GreyNovember, on 02 February 2025 - 07:52 PM, said:
At the very least I don't recall anything in the vein of "Arm modififer that weighs X, has Y slots, and Adds Z melee damage" in the battlemech construction manual.
The best case scenario for the wet dream that is beating someone to death is
THIS thing, which moves at 86 with MASC engaged, deals 20 damage on a successful hit.
If you go for the TSM variant, you start running 1.5x as fast and hit for 40 damage per swing, if you remain above a certain heat threshold.
Here's what that looks like in MWO terms. You'll have to fudge the armor, because the remaining tonnage definitely does not fit a 100 tonner hatchet.
So at the point where you go
absolutely all in, yeah, there's a solid argument to be made for it.
IDK what the table top values would be for melee weapons, and I know the armor values are doubled in MWO for PVP playability.
Last month was the first time I tested MW5 melee with all the available modifiers for melee, and they have stuff like optical and IR stealth, the optical stealth is particularly fun, it makes the mech invisible, not much effect on enemy targetting, ~20% reduced hit, it's just fun more than anything.
And Triple Strength Myomer that increases run speed and melee damage as the mech gets hotter, so lots of incentive to do a hot build, such as burn lasers to get close and the use melee to finished them off.
IDK if anyone has ever tried to read the entire Sarna.net web site, it's massive. That's why I assumed all these things are buried in lore somewhere (hundreds of books!) , even if they aren't in "standard" table top games.
~15 different gyros, lots of special things for heat modification (banks, exchangers, cooling lines, cooling jackets), PPC capacitors, Harjel, reflective armor, hardened armor, etc, too many to even think about. I love being able to craft extremely custom builds.
I should do a write-up on some of the ways this stuff could be used for a MW2 game.
My current thinking is individual mechs should be more characters in games like World of Warcraft, where a mech starts at level 1, and goes up to level ~100, using something like a "gear score" which shows how much the mech is leveled up and customized, and this also effects which tier you can drop into in any individual game. So you might be a Tier 1 player, but you jump in an unleveled mech and you don't get to play in what would be thought of as Tier 1.
Right now we classify pilots in tiers, no matter how unskilled your mech is. We can change that by taking the mech as well as the pilot into account.
That way we can start with something like an inner sphere stock mech as a level 1, and that same mech can level up via incorporating better weapons (perhaps even individual clan tech added to inner sphere mechs)
Make it a long progression to level an individual mech up with the finest equipment.
And the game itself can move along a timeline just as in lore, starting at IS, with a long slow progression to better equipment as various clan techs become available, and eventually various IS and los tech becomes available in the game.
Make it so individual mechs have a long slow leveling process to get to max tier.
Maybe this is a pipe dream, IDK if we could ever get the player base to make a game like that work with ~10,000 active players right now. On the other hand, if it was expansive enough it could draw a larger player base.
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