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Firstly let me say thankyou to our PGI overlords, communication and transparency give us a chance to dialogue over prospective features and changes which we think the game sorely needs. Your community is full of smart educated people who want your product to be the best battletech video game ever made, a financial success, and an iconic success. You have the chance to pan the forums like a prospector knee deep in a muddy river looking for nuggets of gold among the other stuff.
Now onto business. I think most of your ideas for clan implementation can be improved or replaced with better suggestions, save one.
I like the idea of longer beam duration for clan lasers as a way to balance their additional damage
SSRMS
The Idea for SSRM 4s and 6s firing in groups of twos is insulting. First you idea that AMS is a hard counter to missiles just makes AMS a tax on weight to survive missiles rather than a trade off and counter to missiles.
Here is a list of ideas to better deal with that:
- Longer lock on times coupled with faster delock times. This is better because it would still allow for SSRMs to pack a punch while making it harder to lock onto smaller more vulnerable targets.
- Change the spread/ missile trajectory/ projectile speed. A missile that constantly accelerates to the target and a missile which reaches a cruising speed and hits the target will have different patterns and effectiveness. Because of a missiles trajectory you can have them work differently against moving and stationary targets. Penalizing large slow mechs which probably couldn’t dodge an SRM6 anyways over a speedy light.
- Also you could limit the effectiveness against moving targets by breaking tracking if the mech breaks lock.
- Have missiles destruct after flying 180 meters, even if their relative distance to the mech which fired them is less than 180 meters. Allowing mechs of a speed to effectively outrun missiles.
- You could limit the amount the missiles can correct course to be less corrective than IS missiles. Causing more collisions with geometry and decreased abilities to hit fast agile mechs.
As you can see in the image above because the initial planned rout for my proposed SSRMs pushes them out in a spread pattern, they will then acquire and track the target independantly. Moving at a constant speed they will impact the target at different times depending on where the target has moved in relation to their positions. A mech near the max range for Clan SSRMs might be hit by some while outrunning others because of this forced initial trajectory. In part 2 of the diagram you can see that missile 2 has a longer path to take to hit the target so the impacts would not be at the same time without artificially limiting ROF.
SRMS
Clan SRMS have the same damage/range/heat as their IS counterparts. The divergence in Canon is that the IS ones weight twice as much and take twice the space. It’s clear that cutting weight in half is a big advantage. I think that advantage can be lessened giving clans a slight to no advantage in practical play:
- Change the pathing, spread of the missiles so that they are more effective at hitting moving targets but for less damage because fewer missiles impact.. this would also spread damage out on large mechs. Additionally small stationary mechs would take less damage as more missiles missed their smaller profile
- Balance this with Clan Artemis Bringing the spread down to a level of effectiveness between the unguided IS SRM and the Guided IS SRM.
In short Clan missiles would weigh half as much but be balance to do between half and full damage with the skill of the pilot working the missile spread on different targets.
LRMS
The idea that you would change tonnages is an instant no go for many players as it voids the stock builds and forever sets the precedent that this is possible. There are again many ways to balance Clan LRMs as is without mucking up the statistics from table top.
Here is a list of better ideas:
- Change the missile flight pattern so that fewer missiles impact targets closing the gap between the IS version and the Clan version but if 2 mechs are standing in close proximity more damage would be done to the second mech damaged by collateral damage.
- Change missile flight speed so AMS is more effective.
- Change trajectory to make cover more or less effective.
- Change locking times based on range, the clan launcher would take longer to lock on the shorter the range to target. Longer lock times under 180 meters would also make it lesse effective than simply being a giant streak launcher.
- I also reject the idea of dynamically scaling missile damage. You could change lots of things about the weapons that wouldn’t affect the damage done by an exploding warhead.
- Put a soft minimum range on the weapon where firing inside that range could ignite the ammo in the weapon causing damage to that that weapon. something like 20 meters. This would reflect that the weapons have no safeties
- Increase the spread at short range so that if the weapons are fired within 180 meters they don’t all converge on the target instantly. Spread them out causing some to miss and the damage to be largely spread over the mech..
Some weapons you don’t have to worry about like the LB-2X or the UA/C 10 because they don’t exist in the IS yet. Some you do like the ER large laser. Pulse Lasers. PPCs.
ER lasers - In lore the clan versions are better. Unquestionably. What could we do within our game to mitigate that?
PGI proffered the suggestion of extended beam duration and I suggest that this is a good start.
I’d add to that:
- Reduce the maximum range to the stated number. Clan weapons would do 100% damage out to exactly the range listed and then stop. IS weapons would function as normal out to 200% weapons range and fall off like they do now. This would give each a trade off. IS weapons would have an advantage between 100% of clan range and 200% of IS range where their weapons would work and clan weapons would not.
- Have heat tick up over the duration of the beam and not dissipate until the beam has stopped. This could overheat your mech cutting your beam short and would make the most out of the equivalent heat because it would be 8 heat when the beam stopped after 1.25 seconds. Instead of 8 heat dissipating from the moment the gun is fired.
This is mitigatable in several ways:
- Longer recycle time to normalize the DPS
- Charge up time similar to the gauss rifle but on a different timer to prevent abuse. Could have a capacitor overload(JAM) mechanic where it takes additional recycle time if they are charged and you don’t fire them.
- A similar maximum range component as above. IS ERPPC works to 1620 meters before falling to zero damage, the Clan ERRPPC does more damage up to 810 meters but falls off to nothing by 900 meters.
I would start by increasing beam duration to reflect the additional damage. An IS medium pulse laser does 6 damage in .75 seconds. A Clan mpl should burn for .875 do deliver 7 damage. That covers the damage but what about the ranges?
This is an instance where I would support changing the max range to a 50% increase rather than a 100% increase. Then you could cap the total maximum range there and have IS pulse lasers continue to die out to 200% of range. Giving them slightly more reach at a reduced damage.
UA/Cs and LB-Xs are tricky.
The IS UA/C 5 and the Clan UA/C are very similar, The clan version is smaller, and weighs less. It has a nominal range increase which I don’t care about. You can normalize the weight difference in the aggregate. Pretend you had 2 IS A/C 5 it’s 10, but you could carry 3 Clan UA/C 5s in 10 tons. So if you increase the recycle time so that 3 Clan UA/C 5s have the same damage per second as 2 IS UAC 5s you have very different weapons.
If you are looking for further distinction have the Clan versions fire streaks of shells similar to other mech warrior games.
in The LB-X lines you have similar differentials but the weapons are closer than you think. So the tweaking would be smaller.
The Gauss is also a sticking point:
I’d balance them in the aggregate again so that the DPS is the same even if an individual weapon is better for weight/space.
A few more things.
The critical slots on almost all of the clan weapons are less than those of the IS versions. I would balance this as so. When firing at an exposed body part after armor is stripped I would take the number of open and filled critical slots and leverage that to find out if a piece of equipment is hit or the internal structure. If you shot a side torso with 4 IS DHS you’d hit one of those before doing any damage to the internal structure of that point, but if you had clan DHS you’d hit the heatsinks only 1/3 of the time and have an easier time destroying the body part and all of the equipment mounted on it.
Endosteel, Ferro Fibrous Armor, XL engines, etc. would simply be ignored and those shots would go through to the internal structure.
This would give IS mechs a durability edge because they would likely have more critical slots filled with larger equipment and that would lead to enhanced internal durability.
ECM, Beagle, Other things like these.
Give the IS more functionality for their size and tonnage. For example the IS beagle could detect powered down mechs while the Clan one couldn’t because clanners don’t use such cheap strategies. or whatever fluff you need to sell it to the fan boys.
Clan ECM could have a few second delay when changing modes where it neither disrupts nor jams enemy radar. thus giving the IS one additional functionality.
Edited by HammerSwarm, 18 December 2013 - 12:15 PM.
