what Beagle does makes sense to me, as the effects don't translate well and it doesn't do much in the tabletop anyway.
ECM in MWO is silly for a number of reasons better discussed elsewhere. I realize, however, that keeping it to pure tabletop rules would probably leave it not effective enough (particularly without effective C3 computers for it to counter). I don't mind it picking up a little more functionality than the tabletop for the purposes of making sure that it gets used more often than Narc, but what we have now is a radical departure from every other game and from the background. In this case, I'd prefer if i were reigned in to something more like the tabletop version.
The AC-2 and similar weapons are pieces of junk in the tabletop, at least for their tonnage (if not BV). I don't mind MWO changing balance in ways that are difficult if not impossible for the tabletop to manage. I don't think that PGI has done a good enough job at this to be handing out full-time salaries for it, but in principle I don't mind, for instance, changing fire rates to make some weapons more effective and others less.
All in all there are places where I would prefer the game stay closer to home, but many of the changes seem appropriate.
6
Because of this, PGI had to make certain adjustments to the system to make it a valid and desirable piece of equipment. So, ECM limits your sensor range and time it takes to pull up data on your target, etc etc. That isn't to say that they didn't go a little overboard. Hell, you could argue that missile systems in game are equally overboard and I'd be right there with you screaming it from the mountain top. But, the system has to have certain additions to make it something more than dead weight (ie, BAP). And that is one thing that people don't remember when they go to complaining about ECM - it isn't a TT carbon copy because TT game play is entirely different then MWO game play. So, things much change with the changing environment.
