Mister Zeus, on 08 November 2012 - 12:38 AM, said:
A single weekend of play certainly represents a fully fleshed out and tested experience with a new rule set. By all means, keep that one experience with the Solaris VII rules as the de-facto experience of anyone and everyone who has ever played with them.
But on that subject, what were you doing wrong letting the battlefield be dominated by 90 meter range (120 meter extreme range) weapons? Did the player's opposition have nothing but CBT tweaked god mechs mounting nothing but ERPPCs and Gauss Rifles? Did they have no secondary or tertiary weapons of their own to bring to bear on your players when they got into knife fighting range?
Regardless, the only point you make is one that can be easily adjusted by tweaking the refire rates or damages of weapons over that refire rate to prevent insane rapid fire instant death. Notice how PGI didn't have Machine Guns do 8 points of damage every 10 seconds like they could in Solaris VII? You do have a point about small lasers though, but at least they make more sense to adjust refire rate for while machine guns are defined by a rapid/constant fire rate and thus necessitate a damage adjustment to balance them.
On the subject of small lasers, they are effective if you can close range. This appears to be easy to do in MWO due to a.) lag shields on light mechs, and b.) speed cuts to assault mechs which prevents them from keeping their distance somewhat from faster opponents in order to keep their big guns on them for a little longer. But at least the number of them you can mount on a mech is limited rather than unlimited like in CBT.
There is no rule that says PGI has to adhere to a 10 second delay between firing every weapon. There is also no rule saying that the heat system must directly copy that of CBT. I actually prefer the Solaris VII heat system since it eliminate ******** alpha strikes from mechs like Masakari's or Awesomes and forced them to have to spread their fire out a bit more. It encouraged mixed weapon designs to take advantage of different situations regarding range, cover, heat, ammunition levels, and weapon reload/recharge. That a few weapons were overpowered is no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water. If that were the case, CBT would be in the same boat as Solaris VII, but because of the opposite end of the weapon spectrum (i.e. super heavy weapons are supreme in CBT, small fast refiring weapons are supreme in Solaris VII provided you can close range quickly).
Seems like there has got to be a happy medium ground somewhere between those two.
DId you ever even play those rules? I hate when people assume that you have to give something years of play time to understand and fully test out. You don't have to. A group of people who can recite the rulebook in their sleep can definitely tell if changes are going to be positive or negative in even a few hours of play, let alone a weekend marathon for 12 people. It became a long running joke for us all. It took us less than a weekend to discover that DHS were BROKEN. It took us less than a weekend to realize that LRMs were coming from near verticle. A weekend of battletech for a hardcore group would include more games than a casual player would have in a year.
Hex "size" was divided by 4, as were the rounds, while things like heat were multiplied by 4. Which means that you could shoot 4x as far, making those pitiful 90 meter weapons equal to a mid ranged weapon. I'd have to dig out my rule book, but I'm pretty sure machine guns could fire every round, create 0 heat, and go 4x as far... I'm sorry but if you can't see why that was BROKEN I have no idea what to tell you.
You're trying to say that they've got it spot on because they're using the Solaris VII Mech duel rules, but they aren't exactly, they've even changed it from that. Also, those rules were very very bad. In all my years of playing, you are the very first person I've ever found that actually liked them.
As for opponent custimzation I had a rather detailed process and different classes ranging from stock to fully modified, and the modification rules required a good group of techs and time to do the most simple of tweaks. They would go against opponents that had modified their mechs to a similar degree. It wasn't that they weren't challenged, or that they were challenged too much, they just simply found it very BORING to have to use a very small variety of weaponry and to boat it to win the field. Some of them actually enjoyed using mixed weaponry on their mechs... softening up with LRMs as they close to finish off with lasers and autocannons, instead of cramming as many small weapons that have little to no heat on.
The point is it made EVERY long range weapon useless, except maybe the gauss rifle, and that was even sub optimal compared to smaller weapons. It also made every stock mech incredibly useless aside from a few weird designs and most light mechs.
If you really think the developers should be encouraged to use a broken model for their game that causes the players to use only little to no heat weapons, where you can close without much risk to get said weapons into the fight, then I again don't know what to tell you.
Wait... if it wasn't for LRMs being death guided super missles from above and no one would take them otherwise that'd be what we have here....
I do appreciate one thing from you, you made me realize what they're trying to emulate, and why a lot of us hate it so much.
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