78 replies to this topic

[Yeach]

In Battletech, weapon damage is based on damage done during a turn (10 seconds).

How should weapon damage be calculated?

[Azmodan]

there will be no turns here. only DPS


i just hope there will be more parameters for the different types of weapons/ammo aside just damage.
penetration for ballistics, splash radius for missiles, etc.

[Asmudius Heng]

I agree - there are so many characteristics fo weposn that will be very different than the board game that the power of a given weapon will vary widely and the reload time just becaomse another tool to balance that compared to its value and weight.

[Yeach]

Azmodan, on 02 November 2011 - 05:10 AM, said:

there will be no turns here. only DPS

Whats this DPS only?
Nobody believes in straight raw damage ALPHA Strikes?
Anyone use pulse lasers which were often worse than regular lasers but theoretically had more damage?

Anyways there was strategy in Mechcommander which said to focus on pure damage rather faster firing weapons.

[Erhardt]

Definitely different recycle times for different weapons. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't necessarily need to be "bigger weapon = longer recycle" though for general game balance that will probably be the case, regardless.

There are concessions to playability when looking at the tabletop game. I remember reading years ago when the Fasa crew created Battletech back in my high school days, they originally had envisioned a video game to begin with (the seeds of what would eventually become the Battletech Centers) but obviously computers of the day didn't have anywhere near the computational power needed to make it a reality. So thus was the miniature game born, which required obvious abstractions to make a turn-based game workable. I don't think if any of this was "real", armament firms would all just arbitrarily decide "you know what, our weapons should only fire once every 10 seconds".

[Paladin1]

I think each weapon system should have the same "safe" firing cycle time, but you should be able to rush your shots at the risk of jamming or overheating your weapons.

For example, a large laser and an AC/10 should both have a safe firing cycle of 10 seconds, but you should be able to rapidly fire the AC/10 at the risk of jamming it or you could rapidly fire the laser at the risk of rapidly overheating your `Mech. 10 seconds should be the engineered guideline, but as we all know, you can often push things beyond their engineered limits at the risk of catastrophic failure.

[MetalKid]

I think weapons should have different reload times. With the faster/lighter damage weapons, you're accuracy doesn't have to bee as good to be effective. If you have the slower/heavier damage weapons, you better not miss! If all the weapons have the same recycle, people will just load up on whatever is the best damage per weight, making custimization kind of pointless.

[zverofaust]

Tabletop damage-per-turn quite easily translates into damage-per-second, or any unit of time. You can hypothesize that a "turn" represents something like a minute of actual time in which units do various things be it fire or more or both. Using this guideline developers can make weapon reloadtimes and rates of fire however they please. If a weapon does for example 100 points of damage in a turn (thus a minute), you can extrapolate that it'd do 1.6 DPS, and from there, if that weapon can fire say once every 5 seconds, then it'd do about 8.3 damage per shot, which, over the course of a minute of steady firing, equals 100 damage more or less. Or you could have it fire once every 30 seconds and it does 50 per shot for high alpha. Either way it isn't very complicated, but at the same time I wouldn't like to see a straight CBT-to-video game iteration of these exact damages. Sufficed to say it's going to be hard for the devs to balance so many weapons and mech designs particularly since we'll have weapon customization/mechlab.

[infinite xaer0]

cycle times are a tricky balance issue. I guess they'll depend on the kind of pacing that the devs want to put in the game. Personally I'd want MW2's weapon cycle times, or at least something similar. MW4 had ridiculously long cycle times for the majority of the weapons, and all it did was slow down the combat pacing of the game.

[WerewolfX]

Best way to work would be to have autocannons as dps weapons with a static damage increase equaling their full damage output over the 10 seconds or scaled appropriately. For instance an AC 20 does that big mech crushing damage of duh 20. So we have a 10 second dps model to work with that equals 10 shots with 1 per second equaling 20 damage or 2 per shot. an alternative to that is to make lasers fire twice withing that 5 second period Like for a large and split the damage into 4 points per shot. Missile would be the WYSIWYG or what you see is what you get flat damage. Ultra's of course would fire at every half second if you wanted to get pure about it. This would do 2 things make the mechs seem tougher as the damage gets more spread out while trying to track your target. (let's face it hitting a fast moving light mech in the same area is difficult) Plus with the autoncannons and lasers following those guidelines heat could be more on a scale it was meant to be at though personally I prefer the MW2/3 Heat scale.

[TheRulesLawyer]

Large alpha weapons need nerfed further in a real time setting IMHO. ALPHA>DPS to a large degree. You can spend time lining up your shot and then go hide while you wait for reload. High dps, low alpha weapons require consistent performance in order to do that dps plus you must remain exposed the whole time. Bigger weapons should start having painful reload times.

[Lori Black Widow Carlyle]

Poll differs from topic, but anyhow. Weapon recycle time should depend of weapon type and modified by the number of total heat sinks installed.

[Valerian Mengsk]

TheRulesLawyer, on 02 November 2011 - 07:52 AM, said:

Large alpha weapons need nerfed further in a real time setting IMHO. ALPHA>DPS to a large degree. You can spend time lining up your shot and then go hide while you wait for reload. High dps, low alpha weapons require consistent performance in order to do that dps plus you must remain exposed the whole time. Bigger weapons should start having painful reload times.

This is the truth. I see the reload times as another paramater for them to balance the weapons and I have always found more success with large alpha strikes over DPS weapons so this is definately something that needs to be worked out. Of course I do really love the guass rilfe and 8 seconds feels like an eternity on the battlefield.

[MookieRah]

Quote

Large alpha weapons need nerfed further in a real time setting IMHO. ALPHA>DPS to a large degree. You can spend time lining up your shot and then go hide while you wait for reload. High dps, low alpha weapons require consistent performance in order to do that dps plus you must remain exposed the whole time. Bigger weapons should start having painful reload times.

This, which is also why pulse lasers tend to suck more than normal lasers.

Another reason why big, slow weapons are better is cause it punctures through the armor and hits the internals. With the emphasis being urban combat, I will not see much reason for pulse lasers, as I would imagine alpha strike hit and runs would be the name of the game.

[UncleKulikov]

DPS should be calculated as well as damage per hit.
An AC 20 would have a high DPH, and a low DPS (due to the high cycle time of the large caliber shell)
A Medium Laser would have Medium DPH, and a medium DPS (due to a brief cycle time and medium damage)
A machine gun would have low DPH, and low DPS (since machine guns fire rapidly, and don't do much damage)
An Autocannon 10 could have low DPH and high DPS (if it fired multiple shots per trigger pull)

Remember that weapons that fire faster have an advantage since it's easier to draw a bead with them, and faster cycle rates reduce the punishment for missing.

[VYCanis]

Something that i feel MWLL really did really well was how the AC20s (lbx/ultra/standard) compared to Gauss rifles.

In most of the MW games, the gauss rifle was just about as good a brawling weapon as the big ACs, because they all had relatively similar recycle times, but the gauss had several times the range. So of course, people just packed on gauss rifles.

In MWLL, GRs are great sniping weapons, but up close, they tend to lose out to the big ACs, as the big ACs have the high refire rates that make missing relatively forgiving, and can really rack up the hurt once they get in close, where as the gauss needs to make every single shot count if it wants to even compete.

and i think that works great. and is a much more interesting way to balance things than simply having both have similar ROFs

The danger however is that not all DPS is created equal. Dealing 20 damage over 10 seconds in 20 shots =/= Dealing 20 damage over 10 seconds with 5 shots.

The more consecutive shots required to add up to a particular damage count, the more the damage is divided up among different locations, the steadier you have to keep your aim, the longer you need to track your target, the more likely many of those rounds will miss, the more time your opponent can use to get cover between you and them.

Which is the problem that has plagued the balance between MWLL's ac10s vs the ac20s. As the ac20s can rack up damage fine, however the ac10s always feel anemic, even though on paper, the ac10 is almost exactly half the dps of the 20. Its because they have a larger number of rounds attempting to do half the dps of the 20. Effectively spreading its damage out too thinly, which makes its extra range difficult to take advantage of.

[CaveMan]

Separate the recycle times by weapon types, not damage ratings.

Ballistic weapons should be fastest; being the most ammo-limited, they'll self-regulate. Energy weapons, not requiring ammunition, should be the slowest. Missiles should be inbetween, as their large splash damage area compensates for tight ammo budgets.

The longest recycle time should be the PPC, machine guns the shortest.

There should also be some kind of restriction based on weapon overheating. If you fire a ballistic weapon continuously for too long, you'll melt the barrel. Missile launchers can have their feed mechanisms jam. Energy weapons could blow a capacitor. In any case, strategy should be emphasized, over just holding down the trigger and spraying.

[metaphysic]

If you played any previous mechwarrior games, you would know that alpha strikes make up at least 75% of all mech combat.

DPS is not a useful measure of a weapon's effectiveness in MW games.

[Cro]

One needs to remember that in the old Solaris VII box set for the tabletop game, FASA laid out what they thought of weapon recycle times, and what types of modifications they felt were appropriate. Also, with 4 Mechwarrior games previously in existence, it's easy to look back at the earlier iterations and say, "well, this worked, but this sucked" and make an educated guess. A little internal testing, and they can throw stuff at our heads like shoes. I'm more interested in beta testing and giving feedback than I am attempting to divine or influence what the devs will do from a forum with no official information to go off of.

[VYCanis]

but WHY are they alpha striking?

because there is never a reason not to.

There was no recoil, heat was very forgiving, weapons pinpoint accurate, but individually weak, and mechs were uparmored due to how easy it was to focusfire a location to smithereens.

The end result was that to stay competitive you had to be constantly alpha-ing your boated configs because anything less could not reliably kill your opponents. I mean, in the tabletop, medium laser is a workhorse weapon. In MW4, its a noisemaker. in CBT a single ac20 could core out most mechs under 40 tons in one turn, in MW4, the average light mech can shrug off quite a few rounds no prob.

It was simply a matter of trying to translate turn based rules into real time, leaving out certain important aspects, then trying to fix things around the lack of those aspects, and creating more problems.