10 replies to this topic

[Orzorn]

These are ideas from the mektek forums that I though up about a year ago, but I believe they're still valid. Some parts might be a bit out of context but the points are still clear. MWO, being entirely PVP based, MUST be balanced to be fair and fun. In this line of thought, it is clear to me that mechs must have balanced systems for how we are able to customize them (as the devs have already hinted that we will indeed be able to customize them):
If a mech has 4 large enough hard points, then, voila, they have 4 PPCs. In Mechwarrior 2, EVERYTHING used criticals. So you couldn't just take 4 UA/Cs and just stack up ammo, because all the ammo took criticals (I believe it was 5 ammunition per critical, which really really added up. 1 AC usually took 20 ammuntion, so that's 4 critical points right there). Armor took criticals (if it was FF). Engines took criticals. Every. Single. Thing. Took criticals.

This balanced a lot of things out and really discouraged boating, because most ACs were 7 or more criticals, with most mechs having 10 or so criticals in their chest regions (don't forget, though, that your engine took up almost all of your CT region, and sometimes, if it was big enough, parts of your LT and RT). Most mechs could only take 2 large weapons at a time, and then it was another balancing act trying to find a place to put the ammo. If you put it in your torso, if it got crit you could easily die instantly. If you put it all in your arms, then you could lose almost all of your ammo at the very beginning of the mission. Putting ammo in your legs was a bad idea because a single crit and you'd essentially lose the game right then and there.

Ammo explosions was also a big balancing factor of Mechwarrior 2. If you tried boating weapons that used ammo, you could die VERY VERY fast if you weren't skilled. Boating lasers was pretty good on some mechs, but their issue was always range (the largest laser still was outranged by 200 meters by most AC weapons and by all LRMs).

Basically, I would like to see criticals, ammo explosions, worse heat sinks (MW4 has a large problem with this, since their sinks dump 1.5 heat. There are no normal or double hit sinks, and I really believe it is one of the major unbalanced things about it) and critical hits come back with a vengeance. It would really help balance things out and force players to either play extremely well with their boats or force them to spread out their arsenals more.

Another interesting idea is some combination of criticals AND hard points. I imagine it like this: Say random uller #1 has four 2 size omni hard points and also has 20 critical space. What would happen is that every weapon both has a hard point requirement (size and type) and critical requirement (size). So, lets say I wanted to put a medium laser on the head hard point. The head has 4 available criticals and a 2 size omni hard point. The medium laser requires at least a 1 size laser hard point and uses 3 criticals. You can put 1 laser on the head because of this. You lose 1 part of the 2 part hard point and 3 criticals, leaving you with 1 hard point and 1 critical.

Essentially, this would limit some mechs to weapons of specific sizes and also cause you to end up with extra criticals that can't be used. This would both cause players to be forced to think harder about what weapons to use, whether they're worth it, if they're the right combination, and then what to do with the extra hard points (such as add more heat sinks, change armor types to FF to use the extra spots, put electronics in, etc).

To clarify, some things (like heat sinks, or equipment) should use only criticals. Weapons use hard points AND criticals (in my proposed system), obviously. Just trying to clarify that.

Edited by Orzorn, 13 December 2011 - 11:59 AM.

[IceSerpent]

The first idea would encourage boating actually - why bother with ammo when you can boat as many lasers as possible instead? I like the second idea though.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

The first idea would make AC's extinct rather than an endangered species, and would also affect LRM's & SRM's. Off the top of my head it would render about 70% of the stock mechs not favoured and drive everybody to all energy mechs. The second throws out all previous ways of constructing mechs and would mean that you couldn't actually build most stock mechs. I can't see the point of that.

[Black Sunder]

Not this again....

If they have a proper heat system in place then people will look more favorably to missiles and ACs rather than risk shutdown/explosion with masses of lasers and PPCs.

[Orzorn]

Nik Van Rhijn, on 13 December 2011 - 12:31 PM, said:

The first idea would make AC's extinct rather than an endangered species, and would also affect LRM's & SRM's. Off the top of my head it would render about 70% of the stock mechs not favoured and drive everybody to all energy mechs.

I'm just stating how Mechwarrior 2 and 3 both did it.

Quote

The second throws out all previous ways of constructing mechs and would mean that you couldn't actually build most stock mechs. I can't see the point of that.

Each variant of a mech would get its own hard points. This would also make sense with the idea that modifying mechs is a difficult process, and also make omnimechs actually make sense. In Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, and in Mechwarrior 3, you could modify whatever the hell you wanted with no issues at all, even if you weren't modifying an omnimech. Missiles should go in missile pods. Lasers should go in laser pods. If you want a mech with lasers in its shoulders, get a stock variant that has them then swap them out to your specific liking.

Edit: I'm not sure why people are saying "first idea". It's not an idea, those are ALL straight from Mechwarrior 2 and 3. I'm stating facts, not ideas.

Edited by Orzorn, 13 December 2011 - 12:51 PM.

[Havoc2]

There would be no point in making weapons take hardpoints and criticals. Either the weapon fits or it doesn't. It wouldn't make sense for a weapon to meet the hardpoint criteria, but have too many criticals to fit. Either use 1 system or the other.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you mean that all items would use criticals, but weapon placement would be restricted to hardpoints like MW4 style?
So maybe I can fit 2 LRM20s into the shoulder of my MadCat, but I can only hold 1 ton of ammo because there isn't room to load up on enough ammo to last a battle. Or I can put 1 LRM20 and 1LRM10 in the shoulder, and fit 3 tons of ammo.

[Belial]

Something I liked from MW4 was how ammunition was contained the weapon itself, you simply added ammo/ton up to a maximum. This makes sense in that it eliminates absurd ammo locations/transitions (like how does ammo stored in the legs make it to a Mad Cat's missile racks... legal in TT but strange for simulation purposes).

}{avoc, on 13 December 2011 - 01:01 PM, said:

There would be no point in making weapons take hardpoints and criticals. Either the weapon fits or it doesn't. It wouldn't make sense for a weapon to meet the hardpoint criteria, but have too many criticals to fit. Either use 1 system or the other.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you mean that all items would use criticals, but weapon placement would be restricted to hardpoints like MW4 style?
So maybe I can fit 2 LRM20s into the shoulder of my MadCat, but I can only hold 1 ton of ammo because there isn't room to load up on enough ammo to last a battle. Or I can put 1 LRM20 and 1LRM10 in the shoulder, and fit 3 tons of ammo.

I think the latter part of your post here is what OP is getting it. I'm in favor of something similar to this, maybe meshed with my suggestion above.

Edited by Belial, 13 December 2011 - 01:18 PM.

[Orzorn]

}{avoc, on 13 December 2011 - 01:01 PM, said:

There would be no point in making weapons take hardpoints and criticals. Either the weapon fits or it doesn't. It wouldn't make sense for a weapon to meet the hardpoint criteria, but have too many criticals to fit. Either use 1 system or the other.

In my original idea, weapons used both hardpoints and criticals.

But that was a year old idea. I see the point in "if it fits it fits". However, part of the reason I wanted weapons to use criticals is so they could be critically hit, unless there is another potential system for critical hits.

Quote

Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you mean that all items would use criticals, but weapon placement would be restricted to hardpoints like MW4 style?
So maybe I can fit 2 LRM20s into the shoulder of my MadCat, but I can only hold 1 ton of ammo because there isn't room to load up on enough ammo to last a battle. Or I can put 1 LRM20 and 1LRM10 in the shoulder, and fit 3 tons of ammo.

Like I said just now, I intended in the original idea for weapons to use both hardpoints AND criticals. So lets say LRM20s used 2 missile hard points and 5 critical slots (this is just an example, so I'm pulling numbers out of thin air), and the shoulder of a madcat had 4 omni hard points (it IS an omnimech, after all! ). I could fit 2 LRM20s into the shoulder, but that would also take up 10 critical slots. If the shoulder had, say, 12 open criticals, then I would be left with 2 criticals to put ammunition into. But if I switched to the much smaller LRM 10 that used 1 hard point and 3 critical slots instead of a second LRM 20, I would use 3 hard points but only use 8 critical slots, leaving me with 4 criticals to stuff ammunition into.

As I said, this is just how it is in the original idea. I do understand the idea of "if it fits it fits", but I wanted a way to balance weapon size against ammunition constraints and size. In Mechwarrior 4, they have hard points, but no criticals. You can keep stuffing as much ammunition into your mech as you want as long as you have the tonnage for it, which completely disregards criticals, not to mention getting rid of critical hits (and thus, ammo explosions).

But using JUST criticals like in Mechwarrior 2 and 3 causes odd things as well, like an IS non-omni mech like a yeoman being able to be stuffed with lasers, which is totally silly. The point of my system is to try to combine the systems of Mechwarrior 2 and 3 with Mechwarrior 4's hard point system. As several people have pointed out, there are some issues with this idea, but I wanted to integrated the original ideas of the table top (Everything takes criticals) with Mechwarrior 4's approach that actually allowed mech variants to FEEL like mech variants (what is the point in omnimechs if every mech is an omnimech using Mechwarrior 2/3's systems?). However, I wanted to get rid of the unbalanced nature of ammunition, heatsinks, etc in Mechwarrior 4 not taking criticals, and thus, disallowing critical hits.

Which brings me to a strong point: MWO should have critical hits, definitely. Riding the heat wave in Mechwarrior 2 and 3 was dangerous because a critical hit on a set of heat sinks could ruin your normal heat loss. Of course, the issue with weapons having criticals is that it could very well cause large weapons like ACs to become extinct, as Nik Van Rhijn pointed out, because they would instantly get crit off your mech, while small weapons like lasers would be much more durable.

So perhaps, }{avoc, weapons should indeed only take hard points, while ammo, heat sinks, etc all take criticals. My only issue with this is how we would allow weapons to be critically hit? Of course, this is no longer the times of Mechwarrior 2, nor the table top, so we don't need some table to roll dice against. I'm sure the technology is advanced enough to support a more abstract system so that both criticals and weapons could be critically hit, despite weapons not even being on the criticals table.

Edit:

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Something I liked from MW4 was how ammunition was contained the weapon itself, you simply added ammo/ton up to a maximum. This makes sense in that it eliminates absurd ammo locations/transitions (like how does ammo stored in the legs make it to a Mad Cat's missile racks... legal in TT but strange for simulation purposes).

Yes, and that is a valid concern as well. Like I said, if they can figure out a system where stuff does not NEED critical slots, but can still get critically hit and destroyed, then I am all ears. I absolutely hated that a mech could be peppered to hell and back in Mechwarrior 4 and not lose a single round of ammo or a single heat sink. I think its absurd and rather unbalanced, of course, ammo being fed through my legs, up my chest, and into my arms is absurd as well. Both systems have their flaws, mainly caused by not using aspects of the other's system, which is exactly why I attempted to combine them. As pointed out, this will of course have its own problems, but I think those problems are much more manageable than the issues posed by the two separate systems.

Edited by Orzorn, 13 December 2011 - 01:27 PM.

[guardiandashi]

it is an interesting idea. as I understand the principle:
each location has crits (like the standard tabletop construction rules) however on some (all ) chassis some of those slots could be essentually "tagged" as to an .... intended purpose IE the madcat because of the (non movable equipment) only has 7 slots available in the left and right side torso, as it is an omnimech these slots are "modular (omni) and so can take any equipment, however the marauder MAD-5D chassis varient has an energy focused mount in its right torso, and a missile mount in the left torso on the other hand the MAD-5S varient which packs a gauss rifle in the right torso (may) pack a different kind of mount in that location.

[Orzorn]

guardiandashi, on 13 December 2011 - 02:14 PM, said:

it is an interesting idea. as I understand the principle:
each location has crits (like the standard tabletop construction rules) however on some (all ) chassis some of those slots could be essentually "tagged" as to an .... intended purpose IE the madcat because of the (non movable equipment) only has 7 slots available in the left and right side torso, as it is an omnimech these slots are "modular (omni) and so can take any equipment, however the marauder MAD-5D chassis varient has an energy focused mount in its right torso, and a missile mount in the left torso on the other hand the MAD-5S varient which packs a gauss rifle in the right torso (may) pack a different kind of mount in that location.

Yes, this is the exact thing I had in mind. Each variant has hard points to actually go with that variant, and omni mechs get access to omni hard points, so they actually feel and play like omni mechs, because they can quickly switch to any weapon that will fit that slot, as opposed to IS mechs which would be limited to using missile/ballistics/laser hard points.

Edit: after reading your post again, this isn't exactly what I had in mind. Your idea has the critical slots get tagged to be certain types, but in my system criticals are just criticals. Weapon hard points are associated not with criticals but with specific body parts. So imagine Mechwarrior 4's hard points with criticals underneath. However, your idea seems much smoother and simpler to me. Why hard hard point sizes when you could just as easily use the same criticals as your hard points? Make sense to me.

Edited by Orzorn, 13 December 2011 - 02:28 PM.

[wolf74]

***Copied from http://mwomercs.com/...ot/page__st__20 ***
Of the two choices I have here I would have to pick MW2/3 but I would have some limits on them


1st You have to the Internals of the mech to start. So you have a Normal internal Chassis or Endo-Steel internals Or Composite Internals. No on the fly swapping this.
Omni-Mechs: when they come in to the game, Lock down Armor, Engine, & Locked Gear in the unit. AKA your Puma/Adder will always have that Flamer.

Battlemechs: You have the Basic CBT Critical system, but you could do a MW4 Overlay on the mech Limiting the areas where you can put weapon system. This system you would have to look at the Mech-Stock Configuration so you can make the basic Version of them.

The Battlemech would look Something like this in AT1
http://home.grandeco...h%20Layouts.pdf
****End of Copy

The Critical system is a System where Everything you add to a Mech Takes up room. Now we could goto the Advanced Rules and start lowering the number of Critals slot to the smaller mech class you go too.


*** Copied fromed from http://mwomercs.com/...ay/page__st__20 **
In the Max-Tech book FASA #1700 Revised Edition) Page 63 there was a Side Rule that lowered the Internals space based on the mechs class. The Default for TT is 47+4 open slot on a mech (the +4 is the removal of the Lower Arm actuator and Hand actuator) the 47 slot was divided like so

H / CT / Side Torso / Arms / Legs
1 / 2 / 12ea / 8ea / 2ea

Now the Mex-Tech Version is the lighter mechs get less open slots
Assaults = 47+4 (80-100tons)
1 / 2 / 12ea / 8ea / 2ea

Heavies = 45+4 (60-75tons)
1 / 2 / 12ea / 7ea / 2ea

Mediums = 43+4 (40-55tons)
1 / 2 / 11ea / 7ea / 2ea

Lights = 39 + 4 (20-35tons)
1 / 2 / 10ea / 6ea / 2ea

Very Light = 33 +4 (10-15tons)
1 / 2 / 9ea / 5ea / 1ea

Quad Mechs = Replace arm slots with legs slots

Yes the above with make it where you would have to move some minor thing around on the lighter mechs to make them fit but the flavor of the mech can still be the same.
*** End of Copy

Think of Critical Slot system as a Basic Size system. In CBT there is something that is called a Compact Heat sink, use ½ a Critical slot. So technically we could double the number of Critical slot(also doubling the critical slot taken by all gear) OR better change the Term from Critical Slot to Metric Volume and using the number of Critical Slots as a basis for how much.

Edited by wolf74, 13 December 2011 - 02:36 PM.