79 replies to this topic

[LordDeathStrike]

its in the mechlab, it must do dmg to mechs, since this is a mech only game, which makes sense because in mech 2 and mech 3 machine guns could add up, all be it a bit too fast in those games.

i wonder how balanced it will be in mwo, because think about it. the atlas right torso or hunchback, you could fit alot of machine guns in them, like 8-12 machine guns, and 6 slots of ammo, if they tear through armor quick enough it might be better to have these instead of ac 20 in that slot, since with the machine guns you can paint and light up smaller units or big guys, where with an ac 20 you gotta be a better shot!

machine gun might have better range then the ac 20 as well. im thinking the smallest dmg per hit from any weapon will be 1 dmg, so the machine gun might well be 1 dmg per hit, but they shoot fast, like hold down the trigger and spray fast. and 12 machine guns, doing 12 dmg a second, till out of ammo, well thats dangerous!

[Kazzamo]

You have to take the hard point system into account. You might have the weight or the critical slots for said 8-12 machine guns, but there is also hard points limiting the number of and type of weapons you can mount in an area.

[Talynn DeRaa]

As it stands, there's only 3 Ballistics Hardpoints on the normal Hunchback's Right Torso. I think its safe to assume that the one for the Atlas is similarly hardpointed.

Edited by Talynn DeRaa, 02 June 2012 - 03:44 AM.

[Kanatta Jing]

Well Machine guns are limited to Ballistic Hardpoints.

The Hunchback has two Ballistic Hardpoints in it's shoulder.

In case you feel like sniping with dual torso mounted AC/2s or something.

You might have to look pretty hard to find a Mech with 6 full ballistic placements.

[LordDeathStrike]

Kanatta Jing, on 02 June 2012 - 03:44 AM, said:

Well Machine guns are limited to Ballistic Hardpoints.

The Hunchback has two Ballistic Hardpoints in it's shoulder.

In case you feel like sniping with dual torso mounted AC/2s or something.

You might have to look pretty hard to find a Mech with 6 full ballistic placements.

i hope so, cause a machine gun boat could be mw2 scarey all over again if not.

o man 6 large pulse laser awesome is gonna be brutal once we get ahold of pulse lasers!

Edited by LordDeathStrike, 02 June 2012 - 03:46 AM.

[Cruxshadow]

Machineguns are mostly close range armor scrubbers. If I remember right they can also be setup for anti-missile defence.

[LordDeathStrike]

Cruxshadow, on 02 June 2012 - 03:47 AM, said:

Machineguns are mostly close range armor scrubbers. If I remember right they can also be setup for anti-missile defence.

poor lrm boats would cry if we could mount a machine gun or 2 and manually AMS hehe.

just look up and spray into the cloud of inc missiles, 80% kill rate, sweet! the other 20% missed me!

Edited by LordDeathStrike, 02 June 2012 - 03:49 AM.

[Adrienne Vorton]

am i right? been a while...MG= 1dmg against mechs, range 1/2/3? even if it was possible to mount 10 of them, why should i ?

IF i remember right it would be 5tons and 10 crits for 10 dmg...on a very very low range...seems not to be a good choise

Edited by Adrienne Vorton, 02 June 2012 - 03:54 AM.

[Hruhai]

I would have thought the major disadvantage to bulk machine guns would be the ammo? The amount of tonnage you spend on ammo and the vulnerability you have from carrying that much around is too higher risk imo.

It would be interesting to know if it actually works out like that.

[Kreisel]

LordDeathStrike, on 02 June 2012 - 03:48 AM, said:

poor lrm boats would cry if we could mount a machine gun or 2 and manually AMS hehe.

just look up and spray into the cloud of inc missiles, 80% kill rate, sweet! the other 20% missed me!

Have you seen the crazy flight paths the missiles take in video? You'd be lucky to hit a few of them. Plus who is going to be aiming up at the air on incoming missiles when their are other mechs shooting at them to worry about and shoot back at.

[Slystone]

I think I recall one of the Dev team saying someone made a machine gun boat that didn't do that bad. This was months ago I wish I could find the post for you.

[LordDeathStrike]

Adrienne Vorton, on 02 June 2012 - 03:51 AM, said:

am i right? been a while...MG= 1dmg against mechs, range 1/2/3? even if it was possible to mount 10 of them, why should i ?

we arent talking 1 dmg 10 second turn here, we are talking a steady stream of 1 dmg hits, per gun! probably balanced to around 1 dmg per 1 second of fireing. if an ac 20 is 20 dmg, every 4 seconds, then 10 machine guns doing 10 dmg every 1 second is 40 dmg in 4 seconds! and you can paint smaller faster targets with them, the devils paintbrush! but as someone mentioned, its likely even the atlas wont have more then 4 seperate ballistic mounts in its right torso. clan omni mechs on the other hand dont have this issue.

[Hal Michelson]

If you check back through all the Solaris stuff the machine gun was a very popular load out for dueling mechs in the arena. Many of the specialty Solaris mechs would be almost all machine guns and high speed to close to point blank and then just delete another mech. With the staggered/divided turn sequence Solaris (and basically MW2 and MW3) used the fact that the machine gun fired in every segment made it far more powerful than much heavier weapons.

[GrizzlyViking]

LordDeathStrike, on 02 June 2012 - 03:39 AM, said:

its in the mechlab, it must do dmg to mechs, since this is a mech only game, which makes sense because in mech 2 and mech 3 machine guns could add up, all be it a bit too fast in those games.

i wonder how balanced it will be in mwo, because think about it. the atlas right torso or hunchback, you could fit alot of machine guns in them, like 8-12 machine guns, and 6 slots of ammo, if they tear through armor quick enough it might be better to have these instead of ac 20 in that slot, since with the machine guns you can paint and light up smaller units or big guys, where with an ac 20 you gotta be a better shot!

machine gun might have better range then the ac 20 as well. im thinking the smallest dmg per hit from any weapon will be 1 dmg, so the machine gun might well be 1 dmg per hit, but they shoot fast, like hold down the trigger and spray fast. and 12 machine guns, doing 12 dmg a second, till out of ammo, well thats dangerous!

I remember making MG boats for fun in MW3. If you had a fast Mech and crap load of MGs you could take anything, and I do mean anything, down in a couple of seconds. You could load enough MG ammo to never run out, have max engine, and max armor. They were crazy on urban warfare maps, but not very useful anywhere else due to the limited range of MGs.

However, I think MG boats are completely unrealistic in that a Mech of most any size should be able to flick off lots of MG fire similar to the Incredible Hulk. I recall that making similar MG boats was not possible in MW4 due to changes in how loadouts worked.

[CaveMan]

If machine guns do 2 damage a shot they'd be insanely overpowered with any kind of high rate of fire. From the videos it looks like an AC/20 has a firing delay of about 5 seconds. That works out to about 4 DPS. A machine gun firing at a mere 120 rounds/min (twice a second) doing 2 damage a hit would have the same DPS as an AC/20. Clearly, that ain't gonna work.

Furthermore, when you compare the impact energies of machine guns to Gauss rifles (the Gauss' 15 damage is something like 500 MJ, to do 2 damage a machine gun would need to be putting out a total of 66MJ in a round, vs about 20kJ for a single 12.7mm bullet), it becomes clear that BattleTech's machine guns are either 30mm monsters firing 1000 rounds/min or they're firing 12.7mm at like 10,000 rounds/min just do inflict those 2 points of damage a round. 2 damage definitely does not represent one single bullet or even a few!

As weird as it sounds to say this, as I am no fan of MW4, I think MW4 came closest to getting machine guns right. They ought to spray a burst of rounds (doing a total of 2 damage) with a couple seconds of cooldown inbetween. If you fired a machine gun continuously at the kind of rates of fire implied by the source material, you'd melt the poor thing.

[Alex Iglesias]

just fyi MGs probably won't be firing at 2 damage per shot, that'd be ludicrous.

they slowly sandpaper their targets via high volume of plinking and let you keep pressure on your opponents while your mech cools down or weapons are recycling

[Paladin1]

Alex Iglesias, on 02 June 2012 - 09:31 AM, said:

just fyi MGs probably won't be firing at 2 damage per shot, that'd be ludicrous.

they slowly sandpaper their targets via high volume of plinking and let you keep pressure on your opponents while your mech cools down or weapons are recycling

Not 2 dmg per shot, but maybe 2 dmg per 10 seconds, as per canon, or the equivalent since there's evidence that the damage of all weapons has been increased as well as the way that armor is handled.

Very good point about the ability to keep the pressure on while your heat drains off though, I don't think most people are aware of how high the heat is going to go at times.

[Renan Ruivo]

I haven't really played any MW games other than MW4 for a long time, but if that one is any indication you don't need a continuous ballistic HP to fit a bucket load of machine guns. A light machine gun cluster can be fitted in any ballistic slot the mech has, so if it has 10 slots you can fit 10 LMG clusters, if you have available tonnage.

Now, naturally MWO is a whole different thing. But just as i wouldn't draw too much from MW4 and others, i wouldn't draw too much from the tabletop game either.


On MW:O, machineguns with sufficient range might be usefull to shoot down UAV's, missiles and to harass smaller mechs in your Atlas.

[Aggammenonn]

lol, I love the point about heat, I expect we are gonna see some mechs go boom, pretty much every match at least to start. WOOOHOO I MANAGED TO FIT 6 ER PPCS.. WATCH THE FIREWORKS PEOPLE... BOOOOOOM

[wanderer]

LordDeathStrike, on 02 June 2012 - 03:45 AM, said:

i hope so, cause a machine gun boat could be mw2 scarey all over again if not.

o man 6 large pulse laser awesome is gonna be brutal once we get ahold of pulse lasers!

You're used to Mechwarrior 4, which has Clan LPL's. Which are arguably one of the more busted weapons in the game.

Standard IS LPL's have half the range, barely better than a standard medium laser. Not to mention the heat load is obscene-a six-pack of LPL's is enough to push nearly anything into shutdown in a single salvo. Quad LPL's is about the max you're going to vent heat for reasonably.

In any case, MG's are point defense weapons. The big flaw is that even the smallest ammo bay for MG's packs in 100 shots, making it vulnerable to overheat explosions or critical hits...and the hardpoint system is going to make it interesting to pack large numbers of MG's into a 'Mech when you want to have the guns to match the high ammo load.

Note that in tabletop Battletech, I have seen a 'Mech in the Succession Wars era armed with 42 MG's and a single large laser. It actually made decent use of the 2 tons (400 rounds) of MG ammo it had equipped, obliterating a very, VERY surprised Catapult in close combat in a single round.

People into the "point defense" concept might want to pair some small lasers with their MG's- I actually think the -3M Cicada would make an excellent template, with high speed, three small energy hardpoints, and a roomy ballistic one where the Ultra/5 is mounted.

5 MG's, perhaps a few small or small pulse lasers, and some more armor on the highest ground-speed design in the game right now? One might deliver some owies.