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As a review, the way ammunition explosions currently work is as follows:
- Ammo bins have 10 points of HP, like most other items. When the HP on an ammo bin is depleted by crits, or when the location is destroyed, even if the ammo is not, the bin has a 10% chance to explode (the other 90% of the time it is simply ruined).
- Ammunition explosions deal damage equal to the number of rounds remaining times the explosion damage (which is usually equal to the weapon damage) - e.g. one ton of AC/20 ammo exploding will deal 20*7 = 140 damage.
- Ammunition explosion damage transfers inwards as usual, but applies only to internals (ignoring armor) and transfers at 100% instead of being reduced.
This does not lead to interesting gameplay. The central goal ought to be that success or failure in combat should revolve around proper tactical choices and mechanical skill on the part of the players. If random elements are involved, they should be as predictable as possible such that players can plan for their occurrence. The ammunition explosion mechanic does not follow this - rather, it simply leads to mechs occasionally dropping dead at the whim of the RNG gods, dictating the outcome of a fight and potentially swinging the tide of a battle purely based on a dice roll of sufficiently low odds that it can't be practically anticipated.
With that in mind, I would propose the following changes to the system:
- The odds of an ammunition explosion when a bin's HP is depleted by crits is increased to 100%, and a bin's health is reduced to 6 HP.
- Explosive damage of a single round of ammo is reduced to 1/10th of the ammo's normal weapon damage (e.g. an AC/20 round deals 2 damage instead of 20).
- Ammunition explosion damage *does not transfer* to other components at all. This also means that ammo doesn't need to explode when a section is destroyed, since the damage wouldn't transfer anyway. (I suppose it can still explode just for the visuals, but it wouldn't affect gameplay.)
- CASE no longer prevents damage transfer, since that doesn't happen anyway. Instead, CASE functions somewhat like tabletop's CASE II - it redirects damage from the internals to the armor. When an ammo explosion occurs in a CASE-protected component, the internals take 1 point of damage (5 points, for clans) and all remaining damage is transferred to the armor (rear armor specifically, for a torso). Any damage in excess of the armor amount is simply lost. (CASE would also be able to be placed in any component.)
- Ammunition explosion damage would be able to inflict critical hits, if it can't already. These crits would damage internal components and transfer 15% of their damage to the internal structure as normal. (This occurs regardless of whether or not CASE is equipped.)
Simultaneous with that, ammo explosions are also no longer almost guaranteed instant death. A ton of ammo going off will generally destroy the component on smaller mechs and still inflict serious damage on larger ones (especially if the component is already damaged), but it won't blast through the entire mech almost every time - in other words, ammo explosions now have more than one possible tactical effect. This further adds depth to the process of constructing a mech, since you not only have to weigh the odds of ammo being destroyed when placed in various locations, but also balance that with how crippling it would be to lose the different components in question to an explosion. Similarly, it adds further elements to the tactical considerations about where to shoot, though the same mechanism of considering not only the odds of an explosion, but its effects.
In both cases, this greatly improves ammunition explosions from the perspective of helping provide interesting possibilities and tactical depth to gameplay, rather than simply acting as a finger of god that occasionally removes a mech from the field.
Apart from that, this also improves the role of CASE and 'crit seeking' weapons such as machine guns or flamers. At the moment CASE is rarely used, but with ammunition explosions becoming a much more common occurrence and CASE simultaneously mitigating much more of their damage, it would become a more attractive option when constructing a mech. This system would also give CASE an actual use when equipped on an inner sphere mech that has an XL engine. (Clan mechs, with their automatically-equipped CASE, receive a worse version because otherwise they'd essentially become immune to ammo explosions for free. They currently *are* almost immune to them for free - with the current system this isn't too game-breaking because ammo explosions are so uncommon, but with the new system this would be too big of an advantage.) Similarly, since ammo explosions are now relevant, a crit-seeker's ability to so easily crit out ammo bins would help these somewhat lackluster weapons a bit - it won't really fix them, but it can't hurt.
One balancing element that is a possible concern is that energy weapons are already the dominant meta currently, and making ammo explosions more frequent would also have the effect of further pushing people towards non-ammo using weapons. There are two things that I would consider about this. First, lasers are absolutely terrible at destroying components through critical hits, since they deal their damage in many tiny chunks which each roll to crit individually. This results in crit damage almost always being spread over every item in a component and never critting out any of them. So, energy users will be the least able to take advantage of causing ammo explosions (PPCs are better at critting, but are nowhere near the overall power level or meta status of lasers). Second, it would probably not be amiss to accompany this with another small increase in ammo per ton. Ballistics got an extra 50% over tabletop levels, and I'd increase this to just being doubled (AC20 = 10/ton, etc). LRMs also got a 50% increase, which would go up to 100% (240/ton), and SRMs would go from having the same ammo as on tabletop to having a 50% increase (150/ton). This won't increase ammo explosion damage as most people will still only load about the same number of rounds as before, but they won't have to spend as much tonnage on it, indirectly buffing ammo-using builds. Mechs have always had to cart around rather excessive tonnages of ammo, and this has become especially obvious with the advent of CW, so this would be a good time to correct this.
Edited by MuonNeutrino, 06 June 2015 - 05:17 PM.
