13 replies to this topic

[shellashock]

*IMPORTANT*

Preamble:

Spoiler

Hello all!

Before anyone disagrees with the proposal I am posting, please note that I think machine guns are currently in a good place right now as far as the “damage to armour vs internals ratio” is concerned. Most people would agree that they currently do a fine job as a chip damage/crit seeker weapon. Unfortunately, the crit damage potential for machine guns is rarely realized unless you are boating them (using 4-6 of them).

The goal of this proposal is to fit machine guns into a chip damage/crit seeker niche that can be filled by a pair (2) of machine guns. This proposal will also try to turn machine gun boats into the true internals munching buzzsaws they should be while providing a few drawbacks to help counter them. Enjoy!

PS: All mechanics, equations, and proposed numbers are WIP and should be treated as if they are not proven. All of my proposed numbers have been chosen because they gave me nice whole numbers without icky decimals in sections like ammo count and number of shots per second. Please notify me of any holes in my logic, equations, or proposed numbers. I am relatively new to balancing (more of a mechanics design guy), so I would appreciate any help in simplifying/properly balancing my proposal. As always, please be courteous and don’t flame the OP/ other posters in the thread.

1. Make Machine guns burst fire over x seconds

Spoiler

One of the biggest complaints I have seen about machine guns is that they have good “paper” damage, but they are often not able to deliver the advertised amount due to the 100% on-target time required to deal damage. Battles aren’t always as cut and dried as a simple DPS faceoff (one of the reasons why alpha damage is so important here), and this often will negate the machine gun’s “paper” advantage.

My solution to this is making machine guns fire bursts for a maximum of 3 seconds. This locks a machine gun’s damage potential into a set timeframe that (to me) seems reasonable for a weapon that is based off the “death by a thousand cuts principle”. As making machine guns fire in short bursts of rapid fire further reinforces the notion that these machine guns are like Gatling guns, it makes sense to suggest that a “spin up/ spin down” time be implemented as well to simulate the motor that powers the barrel rotation. This delay will be small (around 0.25-0.5 per), but it should be enough to make people think before committing to a battle with their guns and will prevent the need to constantly spam the fire button when the guns finish the 3 second burst. Just hold down the button and it will automatically spin up and spin down at the beginning and end of each cycle respectively.

2: Implement reloading for machine guns

Spoiler

This is one of the most important changes for overhauling machine guns. A mech using machine guns currently will link all ammunition together and will fire continuously until all ammunition has been spent. This can sometimes be upwards of 5 tons of ammo linked together for builds like the 6 MG Jagermech.

Considering that machine gun ammo is spread across your mech’s critical space and is not all stored in a single ammo cache, it would be both arduous and impractical to link all of these rounds together through the mech’s autoloader network. It would be much easier for both the tech working on the mech and the autoloader system itself if it simply counted each of ton/ half ton of ammo as a belt or clip. Once a belt has been depleted, the depleted belt could be ejected and the autoloader would feed a fresh belt to the waiting machine guns.

Now that tons/ half tons of ammo have been split into individual belts, it makes sense to have a reload time while the autoloader fetches a fresh belt and feeds it to any equipped machine guns. This reload time would preferably be in the middle of the road at 2.5-3 seconds long. Giving machine guns a reload time not only emphasizes picking your battles wisely while minding how much ammo you have left in your current belt; it also provides a passive resistance to boating. With a set number of rounds per ton and a forced reload once a belt has been depleted, a mech will need to reload more frequently in the same amount of time as more machine guns are mounted to it. This will help promote opportunistic gameplay for machine gun boats and reduces the need to be constantly on-target to deal significant damage.

[Note: I have been informed that in real life, belts of ammo for fast firing weapons like the Gatling Gun are usually linked together to lower overall reload times instead of being in separate belts. I understand and concede this point, but because ammunition caches are usually centralized and quite close to these weapons in real life, it is quite easy to have multiple belts linked together in real life.

In Battletech/Mechwarrior however, it is possible (and common) to have a weapon that is on your arm and have your ammunition spread between the legs, center torso, and head of your Battlemech. Considering how far apart all of those ammo caches are and that they all link to the same weapon, it is more likely (IMO), that technicians would design the autoloader track and system to load and fire only one belt at a time rather than having a long band of ammunition spreading all throughout the mech in one long explosive belt.

AFAIK though, the details of how the autoloader track and system work are either not given or are intentionally vague to give the writers leeway when making a story, so I am pretty sure that there is no defined way of how an autoloader works in a Battlemech. Therefore, this is kind of a moot point unless it can be proven otherwise and I am just describing the autoloader system to work this way because it fits my view (albeit civilian) of how a machine gun autoloader should work in a big stompy battlemech.]

3: Balance accordingly

Spoiler

With the other two mechanics in place, firing a machine gun is a matter of "wait 0.5 seconds for gun to reach optimal speed, fire for a maximum of 3 seconds, wait 0.5 seconds for gun to slow to a stop before repeating. If belt depletes, wait until reloaded and then continue." This is a fairly middle of the road damage cycle range of 4 seconds.

Now that we have our time range of 4 seconds per cycle, we can focus on balancing the damage and rate of fire of the machine gun.

One thing that is important to me is that the RoF (or number of shots fired in a second) is a whole number. Fractions of bullets are annoying to calculate in some situations (firing 3 times and firing 4 bullets!?), and needlessly complicate an equation IMO. Another thing I think is important is that a SINGLE machine gun should be able to eat through a ton of ammo in a reasonable amount of time. To make things simple, I chose 60 seconds as my benchmark for a single machine gun. Since the equation I am using is (ammo per ton/shots fired per second=60 seconds), and the value 2000 for ammo per ton causes decimal values for my RoF, I changed my equation to [(ammo per ton/ 60 seconds = RoF) = whole numbers] and changed the ammo per ton value incrementally until I got whole numbers all around.

This value was 1800 shots per ton and produced a nice and clean 30 shots per second (exactly 3x faster than current RoF) in a 60 second time frame. Once my benchmark was done for a single machine gun, I scaled my equation from 1-6 machine guns. The equation now reads {1800 shots/ [(x number of machine guns)(30 shots per second)] = x seconds.}

Note that a single burst of machine gun fire lasts 3 seconds. Therefore, we can divide our results by 3 to find out exactly how many bursts of fire that result would be. In addition, one burst of fire involves 1 second of delay from the 0.5 spin up/ spin down delay. Therefore, we can add a second of delay to every burst to properly calibrate DPS; regardless of how many seconds the burst lasts for.

The results were as follows:


Note that although the number of bursts for 3 MG and 6 MG are not whole numbers, they are fractions of 3. Because 3 is also the same value as the number of seconds one burst lasts for (3 seconds = 1 burst), we can multiply that 3 into the fraction of the burst!

This results in (3 seconds/burst) (1/3 burst/x seconds) -> [(3x seconds²/burst) (1/3 burst x seconds/x seconds)] (x seconds) = x seconds -> (3x seconds²) (1/3 burst/burst) = x seconds -> (3) (1/3) = 1x seconds² = x seconds - > 1x seconds²/x seconds = x seconds/x seconds -> 1 second

Long story short, we are able to turn those fractions into the number of seconds the last burst will fire for before reloading.

Seeing as we have now lowered the ammo count per ton from 2000 to 1800, we now need to readjust how much damage that ton represents. 160 damage is the current value for 2000 rounds [(2000 shots per ton)(0.08 damage per shot) = 160 damage]. Therefore, lowering the ammo count to 1800 will change the total damage per ton to 144 [(1800)(0.08) = 144].

I would have said this is enough until I noticed that 144 damage per ton/ ~ 3.333 bursts = 43.2 damage per burst (3 seconds long) from 6 machine guns. This means they are doing an average of 10.286 DPS for 14 seconds before they need to reload (not including critical hits). That DPS is (IMO) way too high for something that is meant to be a crit seeker and chip damager instead of being a heat-less laser. To remedy this, I halved the damage per bullet to 0.04. This will lower the total damage per ton from 144 to 72, and by extension, the DPS of 6 machine guns from ~10.286 to the more manageable level of 5.14. This also lowers the alpha strike potential of 6 machine guns to ~21.6 damage spread out over 3 seconds to ARMOUR. This does not include any possible critical hits that will boost overall damage.

As for the DPS for a single machine gun, it has been buffed slightly from 0.8 to 0.9 DPS or ~ 3.6 damage per burst. This may not seem like much, but remember that the machine gun will now dump all that damage in a 3 second time frame with a greatly increased chance to critical hit internals due to the 3x faster RoF. On the note of critical hit chance/damage per shot, I propose to keep them the same. 6 machine gun builds have very good crit chance/damage potential right now, so tripling the RoF should allow a pair of machine guns to fill the crit seeker niche as well as our current 6 machine gun builds.

Summary:

Spoiler

1. Break up machine gun ammo into individual belts for firing. Once a belt is depleted, a new one must be loaded over an undetermined length of time (3 seconds?)

2. Limit machine guns to "bursts" of up to 3 seconds of length. Once the machine gun has reached 3 seconds of firing, it will automatically "spin down". Once barrels are at rest, the machine guns can be "spun up" to resume firing. "Spin Up/ Spin Down" mechanic takes 0.5 seconds to complete (1 second delay total per cycle).


3. Balance accordingly. Current Values proposed are below

- Reduce ammo per ton to 1800 rounds per ton and 900 rounds per half ton.

- Reduce damage per round from 0.08 to 0.04. Keep the critical hit chance/ damage per shot the same.

- Increase RoF from 10 rounds per second to 30 rounds per second.

Advantages/Disadvantages:

Spoiler

Discuss! If you have any questions about the mechanics and values I proposed or the equations/ formulas I showed (much harder than writing them on paper TBH), please voice them here.

Edited by shellashock, 28 January 2015 - 04:45 PM.

[Koniving]

For number 1 on the pros/cons, you can simply up the damage per bullet and give the illusion that more bullets were fired (by diminishing the bullet count faster) rather than actually spamming more bullets.

3 is an issue that people will deflect against similar to ghost heat, now that I finally understand the graph you made earlier.

This sort of mechanic would've been great for UACs versus what we have.

I like it but the spin up/spin down fire is something that people are going to complain about even if it does feel good.

On a side note, I'm saddened that there was nothing about reducing the obscene 5 meter-wide muzzle flash that MGs have. o.o;

Edited by Koniving, 28 January 2015 - 03:44 PM.

[shellashock]

Koniving, on 28 January 2015 - 03:43 PM, said:

For number 1 on the pros/cons, you can simply up the damage per bullet and give the illusion that more bullets were fired (by diminishing the bullet count faster) rather than actually spamming more bullets.

3 is an issue that people will deflect against similar to ghost heat, now that I finally understand the graph you made earlier.

This sort of mechanic would've been great for UACs versus what we have.

I like it but the spin up/spin down fire is something that people are going to complain about even if it does feel good.

On a side note, I'm saddened that there was nothing about reducing the obscene 5 meter-wide muzzle flash that MGs have. o.o;

1. True, but it will look and sound a bit weird to have the machine gun fire at the same rate and have the counter go down 3 times as fast. Thanks for bringing this up!

3. Not sure what you mean by deflecting against ghost heat. FYI, not all the "disadvantages" are really disadvantages. Some of them are merely questions about how effect a mechanic would be. Hope that clears up a bit of confusion. And yes, I really need to improve that first graph.

I am sure people will complain about the spinup/ spin down mechanic just as they complained about gauss charge, but I think it would be better to have the delay then having a weird 3 second burst, stop for an instant and then resume 3 second burst. The delay is built around how rapid fire machine guns work today; by that I mean how gatling guns fire for a set period of time before they stop to cool off the barrels. Don't see why a rapid fire BT machine gun wouldn't do the same. And spin up/ spin down with appropriately visual/sound effects just looks/sounds awesome.

As for reducing the muzzle flash, I completely forgot about that! I guess it would make sense to keep the large muzzle flash radius though if I want to triple the fire rate lol. Thanks for your review.

EDIT: Wait, wasn't it RAC's that had the constant fire rate until jamming? If those ever get into the game, this would be a nice mechanic for them.

Edited by shellashock, 28 January 2015 - 05:04 PM.

[Savage Sweets]

shellashock, on 28 January 2015 - 04:22 PM, said:

I am sure people will complain about the spin up/ spin down mechanic just as they complained about gauss charge, but I think it would be better to have the delay then having a weird 3 second burst, stop for an instant and then resume 3 second burst.

It would be more realistic to our current understanding, but I think the addition of a delay before actually firing will nerf the machine gun unnecessarily. It's already a pretty niche & situational weapon as is. Even with your improvement, there's also the issue of its ludicrously short range. I would imagine most mechs not engaging you (or not swiftly chased) would escape your machine guns' range before a majority of its bullets would hit them.

shellashock, on 28 January 2015 - 04:22 PM, said:

The delay is built around how rapid fire machine guns work today; by that I mean how gatling guns fire for a set period of time before they stop to cool off the barrels. Don't see why a rapid fire BT machine gun wouldn't do the same.

My question is:

• Is the BT machine gun actually a gatling gun? Or just a mech-sized machine gun?

Secondly, it's 3050. Centuries after the massive technological advances of BT's golden age of technology. I would suspect BattleMech technology (that not even contemporaries of 3050 fully understand) would have mechanisms that are beyond our understanding; despite what real-world influences BT does ground itself in.



Though, I do like the idea of burst fire for machine guns.

Thirdly, if BT machine guns really are gatling guns, they need some better range. I really can't understand how guns firing such low caliber bullets are barely traveling the equivalent of a 9mm bullet clearing 10 feet (or roughly 1 meter) before simply dead-dropping or incinerating into dust.

shellashock, on 28 January 2015 - 04:22 PM, said:

And spin up/ spin down with appropriately visual/sound effects just looks/sounds awesome.

Agreed. It would totally need gatling gun sound effects instead of the pee-shooter sfx's it has now (at least on I.S. m.guns).

shellashock, on 28 January 2015 - 04:22 PM, said:

As for reducing the muzzle flash, I completely forgot about that! I guess it would make sense to keep the large muzzle flash radius though if I want to triple the fire rate lol. Thanks for your review.

Still, it's nice to not to have a muzzle flash so large it blinds you.

Edited by Savage Sweets, 29 January 2015 - 08:52 PM.

[Dino Might]

Just point of fact - a reloading system would take up WAY too much space in a mech, be prone to malfunction, and be just a bad idea all around. Running it all linked is a better idea, with feed cages running from place to place on the mech.
The feed cages do not take up that much space and will be much more reliable than a system that has to somehow move ammo bins from one place to another.

The spooling mechanic to get the barrels rotating first, like a gattling gun, would be fine. It makes sense and wouldn't be all that bad.

If you wanted to add a cooldown on MGs, you could create a system for "barrel heat" - as you continuously fire, the barrels heat up. Once they reach a certain heat level, you stop firing until they cool off. The gattling gun design is set to distribute the heat of that high rate of fire over 6 barrels, so you don't have to stop firing too often, but even then, you could design a gun with a high muzzle velocity that will still require cooling periods with multiple barrels if you run an extremely high rate of fire.

Edited by Dino Might, 29 January 2015 - 06:01 PM.

[Levi Porphyrogenitus]

MGs really need two changes. Do those two things and they'd be just fine. Boating MGs would be dangerous, but would have a huge cost in all situations other than the single ideal one, making it a trade-off worth allowing.

1 - Increase damage per shot back to 0.1.

2 - Increase the critical damage chance and critical damage multiplier again.

What do these changes do? They make the MG marginally more effective against armor, though still very much inferior to pretty much any other option, while also ramping up how dangerous they are to exposed components (and by extension Internal Structure, given the 15% damage return).

I'd also suggest a third change:

3 - Tighten up the cone of fire, allowing for better precision when aiming for specific components.

I don't see a need for any complicated mechanical changes to MGs. I figure that, if you make them actually useful in smaller numbers, then you might start seeing them in at least some of the builds that are supposed to carry them. Boating them has inherent trade-offs, and the stare-to-shoot mechanic is an inherent balancing mechanic that would hugely contribute to limiting their power when boated to the extreme. When coupled with their serious range limitations, I don't see a problem with more dangerous MGs, even when boated 6 at a time.

[shellashock]

Savage Sweets, on 29 January 2015 - 05:14 PM, said:

1. It would be more realistic to our current understanding, but I think the addition of a delay before actually firing will nerf the machine gun unnecessarily. It's already a pretty niche & situational weapon as is. Even with your improvement, there's also the issue of its ludicrously short range. I would imagine most mechs not engaging you (or not swiftly chased) would escape your machine guns' range before a majority of its bullets would hit them.


2. My question is:

• Is the BT machine gun actually a gatling gun? Or just a mech-sized machine gun?

Secondly, it's 3050. Centuries after the massive technological advances of BT's golden age of technology. I would suspect BattleMech technology (that not even contemporaries of 3050 fully understand) would have mechanisms thatare beyond our understanding; despite what real-world influences BT does ground itself in.


Though, I do like the idea of burst fire for machine guns.

3. Thirdly, if BT machine guns reallyare gatling guns, they need some better range. I really can't understand how guns firing such low caliber bullets are barely traveling the equivalent of a 9mm bullet clearing 10 feet (or roughly 1 meter) before simply dead-dropping or incinerating into dust.


Agreed. It would totally need gatling gun sound effects instead of the pee-shooter sfx's it has now (at least on I.S. m.guns).


4. Still, it's nice to not to have a muzzle flash so large it blinds you.

1. I do agree that the delay will be a bit of a nerf to the machine gun, but I am trying to turn machine guns into a close range opportunistic weapon built round savaging internals, not keep it as a close DoT stream. The mechs that tend to use machine guns are on the light side or boat it to the tune of 4-6, and they almost always are built around opportunity brawling/backstabbing. This is why I want to make them burst fire; as this will allow these mechs to do their damage and get out quicker.

The super short range is an issue, but it should not matter too much as my changes should turn machine guns into a more hit and run style weapon more capable of dealing with short encounter times.

2. I am honestly not sure. I am new to BT, so most of my research is from Sarna. I simply interpreted BT machine guns as gatling guns because it more easily justifies having the weapon fire in bursts. In addition, I would assume that a mech sized machine gun is more based around the "death by a thousand cuts" principle due to mechs using ablative armour. I would think that a gatling/chain gun would fill this niche better then a mech sized machine gun would, but again, this is mostly just my interpretation of BT.

3. Again, I am not completely sure how machine guns worked in BT, but I am pretty sure that they were meant to be a short ranged weapon designed for anti-infantry and chip damage against mechs. Giving them mid-range firing capabilities would probably go against that job description, but should pass that by a BT veteran.

4. Indeed, it would be nice to have a low light muzzle flash to prevent the blinding effects of multiple machine guns. Maybe the flashing would be better if the art for machine guns was using a scaled down UAC/5? The flashing would be more muted, coming out of multiple barrels and would be farther away from the mech compared to the current art for machine guns that are very close to the mech's hull.

[shellashock]

Dino Might, on 29 January 2015 - 05:58 PM, said:

1. Just point of fact - a reloading system would take up WAY too much space in a mech, be prone to malfunction, and be just a bad idea all around. Running it all linked is a better idea, with feed cages running from place to place on the mech.
The feed cages do not take up that much space and will be much more reliable than a system that has to somehow move ammo bins from one place to another.

The spooling mechanic to get the barrels rotating first, like a gattling gun, would be fine. It makes sense and wouldn't be all that bad.

2. If you wanted to add a cooldown on MGs, you could create a system for "barrel heat" - as you continuously fire, the barrels heat up. Once they reach a certain heat level, you stop firing until they cool off. The gattling gun design is set to distribute the heat of that high rate of fire over 6 barrels, so you don't have to stop firing too often, but even then, you could design a gun with a high muzzle velocity that will still require cooling periods with multiple barrels if you run an extremely high rate of fire.

1. Just to be clear, I am not talking about having the autoloader system move the bins of ammo from place to place. I am thinking that once a belt of ammo is depleted, the autoloader would eject the belt and go to the next hopper; where it would link with the first round of the belt and load that into the waiting machine gun. As I am civilian, I am not familiar with how ammo linking and such works in real life, but I am pretty sure that it would be more difficult to link multiple belts of ammo at different points of a mech by stringing them all together through an autoloader system then it would be to have the autoloader do what I described above. But again, since it is not clear (AFAIK, would like to know for sure if anyone has any BT sources for it), how the autoloader works for belts/hoppers/whatever of machine gun ammo, so I just assumed it worked like I described because it fit my idea better. Thanks for your input though!

2. I actually had a system like this designed from the start, but I scrapped it for a few reasons: 1. It got really complicated with the math for calculating individual heat bars and making sure they were all properly balanced.

2. There wasn't really a way I could prevent people from "riding the overheat" without implementing the "spin down" delay (three separate mechanics starts getting messy).

3. The system would automatically give macros a huge edge in that they could easily keep up a steady rate of fire with multiple machine guns and pretty much ignore the heat penalties while penalizing people who used multiple machine guns who had to manage multiple heat bars, etc without using a macro. I could fix the macro issues by making a global heat system for machine guns, but that is completely illogical. How could two machine guns (one on each arm of a spider for example) build heat together if only one is firing when they are nowhere near each other proximity wise for heat transfer?

It simply was much easier to set an arbitrary limit to 3 second to simulate the overheating and then assume that the machine guns could cool their barrels sufficiently within that "spin down" period to fire again for another solid 3 seconds without damage to the barrel or the weapon in general. In addition, it make calculating the math easier with just a simple 0.5-1 second delay in total (0.25/0.5 was the number I got for average spin up/ spin down time for real life gatling guns) and is MUCH easier for a person to manage without a macro. Hope this explains why I don't believe the heat mechanic is a good idea.

[Knightshadowsong]

Machine guns are way OP right now. Honestly they need a serous nerf. Battle mech internals and such are made of stuff as hard as the hull of a large battle ship, small caliber bullets, even .50 cals wouldn't do more then dent the internals. I can see taking weapon systems off line, but the get hit with MG's and blow up would be like shooting a tank with a .22 caliber pistol and expecting it to do something other then fly off.

I could understand MG's doing damage to tanks, but on Mech's there only there for anti infantry work. on mech's armor they wouldn't do a thing. So unless there planning on adding power armor/infantry and tanks, then really, MG's should be pulled from the game, or made into a distraction/weapon killer. Not the mech killer they currently are.

[Kalimaster]

Tell you what. Lets leave them alone.

[Burktross]

I'm really only up for reloading if it is in non adjacent parts.
Such as arm ammo --> torso MG for no penalty. But leg ammo --> torso MG reload
It will also encourage case, for torso mounted ammo

As for balancing, I think ammo is fine as is.

Edited by Burktross, 30 January 2015 - 12:07 PM.

[shellashock]

Kalimaster, on 30 January 2015 - 07:54 AM, said:

Tell you what. Lets leave them alone.

Machine guns could be left in their current state, but that would just shaft people who want to use a pair of machine guns for a balanced build. They are probably close to good balance right now though. My ideas are really just trying to get machien guns to my "ideal state". It is probably good enough just to make a pair of machine guns usable against internals and then find a way to balance boats vs 1-2 machine guns.

[shellashock]

Burktross, on 30 January 2015 - 12:07 PM, said:

I'm really only up for reloading if it is in non adjacent parts.
Such as arm ammo --> torso MG for no penalty. But leg ammo --> torso MG reload
It will also encourage case, for torso mounted ammo

As for balancing, I think ammo is fine as is.

FYI, legs are adjacent to torso unless you are talking about center torso. I do get what you are saying though. I personally would be fine with reloading per individual ton because it makes balancing easier, but I would be fine with compromising letting individual tons of ammo be linked together if they are in the same component. Then it makes sense for the technicians to merely lump all the belts into a single hopper and link them together. Once you start getting into cross components, I would think that it would be easier to let the autoloader take care of it instead of cross linking component ammunition.

Cool idea though because a concentration of ammo makes it a more likely target to hit and cause an ammo explosion. Even better is that most MG boats use standard engine due to low weight requirments; so CASE would be even more likely to be used. The only thing that I would really change about ammo right now is lower the number of rounds from 2000 to 1800. This doesn't change too much gameplay wise, but it really helps prevent these stupid decimal numbers I keep getting in the RoF values.


Overall, thanks for all the replies guys! I had less feedback then I expected on my unit's forum, so I was not able to find a lot of these points you guys are bringing up. I will try to revise my idea and make compromises where necessary. BTW, would you like me to just get rid of the old polls when I have fully revised my idea and put up fresh ones, or put up new polls while locking the old polls as reference data (if that's even possible)?

[r4p70r]

Hi,
didnt read the hole thread so sry if someone before me tell the same.
So why on earth every game developer and so many people think its realistc for a gattling gun to spinup before shooting?
Imagine an A-10 Pilot needs to spinup his 30mm Gattling Gun, how funny.
Maybe it is for ballancing but in my opinion it is better to nerf the damage and not the firing mechanism.
Look at this video