52 replies to this topic

[Ignatius Spectre]

Through my years of Battletech play both tabletop and online that FASA's newtech tweaks to increase playership by making battles shorter, took away from the skill and tactics of battletech by introducing weapons that gave a higher percentage of quicker kills at the expense of gameplay. I understand that a weapons race is a natural progression of a galaxy at war as well as a militant society such as the clans, however the game of battletech in the 3025 era tech is the purest and most balanced form of the game, by speeding up the game with the influx of tarcomp, pulse, ER and Guass technology, nevermind clantech, that the game became more about headshots and XL engine crits and less about damage management, BTH modifiers and terrain. Battletech in a digital age should still be an issue of battlefield tactics and battlemech management and not a game of Counterstrike in giant robots. So essentially, how will the devs keep the game from boiling down to people running around in WHM-8D's taking killer potshots from the far side of the maps in 5/8/3 assaults?

[Der Zivilist]

Congratulations, you've walked straight past all information there is to find on this site to come here and make this post.

[Steel Prophet]

Der Zivilist, on 20 July 2012 - 02:04 PM, said:

Congratulations, you've walked straight past all information there is to find on this site to come here and make this post.

QFT!

[Greyrook]

They made a video about it!

http://mwomercs.com/...deo/LbC7w9SN3oE

skip to 1:45 for your answer!

[WardenWolf]

Oh, come on guys - he has ponied up $120, lets at least give him some links!

Check these out first:

http://mwomercs.com/...-for-new-users/

http://mwomercs.com/...-pretty-please/

http://mwomercs.com/...qa-compilation/

Then learn how to use Search for specific things you want to know:

http://mwomercs.com/...earch_in=forums

Then, if you still have questions, please come back and ask here on the forums

[rareth]

wait.. you mean if we pony up the $120 we're entitled to serious responses no matter the question? cool...

[WardenWolf]

rareth, on 20 July 2012 - 02:26 PM, said:

wait.. you mean if we pony up the $120 we're entitled to serious responses no matter the question? cool...

Well... within reason You start asking what I had for breakfast and I might be a jerk But newbies, asking fairly legit first-time questions... and just now knowing the answers already exist out there... that I can appreciate, especially from a Founder - who is likely not paying $120 just to troll us.

[Prat]

ah well. Read up on the links but for a quick answer, they are in fact trying to battle it.

Then mentioned that they're trying to stay away from wide open maps so people aren't just sniping and having to get up close to get a shot.
At the same time, you'll need to have a proper team setup. You won't be taking any shots until you have a target lit up. This will be best handled by light scouts. They'll be far more efficient at this than any other weight class so there goes away the idea of the whole team being mad of ONLY Assault. With varied landscape and choke points, having long range support mixed in with assault (and recon to light them up) will be the ideal setup.

Basically, they're working hard on trying to battle the scenario you've mentioned.

[Ignatius Spectre]

Sorry, I wasn't speaking about team mechanics or weight class roles. Rather about the balance issues developed in CBT with the introduction of clan and 3055+ tech. For example Tarcomps, stealth, ER weapon modifiers,Heavy Guass, Long range 15 + damage weapons, variants that defied their weight class weaknesses through MASC or TSM. Also i misreferenced the WHM-9D, not the 8D. there are 60 ton mechs of equal disparity in the RFL-6X, 55t with the GRF-6S, etc. variants that when played properly unbalanced the board. It was a game mechanics question along the lines of will tech, that in my opinion ruined CBT from its purest form in 3025 tech be repeated in MWO and are we going to have to rely on the pilots skill and the first person form of play to make playable a board game that removed skill in favour of lucky die roles.

[Shad0wsFury]

I'm hoping at some point if things start getting out of hand, they can just do time period matches.

[Ignatius Spectre]

http://mwomercs.com/...tabletop-rules/ this was the only thread that touched on the topic, but briefly and not exactly the questions i was asking. Playing table top and mux's we found that the only tech level that didn't quickly become ridiculous was 3025. The weapons, armour of an assault was matched by the difficult BTH's to hit a light. While a light could out manuever the assault stay at a decent range to give the light a 9 or 10 to the assaults 12 or higher. With the introduction of newer techs, the BTH's came way down, while the armour/speeds of the majority of classes stayed the same. Stealth being the only exception but it was at a cost to sensors. There by unbalancing the game to favour not certian weight classes/role classes but weapon loadouts. The battles turned into plink warfare from max distances using mechs running at full speed and still getting 10's.

[Ignatius Spectre]

Sorry I didn't read through 6583 topics, or the 224,662 replies on the board, but chose rather to ask a question that concerned me, but thanks for the smartass replies. Especially the ones to topics that had nothing to do with the question i asked. And when i searched balance all I received was the balance between weight classes which wasn't an issue in 3025 but developed later with 55 or higher tech. In 3025 you could take any mech from any weight class against most other mechs and have a duel which could produce a decent fight. JR7-F vs an JM6-A two very different mechs classes etc and its a fair fight. I might even favour the JR7. Turn the clock ahead and you put a JM6-D3 against a JR7-8K and its a blowout win for the JM6.

[xRaeder]

Prat, on 20 July 2012 - 02:35 PM, said:

ah well. Read up on the links but for a quick answer, they are in fact trying to battle it.

Then mentioned that they're trying to stay away from wide open maps so people aren't just sniping and having to get up close to get a shot.
At the same time, you'll need to have a proper team setup. You won't be taking any shots until you have a target lit up. This will be best handled by light scouts. They'll be far more efficient at this than any other weight class so there goes away the idea of the whole team being mad of ONLY Assault. With varied landscape and choke points, having long range support mixed in with assault (and recon to light them up) will be the ideal setup.

Basically, they're working hard on trying to battle the scenario you've mentioned.

Sorry, but that is stupid. It would be quite easy to make a map 10x10km with varied terrain. Forests, gullies, hills, mountains, plains, or a variation of these terrains. Grome (a terrain editing/generation tool) is only about $500 for a seat license, and you can easily generate large scale terrains, forests, all using algorithms, with hardly any manual input.

Cryengine 3 supports a ton of optimization options including LOD, content streaming, etc that will allow for large map sizes as well.

With these dinky 12v12 matches there is very little room for tactics, much less strategy because the variables are so limited in these small engagements. We won't see anything like we have read in the Battletech novels. We will not see any advances through a dust storm to flank the enemy. We will not see any orders from command to seal a pass with explosives. Nor any orders to set a forest alight to overheat the Mechs inside.

Look at the videos they've posted. All the stuff we are seeing is close brawls. That's not tactics. That is see red=dead stuff.

It makes me wonder why they even bothered to add a command tree to the pilot skills.

At the very least we should all be asking the developers to rapidly expand the game to 32v32 within months after launch. Seeing as they have gotten 1.4 million dollars from us already that is the least we should be expecting. With a team size as small as theirs 1.4 million buys them a ton of time to make these needed design changes.

If I wanted to play such small scale matches I'd be playing Xbox. This is a modern game with modern hardware, with broadband internet connections, tons of middleware options, etc.

Edited by xRaeder, 20 July 2012 - 07:03 PM.

[RAM]

xRaeder, on 20 July 2012 - 07:01 PM, said:

At the very least we should all be asking the developers to rapidly expand the game to 32v32 within months after launch.

Canonically, 40v40 would be better...


RAM
ELH

[Winters Flight]

One way is by buying themselves time. The game is set in 3049 and advancing day for day in real time. So the highest tech we have available is old Star League era los-tech. The Clans will probably show up in March, but the general feeling is players won't have access to that level of tech immediately (still speculating on how they'll be handled). So for at least the short term very high level tech just isn't in the game.

[BlindProphet]

Ignatius Spectre, on 20 July 2012 - 06:34 PM, said:

Sorry I didn't read through 6583 topics, or the 224,662 replies on the board, but chose rather to ask a question that concerned me, but thanks for the smartass replies. Especially the ones to topics that had nothing to do with the question i asked. And when i searched balance all I received was the balance between weight classes which wasn't an issue in 3025 but developed later with 55 or higher tech. In 3025 you could take any mech from any weight class against most other mechs and have a duel which could produce a decent fight. JR7-F vs an JM6-A two very different mechs classes etc and its a fair fight. I might even favour the JR7. Turn the clock ahead and you put a JM6-D3 against a JR7-8K and its a blowout win for the JM6.

No sorry you didn't bother to look at any of the links, at all. Maybe if you had read Dev Blog 0 or the other Dev Blogs, all linked in the new players thread...you would already have the information you were looking for. Heck you would also see all the dev Q&A's. From those gleaned what weapons are going to be in the game, what technologies, if theres going to be DFA's etc.

But you didn't bother to read...because the links provided to you didn't immediately answer your question.

And yet you bought a legendary...I'm ashamed that my name will be in the credits with yours.

[Ignatius Spectre]

Yes and WardenWolf's was the only reply I received therefor I must be referring to him specifically, they had responded with information rather than a personal attack and I did spend a deal of time going through his links, I could get a PhD in physics as well and solve all the questions of the universe with enough investigation. I tried to quicken the process by asking a question. I'm sorry I wasted so many people's time by forcing them to read the post and then spend the countless minutes formatting a response. How will anyone ever recover the few minutes they spent participating in this thread?

I appreciate the time anyone took to think about the question and supply an answer other than figure it out yourself *****.

[WashCycle]

BlindProphet, on 20 July 2012 - 07:23 PM, said:

No sorry you didn't bother to look at any of the links, at all. Maybe if you had read Dev Blog 0 or the other Dev Blogs, all linked in the new players thread...you would already have the information you were looking for. Heck you would also see all the dev Q&A's. From those gleaned what weapons are going to be in the game, what technologies, if theres going to be DFA's etc.

But you didn't bother to read...because the links provided to you didn't immediately answer your question.

And yet you bought a legendary...I'm ashamed that my name will be in the credits with yours.

Am i'm ashamed mine will be with yours.... because in all honest this is a forum for discussion and he had something to discuss. If you don't like it don't comment and bump his post as simple as that.

[Eximar]

Personally, 3025-3039 is BT. Everything after that was crap. But, MWO is 3049 and it isn't significantly different. We are literally years away from having to worry about ridiculously OP toys, and since PGI seems to have things in hand so far, I hope they will keep things balanced.

Almost none of your concerns will be valid at launch, and only time will tell if they ever become a problem.

[Ignatius Spectre]

Thank you.