20 replies to this topic

[Virgil Caine]

I imagine there are some concerns among veteran mechwarrior players of what we have seen in previous incarnations of Mechwarrior games, especially MW4. Abuse of heavier mechs at the expense of the presence of any smaller mechs. Simply because smaller mechs were plainly inferior.

While I think that developers can go a long way toward changing the balance, by adding information warfare, and command units. The disparity in firepower cannot be overlooked. Knowing where the enemy is, and where he's going is largely useless unless you can bring force to bear on him that makes a difference.

One other thing that can change the paradigm of previous MechWarrior incarnations are the maps themselves. Very large maps can add value to a light or medium mech. In MW4, on the vast majority of maps, you spawned basically in range of the enemy spawn. You maybe had a 200 meter jaunt to get in position to fire, and boom, there it went. I think by having very large maps, the element of speed will matter much more, imagine an Atlas having to cover a large open area to get into range to capture a town, that is already occupied by medium, and heavy mechs in covered positions. Or moreso, medium and light mechs moving in to capture drop points, so that heavier mechs can then arrive closer to the action.

However, this being said, I don't think any amount of tweaking or changes are going to really balance out the firepower that larger vehicles produce.

My idea to balance this out is to have a Weight-per-slot deployment scheme. 12 slots on each side, each with 100 tons of space. 1200 tons.

Every ton under 1200 that is deployed, will be made up for with armor assets. So 12 50 ton mechs will allow for 600 tons worth of vehicles to deploy as well. Vehicles would be AI controlled, but they could help balance out the disparity of firepower between larger mechs and smaller mechs.

[Vulpesveritas]

+1
I think it's a great idea, and would give people more of a skill level rather than just trying to sit there and return fire at each other, suddenly it comes down to reactions and tactics.

= Light mechs win

[Kenyon Burguess]

im hoping a variety of missions will also help solve that issue. if the mission you accepted is to enter a city and destroy an objective. light and medium mechs would be much better suited to accomplishing this without ever engaging assault mechs trying to guard it by sneaking in and attacking from different ranges and angles that the defenders cant respond to fast enough.

[John Talbert]

light mechs with narc beacon. wonder how they will implement player vs player and if a tonnage per side will exist and not a player limit.

[Aurust]

Simple....the lighter mechs score more points when dealing damage to heavier mechs... standard team battle.

[Virgil Caine]

Aegis Kleais™, on 07 January 2012 - 01:23 PM, said:

A light mech, as impressive with Info Tech abilities as possible, just isn't meant to go up against Heavies and Assaults on their own, and they should never attempt to take on a competent pilot and expect a victory. (Luckily, there will be very many inept pilots out there for you to pick on)

Instead, you need to utilize your technological handicap over the larger Mechs and utilize "hit and run" tactics. Staying in a Heavy/Assaults crosshairs for anymore than that would spell imminent doom. (But only if you can afford $200 per vowel).

Killing power isn't the only value you might bring to the table, however. Given the nature of the game, what experiences veteran Mechwarrior players have had: Most maps will be 'figured out' fairly quickly. Information Warfare will fall by the wayside, and it will turn into "Go heavy, or go home"

"You aren't made to take on heavy and assaults..." People won't just accept this limitation, they will change to the vehicle that will allow them to... hence original problem.

[Virgil Caine]

Aurust, on 07 January 2012 - 02:31 PM, said:

Simple....the lighter mechs score more points when dealing damage to heavier mechs... standard team battle.

Being alive allows you to shoot more often. So, the assaults will still out score lights. And besides? Points? LOL

[Omigir]

I think, from what I have read, the dev's have it right.

The value of a light mech in MW:O is everything. Small map or not, if you dont now which direction to run those 200 meters to get into fire position, you have a very bad chance that you choose the wrong direction out of a choice of 360. Light mechs are not there as fighters, but scout, LOSD detection and fire support. Light mechs were never really meant to go up against larger mechs.

At that same point, A team without at least one light mech and they are running all brawlers, will find themselves constantly flanked and out manuvered as the other team with a light, will always know where the apponent is. Light mech pilots, good ones, are going to be worth thier battlemech's weight in gold. Especialy if they can keep a constant LOS and not get blown away every 5 seconds.

So i dont think there will be a mass to 'assaults' like we saw in MW4.

<I do think there will be a weight limit on drops to help keep teams ballanced, that way one team that is short a person or two, has a little more weight free to play with on mech matching. So if you want to run all assults, your drop probably wont support all your players. This is just an assumption but weght and bv combined is a good way to ballance a team>

Edited by Omigir, 07 January 2012 - 03:53 PM.

[Larry Headrick]

All very intersting, but you are forgetting inderect fire suport. The light mech pilot can call in Artillery suport. a large slow mech can try to catch me as i dance just outside of his range, and call in an air strike, or a strafe from an aerospace fighter.
Wash, rinse, repeat. I won the battle without firing any of my own weapons.
By the way I pilot the Locust 20 tun light scout mech.
So what im saying is yes a light can defeat assualt mechs. Just not by himself.

[Aurust]

Virgil Caine, on 07 January 2012 - 02:49 PM, said:

Being alive allows you to shoot more often. So, the assaults will still out score lights. And besides? Points? LOL

Yea points....thats how we do it still on mw4 mercs......it allows calculation of individual effort.if we are only using kills then ya obv everyone will go heavy...i've personally been top score many times in a light mech simply because you ring up the assaults like a pinball machine...you will obv have a terrible kill/death ratio but points wins the game in a standard game.

The assualts that stay alive longer will most likely be shooting at heavy assaults so they wont score as high, and a kill on a lighter mech gives you less points.

In a light mech, if i see a mech is crit armor anywhere you can be guaranteed i will blow you up.....and in the process get tons of points.

So that is how light mechs can be utilized...assuming there is a fair scoring system. I'll hold my breath though considering how bungled this whole thing has been since mw4 mercs.

Edited by Aurust, 07 January 2012 - 04:47 PM.

[DeathMachine]

I'm pretty sure there are going to be objectives. Maybe some objectives that faster mechs need to get to first? Otherwise MWO will be a mindless assault mech game like MW4, which I seriously doubt will happen. Medium mechs seem useless to me though. Why would you want to pilot a medium when you can pilot a light mech to reach that objective or scout an enemy position extremely fast and get out fast if necessary. Or pilot a heavy with less speed but superior weapons and armor. Medium mechs should have a special role.

I would like to see equipment or modules (whatever they are called) EXCLUSIVELY to light and medium mechs.

[trycksh0t]

DeathMachine, on 07 January 2012 - 09:02 PM, said:

I'm pretty sure there are going to be objectives. Maybe some objectives that faster mechs need to get to first? Otherwise MWO will be a mindless assault mech game like MW4, which I seriously doubt will happen. Medium mechs seem useless to me though. Why would you want to pilot a medium when you can pilot a light mech to reach that objective or scout an enemy position extremely fast and get out fast if necessary. Or pilot a heavy with less speed but superior weapons and armor. Medium mechs should have a special role.

I would like to see equipment or modules (whatever they are called) EXCLUSIVELY to light and medium mechs.

Roles of mediums come down to which medium you're talking about. The medium class, as a whole, is designed to be versatile. Mediums can be heavy scouts (Assassin / Cicada), Indirect Fire-Support (Dervish / Trebuchet), Direct Fire-Support (Griffon / Enforcer), or straight-up brawlers (Phoenix Hawk / Wolverine). They're also incredibly cost-effective, Lights die in direct combat, Heavies are expensive and better left to blunt offensives, Assaults are ridiculously expensive. Mediums are the grunts, hold the line 'til cavalry arrives.

Edited by trycksh0t, 07 January 2012 - 09:32 PM.

[DeathMachine]

I could see a heavy scout role for mediums and a light mech escort, but otherwise a heavy mech would be a better choice for all other roles IMO. Anyone else think that lights and mediums should get exclusive equipment?

Edited by DeathMachine, 07 January 2012 - 09:53 PM.

[Fooooo]

DeathMachine, on 07 January 2012 - 09:49 PM, said:

I could see a heavy scout role for mediums and a light mech escort, but otherwise a heavy mech would be a better choice for all other roles IMO. Anyone else think that lights and mediums should get exclusive equipment?

I dare say that the lighter mechs will have advantages in detection range and how hard they are to detect themselves, either by default or from exclusive modules / equipment only available for light/med mechs.


It makes it much easier to make the scout role more useful/played doing it that way.

Edited by Foòóoo, 07 January 2012 - 11:34 PM.

[Pave Low]

"Mediums are the grunts & hold the line until the cavalry arrives."
- trycksh0t

100% agree there. Assaults will be ridiculously expensive & too many light mechs don't cut it.

So good call on the mediums man. From other comments I was beginning to wonder if they are redundant now...

[NiDes]

Virgil Caine, on 07 January 2012 - 11:10 AM, said:

I imagine there are some concerns among veteran mechwarrior players of what we have seen in previous incarnations of Mechwarrior games, especially MW4. Abuse of heavier mechs at the expense of the presence of any smaller mechs. Simply because smaller mechs were plainly inferior.

While I think that developers can go a long way toward changing the balance, by adding information warfare, and command units. The disparity in firepower cannot be overlooked. Knowing where the enemy is, and where he's going is largely useless unless you can bring force to bear on him that makes a difference.

One other thing that can change the paradigm of previous MechWarrior incarnations are the maps themselves. Very large maps can add value to a light or medium mech. In MW4, on the vast majority of maps, you spawned basically in range of the enemy spawn. You maybe had a 200 meter jaunt to get in position to fire, and boom, there it went. I think by having very large maps, the element of speed will matter much more, imagine an Atlas having to cover a large open area to get into range to capture a town, that is already occupied by medium, and heavy mechs in covered positions. Or moreso, medium and light mechs moving in to capture drop points, so that heavier mechs can then arrive closer to the action.

However, this being said, I don't think any amount of tweaking or changes are going to really balance out the firepower that larger vehicles produce.

My idea to balance this out is to have a Weight-per-slot deployment scheme. 12 slots on each side, each with 100 tons of space. 1200 tons.

Every ton under 1200 that is deployed, will be made up for with armor assets. So 12 50 ton mechs will allow for 600 tons worth of vehicles to deploy as well. Vehicles would be AI controlled, but they could help balance out the disparity of firepower between larger mechs and smaller mechs.

Or just categorize it per map, say Light will have have a range of 30 to 50 tons, Medium will have a range of 55 to 65 tons, Heavy will have 70 to 90, Assualt will be 95 to 100 or whatever so that we could have at least 3 or 4 cutom mechs catergorized and not just only one primary, if this is the case.

[Black Sunder]

NiDes, on 08 January 2012 - 02:24 AM, said:

Or just categorize it per map, say Light will have have a range of 30 to 50 tons, Medium will have a range of 55 to 65 tons, Heavy will have 70 to 90, Assualt will be 95 to 100 or whatever so that we could have at least 3 or 4 cutom mechs catergorized and not just only one primary, if this is the case.

Light mechs go from 20-35. Medium from 40-55. Heavies go from 60-75 and assaults from 80-100.

[Derick Cruisaire]

I am hoping that the maps will be mission based. Take and hold, capture the flag, seek and destroy, and so on. When you are looking for a match, I imagine the type of mission will be displayed so you can see whether you want to participate with the Mech you have available. Although I feel that with a good Pilot any Mech can be used for any mission. Some Mechs will be better suited to some types of missions. With a variety of objectives I can see viable uses for every type of Mech in the Battletech universe.

[Fear Radick]

With this "Class" system they are implementing, it kind of seems to me that they will restrict how many of each congruent mech class is available in each drop to force more teamwork.

[Yeach]

Lag might have skewed MW3 a bit but it favoured smaller mechs and smaller weapons.

MW4 went the other extreme favouring larger weapons and larger mechs.

If given a choice I would go with MW4 since it makes more sense that larger mechs SHOULD be more powerful than the smaller mechs because they can carry more weapons.

MW4 address all the perceived shortfalls of MW3 (15ERSML/Flamer Scats). Players got what they wished for.