You got it buddy.


I want mechs to be able to beat everything.


Because, if I cant bring a 300 point mech against 300 points of other stuff with even a slight chance of winning, then something is wrong. With the current rules against anyone who knows even remotely what they are doing, I will lose. Every. single. time. And be laughed at in the process.

I also agree with Highdancer, this applies to other units too, like his example, the Behemoth.

I've just realized how appropriate this game's name is, this is truly the Mechwarrior's "Dark Age"

I agree with the phantom. have been collecting Mechwarrior without playing since the days of Dark age, and have an impressive, painted collection of stuff. However, after starting to play ive quickly become jaded.
While playing with my mates, the game is great, as we play with 'fun' and interesting armies. I have been to a venue twice, and both times the armies fielded were Incredibly finely balanced upon different loopholes in the rules. it is not fun.
I for one will continue to buy Mechwarrior, but only really to play with on a friendly level. I didnt find competitive play enjoyable, and I should imagine a lot of others who dont post on this forum feel the same way.

However, on a plus point for wizzkids, this doesnt affect the sale of this game. If gaming for fun, or only the kudos of winning, this game is brilliant, and I enjoy it tremendously. After the prizes are no longer an issue, mechs apart from Stephani Ehli, Arnis, Bounty Hunter and Geoff Bekker appear. and tanks are used...... outside of transports! I even saw an un-dropped Behemoth II! (I killed it though - SW CBA)

But enough ranting.
I guess the moral is this game isnt dead. Its just we're all too competitive. WE break the game, not wizzkids.

peace

D503, the whole competitive idea was encouraged by WizKids after all, they did launch the whole tournament system. And it did work well for a while, until those people came into the game who didn't care at all for the BattleTech history and the flavour of the game but were very able to exploit rule loopholes and broken units to boost their eBay-income.

If you're ever going to visit the Netherlands, you're welcome to come by and play a few games with me and others.

Wrong! Dead wrong. I find HUGE fault with this. This is one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time... not just about this game, but generally one of the worst ideas I have heard about ANYTHING in a long time.

Narcissus, in BattleTech (the parent game after all), vehicles suffered much more from critical hits than 'Mechs. Since gameplay is much more simplified and faster in MW:DA (the BattleTech Collectable Miniatures Game, as boosters tell us), destroying vehicles with a critical hit wouldn't be too strange. But I guess you never played BattleTech? Also it's understandable that you reacted to topgun505's idea the way you did, because if it would catch on and would be implemented, it would seriously alter the metagame. And if I'm not mistaken, you're one of the experts in that field, right?

I have played BattleTech since the 80s. If you think adding a more dramatic swing from a random element is a good idea, you obviously are more concerned with "fluff" than game balance. Is it too much to expect a game to have both? Do you think cockpit hits one time in 36 with a clan PPC or Gauss Rifle are good for the game of Battletech?

Battletech is / was a great game, but it is hardly flawless. In many ways it is superior to MWDA. In many, it is inferior. As has been pointed out countless times, MWDA is NOT CBT. Deal! If you want to play BT then play CBT. MW does need work, but turning into CBT is not the answer.

Hell, people #####ed that the clans ruined CBT. In many ways they were right. Games evolve. CBT would be half as vast in both game terms and background if not for the clans.

If I want a game of CBT, I will take the time and make the effort and put in the hours and play a game. If I am too lazy to do that, I will not expect MWDA to be turned into a fast version of CBT to suit that. Of course it does not fit the fluff. That is only a problem with suspension of disbelief, not with the game rules themselves. The rules themselves are fine, the only issue IMO is a lack of balance with unit design.

quickly--again regarding vehicles and critical hits... good idea! lets make vehicles worse than they already are, because we all know they're too powerful *sarcastic* vehicles have shorter dials than mechs. Their tendancy to be disabled before the armor and internal structure has been eliminated is reflected in this. Crippling vehicles as a unit is the last thing any intelligent game designer would do simply to fix tank drop.


okay, let me get a few things straight.

1) I know that VTOLs are messed up and they shouldn't be what they are... they should have never had move and shoot, and shorter dials would have been more accurate. Hell, they should simply be like the Slyphs we're going to see in FP ;-P
But thats something we have to deal with until WK gets enough momentum up to change it. Despite how some of you see it, the rules cannot be changed on a whim, however many of us scream bloody murder. Options need to be explored and playtested, something which could take months (or years, in 40k. Be glad ;-P) and the end result isn't always what everyone envisioned exactly. Some people still complain about the arty 'fix', even I was skeptical at first. After playing it for a while though, I find that the rule change works perfectly with how Arty is conducted, as best as it can be represented on-board.

2) Tank drop is also a stupid mechanic that should have never happened. This is also messed up, and applies to #1.

3) This isn't a game of POINTS VS POINTS. The buzz-word of this era is COMBINED ARMS. Sure, a big tank will often slaughter a light or possibly medium mech if you dance it in range (don't like it? I'd say 'play Battletech', but a many heavy tanks and light mechs have similar battle values... then again, people don't like hearing 'play Battletech' either. People want a game thats deceptively like battletech, but not battletech, or dark age at this rate? Dunno) but some squads of infantry around the same pt cost will dismantle the vehicle. That same mech the vehicle would slaughter can also mow down those squads of infantry. Argue all you want about infantry overpowering mechs, but realistically a mech kill all sorts of infantry in the game... just need to watch your step ;-

4) It is simply mind-boggling how some of you want more tactics involved in the game, and yet you also want everything to preform equally against one another and based who wins strictly on who fields more points.

5) The game isn't dieing. Battletech went without any releases after FASA went down for... what, like 2-3 years? It was pretty much declared 'dead' for a period of time. Look how CBT is doing now. They say it is going strong, Mechwarrior has a FAR larger player base, and you all think it is dieing. I would be ashamed to be here if I was preaching to all the other players about how this game is sunk. The attitude some of you take regarding Mechwarrior: Dark Age is appalling. I come here to talk about the game I love to play (and CBT forums for CBT), not to warn people to stop buying and playing.

6) As long as people play for fun, the game will not die... however hard some of you try and kill it.

and now for some humor!

What do you call any vehicle with a point of elementals latched on?

---------- a Coffin! :p

What do you call a point of elementals latched on a mech?

--------- ablative armor! :grin:

Gee, I must have been hallucinating when I turned Erin Johnston (289 points) into a joke with five 14 point infantry (70) then. Mechs beat up on infantry, right? Right?

The 'combined arms' aren't. Until VTOLs get altered, the name of the game is _not_ 'combined arms' but 'which units break the rules the best'. This was artillery (longer range, free hits on bad rolls, ignore defense values, hit multiple targets) but now it's VTOLs (ignore basers, scoot and shoot) and tank drop (scoot and shoot, ablative armor for the tank).

Mechs are a point sink, not a valued member of a force. They're first strike targets, base/break targets, VTOL targets, tank drop targets, all because they cost more than anything else (with the exception of Tonkas and certain small mechs). Contrariwise, a real 'combined arms' force, that excludes a mech, has no such focal point, outside of maybe a DI Schmidt at 94.

While I may be complaining, I'm not ceasing to play MW, I'm not stopping in my efforts to encourage new players (in fact my dice karma has gotten much better since I started giving away tournament prizes again) and I'll cheerfully offer up umpteen jillion ways to make the game better. But I'm not going to close my eyes and insist everything is fine when I don't think it is. And I'm going to keep agitating for change, because I know some of the new kids I play against will and have stopped playing when they got out of the casual sandbox and walked face first into real, no holds barred play. It hurts to have your cool mech disassembled like last week's newspaper underwater when you get based, first round struck and then tank dropped/VTOLed into oblivion.

Yes you were. Pray tell, how did that happen and with what infantry? Furthermore, why did Erin not just kill them all or back off? Even better, why did Erin not just ignore them since they could not hurt her at all? Details, please.

Your infantry didn't happen to be invincible, did they?


Mechs are always the focal point of my force to the extent that in 600pt games I frequently take mechs without support (450 pts doesn't lend well to the common SS mech pt values) and I still win. The key is that with mechs, you can easily win a battle of attrition. Even light mechs have deeper dials than other units, and most are worth repairing. They can move faster than any infantry, and can push consecutively. They keep their stats longer. They're also order-effective, so while the enemy is moving each of his 30 pt VTOLs and 70 pt infantry formations, you have a third of your force tied up on one order. How the hell can a single VTOL beat a mech when the VTOL can only push once while taking a click of damage and being stat the following turn? One click of damage and standing still for a turn is a LOT more dangerous for a VTOL than for a Mech. Also beside the point, I ACKOWLEDGED that VTOLs and Tank drops are a problem. I ALSO said why we aren't seeing change right now.

Oh, I was also directing my comments about #5 to the ones that are saying that the game is dead, they don't play anymore, they hate the game etc.

It's not as bad as simply voicing a complaint :p

I expect this time next year we will see the release of Mechwarrior 2.0: The Quickening or Gigli or Ishtar or something like that. We'll get one more release after FP and a big band-aid. The next release will be a filler with a lot of re-used sculpts. The band-aid will attempt to fix tank-drop and all its incarnations & VTOLs and introduce a move and shoot mechanic for Mechs, but it will still fall short.
We'll then get an announcement that they will be unvieling MW2.0, with an emphasis on Mechs. They'll introduce customizable Mechs,environmental effects and the beginnings of set retirement.
The biggest problem I see with WK is they assume to much.
They assume that we won't do something because they wouldn't.
I spoke to some of the WK staff earlier this year right around the release of Dark Riders for MK. ( I will say that it wasn't part of the design team but people who've used the figs and playtested in house) I asked them about their opinion on two things that I thought we're going to be a problem, Storm Maul and the BPR Salamander. Which seemed very abusive with the right build. The response I got was that they thought that no one would play the game that way. Go check out the MK boards and see the complaints that foillowed this year's nationals regarding Storm Maul. I think it was 7 of the 8 top armies all ran it and the final was decided without a single attack roll.
They need to hire an outside consultant group, a truely cutthroat bunch of gamers, and let them rip apart the new releases and then do something about it. Sometimes WK shows signs of brillance but then they get lazy.

Will 63 is correct I don't have all the stats memorized. He also failed to mention if I used every possible example of just how badly screwed up the point system is I would have written a 20 page paper on the subject.

The mechs primary advantages are two fold. Pushing as in thier supposidly mythical can push all the time feature and having Primary and Secondary damage types. Both of these abilities push up thier point cost and in many cases we end up with reduntant or useless secondary attacks and a heat dial which makes using them useless.

The other problem is designers and developers or any whiz kid employee can not play in tournaments. This means they have no clue how good or bad the units designed are. You want maximized effective units the Designers and developers need to have an intimate understanding of competitive play. They need to actually go to venues play and talk to the players this is only logical. It would give them so much feedback that could help them in designing and understanding our gripes.
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Triumph tiger 100