DocBach, on 09 October 2014 - 04:34 PM, said:
I think the purpose of hard point sizes is to make players make choices and trade offs in choosing a chassis rather than just using the one chassis that rules them all. Don't get me wrong, my Mad Cat is cool and all but now I don't really have much of a reason to use anything else in the game.
The Mad Cat didn't have any flaws in Tabletop either. Frankly, mechs that made tradeoffs in TT weren't that popular.
The pro-sizes crowd are clinging to this bizzare notion that competitive players are willing to make tradeoffs, or allow themselves to have weaknesses that can be exploited. That just doesn't happen in comp. If something has a weakness that can be exploited, it will be exploited ruthlessly.
You might be able to get the game to the point where everything has at least one weakness, but then the metagame centers around finding the mech(s) with the smallest number of weaknesses and covering that weakness by any means necessary. See the Highlander/Pop Tart metagame that dominated last year. Teams would spawn, run to a safe place on the map, and camp there until the timer ran out or the enemy team got impatient and charged their superior position. Did the pop-tart Highlander have significant weaknesses? You becha. It was a huge 90 ton mech with an easily destroyed XL engine, a slow rate of fire, poor DPS, and pretty terrible heat efficiency. Was it so good on other fronts that competitive teams developed an entire metagame around covering those weaknesses and maximizing its strengths to the point of near invincibility? You're darn tootin'.
Lord Scarlett Johan, on 09 October 2014 - 04:40 PM, said:
They're TT grognards, but they don't remember that 99.5% of TT mechs are complete and utter garbage. I still remember when I'd take nothing by tanks, artillery, infantry, and aerospace assets and absolutely wreck any and ALL mech-centric forces. Because stock mechs are a complete wash except for a VERY select few.
This guy gets it. The way to win TT was to field a ton of tanks/infantry/battle armor and one or two really solid mech designs that can act like fast cavalry. I've kicked the tar out of -lots- of pure-mech teams with combined arms, because frankly most TT mechs, as you say, are trash. Fun for roleplayers or challenging yourself, but when competing for cash and fabulous prizes they're not worth the pewter they're cast from.
Edited by Josef Nader, 09 October 2014 - 04:45 PM.