3 replies to this topic

[FallenShaw]

This maybe in the wrong section but I'm not allowed to post a new topic in the general discussion part sadly. However I did wanna discuss this issue that seems to bother me with you guys. Namely with the Catipult Mech Size being too small I feel.

Ik Ik, alot of you will argue its fine, but here me out. It stands pract dead even in height with a 45 ton medium mech. A short one at that. I'm talking about the Shadow Cat of course. Now yes the catipult is builkyier but still, its what 20 tons heavyier. Also the ears on it bother me in looks. Now in judging height of the mech i'm not counting ears. But the acutal body of the mech not just pgi's shoot me targets. Its body and the Shadow Cat are prac even across and up and down. So I'd like to propose a change that being increase the catipults, Mech hieght by 10% while also decreasing the ears size both ways by 10%

It will still be the same height as before counting ears, but will be slightly taller on the body. The decrease in size on the ears across is to help shape stability and of course the up and down to rebalance the increase of mech's body. My Purposed change will also carry over 2 benifits 1 being a double edged sword. 1st benifit is smaller ear hit boxes, no harmful side effects, 2nd Catipults will be able to peek and shoot slightly better over a ridge though I doubt anyone will notice the improvement. That being said it will also be increasing the center and side torso hitboxes along with its legs very slightly. So it wouldn't really be a buff or debuff overall.

My change to the catipult mech scale, is not meant to buff it, nor nerf it. I actually find it one of the more balanced mech's in the game. But When you place it side by side with a lighter mech, or look at the ears.... Its really ugly. It just looks stunted in growth compared to other mechs. And while I know the ears are meant to be a weak point 10% isnt gonna really hurt you hitting them. They are still bigger than the center torso after all. If you can't hit them then, well , Thats a player aim problem. They are god aweful to look at though, and the 10% reduction i feel will make them look like they actually belong on the mech instead of two sticky notes that read shoot pgi made them into.




PGI, don't get me wrong you do some great artwork designs, and the rescale for the most part was needed. However you didn't really complete the rescale balancing well. There are more than just the catipult that need some slight minor tweaks. I doubt you'll pay attention to my post, or that players will rally behind me, however in the future try to fully complete a task you set forth on. Half assing it never gets the job done. But I am thankful mwo is still up and running most games don't last this many years. Playerbase isnt what it was but, thats to be expected. Though I will say take league of legends way of thinking when you deside to upgrade to a new mwo. Rework all of it, but leave Mwo running. Ik there are alot of features a new mwo game could have that weren't done years ago, but they can still be added to this. I just hate seeing a good game die off, seen way to many.







PS: PGI, you could learn alot from looking at the failures of other games. Take what EA Sports has done to starcraft 2, command and conquer, and even league of legends soon. Yes League is still number 1 in playerbase but within the next 2 years that'll change i believe. They adopted the same failing strat of devoplement EA got blizzard todo with Starcraft 2. Hence why it went F2P to try and get some players back. They follow the simple plan of dumbing down games. Make them easyier more newplayer friendly and faster. Only if you do that, then you have to take away from the games mechinaics that player skill and wisdom spent years to learn and perfect. Casual games never last its the competitve aspect of games that keep people coming back time and again. Otherwize the game might as well be minesweeper. Each and every step taken to make things easyier for newplayers when it comes to game mechinanics decreases the difference in player skill vs another. I'm all for teaching newbies how to play, but never for changing the game its self to help them. Its just a flawed way of thinking. The more complex you make a game the higher quailty it is. That in turn = the longer and higher the playerbase last. Keep that thought in mind for future developements. League has decreased its quaility bringing matches to an all time low, starcraft 2 is dying out, and desprate, command and conqure is dead. World of tanks warships ect... dying as well. All these games did the same thing, and all have ties to ea sports, even if they were a 3rd party. They also all were successful in their time due to the competitve nature of their games. A trait that MechWarrior shares as well. Sorry for the rant but if PGI reads this maybe it'll save them from some future errors in judgement.

[Koniving]

To post in other subjects: play the game for at least 25 matches.

There's a lot to comment on... and give me time and I will.

But for now.
MWO's original model was 15 meters tall.
MWO's current model is just shy of 14 meters tall (so barely shorter than most 50 and 55 ton mechs, though with still nearly 30% more volume).
The canonical height of the two types of Catapult in Battletech are 8-9 meters (shunt-legged) and 11-12 meters (stilt-legged).
(Also worth noting the tallest mech until 3065 is 14.4 meters... MWO's tallest mech is 17.6 meters, and most of its 45 ton mechs are just shy of 14 meters.)

Will read and feedback on the rest later.

------------


The Shadowcat is barely over 12 meters tall in MWO, which is two meters shorter than the Catapult. A better comparison would be the Blackjack or the Vindicator. It is also 0.75 meters shorter than an Ebon Jaguar.


Sadly the rest isn't really worth commenting on, personal opinions about the design of the Catapult and some kind of rant about EA sports (which makes it sound like the person is under the impression that EA Sports owns Blizzard? I think he means became E-sports. Not "Electronic Arts Sports" as written. Sadly E-sports is what kept several of these games alive for so long. MWO's got a pipe dream about fitting in that category because that implies it is a highly skill based and balanced platform which it is neither due to weapons so heavily tweaked out of proportion to compensate for including nothing that the weapons were designed to fight (i.e. infantry, lighter armor, aircraft, etc.). But overall the rest isn't worth commenting on.

Edited by Koniving, 14 December 2017 - 07:32 PM.

[Rogue Jedi]

Initially the catapult was somewhat oversized, a while back PGI went through and resized every mech so each ton of Mech mass is realy represented in terms of volume.

The catapult has within 0.5% the same volume as the other 65 ton Mechs, 3.25 times the volume of 20 ton Mechs, 65% the volume of a 100 ton Mech and is accurately scaled to every other Mech in the game.
Catapult is less tall than some lighter Mechs because of its body shape, humanoid Mechs should be taller than bird shaped Mechs because bird shaped Mechs like the catapult are longer.

Think of it this way, which is bigger a 5 meter tall tower with a 1 meter square base or a 3 meter cube? The 1x5m tower has a volume of 5 cubic meters while the 3m cube has 9 cubic meters volume. Would you then say the cube cannot be bigger than the tower as the tower is taller?

Edited by Rogue Jedi, 15 December 2017 - 11:02 AM.

[Koniving]

Note: This post is very image heavy with modest lore and much scale discussion. Spans from BT sizes in general, Atlas, Mist Lynx, Thunderbolts, dropships, approximately when BT's scales went from realistic and somewhat regulated to a certain rule set to "GIANT ROBOTS OF DOOM" (aka when Wizkidz took over) and the mishaps that led to the Catapult's current situation including multiple concept arts with editor notes insisting that the mech be made to be considerably larger in terms of scale... which also led to the slight shrink in MWO's rescale.

Spoiler

(To add, the missile ears are supposed to be large. Even the Atlas, as big as it is supposed to be [roughly the size of MWO's Hunchback) is literally written as not big enough to fit a proper 20 tube LRM-20. In fact all it manages is a 5 tube rapid reload launcher that, as stated in TRO 3025, fires 5 missiles every 2.5 seconds. Then again LRM-20s only fired 20 missiles every 10 seconds anyway, just like LRM-5s only fired 5 missiles every 10 seconds, AMS was not super effective and even then very few mechs even had it. When the battlefield gets saturated with LRMs, they just pull out the Mech Mortars since AMS doesn't react to them. ECM isn't nearly as effective as it is in MWO without stealth armor either. But I could just run that tangent all day.)

There are 4 AS7 Atlases that have 20 tubes. The K, the K2, the S2, and the C.

The coolant hookup is to connect to a coolant truck so that the Atlas can act as a turret without (as much) of a heat restriction.
(Note: The text on the AC/20 is erroneous. It wasn't once the largest caliber, as 120mm was. It was actually "one of the largest calibers."

The Atlas info.


(Cockpit position derived from novels such as Thunder Ridge).

This said, on the personal opinion about the Catapult's ears, looking back on both canonical versions of the Catapult I aka the C1-through-Cwhatever prior to the Catapult II, yeah. Ears tended to be a bit smaller. The better art also has more connected the missile launchers to show a more realistic missile feeding system, too, that would have unintentionally extended the torsos a bit. Of course nothing says that the bridge couldn't be arm hitboxes. But PGI has already made a total of four major edits to the Catapult since 2011, as the open beta files (yep I still have them) also has a second Catapult torso that was much bigger.

Catapult as in 3025's TRO

I note from a physics standpoint, this pose is unsustainable even within a walk cycle. Also note the extra thick bottoms of the legs. This is because when firing, the Catapult was supposed to "squat" to support itself against the recoil and provide a more stable firing platform, with the protrusions on the knees being used to brace the mech (as well as aid in its ability to stand back up or catch itself when being knocked backwards, provided it didn't keep falling after the initial loss of balance).

This is clearly the Stilt-legged model in action. Note the feet clasping at a surface and the knees try to provide a brace. ...Also noteworthy are the errors in the art, such as the center of balance of the Catapult in the rear and the terrain not agreeing with what the mech is supposedly doing as the dark ground looks to be beyond the Catapult rather than under the knee as it is supposedly.

Anyway the main issue with the Catapult is PGI's initial concept of make their own sizes. Alex, the artist, had made the ladder rungs in keeping with the mech's canonical height (plus a pelvis which is not in the Catapult's design).

Note the cockpit size. Now comes PGI dictating its size.

(The sad thing is a shunt-legged Catapult is canonically the same height as a Jenner at the shoulder level as there is a scene where the pilots of each could look into each other's cockpits and wave while moving side by side after the Jenner twisted the saucer section to look at his partner (and wife), it is just a lot bulkier than the Jenner... doesn't quite work in MWO though because PGI made the Jenner very front-to-rear large and meaty, which the Jenner is barely a set of legs with a small rotating saucer section for a 'body'.)
Fixing any of this, however, would require more than a massive rescale, as the mechs would need to be built almost from scratch if we were to properly fit the pilots into the mechs.

Also in forcing MWO's scale..

There's really no room for anything the Mist Lynx can carry... this is also at MWO's scale which is very small... (That image is before the rescale shrunk it further.)

Compared to the Battletech scale, which purposely follows a certain rule about Battletech designs. "Endo Steel = larger." "Ferro Fibrous = larger." "Both of these = huge for its weight class."


"Battletech" scale depictions didn't get "Huge stompy robots" until Wizkidz... which is also responsible for this fine thing.


Even the image of the mechs to tanks to dropships came after wizkidz.

Before then this was the scale.

That would be a 65 ton "Thunderbolt." In another, a Demolisher tank is depicted (which is of the same weight as the Shrek PPC Carrier shown in the more bogus scale), but it stands as tall as the pelvis of another assault mech. During FASA's time they never passed 15 meters, except in the descriptions from fictional narrators in a state of panic and we call those "exaggerations." Also. That is a 2 missile SRM launcher in her hand. Granted it doesn't have any auto feeding system, no automatic guidance setup (Mechwarrior games have always kind of dumbfired SRMs, but in lore they are still guided... just easy to fool and no locks required for guidance), no convergence adjustment motivators or any of that jazz but the man-portable SRM launcher does indeed deliver 2 damage per missile against mechs and while they obviously aren't hauling a ton of missiles on foot, a couple of guys dedicated to carrying ammo can keep a man-portable SRM going for a bit. The point is 100 to 120 missiles is easy for even a small mech to carry because BT missiles are cheap, fairly simple, small, and easily mass produced.

A Wolverine lifting the rear end of a tracked tank under infantry escort.

Maintenance check on a Shadowhawk.

Compared to MWO. Middle image is still bigger than the depicted SHK above.

Keep in mind the artwork depicts an SHK 2D, which has the armor of a Locust. Canonically the SHK-3 and SHK-5 are described as being a fair bit larger to fit fancy things like XL engines, endo steel, double heatsinks (as all mechs made to fit those things are bigger; even the Hunchback series jumped from Komiyaba Type VII skeleton to Cruchis Type V, a taller, wider standing yet skinnier skeleton resulting in a 'bigger' Hunchback for the volume necessary to house double heatsinks and the like. Such was not canonically possible with the original Komiyaba Type VII skeleton.

This one is not intended to actually be to scale, but..
Thunderbolt swarmed by elementals.

Then again, that isn't far off from this one..


Hatchetman (not axman) and Griffin around a hangar.


A few known BT scales.

First: The height of the SHK 2-D. Second, my height. Third, the typically accepted low in height for Light mechs (turns out the Locust and the Firefly are both shorter than that with the 20 ton Locust being 7.5 meters and the Firefly being 7.3 meters. Fourth s 6 feet for uh, people not as tall as I am, then 13.6 which is the height of MWO's Hunchback and also the shortest height ever described for an Atlas... and last but not least, the height of the tallest mech in Battletech before the Dark Ages, the Executioner.)

Also for fun, what they are is already captioned.

(BT Locust btw. Note the SHK MWO height shown is before they shrunk it but even then it's still much bigger than the SHK BT height. "Average height" depicted is 6 feet.)

Ah damnit. I said I wouldn't go on that tangent (and I could keep going for weeks so I'll cut it there.)

Also recommend this thread be moved to something like Battletech discussion, general discussion, or possibly offtopic since we know PGI isn't gonna do yet another rescale that'd actually require major remodeling of the mechs.
A bit later if my photoshop still likes me, I'll do a scale transition of the current scale of mediums and heavies in maybe 3 to 5 different gif animations. Like this one. Remember this one is from the OLD scale.

Edit: Forgot the endtag for the spoiler. Fixed.
Quick edit: Shaw's suggested remodeling wouldn't be a big deal. However a canonical size remodeling of just the Catapult would be, and then it'd throw everything else out of whack and thus everything else would need it., Even the guys at Harebrained Schemes had to make concessions to the scale aschanging PGI's models to the known scales of lore isn't possible without breaking them. This is also why they didn't bother with fixing it for MW5 Mercs either. (And why when they started using canonical measurements for barrel sizes the MWO ACs shrunk so drastically that players cried about it.)

Edit 3:
You can see Harebrained schemes did rein it to approximately the minimum canon size for their concept art, however.

They just couldn't actually get the model to be that small.
Shunt-legged Catapult smallest known height compared to 5'6" female (assumed height of pilot depicted above).
Height to tallest point means the ears.

(See links in my first post for the difference between "Shunt-legged" and "Stilt-legged" Catapults. Shunt-legged models are typically deployed to flatlands, urban environments, etc. Stilt-legged are intended for more mountaineous and canyon-filled terrrain where height is more important. Both mechs weigh the same and the difference is "Hollis Mark I" and "Hollis Mark II" chassis skeletons. (The Stilt-legged design never appeared in a TRO as far as I know)
Also worth noting... Mech-eating dinosaurs.
I went to compare weights, and this was made back when the belief that T-rex was 20 to 30 tons was still common, if insanely exaggerated.

https://www.thoughtc...s-weigh-1091921

Still, nothing like roaming on a planet and suddenly being attacked by a dinosaur that gnaws your arm off.(

Crap, added a bunch more stuff.)

Edited by Koniving, 15 December 2017 - 07:55 AM.