bad arcade kitty, on 23 July 2015 - 03:07 PM, said:
don't you think that 25 ton light mechs deserve to jump better than 45 ton ones with the same amount of jets?
Yes. But it's tricky. There's only 2 reasons stopping PGI from going crazy with jump jet capacity.
1- Fear of poptarts. With heavies and assaults, this is a real threat. With mediums, less so. Sure, the Nova is proving effective in the right hands, but few people are skilled enough to pull it off to the point where they can still defend themselves in a tough spot. But with light mechs, poptarts are hardly a concern at all, because their paper thin armour makes it fairly easy to swat them out of the sky over time. Jump jets would need to be insanely good for light mech poptarts to actually become a plague in this game.
2- Balancing jumpers vs non-jumpers. This is the tricky part. The more you buff jump jets, the worse non-jumping light mechs become by comparison. For example, the Wolfhound, Adder and RVN-2X are already at a considerable disadvantage. But if jump jets become extremely useful, then there's fear that those mechs will be outright obsolete.
I think the solution is simply to have an exponential return when choosing number of jump jets. This will prevent light mechs with 1 or 2 jump jets from being disproportionally good, despite having only spent 0.5 or 1 ton on jump jets. Make it something like this:
1 jump jet: 5 meters height
2 jump jets: 10 meters height
3 jump jets: 20 meters height
4 jump jets: 35 meters height
5 jump jets: 55 meters height
6 jump jets: 80 meters height
The numbers might not be appropriate, but you get the idea. Exponential increase, because firepower also loses its effectiveness exponentially on light mechs as you spend more and more weight on jump jets. Consider the difference in effectiveness having 2, 4 or 6 medium lasers.
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