I think heat is needed if it’s going to be battletech, but there has to be a way heat can be in without it limiting damage output as much. Heat is basically a shared cooldown timer on most weapons. Probably playing with the numbers, increasing heat generated by weapons and at the same time lowering armor values and making heat cool down faster?
I have no idea. Let’s see what they do with it!
I’m not following. Was it commonly accepted that heat was a problem because of damage output? Damage can easily be tuned in other ways (increase it, decrease value armor, etc.).
Personally, I recall heat in the MW computer games being an exciting part of combat that added a lot of variety to tactics and playstyles.
Heat does generate (specially in tabletop rules) slugfest of robots having little tactical options but waiting for heat regenerating enough to shoot once, thus making the the mechanic counterproductive. IRRC. Of course this is because of the interaction of other stuff like movement range, turn length, armor vs. damage values, map design, etc… Changes to any of these could make the mechanic work again. But it’s been a while since I played a game (read the most recent rules quite recently, though), so I could be very wrong.
In an action game it’s different, since there’s much more tactical nuance + execution. It’s more granular, and it does add variety.
I admit I only played a bit of tabletop in the 90s so others here must have far more experience with BT, but for most non-PPC-centric mechs, I thought the damage/armor and heat/heat-sinks ratios were pretty manageable.
I guess this may not be the best example, but I searched for a BT record sheet and found this (because digging my technical readouts out of the closet seemed impractical):
http://s14.postimg.org/7nv18w41d/Record_Sheet_Hunchback.gif
If my math is right, a Hunchback only nets +1 heat if it fires a full barrage (14 heat - 13 heat sinks), and a full barrage =33 potential damage, which is enough to destroy an enemy HB in a single volley (26 armor on the center torso, 20 armor on the left/right torso).
In reality, the HB would be generating heat from movement (but probably not firing all weapons), and it would be unlikely to hit with all its damage in one section. Still, that seems like about the right balance to me (i.e., the potential to obliterate an opponent with one lucky/risky alpha strike, but more than likely you’ll need more careful firing over several rounds).
I’m sure some mechs (e.g., the Awesome) had to struggle more with heat, but unless they’re glaringly imbalanced, I’d just call that part of the unit diversity.
Anyway, I was actually a fan of the 3050 period (with clan/Star League tech), and I guess that probably softened a lot of those issues by adding double heat sinks and more lethal weaponry.
The problem is the sustained effects, I think. Heat is yet another damage effect that limits firepower when damaged. In a game where you can already lose weapons, this results (unless there’s a one-hit kill in one lucky early alpha) in two equal robots being damaged and reduced at just being able to shoot minor damage at each other, in a battle of attrition.
Of course, it could be we played horribly :)
Unless you lose only heatsinks (and not weapons), the lost weapons should roughly offset the lost heatsinks. I’m not saying heatsink mechanics don’t add time. They do. But so does movement and shooting. Sure, you could take those out or simplify them, but in the end, heat is simply another part of BT and playing BT (or any game) consumes time. As to attrition, one man’s grinding attrition battle is another man’s nail-biter duel, with two limping mechs looking for that last shot that will crit a reactor.
I never played the boardgame, but I’m confident the game won’t include randomized overheating leading to loss of firing in a round - that kind of thing tends to disappear quickly in playtesting.
I really hope they keep the heat mechanic. I like it as an immersive device… these are old-school big heavy steel machines subject to wear, tear, and operating costs, not slick sci-fi floaty i-pod-like gizmos with shields and whatnot. Heat makes the weaponry feel substantial, real. I can just picture an overheating mech shimmering in his hex, steam billowing from the vents and from the legs as it strides into water.
It also adds a whole layer of tactical options, beyond the alpha strike thing. We would quite routinely be planning our route to match our heat profiles, ie, make sure that when you’ve snapped off three consecutive turns of ppc fire, you wound up in a river or behind trees to cool off for a turn. It also made closing in for melee combat something that was disireable if the other mech was using autocannons+missiles and you were energy-only and didn’t want to forfeit damage-dealing for a turn. It slowed zippy fast mechs down if they took too many risks, and it promoted the carrying of ammo-based weapons despite the danger of ammo depletion and criticals.
To me, it’s too integral a mechanic to cut.
I think heat is fine, but the randomness someone mentioned isn’t, and I’m hard pressed to remember games were you could randomly freeze up which were positively received. I may have misunderstood though?
Sorry, I just quoted you out of habit, not critiquing your post as much as adding to the discussion :) As far as I know, we never played with random overheating, so I’m not sure where those rules would come from. I don’t think they’re in the core ruleset? But I agree, there’s enough with head shots and criticals and the like that you don’t need another layer of unattributable randomness. I’m also for things like CASE, pilot ejection, and non-fusion-reactor-exploding kills (it offends my sensibilities that mechs would be glowing like stars as they die all over the place like in MWO. Much better to just have a column of greasy black smoke rising from a shot-up hulk.)
Shutting down from heat is a pretty rare event that you have to actively embrace. Good heat management might limit your firepower on badly designed mech’s but even the Awesome could fire it’s 3 PPCs while running and only overheat by 4 points, a trivial amount.
While heat management in combat is important, I always thought of heat being mainly used as another limiter on build designs. If you wanted to carry a bunch of energy weapons, you needed the heat sinks, but if you wanted to carry ballistics, you didn’t have as much heat to worry about, but instead had to worry about ammo (and ammo protection such as CASE). Removing heat would lead to less adoption of ballistic weapons.
Yeah, it was certainly a tradeoff system (comparing the Hunchback to the Awesome is perfect, in that respect). I always kept as many heatsinks in the legs as possible, fwiw; if I lost a leg, I was going down anyways, and if I was lucky enough to stumble across some water then I could wade into it and get the extra cooling from having them submerged.
If there’s heat, there better be inferno rounds available! :)
With Clan tech double heat sinks and so forth, heat sinks became more of a design limiter. In the pre-clan game running hot was just a fact of life with most mechs. Embracing and managing the risk of bad overheat outcomes was part of the game. It made for interesting decisions. “Do I shoot all my lasers at this guy that has charged into close range with me and risk the shutdown roll or do I play it safe and pound him less?”
Hmm. It sounds to me like you’re thinking of a Mechwarrior game where you’re inside the cockpit. In that case, having it randomly shutdown (so you can’t do anything) sounds like pure frustration.
But in a squad size tactical combat game, the potential risk for a mech shutdown seems similar to XCom or Shadowrun where a member of your party can miss an important shot, get knocked down/stunned/unconscious, or critically fail some spell or attack. If it’s totally random, that’s no fun, but if it’s the result of you making some risky moves, and if you have other units to control while the unlucky one recovers, then it may not seem as bad.
Even in the MW simulation games, it wasn’t random. Heat generation to the point of shutdown took time. It was only unpredictable if you were hit by large barrages of heat weapons.
And from memory you could always force it to start back up again, although you may be liable to explode in the next few seconds!
Does anyone play the Battletech miniatures game anymore? I’ve heard that the new streamlined rules are much less clunky than the old ones. Actually, I’m kind of surprised there aren’t more giant mech board/miniature games.
I still play periodically. There may be a more casual rule variant in the latest box set, but the core mechanics haven’t changed at all. It’s still the same grueling mental gymnastics BT has always been. :)