42 replies to this topic

[wanderer]

I hear he likes beef tips in gravy.

Anyway- stock CDA-3C is like a junker car- it may move, but it's not great at doing so. It's vastly underarmored, undercooled, and has a lot of work that can be put into improving it. Basically, for a new 'Mech, you check for:

1) Double heat sinks. If you don't have them, the 'Mech is incredibly tough to keep cool.
2) Armor. Most stock designs don't have near-max armor. Most solid MWO-pilot designs do. You'll want to find tonnage to tweak the fragile -3C's base armor up- even if it means downgrading the PPC to a large laser or the like for now. Heck, I've seen newbies mounting one MPL + 4 MG's, basically giving you a wannabe Spider. Of course, you can always find...
3) Weight savings! XL engines are common in speedy lights and mediums, with endosteel a close second. Your Cicada has a 280 Standard engine- and a 280 XL gives it nine tons to work with. You're small enough that speed > worrying about a blown side torso. Endosteel gives you back 5% of the 'Mech weight for the cost of 14 crit spaces, making the chassis able to carry less- in this case, the -3C will give you 2 tons back for using endosteel. Hey, that's 2 more MG's and another ton of ammo right there!

Right now, you have a lightly armored, overheating basic stock 'Mech. Eventually, that's a XL/Endo design with thicker (something like twice the armor you have stock) armor, probably an ER PPC and quad MG's + 2 tons of ammo. And when the time comes for a new chassis to skill up, you can move that XL engine over to the new Cicada if need be,

[Takashi Uchida]

The fact that you were able to get nearly 600 dmg in a match within the first 3 days of playing suggests to me that you'll be alright. Previous experience with MW means you're already far ahead of the completely new player. You've already got a lot of great help in this post already, so I'll just leave this here

https://docs.google....d.g263f6502b_00

^This is an excellent (and quite lengthy) starter guide that covers the basics of everything from mech building to piloting techniques. It's not 100% up to date but that's okay because we just got an influx of new content due to the clan invasion, so most people are still figuring that out anyway.

You asked about why you only have 4 garages ("mech bays") to house your mechs. Well, unfortunately if you want more, you will have to shell out some real dough. There are two forms of currency in this game. The first is "cbills," which you earn through playing matches and you can use it to buy the majority of the things available in the game. The second is "MC" which is bought through this website (click the yellow MC button between "support" and "redeem" at the top of screen). You can choose various amounts (buying MC in greater amounts will get you more MC for your dollar/euro/whatever, kinda like buying stuff in bulk). The good news is, compared to buying mechs with mc, mech bays are very inexpensive.

What I would do is, play until you have all the elite skills unlocked for a mech that you enjoy playing. At that point, if you decide you like the game enough, you can consider buying some MC.

[Takashi Uchida]

Also the 3C is an interesting animal. I bought it to grind xp for the basic skills because I wanted the unlock the elite skills on my 3M, but I liked it enough to keep it for a while. Don't worry about raw damage numbers if you're using 4 machine guns. Your job is to crippled and finish off the bad guys. Unfortunately, you're gonna need some help in peeling the armor off and if your team doesn't have their sh*t together you might be out of luck. It's definitely not a beginner friendly playstyle or build, and may be even more underpowered since the clan update, but it can work for some folks!

Here are the results of a good game I had in the 3C (pre Clan invasion)

Spoiler