Due to the size of some of these questions, spoilers have been added to help shrink their imposing nature.
Question 1) Consider that "Mechwarrior" in its original form was actually an RPG branch of Battletech designed to focus on the human aspect of Battletech, showcasing the people and their lives within the Battletech world with the actual mechanized combat as merit within that experience. To some extent the original Mechwarrior game and subsequently "Mechwarrior" for the SNES which as far as I can tell is strongly similar with a little less menu-based and more Wing Commander-esque between mission room hopping, conversing, etc were able to capture this..
If the franchise were to return to its routes and have a game that equally focuses on the people as it does the machines and warfare, how would you feel? Would this be a welcomed or unwelcomed experience?
Supplemental questions
Spoiler
How detailed would you like the human element to be?
More menu-reading based akin to the first MW and MW SNES where you might see a visual representation of a character (animated or not) and dialogue with vividly detailed text descriptions of locations and actions and maybe some sort of related background image if any at all. Dialogue has some binary choices. (Yes, no. Accept, decline. Here, there.) These may start quests hat you may take or decline but you likely cannot come back to do them later if you turn it down.
More (old school) visual novel-esque. Emphasis on the dialog more than anything. May be given text descriptions but more likely to just be given some sort of visual or brief animation instead to set the location or show actions. Choices are usually binary or trinary in nature (Buy, Sell, Leave is an example of a trinary choice). Like before you may find quests but turning them down tends to leave you without being able to come back to them.
Mass Effect (Your character physically needs to wander a set area and can interact with certain individuals and may have many branching dialogue trees that may make or break social relationships). Because of the more open format, you may be able to pick up multiple quests as well as decline some 'for now" and return to do them later so long as they are not context sensitive.
Some other example that's more in between these
A visual example of each is forthcoming.
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Question 2) If Battletech produced a Mechwarrior-esque game that is based more on simulation than the simplified crowd shoot 'em up that MWO is (that is to say something more akin to a pilot's perspective of a Battletech campaign rather than quickplay alpha all the cheese action).. Then:
Spoiler
In this Battletech Sim, how would you feel about piloting a mech with lore-based flaws such as the Daboku?
In the case of the Daboku, how would you feel under the threat of the following specific issues:
Getting auto-ejected at a really inopportune time due to a torso hit and flying over the battlefield.
Lasers overheating (say in a proper BT sim, the weapons can overheat independently of the overall Mech Heat, as it is very frequently mentioned in BT about individual weapons being prone to overheating, as such even the machine gun has several references to overheating...despite how it produces 0 relevant heat normally).
And the detail that the laser overheat can interfere with targeting circuits.
Autocannons being prone to jamming. (It would be able to unjam if it jammed under normal operation.)
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4/22/2017
New questions!
Question 3 (this has many questions within it and are all related).
If a PC Mechwarrior-like Battletech Sim (single and multiplayer) were to come out (distinction made as opposed to tabletop Mechwarrior because totally different) and it had an emphasis on making many of its weapons damage over time (DOT) ...
...then answer the following questions with the consideration that all weapons follow their damage class specifics regardless of how many shots you could deliver in a stated unit of time (i.e. if a medium laser is is rated to do 5damage and 3 heat, then whether it is fired once or fifty thousand times, it will only deliver a total of 5 damage and suffer 3 heat within that time....
Spoiler
A weapon class has a number of defined parameters, the collection of those ratings when put into practice is defined as a use, a round, or a report. Time is a factor of this report. Do you prefer to do X damage and Y heat within 10 seconds or 5 seconds? Why? What considerations (good, bad, and possible addresses for them) do you have for the effectiveness and issues of weapons within the time factor you prefer?
Small lasers are matter-of-factly intended for use as an anti-light vehicle, anti-battle armor and in emergencies an anti-infantry weapon. In the time factor of your choice and for simplicity, assume that the baseline large laser fires 2 shots to deliver its 8 damage as a way of showing its power and the baseline medium laser fires 3 shots to make its 5 damage as a way of showing its versatility. How many shots should the baseline small laser do? Why did you choose this number?
How do you feel about TacOps Altered Energy damage? (The rule stats that at stated long range, damage is degraded by 1, extreme range degraded by 2, and within 30 meters of the shooter the damage is increased by 1 including IS PPCs). (Note that IS PPCs do full damage at any range, the 90 meters minimum accuracy range is tied in early canon to the weight of the weapon and in later revised canon it was attributed to a field inhibitor instilling a delay in the energy buildup prior to firing.)
How would you feel if laser damage and effective range could be degraded by things such as smoke, heavy dust/sand particles, anti-laser aerosols and atmospheric conditions, if laser damage and range were thusly increased in low atmosphere and vacuums?
Do you believe it to be fair to use the advanced TacOps rule: Rapid Fire Autocannons? This rule states that standard autocannons can be used twice within a turn but at an increased risk of jamming (as opposed of the standard jam risk of ultras) and a chance of exploding upon the jam? Would you be okay if LBX, machine guns, Mech Rifles (basically all ballistics except Ultras, Rotary, Mortars and Gauss weapons) could share in this rule (sans MG exploding risks).
Upon reading this, do you believe players should be able to use vehicles as well as mechs in a one at a timeMWO dropdeck-like fashion?
How would you feel about AI-controlled infantry, Battle Armor and Elementals? About being swarmed? About being attacked from inside buildings? How would you feel if certain players (those with command consoles or command mechs for example, dead players as another example) could direct these infantry using a simple Battlegrid-style map interface and give basic commands?
In Mechwarrior PC games, "override" will prevent or undo a shutdown. In Battletech lore, weapons lock at 80% heat as a safety feature and to override allows the pilot to use them past 80% heat despite the risks. A shutdown thusly is very punishing as the main way to recover is to wait until the mech's is down to 46.67% heat before it can boot up again. How do you feel about this? Do you think it would be good or bad for the game and why?
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Question 4: Read the question. Watch these if you are not familiar with them. Then answer the question.
Spoiler
Do you believe that the IS and Clans can be balanced on a macro (whole team) and micro level (one versus one of comparable battle value) in a real-time translation of Battletech without changing their base tabletop stats? (i.e. regardless of how it is implemented or how many times it can be fired within a given 5 or 10 second period, an IS Large Laser will produce 8 heat and 8 damage within that given 5 or 10 seconds time.)
If so, how would you do it? Give at least one example comparing an element of each side to demonstrate it.
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Question 5: In Battletech, the pilot is at risk of personal injury from numerous things, including kinetic and thermal blasts to the cockpit area (even infantry autorifles have a chance of injuring the pilot if they hit the cockpit though it does nothing to the armor), being rocked around (falls, stumbles, skids) and numerous other things. Consider all questions as a player that might be in that situation against AI and/or other players.
Spoiler
Do you believe that pilot injury should be a factor of a BT/MW Sim?
What do you envision this would entail in terms of visuals?
What about in terms of mechanics?
What could be some of the less obvious causes of injury?
How do you feel about pilot consciousness? (Figure that combat, despite all the firepower going around, would be paced like a real time translation of tabletop meaning if it takes 6 turns to kill your mech then it takes 60 seconds to be killed in the same way).
How do you feel about thermal delirium as a game mechanic? That is hallucinations induced from extreme temperatures (cold and heat).
How do you feel about pilot panic?
If you said yes to injuries, then how do you feel about severe pilot injuries (dismemberment and terminal injuries that do not instantly kill) and their effect on the pilot's performance?
If you said yes to injuries, for injuries that should affect pilot's performance but would be considered too trivial or common (and thus annoying) to have it do so, do you feel that some sort of animation involving a stimpack or some other stimulant should play to account for the lack of being hampered?
Should the mech controls be partially or completely unresponsive during this animation? This is regardless of whatever sense it makes from a realistic standpoint.
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Question 6: More of an addendum to question 5... Cockpits.
Spoiler
The art of Battletech has many different cosmetic appearances of cockpits that can have a huge impact on gameplay. Some of the most common types are:
Spoiler
Battlemaster used as an example. It was hard to find good examples with identical mechs, the best I could find was Scorpion but it was hard to see, so I went with Shortpainter.
Armor with a visor.
Translucent Armor. This is probably the most extreme example on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I don't have an example, but there is also solid armor (no visor at all), in which case the pilot relies entirely on sensors and a video/holographic display.
Are there any more to add to this list?
Which do you prefer?
Do you feel there is room for all of them?
If they were all in a game and one of your favorite mechs had the type locked to it that you didn't like, would you still play it?
Could you grow to like it?
If you actually had a choice to change it out and each type of cockpit shell (for lack of a better word) was an option to switch between with merits and flaws for either way, would you weigh the options or simply pick your preference?
Supplemental questions on the same core subject:
If your cockpit armor is destroyed and you're left with the 3 structure... should the shell ("glass" armor, roof, etc.) around you be gone?
If it is mangled instead of just gone and partially obstructs your view, could you handle it as part of immersion or would you feel gimped and find it unacceptable?
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As interest in this thread builds up, I will be adding additional questions. You're welcome to edit your posts for answers to additional questions or to add posts to answer them.
LocationNAIS College of Military Science OCS courses
Posted 19 April 2017 - 09:26 AM
As for Question 1:
YES PLEASE! No seriously, please!!!!
I'd like something akin to the dialog system found in Mass Effect/KOTOR, provided we get a custom character, other wise I'd be very, very happy with the Wing Commander III/IV/V full movie cut scene style if we get an already made character.
As for Question 2:
YES PLEASE! No seriously, please!!!!
I'd be very, very happy with a more sim oriented game, over what we have currently, this feels too dumbed down and feels more akin to Call of Duty in a robot skin, then actually operating a proper war machine.
(Much as I know there are quite a few of us who would love a more sim-oriented Battletech-esque version of MW, which is partly why I'm working [very slowly[ on a small series of cinematic of what one might be like... I made question 2 a little more clear in what it is about with the more Sim-like BT/MW as the setting for the question relating to flawed mechs [as opposed to said mechs set in MWO where everything is min/maxed to heck].)
LocationNAIS College of Military Science OCS courses
Posted 19 April 2017 - 11:30 AM
I'm no stranger to quirky designs in BT lore, some of my more favorite mechs are best described as quirky....
Mechs like the Phoneix Hawk, Stinger, Wasp, Coyotl and Bushwacker... Nothing about them is optimized, each has their own quriks as well as some questionable design choices....
Given my choice, in a more sim like IS focused game, I'd be itching to get into a Bushwacker, not because I think it'd be the best mech, but rather I see it as something with some character. An experiment for the IS to adopt newer tech during an active conflict, while keeping traditional mixed bag armaments. So yes, for quirks with it, I'd be willing to put up with intermittent sensor readings, ammo feed problems and all the other little issues an early Bushwacker would put me through.
I'm not a good RPG Player usually I love to read but usually in a game with RPG elements I tend to think - shut up were is my Axe... ok also the try to bring RPG elements to a CBT game didn't work so well - asked by the GameMaster:
"You see movement at your 6 its a open 4x4 with two people - what do you do...."
Maybe he did expect some "interaction" - the only interaction he got was a storm of 12.7mm bullets from the Sperry Browning Gattlings of my Warhammer.
Keep it at a minimum - Mount & Blade create a solid RPG experience without much text and without speech or much interaction. More is not necessary - ok MassEffect style would be gold standard for a Mechwarrrior RPG.
About the second.... it really depends on the pace of the battle - and how many options you have.
Even if combat is half as fast as the current MWO I would say no. (Not even 10sec turn made FPS would be slow enough)
Can I remove the jam with a minigame? (splinter cell; deus ex hacking stuff) - to simulate the rewriting of a loading routine.
of course, the battle around you doesn't stop in the mean time.
About the ejecting - stuff like MW2 Mercs was stupid - eject and die or die and restart the mission again was bad - again it need to be more the kind of Mount & Blade (Fire&Sword or the Napoleonic Wars) - sometimes you have bad luck and the musket bullet hit your horse or your head and you are "knocked" down and the battle unfolds without you. Then it is a question of troops and experience of those troops if you get captured or not.
Will have some examples from the two mechwarrior games up here sometime Friday. The simple MW1 PC style could easily be added into mwo to add to the experience. Well supplement it at least with some flavor. Might add a little more clicks to some menus.
Still I found it pretty entertaining. Mechwarrior is about the people in a universe of mechanized warfare. Yet the human element is so completely lost that some people still think mechwarrior mechs are just robots.
Edit:
Due to a recent like in this direction I started re-reading some old posts but I did not see any images for the examples mentioned...
So the simple MW1 PC style in order to demonstrate option 1 from the first question.
"More menu-reading based akin to the first MW and MW SNES where you might see a visual representation of a character (animated or not) and dialogue with vividly detailed text descriptions of locations and actions and maybe some sort of related background image if any at all. Dialogue has some binary choices. (Yes, no. Accept, decline. Here, there.) These may start quests hat you may take or decline but you likely cannot come back to do them later if you turn it down."
1993 Japanese remake.
Mechwarrior SNES (1993 US)
Wing Commander on the SNES makes a good example too.
So, yeah. In case if I did fail to provide these visual examples later on.
The second option most people should be able to figure out. Whether pure dialogue or dialogue and animations, probably nothing more advanced than Flashback.
And option 3 was..
...Well its mass effect. Just don't look at Andromeda.
Question 1) Consider that "Mechwarrior" in its original form was actually an RPG branch of Battletech designed to focus on the human aspect of Battletech, showcasing the people and their lives within the Battletech world with the actual mechanized combat as merit within that experience. To some extent the original Mechwarrior game and subsequently "Mechwarrior" for the SNES which as far as I can tell is strongly similar with a little less menu-based and more Wing Commander-esque between mission room hopping, conversing, etc were able to capture this..
If the franchise were to return to its routes and have a game that equally focuses on the people as it does the machines and warfare, how would you feel? Would this be a welcomed or unwelcomed experience?
How detailed would you like the human element to be? More menu-reading based akin to the first MW?
More (old school) visual novel-esque, (akin to MW SNES; basically more visuals with the text/voice focused on dialogue rather than 'everything')?
Mass Effect?
Some other example that's more in between these?
Yes, I could definitely get behind this.
Never played MW/MW1, but I could get behind a KOTOR/Mass Effect style of interactivity.
Sort of develop the player character's (and close allies') stats, less on 'MechLab? Would we still 'MechLab, but make it more limited? Maybe you have to develop your Tech's skills? (Repair, salvage, refit Energy, refit missile, refit ballistic, refit armor, optimize cooling, advanced retrofitting (ES/FF))
Then as your Tech's skillset advances, he/she's able to do more and better retrofits?
Also, in a linear SP campaign, you can allow for the time lapse required to actually do these repairs. So take out 'Mech A while 'Mech B is in the shop type of thing.
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Question 2) If Battletech produced a Mechwarrior-esque game that is based more on simulation than the simplified crowd shoot 'em up that MWO is (that is to say something more akin to a pilot's perspective of a Battletech campaign rather than quickplay alpha all the cheese action).. Then:
In this Battletech Sim, how would you feel about piloting a mech with lore-based flaws such as the Daboku?
In the case of the Daboku, how would you feel under the threat of the following specific issues:
Getting auto-ejected at a really inopportune time due to a torso hit and flying over the battlefield.
Lasers overheating (say in a proper BT sim, the weapons can overheat independently of the overall Mech Heat, as it is very frequently mentioned in BT about individual weapons being prone to overheating, as such even the machine gun has several references to overheating...despite how it produces 0 relevant heat normally).
And the detail that the laser overheat can interfere with targeting circuits.
Autocannons being prone to jamming.
I like it. I think in such a game you'd have to start out with a "baseline" for performance. So maybe you start in a dinky, ineffective 'mech, but which has no flaws. Then you can upgrade to a better, larger, gunnier 'mech, but have to wrangle with fundamental performance issues like the ones noted.
Edited by Jables McBarty, 20 April 2017 - 12:51 PM.
About the second.... it really depends on the pace of the battle - and how many options you have.
Even if combat is half as fast as the current MWO I would say no. (Not even 10sec turn made FPS would be slow enough)
Can I remove the jam with a minigame? (splinter cell; deus ex hacking stuff) - to simulate the rewriting of a loading routine.
of course, the battle around you doesn't stop in the mean time.
On the unjam, I suppose it really depends on whether it's geared towards a stronger or weaker following of BT. A stronger one would probably be no unless you could happen to pull from the fight long enough for a field repair (if you think MW: Living Legends, you could pull away from the fight and either by yourself [taking longer] or with the help of equipment and a Tech with some Astechs [much quicker], you could get it unjammed then go back into the fight). A weaker one would most certainly have a minigame. If weapon variants are in order, weapons that have a significantly higher than normal chance or risk to jam would have some sort of manufacturer-made or technician-made workaround for clearing jams while those with low risks to jam would not.
Under advanced rules, basic autocannons can deliver twice their rated damage but at a much higher risk of jamming than their Ultra counterparts. This wouldn't qualify of course as it is risk/reward, but in the case of the Daboku those AC/2s could jam under regular use and thus would qualify under the weapon variant stipulation.
Keep in mind, if I were to make a Mechwarrior-like BT sim or semi-sim, jamming would be less of an issue of 'chance' and more of an issue of tenable risk. Daboku's ACs would be a higher risk or an easier one to slip up but it wouldn't be *Pulls trigger, click random jam*.
I'll attempt to elaborate what I mean down below.
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"Why does it matter at all? Why is mech flaws a thing to even consider? Why would I want bad things?"
Spoiler
First, "What is this thing and why do they exist?"
Consider that Battletech constantly references weapons overheating even on mechs that are considered "Cool running" or otherwise couldn't possibly overheat. A fantastical example is the MG which produces zero heat in terms of tabletop's heatsinks but is frequently mentioned to have issues with overheating on many mechs. Though this has absolutely nothing to do with tabletop. For example, the TRO page for Goliath and subsequently Battletech.rpg.hu 's Mech Factory App both list the Goliath's machine guns as being both Prone to Jamming AND Prone to Overheating.
A set of things called Design Quirks, or more specifically what I'm referring to are Weapon Quirks which is a specific set of design quirks referencing specific weapons rather than the whole mech, is an advanced set of tabletop rules designed to try and include these "issues" and "merits" into tabletop. But beyond this, tabletop often ignores these details in a standard setup.
These create a lot of "characterization" for 'Mechs and vehicles that separate and distinguish them from other 'Mechs. Some mechs are endearing specifically because of these issues or merits. I mean look at the Urbanmech.
So why would you want bad things?
In an ideally well designed Battletech/Mechwarrior experience, there are merits to come out of bad things. Checks and balances.
In the case of the Goliath's machine guns exampled above, yes they do overheat 'quickly'. It could also be possible that this is because they deliver their rated damage much faster than normal machine guns do, causing noticeable heat problems while most MGs probably would never have an issue. Abuse of this faster delivery can therefore come in the form of the lore's already mentioned "prone to jamming" in which the weapons cease to function if you abuse the merit too greatly (after all 1 heat per 10 seconds per MG is basically nothing).
Such can also be the case for the Daboku, it could churn bullets and therefore its damage a little faster than normal, thus being more likely to jam. The Mauler (its successor) in turn, being better designed, won't be as prone to accidental jamming but may also be a bit slower at delivering damage or a little more paced in the reloading department so that it won't jam.
"So Koniving, what do you mean by tenable risk to jam?"
In a design by me developed in an attempt to incorporate the characterization elements mentioned above, a three-level heat system was made. Weapon/equipment (where applicable), Heatsink, and Mech/Engine.
To answer the question, it helps to understand the first level known as weapon/equipment heat.
Spoiler
First and foremost, this is but is not about how the AC/20 produces X heat or the medium laser produces Y heat per rated use.
The second thing to remember is that Unlike MWO and UNLIKE tabletop at first glance, Battletech lore is filled with lots of damage over time rather than front loaded damage. An AC/20 isn't a single shot but anything between 4 and 100 shots over several seconds. The largest AC/5s in Battletech often fire 3 shots to get their rating at one shot per second before it reloads (by changing cassettes). Smaller AC5s might churn out 20 shots before it needs to reload. I will share how this is important now:
Using MWO as a comparison... MWO has a "Cooldown system" which is basically use weapon, wait this long.
In my system, the weapon/equipment heat takes the place of this cooldown bar. It begins at zero and as you use the weapon the weapon heat builds up. This heat gets gradually absorbed into mech/engine heat before going into heatsink heat and then finally being dispersed into the environment. Those two levels aren't necessary to understand but it is as they sound.
What is necessary to know is that once the weapon (or equipment) reaches the maximum level of heat it will stop working until it cools down. Lasers, ACs, MGs, Flamers. PPCs. Everything will fall under this action whether it is FLD or DOT.
For FLD weaponry such as all denominations of Gauss Rifles, PPCs, Mech Rifles, Mortars, most Missile Launchers and Some Lasers, this bar will fill once the shot is done and the weapon will not be ready again until it is empty much like a cooldown bar.
For DOT weaponry, it will fill gradually and technically you can use them as often as you please until that bar fills completely before you're unable to use it for a time.
Now, as you heat the weapon up... your weapon's cooling jacket determines both the overall potential heat the weapon may be generating per weapon OR how well the weapon transfers that heat to the heatsinks. (If we do both it's a double burden or double merit, something PGI doesn't understand as clearly demonstrated when giving their heatsinks a tied together threshold and cooling rate, or faster rate of fire plus reduced heat quirks).
With this understanding, we can move on to tenable risk.
Battletech ACs and all denominations are DOT (Damage Over Time) weaponry.
In the case of autocannons and their ultra siblings that are cassette (magazine based), a single damage rating will not fill the heat bar completely.. So, provided that you expend your magazine (cassette), reload and begin firing again immediately you could hit that maximum long before before the second mag is finished. Once you hit that full bar, your weapon will jam unconditionally. It could also have that risk within 60% of the bar a jam risk could start, getting expoentially higher from something like 1% risk at 60% full to over 90% risk at 95% full. Of course you can mitigate this by not pushing your autocannon into firing faster than it is cooling.
In the case of ACs and UACs that are belt-fed -- that is full automatic with no down time for reloads (these would be your much smaller caliber ACs of 2-through-20 ratings that require considerably more shots to deliver their full damage) -- a proper rating of damage would be at 60% and while you can push past it easily, the closer you get to delivering double your rating within a short time span, the more likely the weapon could irreversibly jam. The extra merit here for belt-fed ACs is that even if you are pushing it thermally and despite having to worry about lots more bullets making their mark to get identical damage compared to larger caliber cassette-based ACs of the same damage class, if you can keep it well paced you might be able to do beyond double the weapon's rated damage with only a little risk.
In both cases, if you fill the heat bar completely you will always get jammed due to weapon heat. The closer you get to filling it completely, the more likely your weapon could jam after a certain temperature. It could be that if you fill the bar to almost maximum a risk of the barrel warping could occur and if you hit maximum a permanent jam will happen (until the weapon can be repaired and the barrel replaced).. while jams happening prior to that could be cleared.
As such, the Daboku would likely fill its bar faster than your baseline autocannon, requiring you to pay more attention to it or else you would jam. Thus, tenable risk. Tenable in the sense that you can see the risk and work to avoid it rather than it simply occuring out of the blue at random.
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About the ejecting - stuff like MW2 Mercs was stupid - eject and die or die and restart the mission again was bad - again it need to be more the kind of Mount & Blade (Fire&Sword or the Napoleonic Wars) - sometimes you have bad luck and the musket bullet hit your horse or your head and you are "knocked" down and the battle unfolds without you. Then it is a question of troops and experience of those troops if you get captured or not.
Wing Commander games had something along those lines. If you ejected, the mission would solve itself either a success or failure depending on your performance and how well you did prior to ejecting and how well your wingmen might be skilled for the job (so you could have done nothing at all but your wing men be so good you automatically succeed when ejecting immediately). However you could only do it so many times before your career is over or you're left for dead.
In the instance of a multiplayer game, the mechanic of manually ejecting preserve your pilot's life at the risk of leaving your mech partially or completely out for salvage by the opposing team. Remaining in the mech could risk your pilot's life depending on the manner of the mech's defeat, (whether destruction results in explosions, auto eject failing to occur or auto eject launching you into serious mortal danger) but assure your guaranteed right to reclaim at least most of the mech. Either way your mission will be resolved by those who continue to fight in your place.
(This would be significant in a game where you have control of several pilots leveling up their skills and in a case like MWO's drop deck, you choose four different pilots and send them down in four different mechs then play them one at a time. Pilots of course being a valuable resource as you unlock pilot skills.)
Far as the Daboku's random auto eject, I figure it would probably be reserved to low health before it could trigger. The issue of it occuring without warning strikes me as both annoying and hilarious in what could happen (to the point that Player A might tell friend B the tale about the battle that launched him into an enemy mech and killed them both, inspiring Friend B to consider becoming Player B, who then might share the story with Friend C and while Friend C might not be up for playing, Friend D is told the story... )
Basically the summary of the above paragraph is: Wild experiences produce good stories which inspire interest and lays seeds to bud new players. A real example:
Spoiler
DayZ pulled me in with players sharing their experiences. I in turn gained a number of experiences which I shared and they inspired other people to sit and listen: To quote a specific woman's response to me sharing an experience from DayZ: "That sounds so cool. So that happened in a game? All my son ever does in his game is lay down in a corner for a minute after being shot. Who'd ever think you'd be working together with someone to try and figure out how to stop serious blood loss. So how did you stop the onset of your friend's fever if you couldn't find any medicine anywhere in the town? So by logging out, your characters could sleep and that helped them fight off the fever? What happens if you 'wake up' with an armed stranger standing next to you?"
Needless to say she became a player, as did her son. Her son burned out and moved on to other games but she still plays.
The screenshots are forthcoming. Got the SNES Mechwarrior shots (mind you I didn't get far into it I just got some basic shots).
Now going from thoughts from yesterday...
To further the above thing about autocannons using the three level heat system I described but in reference to large lasers, lets explore a bit. First and foremost you need only to understand the Weapon/Equipment level heat as described above. Know that it basically replaces MWO's cooldown system, but while related in part to the main heat system, it is not directly related so do not think of heatsinks or mech/engine heat when reading this:
So how could the above heat system be applied to handle all of Daboku's large laser flaws?
Spoiler
Assume the heat system I described is in place. Now lets suppose the Daboku's large laser problem is real and implemented.
We will begin with the following assumptions.
Most lasers are damage over time weapons, whether using several shots of 1/100th or 2/100ths of a second long or a lengthier shot of up to two seconds, their damage is delivered over time. (Damage Over Time aka DOT weapon).
Damage is rated within 10 seconds time.
Energy-based weapons cannot double their damage output like non-Gauss ballistic weaponry.
Suppose the standard for beam-class large lasers to deliver their full damage in 2 separate 1 second long beams each delivering 4 damage. (Compare to the largest caliber AC/5, in which each of its 3 shots deliver 1.67 damage). Note as a staple feature of beam-style lasers, I enjoy the idea that like a Star Trek Phaser (Original, TNG, etc.) you can fire it as little or as long as you want until it overheats. 1 second is just when it overheats and quits working until it cools down and you can fire it again for the other half of the damage.
Now, we know the Daboku is stated to have problems with overheating its lasers, taxing already strained heatsinks.
In tabletop, heatsink taxing is a rule that basically stats if you generate more heat than your heatsinks are rated to handle, you run the risk of "taxing" them, which in turn reduces the coolant/melts the heatsink/what-have-you and translated that means a heatsink gets disabled until you can repair or use a coolant truck (so long as it is reduced coolant and not heatsink melting).
However, heatsink taxing is part of its own thing and would run the risk of happening regardless, so actually "taxing" the heatsinks shouldn't be a forced issue with the mech. Overheating lasers though, that is doable.
So, lets assume that the Tronel VI-X Large Laser(s) that the Daboku is equipped with stock delivers the full 8 damage in a minimum of 2 shots like the baseline beam-style LL. However it simultaneously delivers that same damage in half the time. So each shot delivers 4 damage in half a second, twice as fast as the baseline large laser (in terms of beam time).
However, this comes at the cost of bad housing (effectively a different description of the "poor cooling jacket" which is +1 heat to weapon use rating) and as such instead of each laser shot just delivering 4 heat over a second, it is 4.5 heat (as it is two shots) over the half second beam time. It also hits that maximum heat bar within that half second instead of a full second, and hitting this limit triggers some sort of brief HUD distortion as a side effect. That hud distortion can represent the laser's other flaw in which it interferes with the targeting system.
That issue can be completely avoided by not riding that laser until it overheats but instead splitting its 2 shots into potentially 3 or more. The fact that it delivers 2 damage every 0.25 seconds of firing instead of 2 damage every 0.5 seconds of firing more than makes up for it, even though you will still be able only deliver up to 8 damage within any 10 seconds.
Of course you could in theory trade those large lasers for a different set of lasers or other energy weapon provided they are compatible with the Daboku's arms. You would then be able to get rid of the flaw as well as its potential advantage by doing so.
Another fun example is the medium laser known as the Rassal Blue Beam, which is a blue beam medium laser that is known to deliver 100% of its damage in a single, very brief shot after the weapon has had a brief power up (similar to a binary laser). However, the Rassal Blue Beam is classified as a standard medium laser, one of over 60+ variants of which more than 40 are unique despite perfectly fitting within the generic "medium laser" class.
Rassal Blue Beam -- which I will refer to here-on-out as RBB -- is a medium laser with the following flaws to counteract its FLD merit:
(Lore)Firing delay.
(Lore)Visual warning before firing [Vibration].
(Lore)Audio warning before firing[Sound of power amplifying turbines increase in speed].
(Lore)Rapid onset of heat. [In tabletop there is no way to demonstrate this beyond the "No Cooling Jacket" quirk, despite how it is described as not only having a cooling jacket, but a quality one put up to a daunting task; in the case of a real time game though, bringing all the heat at once would be more than sufficient).
(Effect/TT design quirk)Causes electro-magnetic interference when fired (similar to Daboku's LL when overheating).
and finally (Lore)had to rest a minimum of 8 seconds after firing.
There are so many concepts out there which have not and cannot be touched without making use of DOT mechanics and my BT-lore inspired three level (three stage) heat system.
Can you think of an example weapon system and quirks to give it that could test the system I have conceived?
I'm going to wait 10 minutes to make sure my response to Jables is in a different post.
Jables McBarty, on 20 April 2017 - 12:49 PM, said:
Yes, I could definitely get behind this.
Never played MW/MW1, but I could get behind a KOTOR/Mass Effect style of interactivity.
Sort of develop the player character's (and close allies') stats, less on 'MechLab? Would we still 'MechLab, but make it more limited? Maybe you have to develop your Tech's skills? (Repair, salvage, refit Energy, refit missile, refit ballistic, refit armor, optimize cooling, advanced retrofitting (ES/FF))
Then as your Tech's skillset advances, he/she's able to do more and better retrofits?
Also, in a linear SP campaign, you can allow for the time lapse required to actually do these repairs. So take out 'Mech A while 'Mech B is in the shop type of thing.
I like it. I think in such a game you'd have to start out with a "baseline" for performance. So maybe you start in a dinky, ineffective 'mech, but which has no flaws. Then you can upgrade to a better, larger, gunnier 'mech, but have to wrangle with fundamental performance issues like the ones noted.
I would think you'd still get mechlab, but more in line with Battletech's campaign customization rules and less of Battletech's create your own mech from scratch (and pretending it's a Warhammer) rules.
Basically, you know how Sarna eludes to a softpoint system hidden on some details for certain missile launchers and mech mortars? You can see hints of it on MMLs. Basically, that is part of campaign customization. Weapons of certain compatibility can be easily swapped (not as easily as modular equipment and Omnipods, but much easier than things that would require drastic physical changes to the mech's body). Things that did require drastic changes would take a fair bit longer and the end result wouldn't really be pretty. If you want, picture an LRM-20 duct-taped to a Cattlemaster piloted by a slackjawed redneck chewing a bit of straw that's gone hog huntin'.
You've mentioned techs. Lets consider BT / Megamek HQ Campaign technicians for a minute. A technician is an individual that looks after your mech along with help by a number of Astechs (assistant technicians). The lead technician's skills determine a number of things including repair success, time and quality, maintenance quality, the range of modifications that can be done to your mech and finally parts ordering.
Obviously, the higher the technician's skills the better the jobs that could be performed. One would think if the technician is implemented as an integral part of the game design, you would be able to hire and subsequently fire your technician.
Making four attempts to hire a technician in Megamek. Remember that the higher the number, the crappier the skill. A number of 8 means they basically don't know what they're doing but at least they got some incomplete training, if it is 9 then they dablled in it without any proper training, 6 is a basic knowhow / trained but mostly inexperienced. 0 is Scotty the Engineer with real Whiskey (not that synthetic crap) and a deadline.
Spoiler
The people that answered the call were:
Mathias Klev, 26 years old , looks like Brad Pitt with a cowboy hat. Small arms 3, Tech/Mech 7. Settles for 750 Cbills/week. (He wanted 850 cbills/week)
Tania Interlenghi, 24 years old, portrait is of a bronze skinned mixed-descent with Asian eyes, Small Arms and Tech/Mech skills at 6. Wants base pay of 800/cbills week.
Margret Friis, 20 years old, Blonde, Caucasian, face tattoo. Trained in small arms (6) but has an 8 in Tech/Mech skills. Demands 1,000 cbills/week.
Pre-posting edit: I made a lot of per week references that I just don't feel like changing because I'd have to change a lot of things, so it's better to just say I later found out these are all per month. If you read "/week" remember to think "/month" instead!
(Some flops that were too similar, mostly male and some female).
Here's some promise:
Pamela Inoke. 29, female, brunette long hair and European descent. 8 in small arms. Tech/mech 5, Tech/Aero 7, Abilities: "Oblique Artilleryman", Vehicle Gunner 5. Wants 1,350 cbills/week, doubled each time she sees combat within the given week. Demands a rank of (I'm Steiner for this test) Lieutenant Junior Grade.
Looked up Oblique Artilleryman and discovered that this skill reduces artillery scatter by 60 meters. If I put her on a Long Tom, instead of 30/20/10, I'd get... I dunno, lets try it. Nothing changed. Guess because Long Tom is a single shot. Took a AC/2 carrier and traded the AC/2s out with some Mech Mortar/8s, copied it, regular vehicle gunner of the same skill level in vehicular gunnery but without the skill trait in one and LJG Inoke in the other... Hot diggity that is quite a difference. I think she's worth it.
Gonna try for one more great example:
Lots of flops...
Here we go!
Tim Fahey, 28, bald, missing some teeth, covered in grease. Tech/Mech: 3, Small Arms 5. This pilot has the following implants: Prosthetic Tail, Prothestic Limbs - Extra Arms. Demands: 2,500 cbills/week. Bartered: Failed. Will work for 2,750 cbills and has stipulation: Must be fielded on Mission(s) at least once/month.
Demanding S.o.B. So, if I don't put him on some kind of field mission at least once a month, he'll likely quit or defect. Makes life interesting. And a tail? A tail?! Seriously, a tail? Evidently it's used for melee combat. Wonder if it helps with movement challenges like short falls? Wonder what it looks like...
So. Yeah. That last one was super interesting. If I took Mr. Fahey though I'd have to give him some vehicle gunnery training because I don't care how awesome he might be on foot, without at least some jump gear he won't do **** against a 'Mech, and extra arms doesn't mean he's strong enough to pry open a cockpit hatch. Maybe some battle armor training... but not sure if he could fit. Four arms tend to cause problems.
But yes, that wild moment has passed.
The base rate of Technicians is 800 cbills/week. Or is it per month?
It's per month. So all those per week things, that is the rate per month not per week. They didn't give me a 'time', just "Pay #"
A lot more affordable than I thought. Then again the base pay for a Mechwarrior is 1,500 cbills/month. This is one of the many reasons I believe a player should be playing as a leader or administrator of some sort with multiple pilots under his or her roster so that owning multiple mechs (and in something like faction warfare, having multiple sorties in one mission) makes sense. Plus all that additional income. Though I figure that would be 'their' income and you'd get the mission pay which is significantly greater.
Back to Mech/Techs!
As in the example in the spoiler, Technicians came in a bit of a variety (keep in mind I started a brand new campaign and without reputation, 'great' technicians are incredibly rare to nearly impossible. I had to artificially inflate my reputation a bit to get Fahey to show).
I would imagine in a Battletech/Mechwarrior Sim, you would be able to browse personnel markets on various planets and hire some Technicians as necessary. Techs that are better at the start definitely want more money and two of those cases were pretty demanding. Lower end techs, particularly Klev and Interlenghi are trained but inexperienced and thus much more affordable. I also imagine they can build with their experience and become better. The more they work with specific mechs the better they are with them. I can tell you that as a machinist that works with molds of up to 1 ton, the more often I and my AsMach work on a specific mold the better we get at it.
Then there's a case like Friis, she was super demanding but had virtually no skills to show for what she wanted. I imagine if I bothered to barter she'd lose big time and she might start work really cheap under a stipulation like giving her proper on the field training (meaning she'd likely have to start as an Astech first under another technician). But if I'm willing to invest in her, then I think as a long term reward she should turn out to be one of the best techs I could ever hope to have. At the very least, she will always be cheaper than most -- unless that initial demand is indicative of a personality issue, in which she'll get demanding again and may eventually defect or quit if I keep shutting her down.
Wow! That had a LOT more characterization than I even would have thought possible. I actually wanna preserve these random characters and invest a little in them and they're not even capable of conversation or anything other than a basic set of stats with a random portrait that could just as easily be swapped with pictures of dogs and cats.
It's true you can simply time-lapse as necessary in a single player campaign and as a sense of urgency you can make sure that sorties and defense missions need to happen on specific dates or specific amounts of time after X event so if you aren't up to full strength you would feel it.
I like this sort of urgency in multiplayer. When MWO had a repair and rearm mechanic, it was actually interesting that sometimes the mechs were in a state of disrepair. Even so sometimes they actually still wrecked face and other times they did go down easier as you would expect. MWO has its basis on a battle of attrition but after each fight the mechs are perfectly healthy now.
In a concept I put out based on the stuff we were told we would see, I made certain attrition was part of it. See here.
Now imagine something more like a multiplayer version of a single player campaign. You have your mechs garrison the planet. They receive regular supplies for repairs and the like. But they keep getting hit hard and run out of their repair stocks. Sure upon successfully repelling invasions they might be able to use some of the crap left behind, but they won't be full strength as wave after wave hits. And that's what might have to happen to be able to wrestle control of the planet away. I also imagine they can set up shop elsewhere on the planet if the defending forces are insufficient, allowing them to build up a sort of base for themselves, thus allowing for base to base warfare akin to General Chaos (great Sega game if you haven't played it) or Herzog Zwei (first Strategy game ever, use vehicles and infantry to capture smaller base stations before moving on to the enemy's big base, decent sized maps considering).
The General Chaos reference:
Spoiler
In General Chaos, each team would fight for control of the map. The first fight is on neutral ground with both sides attacking each other. The winning team gets to make the next push deeper into their enemy territory -- or if the circumstances imply, reclaiming lost ground. Eventually one side will reach the other's base for a final stand. Should the defending party win they push back, but if the defending party loses then it's game over (or in our case you lose the planet).
The Herzog Zwei reference.
Spoiler
In Herzog Zwei it is a similar concept except there's no map menu, you play on a large scale map in real time going from point to point, handling the logistics and all else yourself while your forces do the main fighting. You can and often must provide support for your forces, but only your forces can complete any of the actual objectives requiring you to manage them. This includes rescuing units that have fallen off cliffs and making sure they are supplied with fuel and ammunition as they can and do run out of each.
Both games have newly released successors. One is free to play.
Far as repairs, you've got your techs on a salary. Basic repairs should be cheap to free since they're doing the work, replacement parts would of course cost what the actual parts cost. Going back to the Technician though, their 'skill' also goes into their ability to locate and order non-new replacement parts at a discount. These usually require a little bit of repair, too., but the discount often is quite worth it.
In other words, you wouldn't be breaking the bank like PGI's version of repair and rearm unless you have a lot of Mechwarriors and Techs working under you. But the more you have, the more places you can be and the more missions you can do and so the more money you can earn to offset what you'd be spending. But don't get me wrong, advanced ammo isn't cheap but your typical canonical loadout is. And I personally don't condone or see the need for 12 tons of ammo on a mech.
---
Far as your response to Question 2, Jables... I actually have a baseline currently for all weapon systems and equipment, with variants of those bringing about the differences. I actually have gone into a lot of detail about those which I may share sometime later.
For the most part those baselines of the actual equipment would help to define the mech. Each chassis would be compatible with a certain amount of equipment, some of these compatabilities are either canonically named across variants or derived from those in mechs with similar limbs. Arm missile launchers between the Zeus and the Orion would likely be compatible, for example. Then from there if Mech Design_Quirks are associated with just the weapons, then the weapons will exhibit those quirks (good or bad) regardless of what mech they are on.
The Daboku's laser issues could go either way. Is it the Housing in the arms or the Housing on the Tronel lasers themselves? But the issue with the Daboku's ACs aren't attributed to the ACs, they are attributed to the mech itself.
So then, 'Mechs would likely need their own baseline (sans equipment) as well. I can pretty much guarantee that once the Mauler rolls off the factory lines, Dabokus being their inferior brethren would certainly go for huge discounts from scrap heaps and junk shops as would their (dedicated) parts.
Going back to Technicians for a minute. Mechwarrior (the RPG) mentions in the first edition that a character (which means anyone, but in this case I'm referring specifically to a Technician class character) could have "Connections." For a Technician this allows access to a black market for high level, rare and also illegal equipment. This technically is a skill to be unlocked that could also be unlocked at the start while using up character points.
---
Alright, there is a lot of food for thought here.
(Edit: Added indentation on topic changes)
First I would keep the 10sec reference - although this should not give any clue to the rate of fire - could also be 20sec reload time or 1sec - but the optimal damage used the BT stats as a guideline.
Of course, the final outcome might differ - (AC2, MachineGuns, Flammer) -
The main reason I would take 10sec reference is that you have more time to get "feelable" differences. Reducing it to 5sec could mean to give a weapon 0.3sec faster reload but you really should not miss the moment - otherwise the effect is null.
Small Laser:
Rather than having one "LAZOR" i would like to have maybe 3 kinds of laser/weapon in general.
the first increase the to-hit probability (long beam, multiple burst, spread, velocity, but has a lower to damage propability (means it's hard to deliver the full damage all the time)
the second should increase the damage probability (plain more damage, short beam, low pellets, low spread)
the third is a mix of both.
Range is a function of heat and damage per shot.
If you fix heat - range is direct proportional for damage.
So the first version of a small laser - anti infanty - might have a long beam (1sec, 3x times the range than it have in BT, but only mini damage damage - low reload time)
So for the question depends on range - 3 shots when range over exceeds those of the medium laser beam duration 1.5sec
the second is more a poor mans ROOM FLAK - low range, short beam, high frequency of shots
shots 8-9) with .1sec beam duration.
(maybe answer question - the last is a pulse laser? NOPE - its a beam laser - a pulse laser has a much faster duty cycle an the pulsing would not be controllable by the player (0.001beams and 0.001 breaks)
Non-Linear damage drop off - I'm in - although the minimal range is a controversy - shouldn't exist at all. (Ok 30m might be necessary for all weapons with a warhead - so it could be a hard-wired mechanic that does not allow to fire weapons below 30m (MW4 had those silly explosions for a reason)
Battlefield condition like storm, rain and dust should be part of an immersive game - heck you should even be able to fire smoke rounds (unclear: frame rate and graphical performance) that help to decrease laser damage... but can be "hot" or "cold" - the first would allow FLIR (thermal imaging to look through, the second would blind the sensor)
There are some formulas about the bloom and scattering
The father of the idea to have "rapid fire autocannons" must have been the simple issue - standard autocannons sucks in TT and the "additional ammunition" is a joke (imho). A well rounded "simulation" would not need another rule because standard autocannons have their place
No - it's either Mechs or vehicles.
However with AI-Infantry I really would have the real combined arms warfare BT is supposed to have - even when the TT rules only marginally reflect this.
So the main question would have been what is infantry, a tank... supposed to do?
Its obvious that Mechs are for rapid strikes - 100% cavalry - break through enemy lines and exploit. They should not so much be wasted in stationary combat scenarios... this is the task of tanks that can hide much better in the terrain.
Infantry would support both but would be more effective at close quarter were the range of mech weapons is nullified.
Swarm attack - well different story - I think it would force players to think about info warfare more than just aquiring targets - because when you get to close to a couple of toads your toast - there shouldn't be much defense against swarm attacks.
Shutdown.
First the current MWO mechanic shows perfectly how it should not work.
You shut down at 100% but you get damage to the CT - wait i don't get shutdown I get damage on a random location but I'm not helpless. There is a reason i toggle override
The shutdown should apply much earlier - it should not be a toggle - it need to be pressed and repressed (like it was for a short period) Shutdown can start at 70% with 1sec time to react, 80% 0.5sec; 90% 0.3sec - 100% automatic.
Question 4 is a simple one:
I believe that it should be possible to balance stuff using tonnage and critical space as criteria.
Heat could be measured in tonnage and crits (because of the heatsinks)
And because I'm a clever guy, I already have collected the data of my consumers (players). Now I would be able to forecast and know that a change of 100ms causes a reduction or increase of the effective damage valuse of factor ###
This means - when I create a weapon with more range for less weight - i would either reduce the effective damage (by changing beam duration, effective and max range [or the values for my polynomic damage drop off curve ])
If the result still differ I could increase heat - to increase the "load value".
TLDR: the Clan ER-Large Laser vs IS ER-Large Laser show how things should be solved. (Not so sure if the load values are correct.
pilot injury:
ARMA or OPF style (I was reasonable shocked when my char got a stray bullet in the throat in OPF...and i was there looking from 3rd PV how the life blood was bleeding)
Red Outs, lost of stammina (lower reaction times), pulsing, impaired view, ghost images is a nice idea too
Injuries:
time until action performs is increased
Left Arm - Throttle, left side weapons (other stuff)
Right arm - Torso Twist, right side weapons (other stuff)
Legs - turning and jumping
head - primary vision (could be neuro helmet damage, or blood in the eyes, or broken nose)
This should also be possible in a BT sim. wounds caused by spalling damage - or exploding monitors might need a treatment. Bandage, combat drugs.
bigger injuries should need a medic - oh your in a battle mech - so either you life long enough for a combat life saver to climb up - or you need to eject. (only important for the roll play game)
Cockpit;
I would like all three kinds.
MWLL for the win (BA in cockpit)
Of course, I would like the third the most.
Have no problem with the visor (atlas)
or with the copula- Zeus
General the sensors should be the eyes not the look through a window.
The transparent stuff is transparent armor (how this could work dunno - but maybe it could be possible - but after several hits the visibility would be gone too)
- a cockpit hit could take place without even hitting the cockpit (i mentioned spall damage)
consider that the first armored cockpit Battlemaster has two segments - considering that the pilot sits in the front - but get a hit from the side into the 2nd segment. (CT) damage talking in MWO terms. But it could still injure the pilot (for example by causing the filled sink to explode and filling the cockpit with excremnts )
Edited by Karl Streiger, 23 April 2017 - 11:34 PM.
I'm not entirely sure about making something take 20 seconds to reload. The only reasonable things I can think of would be Long Toms, Arrows, etc. But Arrows don't actually reload. Long Tom can tecnically fire once every 10 seconds as long as you're providing a target, you just wouldn't want to (and not because "Tactical Nuke Incoming". In fact it is far from that as the maximum total damage possible in TT from an LT is 270, while PGI's version had a maximum per player damage of 1,350. You wouldn't want to because limited stores of ammo and lets face it, that would be annoying and without good counter play).
Coming back and thinking on it, I believe I know what you mean. Reload time as in the down time before you can use it again after completing spending some sort of allotment of uses (for example an AC/5 spending the full ton of ammo and then changing to the next ton). I could certainly see that. Especially if that second ton is in a different location. Or as a punishment for seriously overheating an energy weapon that falls above the jedi-curve in that it could exceed the damage class it is in.
Something I had thought of based on playing with Megamek is assigning ammo to specific weapons when you have more than one. This adds a bit of realism as well as giving you direct control of ammo consumption (particularly important when you want to jettison specific sections of ammunition instead of all the ammo). And yes later you can draw from another source. (This is where it differs from megamek) I believe the farther away it is from your weapon the longer it should take to get resupplied/reloaded from it. If your ammo has to travel through three body parts to get to your weapon it should take longer than if it only had to go through one or none. Of course most mechs aren't large enough to carry the ammo in the same place as the weapon (especially on arms, torsos are a different story usually). As such you can imagine that Blackjacks probably wouldn't be the quickest reloaders if they had to tap into a second ton of ammo in the CT.
Speaking of which and this is a whole different topic, I have been mapping visual routes for things like ammunition on older mech art. Blackjack's cute life preserver that it wears going from the CT, around the STs and stopping below the arms -- ammo paths? Hunchback's drum, ammo cache? (On the only official 4SP art I have ever seen, the Hunchback's drum is smaller and on the back of the CT instead of the LT).
Back on topic..
I agree on the 10 second reference. It also allows for more variety between variants of the same weapon as there is more time to use the weapon before the rating needs to be done. It also allows for weapons with longer overheat times and longer reloading imes within the same ton of ammo. The only real merit of a 5 second system is it makes heat matter that much more if you push past the tabletop standard in emergencies. But such also risks becoming the standard, or players might just change single heatsinks for doubles on mechs just to be able to run them at full strength all the time instead of just in emergencies. In other words 5 seconds has merits worth considering (besides its Solaris origins), but it also has abusable flaws that has me also favoring 10 seconds.
On the lasers, canonically
Spoiler
(via FASA and written mainly by two of the early novelists, edited by and with articles written by rulemakers of the 2nd and 3rd editions of BT, though the source now considered non-canon by the current company largely due to beligerant use of copyright questionable artwork of mechs that at the time were not yet unseen as well as due to numerous references to lore that had changed several times over after 1986-1988 [Such as, ACs have minimum accurate range because heavy -- though the heaviest one has the shortest minimum accurate range. This made sense though because at the time smaller ACs were often hand-held weapons and the big ones were always in torsos. Bringing us to modular weapons vs non-modular, made **** confusing so FASA since changed it all to being 'fixed' and explained the descreptency as "******* got tired of having their guns grappled away and used on them." PPCs have minimum accurate range because heavy -- yet ER PPC which came later doesn't?)... But in said material,...
standard lasers (there were no ER versions at the time, this came in a later edition of BT) came in two basic forms: Beam-type and 0.1-0.2 second burst type (I call it Zap or Zip because otherwise it gets confusing with the Wubz). The second laser you describe basically sounds like a pulse laser with a scatter lens within reason on an internet based game. The sigificantly faster/shorter/more fun pulse you describe for a pulse laser couldn't be much more than a show and completely imperceptable compared to the poor man's room flak (when ignoring the scatter). Sans a sort of pulsing effect that would be too quick to even see, no one would tell the difference between a beam laser and pulse laser going that fast. We would want a visual distinction to help you know if you're being attacked by a pulse laser or not. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea flak laser idea and in fact it is going on my list of laser mods, though I wonder if something of a "Death Blossom" effect with continuous beams or just slapping this on a pulse laser would (for more of the effect you originally described) might be better? After all these are hypothetical questions if we were to put these into an actual game/simulation (which will probably never happen but one can dream).
(Ed)But wait...
Of course, one of the many things that makes BT so engaging is its openness to interpretation (and in PGI's case that interpretation is awful as it is too literal and far too incomplete in what it actually uses). In reading and responding in detail about the other laser and doing the math, I realized you left out a detail that leaves the Room Flak laser concept open to interpretation. It is stated as high frequency which does mean that they shoot rapidly but there is no specific definition to how often. As long as they are not immediately back to back (say a quarter to half a second apart), you 'could' tell them apart from pulse lasers and then it'd be just fine. The key of course is being able to visually tell the difference between its firing frequency and that of a pulse laser.
I would like to understand fully, however. Is this scattering the laser beam into many direcions for its spread/flak or is this a wide-angle lens to create a single (repeating) beam that hits a wide area for its spread/flak? I'm curious as it would help to determine damage.
On weapon mods:
Spoiler
(I have a list of 'mods' or things that different weapon variants of each class may have to differentiate themselves from one another. A base weapon has all the base stats plus a few somewhat necessary arbitrary ones such as the large lasers being split into two shots instead of one, and the features are assigned a 'weight' within the weapon's tonnage.
As an example, the same source I mentioned earlier specifies that 3 out of the 7 tons of a PPC are dedicated specifically to on-board cooling systems and heatsinks, meaning without that a PPC is actually 4 tons and a duckload hotter! I count the cooling jacket as part of that. But of course it continues, half a ton is dedicated to cabling supplying it with power (how fast it gets ready to fire), 1 and a half tons are dedicated to the barrel (range) and its shell (weapon armor) and the remaining two tons is the actual device (damage capabilities).
A Variant then takes this base formula and reallocates weight to make X happen at Y cost. My favorite rendition of Lord's Light is that of a PPC that field-inhibits for 2 seconds before firing, hence the name as you can see it light up long before that rapid crack of 'lightning' and flash of light followed by that kinetic wave of energy.
To make a Lord's Light PPC, perhaps we take that half ton of cabling and reduce it to a quarter ton; takes longer to power. So there's your drawback. Of course the question becomes what to enhance with that quarter ton? The answer of course is whatever Luthien Armor Works decides to do with it. They could throw it into additional on-board cooling capabilities. They could throw it into the weapon's shell (weapon armor) for additional protection against crits, they could put it into the actual apparatus to slightly enhance damage, they could put it into the barrel to give it more range.
Or, more questionably, they could just shave the weight off (very hesitant about this, however as it can break weight allocations).
The room flak would do something similar, trading in this case range in exchange for its flaking power.
Strangely I'm less iffy about the 3x range small laser (which means 270 meters, and what does this do for ER small lasers which are only twice the range at 180 meters?) But this is partly because "Thereotically, the range of a laser is infinite. In practice, numerous factors such as smoke and dust particles, moisture (and its a long list so I summarize as 'atmosphere') degrade the laser reducing its strength as it travels without additional (blah blah)." But there is more than that.
Pushing range also doesn't push any computer-related or internet-related limiting factor, unlike a pulse laser pushing the 1,000 frames per second server/game time necessary to meet the 0.001 pulse times. Beyond the computer aspect, there is the balance aspect so lets take a look there. 3 total damage might be 30 total damage against infantry (as it is in tabletop and firing a small laser can and will hit multiple infantry/BA0 but that laser power spread over 1.5 seconds against a mech that's 0.3 damage per 0.1 seconds (compared to the baseline beamtime of an SL in MWO, it'd only do 1 damage in that 0.5 seconds), meanwhile against infantry it is 3 damage per 0.1 seconds, (a full 0.5 seconds required to kill one battle armor completely). Thus this is completely acceptable, tangible and easy to balance against other laser variants of both small and medium class. I do believe I'll be saving this one to use as a fill-in-the-blank variant (one that isn't expressly detailed in lore, as many are not and often those that are detailed fail to be consistent).
Minimal range isn't so much a controversy but a poor misinterpretation. Many read "Minimum range" and in Paul's words: "Having a bullet magically not do damage just because it is under a certain range makes no sense." All this shows is the lack of understanding and perhaps a lack of vision. What actually happens in Battletech when a target is under minimum range? There is a penalty to accuracy. Not damage. All weapons deliver full damage below minimum range, in fact in some rulesets they deliver extra damage! The key thing that many miss is that minimum range is actually short-hand for Minimum Accuracy Penalty Range. Try saying that three times fast.
Megamek gives this penalty to torso weapons, which I suppose makes sense since the torsos would be unruly heavy to swing. However, the lore of the 1980s when BT was transitioning from the title "Battle Droids," actually attributed the penalty for ballistic weapons in arm mounts. Why? Well consider doing this practical demonstration yourself. Please take a cellphone in your left hand and hold it like a gun. Now, take a large bottle of laundry detergent, hold it in the right hand and pretend it is also a weapon. Stand somewhere in the open for this experiment. Now using just your left hand, aim in front of you, now to your extreme sides, now whip around and aim behind you. Lower it and with the right hand do the exact same thing. Notice how the right hand with the heavier weapon was so much harder to move at the same speed? Thus, minimum accuracy penalty range. The closer something is to you, the faster you need to be able to swing your weapon to track and hit it. If the weapon is too heavy, it is really difficult to do.
That is the concept of minimum accuracy penalty ranges. It is completely lost on PGI. However, in practice this is impossible to assign to one weapon and not to another if both weapons are on the same arm. As you can imagine this becomes increasingly complex, but then again how often is more than one AC/5 attached to a mech's arm? In 1986 it was unheard of. There were no XL engines. So it was not an issue back then.
In our case, minimum accuracy range penalties can simply be handled matter-of-factly by how the mech handles. The only cases where it truly matters anyway are the following four:
Gauss Rifles. PGI's solution was a charge up mechanic. It is true that the rail guns of real life need to power before they can fire, but BT is more accurate in that it's just being powered on or not. I imagine the length of the barrel would be a factor of course. Almost every canonical representation of Gauss Rifles that I have seen demonstrate them to be pretty damn long. Hollander anyone?
PPC: 2 months before PGI did a charge up mechanic, I suggested (rather directly to the Lead Designer) a charge up as the solution for PPC minimum accuracy penalty ranges (well actually, as the solution to desync PPCs from Gauss Rifles and ACs). PGI then threw it on the Gauss instead. However video evidence shows that when John (Harebrained Schemes, formerly FASA) was with PGI briefly to help formulate the original Mechwarrior 5 prior to MWO, charge up was already the solution original thought of. See evidence here. Both in the building up energy whine to the PPC bar filling up before actually firing.
IS LRMs: Original lore solution is all LRMs are fired at a ballistic launch angle (up and forward), Clans shoot straight at their target (meaning IS can indirect and Clans cannot). Later revisions changed it to some nonsense about arming, meaning IS missiles didn't arm until 180 meters unless the pilot remembered to set it to a shorter range before firing [lots of problems with this logic], IS can hotload 'em of course but armed in the tubes means shoot the tubes and boom. Clans are supposedly always hot loaded by that logic, however, making the Mad Cat one of the dumbest ideas to exist. Naturally I prefer the 1980s logic for LRMs.
The final one being mortars of all sorts for much the same reason, ballistic launch angles.
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I would think hot smoke would blind thermal imaging while cold would not (considering how hot things are on the other side). Will have to run some tests, I recently obtained a thermal camera for fun.
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To be clear by players having control of infantry (when they are dead/no longer in control of a mech or if they have a command console or additional comms equipment to uplink to satelite), I mean nothing beyond being able to direct AI infantry with simple commands such as 'Go here', 'Bunker here', 'Aim this way'. Not so much a "Battlefield" scenario (though that might be cool in its own light).
Moving on. AI infantry and vehicles. Vehicles I imagine could be player and AI controlled I do admit that AI could do some really neat **** in a simulation.
Spoiler
DayZ Mod, a server chose to have AI survivors, bandits and military. Survivors just explored and were friendly, fought bandits and tried to avoid zombies.
Bandits attacked survivors, soldiers and players and tried to avoid zombies.
Soldiers could go either way against players and survivors, always attacked bandits and would fight zombies if they had the numbers.
Sample.
Me and a friend found a military truck but had an issue about gas, it was kind of low and so we went exploring. There we found an AI soldier. Here, he seemed to 'attach' to us so to speak and rode with us. We arrived at a place to look for gas cans and we came under fire. Bandits. We fought the bandits and won. The truck came under fire however and our soldier friend shotgunned the crap out of two of the bandits. Our soldier friend then hopped in the truck and took off. We chased and 3 minutes later he changed direction back toward us. We fired to try and kill him, he sped up and kept going. Two real life hours later this AI soldier brought back the truck, fully fueled and repaired and saluted us. My friend responded by shooting him the head. We soon discovered he brought 3 more AI soldiers that caught us by surprise and as the only survivor I dispatched them. But it was late, we gathered the loot, hid the truck, and discovered it was gone the next morning. But for an AI to be persistent for hours, collecting scrap and fixing vehicles and then specifically seeking out players it had encountered before tells me that there is quite a bit that AI could do if given the runtime (processor power) necessary. Certainly this Arma 2 AI was a hell of a lot better than the basic zombie AI that Rocket programmed for DayZ Mod.
Honestly I would picture that if a true to lore simulation were to be used for a multiplayer game, the 'Mechs would be secondary to the vehicles. You would have some mechs and a plethora of vehicles for any given battle. Exactly how to work out the ratio is a bit lost on me, my best thought is to not limit by number but strictly by tonnage. This way the more tons each vehicle or mech is, the less you can bring into the field. Likely with a limit in the tonnage you can bring in a 'Mech, or a two times multiplayer in that a 'Mech is worth twice its weight in vehicles which isn't actually true... Yeah I haven't done much thought in the distribution of vehicles and mechs department yet.
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Moving to pilot injury:
OPF?
Familiar with Arma which is very impressive (particularly Arma 3), though their methods for self treatment might not work too well when already under the pressures of vehicular and mech combat.
The layout of injuries and affected performance falls in line with what I already have. (Hadn't thought of a broken nose but such makes sense).
Spalling damage? Ah,looked it up. Damage from fragmentation of physical elements (consoles, armor/structure fragments being dislodged and tearing through the cockpit, etc.)
Ejection can be made important in even a multiplayer environment if the player isn't just one pilot but a team of pilots and each pilot is made important. As such when the time comes and you find the pilot's skills are important to you then preserving that pilot should be of at least some priority to the player even at the risk of losing the mech to enemy hands. And if not doing so for the skills that could be lost then the player might do it to ensure that there are still pilots in the area after the battle so that the pilots may be available for future battles until a relief force can arrive (preservation of forces under siege until the calvary arrives to save the day.).
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On cockpits:
Seems you like the same cockpit that I would have the most fun in. I would imagine that the solid (third) cockpit would be the most susceptible to ECM interference or issues from damaged monitors/holo emitters/Neurohelm, and deception tactics. Some of which might ultimately require you to open the cockpit if you are otherwise rendered completely blind.
The 'window' would be the least susceptible to ECM issues, though something like Thermal and MAG might be limited to a small monitor at your side. And like you said, even as some kind of translucent (semi-transparent) armor visibility would be hindered with every hit it takes no matter how minor and big splotches of damage is bound to really mess with your ability to see outside. Imagine the warping of transparent metal after taking several kinetic impacts. Though honestly I wonder how terrifying it would be to have a missile hit the cockpit and the flames of the explosion whooshing around the viewport. Or the impact of a Chemjet Gun from the Mech-Killer Demolisher at 185mm. A single hit out of the four shots would basically fry 5 out of 9 maximum cockpit armor. And if the armor of a mech is divided up into sub-sections (another system I thought of to enhance the realism as well as help push the lore into a tangible game rather than the simplified tabletop hitbox system)... that'd probably be all the forward armor devasted in a single blow.
....A Gauss Rifle shot would plow straight through the cockpit, armor and all, practically severing it from the rest of the mech. Imagine being inside...
The visor could be something of a middle ground, not leaving you completely vulnerable in either case, but you're still susceptible to the problems of both worlds even if just to a lesser degree.
LocationNAIS College of Military Science OCS courses
Posted 26 April 2017 - 10:49 AM
Karl Streiger, on 23 April 2017 - 11:04 PM, said:
Cockpit;
I would like all three kinds.
MWLL for the win (BA in cockpit)
Of course, I would like the third the most.
Have no problem with the visor (atlas)
or with the copula- Zeus
General the sensors should be the eyes not the look through a window.
The transparent stuff is transparent armor (how this could work dunno - but maybe it could be possible - but after several hits the visibility would be gone too)
- a cockpit hit could take place without even hitting the cockpit (i mentioned spall damage)
consider that the first armored cockpit Battlemaster has two segments - considering that the pilot sits in the front - but get a hit from the side into the 2nd segment. (CT) damage talking in MWO terms. But it could still injure the pilot (for example by causing the filled sink to explode and filling the cockpit with excremnts )
As far as Cockpits go, I can see a case for exposed (like we currently use) and as well as armoured (like those of a tank). Having flown Gunships in active combat situations, and been surprised by a AAA unit that did not show up on thermal or RADAR, being able to use my eyes to see it is what saved my life. As I was able to pick it out, and roll my gunships to take the AAA to the armoured belly of my Gunship, rather than into the engines or main rotor.
As for transparent armour, yes this is one step closer now:
Suppose soon we'll have a better representation of what transparent armor will be like on the receiving end, as unlike real glass (and bullet proof glass), it wouldn't crack so much as bend and warp. Or would it?
Said traditional bullet resistant glass's best known example.
In the novels, battletech is equal parts mech warfare, political intrigue, diplomacy, covert ops, everyday life and cultural exchange. Seasoned with a few solaris tournaments.
"A Time Of War" is the battletech RPG, which also focusses more on the people and less on the machines.
Now, before I get to the questions, let me tell you a bit about Mechcommander 2.
In that game, you're the commander of a mercenary unit, controlling a bunch of mechs like in a typical RTS game.
Playing the campaign, you drop with a (tonnage) limited amount of mechs into (often scripted) missions, which you have to beat using only the units you brought with you. New mechs would have to either be salvaged or bought from your current employer. You also had a limited selection of pilots available for hire, each with unique name/callsign, portrait, skills (which could be trained depending on mission performance) and vox chatter sound files.
Each mission had a briefing video, where your employer told you what to do next and how the current operation fit into the grand scheme of things. During the campaign, you change sides/employers (won't spoil to whom). Each side had a different selection of mech chassis available for purchase and also tended to use the same during the missions, e.g. going against Liao you would face stealth and sensor tech, like the Raven and similar designs, while Steiner-Davion and the 'bandits' used others. The way the available chassis were limited and how the mission objectives differed per side helped to add a lot to the character of each faction.
The cost of real actors compared to computer animated NPCs is prohibitive though, so live action video won't be viable for MW:O.
On to the questions:
1) Text dialogue with branching (aka. dialog tree) would be the absolute minimum. An npc idling in the background and a voice over would be nice. To be honest I'm a gameplay over graphics person, so well written dialogue, characterisation and story are more important to me than eye candy. While I appreaciate the later when it is there, it's not a must for me.
So, I'd be fine with clicking around between different (static) screens in a space station, clicking on npcs to start a conversation and then having the portrait of the npc above a text dialog.
While the mass effect way would be the best for player freedom, It would also be the most difficult to implement. For mechwarrior, you would need a multitude of environments for each planet (space station, dropship, mech hangar, cantina/pub on planet, barracks, inside a mobile HQ, e.t.c.), each with a bunch of npcs. You could probably create a few different space station layouts and reuse them, but other places would need at least some unique furniture to keep them from looking the same.
Also, let us not talk about facial animation in ME:Andromeda.
2) Quirks? Depends on the quirk in question. Depends on the game mechanics.
E.g. looking at the quirks listed for the Daboku:
Autoejection: What happens when it happens? Game over? Do you parachute to the ground and have to make your way back to base using only your trusty Sternsnacht? Can you be captured by enemy troops? Can you climp back into the cockpit? How often can it happen per mission?
Overheating lasers: Can it be fixed in the field, e.g. by powering down and up again? Can it be fixed between missions? How much added heat/cooldown are we talking about?
Targeting system interference: What does it do? Fixed convergence? Offset convergence (e.g. weapons fire at a point other than the crosshair)? Larger cone of fire?
Marmala.. erm... jam chance for ACs: I'd be fine with that.
Ask yourself: Would this mechanic be fun? Generally, you want to avoid mechanics which randomly kill the player out of nowhere (notable exception being e.g. ammunition explosion caused by overheating). The player should have the choice between taking the risk or playing it safe.
3)
DOT: The TT is abstracted into turns for ease of play. Firing a laser in turn one and turn two could be interpreted as firing two shots or as firing for the duration of two turns. One reason the duration/cooldown mechanic exists is to make gameplay slower and balancing easier. If neither cooldown nor duration existed and lasers (and ACs) could be fired nonstop, they would be harder to balance against slow firing weapons like PPCs/Gauss. On the other hand, making ACs fire until the cartridge is empty and hving different cartridge sizes per manufacturer might be interesting.
Lasers: I'm too lazy to do the math right now, but I would fit a curve to the TT damage values (time: 10 sec) and then adjust that curve to the given shot/damage values to find the small laser damage (10 sec), then convert to the time intervall of choice.
TacOps Altered Energy damage, damage degradation through environmental effects and Rapid Fire Autocannons: I'd be fine with all that, but I do hope all non-lv2 rules will be pointed out ingame, e.g. during the tutorial or in an ingame encyclopedia (maybe even in a "battlemech warfare handbook" handed to the player by a drill instructor or commanding officer). One note though: If MGs can rapid fire without risk, why would anyone use the normal fire mode?
Vehicles: Would be really nice to have, especially a minelayer and a minesweeper. Dropdeck would be ok, as long as you're required to return to base on foot to climb into your next mech/vehicle instead of magically respawning in the dropship (in singleplayer, in multiplayer respawns would be ok).
AI-controlled infantry, Battle Armor and Elementals: Infantry is slow and receives additional damage from certain weapons like machine guns. Infantry might be good for urban scenarios, defenses or as spotters though. Battle Armor/Elementals tend to be relatively tough little buggers in the TT. Swarm attacks would be scary, but the attackers would need to get close. As long as another player (or ai controlled lance mate) can shoot them off, I'd be fine with swarm attacks.
Heat: If the extended heat scale from maxtech/tac ops was used, I'd be fine with overheating/override working like the lore.
4) Balancing by BV would be better than balancing by tonnage/number of mechs. The problem with clan tech (in TT and most games) is that it does lie on a power curve higher than IS tech (more dmg per heat and higher range) and that only few players would adhere to http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Zellbrigen rules, which were intended to balance clantech. Ofc, clans gave up on zell some time after the initial clan invasion, but by then, IS had 3060s tech.
(I'll expand upon this and answer question 5 and 6 later)
I have a much bigger response coming, but I thought this was pretty interesting...
Though this is the first time I dedicated a thread to questions like these and my ideas, it isn't the first time I mentioned the DOT mechanics or the three stage heat system, in fact you can find it under Deteriorating Cooling Strength... and a similar name before that. Currently I'm just calling it the three stage cooling system.
Moving on to the point of this little short, it also isn't the first time I explained the weapon heat stage and its relevance to DOT mechanics either.
As it happens, PGI announced the mechanics to their rotary cannon, and while my concept for the DOT mechanics are definitely not original and simply borrow some of the most basic weapon heat mechanics in pretty much any shooting game ever, it turns out the Rotary ACs in MWO will be able to demonstrate exactly what I was talking about in the actual game.
From the dev stream's youtube upload that I just watched... You will press the button that will bring the RACs up to speed. (Basic minigun mechanic, a funny thought is that in some cases basic Mech machine guns are actually miniguns). Where it becomes almost word for word on part of the DOT mechanic / First Heat Stage is when it begins firing. "The cooldown bar will fill and if it is still firing when it fills it can jam. And when you let go, they will wind down and then it will start to cool." Trade cooldown bar with heat bar, and heh.
In the novels, battletech is equal parts mech warfare, political intrigue, diplomacy, covert ops, everyday life and cultural exchange. Seasoned with a few solaris tournaments.
"A Time Of War" is the battletech RPG, which also focusses more on the people and less on the machines.
Now, before I get to the questions, let me tell you a bit about Mechcommander 2.
In that game, you're the commander of a mercenary unit, controlling a bunch of mechs like in a typical RTS game.
Playing the campaign, you drop with a (tonnage) limited amount of mechs into (often scripted) missions, which you have to beat using only the units you brought with you. New mechs would have to either be salvaged or bought from your current employer. You also had a limited selection of pilots available for hire, each with unique name/callsign, portrait, skills (which could be trained depending on mission performance) and vox chatter sound files.
Each mission had a briefing video, where your employer told you what to do next and how the current operation fit into the grand scheme of things. During the campaign, you change sides/employers (won't spoil to whom). Each side had a different selection of mech chassis available for purchase and also tended to use the same during the missions, e.g. going against Liao you would face stealth and sensor tech, like the Raven and similar designs, while Steiner-Davion and the 'bandits' used others. The way the available chassis were limited and how the mission objectives differed per side helped to add a lot to the character of each faction.
The cost of real actors compared to computer animated NPCs is prohibitive though, so live action video won't be viable for MW:O.
On to the questions:
1) Text dialogue with branching (aka. dialog tree) would be the absolute minimum. An npc idling in the background and a voice over would be nice. To be honest I'm a gameplay over graphics person, so well written dialogue, characterisation and story are more important to me than eye candy. While I appreaciate the later when it is there, it's not a must for me.
So, I'd be fine with clicking around between different (static) screens in a space station, clicking on npcs to start a conversation and then having the portrait of the npc above a text dialog.
While the mass effect way would be the best for player freedom, It would also be the most difficult to implement. For mechwarrior, you would need a multitude of environments for each planet (space station, dropship, mech hangar, cantina/pub on planet, barracks, inside a mobile HQ, e.t.c.), each with a bunch of npcs. You could probably create a few different space station layouts and reuse them, but other places would need at least some unique furniture to keep them from looking the same.
Also, let us not talk about facial animation in ME:Andromeda.
2) Quirks? Depends on the quirk in question. Depends on the game mechanics.
E.g. looking at the quirks listed for the Daboku:
Autoejection: What happens when it happens? Game over? Do you parachute to the ground and have to make your way back to base using only your trusty Sternsnacht? Can you be captured by enemy troops? Can you climp back into the cockpit? How often can it happen per mission?
Overheating lasers: Can it be fixed in the field, e.g. by powering down and up again? Can it be fixed between missions? How much added heat/cooldown are we talking about?
Targeting system interference: What does it do? Fixed convergence? Offset convergence (e.g. weapons fire at a point other than the crosshair)? Larger cone of fire?
Marmala.. erm... jam chance for ACs: I'd be fine with that.
Ask yourself: Would this mechanic be fun? Generally, you want to avoid mechanics which randomly kill the player out of nowhere (notable exception being e.g. ammunition explosion caused by overheating). The player should have the choice between taking the risk or playing it safe.
3)
DOT: The TT is abstracted into turns for ease of play. Firing a laser in turn one and turn two could be interpreted as firing two shots or as firing for the duration of two turns. One reason the duration/cooldown mechanic exists is to make gameplay slower and balancing easier. If neither cooldown nor duration existed and lasers (and ACs) could be fired nonstop, they would be harder to balance against slow firing weapons like PPCs/Gauss. On the other hand, making ACs fire until the cartridge is empty and hving different cartridge sizes per manufacturer might be interesting.
Lasers: I'm too lazy to do the math right now, but I would fit a curve to the TT damage values (time: 10 sec) and then adjust that curve to the given shot/damage values to find the small laser damage (10 sec), then convert to the time intervall of choice.
TacOps Altered Energy damage, damage degradation through environmental effects and Rapid Fire Autocannons: I'd be fine with all that, but I do hope all non-lv2 rules will be pointed out ingame, e.g. during the tutorial or in an ingame encyclopedia (maybe even in a "battlemech warfare handbook" handed to the player by a drill instructor or commanding officer). One note though: If MGs can rapid fire without risk, why would anyone use the normal fire mode?
Vehicles: Would be really nice to have, especially a minelayer and a minesweeper. Dropdeck would be ok, as long as you're required to return to base on foot to climb into your next mech/vehicle instead of magically respawning in the dropship (in singleplayer, in multiplayer respawns would be ok).
AI-controlled infantry, Battle Armor and Elementals: Infantry is slow and receives additional damage from certain weapons like machine guns. Infantry might be good for urban scenarios, defenses or as spotters though. Battle Armor/Elementals tend to be relatively tough little buggers in the TT. Swarm attacks would be scary, but the attackers would need to get close. As long as another player (or ai controlled lance mate) can shoot them off, I'd be fine with swarm attacks.
Heat: If the extended heat scale from maxtech/tac ops was used, I'd be fine with overheating/override working like the lore.
4) Balancing by BV would be better than balancing by tonnage/number of mechs. The problem with clan tech (in TT and most games) is that it does lie on a power curve higher than IS tech (more dmg per heat and higher range) and that only few players would adhere to http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Zellbrigen rules, which were intended to balance clantech. Ofc, clans gave up on zell some time after the initial clan invasion, but by then, IS had 3060s tech.
(I'll expand upon this and answer question 5 and 6 later)
Have you seen the movie War Machine, made this year with Brad Pitt? Half realistic, half parody, it's about a real 4 star General, the War in Afghanistan, and it had its own load of political intrigue. I found it to be a really good movie.
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MechCommander 2 is a wonderful game. It really depends, these days both live actors and CG are in a similar boat. The advantage of CG is you can replace the MoCap actor. More affordable things can be done of course, though for a truly dynamic or perpetual experience text-based things can always be made either in advance or on the fly to go along with things. One of my favorite examples is Gateway II: Homeworld. It's a story-teller game that puts you into situations as X, and wants to know how you deal with them. Sometimes a game like that can be frustrating as there are dozens of ways to solve any one problem provided you did important things prior to it. In one case the bad guy you got a radio from isn't able to respond because his gun blew up in his face, and so you can try to imitate himwhich has some chance for success but is far too rare to count on, this is assuming you are listening to their radio frequency and not the good guy frequency otherwise you wouldn't even know until one of the security guys on the good guy frequency mentions a team of armed men entering the tram, If you were smart enough to look through a dead good guy's stuff you could find an ID, badge number and some other doodad in order for the good guys to listen to you and answer your request for help, provided you did it fast enough. You can simply blow up the tram and nobody will be getting to you any time soon, if you made sure to do everything you had to first as the launch sequence requires you to travel to 2 or 3 stations. One time I didn't take it all too seriously, and while you can write literally anything as your action and it would interpret it, I felt this one writes beautifully.
The detailed paragraphs are gonna be cut to short, straight to the point sentences.
You see a Tram.
Enter the Tram.
It begins to move; there's a dead man here, endlessly riding the tram with no final destination.
Hold hand grenade.
You are holding the hand grenade. The tram is accelerating.
Pull the pin.
Do you mean the safety pin you found at (X) or the pin on the hand grenade?
The hand grenade.
Alright, you pulled the pin on the hand grenade. There's about 5 seconds before it blows. The tram reaches peak velocity.
Clench hand grenade.
You clench the hand grenade with all your might, you really don't want to let go of it do you? There's maybe 3 seconds before it explodes. You see a depot up ahead with (details).
Pray.
You close your eyes and say a little prayer. Do you feel better?
No.
Too bad.
The hand grenade explodes (details, details... you're dead.)
How often do you get to enjoy that? Not much these days. And beyond what one could call a conversation engine with a set script and some adaptability and predictions, such would be dirt cheap. Just tack the occasional visual graphic in the background and foreground to represent things.
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ME: Andromeda wasn't that bad; the issue is actually a combination of their conversation engine and inverse kinetics on the Frostbite engine. For example, here's a sample conversation from an FF7-2 mod I once made for Deus Ex: http://i29.photobuck...derlyconvo1.jpg
Things like "Expression, sad" weren't set right or failed to trigger at all in some instances. In my case though beyond the occasional misplaced animation (Cora's attitude walk is actually a Turien female walk; wrong species there Bioware!), such isn't terribly surprising when you consider that A) they were forced to change engines and re-develop all their development software from scratch and EA is known for forcing games to meet deadlines despite not being ready.
Far as the IK, one might note that in Bad Company 2, IK is on and is shown in a lot of promotional images, there is even a very unique visual feel to going up and down hills versus regular running. In Battlefield 3, the IK was switched off entirely for animations. Even in BF 4 it appears to not actually be on for 'living' objects; only dead objects. I have a feeling we now know why.
I confess it'd be really nice to explore around The pain would be doing so with multiple planets/systems/etc. If I went this route, you would probably be able to explore your home base/ship which would lead to the various options and management you can do and beyond that it'd be more images and descriptions. Especially if the sim would be multiplayer, I wouldn't want players to spend too much time exploring between fights.
Before I get into that, you mentioned the extended heat scale. The EHS is a system that allows mass amounts of fire and permits excessively hot builds to exist with or without proper cooling. In truth, Mechwarrior 2 fell 10 units below the EHS but 10 above the standard heat scale. MW3, punishing as it felt thermally fell within the standard heat scale (SHS). Its expansion changes that to 10 above the EHS, the same as MW4 and its expansions. A lot of alpha strike abuse was able to happen in MW4 with just 60 threshold (10 above the EHS). Then there's the abuse that used to happen in MWO, when a stock mech had an MW2 level heat scale, an elited 10 single heatsink mech had EHS, a no skill double heatsink had EHS, an elited 10 double heatsink mech had EHS+10 or MW4 level... and your average cooler MWO build has EHS+30 (so 80 usually, sometimes 90 threshold). My max in MWO was EHS+EHS+SHS+7.9. Extended heat scale + extended heat scale + standard heat scale + 7.9. That's 137.9 threshold while still equipping 7 tons in weaponry.
In other words I find raised thermal thresholds to be dangerous territory. Between the DoT mechanic for most weapons and my concept for a heat system, you may find it unnecessary if you consider that weapon ratings are running on a 10 second basis:
Spoiler
A stock Awesome 8Q (interestingly enough) has the ability to hit the conditions for the heatsink taxing rule if all 3 PPCs and the small laser are fully employed within 10 seconds, not counting any excess engine heat produced from cruise to running speeds. This said, provided you don't fire the 3 PPCs at the same time, even manuevering is possible and it would be able to churn up to 20 shots as well as manage continuous cruising speeds (48.6 kph) over the course of one full minute before running into a genuine danger of shutdown, provided firing discipline. Even a 6 PPC Stalker can manage to fire all 6 PPCs within 10 seconds without shutting down, provided they are not fired too close to one another and the mech has at least 16 DHS. If such is possible with just 30 threshold, imagine what you could do with 50.
Beyond that, with DOT weapons if your baseline medium laser does 5 total damage and 3 total heat across 10 seconds, split within 3 shots (MWO's firing rate but single rating within 10 seconds instead of a rating per shot, you're looking at 1 heat per shot, gather 9 identical ML and slap them together and you're looking at 9 heat for that shot). As you can imagine this actually requires its own control, hence a three stage heat system mentioned in some previous posts.
In both of the linked posts I mention a somewhat new approach to the heat system which would be familiar enough and yet without many of the problems that most Mechwarrior games would have.
Though the first of those two links covers one of the three elements very well and the second link gives additional examples, both posts only dig into the third element of a three element heat system: Weapon/equipment heat.
A quick summary for the TL;DR sort...
Weapon and equipment heat would have a HUD element similar to MWO's cooldown bar. Unlike MWO's cooldown bar, rather than being instantly full and gradually emptying when you use a weapon, it would start empty and gradually fill, as I may have stated somewhere, it seems that MWO's new Rotary Cannon mechanic will follow this part of the concept exactly. Anyway, if it gets all the way full, a sort of negative effect occurs, presenting a tenable risk factor that isn't a product of RNG but a scalable, gaugable mechanic that can be played around with, which rewards thermal discipline and punishes the abuse of priviledge.
The quick summary continued.
Spoiler
If a ballistic weapon overheats, it may be guaranteed to jam or lead to barrel warping/melting. Lasers and missiles would have their own issues. I sort of reserve some issues to be manufacturer specific. X brand energy weapons might tend to have this issue when pushed thermally, while Y brand energy weapons tend to have that issue when pushed. Why this matters at all is simply firing won't fill up the bar completely. If we use the Rapid Fire Autocannons rule, then if you netted more than the weapon's damage value too quickly you'd hit that 100% heat and suffer the punishment. However, if you don't push it too fast you could net close to if not double the amount of damage for your AC. Though where this part of the system is really meant to shine would be lower caliber ACs (of 2, 5, 10 and 20 ratings) where lots more shots are required to do the same damage as a high caliber version. These would usually be belt fed rather than cassette fed (and if cassette fed would be among those that "spit out cassettes almost as fast as they eject shells." These guys might be able to push past the double fire limit by splitting hairs with careful firing discipline and thus reap the rewards for their honed skill.
Lets take a quick look at machine guns as a somewhat easier way to illustrate the idea. To point out, MGs of Battletech might not generate "tenable" heat for the heatsink system, BT lore and its mech lore has numerous accounts of machine guns overheating and being prone to overheating. Also in jamming and barrels melting from firing. Such would be your punishments. An MG prone to overheating as an issue/quirk is likely to fill that bar quicker and might catch you by surprise if you're not careful. Of course the reason you would push this is easily under the description of "Burst fire machine guns," where through controlled bursts to keep the guns firing while preventing them from overheating, you can probably get 2 to 3 times their value in a pinch. Of course given their weight, we'd want this to be really unlikely lest they be completely abused. Of course this generates heat that is tenable by the BT system, so there is that too.
But there are two more stages to the overall heat system and this is as good of a place as any. This is not an in-depth explanation as on paper it sounds immensely complicated though in practice it is far simpler than I could ever hope to explain it without glossing over 9/10ths of the details.
Spoiler
As weapons build heat in their weapon heat bar (of which the thresholds vary from weapon variant to weapon variant; a weapon with the negative quirk that it is prone to overheating would simply hit 'full' faster, their cooling jacket and pumps begin absorbing and funelling that heat into the heatsinks.
Unlike MWO which has combined Heatsink cooling and Mech thresholds together into a single threshold, the system I developed would keep them as entirely separate values under the TacOps Heatsink Taxing rule. But before we get into heatsinks, I need to get to the second governing factor.
Mech/Engine heat.
Spoiler
I call it by both names because there are factors specific to the engine or the mech. Ambient heat, for example, plays a role here. But so does exerting the engine between cruise, run and charge speeds.
Beyond engine use and environment, what really matters here is that weapon heat is absorbed into Mech/Engine heat, building you up towards that 30 threshold.
If you're worried about the original heatscale and its "chance to shutdown" and ammo explosion within the teens, allow me to quickly allieviate you of that worry before continuing. If you really breakdown a tabletop turn in which a mech produces a lot of excess heat going second by second, you would be quite surprised at what you find. First divide the mech's engine heat over 10 seconds and then breakdown the weapons and when they fire, with the goal of never hitting 30 and do this with several scenarios of mechs firing... You find that in times when the mech shuts down, it is really difficult to impossible to avoid hitting thirty at any given second, even when your cooldown at the end can bring you as low as 20 or even 18. And when ammo does actually explode or movement is hampered, you will notice that you find it very difficult to keep below a certain amount of heat when using all the weapons over time, keeping you above a that amount for many seconds at times.
That is what the heat scale is intended to simulate: The chances of human error hitting that 30 mark within a ten second time slice, and the chances of maintain a high amount of heat over time which would be detrimental to your machine.
You wouldn't 'suddenly' have an ammo explosion. No, you ride high amounts of heat until the ammo cooks off. You don't suddenly have trouble moving, the mech runs so hot that the machine's muscles begin to have difficulty under the thermal strain. And you probably don't shut off immediately, you get warnings and eventually it shuts down.
Canonically, the first serious warnings come at 80% heat, this is because at this heat the mech will lock out your weapons. It is typical of the Inner Sphere to override this weapon lockout, hence "override." No it does not override shutdowns. Nothing does. It overrides weapon lockouts. The Clans do not participate in this practice however, so that is an interesting thing to note.
When your mech's threshold reaches 100% and lingers or goes above it, the mech will shut down and refuse to start until 46.6667% heat (14 units) just like tabletop.
Getting back to the purpose of Mech / Engine threshold and what affects it. This is, effectively, your mech and engine's ability to deal with heat. Large amounts of it can be detrimental to the machine. An amount of 45 units will likely cook the pilot alive as this is 1.5x the amount of heat the machine can handle before it shuts off the reactor. Mech Heat threshold will handle and be affected by external temperatures as well as internal. Breaches in the mech's frame may reduce the overall heat capacity of the machine. This last bit is a page from realism but I am still debating it.
Heatsink threshold.
Spoiler
But what about heatsinks? Heatsinks cool you, yes. And this is where things will be very different from traditional mechwarriors. In my design, your cooling and threshold are actually one in the same rather than two separate factors. Technically the same is true of Battletech and the heatsink taxing rule. Consider this: If my heatsinks are empty, they are free to pump to their full capacity. If my heatsinks are half full, well they can only pump until the other half is filled, right?
Heatsinks would have two stages: Pumping and Dispersal. 10 STD heatsinks can pump 1 unit of heat and disperse it within 1 second, and 10 units in 10 seconds. 10 Double heatsinks can pump 2 units of heat and disperse it within 1 second, and 20 units within 10 seconds.
A heatsink can be dedicated to a specific weapon or applied generally. If applied to a specific weapon it can pump heat away from the weapon faster, making it easier to use. However it will do nothing for anything else. Heatsinks applied generally will function normally and try to take heat from everywhere.
As heatsinks fill, they are slower to remove heat from the mech threshold until they have dispersed their contents, and the more and more excess heat you build, the harder it will be for the heatsinks to get rid of it quickly enough for you to not have adverse effects on the mech. Furthermore, if the heatsinks cannot get a break from being at full capacity (in other words they stay running at maximum capacity for a length of time), you could suffer coolant burnoff/loss (which can be fixed by hooking up to a coolant truck or getting it replaced) or potentially have a ruptured/damaged/melted heatsink on your hands, adding strain to the rest. Keep yourself cooking and you'll be a ticking time bomb as heatsink after heatsink goes out until the mech simply cannot function anymore or you fry in your cockpit.
Here is where I'm debating it and so one of these versions will be true, and the other might be tossed.
1) When weapons generate heat, it goes into the Mech Threshold and heatsinks immediately begin removing it. Heatsinks have specific rate in which to withdraw heat and disperse it but can only do so until capacity, leaving any excess heat in the mech threshold until it can disperse and then suck some more. The importance of dispersing will come up shortly. If you assign a heatsink directly to a weapon, the heat goes into that heatsink's threshold and not into the mech threshold.
2) When weapons generate heat, it splits half into the Mech Threshold and half into the heatsinks. Within a second the heatsinks also begin removing it it from the mech threhsold. The rate at which the heatsinks can suck up and disperse heat from the mech threshold depends entirely on how full they are and their 'half' of weapon heat takes first priority until they are at capacity, after which the full heat goes to mech threshold. The importance of dispersing will come up shortly. If you assign a heatsink directly to a weapon, the heat goes into that heatsink's threshold and not into the mech threshold.
When heat disperses from the heatsink vents, you show up much more readily on thermal sensors, as such this two stage process is important because you can choose to not disperse the heat immediately but instead wait to exhaust it. However as you build up heat, your mech will have a harder time not showing it And when you do finally exhaust the heat you'll light up like a christmas tree. So it isn't the most practical stealth option, but it's there because the option existed in one of Stackpole's books.
Back to Quirks.
Far as lasers overheating, I didn't picture them getting permanent damage from a typical overheat, much like ACs wouldn't get permanent damage. More likely you'd stop using them and be unable to use them for a bit and excess heat. Now continuously overheating them might be a different story, and a field repair during combat might be out of the question (who knows?), though one could be done between missions. With the heat system above you'd be able to see the weapons, the rate they're producing heat and be able to stop using them before they overheat easily. It'll just creep up faster than normal.
Autoeject: To be honest this is something I'd have to try in Megamek to find out how often it might happen, how annoying it might be, etc. In Megamek you can run around, be captured, etc. I don't know if you can get back into your mech to drive it, it seems unlikely. This one while dramatically funny to think of can also be extremely frustrating. The option to turn off autoeject would definitely have to be there. Of course, with the player able to control several pilots in a mission (not at once), it wouldn't be the end of the world or a game over but it would definitely be inconvenient. Something to offset it might be that a rescue marker would not have to be placed nor would a salvage marker (see below, vehicles.)
Targeting System Interference: So far we just came up with flickering on the screen, possible loss of target acquisition, maybe loss of target data. Most likely the inability to see the crosshair you are aiming with.
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Section 3...
The plan for DOT mechanics is fairly simple. Lasers and ACs might be able to keep firing, and (standard) ACs (and LBX as it wouldn't be fair to leave them out) might be able to get double their rate at high risk.
However, lets take a lore statement that an Atlas K's Er Large Lasers are almost 4 times more powerful per shot than an Atlas D's medium lasers. This assumes we're talking about AS7 models. We know that IS ER LL delivers 8 damage and IS ML delivers 5 damage, so how can that be true? 5 can't even go into 8 twice let alone four times. So what if an Atlas K's ER LL fired 2 shots to get its 8 damage, and each shot is 4 damage? To make the statement true, the Atlas D would fire 4 shots with its medium laser, each shot would deliver 1.25 damage and after the 4 shots it would do 5 damage. As it also happens, 4 damage is 'almost' 4 times more powerful than 1.25 damage. We made the statement true, created a DoT mechanic, and gave you a hell of a reason to favor Large Lasers over much lighter, much more DPS and HPS efficient Medium Lasers.
So then, if ACs are doing decimals to small whole numbers of damage, lasers are doing decimals to small whole numbers, and slow firing weapons like Gauss, PPC and Missiles are front loaded... Well in the face of all those lasers, a PPC really deserves the nickname it has in lore: "the Siege Cannon." After all, it might take 8 medium laser shots (and at least 2 medium lasers) to get 10 damage in 10 seconds, but it would only take a single shot from a PPC to get that damage and it'd be instant. So if you're worried about the slow firing ones, I wouldn't.
Far as the weaker variants of ACs and lasers, the ability to push them to do somewhat more damage as a reward for trigger discipline and being mindful of weapon heat buildup can help to make up for their inferior nature in terms of their rate of damage delivery (as without this mechanic, someone with a more front loaded AC will definitely win against your less front loaded AC, even if both of you are sporting AC/5s or AC/2s. While his Front Loaded version is reloading, provided you've been doing some trigger discipline, you'll be pushing more damage than he could.)
MGs are mentioned above in the heat system I described. But to summarize again: All weapons produce heat. MG heat isn't tenable to mech threshold or heatsinks under normal circumstance. If the MG overheats, it jams. If it keeps overheating with little break, the barrels will melt. So like the ACs and Lasers you need some trigger discipline. Along with pushing MGs beyond the normal rate, the excess heat you build up will be tenable enough to go into mech threshold and for your heatsinks to deal with. At their highest rate under burstfire machine guns, the MGs produce 3 heat. Technically you would never leave 'normal fire'. You'd just keep firing, letting it cool, firing, letting it cool and if you just fired until they got hot and stop until it got cold, you'd have the 'normal rate'. If you stop early and start again early, repeatedly, you might net a maximum of 3x the damage. Of course if you reach that and overheat, yeah I'd likely have the barrels melt, so on average you might get 1 to 2 times the damage, maybe slightly more or less. This helps with the risk of carrying MG ammo.
Infantry:
I'll have to have fun with MGs, but so far as I have seen they receive extra damage from all weapons; in fact it is 10x the damage. Granted this damage seems to divide among them and strangely even a single laser divides hits among them (this makes sense but is unusual since it isn't done anywhere else). But a small laser does up to 30 damage to infantry and battle armor. An Mg does up to 20 as far as I know. An LB-10X's 1 damage pellet can do up to 10 damage. The issue I see with shooting off swarm attacks is that this requires another teammate to shoot at you, including the team damage. Sometimes people aren't good shots. Maybe a quick time that the teammate can do, to minimize collateral? I do sort of picture you having to fight them off yourself which I think can also be done in a quick time, or perhaps you can aim the crosshair at the ones climbing up on you and click, this would remove them. I guess it depends on how fast they can go from starting to swarm you to opening your cockpit and presenting that last stand where you draw your side arm as your last chance to overcome the swarm or die.
Vehicles.
In a system where each player has control of multiple pilots, perhaps rather than traveling back to a base and somesuch to pilot another vehicle, maybe your new vehicle and pilot could be responsible for getting to the previous pilot and providing some sort of 'rescue' or at least a marker for salvage and medical extraction?
Anyway, this doesn't respond to everything you said but I hope I covered enough to show my gratitude as well as share some of the ideas I've had in regards to them. I also apologize if there's too much to read, I do take my hypotheticals seriously as I'm working on cinematics for presenting how this might look.
So this is interesting. After playing BT the PC game I went looking at several sources for Panthers.
Turns out they use Lord's Light PPCs. Many times in the past I said that it has a 2 second firing delay. Well... Evidently I found out why through MechFactory from http://battletech.rp...ctory_frame.php
The Lord's Light is compact compared to most, an accomplishment done in part by reducing the number of cooling tubes for the weapon. (This is part of the reason it also fires on a prolonged delay, to build the heat and remove it gradually before the weapon really 'kicks in'.) The name Lord's Light comes from the bright light that forms around the barrel during the 'priming' sequence prior to the weapon firing (serving as a warning that builds up for the 2 seconds it takes to charge; which is noted elsewhere as longer than most PPCs). It also has the 3 heatsinks in the arm which are supposed to be dedicated exclusively to the PPC (and nothing else), which makes it good I covered this in my own heat system concept.
Supposedly, by reducing the localized weight of the PPC, it is able to swing around easily as an arm weapon (basically if not for the firing delay, this would remove the old-lore reason for the minimum range on its standard PPC).
Unfortunately, if the arm is used in melee (offensively or defensively), the cooling tubes can be pinched (effectively making it behave as if it doesn't have a cooling jacket, so +2 heat), which can "cause the weapon to overheat and shutdown." Not the mech, the weapon itself. I find this interesting because my thermal system concept not only has room for this, but could handle this without any additional mechanics.
So, if the Lord's Light PPC overheats, it stops working for an amount of time past the typical cooldown time. Very simple and straight forward.
Can anyone else bring up weapons and circumstances for weapons in BT that are similar in nature?
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