i really wish people wouldn't uses the AC/5 to exaggerate their complaints about autocannon quality- it's the worst gun in the autocannon lineup, and it's got a massive pile of competing weapons. we know this. it is not indicative of the rest of the guns. it's the old crotchety senile grandma of the autocannon family, please stop mocking it.
We aren't mocking it for laughs. There's a bunch of weapons that stand out and irritate us because the game designers try to present so many other weapons as balanced but failed so hard with some obvious lemmings and we want it to be fixed. Whether it is AC 5, Large Pulses, MRMs or VSL Mediums there is going to be those special few that are scorned above all other weapons for their obvious lameness even though they could be tweaked to become more inline with everything else.
This community would need less moderators if there was better game design. (This last statement is snark/ a joke because it is absurdly false)
i really wish people wouldn't uses the AC/5 to exaggerate their complaints about autocannon quality- it's the worst gun in the autocannon lineup, and it's got a massive pile of competing weapons. we know this. it is not indicative of the rest of the guns. it's the old crotchety senile grandma of the autocannon family, please stop mocking it.
What? Seriously? As if the weapon weren't already gimped enough...
How so?
*Googles Sarna Net Trebuchet*
Let's see... PPC, SRM-2, AC/5... I'm sorry. How is this loadout not garbage given that I can sub in an LRM-10 plus sinks for a better damage at range? You're going to have to explain this one.
They use AC/10s. Weren't we talking purely about AC/5s? The AC/10 I'll admit has some utility, even in the DHS era (although LB-10X would be better, at least before specialty munitions were introduced).
Not listed on Sarna.net's Hunchback page, nor is their a separate page for it. What makes it the best?
1 AC/5 backed by two Medium Lasers? The 3025 Clint is arguably better off replacing the AC/5 with a PPC and extra Medium laser (and bracket firing of course). Of course then it would look sorta like a bigger, nastier Wolfhound.
Pumping out ~15 damage at long range while moving 5/8 isn't easy. The 7K has a good balance of heat management, and under reliance on ammo to make it the only credible AC 5 design compared to other weapon compositions that attempt to fill that damage output with that movement rating.
Netzilla made a blanket statement about all ACs which deserved a rebuttal.
The Turbo Hunchback upgrades the engine to 5/8 and takes out the mediums for a small laser. It's the most fun I've ever had with an AC 20.
I compared the Clint to the Wraith. You can't run without overheating with PPCs for many designs in that era. The Clint has heatsinks to spare after it jumps and fires its autocannon. You can't do what the Clint attempted to do with energy weapons. It still fails at what it tried to do but I see it was the closest thing to what a Level 1 tech Wraith would've been like when you consider the limitations of the technology at that level.
That's great... except I've never heard anyone complain that these guns have too little ammo (unless we're talking about the 3025 Rifleman). The primary complaint is that they do TOO LITTLE damage for the tonnage they cost and have no other benefits that make them worth their weight. Doubling their ammo per ton does precisely zilch to help in that regard. That's why everyone here has been talking about ways to bump their damage or changing/inventing rules to make the lighter ACs more effective.
Problems like...
Overweight - doubling the ammo count does not fix the horrible damage to tonnage ratio that the lighter ACs have.
Doing too little damage per turn - this matters because the more damage you throw down range per turn, the faster you can kill your enemy. Conversely, the more damage the enemy throws at you, the faster he can kill you. It becomes a race and between two equally protected enemies, the guy who can sling more damage per turn is more likely to win. Lighter ACs are near automatically fail at this.
Too little heat - This doesn't look like a problem at first, but one of the main culprits for the Autocannon's heavy weight is that they don't generate much heat. They effectively have built in heat sink capacity that they cannot share with other weapons. Being able to share heat sinks is very important, especially when you're pairing long range weapons with minimum ranges (like the lighter ACs) with short range weapons that take over when enemies get inside those minimums. The problem is that all the short range weapons that would cover the lighter ACs' minimum range zones generate more heat than the ACs, which necessitates more heat sinks that the big heavy weapon isn't using, resulting in wasted tonnage compared to say, the PPC/3 Medium laser combo.
*shrugs*
The major problem with trying to get ACs fixed are record sheets. Very few people want to do the recalculations caused by tweaking damage, range, etc which are the most popular and simplest requests for change. I doubt anyone who wants to do these changes are collecting a paycheck for the game which makes these types of suggestions a non-starter.
That's half the reason why I approach AC or ballistic weapons with various suggestions for changes like
-Have energy weapons that aren't small or micro overheat if you aren't heat neutral at the end of your turn
-have ACs walk fire across targets dividing their damage (rounded up) but getting better targeting numbers with each division
-have ballistics simply go through woods and walls without penalty and even capable of hitting
-ballistics cause knockdown damage (my lamest suggestion)
-ballistics roll for new targets in their line of attack if they miss the previous target (my craziest)
The other half, relates to how you and I think on the same wavelength that ballistics in general are deeply flawed because at a fundamental level they don't have unique attributes like energy weapons or missiles as a weapon class.
Improved ammo is just another in a long list of suggestions I made over the years. But it is a bandaid only for AC 5s and 2s instead of the ballistics class.
It works because part of the problem for all ammo consuming weapons is how they must allocate weight to get an adequate amount of firing capacity.
At the 3025 level it doesn't help as much but it doesn't hinder existing or customs designs either.
At the post invasion level the benefits become more obvious.
You have to spend less tonnage on RACs.
Specialty ammo efficiency has been improved by 100%.
Designs that try to mount multiple AC 2s and 5s aren't starved for ammo.
