The lore model works great for PvE, but not PvP. Not that they should be ignored, but there's a very valid gameplay reason why Clans and IS need to be balanced against each other and not have Clans just be superior in a PvP game. I am very happy with this, because building 'Mechs is one of the fun part of this game and restricting that for the sake of adherence to pen-and-paper rules would be an unparalleled travesty.
I understand that having a lot of MechLab customization breaks Table Top rules.
That would lead to a fun and rewarding gameplay experience for sure. Customization leads to more variety.īoy, I'd just LOVE to go up against the Clans (even a stock Stormcrow or Timber Wolf is pretty good) in a stock SHS Inner Sphere 'Mech. You end up with one or two mechs that happen to have workable stock loadouts, and a bunch of crap that no one would ever play. Otherwise, it would just really really suck but not *completely* suck. It's called 'stock mech battles' and it sucks completely in MWO because of ammo considerations and especially single heat sinks being worthless.
(For the curious, you could assist your elite tech with others to reduce the rolls, and the penalties for failure typically resulted in to-hit roll mods that could be bad enough to make you not want to fail).īasically what I'm saying is that I'm not sure if what the OP is saying was made up by him or is actually supported by fiction.Įdit: Having said that, the OP seems pretty consistent with what I remember from TT lore (what little of it I know), so good on you for the informative post!Įdited by Water Bear, 19 March 2015 - 11:10 AM. It is not impossible to put a clan ER LL on an IS mech, for example, it just required countless in-game hours of time, an elite level technician, and some powerfully lucky 2d6 rolls. For example if you changed weapons in an arm location but kept the total critical space and tonnage the same, it made the field retrofit easier. The customization / repair / reload rules as I used them from TT rulebooks made it possible, if possibly very risky, to do field refits. My problem with the OP is that it doesn't cite sources. There are quite extreme gameplay reasons too. It's not just lore reasons why that level of refit should be restricted. It would also, because of the route in balancing PGI has pursued, make balancing the weapons virtually impossible, and make it horribly unrewarding to try and use any shelved weapon types. Allowing that level of refit actually *does* wind up shelving all sorts of 'mechs, never mind that it makes every chassis of similar weight a boring repetition that's only visually different than any other 'mech of the same weight. Striders with ersmalls or mediums, etc, etc become the rule of the day. MW3 suffered from this very badly - in non stock play it quckly boiled down to the mechs with the smallest hitbox/visual volume that could carry the most effective boatable weapons. It turns all battlemechs into nothing more than differently sized walking gunbags. Yes, there very much are valid and good reasons to simply disallow that level of messing about in the 'mechlab.
There's no reason not to allow a full factory refit before each match because the matches aren't connected in time or space.