-right now, when rear armor goes kaputz, we have engine damage causing slow down
-With legs, we have limping immediately followed by collapse
-cockpits and center torsos go kablooey and you die
-turrets, arms, and side torsos lose the attached weapons when they get wasted
-and AMSes and missile launchers go pop
all well and good,
However I think there are more interesting things that can break to spice up the fight, ranging from inconveniences to fight enders.
first of all, i'd say change the rear armor damage result to something else. Right now with causing 50% slow down it just overlaps with crippled legs. Not to say this is inbalanced as is right now. but it is kinda redundant. (though it did lead to a hilarious situation one time where i saw a crazy warhammer pilot take his ride with 2 crippled legs with no back armor on a cross-country limp all across inferno to repair, took him like 15 minutes, but i digress)
instead, i think rear armor ruinage should result in a 50% drop in heat efficiency. Representing heat sink poppage. Also, jump jet loss if any are present.
-Other stuff that i think would be fun to have go horribly wrong-
Note, its not all totally canon to old rules, but instead trying to shoehorn old concepts into present gameplay.
CT. at low health, potential chance of gyro damage. You get the wobblies screwing with aim, don't recommend jump jetting unless you like flips. Alternatively or in addition to, have the engine damage slow down formerly tied to the rear torso, with the following caveat, you are also bleeding heat all over. At this point you are getting ejection warnings
LT/RT ammo, if the mech has any ammo based weapons, its stuffed into 1 or both of these, depending on the chassis. Potentially occurring at low health and definitely when destroyed, your ammo gets effectively erased, gone. Consider it CASE working right or the rounds just a-tumbling out of huge holes. However, just as possible is a full blown ammo fire cookoff. maybe the CASE panels got stuck, or maybe you don't have CASE, but in effect, your CT and adjacent arm and leg start taking damage that progressively ramps up as the explosion chain reacts until you either die a fiery death, eject, or douse it in large dose of coolant if you hopefully have some.
Head, at low health, potential chance of having your hud scrambled or maybe having smoke and sparks start to occur.
Arms, at low health, weapons mounted there are less accurate/run hotter (accurancy on account of busted recoil stabilizers and heat on account of ruined coolant feeds/busted shielding)
individual bits of gear. radars/ecms/baps/c3s/individual weapons can get popped just like ams
misc stuff like MASC, coolant pods, or any extra systems get tossed into the side torsos and get destroyed with the side torso in question.
As for tanks.
-let each weapon take damage individually
-have heavily damaged turrets move real slow, and only after destruction take all the weapons with it.
-have the usual sensor systems and addon bits exposed and destroyable
-rear armor cripplage deals the heat efficiency loss
-mangled left or right sides cause slow down.
-front crippled leads to high possibility of ammo destruction or cookoffs.
aerospace.
don't really play them at all, so no idea how to treat them, other than i'd like to see more out of control death spirals
BA- at very low health, one of the following may randomly happen until health regens. jump jets go ofline, weapons go offline, radar goes offline, or you get pain induced tunnel vision making it hard to see.
of course all this would need appropriate audio and visual queues so that players aren't wondering wtf is going on
so yeah, TLDR, i want to really have the feel of combat entropy on functioning machines more so than there is now. since its still very common to have units that are crippled like nobody's business still running around at nearly full combat capability right up until the last small laser makes it kersplode. I believe that deaths could be made so much more interesting by opening up some variables. Especially since more variables introduce more ways of skinning a cat than just going for legs and back.
