BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Systems => General BattleTech Discussion => Topic started by: Daemion on 17 February 2018, 01:52:04
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From the Scale and Size thread:
I was under the impression that damage from infantry was mostly dictated by what sort of crew-served or support weapons they are equipped with? So blazing away with your Federated Long Rifle might not do more than scratch the paint & annoy the pilot, but the platoon's support PPCs? A little more effective...
Damon.
I wish it were that way, but enough fiction has the platoon sandblasting. Not only that, but the Infantry Rules from CityTech onward had the damage dropping by number of guys in squad, and it wasn't a large drop. You could wipe out 4 or 5 guys in some instances to see a mere single point drop in platoon damage output.
It was that way under the old BattleDroids rules - infantry platoons only had so many support weapons of a particular type which you might recognize: Small Laser, Machine Gun, or Flamer. While the wording of the rules suggested that a whole squad was wiped out per point of damage, I actually imagine it was the support weapons taking rather accurate or overpowered hits that left each squad/platoon worthless to track for the rest of the board game.
I would have been fine with Mechanized Infantry being looked at as a nebulous number of vehicles, like motorized, if it weren't for wording in Tech Manual which explicitly stated that each platoon had a full vehicle per squad, so I can't look at platoon damage as wiping out a vehicle with a hit, because it varies by weapon damage output. And, you're still dealing with the same life-meter and odd damage devaluation based on number of guys, too.
Tack onto that the weird thing in construction that the mass of Federated long Rifles does the bulk of the damage, but the support weapons give that damage its range in Tech Manual, and that blows the whole notion of the damage simply being the support weapons out of the water with the current set of rules.
Personally, I like the notion of the Support Weapon being the deciding factor for a squad against an armored target. Just think about the original choice for Battle Armor main weapons, how it effectively made each suit as powerful as a squad.
I know what I'd like to see for infantry depiction and rules, and have gone a few steps to make some house rules that play it that way.
So, with that out of the way, I open up the discussion with the question: Does the current ruleset meet your expectation of how infantry should function? How have you always imagined the damage working compared to how it works, numberwise? How deadly do you think the futuristic battlefield of the 31st and 32nd century aught to be for the grunt? Should he be fully covered over to avoid burns and such from stray shots and the like?
Discuss.
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Well...
1) Broad brush, I think infantry functions reasonably under the current rules set, but the lack of consistency between TW and AToW drives me crazy. Paul has previously stated that what drives some of the craziness was an early directive from on high to preserve the infantry tables from Combat Operations. I would prefer the damage conversions working in both directions with a single formula. I'd also prefer to eliminate BA weapons as a class. There is really no good reason not to use infantry support weapons to arm BA. That said, some of the existing BA weapons should be available as infantry support weapons (BA Tube Artillery, I'm looking at you... you're basically an 81mm mortar).
2) How I resolve the actual mechanics of infantry weapons doing damage to heavy vehicles is to imagine the longer range granted by secondary weapons is tied to their ability to provide targeting information to the rest of the squad. The math is less than desirable at the moment, but doesn't have to be. I actually don't have much trouble imagining a futuristic auto-rifle firing ammunition that can damage heavy armor en masse, and even less trouble imagining grenades that can do so. 4AP/4BD with a 15 round burst is designed to be beyond anything we can do today in that small of a package (compare to the vintage weapons). That said, the 5AP/5BD with 20 burst of the Support Machine Gun is quite close to the M2HB.
3/4) Yes, the average grunt needs body armor, without question. "Armor" with less than 5 total BAR across all types of damage (i.e., a divisor of 0.5 per the Companion page 170 conversion rule), yields double damage to infantry.
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So, with that out of the way, I open up the discussion with the question: Does the current ruleset meet your expectation of how infantry should function?
Absolutely not. I think infantry along with a number of the other systems ought to be completely reworked.
How have you always imagined the damage working compared to how it works, numberwise?
I think that Infantry Rifles, from the humble bolt-action rifle, all the way up to the Mauser IIc, ought to deal 0 Damage against Mechs, Combat Vees, and Aerospace. Flat Zero against anything carrying BAR10 armor. Probably against anything carrying BAR5 armor. I think that if infantry platoons want to deal damage against these targets, they should have to be statted out with explicit anti-mech weapons. Likewise, I think the rules for the mech/vee/asf/ba machine guns should change. They should deal 0 damage against real armored targets (bar5+) and deal their actual damage only against unarmored infantry and the weaker side of support vees. In return though, they should get more substantial ranges. But, despite doing 0 damage, they should still register as a "hit" for the purpose of criticals. They should deal their zero damage, with no chance at a Through Armor Crit, but with a chance of dealing a Crit to exposed components, to reflect the way that internal equipment probably wouldn't like having bullets hit it.
How deadly do you think the futuristic battlefield of the 31st and 32nd century aught to be for the grunt? Should he be fully covered over to avoid burns and such from stray shots and the like?
The 31st Century Battlefield ought to be a terrifying place that an unarmored infantryman wants no part of. His role should come in after the mechs and combat vees have done their job.
If you want to make me REALLY happy, there ought to be rules for using the high powered microwave antennas of an ECM suite for anti-infantry purposes. Allow an explicit ECM Suite like the Angel/Guardian/Watchdog/Clan ECM to deal damage against infantry in a manner similar to a flamer, but without starting actual fires, by microwaving the water in an unarmored infantryman's brain and making their heads go all Scanners.
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Absolutely not. I think infantry along with a number of the other systems ought to be completely reworked.
I think that Infantry Rifles, from the humble bolt-action rifle, all the way up to the Mauser IIc, ought to deal 0 Damage against Mechs, Combat Vees, and Aerospace. Flat Zero against anything carrying BAR10 armor. Probably against anything carrying BAR5 armor. I think that if infantry platoons want to deal damage against these targets, they should have to be statted out with explicit anti-mech weapons. Likewise, I think the rules for the mech/vee/asf/ba machine guns should change. They should deal 0 damage against real armored targets (bar5+) and deal their actual damage only against unarmored infantry and the weaker side of support vees. In return though, they should get more substantial ranges. But, despite doing 0 damage, they should still register as a "hit" for the purpose of criticals. They should deal their zero damage, with no chance at a Through Armor Crit, but with a chance of dealing a Crit to exposed components, to reflect the way that internal equipment probably wouldn't like having bullets hit it.
The 31st Century Battlefield ought to be a terrifying place that an unarmored infantryman wants no part of. His role should come in after the mechs and combat vees have done their job.
If you want to make me REALLY happy, there ought to be rules for using the high powered microwave antennas of an ECM suite for anti-infantry purposes. Allow an explicit ECM Suite like the Angel/Guardian/Watchdog/Clan ECM to deal damage against infantry in a manner similar to a flamer, but without starting actual fires, by microwaving the water in an unarmored infantryman's brain and making their heads go all Scanners.
I think infantry should get better weapons, i want swarms of lrms flying from a single platoon.
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Infantry getting better weapons is fair, but they should have to actually carry them. None of this "well, we list an autorifle, but they damage the mech with implied but never detailed equipment" garbage. You want swarms of LRMs from your infantry? Sure, let em lug disposable launchers that fire a LRM. But, they've gotta actually drag it, and any other launchers, across the field, or have a vehicle carrying them.
Get rid of the awkward mechanized platoons and make them actually embark/disembark from explicit vehicles too. Support, combat, or otherwise.
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If they disembarked then they could swarm...is this really what you want lana, to get swarmed? Cause this is how you get swarmed!
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Infantry getting better weapons is fair, but they should have to actually carry them. None of this "well, we list an autorifle, but they damage the mech with implied but never detailed equipment" garbage. You want swarms of LRMs from your infantry? Sure, let em lug disposable launchers that fire a LRM. But, they've gotta actually drag it, and any other launchers, across the field, or have a vehicle carrying them.
I'd like to think if the infantry is in a hex with plenty of ammo, they can be very dangerous. (Troopers just grab another LRM/SRM launcher after firing each volley.)
Leaving the hex (or if it is hit with fire or AoE damage) will reduce the infantry unit to just what it can carry.
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I'm pretty much OK with it. I'd like to see infantry as a useful part of the battlefield, at least under appropriate circumstances, and I can live with the current level of abstraction, even if the way damage is calculated, and how it drops off don't necessarily align with "reality".
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Some days I like to return to the 'infantry=red stains' days whenever the someone makes a 'why are 'mechs kings of the battlefield?' post. TW paints allot of things in broad strokes and no one would use PBI or combined arms if they couldn't inflict significant damage on the battle field so I'm cool with it as is (and it gives MGs a better place in BT)
AToW does a better job with the detail from the infantries point of view in a way that makes sense.
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I'm pretty much OK with it. I'd like to see infantry as a useful part of the battlefield, at least under appropriate circumstances, and I can live with the current level of abstraction, even if the way damage is calculated, and how it drops off don't necessarily align with "reality".
At the end of the day, that's kind of the issue too. There's a distinct difference between 'simulation' and 'game', and the latter relies more on abstraction and streamlining to keep things moving and fun as opposed to the realism and detail of the former. I'm all for house-ruling if you don't like how rules are set up- I know my group used to use more than a few, and so long as everyone is aware of the changed rules, go nuts. But, at the end of the day I'm not sure that overhauling infantry (again) is a great idea- they're much tougher than the used to be (not saying much, granted!), without making things a lot more complex and time-consuming, and I'm not sure there's much to be done to keep that time management problem from ballooning if you make changes now. Let's be real- this is already a slow-moving and detail-oriented game, and having niche units (by that I mean non-Mechs) become bigger time drains likely won't help encourage people to want to use those units.
Then again, I'm also open to being proven wrong, so if you have good ideas for alternate rules, post them down in the board game section of the forums and let's see what you have. (Which is Hellbie-speak for 'don't put them here', of course ;) )
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Absolutely not. I think infantry along with a number of the other systems ought to be completely reworked.
I think that Infantry Rifles, from the humble bolt-action rifle, all the way up to the Mauser IIc, ought to deal 0 Damage against Mechs, Combat Vees, and Aerospace. Flat Zero against anything carrying BAR10 armor. Probably against anything carrying BAR5 armor. I think that if infantry platoons want to deal damage against these targets, they should have to be statted out with explicit anti-mech weapons. Likewise, I think the rules for the mech/vee/asf/ba machine guns should change. They should deal 0 damage against real armored targets (bar5+) and deal their actual damage only against unarmored infantry and the weaker side of support vees. In return though, they should get more substantial ranges. But, despite doing 0 damage, they should still register as a "hit" for the purpose of criticals. They should deal their zero damage, with no chance at a Through Armor Crit, but with a chance of dealing a Crit to exposed components, to reflect the way that internal equipment probably wouldn't like having bullets hit it.
The 31st Century Battlefield ought to be a terrifying place that an unarmored infantryman wants no part of. His role should come in after the mechs and combat vees have done their job.
This. I have my own house rules for infantry which are shockingly similar to this. Infantry can only damage BattleMechs and armored vehicles with specifically identified support weapons. This can be modified and abstracted to a degree by using "mechanized infantry" which, to my thinking, assumes the APC/IFV transports mount said support weapons. Field guns are another option that make infantry significantly more effective against 'Mechs and armor and can be towed by mechanized infantry.
Not sure about the fundamental change to the "machine gun" stats, though.
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Does the current ruleset meet your expectation of how infantry should function?
Yes, with no reservations. Infantry are fun to use, and having fun is the primary purpose of this game. How have you always imagined the damage working compared to how it works, numberwise?
I've always imagined damage from infantry being based on shot grouping. To-hit rolls and cluster rolls aren't about actually hitting the building-sized robot right in front of you, they're about coordinating with the guys right next to you so that your shots land in the same spot to combine their effects and deal that one or two points of damage. Failure on the to-hit or cluster roll doesn't mean you missed the mech, it means your shots went off and hit some random armor plate on their own, and weren't enough to have any effect. Yes, I'm aware that there are edge cases that don't fit in that. It's a game, I don't let it bother me.How deadly do you think the futuristic battlefield of the 31st and 32nd century aught to be for the grunt?
As deadly as the rules make it. You make the game fun to play, and only after that do you adjust the narrative to fit the game. This isn't an rpg, the narrative does not come first.
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Never liked the current mechanized infantry conceptually. I’d rather vehicles follow vehicle rules and not be abstracted as another unit type with additional rules to bridge the gap.
On one hand I agree with Weirdo that infantry are fun and usable in their current form. I might tweak the rules to make the tables more uniform with other aspects of the game.
On the other, I am bothered that the Lords of the Battlefield™️ are susceptible to piddly small arms fire. Maybe bothered is strong. Is there an overly specific compound word in German for something like “only mild annoyance as when a fly lands on your fork”?
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Never liked the current mechanized infantry conceptually. I’d rather vehicles follow vehicle rules and not be abstracted as another unit type with additional rules to bridge the gap.
On one hand I agree with Weirdo that infantry are fun and usable in their current form. I might tweak the rules to make the tables more uniform with other aspects of the game.
On the other, I am bothered that the Lords of the Battlefield™️ are susceptible to piddly small arms fire. Maybe bothered is strong. Is there an overly specific compound word in German for something like “only mild annoyance as when a fly lands on your fork”?
I'm 100% with Weirdo on this one, more options for unit types is not a bad thing! Sure, your infantry is weak compared to mechs, but even the oldest sourcebooks state that infantry can be the deciding factor on the battlefield indicating that every unit has it's place.
The rules already place enough emphasis on mechs, they don't need to down grade any other units further tyvm.
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But, at the end of the day I'm not sure that overhauling infantry (again) is a great idea- they're much tougher than the used to be (not saying much, granted!), without making things a lot more complex and time-consuming, and I'm not sure there's much to be done to keep that time management problem from ballooning if you make changes now. Let's be real- this is already a slow-moving and detail-oriented game, and having niche units (by that I mean non-Mechs) become bigger time drains likely won't help encourage people to want to use those units.
Then again, I'm also open to being proven wrong, so if you have good ideas for alternate rules, post them down in the board game section of the forums and let's see what you have. (Which is Hellbie-speak for 'don't put them here', of course ;) )
I was gonna say. There have been good ideas put up down there, like removing the weird to-hit gunnery and messing with the cluster chart instead, or working damage by squad support weapon, and having armored units attacking those instead of amorphous mobs.
I think you are wrong about the detail and slow thing when it comes to infantry. The real issue is what detail are you going to focus on that can still make them believable when you let the gameplay make a picture in your mind's eye? It really is a matter of simply changing styles, which means the tracking bodies thing might be what should have been put on the wayside.
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Never liked the current mechanized infantry conceptually. I’d rather vehicles follow vehicle rules and not be abstracted as another unit type with additional rules to bridge the gap.
This 100%. I don't see why a game so detailed it simulates the effects of damage to individual parts of individual limbs just handwaves a whole vehicle.
Also small arms should not damage mechs, and should not damage armoured vehicles either.
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Interesting how people are so firm about the in-universe performance of fictional firearms from a thousand years in the future, especially against armor plating that does not exist in any form in the real world.
I can only presume there's some source out there showing how they'd perform, probably followed by the results of Chobham vs phaser tests. Can anyone link me to this source?
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I mean, a federated long rifle is basically an AR family weapon with a germanium based KF bolt carrier group, since it has no buffer tube to retreat into. Pick any flavor of AR you like, and shoot at an Abrams tank for as long as you like. You aren't getting through.
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How do you factor the thousand years of materials/propellant/other advances, or the fact that the Abrams' armor bears little to no resemblance to Battletech armor?
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Well, I'm going off apocryphal mentions of things like a small laser being a credible threat to a modern MBT. If a small laser can slag an Abrams, and BT armor is only taking minor amounts of damage, I can surmise that it's incredibly unlikely that they've crammed anything near equivalent into a rifle cartridge. And if they have, I would be afraid to fire that from only sixteen to twenty inches away from my unarmored face.
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I think BT rifles are very different from todays, as most seem to be heavier. My AR is just over 7 lbs while the long rifle is 10, and most other in the game are heavier still.
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How do you factor the thousand years of materials/propellant/other advances, or the fact that the Abrams' armor bears little to no resemblance to Battletech armor?
Two reasons.
First, we've got several references to the performance and materials of rifles in the Battletech universe. One I'm specifically thinking of is the assassination of Ryan Steiner, where the shooter goes through the calculations for shooting through the bulletproof glass, distance, etc. There are other scattered references in different books as well, and all of them generally portray rifles as roughly equivalent to modern day weapons. The Federated Long Rifle isn't really any better than an M-16 when it comes to shooting people. And remember, you don't really want extreme penetration when it comes to anti-infantry weapons. If your bullet has enough energy to go right through the guy and the brick wall behind him, then you've included too much propellant. You could have more rounds in a smaller package if you cut back to only what was necessary to kill the target.
Second, it's dumb. Guys killing mechs with assault rifles not only goes against our modern beliefs of how war is supposed to work, it goes against the "Kings of the Battlefield" role that mechs are supposed to fulfill. It breaks suspension of disbelief.
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There's also the notion that you can fire it while on the move. That one MP in BT over 10 seconds is a dang fast run, and you're still trying to coordinate with your squaddies to line up a shot on a specific spot so that all your bullets hit to score as damage?
At a full run?
And, yet, the game allows it. They can move and shoot with light weapons.
That suggests gear that isn't mentioned in any write-up of BT infantry I've ever come across, like gyro-stabilized harnesses.
You ever watch the old Ghost in the Shell anime? There was a moment when a perp being chased by the Major loads some advanced propellant rounds into his gun. He has to stop and brace himself to keep from being knocked over, and he still slides back a few inches. That's what advanced propellants will do in your fire-arm. Better propellants means more force against you, harder recoil, and thus a significant decrease in accuracy.
Mech Ballistic weaponry seam to have recoil compensation built in, a guess as to why autocannons weigh so much compared to modern cannons in MBTs. People don't.
I can see an autocannon, appropriately designed and braced, landing a lot of its rounds home to a small area just fine. I have a hard time seeing that with a group of guys spread out all over, some in various stages of motion at the call to fire. Under the older rules, I could see why even laser weapons could knock out a squad or so as simple direct energy weapons. The coordination required to line up a grouped shot from infantry would leave them vulnerable to that kind of retaliation in the moment they opened up.
The Total Warfare rules certainly suggest a more dynamic, fluid deployment of the platoon in a hex, but, the execution of their attack seems a bit too effective for that dynamism.
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As I stated before (not in these words, obviously), I'm with Weirdo on this one.
Current firearms have been given stats as the "vintage" weapons in the Companion, and they're significantly weaker than their 31st century counterparts.
I explicitly said my interpretation of the extended ranges of auto-rifles and other primary weapons when paired with longer ranged secondary weapons was down to sharing improved targeting information. If you look at any of the faction armor kits, you see they all have relatively sophisticated communications built into their helmets, and more than one picture of them includes some kind of optical display (the one that springs immediately to mind was one of the old Lyran pictures). It's a small step from this kind of information extending effective range to enabling effective damage to extremely complex machines with plenty of joints and other weak spots.
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A few things are unnecessary complex. I would like to see that small arms do no damage to BAR5-8+ Armor.
And that simply BA weapons are used as support weapons, we just need a different calculation of squad platoon carry capacity.
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As I stated before (not in these words, obviously), I'm with Weirdo on this one.
Current firearms have been given stats as the "vintage" weapons in the Companion, and they're significantly weaker than their 31st century counterparts.
I explicitly said my interpretation of the extended ranges of auto-rifles and other primary weapons when paired with longer ranged secondary weapons was down to sharing improved targeting information. If you look at any of the faction armor kits, you see they all have relatively sophisticated communications built into their helmets, and more than one picture of them includes some kind of optical display (the one that springs immediately to mind was one of the old Lyran pictures). It's a small step from this kind of information extending effective range to enabling effective damage to extremely complex machines with plenty of joints and other weak spots.
I would be perfectly okay with that if that was something explicitly talked about in the infantryman's kit make-up. It suggests something else that isn't talked about - smart/homing rounds. But, point me to a page in any book describing infantry kit - do they have homing rounds for their front line infantry? Certainly would have been a great starting point for precision AC rounds, don't you think?
But, if that's the case, then the older BMR application of infantry damage as one large grouping or 5-point clusters would make more sense than the purely rules-bound for BAR sake 2-point clusters.
And, this also is forgetting something we seem to often forget as well, Mechs (and other armored units, but especially Mechs) are constantly moving, aren't really the plodding 'stompy' robots that people talk about them as. It's hard to target the 'weak' knee joint while it's on a pumping limb that doesn't seem to stop except for intermittent breaks in movement for whatever reason. And, I haven't even gotten into the supposition that there might be some sort of defensive algorithm or program that helps the Mech detect incoming shots, where they'll probably land, and turn a glancing, better protected face into that attack, thus letting the armor deflect the energies like it's designed to do.
And, lets not forget the ambient ECM that all war machines and units are putting up to make such targeted attacks difficult.
See, the real problem that we're facing is that nobody in charge has bravened up to actually come up with some final guidelines on how to interpret how advanced the BT setting is. The rules are schizophrenic when it comes to infantry and armor and their interaction with Mechs and buildings because there's no final word on how that should be reflected in the setting's gear, and how the settings gear should be reflected in even an abstract fashion for game rules.
The statement in Total Warfare that rules are rules, fiction is fiction, and art is art, is erroneous, or we wouldn't have people throwing fits over the placement of the Marauder's dorsal gun, the fact the Behemoth only has one, or the placement of the LRM Tube on the T-Bolt.
I certainly didn't, because I saw the placement as cosmetic, and that the bulk of the cannon for the Marauder probably simply extended into the right torso from the base of the gun, right where the ammo feed split away into the left torso. Or, some weapons, like the Atlas's hip-mounted LRM, are rapid-firing the appropriate number of missiles/beams. I had no problem with that, but later artists started adhering to the placement of the weapon on the table for a Mech being the deciding factor of the placement of the barrel opening on the picture. So, they certainly did.
I have no problem imagining that infantry weapons - specifically those armed for front line engagements with advanced armored units like Mechs - are able to fire rounds to sandblast away at the armor. There's special gear required for that though, and most likely training, as well. A level of coordination that you don't get with green troops. And, combat losses would hamper that unit ever getting very far. I have no problem with the notion that support weapons could increase the effective reach of said weapons by acting as a homing corridor, or weakening the armor enough that the hits have better chances of scoring damage.
But, the problem lies, then, in the fictional depiction of infantry, if that's the case. And, there still needs to be some tweaking with the rules, because that at least suggests the support weapons should be capable of great damage on their own, and not merely supplementation to the hailstorm.
And, if people have a hard time with that, and insist on infantry light weaponry not being very effective against futuristic armor, which I can also get behind, and that the fictional depiction of infantry kit is what we should adhere to, then the rules have to change.
I'm actually kind of fond of the 3rd option - that both are true. That the typical infantryman we've seen depicted in BT is the large rank and file, but what we see on the board is something outside that depiction, something truly special.
And, I'm with all the people having issues with the way Mechanized Infantry works. That's too big a disconnect, too abstract.
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As I stated before (not in these words, obviously), I'm with Weirdo on this one.
Current firearms have been given stats as the "vintage" weapons in the Companion, and they're significantly weaker than their 31st century counterparts.
I explicitly said my interpretation of the extended ranges of auto-rifles and other primary weapons when paired with longer ranged secondary weapons was down to sharing improved targeting information. If you look at any of the faction armor kits, you see they all have relatively sophisticated communications built into their helmets, and more than one picture of them includes some kind of optical display (the one that springs immediately to mind was one of the old Lyran pictures). It's a small step from this kind of information extending effective range to enabling effective damage to extremely complex machines with plenty of joints and other weak spots.
If it were that simple you wouldn't need the support weapon at all, just the targeting gear/computer. Which there are a number of ways to get without having to lug around a big support weapon.
My main issue with infantry is that the way Total Warfare and Tech Manual sets the damages and ranges of the guns it does tend to make some weapons a bit too good, especially against armor. Thus leaving me scratching my head why I should take certain weapons.
A particularly glaring example in my mind is the semi portable autocannon. A Time of War stats say it is better against armor with an AP of 6. BD is 3 and a burst of 25/-2 is possible. So it should be a bit more reliable at hurting mechs than the autorifle and pretty devastating against enemy infantry. Yet bring it to Total Warfare/Tech Manual and it doesn't offer any range benefits over the autorifle and thanks to it's crew of 2 it actually has a per person damage of 0.385 leaving it worse at everything.
In other words if autorifles are this good then why aren't other things better.
A few things are unnecessary complex. I would like to see that small arms do no damage to BAR5-8+ Armor.
And that simply BA weapons are used as support weapons, we just need a different calculation of squad platoon carry capacity.
At the very least the implications need to be changed more in favor of having the right support weapons for the right role.
I would be perfectly okay with that if that was something explicitly talked about in the infantryman's kit make-up. It suggests something else that isn't talked about - smart/homing rounds. But, point me to a page in any book describing infantry kit - do they have homing rounds for their front line infantry? Certainly would have been a great starting point for precision AC rounds, don't you think?
But, if that's the case, then the older BMR application of infantry damage as one large grouping or 5-point clusters would make more sense than the purely rules-bound for BAR sake 2-point clusters.
And, this also is forgetting something we seem to often forget as well, Mechs (and other armored units, but especially Mechs) are constantly moving, aren't really the plodding 'stompy' robots that people talk about them as. It's hard to target the 'weak' knee joint while it's on a pumping limb that doesn't seem to stop except for intermittent breaks in movement for whatever reason. And, I haven't even gotten into the supposition that there might be some sort of defensive algorithm or program that helps the Mech detect incoming shots, where they'll probably land, and turn a glancing, better protected face into that attack, thus letting the armor deflect the energies like it's designed to do.
And, lets not forget the ambient ECM that all war machines and units are putting up to make such targeted attacks difficult.
See, the real problem that we're facing is that nobody in charge has bravened up to actually come up with some final guidelines on how to interpret how advanced the BT setting is. The rules are schizophrenic when it comes to infantry and armor and their interaction with Mechs and buildings because there's no final word on how that should be reflected in the setting's gear, and how the settings gear should be reflected in even an abstract fashion for game rules.
The statement in Total Warfare that rules are rules, fiction is fiction, and art is art, is erroneous, or we wouldn't have people throwing fits over the placement of the Marauder's dorsal gun, the fact the Behemoth only has one, or the placement of the LRM Tube on the T-Bolt.
I certainly didn't, because I saw the placement as cosmetic, and that the bulk of the cannon for the Marauder probably simply extended into the right torso from the base of the gun, right where the ammo feed split away into the left torso. Or, some weapons, like the Atlas's hip-mounted LRM, are rapid-firing the appropriate number of missiles/beams. I had no problem with that, but later artists started adhering to the placement of the weapon on the table for a Mech being the deciding factor of the placement of the barrel opening on the picture. So, they certainly did.
I have no problem imagining that infantry weapons - specifically those armed for front line engagements with advanced armored units like Mechs - are able to fire rounds to sandblast away at the armor. There's special gear required for that though, and most likely training, as well. A level of coordination that you don't get with green troops. And, combat losses would hamper that unit ever getting very far. I have no problem with the notion that support weapons could increase the effective reach of said weapons by acting as a homing corridor, or weakening the armor enough that the hits have better chances of scoring damage.
But, the problem lies, then, in the fictional depiction of infantry, if that's the case. And, there still needs to be some tweaking with the rules, because that at least suggests the support weapons should be capable of great damage on their own, and not merely supplementation to the hailstorm.
And, if people have a hard time with that, and insist on infantry light weaponry not being very effective against futuristic armor, which I can also get behind, and that the fictional depiction of infantry kit is what we should adhere to, then the rules have to change.
I'm actually kind of fond of the 3rd option - that both are true. That the typical infantryman we've seen depicted in BT is the large rank and file, but what we see on the board is something outside that depiction, something truly special.
And, I'm with all the people having issues with the way Mechanized Infantry works. That's too big a disconnect, too abstract.
There are certainly a lot of issues in the game that are clearly artifacts of things tacked on after the fact that we're supposed to pretend were always there or worked the way they do now. The interaction of infantry, combat vehicles, mechs, and buildings are certainly one of those things.
As far as disconnects of fluff and rules I tend to be of the mind that players should be able to re-create scenes and actions from the fluff as much as possible otherwise it is pointless to have any link between the fluff and the game. Which includes artists should place weaponry correctly in the art.
Mechanized infantry, yeah having a proper vehicle with it's own record sheet instead of this weird abstraction we have now that adds unnecessary special case rules would be much better.
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Just my 2 Cents: Infantry should be way less complicated. But that´s a general Battletech issue. Furthermore, infantry with hand lasers and rifles shouldn´t be able to damage mechs and tanks. There is so much rule stuff I would boil down because its to cumbersome.
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If it were that simple you wouldn't need the support weapon at all, just the targeting gear/computer. Which there are a number of ways to get without having to lug around a big support weapon.
My main issue with infantry is that the way Total Warfare and Tech Manual sets the damages and ranges of the guns it does tend to make some weapons a bit too good, especially against armor. Thus leaving me scratching my head why I should take certain weapons.
A particularly glaring example in my mind is the semi portable autocannon. A Time of War stats say it is better against armor with an AP of 6. BD is 3 and a burst of 25/-2 is possible. So it should be a bit more reliable at hurting mechs than the autorifle and pretty devastating against enemy infantry. Yet bring it to Total Warfare/Tech Manual and it doesn't offer any range benefits over the autorifle and thanks to it's crew of 2 it actually has a per person damage of 0.385 leaving it worse at everything.
In other words if autorifles are this good then why aren't other things better.
At the very least the implications need to be changed more in favor of having the right support weapons for the right role.
Auto-rifles show a rather serious hiccup in the damage conversion formula. The assumption of the formula seems to be that the weapon is firing at its full rate of 15 every time it's used by infantry in BT, but the reload factor is still going by the number of rounds in the mag (30) instead of the number of bursts per mag (2), and may only suffice for one turn's worth of fire, since infantry weapons have to fire more often than heavy weapons in order to deal damage. If you went by bursts instead of rounds, the auto-rifle would end up as a mere .10 damage per trooper, at best.
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Interesting how people are so firm about the in-universe performance of fictional firearms from a thousand years in the future, especially against armor plating that does not exist in any form in the real world.
I can only presume there's some source out there showing how they'd perform, probably followed by the results of Chobham vs phaser tests. Can anyone link me to this source?
Battleships were phased out because smaller, cheaper platforms (torpedoes, aircraft) could defeat them. The same would apply to the Battlemech: If you can disable it with sustained rifle fire, why build it in the first place? You could just go buy a whole heap more rifles instead.
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Auto-rifles show a rather serious hiccup in the damage conversion formula. The assumption of the formula seems to be that the weapon is firing at its full rate of 15 every time it's used by infantry in BT, but the reload factor is still going by the number of rounds in the mag (30) instead of the number of bursts per mag (2), and may only suffice for one turn's worth of fire, since infantry weapons have to fire more often than heavy weapons in order to deal damage. If you went by bursts instead of rounds, the auto-rifle would end up as a mere .10 damage per trooper, at best.
I've pointed out that particular problem (http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=59236.0) several times, and even posted the "AR+ (http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=58726.0)" down in fan rules to fix it.
Battleships were phased out because smaller, cheaper platforms (torpedoes, aircraft) could defeat them. The same would apply to the Battlemech: If you can disable it with sustained rifle fire, why build it in the first place? You could just go buy a whole heap more rifles instead.
Mobility. Battlemechs (especially LAMs) are vastly more mobile than anything you can stuff infantry into (since they can't be stuffed into a 'mech). And as others have pointed out here, the unique way 'mechs can survive destruction of their component parts gives them a survivability edge.
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Auto-rifles show a rather serious hiccup in the damage conversion formula. The assumption of the formula seems to be that the weapon is firing at its full rate of 15 every time it's used by infantry in BT, but the reload factor is still going by the number of rounds in the mag (30) instead of the number of bursts per mag (2), and may only suffice for one turn's worth of fire, since infantry weapons have to fire more often than heavy weapons in order to deal damage. If you went by bursts instead of rounds, the auto-rifle would end up as a mere .10 damage per trooper, at best.
There is a logic to using the full magazine size for the reload factor though.
The trouble for me is the way burst fire is handled and the implication that you can just throw more bullets at armor and it'll work out.
It just creates an implication that mech armor is way too easy to beat that doesn't mesh well with what we've been told for decades about how good it is supposed to be.
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It's been known for a long time that mech armor is ludicrously good against high-velocity penetrators, but vulnerable to broad low-velocity hits or repeated hammering on one spot. Infantry take advantage of the latter, mech fists and melee weapons the former.
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It's been known for a long time that mech armor is ludicrously good against high-velocity penetrators, but vulnerable to broad low-velocity hits or repeated hammering on one spot. Infantry take advantage of the latter, mech fists and melee weapons the former.
No. That's an excuse people came up with to justify letting infantry weapons hurt mechs. Nothing more.
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No justification is needed. Infantry weapons hurt mechs, that is an unquestionable fact. If they didn't, Total War and a lot of rulebooks before it would be worded very differently.
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Except bullets from autorifles are not particularly massive and still have a decent velocity.
As far as descriptions of infantry I prefered the older implications. That even though it was called a rifle platoon it still had abstracted support weapons, grenades, satchel charges, disposable vlaws that were doing the damage instead.
So I don't have an issue with infantry as a unit type being able to be effective against armor, I have issue with the support weapons being so optional to do so under the current regime.
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As far as disconnects of fluff and rules I tend to be of the mind that players should be able to re-create scenes and actions from the fluff as much as possible otherwise it is pointless to have any link between the fluff and the game. Which includes artists should place weaponry correctly in the art.
This pretty much sums up what I'm looking for out of the game - not only that I can play out a game from the fiction, but I can narrate, in my own mind, the outcome of a game as well.
Basically, I'm looking for a narrative that the rules adhere to. We get that with Mechs. We get that with Tanks. We get it with Aerospace. But, Infantry rules don't have a coherent narrative.
I don't mind what narrative, as long as the one the rules conform to is logically followable.
If the support weapon is the reason why ranges are the way they are in a game of armored combat, then it stands to reason that infantry should have the possibility of losing that capacity early just as having it to the last man standing.
And, if support weapons are responsible for a large portion of a squad's damage, then there should be large drops in the Platoon's damage output when one is lost. Conversely, if there are only 4 support weapons and the damage output is much greater than 8, it stands to reason there should be shot groupings bigger than 2.
Here's a narrative that has defined BattleTech for me:
Every other combat unit in BattleTech is subject to the random loss of functionality before it's destroyed. Mechs have locations with weapons, mobility, power output, which get damaged or destroyed. Tanks and Aerospace have tables and external damage effects which can equally leave them immobile, out of control, down a few weapons and so on. It's consistent that no game will ever be consistent in outcome due to that.
Infantry are somehow devoid of that? Even in an environment with ambient ecm, there seems to be an implied accuracy required and that any support weapon can be picked off rather easily. Can't hit the guy directly? Most weapons seem to be powerful enough that all you have to do is get in his vicinity. And, then there are the indiscriminate attacks like artillery, High-Ex Missile Clusters, special explosive munitions.
If every other combat unit is subject to random critical effects, it stands to reason an amorphous infantry mob should be, too. They don't lose mobility, but they have something to lose in the small handful of support weapons they carry. They would lose range and/or damage output. Maybe be prone to stunning after a particularly horrendous attack while the survivors regroup and relegate a guard or two to watch after the wounded, and somebody unhooks the support weapon harness from Bazooka Joe to take over that role, since Joe lost his leg, but his weapon is still functioning.
A lot details of the narrative don't have to be tracked in the rules for the game, but if you follow the rules for a unit through construction and other aspects, a person should be able to paint a clear picture in their head what's happening, and fiction can expound on this.
That's why I have a hard time with the new Mechanized Infantry Rules. The narrative doesn't work.
I would have been fine assuming they were simply another form of Nebulous Motorized with an unspecified amount of vehicles that had a very specific motive type. That was undone by the blurb in TechManual about each squad having a single vehicle, making for a specific 4 vehicles per platoon. I could imagine that an AC20 was knocking out a jeep with 4 men in it when it hit the platoon out in the open, because it was plastering the jeep they were in and rendering the group a mission kill. That's not possible with only 4 vehicles in a platoon.
That's why I look askance on the fact that there are rapid fire weapons (ACs) that are only capable of taking out one guy, maybe two if they're out in the open which are strong enough to punch a hole in a big tank. If each guy in the platoon is armored up enough that it takes that kind of concentrated fire to take out one, or maybe two, then how is it that flechette AC and Missile Munitions are able to do better? Surely the force with which a single AC bullet hits a guy is more than enough to send him flying and render him out of action for the duration of the battle. I have no problem imagining an AC is able to spread the love just as readily as a machine gun. Maybe not in 2d6 volume, but some of them should come pretty close.
What about LRMs using High Explosive warheads? And, yet only a cluster of five can take out a single trooper, maybe two if they're caught in the open.
A laser swept across a group of guys can't find enough weak spots in their armor, and so has to focus on taking out one guy, but a spray of plastic darts can do the job? A high-powered super-magnifying lense that is a laser can't hit a fairly decent number of guys, and merely cook them in passing, but a flamer can do the job?
Now, I expect some limitation to weapons that are dedicated to focused attacks on armored targets having some limitations in the number of guys they can take out, but not down to just one. The 'flechettes' I have some mild qualms against, but should allow for an AC to do more mission-kill casualties against people not wearing the fancy front line armor. They shouldn't be there just so you can have a reason for an alternate munition which plays the system that was derived. (They simply allow ACs to do full their full damage against conventional infantry, and unrandomized like most other anti-infantry weapons are.)
(Btw, LB-X cluster pellets are supposed to be explosive in their own right. They're not merely grapeshot, so I can give them a pass as effective anti-infantry weapons against front line troops on the 25th to 31st century battlefield.)
The narrative with infantry fails. That's what I want to see fixed.
(Aside: The narrative of randomized effects and damage is also why I had issues with Dark Age, especially with the singular combat dial for Mechs. Knowing that in a game of BT, a Mech could be stripped of all its armor and down to its last Internal Point in each location and still be fully functional, or have an arm and legs knocked off rendering it useless though it's far from destroyed made the repetitive and predictable combat dial 'not BattleTech enough' for me.)
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The rules foir infantry are a conceit to keep them relevant. I would have preferred if infantry had 2 damage values: one against other infantry, and another against armored targets. It's weird that just a few kgs can be effective; anti-armor weaponry ought to be very heavy.
Put another way, take a Hunchback and install 14 tons of auto rifles on it. Presume 8kg of rifle to account for mounting hardware.
That's 1750 rifles. 910 damage.
Infantry weapon rules are dumb.
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Battleships were phased out because smaller, cheaper platforms (torpedoes, aircraft) could defeat them. The same would apply to the Battlemech: If you can disable it with sustained rifle fire, why build it in the first place? You could just go buy a whole heap more rifles instead.
Indeed. The state of the game is predicated on a reversal of the current technological realities relating to the relationship of firepower>defenses.
Yeah you can field a hundred peasant levies for the resources it takes to train a single quality man-at-arms, but that trained man-at-arms with quality weapons and armor would defeat a hundred untrained, unarmored farmers with sharpened rakes and shovels. The BTU game requires the same sort of thing in order for mechs to reign supreme.
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That's already the case. Have you tried to take infantry against a Mechwarrior that's actually competent and doesn't ignore them as irrelevant? The mech definitely had the advantage.
While mechs work great when supported by other stuff, they can operate solo. Infantry are useful as part of a team. Solo, they are just meat.
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The rules foir infantry are a conceit to keep them relevant. I would have preferred if infantry had 2 damage values: one against other infantry, and another against armored targets. It's weird that just a few kgs can be effective; anti-armor weaponry ought to be very heavy.
Put another way, take a Hunchback and install 14 tons of auto rifles on it. Presume 8kg of rifle to account for mounting hardware.
That's 1750 rifles. 910 damage.
Infantry weapon rules are dumb.
[takes notes furiously]
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Yeah two damage ratings and perhaps two range brackets as well would do a lot to solve the current battlemech, combat vehicle, infantry, and buildings dynamics.
And Paul's post does kind of point out something else why it needs to be the support weapons and not the primary arms of infantry that are the primary contributors of anti armor capability in a roundabout fashion.
If autorifles are that effective against mech armor then why are mech machine guns so poor against mech armor? Their 2d6 versus infantry gives them pretty close anti infantry performance as a rifle foot platoon firing at other PBIs without special armor. At 5kg they are actually spitting out more throw weight than a rifle platoon and that could potentially mean fewer individual rounds but bigger or it could mean the same rounds but more of them or some combination/compromise of those two factors.
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[takes notes furiously]
Not only is the damage insane, so is the improvement in range (http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=26600.msg620459#msg620459) over mech weapons!
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I think that other thread does raise some fair questions and does help point out some of the problems of the current approach.
It also raises an interesting consideration of how to keep infantry relevant while answering some of these questions.
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Just a little interesting perspective on Infantry Platoons.
Someone always suggested that Infantry should be deployed as squads. Having played around with infantry minis with Mechs, I agree.
Pictures tell a thousand words, and I posted some in the minis forum (http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=60522.msg1388613#msg1388613) showing how they look to an appropriately scaled hex for 1/285 scale.
Stacking is an issue with full platoons.
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I think that does point out some of the problem. The inconsistency of the whole mess.
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My whole issue is that 1.) people want to treat Infantry like another Armor unit and 2.) If you can't, people won't use them.
My ideal has been using infantry as part of a objective. Need to capture a building, your going to need infantry so your Mechs better maker sure they don't get squashed by enemy armor. Hidden infantry spotting for artillery? Better find them before that Arty hits something important.
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Squad deployment FTW! O0
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The rules foir infantry are a conceit to keep them relevant. I would have preferred if infantry had 2 damage values: one against other infantry, and another against armored targets. It's weird that just a few kgs can be effective; anti-armor weaponry ought to be very heavy.
Put another way, take a Hunchback and install 14 tons of auto rifles on it. Presume 8kg of rifle to account for mounting hardware.
That's 1750 rifles. 910 damage.
Infantry weapon rules are dumb.
That illustrates perfectly my problem with infantry damage. It just feels very wrong.
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Critical spaces take care of that problem, as well as medium laser spam.
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Except we don't really have a lot to go off of for how many infantry weapons you can get per critical on a mech. What little we do have is focused on smaller support vehicles and thus may not translate in the same way.
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Wait a minute.
An M1 Abrams can't harm a 'Mech with it's main gun, but a platoon of soldiers can with M-4s?
And if I'm understanding this correctly, a platoon of soldiers can shred an M1 with M-4s?
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They're not M4s. M4s would be something less than the "vintage" assault rifle in the Companion.
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Well that comes back to the lack of consistency I mentioned.
At one point the fluff was pretty clear that modern tank guns were ineffective against full fledged mech armor.
Then the primitive Rifle Cannons were introduced and there were some suggestions that the M1 Abrams could be using the Medium, perhaps even Heavy Rifle Cannons. Both of which while not super effective are damaging enough that some of the early fictional accounts of what the Mackie was supposed to be capable of no longer jived with the game rules.
Strictly speaking yes Battletech has armor of technological sophistication that it wouldn't be out of place in the early 21st century but thanks to how damage is modeled/handled it still isn't really the same thing and behaves very differently.
As pointed out there are stats in the A Time of War Companion for vintage autorifles(still not M4s possibly) and yes they can potentially hurt even the most sophisticated armors.
So I'm not sure if it is fair to say Battletech allows M4s and the like to eventually take down an M1 Abrams. But it does imply you can give a bunch of guys even dated fire arms and enough ammo and they will take out an Atlas. Sure the Atlas should leave a rather large mess on the field but if you're bloody minded enough and have the troops and gear it is possible.
Heck it is possible to give enough people clubs and they will eventually be able to take down an Atlas.
The worst part to me is the designers can't even claim preserving stats either as many got changed going to Total Warfare/Tech Manual.
Which leaves us with Infantry that are deadlier, more durable, and less reliant on support weapons to be effective on a Battletech battlefield.
To be fair I do need to grant there are a good number of support weapons that are pretty good in their own right but the issue for me is how the damage is figured for infantry still makes the primary arm of the unit the dominant contributor for how good the infantry is at taking out enemy armor and mechs. Which just doesn't sit well with me.
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They're not M4s. M4s would be something less than the "vintage" assault rifle in the Companion.
I was assuming M4s. I used a Korvin as a stand-in for an Abrams, although I suspect the Korvin is better armored. I cut the damage of the infantry in half, which is far less than the vintage auto rifle that I suspect is a fair stand-in for an M4.
Korvin didn't last 1 minute.
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If it were that simple you wouldn't need the support weapon at all, just the targeting gear/computer. Which there are a number of ways to get without having to lug around a big support weapon.
My main issue with infantry is that the way Total Warfare and Tech Manual sets the damages and ranges of the guns it does tend to make some weapons a bit too good, especially against armor. Thus leaving me scratching my head why I should take certain weapons.
A particularly glaring example in my mind is the semi portable autocannon. A Time of War stats say it is better against armor with an AP of 6. BD is 3 and a burst of 25/-2 is possible. So it should be a bit more reliable at hurting mechs than the autorifle and pretty devastating against enemy infantry. Yet bring it to Total Warfare/Tech Manual and it doesn't offer any range benefits over the autorifle and thanks to it's crew of 2 it actually has a per person damage of 0.385 leaving it worse at everything.
In other words if autorifles are this good then why aren't other things better.
Pretty sure that your doing it wrong, you should only be losing 1 troopers autorifle damage when you add 2 crew weapon, not 2.
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Wait a minute.
An M1 Abrams can't harm a 'Mech with it's main gun, but a platoon of soldiers can with M-4s?
And if I'm understanding this correctly, a platoon of soldiers can shred an M1 with M-4s?
No. Text cannot convey how much no.
Abrams cannot hurt Atlas.
M4 infantry cannot hurt Abrams.
31st-century auto-rifle infantry can hurt Atlas.
We have no way of knowing if 31-st century auto-rifle infantry can hurt Abrams.
We have no way of knowing if M4 infantry can hurt Atlas.
A Battletech auto-rifle has as much in common performance-wise with an M4 as said M4 has with an Atl-Atl.
Good rule of thumb: If you have Battletech game stats for something, then comparing that something to anything built in the 20th/21st centuries is worse than useless.
I'm going to assume everyone here is too smart to mention XTRO 1945.
Pretty sure that your doing it wrong, you should only be losing 1 troopers autorifle damage when you add 2 crew weapon, not 2.
Correct. Crew size is only relevant when determining how many support weapons can fit in a squad. When shooting time comes, you still have one guy on the trigger, and the rest still have their auto-rifles(or whatever).
Strictly speaking yes Battletech has armor of technological sophistication that it wouldn't be out of place in the early 21st century but thanks to how damage is modeled/handled it still isn't really the same thing and behaves very differently.
Oh my LORD, no. All the no. I'm gonna need a bigger no. There's isn't a single real-life material we can compare Battletech armor to.
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There's isn't a single real-life material we can compare Battletech armor to.
Not even a mish-mash composite, either. ;)
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Exactly. Therefore a weapons performance vs any real-world armor tells us exactly nothing about performance vs Battletech armor, and performance vs Battletech armor tells us exactly bupkiss about performance vs any real-world material. There are zero points of comparison.
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Exactly. Therefore a weapons performance vs any real-world armor tells us exactly nothing about performance vs Battletech armor, and performance vs Battletech armor tells us exactly bupkiss about performance vs any real-world material. There are zero points of comparison.
I'd quibble with you, but hear me out on it. It dovetails the tangent back into the thread!
There absolutely are some commonalities between the real world and the fantasy world of the BTU. Arguably things like fire and simple lead bullets are fundamentally the same. How these (and maybe other) weapons perform versus materials such as trees and common construction materials might be argued as comparable. And even if none of that is comparable between reality and the BTU fantasy, the physical properties of the human body are surely going to be the same. How well the weapons damage the fragile meatbag of a human body is absolutely comparable.
And that's actually where the extreme granularity for addressing infantry in CBT works in the favor of the setting. Because "any hit on a human body produces an effective kill" there's no need to worry about reconciling reality vs fantasy. Get hit with a WWII tech flamer or a 32nd century flamer, either way you're done for the battle. CBT gets to pretty much punt on the entire issue, leaving it to ATOW to worry about.
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Correct. Crew size is only relevant when determining how many support weapons can fit in a squad. When shooting time comes, you still have one guy on the trigger, and the rest still have their auto-rifles(or whatever).
Oh my LORD, no. All the no. I'm gonna need a bigger no. There's isn't a single real-life material we can compare Battletech armor to.
So I was wrong about how infantry work, fair enough. Still that doesn't change that autorifles are frankly too effective.
And I didn't mean modern fully realized Battlemech armor. Battletech does have rules for technology A and Technology B support vehicle armor. I know that doesn't mean they are explicitly armor from modern real world times but the relative technological sophistication is such that they wouldn't be out of place and I also did note they still don't perform like our current real life armors.
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Not to sound like an >:D or anything, but at what point did some of you forget that this is a game and not a simulation? I can understand a desire for internal consistency, but in reality, would you prefer a paradigm where infantry are absolutely useless except against other infantry? It's a game, abstraction is necessary to keep everything balanced and playable.
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... but in reality, would you prefer a paradigm where infantry are absolutely useless except against other infantry?
... maybe ;)
Honestly, you right. We tend to overthink everything about this game.
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I agree with you in principle, though it should be noted that I don't recall any note that says that Battletech guns use 'simple lead bullets', or that 31st century flamethrowers(the vee ones of course) use the same chemical mix as 20th century ones, thus we must accept the possibility of extremely different temperatures, stickiness, and other burn properties. And of course we have even less points of comparison for energy-based flamers, unless the prop for Princess Vespa's hairdryer is a lot more functional than I thought.
We still have zero points of comparison.
... maybe ;)
Honestly, you right. We tend to overthink everything about this game.
Finally, people get it!
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Not to sound like an >:D or anything, but at what point did some of you forget that this is a game and not a simulation? I can understand a desire for internal consistency, but in reality, would you prefer a paradigm where infantry are absolutely useless except against other infantry? It's a game, abstraction is necessary to keep everything balanced and playable.
Even BT being a game doesn't save it from criticisms about auto-rifles being too good. Infantry have a lot of choices for weaponry, but making most of them fake choices doesn't make design of platoons very fun, or using them particularly thrilling. And while some vehicle weapons may have also done this, it doesn't mean you have to replicate the same situation with infantry, especially with a weapon that's cheating when it comes to the reload factor calculation.
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I've said multiple times now I don't actually have a problem with Infantry as a unit type being able to hurt armor. They just should be appropriately equipped to do so.
Because ultimately the point I made about Mech Machine Guns only doing two points of damage while 28 guys with nothing but autorifles is going to do more being ludicrous still stands.
Internal consistency and logic shouldn't be a bad thing.
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No justification is needed. Infantry weapons hurt mechs, that is an unquestionable fact. If they didn't, Total War and a lot of rulebooks before it would be worded very differently.
The thread topic is about whether Total Warfare's method of handling infantry meets your expectations. Obviously, for many of us, the answer is "no". Saying "But that's how Total Warfare handles it!" makes no difference.
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I simply justify it to myself that infantry units carry anti-mech weapons. Even a rifle unit has a number of guys lugging around rifle grenades, bazookas, and other weapons that can damage mech armor. The idea that the assault rifles have any real effect on a mech is ridiculous. But those guys can still carry some weapons that can hurt mechs, enough to last the battle.
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Which would be a perfectly fine stance to take in my book. Tech Manual in particular kind of messes with that but I can grock that kind of head canon.
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Using the much less effective AToW rules for damaging Tactical Armor (pages 185-186; the Companion conversion formula is very different), it's still possible for a single auto-rifle to damage BAR 10 (i.e., 'mech) armor. Granted, it takes a MoS of 11, but it can be done. If you want to reduce the effectiveness of auto-rifles, I think this is the logical place to start.
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BAR ratings should be done away with entirely. Why wouldn't all 'Mechs use BAR 9 armor on their heads? If you have only 5 armor on a rear torso, why not use BAR 5? The barrier rating gets you nothing that armor factor doesn't. Five points of armor are going to be half as thick as ten points over that same area.
A Battletech auto-rifle has as much in common performance-wise with an M4 as said M4 has with an Atl-Atl.
Good rule of thumb: If you have Battletech game stats for something, then comparing that something to anything built in the 20th/21st centuries is worse than useless.
Auto-Rifles are explicitly 20th to 22nd century tech. Bolt-action rifles, which can also damage 'Mech armor, are explicitly 19th century tech. You can quibble where a given brand name weapon falls on that spectrum, if you like, but the weapon stats are meant to be generically true across the whole of their respective technological spectrums. Or to put it another way: a 31st century auto-rifle is evidently defined as a rifle whose build and performance is undifferentiated from a 20th century auto-rifle.
I'm not disagreeing with the other half of your argument, though. I agree that 21st century armor may not be a great analog for 26th century miracle armor.
at what point did some of you forget that this is a game and not a simulation? I can understand a desire for internal consistency, but in reality, would you prefer a paradigm where infantry are absolutely useless except against other infantry? It's a game, abstraction is necessary to keep everything balanced and playable.
Most of the discussion revolves around the rules not being abstract enough, or abstracted in unrealistic and counter-productive ways; that the current infantry rules are not well balanced; and that other directions might better improve playability. Improving similitude isn't automatically counter to improving gameplay.
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BAR ratings should be done away with entirely. Why wouldn't all 'Mechs use BAR 9 armor on their heads? If you have only 5 armor on a rear torso, why not use BAR 5? The barrier rating gets you nothing that armor factor doesn't. Five points of armor are going to be half as thick as ten points over that same area.
*snip*
As someone once pointed out to me, for the exact reason we're discussing. The lower the BAR rating, the easier it is for small arms to get through.
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Which Armor Factor can do equally well.
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Only on a TW scale. The complaint many here have is the crossover from AToW to TW scale.
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Eh. I do get what TPTB were trying to do with the BAR system but I think I do tend to agree that it wasn't well executed but I'm not sure you could use armor factor like that without causing other problems.
Only on a TW scale. The complaint many here have is the crossover from AToW to TW scale.
I've had my issues with how powerful the autorifle is against armor before AToW was published thanks to Total Warfare and Tech Manual being published quite a bit before AToW.
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... maybe ;)
Honestly, you right. We tend to overthink everything about this game.
It's one thing to over think, it's still something else to see a disconnect in narrative and rules execution. That's not overthinking. It didn't take much for me to see the rules for MechInf and go WTF. It also didn't take me long to see the construction rules for infantry and also go WTF.
We still have zero points of comparison.
That, sadly, is true. And, considering our point of reference as players is the modern, early 21st century, maybe it's high time that some sort of attempt was made at a point of comparison by the Devs.
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Only on a TW scale. The complaint many here have is the crossover from AToW to TW scale.
Some are about how BAR works, some are not. Where BAR works, you can simply replace it one-for-one with Armor Factor (ie, treat the Armor Factor of a location as its BAR rating). Where BAR doesn't work, well, you're coming up with a new way of handling things anyways, and if you need a Bar-like value you may as well design the system to use AF instead.
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Well, the Aerospace units have a Threshold value that's based on Armor Factor (location armor points).
I was always keen on them trying to use that to varying degrees for less than optimal combat units.
But, that's going into a whole different discussion.
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That, sadly, is true. And, considering our point of reference as players is the modern, early 21st century, maybe it's high time that some sort of attempt was made at a point of comparison by the Devs.
Oh GODS no. Have you met the residents of this forum, much less the internet? Giving them an actual real-world point of reference is like tying a raw steak around your neck and then mud-wrestling with a pack of hyenas!
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Considering the original question "Does total warfare's treatment of infantry meet your expectations?" My expectations were set by the previous three rules compilations, and it wasn't like I expected the writers to completely re-build those rules from the ground up, so I'd say my expectations were met. Even exceeded by some of the changes (how they handled damage was a welcome change).
There are a lot of things I would do differently (enough to qualify as a complete re-write). But none of it is a deal breaker for me.
Oh GODS no. Have you met the residents of this forum, much less the internet? Giving them an actual real-world point of reference is like tying a raw steak around your neck and then mud-wrestling with a pack of hyenas!
I remember all the times people were trying to beat each other over the head with copies of TRO 1945 to prove some stupid point or other. It was not a good time.
Hell, even the ancient history of the battletech universe isn't our real world. Giving anybody official standards to obsess over seems like a bad idea.
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Much as I love the product, I still believe that giving the fans XTRO '45 was probably one of CGL's worst ideas ever. I hope they never do anything like that again(or if they do, never let it fall into the hands of the fans), but folks who hope for more like it can be comforted by the knowledge that my opinion on such things means exactly bupkiss in the grand scheme of things.
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Much as I love the product, I still believe that giving the fans XTRO '45 was probably one of CGL's worst ideas ever. I hope they never do anything like that again(or if they do, never let it fall into the hands of the fans), but folks who hope for more like it can be comforted by the knowledge that my opinion on such things means exactly bupkiss in the grand scheme of things.
It was a great idea. I loved TRO 1945. The mistake was in not saying "This is just for fun, just a gag. Nothing in here is supposed to be an official rule or an accurate portrayal of WWII tech." They wouldn't even have had to have that in the book itself, just make the statement on the forums.
The problem was they tried to hem and haw around, and say that it was kind of official. That set off, well... us.
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Yeah, I'll give you that.
Either way, I think we can both agree that giving Battletech fans real-world-congruent data points constitutes a worst-case scenario. I'm honestly surprised nobody's yet taken the damage data from nukes to 'prove' that Piece of Equipment X makes no sense, it must be changed, and that all units mounting X must be redesigned.
If someone has, please don't tell me about it. I have enough issues in my life, I don't need stress-induced aneurysms on top of everything else.
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Yeah, I'll give you that.
Either way, I think we can both agree that giving Battletech fans real-world-congruent data points constitutes a worst-case scenario. I'm honestly surprised nobody's yet taken the damage data from nukes to 'prove' that Piece of Equipment X makes no sense, it must be changed, and that all units mounting X must be redesigned.
If someone has, please don't tell me about it. I have enough issues in my life, I don't need stress-induced aneurysms on top of everything else.
I think I made mention of it in another thread, so be careful where you look. Somebody was calculating what a nuclear LRM could be, and that led to the math that 1 point of Battletech damage would equal XYZ amount of explosive...
And yes, determining what a real world equivalent is, that would just be disaster. I think Battletech needs greater abstraction, not less. I love how mechanized infantry work, it's way cleaner than giving each squad their own APC and messing around with that.
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I love how mechanized infantry work, it's way cleaner than giving each squad their own APC and messing around with that.
Ditto. Trying to track record sheets for all the squad-level APCs in a decent-sized infantry force(company at least) would drive me mad, not to mention all the paper wastage. For me, the convenience of compressing an entire platoon down to a single stat line more than makes up for the reduced speed/firepower of such a force.
It's not an official term at all, but in my head I refer to troops paired with 3+-ton APCs as 'heavy mechinf'. :)
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Personally, I would have been fine if Mechanized were handled like a different form of Battle Armor. Each squad is a line of hit points, and then throw in the capacity for mobility damage or auto-destruction of the vehicle. Nothing more than that really needed. Then, they have to function like regular infantry when dismounting to sweep a building.
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I'll admit, that would have been pretty cool, and likely required zero new rules to implement.
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Personally, I would have been fine if Mechanized were handled like a different form of Battle Armor. Each squad is a line of hit points, and then throw in the capacity for mobility damage or auto-destruction of the vehicle. Nothing more than that really needed. Then, they have to function like regular infantry when dismounting to sweep a building.
And having BA weapons be mounted on the vehicle to function as squad weapons?
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Yeah, I'll give you that.
Either way, I think we can both agree that giving Battletech fans real-world-congruent data points constitutes a worst-case scenario. I'm honestly surprised nobody's yet taken the damage data from nukes to 'prove' that Piece of Equipment X makes no sense, it must be changed, and that all units mounting X must be redesigned.
If someone has, please don't tell me about it. I have enough issues in my life, I don't need stress-induced aneurysms on top of everything else.
There's always the secondary effects roll to hide behind with nukes. Not so much with the thermobaric munitions...
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Not so much with the thermobaric munitions...
Oh man, thermobarics. Any weapon system that makes me giggle that much probably shouldn't be available...
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I'll admit, that would have been pretty cool, and likely required zero new rules to implement.
Exactly. I can agree on some abstraction required for the Game of Armored Combat. If I wanted A Time of War Detail, I would simply have ported that over. But, the focus for the abstractions simply went the wrong direction. And, it started early, sadly, with CityTech.
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Eh, what's done is done. Unless you've got a time machine handy, there's no use crying over spent tachyons.
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Well, Total Warfare showed the PsTB were open to reworking rules for infantry and vehicles. One can hope they might give it a look, again.
So, yeah, I'm not shedding tears for what's come and gone. But, I do hope to see something done going forward.
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... or just use Infernos so infantry is a non-issue ;)
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I've said multiple times now I don't actually have a problem with Infantry as a unit type being able to hurt armor. They just should be appropriately equipped to do so.
Because ultimately the point I made about Mech Machine Guns only doing two points of damage while 28 guys with nothing but autorifles is going to do more being ludicrous still stands.
Internal consistency and logic shouldn't be a bad thing.
I don't know, if a machine gun does 2 points of damage, 28 guys with sub-machine guns doing 16 points doesn't seem to be too out of wack.
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... or just use Infernos so infantry is a non-issue ;)
Inferno IV. I am uninterested in pesky survivors
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I don't know, if a machine gun does 2 points of damage, 28 guys with sub-machine guns doing 16 points doesn't seem to be too out of wack.
That is completely out of whack to me.
1. Sub machine guns are not autorifles.
2. 28 autorifles clearly outperforming a mech machine gun against armor makes no sense. Heck taking 4 and strapping them together and giving them a drum magazine is so competitive against armor that it is no contest which I'd want.
3. Looking into how close the throw weight of a mech machine gun(roughly 5kg) is to 28 autorifles(roughly 6kg) makes it hard to explain why 28 autorifles are so much better against armor, especially when you consider they have the same effective ranges and anti infantry capabilities of the two are reasonably comparable to each other.
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You need at least five troopers to reliably get to two points of damage, and nine to guarantee it. Even with a full platoon of 28, you're probably looking at all of nine points of damage (with auto-rifles alone). I really don't see the problem.
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That is completely out of whack to me.
1. Sub machine guns are not autorifles.
2. 28 autorifles clearly outperforming a mech machine gun against armor makes no sense. Heck taking 4 and strapping them together and giving them a drum magazine is so competitive against armor that it is no contest which I'd want.
3. Looking into how close the throw weight of a mech machine gun(roughly 5kg) is to 28 autorifles(roughly 6kg) makes it hard to explain why 28 autorifles are so much better against armor, especially when you consider they have the same effective ranges and anti infantry capabilities of the two are reasonably comparable to each other.
I posted the same qestion a year or two ago and there is only one logical conclusion: Don't think too much about it.
Use your head canon if you must as the details are abstract enough to allow for interpretation. Personal, the damage to mech/armor reflects what type of support weapon that unit it may be carrying.
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Forget the fluff consideration of a platoon of dudes with rifles melting armored vehicles inside of a minute.
I don't it think it makes much sense from a game design standpoint.
You're talking about points-efficient units that can put out respectable firepower with high accuracy. They're balanced by being slow, weak versus certain damage types, and relatively short-ranged. They're the perfect cheap backup to a gausswall. They slow down games by virtue of being inexpensive, and reward passive playstyles.
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Conventional infantry mechanics are probably my biggest gripe with Total Warfare, specifically how their damage output is modeled and averaged between weapon types. The narrative aspect of a squad of 28 guys with assault rifles being a credible threat to a locust or stinger pilot is also bothersome.
I'd like to see them revised with separate Soft Target and Hard Target damage. Soft target damage would be any Conventional Infantry weapons of type "Small/Standard" (small arms) or Melee. Hard target damage would be everything else. Each type would have separate range as well, to avoid the quirks of taking 2xLRM launchers per squad drastically pushing out the effective range of auto rifles. Anything with BAR 5 or higher armor (or buildings) would be immune to soft target damage.
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Conventional infantry mechanics are probably my biggest gripe with Total Warfare, specifically how their damage output is modeled and averaged between weapon types. The narrative aspect of a squad of 28 guys with assault rifles being a credible threat to a locust or stinger pilot is also bothersome.
I'd like to see them revised with separate Soft Target and Hard Target damage. Soft target damage would be any Conventional Infantry weapons of type "Small/Standard" (small arms) or Melee. Hard target damage would be everything else. Each type would have separate range as well, to avoid the quirks of taking 2xLRM launchers per squad drastically pushing out the effective range of auto rifles. Anything with BAR 5 or higher armor (or buildings) would be immune to soft target damage.
I would love that approach and it wouldn't even add that much to infantry. Only real issues would be some support weapons might need to be taken on a case by case basis if they are also good against armor or not and it might also require doing the same thing to mech weapons. Which in my mind are not huge issues really. Hopefully we can get such a rules revision, it'd solve a lot of problems.
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The silliness can be summed up in "a platoon of Capellan nobles, all armed with carbon-reinforced fingernails, can do one point of armor damage to a 'Mech" in legit combat. 28 of them with 0.02 lethal-damage weapon comes up to 0.56 points, rounding off to 1.
Personally I still go back to 'mechs should be uber special and a kick above everything else' - let infantry damage mass produced vehicles, and vice versa, but let 'Mechs be in a league of their own above and beyond anything lesser.'
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Conventional infantry mechanics are probably my biggest gripe with Total Warfare, specifically how their damage output is modeled and averaged between weapon types. The narrative aspect of a squad of 28 guys with assault rifles being a credible threat to a locust or stinger pilot is also bothersome.
I'd like to see them revised with separate Soft Target and Hard Target damage. Soft target damage would be any Conventional Infantry weapons of type "Small/Standard" (small arms) or Melee. Hard target damage would be everything else. Each type would have separate range as well, to avoid the quirks of taking 2xLRM launchers per squad drastically pushing out the effective range of auto rifles. Anything with BAR 5 or higher armor (or buildings) would be immune to soft target damage.
I'd really like this as well. Even better if the Soft Target damage had longer ranges. Could extend that functionality to 'Mech anti-infantry weapons like MGs.
The silliness can be summed up in "a platoon of Capellan nobles, all armed with carbon-reinforced fingernails, can do one point of armor damage to a 'Mech" in legit combat. 28 of them with 0.02 lethal-damage weapon comes up to 0.56 points, rounding off to 1.
So it would take a platoon of Capellan nobles with carbon-reinforced fingernails a MAXIMUM of 16.16 minutes to take apart a Locust. Less if one of those carbon-reinforced fingernails hits the ammo, in which case that fingernail produces 40 points of capital-scale damage.
Obviously this is an edge case where abstraction produces silly results, but it's an abstraction to make infantry worthwhile to take.
And they can do that every ten seconds.
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Personally I still go back to 'mechs should be uber special and a kick above everything else' - let infantry damage mass produced vehicles, and vice versa, but let 'Mechs be in a league of their own above and beyond anything lesser.'
This way leads to a game with very few 'Mechs, and those 'Mechs that do exist, exist to be used like tanks during WW1, basically assault weight only.
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Edge case is an understatement. They only get to 0.56 if all 28 of them hit, which requires an 11 or 12 on the cluster roll. A 10 or less means only .46 points, which rounds to zero.
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Granted, edge case, but the fact someone deliberately chose to write it into the rules means it's a: possible and b: the best mental image ever.
So it would take a platoon of Capellan nobles with carbon-reinforced fingernails a MAXIMUM of 16.16 minutes to take apart a Locust. Less if one of those carbon-reinforced fingernails hits the ammo, in which case that fingernail produces 40 points of capital-scale damage.
Now set it in Necromo Nightmare and suddenly dying in an ammo explosion is not such a bad end result...
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Edge case is an understatement. They only get to 0.56 if all 28 of them hit, which requires an 11 or 12 on the cluster roll. A 10 or less means only .46 points, which rounds to zero.
Great point, you're right. So we're actually looking at a few hours for that platoon of Capellan nobles to take apart every point of the 'Mech(without ammo explosion).
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Which puts them on par with a tech team with the proper hand tools.
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Which puts them on par with a tech team with the proper hand tools.
Not really. They can do it in combat. With their fingernails.
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If you can convince me that you found 28 Capellan nobles in one place arrogant/dumb enough to all have carbon nails, and not only are they agreeing on things enough to move around a mech battlefield as a coherent group but that they're also all willing to challenge a battlemech to a slap fight...I will GLADLY give you that point of damage, and laugh even harder than you when they inevitably TAC a limb off. ;D
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I was never fond of BT's handling of infantry. A rifle should NOT be able to do significant amounts of damage to a 'Mech, especially compared to heavy weaponry mounted on a vehicle or 'Mech. If a 28 man platoon weighs 3 tons, I should NOT be able to benefit from strapping 28 men with rifles onto my tank and having them do more damage than the main gun that weighs 8-12 tons plus ammo, or bolting 8 tons of infantry small arms onto the tank and totally obliterating Battlemechs in a single turn of fire.
I don't know, if a machine gun does 2 points of damage, 28 guys with sub-machine guns doing 16 points doesn't seem to be too out of wack.
The 'Mech class machinegun is firing 20-30mm rounds, not 5-8mm. Those can damage armor, while the 5mm rounds won't do a whole lot. Be aware that the hitting power of a projectile is dependent on its CUBIC volume, as well as its velocity, so a 20mm round (20 cubed = 8000) hits a lot harder than a 5mm round (5 cubed = 125) at similar speeds. 16 of those 5mm MGs firing at the same rate of fire as the 'Mech MG would be 2000, or only 25% of the total impact, typically spread out into many lighter hits over a larger area. Yes, I know that volume would be a Pi x R squared function, and length would be different from diameter, but my sloppy numbers correctly illustrate the degree of DIFFERENCE between the two calibers.
I agree with the idea of splitting infantry weapons damage into Soft and Hard. Shoot at another infantry platoon or thin-skinned truck or car, and those rifles can and will kill. Shoot at a 'Mech or combat vehicle with the same rifles, and you merely give away your position with no other effect. THAT is why your INF platoon carries LAWs or other dedicated anti-Mech weapons, and why there are only a few thousand infantry listed as guarding the planet. There may be 2 million soldiers there, but most of them have no anti-Mech capability at all, and are simply ignored for game purposes.
Ideally, I'd like to see infantry weapons with somewhat increased ranges against other infantry, and keep the short 1/2/3 ranges for their dedicated anti-Mech weapons, but limit them to 1 or 2 shots worth of ammo. Then you have crew-served weapons, and a squad with certain types of heavy weapons should be capable of inflicting a point or two of damage against a 'Mech at decent ranges.
Example:
Basic Foot Rifle Infantry platoon
Main Weapon - autorifle, with damage against SOFT targets only, based on the margin of success. One point if you roll the target number exactly, and based on a "missile hits" style chart for higher margins of success and varying numbers of shooters.
Heavy Weapon (optional) - various, with different ranges, different damage values against Soft and Hard targets, and different amounts of ammo that can be carried.
Anti-Mech Weapon / LAW (optional) - one-shot weapon that can do damage to a 'Mech. Roll for each SQUAD over 50% strength to hit, and each hit scores 2 points. One shot's worth of ammo per squad.
Record sheet could consist of 4 rows of 7 boxes for a platoon, or one row for a squad. Hitting the 4th box in the row would disable that squad's heavy weapon. Add a check box at the end for each squad's LAWs, and a single counter for tracking ammo for the entire platoon's heavy weapons.
The result of using margin of success for small arms would be to make infantry combat at longer ranges possible, but not all that lethal, while making closer engagements increasingly brutal and bloody. The existing system of "all or nothing" turns it into a situation where the first lucky die roll wins, and most encounters end up 28-0, rather than trading steadily mounting casualties on each side as the platoons close. It would also mean that cover would tend to REDUCE the number of casualties taken each turn of fire, even at really close ranges, not merely alter the odds of taking massive casualties as opposed to none at all.
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I posted the same qestion a year or two ago and there is only one logical conclusion: Don't think too much about it.
This is BattleTech, and we are BattleTech players! We're spoiled with hit locations, crit tables and effects. We're used to different weapons for different stripes. You should know better than to tell us not to think too hard about something.
O:-)
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You ground players are spoiled. Aero players have long known that poking at game mechanics is a guaranteed way to have your brain dribble out your ears... :)
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It seems to me most people are ignoring the cluster table roll... Infantry is nowhere near as effective as the examples I'm seeing are assuming. It would be like assuming 11s or 12s on every cluster roll.
And with regard to that "8-12 ton main gun" on a tank, would that be the one that has a range beyond 3 hexes?
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I haven't been ignoring it. It is the only reason the mech machine gun has anything making it at all comparable to an autorifle platoon in terms of effectiveness.
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I wasn't including you in "most people" if that helps... :)
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If you can convince me that you found 28 Capellan nobles in one place arrogant/dumb enough to all have carbon nails, and not only are they agreeing on things enough to move around a mech battlefield as a coherent group but that they're also all willing to challenge a battlemech to a slap fight...I will GLADLY give you that point of damage, and laugh even harder than you when they inevitably TAC a limb off. ;D
Easy! Romano sent them out there to die for the glory of the Confederation after they mocked her evening gown at the annual Maximilian Liao Memorial dinner. (It was either that or have their entire families sent off to Brazen Heart.)
It seems to me most people are ignoring the cluster table roll... Infantry is nowhere near as effective as the examples I'm seeing are assuming. It would be like assuming 11s or 12s on every cluster roll.
And with regard to that "8-12 ton main gun" on a tank, would that be the one that has a range beyond 3 hexes?
That's a valid point. With the cluster table, how many platoons can do more than half their nominal damage on average?
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That depends on what you define as "nominal damage". Personally, I take that as what a roll of 7 can yield.
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I wasn't including you in "most people" if that helps... :)
No worries.
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You ground players are spoiled. Aero players have long known that poking at game mechanics is a guaranteed way to have your brain dribble out your ears... :)
Counterpoint: Eventually, rules changes came into play and trimmed down the excessive scale of space hexes from 6500 km to just 18. Now the Gs that you pull in aerospace units won't result in likely spaghettification!
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Counterpoint: Eventually, rules changes came into play and trimmed down the excessive scale of space hexes from 6500 km to just 18. Now the Gs that you pull in aerospace units won't result in likely spaghettification!
If you haven't failed a piloting roll that results with you breaking apart from the g stress then bouncing off the orbit..your doing it wrong ;)
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No. That's an excuse people came up with to justify letting infantry weapons hurt mechs. Nothing more.
Nah. Because it's the same explanation for why they shoot macros levels of missiles and not just one big missile... and why they use autocannons and not giant cannons. You know, until the gauss rifle came along.
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Nah. Because it's the same explanation for why they shoot macros levels of missiles and not just one big missile... and why they use autocannons and not giant cannons. You know, until the gauss rifle came along.
No, they shoot lots of missiles because Robotech.
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Counterpoint: Eventually, rules changes came into play and trimmed down the excessive scale of space hexes from 6500 km to just 18. Now the Gs that you pull in aerospace units won't result in likely spaghettification!
Mostly I was referring to the fact that smart aero players know to never think about how strafing works with respect to damage and heat. Madness lies that way.
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Mostly I was referring to the fact that smart aero players know to never think about how strafing works with respect to damage and heat. Madness lies that way.
I liked the Aerotech 1 strafing rules. They were awesome.
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I liked the Aerotech 1 strafing rules. They were awesome.
Just a whole row of hexes on a map.
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Just a whole row of hexes on a map.
Wasn't a strifing run 3 hexes wide though?
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Yup.
In those old rules, did ground units attacked by planes have as easy return shots as they do now? If so, imagine an entire company or battalion having Range-0 shots back at you...brr.
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Wasn't a strifing run 3 hexes wide though?
It was.
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It seems like the easy solution here if you want a more realistic game is to give infantry two damage values - to steal Hearts of Iron jargon, give them soft attack (damage vs infantry, where your personal rifles will shine), and hard attack (damage vs anything with real armour, like mechs). A light infantry platoon that just carries rifles will murder other infantry, but their only effect vs mechs would be swarm attacks(where they can possibly get into weak spots too small for vehicle weapons to hit). Conversely, you can give them anti-mech weapons, which will let them hit hard against hard targets.
For mechanized infantry, either steal the battle armour or protomech rules, I'd say. Make an infantry vehicle count as a unit in its own right, and build the rules accordingly.
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Yup.
In those old rules, did ground units attacked by planes have as easy return shots as they do now? If so, imagine an entire company or battalion having Range-0 shots back at you...brr.
Anybody on the mapsheet that was being strafed could attack, target number was base 10 plus attacker movement mod. You got a -4 if you were in the strafing row. Weapons needed a range of 6+ to shoot back.
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Conventional infantry mechanics are probably my biggest gripe with Total Warfare, specifically how their damage output is modeled and averaged between weapon types. The narrative aspect of a squad of 28 guys with assault rifles being a credible threat to a locust or stinger pilot is also bothersome.
I'd like to see them revised with separate Soft Target and Hard Target damage. Soft target damage would be any Conventional Infantry weapons of type "Small/Standard" (small arms) or Melee. Hard target damage would be everything else. Each type would have separate range as well, to avoid the quirks of taking 2xLRM launchers per squad drastically pushing out the effective range of auto rifles. Anything with BAR 5 or higher armor (or buildings) would be immune to soft target damage.
So, I got a copy of Combat Operations because I was curious about the origin of the damage conversion formula for small arms and support weapons. Lo and behold, it does exactly this, albeit as an optional rule, right down to using the same terminology. However, its dividing line on hard and soft effectiveness is if a weapon has an AP of 5 or higher. Auto-rifles would need special ammo just to qualify under this system, as their base AP of 4 would not get them over the hard target effectiveness hump. The Zeus, in contrast, makes it over in its default ammo use.
The formula was also, as I suspected, meant to play off of MW3 rules. Going from base 2 staging system with open-ended damage to the more tightly-controlled "divide personal damage by BAR" version of ATOW doesn't really inspire confidence that things would work out, and yet, a lot of the damage values given in CO seemed to work out better than in ATOW, because they didn't hose one-shot weapons. The Dragonsbane is even actually worth taking as a support weapon. It feels like TW backslid on a more serviceable system.
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Carry over from Combat Operations may be why the Light Machine Gun in AToW has 5AP/3BD, which under the current system does less damage than the Auto-Rifle's 4AP/4BD.
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Carry over from Combat Operations may be why the Light Machine Gun in AToW has 5AP/3BD, which under the current system does less damage than the Auto-Rifle's 4AP/4BD.
When the A-R should simply be a plinker compared to the LMG under the soft vs hard target rules. Finally, the rifles/cannons have something to feel good about! Not much, but at least they wouldn't be easily outperformed by small arms in this case.
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No. Text cannot convey how much no.
Abrams cannot hurt Atlas.
M4 infantry cannot hurt Abrams.
31st-century auto-rifle infantry can hurt Atlas.
We have no way of knowing if 31-st century auto-rifle infantry can hurt Abrams.
We have no way of knowing if M4 infantry can hurt Atlas.
A Battletech auto-rifle has as much in common performance-wise with an M4 as said M4 has with an Atl-Atl.
Good rule of thumb: If you have Battletech game stats for something, then comparing that something to anything built in the 20th/21st centuries is worse than useless.
I'm going to assume everyone here is too smart to mention XTRO 1945.
Correct. Crew size is only relevant when determining how many support weapons can fit in a squad. When shooting time comes, you still have one guy on the trigger, and the rest still have their auto-rifles(or whatever).
Oh my LORD, no. All the no. I'm gonna need a bigger no. There's isn't a single real-life material we can compare Battletech armor to.
Problem what if your in a what if debate that entails an M1 Abrams vs an Atlas (actually saw this a few weeks ago on the Spacebattles forums)?
Though I would note that their are some mentions in the fluff that at lest a number of B-tech infantry weapons do fire their projectiles at much faster velocity's than "real life"
The Zeus heavy Rifle in the novels has two mentions of firing hyper sonic projectiles (once mentioning 45g slugs -it's described as a 13mm based rifle), a third velocity mention depends on how much is "several" times the speed of sound... (no other velocity quotes for this weapon that i'm aware of.) Not to mention their are more than one reference to infantry weapons seemingly having longer ranges than their mech counterparts (I.e. snipers having multi km kills).
The Gauss rifle is mentioned as firing a 125kg slug at hyper sonic velocitys 75% of the time the projectiles velocity comes up (the other 25% is decidedly supersonic).
The silliness can be summed up in "a platoon of Capellan nobles, all armed with carbon-reinforced fingernails, can do one point of armor damage to a 'Mech" in legit combat. 28 of them with 0.02 lethal-damage weapon comes up to 0.56 points, rounding off to 1.
Personally I still go back to 'mechs should be uber special and a kick above everything else' - let infantry damage mass produced vehicles, and vice versa, but let 'Mechs be in a league of their own above and beyond anything lesser.'
Oh we can go even further than that, give them a few laser rifles as secondary weapons and watch that they can suddenly have their fingers damage stuff at 180+ meters... As they round up (8x laser rifles as secondary, 2.24 dmg + 20 finger nails .4 dmg, total dmg is 3 after rounding at 6 hexes).
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I'm fairly certain the table on page 148 of Tech Manual precludes that latter interpretation.
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Problem what if your in a what if debate that entails an M1 Abrams vs an Atlas (actually saw this a few weeks ago on the Spacebattles forums)?
Entering any such debate is mistake #1, and no game designer(or anyone else) is ever responsible for what happens to you in there.
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My personal viewpoint:
They're not perfect, but they're way more useful than they formerly were.
Thanks to the revised rules for how infantry takes damage, they can now survive in the field as more than laughable doorstops. Now they're more like irritating doorstops that - especially in the case of jump infantry - can make things a nightmare for anyone who ventures into a deep forest or urban area. They fill that nice gap when you have leftover BV to use, but Gunnery/Piloting tweaks will push you over the limit.
The weapons fire damaging mech armor... that's always been a thing. Making mechs and tanks completely impervious to small arms fire in a game about mechs pretty well guarantees nobody ever wanting to use infantry. Mechs have been known to be stronger against single shot weapons, but take damage from concentrated bursts. I could see that being the main reason why high caliber assault rifles fare better against standard armor types.
If we're looking at a more narrative/simulationist look than gameplay, infantry really shouldn't be able to do squat against mechs without proper equipment. Infantry squads with higher powered weapons system for use in tactical games should be the default (Like LRMs, SRMs, LAWs, Support PPCs, and anti-tank rifles), but in all the former instances, it slows the infantry units down significantly, which for jump infantry means the difference between 2 and 3 jump, and for foot means moving or shooting. From a gamist perspective, having the option to use a weapons system that is still useful against mechs and tanks but light enough to not encumber the squad (As with current Energy Rifle and Ballistic Rifle infantry) would also be a nice to see available.
The current six "Default" options, while they feel too powerful compared to what the books say, feel good from a game perspective, being strong but not cripplingly so, but I do disagree with rifle squads being more powerful than SRM squads.
Still, I like the current options
Ballistic Rifle - Lightweight, Short-ranged, Higher damage output
Energy Rifle - Lightweight, Medium-ranged, low damage output
Machine Gun - Encumbering, Short-ranged, High damage output with additional effects against conventional infantry.
Flamer - Encumbering, Short-ranged, Moderate damage output with option to use heat effects or ignite terrain in Tacops.
SRM - Encumbering, Medium-ranged, Higher damage output.
LRM - Encumbering, Long-ranged, moderate damage output.
I'd have also liked to see Vibro-something infantry as an option for a high-damage, zero-range squads
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I'd have also liked to see Vibro-something infantry as an option for a high-damage, zero-range squads
Wish granted! (http://masterunitlist.info/Unit/Details/531/ceremonial-guard-otomo-guard)
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It seems like the easy solution here if you want a more realistic game is to give infantry two damage values - to steal Hearts of Iron jargon, give them soft attack (damage vs infantry, where your personal rifles will shine), and hard attack (damage vs anything with real armour, like mechs). A light infantry platoon that just carries rifles will murder other infantry, but their only effect vs mechs would be swarm attacks(where they can possibly get into weak spots too small for vehicle weapons to hit). Conversely, you can give them anti-mech weapons, which will let them hit hard against hard targets.
For mechanized infantry, either steal the battle armour or protomech rules, I'd say. Make an infantry vehicle count as a unit in its own right, and build the rules accordingly.
The (extremely) short lived GROPOS game, by Agents of Gaming, gave every weapon two damage values. One for shooting armor, and one for infantry. It was a neat concept, and Battletech more or less implements that concept with the damage vs. infantry modifier table in Total Warfare for heavy weapons. I could see doing something similar for infantry weapons, but I'm not convinced it's vital to the game.
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I don’t foresee any revision to the infantry and vehicles while TPTB’s focus mandate of MECHS MECHS MECHS AND MECHS is in effect
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The (extremely) short lived GROPOS game, by Agents of Gaming, gave every weapon two damage values. One for shooting armor, and one for infantry. It was a neat concept, and Battletech more or less implements that concept with the damage vs. infantry modifier table in Total Warfare for heavy weapons. I could see doing something similar for infantry weapons, but I'm not convinced it's vital to the game.
You'd probably have to start by gutting the infantry weapons list.
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It probably could use some parsing down as there are a lot of weapons that just don't make a lot of sense to be their own thing.
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It probably could use some parsing down as there are a lot of weapons that just don't make a lot of sense to be their own thing.
I think part of that was to facilitate the transitioning from AToW to TW and vice versa. That way if you were going from AToW game up to TW, you wouldn't have to do any guesswork on which weapon should represent which, since there are TW stats for most every AToW weapon.
(And also could just be the whole "and the kitchen sink" approach of TPTB...)
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Considering TW predates AToW that is unlikely.
I know a lot of it is for taking Campaign Ops to TW but I do feel like there was a missed opportunity to declare some of the items faction brand names of generic equipment. It would accomplish much the same thing without having to give a bunch of stuff their own stat line in TW and if TPTB really wanted to they could give more detailed stat differences at the AToW level that would abstract back into the generic TW version if you ever needed such a conversion.
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I liked the Aerotech 1 strafing rules. They were awesome.
Pre-Pulse laser, Pre-Targeting computer AT1 strafing was nuts. Playing AT1 rules with pulse lasers and targeting computers was crazy. However, I think the 100 point bombs conjured up the most dread.
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Mandatory "Can we have BattleTroops2?" post here. >:D
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Mandatory "Can we have BattleTroops2?" post here. >:D
Mandatory “there are no plans at this time”
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It's been posted a couple of times that AToW was meant to supplement Battletroops in a way by illustrating the details of infantry combat ways that TW cannot.
But that official answer aside, we should all be able to read between the lines and know that the game cannot support yet another rule set. At least without a major surge in new players asking for more.
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It probably could use some parsing down as there are a lot of weapons that just don't make a lot of sense to be their own thing.
What I'd do is drop the archaic weapons altogether for TW, reduce the list to generic's, that is say that at both levels an auto-rifle represents a variety of man-portable (semi-)automatic weapons, and then add iconic weapons, things like the Mauser IIC where there's an actual point to adding it.
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Honestly, I already treat Auto-rifles in TW like large Anti-Material rifles.
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Who says they aren't?
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Even without AP ammo, 4AP/4BD with a 15 round burst can certainly do a number on materiel.
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Honestly, after having played through Descent: Journey's in the Dark versus a few sessions of Pathfinder, I know that I want something closer to Descent as a means of playing out platoon or squad actions for BT. A Time of War is about telling a story for a small set of individuals. It covers the odd instances you'll come across when not in combat, or in the midst of a firefight when someone gets a brilliant idea to sneak out from the storm of bullets.
But, you don't need all those stats and modifiers when you're wanting to have a couple platoons face off in or around a building fighting to seize some sort of objective, or deny said seizure.
A completely revised BattleTroops would fit that. I don't condone rehashing the old BTroops, though. Some things were interesting, but didn't fit well with integration into the standard BTech game of Armored Combat. The nebulous armor system, and forcing Tanks and Mechs to adhere to the same MP-based action system were two of the bigger faults.
I haven't seen the AToW squad combat system. Has anyone tried it? Does it work well enough?
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Even without AP ammo, 4AP/4BD with a 15 round burst can certainly do a number on materiel.
In AToW, only with a margin of success of 7 or higher, and it would pale in comparison to proper support weapons. In MW3, which the Combat Operations formula was based on, it wouldn't even have been allowed to attempt to scratch tactical armor without armor-piercing ammo, as it had an AP less than 5. Even with AP ammo, assuming a value of 4.18 per die (they were open-ended exploding die tests rather than just using normal d6s), you'd need an even larger MoS to have a 50% chance of causing tactical armor damage.
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"Materiel" covers a lot more than things with BAR 10 armor.
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Honestly, after having played through Descent: Journey's in the Dark versus a few sessions of Pathfinder, I know that I want something closer to Descent as a means of playing out platoon or squad actions for BT. A Time of War is about telling a story for a small set of individuals. It covers the odd instances you'll come across when not in combat, or in the midst of a firefight when someone gets a brilliant idea to sneak out from the storm of bullets.
But, you don't need all those stats and modifiers when you're wanting to have a couple platoons face off in or around a building fighting to seize some sort of objective, or deny said seizure.
A completely revised BattleTroops would fit that. I don't condone rehashing the old BTroops, though. Some things were interesting, but didn't fit well with integration into the standard BTech game of Armored Combat. The nebulous armor system, and forcing Tanks and Mechs to adhere to the same MP-based action system were two of the bigger faults.
I haven't seen the AToW squad combat system. Has anyone tried it? Does it work well enough?
I like the old Battletroops system far more than any of the newer rule sets that Catalyst has produced. I want something easy to play, with maybe 15 pages of rules, that doesn't worry too much about integrating with a larger system. If Catalyst produced a Battletroops 2, they'd have rules in it for people with sharp fingernails fighting dropships. We don't need that.
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I like the old Battletroops system far more than any of the newer rule sets that Catalyst has produced. I want something easy to play, with maybe 15 pages of rules, that doesn't worry too much about integrating with a larger system. If Catalyst produced a Battletroops 2, they'd have rules in it for people with sharp fingernails fighting dropships. We don't need that.
They did produce a new BattleForce. It's in Strategic Operations. They've also given us several even more abstracted strategic rule sets.
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He speaks of Battletroops, not Battleforce. :)
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He speaks of Battletroops, not Battleforce. :)
Yes, the game that shared rules concepts with Shadowrun's DMZ: Downtown Militarized Zone tactical game. You could almost do a crossover game with those two long before BattleRun was ever a thing.
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Just out of curiosity, I read somewhere that the original treatment of infantry in battletech (maybe battledroids, actually) was as nine man squads who could use a single machinegun or SRM 2 in combat. Anybody know if this is true?
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Was that somewhere Sarna? Because Sarna does say that (Take with grain of salt of course)
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Was that somewhere Sarna? Because Sarna does say that (Take with grain of salt of course)
No. I think it was in a PDF document talking about the history of the Unseen problem.
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Just out of curiosity, I read somewhere that the original treatment of infantry in battletech (maybe battledroids, actually) was as nine man squads who could use a single machinegun or SRM 2 in combat. Anybody know if this is true?
The oldest I have is Citytech, 1st edition, which had familiar 28/21 man platoons for foot/jump, although they were standardized. There were no construction rules for them (that I recall)
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Just out of curiosity, I read somewhere that the original treatment of infantry in battletech (maybe battledroids, actually) was as nine man squads who could use a single machinegun or SRM 2 in combat. Anybody know if this is true?
That is correct. And it only took a single point of damage to destroy an infantry squad. But you could have 10 squads in the same hex.
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"Materiel" covers a lot more than things with BAR 10 armor.
Maybe, if you're in a really distant or run-down corner of the Inner Sphere, or a place in the Deep Periphery that doesn't have much in the way of defense. If you're fighting 25th century and on specced anything, though, personal armor is going to get up to BAR 6, and what qualifies as materiel is probably going to be way more resilient than this, which is still going to require a high MoS to bypass, even if it's just, say, BAR 7. That still takes you down to a BD of 1 and a required MoS of 3. That's not really a very effective "anti-materiel" weapon, and the fact that it's reaching the MoS more easily by firing at a higher rate is, at the very least, plain weird.
In MW3, the AV of tactical armor didn't even matter that much; tactical armor in general just put a stop to anything below AP 5, even if it was only BAR 5. There is, or at least, has been, a level of overall destructive capability that small arms sometimes cross in the setting, but the auto-rifle just isn't there, at least not at .52 damage per trooper.
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Check AToW, page 187. A typical cargo container is going to be BAR 4 (sheet metal).
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Check AToW, page 187. A typical cargo container is going to be BAR 4 (sheet metal).
I'm not a big fan of that table. I'd certainly write it differently.
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I'm not a big fan of that table. I'd certainly write it differently.
Civilian sheet metal being BAR 4 doesn't sound all that unreasonable, given commercial armor is BAR 5 and the finest military tank armor of the 24th century was BAR 7 (and a number of civilian vehicles start out all the way down at BAR 2).
In AToW, only with a margin of success of 7 or higher, and it would pale in comparison to proper support weapons.
In AToW, you get three of that margin of success just from the mech's size. A reasonably competent (skill 3) character doesn't need any particular amount of luck to be scoring armor damaging hits against a battlemech or combat vehicle regularly with an autorifle. And given that even when an infantry unit hits, it still has to make a cluster roll, which on average reduces the hit to about 60% of its maximum damage, there's plenty of room to make up the difference between perception and (in game) reality.
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That does seem to actually highlight what I think the biggest problem of the BAR system as it currently stands is, it is far too incremental and probably should be more exponential.
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It doesn't help that the description of BT ballistic weapon have been all over the place. Every other sci-fi inspired weapon from the Lasers to the PPC seem to be very thought out or at least, consistent in writing. Ballistics on the other hand often depends on who's writing.
The TK assault rifle for example (a sour subject for me) The original description in the MechWarrior RPG more or less describes a H&K G3 Battle Rifle (20 round magazine, heavy but reliable) but then William H Keith describes it as Steyr ACR because it was cool, then the next writer describes it as a M41A1 Pulse Rifle (inspired in part by the real world H&K G-11) because the M41A1 was the staple sci-fi assault rifles for a generation. To muddy the water more, the TK Enfrocer uses the same ammo and magazine. The RPG stats mirrors that of the Mydron in some aspects that gives me a mental image of something like a Lawgiver (Enforcer, Lawgiver) but the more recent art makes it look closer to a tricked out Glock 40.
The only way to explain all these discrepancies is that the TK, like any popular weapon, has different models that uses different calibers (the catch all explanation for Auto-cannons) But which caliber does damage X? As far as the game is concern, it's doesn't matter, the TK does 4B damage regardless. Pick whatever bullet makes sense to you.
So how do Infantry damage a mech? Doesn't matter how, they just do on a successful roll regardless. Pick whatever explanation makes sense to you.
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Civilian sheet metal being BAR 4 doesn't sound all that unreasonable, given commercial armor is BAR 5 and the finest military tank armor of the 24th century was BAR 7 (and a number of civilian vehicles start out all the way down at BAR 2).
I'm pretty sure that Rolled Homogeneous Armor is BAR 5, so the kind of mild steel used in shipping containers being BAR 4 sounds about right.
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I'm not a big fan of that table. I'd certainly write it differently.
Any chance of seeing your take down in Fan Rules? :)
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Any chance of seeing your take down in Fan Rules? :)
I'm hoping to abuse the powers of vacuum to just change it if we end up doing a reprint. /secretevilplot
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I'm not a big fan of that table. I'd certainly write it differently.
Switch the horizontal and vertical axis?
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In AToW, you get three of that margin of success just from the mech's size. A reasonably competent (skill 3) character doesn't need any particular amount of luck to be scoring armor damaging hits against a battlemech or combat vehicle regularly with an autorifle. And given that even when an infantry unit hits, it still has to make a cluster roll, which on average reduces the hit to about 60% of its maximum damage, there's plenty of room to make up the difference between perception and (in game) reality.
More like the +3 can defray some of the other modifiers, as unless you're standing uncomfortably close to an immobile 'Mech, range movement modifiers will apply; be sure to factor in the -1 recoil penalty, too, and any fatigue, lesser injuries, or encumbrance. We'll just cut it to still requiring a roll that would by itself get to a MoS of 4 (with the stated skill of +3 picking up the slack), but that means that you're looking for an 11, which means that your hopeful outcome has a roughly 8% chance of success.
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Switch the horizontal and vertical axis?
We control the diagonal.
We control the orthoginal diagonal axis, which makes this into kind of an 'X'.
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More like the +3 can defray some of the other modifiers, as unless you're standing uncomfortably close to an immobile 'Mech, range movement modifiers will apply; be sure to factor in the -1 recoil penalty, too, and any fatigue, lesser injuries, or encumbrance. We'll just cut it to still requiring a roll that would by itself get to a MoS of 4 (with the stated skill of +3 picking up the slack), but that means that you're looking for an 11, which means that your hopeful outcome has a roughly 8% chance of success.
Range and movement modifiers are already taken into account elsewhere in the to hit role, by... the range and movement modifiers.
And by the nature of the tabletop scale, infantry are almost always uncomfortably close to battlemechs.
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Range and movement modifiers are already taken into account elsewhere in the to hit role, by... the range and movement modifiers.
Are we talking BT or AToW? Because BT abstracts out the fact that infantry are constantly hoofing it and don't really have weapon stabilization. In AToW, individual trooper characters will have to contend with their own movement modifiers; walking is -1, running is -2, sprinting is -3, and there goes the +3 bonus that you had, possibly even before taking care of the -1 recoil mod.
And by the nature of the tabletop scale, infantry are almost always uncomfortably close to battlemechs.
I had originally written "extra uncomfortable" but thought that it was awkwardly-worded. Unless you're in the same hex, you don't stand much of a chance of making that roll. I totally get what you were trying to say, but that +3 bonus isn't any true equalizer. You're still stuck with needing a sizable enough MoS that the chance of success is 8.33% chance at short range, about 27.78% if you're right up in BM grill at point-blank range, and in all likelihood not going to happen if you're at medium or long range. The damage handed out by an auto-rifle is nowhere near even a "close enough" value.
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Getting back to the original topic:
(snip)
So, with that out of the way, I open up the discussion with the question: Does the current ruleset meet your expectation of how infantry should function? How have you always imagined the damage working compared to how it works, numberwise? How deadly do you think the futuristic battlefield of the 31st and 32nd century aught to be for the grunt? Should he be fully covered over to avoid burns and such from stray shots and the like?
Discuss.
First answer: yes, I think it meets my expectation for a balanced approach to how infantry should function, balancing realism against the need for gameplay rules. Is it perfect? No, & I doubt you'll find any rules system out that's 100% "perfect": too much realism, & it'll take you 5 months of daily game sessions to play through a 15-minute combat encounter; too little realism, & it's become so abstract it's like you're playing Axis & Allies.
Second answer: until recently, I hadn't really given much thought to how the damage was being applied to infantry units. However, I do think that the Total Warfare method is much more realistic than the older methods. You've got, what, 28 guys essentially spread out within a 30 meter circle, which means that (aside from maybe the guys humping the support weapons across the battlefield) they're going to be maintaining as much dispersion as possible -- this isn't a parade field or morning PT, where you may be shoulder-to-shoulder with the troopers on either side of you, this is a combat situation where you want to avoid being taken out by the round that took out poor Chuck.
By being more spread out, you also find the perfect justification for the reduced size in the damage point groupings (used to be 5-point groups, TM drops it to 2-point groups) and for having to roll on the Cluster Hits table. As a squad, the troopers are going to be pretty spread out, but you might be at least somewhat close to a buddy/partner/teammate (you cover his six, he watches your back, etc.), so the angles on your shots are more likely to line up than the shots from the guys 20 meters away from you. And yes, resolving cluster hits can sometimes randomly result in more than half of your clusters hitting the same location on the enemy 'Mech, but a) that's how random dice rolls can turn out, & b) the Hit Location tables are by their nature a bit abstract anyway (consider, after all, that on a 12-15 meter tall 'Mech, chances are the Right Arm is anywhere between 6 & 9 meters long; that's way bigger than your average Beggars Canyon womp rat, but also means you can have hits spread all over that arm that aren't necessarily close to each other). Nor is it reasonable to expect 100% accuracy from infantry troopers, especially when attempting to shoot at a giant armored behemoth that's pumping out loads of energy blasts, missiles, & ballistic rounds at you & your buddies, as it struts across the battlefield it thinks it owns. Some of your teammates are probably going to miss their shots, & it's not always going to be the same guys time after time missing the shot.
As a side-note, the reason why the Auto-Rifle seems so powerful (even when compared to weapons like the Federated Long Rifle or the Zeuss Heavy Rifle) is because it's not a single-shot weapon; each pull of the trigger causes a 4-round burst. If you were limited to only firing single-shots, its damage per shot & BV would actually look more like the Bolt-Action Rifle in its stats (given that the original description for the Rifle/Auto-Rifle, all the way back to MW1, compares it to the M1 in its appearance, that actually makes some sense, as the WW2 M1 was semi-automatic instead of bolt-action but used the same cartridge as the Springfield M1903 rifle from WW1). In contrast, the Federated Long Rifle is single-shot, but apparently uses heavier cartridges/rounds than the Auto-Rifle, because for the same size rifle it can only fit in 10 rounds vs. 40 (ten 4-round bursts in the Auto-Rifle, although reduced to 30 rounds in AToW), but each individual shot is more powerful. The only weird one seems to be the Zeuss Heavy Rifle (it's compared to the M82 Barrett & other .50-cal sniper rifles, & in the MechWarrior RPGs & AToW it's more powerful than the Federated, but in TM the damage & BV are lower), although it's possible that because it has a smaller clip that it's assumed to spend more time being reloaded.
In any case, the Cluster Hit table was probably the easiest way to account for how you're not going to get 100% accuracy 100% of the time when you have multiple people shooting at the same target (something that prior rules versions did, in fact, assume), especially when combined with how many surviving troopers there are in the unit.
As for averaging out the damage the platoon dishes out as its troopers are killed/taken out of action, I think it's again a balancing act of game mechanics vs. realism. True realism would be, "OK, the platoon lost 5 troopers in that round, now I gotta figure out whether my SRM gunners were hit or not, then I gotta figure out if their SRM launchers were damaged by the attack or if they're still OK enough to be picked up by a survivor, & now I gotta recalculate the max damage for the platoon because Chuck Brown decided to drop his TK Assault Rifle for Kenny's SRM launcher...", & would take who knows how long before you can move to the next round of combat...& then turn around & do it all over again (knowing you probably have to account for the difference that being struck by an area-effect explosion has on both troopers & equipment vs. a high-speed high-caliber APFSDS-type round that may have simply cored your trooper like a telephone pole through a windshield). Keeping it as abstracted as possible helps smooth the gameplay along a lot.
Finally, #3 & 4: I think the future battlefield is going to still be super-dangerous for infantry troopers. Sure, maybe the ability of the platoon to survive attacks from large autocannons has improved, but if John-boy's the trooper being hit he doesn't care if it was an AC/2 round or an AC/10 round (or even an ER Micro Laser), from his perspective it's the same result. And thanks to the differences in scales, there are very few armor options available from TacOps that have any effect on reducing the damage they take (& even then the effect is much more minor against items like Flamers & Heavy MGs). But as a unit overall, I think they still end up being just as squishy as they always have been. They have the similar to slightly inferior damage output of Light 'Mechs & Combat Vehicles, the similar armor equivalent (maybe slightly superior, unless they're facing a lot of MGs) again to Light 'Mechs & Combat Vehicles, but with the exception of the Mechanized Infantry units they've got the wallowing maneuverability of an Assault 'Mech -- & we're talking more akin to the Annihilator, not a speed demon like an Atlas -- only with a much shorter reach. Infantry platoons that go hard-charging into the teeth of 'Mechs & CVs are going to get chewed up & spit out. They still have to rely on cover, stealth, & hiding. And don't get me started on how expensive they are, either. When an Infantry Platoon with Anti-'Mech training costs as much as a 'Mech 10 times its mass -- or you realize just how many Savannah Masters you could buy instead of them (hint: you can buy at least a Lance worth instead of a Foot Rifle Platoon without the Anti-'Mech training) -- you start to realize that Infantry is king when it comes to how much you pay for them.
Aside from some restrictions on building more customizable platoons, however, my only complaint used to be with Mechanized Infantry units. It didn't make sense that they took less damage from other infantry units, but took double damage from non-infantry attacks...until I reread their description in TM & realized that they get their extra MPs because they're basically running around in convertibles: other infantry units have trouble hitting them because they're sitting up (relatively) higher & firing down from their open-roofed vehicles....but even those vehicles aren't as tall as a standard Combat Vehicle, let alone a 'Mech, so they not only get to (mostly) shoot down from above into those vehicles, they get to also take advantage of shooting at targets that are packed fairly close together (as per my prior comments about infantry units not moving around in parade formation...except Mechanized Infantry actually is limited to that type of small separation between each trooper).
I am working on some house rules -- mostly just some minor tweaks that build on the existing TM rules, rather than tossing them out the window -- that would allow for the building of truly customized infantry platoons. I'm talking about varying squad sizes, options for more than 2 support weapons (& the penalties that go along with that), having multiple types of Primary and/or Support Weapons in the same platoon (or even in the same squad), etc. But don't worry, they'll still be just as tasty with ketchup as the default platoons will be...
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I always saw mechanized infantry as riding around in something like a Humvee. They take 1/2 damage from other infantry because they're in a lightly armored vehicle as opposed to standing in the open. They take double damage from non-infantry because they're sitting close together in a vehicle that doesn't protect at all from Mech weapons.
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I always saw mechanized infantry as riding around in something like a Humvee. They take 1/2 damage from other infantry because they're in a lightly armored vehicle as opposed to standing in the open. They take double damage from non-infantry because they're sitting close together in a vehicle that doesn't protect at all from Mech weapons.
Yep, although I envision something more like dune buggies & WW2 halftracks for some reason...
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The old Compendium pictured them as being on motor bikes, if I remember right.
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That's motorized infantry. I don't believe mechanized infantry existed until Total War came out. Combat Operations, at the earliest.
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As a side-note, the reason why the Auto-Rifle seems so powerful (even when compared to weapons like the Federated Long Rifle or the Zeuss Heavy Rifle) is because it's not a single-shot weapon; each pull of the trigger causes a 4-round burst. If you were limited to only firing single-shots, its damage per shot & BV would actually look more like the Bolt-Action Rifle in its stats (given that the original description for the Rifle/Auto-Rifle, all the way back to MW1, compares it to the M1 in its appearance, that actually makes some sense, as the WW2 M1 was semi-automatic instead of bolt-action but used the same cartridge as the Springfield M1903 rifle from WW1).
Everyone on the past few pages already knew this, and the problems that came up were about how it could fire half its mag of 30 in MW3/AToW turn but still calculated its reload factor as if it had 30 shots. The problem being (again) that it would properly need 150 rounds if you were to go by bursts available in the magazine. And that they had such poor performance against tactical armor that all those rounds wouldn't really amount to much.
In contrast, the Federated Long Rifle is single-shot, but apparently uses heavier cartridges/rounds than the Auto-Rifle, because for the same size rifle it can only fit in 10 rounds vs. 40 (ten 4-round bursts in the Auto-Rifle, although reduced to 30 rounds in AToW), but each individual shot is more powerful.
Strictly speaking, the auto-rifle first appeared in MW3 and it has always had a mag of 30 and RoF of 15. The rifle from MW2 is not the same weapon, and one can't even be sure that it had 10 bursts instead of a magazine of 10 shots, total. Else, the SMGs in the same section would have magazines of 200 rounds instead of 50.
The only weird one seems to be the Zeuss Heavy Rifle (it's compared to the M82 Barrett & other .50-cal sniper rifles, & in the MechWarrior RPGs & AToW it's more powerful than the Federated, but in TM the damage & BV are lower), although it's possible that because it has a smaller clip that it's assumed to spend more time being reloaded.
Its reload factor is only 0.5, yes. Except that with the auto-rifle, the system seems to be assuming that you're going all-out in emptying the magazine, so, as noted earlier in the thread, it should have an even less favorable reload factor. This is unlikely to change, however, because this bit of weirdness goes all the way back to Combat Operations.
In any case, the Cluster Hit table was probably the easiest way to account for how you're not going to get 100% accuracy 100% of the time when you have multiple people shooting at the same target (something that prior rules versions did, in fact, assume), especially when combined with how many surviving troopers there are in the unit.
As for averaging out the damage the platoon dishes out as its troopers are killed/taken out of action, I think it's again a balancing act of game mechanics vs. realism. True realism would be, "OK, the platoon lost 5 troopers in that round, now I gotta figure out whether my SRM gunners were hit or not, then I gotta figure out if their SRM launchers were damaged by the attack or if they're still OK enough to be picked up by a survivor, & now I gotta recalculate the max damage for the platoon because Chuck Brown decided to drop his TK Assault Rifle for Kenny's SRM launcher...", & would take who knows how long before you can move to the next round of combat...& then turn around & do it all over again (knowing you probably have to account for the difference that being struck by an area-effect explosion has on both troopers & equipment vs. a high-speed high-caliber APFSDS-type round that may have simply cored your trooper like a telephone pole through a windshield). Keeping it as abstracted as possible helps smooth the gameplay along a lot.
There's plenty of abstraction in infantry even if you split hairs about which group of troopers gets hit by an attack. Any more detailed questions could get shipped on to TacOps and other books, but it's not as if having to roll hit locations or figure in attacks by multiple different weapons is something foreign to the most basic levels of play in BT.
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There's plenty of abstraction in infantry even if you split hairs about which group of troopers gets hit by an attack. Any more detailed questions could get shipped on to TacOps and other books, but it's not as if having to roll hit locations or figure in attacks by multiple different weapons is something foreign to the most basic levels of play in BT.
Exactly.
You start bringing in other units besides Mechs, why should they get glossed over so readily just because they're 'not Mechs'? You're already substituting a vehicle, jet, squad or platoon for a Mech, anyhow. This is the game of armored combat, where you're already tracking multiple locations. A BattleArmor trooper is very much like a Mech's left torso or a Vehicle's turret. When he's gone, you lost a support weapon. Didn't even have to bother with crit-checking, or motive damage like you do for vehicles.
And, yet, for conventional infantry, you have to perform some strange balancing act that drops all kinds of things for playability?
Let's face it - BattleTechs combat game was never really designed for fielding anything larger than a company per side. Quite frankly, keeping it to demi-company or lance-sized fights makes for much more time-friendly games.
Aside: This is how I run a lot of my games, simply because it works, and my friends have never complained. Since we're campaign oriented, (or, more like linked-battle oriented) if one game goes quick, and the next round is easily set up, we can get in a couple games in a play session.
In that kind of play environment, I don't bat an eye at having to roll motives for vehicles or the notion of checking to see if a platoon lost its anti-armor teeth in a turn. It really takes no more time than running yet another Mech.
If someone's trying for Battalion+ sized engagements, I can understand why more concern would be stressed about simply putting a check-mark next to a vehicle or infantry platoon that simply indicates whether its dead or not. But, why should that dictate the style for the smaller scale game? Why not simply have a different style of game at that point? (Doh! Wait - I think there is one. :P I think it even has a title. Starts with an A. Think there's an S in there, too. I'll have to look it up and get back to you.)
So, I guess this begs the question: When you think of BattleTech and including conventional forces, what size game are you generally going for, anyway? Company on Trinary? Trinary on Trinary? Company on Company? Lance-on-lance? Lance versus DropShip? Star versus 2 Lances?
And, when you bring in conventional forces, are you adding them to that starting base deployment, or having them replace an existing Mech slot?
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The problem is that I see games ranging from a combined arms "lance" consisting of a couple of light vehicles, a platoon of infantry (possibly deployed by squad), and a lone "bug" 'Mech, all the way up to "company+ per side" battles. In the former game, losing a couple of grunts out of a squad may be significant, and knowing whether the guy with the heavy weapon was just vaporized by a Medium Laser hit, or whether it was another rifleman, could matter. In the larger game, there are times when you'd rather just mark off the platoon when it's hit, to speed up the game.
If the platoon has one "heavy weapon" per squad capable of affecting a 'Mech, and the 4th box of each 7 man squad takes out one weapon (for example), that means you lose the big guns on the 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th casualties. Easy enough to draw 4 rows of 7 circles, with a highlight on the 4th column (or press harder on the crayon), and just mark them off as you take hits. You can even add a couple of ammo circles for those weapons, with the entire platoon firing at once and using one box of ammo. Regular rifle fire should bounce off 'Mech armor harmlessly, and doesn't need to be tracked.
OOOWOOO
OOOWOOO
OOOWOOO
OOOWOOO
ooo
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I don't think a 31st century Auto-Rifle is a "regular rifle". It's at least 500 years more advanced than anything we have now. It's like comparing an M-14 to a 15th century arquebus. Sure, and M-14 can match the rate of fire, but 4AP/4BD is at least 33% more armor piercing and damage than said M-14. How that stacks up against theoretical BAR 10 armor is only given to us in the rules. And those rules say damage CAN happen. Not every time, sure... but that's what abstraction is all about.
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I don't think a 31st century Auto-Rifle is a "regular rifle". It's at least 500 years more advanced than anything we have now. It's like comparing an M-14 to a 15th century arquebus. Sure, and M-14 can match the rate of fire, but 4AP/4BD is at least 33% more armor piercing and damage than said M-14. How that stacks up against theoretical BAR 10 armor is only given to us in the rules. And those rules say damage CAN happen. Not every time, sure... but that's what abstraction is all about.
How effective it is has varied by edition. When it was introduced, you'd be waiting until LosTech introduced armor-piercing rounds before doing more than minor cosmetic damage on the paint of AV 10 tactical protection was anything but a dream. And even then, you'd still need to hit with a high MoS to have a 50% chance of doing a point of damage. Kind of like in AToW, where you either need to be highly skilled or really good cover to roll high enough to get that vital "I reached the round up point!" threshold.
Even if it's a magic future space rifle from space, it still isn't going to have good performance against magic future space tactical armor from space. In this, it is very much a normal, boring, automatic rifle.
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And it isn't like the Autorifle is actually that much more advance, potentially not even 500 years more advanced seeing how it is only tech rating C.
Plus I'd hate to think what the recoil is like firing 15 rounds that have that much power behind them versus how much the gun weights and yes I think AToW does not penalize heavily enough for firing long sustained bursts like that. I'd actually be surprised if you could actually control the gun enough that even an entire platoon could get more than a few individual bullets on target.
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And it isn't like the Autorifle is actually that much more advance, potentially not even 500 years more advanced seeing how it is only tech rating C.
Yeah, if you're going by Tech Rating and effectiveness, it's definitely no Thunderstroke II.
Plus I'd hate to think what the recoil is like firing 15 rounds that have that much power behind them versus how much the gun weights and yes I think AToW does not penalize heavily enough for firing long sustained bursts like that. I'd actually be surprised if you could actually control the gun enough that even an entire platoon could get more than a few individual bullets on target.
AToW is a lot more generous with recoil than MW3 was - for the auto-rife, there's only a -1 penalty for a full burst instead of -1 to your roll for every 3 rounds in the burst (i.e. a -5 penalty). Also, there was that 1 in 100 chance that it would jam because you rolled two 1s.
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And it isn't like the Autorifle is actually that much more advance, potentially not even 500 years more advanced seeing how it is only tech rating C.
*snip*
You're right, it's only 200 years more advanced. That makes the M-14 comparison to an 18th century musket.
*snip*
Even if it's a magic future space rifle from space, it still isn't going to have good performance against magic future space tactical armor from space. *snip*
Except that the people who gave us both the magic rifle and magic armor gave us the rules that say the former can indeed damage the latter.
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The problem is that I see games ranging from a combined arms "lance" consisting of a couple of light vehicles, a platoon of infantry (possibly deployed by squad), and a lone "bug" 'Mech, all the way up to "company+ per side" battles. In the former game, losing a couple of grunts out of a squad may be significant, and knowing whether the guy with the heavy weapon was just vaporized by a Medium Laser hit, or whether it was another rifleman, could matter. In the larger game, there are times when you'd rather just mark off the platoon when it's hit, to speed up the game.
If the platoon has one "heavy weapon" per squad capable of affecting a 'Mech, and the 4th box of each 7 man squad takes out one weapon (for example), that means you lose the big guns on the 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th casualties. Easy enough to draw 4 rows of 7 circles, with a highlight on the 4th column (or press harder on the crayon), and just mark them off as you take hits. You can even add a couple of ammo circles for those weapons, with the entire platoon firing at once and using one box of ammo. Regular rifle fire should bounce off 'Mech armor harmlessly, and doesn't need to be tracked.
OOOWOOO
OOOWOOO
OOOWOOO
OOOWOOO
ooo
Unless the gun is destroyed with the man carrying it (and this is BT, so that's unlikely) another guy can just pick it up and use it.
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How effective it is has varied by edition. When it was introduced, you'd be waiting until LosTech introduced armor-piercing rounds before doing more than minor cosmetic damage on the paint of AV 10 tactical protection was anything but a dream. And even then, you'd still need to hit with a high MoS to have a 50% chance of doing a point of damage. Kind of like in AToW, where you either need to be highly skilled or really good cover to roll high enough to get that vital "I reached the round up point!" threshold.
Even if it's a magic future space rifle from space, it still isn't going to have good performance against magic future space tactical armor from space. In this, it is very much a normal, boring, automatic rifle.
According to the early RPG rules, first you needed to hit, then roll another 2D6 for 11+ to see if your turn's worth of shots inflicted a point of damage against armor. That's only a 1:12 chance of doing a point of damage with a burst from a standard automatic rifle, IF you hit. Multiply that by 28 guys firing and the odds are that the platoon SHOULD inflict a shade over 2 points of damage, on average, but only if they ALL hit the target. The tabletop rules assume that either all of the shots hit or all miss, and if they do hit, up to 50% of those damage rolls succeed, depending on which edition of the rules you use. I find practically every possible combination of outcomes to be HIGHLY unlikely for one reason or another, yet I seem to recall that the platoon inflicts something like 7-14 damage, depending on the edition. Basically, the game pretty much pulls numbers out of a proverbial hat (or some unspecified orifice), and then rounds everything up.
The tabletop rules really need to have infantry damage with basic small arms against "hard" targets toned down heavily, while remaining high against "soft" targets. The platoon's heavy weapons are what should determine their effectiveness against armored targets.
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I don't think a 31st century Auto-Rifle is a "regular rifle". It's at least 500 years more advanced than anything we have now. It's like comparing an M-14 to a 15th century arquebus. Sure, and M-14 can match the rate of fire, but 4AP/4BD is at least 33% more armor piercing and damage than said M-14. How that stacks up against theoretical BAR 10 armor is only given to us in the rules. And those rules say damage CAN happen. Not every time, sure... but that's what abstraction is all about.
Rifle design has been stagnant for a long time. We keep running into the same problem, over and over again, that isn't really going to change.
1. The purpose of a military rifle is to kill people. It takes a certain amount of "damage" to reliably kill/incapacitate a person.
2. Any round that does more "damage" than is necessary to kill a person is now overkill. That means you've wasted space, weight, and ammo capacity just to put a bigger hole in something. That's fine if you're hunting bears, but not if you're hunting humans. Once he's dead, you can't make him more dead.
Let's say you have a super-rifle from 500 years in the future. You could have advanced materials that make it lighter. You could have an auto-aiming device to make it more accurate. You could have super-propellant for your bullets that gives more force in a smaller package. None of that changes the fact that, damage-wise, you're still aiming for something between the M-16 and the AK-47.
If you've got super-bullets that are 1/2 the size of the M-16's rounds, then you can now carry 60 round magazines instead of 30. You don't need a gun that's twice as powerful as the M-16, because the M-16 reliably kills people.
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If you've got super-bullets that are 1/2 the size of the M-16's rounds, then you can now carry 60 round magazines instead of 30. You don't need a gun that's twice as powerful as the M-16, because the M-16 reliably kills people.
Unless, of course, you think you might go up against a Mech. If you do, then you might prefer to use that extra compactness of killing power to up-gun, instead of merely killing lightly-armed people more efficiently. If the modern military had a choice between an M-16 that could kill tanks or an M-16 the size of a pistol, I think they'd choose the former.
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Except that the people who gave us both the magic rifle and magic armor gave us the rules that say the former can indeed damage the latter.
And the question of the thread is, do these rules meet our expectations for the game? For many people, that answer is clearly no.
When the topic is "do you like these rules?", saying "but that's what the rules say" doesn't address the issue. We know that's what the rules say. We want them to be different.
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I simply assume that each soldier in Battletech carries several rifle grenades. Enough to last him in an average battle, to the point that it's not worth keeping track of ammo for it. And a bunch of these together do enough damage that mechs will start to notice.
(http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/warisboring.com/images/canadian_famas.png)
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You don't need a gun that's twice as powerful as the M-16, because the M-16 reliably kills people.
That assumes that people can't have armor to protect them from a M-16.
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Unless, of course, you think you might go up against a Mech. If you do, then you might prefer to use that extra compactness of killing power to up-gun, instead of merely killing lightly-armed people more efficiently. If the modern military had a choice between an M-16 that could kill tanks or an M-16 the size of a pistol, I think they'd choose the former.
No, you still wouldn't make that compromise. You wouldn't carry a weapon that could just irritate a mech. The decision isn't as you lay it out.
If the modern military had a choice between an M-16 that could kill a tank, if your entire platoon shot at it full-auto for several minutes, or an M-16 that carried 90 round magazines but wasn't any more powerful than what we have today... they'd take the 90 round magazines. They carry other weapons to defeat tanks. The gun is for shooting at people. Most of their engagements are against people, not tanks.
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More practically, you'd want something with a bit of overkill, in case the enemy adds body armor or something to the equation, but not WAAAAAY overkill unless it's basically free. Successfully taking on a 'Mech with a rifle makes the 'Mech pointless, so either the rifle CAN'T reliably damage a 'Mech, or else you'd see the Successor states fielding way less 'Mechs and more infantry and light vehicles, the latter only for their mobility. Note that the game is NOT centered around "Infantry, kings of the battlefield".
Considering the size of the BT universe infantry weapons, I'm guessing that either the extra penetrating power needed against 31st Century body armor is part of the reason why rifles haven't shrunk into elegant little machine-pistols under a kilogram in weight, or else they're really not much more advanced than today's weapons.
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That assumes that people can't have armor to protect them from a M-16.
Very true. We know that Battletech infantry uniforms protect much better than cloth, because a platoon in standard uniforms takes half as much damage as a platoon wearing plain old civilian clothes. This means the default uniform has some armor in it, and if the auto-rifle reliably defeats that, well...
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Not only has rifle and hand-held ballistics stagnated for the large part, but the materials that would make for a fancy super-duper cricket gun would also most likely be prohibitive in the quantity department.
Sure. In the future, we have hundreds of systems to go looking for more of the rare metals needed for super-duper cricket guns. But, you're also now having to supply the forces for each of those worlds with those weapons.
Stands to reason that good-old classic steel guns will still be far more common, especially in the civilian and peace-keeping markets.
Which is one of the reasons why I still think that there should be some distinction between Front-line capable platoons, and all the other guys at the very least. No official confirmation of that in fiction, but no real denial, either.
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That assumes that people can't have armor to protect them from a M-16.
That's true. But here's why I think that's not really relevant.
It's been part of the game background for a long time that the Successor States (and the Clans) really didn't armor their conventional infantry very well. They aren't much better equipped than most late-20th century soldiers. Now that may have changed in the 3100s era, but for the bulk of the game's in-universe history, that was the case. You wouldn't be carrying around your Mega-Damage M-16 just to fight other infantry.
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We've also got a strategic level problem here. The entire purpose of armoring vehicles is to protect from conventional infantry weapons. The value of tanks is that they transport heavy weapons while ignoring small arms fire. If mechs and vehicles can't do that, then there's no reason to have them. You build your combat vehicles so that their armor is tough enough to stop the M-16s of the day.
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Not only has rifle and hand-held ballistics stagnated for the large part, but the materials that would make for a fancy super-duper cricket gun would also most likely be prohibitive in the quantity department.
Sure. In the future, we have hundreds of systems to go looking for more of the rare metals needed for super-duper cricket guns. But, you're also now having to supply the forces for each of those worlds with those weapons.
Stands to reason that good-old classic steel guns will still be far more common, especially in the civilian and peace-keeping markets.
Which is one of the reasons why I still think that there should be some distinction between Front-line capable platoons, and all the other guys at the very least. No official confirmation of that in fiction, but no real denial, either.
Stagnating over the past century or so tells us quite literally nothing about any potential advances over the next half-millennium. Got anything new?
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Stagnating over the past century or so tells us quite literally nothing about any potential advances over the next half-millennium. Got anything new?
Really powerful rifles are awesome, but the recoil sucks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rKHXTsDcco
Still gotta have an equal and opposite reaction. Can't get around physics. Shoot a bullet powerful enough to hurt a mech, you're gonna need a new shoulder soon.
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Stagnating over the past century or so tells us quite literally nothing about any potential advances over the next half-millennium. Got anything new?
Not only has rifle and hand-held ballistics stagnated for the large part, but the materials that would make for a fancy super-duper cricket gun would also most likely be prohibitive in the quantity department.
Sure. In the future, we have hundreds of systems to go looking for more of the rare metals needed for super-duper cricket guns. But, you're also now having to supply the forces for each of those worlds with those weapons.
Stands to reason that good-old classic steel guns will still be far more common, especially in the civilian and peace-keeping markets.
Which is one of the reasons why I still think that there should be some distinction between Front-line capable platoons, and all the other guys at the very least. No official confirmation of that in fiction, but no real denial, either.
I was effectively talking about materials engineering. Until we get into carbon nano-fibers produced on industrial scales, we've reached a limit on what all can be done for a gun. Especially of the handheld variety.
When it comes to super-weapons of the future, not only will you want better propellant or some form of accelerating it much faster, but, as has been shown, you'll want advances in recoil compensation or suppression to counteract the added forces involved. There's always enhancements in accuracy, like maybe a harness to guide your arm while you aim, tied to a targeting computer in your helmet. Certainly visual aiming aids with said helmet and a HUD system.
Semantic note: all of that is cosmetic. Aside from recoil suppression or compensation, most of that other stuff isn't built into the gun, but into the trooper or vehicle carrying said gun.
The real issue is that all those add-ons start to weigh a lot, especially if it's all some form of metal.
The same's true for tube artillery. You want a more powerful gun that can send a heavier payload faster and farther? Well, more explosive force means a thicker barrel is required, at the very least, and that makes the gun heavier. Then there's the issue of cool-down time to reduce warping.
It's one of the reasons why rail, coil, and gauss rifle tech is really big right now. You don't have to worry about explosive propellant as the core means of acceleration, and all the stresses involved.
You need materials to make all that lighter, and right now, all those materials are very rare, or not in a state where they can be used to generate the numbers to make such weapons a stock item, and not a mere one-off curiosity.
Even if you propel into the future with hundreds of worlds, you've just increased the pool size even though you've opened up the potential for acquiring more of he needed materials.
BattleTech has shown that some of the things that are heavy now have gotten significantly lighter in 500 years. Namely, armor on Mechs and other combat vehicles. Some things, however, have gotten significantly heavier. Right now, the M1-s cannon can rival a Pulse laser for all the weight of its components. A LAC/2, however, is double that tonnage, and look at it's performance characteristics.
Summary: BattleTech certainly has a theme of advanced war tech in the hands of a small few, and we're not just talking BattleMechs, either. While a Star League era infantry rifle may use lighter materials, have faster bullets, more explody bullets, or even homing bullets, and tie into a targeting system that integrates with a soldier's helmet HUD, there's no real guarantee that you can outfit entire armies with that gun.
It certainly doesn't fit the pattern of the setting that you should, either.
That or the pattern of the setting needs to change.
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And your source for saying that such materials and/or recoil compensation technologies will never reach common usage in the next 500 years is...?
I keep saying over and over: We don't know, we cannot possibly know, what those auto-rifles are like. There are no points of comparison we can draw from in terms of materials science, recoil compensation, anti-magic-armor capabilities, not a single thing. Until we sit and wait and see what the next five hundred years brings us, we can make exactly zero predictions about what will be possible by then.
[Edit] Screw it. I'm out. This thread is too much for me. You guys have fun with your infallible crystal balls.
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And your source for saying that such materials and/or recoil compensation technologies will never reach common usage in the next 500 years is...?
Absolutely nothing, really. I was just pointing out a trend in BT. Mechs are scarce, purportedly. People like to chalk that up to rare materials, advanced technologies and the like. (My favorite theory is more social than logistic.)
Should that also be the case for anti-mech capable infantry weapons?
If it's not, then you come back to what's been said about the strategy issue - an infantry weapon that can be produced commonly that can damage and destroy tanks and Mechs begs the question of why tanks and Mechs are made to begin with. We've had the same issue with WarShips, and that was answered already. They've 'disappeared' more than once.
Are Mechs the next white elephant? Will the future of BattleTech see the death of the Mech, and the rise of the infantryman, or maybe the grav tank?
It could logically happen. How long would it really take? (Not long, in my opinion. Just look at the rise and death of the warship the second time around in the BTU.)
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Massey, the theoretical weapon with the huge magazine you're looking for is the Rorynex SMG, and the Stetta Auto-Pistol (emphasis mine, AToW p. 265). And no, they're not particularly useful against BAR 10 armor. Of course, they're not completely useless either.
Recoil compensation issues are reflected in the mere -1 to hit modifier inflicted by the 15 round burst from the Auto-Rifle (AToW p. 266). And even that is compensated for by a mere 8 C-Bill additional Recoil Compensation system (AToW p. 286). Yes, 200 years of tech advance counts for something (as Monbvol pointed out, the Auto-Rifle is Tech Level C, and so is the Recoil Compensation System).
Weirdo, sorry to see you depart this thread... I (at least) still think the rules as written are reasonable.
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Except that the people who gave us both the magic rifle and magic armor gave us the rules that say the former can indeed damage the latter.
Again, not in the edition where the auto-rifle first debuted, at least as far as core rules alone went. Even AToW really only says that you can technically try to deal damage with the auto-rifle. You're overwhelmingly likely to just waste mags and mags worth of ammo unless you have a skill rating at least 2 higher than normal, but no one is putting a hard cap in the rules explicitly forbidding it... unlike in MW3.
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Well, this thread is about the current rule set, and yes AToW doesn't guarantee damage. TW makes an abstraction that makes damage more likely. That's in line with my expectations. Damage isn't guaranteed, but it's also not impossible.
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Part of the trouble is certainly the rules changes over the years. For me they were pretty good when Infantry were abstracted to have support weapons, grenades, VLAWs, or other anti armor equipment despite being called "Rifle" Infantry and died at a more pronounced rate than they do now. Helped me believe mechs were the kings of the battlefield and that they more clearly stood above all other unit types and why militias didn't really matter much unless they had mechs of their own.
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Massey, the theoretical weapon with the huge magazine you're looking for is the Rorynex SMG, and the Stetta Auto-Pistol (emphasis mine, AToW p. 265). And no, they're not particularly useful against BAR 10 armor. Of course, they're not completely useless either.
Recoil compensation issues are reflected in the mere -1 to hit modifier inflicted by the 15 round burst from the Auto-Rifle (AToW p. 266). And even that is compensated for by a mere 8 C-Bill additional Recoil Compensation system (AToW p. 286). Yes, 200 years of tech advance counts for something (as Monbvol pointed out, the Auto-Rifle is Tech Level C, and so is the Recoil Compensation System).
Weirdo, sorry to see you depart this thread... I (at least) still think the rules as written are reasonable.
(https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/52/03/2d5203f4042ce6a65438e4e7a7ed4b8c.jpg)
:)
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Guys, table tops have never gave us guns remotely realist. Example: my buddy was running a zombie survival game using a combination of Zombies!!! and the D20 system. I missed with a shotgun at point blank rang in a narrow hallway because game mechanics said nope. Table tops are not meant to be simulators, non of it is realistic and allot of it takes some imagination to make the logic work.
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Well, this thread is about the current rule set, and yes AToW doesn't guarantee damage. TW makes an abstraction that makes damage more likely. That's in line with my expectations. Damage isn't guaranteed, but it's also not impossible.
The abstraction that TW is using is based on the prior edition of RPG rules. The calculations don't even make the slightest bit of sense outside of the MW3 stats for weapons.
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That's hilarious massey! :thumbsup:
Carbon, I'm clearly not going to convince you, and you're not going to convince me. I think the rules are reasonable, even if they need some tweaks. Infantry under the current rules can do significant damage if used right, and are relatively easy to counter if you plan for them.
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I don't mind infantry being able to damage mechs. I think they should be able to. In fact I think the amount of damage a normal infantry squad can do is just about right. I just think the designers made a mistake with how they described this damage occurring. And I think auto-rifle platoons should probably be rebalanced versus other types of infantry.
Back in my day, SRM infantry did more damage than rifle infantry. Now that's not the case anymore. And that feels wrong to me. The damage equation they use is all screwed up.
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But, just so this post isn't 100% agreeable and nice and everything :), I think the biggest argument against those superguns is the damage that melee and primitive weapons do. Look at the stats for a heavy crossbow. Look at the stats for a normal character using an axe. Sure, rifles do more damage, but pistols are pretty much the same.
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SRM Infantry still do more damage than Rifle at 17 versus 16, unless there is an errata I missed somewhere.
Aside from that I absolutely agree that there was a huge missed opportunity to keep Infantry relevant but make sure how they are relevant make more sense then it does now.
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15 according to the table in Total Warfare. Which is odd because adding any of the SRM launchers to an infantry unit is a net gain.
EDIT: Actually, no, it isn't now that I think of it. I'm pretty sure the units in Total Warfare were created using the earlier stats found in combat operations.
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Gah, was a column off.
Still that is another indication that something is off that adding missiles to your infantry makes them longer ranged but less threatening.
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I think that particular problem is all down to the Reload Factor in the formula.
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And the Infantry SRMs are all sorts of weird.
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I don't mind infantry being able to damage mechs. I think they should be able to.
I agree with this, although I tend to think that basic rifles shouldn't. Specifically anti-armor infantry should give 'Mechs some concern.
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Rifle design has been stagnant for a long time. We keep running into the same problem, over and over again, that isn't really going to change.
1. The purpose of a military rifle is to kill people. It takes a certain amount of "damage" to reliably kill/incapacitate a person.
2. Any round that does more "damage" than is necessary to kill a person is now overkill. That means you've wasted space, weight, and ammo capacity just to put a bigger hole in something. That's fine if you're hunting bears, but not if you're hunting humans. Once he's dead, you can't make him more dead.
Let's say you have a super-rifle from 500 years in the future. You could have advanced materials that make it lighter. You could have an auto-aiming device to make it more accurate. You could have super-propellant for your bullets that gives more force in a smaller package. None of that changes the fact that, damage-wise, you're still aiming for something between the M-16 and the AK-47.
If you've got super-bullets that are 1/2 the size of the M-16's rounds, then you can now carry 60 round magazines instead of 30. You don't need a gun that's twice as powerful as the M-16, because the M-16 reliably kills people.
The other option is changing out the barrel/chamber on the autorifle, so it fires fewer but heavier bullets.
I'd expect a field-swappable version of this essentially:
http://www.safetyharborfirearms.com/products/shtf-uppers/product/43-shtf-50-mag-fed-upper-conversion
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Kind of late to this, but thought I would add my thoughts. I also think that infantry should have two different damage values. The anti-infantry and Anti-Armor (mech) damage, each with their own range and damage ratings. I also have no problem with infantry having limited ammo. But I thin the biggest issue I have with infantry is the magic transports that some of them have. I would make it so that you have foot infantry and jump/VTOL/etc. (back pack transport) infantry any infantry transports should be a separate vehicle, either on a separate sheet or on the same sheet for things like beast mounted infantry (kind of a 3rd option). With the beast mounted infantry you would have a chance to hit the beast or the troop something like 1-3 infantry, 4-6 mount for small individual mounts, 1-2 infantry, 3-6 for medium mounts, and 1 infantry, 2-6 for large (or bigger) mounts. If you have lost more mounts (mounts may have more than one hit point) than troops you have the option of moving at foot infantry speeds tell that changes or leaving behind the extra infantry that can not be mounted (they would be counted as casualties for purpose of the game, but not for a campaign). If you wanted you could also use this option for the bike mounted troops, with the exception that a pilotless mount does not follow along with the rest of the herd as a living animal does. So when you lose a mount you lose the troops with it or slow down to walking speed be that one per each bike, two per quad runner, or four per jeep, what ever you are using.
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That is completely out of whack to me.
1. Sub machine guns are not autorifles.
2. 28 autorifles clearly outperforming a mech machine gun against armor makes no sense. Heck taking 4 and strapping them together and giving them a drum magazine is so competitive against armor that it is no contest which I'd want.
3. Looking into how close the throw weight of a mech machine gun(roughly 5kg) is to 28 autorifles(roughly 6kg) makes it hard to explain why 28 autorifles are so much better against armor, especially when you consider they have the same effective ranges and anti infantry capabilities of the two are reasonably comparable to each other.
Depends on armor construction. Most people are fairly familiar with the modern hard armors on vehicles today. But there are a lot of other less known armor types out there that would result in a similar result as battletech armor. I've worn a Composite armor where the outer layer was a polymer-foam that was extremely effective at absorbing the initial energy of a shot, but was destroyed in the process. Ended up causing the weird thing where it was often safer to be shot by a few large rounds then a bunch of small ones. There are a couple of armors that use bags of non-Newtonian fluids to absorb the energy but each hit lets the fluid leak so a bunch of smaller hits is also worse then a few large hits.
I liked an advanced version of the foam armor with the anti-laser layers as a form of rebar with thin sheet metal covering in most parts as my idea of what battletech armor is. Explains how techs are able to repair it up to full so quickly and easily without needing armor designed for each mech.
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The trouble is as I pointed out the number of impacts, mass of the individual impactors, and velocity of the impactors are all actually pretty close together. Enough that I'm not sure it can explain the difference in effectiveness.
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The trouble is as I pointed out the number of impacts, mass of the individual impactors, and velocity of the impactors are all actually pretty close together. Enough that I'm not sure it can explain the difference in effectiveness.
Well, under the prototype armor that I wore. Rapid shots in a small area wouldn't be as damaging compared to a bunch of shots spread out over the armor. Just because of the mechanics of the way the foam dispersed energy. The non-Newtonian fluid armor would behave similarly because the fluid would be rigid under stress and have not had a chance to leak out yet . Under normal harden steel/hard composite a bunch of smaller impacts are less of an issue then continuous impacts in a small area.
Oops its Shear-thickening liquid armor not non-newtonian though that may be a subtype. https://youtu.be/kot_maQXj54
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Depends on armor construction. Most people are fairly familiar with the modern hard armors on vehicles today. But there are a lot of other less known armor types out there that would result in a similar result as battletech armor. I've worn a Composite armor where the outer layer was a polymer-foam that was extremely effective at absorbing the initial energy of a shot, but was destroyed in the process. Ended up causing the weird thing where it was often safer to be shot by a few large rounds then a bunch of small ones. There are a couple of armors that use bags of non-Newtonian fluids to absorb the energy but each hit lets the fluid leak so a bunch of smaller hits is also worse then a few large hits.
No, it still doesn't make sense. Because then mech machine guns would just shoot very low caliber ammunition at an insane rate of fire. If big ass guns didn't work, they'd just switch to something that did.
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The insane rate of fire would imply some level of heat. I think the 'mech machine gun represents the "sweet spot" for damage at 1/2/3 range and 0 heat.
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No, it still doesn't make sense. Because then mech machine guns would just shoot very low caliber ammunition at an insane rate of fire. If big ass guns didn't work, they'd just switch to something that did.
*nod*
The numbers do seem to indicate mech machine guns are firing a fairly substantial number of smaller rounds at insane rates of fire.
The 5kg number I came up with is a bit high because part of that number would be ammunition feeds and the actual weight of the bin itself but it is still enough to take out up to 24 infantry, that indicates an absolute bottom limit of 24 rounds being fired every trigger pull, I actually fully expect there to be far more but we do not have enough data to be sure.
Compared to the 32 infantry that can be taken out by an autorifle platoon and that it is roughly 6kg but again part of that would be the magazine and we do actually know how many rounds are being fired at maximum(420) does tell me that mech machine guns probably are firing a similar amount. If they were not the maximum potentials wouldn't be so close.
It honestly wouldn't bug me so much if the armor behaved consistently but it doesn't.
The insane rate of fire would imply some level of heat. I think the 'mech machine gun represents the "sweet spot" for damage at 1/2/3 range and 0 heat.
You can put quite a few rounds through a minigun before it gets hot enough to be a concern.
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My theory is that miniguns are smaller caliber than 'mech machine guns. I'm not sure how many rounds you can put through a GAU-19 before worrying about heat...
EDIT: And it can argued that the multi-barrel configurations of miniguns is a form of heat sink...
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Considering how long the trigger was being held down and how quickly the gunner was back on the trigger in the first youtube video I found of the GAU-19 firing, easily in the hundreds of rounds.
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Considering how long the trigger was being held down and how quickly the gunner was back on the trigger in the first youtube video I found of the GAU-19 firing, easily in the hundreds of rounds.
True, but then you run into the issue of facing units with hardened faced armor in which case your screwed. This is the interesting thing of the constantly shifting armor/weapon dynamic. Somethings phase in and out of effectiveness weapons and countermeasures evolve. Good example is the old battleships of WWII. Against most modern naval weapons they are almost immune as modern weapons are actually not well designed to defeat the high-thickness face-hardened armor of the period.
So you could fit a bunch of 5.56 miniguns on it and fill up half your mech with ammo to feed them. Then the next mechs off the line drop a weapon or two and thicken up the exterior armor face to bounce them or you run into reinforced-concrete defensive structures which laugh at you. So most-likely your going to rely on much better all-around weapons for your main guns, and your machine guns on mechs would most likely have a burst limiter to keep a mechwarrior from emptying his entire ammo load out in a single trigger pull like what happens in all planes. Even on weapons without it your constantly drilled to only fire short bursts as you can easily waste ammo.
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going back to the original question;
"Sort of".
I would've liked to see a clear separation between 'support weapons' and 'standard weapons', possibly something along the lines of a set of 'ammo boxes' for the support weapon column.
in this case, your 'support weapons' would be 'mech/vehicle scale weapons like the aforementioned SRM/LRM launchers, man-portable PPC units, support lasers and support MG's.
Every nth man killed in the platoon, you tick off a box.
Standards would have longer ranges against other light infantry units so that platoons don't have to be standing in each other's boots to inflict damage.
but then, I'd take the 'anti infantry' weapons and proably triple their range going from 'mech to man. (IOW a 'mech mounted MG would do 2d6-out to 18 hexes or so against unprotected infantry in the open.) far outranging the infantry's anti-'mech weapons (with the exception of field gun units, which would be specifically tied to mechanized type.)
Thus, keeping infantry 'relevant', but also preventing the "sword platoon with sniper rifles" from damaging 'mechs out to 6 hexes with 24 damage from the vibroswords somehow magically transporting their cutting edges 180 some-odd meters across open ground.
(and other hilarious misreadings of the rules).
also a separate 'box' for one-shot weapons like VLAWs and the like, which could give a platoon a 20-28 point hit...once in a battle scenario (unless they're adjacent to something like a j-27 ammo transport or an actual, separate, has-its-own-stats APC.)
Dug in infantry would get variable protections:
In woods: 1/2 damage (manpower losses, still tracking by deadguys) from anti-infantry weapons (except fire, fire kills everything.)
In Rubble: 1/4 damage
Hardened positions: 'mech weapons do 'mech damage. a Machine gun against hardened, prepared positions will kill one guy if it kills anyone at all, but an autocannon 5 will smear five guys into paste and reduce the structure to rubble on that facing/hex.
see what I'm saying?
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Hey, who remembers where fan rules belong?
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[thread necro] (It seemed the best place to put this-)
I finally figured out what bugged me about using support weapons to define ranges for the primarys: The grouping.
I'd be fine with it if the damage was spread out over however many support weapons remained in the platoon, and not in groups of two. I can't envision a guy with an SRM spraying his missile over more than one location. A group of four would have to get lucky to manage to spread it out that evenly so that the bullets could have an effect. Usually, I look at anything that spreads across locations as ineffective 'miss' shots.
And, before anyone talks about tracking number of hits in two point groupings on a location 'due to the nature of infantry weapons', I'd point to autocannons, which also fire clusters of shells, which all apply as one damage block.
So, yeah. If that were fixed, I'd be somewhat okay with the infantry construction rules and their depiction, except for Mechanized, but that horse's carcass has been beaten to nigh oblivion.
Otherwise, I'm still up for a touch more grit. Or, maybe putting infantry on their own playing field, like a revised BattleTroops.
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I use variant rules. (3025 era only so far.)
- Infantry platoons are divided into squads (the typical BTech squad being 7 men, with 4 squads in a platoon, but organization can be flexible.)
- An infantry squad can operate one support weapon in addition to its regular infantry armament, the latter being effective only against other infantry. This support weapon is a light machine gun (additional firepower against infantry, with no anti-'Mech value) or the equivalent of one of the following Mech weapons: Machine gun (a HMG in infantry terms), small laser, flamer or SRM-2. These crew-served support weapons can not be fired on the move. (Though highly advanced weapons such as the good old man-pack PPC from TRO3026 could be.)
- In lieu of support weapons, infantry can instead operate field guns much as per the usual rules.
- In addition, a normal infantry squad is assumed to be equipped with short-range anti-'Mech weapons (satchel charges and the like) which can be used to attack 'Mechs in the same hex for 2 points of damage.
- Attacks work using normal to-hit rolls, one roll being made for the entire platoon. Roll on the appropriate column of the missile hits table to determine the number of weapon hits, depending on how many squads are still operable in the platoon. Alternatively, to-hit rolls could be made for each individual squad.
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Hey, who remembers where fan rules belong?