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BATTLETECH
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Mechwarrior: View From the Cockpit
Designing variants for the various Mechwarrior games is often more difficult than designing for Battletech. For starters, the player's available knowledge of certain things, like the rate of heat dissipation and production, is limited by the lack of documentation on the subject. Secondly, the player must design a weapons loadout that is easy for a pilot to handle, since deciding what to fire and when is a vastly different proposition in Mechwarrior. Another major issue is that while overspecialized designs can certainly be created, realistically, situations where all the players are coordinated enough in a large enough game to specialize are rare.
One of the major advantages that Mechwarrior has over Battletech in terms of design is that of human piloting skill. Whereas in Battletech, a single Locust is unlikely to realistically take on a Dire Wolf, the superior speed of a roughly-equivalent 'Mech in Mechwarrior 3, the Owens, does have a chance due to the real-time format and the Owens' almost-ridiculous mobility. It is possible, if difficult, to circle-strafe better than the slower Dire Wolf and focus attacks on the rear and legs of the larger 'Mech, crippling or destroying it through superior piloting ability. Piloting skill in Battletech has no direct correlation with the maneuverability of a given 'Mech.
Field testing is a much more important component of designing for Mechwarrior than it is for Battletech for these reasons. Whereas in Battletech you can simply add up the maximum heat value and add enough heat sinks to compensate for that value, heat sink allocation is a much less intuitive process in Mechwarrior, though you will generally find that it becomes easier with time.
Fortunately, another possibility in some games (Mechwarrior 3 and Mechwarrior 4 at the time of this writing) is mid-mission repair, which can partly overcome minor design deficiencies if the repair/reload options are available. This also ties in to an aspect of the gameplay that is more likely to come up in Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries and Mechwarrior 3 - full salvage rules. While salvage and ammunition tracking is sometimes a part of Battletech campaigns, learning to control ammunition use over a campaign and designing variants based on available hardware are crucial aspects of playing the campaigns in Mercenaries and Mechwarrior 3.
The last big thing to worry about when designing for Mechwarrior is to be aware of equipment variation between games. If you're anything like me, you've played enough Battletech cockpit sims to occasionally have trouble remembering which games had which features working in which ways. That's the purpose of the game-specific subsections - to compile a list of differences between the games from a design perspective. The difference between projectile and hitscan lasers or between "true" pulse lasers and Mechwarrior 3's version can be enough to completely change your piloting style. As another example, sensors function quite differently in Mechwarrior 4 than they do in previous games, to say nothing of the new hardpoint-based design system. That alone merits its own page for discussion.
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