6 replies to this topic

[Kuaron]

I just watched the video comments on Energy Draw from two youtubers (I didn’t know their channels previously):




Besides of blaming PGI for everything and stupidity, shouting for attention and doing other similar things to entertain the viewer, as a youtuber probably has to, they do call a couple interesting points throughout their videos.

The first one is blaming the Double Heatsinks granting additional heat capacity (instead of dissipation only) for breaking the game and encouraging boating, reducing TTK etc since their introduction. He suggests, instead of introducing an artificial alpha cap system replacing an even worse artificial boating cap system, to just change this fact on the DHS. This would mainly reduce heat capacity across the board (noone is using SHS anyway), so it's simply increasing TTK through heat.
My problem with this suggestion is that it mainly nerfs energy weapons, whose balancing parameter is their heat (they require HS where others require ammo) shifting the meta towards the other weapon types. While this suggestion may be an improvement and limit laser vomit alpha, I am not sure how it is supposed to address boating and encourage bracket builds (as neither does PGI’s Energy Draw, to be fair).

The second youtuber suggests something distantly similar to this thread, for obvious reasons (encouraging weapon type mixing over boating).
With the difference, that for ballistics we wouldn’t have some strange bar transfering projectile explosion damage to heat (wtf?!), but a much more appropriate recoil system. IMO it would be even better if Mech’s ability to falling over would be reintroduced, because just being forced to standing still is not a real penalty if you are an assault in a shootout. The penalty for overriding the ballistics’ recoil cap should be comparable to where heat is leading.
For energy he stays with an energy draw mechanic. I don’t see this as necessary, as I don’t agree that recoil on missiles makes any sense; let me explain below.

What I am thinking about, is a combination of both ideas.
If you take the first one’s approach and reduce the heat capacity, you already address energy builds but ignore ballistics and missiles. You don’t want to include them into the same penalty system/bar if you want to encourage mixing over boating. That’s why the only additional bar you need (instead of energy draw) would be the recoil thing for mainly ballistics, leading to an appropriate effect instead of additional heat.
For missiles, which neither are very hot nor is recoil justifiable, I’d just address them by ammo shortage if necessary. Also, their effectiveness is very sensitive to spread, so we have enough parameters to balance them without squeezing them into one of the two pools (heat or recoil).

Your opinions?

[davoodoo]

Ok lets for a second assume that dhs/shs grant no heat capacity and only dissipate.

You can mount 3 er ppc and lets say somehow you fit 10000 dhs despite it being impossible.
Theyll dissipate heat instantly but youll still shut down...

Heat sinks in tt dissipated heat in the same turn weapons were fired and extra heat capacity tries to emulate that.

Edited by davoodoo, 21 August 2016 - 10:37 PM.

[Spleenslitta]

Get a bar for both missiles and ballistics. Then here you got some things that can happen if you overload these bars.
Pick whatever poison you like. Marked them.

Missile bar overload might cause -
1M Guidance computer produces heat.
2M More spread on all missile weapons as guidance computer goes nuts.
3M LBX gets more spread too.
4M Missile lock on time increases by a lot.
5M Possibility of missfiring some of the missiles in your volleys. Missfired missiles are duds.
6M LRM and streaks cannot get target locks and thus just fire straight ahead while missile bar is overloaded.
7M The volley of LRM/streaks that overloaded the missile bar lose their guidance at half their normal range.


Ballistic bar should we call it recoil bar overload might cause -
1B Reticle jitter / severe screenshake.
2B Shot deflections. Do none or little damage to whatever it hits.
3B Structure damage. Only happens if you do something like firing 2x UAC20 repeatedly.
4B Twist the torso to the side by a lot because of the massive recoil. We're talking 5 to 20 degree's here.
5B Recoil shakes the ammo feeds so all ammo jams for a while. You cannot reload missile or ballistic weapons while the jam is in effect.
The more you overloaded the Recoil bar the longer the jam lasts.
6B When recoil has overloaded the recoil bar by a lot the mech will stagger backwards when stationary and slow down while going forward.
7B Mech gets knocked down by the massive recoil.
8B The gun (or guns) that caused the recoil gets damaged. Not necessarily destroyed unless you keep overloading the recoil bar repeatedly till the weapon has no more health.
9B Other internal components such as heatsinks, other weapons, JJ's, ECM, etc get damaged just like in 8B.
10B You can get a temporary or damage to the gyro throughout the match(don't know which).
Lowers either recoil bar limit or regen. If not matchlenght damage it stays limited for a full minute.
11B Damage to gyro lowers top speed and acceleration/deceleration throughout the match or for a full minute.

[Kuaron]

@ davoodoo:
Is it a problem? Currently you neither fire 3 ERPPCs because it gives you 60 heat. But with your hypothetical 1000 HS you can fire 2+1 almost immediatly one after another.

@ Spleen:
Nice ideas.
I totally forgot that we are speaking of tube-based computers weigting several tons. Of course they overheat when calculating too much. For missiles, if we were about to introduce a bar for them, I’d go with overheating and bending barrels though, increasing their spread. Half of the bar would be green (for cold enough) and in the upper half the spread would increase exponentially.
About LRMs I wouldn’t bother at all, LRM20 are already inefficient. There is not big alpha problem with them. I am not sure about streaks though.

About ballistics there are plenty of good ideas. I’d go with cockpit and crosshairs shaking, Mech turning, Mech beiing knocked down… should be enough, I guess.

[Tiantara]

- And we all forgot about... flamers. New strategy would be run on light mech, overheat it to state of nearly impossible to do anything and let your teammate wreck it to junk slowly... With a not nice collision mechanic (to prevent mech stuck one in another) we got pretty bad gameplay...
And we still have heat in ED system. Much heat. Even if you stay withing energy draw pool.

Possible to make for each group of weapon own cooldown with 2-3 grade progress bar.

Laser \ PPC:
Green status 100% - can fire.
Yellow status - 55-75% - can fire but your power lower in half.
Red status - less than 45% - cant fire at all.

Ballistic:
Green status - can fire.
Red status - can't fire.

Missiles:
Rocket load up 1 rocket in 0.15 seconds.
You can fire 1 rocket or wait until they loads fully.
So - 20LRM loads slower, 5LRM ready to use faster.
Same with SRM\SSRM.

Gauss:
Green status 100% - can fire.
Yellow status - 55-75% - can fire but your power lower in half.
Red status - less than 45% - cant fire at all.

Edited by Tiantara, 22 August 2016 - 03:00 AM.

[davoodoo]

Kuaron, on 21 August 2016 - 11:40 PM, said:

@ davoodoo:
Is it a problem? Currently you neither fire 3 ERPPCs because it gives you 60 heat. But with your hypothetical 1000 HS you can fire 2+1 almost immediatly one after another.

It is a problem when things like awesome 9m have 3 erppcs in stock configuration and are supposed to fire them in alpha...
Or dwf prime with 4 erll which are also supposed to be fired in alpha and generate minimal heat.
Or 8 erml of kdk1 which shouldnt generate any heat on their own will shutdown mech...
Or 6 erml nova arms

If we are to spat on battletech like that then i would rather have this game be called something other than mechwarrior.

Edited by davoodoo, 22 August 2016 - 03:32 AM.

[Kuaron]

davoodoo, on 22 August 2016 - 03:20 AM, said:

It is a problem when things like awesome 9m have 3 erppcs in stock configuration and are supposed to fire them in alpha...
Or dwf prime with 4 erll which are also supposed to be fired in alpha and generate minimal heat.
Or 8 erml of kdk1 which shouldnt generate any heat on their own will shutdown mech...
Or 6 erml nova arms

I don’t know the TT game well. So if you alphastrike with your Awesome, do you hit the same location with all three PPCs?
A Nova, btw, wouldn’t necessary have a problem since the heat increase is stretched over the laser duration and starts cooling immediately, and 6 CML only do 36 heat.

Tiantara, on 22 August 2016 - 02:44 AM, said:

- And we all forgot about... flamers. New strategy would be run on light mech, overheat it to state of nearly impossible to do anything and let your teammate wreck it to junk slowly... With a not nice collision mechanic (to prevent mech stuck one in another) we got pretty bad gameplay...

Hm… Not sure about flamers. If DHS would not increase heat capacity and instead double the dissipation (×2 instead of ×1,5), flamers would not become that much more dangerous. At the end, they are only one weapon and we are speaking about a system. Balancing one single weapon shouldn’t be much of a problem, even if MGs threaten to prove me wrong. ^^
I don’t know the TT game well. So if you alphastrike with your Awesome, do you hit the same location with all three PPCs?
A Nova, btw, wouldn’t necessary have a problem since the heat increase is stretched over the laser duration and starts cooling immediately, and 6 CML only do 36 heat.

Concerning three different bars:
Navid suggested in his thread (link in opening post) two bars, one for energy and one for ballistics + missiles. And already there there was criticism that one would have to take in attention additional parameters and it could be too much. This would be even more true with 3 or 4 bars additional to heat (4–5 in total).
That’s why, independently of how DHS are supposed to work in the end, I’d like to deal with Energy using the heat bar we already have. I’d already like to avoid a missile weapon bar as well, but as long as it only leads to increased spread, it’s not critical and don’t need to pay attention to it all the time but you just notice if your missiles are hitting worse. That’s why it could still be OK.
A separate Gauss bar wouldn’t, ofc.

Edited by Kuaron, 22 August 2016 - 11:19 AM.