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Thanks for the heads up on the season pass! I think it is a wise purchase, as this game will only get better and better as long as Isildur is on board!
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Oct 19, 2018 16:47
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 14:57 |
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GreenManGaming has the season pass for $40, plus they have a sale for another 18% off (so its under $33): https://www.greenmangaming.com/paradox-promo/ Edit: Only have Steam keys, in case you have it on GOG or something.
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Oct 19, 2018 16:55
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OAquinas posted:GreenManGaming has the season pass for $40, plus they have a sale for another 18% off (so its under $33): I was on the fence, but with the GMG sale, I'm in.
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Oct 19, 2018 16:59
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Voucher code on GMG is PDX18 in case someone needs it.
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Oct 19, 2018 17:14
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pangstrom posted:Tunnels / indoor stuff would be a great "only lights can get through here"/"only mediums can get through here" etc. way to keep them relevant in some later game missions. Cool idea. Tunnels sound amazing in abstract but I don't know what you do about the camera. It would have to be a dedicated level where you fake it by having the top of the "tunnel" open and the geometry in-between fills in for solid earth. (imagine a waffle iron) OAquinas posted:Ammo never goes in arms. I will occasionally pair ballistic ammo with the gun it feeds in an arm. Reason being if the ammo blows up the gun is useless anyways, so better to lose both than lose a leg as well. OTOH I mentioned upthread that I don't like the sacrificial arms method of protection by intentionally taking side hits. Last night I finally realized why: I almost always flank to the left of the enemy. This puts my mechs with their right side naturally facing enemies. And mechs tend to put their weapons on the right arms / side. That's unchangeable for the most part due to slot layout. But why the hell am I flanking to the left all the time, I asked myself? Thinking about the random mission maps, reinforcements are almost always positioned on the "east" side of the map -- whether they're marked or come in later. So if you flank right you run into them or get sandwiched. Sometimes the right side has terrain that looks really appealing, but it's a trap because that's where the reinforcements show up. I've never regretted the left flank. Now I need to go through all the mechs to find the ones that work best left-handed.
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Oct 19, 2018 18:01
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RBA Starblade posted:Dekker vs A Deck Dekker got decked
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Oct 19, 2018 18:06
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Klyith posted:
That's fair for arm guns. I try to avoid those when possible, but the reasoning is solid. And yeah: isildur--can you sit your mission people down and make them switch up the reinforcement spawns a bit? I can think of maybe one or two maps where the left side (from starting vantage point) is the point of entry for reinforcement lances, and one of them puts them behind a hugeass ridge (so you'd probably avoid that route anyway)
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Oct 19, 2018 18:18
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I wouldn't mind having more stuff to build for your ship, to help out gameplay: Communications Network- Helps build reputation, but most importantly, gives you progressively more accurate info on what you are up against. A common frustration is that the difficulty of many battles is abstract, because a 'two and a half skull' mission could mean a lot of things. The more advanced your communications, the better you can gather up intel on future missions. Aerospace Bays- Let you store Aerospace fighters to provide strategic and tactical support. Come in two types: Fighters, which can neutralize enemy fighter screens in the LZ or drive off enemy bombers, and Bombers, which can perform air strikes on targets. The fighters themselves don't have stats the same way mechs do, but rather simplistic values in terms of durability and offense. They need to be purchased/salvaged so you have to be careful about using them since they may be difficult to replace sometimes. Having good Intel can give you a better idea on enemy Aerospace presence before you are committed to the battle. Logistics Depot- Allows you to call down artillery strikes, drop in ammo, engineer teams (to reactivate/repair turrets) and at later tiers even lets you call down a few mechs you might have sitting in reserve for emergencies. Also improves the quality of salvage left behind.
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Oct 19, 2018 18:28
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Give the Argo some Long Tom cannons, turn it into a space AC-130. Get Murad to salvage the Iberia and re-isolate the Locura.
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Oct 19, 2018 18:43
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Amechwarrior posted:HEY EVERYONE I MADE AN ERROR ABOUT THE SEASON PASS SALE! Thanks for the heads up, preordered.
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Oct 19, 2018 19:21
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Would be cool if you could sub-contract local merc groups to provide vehicle support or infantry (if they're ever added to the game).
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Oct 19, 2018 19:22
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Snagged the season pass through GMG - thanks for the heads up.
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Oct 19, 2018 19:42
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Back Hack posted:Would be cool if you could sub-contract local merc groups to provide vehicle support or infantry (if they're ever added to the game). The periphery had more use of anti mech infantry than other regions. Just having a unique element to capture buildings or other strategic assets would be good. Another idea I had, along with a new Argo building, was to get guerilla support in missions which could be in the form of some friendly infantry, vehicles, or rarely mechs. You could brute force the mission on your own, but getting help might make actually beating the mission more feasible.
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Oct 19, 2018 19:51
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I would love to be able to field an SRM carrier as an alternative to one of my mechs. Showering a foe in SRMs is the best.
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Oct 19, 2018 20:00
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Rectovagitron posted:I love this game so much. I started playing as soon as this came out, but had to move across the country and didn't get my gaming rig set up again until recently. I am spoiled as hell with all the expansions coming out just as I am getting super into it. Definitely ditch the jump jets on the cent. Completely worthless on an LRM boat unless you're planning on being a suicide mech after you run out of ammo. Drop a heat sink and slap on another laser on the Shadowhawk. That said, I prefer keeping the weapons on the shadowhawk to ballistic weapons and SRMs. Having a fast mech that can throw on a lot of stability damage is really effective in the earlier part of the game in getting you more salvage via dead pilots.
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Oct 19, 2018 20:24
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You probably want to run a brawler Shadowhawk fairly hot because it's got crazy melee power and you can use punches to cool off.
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Oct 19, 2018 20:33
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As insane as this sounds - I'd like to field more units and diverse unit types. It would be rad to make it feel like a battle as opposed to a skirmish. I understand that this would take forever to play.
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Oct 19, 2018 21:05
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Klyith posted:OTOH I mentioned upthread that I don't like the sacrificial arms method of protection by intentionally taking side hits. Last night I finally realized why: I almost always flank to the left of the enemy. This puts my mechs with their right side naturally facing enemies. And mechs tend to put their weapons on the right arms / side. That's unchangeable for the most part due to slot layout. Honestly, I've always thought that the "sacrificial arms" method (i.e. the one where you put all of your guns on one side of the mech) was a bad idea in BATTLETECH, and for that matter in the mechwarrior games as well. In BATTLETECH it means you just make it easier for your enemy to side-torso you. In mechwarror games, it just makes your mech easier to disable. It also makes your mech easier to kill once you start fighting opponents who know that power of side-torsoing mechs with favorable geometry.
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Oct 19, 2018 21:50
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Organ Fiend posted:Honestly, I've always thought that the "sacrificial arms" method (i.e. the one where you put all of your guns on one side of the mech) was a bad idea in BATTLETECH, and for that matter in the mechwarrior games as well. In BATTLETECH it means you just make it easier for your enemy to side-torso you. In mechwarror games, it just makes your mech easier to disable. It also makes your mech easier to kill once you start fighting opponents who know that power of side-torsoing mechs with favorable geometry. It has the added problem in battletech of adding to your repair times and repair costs. Great, your heavy lost it's "ablative" arm and you're not out any weapons, but now you need to refit it in the Argo for a month and it's not available for the next contract. That's ignoring the repair costs. It's not the end of the world, especially when you're late game and have multiple lances ready to go, but it's a huge pain in the balls when you've got two heavies to your name and really need that next mission to happen now so the bills get paid.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:It has the added problem in battletech of adding to your repair times and repair costs. Great, your heavy lost it's "ablative" arm and you're not out any weapons, but now you need to refit it in the Argo for a month and it's not available for the next contract. That's ignoring the repair costs. Argo replacing an empty arm takes like 1-2 days, tops. Now, the Leopard repair time is a bit more of a hassle.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:18
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OAquinas posted:And yeah: isildur--can you sit your mission people down and make them switch up the reinforcement spawns a bit? I can think of maybe one or two maps where the left side (from starting vantage point) is the point of entry for reinforcement lances, and one of them puts them behind a hugeass ridge (so you'd probably avoid that route anyway) For the long-term -- talking a 'years' rather than 'months' timeline -- I have a plan that will pull encounters out of the unity scenes entirely and allow spawn placement via JSON. That's a huge engineering task, though, so I'm not really expecting it to happen; there are just too drat many things that are higher priority.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:44
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So I asked before I think, but does the AI now bring Light/Normal Mechs to later engagements? It was one of the things that really threw me off, that every lategame engagement ended up being basically all Heavies/Assaults.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:49
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Glenn Quebec posted:As insane as this sounds - I'd like to field more units and diverse unit types. It would be rad to make it feel like a battle as opposed to a skirmish. Yea, I'd absolutely love to have more units, but definitely not more than 2 lances/8 total units under my control. That's enough to get some really great synergy and large battle feel, but any more than that and I think missions would just take foreeeeeverrrrr.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:53
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isildur posted:We actually have someone now whose entire job is adding more variety of encounter layouts and spawn positions and so forth to every map. So the 1.3 update should increase encounter variety. Probably it still won't feel like enough, because y'all are putting 200+ hours into the game and we targeted about 50 hours of content initially, but I'm pushing hard to keep expanding the available map/encounter combinations. Hell yeah! This is awesome.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:09
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isildur posted:We actually have someone now whose entire job is adding more variety of encounter layouts and spawn positions and so forth to every map. So the 1.3 update should increase encounter variety. Probably it still won't feel like enough, because y'all are putting 200+ hours into the game and we targeted about 50 hours of content initially, but I'm pushing hard to keep expanding the available map/encounter combinations. So you were targeting 50h of content and learned some of us are pushing 200+ hours. How does that knowledge change your development plans? Or is there a point where you have to accept a segment of your players will just play too much for too long and suffer burn out.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:14
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Amechwarrior posted:So you were targeting 50h of content and learned some of us are pushing 200+ hours. How does that knowledge change your development plans? Or is there a point where you have to accept a segment of your players will just play too much for too long and suffer burn out. If you manage to put 200 hours into something without burning out it's already a pretty exceptional accomplishment. Like, I've got something on the order of 350 in FO:NV across 2 complete play troughs and god knows how many aborted ones and closing in on a decade of owning the game. I know there are some people who dump thousands of hours into games but if you "merely" get 200 out of a title I don't really think that's down to the devs screwing something up. edit: 141 hours in Battletech. drat, that's about twice what I thought it was.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: 141 hours in Battletech. drat, that's about twice what I thought it was. I also thought I had around 70-80. Steam says 218. Whoops.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:29
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Amechwarrior posted:So you were targeting 50h of content and learned some of us are pushing 200+ hours. How does that knowledge change your development plans? Or is there a point where you have to accept a segment of your players will just play too much for too long and suffer burn out. That said, most of my design work for the past three years (and really, forever?) has been about building systems to make content creation easier and more streamlined. Flashpoints are a part of that work; eventually I want to be able to build an epic campaign with branching storylines by dragging and dropping content blocks into place, like Unreal's blueprints. I'm not sure I'll get there in Battletech, but this is a lot closer than I've ever gotten before.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you manage to put 200 hours into something without burning out it's already a pretty exceptional accomplishment. I don't disagree with that at all. I've not burnt out myself and am just about to the 200h mark, but then I've had a number of month long absences due to my work since launch. I've seen more than a few comments on the game being "repetitive" or "samey" on the tactical encounter level on the various discords or other forums and I get that. The fact that the people posting those are also likely the ones with 100+ hours is a great sign that the game itself is good at hooking players and keeping them well beyond its targeted playtime. I'm just wondering if/how that knowledge might change what kinds of things are getting prioritized behind the scenes. For example, she mentioned the person assigned to spice up the current contracts spawn points. I wonder if that would have been as high of a priority if a lot of us were just putting the game down around 50 hours instead of players grinding those encounters to dust and learning where all the reinforcement lanes are on each map.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:34
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isildur posted:For any amount of content we create, there's someone who will want double that. I think that scales, too; if we made 200 hours of content, someone would want 400. The best we can hope for is to take the cost of the game, divide it by the number of hours we expect you to play, and decide if that number makes sense to us. Read this and consider NG+ mode that you see in all those 200+ hour open world games like Witcher 3 and Assassin's Creed: Origins. No matter how crazy in-depth a world you make there's some poop socker out there who will work it like it's his job.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:36
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isildur posted:For any amount of content we create, there's someone who will want double that. I think that scales, too; if we made 200 hours of content, someone would want 400. The best we can hope for is to take the cost of the game, divide it by the number of hours we expect you to play, and decide if that number makes sense to us. I can't wait to see the Flashpoint creator and hope in the far future it could be possible to chain whole flashpoints together as a kind of multi-planetary conquest challenge/story where each world is it's own flashpoint and tags earned or lost from your choices change up where you can or can't go next. Maybe too grand a scale, but it would work just as fine as a single world and each flashpoint is a major operation or continent to clear.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:53
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isildur posted:For any amount of content we create, there's someone who will want double that. I think that scales, too; if we made 200 hours of content, someone would want 400. The best we can hope for is to take the cost of the game, divide it by the number of hours we expect you to play, and decide if that number makes sense to us. Yeah, you can't make more SP content than people can play. But I think making a game that people don't get bored of until the third time seeing the exact same stuff counts as a victory. Personally I'll always take really good over more hours. Organ Fiend posted:Honestly, I've always thought that the "sacrificial arms" method (i.e. the one where you put all of your guns on one side of the mech) was a bad idea in BATTLETECH, and for that matter in the mechwarrior games as well. In BATTLETECH it means you just make it easier for your enemy to side-torso you. In mechwarror games, it just makes your mech easier to disable. It also makes your mech easier to kill once you start fighting opponents who know that power of side-torsoing mechs with favorable geometry. It works out ok in this game because the AI doesn't always punish you for it. To take maximum advantage of side hits it should be calculating whether it can leg or bore all the way through side torso with the combined damage available. If a human player has that scenario they will do things like move multiple mechs into position for side hits, think about getting hot to do more damage, etc. If you only have one mech available and the most you can do is pop an empty arm, you probably don't risk anything for such small gain. But two big weakness the AI has are: it isn't great at heat, and it doesn't do any coordination between units. AFAIK each enemy mech chooses actions independently and doesn't look at where the teammate mechs are or what they've done. That's why you occasionally get 5 mechs all standing on the same mineral field like it's a tar pit. It's incredibly dumb and it happens because the AI doesn't consider overall positioning before individual unit goals. This is not a huge knock on HBS! I think Battletech's AI could use improvements, but the biggest weaknesses are hard things for an AI to do. If I had any suggestion for the folks at HBS (or Amechwarrior doing the AI mod) it would be that the easiest AI trick to make it seem more intelligent is to make it more surprising. Xcom was good at this, units will do occasionally something really unexpected. And sure, 2/3rds of the time that was unexpectedly stupid and I was like "why did you put yourself there? brrrrap!" But the 1/3rd of the time it randomly moved to completely gently caress me were the times I thought it could plan ahead.
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Oct 20, 2018 00:27
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https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/preview-of-the-free-1-3-update-localization-beta-and-linux-release.1124593/ Some 1.3 info was just posted detailing some of the changes to the base game like the new "Alliance" stage of high reputation and the ability to take jobs from pirates. Also, DRAG AND DROP 'MECHBAY!
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Oct 20, 2018 01:06
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Amechwarrior posted:https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/preview-of-the-free-1-3-update-localization-beta-and-linux-release.1124593/  But seriously the rest sounds really cool too.
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Oct 20, 2018 01:22
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Amechwarrior posted:Also, DRAG AND DROP 'MECHBAY! 
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Oct 20, 2018 02:12
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Amechwarrior posted:Also, DRAG AND DROP 'MECHBAY! 
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Oct 20, 2018 02:47
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Amechwarrior posted:Also, DRAG AND DROP 'MECHBAY! Praise be
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Oct 20, 2018 03:45
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Oct 20, 2018 04:05
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Kiva, is there a story behind why the mechbay was such a pain to change?
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Oct 20, 2018 04:26
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dreadmojo posted:Kiva, is there a story behind why the mechbay was such a pain to change? I’m going to guess it’s going to involve prioritizing time of what they need to get done verses what they want to get done with their limited resources of developers
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Oct 20, 2018 06:46
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