17 replies to this topic

[Widowmaker1981]

the check engine light, on 19 May 2023 - 11:21 AM, said:

The dissipation and overall cap penalties are logical and make sense from every perspective I can think of but that "cram 50 heat into 25 cap and btw good luck dissipating that in time" effect could stand to be Old Yellered already. I know I am not the first, and I won't be the last to say this is dumb.

I could be wrong here because i havent tested it properly but, based on what ive noticed happening, there is no heat spike.

There is a large reduction in heat cap, so if you're redlining already it feels like a heat spike because you suddenly go way over cap and take damage / shut down, but if you are at 0 heat when the torso blows, i dont think it increases.

[Haipyng]

There are plenty of mechanics carried over from days when they tried to stick to cannon, but it proved to be impossible to balance it for a FPS. Also where quirks, the gauss charge, tinkering with weights, etc, came from. Clan mechs of course were more powerful, but table top balanced them into Stars rather than Lances, and the weight class mattered, Light Stars, Medium Stars, etc.

There was just no way to try to balance the tabletop game using FPS mechanics, which is why we have this assorted strangeness today.

When it was just the IS mechs it wasn't too bad. As time went on it spiraled into the complexity we have today. One of the reasons it has a hard time attracting new folks, too complicated to pick up all the nuances easily.

[Meep Meep]

The heat capacity penalty needs to be either removed or toned down greatly. Keep the loss to dissipation though as there should be some penalty for having a third of your mech blown off.

[sycocys]

If you are getting engine crit space blown off your mech, and the cooling that is attached to it - doesn't really make sense that all the heat stored in the now missing sections gets instantly transferred to the bits that are remaining.

That's how it currently works as far as I can tell, you are retaining 100% of the heat you had generated and having your cap instantly removed which in practice is effectively a heat spike.

Losing the cap completely makes sense, just like getting sinks crit or losing an arm or std engine torso/leg with sinks in place - but what has never made sense is that the heat in those sinks isn't jettisoned with the sink.

[Scout Derek]

the check engine light, on 19 May 2023 - 11:21 AM, said:

The dissipation and overall cap penalties are logical and make sense from every perspective I can think of but that "cram 50 heat into 25 cap and btw good luck dissipating that in time" effect could stand to be Old Yellered already. I know I am not the first, and I won't be the last to say this is dumb.

As far as I know, no, they can't, because of how the game works. This is what happens when you don't invest much money into the game aside from artist stuff, and put it into your SP games instead.

[Magnus Santini]

Um, maybe they could make the mech lose half its speed instead of heat dissipation? If that is not enough it could lose half its torso twist too!

[Aidan Crenshaw]

Magnus Santini, on 20 May 2023 - 10:12 PM, said:

Um, maybe they could make the mech lose half its speed instead of heat dissipation? If that is not enough it could lose half its torso twist too!

Speed already gets reduced when a CXL/LFE mech loses one torso.

[LordNothing]

why not cap the heat spike at the base shutdown threshold? that way losing a side torso will not trigger a shutdown or put you over the damage threshold. the most it can do is redline you. heat containment nodes can be used to gain a little headroom.

also i dont know why heat being handled by a bunch of heat sinks on the destroyed side magically teleports to the still functional sinks. its like shooting a radiator, you are going to bleed hot coolant all over the ground.

Edited by LordNothing, 22 May 2023 - 08:53 AM.

[Widowmaker1981]

LordNothing, on 22 May 2023 - 08:29 AM, said:

also i dont know why heat being handled by a bunch of heat sinks on the destroyed side magically teleports to the still functional sinks. its like shooting a radiator, you are going to bleed hot coolant all over the ground.

You are right, its not really logically sensible for the heat to transfer over. But then id say its also not logically sensible to think a fusion reactor would still be at all functional if 20% of it was suddenly and violently removed...

At the end of the day, its a balance choice in a game. Arguing that it doesn't make logical sense in reality is kinda pointless, there are a whole heap of things like that** where 'realism' is ignored for the sake of balance.

As to whether its a good balance choice? Eh.. i dont know. You are crippled pretty badly when losing a C-XL (or LFE) side torso, to the extent that most builds wont be contributing much more that match.. but you arent dead like with an IS XL, and get a bunch more loadout tonnage than an IS mech with an LFE (which suffers the same penalty) has.

**eg if a "Particle Projection Cannon" is a weapon that fires a beam of accelerated subatomic particles, projectile speed should be at least C/100 - 3,000,000 m/s - even low end particle accelerator speeds are still a noticeable fraction of the speed of light

[LordNothing]

Widowmaker1981, on 22 May 2023 - 09:45 AM, said:

You are right, its not really logically sensible for the heat to transfer over. But then id say its also not logically sensible to think a fusion reactor would still be at all functional if 20% of it was suddenly and violently removed...

At the end of the day, its a balance choice in a game. Arguing that it doesn't make logical sense in reality is kinda pointless, there are a whole heap of things like that** where 'realism' is ignored for the sake of balance.

As to whether its a good balance choice? Eh.. i dont know. You are crippled pretty badly when losing a C-XL (or LFE) side torso, to the extent that most builds wont be contributing much more that match.. but you arent dead like with an IS XL, and get a bunch more loadout tonnage than an IS mech with an LFE (which suffers the same penalty) has.

**eg if a "Particle Projection Cannon" is a weapon that fires a beam of accelerated subatomic particles, projectile speed should be at least C/100 - 3,000,000 m/s - even low end particle accelerator speeds are still a noticeable fraction of the speed of light

still makes sense to keep the same proportion of heat as heat capacity. i think the other draw backs of those engines are strong enough to make up for it.

[Widowmaker1981]

LordNothing, on 22 May 2023 - 10:17 AM, said:

still makes sense to keep the same proportion of heat as heat capacity. i think the other draw backs of those engines are strong enough to make up for it.

Yeah, i wouldn't be opposed to that. It makes sense and prevents the edge cases where taking the ST of a C-XL/LFE mech forces it to suicide because it was already running hot, plus its not really a buff to performance otherwise.

Edited by Widowmaker1981, 22 May 2023 - 12:40 PM.

[TheCaptainJZ]

What if when the torso is destroyed, the amount of heat capacity lost is also subtracted from your heat pool? So if your capacity is 50 and you lose 20% (or whatever it is), you lose 10 heat capacity, but also just 10 heat so your heat gauge stays at the same level and you don't immediately overheat. But your heat capacity and dissipation are still reduced. You can pretend the excess heat dissipated to the air once the torso was destroyed for the realism argument. The immediate overheat problem seems to have always been the biggest complaint. It's a little bit of a buff for XL engines but it just would make for a better pilot experience.

And for IS XL engines, rework the rules so it's not immediate death, but make the penalty for losing a side torso greater than a LFE.

[Tarl Cabot]

TheCaptainJZ, on 22 May 2023 - 01:00 PM, said:

What if when the torso is destroyed, the amount of heat capacity lost is also subtracted from your heat pool? So if your capacity is 50 and you lose 20% (or whatever it is), you lose 10 heat capacity, but also just 10 heat so your heat gauge stays at the same level and you don't immediately overheat. But your heat capacity and dissipation are still reduced. You can pretend the excess heat dissipated to the air once the torso was destroyed for the realism argument. The immediate overheat problem seems to have always been the biggest complaint. It's a little bit of a buff for XL engines but it just would make for a better pilot experience.

And for IS XL engines, rework the rules so it's not immediate death, but make the penalty for losing a side torso greater than a LFE.

This +1.

PGI is utilizing only a portion of the engine crit rules and heatscale. Add that for any players running an IS trial mech or purchasing trial/champion/etc IS mechs w/isXL, even with the heat bar sitting at 0% isXL is instant death w/loss of a ST, whereas for cXL and the couple of mechs w/LFE it isn't. And it would make IS Omnimechs viable instead of players targeting a ST instead of CT/cockpit or both ST/legs to kill said mech. (CT/cockpit/both legs still needed for STD too ).

• isXL 40% Engine loss heat capacity / x% loss heat dissipation / 25% movement
  
• cXL 25-30% Engine loss heat capacity/ x% loss heat dissipation / 20% movement
  
• LFE 15-20% Engine loss heat capacity/ x% loss heat dissipation / 15% movement

In my view, as for the heat spike, all of that heat is not being stored in the lost heatsinks, it is being pushed through those heatsink exchangers by fluids. So the fluid is constantly flowing, pulling the heat from all parts of the mech. It losing some heatsinks and fluids before it closes off but now there are fewer heatsinks and the need to redistribute that fluid.

And to the poster about just reducing speed with a loss, that is already happening but it was NOT always the case. When Clans were introduced, PGI had not added any negative effects when that first ST was destroyed.

01-24-2017 cXL - Increase in heat dissipation penalty from 20% to 40% (many were expecting a change to isXL..)

https://mwomercs.com...14101-24jan2017

09-24-2015 Clarifications about Tiers/PSR..../ same month cXL also received movement penalty of 20%

https://mwomercs.com...-tiers-and-psr/

08-18-2015 New PSR system....

https://mwomercs.com...30-18-aug-2015/

02-17-2015 VOIP functionality using integrated team speak SDK.

https://mwomercs.com...bruary-roadmap/

12-11-2014 Community Warfare Beta Release

https://mwomercs.com...y-warfare-beta/

10-07-2014 cXL - Heat Penalty w/loss of one side torso 20% / isXL still dies to loss of one ST

https://mwomercs.com...tober-road-map/

09-08-2014 PGI bought out/kicked out IGP (publisher)

https://mwomercs.com...ux-infinis-igp/

06-23-2014 MM updates incoming

https://mwomercs.com...sizes-and-more/

06-17-2014 Clans are here (fyi for newer players, initially no heat dissipation nor movement penalty when 1st ST was destroyed....

https://mwomercs.com...nsmission-pt-2/

[LordNothing]

TheCaptainJZ, on 22 May 2023 - 01:00 PM, said:

What if when the torso is destroyed, the amount of heat capacity lost is also subtracted from your heat pool? So if your capacity is 50 and you lose 20% (or whatever it is), you lose 10 heat capacity, but also just 10 heat so your heat gauge stays at the same level and you don't immediately overheat. But your heat capacity and dissipation are still reduced. You can pretend the excess heat dissipated to the air once the torso was destroyed for the realism argument. The immediate overheat problem seems to have always been the biggest complaint. It's a little bit of a buff for XL engines but it just would make for a better pilot experience.

And for IS XL engines, rework the rules so it's not immediate death, but make the penalty for losing a side torso greater than a LFE.

the percentage of filled capacity would simply remain constant. you still just lost half* your capacity and half* your dissipation, got a speed cap, and any other ill effects losing part of your engine causes.

i also would mind some quirks that allow an isxl engine to survive losing a side torso. all be it with worse performance than a cleaved clan xl. this would be useful on light mechs and if we ever get is omnis with xl engines. these would be handed out sparingly to mechs that are in a bad position due to engine limits or because of hitboxes (like the hand full of mechs where you can hit the rear st from the front at certain angles).

*im also not clear on the effects of st loss. how many internal sinks do you lose? what about sinks in engine slots, do you lose those? do external sinks get promoted to internal sinks when you get below 10 internals? losing 20% (or 30% for hypothetical quirked isxl) of engine and engine slot sinks (as well as external sinks in missing components) makes the most sense, but its not all that intuitive.

Edited by LordNothing, 22 May 2023 - 10:51 PM.