It doesn't have to be that many. Personally, just to keep costs down I can see aiming for 8 mechs and 7-8 pilots, max. That way you can switch between lances with no delay, but not have too many expenses on the table.
Is there still time for HBS to...
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I'm not the person to ask, I'm just guessing.
I don't recall the Beta skirmishes calculating explosion damage (stability or otherwise) on the fly depending on how much ammo was left in a bin that exploded. If doing so were easy, or if HBS intended for it to be in the game at release, I think we would have seen it there.
Computers are pretty good at maths so I feel the issue must be a design concern, like trying to keep things simple for player understanding.
I guess it depends how easy it is to keep a force ready to deploy. If we're regularly swapping two or three mechs out for repairs it makes sense to have a second lance, but only ever deploy one.
I'd just find it odd if we could deploy a much larger force and never did.
In this instance it would be a matter of logic, not arithmetic. But I think you're correct that it was probably a design decision, rather than a limitation imposed by the game engine.
During the Icebox Mission, a certain noble lady should have a wingman. Even Generic Red Shirt #524 would suffice.
Well, the lore doesn't say IS mech's can't switch weapons around, especially if it's the same weapon type, just that they can't do it as quickly and flexible as the Clans. For example, it would take the IS techs days to switch out weapons and then only if they are the same type whereas the Clan can do it in matter of hrs and limited by pod space.
You can easily up the refit cost to make weapon switch less beneficial and instead rely on specialized chassis for certain situation.
I would say no there is no time to add features. Even small ones. When they were saying that November/December'ish last year.
As for the salvage. Cohh Carnage did run his company low on funds quite often. He was negotiating more on salvage on most if not all missions.
As for the salvage. Cohh Carnage did run his company low on funds quite often. He was negotiating more on salvage on most if not all missions.
Features? No. But small tweaks like overheat button color, number of parts that you need to salvage to piece together a mech (I think one of the dev is experimenting with 5) and a few minor tweaks to rewards etc is completely doable.
Keep in mind the Argo isn't atmosphere rated, and the mechs are getting dropped in a Leapard that only has 4 mech bays.
So there's an excuse for only 4 mechs at a time, despite owning 6-8.Sarna said:
Indeed. For me, my personal challenge will be to complete the Single Player without customizing any 'Mech at least a couple times and simply use what I got. Should have the added benefit of saving C-Bills as well. I wonder if they included an achievement for that, hmm.
XCOM 2 has an achievement for fighting the final battle with conventional weapons. Perhaps Battletech could have an achievement for fighting the final (story) battle with the starting lance.
I would appreciate more fluidity between what we see and the actual result. The visual feelback just doesn't feel smooth - there seems to be a significant delay between the action and the outcome, which makes it a bit jarring to watch. It's not major, but it's a quality of life change I wish for. That said, I doubt there is time for any major changes, so unless it's already fixed in the release version I guess I will have to learn to live with it.
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I imagine it's game waiting turn to play out and e.g. count what hits and where and how often. Once those are counted it crunches numbers, prints out results and if needed plays animations for e.g. left arm blowing off. It does give that tad disconnected between action and result, but at least we get accurate representations of action end results.
The moment the player press the fire button, the game should already have calculated the end result. The delay between action, effect and result maybe due to poor optimization? I can't imagine HBS spend the entire 4 weeks on nothing but bug hunting so maybe they'll tighten up the coding too.
XCOM and XCOM2 both did feel more fluid and responsive...but I haven't touched either in years so maybe I'm rose tinting it.
XCOM and XCOM2 both did feel more fluid and responsive...but I haven't touched either in years so maybe I'm rose tinting it.
I feel you. The one that really grates me is how your weapons will impact the enemy Mech, and then there's like a 5-6 second pause before the Mech gets knocked down. It just looks weird. The Mech really should fall down about a half second after all the weapons hit.
XCOM2 didn't feel responsive at all when it was released. There was even a mod put out called "StopWastingMyTime" to dramatically cut down on the pauses and animation slowness.
Stop Wasting My Time addressed a very different issue in XCOM 2 than what is happening in Battletech. The X2 issue was a conscious design choice, drawn out cinematic camera angles and animations, slow-mo, etc. Battletech's issue appears to be technical in nature. I would guess some sort of asset streaming delay, possibly an inherent Unity problem. You can see a similar sort of thing with freezes in the various loading screens.
Some things I would like to point out that you might have missed or should be considered:
A - In regard to the AI: Did anyone else noticed that the enemy mech/vehicle diagrams (when selected) showed pilot tag designations, like the ones you get when you start specializing your pilots - Gunner, Tactician, Defender; etc. ...
Maybe that has something to do with why the AI does not always makes optimal choices?
Especially when the pilots get procedural generated and randomly assigned to mechs/vehicles...
B - In regard to salvage: I think its fair to say that Cohh got lucky when he managed to salvage three mechs on that one mission, even so he negotiated for it.
But after the mission he still had to put one of those mechs into storage, plus two other mechs from his active mechbay (cause he still had only one)!
Now, if I remember correctly, the devs said, that mechs you put into storage get stripped of weapons and armour.
(In the PDX/HBS stream on the mercenary campaign with Kiva and Mitch at 00:40:43)
Which would mean, to get them battle ready again, you would have to spend time! ...and money?
And upgrading to additional mechbays is a financial decision as is having a large number of battle ready mechs to choose from, since you have to pay upkeep cost, even if its the same amount for any mech.
Edit: Also, if you managed to leg a mech, head cap it, or kill the pilot before you destroyed any of its components, than why wouldn't you be able to salvage a complete mech?
I haven't checked back on Cohh's streams to see, if destroyed any components on the mechs he salvaged before he took them out.
A - In regard to the AI: Did anyone else noticed that the enemy mech/vehicle diagrams (when selected) showed pilot tag designations, like the ones you get when you start specializing your pilots - Gunner, Tactician, Defender; etc. ...
Maybe that has something to do with why the AI does not always makes optimal choices?
Especially when the pilots get procedural generated and randomly assigned to mechs/vehicles...
B - In regard to salvage: I think its fair to say that Cohh got lucky when he managed to salvage three mechs on that one mission, even so he negotiated for it.
But after the mission he still had to put one of those mechs into storage, plus two other mechs from his active mechbay (cause he still had only one)!
Now, if I remember correctly, the devs said, that mechs you put into storage get stripped of weapons and armour.
(In the PDX/HBS stream on the mercenary campaign with Kiva and Mitch at 00:40:43)
Which would mean, to get them battle ready again, you would have to spend time! ...and money?
And upgrading to additional mechbays is a financial decision as is having a large number of battle ready mechs to choose from, since you have to pay upkeep cost, even if its the same amount for any mech.
Edit: Also, if you managed to leg a mech, head cap it, or kill the pilot before you destroyed any of its components, than why wouldn't you be able to salvage a complete mech?
I haven't checked back on Cohh's streams to see, if destroyed any components on the mechs he salvaged before he took them out.
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Mitch (or Mike) said in a Q&A some months back that the AI has roles such as fire support, brawler etc and act differently. That's all the details we have. Since there's no overlay team work, the AI's weapon load out probably has a bigger impact as far as your average player can observe.
In answer to the threads title, HBS still actually has a decent amount of time for minor changes. This game is not physically releasing and this means there is no hard deadline for final code to make physical media. The game is a digital product that is sent to Steam and it then gives out copies with game codes. They have, literally until likely about an hour before launch to finalize code and get it into Steam for distribution.