How about us real "Back end guys" who build you the network you say that you need and then scream when it's not enough 
But seriously, whats HBS up to...?
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No. The real screaming is management and finance when you say "It's not enough, we need to scale and here's the quote on what it will cost us"How about us real "Back end guys" who build you the network you say that you need and then scream when it's not enough
You game devs have it easy; for us not-so-glamorous back-end devs it's more that the hard tasks turn out to actually be hard, and the "easy" tasks turn out to be even harder
How hard can it be, its all just HTML right...?
How hard can it be, its all just HTML right...?
HTML? That's the damage indicator for BattleTech, right? Head Torso Mitts and Legs
See it all comes back around
At a previous work we had a saying when someone screwed up big-time: "What are you, a web developer?" - it was considered the ultimate insult to a bunch of Unix grey-beardsHow hard can it be, its all just HTML right...?
At a previous work we had a saying when someone screwed up big-time: "What are you, a web developer?" - it was considered the ultimate insult to a bunch of Unix grey-beards
Yes, old style devs consider front-end developers "script kiddies" basically.
I suffer from a similar issue as Data Scientist. Basically I use some software with GUI to develop complex workflows for predictive analysis but since I'm not "coding" management considers my work as being the same as the various Excel users around...
I suffer from a similar issue as Data Scientist. Basically I use some software with GUI to develop complex workflows for predictive analysis but since I'm not "coding" management considers my work as being the same as the various Excel users around...
I think it was more prevalent back around the mid-to-late nineties, when every company suddenly realised they needed a web presence, and who better to deliver it but the boss' grandson, who was "good with computers". And who got to take responsibility for the mess that was "delivered"? You get one guess and if you guess "grandson" you're not right.
Oh you poor thing. I don't know what's worse, management or customers... They both make my life difficult in various ways
Being employed in a ISP and having started as customer care operator I saw both sides... Honestly I'd rather deal with customers any day.
BTW, any news on incoming patches?
Predictions: Urban warfare:
Beside (obviously) new map types I am predicting player controlled vehicle lances and infantry (The latter will be a bear to work up but in most cases assume the best way to kill infantry will be the kill the building they are in shooting at you!) It gives 'em a great shot at combined arms combat with the TT game original "Citytech" rules did. See no reason not to stick with what works!
New weapons system.. Artillery.. Naw naw the real thing.. not the current fake thing. Infantry weapons, infantry swarm attacks.. Moe flash point scripts (and expect some of those from the modding community soon.
No "official" clan tech yet.. going to be awhile.
Should be kicking off player involvement in the 4th war with the next one... Possibly a larger star map. Will we be working for Marik or Davion or Liao, or simply avoiding becoming road kill? We still have a storage drive with a SLDF facilities map on board... if we can figure out how to deal with the Locura. Almost surprised ComStar hasn't made an offer to put us on retainer. Explorer Corp is likely looking on Argo with feeling of great desire. The ships capabilities are just the sort of stuff they like to have available. Literally built for that job in the first place.
Lots and lot and lots of mechs that can be added. And "Frankenmech" construction rules. There are some things that were done in the tabletop game that should never had happened 'cept of course no one knew any better then. Also things that were NOT done that could have been. Yes players can "design" far better mechs then the stock rides in the game but there should be higher maintenance costs on non standard loadout, longer repair times, etc.. various and assorted penalties that add up the further from "STOCK" you take a mech chassis. Maintenance costs on heavily customised mechs should also significantly noticeable.
Remember you have 2 games here.. a Tactical combat game, and a mercenary mech company operations game (maintenance repair,contract negotiation, public relations, reputation, care and feeding of mechwarriors etc.) The Tactical game can expand pretty logically, especially with all the lore behind the tabletop to draw on... the other how ever.. thats a little tougher. You wanna give players lots to do but not so much that it takes away from Story or combat play. WHile lots of detail is all well and good a good game is the sum of iiiits parts and compleity for complexities sake is generally a bad idea in games.. remember these guys need to earn a living doing this so the balance you think is perfect may actually hurt sales and not grow the user base. Just need to be good nuff to tell the story.
Beside (obviously) new map types I am predicting player controlled vehicle lances and infantry (The latter will be a bear to work up but in most cases assume the best way to kill infantry will be the kill the building they are in shooting at you!) It gives 'em a great shot at combined arms combat with the TT game original "Citytech" rules did. See no reason not to stick with what works!
New weapons system.. Artillery.. Naw naw the real thing.. not the current fake thing. Infantry weapons, infantry swarm attacks.. Moe flash point scripts (and expect some of those from the modding community soon.
No "official" clan tech yet.. going to be awhile.
Should be kicking off player involvement in the 4th war with the next one... Possibly a larger star map. Will we be working for Marik or Davion or Liao, or simply avoiding becoming road kill? We still have a storage drive with a SLDF facilities map on board... if we can figure out how to deal with the Locura. Almost surprised ComStar hasn't made an offer to put us on retainer. Explorer Corp is likely looking on Argo with feeling of great desire. The ships capabilities are just the sort of stuff they like to have available. Literally built for that job in the first place.
Lots and lot and lots of mechs that can be added. And "Frankenmech" construction rules. There are some things that were done in the tabletop game that should never had happened 'cept of course no one knew any better then. Also things that were NOT done that could have been. Yes players can "design" far better mechs then the stock rides in the game but there should be higher maintenance costs on non standard loadout, longer repair times, etc.. various and assorted penalties that add up the further from "STOCK" you take a mech chassis. Maintenance costs on heavily customised mechs should also significantly noticeable.
Remember you have 2 games here.. a Tactical combat game, and a mercenary mech company operations game (maintenance repair,contract negotiation, public relations, reputation, care and feeding of mechwarriors etc.) The Tactical game can expand pretty logically, especially with all the lore behind the tabletop to draw on... the other how ever.. thats a little tougher. You wanna give players lots to do but not so much that it takes away from Story or combat play. WHile lots of detail is all well and good a good game is the sum of iiiits parts and compleity for complexities sake is generally a bad idea in games.. remember these guys need to earn a living doing this so the balance you think is perfect may actually hurt sales and not grow the user base. Just need to be good nuff to tell the story.
Yeah. I have a degree in Physics/Applied Mathematics and got training as a data scientist. In Portugal a lot of people think that guys from Computer engineering are the ones who are qualified to do data analysis in detriment of mathematicians or physicists. It is an uphill battle...
I'm pretty sure that there are rules out there for Proto Type mechs. Those could be adapted for non-stock/custom designs. Would be interesting to see what could be done with those type of rules.
I actually don't have a degree, I basically had to learn on the fly as consultants were sucking our department dry...
That said, management doesn't usually have a clue on how to manage new types of expertise...
I'm sure there are rules for pretty much anything in source books, being able to assemble a frankenmech from existing ones would be majorly cool though.
I'd love to see player vehicles and infantry. I think player controlled infantry won't be there, but having them in an opfor would be great. Maybe a TT old skooler can confirm, but I'm guessing the rules for fighting infantry will be far different to mechs. Those dual AC10s may ruin a mech or tanks day, but would it have the same impact on a squad of entrenched infantry in a forest or hills?
Artillery too, as an enemy unit. Could lead to some good missions requiring you to use mixed lances. I could see a mission where the enemy is shelling a city and usinf mechs to fend off the garrison (tanks, turrets and infantry). You'd need to sweep out some lights or mediums to take out the artillery while your heavies and assaults fortify the city and defend the infrastructure.
Maybe you'd start in the city and get Darius to ping two artillery batteries, whilst opfor reinforcements drop down every so often. A little like the spaceport defence mission in the campaign but procedurally generated.
I never did play tabletop, but my understanding of this is that the answer is "very no". Flamers and machine guns are the tools of choice for anti-personnel fire, anything else suffers from a kind of "swarm" rule that limits effectiveness against infantry (i.e. that medium laser may have hit, but it hit one guy only, not the whole unit).
Yeah, that was my impression too.
Still wouldn't want to be that one guy getting hit full on a 100kg anti-armour shell though.
Could again reinforce the need for lights, have something nimble to get in there and annihilate some infantry squads. I'm thinking a multi-shoot mechwarrior piloting a firestarter tooled with MGs and Flamers would be somewhat obscene.
IIRC, current rules for standard BT play are that 1 infantryman is killed for every 10 points of damage the weapon normally deals, rounded down, with a minimum of 1 per hit. So, anything short of AC/20 damage is only killing one guy, while cluster weapons can kill one per cluster. Weapons noted as being "anti-infantry" have special rules that allow them to roll d6s to see how many people they kill, so a single such weapon can take out many people.
I will now direct you to the Firestarter, with a total of 6 anti-infantry weapons stock. It can easily wipe out an entire platoon in a single turn.
I will now direct you to the Firestarter, with a total of 6 anti-infantry weapons stock. It can easily wipe out an entire platoon in a single turn.
Or, you could just attack infantry like a Smoke Jaguar and take them out with an ERPPC. You know...because...why not.
Since we don't really know much yet, any guess/prediction is as good as another, but in my opinion:
From what little was talked about during streams for the Flashpoint release, I'd be really surprised there was player controlled vehicles. It didn't seem high on the priority list. But maybe some new vehicles! They said Marco Mazzoni is being kept busy, but not on a new mech... so maybe turning Duane Loose vehicle concept art into models! And maybe they'll even spend the time to get Hover vehicles (something they intended to have originally but had to table) to behave the way they want? Sounds like a good fit for Urban maps with all the roads... but everything takes time so no idea where it falls on the priority list... [Infantry would be great! But probably lower on priority list than Hover... but anything is possible!]
Artillery and Airstrikes would be great additions! Just like Hover vehicles, there was a desire to have them originally and they were tabled. But I'm going to guess Expansion 3 for those... (just my wild guess...)
They said no 4th Succession in Urban and probably not expansion 3 either. I also got the impression that a larger Star Map was not being worked on for Urban, but could be possible in expansion 3. (This is only my attempt to read between the lines based on "everything has been considered..." responses to the dozens of "questions" for new content they get.)
It didn't sound like we'll see "lots and lots" of more mechs in Urban Warfare. My guess is 3-5: maybe Javelin, Assassin and Annihilator in the DLC and Raven in the FreeLC with the inclusion of ECM. (I got the impression ECM was higher on their priority list, being something similar to the Cyclops and even the Hatchetman, having unique "equipment".) They did seem to see the "low hanging fruit" of more variants, but didn't sound like it was planned for Urban Warfare. My guess is maybe Expansion 3 with some more tweaking of hard points on almost all the variants to allow for more "frankenmech" options when people refit their mechs. They did already initially tweak a lot of the current variants to allow more flexibility than just strictly following what the stock loadout would allow under "hard point rules".
From what little was talked about during streams for the Flashpoint release, I'd be really surprised there was player controlled vehicles. It didn't seem high on the priority list. But maybe some new vehicles! They said Marco Mazzoni is being kept busy, but not on a new mech... so maybe turning Duane Loose vehicle concept art into models! And maybe they'll even spend the time to get Hover vehicles (something they intended to have originally but had to table) to behave the way they want? Sounds like a good fit for Urban maps with all the roads... but everything takes time so no idea where it falls on the priority list... [Infantry would be great! But probably lower on priority list than Hover... but anything is possible!]
Artillery and Airstrikes would be great additions! Just like Hover vehicles, there was a desire to have them originally and they were tabled. But I'm going to guess Expansion 3 for those... (just my wild guess...)
They said no 4th Succession in Urban and probably not expansion 3 either. I also got the impression that a larger Star Map was not being worked on for Urban, but could be possible in expansion 3. (This is only my attempt to read between the lines based on "everything has been considered..." responses to the dozens of "questions" for new content they get.)
It didn't sound like we'll see "lots and lots" of more mechs in Urban Warfare. My guess is 3-5: maybe Javelin, Assassin and Annihilator in the DLC and Raven in the FreeLC with the inclusion of ECM. (I got the impression ECM was higher on their priority list, being something similar to the Cyclops and even the Hatchetman, having unique "equipment".) They did seem to see the "low hanging fruit" of more variants, but didn't sound like it was planned for Urban Warfare. My guess is maybe Expansion 3 with some more tweaking of hard points on almost all the variants to allow for more "frankenmech" options when people refit their mechs. They did already initially tweak a lot of the current variants to allow more flexibility than just strictly following what the stock loadout would allow under "hard point rules".
I do think we might see a "curve ball" in either Urban Warfare (unlikely) or Expansion 3 (more "likely") of co-op Skirmish and Multiplayer. Probably FreeLC as something similar to the addition of Career Mode. I know they initially wanted to fit a version of co-op for Skirmish and PvP into post-launch plans, but it was lowered in priority. (Everything is on a giant huge priority list that fluctuates as things change / develop.)
My guess is it will be implemented as 2 players each controlling a max of 4 mechs. So a max of 8 mechs vs 8 mechs, but still using the UI max of 4 per player. (I'd be more surprised if it was controlling 1-2 of 4 mechs in 4vs4 PvP and Skirmish.)
My guess is it will be implemented as 2 players each controlling a max of 4 mechs. So a max of 8 mechs vs 8 mechs, but still using the UI max of 4 per player. (I'd be more surprised if it was controlling 1-2 of 4 mechs in 4vs4 PvP and Skirmish.)