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Kanos posted:Well, uh, it kind of is, memes aside. Heavier mechs already have an overwhelming firepower and armor advantage, so heavies gaining resistance to the status ailment most likely to kill you while lights don't is kind of a sad thing for lights. Yeah, this. The only real weakness of heavy and assault mechs is that they're just as easy to knock over as lighter mechs. Here's a better fix: make indirect fire have a penalty to stability damage. LRM boating is the main way to completely abuse stability, and a lot of that is because indirect fire is a really powerful tool. Being able to hide a unit from return fire is the ultimate defense, but even if you're not trying to hide a tinfoil LRM boat the positional advantages are pretty good. It even makes vague sense thematically -- indirect LRMs are raining down from above, not hitting side on and pushing the guy over. And they shouldn't be hitting the legs as much. LRMs would still be a major player for stability damage, but they wouldn't knock a guy over every turn like clockwork from concentrated fire like they can now. And LRM boats would still be a viable build, though the tactics for using them would be way more difficult than hiding them behind a rock. (I also think this would be one of the balance changes that I'd be fine with in SP. Not that the AI intentionally tries to abuse indirect fire, but man when they do it by accident it can be pretty loving annoying to have the boot on the other foot. That feeling when a mission suddenly becomes "hunt down the LRM carrier with extreme prejudice before all my dudes end up in the hospital for months".)
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May 14, 2018 05:41
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SpookyLizard posted:Has someone found a way to directly give yourself stuff yet? King Crab hunting is not a fun endeavour. edit data\shops\shopdef_Mech_all.json to delete the line that says "debug" at the top, wait until the shops regenerate and you should be able to buy any mech anywhere (at full price, edit the discount modifiers to get them cheaper)
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May 14, 2018 15:35
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Section Z posted:Confirmation bias: When you finally get a +2 injury resist mod and now that mech never takes headshots in the first place for the past 12 missions. the biggest quod erat demonstrandum armchairyoda posted:If you haven’t run the KS “Phantom” pilot, you’re truly missing out on space-redneck vo work. I have a non-KS pilot with that same VO, but his callsign is Hawg and it is 100% perfect agreed though, space redneck is the best VO. "my momma coulda hit me harder than that!"
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May 15, 2018 02:06
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RBA Starblade posted:A catapult just moved through an entire forest my units can only move two loving tiles at a time in to walk behind my battlemaster, kick the head to 1 hp then detonate it with a MG. The one piece of information I'd really like to have is movement ranges of enemy mechs. For example when right-click targeting a unit, overlay its standard move range on the map dots so you know how far it can go. The AI is definitely programmed to stay 1 hex out of melee range when possible, and of course knows exactly where your units can move. So it generally doesn't let you get the first punch unless it really wants to close distance for AC20 shots or something. That's to be expected from an AI, but I'd like to even the tables a little bit just because melee is drat punishing. (Especially when fighting 8v4 in the heavies & mediums mid-game. Some of my most hosed situations have been from underestimating the move speed of a heavy and so leaving a unit in clobberin' range, or the times when a totally disarmed mech has been a giant pain because it can still kick me in the shins. For the side with 8 mechs, melee brawls are a great trade. And getting the first punch is big for that.)
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May 15, 2018 05:16
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Unzip and Attack posted:I tried this and can't seem to get it to work. Deleted the line and waited about 30 days, no mechs in the shop. Just delete the "debug" with quotes and that's it? oops. now is where I admit I hadn't actually tried that, just figured it would work based on seeing how the shops are populated and the obvious "debug" flag. (the game uses a lot of invisible "items" as flags for state -- for example there are a bunch of events that won't repeat because they give you one of those flag items. that debug item seemed pretty obvious.) Unzip and Attack posted:Strangely enough there was one full mech for sale, a Griffin (first time I've seen a full mech for sale) but it was just that one, and might have been one that I recently sold after assembling it? hmm, it may be running into the 50 item limit for shops? that's in SimGameConstants.json under DefaultShopMaxInventory. there are a shitload of mechs, and the stores are also still trying to populate all the other items. try bumping that number up to 100 and see if a store gets more mechs. iirc when I've sold mechs or other stuff they don't get added to the store to buy back, selling stuff is effectively just deleting it. Xarbala posted:Also increase the Weights of various mechs in various stores to improve your chances of finding them, some of them have comically low chances of appearing by default. store entries with count 0 and no weight = stuff that's always in stock in infinite quantity, like basic weapons & ammo. so if you really want something, that's how to do it.
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May 15, 2018 07:40
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Affi posted:So is this a good game? I’ve played through it and while I love that battletech is back and it’s pretty and with fun battles. It’s kinda missing something. It's good, but compared to the level of depth and replayability that the xcom games have it is definitely missing out. Part of that is being faithful to a not particularly great 1980s boardgame. Part is the size and budget difference between HBS and firaxis. Personally I really like it because it goes the opposite direction from the tactics-as-puzzle style that xcom does. But I have a big ding against it in how the campaign, while a fun story, isn't really worth a second playthrough. But playing endless mercenary-simulator mode also leaves something to be desired, especially once you're in 4 assaults and things get stale. Which is why I'm on the "give light mechs a purpose" bandwagon. So my overall verdict is good but not yet great -- but I have high hopes for improvement.
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May 15, 2018 16:03
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New patch out just now, remember to back up your mods. Bunch of technical stuff, and they've finally fixed the the High & Low Spirits bug. Say goodbye to your endless called shots. Artum posted:I lost half the gauss' ammo due to forgetting I left it in an arm unfortunately but the highlanders still going strong and boring holes in things in single volleys. I think gauss ammo is buyable in stores on planets with all 3 of rich, manufacturing, and research. Still random chance whether it's in stock or not, but the weight is 1 and everything I've seen suggests lower weight means more likely to appear. Ignorant Hick posted:If I rush down the target and evac, do I still get the salvage? yes, salvage only cares about mission success. apparently nobody else cleans up their trash after a battle.
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May 15, 2018 20:03
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counterfeitsaint posted:Sorry if this has been answered, this thread moves really fast. you need to sell them through the store UI to get the full 1/10th value (plus or minus due to faction reputation). if you're scrapping them with the button in the mechbay you get less value, but can get that money anywhere even if there's no shop. As for the prices for the Partial Salvage, it's complicated. remember that when you assemble all 3 pieces you get a fully fit mech with guns and equipment. so the stock fit Spider claims to be worth 3,140,000 and 1/3rd of that is a million -- you may have misread 1046666 as 1466666? but then the stripped Spider chassis has a list price of 2,600,000 and that's what you're selling. tl;dr mechs are still worth more to sell than guns, EoRaptor posted:I didn't mean to imply you didn't have this info, I just meant the AI makes decisions based on armour values. And if the AI pilot is high enough level to have the basic called shot skill from the tactics tree, they do make called shots. It's pretty rare, but I'm sure it happens. yo do you have evidence of this stuff other than experience or gut feeling? the AI in this game is pretty primitive and I'm kinda skeptical whether it is making any real decisions even when it does get the chance to do called shots -- which is only when you have a mech on it's back since the precision shot ability is player-only. the tactics tree skill just gives a bonus to aiming called shots.
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May 16, 2018 06:50
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Alchenar posted:Does the Battletech universe openly acknowledge that Aerodyne dropships like the Leopard would be much better for dancing units around a plant than egg shaped 'we landed here, we can take off in a week' style dropships? hint hint everything in battletech is powered by handwavium and nerd technophelia. none of it makes any sense either when examined against the rules of the real world or even it's own context. everything is there to make a setting that feels good to the author and produces the "right" kind of guns and robits. hint 2: extend this to most other military scifi hint 3: scifi in general But to answer your question, no, an aerodynamic vehicle would not be a faster way of moving to different parts of the planet. these things can lift to orbit in a single burn and accelerate continuously at 1G for days. they have ludicrous power. why bother going through all that atmosphere when it just slows you down? instead, lift off to above the Karman line and do a powered sub-orbit burn to your destination. gently caress flying, mach 3 is too drat slow.
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May 16, 2018 16:26
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Davos posted:Does faction reputation affect anything besides shop prices? gives a bonus (or penalty) to rewards for missions also possibly the max danger level of missions they'll give to you. simgameconstants has numbers for that but I'm not sure exactly how or whether it works. has anyone here actually gotten a faction to dislike them?
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May 16, 2018 16:37
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Kurr de la Cruz posted:You can still burn through them if you really want, hit the LT + maybe get a head hit + knockdown is 3 health right there. Plus ammo explosions. Then let them get up and do it again to the RT, then a leg. When I see a mech I want, I get it. the point he's making is they are not crowd control, ie the mmo/moba term for reducing your threat load by temporarily disabling enemies. killing a pilot is super effective, but short of that a knockdown isn't really effective as crowd control. however, the main thing is that knockdowns aren't meant to be crowd control. Taear posted:I just think that I knock something down and think "Yessss" then it just gets up next turn and nothing bad has happened at all. the point of a knockdown isn't to disable the mech for a turn, it's to get a bunch of free called shots against a helpless opponent. if you are pushing a mech over from unsteady to knockdown and you don't have other units ready to put the boot in before it's initiative phase when it can stand up, you are making a tactical error. a knockdown that immediately gets back up is a waste. you need to think more about managing initiative and activation order. either knockdown a mech that has already taken it's turn, or one that won't get a turn until after your units can go. and yes, this is kinda difficult if you have all assaults. master tactician is a god-tier skill late game for exactly that reason. leaving a mech unsteady isn't terrible. that often *is* effective as crowd control because they will brace to get rid of the stab bars. (if they have bulwark is isn't much good, but anyone else is effectively skipping a turn.) I'm with you on juggernaut being a worthless skill though.
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May 16, 2018 20:04
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DatonKallandor posted:I would have have made it give you brace after meleeing, but someone in Discord came up with letting your melee at run distance instead of walk distance. Both of those would be huge improvements. PoptartsNinja posted:Having it enable charge attacks would be amazing, especially if they kept a movement-based damage bonus. Sprint-melee sounds absolutely amazing, right up until the point where I remember that the AI would also get this power. Then I'm like nope! because the AI with charge attacks would be absolutely infuriating. Because despite my experience of the game being a lot more like Section Z posted:The AI LOVES to brace in my experience. Taear posted:They all suicide into you as much as they can, regardless of what's going on. Brace after melee + keeping the current initiative knockback actually sounds like a good combo. I think it might create a viable role for lighter mechs as a guard-breaker -- using melee to remove a brace is neat but currently difficult because you leave your guy open for a lot of counter-attack damage. The brace would be great for that. And in the hands of the AI, it's good but not insane.
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May 16, 2018 23:30
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Gyshall posted:What file do I have to mod to make buildings slightly more resilient? StreamingAssets\data\buildings\ all the files that are helpfully labeled 'defend' it's best to use notepad++ or another text editor that's not notepad.exe
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May 17, 2018 04:37
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Zore posted:Moving is counterproductive at Heavy+ since your range is lower and Bulwark means you are literally twice as durable if you stand still. Bulwark is deffo a better defense than evasion. But jumpjets and movement aren't just for the evasion pips. Movement is also offense. You get better shot percentages because you're in the perfect range brackets, and you get side-shots that concentrate your damage. I use vigilance way more than precision shot because those side hits are like a free called shot. It's definitely more dependent on mech selection than the bulwark thing though. The slow mechs don't work well, not just because they can't get enough evasion but also because you need the movement range for the position advantage. Narsham posted:This has been discussed before, but smarter AI isn't necessarily good for a game. Chess AI is really strong, but they have to include "dumb" chess AI in commercial games or nobody would ever play them because you'd have to be Grand Master skill-level to have a shot at winning. yeah. people talk about the dumb AI stomping forward into their guns. it would be super-easy to program the AI to hold back and force the player to make those moves. it's a computer, it has infinite patience. but that would suck to play against. on the flip side, this game isn't chess and there are some aspects that are much harder for an AI to make good decisions about. the thing that comes to mind for me is heat management. with any of the mechs that run hot, the AI doesn't make great decisions about when to "spend" its heat buffer. that's judgement and planning, which is hard for AI.
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May 17, 2018 20:37
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Taear posted:I guess this stuff doesn't matter to me because I just called shot the centre torso with 82% every time with everything and oneshot the mechs. If I was going to try hard for salvage or to be more tactical I think Jump Jets would feel more useful but it's just not how I play. The bulwark wall totally works and it works well. It might very well be the optimal strat. I like playing cavalry style only by personal preference. It's more fun. It also takes longer to play missions because I have to think more. And it makes more lopsided results -- I win big when it works out, pay big repair bills when I overextend and get punished. Zore posted:Yeah, but the argument was between 'You always need to move because standing still is death!!!!' and 'What are you talking about, Bulwark is a better defense than evasion every time' I feel like jumpjets can save a mech or a lot of repair bills even if you're playing the bulwark wall, and that's when one of your units gets focused on and you want to get it out of the line of fire. Jumpjets are great for moving backwards, and for breaking LOS. Probably not worth the weight if that's the only use you get out of them though.
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May 17, 2018 21:15
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I bet he's not using bulwark enough either! What's with all these people and their objectively wrong ways they play a video game??? The Gauss is lostech and really good, but upgraded PPCs are no slouch either. And the weakness of gauss isn't damage or heat, but the 180 meter minimum range. PPCs are only 90 which is way easier to deal with. IMO to get the best from it you need a pilot with both breach and the -90m min range from tactics, which is a very particular build. But even then a 90m minimum range can be uncomfortable on gun that's taking up 15 tons. You are putting a lot of eggs in one basket, and then forcing the basket to stay 4 squares behind the rest of your eggs. The one big downside of a dedicated sniper/LRM boat is that the other mechs in your crew take proportionally more damage.
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May 18, 2018 03:51
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Cyrano4747 posted:by the time you get the gauss you should have high enough tactics that minimum ranges basically don't exist any more. or maybe someone got early injuries and so hired up more guys and has been spreading xp around a larger crew instead of sticking to the original 5 quote:By the mid-late game I'm brawling all the time with my gauss rifle once poo poo descends into the melee. I don't want to be in spitting distance of them, but it's really easy to stay just outside the min especially if I'm jumping around. good for you I bet sandwich artist really regrets it every time he takes a desert or martian mission and has to deal with that ppc heat. "gently caress those goons in the battletech thread" he curses while clenching the mouse and staring at the overheat warnings, "I can't let them prove me wrong about the gauss rifle!"
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May 18, 2018 04:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:Lol what the gently caress dude. sorry i got mad about videogames I think I'm gonna head on out of this thread because while I like the game, the conversation has gotten really bad. Now that most people have finished it and have nothing left but arguing about bulwark or gauss or whatever poo poo they think is best and are incredulous that other people do different.
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May 18, 2018 04:30
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Flipswitch posted:Fitting out a Grasshopper. I've maxed out the support weapons with machine guns because the ammo lasts forever even with just one ton. Is it worth switching in some small lasers for discohopper? It doesn't run amazingly hot but it will start to stack up fast. All MGs seems inefficient because AFAIK you can't get more than one pilot injury from head hits in an attack. And the MGs are crit seekers but that means you want to use it as a finisher when the target already has armor stripped, which is pretty situational. So I'd mix in some flamers for the other situational use of loving over hot mechs. OTOH small lasers I'd use all 6 and go for rear hits backstabs. Jump in, alpha strike, jump out, spend a turn cooling off. Instead of clean up duty you're sending it after mediums and low-armor heavies. It should get easy solo kills against the annoying chaff. So you just need two Grasshoppers.  But that's exactly what I did with firestarters: I went out of my way to acquire 2 of them so I had one for the hot maps (flamers) and one for the cold maps (s lasers).On a related note, talking about MGs and hunting for head hits: I'd love a mod that had some UI tracking the number of injuries enemy pilots have taken. Not their max HP or how many they have left, just hits taken -- info that the player should be able to know, but is sometimes hard to track. That's a big weakness for me when trying to pokemon a mech, I don't catch a pilot wound when there's a dozen status messages scrolling. Or forget whether a particular one took two or three.
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May 26, 2018 02:42
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Beer4TheBeerGod posted:I thought I read that MGs get three hit rolls per shot, so they're great for seeking out head shots if you want to incapacitate a pilot. imweasel09 posted:I'm pretty sure they only roll once for a headshot like missles do. They're good for crit-seeking but not any better for headshots. From what I can tell, all multi-hit weapons work the same way: they roll the first hit on the generic shot distribution table, then all follow up hits get an elevated chance to hit that same location or an adjacent one. With the exception of the head. There are two settings, ClusterChanceNeverMultiplyHead and ClusterChanceNeverClusterHead (both set true), that prevent multiple head hits. There are still a bunch of questions, like whether clustering affects all hits from one weapon or everything from the entire weapon type. IE, are 4 LRM5s treated the same as one LRM20? But in general the idea is guns that do lots of low-damage hits, like MGs or LRMs, are better for getting head hits and pilot injuries on normal attacks. They have more chances for that 1/100 roll. However they're bad for called shots to the head because they're being anti-selected so you probably only get one. IMO pilot injuries are cool early game when every opponent has 3 HP. Three injuries isn't difficult to do while keeping 3/3 salvage. But late game when they have 4 or 5, you're better off stacking upgraded 65 dmg AC/10s with a high Tactics pilot and going for the called shot to the dome. (Orion ON1-V headhunter: 2 AC/10s + 3 LRM5)
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May 26, 2018 08:22
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Kanos posted:The 3E is nearly unusable Geez, I don't have one of those so I'd only ever looked at the stock equipment, never actually at the chassis in the mech bay.  what the gently caress even is that?I'd almost call that a bug, like they made the chassis to support the cannon example and then never went back to add some alternate hardpoints. The whole chassis is just pointless, it has 3 gun mounts. Three! Kanos posted:I'd rate the 3M as pretty solid in practical use, though. Medium laser spammers are very efficient damage dealers and it being able to punch harder than an AC20+++ before you factor in support weapons or mods is pretty strong. With that mod that makes Juggernaut have brace, it might even be fairly good 
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May 27, 2018 14:39
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Pattonesque posted:A thing I like about Battletech is that some mech chassis are bad for in-universe reasons! Someone got paid off, the engineering team hosed up, the manufacturer lacked part X so made do with part Y, etc. PoptartsNinja posted:A lot of boondoggles are really fun or interesting. It's fun fluff to bulk out the pages of your 1980s game supplement, but seriously, would you enjoy playing a TT game where you were forced to use the crap mechs? OTOH it is kinda crap for a video game which (at least in theory) is about managing limited resources. The -3E is actively spiteful to the player if you get it while still running missions to "tech up". Congrats, you got the booby prize. Sell it off and use the cash to take more salvage on your next mission I guess! But if you want to talk about fluff, look at the 3E and its 3 weapon hardpoints. Hardpoints make no sense in universe: just look at the list of hunchback variants and tell me you can't swap weapons around with a fair degree of flexibility in the canon. It was added to video games to enforce some diversity and more interesting choices to mech loadouts, so you don't get stuck with the bad game design legacy of 100% custom mechs (m'laser *tips robo-fedora*). But if it's an arbitrary balance system, it should have some actual balance to it.
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May 28, 2018 03:17
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Q_res posted:I've never played Long War, is it also an overwrought pile of poo poo? I don't enjoy Long War at all myself, but I will say that LW is a marvel of consistent design and considered trade-offs when compared to Roguetech. PoptartsNinja posted:Including more variants of the 'Mechs that have more variants (Locust, Jenner, Hunchback, Shadow Hawk, Banshee, etc) would probably help. When I started digging into the jsons this became my #1  "why didn't they do this?" critique for the game. If it had just been a thing where they needed to limit chassis variants to make the salvage system work, that would be an excuse. But no, they totally did it the right way with both chassis and loadout definitions. There's no reason the AI couldn't show up with some sub-variants that still gave you the base mech when salvaged.For extra points, have some of them be tagged as "elite units" with non-stock equipment equal to what the player can use, and use that to up the class variety at various difficulty spots that were a bit monotonous in the campaign. GotLag posted:Out of curiosity, how do reduced spending levels work? My monthly expenses are 568k C-bills at normal levels (fully-upgraded Argo) and I'm not losing money on the whole, but I'm curious as to what effect it would have if I chose a lower spending level. My morale is at 50. You spend less money and a few points are deducted from your morale. The morale you see in the ship CQ is where your super-power meter starts in each mission.
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Sep 2, 2018 08:12
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GotLag posted:You know what? Base defense missions can go get hosed. The 2.5 skull zone is super swingy. You can get cakewalks and near-impossible odds. NihilCredo posted:On my first run, I quickly learned to stay away from Ambush, Escort, and Defend Base missions. It sucked, because it made every contract play basically the same with only terrain providing variety, but the objective-type contracts are aggressively unfun. I 100% disagree, objective missions are good and I hope the expansion adds more. If the game had nothing but missions where you have generic fights vs an enemy lance it would quickly be boring. I like Escort and Defend, but I take a thematically mercenary view on the whole "objective" part. My actual objective is preserving my force, those buildings or APCs are secondary. The trick is to let go of the idea that every mission is a must-win. This isn't Xcom, the negative consequences from a mission failure are some extremely trivial faction rep. Ambush I learned to be more skeptical of because most of those missions have something that keeps them from being "kill target, quick extract" free money. One or two are complete bastards the first time you see them. (Well they said it was an ambush, didn't they?)
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Sep 2, 2018 20:45
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RBA Starblade posted:Early on it's worth it to make sure you can pay rent and buy a couple things from stores if the salvage ends up being poo poo anyway but after a few months you might as well max it out. In particular the paucity of good items in stores makes this pretty much the only option. IMO the economics part of the game is pretty weak, and a lot of it is how they're trying to keep the fluff of battletech while also making a mercenary-management sim. The fluff of battletech does not make any sense on its own, and makes even less sense when you try to use it for anything but a balance system for a stompy robit boardgame. Salvage is cool and a traditional part of mechwarrior games, but I wish they'd done the money vs salvage vs store system a bit different.
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Sep 3, 2018 23:39
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Panfilo posted:It would've been better if it was more similar to grimdark 40k fluff, where super rare ancient forgotten tech is at least still numerous to make sense in such numbers. nah 40k makes even less sense than battletech, it just spends less time trying to build logical foundations underneath the rule of cool The basic concept of battletech is that guy in stompy robit = medieval knight in full armor. That works fine for most of their setting fluff, but has always fallen apart for videogames where you have a PC who starts with a locust and ends in an atlas. The player wants to progress through better and better mechs as they progress through the hero's journey, because that's fun. So then the videogame is trying to respect the whole "mechs are super-valuable" fluff, while at the same time they move the player through an entire buffet of mechs over the course of a few dozen missions. NihilCredo posted:If you take max salvage and end up facing a bunch of tanks or lovely common 'Mechs, losing a few hundred thousands in cash is kind of annoying. I think if I was designing it from scratch I'd reverse the order of the decisions for contract rewards. Have contracts put up a static offer of money, then haggle over salvage after the fight. It would be relatively easy to give that a ton of personality with some very simple programming. Ex: planetary governments are skinflints so they deduct a fair percentage of the salvage value from your salary. But they're also afraid of you so they let you take whatever you want. The big successor state Houses are rich so they give you a better deal, but they claim a bunch of loot for themselves. Pulling that stuff back to your side of the table costs rep. Kamea is on your side so she gives you stuff practically for free, but she's also trying to build an army here. So she wants at least 50% of the total pile (so if there are 2 king crab parts on the table, you probably only get one). That's the type of system that makes salvaged mechs feel important and valuable, because you see what you're paying for them. Plus scoring a complete mech from one mission is both difficult and expensive. It doesn't punish for guessing wrong about salvage pre-mission. And it would allow the store to be a little less crazy with the buy:sell values.
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Sep 4, 2018 03:25
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Amechwarrior posted:So what's everyone's thoughts on the Abilities Beta? I didn't enjoy the all-Bulwark strategy, and I intentionally picked skills and played with tactics that didn't involve having bulwark on everyone. I miss Bulwark. As much as the Bulwark Wall was boring to me, the skill was important for defeating superior numbers of AI. You only have 4 mechs, it's a big deal to have some of them able to take punishment while still shooting back. New Bulwark is bait, which is also a way to defeat an AI, but IMO it's not very interesting to solve AI with gimmick tactics like that. It will also slow the game more -- when you use New Bulwark you aren't shooting, and when the AI uses it you have to switch targets. And last, it switches from favoring positioning (which the player is better at exploiting) to favoring numbers (which the AI gets). I'm not sure why they aren't just swapping bulwark as-is into the 2nd-tier, if they're going to rework skills. That wouldn't be imbalanced! IMO that turns the second rank into a spread where you can kinda make the case for each one. (The power strat is probably 2 Bulwark 2 Master Tactician, which is an improvement over 4 identical pilots with both. Ace Pilot still sucks in the post-game all-assaults setting, but IMHO balancing for that should be way de-prioritized versus campaign and multiplayer where you have mixed forces.)
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Sep 5, 2018 02:23
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Phrosphor posted:Some of the data mined skills that didn't make it into the game involved stuff like giving bulwark to adjacent mechs rather than your own so you could 'cover' mechs with your mech. Yeah, that's too Xcom-y for this game. For the most part I think they hit an excellent feel with the skills: they are important enough that pilots matter and your tactical decisions should be informed by who can do what, but not so powerful that you build everything around using skills and combos. Most of them are passive, or passive additions to normal actions. That's what I don't like about Coolant Vent*. It's out of line with the rest, too much of a superpower -- though the whole injury thing makes it anything but super. *in the abstract -- I lost my old saves in a HD crash this summer so I'm starting a new campaign. don't have anyone with that skill yet. I like Xcom and I like Battletech and especially I like how they feel completely different. Xcom is a tactical puzzle you solve with mystic martial-arts, Battletech is a war of attrition you beat down with boxing robots. I think that Kiva & co maybe have got the impression that their balance was way off for Bulwark vs everything else. It really wasn't. That's the thing about the internet and optimal play enthusiasts, they find everything that's even marginally better and stack all those margins up to make the OP strats.
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Sep 5, 2018 03:56
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2 SPOOKY posted:I played at launch and just picked the game back up to try the Ability Beta. Am I out of my mind, or has salvage changed? My recollection is legging provided 2, coring 1, and any other pilot incap gave all 3? Does blowing one leg off (but not both) cause you to lose salvage? IIRC that's the starting point but there's still a die roll for how many pieces you actually get. binge crotching posted:I still have my starter mechs, but found an AC20+ for sale that I can somewhat afford. Will I be able to duct tape that thing onto one of my babby mechs? Ammo restocks forever, so the only time you need to buy more ammo is outfitting new mechs, or if you lose an ammo box from damage. Except you'll never actually need to buy ammo, you'll have it coming out of your ears from salvage. Buying + guns: don't bother in the early game. First, the good stuff doesn't even show up until you are out of the first 4 systems. Second, you can get to the mid-game without needing them at all, and during that time you'll probably find some upgrades in salvage. And last, you want to pump all your money into argo upgrades and, if you have any left over, generous pay. Morale bonuses build for the whole game, morale is your lifeline in bad situations.
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Sep 5, 2018 22:34
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Baron Porkface posted:Deflector shields don't exist in Battletech right? It seems like "torpedo boat economics" where offense is way stronger than defense would make WarShips frivolous even in the very small quantities they are portrayed with. No scifi shields, and I really wouldn't bother to keep thinking about it. Battletech pre-dates the best organized effort to get real science and practical knowledge of spaceflight and space combat into the hands of hard sci-fi writers. So it's just riddled with impossible contradictions that make the handwavy parts of 100-ton fusion-powered robot tanks look downright realistic by comparison. I doubt there's any way to resolve any of those contradictions without retconning pretty much everything about spaceships, so it's probably better to just let it lie as the "zoom pew boom" background to the stompy robot game. However, torpedo boat economics do not necessarily work out in space even without shields, because the engagement envelope in space is huge.
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Sep 6, 2018 05:26
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Organ Fiend posted:extremely Brooklyn man ("Take that you mor-ahn") is that VO actually good once you get in battle? I couldn't bear to hire someone with it, even when the guy looked extremely Jersey Shore and had the callsign Slick. it just seems so over the top caricature from the responses on the hiring screen I do wonder if there's some minor house in the IS that did the same thing as House Kurita and tried to create a unified culture among the people they ruled, but instead of medieval Japan they chose 20th century new york. as depicted in the only surviving cultural works from that time: Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. Organ Fiend posted:and the very southern lady ("Ummmm hmmmm" "Oops, I made a mess"). I liked very southern man a whole lot.
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Sep 6, 2018 06:57
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Groetgaffel posted:How much heat does jump jets generate? Can't find the number displayed anywhere. It scales based on how far you jump. It's easiest to see in a lunar or mars biome where the heatsink penalty gives you plenty of turns with heat left in the bar. A max-range jump with a 6 JJ light mech (pretty far) seemed to be a little less than a third of the heat bar, so maybe 30? GotLag posted:Edit: am I a blind moron or is there really no way to rearrange my mech bay other than by dropping stuff to storage then readying it again? nope! there's a mod to sort by weight though.
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Sep 6, 2018 20:02
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The more charitable way to say the same thing is that it's made for people who already played the base game a lot and are bored of it, so want a mod that backs up a truckload of variety and dumps it on them. It's a messy pile of stuff, but it's at least a big pile.
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Sep 7, 2018 00:07
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imweasel09 posted:put a thing to let you sprint into melee punches there, as a redesign of juggernaut The problem with this idea is that the AI gets all these skills too and sprint-punching AI would be incredibly infuriating. Some of the AI types are super reckless about charging into melee and mechs in melee favors the side with numbers. But I was talking about this a few months ago with a friend who plays the game, and he had the idea of "drive by" melee attacks. So you only get your normal movement range to run up and punch someone, but then you get the rest of your sprint-range move afterwards. Cyrano4747 posted:Sure you would. Nigh invulnerable after a melee attack? Rename it "wolverine." Remember that melee attacks remove guarded, so you're only invulnerable until the other guy punches back. It's still an ok idea, particularly if juggernaut was moving to a tier 1 skill.
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Sep 8, 2018 01:36
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And Tyler Too! posted:Unless you have a mod that makes Star League stuff appear in shops, nope. If your Lostech gets crit, it's gone. Gauss ammo does appear in stores -- extremely rarely. You need a world with Manufacturing, Rich, and Research and then to get lucky on a weight 1 roll, which is the rarest. (Weight in shopdefs = more common as number gets higher.) For anyone who wants gauss ammo and doesn't want to spend 6 hours hopping back and forth between a couple of planets that match the requirements, the file to edit is shopdef_Ammo_special.json. Organ Fiend posted:Southern man, I think I'm thinking of the same guy you're thinking of, was good. Just kind of easy going and pleasant. I forgot that we can edit generic pilots now, I'll have to try out some more!
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Sep 8, 2018 01:49
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So does ComStar just refuse to transmit encrypted messages? Because the whole ComStar knows everyone's secrets thing is only possible if they're obviously forcing everyone to send messages in clear, in which case everyone should drat well know that ConStar knows. Like if the HPG acolytes are all chanting "god's holy machine must only be spoken to with true words" then maybe you put up with it in order to send a message in less than three months. But you aren't surprised when a mysterious legion of pristine battlemechs shows up to steal the SLDF cache you discovered. You might even have some good guesses as to who the all-white insignia-less mechs belong to!
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Sep 12, 2018 14:43
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how can you write those posts and not say Mech and Blade? for shame! I doubt this particular game could be modded or hacked into doing M&B style conquest -- it's probably possible to do some mod where you could "own" a planet, but without the dynamic missions and politics of M&B I don't see the point. Don't get me wrong I love the idea of it, but it's a different game. If you want better mech storage just mod the "MechReadyTime" in SimGameConstants to a more reasonable number (like .5) so that swapping mechs into and out of cold storage isn't such a PITA. Needing to do a full refit is penalty enough without an extra week of wait.
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Sep 13, 2018 10:11
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Alchenar posted:This is what makes Battletech so fascinating from a 'how games are made' perspective for me. I can't think of another game where so much stuff has obviously been cut before it could be implemented beyond a very initial stage but is still there in front of you - and yet the game doesn't feel like anything is missing. I don't think it's evidence of cut content; rather that they laid down an open and flexible foundation that would support expansions and future development. They kept their options open in all directions so they could see what people responded to best and go from there. After their experience with the Shadowrun games they must have been thinking about potential sequels / follow-ups in the same vein. And any problems they ran into with Hong Kong or Dragonfall based on something they cut corners with in Returns would have been fresh lessons for this one. It's a good inside look at how good designers and programmers make things -- when they're doing things the right way. The fascinating thing is that a lot of games aren't made this way. HBS seems to have a bunch of really competent people. Stuff like a mods with changing borders and dynamic maps are possible because the game is in Unity and they didn't lock it down at all. People are able to get into the code. They may not be officially supporting mods, but they've put zero barriers for it. It doesn't mean there's some cut Succession-Wars feature with a dynamic map, it means that a modder has written code for it.
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Sep 14, 2018 08:09
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It was more of a Star Citizen ripoff than an Eve ripoff, which is even more sad.
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Sep 14, 2018 23:49
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Great Beer posted:Gonna go ahead and post this again because i think it's a good idea and it got abandoned on the last post of a page: Very unsatisfying to have two systems that work exactly the same. I could see a nerfed bulwark that does a full Brace (Guarded + Entrenched), but only against the next attack directed against the unit. So it would be something you could intentionally strip. Still good damage mitigation, but not enough to make perma-tank strategies or survive an entire team of assaults pounding a mech. But also get rid of the stand still requirement, so fast mechs can have evasion + the bulwark, which would be a big boost and make pilot/guts into a legit combo. It makes multitarget without breach into an acceptable skill late-game. It's better for the player than the AI in SP, because a lot of the utility is about initiative and manipulating turn order. Not sure whether that's a tier 1 or tier 2 ability.
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Sep 15, 2018 17:15
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