Michavian, on 10 June 2012 - 11:51 AM, said:
[Cash]
It's my understanding that battlemechs are extremely modular by design; this means that components are designed to be removed and replaced as easy as possible. I assume this because of all of the customization options of the video games and the designs of the mech labs therein.
If these battlemechs are indeed modular by design, then there is no reason for a cost to be associated with modification of the loadout and components of the mech, so long as one uses their own mechlab or a clandestine mech lab. Think of MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, where one's mech lab was on their ship. If one was to use a public mechlab, then I would agree with you on there being some sort of fee to using the mech lab. However, I do not think the cost would need to be very high. I'd need to have a firmer understanding of the game's economy in order to say for certain what kind of costs should be associated with modifying your mech.
[Hardpoints]
I think that eliminating hardpoint size is a ridiculous concept, and so I agree with you on this point. I'd say the previous games had it right in this regard.
[Electronic Hardpoints]
Once again I agree with you on this. Having a hardpoint system for electronic suites would make some sense, although I wouldn't discount some mech's being specially designed with an un-modulated electronic suite.
[Hardware Limits]
I personally see no problem with completely changing the type of armour of a given mech, so long as it doesn't add up ridiculous amounts to the mass. For example, if a mech came fitted with a standard armor type, I don't see why it couldn't be refitted with similarly shaped Ferro armour. And because Ferro is lighter than standard armour, it wouldn't be too unreasonable to think that you could add a little more plating to certain parts of the mech.
Of course, as far as engines go, I agree that one should not be able to fit an absolutely humongous engine designed for assault mechs into a light mech chassis. There could be size classes applied to engines with the higher efficiency engines for a given size class becoming more and more expensive. This does not seem unreasonable.
[Technology]
This is something that completely lacks any sense to me. I don't understand why Clan weapons must be limited to Omni's nor why IS mechs must only be fitted with IS weapons. As far as I know, there shouldn't be too much incompatibility going around. Perhaps if you had a mech designed specifically for Clan weaponry, I could understand why it would not be compatible with IS tech (as I do believe there are size and weight differences that could be crucial), but for it to be the other way around doesn't make any sense, especially from an engineering standpoint. There should be no reason that Clan tech, or at least clan weaponry, cannot be fitted to an IS chassis.
As far as the whole Omnimech thing goes, I can't contribute anything, really. I think this is a mistake that MWO made in setting itself within a specific timeline that is chronicled in lore.
[Time Limits]
Again, with modular design, mech downtime would be negligible.
[Overview]
You make some really good points about a few aspects of the game. For your other opinions that I disagree with; they may be based in lore and you may have a valid reason for these things. Particularly with modularity; if this is not part of the Battletech lore then I have to say that I am very disappointed with the lack of practicality of it all. Modularity would be the single most important design feature of a battlemech of any kind, and would be among the first things I personally would have strived for.
I also believe that customization is an important aspect of any game. Now, if the lore specifically prohibited certain aspects of customization (such as the inability to change armor types, as ridiculous as that would be), that would be one thing. However, from the tone of your post, you seem to be aggressively against the concept of customization and that is just unfortunate. Freedom to customize is what makes the world go 'round. If the game is broken by it, that is the game's fault and it clearly needs to work on balance issues.
If the lore prohibits customization, though, then I think it's time for a new mech game that doesn't follow arbitrary rules based on nonsensical lore.
The setting of BattleTech was that the universe went to crap after hundreds of years of nonstop war that pretty much ended the ability to produce and maintain new 'Mechs and equipment. In this timeline of the game, the technology is just starting to be recovered in the last couple of decades. Technicians skilled enough and the facilities to customize 'Mechs are rare, and most customization is jury rigging at best.
From how I understand how the new hardpoint system works as I've interpreted it from the dev's posts is that it still uses the critical system from the boardgame (which was also used in MechWarrior 2 and 3) and combines it with something like the hardpoint system from MechWarrior 4; You can replace an energy system one for one as long as you have the critical spaces for it. Each 'Mech has 12 critical slots per location besides the head and legs, but some have equipment like actuators, engines, sensors, ect that take up fixed criticals.
Lets take some examples. Bill has an AS7-D Atlas and he wants to trade out his LRM-20 rack and ammo to make room for two PPC's. He can't put them in the left torso where the LRM rack came from because the LRM rack was a missile weapon, and only had one hardpoint, and he needs two to mount two weapons. His center torso has two medium lasers, so it has two energy weapon hardpoints.
However, a medium laser takes up one critical and a PPC takes up three critical slots, and the two medium lasers we take out to open up the laser hardpoints out now only freed up two critical slots, so we're four critical slots short of being able to mount the PPC's in the torso.
The Atlas also has medium lasers in each arms - by removing them, we've now opened up two energy weapon hard points. The arms also have a lot less required equipment than the center torso did, and has plenty of space for the PPC's three critical slots each. In the end, our loadout looks like this:
The hardpoint system combined with the limited critical slots maintains an ability to customize your 'Mech within reason, keeps within lore, and helps maintain a little bit of balance. Unless the chassis you are using was already a boat (like the HBK-4P Hunchback), it's going to be hard to turn 'Mechs into boats.
Now, OmniMechs, like other people have explained, are made from the ground up to be incredibly modular. Whereas customization of standard BattleMechs was a long, expensive process, OmniMechs are designed to be "plug and play", where the user can customize their 'Mech based on the mission. An OmniMech could be configured for fire support one day, then configured to do electronic warfare by swapping out weapon and equipment "pods". It will be interesting to see how the devs implement that if they introduce OmniMechs into MWO.
Edited by DocBach, 10 June 2012 - 12:23 PM.
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