475 replies to this topic

[Halfinax]

I would debate on whether or not Cavadus belittles TT players, but I see that we generally have similar views on customization(don't do it). What's more is no one is being straight up offensive. Glad a lot of these discussions are tending to stay fairly civil.

Edit: I'm not sure if they are going the MW4 route. The way the faq is answered on the subject is weird. They say the are going to allow custom paint, emblems, and equipment, but they seem to be differentiating equipment from weapons,armor, and heatsinks which they say to refer to the previous question and answer (the subject of which I can see no discernible association to).

Edited by halfinax, 08 November 2011 - 05:34 PM.

[gregsolidus]

I still can't grasp the exact problem with boating.Without coolant a laserboat must dedicate a good portion of its weight to heat sinks if it wants to fire at an effective rate,a missile boat needs copioud ammo and may be foiled due to changes made to ECM,and any other gimmick boat will come with its own set of exploitable short comings.

[Odin]

Nice post Amechwarrrior.
I'm concerned only about MP aspect.
I love to tinker with my mech like most others - but I build and field no boats,
I loath them. Customization, is cool - even if it is strictly speaking not widely in use in the Innersphere,
as you perfectly pointed out.

We need hard restrictions for certain weapons or all, to make sure our Battletech world is still recognizable as it
after the paying FPS crowd shows up here - they don't care!, we do and must see to it.
Im very confident Piranha finds a way through.

[Halfinax]

That's because they, overtime, become min/maxed to such an extent that if you aren't equipping one of the handful of winning designs you lose, and this is extremely unfair to new players, and creates nothing but one shot victories. They always end up to such an extreme that they one hit kill whatever the shoot at.

[Odin]

gregsolidus, on 08 November 2011 - 05:35 PM, said:

I still can't grasp the exact problem with boating.Without coolant a laserboat must dedicate a good portion of its weight to heat sinks if it wants to fire at an effective rate,a missile boat needs copioud ammo and may be foiled due to changes made to ECM,and any other gimmick boat will come with its own set of exploitable short comings.

You make it sound as if it isn't/wasn't working.
It did work very well in MW3/4!

[Kudzu]

I really don't see why the "TT haters" in this thread are bothering with this game. They don't want a Battletech simulator at all. Battletech is a dystopian future as seen from 80's cyberpunk mindset. Yes, there are plenty of high-tech things going on, but people have lost the knowledge of HOW it works-- it was best summed up in one of the mary-sue Stackpole books when a captured pirate says something along the lines of "Kid, the only thing I know about computer chips is that when one went bad on my mech I had to steal a whole board full of them from another mech to get it to work again". Interstellar communication isn't maintained by professionals, it's maintained by a religious sect who don't understand how their incredibly complex machines work, they just know that if they perform a ritual the message gets sent. Until the Star League memory core was discovered and distributed mankind was slowly crumbling into a dark age.


Points to cover from various posts:

Weapons not being as accurate as stuff we see today are a part of Battletech. Full stop. It's represented by dice rolls in the TT, it should be represented (albeit in a different way) in the simulator as well. The closer they can keep this game to the TT and still have it work for a computer game the more like Battletech it will be. None of us "fanboys" expect a direct translation, but the closer you come to it the better.

Customization could easily be handled by a proper BV ranking system. Want to have that ultimate laser boat that never overheats? Be prepared to be put up against an entire lance of stock mechs. Quantity has a quality all it's own.

Edited by Kudzu, 08 November 2011 - 05:53 PM.

[Amechwarrior]

gregsolidus, on 08 November 2011 - 05:35 PM, said:

I still can't grasp the exact problem with boating.Without coolant a laserboat must dedicate a good portion of its weight to heat sinks if it wants to fire at an effective rate,a missile boat needs copioud ammo and may be foiled due to changes made to ECM,and any other gimmick boat will come with its own set of exploitable short comings.

The problem is even without coolant flush, if they kill you in the one to two shots it takes then he is overheated and shutdown. You are dead. He wins. This is because he can accurately target specific portions on your 'mechs body repeatably, with every weapon fired at once, before any kind of recoil, or heat effects take place. That is why boating is a problem, because direct fire is too accurate.

[Odin]

Amechwarrior, on 08 November 2011 - 05:51 PM, said:

The problem is even without coolant flush, if they kill you in the one to two shots it takes then he is overheated and shutdown. You are dead. He wins. This is because he can accurately target specific portions on your 'mechs body repeatably, with every weapon fired at once, before any kind of recoil, or heat effects take place. That is why boating is a problem, because direct fire is too accurate.

This.

And there is probably no way to get this boat made inside the BT lore, cos no technician has the knowledge to do it
or parts are missing/very rare and expensive.

Edited by Odin, 08 November 2011 - 05:59 PM.

[gregsolidus]

Odin, on 08 November 2011 - 05:58 PM, said:

This.

And there is probably no way to get this boat made inside the BT lore, cos no technician has the knowledge to do it
or parts are missing/very rare and expensive.

Maybe in 3015.

Edited by gregsolidus, 08 November 2011 - 06:16 PM.

[gregsolidus]

Amechwarrior, on 08 November 2011 - 05:51 PM, said:

The problem is even without coolant flush, if they kill you in the one to two shots it takes then he is overheated and shutdown. You are dead. He wins. This is because he can accurately target specific portions on your 'mechs body repeatably, with every weapon fired at once, before any kind of recoil, or heat effects take place. That is why boating is a problem, because direct fire is too accurate.

Hmmm... that is an interesting problem,there has to be a way to out range them and when you take buildings into account you at least break their line of sight.I think boating could be possibly solved through some sort of in game mechanic where weapons of a similar type perform worse the more of them there are or simply a stricter limit of how many weapons you can mount.

Edited by gregsolidus, 08 November 2011 - 06:10 PM.

[Odin]

gregsolidus, on 08 November 2011 - 06:06 PM, said:

Hmmm... that is an interesting problem,there has to be a way to out range them.

and Urban maps?

[Glare]

Odin, on 08 November 2011 - 05:58 PM, said:

This.

And there is probably no way to get this boat made inside the BT lore, cos no technician has the knowledge to do it
or parts are missing/very rare and expensive.

Now that's just plain not true. The Jenner, a staple of even 3025 Kurita Light 'Mechs mounts four Medium Lasers in all of its Introductory tech configurations (the most common ones). The Komodo is literally nothing but a Medium Laser boat.

In truth, the Mad Max-esque "everything is falling apart and no-one can fix it" setting only ever existed in the first iteration of the rules way back in the 1980s. Back then, Hesperus II, a prime manufacturing world, was simply a world full of gigantic piles of spare parts, no new 'Mechs were being built or designed, and the only direction was backward. That changed very quickly. Factories pumped out 'Mechs, New 'Mech designs came into being, the most recent as of 3025 was the Hatchetman, designed all of ten years earlier. Advancement was happening, but at an anemic pace. Then the Helm Memory Core happened, pretty much the equivalent of jumpstarting a car. It was enough that technology lost for hundreds of years that took several hundred years longer to refine was rediscovered in a matter of decades.

tl;dr: it's perfectly viable, and even supported by canon.

EDIT: Quote added for clarity.

Edited by Glare, 08 November 2011 - 06:09 PM.

[gregsolidus]

Odin, on 08 November 2011 - 06:08 PM, said:

and Urban maps?

Easy,get behind them.With the limited visibility and movement it becomes a less one sided game of cat and mouse.

Edited by gregsolidus, 08 November 2011 - 06:16 PM.

[Halfinax]

But it is still one sided.

[fearfactory]

Mchawkeye, on 08 November 2011 - 02:49 AM, said:

Greetings.

it has come to my attention that many people keep saying things like 'on the TT...such and such is true and there fore that should be true here'. This seems to be especially true of many of the mechanical aspects of the games, like targeting.

It's a topic that seems to pervade a lot of the topics on the board.

While I understand that, it isn't how I see it.

I see the Mechwarrior games being a separate branch of the Battletech universe, based on the same canon and background as the TT and the RP, related to both but born of neither. Mechwarrior the computer game is not trying to be an incarnation of the TT.

They are simply different systems attempting to describe the same actions.

Mechwarrior is a simulation. The constraints it works too have a different solution to the dice rolling systems employed outside of the computer. As a computer game, the challenges are different, both from a piloting point of view and a game balance perspective. I think it's silly to hold one up against another as proof of something being right or wrong; what works in computer world may not work on the TT and vice versa, and shouldn't be expected to.

I just think people should bare that more in mind when putting forth their expectations of the game.

Or am I completely wrong?

Actually, you are right. A BattleTech simulation would end up looking like MegaMek... which already exists and I do enjoy it.

I really want this new MechWarrior game to pay attention to BattleTech. Although, I don't want it to be a full representation of the board game... I want it to do what MechWarrior games have been doing since they were made. Simulate. AND I want this game to do it better. They should attempt to accurately portray the fictional BattleMech and make you feel like you're operating a big humanoid war machine.

My biggest complaints are against MechWarrior 4. When you consider what the other games accomplished (MechWarrior 1, 2 and 3) it really is the worst of the series. 2, IMO, was the best. Not only did it make you feel like you were a MechWarrior piloting a Mech but it actually put you into the Clan side of the BattleTech universe. Everything about it was amazing when the game came out. Then came GBL and Mercs which, again, accomplished the same thing (MechWarrior 2 Mercenaries will always be the best MechWarrior game in my eyes). 3 was not as good but it did have that same simulator feeling as 2.

MechWarrior 4 did not accomplish much of anything. Yeah, it had decent content, and even had a sequel to Mercs, but the game itself butchered the whole simulator idea despite tying to advertise itself as one. It was a mech simulation but it did not simulate "BattleTech" as well as the previous installments. To me, 4 was the step before MechAssault, and what's funny is I actually prefer MechAssault to MechWarrior 4. 4 felt like it was another game that was quickly made into a MechWarrior game (think Super Mario Brothers 2). My biggest complaints about 4: 1 - If you don't pilot an Assault boat you basically lose. 2 - It's like the BattleTech cartoon was made into a game, and even then, the CGI models were better representations of BattleMechs in the cartoon.

There are a lot of suggestions being tossed up, some good some bad. But a few, like cone of fire and no mechlab, are some of the best suggestions that I hope are being considered. BattleMechs are not graceful, and even when they fire weapons, all of them do not center on one location. That's what the "targeting computer" (like the one installed on the Warhawk) is for and you pay a lot of tonnage for it. A cone of fire would actually make this game more "BattleTech" than the rest of the games. Anyone can point and click but this would add some more reliance on successful maneuvering rather than trying to one shot kill your opponent before he/she kills you via jump sniping. Also, as much as people love to say customs are canon and should be allowed, they never actually consider how most customizations happen OR the risk behind them. Most common customs are either field refits (look at TRO:3050 or some of the fluff in TRO:3025) or the result of poor repairs or lack of supplies. Really good customs are usually in the Solaris arenas or are put together for those at the top (like Khans or Royalty). If customizations happened on the fly and without concenquences BattleTech wouldn't have OmniMechs, and even then, there are stock OmniMech configurations.

But anyway... why would they call this game "MechWarrior" and compleatly ignore "BattleTech?" It's like hating your mother/father.

[gregsolidus]

halfinax, on 08 November 2011 - 06:16 PM, said:

But it is still one sided.

I never said it wouldn't.I think one of the secondary issues of boating was the ease of target acquisition due to part tarting and a lack of buildings,change these and boating may change as well

[gregsolidus]

fearfactory, on 08 November 2011 - 06:17 PM, said:

Also, as much as people love to say customs are canon and should be allowed, they never actually consider how most customizations happen OR the risk behind them. Most common customs are either field refits (look at TRO:3050 or some of the fluff in TRO:3025) or the result of poor repairs or lack of supplies. Really good customs are usually in the Solaris arenas or are put together for those at the top (like Khans or Royalty). If customizations happened on the fly and without concenquences BattleTech wouldn't have OmniMechs, and even then, there are stock OmniMech configurations.

The only problem with that is no one really cares what the fluff says.They would much rather have the system fixed than abandoned.

Edited by gregsolidus, 08 November 2011 - 06:24 PM.

[Amechwarrior]

Range and urban maps are not the problem or the solution. In an urban map, he can still put accurate fire all in one damage location, instantly just as easily at 10 meters as he can at 1000 meters. It could be ERLL, UAC/20s or small lasers. The problem is not that one weapon is unbalanced, it is that how we aim those weapons is not in line with how the TT rules work. The TT rules and fictional descriptions for damage, heat, range and everything else are all based on the fact that you simply cannot target the same zones over and over again.

You can change how armor, heat, range, damage, penetration, reload speed, ammo and everything else work to make it fun, but then you start to lose what makes the game Mechwarrior. A simulation of a battlemech in the Battletech universe. Or you could adjust how we aim and fire the weapons to be more in line with the TT rules and solve many problems at once. The big issue it does not solve is missile boats, but that is not the topic of this thread. I think a Mechwarrior game should resemble the TT within the constraints of fun and balance in a real time gaming situation.

[alaric]

I think a targeting system similar to borderlands would be a good fit for this game- namely your accuracy improves as you level up..
pinpoint accuracy plus linked weapons would equal instagib headshots or rampant legging and IMO be a huge turn off.

I am a More of a TT fan than a MW fan but I understand that some things will need to be changed (this game will not be turn based). I am also a MO fan and understand that character progression will need to be important. Progression means you get better so i would expect that starting players will have pretty mediocre accuracy.

[gregsolidus]

Would you mind if you aimed dead center but your laser veered to the bottom right?I understand what your getting at with a cone of fire but the thought of a round not going where I put it seems like a slightly heavy handed solution.