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IMO hunchback 4P wasn't a great mech before the bump to mlas heat. Now it's actively mediocre. Lots of medium lasers is great for raw damage output, but once you're not fighting lights anymore the scatter is a real problem. You either need to use called shot all the time, or get flanks. Flanking is much easier in the faster 55 ton mechs, even though the damage is lower. Compare to the 4G, 100 damage from the AC20 is always going to one location. You can still use called shot if you need it, in which case turn on the supplemental medium lasers (put +crit mlas in your hbk4g btw). It works early game, it works mid-game, my hunch is one of the last mediums I retire. e: Nasgate posted:Right after posting this I decapped/pilot killed the entire enemy Lance. Got Wolverine packing 3 srm6 and 6jj. I assume that's a good build since slapping an AC on there would think my armor a lot. don't let the peer pressure for "optimal builds" force you to do nothing but SRM SRM and more SRM if you start finding it dull. I had an AC10 wolverine I liked, but the job it was doing was kinda gimmicky and it wasn't a front-line fighter by any means. The AC5 stock build isn't bad if you rip a heatsink, 1 JJ, and some of the rear armor to bring the SRMs up to 10. Klyith fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 22:47
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All a JumpShip in the universe needs is what? A KF drive and a way to charge it? Solar sails are so that the charge is slow and steady, because there are examples of charging it with a ships fusion generator and things going wonky (far country was this right?). I don't see why the specifications for turning the Argo into a JumpShip couldn't exist. If I was designing what is essentially a boondoggle exploration ship, thats what I would do. I mean, the argo is essentially the Bradley IFV of dropships right? "It needs a huge mechbay incase we find aliens" "It needs three docking collars for other dropships" "It needs an arcade for the scientists to do something between systems" "It needs a zero-g pool because my cousin is a pool designer and his business is in a slump"
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Nov 13, 2018 23:20
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KF cores are something like 95% of a JumpShip’s mass, they’re not so much built into the ship as the ship is built onto them.
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Nov 13, 2018 23:40
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Phrosphor posted:(far country was this right?). Far Country was a "the math for jumps between these two systems is off one decimal when jumping from this specific jump point during that particular orbital period." The charging off the fusion engines thing potentially causing a misjump is still true, though. Lots of things can cause a misjump.
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Nov 13, 2018 23:44
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PoptartsNinja posted:Far Country was a "the math for jumps between these two systems is off one decimal when jumping from this specific jump point during that particular orbital period." Oddly, I just finished Far Country today. The first mis-jump was something about unknown ripples in the universe and that cosmic rift being exactly where the jump point is what caused the issue. But yea, anything seems to be able to cause mis-jumps.
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Nov 14, 2018 00:07
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Phrosphor posted:All a JumpShip in the universe needs is what? A KF drive and a way to charge it? Civilian KFs are massive to the point where ships with them aren't so much ships, but spartan space stations crewed by a couple dozen at most, with minimal thrust capacity of their own and that do little except linger on jump points.
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Nov 14, 2018 00:08
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Yeah I think Kiva's original fluff for the Argo portrayed it as basically a mobile space station meant to provide a form of "shore leave" for the crews of exploration Leopards. JumpShip comes in with Argo, drops it off, Argo flies off with its Leopards, JumpShip heads off, comes back months later, Argo ready to leave, dock back up, gets out.
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Nov 14, 2018 00:19
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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/battletech/posts/1512716 Everyone should re-read the old Argo KS update. It's not and wasn't planned to be a ship with a jump drive. What would this gain us in the game anyway? We save 30k for a jump? Woo! Now I can afford most of a single ML! We already have freedom of travel by the end of the campaign and I don't think career mode has any restrictions.
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Nov 14, 2018 02:02
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I haven't really played since release so I'm wondering where weapon balance is right now? When I played large lasers and PPC were pretty lovely.
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Nov 14, 2018 02:07
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Amechwarrior posted:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/battletech/posts/1512716 Also, as someone pointed out KF drives take up a huge portion of a Jump Ship's mass. The only way the Argo could mount one and still have enough room for its conventional engines is if they used a Compact KF drive, the same type mounted on warships. If it had one of those then every House and Faction in the whole IS would come charging after you from the word go, cause those drives were one of the Holy Grails of lostech.
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Nov 14, 2018 02:40
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Bogarts posted:I haven't really played since release so I'm wondering where weapon balance is right now? When I played large lasers and PPC were pretty lovely. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/live-battletech-update-1-1-release-notes-updated.1106661/ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...d-more.1116569/ These are the major patch notes and the LL and other game balance changes were done in 1.1 to give them lower heat and upped ML heat back to the levels we had in backer beta. They also matured how called shots are calculated for spread damage weapons like MGs and SRMs. 'Mech stability also got a total overhaul, heavier classes are harder to knock over. 1.2 updated how the Inspiration morale system was accrued in combat, now called "Resolve." 1.3 should bring an pilot ability revision of which the most notable change is how Bulwark works. You can't just tank out in the open and it only triggers when in Cover or Braced, but you can now move and gain damage reductions. Last we saw, the overall damage reductions are lower, but you can achieve a 60% reduction with Bulwark, in Cover, while Braced.
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Nov 14, 2018 02:48
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Skippy McPants posted:Also, as someone pointed out KF drives take up a huge portion of a Jump Ship's mass. The only way the Argo could mount one and still have enough room for its conventional engines is if they used a Compact KF drive, the same type mounted on warships. If it had one of those then every House and Faction in the whole IS would come charging after you from the word go, cause those drives were one of the Holy Grails of lostech. I swear there was a line ingame about it originally being jump capable like that one guy said upthread but it's for sure not anymore because your little crew would definitely not be able to hold onto that thing if it was. But I also haven't played in months so I might be misremembering
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Nov 14, 2018 03:16
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Psycho Landlord posted:But I also haven't played in months so I might be misremembering You are misremembering. There was a big stink on the official forums because DropShips having docking collars is a big "no-no" in tabletop to prevent That Guy (You Know The One (The Munchkin)) from building fractal DropShip lattices in the tabletop game. The Argo was always intended to be a super-special DropShip that was too expensive to mass produce but neither armored nor armed well enough for anyone to give a poo poo about.
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Nov 14, 2018 03:49
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Klyith posted:
No worries here. I just scraped by a 3 skull mission thanks to a default Vindicator with a PPC and LRM 5. I almost went bankrupt from repairs and still have 3 warriors in medbay, but I got a Jagermech(sadly had to choose that since I damaged the Black Knight too much)
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Nov 14, 2018 03:55
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There was some confusing things Sumire would say to you in her dialogue tree where she was outright wrong about FTL, before it was quickly patched, so maybe that's what you're thinking of?
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Nov 14, 2018 04:25
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The jank-rear end FLT is one of my favorite bits of world-building in BT. They always go to great lengths to sell just how much humanity's conquest of space is built on a tenuous foundation. I especially love the bit about how they can't even safely transport drive cores between systems,Sarna posted:Replacement cores cannot be transported as typical cargo transiting through hyperspace. There are two ways to deliver a core to a different star system. The first is the more common, when the appropriate transport assets are available: once constructed or removed from the previous hull, the core is attached to a complete drive and installed within a lightweight transport shell. Another JumpShip would then temporarily attach itself in order to provide the necessary charge and to program the jump through hyperspace. After the charging 'Ship has removed itself to a safe distance, the shell would jump to the target location. The second method would have the titanium-germanium core ground into gravel-sized particles and (usually) chemically treated to reduce the interference with a functional K-F drive. It would then be reprocessed in a zero-gravity facility and recast into a new core, a process requiring many months.
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Nov 14, 2018 04:53
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Buy locally sourced cores, kids
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Nov 14, 2018 06:37
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The Argo was never meant to be a jumpship. It's possible that someone who isn't me said that it was, in an early interview, but I never did because I figured out really early on that my plan to give the player their own jumpship was unreasonable in the lore. It looks like a jumpship because jumpships look like reasonable spaceships, and dropships generally look unreasonable and silly, and McCain (the game's director) put his foot down and said we were absolutely not doing a silly-looking ship for the player's home base. But I never intended it to be a jumpship, or to have once been intended as one. It's a long-term exploration ship. If you're exploring the distant reaches of the Periphery, keeping a jumpship busy for months or years just babysitting a bunch of scientists doesn't make a lot of sense. Jumpships aren't exactly in vast supply, and they have important military uses. So you jump the Argo in, drop it, and it does all the work of supporting the scientists and survey teams for a year. Then you jump back in, pick it up, and off to the next system, and it dumps its data off along the way to be sent back to the Star League for cataloguing. Random trivia: the second, unfinished Argo-class ship was called the Myrmidon. edit: oh, and the silly poo poo aboard the Argo like the low-g pool is mostly your own idea. I think the description of the pool actually mentions that it's an obvious thing to do with a bunch of empty space in a hab pod you're not going to be fully occupying. Think of it as an empty house; some rooms are obvious, like the kitchen or the bathroom, but other rooms are just a big space. Do you put your TV in there, or an exercise bike, or a bunch of bookshelves? That's basically what you're doing when you decide to build a low-g pool or an arcade. isildur fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Nov 14, 2018 |
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Nov 14, 2018 07:51
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Its true, if I can ever afford to move into a bigger house Im putting in a low g pool immediately
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Nov 14, 2018 07:58
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All that aside I really wanna buy something for my two hundred million cbills. Right now all it gets me is replacement weapons and maybe a few more lances of Urbanmechs. And a man cannot live on Urbies alone.
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Nov 14, 2018 08:37
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isildur posted:edit: oh, and the silly poo poo aboard the Argo like the low-g pool is mostly your own idea. I think the description of the pool actually mentions that it's an obvious thing to do with a bunch of empty space in a hab pod you're not going to be fully occupying. Think of it as an empty house; some rooms are obvious, like the kitchen or the bathroom, but other rooms are just a big space. Do you put your TV in there, or an exercise bike, or a bunch of bookshelves? That's basically what you're doing when you decide to build a low-g pool or an arcade. And that makes a lot of sense considering all the science and survey equipment that isn't there due to the ship not serving in its intended role. On a personal note, I gotta say that I love the Argo. "Home Bases" are one of my absolute favorite things in video games. From the Normandy to X-Com Headquarters and the Flux State, I eat that poo poo up and you folks did an outstanding job instilling a lot of character and history into the ship even with very limited resources. It's probably my favorite thing in the game and canonical quibbles aside, it's easily my favorite addition to the setting in ages.
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Nov 14, 2018 08:40
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Skippy McPants posted:"Home Bases" are one of my absolute favorite things in video games.
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Nov 14, 2018 08:50
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I will read your book on game design not least because you have strong and correct opinions about stealth classic rpg Rolemaster
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Nov 14, 2018 10:50
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Ok. The Argo isn't a secret jumpship. 
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Nov 14, 2018 14:04
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It's okay, the life of a Jumpship captain would be boring anyway. They spend all their time lounging around LaGrange points waiting to give cooler people rides to more interesting places. They are the Uber drivers of the 31st century.
Skippy McPants fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Nov 14, 2018 |
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Nov 14, 2018 14:11
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isildur posted:Same. Someday I'm going to write a book about game design, and it's going to have a whole chapter about how The Boxcar Children was formative for me, and how I've been trying to make The Boxcar Children, The Game my whole adult life. basically every game should have a cool home base where you can chat with your buds and decorate it and find out some cool lore this includes games like Tetris
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Nov 14, 2018 14:15
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Skippy McPants posted:It's okay, the life of a Jumpship captain would be boring anyway. They spend all their time lounging around LaGrange points waiting to give cooler people rides to more interesting places. They are the Uber drivers of the 31st century. If I had a low gravity pool in my car, I'd also contemplate becoming an uber driver.
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Nov 14, 2018 14:31
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Fair. A big part of the reason accommodations on Jumpships are so lush compared to Dropships is that the crew spend extended periods of time spaceborne. Still, I doubt the micro-g pools are commonplace. Most Jumpships are run by House militaries or big corps, so I doubt they allocate more than the bare minimum required to keep their crews from going space-nuts. A lot of the stuff you cram into the Argo is more the sort of pimp-my-ride style extravagance that only a successful mercenary or ultra-rich playboy would go for. Skippy McPants fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Nov 14, 2018 |
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Nov 14, 2018 14:54
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Since this is the de facto ur-BattleTech thread, I just picked up the revised Total Warfare book with the old Atlas cover. Looking forward to that. Might pick up Shattered Fortress soon. Also, Wars of Reaving is probably the best BattleTech sourcebook ever made, and one of the better nerdbooks ever made in general. Would any of you be interested in playing some one-off MegaMek games here and there? I'm gonna pick up HBS' game again when the expansion comes out, but I'm pretty much always down for some classic games.
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Nov 14, 2018 14:59
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What's the two-line summary of Wars of Reaving? The Clans finally collapsing under the weight of their own hypocrisy?
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Nov 14, 2018 15:12
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wiegieman posted:What's the two-line summary of Wars of Reaving? The Clans finally collapsing under the weight of their own hypocrisy? Basically, the sitting ilKhan felt the invader Clans had gone native so he started a civil war to repurify collective Clans by purging all Inner Sphere influence, which is some beautiful backward logical when you consider what the clans are all about. Edit: it ended with the shattered remnants of the home Clans cutting off all contacts with the rest of humanity. Skippy McPants fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Nov 14, 2018 |
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Nov 14, 2018 15:14
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wiegieman posted:What's the two-line summary of Wars of Reaving? The Clans finally collapsing under the weight of their own hypocrisy? First, the Steel Vipers kick off what is effectively a purge of the Clan Homeworlds that targets the Clans "tainted" by contact with the Inner Sphere. In so many ways, the Invader Clans are ejected from the Homeworlds in very nasty, chaotic fighting. This furor eventually focuses on the Steel Vipers, too, however, because lol they were in the IS at one point. Whoops! They get Annihilated. During this, the Society (Scientist caste cabal) revolts against the Warrior Caste, adding to the chaos. They use a bunch of wild tech (new Mechs, Nova CEWS, iATMs, other cool poo poo), but eventually lose. Also they use a lot of chemical weapons. By the end (~3085), the following Clans who had been extant at the outset of the WoR are absorbed or destroyed: - Blood Spirit - Fire Mandrill - Burrock (turns out they were still around! but then they died after they came back) - Ice Hellion (mostly wiped out during their failed invasion of the CJF OZ, which is also a good story) - Steel Viper The following are expelled to the Inner Sphere only: - Jade Falcon - Wolf - Hell's Horses - Ghost Bear - Snow Raven - Diamond Shark - Nova Cat (already Abjured pre-WoR) The following are the remaining powers in the Homeworlds: - Star Adder - Cloud Cobra - Coyote (after purging themselves) - Stone Lion (new Clan created form...mostly HH I think) The Goliath Scorpions were pushed out post-WoR to the Umayyad Caliphate after it emerged they were mixing IS genes with Clan. There, they merge with the locals to form the hilariously-named Escorpion Imperio. More than 2 lines, but there's a lot that happens. DrPop fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Nov 14, 2018 |
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Nov 14, 2018 15:21
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The whole mess was definitely a reminder that the Ghost Bears are the best and most sensible Clan since they recognized way early on that poo poo was hosed and moved all their stuff to the Clan's IS holdings.
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Nov 14, 2018 15:23
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Also Diamond Shark is now Sea Fox again (and live mostly on jumpships) and the Snow Ravens are part of the Outworlds Alliance now. Oh and the Nova Cats are mostly dead, the only remaining bit of them is in the (former) (resurgent?) FWL.
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Nov 14, 2018 15:43
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Skippy McPants posted:Still, I doubt the micro-g pools are commonplace. Most Jumpships are run by House militaries or big corps, so I doubt they allocate more than the bare minimum required to keep their crews from going space-nuts. A lot of the stuff you cram into the Argo is more the sort of pimp-my-ride style extravagance that only a successful mercenary or ultra-rich playboy would go for. Some of the biggest corporations today have all kinds of stuff for their employees recreation.
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Nov 14, 2018 15:45
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Yeah, the Wars of Reaving were honestly a good thing - it cut down a lot of the dumb parts of the Clans. What's left in the Homeworlds is a lot more sustainable with the resources there; a lot of the "Why?" Clans are gone or significantly changed; and the IS Clans have been freed up to do things that make more sense. Like the Sharks can actually be merchant-types with way less baggage, or how the fiction no longer has to struggle to try and find a workable wedge for Hell's Horses being vehicle-centric in a society that's entirely based around mech combat. And several periphery powers got a nice boost - the Snow Raven/Outworlds Alliance pairing really works.
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Nov 14, 2018 15:48
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wiegieman posted:What's the two-line summary of Wars of Reaving? The Clans finally collapsing under the weight of their own hypocrisy? STEEL VIPERS: Everyone who has seen so much as one pixel of a picture taken in the Inner Sphere is tainted and we are going to murder them, join on in you guys! Feel free to genocide your rivals over every little grudge, take their poo poo, and call it 'reaving' CLAN SCIENTISTS: gently caress poo poo they're loving everything up, put the clones in the wunderwaffen, release the blood viruses, crash all the HPGs, take over Clan Coyote, oh god we have no idea what we're doing but it sure does have a large body count
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Nov 14, 2018 17:19
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So why not release the viruses first then wait until they've cut down on brutal overlord populations before deploying the clones?
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Nov 14, 2018 19:01
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wiegieman posted:So why not release the viruses first then wait until they've cut down on brutal overlord populations before deploying the clones? Because Clanners are impatient and stupid, and this is doubly-true of Clan scientists.
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Nov 14, 2018 19:10
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wiegieman posted:So why not release the viruses first then wait until they've cut down on brutal overlord populations before deploying the clones? The Society uprising was a panicked response to the warrior caste's catastrophic interference in what had, until then, been the sacred dominion of the scientists — the Clan eugenics program. They had a better long-term plan but never got to attempt it; when the Reavings started they went off half-cocked.
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Nov 14, 2018 19:28
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