I've been waiting for so long for this! previous Mechwarrior games more or less stuck with TT values and it worked out just fine for them. I understand that MW5 has way more enemies to kill than previous titles so a little leeway needs to exist. With that being said though, my only gripe so far is laser duration. In TT and previous MW games they were hitscan weapons and while I do not think it's a good idea in MW5, I still think a short laser duration (at least vanilla values) would be beneficial to this mod. I did notice that the ER PPC only has a range of 630m when it should outrange the gauss rifle with a range of 690m
There are a few things I would like to see added. 1) TT rebalance of clan weapons and equipment, as well as post clan invasion IS weapons and equipment (maybe as a separate mod?) 2) head structure values reduced to 3 3) AC/2-BF and AC/5-BF do 8 and 15 damage respectively and have their cooldowns quadrupled and tripled 4) PPC minimum range of 90m 5) Mod Option menu to tweak weapon settings to our liking.
I've gone with slightly extended laser durations to nerf them a bit. In TT if you shoot 8 lasers at once they'll randomly hit 8 locations, here they'll all hit the same spot provided you can keep it on target. Given the lowered armour and structure values, mechs like the HBK-4P will just blow straight through stuff if all 40 damage hits the same location. The extra duration is intended to make it harder to keep on a single body part and add a bit more skill to the equation, but I'm open to slightly reducing it.
Yeah, you're right I've put the wrong number in for the ER PPC, I'll fix that up in next release.
This mod is sticking to the timeline of the game and campaigns and slightly past it at the moment, so no plans to do clan gear.
Burst fire AC/s are balanced as basically the same as their non burst counterparts with a small damage buff and small cooldown buff as they have the disadvantage of scattered damage and the possibility of some rounds missing. I have been meaning to reduce the cooldown buff a touch though.
No plans on adding a PPC minimum range or minimum ranges for the ACs either, there's no simple way to do it and they AI would need to be told about it somehow too.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to change a lot of the weapon values dynamically, including cooldowns, so there wouldn't be much point in an options menu. I'll release the source soon anyway so you can configure it to your liking.
I did not dig enough into the blueprints for managing weapon ranges, but I am thinking that, since upgrades are changing the weapon ranges dynamically, one could use the same code path to do that from options menu? Maybe if not per weapon itself, but rather for a limited more controversial set, or per weapon category.
On a different note, I have been playing your conversion quite a bit with your modifications and I started to really like it. Tactics are so much more important now and when one commits to combat, happens fast, is personal and it is thrilling AF. Really good stuff!
Maybe you could share the MW editor source for your mod, if you want?
after playing a bit more. There are a couple of things that I do really want to see. these *should* be doable but I wanna see what you think. I noticed that you removed all the standard SRMs and LRMs and are using strictly the stream versions. So these are the propositions I have.
1) make SRMs track their targets. it is canon that SRMs have a lock on ability, so it fits into the lore. Obviously should not be as effective as streak SRMs, but using the stream version as well as having a much longer cooldown makes them much more difficult to use. 2) remove the LB 10-X AC-SLD and just keep the LB 10-X AC and add in ammo switching, kind of like YAW. It streamlines the weapon list further as well as add more lore-friendly gameplay, as well as allowing it to stand out more compared to the AC/10. 3) Maybe add in dedicated Artemis IV FCS units and remove the +ART IV missiles.
I like these suggestions. I also think SRMs should have some basic lock-on ability. Also, can we have the option to allow energy weapons to work past their range?
2 is definitely something I want to do if and when I get some time, 3 might be possible if the AIV control unit is set up to provide mech wide buffs through a quirk or something, but would also need to automatically change ammo type of all launchers. Probably possible, but fiddly, and not sure how it would work in with the MechLab.
Not sure on 1, would need to spend a bit of time playing around with missile turn rates or use some other method to make sure it doesn't become too strong. The further away you are the more time the missiles would have to turn and hit the target, so unless there's some extra code to intentionally make some missiles completely miss it would basically become an SSRM.
you can get in touch with LittleTex and find out how his missile logic works. he has tracking SRMs in Yet Another Revamped Weapon. He might share his source files too.
So uhhh, I might have released an expansion pack for this mod. BattleTech - Beyond 3015... Its weapon balancing is mostly in line with BattleTech 3015, but with some additional features seen in YARW. Also, all the canon weapons already in YARW are included, which is the main point to it.
Interesting idea but you can get shredded in seconds with half armor and since missions are never fair (you're always outnumbered) you end up losing money on missions more often than not. Also even with AI mods the bots are still just too dumb to deal with this lethality and die or take so much damage its not worth it, my locusts would vaporize on level 0-1 missions.
Consider turning take/heli HP way down so they are distractions while the real fights are mech v mech.
Overall, if you made missions had equal fights, like 4 v 4, this would work better, but I think that would break too much of the game in other ways.
Bear in mind the overall DPS considering armour is practically identical to vanilla. Yeah, actually getting hit by a single shot hurts more, but early game missions your enemies come in 1s and 2s where you have a full lance of 4, isolate them and blow them up as a group and you'll barely take a scratch. Identify the most dangerous target and take them out first or at least blow their most dangerous weapon off. Early game enemies are also awful shots, but even still, until your light pilots get good dodge ability make sure you're distracting your target before sending your swarm of paper thin armoured mechs onto them.
Yeah, it's a little tougher than vanilla and you need to think more about how you engage, but that's the whole point. Vanilla is a walk in the park once you know how to play :)
if i remember right stomping on tanks insta kills them in tt, shouldn't that be turned on then? pretty sure even a locust stepping on tank barrels would bend them into the ground. if i remember wrong then my bad, still turning it on though cause imo the equivalent of dropping a dump truck on top of a tank is gonna wreck it or bend the barrels enough to make it incapable of firing. the rest sounds not bad though.
i might be wrong though, last time i played tt was like 30 years ago....
In TT you kick tanks which for a lot of lighter tanks will basically be an instant kill from a heavier mech. The faster it moves the harder to land the kick though, and you run the risk of losing balance and falling over. None of that actually exists in MW5 though, and just stepping on tanks to kill them trivialises them.
I've just done a little rework of laser durations to try and get them to feel a bit better and attempted to translate TT advantages into something meaningful in MW5. Hopefully they all have a use case now.
I did play around with a rifle nerf, which was basically keeping the same double damage that PGI had given them but extending out their cooldowns to suit, but this felt awful. 20s cooldown is not fun even for a cheap gauss rifle.
I've ended up going with a canon approach though, so they don't really fit in here anyway. Unfortunately replacing the PPC with a snub-nosed PPC doesn't really work as it has different tonnage and slot sizes.
I certainly understand why some people don't like the rifles, but now you're stuck with either machine guns or ac2s, and that's just plain worse. Unless you have an alternative in the works?
In vanilla yeah you can only use MGs, AC2s, or light rifles in small ballistic slots, but you can put whatever ballistic weapon you want in the slot in YAML. Hard points aren't restricted by weapon size.
Doesn't help with the weight issue, but that's the way it goes I guess. Still stinks that you go from .5 ton machine guns with 1 ton of ammo for a full mission to a 6 ton autocannon with 2.5 tons of ammo for a mission. :/
The problem with having extended damage fall off ranges, not including that it's not how it works in TT, is it devalues the heavier and hotter long range weapons and ruins playing range gaps. The ML is a really really efficient weapon, the LL only has the advantage of a 180m window where it can do damage but the other can't.
Of course blindly sticking to TT rules in a real time game with no dice makes no sense, so some liberties need to be taken to get it somewhat balanced and feeling right, but I feel having hard caps on weapon ranges where possible helps more than hurts the tactical element.
The only issue I see with this is that the difficulty in the starting campaign missions is brutal. I know all is adjustable, but I played with your strict recommendations. Half armor and massive weapons cooldowns against a total of 15-20 tanks that need 2 x 4 medium shots well placed to die are deadly against the little JVN. Not to mention the turret fire. I suspect that some mission balancing is required as well.
Yeah, the early campaign missions can be a little tough with the tank and VTOL HP boost as they're more or less expected to just blow up if you look at them and miss every shot against you, this mod has been balanced around career starts where you don't have to deal with 20 tanks like that with a single light mech. If it's driving you up the wall early just skip the VTOL/Tank/Turret HP boost until you get out of the beginner missions and hit the star map. I've dropped the suggested setting down from 2x to 1.5x as well which should feel a little better early on when you don't have as many guns to bear or lance mates on hand.
Yeah, I've basically reset the hp for the tanks and vtols to 1 and structure and armor to 1 to rush those.
I also noticed there is a misalignment between the range reported for the medium lasers in mission and the actual medium lasers range. Looks like this could affect the LRMs as well but I can't say for sure.
The ranges for all trace weapons are hard capped at their max range, the range it says in mission and in the mech lab is the max range it does damage at.
29 comments
There are a few things I would like to see added.
1) TT rebalance of clan weapons and equipment, as well as post clan invasion IS weapons and equipment (maybe as a separate mod?)
2) head structure values reduced to 3
3) AC/2-BF and AC/5-BF do 8 and 15 damage respectively and have their cooldowns quadrupled and tripled
4) PPC minimum range of 90m
5) Mod Option menu to tweak weapon settings to our liking.
Yeah, you're right I've put the wrong number in for the ER PPC, I'll fix that up in next release.
This mod is sticking to the timeline of the game and campaigns and slightly past it at the moment, so no plans to do clan gear.
Burst fire AC/s are balanced as basically the same as their non burst counterparts with a small damage buff and small cooldown buff as they have the disadvantage of scattered damage and the possibility of some rounds missing. I have been meaning to reduce the cooldown buff a touch though.
No plans on adding a PPC minimum range or minimum ranges for the ACs either, there's no simple way to do it and they AI would need to be told about it somehow too.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to change a lot of the weapon values dynamically, including cooldowns, so there wouldn't be much point in an options menu. I'll release the source soon anyway so you can configure it to your liking.
On a different note, I have been playing your conversion quite a bit with your modifications and I started to really like it. Tactics are so much more important now and when one commits to combat, happens fast, is personal and it is thrilling AF. Really good stuff!
Maybe you could share the MW editor source for your mod, if you want?
1) make SRMs track their targets. it is canon that SRMs have a lock on ability, so it fits into the lore. Obviously should not be as effective as streak SRMs, but using the stream version as well as having a much longer cooldown makes them much more difficult to use.
2) remove the LB 10-X AC-SLD and just keep the LB 10-X AC and add in ammo switching, kind of like YAW. It streamlines the weapon list further as well as add more lore-friendly gameplay, as well as allowing it to stand out more compared to the AC/10.
3) Maybe add in dedicated Artemis IV FCS units and remove the +ART IV missiles.
Not sure on 1, would need to spend a bit of time playing around with missile turn rates or use some other method to make sure it doesn't become too strong. The further away you are the more time the missiles would have to turn and hit the target, so unless there's some extra code to intentionally make some missiles completely miss it would basically become an SSRM.
Consider turning take/heli HP way down so they are distractions while the real fights are mech v mech.
Overall, if you made missions had equal fights, like 4 v 4, this would work better, but I think that would break too much of the game in other ways.
Yeah, it's a little tougher than vanilla and you need to think more about how you engage, but that's the whole point. Vanilla is a walk in the park once you know how to play :)
i might be wrong though, last time i played tt was like 30 years ago....
I've ended up going with a canon approach though, so they don't really fit in here anyway. Unfortunately replacing the PPC with a snub-nosed PPC doesn't really work as it has different tonnage and slot sizes.
Of course blindly sticking to TT rules in a real time game with no dice makes no sense, so some liberties need to be taken to get it somewhat balanced and feeling right, but I feel having hard caps on weapon ranges where possible helps more than hurts the tactical element.
I also noticed there is a misalignment between the range reported for the medium lasers in mission and the actual medium lasers range. Looks like this could affect the LRMs as well but I can't say for sure.