At first I was in the TT crowd. It is a balanced system, as a whole, for decades now. The balancing mechanic, heat, was based upon probabilities: hit chance and hit location. You had a, mostly, fixed probability to even hit the mech and then a weighted random hit location. When combined with heat, it made you consider turn to turn what to fire. It made you think several turns in the future. Should I take this shot now and gain a bit of heat? Or can I get into a better position and unload more for a better chance of hitting. Of course, you were hoping and praying to hit that low armor section, but you didn't have any control (except with a targeting computer).
In the translation to real-time, we lost probabilistic hit chance and randomized hit locations. If you're hitting more in the real-time game vs. TT, then mechs will die faster. But the far worse part is randomized hit locations. In TT, if you could concentrate all of your firepower into one location, you could seriously destroy mechs rapidly. Random hit locations, more so than heat, was the balancing factor for the power of weapons. Heat was a balance on how often they could fire. In the translation to real-time, our chance to hit increased while we completely removed randomized hit locations. To compound, we also reduced the game time to 4 seconds from 10 seconds.
To combat the absolute carnage that would inflict, we saw some spreading. All missiles spread (to some degree). SSRM are now as close to TT as you get, in actuality (damage aside). Lasers spread their damage throughout a duration. Armor was doubled. Different ways to balance the systems. And for the most part, they worked. However, the pin point weapons, your AC/Gauss/PPC, have no balancing effect. They still can converge upon what ever they hit. What makes this doubly bad is they are very high damage weapons, for the most part. Their balance was completely around the randomized hit location chart, not heat. We've made it so not only can the pilot choose where to hit, but have all high damage shots fired at once hit the same location. Armor was doubled, but you could fire 3-6 high damage weapons to the same location. Survivability is measured in 1-3 turns against a mech like that, not in 4-6. Everything received some balancing randomized or spread to their damage capability except those that needed it the most, the high damage single-shot weapons.
Now we can talk about heat and find that we can fire some of those high heat, high damage weapons considerably more than in TT. You can repeatedly fire those high heat, high damage weapons and place all of your damage into one location. On large mechs, you're almost guaranteed to get the same location over and over again (unless at severe range). On light mechs, you're all or nothing.
Solving heat is only half of the problem, IMO. Heat balances rate of fire, but says nothing about fire concentration. The wonky heat-boat penalty attempted to help fix fire concentration through a rate of fire mechanism. You still see your AC/40 jagers ignoring it. 2PPC/Gauss setups are running fine at 35 point converged damage every 4 seconds. And they could still put out more to the same location if they got in close and used lasers...
No, TT is not the final answer. They work if you had a probabilistic hit chance and hit location. It would definitely help curb some of the rate of fire problems, for sure, but there is still a deeper problem in play. Victor, that system you outlined for 2 ERPPC neutrality would not solve the 2 ERPPC/Gauss setups. That would make them even more gods than they already think they are. It is 35 points of damage, usually to one location, every 4 seconds. Then make them heat neutral... I shudder (it might very well be possible on some of the heavier mechs).
If you've read this far you may think I'm advocating for randomized damage. I am not. I am advocating for a balancing system that reduces the max potential of multiple weapons hitting the same location. We can't increase armor and internals without effectively neutering spread, low damage weapons. We can play wonky heat penalties, but that just breaks suspension of disbelief and is hard to understand. We can spread their damage around the area they hit, but that would likely be abused as well and doesn't make sense for items such as Ballistics.
My own theory would be a different type of weapons balancing. Heat for ROF, capacitance for instantaneous damage. Want to fire your 2xPPC and Gauss? You only have enough power in the capacitors to fire the 2x PPC. If you fire all, you could not get full power to the other, reducing the damage it did. This works for all weapons from low to high. Make short range, high damage weapons require less capacitance than long range, high damage weapons. The more damage you want to deal per shot, the closer you have to get. It works with ballistics as you have to power the recoil compensators and gyros. The system locks out certain weapons in a fire group because it can't handle the recoil. Missiles need some thinking about, but I think they're in a pretty good place as they are TBH.
Capacitance could then be scaled per mech/variant. The Awesome has a higher capacitance, but also has a significantly larger profile.
Want to fire all of your weapons? You can. Disengage the safeties and alpha away. Each shot damages yourself or your weapons. Maybe it damages your weapon (such as slower reload, less velocity, less damage, off center aim). Maybe it does internals damage (more than the current shutdown system does). Maybe it does that and applies additional heat (those relays overheated with that much power draw). Maybe it disables those weapons for 10 seconds. Hell, do something, anything.
Edited by FatBabyThompkins, 10 August 2013 - 06:20 AM.
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hashinshin, on 10 August 2013 - 02:32 AM, said:
