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.