Low Slung Arms

[hilburnashua]

Back when FASA was creating Battletech as a table top game much of the game elements were designed for a minimum of complexity to speed up gameplay. Battlemechs had complete coverage behind level 2 terrain, but not level 1 no matter if the mech was a locust or a banshee. That kind of simplicity. We didn't have the kind of nightmare scenarios 40K has where you measure true line of sight and can shoot at a model if you can see any part of it.

This lead a lot of interesting looking mech designs. Something like the cataphract is a odd looking beast but it functions reasonably well against similar tech mechs. In keeping with the roughly humanoid appearance many of these mechs have a design where they either have weapons systems mounted low (like the cataphract) or have arms that are designed to so that the weapons fire from a low position (warhammer, maruader, etc). Most mechs that have an elbow joint but not a hand seem to share this design.

And while it looks cool, it has a major flaw. If you weapons are mounted low, you are far more likely to hit any elevated terrain between you and your target. It's like building a tank and putting the main gun on the hull and not an elevated turret. This is a huge issue when you are trying to shoot at extended ranges when using zoom.

Certainly nothing I am saying is going to be new to anyone that has played MWO or Mercenaries. These simulator games have taught us how bad these designs for actually shooting. But after these two games I kind of wish PGI had stepped back and looked at how the clan mechs are designed and decided to flip the arms into and overhead configuration or redesigned the arms to fire from shoulder height. After centuries of weapons development and design the clans certainly would not have included such glaring design flaws, flaws that wouldn't have been so obvious back when FASA where creating art for these mechs for tabletop.

Or maybe this is just a PGI problem. There shouldn't be any reason why a mech like a warhammer couldn't straighten it's arms out when firing, like a normal shooting stance when holding a firearm. It's just that they didn't add that degree of motion to the models.

I know that quite a few people love the lore, and I am a fan as well. But the core functionality of these designs are poor. Maybe a spinoff with completely new designs using the basic rules but keeping in mind weapons should be mounted higher.

[GODzilla]

Sometimes I wrote a lengthy post, then after reading over it again I just erased it. Really, these things do happen, when I realize it just makes no sense.

Your last passage suggests that you already got there yourself, but decided to click "Post" anyway.

So yeah, absolutely stunning idea, for a totally different game like you wrote, absent of Battletech or MechWarrior as a brand. If they wanted to make this game, your suggestions would make sense.

[Death a Barbar]

The issue is how they are implementing them into the game.

[Tritol]

Its weird when you consider MW4 (I think) had something like crouching, which is absolutely normal thing for a mech to do (compared to something like going full prone or doing soulslike dodgerolls like they do in books) and later games completely forgot about that.

If Arma can have 545135 stances, there really shouldnt be an issue to add "hands up" stance, where your "arms crosshair" moves slightly above your "torso crosshair" and you can suddenly shoot above cover.

Its not like people are asking for hyper actuators so they can turn their hands 180° around and shoot at enemies behind you ..

[Thundercracker]

Tritol eredeti hozzászólása:

Its weird when you consider MW4 (I think) had something like crouching, which is absolutely normal thing for a mech to do (compared to something like going full prone or doing soulslike dodgerolls like they do in books) and later games completely forgot about that.

If Arma can have 545135 stances, there really shouldnt be an issue to add "hands up" stance, where your "arms crosshair" moves slightly above your "torso crosshair" and you can suddenly shoot above cover.

Its not like people are asking for hyper actuators so they can turn their hands 180° around and shoot at enemies behind you ..

the problem in this case is recoil.

with the arms slung low, bent at the elbow, there is "give" available to absorb the shock of recoils.

extending the arms out in front removes this "give," and thus should produce a hell of a lot more recoil. certain designs are topheavy enough that firing in this manner would risk knocking them over onto their back.

i dunno, mebbey it's because i started with MWO, so i see hardpoint positioning as in inherent advantage/ disadvantage of a given chassis.

[Tritol]

You could solve that in many different videogamey ways. You could simply ignore that, since we are ignoring jump jets and fly around like Goku and we ignore mechs being thrown around when they lose several tons of armour.
You could also add increased spread or accuracy loss when using "raise arms stance".
Or you could add MWO style camera shake like from masc and jjs, so you use this only as a sort of "poptart" style of gameplay and not use it all the time.

About chassis design, well yeah thats kinda the issue of turning tabletop, turnbased game into real time FPS game.
Corsair on tabletop doesnt have to care about its size because you are on hexa fields and there is very easy way to know which way you are facing, but in MWO you can hit it by sneezing two zipecodes away.

And you can see it on MWO meta picks, pretty much everything is high mounts on side torsos.
When you play FP, first wave is 12 stalkers vs 12 blood asps.
The entire point of mechs with arms being kinda "bad" (dont go too deeply into that) is that they can swing their arms around and aim at everything. In MWO most arm mechs are worse, because they can only hunt ants on ground.

[Thundercracker]

Tritol eredeti hozzászólása:

The entire point of mechs with arms being kinda "bad" (dont go too deeply into that) is that they can swing their arms around and aim at everything. In MWO most arm mechs are worse, because they can only hunt ants on ground.

i mean, that kind of depends on the specific mech, really.

if you've got many weapons in the torso, you'll generally not want to unlock your arms so that you can pile on damage.

but if most of your weapons are in the arms, it's much more viable to unlock the arms.

aside from the larger turn radius compared to the torso, arms also have the advantage of moving much, much faster than the torso. this aids torso-twisting to spread out incoming damage, as well as letting you fire on angles the torso just cannot reach.

now granted, both of these things are much more important in MWO. over there, you really must learn to torso twist. over here, it is completely viable to never do it. you'll have "ridgeline" fights far more often in MWO with maps like canyon and that purple flowery one i always forget the name of.

there is, however, one area where arms in 5 (both clans and mercs) beat out arms in MWO: melee exists in 5. you actually have to have actuators to use melee (for example, the summoner does not have them so it cannot use melee.)

melee isnt the biggest factor here in clans. we dont have the melee weapons available in mercs. some of the ones you can get in mercs are ridiculous. my preferred mech there is a hero hatomoto-chi using a large melee, and even other assaults die to or barely survive getting two-tapped.