jss78, on 04 November 2015 - 08:54 PM, said:
This part I don't quite get. Why is AMS more useful if more people carry it? That suggests that there's an exponential return, that two AMS shoot down more than twice as many missiles. The best I figure it's a linear return -- two AMS destroy exactly twice as many missiles -- or possibly slightly diminishing return if more AMS's shoot at the missiles than would've been needed to destroy all misiles.
Bah, someone else already explained why returns are exponential with more AMS - I'll just add that it's similar to armor reduction % in WoW. Adding more points of armor value yields increasingly small increases to your percentage of physical damage reduced - but the gains are linear, not decreasing, because each point of armor gives you the same amount of increased time to kill at any given level of hit points (assuming you're not getting one-shot.)
As someone else explained, this is also why LRMs are terribly hard to balance: any superiority in either weight of fire or AMS coverage will render the other proportionally ineffective. If you have AMS superiority, LRM damage throughput is low to none; if you have LRM superiority, the AMS is spitting in the wind. So you have to tune LRMs for some arbitrary level of AMS in addition to all the other variables like player skill, common tactics, and map variance. But AMS systems are optional, as are LRMS - so the proper risk-reward balance between the two will vary over time.
As they stand now, though it's impossible to balance LRMs against AMS. Since weapon preferences demonstrably change with tier level, the proper balance will be different depending on which segment of the player base is being measured. This means that while you can get a sort of ballpark going that works for most people, LRMs are actually impossible to balance for everyone.
All of this means that the value of AMS is linked directly to the prevalence of LRMs in your games. If you find that you're seeing a lot of LRMs in your matches, you should take AMS if your build can spare the tonnage. In this instance it is not more useful to spend that 1.5 tons on heat sinks, armor, or some hypothetically faster engine. You should take AMS in this case even if you don't feel that you have problems with LRMs. Because frankly, your teammates will - so unless you want to carry them when they take excessive damage (and then die or hide forever,) vaccinate your @#$% Battlemechs.
On the other hand, if you rarely see LRMs, AMS is a pure luxury. It's only a ton and a half, which might be chump change or a significant part of your available weight, depending, but it's not really needed. Also bear in mind that even if you do see LRMs a lot, certain builds simply cannot support AMS with minimal loss of effectiveness (due to space limitations or extreme heat requirements.) If your Hunchback 4P laser brawler is running too hot with AMS, you should take it off, even if you see LRMs blot out the sky every day - mine can't fit AMS, and I don't feel bad for not bringing it on that particular Battlemech.
Edited by Void Angel, 22 November 2016 - 04:03 PM.