Greyhart, on 13 February 2019 - 05:11 AM, said:
3. The adherence to table top mechanics. The table top game should be taken as a starting point and then changed to better facilitate game play. Turned based games don't make good real time games. They should've identified weapons systems from the TT and then applied roles (advantages/ disadvantages) to the weapons. a small laser currently has no advantages over a large laser except that it weighs less. If you have a choice of large vs small you go large as it has longer range better damage output and takes up the same hard point.
They could've put a minimum range on large lasers that would've made them a real trade off with small. Again going with sized hard points would make a difference in this area. They could've made pulse lasers like machine guns rather than faster cycling lasers etc
I agree with most of your stuff, but here's the point of contention I have.
Tabletop, specifically Solaris VII, already made the transition of
turn-based to near real time with a very well laid out set of things that if put into MWO, would have basically made a great real time experience with
tradeoffs and everything for the weapons. (
Worth noting if the heat scares you)
Instead, however, PGI did exactly what you describe as them not doing... they took TT as a base, and they gave **** advantages... just they broke them, too. Large lasers got extra damage and longer beam times and reduced heat. Small lasers got much shorter beam times, faster firing rates, and became such a problem that they were given EXTRA heat due to the problems that they had created due to not following through on your 1st point. They didn't follow up the tabletop base with the lore and fluff, because if they did there would be a lot of tradeoffs for pretty much every weapon system and perhaps even variations to be had, which could have allowed quite a bit of variety.
We would also have abilities such as "Block" to give a command to raise arms in front of our body to try and soak up damage in exchange for being unable to fire those weapons while blocking. Anti-laser aerosols as a consumable, which would reduce incoming damage from laser vomit. Mechs far more prone to overheating when using weapons together, manually set convergence with a simple "Set" and "Reset", as well as 5 firing arcs (lanes) when the convergence is not set (which would be advantageous for corner shooting as you could fire around the corner without exposing the cockpit, and not have issues such as "high slung arms" not being able to fire until you get the cockpit over the ridge. Lets not forget to mention control over our missile firing arc by how we angle the launchers, SRMs that track, Streaks that won't fire unless they are 90% likely to hit instead of streaks that never miss and defy the laws of physics.. and lets not forget automatic attempts to evade fire unless we have the 'intention' to go where we are going (but that last one is pretty unlikely to be doable in a game such as this).
Pulse lasers, subsequently, would've been more like laser machine guns akin to MW3, building heat over time while regular lasers were more of a short burn varying from 0.1 (but requiring several shots to accumulate the rated damage) to 2 second beam times depending on the variant. Weapons are classed by loose expectancy of tonnage, damage, range and heat over a unit of time.
On point 4: MWO has made changes. If they had replicated the tabletop, we'd have 3 PPCs fired at once shut you down instantly, where 2 fired at once then the 3rd spaced out by a couple of seconds, even a 28 SHS mech could manage 3 PPCs without shutting down and be ready to do it again 10 seconds from the first shot fired.
But here, we had thresholds as high as over 120 due to a climbing threshold system that PGI made up and most heat generation reduced and heatsinks generally faster than tabletop with the old skill tree or if taken in the new one, all in the name of PGI's weird balance ideas (where in Solaris VII the ceiling is put to 120 but all weapons generate 4 times heat and the heatsinks sink 4 times as fast, basically meaning it's still 30 threshold), twice that of even MW4 which was the highest heat threshold the MW series had ever seen in its history (MW 2 and 3 Pirate's Moon had 40, and MW3 had the very punishing 30).
(Note: Now the new high end of thresholds is around 60 with a heatsink boating but practical build).
Correct though, it lacks the penalties. But it didn't always lack them. In closed beta you had the penalties of crit-slot damage after hitting 80%, but the monitor to give us the real information never was implemented because this was taken out toward open beta. We also had actuator damage mean something as it'd throw off convergence (arm actuators) or cause you to "drift" left or right (leg actuators), but this kept being reported as a bug so it was "fixed." I remember thinking of it as a feature as it only happened when you lost armor and took damage to the limb affected and later in a discussion found out it was indeed the case..but apparently "realism is a bug."
6. Lack of a pilot. Fully agree. Minor thing, just a simple customizable pilot wouldn't change much. Tying in with point 7, if a significant part of the skill tree related to the pilot and said pilot could be permanently lost, it could allow for a perpetual system of "training pilots" rather than "decking out the tree of a mech." One thing to note though, loss of the pilot should be around head destruction, so as to not happen too often or at the roll of a die.
Edited by Koniving, 13 February 2019 - 12:15 PM.