Viktor Drake, on 10 August 2013 - 12:42 AM, said:
You guys are right on the money. Everything I have looked at or throught about screams to me that a direct translation of TT rules in regards to weapons, damage, heat and heat sinks, is the ultimate solution. I mean that system worked in TT for 23 years so I don't understand why they have to reinvent the wheel for MWO. Sure a few tweeks here or there but not a complete overhaul.
I have already posted numerous times that a ER PPC can only fire once ever 4 seconds whether it is heat neutral or not. This figure doesn't change so a ER PPC can only do a maximum of 2.5 DPS. That issue isn't an issue. What is an issue is being able to fire 4-6 of these at once and that is where heat balancing comes in.
Here is a prime example of table top using a waste heat scale of 30. If I mount 15 DHS that gaves me 30 heat I can disapate without worrying about penalties or going into shutdown or exploding. If I mount up to two ER PPCs, I never have to worry about heat but I can never exceed 5.0 DPS. If I want to exceed 5 DPS, I can chose to mount additional weapons however if I mount additional weapons I can no longer remain heat neutral.
Lets say I mount an additional ER PPC. Now when I fire all 3, I end up with 15 waste heat which makes my mech slow down and perform sluggishly. However I managed 7.5 DPS briefly. If I fire all three again rapidly, well unfortunatly I will probably shutdown and may explode because I need more time to get rid of my waste heat. However I managed to sustain that 7.5 DPS through 2 volleys. Or I can cycle my shots firing 2 ER PPCs, waiting 2 seconds, fire the last one, wait 2 seconds, fire 2 ER PPCs again, wait 2 second...so on and so forth.
Now lets say I add in one more to make it 4 ER PPCs. Now if I fire all at once, I can achieve 10.0 DPS for one shot or double what I can achieve while being heat neutral. However I go into immediate shutdown and maybe exlpode.
With this sort of heat system, yeah I can fire 2 ER PPCs all day long without worrying about heat, but I am never going to exceed 5.0 DPS with just 15 DHS. This is not an issue because the recycle time is the balancing factor in this case. However if I got to 3 ER PPCs, I not have to really start paying attention to heat management and 4 ER PPCs is virtually unusable.
Simple, easy, elegant and exactly how the TT system works.
Additonally it is a noob firendly system. Want your mech to be heat neutral? Well just make sure your maxium weapons heat doesn't exceed the number or heat sinks you have equiped. Weapons do 26 heat, you need 26 single or 13 double heat sinks to keep they cool. Add more heat without adding heat sinks, then your mech will overheat and you have to pay careful attention to what you fire and when. Simple and easy to understand.
Now obviously there would need to be tweeks and I don't think everything could be exactly a 100% translation but the tweeks would only have small effect on the system and be easy to balance with just minor adjustments like a PPC taking 4.5 seconds to recycle rather than 4.0. The key would be keeping as close to TT values as possible though.
One of the fatal flaws in these arguments is that you can still do that in this game as well. Load up 2-3 lasers, and load up 3 heatsinks per laser.
Mechcommander did the same thing. You loaded a 4 weight laser on your mechs for "short range" because those were actually medium lasers. The extra 3 weight came from the game designers assuming heat neutral and adding on the heatsinks to dissipate the heat from your groups of mechs when they ran around the map and fired.
The also did the same thing with autocannons. Loading up an autocannon gave you X amount of ammo and X amount of heatsinks, and I calculated out that they actually took the timeto put in the proper weight of the ammo and the right number of heat sinks to remain heat neutral for the AC5s and AC20s and guass rifles.
all of this is, of course, behind the scenes and hidden within the regular "weight" of the individual weapons. Only someone who was actively comparing stats from the game to sarna.net stats, like I did, would discover this.
And the truth is, those mechs could only pack on 2 medium lasers and an AC if they were a medium, or 6 lasers, or 2 AC20s and a few lasers and LRMs if they were a heavy, and all of this if they were IS mechs, with assumed standard engines and basic gear, etc.
What do people say when they see a 2 medium laser 1 ac medium in this game? "LOL stock? What a terrible mech!". Even if it may not be stock.
You have the ability to be heat neutral in this game, and just as probably, the low heat dissipation of heat sinks and the badness of DHS encourages alpha strikes with mass weapons because there's such a large resivoir of heat to use up but very difficult to dissipate.
hashinshin, on 10 August 2013 - 02:32 AM, said:
In Mechwarrior (not Battletech, Battletech != Mechwarrior) heat has always been a crucial point of the game. When you think Mechwarrior you think overheating. As such, allowing widespread use of heat neutral mechs or heat neutral mechs to be strong at ALL would be removing a core gameplay concept.
Imagine playing call of duty without ammo. Or counterstrike, or battlefield, or which ever FPS is gonna make you the angriest.
I'll do you one better: Imagine if the players cried about being 3 shotted in CoD of counterstrike, so the devs decided to double or triple the HPs so it takes 10 shots to kill someone.
That's analogous to what they did for MWO, and I was here from the start when it went closed beta, telling them double armor is a bad idea and doesn't really help anything.
More hp simply encourages MORE blobbing because there's little possibility of quickly taking someone out when you're alone.
Would anyone enjoy counterstrike or CoD if they buffed HP to 10 shots required to kill someone? Do we regularly hear people crying about needing more HP?
They doubled armor, and then the doubled rate of fire, or even faster, so that "the game doesnt move slow".
They increased heat resivoir, and they decreased heat sink effectiveness, to combat alpha strikes, and then they added ghost heat, because they still wanted to combat boating, which makes "the game move slower".
It seems like they're building on some flawed concept from the start, and then deciding to add MORE onto those flawed concepts to try to "balance it out", instead of doing the logical course and admitting it was a mistake and reversing course. I see that a lot in ego driven game development. Cant admit a failure or misstep, we must make it work no matter how we break the game in making it seem like it works.
there's a host of other issues with the game as well. First one is how mechs actually TURN slower with smaller engines. in TT, mechs all turned the same rate, regardless of engine size, and as in MW2-3-4 as well. This makes sense. Not only is the battlemech "engine" not a torque engine as people would assume, in that it actually produce high voltage/current to make your mech actuate, it makes sense from a military doctrine standpoint as well, that you would require a minimum X amount of Voltage (or electromotive force/power/work) to do the functions of a battlemech that are most important; turning, aquiring targets, and aiming.
Speed takes a huge backseat to those far more important requirements, and it'd be not only logical but likely canonical as well that engine size isn't "put this engine in, turn slower", but "put this minimum size engine in to get turn/aquire functions, and increase engine size for more voltage/amp output to allow for increased foward and reverse velocities".
the engine speed relating to turning rate issue is one of the BIGGEST flaws in this game if they ever decided to put in the 32 kp/h annihilator. On the flipside of the coin, I've seen people using the awesome variant that can handle the 320 or bigger engine spin around on a dime, which is ridiculously overpowered, and only exacerbates the issue of speed, namely, you need even more to avoid assault mechs twinking with giant engines, when you're a tiny mech yourself, and you need even more to "keep up with the joneses" when in your own weight class.
It's speed creep.
[btw you can ask any Electrical Engineer if its possible to dynamically assign a strict amount of voltage to some parts and SHUNT any remaining voltage past that point into remaining electrical systems, they'd tell you it's easy as having transistors biased in switch mode.]
Edited by ThreeRun, 21 December 2013 - 02:51 PM.
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