Kiiyor, on 13 November 2014 - 06:36 PM, said:
This is an excellent point - though I would like to point out that hiding damaged locations against someone wielding their Vorpal Sword of PPFLD+5 is often an exercise in futility, as any decent enemy worth their salt will just wait for you to re-expose the damaged component. It's not like you can do any appreciable damage while you're playing the 'can't hurt me if they can't see me' game anyways. Against someone with lasers or SRM's, it's a far more viable tactic.
I think that more emphasis needs to be placed on internal damage.
On the battlefield, as we speak, pilots are fighting knowing that stripped armour from a location usually means that the next hit is the one that seals the deal. Now, If I lose the armour from any location (especially in a 'Sphere mech) I start to play ludicrously cautiously. If i'm in a medium or light, i'll even petulantly charge to my death, especially if the big hit is at the start of the match. Team player.
I'd like to see far more emphasis on critical hits and slowly degrading internal structure. Damaged arm actuators locking an arm in place, damaged foot actuators giving a mech an appreciable limp making it hard to fire while moving, damaged weapons producing extra heat or with reduced ranges, damaged gauss having triple the charge up time, damaged engines reducing speed, damaged gyros increasing the effect of impulse dramatically, damaged electronic slots making the HUD flicker or lengthening lock on time...
To this end, I think that rather than increasing armour, we should double or triple internal structure, and look at making internal hits a larger part of the game, rather than counting down seconds until death. We could even quirk mechs that are purportedly tanky, like the Atlas, to increase the damage resitstance of their internal components, so they are more likely to be in the fight until the bitter end.
I actually posted a while back on an idea for using armor differently than just bonus HP.
If we treated armor as a form of degradable damage reduction that starts out great and slowed gets holes punched in it (leading to no damage reduction on some shots). I think the TTK would go up, and you'd often lose a limb due to crits and internal damage before totally losing all armor in a location.
I realize this isn't "battletech", but I think it would be a decent way to help increase TTK and to negate the effects of PPFLD.
Armor ratings become about conveying the ability to bounce shots on a location.
As an example (all numbers are mutable):
Every selection of 25 armor conveys a 90% chance to bounce up to 5 damage, so 100 armor can bounce 20 damage rounds (good chance that 100+ armor will bounce even AC20 shots to start).
If a round of greater damage hits an area with armor that does cover it, it punches a hole, the armor rating on the location is decreased by the amount that it can bounce, and the rest passes through to internals.
So a 25 armor location takes an AC10 hit. 5 damage is done to the armor and 5 damage is done to the internals. The location now has an armor rating of 20 and it has a 72% change to bounce 5 damage, and a 99% chance to bounce about 4 damage.
Say a difference 25 armor location takes a series of MG hits. Most bounce, but one out of 100 is going to go through to internals, and decrease the armor in the location by 0.2... this lowers the bounce rate slighty to 98% for ac5's, ect. ect. ect.
Small, crit seeking weapons slight MG's would be useful for degrading armor so smaller damage weapons don't bounce. Flamers and energy weapons could also have a softening affect, they might be limited to same overall damage rates, but the heat may decrease %damage reduction on the location for a while... so that 100 armor atlas center torso might still be able to bounce AC20 rounds, but if it's soaked up a pile of medium lasers (doing little to no damage) but turning the area cherry red, it might now be vulnerable at 50% to a 20 point round, or 75% for a 10 point round.... and each time a round peirces it also then degrades the armor and does internal damage.
This type of system would then force each individual piece of damage to calculated against the armor, making pin point damage much less deadly.
Additionally, internal structure could be decreased, also making crit seeking weapons more useful when they do penetrate.
Edited by Prezimonto, 14 November 2014 - 01:24 PM.