FP Suggestion - Dropdeck Boom/Bust system
FP does have it's underlying issues, but one thing that I think that would really help the immersion aspect of FP would be inclusion of a boom/bust system for the dropdecks. What it is is basically a system that doesn't force/deny players from using certain mechs, but does encourage them to use those designs that their faction is known for, and use a much more varied selection of mechs than the current stale top 10-some percent of variants.
Basically there are three main modifiers: Preference - Production - and Availability.
Preference can be easily understood by reviewing Battletech sourcebooks. TRO 3039, Historical 3039, Era Report 3052... so on and forth. Simply put, every faction has mech chassis on three levels: Common, Uncommon, and Rare. Common would be the stuff preferred by a faction. For example, the Draconis Combine loves and makes the Panther and the Dragon, but they'd be pretty rare in, say, the Capellan Confederation or Free Worlds League. On the other hand, Mechs like the Catapult, Awesome, Whitworth, and Hunchback are appreciated, sometimes imported, but not made there. Those'd be uncommon. Designs that would leave you scratching your head as to why they have them, like the Raven, Cataphract, or Commando? Those qualify as rare. Common mechs have good modifiers, Uncommon Neutral, Rare bad. This kind of reflects how well respected a mech is in a faction, how well stocked they are for spare parts, etc.
Production would be based on factories around the inner sphere. The old 3025 housebooks already go into good detail about which mech factories are where in the inner sphere, and TRO 3039 also tells about which mechs are still being produced at which factories, and which factories have been turned into nuclear craters during the succession wars. Holding a world with a given factory on it would give positive modifiers for the mechs produced on that world. Losing one would lose you those benefits. Some of the inner sphere factories that were captured by the clans were retooled to make clantech, so taking them might allow them to be retooled to make certain designs or give a small, broad benefit to all designs. Specific designs could then be captured between clans, and a little less uniformity and a little more "Trial of Possession" mentality could be encouraged among them.
Availability is the real interesting one. Using automated data collection, the stats for the rate at which each variant is chosen (Maybe in a given day? A given week?) adds a modifier to each mech. This could be a faction-specific measurement, but I think that with the current player base, logging the community as a whole is the best way to get an adequate sample, especially with some factions being really small. Mechs frequently taken have bad modifiers applied to them. Mechs rarely taken have good modifiers applied to them. For example, if everyone is taking Thunderbolts or Stormcrows, the availability of those mechs goes down, making them more difficult to acquire and maintain. Designs that aren't being taken are in surplus, so (The hypothesised) sellers would be pushing to get rid of them with discounted prices, and spare parts would be piling up. Suddenly there's more of a reason to take the Vindicators and Adders out there.
Now I've been talking about modifiers... As for what these modifiers apply to, I'd suggest tonnage (Though at no time should the average modifier factionwide ever be anything but zero, or there'll be a whole lot of faction jumping when every match is at a handicap), as when your super meta popular 70-tonner that doesn't belong in your faction according to the lore is now worth 85 tons, and the often shunned 60 tonner that your faction loves in the lore now only counts as 45 tons, you're more likely to be drawn one way or another. Other things that could be applied on top of this - Especially the Preference and Factory mods - could be LP modifiers, and on the availability aspect, C-bill earnings modifiers.
Other folks have talked about similar things so I don't think I'm speaking in a vacuum, but things like these help to give the game a bit more immersion. As it is, it's mostly just another flavor of deathmatch with a bunch of factions and dots that don't mean anything. At least this way, they start to mean something.
Edited by ice trey, 24 July 2016 - 06:50 AM.
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MovinTarget, on 24 July 2016 - 02:46 AM, said:
a unit?
So vets please bear with us. A lot of us want to be soldiers, not seals.
