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[Maalakeem]

Every FPS out there has the cone of inaccuracy while on the move, and firing from the hip. It's a simple mechanic and noone disagrees that it fits. It's both realistic within the genre and has become something that all accept as part of the game.

Now after many years we have a new Mechwarrior game. It adds some unique bits, like individual weapon mounts being both limited and differnt in how to aim. Arm weapons use the little circle and torso weapons use the crosshair. Not bad for decrease accuracy but still not when dealing with weapon groups. I'm talking about massed laser fire, usually smalls, though I'm seeing plenty of mediums on the Hunchback doing the same thing. The problem, as I see it, is that the lasers, when fired as a group, all hit the exact same location. Nothing in Battletech has that type of tight grouping. You fire a battery of lasers, say from the Blackhawk (Nova) clan mech. All shots are checked separately for where they land. All 12 don't land on one part of the targeted mech. With mounting all over a mech, it's believable, and good for game balance, if all the grouped weapons had a believable amount of divergence. Perhaps even a cone of inaccuracy type of effect. Even tie it's width to whether a mech is walking, running, or jumping.

This would allow mechs facing the bigger more heavily armed mechs to survive longer against beam boats and it would promote the return of the medium laser for dueling. As the small laser wouldn't have the punch to do much damage if the small lasers had sufficient divergence to ensure that someone isn't getting the punch of an AC/20 in a non-ammo consuming version with just a bit more heat and perfect accuracy.

This could also lead to more faithfulness to the tabletop game for fire from longer ranges as the cone would ensure difficult in getting everything to land at extreme range. This would cut down on gauss sniping as the user of said weapons would probably switch to single fire mode, and come to a standstill, to increase accuracy. No tight grouping means not having the entire armor of an Altas's center torso disappear in one volley. If done sufficiently, with perhaps a downgrade in weapon cycle times, would even possibly allow bringing the armor back down from it's current doubling, while still keeping the game more cerebral then most FPSs.

You would simply have to increase missile volley divergence, by have a random number of missiles per volley go wild and vear off course, logical as how all those missiles are in a tight group and likely to have heat blooms throw off the aerodynamics of some of the trailing missiles, and faithful to the original game. To not do this with even SRMs would lead back to a preponderance of Missiles boats.

I truly believe that this would make a superior Mechwarrior game, though we may be too far into development for the introduction of such mechanics. I hope not, as I want this game to flourish, despite it's many negative points in my opinion.