Wolfways, on 11 September 2013 - 01:00 PM, said:
Just want to throw out this question to those who played/play BT TT. I only had a couple of games about 30 years ago so don't really remember much.
If they are balanced in TT why didn't PGI just decrease damage and heat when increasing fire rate by an equal amount? Then all weapons would be balanced, assuming they are balanced in TT.
So, are the weapons balanced?
Not perfectly so. There are caveats. But yes, in theory, that approach would have been logical
But on to the caveats:
1) Underpowered or Overpowered weapons
AC/2 and AC/5 can be considered underpowered.
Some would argue that the Medium Laser was too good, I am not entirely convinced.
This is something one could fix, obviously, and possibly easier than it could be done in TT
2) Tech Levels were not balanced against each other.
Level 2 Tech and Clan Tech are straight upgrades to Level 1 Tech.
Level 2 Tech was a bit special in that one could probably say that Level 1 energy weapons with Level 2 energy weapons were balanced if you had Level 2 heat sinks (Double Heat Sinks). An ER PPC has more range as a PPC, but also produce smore heat, so it basically paid for its advantage in heat.
But the ballistics couldn't benefit as much, and you needed special ammo types (which were introduced much later) or simply the new generation of ballistics (Gauss, LBX, Ultra AC).
This could also be fixed in MW:O. Either we decide we want tech to be an upgrade, or we decide it's a sidegrade. Both is possible, it just is a decision that must be conciously made and then be applied accordingly.
For example, Double Heat Sinks are a straight upgrade in the table top. Biggest contributor possibly. Egine heat sinks get magically better. That is basically a 10 ton upgrade just there. Ditch that benefit, and you might have already balanced DHS. Some mechs will want SHS, because they have the tonnage, not the crits, and others will want DHS, because they have the crits, but not the tonnage.
3)
PGI's heat system doesn't model the TT heat system, and that skews balance a lot.
In the table top, you tried to generally compensate most of the hea tyour mech would generate. Some mechs were even heat neutral, most were not, but generally, you tried to avoid producing much more than 4 or 5 extranous heat per turn. You did that because you suffered penalties, which made all the firepower you had less useful. Losing speed was bad, because you couldn't move into position and were easily outmaneuvered. To-Hit penalties are a direct nerf to your effective damage output.
This feature allowed to better balance weapons against each other, because you could simply assume that weapon weight + heat sink weight + reasonable ammo weight (enough for 10-20 turns probably) would determine the effective weight of a weapon added to a mech. If you didn't pay the full cost by skimping o nheat sinks, you'd suffer heat penalties basically immediately after your first salvo, so you made a choice between burs tand DPS, adn that choice pretty much always mattered.
That'S not how it is in M:WO. You could deal 120 with Quad PPCs before you overheated, and that's enough to cripple most mechs, and so the penalty for the high heat set in too late.
4)
Table Top uses a random hit location system. Yo ugenerally had no control as a player where on the enemy mech you hit. In M:WO, we have mouse aim and convergence, so we have a very good control over where we hit (not perfect, but definitely not mostly randomized).
That skews the armor distribution of Battletech mechs, which was designed to make sense with arandom hit location table.
But it also skews the value of high damage weapons. In Battletech, 4 Medium Lasers dealt 20 damage, and 1 AC/20 dealt 20 damage. But they weren't equal, because those 4 MLs would likely spread their damage across 3-4 hit locations, while the AC/20 would deal it all to one spot, which greatly increased the change of taking out a significant component or even the entire enemy mech with an AC/20. So high damage weapons were balanced with this advantage in mind - 4 MLs cost you effectively 16 tons (4 for the MLs, 12 for the heat sinks), while the AC/20 cost you about 24 tons (2 tons ammo, 14 tons weapon, 8 tons heat sinks) in a build.
Nothing of this is an unsourmountable hindrance. And some of these things would probably need to be changed if PGI really hopes to achieve balance. Convergence + Group Fire for example will always create a synergy between weapons that makes balancing hard. Their heat system will probably also never really allow balancing weapons on a per weapon basis. In fact, both these aspect work together to create a problem where you hav eto try to balance builds, rather than try to balance weapons, and that is completely incompatible with customizability, since PGI just can't balance the thousands of builds that the game enables. Balancing 26 weapons is doable.
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