301 replies to this topic

[MustrumRidcully]

It seems to me that PGI or Paul are deliberately designing the heat system to avoid heat neutral mechs, as if they were some terrible boogey man that cannot be allowed to exist.

I think that is what has lead us to the terrible heat system with a high heat threshold but a low dissipation in the first system, which rewards alpha after alpha and makes it impossible to run heat efficient mechs.

PGI or Paul see heat neutral mech builds as a problematic thing to avoid.

But that is wrong.

Heat neutral mechs exist in the table top, and they are not overpowered there. Most mechs build up some heat, and there are simple reasons for that.

Heat neutrality is achieved by sacrificing firepower for heat sinks. If you build a "hot" mech, you can deliver more damage in a certain time frame then a heat neutral mech - after a certain time frame you overheat, and the heat neutral mech quickly catches up.

Your goal in building a mech is to deal enough damage to kill your enemy before you overheat. If you deal less than that, you die in shut down against a cooler build, but if you can deal enough damage, you would win against any cooler build (provided heat values and weight values were properly balanced), and only a mech that is even hotter has a chance to beat you.
You don't just fight your own mirror build, of course, so sometimes you have to deal with tougher targets than yourself (where you might need to be cooler if you don't want to overheat before the enemy is hurt) and weaker (where you want to be really fast in taking them down so they can't do too much harm and you can afford to overheat sooner.)


That is basically the straight "we brawl each other to death and no one leaves before all enemies are killed" situation.

A sniper can go even hotter - he doesn't have to deal deadly amounts of damage. He needs to deal lots of damage in a short period of time and then runs into cover to cool off. A cooler "counter sniper" that delivers less damage in this window of opportunity will lose a sniper duel and only has a chance if he actively plays against the sniper role (and forces his enemy to do the same, e.g. neither side being able to run into cover).
To counter a sniper, you are often better off with getting a brawler type mech to him so he can't run into cover and overheats constantly while the brawler delivers sustained DPS and beats the sniper.

Skirmishers/STrikers have a similar heat consideration as snipers - they can afford to get very hot quickly, because they won't stick around. They use superior speed to gain distance and move into cover. Being heat neutral would be wasteful.
For Skirmisher vs Skirmisher battles, things look a bit different - you won't easily run into cover if your enemy is similar fast, so in this scenario, a cooler skirmisher may prevail.


The current mechanics works relatively well for the sniper, because they don't need to worry about sustainability. But it's actually "too good" for the sniper, because something like the Quad PPC Stalker can deliver medium or less destroying alpha strikes before overheating, and can cripple heavy or assaults, too - and that is without considering the cooling pauses snipers can get.

This is just one subset of the PPC sniper meta. There are other aspects, like pinpoint precision, or lack of viable short range weapon options (the buff to SRMs helped here, not sure if sufficient or not.)

But the important message regarding the heat system: Don't fear heat neutral builds. The entire heat and weapon system is build around trade-offs. If you want more firepower, you will need to spend more weight on weapons and produce more heat. Weapons that don't produce much heat are heavier, in the end you ever make the decision between trading off between spending your weight on raw firepower, or spending it on sustainable firepower, and if you actually manage to balance the weapons correctly, there will never be a single, easy answer, even if it is possible to build heat neutral mechs.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 30 July 2013 - 01:56 AM.

[El Bandito]

Apparently Paul is deluded enough to believe that heat is the main culprit of the boring PPC meta we had, when it was the instant pin point convergence that is the core of the problem.

Edited by El Bandito, 30 July 2013 - 05:30 PM.

[Ralgas]

El Bandito, on 30 July 2013 - 01:59 AM, said:

Apparently Paul is deluded enough to believe that heat is the main culprit of the boring PPC meta we had, when it was the pin point convergence that is the core of the problem.

mind you watch the crying if erppc's went back to 15 heat. Heat neutral isn't a problem, but doing it with 30 dmg or so every press of "group 1" is. boating penalty can fix it, just their solution so far is........ convoluted. As for convergence, still say it raises as many balance problems as it fixes no matter how you cut it, but it would also help.

[Taxxian]

I think Paul is absolutely right here.

Balance is not optimal, but it is not so bad either.

Paul repied to the suggestion, he should drasticaly reduce the maximum of heat our Mechs can store, before they are negatively affected.

Problem is:
UAC5 Ilya... Gauss Jager... every balistic Mech is already nearly heat-neutral, but you would have to cut the weapons, currently installed in Quickdraws/Awesones/Stalkers , by half!

Is a Quickdraw much more powerful than an Ilya? Well after the suggested change, ballistics would be tremendously owerpowered...

The "Heat-Battery" is part of the game, reducing it would nerf all Laser-Mechs... and that is not what we want...or is it?

Quote

Apparently Paul is deluded enough to believe that heat is the main culprit of the boring PPC meta we had, when it was the pin point convergence that is the core of the problem.

Absolutely, calling the developers deluded and many other things I read in this forum, will motivate them to make a much better game... really an outstanding idea...

Edited by Taxxian, 30 July 2013 - 02:40 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Taxxian, on 30 July 2013 - 02:36 AM, said:

I think Paul is absolutely right here.

Balance is not optimal, but it is not so bad either.

Paul repied to the suggestion, he should drasticaly reduce the maximum of heat our Mechs can store, before they are negatively affected.

Problem is:
UAC5 Ilya... Gauss Jager... every balistic Mech is already nearly heat-neutral, but you would have to cut the weapons, currently installed in Quickdraws/Awesones/Stalkers , by half!

You really don't understand what increased heat dissipation does, do you?

Let's say you have a weapon that deals 10 heat every 5 seconds.
Currently, that means you need 20 standard heat sinks to completely negate this heat.
IF you double the dissipation, you only need 10 standard heat sinks to completely negate this heat.

Now take a mech that uses 3 PPCs, like the AWS-8Q. It comes standard with 28 heat sinks.

The AWS-8Q produces 8 heat every 4 seconds with the current stats, which it would need 20 heat sinks to compensate completely for. It only has 28, so obviously, it overheats fast, gaining 3.2 heat every second, overheating in 20 seconds with a heat cap of 58 (which it would right now have.)

Now imagine you double the dissipation.
The AWS-8Q needs only 10 sinks per PPC. That means it only gains 0.2 heat per second. WIth a fixed cap of 30, it would now take 150 seconds to overheat!

As you see, the mech is actively buffed with this system. No need to remove any weapons from it at all!
Now, you could get all excited and decide to add a 4th PPC (sacrificing 7 sinks for it).

Now the mech produces 1.9 heat per second and would overheat in 15 seconds, which is 1/10th of the previous endurance!

In the old system (or rather the current), this 2nd PPC would lower the time to overheat from 20 seconds to 8.6 seconds. Which is still a bit above 1/3rd of the previous endurance.

The new system reacts a lot more sensitive to changes in your heat output. You can build heat neutral mechs more readily, but skimping on your heat sinks also is punished more severely and notably. This means it is far more predictable of how much each point of heat produced by a weapon is actually worth in a mech build, which should make it a lot easier to finetune the balance of your game.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 30 July 2013 - 02:59 AM.

[Jungle Rhino]

Taxxian, on 30 July 2013 - 02:36 AM, said:

I think Paul is absolutely right here.

Balance is not optimal, but it is not so bad either.

Paul repied to the suggestion, he should drasticaly reduce the maximum of heat our Mechs can store, before they are negatively affected.

Problem is:
UAC5 Ilya... Gauss Jager... every balistic Mech is already nearly heat-neutral, but you would have to cut the weapons, currently installed in Quickdraws/Awesones/Stalkers , by half!

Is a Quickdraw much more powerful than an Ilya? Well after the suggested change, ballistics would be tremendously owerpowered...

The "Heat-Battery" is part of the game, reducing it would nerf all Laser-Mechs... and that is not what we want...or is it?



Absolutely, calling the developers deluded and many other things I read in this forum, will motivate them to make a much better game... really an outstanding idea...

Not in the slightest.

Increasing heat disappation will INCREASE DPS of energy builds - the UAC5 probably needs a nerf to DPS anyhow as it is so easy to macro your way around the jam mechanism. That is just another example of bad game design from PGI.

If you balance the cut to heat cap with the increase to heat disappation then any 'sensible' energy build will remain viable.

Also - the easiest way to increase heat dissapation would be by making doubles doubles. Cool ballistics mechs like the 3 UAC Illya that only run the 10 engine HS that are already doubles would be unaffected. But an AWS with 20 Doubles would see a big boost to their sustained DPS. Plus you remove the whole 1.4 doubles bollucks anyhow. That should have been the first clue they had it wrong all along.

Edited by Jungle Rhino, 30 July 2013 - 03:03 AM.

[Jungle Rhino]

MustrumRidcully, on 30 July 2013 - 02:58 AM, said:

You really don't understand what increased heat dissipation does, do you?

Let's say you have a weapon that deals 10 heat every 5 seconds.
Currently, that means you need 20 standard heat sinks to completely negate this heat.
IF you double the dissipation, you only need 10 standard heat sinks to completely negate this heat.

Now take a mech that uses 3 PPCs, like the AWS-8Q. It comes standard with 28 heat sinks.

The AWS-8Q produces 8 heat every 4 seconds with the current stats, which it would need 20 heat sinks to compensate completely for. It only has 28, so obviously, it overheats fast, gaining 3.2 heat every second, overheating in 20 seconds with a heat cap of 58 (which it would right now have.)

Now imagine you double the dissipation.
The AWS-8Q needs only 10 sinks per PPC. That means it only gains 0.2 heat per second. WIth a fixed cap of 30, it would now take 150 seconds to overheat!

As you see, the mech is actively buffed with this system. No need to remove any weapons from it at all!
Now, you could get all excited and decide to add a 4th PPC (sacrificing 7 sinks for it).

Now the mech produces 1.9 heat per second and would overheat in 15 seconds, which is 1/10th of the previous endurance!

In the old system (or rather the current), this 2nd PPC would lower the time to overheat from 20 seconds to 8.6 seconds. Which is still a bit above 1/3rd of the previous endurance.

The new system reacts a lot more sensitive to changes in your heat output. You can build heat neutral mechs more readily, but skimping on your heat sinks also is punished more severely and notably. This means it is far more predictable of how much each point of heat produced by a weapon is actually worth in a mech build, which should make it a lot easier to finetune the balance of your game.

Yeah what he said - wish there was a 'like x100' button.

It's so damn obvious what PGI should do but they don't even want to try which is what is depressing. They could completely remove all their convoluted heat mechanics with this one simple change.

[Taxxian]

Quote

You really don't understand what increased heat dissipation does, do you?

It seems I somehow ignored the dissipation part... sorry about that.

This may actually work. But it makes Lasers behave more like Ballistics... instead FireBig/WaitForCooling/FireBig it becomes FireSmall/FireSmall/FireSmal just like Autocannons, with much less Alpha than we have now.

I still think we should change the weapons themselves...

If a Laser is to powerful, just make its beam duration longer...
If a SRM is to strong, make it spread more...
In all the Battletech books I read so far, a PPC hit makes the whole enemy Mech glow and melt, why should it not spread the damage a little.

All Weapons should excel in some situations and suck in others... this is not the case now and thats what I don't like.

[Deadmeat313]

MustrumRidcully, on 30 July 2013 - 01:54 AM, said:

What Mustrum Ridcully said.

This is so true. The effect on PPC mechs would be to encourage the pilot to stagger fire to avoid heat spikes. Possibly this would give them a UAC5 feel, as the pilots now have to work out the most heat-efficient fire rate for their build. They would still be able to take wild shots as they don't have to worry about ammo.
Ballistic weapon users should be able to pretty much fire at will, but wild shots may waste ammo.

Further points:
1) A decent base heat dissipation would make standard heat sinks viable again, which would make a lot of the stock builds viable again!
2) DHS would become a choice not a necessity. In TT there are a great many designs where DHS would be wasted, because the standard weapon loadout does not significantly overheat the Mech. DHS should be important to heat-hog energy users, but not so much to ballistic / missile loadouts.


DM

[Tolkien]

Just to throw this idea in to the mix, the heat battery/heat cap is responsible for some of the high alpha problems, but also slightly justified (slightly...).

It's been pointed out before that mechs like the awesome (3PPC) on tabletop can fire an alpha strike without exploding or suffering heat penalties and that is apparently what the devs are trying to recreate. I can appreciate the goal, and while it creates high alpha problems that could be solved by switching to a 30 heat hard cap in this game, those problems will come right back with clan gauss rifles. You can get 3 of those on an assault mech and even with a heat cap of 3 it will be able to 45 point alpha all day.

At the same time the concept of having high cap and low dissipation has killed builds that have weapon groups - one of my favourites was the LH2-Lineholder:

55 tons, 80kph with a 300 standard engine, maxed standard armor, standard structure
4x medium lasers, 1 large laser, 2LRM5's
14 single heatsinks.

This mech could run and fire its long range grouping (Large laser + 2 LRM5's) or close in and run while firing the close grouping (4x medium lasers), and the 14 single heatsinks could handle each all day. Fire an extra weapon though and you were in trouble fast

In the current game meta you just fire everything until your heat gets high, then duck out for a few seconds

So in the latter sense I agree that lower cap, higher dissipation could be good.

[Tolkien]

Namais, on 30 July 2013 - 03:56 AM, said:

Open question - would there be value to differing heat ceilings between groups of mechs?

IMOHO that could be a 'quirk' that would really help some of the chassis that are disadvantaged by their visual design/weapon locations. Maybe the best would be a system with a 30 cap, higher dissipation, but quirks per variant that give a bonus to heat capacity.

The awesome, hunchback, commando are all examples of mechs that need some sort of help along these lines.

Edited by Tolkien, 30 July 2013 - 04:10 AM.

[FatBabyThompkins]

Tolkien, on 30 July 2013 - 03:46 AM, said:

It's been pointed out before that mechs like the awesome (3PPC) on tabletop can fire an alpha strike without exploding or suffering heat penalties and that is apparently what the devs are trying to recreate.

Alpha, as in firing all in one turn, correct, but pinpoint to one armor, no. Also, as the turn is abstracted to 10 seconds, it may be that the Awesome is firing 3 PPCs 3 seconds apart. Of course, in TT, it doesn't matter if they are all fired simultaneously or 3 seconds apart, it still equates to the same heat. In MWO, there is a significant difference from simultaneous fire, heat generation and damage convergence.

[MWHawke]

Why do you all even bother?

[zorak ramone]

Ralgas, on 30 July 2013 - 02:07 AM, said:

mind you watch the crying if erppc's went back to 15 heat. Heat neutral isn't a problem, but doing it with 30 dmg or so every press of "group 1" is. boating penalty can fix it, just their solution so far is........ convoluted. As for convergence, still say it raises as many balance problems as it fixes no matter how you cut it, but it would also help.

Yes, heat neutral 30 point alphas truly are killing the game right now. That's why we see 2xGR CTFs and JM6s dominating the meta, right?

[TexAce]

MWHawke, on 30 July 2013 - 04:22 AM, said:

Why do you all even bother?

Paul is that you?

[Ralgas]

zorak ramone, on 30 July 2013 - 04:34 AM, said:

Yes, heat neutral 30 point alphas truly are killing the game right now. That's why we see 2xGR CTFs and JM6s dominating the meta, right?

ok 35 point, 2 ppc and a gauss..... when they kill the current meta what did you think the new one was going to be? 0.o

give em convergence, it'll become lrms or run in and high alpha close enough the cof/spread doesn't matter, leave it pinpoint end up with what we have now, manage ppc's out you get twin gauss again. What's you're magic solution btw?

[Tolkien]

FatBabyThompkins, on 30 July 2013 - 04:16 AM, said:

Alpha, as in firing all in one turn, correct, but pinpoint to one armor, no. Also, as the turn is abstracted to 10 seconds, it may be that the Awesome is firing 3 PPCs 3 seconds apart. Of course, in TT, it doesn't matter if they are all fired simultaneously or 3 seconds apart, it still equates to the same heat. In MWO, there is a significant difference from simultaneous fire, heat generation and damage convergence.

Completely true - if the damage wasn't all going to one place, a 30 damage blast would be no problem.

In MPBT3025 they didn't double armour values but they did have a system where firing weapons simultaneously caused them to automatically spread (some say they just reduced the damage dealt, but I swear I remember damage spreading automatically). I know FPS purists hate the concept of their shots not going exactly where they visually land, but I truly think the game would be greatly improved by having multiple hits to a target automatically spread, with only the first shot every 0.5 or so seconds going where visually placed.

You would still need skill to put shots on target, and you would need self control to not just hammer the fire button if you actually want to target a component, but pinpoint damage would be much less of a problem and matches would probably last much longer.

[Royalewithcheese]

Ralgas, on 30 July 2013 - 04:42 AM, said:

manage ppc's out you get twin gauss again.

Not actually the worst thing that could happen to the game. You've got three dualguass chassis, (CTF variants might count as more, because they're more differentiated) each with strengths and weaknesses, and none of them Assaults.

Edited by Royalewithcheese, 30 July 2013 - 04:48 AM.

[Warge]

Taxxian, on 30 July 2013 - 02:36 AM, said:

Well after the suggested change, ballistics would be tremendously owerpowered...

That's why AC/10/20 should fire short bursts. As for Gauss - it's min fire range must be 100-120m to be real sniping weapon: good at distance but useless in brawl.

[Tolkien]

MWHawke, on 30 July 2013 - 04:22 AM, said:

Why do you all even bother?

Because this game is currently the only first person mech warrior game in development, and if it flops it will be a while before the property is picked up again.