(GH1) Is there ever any reason to have legs?

[DudeGuyMan]

Legs are heavy, and all they let you do is run, which is a pretty crummy mode of locomotion compared to skimming. Sure they're an extra location that can take a hit, and you can mount weapons on them, but the same can be said for wings and wings let you fly.

In my new game I've got the newbie Corsair skimming around legless at 200+ dpr and MV 0 with a decent loadout consisting of its stock rocket launcher, a shaka cannon, and two storm pistols, plus head, arm, and torso armor lifted from a Vadel. And that's just a clunker with a class 1 gyro.

Is it just me or is a legless flying battroid totally the way to go? I'm basically just ripping off the Harpy, but for some reason the Harpy never seems to go above MV -3 no matter what you do with it.

[Frumple]

Turning, friend. Turning is faster legged and walking. I think there's a couple other bonuses, but that's the big one I can remember.

[DudeGuyMan]

Interesting. A faster turning rate is nice, but I can't see it being worth 8 or 10 tons weight added to a mecha. The amount of firepower I should be able to cram into a legless Gladius while still maintaining MV 0 is already making me giddy.

How do you usually fight in the endgame? I usually get into the air, unload my nukes and/or phase bubble (yes I will strip the Argoseyer to kit out a battroid, I'm weird) and then strafe the survivors with phase and breaker cannons at full speed, counting on stunt driving, born to fly, the flight bonus, ECM, the defensive bonus from speed, etc. to keep me alive as everyone shoots at me at once. Then I fly past everyone and try to drop back down to skimming behind cover, whereupon I turn around, take off, and do it all over again. I won Robot Warriors in a Condor that way, although I think it still had legs.

[plllizzz]

Nova Scythes.

Lots of them. Add a tail for another one. Mount them. Find the highest output Engine and go with it.

Melee. Fu**ing. Everything.

[PlaintextMan]

Yeah, now that you mention it, legs are pretty underrated in GH's design. Balance, stability and general Newtonian physics is definitely not worked into the game very well. For one thing, look at the mass distrobution of some of the stock meks in the game. It's pretty crazy in some cases.

I most usually keep legs, though. You can stick stuff into legs, like backup sensors and ECM units (to mitigate the WTF-factor when your mech suddenly performs like crap when the main unit goes out). Not to mention piling up backup mounting points, or just sticking a bunch of overchargers and arc thrusters into them. And as Frumple mentioned, the rate at which you can turn with legs is a big advantage compared to skimming IMO. And running really isn't all that crummy once you fit overchargers. I'm not really much of a flyer; I prefer ground stealth/artillery combined stand-up fights on foot (the mecha's foot, that is) so this might just be a style-of-play thing. The Puma and Excel are some of my favorite mecha, for example. Another big thing to me is that it takes much more firepower to take out a leg than to damage just enough arc thrusters/hover jets to put that gerwalk solidly down on the ground, and that really scared me off gerwalks and flyers after a few incidents.

My late game strategy usually involves a lot of armor and... what where they called? ... heavy missles? The kind the Harpy uses. Those things that are really expensive to restock, but worth their price. I sometimes store extra clips of them in my mech. That's for softening up armor. After that, let the DC20x10 Heavy Laser, Starburst Rifle () and Breaker Cannons finish the job. Or all the mariad of other miscellanious missles and lasers I stuck into the leg mounts and armors, if my main weapon goes out or overloaded ;-)

Nova Scythes.
Melee. Fu**ing. Everything.

That sounds like fun, too. I lol at how melee weapons can be stuck into weird places. One of my favorite early-game tactics is sticking a SF:1 mace into my mek's leg as a potent backup againts Strongarms and such.

[DudeGuyMan]

My current beyond-endgame mecha is the Gladius, stripped down to a bare torso, then given Harpy arms, a Jos head, and Gigas wings, and equipped with the Typhon breastplate and weightless class 7 armor all around, except for the head where I put the weightless class 4 armor from the Maanji. All based around staying as light as possible while still having decent durability, so that I could load the hell up on weaponry while maintaining 200+ dpr and MV 0.

1x Phase Bubble
2x Six-shot Monstrous nuke-launchers
1x Harpy Pulse Laser for intercept
2x Heavy Gauss Rifles (The DC24x10, range 144 kind)
2x Heavy Rocket Pods (DC14x10, range 156, nice for a 2-ton weapon)
2x Phase Cannons
Assorted SF:0 heavy weapons wherever I had room

The gauss rifles weigh 9 tons each, but the hell with it. At this point weight is way less of an issue than just plain having places to cram things. Discounting the pulse laser and the SF:0 junk, all of my weapons have a range of at least 144. Those big endgame Robot Warriors hordes are usually largely blown into submission before most of them get close enough to shoot at me. Not that the occasional screwup doesn't happen, mostly due to me somehow starting with my back to the crowd with no intervening terrain, but it's pretty sweet overall.

[PlaintextMan]

*Slow clap*

That is a beyond-endgame mecha. You have exploited Mecha Engineering to its fullest.

Exploitable as it is though, I think Mecha Engineering is one of the best parts of gearhead. It's just so much fun to make your own mecha.

[DudeGuyMan]

Exploitable as it is though, I think Mecha Engineering is one of the best parts of gearhead. It's just so much fun to make your own mecha.

I agree. I occasionally fool around on a character that has totally and completely beaten the game just to tweak his mecha for the sake of tweaking with an essentially unlimited budget and access to any parts I want.

I've been messing around with legs again. Lately I'm torn between Fenris legs wearing class 6 leg armor, and Savin legs wearing class 3. The former weigh a total of 5 tons each with a total combined durability of 400, while the latter weigh a mere 4.5 with a total durability of 450.

The Savin legs would seem to be clearly superior, but the difference between installed weight and equipped weight mean that the Fenris legs actually keep me at MV 0, while the Savin legs move me to MV -1 even though the pair of them are a total of 1 ton lighter altogether. I can make them work if I move some more stuff around, though.

At a certain point you stop seeing mecha and start seeing just gyroscopes, and limbs with different proportions of weight versus durability. Some random stuff I love...

Jos head, Harpy head, Harpy arms, Fenris legs, Savin legs, Gigas wings. The Gigas has the best wings in the game. If you want to make the Argoseyer better, rip it's wings off and give it Gigas wings. Can you do that? I never got into the Argoseyer. I also love the Harpy's 1.5 ton laser cannons, and the 2 ton heavy rocket pod from the Quetzal. Nice damage, 156 range, and it only weighs two tons! Acc penalty and only 6 shots, but nothing is perfect.