69 replies to this topic

[Royalewithcheese]

Standard poptarts have two kinds of weapons with two completely different firing characteristics. It makes sense to have a single alpha group, but it makes less sense to only have a single alpha group. Sometimes you want to keep your heat down, conserve ammo, fire over low cover, etc.

[XSerjo]

I think that core of problem is all_at_one_point damage. It doesn't matter where your weapons are: in torso, in head, in arm with lower actuator, in arm without actuator - all aims at the same piunt.

Let torso mounted weapons have fixed convergence distance (maybe adjustable by player in Mechlab), let arm mounted weapons have variable convergence distance (but weapons in arms without lower actuators should have some restrictions like lower minimal distance).

It's non my idea, I've found some discussions here: http://mwomercs.com/...on-convergence/ , for example.

[Gristle]

Zyllos, on 27 March 2013 - 08:21 AM, said:

...
This is my suggestion, why not balance Alpha Strikes and Chain Firing?

Alpha Strike -
Pros:
Allows for minute control of torso facing before/after firing.
Allows easier movement control and controlling when to fire while changing movement directions.

Cons:
Adds heat all at the same time.
Weapons do not all land in the same spot.

Chain Firing -
Pros:
Allows for pin-point targeting against your target.
Allows more control of heat when firing.

Cons:
Requires torso to face the target when continuing to fire.
Harder to control movement and keep pin-point damage going.

Ignoring on how you achieve the above, would it not be better to balance Alpha Strikes and Chain Firing instead of Alpha Striking always being just straight better in almost every situation? The only time Alpha Strikes are bad is if using one would shut you down.
...

Doing anything with "Alpha strike" is impossible. I never "alpha strike", but I do frequently fire all my weapon groups simultaneously, or nearly simultaneous. If restrictions are placed on "Alpha Strike" people will just rapidly chain fire their weapons, creating a pseudo-alpha strike, and the same issues that changes are attempting to fix will remain.

[Royalewithcheese]

XSerjo, on 28 March 2013 - 07:41 AM, said:

I think that core of problem is all_at_one_point damage. It doesn't matter where your weapons are: in torso, in head, in arm with lower actuator, in arm without actuator - all aims at the same piunt.

Let torso mounted weapons have fixed convergence distance (maybe adjustable by player in Mechlab), let arm mounted weapons have variable convergence distance (but weapons in arms without lower actuators should have some restrictions like lower minimal distance).

It's non my idea, I've found some discussions here: http://mwomercs.com/...on-convergence/ , for example.

IIRC they tried this system initially (maybe before CB? I forget the specifics) and it was annoying/unfun in practice.

[Zyllos]

Gristle, on 28 March 2013 - 07:45 AM, said:

Doing anything with "Alpha strike" is impossible. I never "alpha strike", but I do frequently fire all my weapon groups simultaneously, or nearly simultaneous. If restrictions are placed on "Alpha Strike" people will just rapidly chain fire their weapons, creating a pseudo-alpha strike, and the same issues that changes are attempting to fix will remain.

The problem is not about "only change Alpha Strikes", it's about having weapons aimed at slightly different locations so that when Alpha Striking, they do not all hit the same location but Chain Firing weapon groups, you can physically control their hit locations by actually aiming.

If you rapidly Chain Fired weapon groups, you will not be able to converge those weapon groups which are fired as the same time as others but you could at least be hitting the target centered around their respective crosshairs, just most likely not being the same hit location.

Edited by Zyllos, 28 March 2013 - 08:19 AM.

[Gristle]

Zyllos, on 28 March 2013 - 08:17 AM, said:

The problem is not about "only change Alpha Strikes", it's about having weapons aimed at slightly different locations so that when Alpha Striking, they do not all hit the same location but Chain Firing weapon groups, you can physically control their hit locations by actually aiming.

If you rapidly Chain Fired weapon groups, you will not be able to converge those weapon groups which are fired as the same time as others but you could at least be hitting the target centered around their respective crosshairs, just most likely not being the same hit location.

So you are saying remove convergence for alpha strikes, but allow it for chain firing, but not if you rapidly chain fire? How would this work? What would be the determining factor that allowed convergence, or not?

[Royalewithcheese]

Zyllos, on 28 March 2013 - 08:17 AM, said:

The problem is not about "only change Alpha Strikes", it's about having weapons aimed at slightly different locations so that when Alpha Striking, they do not all hit the same location but Chain Firing weapon groups, you can physically control their hit locations by actually aiming.

If you rapidly Chain Fired weapon groups, you will not be able to converge those weapon groups which are fired as the same time as others but you could at least be hitting the target centered around their respective crosshairs, just most likely not being the same hit location.

This is exploitable by macros. The best solution here is the simplest one: make everything converge.

[Rakashan]

Zyllos, on 27 March 2013 - 08:24 PM, said:

If you Chain Fired those weapons in their logical groups, you would first fire one of the weapon groups. Most likely the Right Torso section first as it is the largest concentration of damage. Knowing that section is the only one firing, you can aim the Torso crosshair to the left and slightly low of the target where you actually want to hit. After firing that weapon group, then you go on to Chain Fire the next weapon group from the arms, which have a large degree of control due to arms actually converging. Then lastly the head energy is shot with the Torso crosshair slightly right and below your target.

Yeah, I understood your intent. I even considered it although my response probably glossed over the issue. The problem with this is two-fold. First, you already don't want weapons firing out of identical ports (which I agree with) which implies that any firing group (like the HBK-4P torso) would still include offset in the "straight ahead" model. This would be particularly notable when using a large mech like an Atlas aiming at a small target like a Commando. Second, you'd still be delaying enough for the opposing pilot to twist or juke or otherwise prevent pin-point fire of anything except the largest groupings (again, the HBK-4P torso) from mattering.

I think any variant of the "straight ahead" mechanic is going to disperse fire too much to reward any aiming skill. The alternative would be to apply some sort of convergence to such a fire grouping but that would essentially bring you back to the "arbitrary offset" regime and reward mechs with groupings (e.g. the CATs) who could then make mini-alphas.

If you really want to punish alphas (a proposal I am not sure I would support in any case), the only thing you could really hope for is to chase the cone-of-fire idea and make accuracy inversely affected by the number of weapons fired in the last X seconds (where X could be fractional like 0.5 seconds when tuned). The problem is that this is a fairly ugly coding problem intended to punish a pilot who actually spends time working on his aim (not exactly a popular idea which is part of the reason PGI stepped back from the idea of cone-of-fire in the first place).

[TruePoindexter]

Traigus, on 27 March 2013 - 08:18 PM, said:

The main drawback for Alphaing in Battleterch isn't in MWO:

Penalties for riding high heat.

Until you shutdown or hit "O" just before you shut down. all levels of heat in MWO are the same.

TT has penalties for riding at high heat.

You'd see a lot less alphas if at 75% heat you had a 15% chance of your ammo blowing up.

I doubt anyone will lever implement any of that though.

In TT heat is dumped in bulk as well. If you generate 20 points of heat and cool 20 points of heat it is as if you generated no heat at all in TT.

In MWO you will always generate heat from weapons fire and it will take some period of time to vent. There's no need for heat based penalties when cooling takes a lot more time.

[Zyllos]

Gristle, on 28 March 2013 - 08:27 AM, said:

So you are saying remove convergence for alpha strikes, but allow it for chain firing, but not if you rapidly chain fire? How would this work? What would be the determining factor that allowed convergence, or not?

I am saying that weapon convergence is never allowed. But you could aim weapon groups to hit a specific location, if you individually chain fire between weapon groups because they are the only weapons firing. There is no "determining factor" involved.

Think about this, if all weapons have completely different crosshairs. Every single one. How do you get all of those weapons to converge onto a single spot? You chain fire each one individually onto that single point you want to deal damage to. If you alpha striked all those weapons, they all hit on their respective crosshairs.

Now, my suggestion, says that instead of having an individual crosshair for each weapon, they instead converge onto a matrix square, logically and respectively, based on their physical location. Thus, in my example, the HBK-4P's laser hunch would hit on the matrix sqaure all close to each other. Their firing pattern is basically mapped from the matrix square around the torso to the convergence square around the Torso crosshair.

There is no calculations on how many weapons are being fired or whatnot. They always hit the same location in the convergence sqaure (around crosshair) from the square matrix (square around the torso of the mech).

Royalewithcheese, on 28 March 2013 - 08:34 AM, said:

This is exploitable by macros. The best solution here is the simplest one: make everything converge.

I am not sure what macros could achieve here. The game isn't checking if your firing many weapons or not. They just physically hit in different locations based on their physical location on the mech.

Rakashan, on 28 March 2013 - 09:06 AM, said:

Yeah, I understood your intent. I even considered it although my response probably glossed over the issue. The problem with this is two-fold. First, you already don't want weapons firing out of identical ports (which I agree with) which implies that any firing group (like the HBK-4P torso) would still include offset in the "straight ahead" model. This would be particularly notable when using a large mech like an Atlas aiming at a small target like a Commando. Second, you'd still be delaying enough for the opposing pilot to twist or juke or otherwise prevent pin-point fire of anything except the largest groupings (again, the HBK-4P torso) from mattering.

I think any variant of the "straight ahead" mechanic is going to disperse fire too much to reward any aiming skill. The alternative would be to apply some sort of convergence to such a fire grouping but that would essentially bring you back to the "arbitrary offset" regime and reward mechs with groupings (e.g. the CATs) who could then make mini-alphas.

If you really want to punish alphas (a proposal I am not sure I would support in any case), the only thing you could really hope for is to chase the cone-of-fire idea and make accuracy inversely affected by the number of weapons fired in the last X seconds (where X could be fractional like 0.5 seconds when tuned). The problem is that this is a fairly ugly coding problem intended to punish a pilot who actually spends time working on his aim (not exactly a popular idea which is part of the reason PGI stepped back from the idea of cone-of-fire in the first place).

Why would fire be too dispersed to chain fire weapons groups for them to aim at specific locations?

I agree on your assessment about Atlas weapons against Commando targets. If you alpha striked at the Commando, placing the Torso crosshair dead on the target, the Atlas might be wide enough to miss, just wide right, with the AC/20 and wide left with the SRMs. But I am not sure, I would have to sit down and actually see the two mechs side by side. And this is something that could be fine tuned. Maybe the convergence square could be 25% less than the square matrix of the torso weapons.

Also, maybe that should be the point with the disparities between extremely large Mechs against extremely small targets, it's harder to just fire everything against the target and hit. But I would almost bet that if you alpha striked with an Atlas and that Torso crosshair was on the Commando (or ahead if your firing Time-to-Target weapons), some of those weapons would be hitting. Or you could just focus on getting the AC/20 to hit, which would be no different than now.

But I disagree with the weapon fire being too dispersed to aim them. The HBK-4P's laser hunch would be no harder now to aim at a location than it is with the suggestion. It's just that you also can't fire the arms and head laser at the same time and have it land where your aiming because those are slightly deviated. So you have to chain fire the groups to get them to land on a single point on a target.

Edited by Zyllos, 28 March 2013 - 12:30 PM.