4 replies to this topic

[Excalibaard]

First of all a message to the reading players: I am pro-new heat system. Before you call me mad, no of course it's not perfect yet. But it's a step towards the right direction and we'll have to adapt to using more heat sinks in our builds. Things that worked before, will not work now. Our MWO builds are way overloaded compared to stock variants as of now. Deal with it people.

Stay put for more calculation sheets, for now these are the rough suggestions that I have:

Now to my post itself. I like the recent changes, but I'm still not convinced by ED. ED is a 'heat scale on top of a heat scale'. It has a threshold and a dissipation rate, just like the regular heat bar, except that it's dependent on damage dealt by weapons instead of heat. I'm skeptical if this is really necessary to 'limit alpha dominance' which was given as a main reason for this system in the first place. We shouldn't need an additional scale that limits according to damage dealt, as it creates a very strange and unintuitive balance of two systems trying to accomplish the same thing.

Having many heatsinks would in itself limit the tonnage available for high damage weapons in smaller mechs, or the space available in larger mechs. The main problem in a system which is purely heat-gated are the high dmg/heat ratio weapons: Ballistics. The size/weight are the achilles heel of ballistic weapons, meaning that the smaller/lighter weapons will have space for heatsinks and ballistics will not, bringing the end result to a similar alpha/capacity. This could severely restrict ballistic weapon dominance in the heat-based system.

Therefore, if ballistics turn out to be a problem, that means the heat capacity (and dissipation) should be more dependent on external heatsinks, which are restricting the tonnage/space requirements of ballistics.

I suggest playing with the capacity/dissipation per heat sink type and base capacity a bit more to find a good dependence on heatsinks/alpha. Currently SHS have too good capacity due to the amount you can equip and their base advantage and DHS have too poor dissipation for the capacity of low amounts of heat sinks in order to cool more energy/missiles focused builds. Therefore I suggest this:

- Equal Capacity per SHS as per DHS.
Larger mechs which equip SHS due to space restriction can usually run many more SHS than DHS anyway, meaning they'll still have more capacity overall but not gain as much of an advantage as they currently do with the SHS Kodiak.
- True DHS
By increasing DHS dissipation to 0.2 (and reducing SHS dissipation to 0.1), they will help the less spacious weapons pull closer to the easily dissipated ballistic weapons when more heatsinks are equipped in a sustained fight.

A few other things to try out:

- More emphasis on external HS towards heat capacity/dissipation.
- Make Heat Capacity (not dissipation) somewhat dependent on the engine size by non-linear scaling with internal HS and counting heatsinks in engine slots as internal HS.
These two ideas combined give interesting results around the high-weight segment. Mechs with space to spare for external DHS will have a higher capacity for alpha than those that don't. By keeping the dissipation similar but linking the capacity to the location of heat sinks will help less spacious builds of Energy and Missiles in competing against ballistics.

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Below are calculation charts. Making these costs me some time, so stay put. More will be added.

Extremely useful calculation chart made by Solahma.
Edited by me to include modifyable Base Heat Capacity and a parabolic relation between heat capacity and internal heatsinks. With rate-change 0 this will simply be a linear relation to internal DHS like we have now.

Energy Boats Comparison

Live: http://imgur.com/iR20aCD
PTS4: http://imgur.com/U2UgSc5
Proposed: http://imgur.com/UZcGrk8
The stats used during my proposed system test are:
0,1 dissipation/SHS; 0,2 dissipation/DHS; 1 capacity/external HS, internal SHS and internal clan DHS. IS Internal DHS start at 1 capacity and each additional DHS has capacity reduced by 0,05 from the previous.
The rest is the same as PTS4, without ED (because that's a pain to implement in this sheet). These are not optimal values, but a demonstration of what they do.
The new pilot skills and weapon values and also quirks have been accounted for.

Test builds:
EBJ-1: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...a868da61d4ae8ca
BL-6-KNT: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...18873c933f137b3
BNC-3M: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...bb79bc4a6d29562
TDR-5SS: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...c35aeb1faf7dde3
TDR-SHS: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...89dba6a17f95822
FS9-A: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...fc817b9fe1e06fd
LCT-3M: http://mwo.smurfy-ne...51b5c6a873ae000


Brawlers comparison:

LRM comparison:

Ballistic Boats comparison

Edited by Excalibaard, 16 September 2016 - 02:03 AM.

[Kaptain]

Excalibaard, on 14 September 2016 - 05:56 AM, said:

- Make Heat Capacity more dependent on the engine size

Stop that. Too much is already tied to engine size. This would nerf low cap mechs into oblivion.

[ScarecrowES]

Here is what I recommend for anyone who might have an idea or a few different ideas they'd want to suggest: give them a quick test yourself first. The math behind the MWO heat system is not terribly complex. You just need basic understanding of how the heat capacity and dissipation rates for your mech are determined, and what the heat value for all the weapons you want to fire is.

From there, you can make adjustments to any values you might want. Think we should adjust this value or that one? Try it. See how it works. Try the same changes for other builds. Use all types - meta, mixed, energy, ballistic. How do those results compare to the previous ones?

Make sure you're comparing the results from your changes to those on the live server.

I think it helps to really understand what you're asking and have an appreciation for what the results will be.

[Excalibaard]

Kaptain, on 14 September 2016 - 10:31 AM, said:

Stop that. Too much is already tied to engine size. This would nerf low cap mechs into oblivion.

It's all a matter of scale. As I wrote after that, 'make it non-linearly scale with internal heatsinks'. This means that It could either be skewed towards lower end, but still granting high-speed mechs a small advantage, or skewed towards large engines and validating your concerns. I'm testing both possibilities at the moment.
I've updated the phrasing and some calculations.

ScarecrowES, on 14 September 2016 - 12:12 PM, said:

Here is what I recommend for anyone who might have an idea or a few different ideas they'd want to suggest: give them a quick test yourself first. The math behind the MWO heat system is not terribly complex. You just need basic understanding of how the heat capacity and dissipation rates for your mech are determined, and what the heat value for all the weapons you want to fire is.

From there, you can make adjustments to any values you might want. Think we should adjust this value or that one? Try it. See how it works. Try the same changes for other builds. Use all types - meta, mixed, energy, ballistic. How do those results compare to the previous ones?

Make sure you're comparing the results from your changes to those on the live server.

I think it helps to really understand what you're asking and have an appreciation for what the results will be.

Running the numbers as we speak, I figured I'd post it in advance because there are a lot of builds to test and I don't have a lot of time. I'll be updating the post with comparison graphs once I'm done.
Edit: I've finished energy boats. Particularly interested in the brawler comparison with SRMs and Ballistics vs energy boats.

Note that many of these builds are built for the old system and may need some tweaking for optimal performance in the new system.

Edited by Excalibaard, 15 September 2016 - 05:41 AM.

[Excalibaard]

I've added energy boats, will be doing the rest when I get home.