97 replies to this topic

[joedawg39s]

To start I build around the stock engine. I usually try out a few different builds/play-styles, then once I settle on one, I build around the weapons and find the right engine.

[zudukai]

Victor Morson, on 13 December 2013 - 04:38 PM, said:

AS7-D-DC

Void Angel, on 13 December 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

AS7-D-DC

UAC/5 is a very powerful weapon with no minimum range, it excels at brawling with it's high rate of fire and decent ammo per ton,

SRMS, brawling weapon.

Medium lasers, medium range, standard weapon, if you needed a standard weapon to measure all against, this is it. fits perfectly within a brawler.
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PPC, long range weapon, hot, high output per round, long recycle, minimum range. this weapon does not like rapid fire, it does not like getting in the face of other mechs.
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it looks to me like you wanted to post your meta highlander in a brawl against this D-DC, you should see how fast they fall when you get a case of suddenly atlas. or you are kept busy and this D-DC facerolls you.

[joedawg39s]

Oh noes! That stalker has ghost heat! He might need to fire his weapons in a controlled manner!

[sneeking]

if your going to brawl with uac5 you need a disciplined mouse finger to avoid the jamm.

iv used it a lot on my cn9-d and yenlo but still I regularly swap it out because under pressure sometimes I crumble ( loosing my cool and getting jamm )

[Void Angel]

I'm told that if you just hold down the mouse button, you don't have the ghost jamming problem - it's only if you're clicking it. It seems to work like that on the testing grounds, but I don't use any UAC/5 rigs in live matches, so I haven't tested it enough to confirm. On the other hand, if you're just trying to fire one at a time, combat pressure can make that difficult; this is why I don't use UAC/5s as my sole heavy brawling armaments.

[dragnier1]

I usually start with the engine, before i get down to the other stuff. I prefer higher mobility, with some exceptions. For the heat sinks, besides the crit space and heat cap you also need to consider the weight limitations.

[Arcadies]

Who the **** is Victor Morson? I don't think that guy knows what he's talking about. Is he some sort of high rank league player or something?

[Buckminster]

Arcadies, on 16 December 2013 - 06:51 AM, said:

Who the **** is Victor Morson? I don't think that guy knows what he's talking about. Is he some sort of high rank league player or something?

Do yourself a favor, and don't get into it. Victor and a couple other guys seem to like to get into trolling each other, and it can derail a perfectly good conversation. Everyone will have their good points, but it all gets lost in the garbage. I've had to stop following a few threads because they just became page after page of troll baiting.

But like everyone else on these forums, he has some good ideas and he has some bad ideas and you have to take what he says with a grain of salt.

[Rushin Roulette]

Void Angel, on 13 December 2013 - 01:50 PM, said:

Sorry, but that's not correct. Endo-Steel is usually a superior option, but exceptions most certainly exist.

Victor Morson, on 13 December 2013 - 02:09 PM, said:

No they don't. Every one of those is both a Frakenpug Ghost Heat nightmare that aren't worth considering in concept but when I went to fix them one thing jumped out at me:

Good to see that you have absolutely no idea what you are writing about (As usual)... The only Mech listed by Void Angel which would even remotely have a Ghost heat problem would be the Stalker with 4 SRM6 launchers. All other mechs and weapon systems are completely ghost heat free, because the individual weapon systems stay under the ghost heat threshhold (Plus, all weapon systems harmonize well together for brawler builds with no more than 3 basic weapon groups per build).

Your builds on the other hand are basically terrible (apart from the DDC build). The other 2 mechs are trying to be a bit of brawler and a bit of sniper while not being good at either one.... what is the point of mixing SRMs and regular PPCs? You can snipe a bit with PPCs, but once you are being circled... the PPCs are useless and the SRMs currently have a hit detection issue. Btw, you Stalker is way worse, because it has a lower heat efficiency than the non-"improved" one from Void and it still has the ghost heat problem of 4 SRM6 launchers ontop of that.

P.S. Your point about look at better players configs and copy them.... Please dont think that will make anyone a good player... all that advice can do is to make someone a mediocre player at best and an apeing player at worst.

Take the builds from good players, adapt them to your personal play style and use that, make a completely new build to tailor fit your play style and get good at those builds.... that is how you get to be a good player.

EDIT:

Getting back on topic.

I usually start with maxing armour, add the weapon systems I want depending on what role I want to fill with that mech as well as the support systems and ammunition (Scout, sniper or brawler as well as a few inbetween roles such as scout sniper or support mech).After that I add DHS and ES internals. Then I see which engine would fit taking into account how the heat is managed and which Internal heatsing thresholds as well as max rating.
Finally I start compromising in single points such as lowering armour, using a smaller weapons or engines depending on what gets the best result at the end.

Edited by Rushin Roulette, 16 December 2013 - 07:42 AM.

[Buckminster]

Buckminster, on 16 December 2013 - 07:07 AM, said:

Victor and a couple other guys seem to like to get into trolling each other...

Rushin Roulette, on 16 December 2013 - 07:36 AM, said:

stuff

Thanks for proving my point. Sure, I disagree with Victor on his "all mechs should have ES", and he was a bit of a tool in the way he went about it. But being a bunch of trolls doesn't help anyone - especially the new guy that wants some advice on mech building..

Rushin Roulette, on 16 December 2013 - 07:36 AM, said:

EDIT:

Getting back on topic.

I usually start with maxing armour, add the weapon systems I want depending on what role I want to fill with that mech as well as the support systems and ammunition (Scout, sniper or brawler as well as a few inbetween roles such as scout sniper or support mech).After that I add DHS and ES internals. Then I see which engine would fit taking into account how the heat is managed and which Internal heatsing thresholds as well as max rating.
Finally I start compromising in single points such as lowering armour, using a smaller weapons or engines depending on what gets the best result at the end.

And thanks for getting back on topic.

[Void Angel]

Buckminster, on 16 December 2013 - 07:58 AM, said:

Thanks for proving my point. Sure, I disagree with Victor on his "all mechs should have ES", and he was a bit of a tool in the way he went about it. But being a bunch of trolls doesn't help anyone - especially the new guy that wants some advice on mech building..

And thanks for getting back on topic.

In other words, don't feed the trolls. =) Of course, the troll was pandering misinformation (again,) so correcting him is on topic - but once the troll was corrected, it doesn't do any good to poke it further, no matter how much its arrogant ignorance may rankle.

Getting back on topic is excellent advice.

[Arcadies]

Void Angel, on 16 December 2013 - 10:33 AM, said:

the troll was pandering misinformation (again,) so correcting him is on topic - but once the troll was corrected, it doesn't do any good to poke it further,

But bro... I heard Endo Steel + MOAR PPC makes every build better. In fact, here is a Pros only, Elite 12-man League Champion mech. The Marsonizer . The armor is REALLY streamlined, and it does run a little hot, but it has AMAZING pin point alpha, and Endo Steel. Experienced players only though.

[Buckminster]

Although I have to laugh - all my griping about trolls, and I don't think I ever replied to the OP.

So how do I design mechs? For me it also starts in Smurfy's. Playing with loadouts without spending any C-bills is a must. Especially since a tool like Smurfy's gives you a metric to determine how a mech will operate. It's Cooling Efficiency calculator is fantastic, especially since you can go to the 'Weaponlab' tab and play with groupings. The in-game mechbay doesn't really let you do that, so a mech can appear to be too hot when the reality is that it has two (or more) distinct weapon grouping that work at different ranges.

But honestly, I prefer to play with a mech, and then decide what needs improvement. If my stock mech seems to need more distance punch, I look at the weapon layout to see if there is a system I can give up so that I can use that weight on longer range. If it seems too slow, I play around with squeezing a bigger (or XL) engine in. But it's really mostly about finding the right feel.

The only two real rules I have (and I break those too) is that ES and DHS are top upgrades. I'll ignore ES on energy heavy builds that really need the heat sinks, and I'll ignore DHS on builds that run reasonably cool without. But generally, these two make their way on to most of my builds.

[Void Angel]

Yeah, Weaponlab is an invaluable tool. That can't be stressed enough.

[Kai Harper]

Ooh...the Weaponlab has that feature? I wasn't aware! Thanks guys!

[Void Angel]

Yesss... It is glorious. The only thing is that for some reason it can't account for flamers. Smurfy tells me they "generate infinite heat," which isn't literally true, obviously. But I don't know what he meant by that, so I can't explain it.

[Rushin Roulette]

Wow... you never finish learning do you? I never knew about that weapon lab button either. The great Smurphy's lab gust got even greater in my eyes .

Love that Hunchie build... only thing missing is another 5 Heatsinks for it to be able to even launch.... 3 seconds till overheat... genius.

You could of course use this build as well AWS-8BBQ

What it lacks in PPCs it compensates with ERPPCs which dont have a minimum range and it even has a Flamer in the head so that you can breath fire at your enemies while they flee in terror!

Edited by Rushin Roulette, 17 December 2013 - 03:13 AM.

[Alistair Winter]

@ OP:

I sometimes design around the engine, other times I design around the weapons. For example, I design my CPLT-K2 around whatever room I have left with biggest engine and max armour (ish). I design my light mechs around different weapon configs, and then seeing how much room I have left for engine, AMS, BAP, jump jets, etc.

Victor Morson, on 13 December 2013 - 12:43 PM, said:

Never ever ever, ever, EVER true.
Adding Ferro is optional on top of Endo, but Endo should be on EVERY 'mech. If a 'mech is lacking Endo it's a very bad design.
There are literally no good non-endo designs, at all.

This is pretty much a "no true scotsman" argument.
"No good builds are better without Endo."
"This good build is better without Endo."
"It's not a good build."

There's a number of AWS-builds that don't work with Endo, because they require a lot of crits for double heat sinks, energy weapons and/or missile weapons. Both with STD engines and XL engines. You could counter by saying that the AWS isn't a good mech anyway, but spare me. I'm guessing there's a lot of similarities with similar mechs that are energy/missile boats, such as the Stalker.

[Fang01]

I tend to build for a specific speed range and focus weapons loadout more for close range punch

Victor Morson, on 12 December 2013 - 04:27 PM, said:

PS: I recommend you always take Endo and DHS. DHS will improve the "unseen" heatsinks in the engine as well, and thus are ALWAYS worth it, even if you don't have extra heatsinks.

I have to generally disagree here. I have found a couple situations in bigger energy based mechs where higher efficiency could be achieved with STD sinks due to the smaller crit slot size.

ALWAYS cross check your builds in Smurfy's, you might be surprised. (ESP if you're building an awesome)

[Void Angel]

Guys, Victor has already been pretty soundly trounced - this is why he's stopped responding. Please don't invite him back by quoting him.