The sensor model in CH was super cool, in that it gave an extremely well defined role for scout mechs. Being forced to create a chain of controlled sensor towers, having the specific role of a C2 mech that needed to then be in the area, and then having that enable shared sensor data (as well as being required for communications) was just super cool.
The ability to have parties and use private chat limited the impact of the communications stuff.
Ultimately, Mechwarrior would benefit from a complex sensor/target sharing system like CH though. It was a cool feature. Being able to take down a node in the enemy’s comms network, and have them suddenly lose sensor picture of an area was cool.
The mech consrtuction, and how it was directly related to weapons’ spread patterns, was also super cool.
For those who never played:
In CH, when you fired a group of weapons, they all fired in sequence, separated by a few milliseconds. So, almost simultaneously.
However, every weapon in CH had recoil, and it was realistic, physics based recoil based on the weapon, the type of ammunition, and its location on the mech. So, a weapon on the left side of your mech would pull the reticle to the left… the further away from your center of gravity, or the more powerful the cannon, the more it would kick.
So you could create specific spread patterns by placing weapons within a group at specific locations on the mech, and have them fire in a specific order in the group, thereby using the recoil from each weapon to compensate for the recoil of other weapons in the group.
It was a super cool system… I think that someone was actually making a fan version of Chromehounds, but I forget what it was called, or what happened to the project.
Chromehounds had the distinction of being one of the few “western” style mech games, like Mechwarrior where the mechs felt like heavy war machines, as opposed to the Asian style games where robots were more fast, zippy, Gundam style things.