Greetings.
Warning! Long post ahead, thinking required! 
Heat currently works according to real-world physics it seems. That is you cool extremely slow at low internal temperatures and faster at higher temps due to higher dT to the ambient temperature.
Now this is broken in several ways:
During combat and even during short breaks, the heat barely goes under 400-500K. Most of the action takes place around 800-950K heat, giving only a minimum of control and making it harder to judge your waste heat.
For the same reason, low-heatsink designs have trouble staying cool on Inferno and tend to stay around 700-900K just from MASCing around a bit. On the other hand heatsink-heavy designs like the Novacat have no trouble staying cool.
This is a big deal. It -really- should be the other way around.
Heat dissipates too fast in most cases. While it takes a while to cool down to ambient temp like I mentioned above, you're out of the red pretty quickly.
As a consequence, energy-heavy designs can hug the red line repeatedly without any side-effects, apart from having to hit override occasionally.
I think this has a number of causes:
- Engine heatsinks are non-existant or not working properly. Fusion engines should offer 10 free heatsinks, even double-heatsinks when the mech uses this type.
- IS machines have no access to double heatsinks, a
key technology- The dissipation rate of heatsinks and heat generation of weapons seems off in many cases. There is no clear value on it that the player can use to determine "I will overheat by X if I fire Y"
- Heat dissipation follows real-world physics that not only makes fine-grain control harder, but also forces most mechs to hug the red line during combat
It is problematic. I can't really enjoy the heat system. It penalizes low-heat designs but isn't brutal to high-heat ones. Inferno seems to only amplify this. There are no side-effects for high heat levels.
Now let's take a look at how
CBT does it.
Bear with me. Just read and don't go "hurp dice derp real-time" just yet, please!Heat is collected during the weapon phase. Your weapons created "24" heat. At the end of the
10-second turn, the heatsink capacity is substracted from that value, e.g. 24-20 (10 double sinks) = 4 heat remaining for the next round.
This is not real-time of course and "collecting" heat to actually use it later doesn't work in real-time. But what we can learn from this is that a single sink dissipates 1 and a double sink 2 heat in 10 seconds.
I want to take this system and convert it into real-time
Now let me interrupt here for a little bit. Before you go kicking and screaming for me mentioning "goddamn" CBT again or accusing me of wanting to turn MWLL into CBT or whatever you think my problem is, let me put up this disclaimer:
I'm not doing this because I want CBT in MWLL. I'm doing it because CBT is a proven system and because all mech variants are OPTIMIZED for this! This goes especially for many of the Clan "Primes". To truly achieve proper balance, either the current heat system has to go, or the Primes do. And many of us will scream bloody murder if the latter happens.
What I want to do is a nice system that punishes high heat, adds the Battletech flavor of "realism" and turns the game into a fun simulation without sacrificing gameplay! Disclaimer end.I would completely redo the heat system. First, introduce an arbitrary heat scale. It is linear, a heatsinks dissipates 1 heat over 10 seconds, weapons create X heat.
(If we change weapon damage in any way, we should keep these 10 seconds in mind, because it too should be averaged over 10 seconds)I can explain it better if I make an example:
Your mech has a large laser and 2 medium lasers. It alphastrikes, therefore creating 8 heat for the large and 3 for each med = 14. Let's add 2 due to running (or maybe even more, this doesn't have to be the same value as CBT unlike weapon heat) for a total of 16. Your mech spikes to 16 heat.
You have 4 extra heatsinks, single technology. 10 engine heatsinks + 4 extra allows you to dissipate 14 heat, leaving you at
2 excess heat. This doesn't happen instantly though. These 14 heat are dissipated over the course of 10 seconds. That's 14 per 10 seconds, or 1.4 per second, or 0.14 per 1/10 seconds. We probably won't need more than 1/30 sec resolution though. At the end of these 10 seconds, your heat returns to
2.
If 10 seconds is deemed too fast for gameplay, we can of course modify it. Try 15. Or 18. This is open for testing.
But wait a sec! you say. Aren't we missing something?? Yes we are. Heat capacity. What does "spike to 16" actually mean in a real-time environment? It is nothing without a scale. So what is heat capacity? It determines how many heat points you can "carry" before you hit the red line.
How is this capacity determined? Balancing it a couple of times? Depending on chassis? No. It is determined by the number of heatsinks itself! Example:
A Novacat has a whopping 25 double heatsinks (10 in the engine, 15 extra) that allows it to dissipate 50 heat in 10 seconds. But at the same time, it has a heat capacity of 50 heat points aswell! It now fires 2 ER Large Lasers, which produce 24 heat. This is a fraction of the heat capacity, but nevertheless, the heat instantly spikes to 24. This is not a problem, since it can go up to 50. It dissipates 50 heat in 10 seconds, or 5 in 1 second. So it takes roughly 5 seconds to dissipate this heat again and reach 0.
But this is op you say! it will be able to fire its weapons without problems! What if it reaches 50 heat points, what then? Of course, something has to happen. Should the heat level exceed the heat capacity, we hit the red line. I would love to have heat effects at this point, but for simplicitie's sake, let's ignore that for now. The solution is simple. For example 1 heat over capacity = shutdown initiated, 10 heat over = taking damage, 15 heat over = insta-shutdown. These are fixed levels everybody can figure out and should be the same for all mechs. You KNOW when you hit 100% capacity that a shutdown will follow, or that firing all PPCs will do just that. Example 2:
The Novacat alphastrikes. A risky move, but our pilot is bold. Both ERPPCs output 30 heat while the ER large add 36 to that for a total of 66. This doesn't look good. With a heat capacity of 50 this instantly puts us at 16 overheat! Not only will you take damage for being 10 over max, but you will also shut down instantly. No alpha strike for you! This illustrates how much of a last measure alpha strikes actually are in heat-heavy variants.
If you still think that this makes the Novacat overpowered, keep in mind that weapon damage should probably be adjusted to the new heat system aswell.
Ambient temperature can be implemented by decreasing the dissipation capacity of every heatsink by a fraction. 25°C = x1.00, 100°C = x0.75, 200°C = x0.60 or something like that. It will have to be determined by experimentation.
Coolant would also alter this modifier as long as it's active, doubling single heatsink efficiency and adding 50% for double heatsinks.
To summarize: Heat capacity is determined by number of heatsinks (x2 for double heatsinks). Heat dissipation rate is the full heat capacity per 10 seconds. Weapon heat is applied immediately, heat is dissipated over time. No heat effects until the full heat capacity is exceed.Heat effects would be nice aswell. Instead of simply threatening to shutdown when the heat capacity is exceed, we could have heat effects that gradually get worse aswell. Scrambling HUD, blurry vision, slower running speed and maybe ammo-explosions. It's as canon as it gets
Finally, to put a nice face on this system, maybe we could do some maths and make it look like full heat capacity is actually "900 Kelvin" and zero heat being "(ambient temperature) Kelvin. This would only be a visual touch though.
Well, that's it. I hope this post was educational. The heat system would solve the problems I mentioned at the top.
I'm open for opinions!
