36 replies to this topic

[Xhaleon]

Werewolf? Why put CASE in an IS XL mech? It won't save the engine from destruction, so its addition is completely moot. At least, from a random skirmish standpoint, since CASE can still protect the rest of the mech for salvage in a campaign. Still, I'd rather spend the tonnage elsewhere, and in MWO we will very likely follow the random skirmish structure fairly closely.

Light engines are a godsend for the Sphere for a good reason. Now, if only Clantech wasn't handwaved as being magically too difficult for even the most developed IS factories to reverse engineer and churn out every cycle...

[WerewolfX]

I was speaking from a game play perspective of my Other Idea post I realize that in TT that's how it works when a Mech with an IS XL engine loses a torso it goes poof. However, this isn't tabletop.

[verybad]

There are a lot of options possible for thsi sort of thing other than *drum roll* following the btech TT rules exactly. For instance, Engines (and other internal systems) could get a hit point system similiar to the overall system.

Why you ask? Because this allows for a more flexible damage system, armoring interrnal components, tracking internal communications (eg what happens if the arm Autocannon loses it's connection to the overal targeting system, but still works?

Believe me, this is not an attempt to "skip" TT rules, more a recognization that the TT rules are very simple, (meant for tracking on a single sheet of paper), and could be more complex and inclusive of a deeper damage system than is currently familiar without making the game more complex to play. This would add interesting elements and more variety in damage.

Armored components, more and less robust compnents (eg a Clan XL engine would have more hit points but not be armored by default)

The Module system discussed for Information warfare could be used for making the critical hits and internal compnents system very flexible and fun.

After all, battlemechs aren't actually built with separated torso compnents (side and center) A clan XL engine could be destroyed by hitting it from a side and never damaging the center torso armor (as the TT rules woudl require you to do, which is silly) moreover so could a standard engine.

Inner Sphere XL engines are more vulnerable than Clan XL engines because of the TT rules, not through any true simulation of the way damage occurs in battlemechs. There is no golden rule that prescribes this.

I know this post will be ridiculed by purists, but all I ask is just look at it with an open mind.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

Seems very logical to me. But there again I'd like to see crits and internals properly modelled as well.

[elitewolverine]

VYCanis, on 04 January 2012 - 12:13 AM, said:

durability with an XL, no, thats not what i want. Its not even my cake to eat, i hate using XLs, i prefer zombie mechs whenever possible.

however, the original "side torso destruction with an XL=dead mech rule" was balanced for a system where size and shape of a mech have no bearing at all on how difficult or easy it is to hit certain parts, "wiff factor" was high, and on average damage tended to spread itself around on a mech.

In real time 3d. certain mechs are of different sizes, with different sized hitboxes, and by nature of people's natural aiming skills, they will usually go for aiming at general center mass unless specifically trying to leg or arm an enemy.

This means that in MW games people lose side torsos a lot more often and a lot faster than they do in TT. Even when the usual go-to tactic is just core out the CT as fast as possible, and ignore all else.

Using an XL and having a side torso go poof, i think should be a major problem that affects a mech's longevity and performance severely (aside from the fact you just lost a side torso and everything in it), and much more so than had the person been using a standard. I just don't think the mech should keel over dead from just losing a side, but be more likely to do so from various potential consequences.

So that a mech with a standard engine can lose a side torso and still potentially fight on, minus whatever he lost but penalized no further.
wwere as a mech with an XL loses a side and is now running like an oven, suffering speed loss, and/or any other host of crippling problems.

But you still wanting your cake and eat it too...

Your wanting the benefits of an XL, which is seriously a game changer, but none of its drawbacks...ie death.

Lets take my above example. 40tonner, 6/9 walk, PPC as main weapon, 2heatsinks and 2mediums for backup.

You take the extra 5.5 tons. For the sake of fun. Since a medium laser does 3 heat, and you have 12 heat to play with. Lets throw 3 additional on the mech. Put 2 in the CT, and one in the Head. Then put 2 additional heatsinks in the legs (all 4 in reality).

Are you honestly saying that in a 'dog fight' That your extra 9pts of damage and extra 2pts of heat dissipation will not tip the battle against a mech who has just cored out your torso. Cored out obviously being not only did he chew out your armor but internal structure as well. Now your able to 'fight' still and you turn around putting all 5 medium lasers onto him...

More than likely if he is the same weight as you, and he is able to core out your side torso which was maxed armor to begin with, he is probably suffering a similar damage profile from your PPC and 2ML's

And in the rules for engine hits...

1 engine hit creates 5heat per turn and 2 engine hits creates 10heat per turn.

Continue with the scenario above, say you have damaged his CT, he has 2 engine hits, he is suffering from 10heat. If he has no additional heatsinks other than the ten offered by his engine, everytime he moves he is building up heat, and firing makes it worse.

Most light mechs only come with 1 or 2 additional heatsinks and thats a maybe. So his non xl status is a hinderence.

You can spin the i dont want to die from 3 engine hits all you want but the advantages are clear if you do not.

The advantage would be why wouldnt i take a xl out? i dont die so screw it, i save weight and i get MORE WEAPONS

[elitewolverine]

Xhaleon, on 04 January 2012 - 11:10 AM, said:

Werewolf? Why put CASE in an IS XL mech? It won't save the engine from destruction, so its addition is completely moot. At least, from a random skirmish standpoint, since CASE can still protect the rest of the mech for salvage in a campaign. Still, I'd rather spend the tonnage elsewhere, and in MWO we will very likely follow the random skirmish structure fairly closely.

Light engines are a godsend for the Sphere for a good reason. Now, if only Clantech wasn't handwaved as being magically too difficult for even the most developed IS factories to reverse engineer and churn out every cycle...

you said it salvage...and the all important part of the pilot not dying...

Ammo explosions are messy resulting not only in the loss of a expensive mech but a mechwarrior pilot.

Sure its a game, but coming from the table top scene, case even with IS xl's is a godsend for early tech campaigns..

I can remember a 0/1 pilot/gunner that got his ammo hit and he forgot he had case cause he was sporting xl. The look on his face was great, then of course the smile when he was reminded he had case.

[VYCanis]

@elitewolverine

i don't see how its "cake and eating it too" if standard engines still make for a tougher mech and XL engines are still riskier

I never said none of the drawbacks. There can be plenty of drawbacks to make XLs unattractive once a mech starts getting critted and torsos blown out and such. I just don't think auto dying to side torso destruction makes for a good game.

Like i said before, the side torso XL kills rules are balanced for a game where aiming for center of mass and mech shape has no meaning in the context of its rules, but definitely apply in real time with player controlled aim.

So take your average standard engine using mech, Blow out a side torso. Ok, its still coming at you with whatever its got left. No extra heat, no speed penalties. its impaired, but its still a potential threat.

Drop an XL in there instead. Blow out a side torso, instead of killing it, it is extremely crippled. Its heat is through the roof from engine damage, its speed is curtailed, and probably has all sorts of other problems, making the mech much more impaired and less able to continue the fight and easier to take down.

Would it be as much of a risk as being completely and immediately taken out of a fight? No, but thats a far cry from saying there wouldn't be any drawbacks.



Additionally. Where taking an XL in the TT was risky but not on its own a death sentence, due to the way hits and damage tended to spread around, having an XL using the same exact rules in real time would lead to XLs being full on deathtraps, much moreso than in the TT. In affect you'd misrepresent the original balance of the TT more from sticking to the original rules than you would without.

[Halfinax]

Vycaris, because it's destroying the engine. and it's mounts. The XL engine needs the extra space to function and be lighter. Just as your car cannot function with a third of it riddled with holes and no engine mounts to keep it in place neither can a 'Mechs fusion engine function full of holes and with a third of it's mass unsupported.

The take for an XL engine is you get to mount an engine that weighs half as much as it's standard brethren, but at the cost of taking more space and being more vulnerable as a result. If you take away either of those you imbalance the XL to being the only real choice.

I get what you are saying about adhering the the TT rules slavishly, but this is one of those things where the TT rules can translate well to the Sim world of MechWarrior. Mind you that those XL engines are actually made of a more fragile material as per the lore as well.

[UncleKulikov]

Basically take the spirit of the tabletop rule.

You trade weight for a greater chance that the engine can be hit. So, make XL engines more vulnerable to damage either through critical chance, or something like that.

[elitewolverine]

VYCanis, on 04 January 2012 - 03:20 PM, said:

@elitewolverine

i don't see how its "cake and eating it too" if standard engines still make for a tougher mech and XL engines are still riskier

I never said none of the drawbacks. There can be plenty of drawbacks to make XLs unattractive once a mech starts getting critted and torsos blown out and such. I just don't think auto dying to side torso destruction makes for a good game.

Like i said before, the side torso XL kills rules are balanced for a game where aiming for center of mass and mech shape has no meaning in the context of its rules, but definitely apply in real time with player controlled aim.

So take your average standard engine using mech, Blow out a side torso. Ok, its still coming at you with whatever its got left. No extra heat, no speed penalties. its impaired, but its still a potential threat.

Drop an XL in there instead. Blow out a side torso, instead of killing it, it is extremely crippled. Its heat is through the roof from engine damage, its speed is curtailed, and probably has all sorts of other problems, making the mech much more impaired and less able to continue the fight and easier to take down.

Would it be as much of a risk as being completely and immediately taken out of a fight? No, but thats a far cry from saying there wouldn't be any drawbacks.



Additionally. Where taking an XL in the TT was risky but not on its own a death sentence, due to the way hits and damage tended to spread around, having an XL using the same exact rules in real time would lead to XLs being full on deathtraps, much moreso than in the TT. In affect you'd misrepresent the original balance of the TT more from sticking to the original rules than you would without.

But if everyone aims for the CT whats the diff? Once that CT is gone all mechs are dead...

And yea heat goes threw the roof but i bet it will offer just enough time to "UNLOAD YOUR WEAPONS"

That in and of itself presents a huge issue, it allows that one last final hurrah to kill another mech that would otherwise not be killed.

You dont want to die we get it, but the weight savings and extra speed or weapons or both can do enough to kill another mech WHEN IT SHOULDNT...

Thats the whole point, its literally a game changer, it was a game changer for the clans and now you want to give that same ability to IS xl's

And as for heat...you realize that if i cored out your torso in my example you would gain a whopping 1...say it 1 heat per what ever second they decide a turn is. It was believed that ever turn was 5-15seconds on average so a 10 turn game was like 3min dogfight in RL time...give or take.

So in my example if i was odd enough to couple my ppc and 2 lasers into my left arm, then the other 3 into the CT and Head, Heat sinks in the legs..

If 15 heat is given because my xl engine was cored into my right side. I would gain 1 heat, not alot when you look at a heat scale, not alot by far for 3025-3029 campaigns.

And if your running double heat's even better, considering your using xl tech it would only make sense to give me double heat sink tech. Which in my example would give me up to 28heat dissipation...

So again, added heat is NOTHING. Even if you were to say coring out a engine would cause half speed im still a 3/5 running machine...that can kill...

Your looking at the I dont wanna die picture and not looking at how much an XL can change the life/death of the other pilot.

So the question doesnt become 'should i risk taking xl's' the question becomes 'why not...'

[VYCanis]

and yet most of what you're describing is from the standpoint of the TT without taking into account the differences that would have to occur in translating to real time. The numbers would not be exactly the same, for starters, and rates of things would need adjusting, and so on.

additionally, if you are "only" accruing a little bit of heat each given amount of time, it means your means to cool off has been effectively eliminated. it means nothing short of shutdown will cool you off, That in and of itself is pretty damn crippling.

And even if you have enough heatsinks to bleed off excess engine heat. Your heat efficiency is gutted and your means to fight severely curtailed.

Like i said before, i don't plan on making much use of XLs. But i don't want the go to strategy when it comes to everyone who does (and a great many stock mech variants do) to simply be, gut a side torso and move on. Thats not satisfying for me and thats not satisfying for them. Especially since side torsos are much easier to pop than legs, arms, or anything else really

Edited by VYCanis, 05 January 2012 - 12:22 AM.

[Dlardrageth]

Two minor notes to that one, VYCanis:

1. We don't know at all how expensive/affordable/obtainable XL engines will for refits (not on chassis that have them stock obviously). Thus they might at least till the clan invasion expansion be a rather rare due to hard to obtain item.And that would give some credit to the theory that they should not be that easy to destroy/use as weakspot. So that would sort of warrant some tweaks there.

2. We don't know either much about the damage/hitbox modeling projected by PGI yet. I don't think it is written in stone that the TT system will be ported 1:1 in that aspect. As discussed elsewhere, the rather huge hitboxes that would give in a computer game might not be appropriate any more. Might not even have been with MW4, but well... So if we get a damage modeling that has, say, 4 different hitboxes for each side torso (just an assumed number), that could resolve the whole issue with the XL engines you depicted.

Of course, we don't know yet, so might be a totally valid concern. Or it could turn out we were worried about nothing.

[Nik Van Rhijn]

With mechs that carry ammo I nearly always aim for the side torso (if I can) simply because they have slightly less armour and that is where the ammo is. This is whatever the engine. To be honest, until they finally tell us what we are getting in the way of a mechlab I will be working on using standard mechs with maybe some variants available. There's no guarantee that we will have any XL engined mechs available at the start, or that we would be able to afford the upgrade.

[VYCanis]

@Dlardrageth
@Nik Van Rhijn

those are good points

[Pht]

VYCanis, on 03 January 2012 - 07:31 PM, said:

well its not the individual crits that concern me so much,

its that the same 3 strikes "yer engine is kaput" rule that applies to standard engines applies to XLs as well, And with there being 3 crits in each side torso, it means that your mech can be easily killed by coring out a side torso without so much as touching the center.

Somehow, I don't see that this is a problem. XL's free up a LOT of weight and make the assault class viable as a mobile option instead of old school defense points that are only kind of mobile.

[Liam]

Normally I would be for advanced damage model, simulation like, not simplified as in TT.
With hit boxes for:

- weapons
- cockpit
- electronic bays (by considering there redundant standard systems (BAP etc. excluded))
- ammunition bays
- Internal structure base structure
- actuators and myomer stuff
- armor plates separated in many hit box segments ( 4-8 ? 1m² ? )
- engine
- heat sinks
- gyro

other stuff RNG based. Maybe it is still an overkill for multilayer game. However splitted armor hit boxes in 4-6 segments would change the whole game ...

Splash damage and penetration (critical damage will be then needed)

then the first poll choice could be a good solution.

[Halfinax]

@Liam. Gotta say if they don't subsection the sections then the game will be pretty flawed. I think for a balanced gameplay experience this sort of compromise is necessary from the TT rules. Those rules exist to supplement a dice rolling based mechanic. I think this should be more player skill based (albeit it with a CoF system) to better integrate player skill with the randomness associated with firing while on the move. A sub-segmented section would better represent this, and to some extent that would mean splash damage if for no other reason than that damage would be spread out at a relatively random rate based on denting from balistics and the running of energy weapons which would be more of a multi-moment attack (hits for a few moments and isn't just single hitscan attack).

The subsectioning that has been suggested in other threads would actually better balance the game in my opinion regardless of whether PGI chooses a pinpoint accuracy system (really hope they don't) or a Cone of Fire system (really hope they do) in either case the damage should be spread out in some manner, and a subsectioning of the armor would be most appropriate to both a) provide longevity to rounds, and help people feel they can take damage without being instantly made obsolete in a 10+ minute match.