I’ve been looking at that wiki that Ironsight linked. A lot of the stats on there seem really poorly balanced. Take for example the medium laser compared to the pulse:
medium laser (1 tons, 25 damage, 10 heat)
medium pulse (2 tons, 30 damage, 20 heat)
Double the tonnage and heat for 20% more damage?! There are a lot of other examples in the weapon stats.
Pulse lasers have a to-hit bonus. Granted in the game it probably doesn’t matter because you’re going to have high gunnery pilots anyways. The super high gunnery is part of the big issue here. Is basically you’re almost always able to get to ML range and when you are there you’re going to have 95% hit anyways or stay at very long range and rain LRMS. In the table top it can make a big difference if you’re at the long range modifier for the ML instead of a medium range modifier for the LL. You pretty much have to force yourself to try and play a style that makes anything other than ML, LRM, and AC/20 viable. Maybe multiplayer is better.
Battletech weapon balance doesn’t really make raw sense but that’s part of the theme, Mechs are more cobbled together from available parts and based on relative cost (and so factories that can create high end parts matter too) vs being made from the absolute best options.
Obviously it breaks down in this format where you just have access to all the weapons and can swap them all in and out whenever. In that case Large Lasers are just garbage.
I run mechs stock for a while before I twink them out for nostalgia and challenge fun but that definitely doesn’t make the balance issues not a problem.
I’d understand if the stats were for ML vs. LL standard vs. pulse, because of the range issues. But the stats were for two medium lasers, with the exact same range. And, according to that wiki, both of them have the same in-game accuracy modifier, to boot. Which, by the way, is another question I have—what does +1 ACC mean in game terms?
The pulse medium just seems incredibly bad when stacked against the basic ML.
On LLs (and PPCs, too) I think in addition to the range benefits (which I agree could be made more significant in-game) the bigger guns have the benefit of not spreading their damage all over the place (compared to a comparable plurality of smaller guns), which tends to help with scoring some component damage.
It’s slightly better than tabletop. One single heat sink in the tabletop is one heat per turn, and a medium laser is 5 damage and 5 heat.
Well crap, my memory is obviously terrible.
IIRC, regular lasers have a “burn time” that they have to remain on target to do full damage. Pulse lasers, well, pulse, and do less damage per strike but each “hit” consists of multiple pulses or strikes. Or something.
Only thing I had to look up about heat: the base dissipation rate is 30 per turn. The rest is simple arithmetic until you hit a hot world.
Pretty sure I posted this way upthread, but worth reposting for sure.
Other than the sprint and jump heat values, which also needed to be looked up.
Does anyone know if in the Mech Bay there’s a way to view the stock level of armor on each location? I’ve modified the loadout of a mech, then reverted to the stock loadout, but I’m not sure if I reallocated the armor properly to what the stock version had.
There’s the circular arrow toward the bottom right which resets everything to how it was when you opened the mech bay, but there is no factory default reset option in the game (at this time - seems a popular request and I’d imagine it wouldn’t be TOO hard to code in). The only view would be online through various resources, afaik.
Don’t have much to add to the discussion, except to say that I finished the campaign missions after 42 hours and loved all of it. It really blows my mind sometimes that we have a full featured Battletech game in 2018 that doesn’t even include the clans.
Thanks Dan. I didn’t think there was, but thought I’d ask.
Oh, wait! I was wrong!!!
So if you click the “i” in the circle by the “stock combat role” to see the default loadout, you can actually hover on each part to see the armor assigned.
Oh wow, that’s fantastic. Glad you found that out, that will be very helpful!
Then I stand corrected regarding an earlier critique.
I originally said there was no way to view the stock layout, which I said was bad design.
I commute the judgement to bad UI and not bad design. bad UI is much lesser a crime, and easier to fix.
It is an… adequate UI, with certain parts mediocre (inventory management, buying/selling).
They got the combat UI working well, at least.
In other news, I finished the game. King Crab is aweeeeesome. Dual AC20s. Precision shot to the torso all day, boom boom boom. Something like 1800 armor.
Agreed. I still wish they had a button to flip the loadout to default, but I kind of understand why they don’t; parts removed and then added back both cost less and take less time in a refit than items from your components list, and my guess is nobody wanted to go through the hassle for fringe/uncommon requests when they’re trying to get a working game out the door. I hope that will be there in a future update, however.
“A Hunchback. How quaint.” KATHOOM! “Oh, did something happen to the right side of your mech?”