My proposal would be something in another direction.
While having a "general" heat level, also add individual heat for each weapon. It never made sense how firing your lasers also heats up your missiles. I am not sure if it was born out of just simplification or its how it works in the canon, but having one shared heat for all weapons does not make sense.
It would be the perfect way to balance boating weapons. If you just stack 6 large lasers on your mech, you would find that repeated firing would individually melt all of your lasers (while adding to your overall heat). This would make Mechs that are focused on energy weapons viable, while making true boating impractical. Sure you could bring 4 large lasers to the fray, but you would need to bring some smaller separate lasers to use while your big ones cool off to usable levels. It basically would make "big" weapons have less of a universal purpose and force them into the role of "the big punch" or longer range weapons. This would make alpha striking viable without making it overpowered.
As far as ballistics, it would just need some careful balancing of ammo. Ideally you would want to encourage players to MIX weapon types on a mech, use your ballistics while your lasers cool off.
Or if it was a more ballistics focused mech, energy weapons would serve the purpose of saving ammo instead of burning it all off quickly. Another way to counter boating of ballistics is to make them do variable damage at range. It would makes sense that and ultra ac 10 does not have the same power at its maximum range as opposed to 10 yards away. Thus promoting smarter ammo conservation and limiting the effectiveness of just bringing 6 of the same guns with ammo to a fight.
So for example under this system if someone would boat clanultra ac2s on a Daishi, the damage at long range would be equivalent to little bee stings bouncing off your armor. At closer range, they would be better, but in which case other weapons become more attractive. A group of u ac2s could still serve as a good mid range weapon, just not a "everything weapon".
LRMs should be simple to balance. They should have ridiculous reload times and be very effective at long range, but other weapons are better up close. SRMs should also take a long time to load but have the inverse of providing a close range punch that cannot be obviously used at longer ranges. (Its why you dont see many srm boats, their range sucks).
The main issue behind boating (in past games) is that people stack similar weapons on their mech that can be used at very long/short ranges. These weapons (large lasers, gauss's, ppcs, LRMs) have too much versatility and are too good in a close range matchup compared to other smaller weapons. Its a matter of DPS, smaller more numerous weapons should have usefulness at short range by having more DPS than the big guns. The big guns are great for that big punch, but the problem with them is that they are good everywhere regardless.
Poptarting I think is a viable strategy that uses terrain to its fullest potential. It requires the other team to respond strategically and flank the enemy. preferably mechs that are set up to poptart are set up ONLY to poptart. In any other role their damage-per-second should be really low and undesirable in a fire fight. If one was to nerf poptarting (which is probably a good idea). I would make weapons such as PPC's and Gauss's have a 1 second delay before actually firing. Would make sense as if they had to "charge up" before firing. This would mean that the "poptarter" would have to expose himself much longer (or have excellent timing) to get effective shots off. Seeing as the Gauss/PPCs are the main offenders of poptarting it would makes sense to do this.
Even with these changes, I still think the big guns would be incredibly viable and important for success. Its just that they should have a specified role, and not something you can throw 6+ of on your mech with 25 heat sinks to do well in ANY engagement. There are reasons why real world commando teams do not use 50cal machine guns in all situations. Make smaller weapons more versatile, make bigger ones more situational. You won't need to worry much about people boating smaller, shortrange weapons because well... they will be out of range of big guns. This should also help making smaller mechs more viable and dangerous.
Alpha striking has its place, but boating is its evil twin brother.
Edited by pizza koopa, 19 November 2011 - 11:05 PM.
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Yeach, on 18 November 2011 - 07:34 PM, said:
