The rate of fire is fine for a game with group fire.
Problems.
1) It's questionable group fire is actually "accurate" to Battletech. It should be noted that weapons in the table top are all fired in a 10 second turn, and when you fire them, you roll for to-hit and for the hit location individually. That suggests that you actually don't fire them all at once (and certainly not with any form of convergence). If you deliberately aim for certain locations, it's a lot harder to hit. (That doesn't have to mean we must ditch convergence and replace it with RNG, but it means we must rethink a lot of stats that we imported from Battletech.)
2) The rate of fire is reasonable for group fire, however, because waitinf ro 10 seconds to fire 2-10 weapons would be pretty boring, and it would put alpha strikes even more to the forefront
The bigger problem is that for some reason ignored that the original stats where based on a 10 second turn. An AC/20 did never deal more than 20 damage in 10 seconds. You couldn't decide to fire it twice for twice the damage and twice the heat. (Optional rules- with high jamming chances - where added in some supplement, but that happened when regular ACs were already obsolete by Battletechs terrible power creep). If you could have, their attempts to balance the game would have been completely fruitless. One fundamental aspect of energy vs ballistic balance was that that all weapons were assumed to equip heat sinks to compensate the heat the weapons produced. (AC10 - 10 damage in 10 seconds, 3 heat requires 3 heat sinks, 2 tons ammo: 17 tons. PPC: 10 damage in 10 seconds, 10 heat requires 10 heat sinks, 17 tons.) So the effective weight of weapon was basically weapon weight + heat. If you suddenly double the fire rate of a weapon, you double only the heat part of each weapon. At one point in the Closed Beta, you would have needed 30 standard heat sinks to compensate the heat of one PPC, but only about 9 for the AC/10... (That didn't make the AC/10 a particular good weapon. The Gauss Rifle was even more impressive. It was orginally balanced to compete with Double Heat Sink using energy weapons, and only required 1 heat sink. Dobuling its rate of fire made it twice as powerful at basically no cost.)
3) But it gets even more complicated!
One of the reasons why it was half-way reasonable to assume that weapons would get the heat sinks the heat required was the Battletech heat scale. You didn't just shoot and shoot and shoot until you got to a heat value of 30. Just being 4 or 5 heat sinks should would mean you would stack penalties really fast and your mech would be quickly useless, even though not shutdown.
PGI gives us a heat thresold of 30 + heat sinks (30 + 2 x engine double heat sinks + 1.4 double heat sinks). The logic behind it was probably: If they don't raise the threshold, then a mech like the AWS-8Q would overheat if it fired all 3 weapons at once. We call this an alpha strike. The table top alpha strike however does not actually require all weapons to be fired simulatenously in the same split second - they could be fired at any point in the 10 second turn. Which would give "real time" heat sinks to partially dissipate the heat that where incurred so far and allow a mech to lower its heat level far enough between PPC shots so he'd never overheat. But well, PGI went with the 30 + sinks model.
But this allows doing stuff that would be impossible normally. For example - 6 PPCs with 15 DHS? That would instantly overheat a mech in the table top. In MW:O (even if the PPC was at 10 heat per shot), this mech could deliver two full salvoes. Yes, the second would lead to a shutdown, but it's still 120 damage in about 4 seconds.
4) And then there's convergence.
The aformentioned 120 damage strikes sound like 60 damage strikes if you consider that PGI did double armor values. but in the table top, this would have been 6 hit location rolls for 10 damage each. That more than 3 or 4 would hit the same spot is extremely unlikely.
(Ironically, as far as I know, the doubling of armor was actually PGI's response to dealing with convergence and mouse aiming. Imagine a game where a single AC/20 hit could probably leg any light... I don't think we'd have all that much fun in this...)
5)
Before the introduction of double heat sinks, PPCs were pretty much useless. Double Heat SInks came, and a heat nerf came. THe PPCs were a bit more practical, but there was still no Host State Rewinds, and powerful short range missiles - your "sniper precision shots" could easily be misses because you didn't see what the server saw.
But when all the pieces came together (DHS, HSR, srm nerfs...), the PPC looked suddenly more attractive. Finally your chance to actually hit targets through lag was good. You finally could use the Double Heat SInk inflated heat capacity of your mech to deliver a large volume of damage in a very short time. Sure, it takes forever to cool off, but if your enemy is dead, you have the time, and if he isn't, at least the PPCs have the range to let you get into cover and hope that the enemy doesn't just follow you there...
Note: Table Top stats are hardly perfectly balanced, even if we ignore power creep like Level 2 Tech and Clan Tech. BUt it's important to understand some of the basics if you want to make sense of why the stats where as they were, and how much PGI's choices worked against its balancing mechanism in ways that did
not improve the balance.
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If this game wouldn't have group fire, and required us to shoot weapons seperately, I'd expect that lower rates of fire would be quite okay. Trying to maintain 4 AC/2s or 2 UAC/s firing constantly on a target is already hard now. Imagine you had to do it with 3 different weapon systems that all need different lead times. And you ideally sitll want to torso twist to avoid shots.
With group fire, we'll probably need something else to force more chain-fire. A lower heat capacity (raising the heat dissipation however to compensate and focus the game more in direction of sustained damage / DPS) could do a lot, but it won't address the low heat weapon that much. For that, we might want to look at solutions like Homeless Bill has them.
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I am not quite sure how I would handle the TT conversion. As a naive start, I'd probably based things on DPS and HPS figures based on TT stats (so if I want an AC/20 to fire every 4 seconds, I would try to ensure it still delivers 20 damage in 10 seconds), and assuming I can't find a way around convergence (it's really difficult to get rid of tis without making the game too difficult to play and/or the UI to difficult to design), I'd probably put in some limitations on group fire, and might set recycle rates so that even if you boat the most optimum weapon combo, you can't deal too much damage in one shot.
I'd probably also ditch the TT armor values mostly. The (max) armor distribution per location is balanced on the hit location table the game used. The moment you don't have that hit location table (be it due to mouse aiming and convergence, or because of Clan Warriors with Pulse Lasers and Targeting Computers), you break them. Maybe a simple approach would be to take the max armor values from the TT, and say you can put no more than 1/4 of those points on any single location, but you can otherwise do whatever you want. Let the players figure out what the best armour distribution is for survival.
Edited by MustrumRidcully, 21 June 2013 - 02:36 PM.
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Mercules, on 21 June 2013 - 11:39 AM, said:
