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Stravag posted:This is suppossed to be a condemnation but it really isnt I mean, it's a cool concept. The problem is it's game-breaking. I just sketched out a 40 ton Clanner, 8/12/8, 2 ER Medium Lasers, 12 ER Micro Lasers, 4 MGs + 1 ton ammo, max armor, and ECM. Give me a lance (or Star, I guess  ) of those and I'd turbofuck an assault lance.
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Jul 6, 2021 06:17
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Bloody Pom posted:Can't have more jump jets than your walk speed, or sprint speed if you're using improved JJs! I willfully override that rule with the “you need to fill out the weight? GO CRAZY.” rule. That rule ruled.
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Jul 6, 2021 06:27
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Organ Fiend posted:You are using Vanilla right? Or are you using BEX or some other faction table mod? No, just vanilla. Trying to get at least the campaign done before moving on to other games. Gwaihir posted:Mechs like the Locust and Urbanmech actually canonically are small enough to fit two to a bay that only fits one Atlas. So a Leopard could land eight Urbanmechs all at once? 
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Jul 6, 2021 06:55
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Gwaihir posted:. All it would mean is you end up only using the very few stock units that are very good in the era, and trashing everything else. So I think that having some "bad" units in there is cool and good. I think inherently more powerful units is cool and good. I would argue for battletech, the key to the experience should be scarcity of resources, rather than abundance. A big part of that should be to limit access to mechs. Throwing hundreds of mechs into your organization over the course of a career offers tremendous experimentation and 100% is fun, but at the expense of viewing the mech as a unique and personalized object. In universe, a mechwarrior's mech is a deeply important object both militarily and socially, and is a tremendously personal item. A game should make that clear to the player. A player should see an individual mech (not just chassis type) as something imbued with personality. Narratively, a mercenary company should be the traditional scrappy underdog, held together with spit and wire. The focus should be on the personalities of the pilots, and extend that to the mechs both as tools themselves and as the rides of their pilots. Give your pilots traits based on actions they take on the battlefield as their primary statistics, rather than a leveling system. My experience and frame of reference with this sort of system is the total war series, but there's likely better implemented examples I don't know about. Give the mechs traits based on what happens to them in battle. Maybe an arm is field repaired poorly and can't fit the medium laser its rated for, but can only fit a small laser until you replace the whole limb in an actual repair facility. If there's another limb at the facility. Perhaps your tech is great and is able to tweak the targeting system on your catapult to acquire targets at greater range, but its at the cost of computing power that would sometimes gently caress up that catapult's IFF, and in the heat of combat it registers as an enemy. Make switching to a new mech a significant deal. Yeah your locust sucks but the focusing lens you bought from that weird Davion supply officer for the medium laser is super effective and your pilot loves it, and he's going to have a tough time switching over to that commando you salvaged, especially before you drop for what you hope is still an active religious civil war on a planet on the Capellan/FWL border. Mechs don't have a lot of empty space inside them, and it should take a lot of shots to bring a mech down. Salvage and the creation of a functional battlemech should be complicated, expensive process, taking away from precious resources which you need to repair your own damaged battlemechs. It should be a triumph and big deal to salvage a battlemech. Ultimately, I think by limiting player mech choices and focusing on giving pilots and their mechs traits based on your in-game actions, you create a more unique and robust playing experience. This would include using primarily stock mechs, and limiting the ease of integrating new chassis in your unit. Oh my god I am so sorry.
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Jul 6, 2021 08:40
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These are really cool ideas and I like the idea of mech scarcity and pilots becoming accustomed to their mech. I'd also go broke super fast because after 4 missions I've already had pilots get injured twice and blew one of my own mech's arms off because I didn't understand heat and fired too many lasers with it.
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Jul 6, 2021 09:12
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lonelylikezoidberg posted:Oh my god I am so sorry. Battletech has a problem where mechs are at the same time heirlooms passed down between generations but also you blow up like 4 of the things every mission, often a lot more. Any battletech game that tries to limit how mobile you are in regards to moving between mechs either has to do away with salvage, another cornerstone of the games lore, or sharply limit how many mechs you fight in any given battle until you reach the big leagues where you're throwing down against actual Great House military units. I don't dislike the idea of a battletech game where you're mainly fighting infantry and tanks, but I suspect you've sacrificed too much of what makes battletech battletech to arrive at a situation where you can reasonably limit your ability to move between mechs. Tieing pilots more rigidly to mechs is also an interesting idea but you'd need to expand the scope of the game beyond a single lance and change how lethal the setting is for pilots for it to work. If I only have 4 slots to bring mechs to a mission with me then I'm ditching the locust pilot the second I have a better alternative for the same reason I'd ditch someone who insisted on bringing a scooter to a destruction derby, sooner or later they're going to die and then get someone else killed because they really wanted to stick to their trusty mech rather than upgrade to something that isn't going to find itself outmatched all the time. But if I can instead bring 3 or 4 lances with me on deployments and then pick 2 of them based on intel on the ground, then yeah the locust pilot has a place. Or a system where I can reinforce from my available units, I'd keep the locust pilot around and use them to scout or harass or make end runs against objectives while my main lance holds the enemy in place.
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Jul 6, 2021 10:16
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It would be fine if we hadn't strayed into the idea that Battletech games have to be about mercenary companies rather than fighting for one of the big houses. Mechcommander had a fantastic campaign.
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Jul 6, 2021 12:14
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Infinitely more people talk about MW2 Mercs or MW4 Mercs than talk about Mechcommander, and nowhere was this more evident than the early stages of Battletech's crowdfunding. It's probably because people liked those games more.
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Jul 6, 2021 12:26
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Any attempt to limit Mech scarcity to the point that salvaging one is a big event would result in every mission being a wade through vehicles/infantry and enemy Mechs almost becoming minibosses of a sort. I'm not necessarily against that, but it's what it would end up being.
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Jul 6, 2021 12:51
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GD_American posted:Any attempt to limit Mech scarcity to the point that salvaging one is a big event would result in every mission being a wade through vehicles/infantry and enemy Mechs almost becoming minibosses of a sort. Sounds like MW5
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Jul 6, 2021 12:58
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How does the mercenary review board fit into the universe? Are they a plc or LLC or something? Say two houses are going to war and one puts up an assassination job, the other house knows about that right? And everyone is cool with this, the board puts the job up and everyone nods and goes "hmmm, we'll have to watch out for that one." Guess it explains why the targets are in mechs instead of chilling in their house eating dinner.
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Jul 6, 2021 13:07
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I installed BTA and I'm having so much dumb fun with a Wraith. Weirdo jump mechs were what was missing from my life.
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Jul 6, 2021 13:13
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ilmucche posted:How does the mercenary review board fit into the universe? Are they a plc or LLC or something? The MRB is basically just a Comstar op to keep tabs on non-House affiliated guns floating around. The whole thing was run by them as one of their ways to suppress the Houses and basically fell apart when they lost any credibility after Comstar literally tried to take over the entire IS in Operation SCORPION like the cartoon villains they are. They got replaced by the MRBC which was basically the same but replace Comstar with the Wolf's Dragoons and with less outright cackling villainy because they're designated protagonists and thus heroes.
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Jul 6, 2021 13:23
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Has anyone tried the battletech revised/BTR mod? I saw a few videos of someone playing it and it looks pretty fun without being too groggy. At a glance anyway 
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Jul 6, 2021 13:53
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Carcer posted:Battletech has a problem where mechs are at the same time heirlooms passed down between generations but also you blow up like 4 of the things every mission, often a lot more.
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Jul 6, 2021 14:05
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Ardlen posted:You could treat Mechs like heirlooms and have enemy Mechs freely withdraw from fights. It is less likely that you'll slavage anything when they leave as soon as an arm falls off. But you can salvage that arm. It's always so dumb in these types of games that giving up or running away isn't an option for the enemy. Mopping up the last dregs of a battle that's already won isn't fun. The Total War games do it fairly well. You're not fighting to kill every last enemy, it's about breaking them. Give psycho players the option not to honour a surrender if they want.
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Jul 6, 2021 14:28
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sassassin posted:It's always so dumb in these types of games that giving up or running away isn't an option for the enemy. Mopping up the last dregs of a battle that's already won isn't fun. Panic system mods really take the edge off this, pilots of 90% destroyed mechs, or scrub pilots that eat their first Annihilator volley will often just peace out.
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Jul 6, 2021 14:34
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sean10mm posted:Panic system mods really take the edge off this, pilots of 90% destroyed mechs, or scrub pilots that eat their first Annihilator volley will often just peace out. Yeah its great in BEXCE when I can force pilots to panic, often in a situation I'd eject a pilot to save them from death. I think having mechs actually run away from the fight to try and withdraw, maybe with a surrender flag or something, would be good as well. Let the player choose if they're willing to let the enemy withdraw or focus them down for salvage. Something that feels missing is longer deployment contracts. Like flashpoints but more general, so contracts where you're defending a specific base or supporting an invasion. Right now there's no real feeling like you've accomplished anything on any particular mission, which is fine and not incorrect with mercenary work, but bieng able to think back on your merc career and remember the difficult set of base defense missions before taking the fight to the enemy and wiping out their base, or that time you supported an invasion but things went wrong and you ended it covering your allies retreat would be neat.
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Jul 6, 2021 14:48
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sean10mm posted:Panic system mods really take the edge off this, pilots of 90% destroyed mechs, or scrub pilots that eat their first Annihilator volley will often just peace out. Yeah, that's really something that I'd like to see more of in Battletech II or whatever. A lance of lights hits the board, sees that the medium/heavies are trashed and decides to take a couple shots for honor's sake before retreating so great-grandpa's Wolfhound doesn't get trashed and repurposed as a merc's joytoy.
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Jul 6, 2021 15:03
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Bloody Pom posted:Battletech 2 should instead go further in the opposite direction and fully integrate MechEngineer. I've seen pictures of RT's mechlab, so I think I know what you're talking about. You could do something like that (i.e. fixed number of mods per mech, where all mechs get the same number of mods, regardless of tonnage), and then make the benefits of some (all?) mods scale by tonnage. E.g. vectored JJs give you (105-Tonnage)% more damage when jumping (bonus for lighter mechs) and melee mods give you +(Tonnage * 1.1) melee damage (bonus for larger mechs). The exact numbers/scaling formulas would need work, but this could give overengined and undertonned mechs a purpose.
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Jul 6, 2021 15:59
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Why are gauss rifles so expensive? Is it just more range and less heat for slightly more weight and significantly less damage than an AC20?
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Jul 6, 2021 17:56
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sassassin posted:Why are gauss rifles so expensive? Is it just more range and less heat for slightly more weight and significantly less damage than an AC20? Way more range, way less heat, no recoil, and they do through-armour damage so you can trigger critical hits and ammo explosions long before you've worn through a tough enemy's armour. They may not be strictly optimal from a weight-to-damage ratio, but in my opinion gauss rifles are significantly better because you can shoot them every turn once you've seen an enemy instead of needing several turns to get in range, and because you can be triggering catastrophic damage on enemy mechs from your first shot even when you're fighting assaults in five-skull drops.
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Jul 6, 2021 18:07
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sassassin posted:Why are gauss rifles so expensive? Is it just more range and less heat for slightly more weight and significantly less damage than an AC20? - Longer range - The ammo can't explode - In the base game at least, they do a small amount of structure damage straight through armour, so you have a chance to cook off enemy ammo / disable weapons
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Jul 6, 2021 18:08
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Carcer posted:Something that feels missing is longer deployment contracts. Like flashpoints but more general, so contracts where you're defending a specific base or supporting an invasion. Right now there's no real feeling like you've accomplished anything on any particular mission, which is fine and not incorrect with mercenary work, but bieng able to think back on your merc career and remember the difficult set of base defense missions before taking the fight to the enemy and wiping out their base, or that time you supported an invasion but things went wrong and you ended it covering your allies retreat would be neat. The easiest way to really crank up the difficulty is successive battles with carryover damage and limited re-arm/repair time, and that's not something this game can do very well. It tries, but if you're stocked up anywhere near most endgame players you just pull out Lance B, C, D, etc Dyz posted:Sounds like MW5 I'd like to play it one day, but I'm on a small non-gaming laptop. I wouldn't even dare try RogueTech
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Jul 6, 2021 18:28
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The "Sounds like MW5" comment is definitely definitely not a positive one lol.
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Jul 6, 2021 18:38
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The gauss+/++ are really where it's at since they're 2 tons lighter than a regular gauss, or 1 ton heavier than an AC/10++ but with more range, damage, stability damage and accuracy and much less heat.
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Jul 6, 2021 18:41
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sassassin posted:Why are gauss rifles so expensive? Is it just more range and less heat for slightly more weight and significantly less damage than an AC20? Its an artifact from the tabletop game. The GR in tabletop was probably the best weapon in the game, at least for IS tech. Its not in this game because of a lot of changes between TT and this game. For one, there is no damage reduction from cover in TT. All forms of cover basically reduce change to hit instead of reducing damage. I.e. whenever you get hit in TT, you take full damage. You just get hit less overall. The GR's longer range means that its more accurate than the AC20 at all but the closest ranges. The range brackets in TT amplified this effect. Combined, this meant that the GR essentially pierced cover. To replicate this effect in BATTLETECH, imagine if the GR had breaching shot built in (on every shot, not just when you fire one). Another thing is that the engagement range in BATTLETECH is much shorter than in TT. Visual range in this game is about 300m. In TT, if you have LOS, you can see it and shoot at it. So in this game, at least one mech from either side needs to get into ML/AC20 range before anyone can shoot at anyone else, while in TT, a lance of GR carriers would have several turns of free fire on a lance of AC20/ML mechs before they even got into range. GRs in BATTLETECH can practically fire across the map, but you rarely get a chance use their range because of the sight range issues. I have made GR carriers, deliberately hold them back and let them free fire from max range. If the brawlers are doing their work, the GR carriers hardly even need armor since they never get shot at. The whole lack of explosive ammo was also a much bigger deal in TT, where ammo explosions were much more severe.
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Jul 6, 2021 18:52
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Alchenar posted:It would be fine if we hadn't strayed into the idea that Battletech games have to be about mercenary companies rather than fighting for one of the big houses. Mechcommander had a fantastic campaign. I don't think a campaign where you're a mercenary commander needs to be all that different from being a part of a house army. Military units in the lore are often separated from supply lines and aren't always on planets with a high-tech industrial base. House militaries need to prioritize, and if you don't have a factory producing medium lasers on the planet maybe you have to wait until the next supply ship arrives, whenever that is. Perhaps you're on a planet with many biomes and you start out being part of a larger well-supplied force and are forced to go on the run and scrape and white knuckle things to get back to your command. Maybe you're on extended missions for a couple of weeks and have to make do with commandeering agro mech repair facilities out in the field. GD_American posted:I would say one way to disincentivize radical min-max optimized builds is to heavily increase penalties in reliability/performance (in whatever way you could) the further you get from the standard build or variant. Nation-states went through a shitload of man-hours and testing to get the Locust 1M (for example) to where it was reliable. But if you decide "I'd rather have an SRM/6 and a bigger engine", you're a merc unit, not a mega-corp or nation state. You don't have the resources to keep it from being a buggy, jury-rigged monster. I think this is a great idea. Carcer posted:But if I can instead bring 3 or 4 lances with me on deployments and then pick 2 of them based on intel on the ground, then yeah the locust pilot has a place. Or a system where I can reinforce from my available units, I'd keep the locust pilot around and use them to scout or harass or make end runs against objectives while my main lance holds the enemy in place. Great point! An in-depth game system should allow you to have as many mechs as you want but you're limited in your deployment by in-game factors, rather than by the game mechanics themselves. You should be limited in deployment thanks to available pilots, or drop ship berths, or available functional mechs, or unavailable supplies, or whatever. If your game system artificially limits you to a specific number of units but your mechs always start shiny and fully loaded you're almost always better off bringing an atlas. But if you've used all your autocannon ammo two battles ago and you have to do some recon against an unknown enemy, your three light mechs with primarily energy weapons are going to look pretty good - assuming you have the pilots to field them. Disguising limitations of the engine through in game narrative explanations is going to be a more satisfying and rewarding. Finally, I think that Battletech falls into the trap that many sim games do: when you're on a mission, you ALWAYS know you will get into a fight. It removes a lot of the tension. If I have an escort mission and I think there will be enemies but I'm not sure, maybe I'll take my centurion rather than a mongoose. But if I take the centurion, it can't spend that time in the repair bay getting a busted arm actuator fixed, and the range of movement in the autocannon arm will be limited. Do you play it safe and bring the centurion, or bring your mongoose knowing it might not be able to handle what it encounters, if you encounter any hostiles at all? But it will be able to make a withdrawl much more easily than a centurion if things get hairy. And if you get a run of missions where hostiles don't show up, does this mean you're going to walk into a big showdown later or everything is going to be a cakewalk? Is it going to make you more paranoid or more lax in your deployment? Battletech needs more surprises where the player is thinking not just about the immediate conflict but about long-term strategy and management. lonelylikezoidberg fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jul 6, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2021 19:18
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If I blow up a lgg so I have to blow up the other one or does the mech still get up?
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Jul 6, 2021 19:55
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You can still get up and shoot with one leg. Destroying both kills the mech.
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Jul 6, 2021 20:05
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ilmucche posted:If I blow up a lgg so I have to blow up the other one or does the mech still get up? Mechs can walk around with one disabled leg you have to disable both to eliminate the unit.
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Jul 6, 2021 20:05
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ilmucche posted:If I blow up a lgg so I have to blow up the other one or does the mech still get up? They'll get back up, and usually be a lot slower; can't remember from vanilla, but in Roguetech their accuracy goes totally to poo poo the round that they get up.  This leads to the assassination-mission strategy of knocking down the target (either through stability damage or legging), and either murder or leg via the free called shots while it's down. Beats the poo poo out of trying to catch a runner... RT update: adding in all the later-era ironmongery makes for harder, more dangerous fights, but leads to some really sweet loot - I now have an HAG30 and an HAG20 (Hyper Assault Gauss - fires 10 submunitions per shot, essentially LBX cluster - 2 shots for the 20, 3 for 30, and they still have a good through-armor crit chance), 5 packs of Harjel (Clan self-repair tech, fixes some armor and structure each turn), some Rotary Auto Cannons, Protoype, Radical Prototype and Compact heatsinks, and all kinds of neat poo poo I've blown up and thus couldn't salvage.  Also getting nice selections of "loot I have too much of so sell right from the salvage screen", like 12 regular heatsinks and chunks of vehicles that I don't feel like piecing together to scrap. Ended up jumping back to one of the Solaris 7 gameworlds for an Arano storyline flashpoint, rampaged through the available offseason fights, and then left... just to have the final Arano fight pop up.  Which meant clearing more Solaris fights. Big money for the Arano FPs, plus all the cash from the Solaris fights, means that even after two hideously-expensive Bull Shark refits, and buying a shitload of nicer electronics and melee gear, I'm still up around $25 mil or so.  And currently cruising down to Tarragona to go womp on the Widow Hunter and the Black Bounty...
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Jul 6, 2021 20:41
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Ok last dumb question for the night, if I want to build a head shooter for salvage is it better to go for gunnery or tactics? 5 guts for survivability because I'm new, then up the called shot chance with tactics? I'm thinking glitch can get in this centurion I just got and spray missiles everywhere while behemoth chills out in the vindicator and tries to shoot faces.
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Jul 6, 2021 20:54
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Tactics is what improves your called shot chances to hit heads. After you get your skills (bulwark and probably sure-footed or multi-target), beeline to tactics 9 for the called shot bonuses.
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Jul 6, 2021 21:03
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Ok never mind. I salvaged a full thunderbolt from a mission to train 3 urban mechs. It's biiiiiiig And a tile is what, like 30m? ilmucche fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jul 6, 2021 |
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Jul 6, 2021 21:38
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ilmucche posted:Ok last dumb question for the night, if I want to build a head shooter for salvage is it better to go for gunnery or tactics? 5 guts for survivability because I'm new, then up the called shot chance with tactics? Yes. They're both essential tbh, gunnery for the general accuracy and tactics for the called shot bonuses. If you really want a dedicated headchopper pick up a Marauder. With tactics 9 you're looking at a 35% headshot chance, give it an AC20 and nothing will survive you.
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Jul 6, 2021 21:58
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And Tyler Too! posted:Yes. They're both essential tbh, gunnery for the general accuracy and tactics for the called shot bonuses. If you really want a dedicated headchopper pick up a Marauder. With tactics 9 you're looking at a 35% headshot chance, give it an AC20 and nothing will survive you. Or spam lots of small >30 damage weapons!
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Jul 6, 2021 22:02
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ilmucche posted:And a tile is what, like 30m? You mean the movement dot locations? They have 24m spacing in a hex based array. The TT map sheets are 30m hexes for comparison.
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Jul 6, 2021 22:35
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Amechwarrior posted:You mean the movement dot locations? They have 24m spacing in a hex based array. The TT map sheets are 30m hexes for comparison. 20 tiles away as an optimal range???
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Jul 6, 2021 22:45
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ilmucche posted:20 tiles away as an optimal range??? The rulebook for TT has a note from the authors basically saying the distances are abstractions. The reality of the setting is that true-scale weapon ranges would require prohibitively large maps. So the optimal range is probably even further out
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Jul 6, 2021 22:58
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