777 replies to this topic

[LarkinOmega]

So this thread is immensely entertaining.
Rej's inflexibility is funny.
Void's ability to rephrase and restate his opinion is wonderful to behold. Imagine, a person able to defend their position adequately on the internet.

But those are not the best part. Oh no, the best part of the thread is all the people admitting that they consider themselves cowards. The self denial is intense.

[MustrumRidcully]

Cryll Ankiseth, on 21 March 2013 - 10:52 PM, said:

And what would your definition of "brave" be then?

[LarkinOmega]

Cryll Ankiseth, on 21 March 2013 - 10:52 PM, said:

And what would your definition of "brave" be then?

Knowing when to commit and actually committing, supporting your allies, withdrawing and recommitting when necessary, sacrificing yourself when it will win the match for your team, absorbing fire for an ally who needs it, coming out of hiding to support your team, exposing yourself to fire when your team does.

Even that's not bravery, since we're not in any actual danger in this game. That's just being a good pilot.

[xxx WreckinBallRaj xxx]

I also see newb Assaults a lot that apparently did not use half their weight. If my Medium has more firepower than your Assault; you're doing something wrong.

[Shade4x]

Rejarial Galatan, on 18 March 2013 - 08:42 PM, said:

Hey Abivard, check this out:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This is applied to demoralizing the enemy so they would give up and your side would not suffering loses. This is a game. Death is not permanent. There is no surrender option. This does not apply to this game.

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“Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.”
―Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Again, this game does not allow to starve it's fellow players, or hold their wifes and children as ransom. It's against the ToS. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have the stomach for such tactics. Yes they are pretty words, but they mean horrible things.

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“Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
1 He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

This apply's to fights you cannot win on a persistant world, where death = loss of military power. The closet you can even relate this to mech warrior online is "Don't fight the whole team with the spider, wait till your team engages." Again your fundamental misunderstanding of basic theory is mindbogglingly

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.
2 He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.

matches are 8 on 8. Their are no superior or inferior forces.

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3 He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.

this is for a standing army, who you live with and campagin with. It's mainly to avoid hesitation in battle due to fear of death. This game has no standing army's, no death and there are no campagins. There are matches. Your next quote should be about the needs of a socialistic economy from Ann Rand.

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4 He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

Again, this means to prepare for death, make sure you have all your equipment and catch your enemy off guard without equipment. We are in 100 ton mech's with limited loadouts in 10 minute matches. Kinda hard to suprise your enemy when they knowingly and willingly enter a fight knowing that it will be over in 10 minutes.

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5 He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

THERE IS NOT SOVEREIGN YOU *****! There is no king of mechland. There is no military capacity. Congratulations. You completely misquoted Sun Tzu's entire book. If you where in charge of a real military force, they would be conquered and killed in minutes. Sun Tzu requires understanding, otherwise it's pretty words that make you sound smart. However you are not sounding very smart ATM.

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“Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting.”
― Sun Tzu

Oh Lord. Here we go again. Tell ya what. Follow his advice and quit.

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Do I really need to copy all these into this again? Sun Tzu himself states quite clearly that it is better to win with out ever fighting...

Thats why Sun Tzu was a general who masacared several kingdoms, beheaded the kings favorite concubines and conqured a fair portion of china. It's better for people to give me millions of dollars then to work! That doesn't mean i don't have to work.

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actually void, i see no reason to fire a retort at you, as we see things very very differently. All that matters is this: you play MWO your way, I will my way. IF we are teamed, I will watch your back. You can or do not have to watch mine. THAT is all that matters here.

The problem here sunshine, is that you get the whole team killed because you place a 100 ton deficite against your team. While your hiding back and pretending that you being last alive is attributed to your military genuis and skill, your team dies to the atlas who is not afraid, charging in with 3 Srm 6's and an AC/20.

Sun Tzu is not strategy, its a way of thinking and theory for outside the box. it does not apply in a linear game, with limited rules. Mech warrior does not follow conventional strategies from the french revolution, nor the neoplionic wars. The reason is that you can't build trenches, make torches, take a city nor pillage a country side. There are no supply lines, Moral isn't a question, and the higher ground is a disadvantage to mech's that can't seem to point down a hill. Stop pretending you and people like you know military tactics and theory when you can't even grasp the rules and limitations of a game...in beta.

[LarkinOmega]

Cryll Ankiseth, on 22 March 2013 - 09:42 PM, said:

We all hope our team is proficient enough to utilize teamwork, but we cannot expect it of them. Hell, you can't even expect good players to do the same, since they are not you. Not everybody plays this game to win sadly.

Which, like Void has said over and over again, this thread is trying to correct.

[Void Angel]

Shade4x, on 22 March 2013 - 06:31 PM, said:

Sun Tzu is not strategy, its a way of thinking and theory for outside the box. it does not apply in a linear game, with limited rules. Mech warrior does not follow conventional strategies from the french revolution, nor the neoplionic wars. The reason is that you can't build trenches, make torches, take a city nor pillage a country side. There are no supply lines, Moral isn't a question, and the higher ground is a disadvantage to mech's that can't seem to point down a hill. Stop pretending you and people like you know military tactics and theory when you can't even grasp the rules and limitations of a game...in beta.

Heh. I already tried refutation; he just tries to deflect, then moves on to his next talking point. It's best if we don't quote him, so that he keeps his promise and stops trolling the thread for a while. I figure he'll be back - the thread has been popular, and I suspect this bothers him. =)

[YueFei]

Rejarial Galatan, on 20 March 2013 - 06:57 PM, said:

<laughs for a few minutes> so, my quotes from Sun Tzu have nothing to do with military tactics either real world or to be applied to the game right? I wonder why they teach his quotes at some of the finest military academies. His quotes are applicable to political maneuvering yes, but, more importantly to effective combat tactics, and as such, they with no shred of a doubt be applied here. Think what you want, assume even more, nothing will change your view of me, or mine of you. At this point, I will make a single suggestion, we part ways, period.

If you can win a match without firing a single shot at the other team, lemme know.

Edited by Hayashi, 26 March 2013 - 02:19 AM.
Flaming redacted.

[MisterPlanetarian]

Void Angel is right in literally every point in the OP. And the lame political sun-tzu quotes have no relevance to the subject at hand. Which is that LRM atlases suck and camping 600 meters away from your team is not a viable strategy to secure victory with.

Atlases are not LRM boats period. Mainly because of how their energy mounts work.

Atlases are not snipers, because of how their weapons are mounted and how their profile looks.

Atlases have the highest armor in the game, good torso twist and a standard engine.

Atlases excell at midrange dps, 2x UAC5 and 2x LL will rip up any mech at 400+ meters in no time. 12-15 focused DPS per D-DC? Yes please.

Atlases are tanks.


Stalkers have enough energy hardpoints for tag, 40+ tubes of LRM's and artemis aswell as enough ammo not to embarrass themselves. Even so its stupid as hell to boat LRM's on a stalker because of the missile flight times.

LRM Stalkers are not trading shots at the lines which means the real meat of your team (Catapults, Cataphracts, Jagermechs and D-DC's) will die alot faster and risk costing you the game.

FIRE SUPPORT = Bringing focused damage at good range that can keep up with your atlas or other assault mech anchor. This is usually best done with PPC boats or UAC5/Gauss stacking.

Competitive LRM builds fought at 300 ish meters for a reason. Said reason is that LRM camping at 800 meters is stupid.



TL;DR Void Angel is right about everything.


Bolded all the important bits for clarity.

Edited by Hayashi, 26 March 2013 - 02:27 AM.
Flaming and possibly discriminatory content redacted.

[Warskull]

Just ignore Rej.

It is really very simple. If you choose not to fight you create a situation where your team is down players. Say 3 noobs choose to stay back and play "defensively", they just created a 5v8 situation. Their 5 players are either going to have to carry like a beast or they will get massacred. Now those 3 players are looking at a 3v6 or a 3v7, they will simply get steamrolled.

All you have to do is make sure you are outputting damage in some way. Yes, you can pop behind a hill for a moment to shed some heat or avoid some missiles. You can reposition. However, you need to make sure you spend more time dealing damage than everything else.

You don't have to brawl either, you can be aggressive from 800m just as easily as being aggressive from 200m. You can be aggressive while poptarting. Just remember the fastest way to learn the game and get good at it, is to learn how to brawl.

You should constantly be a threat that the enemy team has to deal with. You should be the one dictating how the game is played, not the other team.

Edited by Hayashi, 26 March 2013 - 02:19 AM.
Flaming redacted.

[Void Angel]

Well, I actually was talking specifically about LRM boats with an Atlas - which remains a very bad idea. LRMs are powerful weapons if used properly; my problem with the build(s) I criticized in the OP was that that they were sporting the weapons loadout of a Catapult on a 100 ton battlemech. Presumably the extra tonnage (after armor and the like) went for ammo. LRMS are fine on an Atlas, but the chassis lacks the hardpoints for a true LRM boat; for this and other reasons, the Atlas needs to be at least somewhat effective in direct combat.

I'm using 20 tons of LRM launchers as my primary armament right now - but I supplemented it with 12 tons of heavy beam weapons. My remaining armament consists of a LLaser, and an ER PPC; this mix gives me enough firepower to rain destruction from afar while still giving me enough firepower to hurt people in line of sight. So I'm not a sniper, and I'm not a missile boat - in fact, this design is much closer to the holistic "something at all ranges" approach common in "canon" 'mech designs. I can bring massive, sustained firepower to bear at nearly all ranges.

In combat, I'll move to flank, pounding on long-range enemies if they're in the open, but I'm mostly just trading charged particle injections and maneuvering for a good angle on the LRMS (something so many boats just don't do.) I stay close enough to my team that I can still support and be supported, and try to keep everyone on the same page and doing something (even if it's just patiently waiting to ambush.) When appropriate, I'll even move to close range and finish people off. I'm still dependent on my team to keep brawlers and lights off me, but who isn't? I'm still taking advantage of the Atlas' strengths by bullying people at medium/long range. I have massive firepower available with the LRMS, and even though my beam weaponry's not that heavy, snipers know they've been kissed.

In short, since the much-needed buff to heavy beam weapons, long-range energy builds are far more viable than they were when I initially wrote the post; you can be an effective mid-long range Atlas, but you simply cannot boat anything - you don't have enough hardpoints and space for it.

[Void Angel]

I have to disagree about Missile boat Stalkers, however. While I don't advocate boating 75 LRMS on the things, I do find the Stalker to be an impressive missile boat. While you should always carry some energy weapons (unless you absolutely cannot afford the space,) LRMS are very effective, and the Stalker's hardpoints make it an excellent choice for a missile boat. It's also an excellent choice for a midrange support combatant, but it is less efficient at brawling - a limited torso twist and no arms to speak of makes brawling a risker proposition, though it can be done. Still, my drop buddy uses an LRM boat Stalker often, and does very well in that role.

[MisterPlanetarian]

Before the Nerf i'd give LRM stalkers a pass but only if they didnt try to use them at extreme ranges. PPC's and gauss rifles outshine LRMS in the long range game anyway.

This is what a proper LRM boat looked like before the nerf.

[Wintersdark]

People quoting Sun Tzu in video game forums drive me batty. Seriously. Quoting Sun Tzu doesn't make you look like a genius tactician, as it's almost entirely worthless applied to a video game - and it's contents are pretty much 100% common knowledge at this point anyways. Nobody will be awed by this.

Sorry, had to rant there.

Anyways, Void Angel is, as usual, entirely right with the OP and this thread - moronic trolling aside - is very valuable, a must read for new players.

[Warskull]

MisterPlanetarian, on 23 March 2013 - 04:12 PM, said:

Before the Nerf i'd give LRM stalkers a pass but only if they didnt try to use them at extreme ranges. PPC's and gauss rifles outshine LRMS in the long range game anyway.

This is what a proper LRM boat looked like before the nerf.

This is of note, i would say 90% of the player base has no idea how to use LRMs. They think of it as some magic weapon you fire blindly from behind cover. The problem with this is your LRM accuracy is going to suffer greatly. Unless you are dropping with friends and using voice comm software you have no way of knowing how good a target something is when firing blind.

LRMs are a tool to punish positioning errors and threaten open space. They are at their best in the 300m-600m range when the opponent doesn't have cover. They get to the opponent relatively quickly, deal huge damage, and obscure/shake his screen making his retaliation more difficult and less accurate. A good player will still hit you, he'll miss the component he was aiming for more often.

LRMs can also be used to scare enemy units into acting timid. Do you see a sniper getting a bit too aggressive. Fire an LRM volley and make him get behind cover for a bit. You can make your enemy stop doing damage with LRMs and that is a crazy powerful tool. However, you shouldn't spam LRMs when doing this, you should only fire one, maybe two volleys (if they are exposed enough or react slowly enough.)

Blind firing an occasional volley is okay, however it should be an action you take while you are moving between positions. Blind fire should not be your primary mode of operation. I see LRM boats fire hundreds of missiles into buildings, refusing to move fowards, while their teammates who are spotting/brawling for them get torn up because they are outnumbered .

Cowardly use of LRMs is worthless, they'll pick off your teammates, then rush into 180m with you. Aggressive fire support (which does involve exposing yourself to damage) is a force to be reckoned with.

[Abivard]

Heh, I see so few that understand anything sun tzu wrote, much does not apply to this game but some does. Morale, deadly ground, surprise, preparedness, All these most certainly can be applied to this game.

Knowing when to fight; when you enter a drop, you had best KNOW you MUST fight !
Some mechs can not look down, some can, height does matter.
Know your enemy and know yourself; Know what all the mechs can and can not do, learn the weapons, the strengths and weakness, learn some units prefer certain tactics,

Surprise is something that occurs in the mind of the enemy; this is so true, ignore and lose.

Most simply don't know the difference between strategy and tactics.

Anyways how about, Guderian, Von Clausewitz ,Miyamoto Musashi, Antoine-Henri Jomini, Liddell Hart, Von Mellinthin, but to understand any of them you must understand the military and political structure of the times in which they wrote, how to take that and apply that to modern concepts...then translate them into a game, that has no basis in logic or reality or even common sense.

So, if you haven't even heard of these people I named don't quote anyone or anything but, 'follow the fracking atlas, stay together,lock targets, focus fire, and don't be timid!'

Edited by Abivard, 24 March 2013 - 05:52 AM.

[1453 R]

LRMs demand attention. No other weapon in the game is even remotely as visible as an LRM launcher, and a good LRM user will make use of that as much as anything else. You can drag threats off of friendlies real fast by lobbing a few missile salvos their way, and the LRMs themselves tend to draw enemy attention like little eyeball magnets. I know I've caught a few Lurmwarriors just by following the missile trails, and they're always so surprised when someone dares to get in their face and screw them over.

If you're trying to be a sneaky bombardier-type (which, frankly, doesn't even make sense when said, let alone attempted), then you're doing it wrong. And likely being far too timid in your engagements anyways. I agree with Warskull - anyone who expects to do anything but distract the enemy with indirect fire is touched in the head. Get y'all self up into the MRM range profile, find your own direct LoS locks and pound them into the dirt from the back of the fragball, not the back of the map.

[Saiyajin12]

Chavette, on 26 January 2013 - 06:23 PM, said:

Not a tactic? It's a way of life for some.

Hahaha the camper way of life, like them mountain lovers in bf3, contributing to your teams success by scoring 1 kill per 5min or so

This was a fun read, and cheers to op for trying to help people not run sub optimal builds.

Off topic, I do run one myself though, the 6mg dual er ppc troll build Apparantly I offended someone in a game by even using that build, stating that sure I was doing damage, but it was too spread. Pulled off highest damage done in that game, so I think I atleast wasn't the prime factor to our loss.

[Saiyajin12]

Tesunie, on 27 January 2013 - 12:41 PM, said:

Let me say that cowardice is not a tactic nor strategy. Withdrawing though. The op is not talking about withdrawing to a better position but hiding to avoid damage and/or refusing to get into the fight/not moving to get into range/visual for sniping. He basically is saying that people need to preform their role, whatever that might be.
Scout/harasser/spotter - to gather information and attack vulnerable targets, backstab, disrupt enemy formations, anti-light and assault protection.
Long Range support/ sniper - to remain in the farther back ranks of the forces and provide fire support using spotting information and scout intel to move into safe positions. To provide cover fire for the forward elements and provide additional heavy weapon support for lighter armed units.
Close Range Brawler - The forward elements of the force designed to take and deal damage. The heavy armor and brusers. They are the mechs designed to kill quickly but are slower and more vulnerable to faster units out maneuvering them. They rely heavily on intel from scouts to be properly position themselves due to their slower speeds.

And he never said to rush to your death. I'm a Cicada pilot most times. Let me tell you that I run as a scout and harasser. I'll check the tunnel if no one else has. I'll use that tunnel to launch an attack on bases (conquest) or their backsides to disrupt their formations and target LRMs boats. Being in this role, I tend to find that my allies "cowardice" can get me killed as they don't push forward when I'm stopping the LRM rain and forcing the backs of the enemy to face them.

I've also had no problem scouting that ridge to get intel for the team and not die. Maybe take some damage, but it isn't suicide to scout the ridge. Heck, I can normally charge over, get behind them, and even run back over the ridge still alive.

One trick is to know when to run, charge or stand your ground. The expression "Discretion is the better part of valor" can apply if you intend to rejoin the fight at a more opportune time. Rushing in to die is dumb (and not what the op is about).

As for all the Sun Tez quotes, those are all poorly chosen and irrelevant to MW:O. They all are referring to avoiding a fight or by defeating a foe without having to fight. This is a game completely revolving around combat. You can not avoid the fight and win the game. Run away till a more opportune moment presents itself is not what those quotes are talking about. Those quotes all say to avoid a fight when possible, but TO FIGHT AND FIGHT TO WIN WHEN YOU NEED TO. I have never read Sun Tez, and you don't need to for a good grasp on tactics and military doctrine/stratagies. Team work, comunication and people doing what they can in their role will help you win. Being a scout hiding in you assault specialist shadow does not help the team. Being LRMs and charging the foe to get close is stupid. Setting a mech whose design is to be a mauler as support is a bit wasteful (especially if a Catapult that is in a lighter weight class can do it better).

All of the ops points where well founded and true with good points. He might have stated it in a fashion that wasn't clear, but his remarks have been well done to refine his points (even if he loved the strawman expression and used often unknown of less used words). On the otherside, bad quotes from Sun Tez that aren't relevant doesn't support you argument, which might be well founded but poorly expressed. The op isn't saying that a sniper should charge, but that a good sniper should be always moving to get into a better position. A scout should get intel, but not stand still out in the open nor hide and remain ineffective. There is always somewhere you can check as a scout. Even upon your own death you can still report your findings.

But I think the point is to have every action have some positive results for your team. If you aren't helping in some way, then you are hurting the team.

Actually, you can win by not fighting if both sides base race on assault! 100%, nay 120% fun for everyone! Had a couple of games where no one even got shot once, just traded bases. Best games, ever?

[Saiyajin12]

evilC, on 13 February 2013 - 12:57 PM, said:

TL;DR, but just to say that as far as PUGs go I disagree 100%

99% of all PUG matches that I lose are because newbs play it like it is COD and get way way too aggressive (ESPECIALLY on frozen - the ridge between the dropship and the mountain is like some kind of magical noob magnet)

Better that then both teams edging off one side going tunnel and the other just marching over the middle and trading bases.