First off, let me say thank you to the dev's for participating in this thread.  I am very impressed with the detail that ToeBall outlined is going into the weapon systems, including lock times and such is well beyond what I was figuring would happen, but I have to say that it just makes me all the more confused that you would use a completely unrealistic aiming system when your putting that much detail into your weapons.

  Why is it unrealistic?  Well because it can not exist in the physical world we occupy, because it has no calculation phase.  It's a point and shoot mechanic, not an aim and shoot mechanic.  I'm sure that you guys know about things like bullet drop and windage, there's not even an abstraction for these types of things in the fps mech.

  I made mention of the Abrams tank in my previous post, and as luck would have it, I caught a show the other night called anatomy of an Abrams.  On there they showed a gunner in a sim, he shot around 5-6 targets and everytime the process was the same:  Traverse and change elevation until the reticle is on target, followed by about a 1 sec pause, then the screen would white out due to simulated muzzle flash.  The pause is the computer making the calc's needed and traversing/elevating the weapon so the shot will actually hit the target.  In a mech its even more complicated as the aim point doesn't have any relationship with the weapons systems(not looking down the barrel) and mech's have more weapons to aim.

  If you imagine a flat plane, with no terrain in sight, and place a mech on it, all of the weapons will be targeting a point off into infinity.  Which means they will almost be parallel to each other.  Now if you move the reticle, say left, until you come across a mech at 100m the weapons will instantly be aimed at that point, with no time lost for the calculation needed to adjust the aim of the weapons to the new point and no time lost for the weapons actually moving to their new location.  It's simply impossible for it to work like that in a real world.  Now I'm not saying you should sim all that, but adding an abstraction would certainly feel more real than what the fps mechanic provides.  Crysis even understands that there is a difference between aiming and pointing, at least at the infantry level, that's why they have to different aim mechanics, though I don't believe it would be a very good way of doing it a mech.

  I had no such memory, so I looked it up in the CBT:Total Warfare book (The latest standard and tournament rules for CBT).  There is no "alpha strike" rules in it.  All weapons fire is done independently, the abstraction doesn't care whether you fired them one at a time or all at once, each is independently targeted, with both separate to-hit rolls and separate damage location rolls.  As for MW being more accurate, I would disagree, because in addition to what I discussed above, all mech's are also conducting EW, the ECM equipment in the game is an above and beyond type of thing.  What's more is that each weapon has it's own firing system, not one firing system that controlls everything, this is evidenced by the discription given for the minimum range modifier.

pg. 107 of Total Warfare
 
  PPC minimum range used to be explained as: the beam did not coalesce until it reached the minimum range, LRM's used to talk about safeties, but now refers to firing ballistically to achieve their range, but autocannons?  There is no other explaination other than targeting to explain it being more difficult to hit something when it gets closer with an autocannon.

  Btw, could you please clarify what you mean by torso weapons being hard mounted, as I am not sure if you mean they are completely fixed or just have a more limited traverse mechanism?

  Also, for the record, my suggestion for targeting is a compromise between the fps mechanic and a more sim oriented approach and not what I would term as the most accurate way to do it.  If complexity to implement wasn't an issue, what I would prefer would be a normal aiming reticle plus a simple geometric shape ghost reticle for each weapon on the mech.  The ghost reticles would track the actual aim point for each weapon at all times.  When you place the aim reticle on the target and hit the aim button(could be automated but you would still need a way to manually do it for non-standard targets) the ghost reticles would 'snap' (fast traverse) to an oversize circle (actual size would depend on TC or non-TC and game balance issues) around an aim reticle.  The exact point they snap to would be determined by a weighted random determination, with the weight given  progressively to the outer edge of the circle (its a ball park aim).  The aim would revise continuously by moving toward the aim point though not unnecessarily directly at it as this should be influence by whether or not you have a Targeting Comp or not as should how close it will ultimately get to the aim point.  The time for revision should vary by range, which would take the quality of optics out of the equation or at least reduce it's effectiveness.  This time variance could also be used for minimum range modifiers.  I consider this a pie-in-the-sky idea and only bring it up to illustrate that I'm trying to find a realistic comprimise to what I see as a deficiency in the targeting mechanic.

There was mention that ammunition weapons would cost C-bills to load out, I was wondering what the balance would be on heat weaponry.

Flipping through the technical readouts I note that several of the designs talk about the laser weapons burning out critical components after only 1000 firings, etc, or having their mirrors misalign due to using the laser barrels in hand-to-hand combat.  But 1000 shots vs. 45 for an AC/2 seems like a massive bargain even if you do have to replace the entire laser.

If massive heat spikes are the balance, then I hardily endorse them.  It's time that the good old AC/5 became the workhorse weapon it was designed to be.

Pushing this thread back to piloting and gunnery.  You guys going to implement charging and pushing as well as a more physically realistic DFA?

Also, I've noticed that in MW games, jumping opponents end up being somewhat easier to hit, but on the tabletop they are harder.  Any thoughts on making this so, or will jump jets be used by "pop-tarts", DFAs, and occasional terrain navigation?

My vote would be for the former.  I always saw jumpjets as a mobility enhancer first allowing the Mech to defeat impeding terrain.  There use as an attack vector were secondary and dangerous because of the control issues.

One of the things lacking in all other MW games is Physical Attacks.  Let me tell you, I have lost more mechs to having their head punched in or their leg kicked off than by weapons fire.

After watching a few vids of MW:4 gameplay I noticed that there are awesome shots of mechs charging toward one another, weapons blazing, they get closer, closer, machine guns chattering and SRMs fly, and then... they hit each other, abruptly stop as their forward energy is canceled, and then start to awkwardly torso twist and turn in order to get away from the splash damage and get back into a circle of death.

I'm thinking of something similar to the Halo "rifle butt of death" only, obviously not so over powered.  Maybe in order to punch you simply swing your torso to the side, then hurl it back toward the enemy and when the arm hits, WHAMMO!  Kicking might be too tough to add in and would probably look extremely dumb for all the chicken walkers out there.  But punching would give an advantage to mechs with their hand actuators still installed as opposed to the majority of Clan mechs who have gun pods there.  It would also make the Kodiak a clan mech that an Atlas wouldn't necessarily want to get too close to.

Thoughts.

  As I said, I don't think you should sim those things but instead use some kind of simple abstraction to represent them.  Your stated solution would only cause a rolling delay, not eliminate it.  I'm not going to get into why, becuase I have got the feeling that even if I were to present an arguement so compelling that it would convince an astronaut, that has walked in space and seen it with his own eyes, that the world was flat, it wouldn't change anything.  Btw, beam weapons would be effected too, because they are offset from the aim point.

  I don't agree with what you state your game is about, that is I don't think that is what it should be about.  As your description implies that the game is about hosing the battlefield down with weapons fire and I believe that battletech is about tactics.  Things like piloting, minimum ranges on weapons and even aiming delay create choices that the player must make on the fly.  These choices will affect their tactics.  Do I move through that rubble and risk falling down and damaging myself in order to get behind that enemy mech or do I go around it and perhaps give up being able to get behind him.  Caught at short range by a mech armed with several guass rifles do you extend and make it harder for both of you to hit each other or close inside the minimum range of the guass thereby making it harder for him to hit you but easier for you to hit him (assuming that you don't have any weapons with minimum ranges).  Do I take the snap shot knowing that my aim won't be as accurate or do I hold on target until my aim is more accurate?  These are the kinds of things I'm talking about.

  Also with reguard to the weapons systems, please put some kind of mechanic into the missile system to spread the damage out.  The reason I ask this is because without it an LRM 20 becomes and AC 20 that weighs less, has longer range, and generates less heat to fire.  I didn't mention the minimum range of this weapon because it only applies to the IS version.  Clan LRM's don't have a minimum range.


  Definately faster, as most jump capable mechs can jump as far as they can walk in a turn, but because they must actually travel farther than if the walked (an arc as opposed to a straight line) they would actually be moving faster than if they walked it.  As for manuverability, I think that is more reasonable than saying you can't and I personally would find it more enjoyable.


  Would you mind engauging in some speculation as to how you might implement phyiscal attacks?

I think we're misunderstanding each other, I was talking about not siming things like bullet drop and windage, as opposed to the lock times and barrel heat that I believe you have already coded.  In fact I think those things are all the more needed if you don't take a more realistic approach toward the aim mechanic, but could coexist with it nicely by adjusting the delay in aim so that it 'feels' right.  Incidently the pre-alpha state of things is why I started this thread, I hoped to be able to start a dialog about some of the mechanics before they got set in stone.  In that way, even if my ideas are not used directly, perhaps the dialog might cause ideas to come about that might not have been thought of otherwise.


I'm glad to hear that you guys have an eye on tactics while you are creating this mod.  As for the Mad Dog/Demolisher engagement, in CBT, just for reference, that exchange would end badly for the Demolisher most of the time, simply because it has fewer armor locations to spread the damage over, while the Mad Dog would be heavily damaged, perhaps even crippled, it would definitely be the expected winner, despite giving up 20 tons.  I think I get what your trying to get at by setting it in an urban setting, that good tactics and use of terrain by the Demolisher could nullify some of the mechs advantages, but were I facing that situation in CBT, the best I would hope for would be to prolong the fight until I could get some help in play.  I think the steep learning curve is a good thing, after all, it's supposed to be easy to learn to pilot a mech, but very difficult to master.


With out knowing the particulars, I still find myself wondering if the damage will end up being too locally grouped, but rather than asking you to explain it, I'll just mention that missile systems are the shotguns of CBT.  I know some people think that of the LBX, but they're more like AAA firing proximity fused rounds.


Agreed on the mortal combat thing not being good.  DFA(Death from Above) and Charge attacks seem like they would be the easiest to implement, but without falls and their associated damage, the former would probably be used to often (it's supposed to be a high risk/desperation move) and the  latter would lose some of its effectiveness.  Are there plans for mechs to fall over?  If so, will getting back up be automatic?