32 replies to this topic

[Sable Dove]

So lasers get their listed effective range, with damage falloff up to twice this range. Ballistics get this dropoff up to triple their effective range.

This is not only unfair to energy weapons, but also goes against canon.

For the most part, effective ranges are consistent.
Exceptions include:
UAC5 should technically have an effective range of 540m instead of 600m, but still a max range of 1800m. It has a weird range setup.

ERPPC should have an effective range of 630m (not 810).

ERLL is 630m/1710m

Gauss Rifle should be 630m, rather than 660m.

Machineguns should be 90m effective range (and be made into more reasonable weapons, rather than the crit-seeking gimmick).


Otherwise, just increase the Energy Weapon max ranges to triple the effective range, like they're supposed to be. If you're worried about balance, make it a non-linear dropoff, so that to their current max range is a similar slope to what we have now, but becomes more shallow as it approaches long range.

If you're still concerned, increase the projectile speed of most ballistics so that they are slightly easier to hit at long ranges. Take the 5s up to 1800m/s, and the 10s up to 1500m/s.



As a side note:

Flamers should have a max range of 270m. Though obviously a penalty to hit isn't in the system, and reducing damage wouldn't really accomplish much. Maybe if the heat addition were less effective at longer ranges. But that would require them to first be effective at short ranges.

Also, LRMs are supposed to have max range of 1890m? I know there's not going to be damage dropoff for individual missiles, but is it really too hard to make the missiles spread out more the longer they fly, so that at long ranges, many of the missiles will fall wide, even with a lock-on?

Minimum range for LRMs is also 540m, though this would be better simulated by decreasing the agility of missile so that they are not reliable to hit at shorter ranges.

Perhaps we'll leave missiles alone for now, since it obviously would require a more unique solution.

Edited by Sable Dove, 06 December 2013 - 09:17 PM.

[kuangmk11]

Lasers kinda got shafted in the translation to real time game. ACs should be firing bursts (spreading damage), bar that I would be for a laser range boost.

[FupDup]

PGI's reasons for only 2x range on energy weapons is probably one or both of the following:
1. To make up for ballistic weapons' greater tonnage investment
2. Fear of high-heat weapons being too good

Reason #1 is already handled by energy weapons needing more DHS, which increases the "effective" tonnage and critical slots of energy builds. Reason #2...is PGI's own ideology and as such will not change.

[80sGlamRockSensation David Bowie]

There's a simple reason for why there are sooo many discrepencies between cannon weapon stats and stuff of that nature.

PGI has attempted to balance the game in some way, but for the most part has completely missed the ball when it comes to weapons like pulse lasers, machine guns, flamers and NARCs.

While some things they've done a good job like allowing for beyond max range damage drop off, things like their implementation of flamers and machine guns are enough to make any game designer cringe. There is no reason that they have gone off in many convoluted gimmicks to attempt making weapons working instead of reworking them from scratch.

Edited by mwhighlander, 06 December 2013 - 09:35 PM.

[Asmudius Heng]

I wonder if this was a holdover fear from MW4 where ERLL was supreme instant hit long range etc.

Because Lasers are instant hit. You hit what you aim at no need to lead etc which is powerful.

Except that they made it DoT so the spread damage can be quite punishing unless you are a good aim.

Still, the fact that ammo based weapons generally spread thier damage at extreme ranges and come with a huge tonnage cost seems to balance them out.

I have not felt too shafted by taking lasers quite frankly, the fact you have no ammo allows you to shoot out fo range a bit more where you might be worried with an AC if you miss when at half damage etc.

I do think ACs would have been more fun in bursts though

[JimboFBX]

if you fire an ac beyond 2x range you're probably just wasting ammo with minor exceptions

[aniviron]

I don't think what this game needs is for more weapons to have even longer ranges, especially since your suggestion includes a clause that missiles are fine being the only class of weapon hard limited to their tt range.

[stjobe]

It´s not that lasers get "unduly short range", it's that ballistics get unduly long range.

Currently we have
Ballistics: 3x effective range.
Energy: 2x effective range.
Missiles 1x effective range.

It has some "interesting" effects, like the AC/20 doing more damage than the AC/10 at 500m, and ballistics being more effective long-range weaponry than the now ironically named Long Range Missiles (of the ballistics, only the AC/20 and MG can't reach over 1,000m).

So my suggestion would be to make all weapons have 2x effective range as max range.

[Durant Carlyle]

According to my sources (Sarna and a PDF of the BattleTech Master Rules Revised Edition version 1.0 based on the third printing with additional corrections):

Energy Weapons
ER Large Laser: 19 Hex, 570 m
Flamer: 3 Hex, 90 m
Large Laser: 15 Hex, 450 m
Medium Laser: 9 Hex, 270 m
Small Laser: 3 Hex, 90 m
PPC: Min 3 Hex, 90 m -- 18 Hex, 540 m
ERPPC: 23 Hex, 690 m
Large Pulse Laser: 10 Hex, 300 m
Medium Pulse Laser: 9 Hex, 180 m
Small Pulse Laser: 3 Hex, 90 m

Ballistic Weapons
AC/2: 24 Hex, 720 m
AC/5: 18 Hex, 540 m
AC/10: 15 Hex, 450 m
AC/20: 9 Hex, 270 m
Gauss Rifle: Min 2 Hex, 60 m -- 22 Hex, 660 m
LB 10-X AC: 18 Hex, 540 m
Machine Gun: 3 Hex, 90 m
Ultra AC/5: 20 Hex, 600 m

Missile Weapons
LRMs: Min 6 Hex, 180 m -- 21 Hex, 630 m
NARC: 9 Hex, 270 m
SRMs: 9 Hex, 270 m
SSRMs: 9 Hex, 270 m

Other Equipment
BAP: 4 Hex, 120 m
ECM: 6 Hex, 180 m
TAG: 15 Hex, 450 m

So yeah, they've mucked around with some of the base ranges a bit.

The double range for energy weapons is fair as the beams would spread out and eventually not do damage.
The triple range for ballistic weapons is fair, as the projectiles eventually fall victim to gravity and friction.
Not having extended range at all for missile weapons is fair, due to them being self-propelled and not having an infinite amount of fuel on board.

Edited by Durant Carlyle, 07 December 2013 - 07:22 PM.

[stjobe]

Durant Carlyle, on 07 December 2013 - 02:50 AM, said:

The double range for energy weapons is fair as the beams would spread out and eventually not do damage.
The triple range for ballistic weapons is fair, as the projectiles eventually fall victim to gravity and friction.
Not having extended range at all for missile weapons is fair, due to them being self-propelled and not having an infinite amount of fuel on board.

No, triple and single range is not fair as it mucks up weapon balance needlessly.

All weapons in the BattleTech Universe are line-of sight; they can fire and hit on anything closer than the horizon (check TacOps for rules for horizon range). The original rule books had fluff blurbs about how Star League era 'mech could hold a laser on a fly on the horizon and how their missiles could pin-point hit anything they could see - but after centuries of war, that technology was lost and now the MechWarrior had to manually hold his laser on target to achieve burn-through and basically all missiles were dumb-fire.

Compare the Star League era Crusader or Marauder (DHS, ERPPC, SSRMs, Artemis) with the Succession Wars era models (SHS, PPC, dumb-fire SRMs/LRMs), and that's not even accounting for the lost guidance and targeting tech.

But that's just fluff and lore; game-play balance wise it doesn't make sense to have ballistics fire further than missiles or energy, especially not when the effects of it is that the AC/20 is a more damaging weapon than the AC/10 at 500m, and that ballistics are better and more accurate long-range weaponry than LRMs.

[MustrumRidcully]

Asmudius Heng, on 06 December 2013 - 10:04 PM, said:

I wonder if this was a holdover fear from MW4 where ERLL was supreme instant hit long range etc.

Because Lasers are instant hit. You hit what you aim at no need to lead etc which is powerful.

Except that they made it DoT so the spread damage can be quite punishing unless you are a good aim.

It's more than just about good aim, I think. DOT weapons give the enemy time to maneuver and torso twist, and some things even a brilliant shot (=mouse-pusher) can't compensate for.
It was one of the best ideas PGI ever stole from MW:LL. They just should have applied to Ballistics and PPCs, too. Then we might not need to worry so much about convergence.

I figure the higher max range of ballistics was an attempt to deal with TT and previous mech game balance problems preemptively. In the table top, ballistics suffered a lot. Standard ballistics were made obsolete by double heat sinks, and the level 2 ballistics (LBX, UAC, Gauss) might be great, but suffer from both limited and explosive ammo. And of course, previous MW games often had eve worse hit detection probems than MW:O ever had, sometimes making only hit scan weapons viable.

I am a little confused as why weapons have that normal-to-max-range interval at all,however. Barring some advanced rules, the current "normal" range of weapons was their highest range you could fire them at in TT. Did they raise the ranges intentionally to allow for more long range play? Did they want ballistic snipers?

[Sable Dove]

JimboFBX, on 06 December 2013 - 10:44 PM, said:

if you fire an ac beyond 2x range you're probably just wasting ammo with minor exceptions

Yes, but that's not the point. If you fire a ballistic weapon at a target that's double your effective range, you're still doing roughly half damage. If you do the same with an energy weapon, you're dealing no damage. It's not so much that ballistics have longer maximum range as much as it is that their damage drops off more slowly.

aniviron, on 07 December 2013 - 01:30 AM, said:

I don't think what this game needs is for more weapons to have even longer ranges, especially since your suggestion includes a clause that missiles are fine being the only class of weapon hard limited to their tt range.

Actually, I'd also be just as happy if they reduced ballistics to double maximum range instead of increasing energy weapons to triple.

What I meant regarding missiles was simply that they are too complex an issue to deal with in this thread. Personally, I would like the way missiles work in general to be changed completely, but again, that's beyond the scope of this thread.

[Asmudius Heng]

MustrumRidcully, on 07 December 2013 - 03:38 AM, said:

It's more than just about good aim, I think. DOT weapons give the enemy time to maneuver and torso twist, and some things even a brilliant shot (=mouse-pusher) can't compensate for.
It was one of the best ideas PGI ever stole from MW:LL. They just should have applied to Ballistics and PPCs, too. Then we might not need to worry so much about convergence.

I figure the higher max range of ballistics was an attempt to deal with TT and previous mech game balance problems preemptively. In the table top, ballistics suffered a lot. Standard ballistics were made obsolete by double heat sinks, and the level 2 ballistics (LBX, UAC, Gauss) might be great, but suffer from both limited and explosive ammo. And of course, previous MW games often had eve worse hit detection probems than MW:O ever had, sometimes making only hit scan weapons viable.

I am a little confused as why weapons have that normal-to-max-range interval at all,however. Barring some advanced rules, the current "normal" range of weapons was their highest range you could fire them at in TT. Did they raise the ranges intentionally to allow for more long range play? Did they want ballistic snipers?

I think there was some extreme range catagory with a horible negative to hit in TT that was advanced rules only

[Charons Little Helper]

I don't know why everyone's going into such odd explanations going back to TT etc.

The answer is a simple balance one.

Lasers hit exactly where you aim, making them nearly as easy to hit with at long range as short.

Ballistics are harder to hit with at long range due to projectile speed, therefore they are inherently weaker at long range than lasers before extreme range differences.

End.

Edited by Charons Little Helper, 07 December 2013 - 04:33 AM.

[DaisuSaikoro Nagasawa]

Possibly because the first few maps we had were (are) really small and it takes a matter of moments for engagement. Owning that you can pling pling mechs from dzs (a little different now with the drop point changes) having lasers that could core up mechs from the get go would just make everyone's day suck (and cause people to complain more than the ones in this thread (heavens to megatroids).


I, personally, feel as if people forget the evolution of this game and just how far we have come... be it no more yellow screen hud issues, black screen startups, and various other bugs, features, and assets that have come and gone the game is still progressing. Open up the maps and have them all be as large as alpine and maybe the lasers will get a review.

Until then relax on the whole tabletop = video game conversion because the TT stuff happened in an imaginary world where physical realities were thought about but not important... where as a video game (and these artificial words that are created) have dynamics and physics that just don't take place in a relative dream world (and I'm not trying to say either is valid. Imagine the type of stuff people would be saying if MW was a translation from a video game into TT... Yeah, it helps to just relax and just not)...

[OneEyed Jack]

Sable Dove, on 06 December 2013 - 09:09 PM, said:

Minimum range for LRMs is also 540m,

What? 7 hexes was the "sweet spot." Still in short range, but they suffered no min range modifiers. At 6 hexes or less, they suffered modifiers. 6 hexes is 180 meters, not 540. 540 meters is approaching their MAX range, not minimum.

MustrumRidcully, on 07 December 2013 - 03:38 AM, said:

I am a little confused as why weapons have that normal-to-max-range interval at all,however. Barring some advanced rules, the current "normal" range of weapons was their highest range you could fire them at in TT. Did they raise the ranges intentionally to allow for more long range play? Did they want ballistic snipers?

They raised ranges because otherwise everything would be a brawl, and there would be no point in long-ranged weapons at all. TT is turn-based, so it made sense, but in real time, when that Boom-Jager could close from outside the max range of your sniper build to within range of his AC20s in less than a weapons cycle, it could be a problem. Not that i'd mind, personally....

[Funky Bacon]

Heh, looking at ER-PPC and ER-LL I can understand the extra increased range. No one would bother with the extra hot ER weapons if they got such a small range boost for that heat cost. Mechs move rather fast in game and those extra 100m can be covered quite quickly.

[Deathlike]

I thought the OP was talking about the awful Small Lasers.

It's hard to take that and Small Pulse Lasers seriously.

[Galenit]

OneEyed Jack, on 07 December 2013 - 05:17 AM, said:

They raised ranges because otherwise everything would be a brawl, and there would be no point in long-ranged weapons at all.

You mean in taking an ac10 over an ac20?

With 2x ballistics, 2x energy and 1x missile, the ranges would match up a lot better.

For the long ranges you have then:
gauss+erppc for pinpoint damage
ac2 + erll for dot damage
lrm for hitting hills

And the ac20 would match the other shortrange weapons like srm and mls.

[Randalf Yorgen]

People are full of it when it comes to AC's. the AC is a SINGLE explosive Shell, be it AP, HEAT, HEAP, Squash Head , HE or what ever. It's not until the Uzile and the Rotary AC comes online in 3062 that the AC's start firing in bursts. People who say anything different are Battletech CLICK players and I have no time for that {Scrap}. GET WITH THE TIMELINE. why the hell do you think AC20s weigh 14 tons.

The reason the AC has high damage at 3 times the range is because it explodes when it hits the target releasing all that damage to the location that it hits. What PGI didn't do but should have was have the rounds start to tumble and drop and drift off line once it went past 2 times it's optimum range making it next to impossible to get at hit at three times the range.

LASERS are intense beams of focused light. Over time and distance they suffer from many different things. Planet side, Diffusion and dispersion for starters. Diffusion is the dust and smoke particles bleeding off some of the energy and dispersion is caused as the beam starts to come undone and spread out over distance (Time and losing its focus frequency) in Atmosphere these two are the primary things that effect lasers (my background is Radar, same as lasers, just employed differently at a different frequency) and cause the signal to weaken over time and eventually disappear. If happens very quickly in atmosphere.

Lasers in Space would have 300 times the range but are affected by Gravity and Solar Wind. Yes Gravity can bend light beams and waves and cause the laser to bend and twist over time causing its accuracy to be lost at say 10 times range when fighting close to a source of gravity. (Star, Planet, Singularity)(it's why the American SDI initiative isn't the end all and be all that they claimed it was going to be back in the 1980's) Solar Wind is something else to consider as it is made up of charged particles that are thrown off by a Star and could cause some dispersion and a lot of diffusion so the effective range of Lasers in a moderate Solar storm would only be about 5-8 times their range.

Want to argue this, ok, bring your proven science and show me.