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Current plans and why they may become problematic:
Ok so as of now Clan tech is getting put more in line with Inner Sphere but with different characteristics such as more heat and range than then Inner Sphere counter-part or different critical slot or weight.
-Problems with such a direction in balance:
1: Depending on the time line when the Inner Sphere starts to reverse engineer Clan tech for mechs and weapons to fight the Clans the later Inner Sphere designs and weapons will have to be brought back in line with there own old tech making a vicious cycle of nerfing, buffing and rebalancing. I think of this like making a fps where u start in ww2 and end up in modern day but need to balance your M1 grand to be viable against a m16.
2: Any change in weight or critical slots will change what's possible on every clan mech variant making clan mechs loadouts uncannon
3: Eventually you will end up with lets say 200 early Inner-Sphere mech designs that are the game equivalent to the tablet top counter parts and lets say 400 or more Clan and late Inner-sphere designs that will have to be heavily balanced taking more man hours and testing to be able to be on par with the earlier assets making production take longer.
4: Clan mechs are supposed to be terrifying to face as an Inner Sphere pilot your supposed to think how the heck did the Inner Sphere beat the Clans back when they have this technology and new players wont understand what a great achievement it is to beat a clan mech of similar weight with an Inner Sphere mech if there just the same as beating another inner sphere mech.
5: The Inner Sphere had advantages over the Clans they where not technological based but in tactics and numbers and the advantage of defending. No game has taken advantage of balancing off these advantages and I think it would make a better product if a way was found to balance around what advantages the Inner Sphere did have rather than what taking away what advantages the Clans did. I believe a more cannon approach needs to be found so that the Inner Sphere and Clans retain there distinct flavors making them feel different and fresh when u go from one to the other.
Ideas on how to balance the 2 factions in a gameplay environment that does not break cannon or lessens impact of change:
Some of these may have been posted as I don't spend excessive time surfing the forums and I do apologize if they have been mentioned before.
-Differing solutions and some thoughts behind them:
1: Inner Sphere home field advantage as in they get better deployment areas and since traditionally the Clans are invading Inner Sphere worlds they know the planets temperature so in the minute before deployment let them use mech lab to fine tune there mech to the map as in putting more heat sinks in for hot maps and taking some off for cold maps for more weapons while the Clan players would have to build good for all situation mechs instead of for the particular planet.
2: In Clan vs Inner Sphere battles let the Inner-sphere players have a proper base to defend with automated defenses, walls and such making proper use of the base a force multiplier
3: As the Clans are supposed to live by there Rules of engagement put a system in that makes proper team work by players playing as the Clans difficult since they believed in 1vs1 duels. For example if a Clan player deals lets say deals 40 damage to an Inner Sphere player before anyone in his company he is considered to have engaged that target and the Inner Sphere mech would have symbol like being tagged telling other Clan players of this status however if the engaging Clanner died the status would be dropped and the next most damaging Clan player within lets say 700m would engage him. If the Clan mech that engaged this target damages him he will get bonus c-bills and exp but if one of his teammates damages him they will get reduced rewards for damaging the engaged inner sphere mech and if they do lets say more than 10-20 damage to a enemy that is engaged by another teammate he will get negative rewards like minus c-bills and exp.
4: Give each mech in the game a matchmaker weight similar to what they have in World of Tanks so that a 80 ton clan mech would have 30% more matchmaker weight compared to a Inner Sphere 80 on mech and let the match maker balance the games that way so that both teams are comparable with restrictions like a team can be no larger than 16 and no smaller than 8 and only a like 5 match maker point difference between the teams . I like this solution best because its fairly simple to balance and implement and changes would be quick if a rebalance is required. Also with this system you could do mixed battles of Clanners and Inner Sphere on same team.
5: A commonly suggested fix but I still consider it preferable to the large amount of balance work the current idea causes, make drop weight for clan side less than Inner Sphere side by example 33% or so based of balance testing.
Well I hope I put a few new ideas out there and explained them semi-decently feed back is appreciated. Lastly thank you everyone at Piranha Games and the Battletech community keep up the good work and lets make this game great.
Edited by Skyros, 28 January 2014 - 03:57 PM.
