Vettie's Views: The Mech Lab

By now, anyone who reads this forum knows that it is packed with Vettie’s Views on things. The views may not be politically correct and you may not agree with them, but they are my views on things, the way I see them. It’s mostly about MechWarrior, a favourite past time of mine, but sometimes I throw other thing in there too.

MekTek has recently released a new patch, MP3.02b. Its main purpose is to defeat a few known hacks. Hacks, not cheats, but hacks. I don’t understand why there is a need for hacks, especially in a game this old, but they are out there. I have seen some, had some used on me and even had some given to me. Come to think of it, I have even ALMOST figured out how to create one. I am not a code writer, I don’t know GOTO from if statements. Personally, I have no use for hacks and I really don’t care for people that use them. Folks, IT’S A GAME! A game is supposed to be played for fun and enjoyment and like most things in life; you have to put a little work into to be good at it. I am still working on that part of it, but I have fun and that’s what a game is about, having fun. Thank you any MekTek guys that read this.

On to the subject of today’s review, the Mech Lab, or how I create a battlemech. I am sure that everyone has their own way of doing this. I can spend hours in the mech lab generating configs and have often done this. My MP3 variants folder has over 1375 files. Most of those are Victors (not really), lol, w00t! How about you, how files in your variants folder?

So how do you go about it? Sure copying a configs you saw someone use is easy, but lets say you want create your own special configs, how do you go about it, where do you start and finally how do you test it?

Well for me, it all depends on what I want to accomplish with the mech. Will it be for Brawling, Sniping, scouting, support or any other myriad of things? Once I know what I want to do, I decide on two or three chassis that would fit that role, and of course one of them has to be a Victor. Not really, but I do like the Victor (shocker there, huh). In choosing a chassis, of course it has to match the requirements of the role meaning that it must carry the right electronics, if needed, and it must be a mech that I am comfortable in. I like a daisy, but it drives like a bus and doesn’t handle well to me so I don’t drive one very often.

Once I have narrowed the chassis choices down, I create one in the mech lab renaming it FF or something. I eventually will rename it, but I almost always start with FF. My mech naming convention is pretty simple, because I am old and because I have so many mech configs, I cant remember whats on all of them. To fix that, I use the following naming routine: Type of Armour, Speed, Electronics and Weapons. In short it looks lie this when I am done: FF72ELJ Gax2PPC. This would be a FF (Ferro armour) with 72K speed, ECM, LAMS, Jumpies, 2 Regular Gauss and a PPC. For Reflective Armour, I use Ls, meaning Laser Safe; Reactive gets Gs or Gun safe. I always list Ballistics 1^st, Beam Class 2^nd and Missiles last.

Now that I have created a mech, I strip it of electronics and heat sinks. Next I go into the weapons room and remove all the stock weapons and finally to the armour area and strip ALL the armour off. This gives me a clean slate to work with other than the speed. Now, back to my objective, what is this mech for? That is what determines the weapons I add.

I have to say there are some weapons I don’t use very well, simply because I have not taken the time to learn how to use them. For the sake of this article, let’s say I was about to build a general purpose mech for use in Sunder. Playing in that server, you never know what map will come up and you never know the environment (settings) until the map rotates. That calls for mech that can do anything. Sunder Junkies for the most part take Heavy or Assault Mechs. To survive through a wave, I will need something that can stand up to some fire as well as dish it out AND I will need something I am comfortable in. My three chassis choices, in order of preference for this purpose are the Victor (shock and dismay), the Highlander and the Wild Cat.

I have already generated a Victor in the Lab naming it FF and stripped the weapons and amour. Now I know the purpose or mission of the mech, kill and survive in multi environments. I need a mech that wont run hot and shut down every few alphas and one that has speed enough for me to get to a ‘hot spot’ to help someone on my team, or run away from the current danger and reposition myself to better dish out punishment. In the weapons lab, I scroll thru all my choices. WOW! Way too many. Ok, let’s keep this simple. A good solid choice with some decent range and damage is a standard gauss rifle. Two gauss rifles inflict lots of damage, so I put 2 on my Victor. Scanning through the weapons, the PPC stands out. Good range, good damage, splooge (effects), not much heat (manageable without heat sinks) and the recycle rate matches that of the gauss rifles making for a decent alpha of 48pts. Alpha damage is important, but not as much as being able to continue to fire (without overheating) and be able to alpha over and over without waiting forever for weapons to recharge or reload. Also, all these weapons are very close in range making it possible to apply an alpha to a target.

After selecting my weapons, I set up my groupings. I like things simple, a couple of weapons classes and as few fire groups as possible. I like to set my long range weapons (usually ballistics) to group one, and next longest to group 2. Group 3 (if ever) is set for missiles. I NEVER have more than 3 groups. I use a mouse for torso twist, speed and firing weapons groups 1 and 2. I use a nostromo for everything else. (Thanx Cow for turning me onto that. I just wonder what I COULD have done back in the NBT days when I used an EVO joystick). In this case, the twin gauss rifles (one in each arm) get set to group 1 and the PPC goes to group 2. There is no group 3. Pressing both my mouse buttons gives me an alpha and I have a button set on the nostromo for chain fire mode. Well I am all done with weapons so it’s on to the electronics.

I don’t need any heat sinks because I have only one PPC and even on hot maps the heat is manageable. I want ECM, LAMs and Jumpies. I don’t use the Advanced Gyro much, except for brawlers or ground pounders. Next I check the speed. Its pre-set at 72 and the Victor handles well at that speed so I leave it. All done here for now so lets add some armour.

In the armour add section of the Mech Lab, you simply hit max armour and the lab will fill your mech armour slots using all of tonnage available, but it doesn’t always fill them equally IF you don’t have enough tonnage to max out your mech, as in this case. When I know its not going to be full armour, I generally start with the areas I know that will need the most. Center Torso on most mechs are big, on ALL my mechs they are full. Most pilots in the game are honourable enough and generally try to CT an enemy. For that reason, my CTs are full. Next are the arms. Many IS mechs have the majority of their weapons payload in the arms, so they get full to protect those weapons. Legs are a prime target for many warriors, so on to the legs goes full or near full armour. The chest area, right and left torsos are next. These areas depend on weapon loads and the general strength of the mech. IF these areas are ‘weak’ the get full armour, if they can stand up, I may not fill them. The Head on most mechs leads right to the CT as the actual HEAD is generally a small area enclosed in the top of the mech. I fill it if the mech is prone to head shots, otherwise I may cheat some here and the rear torso. Most of my fighting is done face to face or side torso to face, rarely do I get attacked from the back except in no radar maps where the opponent snuck up behind me. IF I have to ‘cheat’ armour, I try to keep the armour at least 75% if not more.

I ran a series of tests on the Thor sometime back using a level 0 stationary bot. I created a mech with no weapons and loaded up its armour completely full. I took a Canis with 2 gauss and 2 erppcs (a popular configs on sunder) and walked up to the bot to about 100 meters away. I alpha shot the Thor CT and RT/LT until it died, noting how many shots it took. I went back to the mech lab and deducted 1 slice of armour across these torso areas and tried again, noting the results. I kept doing this until I found the break point. That is the point where it took 1 less alpha to kill it. I added the points of armour back in and retested running this test over and over to get a good number of results to measure. I found the amount of armour I could remove across the 3 torsos and the mech take as much damage as if it were fully armoured. I don’t suggest everyone do this, but it is helpful if you need that extra tonnage for speed or ammo, or LAMS or ECM or BAP or whatever.

Finally back to the main screen in the mech lab. This is where I rename my mech, add camo and save it. This one would be the name I mentioned earlier (FF72EJL Gax2PPC) and I will choose a camo for woodsy type terrain and save my mech. How many of you use camo? I always thought it would be nice if in NON Battle maps you could select your own camo.

I repeat the process for the Highlander next. The Highlander gets a bit of a different load-out, selecting a CapPPC instead of a regular PPC and it gets IFF. The speed is lower at 67, but it still handles well at that speed. Again, the armour is not full, so I have to ‘cheat’ away some of it of give up the IFF. IFF is good for the Highlander. I have found the Highlander to be a bit fragile for such a large mech, so the IFF saves it some beatings from a distance. The CPPC adds a bit to and alpha and makes this a damn good 800 meter sniper with a 54pt hit.

Lastly, I create the WildCat. The Wildcat will have a bit of a different load-out, but a damn good one. ECM, LAM, and Jumpies, 2 Clan Gauss with double ammo and 2 ERLLs with 2 heat sinks. To keep the speed up reasonable, 75k, I am going to have to strip some armour. I put the ERLLs in the Torsos, not the Arms, so I can completely strip out the arms. A few other ‘armour cheats’ here and there and I am done. The Clan Gauss and ERLL were made to go together. Both have 800 meter range, it just too bad they don’t recycle the same. Adding an extra ton of ammo for each gauss rifle allows you to use those gauss rifles more often and in an extended battle on maps with no time limit, it could mean the difference in staying alive or dying.

Well that was fun huh? Now the question is, ‘I built a mech, but how do I know if it works?’ Ever ask yourself that? I mean, some configs look good in the lab or on paper, but they just don’t work well in the game. I like to test them. I set up a server and lock it, not advertising and go into test mode. I pit each of these mechs against known good configs on maps similar to what I will be driving on. Example, I pit the Victor in a level 9 BOT against a level 9 BOT Canis (2Gauss/ 2ERPPCs) on a 100% heat efficiency rated map, say Aspen. I might mention that I have altered my BOT files so that they act more human like and that if hit while attempting to fire, the knock COULD cause them to not fire or knock their shot off. Mine use their jump jets if they have them and they don’t just charge the enemy blazing away like a n00b rush. In any event, the BOTs then got at each other for a bit and I record the wins/losses. I do this with each mech, then I do it with the group of them. For the defense, I will load a Canis (mentioned above), a Gladiator with 3 gauss and 1 erppc, a Cyclops with a Heavy gauss, a regular gauss, a PPC and a large laser, and a BK covered in reactive armour and loaded with PPCs and all the electronic toys. Again, I let them play, taking a camera and recording the outcomes. Finally, I take the above BOTs and I climb in one of each of my new creations to see how they work. When Im all done, I know which configs worked, how it performed on the battlefield with a competent driver and how it performed with me driving it.