Mchawkeye, on 19 December 2011 - 01:37 AM, said:
Crumbs. Why on earth would I disagree with you and then simply reiterate your own suggestion?
That's a very good question
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What I am suggesting is that (reasonably) realistic ballistics come into play. so canon have an amount of travel time and thus would require the pilot to assume a lead to target; consequently you might be trying to HIT the moving torso of your target, but you would AIM in front of it.
This is what I suggested, part of the suggestion actually. This is not where the problem is though. I used "stationary shooter, stationary target" scenario in my post for a reason (assume that you have a proper lead on moving target if you want - it's the same thing). The question is what should happen if my crosshairs are in the right spot when I pull the trigger, in other words my shots are going to be on target as a given, but what should be done about damage?
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Lasers are a different issue, I agree. my currently favourite idea to handicap laser boats is a batter reproduction of heat issues. especially negative heat effects as the scale climbs.
That would certainly help, but won't fix the problem. It's the path MW4 took - rebalancing via playing with heat/armor/weapon weight/damage values. Problem was that people were still boating weapons with the same projectile travel time. It wasn't as bad as in MW2/MW3, but still was an issue.
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Also, as the thread was started, setting your lasers (for this example) to converge on a spot, say at 500m, at that point they come together, Before or after that point the lasers hit in the appropriate spread.
This is good in theory, but given the size of a mech and weapon range you won't be able to make it useful and look realistic at the same time. First, it would give an extra incentive to put all weapons into CT (thus decreasing the base). Second, a mech is roughly 10m tall - let's say (just to keep it simple) that it's also 10m wide. So, I have medium lasers in the arms (10m base, 270m range), set them to converge at max range (270m), and aim for CT of the target (3-4m wide, I guess). At what distance would they miss CT and hit RT+LT instead?
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That, and as I already pointed out to you, various simulated effects (like shaking while moving, for one example) would make it significantly harder to aim accurately, again wearing down the effectiveness of laser boating.
That's irrelevant as it only affects aiming (i.e. do I hit or do I miss), instead of the spread. Regardless of the aiming mechanics, a situation where boating multiple small weapons does more damage to the single location than a single large weapon would make those large weapons useless. In BT AC20 is a deadly weapon because it does a lot of damage to a single location as opposed to a bunch of lasers that may do more damage overall, but that damage is spread all over the place. If damage is not spread at all, people will boat whatever weapons give the most overall (combined) damage.
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It worth noting that laser boats exist as part of the BT canon, but I agree that boating is a potential issue that needs to thought about. that doesn't mean we have to resort to arbitrary randomness for the sake of balance; This is a simulator, not the TT.
As I see it, there are 2 ways to do it - to mimic what MW4 did and change the weapon characteristics (heat, damage, weight, etc.) or to introduce randomness. Former would allow for pinpoint accuracy, but will require a lot of work to redesign the whole rule set. Latter is easier to implement and is closer to canon BT, but your accuracy would not be picture-perfect.