Did they ever fix Light and Medium mech's usefulness in late game? I've had a hankering to jump back in with the DLC but I've been waiting till they fixed some of those core issues.
Did they ever fix Light and Medium mech's usefulness in late game? I've had a hankering to jump back in with the DLC but I've been waiting till they fixed some of those core issues.
I'm not in the late game yet as I have a mix of meds and heavies and no, lights are useless.
Difficulty level in the game means tonnage. Any missions where lights would be valuable like escort destruction result in the OpFor pushing your shit in immediately with huge lances or 80 tonne SRM carriers.
Did they ever fix Light and Medium mech's usefulness in late game? I've had a hankering to jump back in with the DLC but I've been waiting till they fixed some of those core issues.
Raven can be useful because ECM totally breaks the AI, Firestarter can be useful fairly long but not once there's assaults on the field. Royal Griffin works all the way to the end and holds its own against 100 ton mechs IME but that's a bit of a special case. Also some of the new Flashpoints have tonnage limits, often with no in-world reason.
There's no fundamental changes though, if you want to drop 400 tons you can drop 400 tons. IMO once you have four fully kitted out assaults you are basically done with that campaign/career so it doesn't really bother me that there's no mechanics to make lights/mediums essential at that point of the game.
I think you need to do some modding to get the weightclasses relevant throughout the game:
-persistent or semi-persistent evasion. Gives evasion bases on movement speed, and they dont go away when something shoots at them. Makes lights be able to zip around and constantly keep 4 or 5 pips.
-Counter that with increased sensor scan efficiency, because enemy lights are a pain.
-Increased sensor range for lights and scout-medium mechs (cicada), lets you use them as spotters much more effectively.
Nothing of these really help out with losing the raw damage output needed to chew through the amount of enemies the game throws at you. Until someone mods in additional mech lances, there's not much reason to deck out as heavy as you can.
Nothing of these really help out with losing the raw damage output needed to chew through the amount of enemies the game throws at you. Until someone mods in additional mech lances, there's not much reason to deck out as heavy as you can.
The more I play the less I unconditionally agree with that. How easily you win is determined both by your firepower and your ability to avoid/tank damage. What your firepower actually amounts to depends on whether you can fire from a useful angle, killing somebody by Precision Shotting their CT through the back panels requiring maybe 1/6th of the damage you need when you are just firing at them from the front. Which means mobility gives you both very good defense (it allows you to move from cover to cover and it gives you avoidance pips) and offense (it allows you to fire from whatever side you want, from the range you choose).
Utilizing your mobility to the full is a skill - you get better and better at it the longer you play. So while on paper something like a Thunderbolt is vastly better than a Shadowhawk in reality I've gotten more use out of Shadowhawks than Thunderbolts. The mobility isn't the only factor, both having 5% more avoidance as a medium and 1 better initiative are very valuable things. You do need to play with patience and with the goal of maximizing your defenses, but if you do that and have Ace Pilot on your pilots a plain old Shadowhawk loaded with +4 damage SRMs and an avoidance gyro is surprisingly good. And that's just a Shadowhawk, the Royal Griffin with its 33 free tons is IMO better than any heavy mech.
Did they ever fix Light and Medium mech's usefulness in late game? I've had a hankering to jump back in with the DLC but I've been waiting till they fixed some of those core issues.
Some of the lights can be unholy terrors later in game when you max them out. I threw my PC into a Firestarter for a bit during the twilight act of the game. With 6 Small Lasers, 6 MGs, plenty of Jump Jets and I think I might have gotten a couple leg mods on there as well, it was a flying wrecking ball that could get in behind softer targets and take them out fast.
The real drawback is that they can't tank damage for the rest of your team, and if the RNG screws you, you're one bad roll away from losing a mech. Also, since your PC can't die, you won't lose a pilot randomly either, but an injury might keep you from using the mech while your character is keeping a medbay bed warm.
A larger mech just has more utility and can be useful in more situations than a light. I'm kind of OK with that, not sure it has to change. Maybe if there is a mission type specifically made for lights that focuses on movement and balances enemy forces accordingly. A mission with two lances, one scout, one heavy might be kind of fun.
I was pleasantly surprised to go into a 3 skull mission with a mix of mediums and I think a higher end Heavy or a lighter Assault? So it seems like they're at least mixing up the classes of the OpFor.
Nothing of these really help out with losing the raw damage output needed to chew through the amount of enemies the game throws at you. Until someone mods in additional mech lances, there's not much reason to deck out as heavy as you can.
The more I play the less I unconditionally agree with that. How easily you win is determined both by your firepower and your ability to avoid/tank damage. What your firepower actually amounts to depends on whether you can fire from a useful angle, killing somebody by Precision Shotting their CT through the back panels requiring maybe 1/6th of the damage you need when you are just firing at them from the front. Which means mobility gives you both very good defense (it allows you to move from cover to cover and it gives you avoidance pips) and offense (it allows you to fire from whatever side you want, from the range you choose).
Utilizing your mobility to the full is a skill - you get better and better at it the longer you play. So while on paper something like a Thunderbolt is vastly better than a Shadowhawk in reality I've gotten more use out of Shadowhawks than Thunderbolts. The mobility isn't the only factor, both having 5% more avoidance as a medium and 1 better initiative are very valuable things. You do need to play with patience and with the goal of maximizing your defenses, but if you do that and have Ace Pilot on your pilots a plain old Shadowhawk loaded with +4 damage SRMs and an avoidance gyro is surprisingly good. And that's just a Shadowhawk, the Royal Griffin with its 33 free tons is IMO better than any heavy mech.
I haven't played Urban Warfare yet, but I'm curious how well this holds up.
Because the key to using your mobility is patience. You need time to let the enemy stumble into your killing grounds. You need time to hit and fade repeatedly. You need time to play rope-a-dope with the AI that will for the most part blindly stumble towards you.
And increasingly the newer mission types will not allow this. You are on a timer. You don't get to pick the killing grounds as you are tied to an objective with little cover. You need to either maintain aggro to distract from something you are protecting, or aggro locks onto you like a magnet the moment you step into the objective.
I find it increasingly boils things down to just being able to tank hits, and alpha strike for as much as possible. Either that or it's just challenging me in ways I haven't found a way to mobility to death yet.
Nothing of these really help out with losing the raw damage output needed to chew through the amount of enemies the game throws at you. Until someone mods in additional mech lances, there's not much reason to deck out as heavy as you can.
The more I play the less I unconditionally agree with that. How easily you win is determined both by your firepower and your ability to avoid/tank damage. What your firepower actually amounts to depends on whether you can fire from a useful angle, killing somebody by Precision Shotting their CT through the back panels requiring maybe 1/6th of the damage you need when you are just firing at them from the front. Which means mobility gives you both very good defense (it allows you to move from cover to cover and it gives you avoidance pips) and offense (it allows you to fire from whatever side you want, from the range you choose).
Utilizing your mobility to the full is a skill - you get better and better at it the longer you play. So while on paper something like a Thunderbolt is vastly better than a Shadowhawk in reality I've gotten more use out of Shadowhawks than Thunderbolts. The mobility isn't the only factor, both having 5% more avoidance as a medium and 1 better initiative are very valuable things. You do need to play with patience and with the goal of maximizing your defenses, but if you do that and have Ace Pilot on your pilots a plain old Shadowhawk loaded with +4 damage SRMs and an avoidance gyro is surprisingly good. And that's just a Shadowhawk, the Royal Griffin with its 33 free tons is IMO better than any heavy mech.
I haven't played Urban Warfare yet, but I'm curious how well this holds up.
Because the key to using your mobility is patience. You need time to let the enemy stumble into your killing grounds. You need time to hit and fade repeatedly. You need time to play rope-a-dope with the AI that will for the most part blindly stumble towards you.
And increasingly the newer mission types will not allow this. You are on a timer. You don't get to pick the killing grounds as you are tied to an objective with little cover. You need to either maintain aggro to distract from something you are protecting, or aggro locks onto you like a magnet the moment you step into the objective.
I find it increasingly boils things down to just being able to tank hits, and alpha strike for as much as possible. Either that or it's just challenging me in ways I haven't found a way to mobility to death yet.
I just finished a full career (all non-ally FPs done) with the DLCs and my "endgame" lance was an Atlas, a Grasshopper, a Royal Griffin and a LRM boat Stalker. Did maybe 50 missions with that setup or something similar so I got to see plenty of times what works better. In the end it's clear that while the Atlas has 60% more armor and way more internal structure, the fact it gets 3-4 avoidance pips at best and has trouble leaping from cover to cover meant it was getting more beat up than the Griffin all the time. Griffin could get up to 7 avoidance pips with a 10 pilotting pilot and had no trouble leaping from cover to cover or from a firing position to out of LoS. With +3 avoidance gyro and the innate +1 dodge from medium chassis those 7 avoidance pips give it a total of -90% to be hit. Sure enemy fire reduces them but usually you only get fired at by 3-4 enemies at worst. With the old Bulwark that rewarded standing still things were different but right now a properly played medium mech is the most durable mech in the game - speed is life.
As for firepower, with the Atlas there were turns I couldn't get it within range of the target because it's too slow, or I had to fire from the front because I couldn't flank with it. When it did get to fire it was better at killing enemy CTs from the front but Griffin was better at getting behind enemies and killing their CTs from behind.
It's true I wouldn't swap my lance for 4 Shadowhawks but if I had to try to kill assaults with 4 properly kitted out Shadowhawks it wouldn't be an impossible mission at all.
I find the main reason that going heavy is so attractive is that maps tend to fuck you hard for the sort of cover you'd need for lighter mechs; too often the maps are effectievly punchbowls with nothing to break up LOS, terrain modifiers bogging you down and the mission objectives forcing you to be more aggressive.
Further, by the time enemy mechs are rolling out the heavies and assaults there aren't recruits around anymore so chewing through 6 or more pips isn't a challenge for a concerted effort by the enemy.
I find the main reason that going heavy is so attractive is that maps tend to fuck you hard for the sort of cover you'd need for lighter mechs; too often the maps are effectievly punchbowls with nothing to break up LOS, terrain modifiers bogging you down and the mission objectives forcing you to be more aggressive.
Further, by the time enemy mechs are rolling out the heavies and assaults there aren't recruits around anymore so chewing through 6 or more pips isn't a challenge for a concerted effort by the enemy.
The thing is, the less cover there is the more important avoidance is. An Atlas is going to be screwed over even worse by those flat Lunar landscapes with no forests since it can't reposition itself easily. One of the new Flashpoints has 3-4 missions on flat Lunar terrain with no cover and on every one of those my Atlas took way more damage than my Griffin.
And if you leave a mech somewhere 6 enemies can shoot at it it's going to get hurt, be it a medium or an assault. As for having to be more aggressive, on any map where you are in a hurry being faster is a virtue on its own.
Sometimes I wonder if people play the same game as I do. :P
I find the main reason that going heavy is so attractive is that maps tend to fuck you hard for the sort of cover you'd need for lighter mechs; too often the maps are effectievly punchbowls with nothing to break up LOS, terrain modifiers bogging you down and the mission objectives forcing you to be more aggressive.
Further, by the time enemy mechs are rolling out the heavies and assaults there aren't recruits around anymore so chewing through 6 or more pips isn't a challenge for a concerted effort by the enemy.
The thing is, the less cover there is the more important avoidance is. An Atlas is going to be screwed over even worse by those flat Lunar landscapes with no forests since it can't reposition itself easily. One of the new Flashpoints has 3-4 missions on flat Lunar terrain with no cover and on every one of those my Atlas took way more damage than my Griffin.
And if you leave a mech somewhere 6 enemies can shoot at it it's going to get hurt, be it a medium or an assault. As for having to be more aggressive, on any map where you are in a hurry being faster is a virtue on its own.
Sometimes I wonder if people play the same game as I do. :P
There are obviously a lot of ways to play the game. I personally would argue that armor swapping and managing your initiative and cooldowns correctly is more important than evasion. Possibly the biggest advantage the player has over the AI is that the AI can't reserve.
Hold on.... you mean stomping up with stock 'mechs, planting yourself in some trees and blasting away is not the best way to play this game?
I'm in trouble then.
Besides the stock mech part, you can definitely build your pilots to make that work (it's what I did). The modern Bulwark is still really good if you have cover available - if you aren't building for Evasion, then DR% basically breaks the game.
I find the main reason that going heavy is so attractive is that maps tend to fuck you hard for the sort of cover you'd need for lighter mechs; too often the maps are effectievly punchbowls with nothing to break up LOS, terrain modifiers bogging you down and the mission objectives forcing you to be more aggressive.
Further, by the time enemy mechs are rolling out the heavies and assaults there aren't recruits around anymore so chewing through 6 or more pips isn't a challenge for a concerted effort by the enemy.
The thing is, the less cover there is the more important avoidance is. An Atlas is going to be screwed over even worse by those flat Lunar landscapes with no forests since it can't reposition itself easily. One of the new Flashpoints has 3-4 missions on flat Lunar terrain with no cover and on every one of those my Atlas took way more damage than my Griffin.
And if you leave a mech somewhere 6 enemies can shoot at it it's going to get hurt, be it a medium or an assault. As for having to be more aggressive, on any map where you are in a hurry being faster is a virtue on its own.
Sometimes I wonder if people play the same game as I do. :P
There are obviously a lot of ways to play the game. I personally would argue that armor swapping and managing your initiative and cooldowns correctly is more important than evasion. Possibly the biggest advantage the player has over the AI is that the AI can't reserve.
Yeah, there's so many ways you can control your own difficulty that it doesn't really even matter if you are playing well or poorly. There's one guy who finished the campaign with nothing but AC2s and some people use nothing but stock configurations etc. It's not like I can make anybody change their mind about the usefulness of lighter mechs even if my own experiences about how well they work compared to assaults aren't in line with what Everybody Knows to Be True (tm). I'm just starting to look like that one autistic guy who can't shut up about how 6.8 evasion pips gives 87% armor multiplier and why doesn't everybody see that they are wrong!!!1 WROOOOOONG1!1
...
WRONG!!
0
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
I find the main reason that going heavy is so attractive is that maps tend to fuck you hard for the sort of cover you'd need for lighter mechs; too often the maps are effectievly punchbowls with nothing to break up LOS, terrain modifiers bogging you down and the mission objectives forcing you to be more aggressive.
Further, by the time enemy mechs are rolling out the heavies and assaults there aren't recruits around anymore so chewing through 6 or more pips isn't a challenge for a concerted effort by the enemy.
The thing is, the less cover there is the more important avoidance is. An Atlas is going to be screwed over even worse by those flat Lunar landscapes with no forests since it can't reposition itself easily. One of the new Flashpoints has 3-4 missions on flat Lunar terrain with no cover and on every one of those my Atlas took way more damage than my Griffin.
And if you leave a mech somewhere 6 enemies can shoot at it it's going to get hurt, be it a medium or an assault. As for having to be more aggressive, on any map where you are in a hurry being faster is a virtue on its own.
Sometimes I wonder if people play the same game as I do. :P
There are obviously a lot of ways to play the game. I personally would argue that armor swapping and managing your initiative and cooldowns correctly is more important than evasion. Possibly the biggest advantage the player has over the AI is that the AI can't reserve.
Yeah, there's so many ways you can control your own difficulty that it doesn't really even matter if you are playing well or poorly. There's one guy who finished the campaign with nothing but AC2s and some people use nothing but stock configurations etc. It's not like I can make anybody change their mind about the usefulness of lighter mechs even if my own experiences about how well they work compared to assaults aren't in line with what Everybody Knows to Be True (tm). I'm just starting to look like that one autistic guy who can't shut up about how 6.8 evasion pips gives 87% armor multiplier and why doesn't everybody see that they are wrong!!!1 WROOOOOONG1!1
...
WRONG!!
It's in part a consistency issue (for me). The expected value of the damage versus the expected value of the armor doesn't mean much to me if the hostile mech makes that 10% shot with a 100 damage AC/20 and blows a side torso off, completely altering the flow of the battle. With assaults, I know I can tank that 60 damage (because cover + Bulwark) and I'll be able to hit back, with decent odds of being able to blow the hostile's head right off. There's also time to kill: dead mechs don't inflict damage. And if I go dual AC/20+++ and have 9 tactics all around, odds are good I'll be killing one mech per turn-if-not-more, whether it's via headshots or just plain smashing components to bits.
Assaults are good at holding heavy weapons, and heavy weapons mean you have good odds of blowing off heads, which is good for salvage.
So yes, you can certainly play go-fast (and it sounds like be surprisingly successful with it!) but there are reasons why everyone else is doing the irrational thing.
Also, 30 turns for one battle is a bit much for my tastes.
Aw man, it was really sad last night for Oosik drop night. The queue was so bad last night I think we got a total of 2 games in before we dropped down to 2 of us. Then I had to bail since my dog demanded that I pay attention to her. Sorry for that @Nobody . But at least we got two games in with double UVs! Hopefully this is just a fluke and next week's Oosik Night is better. Otherwise, I might have to figure out if we need to change nights or perhaps the nights of waving the Positivity Lance Flag might be numbered.
@Erlkönig mentioned that the numbers are slowly dropping in Steam, so yeah.
Uh ... why would my medium mech be out of cover and your hypothetical assault be in cover? Assaults don't magically conjure cover from anywhere, they have to get to them - and surprise, faster mechs are better at getting to where you want them to be. So the comparison is an assault with 3 avoidance pips vs a medium with 6 avoidance pips, both in cover + Bulwark (though in reality my assaults are sometimes stuck between two forests without cover while my medium can make the leap in one round).
Assaults win in sheer damage, that's irrefutable. Having played maybe 70-100 hours with mediums and assaults in the same lance, mediums easily win in survivability as long as you keep them in motion. But if that's too hard and you just want to walk 90m foward and shoot all your weapons from the front every turn without having to stop to think, then yeah 400 ton assault lance is always better.
And I've never had a 30-turn mission in my life. That and thinking mediums somehow do not benefit from cover is just making things up.
Assaults don't conjure cover out of nowhere. But they can find that one spot of cover and then just squat in it, relying on leg and head shots to get hostiles in position. Yeah, there aren't the back shots, but most of the time I'm going for salvage so I don't even want back shots.
Lunar environments are where that strategy is decisively beaten by go-fast because there is no cover whatsoever. Martian cover is uncommon enough I'll give it to you as well. Anything else there is enough cover you can largely just stay in it once the engagement has begun, and even maneuver enough to get flanking shots. Unlikely to get back shots, but the flanks are enough.
Can I take my time in the campaign and do as many missions as I want or is there a clock somewhere.
0
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
You can do as many missions as you want. There is no timer. The only time there is a timer you’ll know because you are immediately forced into the next mission.
+4
Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
The only fail state is running out of money for payroll and maintenance. Take all the time you want.
Uh ... why would my medium mech be out of cover and your hypothetical assault be in cover? Assaults don't magically conjure cover from anywhere, they have to get to them - and surprise, faster mechs are better at getting to where you want them to be. So the comparison is an assault with 3 avoidance pips vs a medium with 6 avoidance pips, both in cover + Bulwark (though in reality my assaults are sometimes stuck between two forests without cover while my medium can make the leap in one round).
Assaults win in sheer damage, that's irrefutable. Having played maybe 70-100 hours with mediums and assaults in the same lance, mediums easily win in survivability as long as you keep them in motion. But if that's too hard and you just want to walk 90m foward and shoot all your weapons from the front every turn without having to stop to think, then yeah 400 ton assault lance is always better.
And I've never had a 30-turn mission in my life. That and thinking mediums somehow do not benefit from cover is just making things up.
I'm not sure I've found mediums win in survivability late game, even when you keep them in motion. The likelihood of them being one shotted by the big boys with expert pilots sporting huge cannons isn't insignificant. And it rises significantly when you face the 2+:1 missions the game loves to throw at you. Those evasive pips don't last as long as you'd like with one lance in front of you and maybe another half lance chucking LRMs from the fog of war somewhere. They simply do not have the armor to tank those hits. More over, it's difficult to split the difference between keeping the pilot perks that play to their mobility, and the pilot perks that might let them survive that AC20 round to the side torso after taking a few stray LRMs.
+1
Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
Campaign: play with story missions enabled. Those are the Restoration of House Arano missions and come with various cutscenes and set pieces. Once the final campaign mission is finished, the game transitions into Career mode. Career mode is a sandbox, and Flashpoints become enabled if you have that DLC.
Career mode: start with the same strength of lance as you would have started with in Campaign mode, except there is no House Arano storyline and Flashpoints are enabled right off the bat. You start with the Argo, and the whole map is accessible. There is a scoring rubric that comes into affect at the end of ~four years in-game time, but that's mostly for the sake of having some number wot to make big. I assume the game continues after that time elapses? I haven't played that long in any one of my games, I usually play partway through until the challenge starts to drop off.
Career is 1200 days to get as high a score as possible. You can keep playing after that, but your score snapshot is taken at the 1200 day mark. There are no story missions, and you have access to travel anywhere right away.
Campaign you get story missions (and their deliciously high C-Bill payout). There's no clock, but you are gated in your ability to access various parts of the map by certain story missions. There's no scoring. You can keep playing after the final story mission.
While it's true you can generally faff about as much as you like in campaign, accruing better mechs and leveling your mechwarriors, it does make sense to push a bit until you have the Argo dropship. Until then, you are stuck with the poorest repair ability, the poorest medbay ability and the slowest travel speed. Or not!
The other difference is that in the campaign, planetary difficulty increases globally as the story progresses. That means the lowest difficulty planet post-campaign is 3-skulls (plus some minor variation from contracts). In career mode, the planets stay the same difficulty throughout so you can still find 1/2 skull planets.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Campaign: play with story missions enabled. Those are the Restoration of House Arano missions and come with various cutscenes and set pieces. Once the final campaign mission is finished, the game transitions into Career mode. Career mode is a sandbox, and Flashpoints become enabled if you have that DLC.
Career mode: start with the same strength of lance as you would have started with in Campaign mode, except there is no House Arano storyline and Flashpoints are enabled right off the bat. You start with the Argo, and the whole map is accessible. There is a scoring rubric that comes into affect at the end of ~four years in-game time, but that's mostly for the sake of having some number wot to make big. I assume the game continues after that time elapses? I haven't played that long in any one of my games, I usually play partway through until the challenge starts to drop off.
Campaign is a bit different in that mission difficulty scales up as you progress the story. Thus, once you're done with the story, I don't think you'll ever see any missions under 3 skulls again. In Career, mission difficulty is unchanging. Each planetary system stays at the same difficulty throughout your entire career play through.
I find the main reason that going heavy is so attractive is that maps tend to fuck you hard for the sort of cover you'd need for lighter mechs; too often the maps are effectievly punchbowls with nothing to break up LOS, terrain modifiers bogging you down and the mission objectives forcing you to be more aggressive.
Further, by the time enemy mechs are rolling out the heavies and assaults there aren't recruits around anymore so chewing through 6 or more pips isn't a challenge for a concerted effort by the enemy.
The thing is, the less cover there is the more important avoidance is. An Atlas is going to be screwed over even worse by those flat Lunar landscapes with no forests since it can't reposition itself easily. One of the new Flashpoints has 3-4 missions on flat Lunar terrain with no cover and on every one of those my Atlas took way more damage than my Griffin.
And if you leave a mech somewhere 6 enemies can shoot at it it's going to get hurt, be it a medium or an assault. As for having to be more aggressive, on any map where you are in a hurry being faster is a virtue on its own.
Sometimes I wonder if people play the same game as I do. :P
There are obviously a lot of ways to play the game. I personally would argue that armor swapping and managing your initiative and cooldowns correctly is more important than evasion. Possibly the biggest advantage the player has over the AI is that the AI can't reserve.
Yeah, there's so many ways you can control your own difficulty that it doesn't really even matter if you are playing well or poorly. There's one guy who finished the campaign with nothing but AC2s and some people use nothing but stock configurations etc. It's not like I can make anybody change their mind about the usefulness of lighter mechs even if my own experiences about how well they work compared to assaults aren't in line with what Everybody Knows to Be True (tm). I'm just starting to look like that one autistic guy who can't shut up about how 6.8 evasion pips gives 87% armor multiplier and why doesn't everybody see that they are wrong!!!1 WROOOOOONG1!1
...
WRONG!!
I mean... you're not wrong, but you're not really deviating from the assault meta as much as you think. You said you play with an Atlas, a Grasshopper, a Royal Griffin and a Stalker. The Royal Griffin is absurdly OP and has assault levels of firepower and armor at medium tonnage. The Grasshopper's crazy combo of JJs, massive short range firepower, and strong armor make it possibly the only evergreen mech in the whole game. You can use a Grasshopper to kancho any enemy at any tonnage, just because rear attacks are so dangerous and the Grasshopper is so good at them. Your other two mechs are the most powerful general purpose assault mech in the game and the most powerful indirect fire assault mech in the game.
The meta has been Bulwark + Multi-shot pilots in dual AC/20 assaults for a long time, for all the reasons Orca pointed out: a little cover goes a long way and headshots are the way to fish for salvage. And everyone loves salvage! The Battletech endgame is basically Pokémon: gotta catch em all.
Mediums are amazing but require high end gear. The +3 to hit gyro, 35 damage medium lasers, 30 damage Small Lasers, +4 Damage +2 Stab Damage SRM 6's and, ideally, double heat sinks. The Lasers and SRM 6's are the most ton efficient weapons in the game, double heat sinks make the setup good steady DPS but that doesn't really matter, you'll still get several turns of continuous fire with just high Guts + Coolant Vent (don't bother carrying any normal heat sinks) and then you can spend a turn or two in melee or repositioning. If the map has water you can jump into then it's just trivial.
Base Shadowhawks and Griffins are fine for this, variants with plenty of the right slots and enough armor that no single hit is causing any problems, especially if the map allows cover.
Assaults are nice, you actually get to use weapons that aren't Small/Medium Lasers and SRM 6s lol, but I'd always bring a couple Mediums to have someone who can move around the map and they're ever bit as good.
That said, it's silly the game didn't launch with tonnage limits, I've seen it in one of the new Urban Warfare flashpoints and that's nice, but maybe a generic limit for how much a Leopard can drop per mission, then maybe it varies by planet type (gravity/atmosphere density increease or decrease tonnage) or perhaps just have a few mission types dictate it, I dunno, plenty of options.
Oh and while I guess you should try it for yourself and see, personally I was terribly disappointed by the campaign. You had zero player agency, they had "dialogue" where all your responses were the same every time... you basically got to choose how you said yes. Then the characters and story you sit in mute witness to aren't exactly amazing. None of the characters are even members of your crew.
Frankly after the Shadowrun games I was incredibly disappointed.
It seems like going for salvage is much, much more rewarding. Am I missing something?
Yes, having things that you did not destroy leftover to sell is better than destroying those things and not being able to sell them, or use them yourself.
If you don't need said things from said mech, it's usually better for your bottom line to kill that mech quickly instead of risking the damage it could cost you in repairs by going for salvage. You're not always in a great position to go for salvage, and sometimes if you do, your own repairs may end up costing you more.
Oh, I think I might be... not up to the stage you're talking about? I'm talking about the contract negotiation where I can go for either extra cash or extra salvage.
It seems like going for salvage is much, much more rewarding. Am I missing something?
Generally speaking, going for salvage is definitley a good way to play the game since it means you have more toys to play with or sell.
Also, Salvaging is more of a mid-late game thing, since early on it's really hard to reliably pull off; a clean headshot on a light or medium is going to require around 50-60 damage and a called shot to the head has a 2% chance of connecting before you get the tactics bonuses rolling so like Frei said it can lead to wasted time where that other guy is trying to kill you.
Still, nothing ever feels so good as when you murder a pilot either by headshotting him, blowing off side torsos or falling down a bunch and seeing a signifigant increase in your deployable tonnage.
+2
Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
Salvage is quite valuable, yes. Generally you'll want to set just enough cash income to allow continual dropship upgrades to be worked on, and a few months of payroll encumbrance. Anything you negotiate while those conditions are met should go towards salvage. I generally don't go for rep unless I'm punching way down and don't need the cash or components a mission is likely to give me.
You don't need headshots for salvage, early on you can do it quite well by killing the pilot through side torso damage and a fall or two, and even destroying both legs for 2/3 pieces is usually fine.
But yes, Tube, even just playing normally and getting one salvage piece off if each downed mech plus sundry other gear and selling will be more cash. Remember things only sell for 10% value, but mechs are worth so much that's still a lot. That said I generally keep a little cash in the negotiation just for liquidity (and being lazy about selling crap to the vendor)
Posts
I'm not in the late game yet as I have a mix of meds and heavies and no, lights are useless.
Difficulty level in the game means tonnage. Any missions where lights would be valuable like escort destruction result in the OpFor pushing your shit in immediately with huge lances or 80 tonne SRM carriers.
Raven can be useful because ECM totally breaks the AI, Firestarter can be useful fairly long but not once there's assaults on the field. Royal Griffin works all the way to the end and holds its own against 100 ton mechs IME but that's a bit of a special case. Also some of the new Flashpoints have tonnage limits, often with no in-world reason.
There's no fundamental changes though, if you want to drop 400 tons you can drop 400 tons. IMO once you have four fully kitted out assaults you are basically done with that campaign/career so it doesn't really bother me that there's no mechanics to make lights/mediums essential at that point of the game.
-persistent or semi-persistent evasion. Gives evasion bases on movement speed, and they dont go away when something shoots at them. Makes lights be able to zip around and constantly keep 4 or 5 pips.
-Counter that with increased sensor scan efficiency, because enemy lights are a pain.
-Increased sensor range for lights and scout-medium mechs (cicada), lets you use them as spotters much more effectively.
Nothing of these really help out with losing the raw damage output needed to chew through the amount of enemies the game throws at you. Until someone mods in additional mech lances, there's not much reason to deck out as heavy as you can.
The more I play the less I unconditionally agree with that. How easily you win is determined both by your firepower and your ability to avoid/tank damage. What your firepower actually amounts to depends on whether you can fire from a useful angle, killing somebody by Precision Shotting their CT through the back panels requiring maybe 1/6th of the damage you need when you are just firing at them from the front. Which means mobility gives you both very good defense (it allows you to move from cover to cover and it gives you avoidance pips) and offense (it allows you to fire from whatever side you want, from the range you choose).
Utilizing your mobility to the full is a skill - you get better and better at it the longer you play. So while on paper something like a Thunderbolt is vastly better than a Shadowhawk in reality I've gotten more use out of Shadowhawks than Thunderbolts. The mobility isn't the only factor, both having 5% more avoidance as a medium and 1 better initiative are very valuable things. You do need to play with patience and with the goal of maximizing your defenses, but if you do that and have Ace Pilot on your pilots a plain old Shadowhawk loaded with +4 damage SRMs and an avoidance gyro is surprisingly good. And that's just a Shadowhawk, the Royal Griffin with its 33 free tons is IMO better than any heavy mech.
I think this picture shows what I mean.
Some of the lights can be unholy terrors later in game when you max them out. I threw my PC into a Firestarter for a bit during the twilight act of the game. With 6 Small Lasers, 6 MGs, plenty of Jump Jets and I think I might have gotten a couple leg mods on there as well, it was a flying wrecking ball that could get in behind softer targets and take them out fast.
The real drawback is that they can't tank damage for the rest of your team, and if the RNG screws you, you're one bad roll away from losing a mech. Also, since your PC can't die, you won't lose a pilot randomly either, but an injury might keep you from using the mech while your character is keeping a medbay bed warm.
A larger mech just has more utility and can be useful in more situations than a light. I'm kind of OK with that, not sure it has to change. Maybe if there is a mission type specifically made for lights that focuses on movement and balances enemy forces accordingly. A mission with two lances, one scout, one heavy might be kind of fun.
I haven't played Urban Warfare yet, but I'm curious how well this holds up.
Because the key to using your mobility is patience. You need time to let the enemy stumble into your killing grounds. You need time to hit and fade repeatedly. You need time to play rope-a-dope with the AI that will for the most part blindly stumble towards you.
And increasingly the newer mission types will not allow this. You are on a timer. You don't get to pick the killing grounds as you are tied to an objective with little cover. You need to either maintain aggro to distract from something you are protecting, or aggro locks onto you like a magnet the moment you step into the objective.
I find it increasingly boils things down to just being able to tank hits, and alpha strike for as much as possible. Either that or it's just challenging me in ways I haven't found a way to mobility to death yet.
Steam: betsuni7
I just finished a full career (all non-ally FPs done) with the DLCs and my "endgame" lance was an Atlas, a Grasshopper, a Royal Griffin and a LRM boat Stalker. Did maybe 50 missions with that setup or something similar so I got to see plenty of times what works better. In the end it's clear that while the Atlas has 60% more armor and way more internal structure, the fact it gets 3-4 avoidance pips at best and has trouble leaping from cover to cover meant it was getting more beat up than the Griffin all the time. Griffin could get up to 7 avoidance pips with a 10 pilotting pilot and had no trouble leaping from cover to cover or from a firing position to out of LoS. With +3 avoidance gyro and the innate +1 dodge from medium chassis those 7 avoidance pips give it a total of -90% to be hit. Sure enemy fire reduces them but usually you only get fired at by 3-4 enemies at worst. With the old Bulwark that rewarded standing still things were different but right now a properly played medium mech is the most durable mech in the game - speed is life.
As for firepower, with the Atlas there were turns I couldn't get it within range of the target because it's too slow, or I had to fire from the front because I couldn't flank with it. When it did get to fire it was better at killing enemy CTs from the front but Griffin was better at getting behind enemies and killing their CTs from behind.
It's true I wouldn't swap my lance for 4 Shadowhawks but if I had to try to kill assaults with 4 properly kitted out Shadowhawks it wouldn't be an impossible mission at all.
Further, by the time enemy mechs are rolling out the heavies and assaults there aren't recruits around anymore so chewing through 6 or more pips isn't a challenge for a concerted effort by the enemy.
The thing is, the less cover there is the more important avoidance is. An Atlas is going to be screwed over even worse by those flat Lunar landscapes with no forests since it can't reposition itself easily. One of the new Flashpoints has 3-4 missions on flat Lunar terrain with no cover and on every one of those my Atlas took way more damage than my Griffin.
And if you leave a mech somewhere 6 enemies can shoot at it it's going to get hurt, be it a medium or an assault. As for having to be more aggressive, on any map where you are in a hurry being faster is a virtue on its own.
Sometimes I wonder if people play the same game as I do. :P
There are obviously a lot of ways to play the game. I personally would argue that armor swapping and managing your initiative and cooldowns correctly is more important than evasion. Possibly the biggest advantage the player has over the AI is that the AI can't reserve.
I'm in trouble then.
Besides the stock mech part, you can definitely build your pilots to make that work (it's what I did). The modern Bulwark is still really good if you have cover available - if you aren't building for Evasion, then DR% basically breaks the game.
Yeah, there's so many ways you can control your own difficulty that it doesn't really even matter if you are playing well or poorly. There's one guy who finished the campaign with nothing but AC2s and some people use nothing but stock configurations etc. It's not like I can make anybody change their mind about the usefulness of lighter mechs even if my own experiences about how well they work compared to assaults aren't in line with what Everybody Knows to Be True (tm). I'm just starting to look like that one autistic guy who can't shut up about how 6.8 evasion pips gives 87% armor multiplier and why doesn't everybody see that they are wrong!!!1 WROOOOOONG1!1
...
WRONG!!
It's in part a consistency issue (for me). The expected value of the damage versus the expected value of the armor doesn't mean much to me if the hostile mech makes that 10% shot with a 100 damage AC/20 and blows a side torso off, completely altering the flow of the battle. With assaults, I know I can tank that 60 damage (because cover + Bulwark) and I'll be able to hit back, with decent odds of being able to blow the hostile's head right off. There's also time to kill: dead mechs don't inflict damage. And if I go dual AC/20+++ and have 9 tactics all around, odds are good I'll be killing one mech per turn-if-not-more, whether it's via headshots or just plain smashing components to bits.
Assaults are good at holding heavy weapons, and heavy weapons mean you have good odds of blowing off heads, which is good for salvage.
So yes, you can certainly play go-fast (and it sounds like be surprisingly successful with it!) but there are reasons why everyone else is doing the irrational thing.
Also, 30 turns for one battle is a bit much for my tastes.
@Erlkönig mentioned that the numbers are slowly dropping in Steam, so yeah.
Steam: betsuni7
Assaults win in sheer damage, that's irrefutable. Having played maybe 70-100 hours with mediums and assaults in the same lance, mediums easily win in survivability as long as you keep them in motion. But if that's too hard and you just want to walk 90m foward and shoot all your weapons from the front every turn without having to stop to think, then yeah 400 ton assault lance is always better.
And I've never had a 30-turn mission in my life. That and thinking mediums somehow do not benefit from cover is just making things up.
29 turns elapsed. Maybe not 30, but pretty close.
Assaults don't conjure cover out of nowhere. But they can find that one spot of cover and then just squat in it, relying on leg and head shots to get hostiles in position. Yeah, there aren't the back shots, but most of the time I'm going for salvage so I don't even want back shots.
Lunar environments are where that strategy is decisively beaten by go-fast because there is no cover whatsoever. Martian cover is uncommon enough I'll give it to you as well. Anything else there is enough cover you can largely just stay in it once the engagement has begun, and even maneuver enough to get flanking shots. Unlikely to get back shots, but the flanks are enough.
Then came back in as a rich pirate king and stomped the campaign
I'm not sure I've found mediums win in survivability late game, even when you keep them in motion. The likelihood of them being one shotted by the big boys with expert pilots sporting huge cannons isn't insignificant. And it rises significantly when you face the 2+:1 missions the game loves to throw at you. Those evasive pips don't last as long as you'd like with one lance in front of you and maybe another half lance chucking LRMs from the fog of war somewhere. They simply do not have the armor to tank those hits. More over, it's difficult to split the difference between keeping the pilot perks that play to their mobility, and the pilot perks that might let them survive that AC20 round to the side torso after taking a few stray LRMs.
Career mode: start with the same strength of lance as you would have started with in Campaign mode, except there is no House Arano storyline and Flashpoints are enabled right off the bat. You start with the Argo, and the whole map is accessible. There is a scoring rubric that comes into affect at the end of ~four years in-game time, but that's mostly for the sake of having some number wot to make big. I assume the game continues after that time elapses? I haven't played that long in any one of my games, I usually play partway through until the challenge starts to drop off.
Campaign you get story missions (and their deliciously high C-Bill payout). There's no clock, but you are gated in your ability to access various parts of the map by certain story missions. There's no scoring. You can keep playing after the final story mission.
While it's true you can generally faff about as much as you like in campaign, accruing better mechs and leveling your mechwarriors, it does make sense to push a bit until you have the Argo dropship. Until then, you are stuck with the poorest repair ability, the poorest medbay ability and the slowest travel speed. Or not!
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
Campaign is a bit different in that mission difficulty scales up as you progress the story. Thus, once you're done with the story, I don't think you'll ever see any missions under 3 skulls again. In Career, mission difficulty is unchanging. Each planetary system stays at the same difficulty throughout your entire career play through.
I mean... you're not wrong, but you're not really deviating from the assault meta as much as you think. You said you play with an Atlas, a Grasshopper, a Royal Griffin and a Stalker. The Royal Griffin is absurdly OP and has assault levels of firepower and armor at medium tonnage. The Grasshopper's crazy combo of JJs, massive short range firepower, and strong armor make it possibly the only evergreen mech in the whole game. You can use a Grasshopper to kancho any enemy at any tonnage, just because rear attacks are so dangerous and the Grasshopper is so good at them. Your other two mechs are the most powerful general purpose assault mech in the game and the most powerful indirect fire assault mech in the game.
The meta has been Bulwark + Multi-shot pilots in dual AC/20 assaults for a long time, for all the reasons Orca pointed out: a little cover goes a long way and headshots are the way to fish for salvage. And everyone loves salvage! The Battletech endgame is basically Pokémon: gotta catch em all.
Base Shadowhawks and Griffins are fine for this, variants with plenty of the right slots and enough armor that no single hit is causing any problems, especially if the map allows cover.
Assaults are nice, you actually get to use weapons that aren't Small/Medium Lasers and SRM 6s lol, but I'd always bring a couple Mediums to have someone who can move around the map and they're ever bit as good.
That said, it's silly the game didn't launch with tonnage limits, I've seen it in one of the new Urban Warfare flashpoints and that's nice, but maybe a generic limit for how much a Leopard can drop per mission, then maybe it varies by planet type (gravity/atmosphere density increease or decrease tonnage) or perhaps just have a few mission types dictate it, I dunno, plenty of options.
Frankly after the Shadowrun games I was incredibly disappointed.
Yes, having things that you did not destroy leftover to sell is better than destroying those things and not being able to sell them, or use them yourself.
If you don't need said things from said mech, it's usually better for your bottom line to kill that mech quickly instead of risking the damage it could cost you in repairs by going for salvage. You're not always in a great position to go for salvage, and sometimes if you do, your own repairs may end up costing you more.
Generally speaking, going for salvage is definitley a good way to play the game since it means you have more toys to play with or sell.
Also, Salvaging is more of a mid-late game thing, since early on it's really hard to reliably pull off; a clean headshot on a light or medium is going to require around 50-60 damage and a called shot to the head has a 2% chance of connecting before you get the tactics bonuses rolling so like Frei said it can lead to wasted time where that other guy is trying to kill you.
Still, nothing ever feels so good as when you murder a pilot either by headshotting him, blowing off side torsos or falling down a bunch and seeing a signifigant increase in your deployable tonnage.
But yes, Tube, even just playing normally and getting one salvage piece off if each downed mech plus sundry other gear and selling will be more cash. Remember things only sell for 10% value, but mechs are worth so much that's still a lot. That said I generally keep a little cash in the negotiation just for liquidity (and being lazy about selling crap to the vendor)