Does Catalyst Not Know How to Handle Infantry?

[victor_shaw]

The main issue is that it's a game about giant robots. So infantry is an after thought. How do you make the average GI useful on a battlefield full of super robots.

[DevianID]

The main issue is that it's a game about giant robots. So infantry is an after thought. How do you make the average GI useful on a battlefield full of super robots

Its the same question about how do you make infantry useful when submarines are duking it out.  Mechs (and submarines) operate on a different level from infantry.
Infantry DO exist in that environment, but their role is for mostly out of combat stuff like seal team insertion and boarding crippled units (whether mech or submarine).  So infantry is important for submarines (and mechs) but we dont care about it on the table for the most part.

Infantry on timed objective missions where the infantry have to search inside a building while the mechs hold back the enemy is how 'dropzone commander' used infantry.  This, and spotting, are the 2 best uses for infantry IMHO, and both uses dont involve shooting at a mech.

[Charistoph]

Right now, there's no bullet made which can be fired from a standard battle rifle and penetrate tank armor. And I don't see that changing now or 1,000 years from now. The heaviest element we have for this, depleted uranium, still cannot punch through, even at .50 BMG. A 30mm cannon round can, and even that requires a high rate of fire and multiple rounds. This is a size comparison between it and an intermediate .556 cartridge. This just flat-out isn't going to be fired by anything the size of a human being. Hence, the need for Field Gunners shooting full-sized autocannons:

Except for the fact that we know it happens, probably due to the ablative nature of Battletech Armor.  Modern armor is designed to prevent penetration by being a hard stop or deflect if properly shaped.  Battletech Armor diffuses the energy by basically requiring it to be shot off to be penetrated.  We also see this in the damage reduction of Rifle Cannons and Ferro-Lamellor Armor.

[DevianID]

Except for the fact that we know it happens, probably due to the ablative nature of Battletech Armor

The formula grants a ton of bonus damage to the rifle due to rapid fire, so in excess that they put an errata capping it at .6.  Thus it only happens since TW, and only due to the formula that already was faulty.  2 rifles have .03 damage and .52 damage, because of wonky multipliers and rounding.

For example, .52 +.52 = 1.04, BUT if it was 1 rifle shooting 2x as fast (a double barrel autorifle) then the base damage would be .65 or so (someone who is better with the ATOW conversion could answer what the autorifle, if the burst setting and ammo capacity was 2x larger, would do.  It is not anywhere near 1.04 IIRC)
Thus, 1 guy doublefisting autorifles firing the same amount of lead would do less damage compared to 2 guys, despite both hitting with the same number of shots in the RPG--completely because of how multipliers, rounding, and cumulative damage applies.  The autorifle platoon should instead be calculated as if the burst was 28x the normal burst size for 28 guys, not .52 x28, as they give super different numbers, and the RPG separated out burst damage for that reason, but then unseparated it for btech because lazy--hence why rifle infantry jumped WAY up in damage from older editions to TW when they just added all the burst.

Edit: im much worse math crunching ATOW stuff.  I think an autorifle with burst 30 (2 guys shooting) is .76 damage (not .52+.52) and 28 guys, for burst 420 instead of burst 15, comes out to 7 damage.  Why this is intersting--the OLD damage before TW made it additive instead of multiplicative, was 7 damage for rifle platoons.  Thus in ATOW when using burst 420 for 28 guys is the old calculation of 7 damage per rifle platoon.

[Daryk]

Yes, Reload Factor and Burst Fire modifiers are exactly why that difference is so large.

[monbvol]

The formula grants a ton of bonus damage to the rifle due to rapid fire, so in excess that they put an errata capping it at .6.  Thus it only happens since TW, and only due to the formula that already was faulty.  2 rifles have .03 damage and .52 damage, because of wonky multipliers and rounding.

For example, .52 +.52 = 1.04, BUT if it was 1 rifle shooting 2x as fast (a double barrel autorifle) then the base damage would be .65 or so (someone who is better with the ATOW conversion could answer what the autorifle, if the burst setting and ammo capacity was 2x larger, would do.  It is not anywhere near 1.04 IIRC)
Thus, 1 guy doublefisting autorifles firing the same amount of lead would do less damage compared to 2 guys, despite both hitting with the same number of shots in the RPG--completely because of how multipliers, rounding, and cumulative damage applies.  The autorifle platoon should instead be calculated as if the burst was 28x the normal burst size for 28 guys, not .52 x28, as they give super different numbers, and the RPG separated out burst damage for that reason, but then unseparated it for btech because lazy--hence why rifle infantry jumped WAY up in damage from older editions to TW when they just added all the burst.

Edit: im much worse math crunching ATOW stuff.  I think an autorifle with burst 30 (2 guys shooting) is .76 damage (not .52+.52) and 28 guys, for burst 420 instead of burst 15, comes out to 7 damage.  Why this is intersting--the OLD damage before TW made it additive instead of multiplicative, was 7 damage for rifle platoons.  Thus in ATOW when using burst 420 for 28 guys is the old calculation of 7 damage per rifle platoon.

*nod*

A lot of the problem of the conversion formula we have really comes down to the fact that it makes certain weapons that should be better against infantry less useful all because it is rigged in a way to calculate usefulness against armored targets.

Which would not be so bad if it did not value burst rating higher than AP rating.

[Charistoph]

The formula grants a ton of bonus damage to the rifle due to rapid fire, so in excess that they put an errata capping it at .6.  Thus it only happens since TW, and only due to the formula that already was faulty.  2 rifles have .03 damage and .52 damage, because of wonky multipliers and rounding.

...

Edit: im much worse math crunching ATOW stuff.  I think an autorifle with burst 30 (2 guys shooting) is .76 damage (not .52+.52) and 28 guys, for burst 420 instead of burst 15, comes out to 7 damage.  Why this is intersting--the OLD damage before TW made it additive instead of multiplicative, was 7 damage for rifle platoons.  Thus in ATOW when using burst 420 for 28 guys is the old calculation of 7 damage per rifle platoon.

Which means what in terms of preventing small arms being able to damage Battletech Armor?  It just seems that you're arguing a level of degree rather than capacity, when what you quoted was simply talking about capacity.  As you noted, even the farthest back one can find Infantry records, even one trooper can do one point of damage (though it used to take more to add more points of damage for the platoon).

To properly recognize just how useless small arms are in modern combat and apply that to Battletech, we'd be looking at something like how Infernos work for Combat Vehicles.  No damage, but a possibility to make a crit (with a decent modifier like a +2 or 3).  This would only apply to Rifles, though, as the higher energy of Machine Guns, lasers, PPC, missiles, and gauss would be easily justifiable in knocking armor off.

[monbvol]

Which means what in terms of preventing small arms being able to damage Battletech Armor?  It just seems that you're arguing a level of degree rather than capacity, when what you quoted was simply talking about capacity.  As you noted, even the farthest back one can find Infantry records, even one trooper can do one point of damage (though it used to take more to add more points of damage for the platoon).

To properly recognize just how useless small arms are in modern combat and apply that to Battletech, we'd be looking at something like how Infernos work for Combat Vehicles.  No damage, but a possibility to make a crit (with a decent modifier like a +2 or 3).  This would only apply to Rifles, though, as the higher energy of Machine Guns, lasers, PPC, missiles, and gauss would be easily justifiable in knocking armor off.

What makes it worse is that Infantry armor is clearly non-ablative in Battletech and thus works much more on the principle akin to modern armor of pass/fail penetration.  Yet the Autorifle is arguably more effective against a mech or tank than it is against other infantry.

Two guys with Autorifles will always do 1 damage to a tank or mech but will never mission kill more than 1 PBI.

This is why I celebrate the errata and honestly wish it was set even lower than .6.

[Hellraiser]

TLDR......

You know, in regards to infantry damage based on Support Weapons v/s no SW,  I had an idea.

What if Infantry had brackets similar to how AT has them.

For example....

A laser bay with 1 each ML, ERML, LL, ERLL looks like this.
Short-26 (3),  Medium-21 (2),  Long-8 (1)


As I think about it it might stop the cheese of the AR platoons w/ a really long range support gun.
It might also allow for different squads to mount different weapons.  (2 Standard (w/ 1 MG), 2 Support w/ (2 HSL)

All weapons with range of 6 or less would be Short.   Which is "most" of the non-Support units.
Then there would be a few that would reach medium & some more that reach long.

No issues w/ this Heavy-ER SupLas going 15 while this one goes 18, etc etc.
Just have them all fit the 6-12-20 ranges of the AT brackets.

Each pair of MGs or other burst weapons regardless of if its Support or Standard could qualify for a D6 of burst against Infantry.

The "mixed" platoon I mentioned above would have 1D6 Burst Damage at Short but also could reach out to Medium for small taps against mechs.

Basic weapons need to have a lot of their damage nerfed  (.52 for AR, looking at you)
Support could be boosted a bit on the other hand.

I wouldn't let basic weapons do more than .2 damage at most.
Support on the other hand shouldn't be doing LESS than 2 points IMO since Mech MGs do that much.   (EDIT... Except LRM tubes at 1 each)

[Charistoph]

Support on the other hand shouldn't be doing LESS than 2 points IMO since Mech MGs do that much.

Might I suggest that the only exception to this would be LRM Support Weapons?  They have insane range compared to the rest of the Support Weapons of the Succession Wars, so them being doing 1 per would make sense, and keep with how the individual LRM is considered.

[Hellraiser]

Might I suggest that the only exception to this would be LRM Support Weapons?  They have insane range compared to the rest of the Support Weapons of the Succession Wars, so them being doing 1 per would make sense, and keep with how the individual LRM is considered.

Valid, I hadn't considered the LRM launcher.

FYI.   
LRM Infantry are not a thing in the Succession Wars,  the Man-Portable LRM Launcher was developed by the FWL in 3057.

[Daryk]

The AR is the least of your worries, really.  Just take a look at any of the stock weapons with an attached grenade launcher.  And don't even look at the MG-42B... 

[DevianID]

Daryk, was my math correct that a burst 420 autorifle is 7 damage?  Im not confident in the AToW side, so I may have seen 7 and missed something because I wanted it to match the 7 damage rifle infantry did pre-TW.

[Daryk]

Yes, at least according to my spreadsheet... 

[TigerShark]

Regardless, this should be a situation where infantry are drag-and-drop. New players shouldn't have to do math to average out what a platoon can/cannot do. Nor should a 100-BV platoon be that deadly to a 3,000 BV 'Mech, IMO. It's one thing to game the system and make a custom vee with 20 MGs intended to sand blast a unit to death; it's another to have it the base, canon unit of that type.

I think that's part of what turns people off from Infantry, IMO.

[Charistoph]

Regardless, this should be a situation where infantry are drag-and-drop. New players shouldn't have to do math to average out what a platoon can/cannot do. Nor should a 100-BV platoon be that deadly to a 3,000 BV 'Mech, IMO. It's one thing to game the system and make a custom vee with 20 MGs intended to sand blast a unit to death; it's another to have it the base, canon unit of that type.

I think that's part of what turns people off from Infantry, IMO.

But one of many reasons, I think. Heck, in most cases, most ConvINf is drag-and-drop, and only becomes a challenge when one is building a unique unit.

However, when one considers how weak and fragile ConvInf is, and how slow non-Motorized/Mechanized is, the only reason to be having ConvInf in a game is for campaign reasons aside from being cheap Initiative sinks.

[TigerShark]

But one of many reasons, I think. Heck, in most cases, most ConvINf is drag-and-drop, and only becomes a challenge when one is building a unique unit.

However, when one considers how weak and fragile ConvInf is, and how slow non-Motorized/Mechanized is, the only reason to be having ConvInf in a game is for campaign reasons aside from being cheap Initiative sinks.

We play with infantry all of the time in MekWars. I would say I play a minimum of 4 - 5 games/week with it. I can imagine folks eschew them on table top for simplicity sake, but with such abstracted construction simplified, there's not much reason we can't bring them.


It's been a while since I've allowed Conventional platoons to occupy an initiative slot, though. I forget that insane rule still exists in canon. lol Good lord...

[Nicoli]

Well, on the autorifle front... If you use caseless (not the plastic cartridge, which is cool but not quite as good as caseless for max hurt) a 3mm performs roughly double its mm due to no case bloating the diameter.  So a big 9mm futuristic caseless would look like an 18mm rifle round, which would look like a round hitting the gold rings on the 30mm pictured below if chambered in brass instead of caseless.  At that size, if you use a low velocity round (which you have to or you kill the user in autofire) then the slow heavy round can ALSO get some shaped explosive armor piercing nastyness.  THIS autorifle I believe would have a btech .52 damage and range 1/2/3, because that is what the real world rifle looking like that would do.

The name of this real world comparable rifle btw?  Its an automatic light grenade launcher firing at 185 m/s.

So its possible to arm infantry with this kind of weapon today, but the kind of destruction a .52 'generic autorifle' can put out is comprable to an automatic grenade launcher.  Since the weapon is not described as that powerful, then it must be the rifle's stats and damage conversion that are out of whack.  For the same reason the makeshift rifle is .03 damage and is too low, the autorifle at .52 is too high--reload and rapid fire multipliers are the major culprits i think.

As an Armorer and Gunsmith that made me want to slam my head into a sharp pointy object.

Caseless ammunition is pretty much a bad idea, it's been tried, I've tried it... with a very long string and a wall between me and the gun. This is because if your powder charge is not perfectly burned you get to have an explosive go off in your hand while the next round is being loaded. Cartridge size and shape has little to do with the Projectile being used and almost always the mechanical design of the firearm or Magazine. A round's total design is done with an idea on how it is to be used. Larger rounds are heavy, bulky and make the firearm harder to handle, this is why militarys went to smaller rounds with improved powders and gunmetal alloys. It allowed them to tailor the projectile much better to allow soldiers to fire more of them, maintain accuracy, all while being able to carry enough rounds to actually last a fight.

The reason we have infantry doing ablative damage is because instead of redesigning infantry rules from scratch to allow detail, they just kept bolting it onto the existing heavily abstracted rules.

[Nicoli]

Which means what in terms of preventing small arms being able to damage Battletech Armor?  It just seems that you're arguing a level of degree rather than capacity, when what you quoted was simply talking about capacity.  As you noted, even the farthest back one can find Infantry records, even one trooper can do one point of damage (though it used to take more to add more points of damage for the platoon).

To properly recognize just how useless small arms are in modern combat and apply that to Battletech, we'd be looking at something like how Infernos work for Combat Vehicles.  No damage, but a possibility to make a crit (with a decent modifier like a +2 or 3).  This would only apply to Rifles, though, as the higher energy of Machine Guns, lasers, PPC, missiles, and gauss would be easily justifiable in knocking armor off.

Or we could just realize that CBT's way of handling infantry has been built off of an adhoc set of rules and should of had a complete revisit it to it to make proper rules for infantry a long time ago. The only reason we have small arms doing damage to mechs and full combat vehicles is because that is all the rules they had to work with. There is no reason to even waste time looking at the current rules and how to beat the square peg into that round hole to get the rules to work. Just design proper infantry rules and split anti-infantry weapons from full heavy support weapons.

[Daryk]

I think most people are still underestimating what TL C means.  A full platoon of troops with 2AP/3BD, 3-round burst rifles rounds up to (at most) two, 2-point groups of damage.  If only three troopers hit, it's properly zero damage.  THAT is 1980's "small arms".  Bog standard Auto-Rifles are far more powerful than that.  Heck, even the "vintage" assault rifle (also TL C) has a burst of 10 (and still needs three troops to hit to do even 1 point of damage)...

[Hellraiser]

The AR is the least of your worries, really.  Just take a look at any of the stock weapons with an attached grenade launcher.  And don't even look at the MG-42B... 

Those are taken into account with BV & C-Bill costs really.

The ability to dump junk ARs that are cheap in BV & C-Bills onto a couple longer range "support" guns breaks the BV & cost calculations both.

[Daryk]

Even with Field Guns in the mix, the M42B remains an outlier...

[victor_shaw]

The main issue  with the idea of it's higher tech comes in with how these weapons work against infantry take in standard ballistic vest in Mechwarrior. If the weapons have trouble getting through a ballistic vest I don't care how many you fire at a tank, you're not doing anything more than scratching the paint.

[TigerShark]

I can easily show how a pure conventional army can absolutely wipe the map with a Clan force without breaking a sweat (welcome to try it out in MegaMek! It's actually pretty fun lol). Plain infantry are flat-out overpowered. Something should change so that this unit type is a bit more balanced.

I tend to hear "don't be a jerk" in regards to fielding things that are considered broken in the rules. But my reply is usually "don't be lazy". The play-testing is out there and has been for over a decade. It's pretty well-known that infantry are really too useful for the minimal BV they cost. The "sand blast" critical hits, initiative sinking, and dirt cheap missile/artillery spotting can all happen for 1/10 the cost to field a single 'Mech.

[DevianID]

Caseless ammunition is pretty much a bad idea, it's been tried, I've tried it...

I dont doubt Nicoli.  BUT... the fiction (at least what I read) had most of the guns using caseless rounds.  3mm caseless with 80 round mags is a thing they tried in real life, but failed because the powder charge, as your experience tells me, stinks/is dangerous.  The techC weapons seem to have figured this out.
The new plastic cartridge could be just as big a dud as caseless in 10 years, but plastic cased ammo is the future of the 2020s like caseless was the future of the 80s.  Both follow the paradigm of heavier bullet but lighter total cartridge.

That aside, I agree trying to make small arms do damage to a mech is the wrong direction.  Squads should have an antipersonnel damage value and a selection of heavy weapons taken right from the btech stats.

I think most people are still underestimating what TL C means.

  Not me, I likened the autorifle to a light automatic grenade launcher with 30 rounds and 15 burst.  That weapon deletes, and firing 15 rounds in burst without a heavy mount is a joke.  But the damage of 7, keeping the same base weapon but using multiplicative methods, versus 15 using questionable burst+burst trooper addition, puts 7 autorifles at 1 btech machine gun versus 3.5.  I can buy 7 fancy tech c autorifles matching a machine gun, making each 7 man rifle squad have 1 mgun for btech gameplay.  I cant buy 3-4 guys being the equal to a heavy mounted machine gun.

[Daryk]

Recoil is another thing technology can take care of... 

[monbvol]

The main issue  with the idea of it's higher tech comes in with how these weapons work against infantry take in standard ballistic vest in Mechwarrior. If the weapons have trouble getting through a ballistic vest I don't care how many you fire at a tank, you're not doing anything more than scratching the paint.

I now have this amusing image of tank crews grabbing surplus flak jackets and strapping them over every bit of their tank that they can just because it would protect them better against infantry than their actual armor.

[Hellraiser]

LOL.

As mentioned, the real issue is the values given to non-support weapons.

They should all be in the .01-.2 range of power.

Regardless of "reality" I don't have an issue with an infantry platoon doing 5 points of damage at 1 hex range.

28 points out at 15 hexes is an entirely different beast.

They don't need new rules for creating platoons or anything.

They just need to reduce the damage values & then redo how range works so that its like a mixed bay of different range lasers.

The only damage that reaches "Long" range is the weapons that have "Long" as their range.

If the basic AR is .2 & you have 20 of them then its 4 points of damage + whatever support weapon adds on.

I can handle that.

[Nicoli]

I dont doubt Nicoli.  BUT... the fiction (at least what I read) had most of the guns using caseless rounds.  3mm caseless with 80 round mags is a thing they tried in real life, but failed because the powder charge, as your experience tells me, stinks/is dangerous.  The techC weapons seem to have figured this out.
The new plastic cartridge could be just as big a dud as caseless in 10 years, but plastic cased ammo is the future of the 2020s like caseless was the future of the 80s.  Both follow the paradigm of heavier bullet but lighter total cartridge.

Problem with caseless ammo is that you need a perfect powder burn all the time which is just not possible ever because chemical reactions are just not that perfect. Any powder failure risks igniting the following round with an open breach which causes a magazine chain reaction 90% of the time. The thing to do is to use a light stable casing like cellulose that only burns at the temperature of the full exothermic reaction of the powder going off. This protects the powder better then canvas bags or caseless with negligent weight.

That aside, I agree trying to make small arms do damage to a mech is the wrong direction.  Squads should have an antipersonnel damage value and a selection of heavy weapons taken right from the btech stats.

You don't need them straight from the Battle tech stats because infantry aren't going to be carrying around a 1.5 ton LRM or SRM launcher with all the nice auto-loaders. That said there should be a selection of infantry support weapons that either boost their Anti-infantry/light vehicle capability or provide full anti-armor. I'd suggest looking at how Battlefront handles the difference in their games for ideas. Is based the idea to treat each squad like a battle armor unit from them treating platoons as a collection of fire teams not individual soldiers.

Also Infantry weapons need to be culled heavily, seriously bows... I don't have issues with adapting a ruleset to another period but keep them separate. Infantry should have equipment packages, for example "Light", "Standard", "Grenadiers". That package gives you a standard stat line and then you can add support weapons based off the package.

[DevianID]

You don't need them straight from the Battle tech stats because infantry aren't going to be carrying around a 1.5 ton LRM or SRM launcher with all the nice auto-loaders.

  While I agree, the idea of another chart with weapons just to circle back to eventual btech-like stats gets me.

In my mind, a light squad, which weighs .5 tons currently in BTECH, can carry a .5 ton machine gun/light machine gun or .5 ton small laser.  A heavy squad, which weighs 1 ton in BTECH, can carry an SRM-2, or flamer, or medium laser, or heavy machine gun, OR can carry a mgun/LMG/small laser + antimech equipment.  Uses the weights we have now for infantry squads and fits with minimal fuss without creating an additional table of weapons.

I also support squad based deployment.  Fitting platoons inside a hex is not a thing, and fitting multiple friendly and enemy platoons would look like a wall of spartans fighting a wall of immortals--IE not a real battle situation.  There is just enough room for 2 friendly squads and 2 enemy squads in a hex if they are being VERY neighborly.