43 replies to this topic

[Voyager I]

Solutions looking for problems I see.

[Felime]

Dober not understanding probabilities ITT.

Put armor on your legs and stop crying about it and asking to have the armor effectively tripled for free.

Edit: Not to mention that, unless every shot on the map magically homes in on your leg, it's still far safer than in tabletop where a kick can strip all the armor(or the entire leg) off in one attack.

Edited by Felime, 09 July 2012 - 09:39 AM.

[Dymitry]

CCC Dober, on 24 June 2012 - 02:23 AM, said:

@Son
I gave the idea another spin and realized something. In the past there was only one hitzone for either leg or arm and that carried over into the game unmodified. The results were that hitting both parts of the Mech was easier than when you attempted to do that with dice in the original game. This led to the exploits I mentioned. Conversely, if the original game sported multiple hitzones for both arms and legs, they would have been incredibly hard to kill and thus become equally prone to exploits. What we have here is one of the extreme cases, where things that work well and balanced it TT simply don't work as intended in a realtime environment.

Back on track: I realize that this game is trying to capture the spirit of the game and that both aforementioned environments have different rules. In order to preserve the feeling and character of the TT, it might become necessary to handle multiple hitzones for arm and legs 'under the hood'. Visually everything stays the same, armor, internals and values. But in combat things would suddenly start to make sense. Like shooting off the foot of a Mech may still allow it to limp slightly faster than with a blown lower leg. Or that a savaged upper arm doesn't automatically render lower arm mounted weapons useless. Things like that go a long way to consolidate both what you can read (Victor's Daishi having his foot actuator blown to pieces) and experience (TT) in this game.

I could give an example on how it may work out in the end (hypothetical values).
Let's say you want to destroy the leg of another Mech and your shots have to cover a long distance. The first salvo deals 15 damage to the upper and 10 to the lower leg. The next salvo ended up with 10 hitting the foot and 15 hitting the lower leg. Assuming that your maximum leg armor is 20 for the whole leg that means each part of it is equally armored. So the upper leg is down to 10/20, the lower is down to 0/20 (internal damage of 5) and the foot at 10/20. Overall the average armor level is down to 15/60, which is 25%. Internal structure is good so far, only the lower leg is a bit shaky. Let's say the average internal level is at 80%. So the target display would display the leg armor as orange-red and the internals green-yellow-ish. Visuals however show the lower leg armor to be a total mess and that is where we come full circle. This is the spot where the leg will offer the least resistance and severely cripple movement speed if destroyed. If it was the foot, less so. Upper leg would probably result in dragging the whole leg at a snail's pace.

The above is what goes on in the novels and gives us a more accurate idea of how it was envisioned originally (personal impression). The TT game can't display such a level of detail for the reason I have mentioned already and because it is complicated enough without it. MW:O on the other hand is not limited in such a way and can combine the best of both worlds, so to say. And it already does, see persistent visual damage. The calculations and tedious things basically run 'under the hood' and I think this allows for more refined hitzones while staying true to the spirit of the game.

So by my reckoning we may get more realism/depth and less griefing from this.

This is a great idea and a good compromise, does not sound so hard to implement or easy to exploit.

[Schtirlitz]

Not that critical, considering it is impossible to break off a leg, but still good idea.