178 replies to this topic

[Silversynch]

DI3T3R, on 16 January 2015 - 09:01 AM, said:

That was my idea:
- A blob of 5 Elementals walking/jumping/shooting in lockstep.
- PGI can use the following model: A virtual body of a four-legged Mech, but the joints are transparent. That way the Elementals always stay in formation, because they are really limbs of a single model.
- As the Point takes damage, the limbs get severed one by one. The Point loses firepower, but it also gets even smaller. The pointcommander/torso/you is the last one to die.


An Elemental-Point is equal to a Mech in terms of the unit-organization-chart, but not in terms of performance/BV.
It takes 2-3 Points at minimum to take down a Mech in Tabletop. And only if the terrain keeps the Mech from simply running away.

River City? The Swamp? Great maps for Elementals, because they can hide and ambush.
Alpine peaks? Caustic Valley? Horrible maps for Elementals.

Many Mechs are not viable on certain maps. Don't have jump jets? Canyon is not for you? Slow, lumbering? Think twice about waking across those Alpine peaks! It's in the nature of the game by now for some maps to make you OP and some completely hold you back.

[EAP10]

Maybe PGI could introduce a 'combined arms' mode with 5-8 people plus tanks, infantry and elementals. That way it would not put so much stress on the servers.

[0rionsbane]

i love piloting elementals, yeah i would get blown up from one ac 20 shot, but they are like 1/4th the size of a locusts leg so, kind of hard to hit the buggers.

used the cheat to pilot them in mw2 and mw3 pirates mood had them fully implemented.

[Anyone00]

Crazy idea: a game mode called "Lowest Bidder" (or what ever the proper term for the Clans would be)
Two points of respawning Elementals and two second-line Clan light or medium mechs (base, do not respawn) have to stop a standard 3 lance IS group from obtaining a certain goal.

Now how to design it with the Elemental's ~11kph speed in mind.

[Dennma]

Koniving, on 23 June 2014 - 08:37 PM, said:

On an equal note: Battlemechs of the Inner Sphere were known to be deployed with Infantry and Vehicle support.

The Blackjack specifically is an infantry support mech.
The Firestarter is purely an anti-infantry mech, if those two give you some idea of the devotion given to fighting infantry.

The presence of 'consumable module' infantry and battle armor would give a whole new reason for flamers and MGs, as lasers and ACs wouldn't be terribly efficient when dealing with infantry. SRMs would still have great use of course, but you can't really 'aim' SRMs for something quite so small.

Infantry would be awesome. I played MechAssault on the original XBOX, and MWO feels so empty without little useless ant soldiers to squish. Tanks would perhaps make for more of a challenge than infantry, and would indeed be in keeping with the lore. Clans could drop with elementals, IS with infantry/armor support.

[Will9761]

YES! Please do! Make it so PGI!

[Koniving]

Dennma, on 07 March 2015 - 11:34 PM, said:

Infantry would be awesome. I played MechAssault on the original XBOX, and MWO feels so empty without little useless ant soldiers to squish. Tanks would perhaps make for more of a challenge than infantry, and would indeed be in keeping with the lore. Clans could drop with elementals, IS with infantry/armor support.

Funny thing on that.
Soldiers weren't quite ants -- well it depended on what you're in. Something Atlas height or so (MWO's Hunchback height is approximately the height of a BT Atlas) would have something close to ants.

To mention it, these front wheels are listed as nearly 9 meters (27 feet) tall. Look at the people.

Now look at this Shadowhawk as originally scaled by FASA in 1987 (its paper thin armor makes a LOT more sense looking at this, especially when info about later models (especially the 5 series) increasing its size to allow more armor without changing its overall carrying weight.


For comparison, Wolverine with tank and infantry.


And remember the Locust image? Ever thought about how it's so ungodly skinny and doesn't look like someone could even fit into it?

Take a moment and consider this.

On top of the slope is a cockpit window. Now consider that the Locust has a foot of a slightly larger size than the Shadowhawk. Let that sink in for a moment. Yeah, it's big. Interestingly it's still smaller than 10 meters (the MWO Commando is 9.7 meters tall).

Remember the Marauder? In a Thunderbolt versus Marauder tale A Dagger's Death, a Marauder is described as half a meter taller than an Atlas's skull. Those long, thin and kinda lanky arms and legs? Stilts so to speak; extra size instead of extra tonnage.


Makes things interesting.

[Ultra-Laser]

Koniving, on 08 March 2015 - 05:04 AM, said:

-snip-

See, if Battle Armor was introduced this is the one thing that would drive me nuts. If you guesstimate from the size of the cockpits, access hatch looking bits and ladder greebles then MWO mechs ought to be at least comparable to proper BT scale mechs, but if you take too close a look at the scaling in the city maps then our mechs are somewhere between "mid sized gundam" and "small-ish godzilla".

Back on topic, my two cents on Battle Armor (yes, Battle Armor, not just Elementals, The Inner Sphere cateches up on the Battle Armor game pretty darn quick).

I'm pretty comfortable with the notion of BA being a consumable, but BA's nature as an attendant unit to a given battlemech, as opposed to the one-shot arty/airstrike might mean having BA take up its own mech module slot. I'm leaning towards having it as an "indefinite" consumable myself, although depending on how OP the final set up is I might be willing to have it take up both consumable slots. The way I would like to see Battle Armor work is that the point/squad starts out as passengers outside of your mech (at last a use for all these gab bars!) for both inner sphere and clans alike. Some might quibble over the omnimech/battlemech rules and technobabble for why one can carry BA but not the other, but as far as I know allowing BA to hitch a ride on conventional battlemechs if a fairly common house rule. Might even be in TacOps. As these squads are riding on the outside of your mech there is every likelihood that they will be shot off as you close in with the enemy. Now some of you might read that and think "sweet, ablative armor" and you'd be mostly right. Keep in mind that the Battle Armor consumable counts as "spent" the moment you enter the game as far as c-bill cost goes, so having your hard earned c-bills get shot to bits in exchange for being able to tank another 2-3 seconds of fire means that you likely won't be able to make full use of your investment.

Now for how I'd want Battle Armor to actually be used. To "activate" battle armor you would simply press the relevant button for that consumable slot. Once this is done the squad will do one of two things. If you the player do not have a target within 100 meter/jump distance, then the BA squad simply dismounts and patrols the area around you as bodyguards to the best of their AI ability. They'll do their best to stick with you, but unless you're in an assault mech or slow heavy you're probably going to outpace them. If you do have a target selected within 100 meters/jump distance, then the squad goes all out trying to bring that mech down. Proper swarming would best be omitted until the game has a firmly established system for melee combat between mechs, but having the AI prioritize legs and/or exposed internals is a definite possibility. If the squad has any one-shot weapon systems then it will use them on the ordered target at the first opportunity, bodyguard squads will simply hold their fire on their one-shot gear until given a specific target to bring down, harassing anything that gets too close to them in the meantime. If their lucky enough to be alive when that target goes down then they revert to the bodyguard behavior described above. Squads can be switched from bodyguard behavior to attack behavior simply by selecting a target and pressing the button for that consumable slot, the same button can be pressed to have attacking squads disengage and revert to bodyguard behavior. The distance to target only if you wish to have the BA leap from your mech onto the enemy. You can have them dismount and then order them to attack whoever you wish from whatever distance you wish, just keep in mind the time it will take them to get there and the likely hazards they will have on the way. Some might see these options as too limited, but I made a deliberate effort to keep them simple to use. Being allowed to relay complex commands to battle armor, or any other class of AI team mate for that matter, sounds like the sort of job that the Command Console has been begging and pleading for from day one.

The Clanners would have their Elemental points of course, who we can assume would outclass their Spheroid counterparts in most if not every way. How are us poor spheroid dogs supposed to cope on this front? Assuming that PGI continues the trend of having bits of 3052+ leak into our forever 3050 we'll do it the same way we do in our mechs, we specialize, or failing that just get dead sneaky. If we restrict ourselves to bipedal BA produced in 3052 and earlier that gives us.

Spoiler

INNER SPHERE STANDARD

You know it, but you probably don't love it. Does nearly everything the clan elemental does, poorly. It's weapon options are a flamer, a machine gun, a small laser and a one-shot SRM-2, you are allowed to take one and only one. Its no one's fault really, just a result of trying to beat the clans at their own game and simply not having the know-how to pull it off. In all honesty I actually prefer that the Inner Sphere's do-everything BA be flat out worse then the clan equivalent. Like I said, the IS wins by specialiszing.


GREAY DEATH STANDARD

Named Characters to the rescue! I think. The GD Standard ditches the jump pack in favor of improved ground speed, improved sensors (which work like a baby version of the active probe) and an anti-personnel mount. Not an MG like what goes on our mechs mind you, this is more like in the neighborhood of stuff like the P-90/M-16/AK-47. The GD standard keeps the weapon option of the IS version with the option of the One-shot SRM-2 replace with a reload-able SRM-1 and further option of a Light Recoilless Rifle, which is like a hunting rifle meant to take down mechs. In MWO gameplay I'm thinking this would be an alright sidegrade to the IS Standard, its better overall as long as you don't care for jumping BA in the first place.

GRAY DEATH SCOUT

Because there is no reason for a name to be more complicated then it has to be. It's exactly what it sounds like, little armor even by the standards of BA, a proper active probe rather then the GD Standard's Improved Sensors, and its only "offensive" weapon is an anti-personnel mount like I described earlier. If I saw these in MWO what I would want is for them to be the NARC/UAV of the IS Battle Armor lineup. Ordering them to "attack" means "keep a target lock on that guy" rather then "Bring it down!" like with other BA squads. If their AP mounts even do enough damage to count then they'll only ever take potshots at whoever wanders near them.

INFILTRATOR

Fresh out the labs at the New Avalon Institute of Science is another Battle Armor that sounds just like what it was meant to do, although the nature of MWO means that it might end up being named "those obnoxious lil' buggers that come out of nowhere and are a huge paint to deal with even if they don't actually do much". Comes with stealth armor, a grenade launcher and a "heat sensor" which probably won't end up doing anything in-game and if we're lucky will get swapped out for more armor/ammo. These guys don't actually have hands to hold onto your mech with, so chances are they'll spend the game either vainly trying to keep up with you or being extremely irritating to whoever you singled out for them to harass. If these make it into MWO people won't ever take them for their raw killing power, they'll take them because the stealth armor is going to make them a huge pain to find. TT rules make them flat out invisible to pretty much anything other then plain sight without an ECM suite, so you can't even guess what area their in based on where your radar display goes fuzzy.


RAIDEN

This Draconis Combine exclusive Battle Armor has a small laser in the right arm and a one-shot SRM in the shoulder. Its only in the prototype stage in 3052, but given how many of us players are running around in King Crabs, Raven-4Xs and other mechs that are supposedly either teetering on the brink of extinction or only had a small handful produced in the first place I don't think availability is much of an issue for us players. The production model is due to ditch the SRM for more armor and replace the small laser with a modular weapon mount for flamers/MGs/another small laser, but that's just a slight bit further ahead in the timeline then I think PGI is willing to go at this exact moment. Its a jumping moderate-to-well armored squad with just enough firepower to be noticed. I imagine their most common use in MWO would be to deliver fatalities to mechs that are already pretty beat up to start with.

Man I keep writing these things thinking I'm just gonna say one or two things and before I know it I've got a freaking essay.

[Koniving]

Ultra-Laser, on 08 March 2015 - 01:59 PM, said:

See, if Battle Armor was introduced this is the one thing that would drive me nuts. If you guesstimate from the size of the cockpits, access hatch looking bits and ladder greebles then MWO mechs ought to be at least comparable to proper BT scale mechs, but if you take too close a look at the scaling in the city maps then our mechs are somewhere between "mid sized gundam" and "small-ish godzilla".

Indeed. I've noticed the 'thin' ones are typically very tall/large despite the tonnage. (Marauder being slightly taller than an Atlas despite the huge tonnage difference, which even at this size the mech is still really thin and lower volume so still feasibly lighter).

I waited to respond to the original message until I could find the image again. While unable to find the entry I originally based the fact that the Locust must be larger (in which to cover their tracks and the firepower they have in their scout lance, the Locusts would step on the smaller footprints made by the shorter though much girthier Shadowhawks), I found one of the images on page 41 of CityTech.


The little story there is kinda funny. And compare the size of the Locust to the Shadowhawk images I provided earlier -- it's still a fair bit thinner than the Locust despite the similar armor. And even at that size, I think the Locust (between its height and lengthy legs it'd be pretty difficult to hit while moving).

I believe it definitely would create considerable diversity between mechs.
Adder, Firemoth, Mist Lynx, Kitfox.




Ignore the second and bottom rows on this.(For comparison, MWO puts the Commando at 9.7 meters tall, the Centurion at 14.7 meters, and the Shadowhawk is approximately 15.6 meters [in BT it'd be less than 9 meters tall]).

BT's Atlas is stated to be in the 13 meter range in height. The tallest mech in BT in 3055 is the Executioner (14.4 meters), and yet MWO has the Atlas at 17.6 meters.

You'd definitely have some reasons to choose some mechs over others.

Quote

Back on topic, my two cents on Battle Armor (yes, Battle Armor, not just Elementals, The Inner Sphere cateches up on the Battle Armor game pretty darn quick).

I'm pretty comfortable with the notion of BA being a consumable, but BA's nature as an attendant unit to a given battlemech, as opposed to the one-shot arty/airstrike might mean having BA take up its own mech module slot. I'm leaning towards having it as an "indefinite" consumable myself, although depending on how OP the final set up is I might be willing to have it take up both consumable slots. The way I would like to see Battle Armor work is that the point/squad starts out as passengers outside of your mech (at last a use for all these gab bars!) for both inner sphere and clans alike. Some might quibble over the omnimech/battlemech rules and technobabble for why one can carry BA but not the other, but as far as I know allowing BA to hitch a ride on conventional battlemechs if a fairly common house rule. Might even be in TacOps. As these squads are riding on the outside of your mech there is every likelihood that they will be shot off as you close in with the enemy. Now some of you might read that and think "sweet, ablative armor" and you'd be mostly right. Keep in mind that the Battle Armor consumable counts as "spent" the moment you enter the game as far as c-bill cost goes, so having your hard earned c-bills get shot to bits in exchange for being able to tank another 2-3 seconds of fire means that you likely won't be able to make full use of your investment.

I love it. But for performance reasons and because of the sheer size of MWO's mechs, I'd imagine them popping out of an imaginary storage unit or air-dropped. But yes, having them escort you until slaughtered is ideal, even with a length of time and good equipment they'd still be hardpressed to compete with the artillery strike/air strike. But at least you'd have them.

Quote

The Clanners would have their Elemental points of course, who we can assume would outclass their Spheroid counterparts in most if not every way. How are us poor spheroid dogs supposed to cope on this front? Assuming that PGI continues the trend of having bits of 3052+ leak into our forever 3050 we'll do it the same way we do in our mechs, we specialize, or failing that just get dead sneaky.

I haven't read what's in the spoiler yet (super tired from work) so I'll be back to excitedly read it.

But for now, one obvious thought is to simply play the numbers game. Clan spawns 5 Battle Armor with appropriate weapons. From what I see on megamek, they are mostly melee-focused (swarm mech; attack swarmed mech, attack legs, stop swarm) with some having light MGs. IS spawns infantry and from what I'm seeing here, that's typically 20 to 28 infantry men and they can be packing anything from MGs to a Gauss Rifle. SRM / LRM, etc.

If the Clan Battle Armor jumping becomes a problem, the IS has jump-men, infantry with jump packs.

Just food for thought. Looking forward to reading that spoiler when I'm more awake.

[TheArisen]

Yes if IS gets tanks or something roughly equally good.

[Ultra-Laser]

Koniving, on 10 March 2015 - 10:16 PM, said:

I love it. But for performance reasons and because of the sheer size of MWO's mechs, I'd imagine them popping out of an imaginary storage unit or air-dropped. But yes, having them escort you until slaughtered is ideal, even with a length of time and good equipment they'd still be hardpressed to compete with the artillery strike/air strike. But at least you'd have them.

Depending on what deployment method they use we could argue for conventional or maybe infantry too. I'll be sure to have my 4xMG/flamer/BAP Locust ready to go.

EDIT: AERIAL INSERTIONS OF COURSE! PGI already has the assets for airstrikes, so they have something to start from already. I like this idea.

Koniving, on 10 March 2015 - 10:16 PM, said:

But for now, one obvious thought is to simply play the numbers game. Clan spawns 5 Battle Armor with appropriate weapons. From what I see on megamek, they are mostly melee-focused (swarm mech; attack swarmed mech, attack legs, stop swarm) with some having light MGs. IS spawns infantry and from what I'm seeing here, that's typically 20 to 28 infantry men and they can be packing anything from MGs to a Gauss Rifle. SRM / LRM, etc.

If the Clan Battle Armor jumping becomes a problem, the IS has jump-men, infantry with jump packs.

Just food for thought. Looking forward to reading that spoiler when I'm more awake.

In BT land "knife fighting close" for a mech is "typical engagement range" for infantry. Battle Armor is less a motorized suit of armor then it is a wearable armored vehicle, which I believe I alluded to in some of the weapon summaries. IS BA and Elementals have comparable squad sizes, so I'd be willing to let PGI bump it up or down one if it was the simplest solution for a given balance issue.

TheArisen, on 11 March 2015 - 12:37 AM, said:

Yes if IS gets tanks or something roughly equally good.

You mean Like Battle Armor of our own? :^)

Edited by Ultra-Laser, 11 March 2015 - 05:05 AM.

[Anyone00]

Ultra-Laser, on 08 March 2015 - 01:59 PM, said:

The Clanners would have their Elemental points of course, who we can assume would outclass their Spheroid counterparts in most if not every way. How are us poor spheroid dogs supposed to cope on this front?

The way I figure it for this point in the time line: entrench with relatively big guns.

[Ultra-Laser]

Anyone00, on 11 March 2015 - 05:26 AM, said:

The way I figure it for this point in the time line: entrench with relatively big guns.

As cool as that idea is it would make way more sense to just do it as a more general turret drop consumable, unless you already intend for it to be unusable on maps with no buildings. Entrenched infantry is a cool idea and all but:

1) My poor lil' frame rate already dreads the notion of having to render dozens of tiny armored dudes every time more than one person brings BA to a match, let alone the prospect of each person being allowed to bring dozens of his own little dudes.

2) Having infantry be be able to fortify indestructible builds means that ballistic/laser/missile weapons, owning to glorious Canadian hit detection and geometry, might not be able to hit them at all, especially if their in something like a parking garage. I'm all for giving flamers another niche or two but that seems like a pretty backwards way to go about it.

[Anyone00]

Ultra-Laser, on 11 March 2015 - 01:42 PM, said:

As cool as that idea is it would make way more sense to just do it as a more general turret drop consumable, unless you already intend for it to be unusable on maps with no buildings. Entrenched infantry is a cool idea and all but:

1) My poor lil' frame rate already dreads the notion of having to render dozens of tiny armored dudes every time more than one person brings BA to a match, let alone the prospect of each person being allowed to bring dozens of his own little dudes.

2) Having infantry be be able to fortify indestructible builds means that ballistic/laser/missile weapons, owning to glorious Canadian hit detection and geometry, might not be able to hit them at all, especially if their in something like a parking garage. I'm all for giving flamers another niche or two but that seems like a pretty backwards way to go about it.

1) No running around; just straight from the VTOL to the building and after that they are not visible (besides the laser beams).
2) Just hit the building at all and if you would proc a critical (like against a mechs internal structure) or do some heat damage one of the guys inside dies.

[Ultra-Laser]

Anyone00, on 11 March 2015 - 02:52 PM, said:

1) No running around; just straight from the VTOL to the building and after that they are not visible (besides the laser beams).
2) Just hit the building at all and if you would proc a critical (like against a mechs internal structure) or do some heat damage one of the guys inside dies.

You propose that infantry are to hide inside of buildings, which are indestructible, and not give them a model of their own and just have weapons fire out of the indestructible buildings. Please step back for a moment and meditate on the implications of this scenario.

[Anyone00]

Ultra-Laser, on 11 March 2015 - 05:13 PM, said:

You propose that infantry are to hide inside of buildings, which are indestructible, and not give them a model of their own and just have weapons fire out of the indestructible buildings. Please step back for a moment and meditate on the implications of this scenario.

Did you not read what I typed?
You fire a flamer at the building: they die.
You fire a machine gun at the building: they die.
You fire a lb-x at range at the building: they die.
Even other weapons will eventually kill them.

There are only so many consumables in a match.

[Ultra-Laser]

Anyone00, on 11 March 2015 - 05:32 PM, said:

Did you not read what I typed?
You fire a flamer at the building: they die.
You fire a machine gun at the building: they die.
You fire a lb-x at range at the building: they die.
Even other weapons will eventually kill them.

There are only so many consumables in a match.

so the building goes from being terrain to a unit?

[Anyone00]

Ultra-Laser, on 11 March 2015 - 06:22 PM, said:

so the building goes from being terrain to a unit?

Well more likely it would be pulled off by having an invisible (and non-tangible to the mechs) object that acts as the hitbox and a target for the consumable (and that invisible object is connected to how every many lasers smaller-invisible-objects that shoot the lasers) that fits over structures that are occupy-able.
This would essentially require every map be passed over to add these objects but the AI would be much simpler than having NPC units running around the map (basically be mini-turrets but hopefully keeping in mind these are supposed to be guys in a building shooting a gun on a mount hence not able to easily hit smaller fast moving objects). It would take about as much work as adding Elementals running around independently with a modicum of intelligence but largely different kind of work. So adding Elementals and/or entrench-able standard infantry will be worked on right before or right after melee combat.

[Ultra-Laser]

Anyone00, on 11 March 2015 - 06:53 PM, said:

snip

That's a cool idea, but I still see some issues that would get in the way of pratical implementation vs a generic turret drop consumable. The most apperent one being that PGI would either need to build a hitbox for each and every building asset in game or go back and change every map to have uniform buildings. In the case of the latter I'm guessing they would just slap in some "abandoned bunker" type asset to serve the same functional role. AI for Battle Armor squads would be no small hurdle, but based on the fact that we have turrets presently in game its a good bet that they're at least looking at the getting most fundamental elements in place.

[LordNothing]

dealing with bugs was one of the more annoying things about MWLL. id rather not see mwo adopt it.