339 replies to this topic

[Creed Buhallin]

RickDiasPK, on 10 May 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

In-joke response: Only game I know where you spend 5 hours marching, then spot a single UrbanMech and have your commander declare, "bog whiffed 13s rtb", so you go marching home for fear of getting into a fight if you stick around.

You're not wrong here. I nearly got myself kicked out of factions more than once for daring to enter the map in something less than overwhelming force. That's why I made a point of being in charge whenever I could from then on I led several factions, and we always had a good time.

RickDiasPK, on 10 May 2012 - 02:47 PM, said:

Serious reply: I don't know if I'd hold them up as examples of ranges working well, though the funny part is my complaint stems from map design. Most of the maps I ever saw for that format were like... 400x400-ish, mostly open plains. It was kind of a Griffin-fest if I remember properly. Had some interesting ideas, but real time movement meant you couldn't get high-speed long-range attackers to commit to bad moves under mistaken info. They'd usually just safely plink at a distance and dance around all day, somewhat different to how movement works in the turn-based board game.

Possible I was just playing on bad servers though.

I think it may have been. Our maps were typically pretty interesting terrain, and not just max-range. The large maps did grant the ability to retreat forever, which often made nimble long-range 'Mechs the order of the day... But there were ways to force them to engage, or catch them by surprise. I made very good use of both a stock Victor and TDR-5SE Thunderbolt, which I expect would basically be suicide on your maps.

But that's really kinda my point here. "Range" as a single data point, which so many people seem to want to argue over, is meaningless. On the flat, open maps you experienced, nimble snipers ruled because it was effectively impossible to close on them. On my maps, they really didn't, because we had enough woods and hills and even water to hide, for the most part. In MW3/4 the extra-long LRM range was mainly to compensate for pinpoint-accurate direct fire weapons with zoom capability that could let a Supernova put all 6 ER Larges on the same target with one trigger pull. On the tabletop, the ranges made for a good balance that gave opponents the chance to close, and didn't require you to use your entire living room for a map (I played Harpoon once where we had to do this - realism isn't always fun).

But it seems that everyone just wants to rant about how much better their numbers are, rather than see how it actually plays before making a judgement. Yay internetz!!

[Insidious Johnson]

Belisarius†, on 10 May 2012 - 06:15 PM, said:

well written and thought out wall of text

Good job on expanding your position! I agree with most of what you have said, but disagree with the premise of the battle is fought @ one time and one place.. even in NR. I see the ranges making feints, flanks, and surprise powerups making a huge impact here. If you are thinking just of the singular mechwarrior, I 100% agree with your post, but this is actual TEAM play. The scouts have a real and constant accounting job in this iteration: find, track, assess enemies rear for assets, provide radar extension for the team, and funnel targets into your defined kill zone. Given the quality of terrain and camo, finding every enemy might prove to be more than a chore until they decide to shoot. At that point the scout might be considered a loss, or not. Basically the fluidity of speed imperative in the scouts and strikers also comprise a feint n flank opportunity. But there is more than just gameplay tactics and I'm doing my best to be informative enough to let you picture it while being vague enough not to draw a picture that will become everyone's standard practice on day one.

The next thing to consider is leveling the playing field between vets and newcomers. A vet instinctively deadfiring LRMS on a parked target 1km away is as useful as a new guy spraying LRMS within firing range without a lock. I see the changing of ranges as a way to make the game NEW to OLD people in this respect. Havent' seen that touched on very much in this thread, but I'm sure it was in the minds of the dev's awhile back. The range ratios remain similar between weapons as it has in previous games. That is a key thing to remember. Also the minimum range thing will force support to have a much more mobile mentality than "I can park my vulture here, cover the whole battlefield and all they can see is my cockpit".

As for me, I've played every league type and under every condition allowable for play. As for your concerns, they concern me and everyone else as well. I'm ready, willing, and able to raise a thermo-nuclear stink about anything, but I'm not choosing ranges as one of them as my vision and reflexes do not improve with age. What is the average age of a mechwarrior ? When the time comes for me to go nuts and presume I know everything I haven't seen, I'm counting on YOU to reign me in, plz. And that is the final thing to think about here: as interconnected as every part of this game will be, much is yet to be revealed! We simply do not have all the constants yet to account for all the variables left. So, happy algebra to those of you intent on doing the math before all the numbers are in!

[movingtarget]

i noticed the lrms tend to arc up alot before comming down if they could be direct fired in a straight line they could probaby double there range at the cost of hitting obstructions, such as houses and trees

[Samuel Maxwell]

Finally a thread that rants against the ranters! OP makes sense, and unlimited range only limits tactical viability. Won't say much more because there's already five pages of explanations worth of material.

Edited by Samuel Maxwell, 10 May 2012 - 07:11 PM.

[William Petersen]

Belisarius†, on 10 May 2012 - 06:15 PM, said:

In that situation, the long range 'mech needs to be able to inflict enough damage that the brawler will be crippled by the time it gets close. If it cannot, long range is not viable and everyone will brawl.

Team game is team game. The long range Mech doesn't need to cripple the brawler at all. He needs to soften him up so that when he does get on top of the long range Mech's position, his own team mates can dispatch him with ease (or so that your own short ranged weaponry can deal with him adequately. There's a reason the CPLT-C1 has those 4 MLas). Also, that "worst case" is essentially every first contact situation in the game. If the long range Mech can cripple the brawler before it even gets to him, guess what. No one brawls.

[Rear Admiral]

Samuel Maxwell, on 10 May 2012 - 07:07 PM, said:

Finally a thread that rants against the ranters! OP makes sense, and unlimited range only limits tactical viability. Won't say much more because there's already five pages of explanations worth of material.

Agree with this. However will say this:

Most of these arguments seem well thought out except for one concept I keep reading. The word 'change', as in, 'why change the range from 800 to 640?' I think somebody said it upthread, but it bears repeating: the ranges arent being changed to 640. This is a reboot that is trying to stay as close to TT as possible, as per the devs. The ranges of LRMs have always been 640. They arent being 'changed' at all. So when somebody bases an argument off of 'changes' that arent changes at all, said argument has no merit. This is an important concept. This IS NOT a sequel to previous mechwarrior video games. So, while your previous video game experiences are valid, they dont really apply to this game.

Also, honestly, I didnt like the previous MW video games because they strayed way too far from the BT I knew and loved. I, for one, am looking forward to a new direction for the MW franchise/license/whatever. Shorter ranges and all.

Have a nice day.

edit: typos

Edited by Rear Admiral, 10 May 2012 - 07:23 PM.

[FireBlood]

Check it out, these are the actual ranges of weapons from MW2 Mercs. This is how the first half or so of the game plays out until better tech is introduced.

Large Laser 570
Medium Laser 270
Small Laser 90
PPC 570

AC2 720
AC5 570
AC10 450
AC20 360
MG 90

LRM 5,10,15,20 630
SRM 2,4,6 270

Just because some other later versions of mechwarrior moved away from these original distances it can be chalked up to the timeline and better tech... oh and it is a video game so comparing real world ranges is silly, if only we had real mechs to test out ranges.

Edited by FireBlood, 10 May 2012 - 07:25 PM.

[Aelos03]

William Petersen, on 10 May 2012 - 07:16 PM, said:

Team game is team game. The long range Mech doesn't need to cripple the brawler at all. He needs to soften him up so that when he does get on top of the long range Mech's position, his own team mates can dispatch him with ease (or so that your own short ranged weaponry can deal with him adequately. There's a reason the CPLT-C1 has those 4 MLas). Also, that "worst case" is essentially every first contact situation in the game. If the long range Mech can cripple the brawler before it even gets to him, guess what. No one brawls.

in 1vs1 situation range mech should destroy brawler on long range and brawler should get win in close simple, i can say same whats point in having long range if brawler can get in to fast?

Edited by Aelos03, 10 May 2012 - 07:34 PM.

[Belisarius1]

Insidious Johnson, on 10 May 2012 - 06:46 PM, said:

Good job on expanding your position! I agree with most of what you have said, but disagree with the premise of the battle is fought @ one time and one place.. even in NR. I see the ranges making feints, flanks, and surprise powerups making a huge impact here. If you are thinking just of the singular mechwarrior, I 100% agree with your post, but this is actual TEAM play. The scouts have a real and constant accounting job in this iteration: find, track, assess enemies rear for assets, provide radar extension for the team, and funnel targets into your defined kill zone. Given the quality of terrain and camo, finding every enemy might prove to be more than a chore until they decide to shoot. At that point the scout might be considered a loss, or not. Basically the fluidity of speed imperative in the scouts and strikers also comprise a feint n flank opportunity. But there is more than just gameplay tactics and I'm doing my best to be informative enough to let you picture it while being vague enough not to draw a picture that will become everyone's standard practice on day one.

I think I might have misunderstood a lot of your post, so I'm really only going to address the part I got clearly.

I agree that the team game is different to the 1v1 game. I remember countless late-night duels when nobody else was around where I insisted on taking a range 'mech and died to a brawler a-moving at my face. If there had been 7 of me and 7 of him in the same situation, though, his team would have been obliterated. I agree completely. But I'm not confident that the team effect will cover it.

I spent a lot of time in league play with NBT's HC mod, and that actually created a lot of situations that emulate what we've seen of MWO so far. There were many slow, brawling mediums below 75kph, and a lot of high dps weapons sitting between 500 and 700m. Fights involving those were very common, and almost universally the mid-range weapons were able to trash a push but did not create enough space to manouvre or harass. OpFor just charged as soon as you dissolved your killzone.

MWO will do things differently and we'll see what that achieves, but experience in other games is enough to make me concerned.

The key thing that I pretty much require from MWO is that it is possible for a team to take cover, reposition and reopen combat while within engagement ranges. If that's not the case, I'm worried that this game will be a simple shoot-em-up by any other name.

Edited by Belisarius†, 10 May 2012 - 07:43 PM.

[Yeach]

Aelos03, on 10 May 2012 - 07:33 PM, said:

in 1vs1 situation range mech should destroy brawler on long range and brawler should get win in close simple, i can say same whats point in having long range if brawler can get in to fast?

People tend to forget that that being a team game, a lance of Catapults might be able to take out an Atlas in one opening salvo.
The evening up comes when the Atlas' teammates get the time to get up close to unload the AC20s on the Catapults at close-range.

[Belisarius1]

William Petersen, on 10 May 2012 - 07:16 PM, said:

Team game is team game. The long range Mech doesn't need to cripple the brawler at all. He needs to soften him up so that when he does get on top of the long range Mech's position, his own team mates can dispatch him with ease (or so that your own short ranged weaponry can deal with him adequately. There's a reason the CPLT-C1 has those 4 MLas). Also, that "worst case" is essentially every first contact situation in the game. If the long range Mech can cripple the brawler before it even gets to him, guess what. No one brawls.

This is exactly the mentality that frustrates me. It's only "every first contact situation in the game" if cover is sidelined by half a dozen different mechanics and players are reduced to running screaming at each other to butt heads across open plains. A smart brawler will use terrain and intel from his team to move in closer while the other guys can't shoot him.

And as to "team game is team game," insidious put it better and I've already outlined my concerns, but I'll point out that your example is not team vs team but team vs lone kamikaze. If there are as many brawlers in the push as there are people shooting them, it can sometimes look different.

Also, please don't treat me like someone who doesn't know how teamplay works. I feel I've made my experience apparent.

Edited by Belisarius†, 10 May 2012 - 07:46 PM.

[Insidious Johnson]

Belisarius†, on 10 May 2012 - 07:33 PM, said:

Regarding scouts, flanks and what have you, how is that kind of play helped by reducing engagement ranges? I didn't catch that.

Ingress and Egress hostile fire as a scout and you consider ranges much more. Instead of being able to dump enough missles to knock over a scout, it will require a chassis of similar performance to deal with it straight up. Other than that, you'll have to pick a mech the enemy scout has seen to bait away to an ambush. Shut down mechs suddenly powering up to hose an enemy scout en masse without detection is going to be a common tactic. Once a lance is blind you play on your terms and can detach your fast movers to flank while your assaults scream 'Over here stupid' from behind cover, while being intetionally spotted and awaiting an overcommitment.

I never got to play HC, i'd had it with MW4 by that time, although I have heard nothing but good things about it. Wish I had played it now, old Trendkill tried to drag me outta GW for it but was just not into it @ the time. He might still be active if I had . IDK add it to the regrets pile.

[Solis Obscuri]

Belisarius†, on 10 May 2012 - 06:15 PM, said:

I'll lay this out clearly, because I think there's a huge misunderstanding on one side. This will be long, but you did ask.


The price of reduced range is that it becomes easier to close into brawling range. That much is obvious. The important metric is dps versus the time taken to close. The worst-case situation for brawler versus range is when the brawler is charging blindly towards the ranged 'mech across open ground. In that situation, the long range 'mech needs to be able to inflict enough damage that the brawler will be crippled by the time it gets close. If it cannot, long range is not viable and everyone will brawl, because your test has demonstrated that range does not come out ahead even in ideal situations for that tactic. With me so far?

By reducing the maximum range, you narrow the window the ranged 'mech has available to inflict that crippling damage. It takes 30 seconds to cross from 900 to 450m, but only 20 seconds to cross from 600 to 300. To maintain the balance, you must increase the dps of the ranged 'mech so that it can continue to deliver crippling damage in a shorter window; MWO has done this, as LRMs now fire very quickly. There are hidden costs to this. The first and most obvious is that everything dies much more quickly. The game moves away from sim and towards a classical shooter, where enemies are killed in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.

Second and less obvious is the cost to cover and manouvre-based play. In simplest terms, you need a certain window of grace in which to expose, fire, retreat, reposition and fire again. Here is where everyone who played MW4 casually and/or briefly will write me off as a poptart and ignore everything else I have to say. I challenge you to keep reading and entertain the suggestion that what you saw in 3pv respawn pub matches was not what the game was meant to be.

People who never played MW in organised FFP/NR tend to deride cover based play as a dumbing-down of the game. The fact was that for players who knew what they were doing, the herp-derp forward-reverse or stand-still-and-jump-up-and-down move that permeated pub servers was actually a death sentence, because you became an incredibly easy target for a competent team able to predict you while flanking your static position. In essence, the tactic that 99% of people rage about was a complete joke among good players (except in 3pv, which is irrelevant for MWO).

Real cover based play involved whole teams or subsets of teams constantly attempting to flank each other, using terrain to create and shield firing angles and searching for advantage or weakness. Longer range and slower weapon recycles meant teams were able to engage lightly, trading shots and shifting positions. If you found yourselves engaged in a poor position, retreating to a better one was sometimes viable because the enemy were far away. Harassers could work with relative confidence knowing they were difficult to catch. That space actually created a thinking man's game of the highest order.

By reducing range and increasing cycle time, you drive players towards exposure and open-plain slugfests. If a team that moves out of sight for thirty seconds to find a better angle risks cresting to find a horde of hunchbacks up in their grill, that tactical option has been removed. It is better to simply stand in the open and fire until they reach you. This is exacerbated by mechanics such as convergence, which further punish a team for moving from cover into combat.

Ironically, stupid poptart tactics are hurt less by shorter weapon ranges and higher recycle times, because they rely on a simple move that occurs as fast as their weapons recycle. They'll just come up and down a bit faster.

The real losers are players who try to use cover intelligently to create space and angles, who stay down longer than their weapon recycle because they're moving from place to place. They suffer because their guns have less idle time, so instead of giving up two shots' worth of damage to reposition, they lose four to move the same distance. There is also a much higher risk that in the time they are down and blind, their enemy will move into range and crush them. Again, it's better just to stay in the open.

I get incredibly frustrated by all these mechanics that are being introduced to combat the demon known as poptarting, when that demon was actually never a problem in the first place, and by targeting it you destroy everything that made MW the thinking man's game everyone seems to desire.

You make a cogent argument, but I think you are looking at tactics with too narrow a focus. One of the stated goals for the devs has been creating maps with varied terrain in order to avoid giving too much advantage to either brawlers or ranged fire, and to encourage team effort over individual play. Additionally, the mechlab setup has some features which to discourage excessive "boating" (possibly to a greater degree than MW4), and most of the 3025-era designs we've been seeing carry varied weapon payloads which don't over-specialize in any one thing. Sensor limitations seem stricter that in previous MW games, requiring LoS on targets to track their movement - this is a major asset to "tactical" play, IMO, giving brawlers options to avoid open-field slugfests, and also giving hit-and-run fire-support a chance to evade pursuers. The addition of indirect-fire options also provides a tactical concern for anyone relying solely on open-field DPS, since any team with a fast spotter and several 'mechs equipped with LRMs as primary or secondary argument will have an easy time focusing them with minimal exposure - not to mention the addition of artillery and airstrike support from the command interface, which is likely to make massed battle formations in open areas very dicey (and also to ruin the day of holed-up ridgeline snipers!) But the way you're discussing things, it's like you're looking at this from a 1v1 perspective, which I don't think is the whole focus here in MWO.

[Joseph Calvert]

Really, It's a brand new game people. The Dev's are taking us back to the basics of battletech.

Please stop whining that its not going to be like MW4,3,2, because guess what, its not.

MW4 ranged quite far from BT.

Lets all get our hot little hands on the game first. Frag through a few battles, and then if you want to complain, fine it your right.


Just don't do it before you've even played the game.

[Lothahnus]

Coralld, on 10 May 2012 - 05:55 PM, said:

I don't mean to sound insulting or anything like that but have you played MW4M? If not then please do so for a few hours and you will notice EVERYONE using Heavies and Assaults nearly all the time and neglecting over 50% of the other chassis simply because they can't fit two PPCs and two Gauss rifles or a crap ton of LRMs. The game is just ruled by snipe fest after snipe fest and LRM storming.

Now before people jump down my throat, please know that I have not played TT, I have seen and watched it but never got involved. I am looking forward to a MW game that doesn't involve mindless snipe fests and missile spamming and it looks like MWO will finely be the one to deliver what my self and many other people want, which is having all weapons and mechs viable. If the ranges need to be adjusted then the Devs may do so. We will find out during beta at the soonest.

Actually i play MW4 and true a lot of people snipe but alot brawl too. and not too many spam the missles. When push comes to shove missles just are not that powerful in MW4 and are easily avoided. And people play just about every mech available. I dont know what server you play on but there are different types of servers too. some are all brawl maps. Snipers are not to good there.

Joseph Calvert, on 10 May 2012 - 08:00 PM, said:

Really, It's a brand new game people. The Dev's are taking us back to the basics of battletech.

Please stop whining that its not going to be like MW4,3,2, because guess what, its not.

MW4 ranged quite far from BT.

Lets all get our hot little hands on the game first. Frag through a few battles, and then if you want to complain, fine it your right.


Just don't do it before you've even played the game.

I am not really complaining about the game play as much about how dumb it is for such an advance tech is so limited in range.

[Belisarius1]

Insidious Johnson, on 10 May 2012 - 07:48 PM, said:

Ingress and Egress hostile fire as a scout and you consider ranges much more. Instead of being able to dump enough missles to knock over a scout, it will require a chassis of similar performance to deal with it straight up. Other than that, you'll have to pick a mech the enemy scout has seen to bait away to an ambush. Shut down mechs suddenly powering up to hose an enemy scout en masse without detection is going to be a common tactic. Once a lance is blind you play on your terms and can detach your fast movers to flank while your assaults scream 'Over here stupid' from behind cover, while being intetionally spotted and awaiting an overcommitment.

I'm still not certain why shorter ranges help that though. Relative to detection ranges, you mean? As in a scout can't just be missiled down the instant it gets contact? If so, I agree, but you'd get the same effect by increasing detection range to 1500m or whatever. It's true that with shorter ranges, scouts which stay outside fire but inside sight become harder to deal with without hunter-killers, but scouts which try to harass also become a lot more fragile because they must be closer. A small 'mech is almost twice as easy to hit at 650m as it was at 1000m.

I'm happy to admit that there will be options opened up that I haven't heard of yet, and I trust that the devs are committed and capable of making an interesting game. My real worry is that from what I've seen, the kinds of things they're holding up as amazing tactics are... well... they sound exactly like the crazy strategies I used to come up with when I first started to FC, frankly, badly in need of some KISS and working because the other team stands still and lets it.

It's normal for developers to only have a vague idea of what their competitive playerbase will make of their game, but I would feel a lot more comfortable if there was a closed beta that included at least a couple solid NR league guys. I'm terrified that the range cutoffs will turn out to be detrimental but it won't get caught until open beta. At that point, smart players lobbying for increased complexity will be drowned out by people ranting about how the raven doesn't look like it stepped out of a TRO... and then we're more or less boned. I don't think the risk is worth it and I don't think it can be reverted at a later date, so I'm engaging thermonuclear mode now.

Edited by Belisarius†, 10 May 2012 - 08:26 PM.

[Aelos03]

i think we are only afraid that long range mechs are going to take beck seat and i hope this is not a case.

[Ross486]

Yoseful Mallad, on 10 May 2012 - 12:49 PM, said:

First off... If the DEVS want to merge this thread with another please do. I wanted to bring up a point but was not willing to hunt down all the posts in other threads to make my point. Ok... Soooo many are complaining about ranges of weapons in the game and that it seems like this is going to be a close up in your face slug battle type of game. Someone even complained about the LRMs only having a range of 630 meters. This is not MW games of the past where range has no meaning. This is going to be a thinking mans MW game and the DEVS have got the ranges right for a change. You cry about wanting tactics... Well you got it. Being able to snipe from the other end of the board is hardly tactical. Leave the extreme long range to you LONG TOM artillery units lol. Back to the crying over the LRM range. Again, the DEVS got it right. In classic table top 1 hex is 30 meters for range. LRMs have a max range of 21 hexes. 21 hexes by 30 meters is... Do the math... 630 meters. That's dead on with the game guys.

I can agree with you on this my kuritan brother .

[StaIker]

William Petersen, on 10 May 2012 - 07:16 PM, said:

Team game is team game. The long range Mech doesn't need to cripple the brawler at all. He needs to soften him up so that when he does get on top of the long range Mech's position, his own team mates can dispatch him with ease (or so that your own short ranged weaponry can deal with him adequately. There's a reason the CPLT-C1 has those 4 MLas). Also, that "worst case" is essentially every first contact situation in the game. If the long range Mech can cripple the brawler before it even gets to him, guess what. No one brawls.

Sorry, this is wrong. If the Cat needs help from a team mate to finish the target at close range then we are no longer talking about a 1v1, it's now 2v1. To make it a fair example the enemy must now be presumed to get 2 rushing brawlers in the example, only 1 of which the Cat will partially damage while the other gets into firing range untouched. Alternatively, if the Cat is forced to engage a rushing target at close range because LRM's can't do enough damage then it's no longer acting as a support Mech, you may as well bring a brawler yourself.

Belisarius' description of how combat works in practice was exactly correct. In order for long range weapons to be viable they have to utterly dominate at long range. If they are only capable of harasment and are not killing weapons in their own right or if their range makes them only marginally effective as a softening tool, then they actually handicap the team that uses them because bringing more brawlers provides more usable firepower.

[Dr Killinger]

Anyone who thinks that the ranges are too short should go play TSA sandblasted in MWLL, and see what a retarded snipe-fest it is. When an Atlas can't pop it's head over a hill without being put into orange armour, the games loses it's fun for me.

I only play MWLL when capping bases is involved now, then the game shines as people are forced into some close-up knife fights. I personally can't help but rage when I die in a matter of seconds to an enemy I cannot see. If I wanted that, I'd play a normal FPS.