114 replies to this topic

[Wintersdark]

Alistair Winter, on 06 March 2016 - 08:46 AM, said:

I wasn't asking you to.

I know; I wasn't being short with you, I was just letting you know they're readily available. Normally, I like to provide sources, but it'd be a pain in the ***

Quote

If you want to have a discussion, it would be better to point out the cases where you feel I'm incorrect, but I guess it's not important.

What I meant is, it's not that mediums are getting bigger and heavies smaller - there are some mediums getting bigger and others getting smaller, and likewise with heavies. It's not class-wide. But the point is, as all the mechs will be scaled by volume, it'll be impossible for them to be wrong. Medium mechs can't be too big, or heavy mechs too small. They'll have the correct volume. That's the point of this; it's one of the few changes PGI can make that can't be wrong.

That doesn't mean it'll make all the poor mechs in the game better: If it's got poor hardpoints/hardpoint locations, it's still going to have poor hardpoints/hardpoint locations.

They are, as we discussed, remodelling some of the more egregious offenders, but again this is done first and foremost to remove size as an issue in balance. Size impacts balance, but if everything is the correct volume:mass (assuming all mechs are as compact as possible) then that aspect of things is at a good baseline.

Quote

<shrug>

Sometimes they get things right. The game has many faults, but balance is improving, slowly.

I'm a certified White Knight. They absolutely do get some things right, and balance IS improving.

I'm not faulting PGI with my statements about them failing doing it by hand. I'd argue nobody could do all the mechs by hand based on game balance primarily and not size and mass. There are too many variables, it would take a lot of people, it just wouldn't work.

Consider: Where do we have the most balance success? When PGI makes smaller, incremental changes to individual mechs, or does whole huge balance passes? The larger the pass, the more weird bugs that get in and nonsensical quirks and changes that happen, because it's so much work, and there's so much data.

Doing all this by hand would be a monumental task, and you'd just never get someone making that many balance decisions correctly. Not anybody. It would be a failure, AND the mechs would still be sized wierdly afterwards.

[Khobai]

Quote

What's even larger than its size is its firepower.

Yet despite all its firepower its at best a tier 2 mech (but probably tier 3). because it has huge hitboxes, its abysmally slow, and it costs 100 tons of your dropweight. And its soon to be completely replaced by the Kodiak. Direwolf definitely needs help with the Kodiak coming out soon.

Edited by Khobai, 06 March 2016 - 09:35 AM.

[Wintersdark]

Khobai, on 06 March 2016 - 09:33 AM, said:

Yet despite all its firepower its at best a tier 2 mech (but probably tier 3). because it has huge hitboxes, its abysmally slow, and it costs 100 tons of your dropweight. And its soon to be completely replaced by the Kodiak. Direwolf definitely needs help with the Kodiak coming out soon.

It's getting help.

It's shrinking a lot: Being a brick, it has high volume to surface area. Thus, as all the mechs have the same density, it'll end up looking a lot smaller than the Kodiak.

[MauttyKoray]

FupDup, on 02 March 2016 - 09:34 PM, said:

Meanwhile, he thinks that the Daishi is too big.

Lel.

If you ever learned about Volume in school you would know this to be true. A Humanoid design will tend to be taller/more spread out (i.e. gargoyle, executioner) than a more compact design (i.e. dire wolf, warhawk). Basic height/width are not the correct measurements to use when scaling mechs based on their tonnage. In fact, I believe a direwolf is actually slightly smaller than a timber wolf based on volume/tonnage, meanwhile the Grasshopper (at least in battletech) was extremely tall because it had such a small but long design, it actually was roughly the height of a Gargoyle for comparison.

Heights from Battletech: (the Grasshopper came in at about 14m)


Unless you want this, with mediums almost as big as some of the assaults, I'd say let PGI do their thing because from what's been said the lights/mediums will at least end up being smaller than this for the most part.

Edited by MauttyKoray, 06 March 2016 - 10:07 AM.

[FupDup]

MauttyKoray, on 06 March 2016 - 10:05 AM, said:

That TT chart is atrociously terrible, and makes me want to puke every time it gets posted.

20 ton light mechs presenting a similar target profile as 100 ton mechs is really, REALLY bad for game balancing.

[MauttyKoray]

FupDup, on 06 March 2016 - 10:09 AM, said:

That TT chart is atrociously terrible, and makes me want to puke every time it gets posted.

20 ton light mechs presenting a similar target profile as 100 ton mechs is really, REALLY bad for game balancing.

That's my point, while it made NO GAMEPLAY IMPACT for TT because you used dice for determining hits, it would kill lights and mediums in this game due to the profile size. So unless you want them to be 'correctly sized' for Battletech lore, let them rescale things based on volume like they're doing.

In truth the shadow hawk isn't gonna have an issue, its still a solid mech and once the 'alpha meta' goes away we should see many more lesser used mechs come back into play for various reasons. The centurion however...I feel bad for it, its been in a spot spot for a while now, part of which and others have agreed is that the thing is too damn wide.

Edited by MauttyKoray, 06 March 2016 - 10:17 AM.

[Y E O N N E]

MauttyKoray, on 06 March 2016 - 10:16 AM, said:

In truth the shadow hawk isn't gonna have an issue, its still a solid mech and once the 'alpha meta' goes away we should see many more lesser used mechs come back into play for various reasons. The centurion however...I feel bad for it, its been in a spot spot for a while now, part of which and others have agreed is that the thing is too damn wide.

And yet, the CN9 has always retained some niche role in every era of the game it has been around for. It's heavy enough to have decent armor, light enough to go fast on a smaller engine, shaped well enough to be fantastic at spreading incoming damage, and has just the right hard-points to be a competent brawler (A, AH, D) or a competent striker (AL).

[Otto Cannon]

I think sorting by volume is the best starting point.

If afterwards certain mechs still seem to be unbalanced by their target area, they can still be reshaped with the same volume to make them harder to hit without changing the accurate relative overall size.

I don't expect much further reshaping to be likely, considering how reluctant PGI are to allocate staff to these things, but standardising volume followed by shape tweaking on the worst mechs would give the best final result if done properly.

[Adamski]

Otto Cannon, on 06 March 2016 - 12:10 PM, said:

I think sorting by volume is the best starting point.

If afterwards certain mechs still seem to be unbalanced by their target area, they can still be reshaped with the same volume to make them harder to hit without changing the accurate relative overall size.

I don't expect much further reshaping to be likely, considering how reluctant PGI are to allocate staff to these things, but standardising volume followed by shape tweaking on the worst mechs would give the best final result if done properly.

Reshaping models would be WAY too much work, much faster and easier to just turn some small portion of the torso's into legs and arms hitboxes instead.

BOOM, improved mech survivability.

[Narcissistic Martyr]

They're too big?

I don't know... they're both great mechs and very durable if played correctly.

[Seal Farmer]

Sigilum Sanctum, on 02 March 2016 - 11:09 PM, said:

Russ said the Grasshopper might need to get fatter.

Jesus christ, I will scream.

what if instead they stretch it another 20% taller, lol

[Sigilum Sanctum]

Seal Farmer, on 10 March 2016 - 10:21 PM, said:

what if instead they stretch it another 20% taller, lol

MRW:
https://youtu.be/V3-4_NgXwF0?t=26

Edited by Sigilum Sanctum, 10 March 2016 - 10:26 PM.

[mogs01gt]

Nightshade24, on 03 March 2016 - 07:10 PM, said:

Ramblings.....

Why would a 35 to 40 ton mech be so vastly different or a 55 to60 or 75 to 80 ton?
Doing the sizes by weight classes will not fix anything. It'll just create extreme consistencies...
The fact that in your proposal that an 80 ton mech and a 100 ton mech (20 ton difference) can be nearly the same size but a 80 ton to 75 ton will be vastly different erks me.

Depends if you want to bring reality and physics into the mix. Adding 5 tons to a 35 ton object is an increase of 15%...That is significant. Adding 5t to 95t is only a 5.2% increase. That is negligible.

The issue people have is the high inconsistencies between mechs in the same class. Just look at Victors.

[cazidin]

So, where's that Catapult rescale?

[Nightshade24]

mogs01gt, on 11 March 2016 - 05:58 AM, said:

Depends if you want to bring reality and physics into the mix. Adding 5 tons to a 35 ton object is an increase of 15%...That is significant. Adding 5t to 95t is only a 5.2% increase. That is negligible.

The issue people have is the high inconsistencies between mechs in the same class. Just look at Victors.

The victor is smaller than the 85 tonner (ie, Battlemaster), bigger than all 75 tonners (ie, Timberwolf), and fits rather comfortably with all other 80 tonners.

Victors look fine to me.