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toasterwarrior posted:Can you pimp out your mechs past their pre-built specs and slots? Like, upgrading raw stats? In tabletop, not really. A mech's tonnage is determined when the chassis itself is designed, and that (paired with its engine rating) really determines 90% of the stats of the mech - its maximum armor values, how fast it goes, whatever. There're a few 'advanced technologies' available in mech construction - lighter but bulkier endo-steel internal structures, ferro-fibrous armor, extra-light engine, more efficient (but bulky) double heat sinks, things like that - but in-universe, applying those technologies to a 'mech usually more or less requires rebuilding the whole unit from ground up. The whole system is theoretically built around a zero-sum give-and-take arrangement where a gain in one area has to come from somewhere else - increased weigh, increased bulk, increased heat output, and so on and so forth. (I say theoretically since nothing is perfectly balanced and there are some clearly superior options)
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Jun 9, 2017 11:47
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vorebane posted:If any PGI were any good at life that's what they would make MW5 about. That and Hatchetmen. They'd have to hire actual coders for that!
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Jun 14, 2017 09:18
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I suppose that this is a good time to remind people that the FATAL and Friends thread features an RPG which basically boils down to 'when people call for a trial, two 'lawyers' riding giant robots get drop podded down from the heavens, each lawyer picks a side, and whoever's giant robot is last standing wins'. Edit: It's called Giant Allege and it's just about as silly as it sounds. Drake_263 fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 13:47
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MilkmanLuke posted:Give me a Capellan mechanic or peasant who watched his village get stomped by crusading Fed Sun forces. Skoll posted:Disenfranchised Marik working man whose family was killed during one of their civil wars. A friend of mine was trying to run a BAttletech campaign and my character concept was 'they sort of accidentally kidnapped him'. Dude minding his own business and trying to have a drink in peace when a raggedy band of mercs comes in, trying to grab a quick beer before their dropship takes off. Ten minutes later, predictably, there's a barfight, and my he keeps out of it right, nursing his beer, right until one of the locals pulls a knife, at which point the beer gets broken over his head. (It's just rude to pull a knife in a honest fistfight.) A few swings later they hear the notoriously brutal/corrupt local law enforcement approaching and everybody grabs their buddies and books it. It's only when the mercs are strapping in for takeoff that somebody looks up and goes 'Who's the new guy?' 'Oh poo poo, we took him along?'
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Jan 14, 2018 13:55
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Section Z posted:This is great. I've always been of the mind that RPGs and the like are at their best when they don't take themselves too seriously. Plus, a rough-and-tumble working-class type with a loader claw for an arm made a nice counterpart to a friend's snooty Steiner heir.
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Jan 15, 2018 11:29
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Fair reminder that the primary reason Clan LRMs don't have a minimum range in the tabletop game is because somebody typoed it when they were first writing the Clan weapons table, and when after the book was released they went 'Uhh that's not right we should fix that', the BT community's collective response was 'it's already in the book I have my hands on my ears, laaa laa la laaaa, I can't hear you'.
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Jan 26, 2018 10:44
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vorebane posted:BT Nerds - Taking full advantage of a typo mistake is more important than a fun well balanced game. In the same vein, Clan technology was supposedly balanced via batchall (players were supposed to figure out the minimum possible force they needed to actually win) and zellbringen. If you look at the actual rules for zellbringen, they're pretty restrictive - you choose one target to focus on, you form off into a little duel, you're supposed to always be obligated to fire all weapons that have a theoretical chance of hitting the target, no melee.. it makes for some pretty rigid tactics. Clan mechs were supposed to be these super samurai with a complex code of honor - essentially you're playing hard mode, but you've got some great toys to balance it out. In practice, balancing mechanics via fluff never works, and I'm pretty sure like 95% of 'Clan' players looked through the zellbringen rules, then went 'gently caress it, I'm actually playing plucky IS mercs who somehow managed to salvage multiple Clan mechs in perfect condition'. IS pilots in Clan mechs = no batchall or zellbringen = the gloves come off.
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Jan 27, 2018 13:56
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Q_res posted:What's truly infuriating about this is that the concept art for the PGI Centurion is perfect. Then they modeled it and turned it into this squat, wide thing. If they'd just modeled the concept art I think most people would love the reimagined Cent. I think when the cent was first implemented it was a slim little thing, then they just.. rescaled it to be more squat. It was literally so slim for its relative speed that it was drat near impossible to hit at range. (Of course, it doesn't help that this was the time before engine size limits on mechs..)
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Jan 28, 2018 09:45
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I'm tempted to steal that Atlas skull and crossed wrenches as an avatar, I've been using something a little like it on Discord for ages.
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Feb 18, 2018 09:05
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Zaodai posted:Sarna says there were a number of surviving Crabs in House hands up through the end of the 4th Succession War, although they only totaled about a hundred at that point. They ran standard armor instead of ferro fib, single heat sinks instead of doubles, and then regular lasers instead of ERs or pulses (which helps offset the lack of heat efficiency anyway and isn't really much of a downgrade in the era). I love the Crab, but won't twin large lasers plus secondaries make it overheat hilariously on single sinks? The lasers alone put out, what, 8 heat apop.
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Apr 3, 2018 00:47
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mods change my name posted:Can the Charger Drop or throw his pistol at people? I mean how would that work with power and coolant lines? IIRC the mechs that have 'pistols' and 'rifles' usually have that more as a convenient mount for adding weapons than actual carried guns, ie, it's actually a part of the arm. I think some designs feature a sort of a decoupler system to make maintenance easier - sort of like a poor man's Omni Pod.
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Apr 3, 2018 09:25
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Antilles posted:From what we've seen of the ship upgrading on the stream, it's basically a list of upgrades (Power 1, Power 2, Power 3/Hab 1, Hab 2, Hab 3/MechBay 1, Mechbay 2, Mechbay 3/Tech 1, Tech 2, Tech 3 etc etc) that each have an initial cost, adds to monthly upkeep, and with requirements (f.ex. Power 1 seems to be a pre-req for a lot of other upgrades). Of course the interface makes it look better than that, and apparently upgrades will be visible on the ship model which sounds cool as heck. And the different upgrades seem to come up frequently in random events as well. Considering the whole setting I think it's probably going to be less 'hey this ship is visibly blinging up as I upgrade it' and more 'hey so there's no longer a visible gaping hole in the secondary cargo bay'. Fully upgraded Argo is basically a factory-fresh Argo. isildur posted:Yeah there was a whole idea i had for salvaging each piece individually. We never implemented it because we realized how obnoxious it was going to be. So instead we went to 8 'mech parts', which was just making the individual pieces generic, instead of requiring specifically 'one left arm' and 'one right torso', to reduce the obnoxiousness. It is incredibly refreshing to see devs whose heads aren't firmly stuck up their own asses up to the goddamned sternum. Can't wait to play the game myself!
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Apr 4, 2018 09:51
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RabidWeasel posted: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? I've no idea how viable different configurations are in the computer game, but in the tabletop you generally want to start with a big 'hole puncher' type of a weapon like an AC/20 that'll blast open a section (and on smaller mechs, plain remove chunks of 'mech), followed up by a 'crit seeker' weapon system and hope you land a couple of hits in the section you opened up. Every hit that lands in a section with no armor has a chance to trigger a critical hit. Against lightly armored mechs this is limited in effectiveness - mostly because a hit from an AC/20 has a solid chance to plain neutralize a body part in one go anyhow - but against heavy/assault mechs with oodles of armor and internal health, every crit that gets through has a chance to take out something important and kill/cripple the target way before its armor would've implied. An Atlas for example devotes enough tonnage to its armor to make a light 'Mech out of, which lets it tank damage from 'traditional' efficient weapons like medium lasers all day long before it starts actually losing limbs (and combat effectiveness). 'Sandblasting' on the other hand is using a weapon system that spreads its damage - LRMs and SRMs in particular - against a fully-armored mech. This is generally something you don't want to do since 'mechs only start losing combat effectiveness once the armor's off and internals start taking damage/crits. In the computer game era, the PPC, AC/10 and AC/20 seem like good hole-puncher weapons, while SRMs and LRMs in particular excel in crit-seeking. LRMs have the benefit of range, but for obvious reasons tend to more end up used against mechs with full armor. Later on in the timeline, the introduction of the LB-X AC line of autocannons combines both hole-punching and critseeking into one package - solid slug for a traditional high-damage single-point hole-punching, followed by cluster shot to shred exposed internals.
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Apr 6, 2018 05:10
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Gyro augments for DFA, actuator augments for increased melee damage, support weapons to add to melee attacks; I like how actually punching a gently caress in the face is now a viable option.
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Apr 6, 2018 14:22
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Thirding Into the Breach. It's basically.. well, like Battletech meets Fire Emblem meets Pacific Rim. You control a squad of giant robots, fighting off these massive alien creatures, upgrading your mechs and training your pilots and trying to hold off the tide. Great game, form the same people who made Faster Than Light. Edit: The twist is that it's got a distinct puzzle element, too. Basically when the turn starts, you see whatever moves the enemies are going to make at the end of the turn; your job is to either kill the enemies OR figure out how to use your many interesting abilities to do things like push them out of their firing positions or into acid/water/lava pits, nudge a smaller enemy into attacking the boss monster instead of the corporate tower you're trying to protect, that sort of a thing. There's multiple (I think ten or so?) 'teams' of three mechs, each with their own special abilities; one pushes and throws monsters around a lot, another covers the field in clouds of gas that damages enemies and prevents them from attacking, another is doing something wrong if half the map isn't on fire by turn 3.. that kind of a thing. Drake_263 fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Apr 7, 2018 |
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Apr 7, 2018 18:25
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Hey, random question for Isildur that popped into my head: Do LRMs 'bundle up' like they do in tabletop? It's kind of hard to tell from the graphics.
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Apr 10, 2018 18:24
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DatonKallandor posted:They pick a specific location and cluster around that location, but roll to-hit for each individual missile. So no one-roll for your LRM20 to see if it wiffs completely, you get 20 chances to hit with one missile each. I feel like this is A Good Change. Hits being likely to cluster in the same general area means you're decent at actually focusing damage instead of sandblasting all over a target, and each missile being a separate hit makes it a nice ranged critseeker, too. IS LRMs always felt a little underwhelming to me.
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Apr 11, 2018 04:49
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I've been watching ChristopherOdd play Subnautica and he seems pretty likeable. Even if he has his moments where you want to reach out and shake him a little. "Stop whining about not knowing how to navigate when you keep turning your goddamned beacons off." "There's a datapad on that table you passed like four times already, YOU WERE LOOKING RIGHT AT IT." Drake_263 fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Apr 11, 2018 |
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Apr 11, 2018 19:40
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I have a MWO story, too! Once upon a time, back before 12v12 was a thing, I was playing with a bunch of my friends. I was tweaking my trusty Rainmaker Catapult - I think they'd just implemented Artemis-IV. Anyhow, everybody else was waiting for me to finish so I was in a hurry in the lab when I hit the final buttons - and then we drop into River City, I power up right next to the shuttle at the docking platform. gently caress me sideways. I only have one of my A-LRM20s - and to add insult to injury, my LRM ammo is all standard ammo, not Artemis-enabled. So in essence I only have my secondary lasers on me plus a bunch of volatile ammo and no way to get rid of it. I done hosed up. So at this point I realize I'm going to be more of a liability on the field, but gently caress it - I might as well make a big noise before I go down. Be a distraction and tank some fire, you know? Cue a bright purple Catapult thundering out of the fog of war, making GBS threads lasers everyfuckingwhere and flapping the missile bays on its ear pods like the wings of a demented robot chicken, charging the other side's formation as fast as my XL300 can carry me. Cue said formation actually scattering before me. I have no idea what madness the pubbies were up to, but they must've seen a charging catapult and thought I was a dreaded Splatapult or something equally nasty - but when they saw me running, they ran, and I naturally gave chase. The ridiculous thing is, a Catapult is actually decently fast with a bigass engine powering it, and the way the torso hitboxes were arranged at the time made it hard to really focus your fire on a given section of the torso. My ears, of course, got shot off decently early, but I was past giving any fucks about that. The absolutely, ridiculously stupid thing about the whole shitshow? Not only was I (to my immense surprise) still alive at the end of the match.. I got two kills. With a trio of medium lasers and a TAG.
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Apr 13, 2018 20:02
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Re: Spider Chat: The Spider also makes for a decent tank hunter in HBS:BT. Regular vehicles take double melee damage (I believe) so a Spider moves ridiculously fast and goomba stomps tanks like a 60-tonner, with the added option for Death From Above.
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Apr 20, 2018 12:12
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I think I'm going to try and make my Blackjack into a LaserJack. Yank out the AC/2s and ammo, you have enough tonnage to replace the arm medium lasers with large lasers, 4 extra sinks, and use the last ton to maximize your armor coverage. It'll run hot as hell though, and several in-game biomes (lunar, martian, badlands) gently caress over your heat sinks so you may still want to keep around mechs with easy access to ballistics. Also hate to beat a dead horse but: Kanos posted:I was almost 100% certain that neurohelmets only really keyed into the mech's sense of balance and equilibrium, rather than acting as some kind of neural control interface. The Technical Readout book I read says that Battlemech neural helmets aren't direct control interfaces. They're used to identify a pilot (it reads your brainwaves and locks out unauthorized users) and to convey intent. Specifically, the 'Mech computer learns, as you pilot the mech, that 'yes, he really wants to tilt dangerously forwards while he's charging' and overrides the mech gyro to let it actually, you know, do that. When you select the mech hand option and hit the trigger, it picks up on your general intent (enemy mech vs cargo box vs civilian) and decides based on that how gentle you want to be. Actually controlling the Mech from one place to another is done on traditional physical controls, but the neural interface keeps you upright and lets you focus more on piloting than constantly flicking little mode switches and the like. (Some 'Mech cockpits also come with a virtual glove or two you can use when you want to be very specific about controlling the 'Mech's hands.) This all records on a special data card called a BattleROM, by the way. When you move from mech to mech, you plug your BattleROM in and it basically brings your 'settings' over from one mech to the next. A MechWarrior who loses their BattleROM is generally in for a long annoying stint of being a complete newbie until they manage to 'break in' a new ROM profile. The interface is only one-way, though - the helmet uses magnetic fields to read neural activity, but it can't actually send anything back. It's been tried several times over the centuries but it just turns out that the treshold for 'EM signal powerful enough to induce specific data in active neurons' is way higher than 'EM signal powerful enough to cook said neurons'. For a two-way link, you need a direct neural interface.. Sky Shadowing posted:I was under the impression that the neural interfaces that Clanners could use (and are in fact mandatory for ProtoMechs) were so damaging to the mind that even the hyper militaristic Clans thought it wasn't worth the cost. ..which is a whole 'nother set of worms. Specifically, this is exactly true. The technology for direct neural interfaces is still relatively crude. A number of Clan would-be pilots turn out to be so incompatible with the neural interface that the feedback cooks their nervous system. The ones that survive, well, they generally fail to survive long. Long-term exposure to the interface tends to lead to overtime neural damage, mental breakdowns, and in the most fun cases, a very specific kind of psychosis that essentially leads to the pilot being more or less addicted to the interface. Inside the ProtoMech, they feel like a steel giant, a god of war made manifest; outside, they're a weak soft puny little bag of flesh. This generally tends to end up with said pilot deciding to never come out of the ProtoMech at all, followed by their sibko having to forcefully put them down when they go on a rampage as a 6-meter-tall war machine. There's a MechWarrior RPG module out there somewhere where a mad scientist has been experimenting on neural interfaces on Solaris VII; he finally ends up using a neural linkage system he's cobbled together on a FrankenMech he's slapped together from salvaged 'Mech bits, is promptly overwhelmed by the rush from the battle computer, and goes on a Godzilla-esque rampage through downtown.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:06
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Mr.Trifecta posted:Are the maps procedurally generated or static? The maps are static, but there's a lot of variety.
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Apr 22, 2018 18:40
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Dallan Invictus posted:Can someone clear up how evasion works now? I'm used to tabletop where the number of hexes you move determines how much of a penalty exists to hit you, but I get the impression that evasion is subtly different? Certain terrain and pilot abilities give you actual damage reduction against attacks, which tends to be better than evasion. This is also because evasion modifiers are actually stacking pips and every time you're shot at, you lose one pip. That Spider with the +5 to hit can be taken out with focused fire since after a couple of half hearted pot shots his way he actually only has a +3 to hit, etc. The Sensor Lock ability also plain takes two evasion charges off its target. Movement is still very important, but as you said - subtly different.
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Apr 22, 2018 22:53
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