198 replies to this topic

[Pht]

Joseph Mallan, on 14 August 2013 - 05:16 PM, said:

Solaris was republished but with rules aligned with normal TT. 30M haxes.

Under what name? Got link, perhaps? Haven't seen it amongst the publications since the new core rules started rolling out. Be rather interested to see this ...

[Dimento Graven]

Joseph Mallan, on 14 August 2013 - 05:16 PM, said:

Solaris was republished but with rules aligned with normal TT. 30M haxes.

I was about to acquiesce to the point on extended ranges, then I realized that the new rule sets in Tactical Operations: The Advanced Planetary Conquest Rules, book appear cover a technological time frame in the future from where MWO is taking place, therefore, it looks like the applicable rule set is the one I referenced, as the weapons we have "now" in 3050 don't have range they will "then" (appears to be beyond 3075, from what I've skimmed).

I mean, there's a LOT of lore that would need to be revised if we let these rules supersede all others (like it dictates in this reference).

That's my thought anyway...

[Taemien]

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 12:39 AM, said:

Explain why every modern FPS and 3PS game in existence has cones of fire then...

Apples and Oranges.

This isn't a first or third person shooter. This is MechWarrior.

[Pht]

Dimento Graven, on 14 August 2013 - 05:27 PM, said:

I was about to acquiesce to the point on extended ranges, then I realized that the new rule sets in Tactical Operations: The Advanced Planetary Conquest Rules, book appear cover a technological time frame in the future from where MWO is taking place, therefore, it looks like the applicable rule set is the one I referenced, as the weapons we have "now" in 3050 don't have range they will "then" (appears to be beyond 3075, from what I've skimmed).

I mean, there's a LOT of lore that would need to be revised if we let these rules supersede all others (like it dictates in this reference).

That's my thought anyway...

The new core rules are not "for" any given timeset in the universe. They're for the whole timeframe. Any era-specific stuff is listed under any given rule or equipment.

Yes, they superscede all the earlier stuff, as far as being "official" - and there's honestly not really that much changed. Besides a new BV system, the targeting computer change, a change to how partial cover works, and a tweak to vehicle armor rules to stop the "flying spear" tanks, it's pretty much 100% the same. None of the basic stuff has been changed at all.

I don't see what you think would need to be revised...?

[One Medic Army]

Taemien, on 14 August 2013 - 05:30 PM, said:

Apples and Oranges.

This isn't a first or third person shooter. This is MechWarrior.

If you cannot see the similarities in both interface and gameplay, then you are beyond help.

[Pht]

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 05:33 PM, said:

If you cannot see the similarities in both interface and gameplay, then you are beyond help.

He's not talking about how MW games HAVE been made ... he's talking about how they SHOULD be made.

"Mech" - This is shorthand for "BattleMech," an upright walking armed and armored combat unit from the fictional BattleTech setting ("BTU").

"Warrior" A person that "makes war" by doing combat.

So, "MechWarrior" means someone that uses a BattleMech to do combat.


What does this definition require?

A "warrior" - that would be us at our computers, "doing" fictional combat - meaning that the computer DOESN'T do any of the stuff the 'Mech's pilots do that we can do with our computer peripherals (control the aim point, etc).

A "BattleMech" that operates in this fictional combat as the BTU says it does.

The pinpoint damage setup is NOT how the 'mechs in the lore behave, and it WOULD be more fun if the 'mech part actually existed in this game.

Edited by Pht, 14 August 2013 - 05:40 PM.

[Ralgas]

Random cof's are bad, everyone's pretty well agreed on that, but everyone is still overlooking the bugbears that have been created post the removal of convergence, the assault mechs with 3e in 1 location.

Add convergence and battlemasters become our new overlords, closey followed by highlanders (i think there was a victor with 3e on an arm 2?) The systems suggested by design either have to be bad (random) or unbalance the game in other ways. I'm loathe to suggest further hardpoint restriction (i quite like being able to go to sarna and loadup several alt variants/chassis loadouts in mech ihave that this would make impossible) but that combined with crossing several mechs off the possibles list may be the only way to do it.

My own concept of using lowered projectile speeds, a slightly lowered heat cap and a expanded/streamlined alpha penalty heat system just doesn't seem popular

[Joseph Mallan]

Taemien, on 14 August 2013 - 05:30 PM, said:

Apples and Oranges.

This isn't a first or third person shooter. This is MechWarrior.

I'm sorry? This is a FPS, You are walking around in the seat of a giant robot, (1st person perspective) Shooting other giant robots(shooter style game).

[Taemien]

One Medic Army, on 14 August 2013 - 05:33 PM, said:

If you cannot see the similarities in both interface and gameplay, then you are beyond help.

If you can't see the differences then you are just blind.

Lets compare Super Mario 64 to a third person (or even a 1st person if you do some crazy camera options) shooter because it has some similarities too.

[One Medic Army]

Taemien, on 14 August 2013 - 09:10 PM, said:

If you can't see the differences then you are just blind.

Functional differences:

• Momentum
  
• Turn rate
  
• Torso-twist
  
• A and D turn rather than strafe
  
• More hit locations
  
• More weapons fired at one time
  
• Weapons fired from multiple locations (not that it makes any difference currently)

That's about it. Functionally this is closer to a FPS than it is to a sim.

Edited by One Medic Army, 14 August 2013 - 09:42 PM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Pht, on 14 August 2013 - 05:18 PM, said:

Under what name? Got link, perhaps? Haven't seen it amongst the publications since the new core rules started rolling out. Be rather interested to see this ...

It was included in the Solaris 7 Map pack

[Brilig]

Ralgas, on 14 August 2013 - 06:18 PM, said:

Random cof's are bad, everyone's pretty well agreed on that, but everyone is still overlooking the bugbears that have been created post the removal of convergence, the assault mechs with 3e in 1 location.

This is a bugbear that should be relatively easy to fix.

I agree there will be a few mechs that can with some extra effort get around a convergence fix.

Just to make sure I'm on this same page I think this is what you are talking about.

Take the 3 energy in side torso mech like the Highlander, or Battlemaster. (There are others) Fired with no convergence those weapons will shoot straight out from where they are mounted. So someone could put dots on their monitor to represent where those weapons will hit when fired without convergence. So it would be possible to aim with dots drawn on the monitor, and the weapons are mounted close enough together that all 3 might hit the same part of an enemy mech.

There are a couple of ways to address that. One would be with modeling, or art assets. PPCs in the side torso of a highlander fire out of tiny little Mlaser looking mounts that are tightly packed together. Do a modeling/art pass on them, and make a PPC loaded in their side torso use the same PPC mount an Awesome has. That could spread the shots far enough from each other that they cant all hit the same section on the target mech.

If that doesn't then as you suggested, its time for a hard-point system that wont allow more than 2 Large weapons in the same section. Large weapons being anything that does 10 or more damage. Not my favorite idea either, but its better than not addressing it.

[MustrumRidcully]

Donnie Silveray, on 14 August 2013 - 04:10 PM, said:

Then how do you address mech builds that don't rely on 60 point precise alpha strikes or PPCs? Should they be punished for the actions of the few? How do you address players who are reasonable in builds without relying on exploiting the game?

They aren't punished, because they only lose something they, as you stated, didn't use in the first place.

If you run a 2 SRM6, 2 ML, 1 PPC mech or something like that, then you don't benefit from pinpoint precision from alpha strike or group fire and conergence.

So if we add cone of fire with a cone depending on the number of guns firing - you do just as well as before, since you weren't all that precise to begin with if you wer firing all your guns together, so nothing really changes, and if you chain-fired, well, you're cone is smaller, so you lose a lot less then the guy that was used to his Death Star PPC firing with pinpoint precision with the single click of a button.

If we remove group-fire and enforce chain-fire, you don't lose anything either, because if you had group-fired with your heterogenous loadout, many of your weapons would have missed, so you probably didn't do it it begin with.


Currently, it's anyone with a mixed weapon loadout that's punished, because he can't get the precision a boat can get, and where he deals 35 damage spread over 2 or 3 hit locations, his boated enemy deals 35 damage to one location, and cripples or destroys him much faster.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 14 August 2013 - 10:36 PM.

[MustrumRidcully]

Wired, on 14 August 2013 - 05:01 PM, said:

Well, it seemed to work well enough in those games. Then again, the levels were never big open fields, and despite the popularity of gauss weapons and ppcs in this environment the prefered build in mw2 for competitive play was mplas and lrms. Then again we had horrible netcode to deal with, so that might of been the balancing factor there.

As I understand it:

MW3 did have hitscan lasers and convergence. Alpha Boating was the best tactic. Additional complication was that it had severe lag issues when played over the internet, so unless you were in a LAN with friends, lag would make ballistics (that did have a travel time) useless.
MW3 was also gunbagwarrior - no hard point limitations, your chassis basically only decided your looks and your weight.

MW4 did have hitscan lasers and convergence, but medium lasers had been severely nerfed compared to MW3 (as a reaction to ML laser boating) - which lead to it being replaced by the Large Laser. But PPC and Gauss boats were also not uncommon.
MW4 had a restrictive hard point system... Which didn't seem to stop boating, because they still tried to make canonical setups possible, and some of them are boats, and some of them ar enot that far removed from being boats.


So the problems were in large parts the same.
Lag screwing up weapon use, lots of boating.

The difference wa sof ocurse they were not dedicated multiplayer game. But basically, we currently have Mechwarrior IV without the single player campaign, better graphics and about as much multiplayer gameplay options, and about as well balanced. I'd expect a game that is PvP only to be better on the last two parts, really.

[MrZakalwe]

Pht, on 14 August 2013 - 03:46 PM, said:

There's something different than the cone-of-fire concept.

Something that would only take simple addition and a 2-12 range math equations, without removing player skill as the deciding factor.

http://mwomercs.com/...different-idea/




This is not a problem for the fixes for the pinpoint damage mechanic.



I suspect from your post you don't even understand the TT combat mechanic at all. I'll even go so far as to bet that you think that any math-mechanic that uses the word "dice" or "random" (meaning a hit-percentage) must, because it uses these things, remove human skill as the deciding factor... which is totally irrational, and in this particular case, ignorant and wrong.

The "every -direct weapon fired at the same time of the same velocity hitting the exact same point under the reticule" combat mechanic is a problem, because the developers used this mechanic with the TT damage and armor numbers to start, which IS NOT balanced for that much damage to one location - so they doulbed the armor and internal structure numbers, which messed up weapons balance, which lead to rate of fire tweaks, which lead to more tweaks, which lead to more tweaks ... and will continue to do so for as long as they support the game.

IT IS a problem.

NM that it defies the very name of the game and the lore and locks everyone into ONE mechanic (apply as much damage to a single section as quickly as possible without exposing yourself) AND makes the game LESS fun and rewarding than it could be.

My God I read the whole post you linked to and you basically want to play Mechwarrior Tactics from cockpit view and only control one mech.

You want dice rolls to determine everything more or less.

This is worse than cone of fire, many times worse.

[Ralgas]

MrZakalwe, on 15 August 2013 - 12:21 AM, said:

My God I read the whole post you linked to and you basically want to play Mechwarrior Tactics from cockpit view and only control one mech.

You want dice rolls to determine everything more or less.

This is worse than cone of fire, many times worse.

As i keep saying, it's actually Knights of the old republic (the rpg, not the mmo!) with mechs. Which is about the only real way to satisfy a TT convergence nut in 1st/3rd person without using systems that are far too easy to compromise by hackers or run into other issues.

All those saying "pgi can't" are forgetting it's due to hsr-> due to server authoritative hit reg-> one of the better forms of hacker protection. They could throw it back to the clients with the server simply handing out matchmaking and damage but we'd be actuator deep in aimbots before you could say convergence.

That said when keeping track of 6-10 weapon aim points at once on 24 separate mechs, before you even touch movement and mech torso alignment.... you put it that way and you see why there could be issues with lag with true convergence introduced

Edited by Ralgas, 15 August 2013 - 12:45 AM.

[TexAce]

Corwin Vickers, on 14 August 2013 - 05:04 PM, said:

Why not just add craploads of bouncing from movement? I think these mechs move entirely too smoothly for multi ton walking robots.

Then it's not a luck issue but a skill issue on whether or not you're going to hit the location you are aiming at.

Of course if it's too hard to hit the lower skilled aimers will get peeved.

I disagree, people will even more tend to shoot alphas, because when they bounce around and see a moment when they are sure they will hit they will tend for the alpha, because risk will be higher to miss the next shoots if they choose to shoot one weapon after the another.

[MustrumRidcully]

I'd probably play a Knights of the Old Republic version of Battletech.

But I am also fine with playing a shooter version of Battletech. Give me mouse aim, convergence and all that sh*t, but balance your game.
I am confident it's possible.

[Ralgas]

MustrumRidcully, on 15 August 2013 - 02:10 AM, said:

I'd probably play a Knights of the Old Republic version of Battletech.

But I am also fine with playing a shooter version of Battletech. Give me mouse aim, convergence and all that sh*t, but balance your game.
I am confident it's possible.

I'm fairly confident it's possible too, but it is a LOT harder than most on these forums give credit for, which is then exacerbated by past design decisions and a team that hasn't attempted a title with this level of depth and volume of balance considerations before.

[MrZakalwe]

Ralgas, on 15 August 2013 - 02:24 AM, said:

I'm fairly confident it's possible too, but it is a LOT harder than most on these forums give credit for, which is then exacerbated by past design decisions and a team that hasn't attempted a title with this level of depth and volume of balance considerations before.

I actually don't think they are that far off the mark at the moment.

Super high pinpoint alphas are gone and they have said they have a solution for the Gauss/PPC issue then if it works that will be sorted to.

Improve the LB X and the AC 10, get SRMs and SSRMs up to scratch, stop punishing multiple large lasers so hard, make pulse lasers worth it and they are more or less there.