23 replies to this topic

[Kiiyor]

Greyhart, on 03 July 2017 - 06:47 AM, said:

yea isn't it fun!

I ask the question what problems is it that people want to solve and they all come up with solutions but don't identify the problems. Human nature is interesting isn't it

The problem is, and always will be, limiting the ease of which a player can put single, gigantic holes in an enemy mech in the most efficient way possible.

Gauss and PPC's of various flavours concentrate a lot of firepower into a small area, as do massed lasers if a steady hand is at the helm, and they expend their firepower in an extremely short amount of time. No DPS build or weapon can compete if the enemy is exposed for only as long as it takes to fire a single salvo - and even if they are in the open, a fight still favors haymaker punch mechs as they get to use downtime between shots to torso twist and mitigate incoming damage.

Taking damage is fine, and part of the game. Driving a fresh medium or even a heavy mech however, and having your armor reduced to an angry red (or having your internals damaged) after a single enemy salvo is not fine, yet it's what most truly competitive players try their best to achieve in the mechlab. That's where the issue lies.

[Vincent DIFrancesco]

MustrumRidcully, on 03 July 2017 - 06:46 AM, said:

Actually, very few weapons deal TT damage, since TT damage is the value they deal over 10 seconds. We deal this damage over about 4 seconds (sometimes less, very rarely more).

And called shots in TT are difficult to perform, so we have a much higher precision. Imagine firing 8 lasers and no more than 2 hitting the same location. Or firing 2 Gauss Rifles and hitting the left leg and the right torso.

And all those reasons are why they doubled the armor and structure for mechs in this game. Increasing the mech's defenses, as the person I responded to suggested, is not going to make these problems go away. This game is a shooter. There will always be people who can aim better than 2D6 location rolls.

[LordNothing]

MustrumRidcully, on 03 July 2017 - 06:46 AM, said:

Actually, very few weapons deal TT damage, since TT damage is the value they deal over 10 seconds. We deal this damage over about 4 seconds (sometimes less, very rarely more).

And called shots in TT are difficult to perform, so we have a much higher precision. Imagine firing 8 lasers and no more than 2 hitting the same location. Or firing 2 Gauss Rifles and hitting the left leg and the right torso.

the pace is a little bit too fast for a mechwarrior game. if you go play living legends (if the ce servers are still active anyway), the first thing you would notice is how slowly the weapons fire. mech4 sped things up abit, but 2 and 3 had about the right pacing. if you had about 8 seconds to close in on a gauss boat, things would be a lot different.

people complain that they dont want to see cod mechanics, yet the game pushes quakelike mechanics instead. 'motion/recoil based crosshair jitter noooooo thats for the kiddies' even though its a good mechanic to have in a vehicular combat simulator, especially ones with ttk issues. unchecked hardpoint inflation was going to blow up in everyone's face eventually, hince the mega round of laser nerfs.

energy draw could have been great but it was just too damn clunky in its implementation. something simpler like ghost duration might have been better. tax the reactor and your burns get stretched. also works for missiles, put too many objects in the sky and your targeting computer from the 80s will have trouble guiding all of them and you get ghost spread. ballistics are even easier, just add recoil. the heavy gauss recoil mechanic is awesome and id like to see more things like that from pgi. big recoil for big guns, cumulative recoil for dps ballistics.

exponential heating doesnt make a lick of sense from a physics standpoint. mechanics are more immersive when they are plausible. simply keeping it linear with higher heat values would have kept boating under control, force people to space out their shots better. then start breaking mech systems when it gets too high. but that makes too much sense.

Edited by LordNothing, 03 July 2017 - 10:43 AM.

[Greyhart]

Kiiyor, on 03 July 2017 - 08:12 AM, said:

The problem is, and always will be, limiting the ease of which a player can put single, gigantic holes in an enemy mech in the most efficient way possible.

Gauss and PPC's of various flavours concentrate a lot of firepower into a small area, as do massed lasers if a steady hand is at the helm, and they expend their firepower in an extremely short amount of time. No DPS build or weapon can compete if the enemy is exposed for only as long as it takes to fire a single salvo - and even if they are in the open, a fight still favors haymaker punch mechs as they get to use downtime between shots to torso twist and mitigate incoming damage.

Taking damage is fine, and part of the game. Driving a fresh medium or even a heavy mech however, and having your armor reduced to an angry red (or having your internals damaged) after a single enemy salvo is not fine, yet it's what most truly competitive players try their best to achieve in the mechlab. That's where the issue lies.

Yes I agree.

I think people focus too much on limiting damage output and not enough on how damage is applied.

Pin point accuracy has been the problem throughout. What we are not going to get is convergence or cone of fire, both of which would go a long way to solve the problem. Therefore we need look at how the damage is applied to the armour or internals, in order to simulate the fact that armour doesn't just end at a line (who would make amour like that) on a component but that heat from a laser would spread through all the armour pieces or the impact of a bullet would spread out from the impact site (like cars are designed to spread the energy from an impact).

If you look at it as to how the armour would react and how the damage could be spread over multiple components you then realise that it is not where the damage is coming from, as it could come from 12 different mechs on to a single component, its how you deal with that damage.

You could put a hard cap on damage received to a single component within a certain timeframe. But that would end in the silly position that people would seek to build a weapons loadout to that specific mechanic.

I think bleed over into adjoining components is the way to deal with it. Over a certain amount X% gets transferred to the adjoining parts of the mech, we have something like this when you shot an arm that is already destroyed.

The focus on how the damage is dealt with means that TTK is increased when attacked from multiple sources but remains the same for 1v1 combat.