General Category > Game Mechanics

Possible Rule Change: Armor and Mobility

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Joseph Hewitt:
One of the things I've been playing around with is a new to-hit/damage system. At the moment mecha have a MV score, which is a penalty applied to piloting rolls. Weapons have Acc, BV, and some other traits which can help them hit more easily. Once a mecha is hit, damage is rolled, and this must penetrate the mecha's armor. Again, there are certain traits which can make this more or less likely.

My new system would scrap most of that. Weapons would have three basic traits: Accuracy, Penetration, and Damage. All three would be rated on a scale of 1 to 5. Models (mecha, characters, and props) would have two defensive scores: Mobility and Armor. These get added to a target's defensive skill, making them harder to hit or damage.

Accuracy counteracts Mobility, but it can't reduce the target's defense below the basic defense value. Likewise Penetration counteracts Armor. In order to cause damage, the attacker must defeat the best one of the target's defenses. If Mobility is beat then the target is hit but not necessarily hurt. If Mobility and Armor are both beat, the target is hit and damaged.

So there's no point in using your gauss rifle against a Vadel because you're probably not going to hit. And there's no point in using the vulcan cannon against a Bargol since you'll never penetrate the armor. On the other hand if you use the vulcan cannon against the Vadel and the gauss rifle against the Bargol you should do pretty well.

The advantages of this system over the current one:

* There's no such thing as "the best weapon"; instead different weapons have different uses.
* Armor and maneuverability are now co-measurable. Though there will probably be certain differences between the two, specializing in one or the other should both be viable (as should trying to balance the two).
* On a related point, being deficient in one or the other will no longer be a death sentence.
* To repurpose the other mecha traits, Targeting could now represent your chance of causing a critical hit (with an Attack+Craft roll) and ECM counteracts it.
You can download a test program to play around with this here:

http://www.gearheadrpg.com/GHW_Combat.zip

I know this is a big change, but the game's in the middle of a massive rewrite. If things are gonna be changed now's the time to do it.

xpace:
Sounds good to me, provided this new system gets play tested enough for balance. I really like a rock-paper-scissors type of system of strengths and weaknesses because it can add a lot more strategy to a game. And since a lot of the strategy in GearHead seems to be how your mecha are built, this would add to it. This would also give players more of a reason to have more than one type of weapon installed, so that they'd have a better chance to penetrate a target's defenses even if they don't know what they'll be up against next.

BTW, while we're on the subject of mecha defenses: In the GH Technology: The Babble Behind It thread you mentioned:

--- Quote from: Joseph Hewitt on October 23, 2009, 03:24:31 AM ---
- Force fields (Repulsor Shields) are being developed, but are not yet standard technology. There's one example of a force field in GH2 already (based on the phase effect, not a repulsor shield) and another one will be showing up soon.
--- End quote ---

I understand that you would want to make that technology rare. But I'm assuming that if the player plays their cards right, they could acquire a piece of that. This would be cool. GH1 had that 'super mecha' and 'stealth mecha' as special story rewards, so I'd expect GH2 to have it's own special tech rewards.

However, I'm thinking that, after going through a one-time story mission or something and (through persistence and/or luck) the player manages to get a shield generator, how much would they lament their luck when enemies manage to either destroy the component or the mecha they're piloting. (It'd probably only be a matter of when, not if...) Perhaps players should have more than one chance at getting one?

Also, this reminds me of how, in GH1, the largest mecha are not the best choices for players. Huge mecha and tanks are pretty strong as opponents, but the poor MV score (and other stats) makes them very impractical for the player to use. They may have room for a lot of armor, large weapons, and components, but they'd eventually get damaged. So a medium-sized mecha is usually much better, because not getting hit and a better chance of hitting your target is what's most important.

IMO, that situation is rather unfortunate. The impracticality of large vehicles rather limits the choices available to players. However, I think that having either a really high penetration resistance (would that be your new "Armor" stat?) or Repulsor Shields might make really large vehicles a more practical choice.

DudeGuyMan:
I'm firmly in the "mecha are cool but silly and no sane society would ever really build them" camp and would find it beautifully subversive to drive a giant mecha-smashing tank around. :D

That aside, yeah I think this proposed system sounds pretty good, both simpler to understand and a bit more realistic. Machine gun bullets don't "strip armor" from an Abrams tank, they just spang off it.

Prokofiev:
The 'scale of 5' sounds like it might be a tad simplistic. Even the 'vanilla' modless base game has a very wide variety of weapons, especially taking into account differences between, say, light rockets 60 and swarm rockets 40. Or, for that matter, swarm 5 v. 20 v. 40.

That said, I do like the idea of making the different forms of defense/attack more useful and distinct. In my (comparatively short) experience with GH1/2 it seems like mobility is king. Armor helped a little when you inevitably got hit, but a poor MV value and/or low speed generally meant a fast death, regardless of how much armor you had. In GH2, your opponents had a tendency to always throttle about at top speed (especially in space!), which favored high BV/acc.

Took a little whirl at pokemechs. Seems clear that weapon choice matters more, but also looks lucky damage still plays a big role. Of course, I doubt that a buruburu and a thorshammer will both have 10 HP in the next version of GH2, heh.

xpace:
I also find the idea of piloting a Tank instead of a Battroid (the typical humanoid mecha) to be a very attractive idea. It's just too bad that this is not especially practical with the current combat system. But, to be fair, tanks are typically not known for being either very maneuverable or fast. This makes it rather difficult to dodge attacks with them, which makes it more realistic.

The Monstrous can be a strong opponent, but it just does not have the same durability under player control. The reasoning for this was explained in detail on page 42 of the GearHead Arena Player's Guide:

--- Quote from: Aquillion ---
...The reason why you lost a CYB-13 Monstrous so quickly is because they suck. They're alright for the computer, mind you, and can be a nasty challenge due to all their kickass equipment; but they're no good for the player. My reasoning here is simple: There are essentially two main options in mech design, heavy armor/weapons vs. lightweight maneuverability. The Monstrous falls fairly obviously on the 'heavy' side of the equation. In theory, you're supposed to need a balance between these two, and in one-on-one combat, both ways would be equally viable; but in practice, it just doesn't work that way.

Problem is, players virtually never enter one-on-one combat. It's rare to enter a fight with less then three opponents; four or five is more common. When you're outnumbered, dodging and speed have a clear advantage; with high enough maneuverability you can dodge attacks from less skilled pilots all day, but no amount of armor will keep you alive for long against even mediocre opposition. Superior weaponry--the other half of the heavy-mech strategy--is supposed to help here by letting you eliminate everyone before they eliminate you, but again, that's much less likely to work when you're up against so many people. High speed, on the other hand, lets you pick and choose the order in which you engage your opponents, and lets you (sometimes) fight them one-on-one.

Because of these things, I generally don't think I'd ever want to get into a fight using a mech whose MV penalty exceeds -2 or so...
--- End quote ---

Further, it's unfortunate that some of the more obscure mecha designs, such as the Ornithoids, are also not especially practical for players. IMO, availability and PV (cost) should be the primary factors in deciding which vehicle to use.

Ideally, even a seasoned player would have a very tough time deciding on which vehicles to aim for owning because a majority of them would have a decent balance of strengths and weaknesses. As the saying goes, "Variety is the spice of life." And still being a force to reckon with (instead of seeing it as an Iron-Man Challenge) while piloting whatever fits their play style would be a big boon to some players.

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