a sick idea that would NEVER be popular...

[Cannonshop]

Imagine Battletech...but with thresholding rules.

yes, the ones we use on Aerospace units, but applied to Battlemechs, Tanks, and buildings.

10% rounded up to the nearest tenth.  (aka 41 armor points and you only need a five point whack to get a crit check).

Okay, that's a little widespread, let's look at our 3025 units, and maybe twist this a little bit...

Okay, Damage thresholding applies to ballistic weapons.  it doesn't apply to missiles or energy weapons, but it does apply to ballistics.

How does that change your perception of the base 3025 'mech lists? does it make the proliferation of AC/5s make more sense?

more importantly, does it make your tabletop games run faster?

what about if we remove the classification restriction so that any weapon that can make 10% of a location's armor capable of inflicting a critical hit?

predictably, light 'mechs suffer the most here, though they also gain the ability to kill heavier designs more readily, and lethality over all goes up, provided they're running something heavier than an LRM.

but...is it interesting?

Let's hear your thoughts.

[worktroll]

First thoughts:

1) More calculations, would slow the game down more.
2) More crits, increases lethality, but also tending to slow play until that point is reached.
3) It gives the autocannons reason to live! UACs become even more frightening.

I like the idea of restricting it to autocannons. I might round down, just to stop AC-2s being lethal (eg. need less than 11 points to threshold, not 21 points - there's an awful lot of locations with less than 21 points.) AC-5s at less than 41, 10s at less than 91 (eg. all)

Maybe make ferro-fibrous more resistant, or prevents thresholds?

[Takiro]

Interesting concept.

One of the big advantages for the BattleMech is it's endurance or resistance to critical damage that Conventional Armor just can't compare.

Wasn't reactive armor made to blunt this type of damage.

[PuppyLikesLaserPointers]

That's interesting and also fun. I am not fond of simply making the mechs better than the vehicles rather than it beats the vehicles by using their own legs, and it makes a clear advantage to the vehicles.

But, for balancing the weapons, I think that restrict it to the autocannon would be better, for I think that the weapon group is generally the weakest type of weapons and I see those near to lackluster personally for despite of its ton of weakness usually the gain is not so big compared by using the energy weapons instead. Also on the era of 3025 those mechs suffer for lack of CASE, so it would be huge.

Also it does not penalizes light mechs much, for with this even an AC/5 can keep causes the crit roll against any parts of an Atlas save for center torso and legs. So if it is in effect, AC/5 groups would be the best beneficiary.

By the way isn't the threshold triggers when the damage exceeds the threshold? So if you have a part starting with 41 armor points 6 or higher damage will cause the critical hits, not 5 or higher.

Also, will hardened armor counted for a double when calculate the threshold in your idea?

[DevianID]

So I thought about something along the lines of armor /5 for ground units, compared to armor /10 for aerospace.  Aerospace is noted for being easier to punch through, so I feel its important if you have a threshold to make it better then what aerospace get.

Thus something normal like a thunderbolt would have 6 for CT and leg, 5 for side torsos, and 4 for the arms, with a 2 for head, if we did thresholds are armor/5.  Meanwhile a manticore tank would have 9 on the front/turret, 6 rear, 7 side.  It would make the distribution on tanks versus mechs more interesting for sure, by having the low to the ground tanks have better armor thresholds then mechs but still being vulnerable to the facing side taking lots of damage.  Large lasers and PPCs would be stronger, certainly, and small lasers and higher would get a crit chance on the cockpit... makes more sense why that mechwarrior is taking damage haha.

If you did armor/10, well then you wouldnt be buffing the AC5 so much as medium lasers, which already are good enough lol.

As for only ACs getting armor penetration rules... I am a big fan of AP ammo being unlocked for earlier era play.  I think its a simple thing to just make a primitive AP ammo that costs more, which is what they did for rocket launchers.

As for lore... yeah the Passive Reactive armor of battletech is designed to ablate rather then be penetrated.  So its a bit of a shift in the lore, as existing descriptions of battles and weapons would all need to change.  That kinda reinforces why it wouldnt be popular.

[Daryk]

For 'mechs at least, I'm in favor of keeping the threshold values the same as ASFs (they have the same square-cube problem).  And PLLP has the rounding right.  41 points of armor will prevent a threshold crit from a 5 point hit.

I like DevianID's idea of making tanks a bit tougher.  Motive crits are already a thing for them.

[phoenixalpha]

Didnt Renegade Legion do something similar?

[Daryk]

RL had armor and weapon penetration diagrams.  I suppose you could say it was similar, but this is more abstract (just like BT in general compared to RL).

[Cannonshop]

Interesting concept.

One of the big advantages for the BattleMech is it's endurance or resistance to critical damage that Conventional Armor just can't compare.

Wasn't reactive armor made to blunt this type of damage.

In the 'real world' Reactive armors (ERA) are great....if you're facing shaped charge warheads.  it's less great against solid penetrators.  (one of the main reasons so many tanks moved away from using HEAP/HEAT rounds toward high velocity solids in the 1970s and 1980s  after that type...kinda lagged in the 1950s and 60s.)

okay...
so...

out of five responses, the majority favor restricting to autocannons only.  (I guess machine guns WOULD be kinda overkill here.)

Most people favored rounding down? or is it up? 

not really sure there.  There is one suggestion for changing to a 20% (aka if armor is 10, that's the most you're going to crit with an AC/2, an AC/5 only crits on 20 or lower)  is that right?

Admit I didn't bother taking AP ammo as it exists into account, there's a reason; I'ts bloody useless and consumes an enormous portion of your ammo bin for being bloody useless (*fewer shots, you miss each one more often, and the crit chance sucks ass on anything smaller than a class 20, which has two shots in a ton and requires standing in the other guy's boots to hit.)

now for some of my logic in choosing what I did for the post that started this;

1. most of the time absorbed in battletech play, is players hemming and hawing, I don't see a time penalty from the addition of thresholds, because most of the dithering is in the movement phase anyway, and that's not likely to change.

2. I've noticed a trend with people when you give them math; they find it easier to mentally calculate 1/10th, than 1/5th, especially with numbers that aren't a multiple of five.  This may have something to do with how american money is decimal based, but most people who struggle to come up with 1/5th of 23, can do 1/10th of 23 in their heads after about fourth grade.

rounding...

alright, rounding up or down to the nearest ten means an Ac/5 will top out the threshold at 50, rounding it down, yeah, you've got to be over 50 to get the crit check...which is great, when you've got as many designs that don't reach 50, but do pass 40, in the Heavy and Assault categories.

which kinda makes the idea pointless, really, unless you're willing to ALSO go with sliding numbers that WILL take more time.  (dividing by the REMAI"NNG armor takes more time....and requires consulting your opponent to make sure he's not bunking his totals.)

not really sold there, but I can be.

like the title says, I'm pretty certain the risk-averse average player would NOT appreciate something like this.

in any form.

Mainly I'm looking at this, and remembering that the BAR system got dumpster-filed (though not deleted) pretty quickly with the next pile of extra weapons (Rifles anyone?) came up after a change in leadership.

now..for the awful.

AC/2 being genuinely dangerous recalibrates a lot of mockery directed at lots of existing designs.  The Jagermech suddenly becomes dangerous because it crits at range-or can crit at range, anyway, if your dice don't hate you, same for the base model Blackjack, the Pike, that Clan thing with ten ultra 2s and so on.

i'ts a 'machine gun hit' that can PENETRATE armor at a distance, making certain fluff scenarios actually work.

likewise for the AC/5, a weapon that is predominant in the early designs of the game and keeps showing up despite being...welll an overweight ER medium laser that ammo explodes and runs out of shots.  Nearly everyone dumps it first, usually for a PPC or some flavor of large laser.

but what if it actually had a REASON to exist beyond "well, we forgots how to mek thim farncy lenzes"?

all of a sudden, the SHD-2H becomes something you might actually WANT in your army, makes the token autocannon on a Marauder actually useful as more than ballast.

but toying with the base idea a little more (I sincerely doubt anyone's going to bother testing this...)

Thresholds:

Autocannons/ballistics: 1/10 threshold,  Threshold caps.  (51 points in the design, no threshold check off an AC/5 or smaller, 21 poitns same for AC/2, and so on.)

LBX Cluster loses the threshold ability-it's armor damage only and normal chances for crit as we all know, slug loads do the same as basic autocannon (1/10th threshold crit)

AP ammo: Doubles your critical chance at the same threshold. (1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, 3 becomes 6...yeah, it gets absurd)
Flak: Only thresholds against Aerospace units or VTOLs (Non penetrating against Standard ground units).


Energy:  1/20th thresholds on ground vehicles, 'mechs, etc.  (round down, so a ML will go through 25, but only does armor damge on 26.)
Missile: armor damage only.  (this should be obvious with something like an LRM, where each missile is hitting separately with a shaped charge, same for SRM)

I honestly don't think we need to give Ferro any more advantages, esp. Clan ferro...but hardened?  Yah, treat hardened armor as having double the threshold requirement (aka an AC/5 is not going to threshold 40 points of hardened armor, period.  You have to chew that shit off point by point until it's gone.)

balancing: The empty 'Roll again' spaces? you don't roll again on a threshold crit, it may have penetrated, but it didn't hit anything vital, the shell is just kinda 'there' in that empty space and inert now, or maybe it overpenetrated and fell out.

yes, missile boats kinda suffer, but then, we have Clan LRMs running around and they'll still kill things just as fast as they have always done, you just don't get to check for a critical chance as often, but then, that's why you have hole punchers, right?

[Daryk]

Porting thresholds from ASFs directly would mean 11 points of armor would be enough to prevent an AC/2 from penetrating (the rule there is "round up"; TW page 239 refers).

As I recall, there's an option to adjust thresholds based on the current armor in a location, but the standard rule is based on the undamaged armor value (TW page 239 again).  That may only apply to buildings, though...

[phoenixalpha]

RAC5 would become the weapon of choice then.
up to six chances of a crit, with in reality a 50% crit rate.

[Takiro]

Well an AC/20 would have uses too even in the 3050s. I mean they get dumped for a Gauss Rifle super quick in the era of lostech but with the ability to threshold check an opponents armor and the 20 points of blam it would be the ultimate anti-Mech weapon. Put the real fear of god into Mech units.

[Daryk]

This would basically give the bubble of doom an exponent... ;D

[idea weenie]

I'm imagining a light Mech that runs fast and has Machine Guns, like the Piranha.  Its entire goal is to fire enough times to roll a head hit (causing a pilot hit) and go for a critical.

How about if Autocannons and similar kinetics counted as double their damage when calculating piloting rolls for remaining standing?  (Not Machine Guns)

So if you need to hit with 20 pts of damage to make the piloting roll, then a single AC/10 shot will work, a pair of AC/5 shots, or five AC/2 shots.

[PuppyLikesLaserPointers]

I'm imagining a light Mech that runs fast and has Machine Guns, like the Piranha.  Its entire goal is to fire enough times to roll a head hit (causing a pilot hit) and go for a critical.

How about if Autocannons and similar kinetics counted as double their damage when calculating piloting rolls for remaining standing?  (Not Machine Guns)

So if you need to hit with 20 pts of damage to make the piloting roll, then a single AC/10 shot will work, a pair of AC/5 shots, or five AC/2 shots.

That's actually makes sense - unlike energy weapons kinetic weapons delivers raw kinetic energy. Yes PPC does deliveres raw kinetic energy as well but in this case the kinetic energy is directly turned to the heat instead because the particle is too smaller than the autocannon bullets, so it is unlikely that a PPC deals same kinetic damage as much as an AC/10 does.

[DevianID]

I tried the autocannons do more psr damage/energy does less, but we quickly stopped using it.
1, it was annoying to keep track of-not impossible but definitely we needed pen and paper for psr damage tracking when we didnt before
2, energy weapons at the scale cause plasma explosions that excavate armor explosively.  So they would create just as much knockdown as anything else.  Yes, energy weapons could work differently, like by being cancer beams with lots of radiation, but I'm pretty sure we want the explosive kind of lasers not the other ones.
3, it didn't actually help autocannons, but it made gauss rifles more problematic.  The ac2 was still for fishing for motives or open armor, the extra knockdown from 2 to 4 didn't matter.  But gauss rifles (we do play with the optional rule for every 20 damage adds another +1) would hit 60 damage for PSRs with 2 shots, which just stopped cold any non-elite pilot.  The difference from 30 with 2 gauss normally to 60 was massive.  Same with ac20s, the big guns were already fine, and this just made them even better compared to an ac5.

[Daryk]

Thanks for the play testing data! :)

[Hellraiser]

See now, this shouldn't be a "game wide" change, but, what this SHOULD be is the proper way the Armor Piercing AC ammo works.

Forget the 1/2 ammo, penalty to hit blah blah & only a crit chance on -1 to that roll as well.

Instead give AP ammo the "threshold" effect from AT.

I could get behind that.

For that matter, give them a BONUS to Crit based on the AC size,  so +1/+2/+3/+4 for 2/5/10/20

Makes an AC20 w/ AP Ammo very likely to punch through & get at least some crits w/ decent odds at 3.

Something like an AC5 being able to get Crit Checks at +2 on any mech with 40 or less Armor in that location would be nice for the AC mechs.