Strum Wealh, on 05 February 2015 - 12:12 PM, said:
Unfortunately, I could not locate the bg.battletech.com thread (and a Google search turned up no instance of a thread about PaintedWolf's
Lancea), but I did find
PaintedWolf's thread on the Solaris7 forum, and his
Lancea was indeed about as well received there as it was here.
Nope, no results for the BT forums - I was just responding assuming wanderer had seen it posted recently. I made an account to search the forums and turned up nothing. And neither did a tailored Google search. Wanderer may have just been thinking of the Solaris thread.
PaintedWolf, on 05 February 2015 - 09:16 AM, said:
Why couldn't they just ignore the light mechs trying to "tie them up" (whatever that means) and just nuke the heavy hitters?
As for costs, I have already noted how that is mitigated by Drop Ship capacity and supply lines. More Mechs also requires more transport and logistics.
Heavy hitters can be conventional artillery which is dirt cheap and outranges your Arrow IV's by double or triple and hardly takes up space. Lights would just be there to hit you with Inferno munitions and keep you locked down.(or at least that's how I'd do it) Arbalests are ECM lights with LRMs that would exist concurrently with this design in the Dark Age. They're nearly a tenth the C-bill cost, a quarter of the tonnage and less than a third of the BV. Linked Pulse Laser+TC designs like a cheesy Shadow Cat loadout would also murder this formation, since 3cMPL is 21 damage which is enough to headcap you. Aiming high makes getting either of these results very doable and even a non-head strike is forcing you to make a piloting test at a penalty of 2.
I don't understand your obsession with logistics. If you had some fluff about the nation or unit building it being long on money and resources and short on dropships and jumpships it might make an inkling of sense, but instead the Lancea's description reads as “I did this, I did that, I made this thing that's the best thing since sliced bread, bask in my glory and heap adulation upon me.” In a straight game, these suckers would drown in cheaper BV units. In an RPG/campaign style game, a fortress full of artillery and mechs could be built and equipped for the cost of that unit.
Logistics is going to be more important for your attacking unit than the defending one because the defending one has the luxury of building up the forces at the garrison over time, and any strongpoint which necessitates 36+ Lanceas can afford to have a much larger, more varied force that can smack down this turtle formation.
PaintedWolf, on 05 February 2015 - 09:16 AM, said:
As I recall, there was a megamek battle held between some of my previous, weaker designs using Inner Sphere tech vs one of your most influential and experienced players using Manei Domini Celestials. Despite the forumites bragging for 11 pages about how bad I was going to lose, I won with 2 assault Mechs left. Instead of acting honorable or magnanimous, my victory was attributed to "lucky shots".
Even though it was a 5 vs 5 Mech fight, and my opponent, gave his pilots every single cybernetic upgrade possible, giving him 10 times my battle value.
I'm sorry if after eleven pages of certainty, followed by denial, I question the judgments of such, in their own minds - omniscient, majority. Simply put you were absolutely certain I would lose, I won against 10 times my forces Battle Value, and still you could not accept that my designs had merit. And these designs were primitive compared to the Lancea.
“bragging
I was going to lose”
“
I won”
“10 times
my battle value”
“
I question”
“
you were certain”
“
you could not accept”
I, I, I, you, you, you. This is sounding more and more like you have too much personal investment in your design, and are taking criticisms of the design as crticisms against
you. This entire anecdote is nothing but worthless self-aggrandizement.
Who is 'you'? Everyone who speaks against your designs is a single aggregate? Why do the fate of your earlier designs matter? We're not talking about them, we're talking about the Lancea. They don't matter unless the failing is not with the design but with you – a criticism nobody has leveled at you. And mentioning this in this manner makes it seem like you're trying to appeal to authority while simultaneously saying 'I am an authority!' If you don't believe someone ran a MM sim on your mech without a log, why should we believe that this happened without evidence? It's just ego-stroking puffery.
PaintedWolf, on 05 February 2015 - 12:54 PM, said:
In any case, you are essentially arguing against my Mech design by saying "Well a lot of people don't like it!"
If we applied that reasoning to World War 2, a lot of people argued against the Aircraft Carrier being an effective weapon (since it went against what they learned in Naval School. ) It was indeed, partly chance (the Japanese fleet failed to sink the carriers in Pearl Harbor, forcing us to use them since they were among the few ships to survive). According to your logic, the battleship should have been able to beat the carrier, since the design was more popular.
Interesting note, the Japanese recognized the value of the Carrier first. In fact, the US carriers were their primary targets at Pearl Harbor.
PaintedWolf, on 05 February 2015 - 01:49 PM, said:
Side note- as for WW2, the Americans dismissal of the Carrier, while stubborn, was hardly as fatal as the Reich's dismissal of Relativity Theory as "Jewish Physics".
I'm not seeing anything relevant here either. Just historical factoids that have zero bearing on the discussion.