Wintersdark, on 27 February 2017 - 10:28 AM, said:
This difference is that ALL lights will have and advantage vs all big assaults, not just fast vs. slow. Speed will still matter, as they can pounce quickly and retreat as fast, but agility will be tunable per weight class and even per individual mech, something that isn't possible right now. I'm not getting involved with theory crafting about where specific values will be (how agile will 100t assaults be?) As that's tunable. It's the fact that after this change, well have more balance ***** across the board
This is where you lose me. What you are describing is a hard counter system and frankly that always makes for bad game play. Hard counters or even pseudo hard counters are not "more balanced ***** across the board". lights<mediums<heavies<assaults<lights should not be a thing.
Wintersdark, on 27 February 2017 - 10:55 AM, said:
Right now, any changes to mobility have very varied impacts because of that. Add a +turn rate perk, and mechs with large engines gain massively while mechs with smaller engines don't gain anything. Having all these mobility values being calculated values instead of specified just means they're not really adjustable.
Say PGI feels Mediums need to be more agile as a chassis. Sure, they could quirk all mediums with +10% turn rate, but that means that the mediums which already turn fast (and thus don't really benefit) turn super-fast and the rest still turn slowly(staying too clumsy to benefit). Once that percentage is high enough to allow slow mediums to turn quickly, then fast mediums are just broken. Because we can change engines, it's not enough to just only apply the quirk to "the slow mechs" as a mech can be fast or slow.
In this system, you can tune a specific chassis (or a whole weight class) and have it have a fixed impact. All the mechs just gain or lose whatever amount of turn rate you want.
It's a balance point that can be adjusted simply with a fixed impact. Want a Phoenix Hawk to be more agile, regardless? No problem. Feel the Dire Wolf isn't quite agile enough, but don't want the Kodiak to twist like a dancer? Or want the KDK-2 to turn quicker at low speeds but not over-buff a 400XL equipped KDK-2? No problem.
Other than the underlined the quirk system could have done and did all of that. Even the underlined they probably could have made a quirk that excluded engines above a certain rating. None of what you have described appears to be fixing anything other than making mechs that didn't have mobility quirks that much less desirable. Sure, it will depend on base value that are given which is why I am more than willing to try it out, but I am not nearly as optimistic as you are.
Wintersdark, on 27 February 2017 - 10:28 AM, said:
There's really no disadvantage here. The worst thing that happens is that you lose some customization of mobility [but note, we have mobility skills you can choose to take or not], but that customization of mobility is the least important aspect of engine size except in cases where you want to go low in rating for whatever reason. If the baseline mobility levels are Good Enough without mobility skills, then perhaps you won't take all the mobility skills to be able to take something else. Aaaand then, there you have it, customization again. In exactly the same way you have it with engines now.
That is a mighty big If. Those mobility skills also are to make up for the mobility skills in the old tree not just what was lost from decoupling then engines from mobility. I'm not sure I agree that we have all this customization you seem to think we have when in all likelihood it is still going to be a net loss across the board. I just hope I am wrong.