MSG: Mecha Combat Bits
At the end of the video you can see the RX-78-2, the Alex, the Ez8, the Blue Destiny, and one more that I don’t recognize off hand. Does anybody know what it is? It looks like a plain old GM.
Combat: the bread and butter of the mecha genre. Without it, you might as well be watching a cartoon about dishwashers. Here are some thoughts I’ve had about mecha combat while watching Mobile Suit Gundam. Some of these thoughts are accompanied by suggested rule changes, while others are just thrown out there for comment.
Weapons: Accuracy vs Penetration
There seem to be two factors involved in damaging your opponent: hitting them, and penetrating their armor. The Guntank has the most powerful weapons but has a hard time targeting mobile suits. The Gundam can usually hit with its beam rifle, but has a hard time damaging large targets.
In GearHead, the more accurate weapon would also be the one most likely to penetrate armor. Accuracy bonuses aren’t as important as damage class, and in most cases don’t vary very much. I kind of wish things were more like they are in Gundam since then you’d have to choose the right weapon for a particular job. There’d be tradeoffs. It wouldn’t simply be a matter of the biggest gun being the best choice in all situations.
I note that armor class in Dungeons and Dragons works this way- it’s a single defensive value which combines both armor protection and the ability to not get hit in the first place. Certain special effects can negate one aspect of this protection, either automatically hitting or ignoring armor.
In the cartoon, mecha get shot up a lot but don’t show any signs of damage until something important stops working. This is roughly the way things work in GearHead.
Battlefield Control
Outmaneuvering the enemy is apparently very important in Gundam. It’s not just a matter of mecha being weaker from the back- covering fire and suppression are used to control areas on the battlefield. Mecha get pinned down, isolated, and taken out one by one.
GearHead, on the other hand, works pretty much like a steel cage wrestling match. There are mecha going everywhere, running around, bouncing off turnbuckles, throwing chairs… And since the AI is so dumb and predictable, the PC can pretty much just set up a nice position and pick them off.
I’d like to include some rules for covering and suppression. Unfortunately, in addition to the new rules this would probably require upgrading the enemy AI.
Mechariders
Mecha riding on top of other mecha are cool. Gundam has G-Parts, the Gouf has some kind of flying saucer shaped thing that I can’t find the name of right now. Possibilities for GearHead? Imagine a character who specializes in tanks having a special flight base that clamps to their tank for space missions.
April 21st, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Having the mecha’s transportation abstracted from itself would be interesting, maybe as addons allowing certain types to fly or something. Iguess I see this sort of like the Hover Disc travel power in Champions Online. You don’t have it out until you want to fly, then you hop onto your UFO shaped metal thingie and sort of air-surf on it.
Certainly, if it were possible to equip your battroid with external devices to provide space movement, it should be harder or impossible without such a device, and mecha with built in capabilities should be more expensive.
April 22nd, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Ideas are quite nice but as far as riding is concerned I hope for only one thing - that I will be able to turn it off/mod it out easily. I always thought of mecha as - often humanoid but still - combat vehicles. And vehicles riding on vehicles idea puts quite a stress on my duspension of disbelief making me see it as rather silly, not cool. Although I believe there will be players who will find it to be interesting feature.
Weapon damage, accuracy etc - sometimes maybe one could find hard-hitting and accurate weapon (a bit powered up laser?) but balanced in different ways - long time needed to shot, requiring lot of energy and so on.
May 13th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
I find it amazing that game designers believe that an upright walking armoured vehicle would survive longer than the prototype stage!
Tanks, and most other tracked vehicles, are STABLE firing platforms allowing for large high-powered long-range weapons with sophisticated targeting services.
The best defence is not to be seen! So just walking about makes you a target. Then there is the small matter of kinetic energy. A kinetic energy penetrator (also known as a KE weapon) is a type of ammunition which, like a bullet, does not contain explosives and uses kinetic energy to penetrate the target.
The term can apply to any type of armour-piercing shot but typically refers to a modern type of armour piercing weapon, the armour-piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot (APFSDS), a type of long-rod penetrator (LRP), and not to small arms bullets.
The ‘Fin’ round travels at around 975 m/s (3200 ft/s), resulting in the generation of three and a half tonnes of force when it comes in contact with a weighted and/or fixed object. Speed, and therefore energy, inevitably decreases during flight, however it is still very deadly at ranges up to six kilometres.
The opposite technique to KE-penetrators uses chemical energy penetrators. There are two types of these shells in use: high explosive anti-tank (HEAT) and high explosive squash head (HESH). They have been widely used against armour in the past and still have a role but are less effective against modern composite armour such as Chobham, Kanchan as used on main battle tanks today.
The principle of the kinetic energy penetrator is that it uses its kinetic energy, which is a function of mass and velocity, to force its way through armour. The modern KE weapon maximizes KE and minimizes the area over which it is delivered by:
* being fired with a very high muzzle velocity
* concentrating the force in a small impact area while still retaining a relatively large mass
* maximizing the mass of whatever (albeit small) volume is occupied by the projectile—that is, using the densest metals practical, which is one of the reasons depleted uranium is often used.
So then, the “standing” target would have to compensate for the force of the impact even if the armour wasn’t penetrated! Otherwise, it’ll end up on it’s back…
There are also the HEAT and HESH/HEP rounds. But they are relatively unimportant considering the faults of a walking vehicle. The vehicle has far too many moving parts, is too unstable for accurate fire and with a one man crew, is quickly overwhelmed on the battlefield! How is your one man going to keep track of several enemy threats, target one accurately, fire a missile, and keep moving defensively?
Then we have to consider death from above, helicopters…