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Paladin Brewer, on 17 March 2012 - 03:07 PM, said:
It's also not all about weapons fire. What if a company or lance commander gets double legged? He can still use his sensors, map, see the battle call down artillery, etc. But not if the game labels him as dead 
I too thought about that, it's a very important issue. That's one more reason why automatically putting immobilized mechs out of commission would be wrong. Commander role, as far as I understand it from dev blogs here and here, would have lots of unique skills to coordinate the lance, share the radar info and call in support of sorts, in forms of different kind of radar sweeps or bombardments. I presume that, as commander is supposed to issue orders via battle grid, he wouldn't be that much penalized in his commanding abilities if he would be immobile. Commencing UAV or sat sweeps, directing artillery fire or airstrikes, issuing orders via battlegrid, all that skills are highly valuable for a lance and almost in no way depend on commander's mobility.
While it would be true that downed commander's mech would be extremely vulnerable and it's protection would be a high-priority task for the lance, it wouldn't be fair to simply label commander as dead if his mech would be immobilized. With or without legs, command mech would still contain lance leader, who's actions can make the necessary difference to turn the tide of battle. The same could be, to some point, true for scouts too as the lance would still be able to take advantage of their advanced sensors while scout mech is still in play. So, even if a scout would not be able to actively follow the enemy, he would have the large section of battlefield monitored and allow friendlies to know about enemy movements in that area and receive his targeting information.
Edited by Siilk, 18 March 2012 - 12:15 PM.
