vehicle jumping, guns, stats

[Punisher1]

Ok I read alot of pages of material and cannot find the EXACT ideas I do not know the game in its entirity.....sooo here it goes.


Jumping vehicles:

General Concept: The ability to get into a neutral vehicle once yours is destroyed. If You eject from your mech, aircraft, tank ect...Or go from infantry to a vehicle

Problem:

You join the game in another form of vehicle and that is not working out for you and you want to change over to a new vehicle but not leave the battlefield.
Or if you eject from your Mech and have to escape and evade back to your base? What if all the Mech pilots slots are used up? Maybe you are closer to the airfield ot a Armored vehicle yard?

Solution:

Random neutral vehicles are placed on the map, APC's, Jeeps, Tanks and the like. These vehicles allow you to get back to your base quickly with some protection and even a mounted weapon or two.

Base Defenses:

General Concept: Each base or obective needs some sort of defenses, these can be manned by infantry after a base, mech factory, or other defensive position is captured.

Problem: Infantry is important but is not very useful after capturing structures and the like unless there is room for everyone to jump into vehicle, being a infantry guy has a really short life span.

Solution: So to kill off all those pesky vehicles and other infantry several types of the typical battletech base defenses should be availible to man. This will help in several ways, Keeps the other team from camping your base, keeps them from taking it over, stops a vehicle rush.
Defensive batteries (guns, missile launchers, beam weapons) can be manned on location or from inside the base for an extra defensive protection.


Stats :

Simply everyone wants to keep and track thier stats linked to thier user name, clan, group and or the like. So a system that tracks you stats just like on any other FPS would be a nice touch.



   

[SeniorBiscuit]

There is no conventional infantry, just BA atleast for the forseeable future. (sadly)

Its not a clas system you start as a BA, and can jump into any type of vehicle, if you eject you become battle armor again then you have jumpjets to get back to a base, or to continue fighting!

Turrets have always been automatic in Mech pc games, I see no reason this will change... Crysis has auto turrets so should be easy to implelment.

[Gnarlycharly]

I hope MWLL has troops besides BA.

[(TLL)KitLightning]

I hope MWLL has troops besides BA.

For now the BA (Longinus and Elemental) is the lowest part of the food chain and so function as the current "troops". The non-armoured soldiers (a.k.a. soft targets) were postponed months ago.

Random neutral vehicles are placed on the map, APC's, Jeeps, Tanks and the like. These vehicles allow you to get back to your base quickly with some protection and even a mounted weapon or two.

It seems as a good idea, but the longevity in a vehicle with very little armour is short. In all other MW games the vehicles below Light Mechs were paper toys.

[Ravir]

Base defenses are automated, if there are any.

There's no set amount of "pilot slots" in any current gametypes.  If you can afford a mech, you can buy it and pilot it.

BA are actually fairly good at harassing mechs at close range.  I wouldn't recommend attacking a fresh Assault mech on your own, but a wounded Light or Medium is definitely something you can challenge if you're good enough.  Because of that, a well timed BA attack can force the enemy to turn his back on your teammates to deal with an annoying fly while the bears charge out of the woods behind him.

[Punisher1]

Ah good to have some answers I was not sure how the game worked, as you can tell. thanks for the info

[KorJax]

Also, don't expect actual infintry units any time soon.  The problem with infintry is that they are too useless and too slow to do anything that's fun or worthwhile in battle.  Hell it takes ages for a single elemental to reach one outpost to another on one of our maps, imagine how long it would take if you were some useless foot soldier?

[Flyingdebris]

also, there just aren't enough players in a game to justify unaugmented infantry.

you would pretty much need the combined total of both teams to have one halfway decent un-aug infantry force.  Cause right now with team sizes as they are, and no real way to drastically increase it without lagging out everybody to hell, if you did have regular infantry, they'd be able as useful as a baby turtle in a gunfight.  They'd last for all of 5 seconds before someone notices and vamporizes them, or they'd get killed in one of the many numerous explosions likely to going off at any time.

[StaticShot]

It would seem the devs are pretty strongly against finding a way to make infantry work at this point.

My suggestion to get infantry in the game, without all the numerous downsides that have been listed, is as follows:

Jet Packs.

The main drawback to abandoning a mech out in the field, is the time it takes to get back, so just equip infantry with tribe style jet packs to get around quicker. For anyone who's played Metal Warriors, you'll understand this concept.

As far as their usefulness, ejected infantry can be equipped with an anti vehicle rifle to still plink away at things if they don't want to retreat. It's clear the goal of this game is to focus on vehicle combat, so when you destroy someones vehicle, you should have a reasonable shot at killing them afterwards. This is all dependant upon information I don't have of course, since I don't know your development structure and intended goals of each unit come launch. It's sounding like Elementals are meant to be the cannon fodder aka "infantry". I would reason however that if a purchase cost was attached to the Elementals, their power could be upped. That of course has down sides as well, but I just wanted to toss the jet pack ideas at you guys to throw into the idea pool.

[Landros Radick]

Honestly, it's a matter of changing the bias of play rather than trying to balance mini-scule amounts of infantry against mechs.

More infantry geared means infantry objectives outweight Mech objectives and take priority. You'd see more heavily armored transports, much more vehicles than there would be and it'd end up more like BF2142. It'd take much bigger gameplay mechanics than what really would be allowed for in 32 player pubs. The mechs would be the more rare king of the battlefield at that point and people probably wouldn't like that as they would be more rare until the end of the rounds.

First and foremost, people want a Mechwarrior game. No one really wants to hop into infantry and if anything, Mechs should be (and is) the focus for now.

As far as Crysis being limited to 32 player limits: http://crymod.com/thread.php?postid=434807

[Flyingdebris]

unaugmented infantry works in battlefield games by virtue of all the weapons being balanced with people on foot in mind.  Battlefield, in any of its incarnations however, has never had to deal with vehicles that could spit out 40 or more missles with one trigger pull, or bolt on a crapload of machineguns, or fire giant shotguns.  Also, even heavy vehicles could be taken down with only a few well placed shots from anti vehicle ordinance, or 1 landmine.

So unless you want atlases dying to a handful of srms, or making vehicle weapons abyssmally weak, you won't be seeing PBIs any time soon.

I mean have you played bf2142?  their mech was balanced vs infantry.  And do you know what it couLd do?  It could fire a burst of AC rounds all around a guy and not kill him and would still take multiple rounds to do the job when it did connect.  Its missles were completely useless against infantry, and were completely inaccurate past 200 yards.  The mech  could only take about 2 to 5 rockets/tank shells before it died.  That was balanced.

Balancing somethign like mwll so that fleshy guys could run around without being killed as an afterthought would KILL THE GAME worse than making the stretch of having power armor everywhere.

[Landros Radick]

unaugmented infantry works in battlefield games by virtue of all the weapons being balanced with people on foot in mind.  Battlefield, in any of its incarnations however, has never had to deal with vehicles that could spit out 40 or more missles with one trigger pull, or bolt on a crapload of machineguns, or fire giant shotguns.  Also, even heavy vehicles could be taken down with only a few well placed shots from anti vehicle ordinance, or 1 landmine.

So unless you want atlases dying to a handful of srms, or making vehicle weapons abyssmally weak, you won't be seeing PBIs any time soon.

I mean have you played bf2142?  their mech was balanced vs infantry.  And do you know what it couLd do?  It could fire a burst of AC rounds all around a guy and not kill him and would still take multiple rounds to do the job when it did connect.  Its missles were completely useless against infantry, and were completely inaccurate past 200 yards.  The mech  could only take about 2 to 5 rockets/tank shells before it died.  That was balanced.

Balancing somethign like mwll so that fleshy guys could run around without being killed as an afterthought would KILL THE GAME worse than making the stretch of having power armor everywhere.

See that's where the fault is. Balancing the mech vs infantry with the intent that the infantry are to take down the mech all the time. It's never supposed to be like that because:
1) there's no hope at all in Battletech universe that infantry are supposed to take down a mech.
2) there's no equipment except for an ambush or a surprise element such as Vibra-mines or artillery for them to take down a mech.

In a combat situation of two sides being equal with similar equipment people look at it in two dimensions of mech vs infantry only. Mech's being the rare thing that they are in the scenario I provided would be pit against more aerospace, tanks or other mechs before they even encounter the infantry unless the maps were geared for infantry ambushes all the time. I'm not advocating that MWLL change, infact I'm the opposite. People want Mech combat more than anything, the infantry aspect is a fantasy on the side from thoughts like Shadow of the Colossus. They'd like the adrenaline rush of running from something big.

[KeenanEmpire]

You could just imagine yourself playing a meatbag (infantry), and ask yourself, what would you do if a mech of any size waltzes near you.

You aren't going to MG it, or Rifle it, the best you could do is Anti-Armor Rocket it. And at that point, you have hit a 60+ Ton Mech with a scaled down SRM. A SINGLE one.

An infantry wouldnt last 3 seconds, And on a team size as small as i think they are making it, It would be pointless/useless to be one. Jet Packs on infantry, sounds pretty silly. Especially when your going to die in 3 seconds anyway.

[Sean Lang "Phil"]

Infantry in general, battletech novels, where not helpless... but most died rather quickly and in masses. I do not blame the devs for not implementing them at all, it would almost be useless. Yes they have their place in certain novels and stories, but in general, infantry were usually on the short end of a very quick death once a battlemech spotted them which with optics was rather quickly.

[StaticShot]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to advocate that Infantry should be made more powerful, in fact, I'm against that.

I've logged a lot of hours in BF games, and I fully understand what you mean about the walkers. I dislike that the vehicles in BF games are almost worthless at times, and infantry can take out a tank with 1 rocket for example. You can even destroy the walkers with a pistol, if you shoot them in the right spot.

I'm only advocating infantry be used instead of elementals for pilots, because I don't like the idea of having to chase down a bouncy lil elemental pilot everytime you blow up a vehicle or mech. After your mech is blown up, you should be forced to retreat back to base and grab something else. This would of course, only matter if dying had negative conseqences. Such as, causing you to lose funds, so you're going to want to flee ASAP.

The main arguement I see for keeping the elementals, is you want players to keep fighting after their vehicle blows up. That's where I views differ I guess, because I feel they shouldn't pose even the slightest threat to a mech once their vehicle/mech is blown up and they eject.

To me, it all depends on how powerful the elementals are.