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Koniving, on 07 March 2014 - 08:30 PM, said:
Their capabilities in damage to each other is supossed to be double what they do. None of them are supposed to carry the armor that they have in this game. Example, a Jager S has 6 tons of armor, that's 96 points of "armor" or in MWO, that's 192. Either way, they're not too big.
I didn't say anything about the Jag, because that mech is currently doing very well for itself. What I did say is that several mediums are totally bonkers, like the Cicada being dramatically larger than the Jenner or the Trebuchet being nearly able to see eye-to-eye with an Atlas on flat terrain (from the cockpit view at least). Stuff like that makes them attract more visual attention (enemy can spot them easier from a distance, more likely to shoot them) and can help them catch more gunfire (bigger target means lower likelihood of missing). If a Trebuchet or w/e dan't mount the armor of a heavy/assault mech, or the firepower, why the heck should it have a similar target profile?
Koniving, on 07 March 2014 - 08:30 PM, said:
The Catapult when you consider the location of entry hatch and ejection system to be rear-ward by lore, then the Catapult we have actually has no space to hold an engine let alone any torso mounted ammunition. Funny thing is by lore, the Catapult would also be considerably Larger.
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That fluff doesn't have any bearing on how the mech performs in MWO. In MWO, the Cat has a nice, big nose that attracts a lot of fire to it. In Tabletop, that didn't matter because you did a 2d6 roll every time you wanted to shoot an enemy. With aiming, though, size (and shape) matters. A lot. It's why the Awesome's fat barn door CT seems to magnetically attract enemy alpha strikes, and how the Stalker can spread damage with its side torsos so efficiently. It's why the Atlas is like a gigantic pincushion for weapons fire, and why the Trebuchet loses its firepower so fast (huge arms that are hard to protect, and contain most of the mech's hardpoints).
Koniving, on 07 March 2014 - 08:30 PM, said:
The Raven is too skinny, slightly too long, but otherwise with the redesign It's human pilot fits perfectly and it's exactly the described height in most examples. The difference is that the legs are longer because the torso itself isn't the big chubby blob it's supposed to be.
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When compared with other lights, the Raven's total surface area is actually inferior to that of the Jenner's. Legs are longer and the body is 'longer.' But the limbs are also thinner, and the nose is so thin it almost doesn't exist. Meanwhile the Jenner is quite unnecessarily huge and fat; kinda akin to lore.
The Jenner meanwhile might be only slightly taller than the Locust... But it's 1) thicker and meatier, and 2) 1+1/2 times as long as the Locust from rear to nose.
Meanwhile the Raven's rear to nose is only slightly longer than a Firestarter's body. Which makes up for the Raven's otherwise very slender frame. The area with the missile pods and weapon ports on the Raven kinda makes up for the lack of width as well, but ultimately the Raven is actually really pushing it for not being quite up to size with the other 35 tonners.
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When compared with other lights, the Raven's total surface area is actually inferior to that of the Jenner's. Legs are longer and the body is 'longer.' But the limbs are also thinner, and the nose is so thin it almost doesn't exist. Meanwhile the Jenner is quite unnecessarily huge and fat; kinda akin to lore.
The Jenner meanwhile might be only slightly taller than the Locust... But it's 1) thicker and meatier, and 2) 1+1/2 times as long as the Locust from rear to nose.
Meanwhile the Raven's rear to nose is only slightly longer than a Firestarter's body. Which makes up for the Raven's otherwise very slender frame. The area with the missile pods and weapon ports on the Raven kinda makes up for the lack of width as well, but ultimately the Raven is actually really pushing it for not being quite up to size with the other 35 tonners.
And yet, in spite of all those arbitrary measurements, those legs make such nice and juicy targets in-game. Increasing the Raven's size just to fit some "lore" text is venturing into crazytown territory. The mech does not need a nerf like that. If anything, the Raven could potentially use a slight buff (particularly 2X and 4X variants...) to help it compete with the Jenner and new Firestarters. This is about gameplay balance and gameplay balance only, mind you.
The point of it all is...IDGAF about what some space opera romance novels say about how big certain mechs are supposed to be. Keeping a distinctive silhouette is of course necessary to identify mechs from one another (i.e. skinny Spider, chunky Thunderbolt, etc.) but there comes a time when it's just going too far (Trebuchet, 55 ton mediums and Quickdraw, I'm looking at you!). That little snippet of lore just does not and cannot translate to a real-time game unless you also inherit Tabletop's 2d6 rolls for targeting. Once we add the ability for pilots to aim instead of throw dice, things get hairy.
If you were crazy, you could build a custom TT miniature that stood 12 inches tall from its hex base, and it would function identical in gameplay to any other miniature of the same tonnage/armaments/etc--the only difference is that it would look really really awkward. In TT, the mech scaling was aesthetic only. It made no functional difference in combat. A 12 inch tall miniature had the same likelihood of being shot as a dinky little Flea mech (assuming equal number of hexes moved in the previous turn).
In real-time shooters, scaling is far more than aesthetic. It plays a big part in how survivable a unit is, because we can aim. For starters, it means you can see them more easily at a distance. This reduces stealthiness a little bit, and more importantly it attracts enemy aggro to the bigger target. The human eye is simply attracted to big things, especially big things that are moving. More surface area also increases the statistical likelihood of you getting hit. I think it's fairly straightforward as to why trying to land a shot on something like a red hole on a cardboard target is noticeably harder than it is to try to hit a farmer's barn (extreme example is extreme, but you get the idea).
All of this being said, I'm not expecting rescaling of various mechs (most mediums, some heavies, perhaps one light) to instantly make them fully competitive against their top-tier peers, but it would be a good step to helping that happen. Part of those mechs' weakness is their body shape/size.
EDIT: Also worthy of noting is that when I ask for size reductions, I don't mean just the height dimension. I mean reducing all dimensions (x, y, z) by the same proportion as the height. Basically, the mechs would have reduced height, width, and depth at the same time, but retaining the same overall body shape (just a different size).
Edited by FupDup, 07 March 2014 - 09:12 PM.
