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obviously, for such things to exist, there needs to be clear UI indication of these components, what happens when they are damaged, an intuitive implementation of the debuffs you get when these components take damage, and it needs to not impact gameplay so intensely that its just a completely unfun mechanic to be afflicted by and feel like the curse of the RNG, but add even more risk to taking structure damage and really give the feeling that you have taken an absurd amount of damage and are barely skating by. I've always liked the aspect of tabletop of slugging it out to the point that these walking behemoth buckets of bolts are just barely on their feet and slugging out every inch of their capabilities in desperate attempts to win and stay alive.
arguments against all this are that it might be too much complexity involved in what happens when you are already at 1/3-1/2 of your total hp in a component in the first place, and it even further strengthens the already decent power of crit seeking weapons, and I think they are valid points that i don't have substantial arguments against right now.
my idea is that these components, even when taking maximum crit damage, do not lead to an effective death or complete disabling of a component, as that seems too unintuitive against the basic idea of you die when a crucial section or set of sections are destroyed. instead, they provide moderate, impactful, yet still playable debuffs to mech operation, that have an effect that is probably linear to the amount of crit damage taken.
here's what I was thinking, in detail, of what happens when individual components take crit damage:
cockpit: head damage is already punishing enough when it does happen, I think that just having visual cracking on the cockpit would be decent enough when the cockpit gets crit damage, or even just taking internal head damage. whether or not the cracking becomes visually impairing should be up for discussion.
life support: the tabletop effects dont seem to translate at all to the game, so I think this should probably be rolled into cockpit cracking or just have no effect at all.
sensors: have a "mini-ecm" effect, once every 5 seconds or so, the low signal effect occurs for .5-1 second
Gyro: we don't have pilot skill rolls or fall downs in this game, but a gyro stabilizes the mech. perhaps gyro crit damage can have a linear increase in reticule wobblyness, kind of like when you are zoomed in on a sniper rifle in lots of first person shooters.
foot, lower leg, upper leg, hip actuators: I dont think these should be nearly as refined and specific as they are in tabletop, I would be fine with moderate decreases in leg movement as these are damaged. you go to half speed / 40/50 kph when you lose a leg entirely, maybe one of these components sustaining max damage puts you 1/8th of the way to that point? I don't want this mechanic to drop speed down any further than legged speed, so this can be tricky to design for. perhaps instead these can debuff agility attributes rather than speed attributes?
hand, lower arm actuators: significantly reduce the capacity for that arm to move laterally when unlocking arms
upper arm, shoulder actuators: significantly reduce the capacity for that arm to move vertically when unlocking arms.
engine: this one's tricky because of XL/light engines losing a percentage of heat and movement speed already when a torso is lost, or a death immediately occuring with IS XL torso loss. As I stated earlier, I don't want internal crits to cause a loss of functionality entirely, and I don't want to die with yellow torsos because a spider shot machine guns at me, so I was thinking there could be further heat and movement loss by a very short margin, with heat being affected much more than movement. perhaps something like an additional 5-10 percent movement loss total, and the ability for additional engine-mounted heatsinks to be crit, and maybe internal engine heat sinks being reduceable down to about 4?
this reminds me that I think there should be a UI indication of the number of active, undestroyed heat sinks currently in operation.
endo/ferro/stealth slots: like tabletop and current mwo, these should not be affected by crits.
Again, I'm just proposing these ideas as a hypothetical, and I'm not really trying to passionately push this into the game, but I feel like these approaches to component crits might be more in the direction of what I think could work out in the game.
Edited by Registerfault, 16 July 2017 - 10:55 AM.
