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Q_res posted:Basically, HBS rescaled autocannons from AC-2/5/10/20 to 5/8/12/20. Which has worked out really well in my opinion, once they addressed the issue of the AC/10 being a headcapper. So since it is relevant to this discussion; as someone who loves X-Com style gameplay and HBS' Shadowrun games, thinks that MW2/mercs is a still-untouched pinnacle of the first person mech pilot genre, and used to watch that weird Battletech cartoon as a kid, I'm understandably anticipating the release of this game. However, I don't actually know a drat thing about the actual Battletech rulesets, so I'm curious as to how close / divergent the game seems to be from the TT rules, based on the beta (which I completely missed). And how beholden are HBS to angry grognards in cases where the rules are just loving bad (I assume that this is a thing because lol if there exists a TT game without some incredibly broken elements and an army of angry nerds ready to defend that design decision to the death)
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Jan 30, 2018 23:34
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That sounds promising, thanks for the info  I hope that there are some good mods / 3rd party scenarios like there were for the Shadowrun games, I can see there being a lot of room for extending the game's life with different campaigns. And/or that there's enough variance in the game that it's fun to keep playing new games from the start just to see what the RNG throws at you, like in XCOM. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 00:33
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Is there a reason why melee weapons are apparently just not a thing? I mean in the real world it's probably a dumb idea but coolness demands that I can put a giant chainsaw on my giant robot.
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Jan 31, 2018 17:49
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I'd actually be weirdly annoyed if it released today because it's my brother's birthday and I wanted to get him this game a lot but it's not out yet so I got something else instead.
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Feb 14, 2018 18:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:If I had to guess I'd think balance. It might have been the kind of thing that was hard to balance missions around. This is my reading, same with the no loans thing.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:33
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HBS have an extremely strong track record with music in their games, this looks to follow the trend.
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Mar 1, 2018 23:37
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My biggest issue with ironman in any game isn't that I can't accept losses but that crashes, bugs and misclicks happen and I am not OK with those causing poo poo to go wrong. E: I think that a big problem with games that tout ironman modes as a big deal is that they generally also have a high degree of lethiality for units; that is, your units might die in only 1 or 2 attacks so it is very possible to suffer the loss of a unit from a handful of unlucky die rolls. If your losses feel like they were the result of poor decisionmaking rather than bad luck then you don't feel the urge to reload so hard. Related, just how (un)likely is it to get instantly headshot and killed in Battletech? Are there systems in place so that this can't really happen? RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 23:37
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isildur posted:It's actually easier to deal with the loss of a MW because the really absurdly expensive and powerful thing is the 'Mech. You can stick a rookie in the cockpit of a Catapult and it will still be a Catapult. The specifics of how BT works are in my favor on this issue. I kind of had this in the back of my head earlier but I don't know enough about the TT rules to say just how big a deal it is having a rookie in a badass mech vs. an experienced pilot. The whole "you can never lose a mech, only badly damage it" thing seems like a very strong defense against letting the player get totally boned by a run of bad luck (or their own poor decisionmaking). But if you can train up new pilots without actually throwing them at the enemy then that makes losing experienced mechwarriors even less painful. Let the meatgrinder begin!
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Mar 6, 2018 01:05
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There's definitely something non-Euclidean going on in that knee-to-waist region
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Mar 6, 2018 23:12
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Phrosphor posted:I can't believe I am this excited for a videogame in the year of our lord 2018.  it's not just the mechs but I loving love any games where you can customise the poo poo out of your units and the gameplay looks much slower paced than XCOM (and I hated the XCOM strategy layer 'game')
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Mar 7, 2018 00:11
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Q_res posted:There's been an OP update, including explanations of all the Pilot skills and how Evasive Pips work. Do we know if there's any restrictions (such as cooldowns) on using pilot skills?
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Mar 7, 2018 19:35
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I'm honestly curious as to how much time it could take to implement such a feature, they must be extremely tight on their deadline. Maybe they just kept pushing it back and now they don't have time to finish implementation and QA before release? Even Battle Brothers (which is an indy game by a tiny 'labour of love' dev team) lets you rename your units.
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Mar 9, 2018 09:07
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isildur posted:Once we stack up all the tiny features, we end up with pretty significant amounts of time commitment. The feature is simple; it's done already, because we did it for the commander. The UI is not, and our UI engineers have more critical issues to finish than we have time left to finish them. The engineering and QA teams are in a flat-out sprint at this point, and we literally don't have time for anything that's non-critical. I don't care that this is missing but there is a very distinct part of the potential playerbase for whom this kind of thing is hugely significant. Like, I probably spent a grand total of maybe 15 minutes in XCOM2 playing with the unit editor but I have a friend who spent more time making cool posters with the stupid propaganda feature than actually playing the game. Also people tend to spook easily when a developer talks about features getting 'cut' because that usually means 'this is never happening under any circumstances'. If this had been announced as 'feature will not be in at launch' I'm sure that it would have drawn less comment.
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Mar 9, 2018 18:50
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I'm sure someone has said this already but what are the mechanics with head hits and missiles? It would seem kind of unfair if a bigass salvo is almost guaranteed to score a pilot injury just through sheer numbers.
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Mar 12, 2018 22:12
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Amechwarrior posted:In the beta 2 update they removed heads from the missile clustering rules so the whole salvo won't come down on your face if that first one is a golden 12 headshot. I also think you can only take one non-fatal pilot injury per enemy salvo, not including a knockdown injury, but haven't confirmed this myself. I was able to reliably down low guts pilots in a 4 LCT-1V (8MGs total) vs 1 AS7-D Atlas through melee/MG spam. But that's not something you are going to fall in to in the campign. We also tried two custom FS9's w/ all MG and two missile boats to see if it worked 4v4 and it turned out the missile boats were just too destructive after the FS9 melees to pilot kill before really wrecking the chassis/salvage. It worked on the AS7 because it had so much armor that we couldn't get through it to damage the goods before the pilot died. Is there actually a reliable way of blasting heads other than called shots to the head with sufficiently high skill? In this context it would seem that missiles are preferable anyway due to their high instability damage resulting in more knockdowns.
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Mar 12, 2018 23:54
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My body is ready  Voyager I posted:EDIT: Lmao my girlfriend watched the trailer with me and she's worried that it's not going to be enough like Xcom.  E: I am so thankful that the Argo interface doesn't appear to be anything like the loving tyre fire of XCOM2's cluttered piece of poo poo RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Mar 14, 2018 |
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Mar 14, 2018 19:47
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Skippy McPants posted:Another question, do you start out with an active loan that needs repayment à la Animal Crossing or are loans only for big purchases and dire times? The former, but also you actually can't take out more loans once the original loan is paid off (presumably because it's pretty hard to balance between "exploitable way to blow through the power curve" and "so expensive nobody will ever use them")
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Mar 16, 2018 20:04
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Pharnakes posted:Whilst obviously being aware that the games industry likes to crunch, I'd never really thought about it before. There's tons of industries where damagingly excessive hours are is the norm, videogames are just an outlier in the length and intensity of their crunch periods.
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Mar 17, 2018 23:50
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Given that most of the people who watch that stream in general play Paradox's other spergy strategy games and it was explicity angled as an introduction to basic combat strategy (which they actually overviewed quite well) I don't think that it was the worst presentation. I would have rather seen some faster paced SP content with less talking but equally I know people who I could show that video to and get them excited (they're basically all TT gaming nerds but I don't think any of them have ever played a BT game)
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Mar 22, 2018 23:02
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Weapons have range brackets, the closest you actually need to be in order to get maximum hit chance with the closest ranged regular weapons is sufficiently far away that few mechs can close and flank that distance in a single turn, and the mechs that can are very lightly armed / armoured. So yeah the solution to getting shot in the rear end is not closing to the enemy unnecessarily rapidly, and taking out light mechs quickly if they try to rush you. This LP thread has plenty of videos where you can see how fights evolve if you play (a bit) more cautiously. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Mar 26, 2018 |
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Mar 26, 2018 22:10
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I'd probably be down for a reinforced lance of 5 mechs but anything more than that feels like it would be bad for a lot of reasons. I kind of just realised that there's probably going to be a lot of "here have lostech everywhere" mods really quickly and it's going to be super fun making intentionally super broken setups and seeing how many normal mechs you can stomp your way through at once. RabidWeasel fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Mar 26, 2018 |
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Mar 26, 2018 23:27
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Can someone who watched that stream give a non-spoilery idea of the content so I know if I want to watch it? I'm not really that bothered about spoilers I just don't want to watch yet another video of content that's mostly been covered already.
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Mar 29, 2018 20:42
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Internet Explorer posted:The HBS stream has no spoilers. The stream that Cohh is doing right now has shown off the first 2-3 missions of the game, including storyline videos. Thanks, I watched the Paradox stream, sounds like I'll take a pass on the other one, the guy is probably going to be figuring out how the game works and I presume that the early missions are going to be handholdy (and it would be nice to not get totally spoiled on any potential fun things that happen). One thing that I did think was interesting from the Paradox stream is that improved weapons are far more common than I expected. There were 3 or 4 of them for sale at the one system that they happened to be at. I wonder if they will be equally common as salvage items; if not, the relative value of cash to salvage might be a bit higher than expected. Presumably the ++ weapons are going to be fairly rare.
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Mar 29, 2018 20:53
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Internet Explorer posted:Interesting. Well, I've save judgement until I'm actually playing but right now it seems a bit too easy. I assume that it's the first missions and that you don't want to scare people off, but often with this type of game the beginning is the hardest part. Hopefully they've achieved a good balance. It does seem that by design you're more or less free to decide how difficult the game is by choosing easier or more difficult contracts. The challenge of the game seems to be as much in making sure you don't go bankrupt as actually doing well on the battlefield, and large scale repairs can be significantly more costly than the reward for completing a contract. There is also an ironman mode planned for the future which may also have some difficulty-increasing gameplay changes as per recent dev posts on the Paradox forum.
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Mar 31, 2018 00:36
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Someone pointed out that since the game deals with melee as part of your movement, and that the Ace Pilot skill lets you shoot and then move in the same turn, then unless they specifically coded it otherwise a Piloting specialist can can shoot and then make a melee attack on the same turn. Which sounds amazing and makes the idea of a melee specialist all the more tempting 
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Apr 1, 2018 16:23
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Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:He's really bad at it though. He walks into PPC turret fire and goes "Aw gee, I better rush into it while fighting these mechs" and gets hosed. "Better move up my fragile autocannon platform to get LoS on this turret so I can shoot it! Oh, it unpredictably got cored."
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Apr 1, 2018 17:53
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I like how fast the really early missions are, presumably they will get more complex but it's good that you can just throw yourself at a bunch of light mechs and tanks to get into the swing of things.
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Apr 1, 2018 22:17
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Having seen that there are several melee-enhancing components you can add to your mechs, I am really wondering how likely it will be viable to make a heavily melee dedicated mech. I guess that they decided in testing that it was good otherwise they wouldn't have removed AoD (I presume the reason for removal was that it was too good) I just wanna have a reason to slap jump jets on a fast assault and go completely ham with robofists
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Apr 3, 2018 01:48
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sebmojo posted:Cohh's endless, doomed procession of Blackjacks is hilarious. He keeps removing more armour and adding heatsinks it really doesn't need 
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Apr 3, 2018 08:29
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Speaking about DFAs, It's a shame that (as far as I am aware) you can't use jump jets to get close and then do a regular melee attack. JJs give you a bit more range and more chevrons so there are good reasons to want to do this so you don't blow your legs off constantly.
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Apr 3, 2018 20:35
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My PC is almost certainly going to have some issues with it, I figure if it runs like total poo poo then I'll use it as an excuse to do a rebuild
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Apr 4, 2018 23:14
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Unrelated to the giant death machine beauty pageant, but something that seems to get talked about a lot in discussions on different mech configurations is 'sandpapering' and 'crit seeking'. In pratical terms, just how much difference is there between blasting someone with a load of missiles vs. a single AC20 in terms of actually reducing enemy mechs' combat effectiveness? Since the game automatically makes you shoot your heaviest weapon first, is it actually the case that you're best served with a mixed loadout so that you can penetrate and start getting crit rolls in the same turn, or is this something which just doesn't happen often enough to be worth taking into consideration?
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Apr 5, 2018 22:29
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I hope that at least one of the sturdier mechs (i.e. bigger than a firestarter) has an unreasonably large number of support hardpoints. Wanna robo-punch a dude and then shoot them with a bunch of lasers.
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Apr 6, 2018 08:08
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I just got round to looking at that latest bit of legalese in the HG case and it is a beautiful smack down.
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Apr 6, 2018 21:56
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Pharnakes posted:Post some highlights so the rest of us don't have to read through that word soup. It's a slow burn, there isn't anything particularly worth highlighting, the whole thing is just "HG are either dishonest, morons, or dishonest morons" Also: Apparently one of the Banshee variants has 8E6S hardpoints, which means if you just want to go ham and fill it up with medium lasers and MGs it does 200 damage at 270M, 290 damage at 90M, and melees for 220 damage. And every time the MGs fire you get 18 crit rolls with a 75% crit chance bonus  I guess having most of your mech filled up with a rediculously huge engine is fine if your weapon loadout doesn't actually weigh anything and you can dump heat by casually dropping your orbital cannon melee attack on people.
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Apr 6, 2018 22:28
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Radio Free Kobold posted:I think I have a new favorite mech. I really hope that there's at least one other mech in weight between the Firestarter and the Banshee which is obviously designed to be melee friendly with a large number of support HPs on a relatively fast chassis. The dragon would probably be a good candidate purely on the basis that it's over-engined and has a battlefist but that might not mean anything.
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Apr 6, 2018 23:25
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Anticheese posted:I only saw basic weapons on the stream. Is it possible to get enhanced weapons in multiplayer, or are those campaign-only? Doubling down on special weapons and gear might be one way to bump up the cost of mechs if the prices support it as a viable option instead of a no-brainer choice. I hope that there's a way to use the campaign mode mech parts and upgraded weapons in MP somewhere down the line, if both players agree. The Grasshopper does sound like a beautiful thing you can fill with very many guns.
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Apr 7, 2018 08:23
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How Disgusting posted:Battle Brothers. It even has a (basic) mercenary simulation thing going on!
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Apr 7, 2018 12:25
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DHS are kind of confirmed, endo steel I have no idea.
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Apr 8, 2018 21:48
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Random rear end in a top hat posted:I mean, kinda? Is that something that a 'mech could reasonably pull off, or would it just be way too much heat? Is that many missiles strictly LRM territory? At least in HBS Battletech hardpoints prevent you from doing really dumb stuff with SRMs, otherwise yeah you could actually have 10 SRM4's and a bunch of heatsinks on an Atlas. It remains to be seen if it stays that way but LRMs got a huge reduction in their heat output so if you really want to fire 40+ missiles at the same time without your mech just straight exploding that appears to be possible
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Apr 9, 2018 08:58
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