You, Good Sir, are not wrong. The Multiplayer Community is not arguing for Evasion to be permanent.
This particular tail, has never wagged the BATTLETECH-Dog. :bow:
More Permanent Evasion is Better for Gameplay
- Thread starter CatGrenade
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
This particular tail, has never wagged the BATTLETECH-Dog. :bow:
Ah, there it is. Lights are totally fine - if you have all-10 pilots and at least four of a very specific piece of kit you might not even encounter in your career due to RNG.
How about when you have stock 'Mechs and rookie pilots?
Are we even talking all lights here, or just tricked-out Firestarters and Jenners?
I mean, I did a campaign run starting with five Locusts, but I traded up every chance I got because man, the LCT-1M is not a viable combat 'Mech much beyond a skull or so.
Part of the problem with permanent evasion is that it would need some extensive AI mods to prevent clubbing. When faced with a high-evasion target, the AI will almost always use a single lowish-heat weapon (say one medium laser) to strip evasion for followon mechs to focus fire, even if evasion is non-strippable in the current mod. I have not seen a non-strippable evasion mod playthrough where the AI has been successfully tweaked to remove this tendency. And this is when the same exact mech has plenty more weapon options/combos it could have used that still would have been completely or nearly heat neutral.
I encourage anyone with evasion questions to check out some of Edmon's Youtube content if you want to see this in action.
Mike
I encourage anyone with evasion questions to check out some of Edmon's Youtube content if you want to see this in action.
Mike
And i took on and killed 2 king crabs with 2 locusts.
It just took an hour to do...
They arent meant to go into combat by themselves and survive... They are more of a supporting and harassing role then anything else.
A locust working with something like a catapult can be far more effective then having just two catapults if he plays defensively,staying out of los and jumping in to get his lance indirect fire advantages often.
The reason jenners and firestarters are a goto light mech for light mech only runs is that they are capable of filling roles that require damage to be thrown around because many of the other light mechs are incapable of filling that role.
And thats fine! because light mechs are supposed to work with heavier mechs in the end... And i personally think they work well together.
Im one of those guys that did an all light mech run as well, beating the campaign with relative ease.
It for certain got MUCH easier towards the endgame with lights then at the start due to pilot skills and equipment.
Ace pilot was downright the best ability to have for me... It made a huge difference because it opened up WAY more options to take advantage of situations.
But id take a light in any of my lances any day of the week over having nothing but heavy mechs... Even if that light had a garbage pilot.... Just because that initiative advantage gives you more options.
This is fair enough, but I did actually push very hard into very difficult missions early. The kind of missions people who don't have a full set of mediums won't usually touch. I also never had any +3 gyros, I only had a couple of +2 versions by the end, in addition to every mech having the vastly more common +1 version. Once you have the tools, then you are golden, but even if you don't they still can kick a lot of arse.
Plus I myself was learning the playstyle in the beginning! XD. I didn't go in thinking they would be as powerful as they turned out to be! XD.
PS. If you just have A.I. Reserving and crank up the A.I. chance to melee, you can make things a lot harder for yourself. But that's true no matter what your composition. When I was saying most mod packs with these things aren't harder, it's because they have things like extra tasty gear for lights and stuff like permenant evasion. That makes life much easier as a counterbalance.
This is absolutely not the case, see my reply above.
I was using trash-tier pilots and gear, for most of the early and mid game along with all kinds of lights and I cut far too deeply into VERY hard missions, too early. This was a level of over confidence on my part after totalling early missions too easily, that was why my mid game was a bit rough in places. My pilots got to 10/10/10/10 in the course of over 100 missions in lights, so they very much earned their abilities by piloting them throughout the early and mid game.
To clarify, by even the end game, I was using a combination of Javlins and Firestarters with mostly +1 Gyros, which are very common. I did not have any +3 ones. I had a couple of +2 ones.
If you play more normally and don't plunge into 2 skull / 2 and a half skull missions when your still running a locust. You will be fine
.
Last edited:
Seeing as there is a contingent of players that believe that evasion is fine as it is, and another that think it needs to be changed to not being stripped by incoming fire, how about the idea I floated on the previous page?
Strip evasion on hits, but not misses. Or, alternatively strip it on misses but not hits.
Seems to me to be a nice middle-ground between the two camps.
Strip evasion on hits, but not misses. Or, alternatively strip it on misses but not hits.
Seems to me to be a nice middle-ground between the two camps.
Edmon I think posted a reasonable reply, but I just want to echo the sentiment that you have to be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. I was able to do up to 3 skulls with my lance of 4 Spiders, but it was really hard until all of my pilots got the Ace Pilot ability, and even then it was very challenging. Even with end-game gear and 10/10/10/10 pilots though, I would not attempt higher than maybe 4 Skulls with a lance of 4 Spiders (although maybe the COIL will change that....if you have the guts to put it in your CT!).
But seriously, that is really good! I think it would be unfair to call the game 'balanced' if 4 Spiders were actually able to take on 5 Skull missions. By the same token, I don't think 4 Locusts should be able to handle more than maybe 3 Skulls. Afterall, these are not combat machines! They are scouts, plain and simple. So I don't see it as 'bad' that you need the Firestarter in order to handle the highest difficulty missions, but to each their own!
Of course all this may change in two days.....perhaps Locusts and Fleas will become the new 'kings of the battlefield' (though much as I love light mechs, I sincerely hope not!)
Really? Because that is a super easy thing to change in the Behaviour.json file. For example, I think the default setting for AI to fire a 'conservative shot' is 40% or less chance of hitting. In my game, I have it set to 30%, because I think its better for the AI. You could theoretically set it to 0% so that the AI always fires all weapons all the time, but I think that would be a mistake...
I sort of like this idea, except I think it would work better if it strips evasion on misses not hits because making it strip on hits only punishes you for bad RNG and that would definitely feel 'unfair'. However, it sounds like there are some interesting changes to how Evasion works already coming our way. I'd much rather play around with them and get a feel for their effects on 'game balance' before looking into alternatives such as what you have suggested...
Fair enough, I also would like to see what the unlocked evasion does for the early game (and what the defensive bonuses that replace the evasion increases does for the middle/late game).
Either way, I personally don't think there's an immediate need to do anything about evasion; it's just that the discussion always polarises into two camps, the Evasion-must-NOT-be-changed camp and the Evasion-MUST-be-changed camp. I think the really interesting discussion is to be had somewhere in the middle, which is why I always try to bring that one up (also because it's such a natural solution; why is evasion stripped on hits and misses when it could be one or the other?).
This is where the issue and what makes sense come into conflict. The issue is that really evasive mechs with massive stacking evasion are impossible to hit. Being unable to hit them, means under this suggestion that you can't strip them either.
If you missed and stripped evasion, that'd be better from a gameplay perspective but it makes no sense logically / in the matter of lore and that "correct" feeling.
I am not certain anything beyond fixing the A.I. needs doing though, but if we were to do something, I'd suggest that very high end evasion strips faster. Maybe 2 tokens per hit if on or above 6.
Actually if you think about it a little, a miss stripping evasion makes some sense. When you miss your target, you would then adjust your aim, and if your team mates see you miss, they would adjust their aim accordingly to try and hit. they see you miss a fast moving target, so they compensate just a smidge more to hit because they see a shot get close.
makes a bit of sense to me anyways.
makes a bit of sense to me anyways.
If you could strip half a pip, I’d be for hits stripping half a pip and misses stripping a full pip.
This would give evasion more utility as it degrades, since it would still provide a decent amount of damage reduction until it gets really low, even with 2 lances of mechs shooting at you. It would also make Sensor Lock a more appealing choice, and the AI choosing to fire single weapons to strip evasion would actually make sense. Therefore it would also make Multishot more interesting.
There is one slightly counterintuitive result, in that it ends up being better to fire weapons outside their optimal range in order to guarantee full evasion pip losses. Maybe weapons only strip evasion on a miss if fired within their optimal range? Or only strip full evasion on a miss within their optimal range?
This would give evasion more utility as it degrades, since it would still provide a decent amount of damage reduction until it gets really low, even with 2 lances of mechs shooting at you. It would also make Sensor Lock a more appealing choice, and the AI choosing to fire single weapons to strip evasion would actually make sense. Therefore it would also make Multishot more interesting.
There is one slightly counterintuitive result, in that it ends up being better to fire weapons outside their optimal range in order to guarantee full evasion pip losses. Maybe weapons only strip evasion on a miss if fired within their optimal range? Or only strip full evasion on a miss within their optimal range?
Last edited:
One thing you lose with perma-evasion is a slight bit of tactical play that involves timing of your moves.
Things like baiting enemies into an attempted focus fire on your mech whilst reserving, only to have you sprint away to regain all your evasion.
When to step out, when to risk your evasion, taking into account all the enemies that have already fired and such.
Its a very small underutilized tactic, yes. But its something i have done before.
Also, you may want to just standby or get your evasion to max depending on if the enemies heavy hitters have went or not. You dont want your evasion chewed off too early.
Its extra depth to the combat, even if its subtle.
Things like baiting enemies into an attempted focus fire on your mech whilst reserving, only to have you sprint away to regain all your evasion.
When to step out, when to risk your evasion, taking into account all the enemies that have already fired and such.
Its a very small underutilized tactic, yes. But its something i have done before.
Also, you may want to just standby or get your evasion to max depending on if the enemies heavy hitters have went or not. You dont want your evasion chewed off too early.
Its extra depth to the combat, even if its subtle.
Last edited:
This is actually a really important and key part of Light / Evasive play which is massively overlooked. It matters a lot.
Not permanent, but more valuable and/or lights to be more viable or both. Evasion is weak in multiplayer, due to a combination of bad pilots, the new height accuracy advantage, the power of sensorlock when you know the enemy has only 4 units, no defense gyros, etc.
Lights and the boatload of fast mediums we’re getting.
I really like the idea of some kind of attenuation or reduction in evasion degradation. Either a non-zero minimum (scaled by weight class) so you only get a certain minimum defensive bonus if you keep your mech moving, or by tweaking the amount of evasion lost on a hit.
Also, evasion maintenance ends up looking fairly similar to stability maintenance when facing LRM-heavy lances.
Okay fair; however, saying lights are more than viable by pointing to a whole career being completed with them taking on 4+ skull missions misses a key part of the argument which is that being able to take on 4+ skull missions is a very high skill ceiling to attain with units with a really low floor to fail at. It's similar to a player saying the leveling class equipment (the not good stuff) in a game (eg PoE. Destiny, or Diablo 3) is viable for the end game because the player can complete end game content, but really it's because of their mastery of the systems of the game that allow them to do so, not the equipment itself. Most other players would not be able to do so. It's more about increasing ease of use and reducing failure with the units than giving them buffs to be better than other things. Sometimes, yes, those are one and the same, but not always.
Just because something has a high skill ceiling does not mean it isn't a great weapon. The Shock Rifle in Unreal Tournament was a notoriously hard weapon to master, traded by most for anything else. Those who had mastered it though, could wipe players out around corners with the devastating "shombo" combo on command.
It is lights specifically that are evasion monsters, because of their internal bonus to evasion as well as their speed. You will not get the same success with what you'd think are classically better mediums, like the discoback. It is too slow, and be focused down by A.I. heavies and assaults.
I...was not say things with high skill ceilings are bad. I'm saying that it's possible lights should be given attention to making it so they're not as easy to fail with. Because they are easy to fail with after a certain point.
And they could probably wipe players out with any old weapon because they were great players. I think that's what @Timaeus is saying.
For the great players (you know, the ones that have played through the game with only the weakest weapons or units and succeeded), I'm sure buffing evasion would just make the game even easier. That's not all players though, and games are (generally) more successful if they don't just cater to the best players.