24 replies to this topic

[Ravingdork]

What is the best armor configuration for mechs, particularly around the torso area?

Should you use halfsies? Or perhaps have 3/4 in front and 1/4 in back. Would 2/3 front and 1/3 rear be better?

Should a medium brawler have a different allocation than a painfully slow assault? What is the optimal ideal?

[Sadistic Savior]

Ravingdork, on 08 April 2013 - 01:16 PM, said:

What is the best armor configuration for mechs, particularly around the torso area?

Should you use halfsies? Or perhaps have 3/4 in front and 1/4 in back. Would 2/3 front and 1/3 rear be better?

Should a medium brawler have a different allocation than a painfully slow assault? What is the optimal ideal?

You are limited in how much back armor you are allowed to place. I would advise maxing this out on any mech. No matter how much you can place, it never seems to be enough, especially on heavy/assaults.

Concentrate remainder on head, center torso, and then left/right. Only cover the arms if you have major weapons there. I typically put medium amounts on legs because, for whatever reason, no one ever seems to target legs. I store ammo there for the same reason.

[Lord Psycho]

I'm writing this down..Sadistic Savior stores explosives in his feet......


I have just enough armor in my back to prevent a lgiht from one shotting me in the back

Edited by Lord Psycho, 08 April 2013 - 01:43 PM.

[Sadistic Savior]

Lord Psycho, on 08 April 2013 - 01:43 PM, said:

I'm writing this down..Sadistic Savior stores explosives in his feet......

It sounds stupid I know, but that really does seem the safest place. Most people (at least in PUGs) target the torso or head (or back). Your legs will always have more armor than your back torso. And at worst, you can hop around one legged (ammos explosion damage goes to RT/Left torso before center torso right?). If your torso goes though, you are probably dead.

[Ravingdork]

There's a max limit in the rear? I thought the max limit was for both front and back. For example, if I have 48 points, I could do 24/24, 36/12, 38/10, 48/0, or 0/48.

[Sadistic Savior]

Lord Psycho, on 08 April 2013 - 01:43 PM, said:

I have just enough armor in my back to prevent a lgiht from one shotting me in the back

I always max it out because that is the first place those little b*stards will target. They will circle strafe you and try to hit your back.

Ravingdork, on 08 April 2013 - 01:48 PM, said:

There's a max limit in the rear? I thought the max limit was for both front and back. For example, if I have 48 points, I could do 24/24, 36/12, 38/10, 48/0, or 0/48.

It is like that in the table version of the game. In this game, there is a hard limit though. And it is not a lot.

The Mechlab will tell your the max you can have. The value you see there is the total allowed for both combined, but there is a limit on how much of that can be on the back.

Edited by Sadistic Savior, 08 April 2013 - 01:51 PM.

[Konril]

Ravingdork, on 08 April 2013 - 01:48 PM, said:

There's a max limit in the rear? I thought the max limit was for both front and back. For example, if I have 48 points, I could do 24/24, 36/12, 38/10, 48/0, or 0/48.

This is actually correct. There doesn't seem to be anything in the game engine stopping you from putting all your torso armor in the rear as far as I can tell. But I can also tell you probably don't want to. The back torso locations can only be hit from the back. If the enemy is to your side then any damage to your torso goes to your front torso. From the front, it should be pretty obvious that the enemy is going to hit the front as well. The back of practically all battlemechs is really flat compared to the front, so it is just the way the geometry works.

The usual rule of thumb is to put 1 in the back for every 3 in the front. So with a 40 cap, you would want 10 in the back and 30 in the front. But honestly, actual values people use will vary depending on their needs.

[Sadistic Savior]

Konril, on 08 April 2013 - 02:37 PM, said:

This is actually correct. There doesn't seem to be anything in the game engine stopping you from putting all your torso armor in the rear as far as I can tell.

LOL! I wish!

My Highlander has a hard limit of 20 in center torso rear. It says "limit reached" if I try to add any more. It has been the same on every mech I have had so far.

Granted I have only had 3 or 4 models. Maybe there are some models that let you do that. But it isnt the Hunchback, Catapult, Highlander, or Jaggermech for sure.

Edited by Sadistic Savior, 08 April 2013 - 02:41 PM.

[Makenzie71]

I target feet in a close fight...especially if there are friendlies swarming about. If I leg a bad guy, he's an easier target for the good guys. If I accidentally leg a good guy...well, at least I didn't shoot you in the face.

Always max all the armor you can. I don't run weapons in the arms on my Cats but keep the armor up anyway because the arms themselves can shield your torso from side fire. I will sacrifice a gun to have all the armor.

Keeping ammo in the legs is risky, but it's a pretty good gamble. As Savior says, there's not a lot of legging going on. I try not to do it all the same. I prefer to have ammo center mass in a CASE...but when slots get cramped, in the legs it goes.

[Xiphias]

Sadistic Savior, on 08 April 2013 - 02:41 PM, said:

LOL! I wish!

My Highlander has a hard limit of 20 in center torso rear. It says "limit reached" if I try to add any more. It has been the same on every mech I have had so far.

Granted I have only had 3 or 4 models. Maybe there are some models that let you do that. But it isnt the Hunchback, Catapult, Highlander, or Jaggermech for sure.

Have you removed the front armor first? I have a Jagermech and it will let me put 84 armor in the rear CT. I'm 99% sure that you can do this on any mech.

[Konril]

Seriously? That highlander comes with 30 in the rear torso by default. So I can't imagine what would be limiting you to only 20. But yes, I have managed to save a Centurion with 1 armor in the front and 63 in the back with no warnings whatsoever.

[Sadistic Savior]

Konril, on 08 April 2013 - 02:55 PM, said:

Seriously? That highlander comes with 30 in the rear torso by default. So I can't imagine what would be limiting you to only 20. But yes, I have managed to save a Centurion with 1 armor in the front and 63 in the back with no warnings whatsoever.

I will look at it again to night and take a screenshot. Maybe there is something I am missing. But I have deliberately tried to load up back armor before and always ran into this issue. It is irritating the hell out of me.

[El Death Smurf]

Sadistic Savior, on 08 April 2013 - 03:03 PM, said:

I will look at it again to night and take a screenshot. Maybe there is something I am missing. But I have deliberately tried to load up back armor before and always ran into this issue. It is irritating the hell out of me.

i think he's trolling us. no one's that stupid... right?
if you are sincere. im sorry. and to explain the highlander, for example, has 116 center torso armor points, and you can distribute them between front and back how ever you please.

anywho.
my armor allocation depends on what wepons im using. what mech. and engine type and size.
if you brawl, you will get shot in the back, so dont skimp. if you use lrms, ppc or gauss and are hanging way back you can skimp. if you are slow (65kph or less) do not skimp at all, and a 3/1 ratio would be very prudent.
some mechs can get away with rear skimping. most lights, hunchbacks, and catapults can torso twist really well and anyone who ever gets behind you wont be behind you very long.

mechs that i personally kill alot from behind are Jagermechs, Awesomes, Stalkers, and Atlas'. they all tend to be slow, and in a 2v1 cituation dont stand a chance at pretecting their rear, where as catapults, for example, can easily twist their way around to keep me out of their back door.

[Durant Carlyle]

I only put 8 armor on each of my rear torso sections. Then again, I am piloting a Jenner, so there's not much to put there in the first place. And in a Jenner, you die from front CT coring the vast majority of the time. If it's not that, it's from legging.

[Burnsidhe]

You have a total amount of armor that can be placed on any section. There is nothing preventing you from putting it all in the front or all in the back, except for simple experience that putting it all facing one way or the other gets you killed fast when some light mech inevitably gets behind you.

There are limits, however. There is a tonnage limit; if you don't have enough tonnage to devote to armor, you'll hit the 'overweight' message. If you try to add more armor than that body part can support, you'll hit the 'Limit reached' message.

For instance; 84 points of armor on a torso can be distributed 64/20, 56/28, 84/0 or 0/84, any combination adding up to a *total* of 84 points, but if you try for, say, 57/28, you'll hit the 'limit reached' message when you tried to assign that last point.

During the assignment process, though, it can look like there's a hard limit on front/back armor. Say you have 60 points allocated to armor in a 60/8 split and want to get to 28 on the rear armor.

It would something look like this when you started: Front 60/14 and Rear 8/14. You would get the "Limit reached" message at 22 and feel frustrated. At least until you realized that you can remove points from the front armor and allocate them to the rear.

Edited by Burnsidhe, 08 April 2013 - 06:55 PM.

[Koniving]

Just don't forget to have armor on the arms.

This poor guy stripped them. Now his arms have been stripped, too.

Edited by Koniving, 09 April 2013 - 08:27 AM.

[Elyam]

Torso rear armor is not limited, you can split the section total in any ratio you wish (i.e., if the section allows 64 points, you can put 50 front/14 rear, or 32 front/32 rear, or whatever combination you wish).

How much rear armor to use requires consideration of the mechs size, speed and role plus the notion that even the lightest and fastest mechs should be able to withstand a decent low-register hit (which is synonymous with a medium laser hit, a couple of SRMs, a single LRM-cluster, an AC/5, etc.). Now, this is the standard in tabletop. In MWO, due to the ability to fire multiple weapons simultaneously and impact the same point (the reason MWO decided to double all armor values to compensate), any armor numbers should be doubled as well, leading to even lights being able to withstand a rear hit from the very common paired medium lasers.

This means lights beginning with around 10 points of rear armor in CT and 8 points in rear LT/RT, slowly rising to 3x that on assaults (i.e., an Atlas with 30 rear CT.and 24 rear LT/RT). Individuals will alter this formula slightly but the general notion is sound as proven in all the years of TT and now with the double-values in MWO.

If the mech is slower, it will face rear fire more often unless assured of rear-cover escorts. If it has jump-jets, it will face rear fire less. But be wary on fast lights, for even though they tend to face less rear fire in general, they also use speed to retreat all the time, and thus end up taking rear fire at those moments. Of course, if the mech is a heat boat that always flirts with shutdown it will also take more rear fire. Consider everything you can and experiment with front/rear ratios as you see fit. But the formula above is tried and true.

[focuspark]

Armor distribution depends on play style. My COM-TDK I place the armor 2/3 front + 1/3 rear because I circle a lot in it and it gets hit in the rear a lot. On my CTF-3D I put 3/4 front + 1/4 rear because I stand and shoot people at range with it a lot, but also need to survive the annoying little mech stabbing me in the back.

[Stijnovic]

Just play a couple of games with a certain front/back armor ratio. See if you die more by back or by front shots. Then adept armor accordingly and try again until you die by front/back shots 50/50...

[Garth Erlam]

<ul>
<li>Ammo is placed in the legs for the following reasons:</li>
<li> </li>
<li>It is one of the few places you cannot put double heat sinks.</li>
<li>It is likely that, even if they DO destroy your leg, the ammo wont go critical.</li>
<li>Even if the ammo DOES go critical, you are probably dead anyway.</li>
<li>The legs have more armour than most other places, from a single angle (IE. your leg has more armour than your front side torso)</li>
<li>Would you rather your ammo go critical and destroy your leg, or your centre torso? How about your side torso, then head?</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p>In terms of ratios of armour from front to back, I tend to go like this:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Light Mechs: 2/2.5-1 front to back.</p>
<p>Medium Mechs: 2/2.5-1 front to back.</p>
<p>Heavy: 2.5-1 front to back.</p>
<p>Assault: 3-1 front to back.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The reasons for these are as follows: If you're in a medium or light, you're going to be almost guaranteed to take rear damage fighting another light/medium. What that means is if you have something like 8 rear armour and 20 health internals, a single alpha from a 6 ML cicada will remove the entire section. You want to avoid that. For Heavys and Assaults you're generally going toe-to-toe with other Heavy/Assaults, and that means you want more front armour, but enough rear armour so that that 6ML cicada can't one shot you from behind. Assaults are 3-1 (occasionally more front) as even with that ratio, you can survive 3+ alphas to the back anyawy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hope that helps!</p>