468 replies to this topic

[Syllogy]

CloaknDagger, on 27 March 2013 - 02:04 PM, said:

I don't know. This would be more like the RPG. There's all kinds of EXTRA modifiers people have. Some pilots suck at missiles, but are great at energy weapons. Other ones may as well be the assault class boxing champions of the galaxy, but they can't use jump jets if their lives depended on it.

But the Gunnery and Piloting Modifier are essential parts of Tabletop Balance. Also, the Hit-Location Dice-Roll is an essential part of TT Balance. To throw both the modifiers and dice-rolls out blows a hole in your argument that "Canon Stats" are balanced and rational.

[CloaknDagger]

Syllogy, on 27 March 2013 - 02:09 PM, said:

But the Gunnery and Piloting Modifier are essential parts of Tabletop Balance. Also, the Hit-Location Dice-Roll is an essential part of TT Balance. To throw both the modifiers and dice-rolls out blows a hole in your argument that "Canon Stats" are balanced and rational.

But they aren't being thrown out. They're being replaced by actual pilots.

Pulse lasers still have an effective to hit bonus*.

SSRMs still get far more hits than SRMs.

*Whether it's enough or not is debatable

...and then Syllogy was a piloting and gunnery modifier.

[Syllogy]

CloaknDagger, on 27 March 2013 - 02:14 PM, said:

But they aren't being thrown out. They're being replaced by actual pilots.

..wait?! You're replacing parts of the game because this isn't a board game?! For shame!

[CloaknDagger]

What I think you're saying is that moving from TT to FPS messes with the RANGE modifiers.

You're saying that having a large laser arbitrarily getting a +4 to hit at a range to 15, while a medium laser gets a +4 to hit at a range of only 9 will be broken in the transition.

But that's just something that can be easily solved with a little testing.

For example, if a target is half the size at 15 hexes (450 meters) than it is at 9 hexes (270 meters), then make the Large laser's fire time (that is, how long it takes for the beam to fire) be half as much as the medium laser.

Then the two would have the modifier they're supposed to have.

Edited by CloaknDagger, 27 March 2013 - 02:19 PM.

[Syllogy]

CloaknDagger, on 27 March 2013 - 02:19 PM, said:

What I think you're saying is that moving from TT to FPS messes with the RANGE modifiers.

You're saying that having a large laser arbitrarily getting a +4 to hit at a range to 15, while a medium laser gets a +4 to hit at a range of only 9 will be broken in the transition.

But that's just something that can be easily solved with a little testing.

For example, if a target is half the size at 15 hexes (450 meters) than it is at 9 hexes (270 meters), then make the Large laser's fire time (that is, how long it takes for the beam to fire) be half as much as the medium laser.

Then the two would have the modifier they're supposed to have.

No, what I am saying is that the boardgame is made up of a compliment of rules and processes that function in concert with each other.

When you start replacing essential, core functions (like dice rolls) with a variable like a real pilot, the result is that those stats and functions become corrupted and are no longer practical for use.

[CloaknDagger]

Syllogy, on 27 March 2013 - 02:22 PM, said:

When you start replacing essential, core functions (like dice rolls) with a variable like a real pilot, the result is that those stats and functions become corrupted and are no longer practical for use.

Again, I don't think you understand what I mean.

The piloting modifiers are an ABSTRACTION.

MWO replaces them with THE REAL THING.

That's GOOD. It's works BETTER that way.

Everything still works as long as the range modifiers are close enough to their TT equivalents.

It's all just statistics.

If I'm using weapon X in TT, and at range Y it says that an average pilot has a 20% chance to hit, that just means that in MWO, and range Y, an average pilot should be hitting with that weapon 20% of the time.

If people aren't hitting about 20% of the time, then the weapon needs to be adjusted accordingly to keep everything balanced.

Edited by CloaknDagger, 27 March 2013 - 02:29 PM.

[AndyHill]

C'mon guys, you're not that new on the Internet, you should know what a troll is already.

[pesco]

Gandalfrockman, on 09 March 2013 - 08:35 AM, said:

Have you actually Played the game?
1.Doubling armor was a very GOOD thing, I played before they doubled armor. Everything died instantly, Without random die rolls to determine hit/miss/distribution, even the heaviest mechs went down in one salvo.

2.Tripling rate of fire was a good thing, A real time game shouldn't be built around 10 second rounds, this also helps to accomodate change #1, yes there are some heat issues, but they primarily effect stock loadouts. No Idea what your talking about on the ballistics The only ballistic that this may have dust binned is the AC10 and people WILL argue with you about that one.

Jesus, I do not get how people cannot grasp this: What they should have done is leave the armor alone and scale the damage down to fit whatever RoF they would have wanted, as long as the DPS came out to the TT value. But for whatever braindamaged reason they couldn't fathom such an obvious idea. Instead they, and you, keep parading around telling people how "they tried it 1-to-1 canon" -- which they didn't. They tried fracking 3-to-1 canon. And guess what, everything died instantly!

Could you show me to a palm Sir, I think I need to smash my face into one.

Edited by pesco, 27 March 2013 - 02:30 PM.

[Noob Weapons]

1. Doubling Armor

Without this, you would be whining because my sniper build one shots you after you have already walked for 5 minutes to get to the middle of the map.

2. Tripling weapon RoF

Apparently you want there to be only one or two viable weapons. Without higher RoF, the game would consist of people using high damage AC-20, Gauss, PPC only, because I could pop out, trade alpha strikes, come out ahead, and hide again while your weapons are on their 10 second recharge.

3. No guidance on SRMs.

close quarters combat. If you think SRM are bad, you're fooling yourself... One of the best Hunch builds is the 4SP because of two SRM6's. If you cant hit with it, then its your problem. Streak SRM were overpowered for a long time, and that was with only two missiles. Imagine 3 SRM6's that home in. they would never have to aim, only hold their button down for three vollies and you would die.

4. Treating ECM like Stealth Armor, AECM, and a regular ECM all at the same time.

One point I can nearly agree with. ECM is really strong right now.

5. Treating BAP as... a targeting system?

again, problem with ECM

6. Streak SRMs always hit.

So you want this to be a board game where we roll a dice on if our weapons even fire or not? If you want the board game, go play the board game. We're piloting mech, not random number generators.

7. Unjammable U/AC-5s

UAC5's still jam. And my mech that uses them as a main damage source probably has a higher KDR and win rate than any of your mech.

8. Machineguns not doing 2 damage.

MG's are definitely useless... But if they did 2 damage at their current speed they would be broken as hell. At least make a more reasonable argument.

9. Less than Double Double Heat Sinks.

Double heat sinks are already too strong. Seriously, I get tired of these bad players who alpha strike all day, overheat and say "The heat system is broken! I cant play! change it!" Its not broken. You are just terrible at the game. The heat feels very balanced between weapons, and prevents people from stacking one type of weapon (in some cases at least). Double heat sinks are right where they should be, and if they were more powerful the game would be unplayable.

Name a single build that you use single heat sinks in, and I will tell you how bad it is and how you can improve it with doubles, then tell me double heat sinks are not powerful enough.

10. No heat scale effects.


This is another thing that I slightly agree with. This seems like a fun addition, but I believe why they havent added it is because they are looking to uncomplicate the game and bring in newer players. Adding these kinds of complicated functions that are hard to understand is what is driving people away from the game.



All of your suggestions make no sense in a FPS type game, they would make the game boring and unplayable.

I know you grew up with this stuff, but the board game CANNOT work like the real game does. If they adopted these changes, they would not grow any new players, because there would be only 30 people who played it for the nostalgia, and the rest would see how completely broken the game is when it is directly ported over to a video game.

Board game rules are NOT made for a game like this. Things have to change to make a good, repeatedly playable game.

[CloaknDagger]

Noob Weapons, on 27 March 2013 - 02:56 PM, said:

I know you grew up with this stuff, but the board game CANNOT work like the real game does. If they adopted these changes, they would not grow any new players, because there would be only 30 people who played it for the nostalgia, and the rest would see how completely broken the game is when it is directly ported over to a video game.

I have to ask, did you read ANYTHING in this thread? Because literally all of your points have already been gone over.

[Sturmforge]

Of course they do not read. All I keep seeing is "OMG 10 second refire would be boring" and "Double Armor is necessary because of higher RoF." When a lot of posts on this thread have addressed both.

[Xerxys]

MustrumRidcully, on 27 March 2013 - 02:34 AM, said:

No, that's not what the lore states.
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Autocannon
Description

An Autocannon is a type of rapid-firing, auto-loading direct-fire ballistic weapon, firing HEAP (High-Explosive Armor-Piercing) or kinetic rounds at targets in bursts. It is, basically, a giant "machine gun" that fires predominantly cased explosive shells though models firing saboted high velocity kinetic energy penetrators or caseless ordnance do exist. Among the earliest tank/BattleMech scale weaponry produced, autocannons produce far less heat than energy weapons, but are considerably bulkier and are dependent upon limited stores of ammunition.
Autocannons range in caliber from 30mm up to 203mm and are loosely grouped according to their damage vs armor.^[1] The exact same caliber of shell fired in a 100 shot burst to do 20 damage will have a shorter effective range than when fired in a 10 shot burst to do 2 damage due to recoil and other factors. Autocannon are grouped into the following loose damage classes:

• Autocannon/2
  
• Autocannon/5
  
• Autocannon/10
  
• Autocannon/20

Beyond the "standard" models, variants include the shotgun-like LBX, quick-firing Ultra and the gatling-type Rotary. Light-weight variants and capital ship scale models also exist. The experimental Hypervelocity Autocannon has also entered limited production.^[2][3]



Caliber

Caliber is fluff for the size of the barrel that the shell or shells are fired from and no standard caliber has been set for any of the classes of Autocannon. Autocannon in a class vary by manufacturer and model. With the fluffed number of shells and caliber being specified, no Autocannon has been specified to be one shell fired for each "round" or burst of fire. Probable exceptions are the 185 mm ChemJet Gun Autocannon/20 mounted on the Demolisher combat vehicle and Monitor Surface vessel or the 203 mm Ultra Autocannon/20 on the Cauldron Born A BattleMech.

Keep to the mantra of, "A factor of 4 across the board". Ammo would have to be increased by this factor to make up for the reduced damage and, therefore, increased ammo usage. Still works out to be an AC/2/5/10/20 and even the MG would keep to the same damage. You're just going to have to work on your aim to get the full damage. PPC is same thing as your precious AC weapons. The damage has been split up to accommodate for the increased rate of fire.

Edited by Xerxys, 27 March 2013 - 06:37 PM.

[Lamenter captain]

Doubled armor but tripled ROF of weapons.....
Shouldnt they just have doubled RoF of weapons if the goal was to slow down dps?

[Xerxys]

Lamenter captain, on 27 March 2013 - 06:17 PM, said:

Doubled armor but tripled ROF of weapons.....
Shouldnt they just have doubled RoF of weapons if the goal was to slow down dps?

If you only doubled ROF, the game would be on a 5 second round, essentially. Would it be fast pace enough for what you want if you had to wait 2 seconds longer to shoot than you do now? Besides, they would have had to increase rate of heat dissipation by 2 as well. It would have slowed down dps, yes, but it would have bogged the feel of the action as well. What PGI failed to do was drop heat dissipation, hence, they fundamentally ruined game balance. To increase rate of fire by close to 1/3 of the TT values and then to compensate only increased armor by 2 but do nothing with heat dissipation is nowhere near a 1:1 ratio.

PGI finally recognized that heat was an issue, well after 2 generations of beta testers told them they humped the bunk, was to make it so that heat sinks increased heat capacity instead of dissipated heat as it should have.

Edited by Xerxys, 27 March 2013 - 07:25 PM.

[Xerxys]

CloaknDagger, on 27 March 2013 - 09:22 AM, said:

I was unclear.

In TT, if they jam, they stay jammed. You are completely screwed.

In MWO, you can unjam them once they are jammed.

http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__2140266

If you apply this rule to EVERYTHING that requires the change, then you do not need to worry about this. They have a ratio of jamming ~1:6 now. If you change it to 1:24 and drop the "fix" time to un-jam the weapon stays the same. They jam just as frequently in a 10 second setting, roughly, and the down time is same as current. Or I suppose you could keep the 1:6 ratio and drop the down time by 1/4, but it would be an amazingly frustrating weapon that way.

Edited by Xerxys, 27 March 2013 - 06:35 PM.

[Xerxys]

Syllogy, on 27 March 2013 - 12:38 PM, said:

Straight from the Official Battletech TechManual:



This indicates that with every trigger pull of an AC20, there is a potential of 20 points of damage vs. armor. (Regardless of AC's being fired as a single shell, or a volley of shells)

The defining factor is that this is not 20 points of damage within a given amount of time.

You can extrapolate this by looking at the Techmanual's description of the Ultra AC:

What it's saying to me is that the AC/20 is supposed to do 20 damage over the course of the 10 second round. My example used the PPC, does it do 2.5 damage per shot? Nope, but in order for it to have the potential to do 10 damage in a 10 second setting, I dropped it to 1/4 of it's value to accomodate to the drop of a 2.5 second round, 10/4=2.5

I'm showing how a ratio from TT values can apply to a combat sim game and now you're throwing canon in my face? Nothing I read states that the damage has to be done at the single shot. PPC is one weapon that is supposed to do X damage on one trigger pull, but since we increased the rate of fire we dropped the amount of initial damage. I'll go the moron route in my next post.

Edited by Xerxys, 27 March 2013 - 07:09 PM.

[Xerxys]

Ok, this if for the ignorant and stupid that can't understand how ratios work.

I'm going to keep to the K.I.S.S. rule here as much as possible. Since people don't like the idea of, and ABSOLUTELY can't live without, an AC/20 doing 20 damage on a single trigger pull, I'm going to show you a different route to get to the same place so the pigheaded can get behind it.

PLEASE NOTE THAT I WILL STILL BE KEEPING TO A 1:1 RATIO FROM TT VALUES!

The 10 second round won't work for a combat simulator game. PGI decided to cut from a 10 second round to a 3 second round to increase Rate of Fire(RoF) in order to pick up the pace of the game. I think 3 is a truly stupid number in this case because 10/3=3.33333333.....etc... For the ease of the less than stellar intellectuals I'm going to instead drop from a 3 second round to a 2.5 second round. 10/4=2.5 I have hereby drop the TT round by a factor of four. I'm going to use the PPC as my weapon example and a mech engine capable of holding 10 SHS.

Since I have increased the RoF by a factor of 4 I must change some other aspects of the game to account for the increased damage done in the 10 second standard. Since I'm multiplying the shots fired in the 10 second round and I absolutely can't cut the damage of weapons to anything below the TT values of the weapon I'm going to decide to change other things to even this out. I'm going to multiply the armor of every mech by a factor of four. This includes all of the structure, armor and the hp of the components within the mech's section. Now some other things have to be changed, but what?

Lets take a quick look at where we are right now. From the 10 second TT rule I have increased the pace of the game by dropping this from 10 seconds to 2.5 seconds. I have increased the survivability of the mech since the PPC we're using is now doing 40 damage in the 10 second round, 10 damage every 2.5 seconds(trigger pull). But I'm now generating 40 heat every ten seconds, 10 heat every 2.5 seconds(trigger pull). In order to combat that heat generation what are we going to have to do? Increase heat cap to 120(TT standard 30*4)? Nope, this is stupid and kills the spirit of the TT game. 10 SHS will dissipate 10 heat every 10 seconds, but we need it to dissipate 40 heat every 10 seconds. What we have to do is increase the rate of heat dissipation by a factor of four. It is now dissipating 10 heat every 2.5 seconds.

If you will please note that we have not in any way deviated from the 1:1:1 ratio of the TT game. We're able to fire more frequently to "transfer" over to a combat sim game and countered all the negatives inherent therein. Also note that if you keep to the mantra of "a factor of four across the board" you will keep the everything balanced.

Again, is this going to be an absolutely perfect transferring from TT to a Sim? Probably not, but it still gives a very well balanced point from which to start.

With me still? Does this repair you injured man-gina?

Edited by Xerxys, 27 March 2013 - 07:18 PM.

[Xerxys]

Noob Weapons, on 27 March 2013 - 02:56 PM, said:

All of your suggestions make no sense in a FPS type game, they would make the game boring and unplayable.

I know you grew up with this stuff, but the board game CANNOT work like the real game does. If they adopted these changes, they would not grow any new players, because there would be only 30 people who played it for the nostalgia, and the rest would see how completely broken the game is when it is directly ported over to a video game.

Board game rules are NOT made for a game like this. Things have to change to make a good, repeatedly playable game.

Please read the posts, perhaps even a second time, before you regurgitate fecal matter like this. I'll make it easy for you here.

http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__2134914

or if you're among the less intelligent then try the next link

http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__2140928

Edited by Xerxys, 27 March 2013 - 07:41 PM.

[WinnieTheWhor]

Big thread of mad at tabletop and FPS rules being different for good reasons.

[Xerxys]

Syllogy, on 26 March 2013 - 08:04 PM, said:

Medium Lasers are Energy Based, Autocannons are Ballistic

Seriously though, An AC5 is called an AC5 because it does 5 damage per shot (not per shell, not per 10 seconds, but 5 damage per shot) regardless of the delivery method, as long as it is Ballistic.

Do some research, ask some questions... hell, ask Randall Bills (Catalyst Games' in-house Battletech Guru) and you will find out that this is correct.

Change the rate of fire, but keep the DPS, and you are still throwing Canon out the window, even more-so than PGI has done.

This mess is exactly why PGI used TT rules as a baseline and not a true Gameplay Rule System.

An AC/5 is an AC/5 because within a 10 second time frame it does 5 damage. Don't speak of canon if you're not absolutely positive of what you're saying. Go look it up in the books and you'll see that you're incorrect with your statement.

Syllogy, on 26 March 2013 - 06:08 PM, said:

Since Heatsinks are based on Heat / Second, Firing Time between TT and MWO would be equal.... otherwise you would have to triple the current Heat Sink dissipation.

Exactly!