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I haven't played flashpoints yet so maybe they already implemented something like this but what if they setup some missions where you had to send out multiple lances simultaneously to complete different objectives. Functionally this could occur as separate missions but you wouldn't be able to use the pilots/mechs that are being used for other the other objectives. Some of the objectives could be tailored to favor lighter/faster mechs like destroying a radio relay. Destroy it fast enough and you maybe prevent reinforcements from arriving in the mission for the 2nd objective. The longer you take the quicker the reinforcements arrive. Fail the mission and the reinforcements are already there waiting for you. Would also encourage you to develop more pilots/mechs. When I originally played through the campaign I mainly used the same pilots and my best 4 mechs for every mission unless one was out an inordinate amount of time for repairs or injuries.
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Dec 12, 2018 00:52
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Urban combat might possibly be a place where lighter mechs shine Like, sure, bring your Atlas-II into this city, where you'll never get high ground because you can't jump on any of the buildings and you're constantly getting backshot by Jenners on top of skyscrapers who you can't pursue because they're abusing the initiative system to get away from you and you're not fast enough to get a bead on them when they jump away unless you level the city, of course
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Dec 12, 2018 01:02
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Pattonesque posted:Urban combat might possibly be a place where lighter mechs shine You'd have to let the AI use the init system and reserve. I fully support this idea, but that's going to make the game an extra notch harder everywhere, not just in urban situations. Getting stuck in Phase 1 with 8+ AI there with you means you can't manage your Evasion and move when optimal. You have to go, then they go, repeat 3 more times, then you run out and they run a train of 4-8 units after their first 4. You got to be prepared for those types of missions and play them differently to ensure that doesn't happen. Toozler posted:Does the 4.5 skull Davion alliance FP have a target acquisition mission? Think i will let it expire if so. I completed the Marik alliance one and won zero salvage items because I was running and bracing the entire map. Not exactly fun Battletech Yes it does, it seems to be one of the hardest ones if not the hardest one going by posters on PDX forums.
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Dec 12, 2018 01:09
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Amechwarrior posted:Yes it does, it seems to be one of the hardest ones if not the hardest one going by posters on PDX forums. This one is an absolute fucker. I just barely managed it: Two assaults, two fast mediums with max JJs, armor, and preferably no ammo Send the assaults to the close point and have them switch out turn by turn with the nearby forest. They'll have to focus down a few mechs, so bring your best alphas and abuse called shots to the CT send one medium to the far right point and one to the northern point in the lake. Both are going to come under heavy fire so you'll want to finesse it so they've got max move mods and bracing the first turn in. The second turn is the issue because you can only get two evasion pips or so with JJing -- you could jump in and out so it takes three turns, but that's risky Start moving the assaults toward the extraction point (near the far right point) as soon as you can. Fortunately you can use the big building as cover but you'll still be under fire from LRMs Your far right medium doesn't have much cover after it gets the point, so you may have to run it into the forests east of the point. I ended up having to eject this pilot as the was a turn away from a CT core Your northern lake medium is gonna be the tough one. You have two basic retreat options -- either jump up the cliff and take a wide end-around to the extraction point, or jump it to the central building and hope you have enough JJs to get behind it. After this it's just a matter of beelining to the extraction point and abusing facing with JJs. I ejected one pilot but otherwise got away unscathed.
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Dec 12, 2018 01:53
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The problem with light mechs is that the mass spread for 'Mechs in the source material is so absurdly wide. According to the construction rules, total mass determines both HP as well as room to fit more weapons, meaning more attacks. The only thing Lights really have going for them is the ability, if you build for it, to go fast and become hard to hit. Advantages that can be dealt with, and in unmodded HBS BT, advantages that scale poorly the more people are shooting at them. The fact that videogames just naturally gravitate to the biggest robots over time is because the source material encourages it in its design.
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Dec 12, 2018 02:05
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What if mechs got a free and non-removable rank of evasion for each rank size smaller than their attacker? That way it wouldn't screw up the early game when it's lights vs lights, and equal classes are always fine, but assaults shooting at lights have to go up against 3 non-removable ranks of evasion plus however many the light has from moving.
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Dec 12, 2018 02:16
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It doesn't help enough. When i did the lone mech achievement with my atlas 2 i gunned down 2 light/medium mixed lances. I was still using multi shot because the assault has enough weapons to wing a light with something and still completely remove a sections armor. The ai was moving enough most of the things i shot at were at 2-3 pips. And if anything is beyond that you call shot ct. And shot scatter doesn't matter youre only calling the shot to get the increased accuracy
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Dec 12, 2018 02:33
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Piell posted:What if mechs got a free and non-removable rank of evasion for each rank size smaller than their attacker? That way it wouldn't screw up the early game when it's lights vs lights, and equal classes are always fine, but assaults shooting at lights have to go up against 3 non-removable ranks of evasion plus however many the light has from moving. We kind of already get this with code:
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Dec 12, 2018 02:34
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What is this balance obsession? It's okay for lights to be different than but generally worse than heavier mechs. Why would anyone plow extra resources/money into making bigger mechs if they were all on equal footing? Why would players strive to get heavier mechs?
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Dec 12, 2018 03:05
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Because once upon a time heavy and assault mechs meeting were so rare that a battle would grind to a halt around them to watch the titans duel and some people like to think that everything battle tech related should be like that. Which just ignores the joke term steiner scout lance for a full assault mech lance. edit: the only way to make that light and medium centric balance work is if you make a battletech game which uses the world in conflict system where you're slowly recouping points to buy reinforcements, but if you did that you would have to get rid of customs and telling your pilots exactly what to do and turn it into just an RTS. I'm sure if someone really wanted to they could do a reskin of WiC with battletech stuff and it would get them exactly what they want, but until we stop playing games centered around you your lance and maybe 1 backup lance and start controlling multiple companies at a time i don't really want to play a game like that. Mech commander 2 kinda gave you the option to run massed lights instead of a bunch of heavies, but even if you were running only assaults you were still bringing 6-8 mechs at a time and you were curbstomping waves of lights and mediums without caring. And until the AI is running optimized designs like you are the ability to customize your mechs breaks any system which tries to be balanced for both you running only 6 assaults or 16 locusts Stravag fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 03:11
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I want to liberate a planet with a locust and a little bit of gumption
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Dec 12, 2018 03:13
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mods changed my name posted:I want to liberate a planet with a locust and a little bit of gumption Just the gumption. He captures the Locust! (though I suppose 'gumption' is kinda underselling the fact that he had been trained from childhood to succeed his father as commander of their merc company)
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Dec 12, 2018 03:24
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I wish the weight restrictions on "light" missions were 55tonners instead of 50tonners. There's no reason to actually have the royal griffin readied up when you can only bring crabs, enforcers, and cents.
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Dec 12, 2018 03:30
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Add MASC, make it so that a standard move has the same range as a sprint and adds sprinting evasion pips at the cost of extra heat generated, make it exclusive to lights. Now they can super-flank people for backstabs and ignore some incoming damage.
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Dec 12, 2018 04:25
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And Tyler Too! posted:Add MASC, make it so that a standard move has the same range as a sprint and adds sprinting evasion pips at the cost of extra heat generated, make it exclusive to lights. Now they can super-flank people for backstabs and ignore some incoming damage. You have to really good at backstabbing for that kind of mobility to matter any. There's only one light mech that fits that bill.
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Dec 12, 2018 05:10
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Obviously the best way to make lights viable late game is just to add in a scaling weapon weight mechanic so an AC20 on a 80tonner or heavier weighs its standard weight but on a 20tonner it scales to only weigh 2 ton. problem solved.
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Dec 12, 2018 05:18
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Xarbala posted:The problem with light mechs is that the mass spread for 'Mechs in the source material is so absurdly wide. According to the construction rules, total mass determines both HP as well as room to fit more weapons, meaning more attacks. The only thing Lights really have going for them is the ability, if you build for it, to go fast and become hard to hit. Advantages that can be dealt with, and in unmodded HBS BT, advantages that scale poorly the more people are shooting at them. This. The system itself is based off a progression of bigger = better, otherwise you wouldn’t have such a massive discrepancy between light and assault firepower. All the ideas people have involve some serious mental gymnastics in giving handicaps to light armor replacement (dodge tanking instead of armor tanking) and that’s just not going to work on its own. You have to address the damage aspect of it too. In the end I think you either have to accept that going up in weight class is basically “leveling up” or you have to go to a rock/paper/scissors model, eg the “World in Conflict” example. Infantry, light tanks, mediums, and heavies can all hurt each other, but each is stronger against a certain class.
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Dec 12, 2018 06:26
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Just let people bring along say 200 tons of mechs but you can only control 3 or 4 at one time. Let mechs tag in or out or else replace fallen mechs. Big slow mechs would be handicapped since it takes that much longer for them to go back and forth. Also rebalance custom mechs by bringing back the lower tabletop max armor limits.
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Dec 12, 2018 06:35
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Stravag posted:Because once upon a time heavy and assault mechs meeting were so rare that a battle would grind to a halt around them to watch the titans duel and some people like to think that everything battle tech related should be like that. Which just ignores the joke term steiner scout lance for a full assault mech lance. This is from one of the Warrior novels, I think, where Ardan Sortek (?) faces off against a Liao mechwarrior and everyone oohs and aahs about how they're going to tell their grandchildren about the time they saw two assault mechs fight one-on-one Sortek is in a Victor and the Liao dude is in an Awesome, lol
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Dec 12, 2018 07:00
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Pattonesque posted:This is from one of the Warrior novels, I think, where Ardan Sortek (?) faces off against a Liao mechwarrior and everyone oohs and aahs about how they're going to tell their grandchildren about the time they saw two assault mechs fight one-on-one No idea, I havent read it myself. I just know its the nostalgia part of the universe people have rose tinted glasses about.
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Dec 12, 2018 07:50
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OXBALLS DOT COM posted:Also rebalance custom mechs by bringing back the lower tabletop max armor limits. Am I the only grog who still follows this rule in game? I can't bring myself to put more than the TT max (total of Front + Rear armor can equal up to double IS) on my torsos. Any fractional leftovers I get I put on the CTR. I don't think Lights need any more combat bonuses, they are not brawlers or even front line flankers like the faster Med/Hvy units are. Anyone here ever use any of the TT scenario books or run a campaign with them? They already figured out how and where to use lighter designs and shape missions to their advantages. This is why my preferred choice of "balance" is not to make Lights as combat capable as Mediums or higher, but make encounters where absolute speed is of the essence for part of the mission. In theory, Target Acquisition and Recovery should be doing this, but they just aren't right now. An Atlas should stand a good chance of taking an entire company of Wasp/Stinger/Locusts as lore suggests. It has the firepower and armor to outlast them, but to chase them? Not a chance. The LCT has a run distance of 350m in this game, that's larger than the range of the ML/SRM/AC20 they can cover in a single turn and just over half the distance of LRMs. It can get away from danger. You could build a contract based on hitting waypoints, one after the other instead of simultaneously like Trg.Ack and a pack of LCTs would outrun the opponents that spawn near (but not on top of) each waypoint. Want to make sure you can't bring 4/6 units or slower? Massive firepower you can't win against if you are caught by the pursuers as they converge on your location. Want to make it so you can't bring 5/8 55t units? Turn timers between waypoints, at a high enough level factor in the sprint bonus distances. All of a sudden, you might want to bring a CDA with maximum armor and minimal weapons to be "Beacon Bait" to touch each waypoint first and pull agro. Then your high powered JR7s and maybe COM/FS9s come in for the back shots before departing to keep pace with the CDA. You could also massage the Lancedef for the contract to limit the total number of enemy units with the "unit_indirectFire" tag to keep LRM spam to a managed level. The waypoint change would also keep the Lights in a tight pack where they work best, not split up and isolated where they die in the current high level Trg.Ack missions.
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Dec 12, 2018 08:12
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Amechwarrior posted:Am I the only grog who still follows this rule in game? I can't bring myself to put more than the TT max (total of Front + Rear armor can equal up to double IS) on my torsos. Any fractional leftovers I get I put on the CTR. I did that for my first couple playthroughs but then I stopped caring. it wasnt making that much of a difference because I dont go past 35 armor on a mech on the CT or 30 on the STs unless there is nothing else I want to spend the weight on. Usually that only happens when I'm making a lowlander or scoutlander and put a bunch of ersmalls on it. edit: the marauder starting with 85 rear CT armor bothers the poo poo out of me tho because its a massive waste Stravag fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 08:17
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Amechwarrior posted:
The problem with this is that the games economy is heavily based on salvage. You would either need defined rewards like flash points or no salvage option but stupid high pay. You’re right about one thing, in that the real solution to the light conundrum is the same as in TT: crafted scenarios which require lights. The flashpoint mechanic is probably how you get that. Defined payout at the end and you can have story based reasons for preliminary missions that require lights.
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Dec 12, 2018 14:13
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Delayed deployment? Lights start on map, enemies in radar contact. You get mediums on map turn x heavies turn y and assaults on z
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Dec 12, 2018 14:28
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I always uparmor as much as reasonably possible even if it leaves some mechs undergunned because of how often you get pinned between two lances. It's nice to know you can rely on your metal asses taking a couple ppcs without the whole thing falling over. Speaking of which boy my vindicators are not cutting it anymore at 3 skull missions. Poor guys
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Dec 12, 2018 15:31
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Amechwarrior posted:I don't think Lights need any more combat bonuses, they are not brawlers or even front line flankers like the faster Med/Hvy units are. Anyone here ever use any of the TT scenario books or run a campaign with them? yes they absolutely did not ever solve the problem of lights being irrelevant when you had the choice of going heavier. the set of things a jenner can do that a wolverine cannot is very small, and any scenario made to favor the jenner is going to be both very extreme and mostly incompatible with this game's other systems (like progression and post-match rewards).
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Dec 12, 2018 15:48
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RBA Starblade posted:I always uparmor as much as reasonably possible even if it leaves some mechs undergunned because of how often you get pinned between two lances. It's nice to know you can rely on your metal asses taking a couple ppcs without the whole thing falling over. Yeah, I had to drop my mediums when I started doing 3 and 3 1/2 skull missions. It's weird going from an all medium loadout to an all heavy deployment because of how much slower they are. The amount of battering they can take is pretty sweet though.
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Dec 12, 2018 17:03
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So in a 100 in-game days I've gone from 2 mediums to 8 and a heavy. I got lucky early with the Centurion that I made into a Yen-Lo-Wang with an AC/20 ++ ( +10 dmg ) that took a breaching shot pilot that served as a great can opener which helped a ton My only real complaint is that since I've sky rocketed through the medium phase. I never really got a chance to try out the Hatchetman or Crab before they became quickly outclassed by the 55 tonners
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Dec 12, 2018 19:26
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Got excited to get my first heavy mech, only to discover that the Dragon seems to be extremely  compared to the Shadow Hawks I already had.I did luck into a PPC++ and an LRM10++ so there's that. 
sean10mm fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 20:04
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I R SMART LIKE ROCK posted:My only real complaint is that since I've sky rocketed through the medium phase. I never really got a chance to try out the Hatchetman or Crab before they became quickly outclassed by the 55 tonners I think once I wrap up my first campaign I'm going to start a new one that is modded so I start with 4 firestarters, or 2 + 2 hatchets. They were fun the little bit I played with them, but at least for me they lose steam way too soon. They do chew up lights and small mediums though.
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Dec 12, 2018 20:21
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iirc roguetech and ccc both start you with random mechs under a certain tonnage limit. Which helps get you more game time with the less popular lights and mediums
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Dec 12, 2018 20:26
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sean10mm posted:Got excited to get my first heavy mech, only to discover that the Dragon seems to be extremely Yeah, the 40 and 60 tonners are simply outclassed by their contiguous weight peers. Also, while variants can increase their relative competence to other stock weapons if those are the alternative, note PPC is the least damage efficient weapon in the game, and LRM10s are the least efficient LRM launchers.
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Dec 12, 2018 21:31
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Finally got some Star League tech off the Black Market in my campaign. It was a whole Highlander with double heatsinks and a Gauss rifle....but it also cost me nearly 28 million Cbills. Seems like it is one of the original HGN-732s if I am not mistaken, being sold at triple the price. Reasonable for SL tech mechs in pristine condition sold illegally. It also took me a few months to find in-game. This might sound like a problem but it isn't, not really. My only real issue with both the faction and other market is that I rarely seem to find SL tech at all, at least not as often as I would during my career play. Most of the time it is just more 2+ stuff I already own. Again I get that the stuff is rare, but it mostly gets boring hoping for a good roll when you visit a planet.
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Dec 12, 2018 21:52
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I asked before but didn't see an answer, how do you find black markets? Do planets just occasionally have them?
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Dec 12, 2018 21:53
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they'll say black market on the navigation screen I believe. Once you get to such a planet it will be a greyed out tab on the shop screen unless you have been granted access. they wanted 2.5mil cbills from me but I killed a lot of pirates
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Dec 12, 2018 22:00
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Black markets are static and marked among the traits of a planet as Black Market when you click them and read the list. However to actually access it you have to just wait around for their event to trigger. You pay a fee that depends on your standing with the pirates, then you have access to the market whenever you visit one of the planets with it. It shows up in a tab when you access the regular store.
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Dec 12, 2018 22:01
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Conspiratiorist posted:Yeah, the 40 and 60 tonners are simply outclassed by their contiguous weight peers. Yeah they're not great, they're just the first "special" items I've found. Though the PPC++ I got is at least better on paper than a generic large laser in terms of damage:heat if I read the stats right.
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Dec 12, 2018 22:09
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sean10mm posted:Yeah they're not great, they're just the first "special" items I've found. Damage / [Weight + Ammo Weight + (Heat/3)] The 60 damage PPC++ is 3.21, stock LLas is 3.63 and has an inherent +1 accuracy bonus.
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Dec 12, 2018 22:30
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Purchasing mech parts is no joke. Just went from all mediums (vindicator, shadow hawk, wolverine and Griffin) to having 2 stalkers as well thanks to Arano selling 3* parts in two of their markets for $900,000 a pop.
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Dec 12, 2018 23:30
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Here's an exciting turret fact I learned from a firestarter that would not die six rounds in a row and somehow had the stability on ice to resist ten thousand missiles: they don't need LOS if your mech is shut down to shoot you - only if it's on!
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Dec 12, 2018 23:56
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