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So please, if anything doesn’t make sense, maybe needs a visual explanation, or you don’t agree with something or may have a better alternative to the idea. Post it and let me know. This is only the first version of this idea, I plan to edit it after suggestions and feedback from the community.
Also let me know if I forgot to talk about a certain subject that could be affected.
Also this took 8 hours to write, so as I grew more fatigued some parts may be poorly explained, just let me know (Like overriding and overheating).
The Main goal of this System is to change how Heat Bar and Heat sinks work by making each of the aforementioned items separate from each other but working towards the same goal of heat management.
Table of Contects
-Change to main Heat Bar
-The Dynamics of Heatsinks
- Increased Cooldown times for Weapons, and Ghost heat
- HeatSink Allocation, Destroyed HeatSinks, and Engine HeatSinks
- The Double HeatSink Problem
- Overheating and Overriding
-Jump Jets
-Flamers
-UAC and AC’s
Change to main Heat Bar
As of right now, the heat scale is a little complicated, figuring out the thresholds, how much heat an alpha produces, how the percentages affect the current numbers, etc…
My idea is simple; heat will be monitored two ways: heat bar, and heat points.
Let’s start with the heat bar. Right now we only see it as a percentage of current hear. But really in the midst of battle, no one really knows how much heat was used, they can set weapon groups and memorize exactly how much heat each weapon group uses, but that’s ineffective in the grand scheme of monitoring heat usage and builds that might be heat intensive.
The idea here would be to change the bar to a linear scale of 0-10.
The Heat Bar
Spoiler
What this means is that your mech has 9 free points of energy before it overheats. So for instance, (I will be looking at Sarna values), if I fired a Medium laser which takes up 3 heat, I will consume 3 heat points.
The Heat Bar after Medium Laster
Spoiler
Now these are FREE HEAT POINTS, basically think of them as your default number every mech can tolerate without any other heat variables. The idea is, if you go over your heat point limit (will talk about that next), you draw heat on your heat bar.
As of right now, again this is a linear number that can be changed accordingly; I am thinking that you will cool down at a rate of 1 Heat Point every 5 seconds; So if you fired a medium laser consuming 3 heat, it would take 15 seconds for your heat bar to reach 0 points again.
The New Dynamics of HeatSinks
Now, the point of this idea is also to really stress the importance of heat sinks. How will they work in relation to the heat bar? Well, they won’t affect the heat bar directly; instead they will provide heat points that are directly tied into weapon heat.
Heatsinks will now provide a set amount of “Heat Points”.
SHS = 1 point
DHS = 2 points
I should also add the “Engine” provides 10 Heat points, so you have a total of 10+(Heatsink points) heat points. So let’s take a look at an example:
BattleMaster Example
Spoiler
Here we have a BLR-1G, it has a total of 10 DHS (I talk about engine heat sink slots in another section). Each DHS provides 2 Heat Points, so the BLR-1G will have a total of 30 heat points, 10 from the engine, and 20 from the heat sinks.
Now here is the kicker, the Heat Points are not represented by a bar, but a simple UI layout that shows: the current number of heat points in use/ the amount of heat points this mech has.
I was thinking something like this:
Heat Point UI
Spoiler
Now what is a heat point and how does it work? Well a heat point is basically a numerical representation of 1 heat point - Repetitive right? But let’s look back again on our earlier example. If we fired 1 medium laser, we would consume 3 heat points off our energy bar. But now we have heat points to prevent us from building up heat. So after a medium laser was fired, the UI would look like this:
Heat Point UI After ML
Spoiler
Cool right? No heat gained, only heat sinks put to work. But how exactly are those Heat Points tracked, do they cool off at a linear rate? No, your heat points are locked to a weapon, sort to speak. What I mean is, if you fire a medium laser you will have 3 Heat Points consumed until the weapon has finished cooling down.
So once the medium laser has finished its cooldown and is ready to be fired again, you “dissipate” the 3 Heat Points instantly. So just to be clear, in this example you fired a LPL and a Medium Laser:
Heat Point UI After 1 ML and 1 LPL
Spoiler
You have consumed 10 heat points from the LPL, and 3 from the medium laser, for a total of 13. Let’s say here the LPL finished its weapon fire cool down first, you now have 3/30 Heat Points, because the medium laser has not finished its weapon fire cool down yet, but once it has you will be back to 0/30 heat points.
It’s very simple; you build up heat points based on the heat value of the weapon. This is easy to follow both in game and in the mechlab.
Now as mentioned, if you go over your heat point limit you will draw heat points from your heat bar. So let’s take a look at this example:
Heat Point UI After 3 ML and 3 LPL
Spoiler
Here you fired 3 medium lasers and 3 large pulse lasers. Each LPL is 10 Heat points, and each ML is 3 Heat Points, giving a total of 39 Heat used. Notice that we only have a total of 30 heat points, but we used 39 heat. Therefore, you consume all your heat points for a total of 30/30, and 9 of your free heat points.
But how does the mech cool off? As mentioned, the Heat Bar cools off by 1 Heat Point every 5 seconds, so it doesn’t matter if all the weapons have finished their recycle time, the Heat Bar cools down at its own pace, this ensures you can’t keep accessing free points until some time has worn off.
Now what about the Heat Points? Well they drop based on the weapon that cools off first. So the 3 medium lasers will cool off first, and you will have 21/30 heat points. Then the LPL will finish cooling off next, and you will have 0/30 heat points.
Now remember, it doesn’t matter if I fired the lasers simultaneously or a few seconds apart. Meaning, if I fired 3 ML and 3 LPL at separate intervals, but none of the weapons that were fired earlier have finished their recycle rate, I will build up the same amount of heat – 39. The only difference is in how the Heat Points would cool down, basically if 1 LPL finished first, I would drop to 20/30, then a ML finished, I would drop to 17/30, and so on…
As you can see, the system is easy to follow and monitor on the UI HUD, it also allows for heat neutral builds. Meaning if you built a 6 ML mech with 18 heat points, you would by theory never even draw points from your Heat Bar, ensuring you never overheat.
But that seems problematic? It would allow some mechs to have high alpha builds with no heat cost, let’s talk about that in our next 2 section.
Increased Cooldown times for Weapons and Ghost heat
Now we want to keep our TTK times somewhere where they are no I assume, but if we are firing 3 LPL’s every ~4 seconds with no heat buildup, that’s a problem; the solution I believe, however, is simple.
The first is to increase cooldown times. The longer a weapon takes to cooldown, the longer your heatpoints remain in use, meaning if you are carrying any other weapons and all your heat points are in use, you begin having to manage your heat wisely.
But what cooldown values should the weapons have? Personally, I don’t know, but I believe they should be values somewhere on these 4 factors averaged together:
Range – The shorter the range the lower the cooldown.
Damage – The Higher the Damage output per shot the higher the cooldown should be.
Heat – Lower heat weapons should have higher cooldowns.
Instantaneous damage vs Damage over Time – Damage over time weapons like lasers
should have lower cooldowns compared to instantaneous damage such as PPC’s, pulse lasers somewhere in between.
Now remember, I say averaged. Meaning just because a small laser has a low heat value doesn’t mean it gets a really high cool down, it has low range and damage, and it is damage over time, albeit a small duration, so it’s overall cooldown falls on the low side.
Gauss Rifles for instance, mid-high range, high damage, instantaneous, and very low heat, should have a much large cooldown. Though all weapons should have a higher cooldown than their current values now to ensure TTK doesn’t drop to frustrating levels.
The cooldown balance really can only be figured out through data, but I believe those are the 4 main factors that should be used to determine the cooldown of a weapon. So, if you had 3 LPL, their cooldown might be (throwing a random number out there) ~8 seconds; You get 30 damage per shot with no extra heat, but you’re out of the fight for the next 8 seconds and also have 30 heat points in use for those 8 seconds.
Now for ghost heat – I personally hate it, and so far I don’t see a need for it in my system. As you keep reading you will see why. But it remains a balancing factor as a LAST RESORT. I am only going to say this about ghost heat, if the increased cooldowns don’t see a balance, like PPC boating still being an issue despite their long theoretical cooldowns under this system, allowing brawlers to get in range, then ghost heat can be thrown into there.
At least this time users will know exactly what the penalty is, so if firing 3 PPC’s produces 10 bonus heat, you would basically take 40 Heat Points for 3 PPC shots. Right now I don’t want to get into detail with this unless users do want to have a debate if ghost heat should stay and how it would work with this system, I will leave it with that short example.
Heatsink Allocation, Destroyed Heatsinks, and Engine Heatsinks
Now, remember when I said your engine gets a set number of 10 free heat points? Well, one could initially assume that an engine (250+) comes with 10 free SHS, so they get 10 points. No, 10 is the default number regardless of DHS, SHS, or Engine Size.
This would also mean that switching between SHS and DHS on a mech should be drastically lowered, to 150k I suggest.
That’s right, first thing I want is to get rid of the 10 necessary heat sinks, an engine of any size provides 10 default heat points to be used, so you no longer have to waste tonnage and crit slots for those heat sinks to reach the required minimum of 10.
However, I also want to get rid of free heat sink slots in Engines. As you know, for every 25 Engine Points if you will (275, 300, 325…), you get a free Heat Sink slot to put your heatsinks in there. I also want to get rid of that. Two reason, make critical slots more important to manage (the DHS problem, talked about in another section), and make HeatSink loss due to component loss/crits a detriment to the battlemech.
Let’s step back a bit to our old battlemaster build, shown here again for reference:
Battlemaster under current system
Spoiler
First things first, since we aren’t allowed Heat Sinks in our Engine, the build would look more like this:
BattleMaster under new system
Spoiler
Basically this mech has a total of 24 heat points, and again, we will get further into detail about this kind of management in the double heatsink problem section. This mech has 14 heat points from the 7 DHS, however, if one of these DHS were ever destroyed through critical damage or component destruction, it would be represented in the UI.
For example, our UI looks like this with a fresh BattleMaster:
Heat Points UI for fresh Battlemaster
Spoiler
Now let’s say it’s Right Arm was destroyed, and it had an open right torso and one DHS got crit’ed out by weapon damage, that Battlmaster has now lost 6 Heat Points, and the UI would represent that:
Heat Points UI for destroyed RA and damaged RT Battlemaster
Spoiler
All of a sudden, you have lost 6 heat points, and even though you still have your 3 LPL’s, you can’t alpha them without overheating now. With lost heat sinks means more energy management, and it also place high priority on HeatSink placement, so just because you lost a non weaponless side that had heatsinks doesn’t mean you are in the clear, you now have lost a possible substantial amount of Heat Points, not allowing you to utilize all your weapons.
This is also in reference to the second solution for mechs that may appear heat neutral at first, but given enough component damage to heat sinks, they can no longer fire all those medium lasers without building up heat.
I also believe Heat Sink Health should be lowered; they should be easy-ish to crit out, giving more reward to hitting exposed components.
Now heat sink allocation becomes a real priority to think about. Where do I want to store my heatsinks? How much crit space and tonnage do I want to waste on heatsinks? Even if my mech is already heat neutral, do I want to waste more tonnage on extra heat sinks in case some of them are crit out? Do I want to use SHS, or DHS? A choice between more tonnage getting Endo/Ferro or more crit slots to have a heat neutral build might be a much bigger deal now. Do I want an XL at the cost of less crit slots as well?
Of course, the Engine can never be crit out, so the worst case scenario you have 10 heat points, and if you have a zombie mech with 2 mediums in the center torso and one in the head, your engine provides you just enough heat to alpha them with no heat buildup.
The Double HeatSink Problem
As of right now, DHS are a go to no brainer. Who even wants to use SHS? Well given what I went over there may be a case now, but let’s reiterate.
SHS provide 1 heat points, while DHS provide 2 heat points, stating the obvious, but DHS consume more crit slots per heat sink, meaning you can’t place as many of them as a SHS, and they get crt out much easier. Some mechs will also be forced to use arm space as a place to put DHS, your shoulder/arm goes, that’s a lot of heat points gone potentially.
With SHS, you can spread them out as you want, put them In the legs or head (clans can afford to put one DHS in each leg of course ), and losing one to a crit is not as detrimental as losing a DHS, plus they are harder to crit since they consume only 1 slot.
Now lets take a look at our Battlemaster build using DHS, and edited to fit a more heat neutral build in our system:
Battlemaster using DHS
Spoiler
Look at this, I had to drop my medium lasers, slightly ton down my engine, and remove Endo Steel fromy my build all just to remain heat neutral to fire 3 LPL’s. And if I Lost my Right Arm/Torso, it will be a huge loss of 12 heat points, and I can no longer remain heat neutral to even fire 2 LPL’s. And remember, the heat points are consumed for the entire duration/recycle time of the laser, so if I even try to chain fire it won’t matter, I will still overheat if I try to fire all 3 of them.
Now let’s try the same build with SHS:
Battlemaster using SHS
Spoiler
Well look at that? Let’s what has changed in this build, I also want to note that I wanted to place 2 SHS in the CT but they kept auto placing them in the engine, so imagine 2 SHS in the CT instead of the RT/LT.
So what has changed? Well, my Engine a 305 instead of a 320, not a bad drop. I put in an Endo –Steel for extra tonnage, I stripped all but 4 arm armor in each arm, and I have SHS located only in shoulders, legs, head and CT*. This means now I can use my arms as free armor without worry of losing Heat Points if they are destroyed, if I lost my Right Torso like in the last example, I would lose (9-1) SHS. I say 8 because imagine one SHS is in the CT instead of RT/LT, so now I’m at 22 heat points. Enough to fire 2 LPL’s and remain heat neutral and even a third once in a while if I have enough free heat points.
This is a much better deal than the DHS in this example, I trade some speed and armor for better Heat sink placement and Heat Point safety.
This is also the reason I did not want free slots in the engine, because if you can start putting DHS in the engine, well SHS lose their purpose again. This is also the reason I did not want DHS to provide 20 base heat points by simply making the switch, you actually have to put in heat sinks to get the incremental heat points.
Overheating and Overriding
Now let’s skip to overheating and overriding. How should it be implemented to provide a benefit to shutting down/overheating as compared to the punishment for overriding.
Let’s first take a look at shutting down/overheating. Now if you remember, you get 9 free energy points on your heat Bar, once you reach 10 or more, you shut down. But how is the shut down and how does the total number of heat on the heatbar determine your length?
Let’s start like this, when you are shutdown/overheat, you lose 1 heat point per second on your Heat Bar. Meaning if you shutdown your mech at 9 heat on your heat bar, you lose all 9 heat in 9 seconds, as opposed to 45 seconds. Now what happens if you overheat, let’s say at the value of 10 heat, are you then shut down for 1 second?
Short answer is no. You are shut down for a minimum (again can be changed) of 3 seconds, and you only power back up when you have cooled down to under 10 heat points on your heat bar.
So if you over heat on any value between 10-12 heat, you will always be shut down for 3 seconds; however, if you shut down at say 16 heat, it will take you 7 seconds to reach 9 heat points on your heat bar, so you will be shut down for 7 seconds. This length of time is enforcing proper heat management and builds.
Damage taken to overheating will tie in to overriding. First, let’s look at the way damage works if you are overheat and shut down. For every 5 heat you are over the maximum (9) shut down to overheat, you will take a base amount of damage based on your mech class (light, medium, heavy, assault).
Before I give an example to be clearer, let me specify the damage numbers by mech class. 1 damage for lights, 2 damage for mediums, 3 damage for heavies, and 4 damage for assaults.
So let’s go back to an example. I draw 17 heat on my heat bar and I am in a Dragon, I have an 8 second cool off period, and that is one interval of 5. I take an instant 3 damage to ALL my components BUT the head. Basically, as long as your total heat under 14 on the heat bar, you will never take damage from overheating.
Now if I overheat with 21 heat, I will be shutdown for 12 seconds, and draw 2 intervals worth of 5 heat. Basically I would take 6 damage to all components but the head.
So the formula for damage taken is: (MechClass)*(extra heat/5 Rounded Down)
Now for overriding, this needs to be as risky as it is rewarding. Currently you can override and still pump out tons of damage before killing yourself. There’s a bigger reward in it then risk, and the system can be abused a bit at the 99-100% mark. But with this system you can’t.
The idea is this, you take your mechs class amount of damage for every second you are above you heat maximum of 9. So let’s say I’m in my Dragon again, I draw 14 heat but I have override on. I will take 3 damage every second to ALL components but the head until I shut down or reach 9 heat on my heat bar. And remember, while I am not shut down it takes 5 seconds for the heat bar to drop down by 1. So in that scenario I would take 3 damage every second for 25 seconds.
But wait a minute, that sounds like a luxury, If I’m overheating and only taking 3 damage to all internals every second, I can still pump those damage numbers. Well now hold on a second, the 5 interval variable comes into play here. So If I try to fire again and say I reach 24 heat, that is technically 15 points over the maximum allowed. That is 3 intervals of 5, meaning I will take 9 points of damage to every internal but the head every second until I dropped to Interval level 2, where I will not take 6 points of damage every second- Basically, extremely punishing.
Now what if I choose to shutdown while I am on override? Let’s say I was at 14 heat with override on and decided to shut down 3 seconds later. I will have taken 9 damage from overriding over the 3 seconds, and another 3 for shutting down at a 5 heat interval. In three seconds my heat will still be at 14, and when I shutdown the shutdown/overheat rule comes into play, for every 5 heat I am over the maximum, I take a set amount of damage based on my mechs class.
So the formula for damage taken is: ((MechClass)*(extra heat/5 Rounded Down))per second+ ((MechClass)*(extra heat/5 Rounded Down)) if shut down
(Please tell me if this is wrong or unclear I have been writing none stop for the last 8 hours).
If this doesn’t make sense, let me know please! I will make a revision of this making it more clearer and with visual aids if needed.
Jumpjets
Jump jets take on heat, but the way they work in this system is very simple. For every jump jet on your mech, you add 1 point of heat when in use. So let’s look at this mech:
Vindicator 4 JJ
Spoiler
This mech has 4 JJ and a total of 0/14 heat points. If I used my jumpets, I would incur 4 heat points (1 for ever jj), so my heat points would change to 4/14. Just enough heat to fire off my PPC to remain heat neutral.
Now the heat does not dissipate as soon as you stop using your JJ. Your JJ have to not have been in use for 3 seconds before you dissipate their heat. So once I used my JJ I would be at 4/14, I don’t use them for 3 seconds and I would drop back down to 0/14.
And that’s really it for JJ’s.
Flamers
A Quick word on flamers and how they would affect this system; using Sarna values, the flamer would take up 3 heat points while in use. And Like JJ, they don’t dissipate heat until after a set amount of time of no use, let’s say in this case 5 seconds.
Now for every second you are able to maintain a flame on an enemy, you increase their heat points by 1. More flamers would not increase the heat points per second, instead they would decrease the time needed to raise the heat point by 1. What the formula is for the time decrease per flame is, I’m not sure I’m not a math major but I would appreciate some input.
Now to keep things balanced so you can’t cripple your foe with flamers. Each flamer can only raise the amount of heat raised by 5+(n-1) heat points. So if you have 1 flamer, and manage to keep it on your enemy for 5 seconds, you have raised their heat points by 5. If you have have 2 flamers, you can only raise their heat by a total of 9 points, but with a reduced amount of time, and so on… So with 5 flamers, you can only incur a total of 15 heat points, at a fast amount of time, but you will incur the same penalty on yourself.
Mechs affected by flamer heat lose 1 heat point per second assuming they have not been hit by a flamer In the last 5 seconds.
UAC and AC’s
Lastly AC’s, under this system they may now seem like the ultimate go to boat, but remember, everything is getting an increased cooldown. So you can’t just fire AC-2s every .6 seconds with no heat worry, the cooldown based on the 4 factors could be higher, maybe at a rate of every ~2 seconds. So yeah, you can boat AC-5’s and all, but your DPS is still not increasing because of increased weapon cooldowns.
Another factor is ammo reduction. Reducing ammo is very simple; though, this can cause players to boat more ammo. And if they do, well we can increase the chance of an ammo explosion significantly, make it very risky to carry AC ammo - and hey, maybe finally a use for C.A.S.E. It’s really a simple balance fix, very heat efficient weapons at the cost of reduced ammo per ton and very high chance of ammo explosions.
In terms of UAC’s, they will like all weapons have their cool down increased, but they function the same way in that they can get off another shot (just 1 extra), with no extra heat, during their recycle time.
Edited by SovietArmada, 20 June 2017 - 12:01 AM.
