172 replies to this topic

[OneEyed Jack]

Thomas Dziegielewski, on 25 August 2013 - 02:11 PM, said:

Feels like internal HP should be doubled instead. Then more gameplay would emerge from having modules disabled/destroyed when internals are crit.

Um... Internal Structure was doubled, except in the case of the head, where it was quintupled.

Goose, on 25 August 2013 - 02:20 PM, said:

What is the crit mechanic in here, anyways? It's not TT, that's for shure …

It's pretty much the same, except that internal components have hit points (most have 10) instead of dying to the first crit they take, and most/all of the built-in components (gyro, actuators, sensors, etc..) can't be hit (like FF and ES).

Crit Info

[stjobe]

Thomas Dziegielewski, on 25 August 2013 - 02:11 PM, said:

Feels like internal HP should be doubled instead. Then more gameplay would emerge from having modules disabled/destroyed when internals are crit.

Perhaps we'd get that, but the question is, is that a good thing? It isn't BattleTech, that's for sure, but then again, MWO has never been further from BattleTech than it is at the moment, so perhaps that's something you strive for (saddening as that is; I gave you good money when you promised to make a BattleTech game, I do not care for a generic Stompy Robot game with a BattleTech skin).

Just promise me you consider light 'mechs when/if you decide to (again) raise internal structure HP; it's hard work as it is to kill 'mechs with a light's weapon loadout. Targets having as much IS as they have armour would make it nigh-on impossible.

No, Thomas. If you feel TTK is too low, you're going to have to look elsewhere to increase it; my suggestion is you look at your perfect aim (a.k.a. instant convergence with no CoF). I strongly believe the solution lies that way, not in just doubling and quadrupling armour - that's the lazy way out, and it will destroy the balance between weight classes.

[Thorqemada]

Thomas Dziegielewski, on 25 August 2013 - 02:11 PM, said:

Feels like internal HP should be doubled instead. Then more gameplay would emerge from having modules disabled/destroyed when internals are crit.

Simply doubling hitpoints will make those Mechs with a high Armor/Internal hitpoints basevalue benefitting more from it compared to those Mechs with a low basevalue.
For example a Mech with 100 HP has 200 after doubling, a Mech of 50 HP has 100 after doubling - that means that the Mech with the lower base value gets half the benefit.

Its the fundamental flaw of percentage based systems!

Edited by Thorqemada, 25 August 2013 - 04:59 PM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Thomas Dziegielewski, on 25 August 2013 - 02:11 PM, said:

Feels like internal HP should be doubled instead. Then more gameplay would emerge from having modules disabled/destroyed when internals are crit.

Maybe. But the problem with the crit system is that it's so random. That's not good for a competitive game - where does skill enter the equation with crits? It all boils down to doing what you already do anyway - keep shooting your guns.

I think it would be better to look into armour distribution and make the choice of which mech component - which arm, which side torso, which leg - be more important. Currently it isn't because it's just more efficient in pretty much all cases to attempt to core a mech. I think that would already be enough complexity for the game, too.

Another drawback of raising internal armour - it's "free money". You don't need to spend armor points for it. I strongly suspect that it will lead to people be more willing to sacrife armor on arms or legs, since they have a strong internal armor buffer, and spend the weight gained on extra firepower. (And additional weapons also serve as a kind of crit buffer.)

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 26 August 2013 - 01:17 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Goose, on 25 August 2013 - 02:20 PM, said:

What is the crit mechanic in here, anyways? It's not TT, that's for shure …

There is an exhaustive guide here: http://mwomercs.com/...-a-brief-guide/

[Karl Streiger]

The advantage of more internal HP is that the critical hit system can show what it is made off.

However it is allready working on Assault Mechs - when not targeted by multiple high alpha exectioner squads - the Atlas internal systems tend to get critical before a section is destroyed.

That means it is allready working. But with pilots go directly for CT - it doesn't change anything but the ammount of fire power necessary to put an opponent down. (In CT there is hardly anything that may have an influence on the Mechs performance - currently)

No Sirs - you have to take a look at the armor distribution. You can leave internal HPs as they are but move some armor points arroud - an optimal approach is to make numbers of criticals and armor points directly proportional to the 3D modell.

Alternative but much more difficult - is to locate critical components - add a damage barrier rating to each component - and allow every hit to degrade the mech performance - while semi penetrating the armor. (each hit on the weapon housing - for example ballistic of an Hunchback - will decrese the abillitys of this weapon)

[Tombstoner]

MustrumRidcully, on 26 August 2013 - 01:19 AM, said:

There is an exhaustive guide here: http://mwomercs.com/...-a-brief-guide/

As i see it the interaction between size,speed and armor is heavily slanted in the favor of lights.
The game needs mech and location specific armor cofactors that buff armor. TT rules took this into account by simply not having a factor of size, but only used range and speed, pilot skill.

I posted this someplace before but a gunnery range is needed to ***** speed, size, armor interactions. The model will tell you what the armor cofactor needs to be to balance out evasion. As i see it lights should be 1, mediums 2, heavy 3 Assaults 4x
just to balance out how easy it is to hit an atlas. its armor is so week for its speed. with larger alphas on the horizon i see speed becoming more important.

The atlas is not a focal point for combat to revolve around. mostly because people just run ahead trying to get into the same firing positions game after game without trying something new. but if it was something that could stand in the open and soak damage that would kill me. game play evolves. a simple buff to internals makes killing lights so much harder and dosent add much to the crit aspect of game play.

The game plays too fast to see how crits affect game play. hey he's limping....1,2,3 seconds hes dead.

[Revorn]

Double the internals HP would also change the Balancing between Energy Weapons and Ammo Weapons.

[Suberoa Zinnerman]

Pht, on 25 August 2013 - 09:12 AM, said:

"spray damage all over"
No, it doesn't "spray all over" - if you aim for center of mass, it bell curves heavily to the center of mass. If you aim for, say, his knees or feet, you actually CAN'T hit his cockpit or upper body parts.
So much for that example (unless you want to more closely specify your factors, than I'll happily work them out).

I have no idea what you're claiming here, because unless things have changed in standard tabletop battletech in the past few years, you cannot selectively target what hit table you're going to use (punch vs kick vs normal) - it is entirely situational.
If you are firing at a mech standing in the open, your shots will spray all across the target. This is a simple fact of the way the hit chart works. You have a ~14% chance of hitting any one of the arms on a battlemech vs a ~19% chance of hitting the CT. While the CT is the most likely individual hit location to be struck, it is not substantially higher than any other location other than head - even an individual leg (the least likely to be hit) is still ~11%, or 22% in aggregate.

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<snip irrelevancies about to-hit chance>
Again, it doesn't spread all over. It bell curves under the reticule; in relation to the conditions of the shot. There is nothing "nonsensical" about it.

It spreads around the exact same amount. There are no rules - or didn't used to be, anyhow, I'm not up on all the optional rules - that you're more likely to hit a selected location up close, or that you're even allowed to aim for specifics parts at all barring certain circumstances (such as the use of a Clan targeting computer).

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Proven false by the above examples. The only weapons that lose accuracy at short range are those with minimum ranges, like vanilla PPCs which are unfocused at under 3 hexes, and a select few other weapons; all of which operate very WELL at long range.

You are conflating accuracy with precision. Accuracy is close your weapon is to where you aimed it; precision is how much it 'scatters' around.
A weapon that is highly accurate but imprecise will have a big pattern around/across the entire target; a weapon that is inaccurate but precise will have a tight pattern of hits off in some random-*** location. In Btech terms, the former will hit often but will wander all across the target (like all normal weapons in BTech) while the latter will miss a lot but will always hit a specific location if it does.
If you sample 100 weapon hits at 20 hex range and 100 weapon hits at 1 hex range, they will have the same probability of hitting a given hit location. Both use the same hit location chart. This means that weapons are far more precise at long range than they are at short.
To put this in context, the closest approximation of how Btech weapons work on the tabletop is the LBX - it fires shots in a cone which hit all across the target. But to get it to work like it does in tabletop, the cone of fire would have to adjust depending on how far away the enemy is.
Am I simply explaining this poorly?

The cone here is your scatter. d is your mech (and the shots scattering across it)
To have your shots scatter by the same amount up close - position delta - your cone - your (im)precision - would need to expand hugely. You could be up close to an Atlas where he's filling a good chunk of your view and you press your trigger and your guns would shoot in all sorts of random directions to hit his shoulder, his leg, his torso, his other leg . . . while if you shot at the same Atlas out at 500 meters where he's just a little blob your guns would all shoot in pretty much the exact same direction - even if they're hitting his shoulder, his leg, his torso and his other leg.
Explain to me how this is anything other than arbitrary and nonsensical from the perspective of a FPS game.

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Not true.
Reference the called-shot hit tables, which represent a mix of pilot gunnery skill and 'mech aiming capability; and the RPG (a time of war) gunnery skills.
Also reference the FACT that human(pilot) skill and choices determine which hit-location table is used - you can significantly narrow your field of fire.

I am using the core battletech rules without any optional/higher level rules. Now maybe there's some rules that let you nudge your rolled location up or down, but those aren't in the basic rules (Total War) which are what I've been looking at.

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What's demonstrably pure nonsense and arbitrary is the current aiming setup.
Think about what you've just posted - "you're actually aiming the guns by hand" - you're not actually physically aiming (aligning) the weapons.
THE MECH IS.

Thank you for missing the point entirely.
You're aiming a reticle that your guns are slaved to. You're not picking up dice and rolling them to see what happens. The dice are an abstraction. Pointing a reticle is not.

[Suberoa Zinnerman]

Thorqemada, on 25 August 2013 - 04:58 PM, said:

Simply doubling hitpoints will make those Mechs with a high Armor/Internal hitpoints basevalue benefitting more from it compared to those Mechs with a low basevalue.
For example a Mech with 100 HP has 200 after doubling, a Mech of 50 HP has 100 after doubling - that means that the Mech with the lower base value gets half the benefit.
Its the fundamental flaw of percentage based systems!

The small mech gets 'half' the benefit because it's not the absolute values that matter, but the relative values compared to each other. A percentage modifier applies to all machines equally, meaning that it comes out a wash. (Obviously in practice things like AC/20s no longer ripping up light mechs with single hits is an issue)

As an example, let's put an Atlas (arbitrarily assigned 100 points) and four Commandos (arbitrarily assigned 25 points each) on a balance. They are currently balanced with 100 points on each side.

Now, if we double them - adding 100 points to the Atlas and 25 to each Commando we have 200 vs 50 x 4. You remain balanced and relatively speaking, exactly where you were to start.

Now if you add, say, 25 points each, the Atlas has 125 points and the Commandos have 200. Uh oh! Unbalanced load!


Edit: As an aside, with regards to multiple weapons firing, most quality heavy naval guns (which were fitted in multi-gun turrets if we recall) generally had dispersion of less than 2% in range - which means that at a target 1000m away the shells would have a near-far scatter of a couple dozen meters on the outside. Now, keep in mind that this is where they land, and as they're arcing a lot of them are going to pass through the same general target area - ships (and battlemechs) aren't flat silhouettes on the dirt, but objects with physical volume.
Also, side-to-side dispersion was much smaller.

Edited by Suberoa Zinnerman, 26 August 2013 - 09:37 AM.

[Almond Brown]

Tombstoner, on 21 August 2013 - 06:35 AM, said:

Unbalanced in what way?

Well initially, the poster in question uses "survivability" and then assume only "armor" in his thought process. How about "internals"? Does internal structure not factor in?

If your going to "tell the Dev" how to do it, then at least produce your "formula" and make damn sure it is totally feasible when the coding begins.

[Mechteric]

I think they should make the Hardcore mode exactly that, 1pv only AND no double armor. It would be like the Call of Duty hardcore mode which was pretty fun back in the day before Call of Duty got boring sequels.

[Almond Brown]

Pht, on 25 August 2013 - 08:44 AM, said:

stuff

It's THE factor that allows for something besides insta-death "giant head" style gameplay.

A tad mellow dramatic don't you think? When was the last time you got head shotted or even 1 shotted 2 or 3 Matches in a row in the first or second volley to reach your Mech?

What will be required to have a true system where the machine factor is used and accepted by those playing the game would be Neuro linked Helmets. Until they become a reality, folks have to see and what they can target, is what they get to hit. The closer the ranges, the better the specific panel selection gets.

[Almond Brown]

Pht, on 25 August 2013 - 11:01 AM, said:

stuff

I believe this is so because we've had 24 years worth of (so called) mechwarrior gaming in which the battlemech's part of the aiming equation has been utterly left out.

And I believe that is why another company is making MWTactics. A BT game that uses the Core Rules of rolled and hit shots as the TT game represents.

It would be so very frustrating firing a weapon on a seen target and not be sure it would go where it was aimed. As to the 4 Rifles and moving targets thought above. Is the unit carrying those 4 Rifles called a BattleMech or just a bipedal humanoid?

[Almond Brown]

Pinselborste, on 25 August 2013 - 11:19 AM, said:

Problem is that PGI wants to use TT stats in a game that works totally different.

convergence worked fine in MWLL, but that was cause they didnt use TT stats and also had armor Distribution changed depending on how big a Location was, rear Torso was also only one Location and things like the launchers on the madcat where seperate hitboxes.

TT stats where made to work with dice rolls and turn based combat, not with People aiming themselves in a realtime game.But since PGI cant accept that we will just get more stuff like the boating Penalty and soon weapon Charge up, while the way to solve it would be to rebalance all the armor, the way heat works and weapons based on the mechanics of mwo.

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But since many players cant accept that

once the base foundation is laid, there is no going back. I have read the analogy before and it seems apt. You cannot remove the 5th floor from a 12 story building. Well, in fact it could be done today but what would be the point? To reduce the building to 11 stories to save space. Well the cost to remove the floor would be more costly then paying the rent for the empty floor for 40 years.

What is boils down to is that, yes, some stuff is not to everyone's liking. They get that. It is sad really as a lot of work went into it using the Tools selected. Harping on it over, and over, and over, is not gonna change the code... The 5th floor remains. Rent on 6. LOL

[Tombstoner]

Almond Brown, on 26 August 2013 - 09:31 AM, said:

Well initially, the poster in question uses "survivability" and then assume only "armor" in his thought process. How about "internals"? Does internal structure not factor in?

If your going to "tell the Dev" how to do it, then at least produce your "formula" and make damn sure it is totally feasible when the coding begins.

Yes internals matter. but are a fixed amount that can be considered part of armor for determining survivability.

I outlined a process that produces the relationship between input factors speed. target size, armor protection in terms of mech survivability. location of hit, frequency of hits.

I use this http://www.jmp.com/. to model complex multidimensional behavior. Look up DOE.
i can't use it to build a model for this game since i dont have real data from the gunnery range. that's key in seeing the differences between shooting a spider vs. an atlas. at multiple ranges with different weapons at different angles of attack.

Its totally feasible since its just a set of polynomial functions in a text file that define the relationship between input factors and survivability. in fact this should have been done once the decision to go skill based was made. part of the problem for this game is the existence of TT rules... they needed to be ported correctly or you get what we currently have.

The current build works, but its got major flaws that are exasperated by decisions like double armor or internals. it effects lights disproportionately then assaults. MWO is a nightmare to balance. art will kill a mech on arrival. see awesome and kintaro

Edited by Tombstoner, 26 August 2013 - 10:34 AM.

[Tesunie]

I still feel that the route cause of the problem isn't doubled armor, but our super good convergence. I think convergence could use to be slowed down, making it so skill will play more of a factor, instead of "twitch" reflexes. And I'm not saying "random rolled locations", but just slowing down the rate that your weapons converge upon a target distance and point. This should help reduce the "6 PPC mega PPC weapon" we see now, where all PPCs shot on the mech all hit the same location. They can, but you have to have "skill to kill", or be able to hold your reticule over a target for (example) 0.5 seconds to have them all converge on the target location.

With a slower convergence (which might need to be tweaked as to how slow it works) probably would reduce the pinpoint damage, spreading some damage over the mech like how the designers intended to happen in TT. We might actually be able to remove the double armor buff entirely if convergence was reduced to a slow enough state.

If convergence was slowed down (making pin point a skill worth getting maybe), I would probably also add in a feature that, when your weapons are fully converged on a target, that it would turn gold to let you know.

However, I think a lot of people would rise up in out right rage if this system was implemented, as too many people would probably continue to snap their shots off, and complain that they can't hit the target that was under their reticule (for not even half a second). Though, to be honest, I would love to see something like this hit the test serves at some point as a "lets gather some data and see if it might even work" and not as a "we are soon to add this in, lets test it!" Test server should be to toss ideas around, letting people check out some quick changes before they are implemented to see if they are even worth pursuing and if people liked it or if it even had the desired effect on the game. (Basically, the test server should test things, even if they aren't intended to be added into the game.)

[Almond Brown]

Tombstoner, on 26 August 2013 - 10:33 AM, said:

Yes internals matter. but are a fixed amount that can be considered part of armor for determining survivability.

I outlined a process that produces the relationship between input factors speed. target size, armor protection in terms of mech survivability. location of hit, frequency of hits.

I use this http://www.jmp.com/. to model complex multidimensional behavior. Look up DOE.
i can't use it to build a model for this game since i dont have real data from the gunnery range. that's key in seeing the differences between shooting a spider vs. an atlas. at multiple ranges with different weapons at different angles of attack.

Its totally feasible since its just a set of polynomial functions in a text file that define the relationship between input factors and survivability. in fact this should have been done once the decision to go skill based was made. part of the problem for this game is the existence of TT rules... they needed to be ported correctly or you get what we currently have.

The current build works, but its got major flaws that are exasperated by decisions like double armor or internals. it effects lights disproportionately then assaults. MWO is a nightmare to balance. art will kill a mech on arrival. see awesome and kintaro

This all assumes that the Dev team didn't try a full set of different setups before deciding on the one in place. Actually, having read that the first "Friends and Family Beta" started with standard TT armor and pretty much default TT weapons values. Words was, it did not go well when certain criteria had to be met to meet a desired Game play style.

[ollo]

Thorqemada, on 25 August 2013 - 04:58 PM, said:

Simply doubling hitpoints will make those Mechs with a high Armor/Internal hitpoints basevalue benefitting more from it compared to those Mechs with a low basevalue.
For example a Mech with 100 HP has 200 after doubling, a Mech of 50 HP has 100 after doubling - that means that the Mech with the lower base value gets half the benefit.

Its the fundamental flaw of percentage based systems!

No, fhe fundamental flaw is that you all apparently didn't have math in school... or slept during the lessons... or forgot everything you learned there... i really don't know!

[Tesunie]

ollo, on 26 August 2013 - 01:36 PM, said:

No, fhe fundamental flaw is that you all apparently didn't have math in school... or slept during the lessons... or forgot everything you learned there... i really don't know!

I don't think THAT is the problem. Some of them are messing up their math, but others are seeing things from a different perspective. Refer to my graphs not to far back (ignore the +25 point graphs, I messed them up and I admit it. And ignore Commando, as I referred to the wrong numbers). They see it as the line graph (Look at that sharp angle the Atlas has over the Spider!), we see it as the bar graph (yup, evenly distributed across the board for an equal increase), or we see the even better pie graph (looks the same to me as far as difference between atlas and spider, no advantages). It's all a matter of perspective on this one.