Average Manatee
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2012
- Messages
- 14,242
Picked this up, gave it a whirl. My god its amazing how poorly designed it is.
4 unit cap, really? Firaxis figured out that even nuXCOM needed an unlockable 6 unit cap back in 2012.
Not having a tonnage-limited deployment, or some kind of deployment limit/cost, is insanely stupid. There's even a deployment tonnage counter on the deployment screen but its just fucking irrelevant. Presumably the devs' suffered from their IQ temporarily skyrocketing to the room temperature level required to figure out that a tonnage limitation was needed but then forgot to actually implement it.
This game accomplishes an incredible feat of becoming dumber and less strategic as the game goes on. The first few missions are the best because you can actually flank and shit and use something other than just standing and firing till things die. Running around and jump jetting behind things with a Panther to snipe from behind with an LRM and PPC was cool. Skip ahead 10 missions and you'll just get chewed up instantly, because for some dumbfuck reason being shot at makes it easier for other things to hit you and you'll have 8+ AIs shooting per round. Loadout becomes progressively less interesting as you play, because where there's lots of options when you have 3 weapon slots and 12 tons available, when you have 3 weapon slots and 30 tons available you just fucking pick the biggest weapons because no one is loading small, short-ranged laser pointers to shine on enemy assault mechs surrounded by 6 other enemy mechs.
Who the fuck decided on this targetting system? i.e. not having a targetting system at all unless you spend magic?. All I've played is Mechwarrior where angling your body is fairly useful to hide your weakened side. Here? Only cardinal directions matter and its a pure dice roll unaffected by the mech structure or relative position other than cardinal direction. This makes orientation fairly useless as you always need to be positioned at least a little bit forward-facing because you need to fucking shoot things, yet the damaged arm that should be 95% hidden behind the entire rest of the mech's body has the exact same chance to be hit as the opposing arm that is directly in front of the line of fire. I don't know tabletop rules but I'm going to guess this is some dumb shit they took from there because no one could think that the current system makes sense for a game. Due to how you have 8 separate targets to hit from the front it becomes highly random whether you get enough repeated rolls to hit the same thing and actually disable the enemy, and its also random whether you took out an arm that has literally nothing or the central torso that kills the mech. I also don't recall having 3 separate armor levels for the torso in mechwarrior, it's really fucking obnoxious. The targetting spell itself is a joke, it only adds like a few % to target a specific part which makes it useless and irrelevant that fixes none of the problems with the dice system... until you level tactics and suddenly you have a 35% chance for every weapon to hit the head, utterly breaking the game. What is even the point of shooting at any other point than the head then? Also why does DFA not hit the head? Isn't that the whole point of the maneouver?
AI is awful, as soon as combat starts it just sort of blindly walks towards you until it can see and shoot you. It seems to merely be walking towards the center of your group of mechs, which means if you space them out into four corners the AI flat out breaks, letting you abuse initiative to peak out and take potshots then get back into cover by their next turn, where they'll just walk around in the center of the map. As far as I can tell in 95% of random missions getting in combat with any AI effectively aggros the whole map towards you, and the 5% is usually the AI bugging out on cliff wall.
Why is there no recon or even a general force estimation for 90% of maps? Why are we bidding on salvage when we don't even know the enemies? I did several missions where I bid high on salvage and there weren't even fucking mechs that showed up! The mech salvage system is atrocious. Getting 2 or 3 "wrecks" for a kill rather than just 1 is pure luck until you get the game-breaking headshot ability, which means taking any more than 1 salvage pick is basically just praying to the RNG gods. Why do you have to pay multiple times for different parts of the same whole mech you just headshotted anyway? Was King Solomon summoned on-site to make the three cuts into the completely whole mech? Furthermore how are players expected to estimate their ammo requirements based on the expected number of enemies? Oh right, just get a bigger mech so you can carry 480 LRMs. There's not even a damn map of the area to see where you are deploying before you deploy.
This game has the most godawful performance I've ever experienced. I've dealt with shit loading times, fine, whatever, I can leave it windowed on one monitor while I fuck around on another. But how does the game lag for a second every fucking time I bring up the UI element to fire a weapon, or dismiss said UI? How does the most COMMON FUCKING ACTION OF THE GAME REMAIN BROKEN? I could literally pay some pajeet programmer $50 to create a game UI for me, and he could create an in-game chrome browser that loads twitter photos of the UI element on-demand, and it would still be more responsive than this sack of shit.
I'm sure all this and more has been thoroughly discussed at this point.
Random question for whoever here might actually know a lore more about the Battletech lore than I do: Isn't the scale of combat for the universe completely fucking off? Like with battles where whole worlds are taken by low hundreds or even dozens of mechs? Shouldn't any reasonably normally advanced planet with a billion or so people be maintaining forces of hundreds of thousands of mechs? I mean I get that at this specific point in the timeline mechs are supposed to be really high tech and hard to reproduce well for the inner sphere in a sort of dark age, but even still mechs literally weigh 25-100 tons, quite comparable to modern tanks, so anything that could produce them should be able to churn them out at least as fast as we can churn out tanks in the 21st century if needed (btw this is really weird, why are 100 ton tanks microscopic next to 25 ton mechs?). Is there an explanation for this lack of large armed forces or is it all sort of just ignored for the purpose of allowing small level tactical fights to win wars?
4 unit cap, really? Firaxis figured out that even nuXCOM needed an unlockable 6 unit cap back in 2012.
Not having a tonnage-limited deployment, or some kind of deployment limit/cost, is insanely stupid. There's even a deployment tonnage counter on the deployment screen but its just fucking irrelevant. Presumably the devs' suffered from their IQ temporarily skyrocketing to the room temperature level required to figure out that a tonnage limitation was needed but then forgot to actually implement it.
This game accomplishes an incredible feat of becoming dumber and less strategic as the game goes on. The first few missions are the best because you can actually flank and shit and use something other than just standing and firing till things die. Running around and jump jetting behind things with a Panther to snipe from behind with an LRM and PPC was cool. Skip ahead 10 missions and you'll just get chewed up instantly, because for some dumbfuck reason being shot at makes it easier for other things to hit you and you'll have 8+ AIs shooting per round. Loadout becomes progressively less interesting as you play, because where there's lots of options when you have 3 weapon slots and 12 tons available, when you have 3 weapon slots and 30 tons available you just fucking pick the biggest weapons because no one is loading small, short-ranged laser pointers to shine on enemy assault mechs surrounded by 6 other enemy mechs.
Who the fuck decided on this targetting system? i.e. not having a targetting system at all unless you spend magic?. All I've played is Mechwarrior where angling your body is fairly useful to hide your weakened side. Here? Only cardinal directions matter and its a pure dice roll unaffected by the mech structure or relative position other than cardinal direction. This makes orientation fairly useless as you always need to be positioned at least a little bit forward-facing because you need to fucking shoot things, yet the damaged arm that should be 95% hidden behind the entire rest of the mech's body has the exact same chance to be hit as the opposing arm that is directly in front of the line of fire. I don't know tabletop rules but I'm going to guess this is some dumb shit they took from there because no one could think that the current system makes sense for a game. Due to how you have 8 separate targets to hit from the front it becomes highly random whether you get enough repeated rolls to hit the same thing and actually disable the enemy, and its also random whether you took out an arm that has literally nothing or the central torso that kills the mech. I also don't recall having 3 separate armor levels for the torso in mechwarrior, it's really fucking obnoxious. The targetting spell itself is a joke, it only adds like a few % to target a specific part which makes it useless and irrelevant that fixes none of the problems with the dice system... until you level tactics and suddenly you have a 35% chance for every weapon to hit the head, utterly breaking the game. What is even the point of shooting at any other point than the head then? Also why does DFA not hit the head? Isn't that the whole point of the maneouver?
AI is awful, as soon as combat starts it just sort of blindly walks towards you until it can see and shoot you. It seems to merely be walking towards the center of your group of mechs, which means if you space them out into four corners the AI flat out breaks, letting you abuse initiative to peak out and take potshots then get back into cover by their next turn, where they'll just walk around in the center of the map. As far as I can tell in 95% of random missions getting in combat with any AI effectively aggros the whole map towards you, and the 5% is usually the AI bugging out on cliff wall.
Why is there no recon or even a general force estimation for 90% of maps? Why are we bidding on salvage when we don't even know the enemies? I did several missions where I bid high on salvage and there weren't even fucking mechs that showed up! The mech salvage system is atrocious. Getting 2 or 3 "wrecks" for a kill rather than just 1 is pure luck until you get the game-breaking headshot ability, which means taking any more than 1 salvage pick is basically just praying to the RNG gods. Why do you have to pay multiple times for different parts of the same whole mech you just headshotted anyway? Was King Solomon summoned on-site to make the three cuts into the completely whole mech? Furthermore how are players expected to estimate their ammo requirements based on the expected number of enemies? Oh right, just get a bigger mech so you can carry 480 LRMs. There's not even a damn map of the area to see where you are deploying before you deploy.
This game has the most godawful performance I've ever experienced. I've dealt with shit loading times, fine, whatever, I can leave it windowed on one monitor while I fuck around on another. But how does the game lag for a second every fucking time I bring up the UI element to fire a weapon, or dismiss said UI? How does the most COMMON FUCKING ACTION OF THE GAME REMAIN BROKEN? I could literally pay some pajeet programmer $50 to create a game UI for me, and he could create an in-game chrome browser that loads twitter photos of the UI element on-demand, and it would still be more responsive than this sack of shit.
I'm sure all this and more has been thoroughly discussed at this point.
Random question for whoever here might actually know a lore more about the Battletech lore than I do: Isn't the scale of combat for the universe completely fucking off? Like with battles where whole worlds are taken by low hundreds or even dozens of mechs? Shouldn't any reasonably normally advanced planet with a billion or so people be maintaining forces of hundreds of thousands of mechs? I mean I get that at this specific point in the timeline mechs are supposed to be really high tech and hard to reproduce well for the inner sphere in a sort of dark age, but even still mechs literally weigh 25-100 tons, quite comparable to modern tanks, so anything that could produce them should be able to churn them out at least as fast as we can churn out tanks in the 21st century if needed (btw this is really weird, why are 100 ton tanks microscopic next to 25 ton mechs?). Is there an explanation for this lack of large armed forces or is it all sort of just ignored for the purpose of allowing small level tactical fights to win wars?
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