55 replies to this topic

[Karl Streiger]

MustrumRidcully, on 15 June 2017 - 10:37 PM, said:

I suppose one could minimize that if Charge only dealt extra damage against enemies, as non-realistic as that might seem.


Overload (a Descent successor) has a charge attack, too. IIRC, When you activate the abilty your other weapons are locked out, and then hitting an enemy deals (more) damage. Something similar could work even in MW:O if there are no new animations. The weapon lockout prevents it from being "always on". And makes it obvious when to use it - when you stand around disarmed on the battlefield and can't do much else.

Sounds good to me, maybe lock the torso death center but increase the speed (a animation would be nice - like in HBS BT were that arm less Centurion rammed his head into the belly of my Panther)
So everybody might see - oh there is someone charging

[STEF_]

evilauthor, on 15 June 2017 - 09:28 PM, said:

I can only imagine what that would do in your typical MWO traffic jam. Half a team could fratricide each other just leaving the drop zone before they ever catch sight of any OpFor.

naaaaaaaaaa, melee would be fine with a key (clicking M for melee, for instance).

[Wildstreak]

Cathy, on 01 June 2017 - 11:16 AM, said:

3025 because it was for me the whole point of the Franchise.

As soon as the tech came back, I lost interest

Tech coming back before 3050 was not a big deal due to limitations.
Clans and the Tech Rush was the beginning of the downhill buttslide with no brakes on a steep snowy mountain through a forest.

[ice trey]

Speaking from personal preference, I much prefer to play with new tech, but when clantech was introduced, I wasn't even old enough to go to kindergarten yet. Calling it "New" is pretty laughable to me. Newtech is TSEMPs and CEWS, not Streak SRMs.

For me, between the time I started playing until Total Warfare was released and I found experienced people to play with, the Succession Wars introductory tech (Then Called "Level 1") was a nostalgic thing to play with every now and again... It made a great setting for the RPG... but there were a few major snags.

The first was that unless you were one of the oldbeards who were playing it in their teens because they wanted to play something based on the Robotech cartoon, getting your hands on the unseen minis was a very expensive endeavour. Especially with so many sellers putting up "US shipping only" or somehow jacking up the shipping rates ten-fold just to go over the border, it meant that you could only viably buy the considerably less aesthetically pleasing and usually less effective in-house designs. This also meant that the game felt like there were "holes" in it, since the unseen were the very first 'mechs in the Battletech game and everything else was built around them, removing them meant that there were gaps in roles that could be filled. Sure, you COULD proxy with the Project Phoenix mechs - but they looked nothing like the 3025'ers aesthetically, and stuck out like a sore thumb as a result. For all the gripes about 3025 mechs being boxy, on close examination they're covered in tiny armor plates, ports, vents, and other fine details. The Project Phoenix mechs AKA the reseen were far less detailed, covered in broad, flat surfaces.

The other issue with the old-tech is that it got stale very quickly. Playing with new guys? Probably need to use Level 1. Playing with old guys? They want to use Level 1. It seemed finding someone who kept up to date and knew their stuff was an uphill battle. Finding matches with guys who liked that tech level was a treat, and allowed me to use my main army with all my mechs like the Owens, Strider, Ninja-To, and Shugenja, using C3 Networks and MRMs, Streaks and Pulse lasers... But then being forced to dumb back down to introbox tech to teach more guys from scratch in the next match. When you're wanting to try out your 'mechs but get forced to shelve them because the other players either havent RTFMd or haven't been arsed to RTFM in 20 years, you get irritable.

The final thing I had with 3025 could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. I know that it was a period of salvage, where a 'mech might have been made in one faction, blown up, cobbled back together by the other side, blown up on another world, and cobbled back together by yet another faction. This was part and parcel of the feel of the setting. However, I could also use the lego blocks analogy: 3025 is like getting one of those megablocks sets...



...yes, you get all the blocks that you need to build things. You get the 2X4s, the 1X4s, the 2X2s, the 2X1s... all the foundations you need... but everything that you make draws from the exact same box of bricks. All the factions feel "Samey". Mention this, and I'll probably get a "Nuh-uh, the Zeus feels Steiner, and the Jenner feels Kurita", but the armor on that Jenner is the same kind as the armor on that Zeus, and the Zeus' medium lasers are effectively the same as the ones on that Jenner. Likewise with the heat sinks... Save for a few suggestions that get broken all the time like "The DC likes PPCs", (which interestingly enough of all the 'mechs they were producing up to 3025, only the Panther carried it) there isn't any real differentiation between each faction during that time period, especially if half of your army is running Warhammers and Marauders like everyone seemed to do.

Fast forward to the 3060s, and now we're starting to finally see differentiation. House Liao got their TSM operations going, the FWL is putting Ultra AC10s and Light Gauss Rifles on everything, Steiner got their new Light Engine and Heavy Gauss Rifles that make them spend more time on their backsides than they already did... The Dracs had C3 Networks on almost everything, and Swords on everything else, and the Davions were fitting everything with copious amounts of Autocannons and Targeting computers. This could be likened to getting the good lego kits, with the Space Police or Medieval Knight Castle set or Ice Planet...

...Every faction now had a flavor to it and played significantly differently from others. Sure, you might not be able to find a lot of creative ways to use that orange plastic chainsaw, but it complemented all those drab 2X4 yellow blocks to make a pretty cool base...

I can definitely see where the animosity stemmed based on the horror stories of older players. Fasa dropped the bomb on the whole community with bigger, better mechs and equipment in a time period where people only knew about balancing matches by tonnage. Fasa offered no suggestions on how to balance matches, save for suggesting that lorewise the clans used the least they possibly could in order to win matches, but do you think that the munchkins would ever use any sort of self-limiting when it came to matches? You'd have better luck hoping for that in the Mechwarrior Online community. You'd see people saying "I have a Dire Wolf - you have a 3025 Atlas. They are both 100 tons so this is a fair fight". Had FASA introduced a working, convenient point-balancing system at the same time, we'd likely have not had to deal with as much spite regarding the clan/sphere split. This would have continued on to the Fedcom Civil War, maybe beyond... but we've had Combat Value, Battle Value, and BV2 for more than 20 years now. Matches can be played with relative balance. Not perfect - perfect requires balancing done by supercomputer and adjusting for maps - defeating the point of a Pen and Paper game... but the nominal "balance" benefits given by 3025 gameplay doesn't really help the fact that the only thing differentiating the different factions is flavor text, not mechanics.

Edited by ice trey, 16 June 2017 - 11:05 PM.

[Metus regem]

ice trey, on 16 June 2017 - 10:20 PM, said:

Stuff-

My group did some adjustments to the Clans, we only have them up to IS Civil War era tech with Omni mech versions of SLDF mechs. We found it made them much more balanced against 3025 era mechs.... We also made their average pilot a 4/4 rather than a 3/4.

[Tyrnea Smurf]

My favorite era for straight up fights was/is the 3025 tech base. Call it nostalgia, stubbornness, greybearding or what have you.

The one massive flaw to the introduction of the Clans was lack of a well understood system to try and match up the uber OP Clans of 3050 to the L1 country bumpkins of 3025 IS veterans.

You really couldn't win if you were playing the IS force in those early invasion days on TT.

Often my gaming group would have to pit a whole company vs a star. And even when the Company "won", the clanners would have a far better K/D ratio, or would troll the IS players on the need to out number near 3 to 1 to win.

It could get brutal - all around.

Eventually I ran a big campaign of the Clan invasion - doing my best to really take the lore setup of the situation in the spring of 3049 as I could. To put it simply, the Clans were going to have the element of surprise and superior tech, vs the Inner Spheres massive peasant armies that they could use to out bleed the Clans into oblivion.

After 3051 I started allowing the IS players to start upgrading in limited number to Clan specs - with full clan spec availability by 3060. My reasoning was, Jamie Wolf had specifically been given everything the Clans had developed up to the 3020's, including full technical readouts and schematics. (and the lore does not tell us if the Clans made any big breakthrough in those last 2 decades before the IS invasion - so as far as I could find back then - Jamie Wolf had everything more or less) He then used the next 20 years developing the means to produce the advanced Clan equipment, including limited runs of omnimechs. His world Outreach became in essence the prototype factory world for the Inner Sphere to obtain the Clan machine shop. At the Outreach conference with the leaders of every IS power present he offered to share that technology. No reason why within a decade the IS industrial juggernaught wouldn't be turning that equipment out exclusively.

On the flip side I allowed the Clan players to abandon Zelbrigen, and begin mass recruitments of their conquered populations to find more cannon fodder to throw into the breach.

It ended with the Clans thrown back out of IS, but with the IS in shambles and fighting among themselves once again.

And to semi answer the notion on how to try and balance Clan vs. IS matches - after the mid 3050's you could say the IS has as much justification to be running around with mostly Clan tech retrofitted units on IS built battlemechs as the Clans do.

So my balancing mechanism was - both sides ended up back using even technology. Just like in the earlier eras.

[MustrumRidcully]

Once the balance problem was basically solved, did you think overall that the fights with both sides using Clan level tech were more fun, or did you prefer the 3025 fight?

That makes it sound like you preferred the way fights went "in the 3025", even if you eventually managed to "balance" things by simply giving everyone access to the same (Clan Level) Tech.

[Tyrnea Smurf]

The biggest difference was - in using 3025 tech, a player had to really manage and play the mech within its design envelope.

He couldn't go brawling with a Archer with great success against a Warhammer for example, and heat and movement are constant balancers that punish players who don't think ahead at the tactical situation as its developing in a match.

When it ended up mostly Clan tech vs Clan tech the biggest difference was adding a few extra maps to the playing field, as you could really use the extra speed and range Clan tech grants to engage in battles of maneuver more than the 3025 tech base allowed - or would play out with the group I had on hand.

When it was the 3025 tech base in play, battles would quickly devolve into slugging brawling grudge matches. Often because how close units ended up to get into effective range, melee was as common to the damage being ladled as it was from weapons. And often enough the side that was "losing" the fight could squeak it out with a lucky break or 2 taking victory from the jaws of defeat.

With the Clan tech standard, a lot more hit and shift tactics were employed. Often the sides would engage in a death grip in a circle at each other at range, sniping and maneuvering waiting to see which would take the first real handicapping loss (be it machine or positioning) before closing in to pound away. Very often here, the side that got the early advantage, kept it. The only thing I could think to explain that was, given how much stronger the weapons are in clan tech, once you can start out damaging your enemy, that enemy starts losing more and more combat ability too quickly to allow a "lucky" break or 2 to reverse the end result.

Edited by Tyrnea Smurf, 30 June 2017 - 01:21 PM.

[Tarl Cabot]

Quote

After that was all done, we found that everything was much more balanced between IS and the "SLCF" and that the games we much, much more fun.

This. When the Clans were first play tested with their rituals, batchalls and such they were using Star League tech. They were able to push in from the periphery to the border worlds but then could not really advance any further. That was when FASA created the current Clan technology.

[Brain Cancer]

Wildstreak, on 01 June 2017 - 05:43 AM, said:

As for limiting, not really. They were more open and flexible, creative people could invent ways to deal with things. Sad the RPG never got much attention. There were a few things going even back to core rules that were broken.
- Boating was actually allowed even back in core rules, just hardly anyone did it.
- They never put out rules for making FrankenMechs.
- While the 3025 society was portrayed as suffering tech wise and scavenging for parts, if you got into the RPG, you found this strange thing where average techs would quite often be really good at repairing things and your unit repairs went quite well.
- They originally portrayed some Mechs having interesting problems like lasers that did more heat and less damage plus locations that could not carry full armor and structure. This was to reflect the nature of the era. Again, if you got into the RPG and learned how it handled techs repairing things, you would find no rules to simulate these problems and repairs were much better than described.

Funny you should mention all that:

-Boating definitely happened, but it just took finding the right variants to do so. The Hunchback-P and stock Awesome were perfect 3025-era examples of this, and in the same timeframe, the Charger-SB was a large laser boat. There just was a lot more generalists than specialists in terms of chassis options, because face it. It's tough to make the same boat loadout over and over again and still have people feel it's worth endless minor variation #42.
-Frankenmechs didn't get rules until much later, although they're in now. A few quasi canon designs showed up like the Wolfman, but they weren't true Frankenmechs as they fit normal construction rules.
-Mechwarrior RPG 1st edition was quite prone to having partial repairs happen- you'd generally see 'Mechs pick up gradual losses in effectiveness over time as a tech goofing it up would knock off perma-armor points and such from a unit until it'd begin to look like a shambling junkheap even when "fully repaired", meaning most long campaigns had you looking for fresh replacements from time to time if you could find them.

Boating was still the best option, and from both being a tournament player and running an RPG campaign for years, it was always better having a specialist over a generalist, because the specialist is more likely to be able to put 100% of his weapons at the best possible point vs. having varying levels of effectiveness due to range or other differences in weapon performance between a mismatched set. At the least, you wanted matching rangebands, like PPCs and LB-10X's, or SRMs and medium lasers to make positioning as optimal as possible. Of course, things like TT's crit system made spread weapon damage actually worth it, as multi-hit weapons were excellent for actually doing crippling internal damage. There's a lot MWO doesn't do that would be in the spirit of the original game, after all.

Tarl Cabot, on 30 June 2017 - 07:42 PM, said:

This. When the Clans were first play tested with their rituals, batchalls and such they were using Star League tech. They were able to push in from the periphery to the border worlds but then could not really advance any further. That was when FASA created the current Clan technology.

Yep. Biggest balance mistake FASA ever made was deliberately making an entirely overpowered tech tree, and the designers have spent decades since trying to fix it, with the inevitable power creep and gradual unification of tech levels as the timeline advanced.

3145-era stuff is basically "mix and match" level of factory-level construction, and the two tech trees have enough different bits in them that you're not -always- best off going with pure Clantech.

[Karl Streiger]

Brain Cancer, on 01 July 2017 - 08:30 PM, said:

Of course, things like TT's crit system made spread weapon damage actually worth it, as multi-hit weapons were excellent for actually doing crippling internal damage. There's a lot MWO doesn't do that would be in the spirit of the original game, after all.

I think MWO goues the other way arround (or at least it did once)
Like you can do with TacOps. Increased critical hit chance for heavy hitters. So the incentive was to use Cluster rounds first - slug second - its a complete different game and even more fun.

I loved this also in MWO - there was a time when LRMs were of some use when fired with LOS - shredding armor all over the target - and you put a single Gauss slug into that mech - breaching the armor and causing a critical hit.

[Ruslan Savelyev]

Brain Cancer, on 01 July 2017 - 08:30 PM, said:

Yep. Biggest balance mistake FASA ever made was deliberately making an entirely overpowered tech tree, and the designers have spent decades since trying to fix it

The local shop I played at in the early '90s never really went past Star League tech. Different days and different house rules, stock only games, super-stock games(like more armor and ammo on some designs), free-for-all build games like a 12x LRM5 Atlas, 2 shots in the fire phase for AC2/5/10 and MGs... but even with a 1 mulligan re-roll for headshots, there was very little enduring interest in the Clan game. A Clan vet pilot with 2 gunnery in a Masakari/Warhawk could turn a game on a few lucky rolls, as well as change/ruin the entire concept of partial cover due to low BTH and weapons using the punch tables. Clan 'Mechs looked great, and I probably collected and painted almost every one, but I always thought that the Clan power creep diminished both game play and lore depth in terms of faction unique or rare 'Mechs. Clans seemed to be a turning point for players slowly losing interest and going from FASA to GW.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

all this new Tech in TT only moneysink , -buy the new Ugly miniatures from the ugly Mechs thats have all the big fat Weapons ,and the TRO and the new Rulebooks and Novels with a 12 second Fights over 20 Booksides..Buy a Mechpack

Edited by Old MW4 Ranger, 20 July 2017 - 02:32 AM.

[Rorik Thrumsalr]

I like 3049-3067 tech myself, and I've been playing tt since the early 90's. But...I am also a clanner, and play as such, most games we would play were roleplaying senarios. Whenever we'd fight against IS opponents we would always "Lore Balance" the fights. We had loads of fun. TBH I find 3025 tech to be a little slow and boring, with fairly limited options, but I can acknowledge that for some those limitations would be a legitimate boon.

[Gaius Cavadus]

3025 tech was always my favorite. The balance was well done for the most part and battles were usually more pitched which add some entertaining tension to the games.

I was so stoked when we got that original Mechwarrior 3015 video before the project morphed into MWO.

[Khobai]

when I played in tabletop campaigns we did random stock mechs only (each faction had randomized charts you could roll on to see what mechs you got in your lance). and clan tech was perfectly fine. most of the time clans had a disadvantage due to battlevalue setting stock clan mediums as being equal to stock IS assaults lol.

allowing customized mechs was the biggest imbalance in battletech and consequently mechwarrior online. stock mech only is the only way to play tabletop. if you allow customization youll end up with people making broken crap like annihilators with 5 gauss rifles.

Edited by Khobai, 10 August 2017 - 02:42 AM.

[Metus regem]

Khobai, on 10 August 2017 - 02:35 AM, said:

when I played in tabletop campaigns we did random stock mechs only (each faction had randomized charts you could roll on to see what mechs you got in your lance). and clan tech was perfectly fine. most of the time clans had a disadvantage due to battlevalue setting stock clan mediums as being equal to stock IS assaults lol.

allowing customized mechs was the biggest imbalance in battletech and consequently mechwarrior online. stock mech only is the only way to play tabletop. if you allow customization youll end up with people making broken crap like annihilators with 5 gauss rifles.

I both agree and disagree with you on custom units in TT, min-maxers are a problem as they are the most likely to put something like Gausszilla on the table, non-powergamers are just as likely to give you something that has flavor and personality, flaws and all. Myself I like units that are a mix of both, efficient at what they do, but not perfect killing machines, in other words balance.

[Khobai]

min-maxers are the #1 problem in any game that allows high degrees of customization

MWO shouldve had a customization point system to limit the amount of customization. So like changing one weapon out for another would cost a customization point. And youd only get X customization points. That would prevent custom builds from deviating too much from their stock derivatives.

[Metus regem]

Khobai, on 10 August 2017 - 09:35 AM, said:

min-maxers are the #1 problem in any game that allows high degrees of customization

MWO shouldve had a customization point system to limit the amount of customization. So like changing one weapon out for another would cost a customization point. And youd only get X customization points. That would prevent custom builds from deviating too much from their stock derivatives.

Personally, I think MWO should've kept the cardinal rule of engine size restrictions, being multiples of the mech weight. I can tell you right now, if I had to chose between using a 240 or 300 in my Riflemen it would be a lot harder to justify the extra weight... As it stands I go from a 240 to a 250 for what is about half a ton difference, taking into account the external DHS I have to mount with the 240...

Another thing I'd have done is not allow us to add Endo Steel so freely to any mech... There are some mechs where the only difference between variants is things like having Endo Steel or not..... hell units like the Raven 1X and 2X it's a case of engine size is the difference....

I guess I don't like the fact that we all have factory level refit center in all of our hangers is just a little farfetched for me....

[Gaius Cavadus]

Yeah, I definitely agree that engines and internals should have been locked per variant. That would have required some interesting balance and mechanics to make every variant useful, however.

Edited by Gaius Cavadus, 10 August 2017 - 02:41 PM.