22 replies to this topic

[B O O M E R A N G]

They both just provide weight reduction right?

I just came to the realization that Ferro Fibirous does not actually give one mech more armor hit points

Ferro Fibirous:
12% more protection per ton, occupies 14 more critical slots but weighs less.
Endo-steel:
Made from lighter endo-steel and weighing 5% of the 'Mech's maximum tonnage but occupies 14 critical slots.

Edited by B O O M E R A N G, 02 January 2022 - 04:36 PM.

[FupDup]

Yes, the TT description of FF armor is very poorly written, as if it came out of google translate. Saving weight is all it's supposed to do, and it saves far less weight than Endo-Steel does. Use it if you already have Endo and have extra slots for it, but never take FF without Endo unless you're using an Omnimech that doesn't get to choose.

It's also confusing that "Light" Ferro-Fibrous actually takes more tonnage than regular FF and "Heavy" FF is the lightest IS variety of it.

[B O O M E R A N G]

Thanks so much FupDup

Now I am off to look at all my mechs

[ScrapIron Prime]

And do remember that EndoSteel ALWAYS gives you a bit more spare tonnage than FerroFibrous does, and for the same cost in spaces. So for Inner Sphere mechs, if you have 14 spaces to spare, use EndoSteel first.

[LordNothing]

sometimes i take light ff if i don't have enough slots for endo. usually to use up spare slots on an assault build that doesn't have the slots for endo. slots tend to be the limiting factor in assault builds. its not worth much more than (almost) an extra ton of ammo on 100 tonners, half a ton on lighter mechs. but if you can get a little extra its good.

Edited by LordNothing, 02 January 2022 - 08:00 PM.

[w0qj]

Endo-Steel and Standard-Armor: usually the default for IS mechs.

Light-Ferro-Fibirous + Standard-Structure: Sometimes (rarely) in IS Assaults, when you have extra tonnage after fitting Endo-Steel & all weapons/eqpt, you can also try to switch to this LFE + Standard-Structure to fit a bit more equipment in (typically one or two extra DHS, or a bit more ammo)!

Do be careful of the switching cost from LFE/FF-Armor, and Endo/Standard-Structure, and if you find that you frequently do this, you might want to have two twin mechs, to avoid this switching cost!

[Escef]

w0qj, on 03 January 2022 - 02:57 AM, said:

Do be careful of the switching cost from LFE/FF-Armor, and Endo/Standard-Structure, and if you find that you frequently do this, you might want to have two twin mechs, to avoid this switching cost!

C-bills are like the tide; they come, they go. That said, it is frustrating to waste the ones you have. If you are toying around with build ideas it might be best to first tinker around on MechDB. Also, you might also note that there is the option to go into the testing grounds with a build before you commit to spending c-bills on it (the button for it is on the Mech Stats box in the lower right of the in-game mechlab).

[LordNothing]

cbills are starting to become a waste product. i can usually shrug off the cost of swapping an engine (which i have accumulated many) or changing the structure or even the heat sinks in some cases (usually urbies), something a poorer me would have winced at. 1.5 million cbills, meh.

i usually find a mech for a build rather than vise versa. sure you can turn a catapult into a dual ac20 mech or an atlas into a lerm boat. but its better to find a chassis that's more suited to the desired job, with appropriate quirks and hardpoints, than to try to shoehorn a build into a mech that would be better off doing something else.

Edited by LordNothing, 03 January 2022 - 01:28 PM.

[Blood Rose]

B O O M E R A N G, on 02 January 2022 - 04:34 PM, said:

They both just provide weight reduction right?

I just came to the realization that Ferro Fibirous does not actually give one mech more armor hit points

Ferro Fibirous:
12% more protection per ton, occupies 14 more critical slots but weighs less.
Endo-steel:
Made from lighter endo-steel and weighing 5% of the 'Mech's maximum tonnage but occupies 14 critical slots.

Lore wise FF provides better protection (more armour per ton) and is quite useable on TT, but Endo saves a set 10% of the units weight.
Typically this means that in MWO and, in theory, in TT Endo is better. In TT they are about the same, depending on your armour useage, but this is where lore comes in.
Lorewise you cannot switch a structure type from regular to Endo. You are essentially re-building the entire Mech. So FF is, in addition, a good way to get weight reduction on an older chassis that you are upgrading in a campaign.

[Meep Meep]

LordNothing, on 02 January 2022 - 07:51 PM, said:

sometimes i take light ff if i don't have enough slots for endo. usually to use up spare slots on an assault build that doesn't have the slots for endo. slots tend to be the limiting factor in assault builds. its not worth much more than (almost) an extra ton of ammo on 100 tonners, half a ton on lighter mechs. but if you can get a little extra its good.

Same. I'll use light ff instead of endo when I need a bunch of slots for heavy weapons but still need to save a bit of weight to fit it all or if I'm slightly short on weight instead of shaving off armor.

[ScrapIron Prime]

Blood Rose, on 03 January 2022 - 01:35 PM, said:

Lore wise FF provides better protection (more armour per ton) and is quite useable on TT, but Endo saves a set 10% of the units weight.

Ferro providing "better protection" is a bit of a misnomer from the description in the original Battletech game. In effect, the same amount of armor weighs less, but the maximum number of points per hit location do not change. You can't actually get MORE protection by using Ferro Fibrous, it just weighs less. That's the way it worked in the board game, that's the way it works in MWO. (And every other mech game if I'm not mistaken.)

[FupDup]

I've seen suggestions in the past (by Konniving I think) for mech armor caps to be based on armor weight, so for example you could have 16 tons of STD armor or 16 tons of FF on a mech. This would actually let FF live up to the TT description and maybe make it worth using without Endo first.

Mechanically impossible because maintenance mode, but still an interesting idea.

[ScrapIron Prime]

FupDup, on 03 January 2022 - 01:46 PM, said:

I've seen suggestions in the past (by Konniving I think) for mech armor caps to be based on armor weight, so for example you could have 16 tons of STD armor or 16 tons of FF on a mech. This would actually let FF live up to the TT description and maybe make it worth using without Endo first.

Mechanically impossible because maintenance mode, but still an interesting idea.

I disagree with doing it, but I think it WOULD be possible. Equipping certain omni pods grants a buff to the entire mech, so why couldn't equipping Ferro grant a 12% armor buff identical to what the survival tree gives you?

Again, I don't want that, it goes against lore and would be a potential game balance issue, so I'd vote no.

[LordNothing]

im fine with ff just being an armor weight buff. but start doing things like reactive or reflective armor, and they will probibly need to come with intrinsic quirks. pretty sure this is how things like targeting computers and bap work and im pretty sure that upgrades are treated as any other piece of equipment internally. stick it between xl engine mobility quirks and blueshield on the list of things that will never be implemented.

Edited by LordNothing, 03 January 2022 - 02:44 PM.

[Escef]

Blood Rose, on 03 January 2022 - 01:35 PM, said:

Lore wise FF provides better protection (more armour per ton) and is quite useable on TT, but Endo saves a set 10% of the units weight.
Typically this means that in MWO and, in theory, in TT Endo is better. In TT they are about the same, depending on your armour useage, but this is where lore comes in.
Lorewise you cannot switch a structure type from regular to Endo. You are essentially re-building the entire Mech. So FF is, in addition, a good way to get weight reduction on an older chassis that you are upgrading in a campaign.

Lore wise there's also the fact that ferro armor can be manufactured in any facility with the know how and tools. Endo steel requires orbital/space-based manufacturing facilities, because the foamed metals used in it can only be properly made in a microgravity environment. Most of these kinds of facilities did not survive the Succession Wars, which is why during the early clan invasion ferro armor was much more common than endo steel on Inner Sphere mechs. Amongst the clans, such facilities are resource intensive to construct and maintain, which limits the usage of endo steel (some of the more resource strapped clans, like the Blood Spirits, often cannot justify the material outlays for such things).

[1453 R]

I do believe that was the intended tabletop balance, yeah - Ferro armor is "inferior" to Endo structure in terms of performance, but it's cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to install, and cheaper to repair, as well as more readily available. All very big selling points...in a game where logistics matter.

Since "logistics" is a foreign concept in MWO, Endo is strictly superior in all cases to Ferro, and the Clans' ability to mount both in the same space the Sphere has to use on one is one of those sneaking imbalances people just hate. At this point the Sphere's mad over-generous quirks have more-or-less evened things up, but there are times I wish there were reasons to pick Endo over Ferro - or even to leave them off altogether and go with standard armor/structure. So incredibly few 'Mechs ever need the space, it's only ever assault 'Mechs with mass to spare. Blugh.

[Escef]

1453 R, on 04 January 2022 - 06:11 AM, said:

I do believe that was the intended tabletop balance, yeah - Ferro armor is "inferior" to Endo structure in terms of performance, but it's cheaper to manufacture, cheaper to install, and cheaper to repair, as well as more readily available. All very big selling points...in a game where logistics matter.

Ironically, if you look at the c-bill costs in table top, endo steel is overall cheaper than ferro armor. While ferro armor is twice as expensive as normal armor, and endo steel is 4 times as expensive, these prices are by the ton. Double cost armor that saves at most 2 tons is not impressive. Quadruple cost structure that saves at most 5 tons sounds a lot better. Especially as armor gets blasted off of mechs on the regular.

When the c-bill prices for these things were originally written down there were no modifications for the in-universe scarcity. Nor for the fact that ferro armor should be ludicrously common, thus bringing economy of scale into things.

I put together a quick spread sheet several years ago (a bit over 11, according to the file's metadata), and the resulting computations found that even on the most expensive of mechs, the extra c-bill expenditures for endo steel were almost 130k less than ferro armor. That doesn't even factor in the reality that ferro armor will need to be constantly replaced.

So, yeah, TPTB at the time did not do a good job of making the crunch of the economics reflect the fluff in the lore. (On the off chance you aren't familiar with the terminology, crunch and fluff are table top gaming terms that refer to rules and mechanics vs descriptive text. A wonderful example of this is in the original description of the Atlas, which states it can casually pick up and toss smaller mechs, when by the rules it can only lift the lightest of industrialmechs, and most certainly not a full sized battlemech.)

[1453 R]

Hm. See, I did not know that, I'd always believed ferro armor was cheaper to field/repair than endo structure. 'Course, I've never had any familiarity with the tabletop game, never been any real way to break into it before.

Still. A curious decision indeed, especially as realistically a BattleMech would need to be completely redesigned to factor in the increased bulk of an endo steel skeleton, and there is no god damned way ES should float the way it does. But eh. Vagaries of rules abstraction for a for-fun game, ne?

[ScrapIron Prime]

1453 R, on 04 January 2022 - 08:00 AM, said:

Still. A curious decision indeed, especially as realistically a BattleMech would need to be completely redesigned to factor in the increased bulk of an endo steel skeleton, and there is no god damned way ES should float the way it does. But eh. Vagaries of rules abstraction for a for-fun game, ne?

Ferro Fibrous takes up internal space too. I get that this is game balance, but one would think that just slapping on better armor would be easier than that. Retrofitting new armor is an external thing, whereas adding endosteel is changing out the chassis, suspension, and frame... more of a ground-up kind of thing. To me, that always said the cost of these items was backward.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1453 R]

That's a good point, honestly. I could understand the need for a new armor formulation to require new fittings, anchors, and other points inside the machine and take up some extra volume that way, but on retrospect it doesn't make much sense for armor to chew up so much internal volume.

Blugh. Oh well. What is it we always say? "Stop expecting realism from BattleTech and you'll like it way better."