61 replies to this topic

[Yeach]

Might not appeal to some people from TT or even BattleTech (might not be this game either) but I think we should get rid of weapons that do low damage (<5 dmg per turn).
specifically the weapons
AC2, small lasers and machine guns; an alternate is make them into a weapons array (MW4 machine gun array)

BattleTech card game and Mechcommander already did so;
ie notice that there are no AC2, small lasers or machine guns in Mechcommander (Light AC was a AC5)

For Mechs that already exist with these weapons could be modified to fit the removal of the weapons;
ie Blackjack two AC2 would equal one AC5
Charger with 4 small lasers combine to make 2 medium lasers
2 MG and ammo equal a machine gun array.
etc

Anyways just a suggestion to simplify the game with less variables (weapons) for balancing.
sidenote: would also remove the 15 small/ersmall/machinegun boats.

[Exilyth]

Could you please elaborate on why you would want theese weapons removed, aside from 'low damage' and 'simplifiying the game'?

A lot of them are not very strong, but still usefull, e.g. the AC2 has a very long range.

Also, heat output would not match up, e.g. small laser - heat 1 vs medium laser - heat 3.
This would change the affected variants heat profile, mostly in a bad way.

Edited by Exilyth, 19 February 2012 - 06:20 PM.

[Tannhauser Gate]

Sorry, Yeach. I think this idea is just more min maxing. It would shift combat back to "bigger is better" which PGI trying to change with roles and it would remove weapons used by lighter vehicles and mechs. Making weapons obsolete due to low damage or whatever is a mistake. At some point Id like to see battle armor, infantry, ground and aerospace vehicles and other combined arms. Removing all the weapons that are "light" compared to mech weapons would make the game 1 dimensional.

Edited by LakeDaemon, 19 February 2012 - 06:25 PM.

[ManDaisy]

Good intentions, bad idea. This will only create a more restrictive hard point system if the devs are going that way. You won't be able to fit more smaller weapons on either, they will just "create" new weapons in place of old ones that are heavily distorted.

[Breeze]

One thing that I've found about smaller weapons that don't translate from TT to Mw is how useful these smaller weapons actually are. And that they have a real role in the Battletech universe.

At the very least, these smaller weapons tend to be far more efficient in terms of heat management. In the TT rules, a small laser generates one heat for 3 damage (1:3 ratio) while a large laser generates 8 heat for 8 damage (1:1 ratio).

I've found multiple smaller weapons are especially useful at the tail-end of combat (In TT, at least) when most of the armour is gone and internals are vulnerable. You'll want to pepper the enemy mech with many hits in as many locations as possible to cause as many critical hits as possible. This is also something that I don't think has previously translated to the MW series very well also.

So I definitely think that there's room for small weapons, if its heat efficiency and utility are translated well.

[CoffiNail]

In MWLL the MGUNs go out to 1600m iirc. You know what is great about them? Splashing freaking guys at 1500m. You freaking plink away at them, distracting them. Often useful for crouched mech (this decreases the amount of time is takes to lock on with missiles) which will suddenly get damage indicators going off, alerting the pilot to the direction of damage. Now a lot of pilots will stand to get away from the incoming fire, not realizing it is only MGUN. OR on a map with high Cliffs, and I was 160 degrees from my team and two Timber Wolves where firing LRMs at my team. I fired away with my MGUNs and distracted the Timber Wolves long enough to let my team get further to the Cliff base where the Timber Wolves could not aim.

[Yeach]

Exilyth, on 19 February 2012 - 06:03 PM, said:

Could you please elaborate on why you would want theese weapons removed, aside from 'low damage' and 'simplifiying the game'?

A lot of them are not very strong, but still usefull, e.g. the AC2 has a very long range.

Also, heat output would not match up, e.g. small laser - heat 1 vs medium laser - heat 3.
This would change the affected variants heat profile, mostly in a bad way.

That was the intention; simplifying the game and simplifying the balance of the game (which will be more involved when clan weapons are added.)
Less weapons equals less weapons to balance against each other. Just a suggestion.

In regards to the heat profile. 1 medium laser = 3 heat vs 2 small lasers = 2 heat; I don't think it changes the heat profile too much.

[Dlardrageth]

Yeach, on 19 February 2012 - 09:10 PM, said:

That was the intention; simplifying the game and simplifying the balance of the game (which will be more involved when clan weapons are added.)
Less weapons equals less weapons to balance against each other. Just a suggestion.[...]

And why would we want a thus "simplified" aka "dumbed down" game? Next you know, someone will lobby for removal of different Mechs speeds to "simplify" the game. Or to remove the whole light Mech class. It might make balancing easier, but isn't really BT/MW any more.

Same for the "weapons array" idea. Apart from the single fact that a "machine gun array" sounds still a bit weird (it's not a solar panel or something), what would be the exact difference, aka advantage there? You'd still end up with a weapon system that does little damage against other Mechs and is more suited to fighting infantry/vehicles. And that doesn't really change when you later get the LMG/HMG variants as well. And yes, MW4 went that way with the "array", god knows why, but then MW4 had some weird, non-BT features anyway...

In MechCommander the removal of AC2s and small weapons actually made sort of sense, as you did not control the Mechs directly and thus making them specifically snipe or "brawl" was not that feasible. Actually, coming to think of it, MechCom might probably have worked fine without any option to swap out weapons at all, just using canon variants, IMO.

[Gorith]

Yeach, on 19 February 2012 - 09:10 PM, said:

That was the intention; simplifying the game and simplifying the balance of the game (which will be more involved when clan weapons are added.)
Less weapons equals less weapons to balance against each other. Just a suggestion.

In regards to the heat profile. 1 medium laser = 3 heat vs 2 small lasers = 2 heat; I don't think it changes the heat profile too much.

Imho this is leaning to heavily in the simplification direction... Honestly I would love to see it made MORE complex... Something along the long the level of complexity in eve would be perfect

[Egomane]

I'm all for more complexity. This is not a console shooter that has to be kept simple. It is a full blown PC title that can be as complex as our hardware can handle.

If a Pilot is unable to use the weapons of it's mech to full effect, because they are "to small", he should look for a different mech, with a different weapons loadout.


Edit: Quick example of a mech that could be very difficult to change without changing it's profile completly and getting out of it's allowed tonnage very quick.

Vindicator 1R
Weapons:
1 PPC
1 LRM 5 (average damage = 3)
1 medium Laser
1 small Laser

How would you group those weapons? From your point of view, we would have to get rid of the LRM and the small laser and group them into something meaningfull. An AC/5 maybe? No... way to heavy. A LRM 10 (average damage = 6) the same as the AC. Both are increases to the long range firepower while taking from the low distance capabilities of the mech.
So how about an additional medium Laser instead? You not only lose weight for the mech (2,5 tons) but you will also lose long distance capabilities.

There is no way of adressing a meaningfull adaption in the way you suggested, Yeach. You will always cripple the mech in one way or the other. Leave them as they are, and let the game be complex.

Edited by Egomane, 19 February 2012 - 11:48 PM.

[Victor Morson]

If they introduce the concept of TACs from the boardgame, or even better (far better) introduce critical hit areas that a player can actually aim at - like the missiles when the launcher is exposed on a Catapult - it'd completely justify this kind of weapon's existence - other than AA, it's ALL they do well in the boardgame. You're better off with medium lasers 99 times out of 100 otherwise.

[guardiandashi]

been there seen it IMO its actually bad for the game to "loose the small guns"

what a lot of people fail to understand is under the standard rules all the weapons have a role or nitch where they are really good

small lasers, machine guns, flamers these are all designed around the concept of either "death by paper cuts" or anti infantry
these are short ranged "plinking" weapons think a BB or pellet pistol sure it does garbage damage, but the ammo is cheap or plentiful, etc

the piranaha class battlemech also takes this to a logical extreme it packs something like 12 machine guns (in its base config) along with a few longer ranged guns but its obvious tactic is to charge in and "hug" its opponant (no actual hugging involved just getting toe to toe) and then unleash its massive "machine gun array of doom"

what with the table top games standard "scatter hits" mechanic you are almost guaranteed to hit almost every location on the enemy mech at least once every "salvo" and if your luck causes a "concentration" of hits to occur in a location where the armor is thin or breached you can potentually clear every "critable componant" from the location as a working device.

the ac2 on the other hand is the longest ranged weapon in the game (or close to it) sure it doesn't do a lot of damage but imagine you are standing around out in the middle of nowhere.... and all of a sudden "plink" loose 2 armor you look around and don't see anything .... plink loose 2 more armor and this keeps happening....

[Yeach]

Egomane, on 19 February 2012 - 11:39 PM, said:

I'm all for more complexity. This is not a console shooter that has to be kept simple. It is a full blown PC title that can be as complex as our hardware can handle.

If a Pilot is unable to use the weapons of it's mech to full effect, because they are "to small", he should look for a different mech, with a different weapons loadout.


Edit: Quick example of a mech that could be very difficult to change without changing it's profile completly and getting out of it's allowed tonnage very quick.

Vindicator 1R
Weapons:
1 PPC
1 LRM 5 (average damage = 3)
1 medium Laser
1 small Laser

How would you group those weapons? From your point of view, we would have to get rid of the LRM and the small laser and group them into something meaningfull. An AC/5 maybe? No... way to heavy. A LRM 10 (average damage = 6) the same as the AC. Both are increases to the long range firepower while taking from the low distance capabilities of the mech.
So how about an additional medium Laser instead? You not only lose weight for the mech (2,5 tons) but you will also lose long distance capabilities.

There is no way of adressing a meaningfull adaption in the way you suggested, Yeach. You will always cripple the mech in one way or the other. Leave them as they are, and let the game be complex.

My suggestion doesn't include LRMs or SRMs.
LRM5 btw do 5 damage.
So for your example of the Vindicator, i would either add 0.5t armor and remove small laser or remove 0.5t armor and add a medium laser.

[Yeach]

Another reason for removing these weapons (and simplyfing the game) is the range overlaps and how it affects balancing.
With keeping the AC2, you could make the argument that you have 4 ranges extreme, long, medium and short range (for the AC2, AC5, AC10 and AC20 respectively); adding the small laser you could add another range (extreme short).

Overall it affects the balancing; ie more variables.

Note: how come it is called an AC2 and not an AC2.5 or AC3 (TT likes to round up sometimes; see run speeds 5 walk MP = 8 run MP)

[Egomane]

Yeach, on 20 February 2012 - 07:49 AM, said:

My suggestion doesn't include LRMs or SRMs.
LRM5 btw do 5 damage.
So for your example of the Vindicator, i would either add 0.5t armor and remove small laser or remove 0.5t armor and add a medium laser.

You should include the LRM 5, because at average it does 3 damage, 1 on minimum and 5 at maximum. LRM launchers were never meant to always deal maximum damage on a hit, but an average of 60%.

But, ok... bad example, lets try a new one:
Vulcan 2T
A single AC/2 for long range weaponry. The only long range weaponry.
What to do? Lose it? Upgrade it to an AC/5 (what to lose in exchange?)?

PGI will try to stay as close as possible to the tabletop game, they announced that several times now, so they will most likely not make all missiles hit, like previous Mechwarrior games did. We should calculate what we can expect, more in line with those rules, then what we had in the old games.

That put aside...
We shouldn't simplify a game, just because we can. Battletech has always been complex. The pc-games have been complex (until Microsoft got their hands on them). Why should we use a simplification without real need? Why should we change dozens of established mech designs? We haven't even seen the game yet and don't know if the old system has some value in it or if your "grouping" would have been better. We will have a beta-phase to figure that out.

[Felix Dante]

They have already stated (I could be wrong here) that minor modifications such as removing small weapons to add armor or more heat sinks might be allowed once you have the modules and money (C-bills) available to do so.

So that means this shouldn't be something to worry about too much I think.

[MaddMaxx]

4 smalls for 2 Meds costs you 2 damage per trigger pull. That can add up fast when in the correct range increment.

Especially if destroying a Torso loses the arm like many seem to want.

Edited by MaddMaxx, 20 February 2012 - 08:36 AM.

[canned wolf]

Something that could go a long way toward making light weapons more useful would be increasing their tracking speed. MWLL is my best example for this. You don't use light weapons to kill elementals, you use rapid fire. Why? because everything tracks at the same speed, the speed of your torso. Go back to a mechwarrior 3 style control for weapons, then give them different tracking speeds based on class and size. AC2's get way more useful when you can get them on target twice as fast as a gauss rifle or ppc. I kind of like the idea of missle boats being crit vulnerable while they are fireing too.

It would make for some intersting fights in a catapult. When I hear the lock warning, do I hit the switch and close my ports, turn and take it on the side, or try to get a lock and empty the launcher so there's nothing to crit on until it reloads?

[Exilyth]

If the mechlab allows customisations of that kind, eveyone will be able to choose whether to replace thoose 'small weapons' with something else or not. 'Bigger != better' also holds true for weapons, every piece of equipment has their advantages and disatvantages.

[Damocles]

Where is this "problem with balance" that people see?

Is it really going to be so difficult when we have an existing universe and like 6 other games to base these numbers off of already?