SUNDER

Sunder

I would like to take a few moments and talk about my favourite on line server, Sunder. Sunder is supported by NBT and users that provide donations. It runs pretty much 24 / 7 unless NBT takes it down for league games.

Sunder is a 20 person, mission play server that gets heavy use most nights from about 7.00p to about 11.00p CST. It runs mission play through the use of MW4Monitor program. The missions come up in random rotation with random settings, such as weather, visibility, radar and day or night. As far as I know, almost all the mission play maps are on the server (with a few exceptions) although some are not in rotation. Those that are not in rotation can be voted in by the players in the server.

The server is set up so that players can vote a public admin. This is useful because it allows a player to change the settings or the map should something come up that people don’t want. This is sort of good and bad I guess. I like team only radar maps or maps with heavy fog or many of those combinations. I also like to play stock every once in a while, but that almost always is changed or voted off.

Every night in Sunder you can get your fill of killing mechs, or as in my case, getting killed by mechs. Sunder has no restrictions except that it is puretech, forced first person view and no respawn. When a scenario begins, if you get killed, you have to wait until the next round to get back into the action.

Each night sees Sunder starting to fill up around 7.00p CST with a usual cast of characters. Because there is no team weight limit or pilot weight restriction (unless voted on or set by the public admin) you will see lots of assault mechs. And I mean LOTS of assault mechs. Marauder IIs, Behemoths, Kodiaks, Cyclops, Gladiators, Canis you name it and you will see it in there. A player like myself is almost forced to take an assault just to stay alive long enough to get a kill.

You will see some very interesting configs in Sunder, too. Things you may not have thought of for yourself before. OF course, you will see the standard configs too, but the variety is truly refreshing. People have their favourite mechs and Sunder is the place they get to use them. You might see one team with 3 or 4 Cyclops on it and they will all be different configs.

Sunder is the reason behind one of my more infamous Victor configs. The Victor is my personal favourite but the introduction of Behe IIs with railguns and Marauder IIs with mini gauss and CapPPCs made me rethink my approach to Victor-y (get it, Victory with a Victor? Oh well). I found myself getting smacked at range and not being able to do anything about it in a Vic. About the best I could do would be to load 3 Lt Gauss rifles and shoot.

I went to mech lab to look at different configs and to study what seemed to work. I had a Victor with 3 Mini Gauss and a PPC but I could put that same load out on a Tenchi (some 15 lighter) or a Black Knight and have ECM and BAP with my jumpies. 3 Mini gauss and a PPC just didn’t have the punch that I needed to make people stop a minute and see what was hitting them. I needed 4 mini gauss and a PPC with lots of armour and ECM and Jumpies.

I decided to strip away all the armour and speed of my Victor and just give it ECM and Jump Jets. Then I added the 4 mini gauss and the PPC. Next I started filling the armour in the places I needed most. This could e different for each of you because of the way you play. After all the armour was installed I had a decent, but slow mech. I needed field trials!! After a round or two, I decided I could strip away some more armour and boost the speed to 67kph. It worked! The 4 mini gauss PPC Victor was born.

I use it often in Sunder and I have since modified it even more so that I have a version with LAMs for those missile friendly maps that come up. The 4 mini gauss cause enough damage and knock to get peoples attention. OF course the PPC is just icing on the cake. The best thing about all of this is that they all recycle at the same rate and I can alpha them 45 times before running out of ammo. The mini gauss give you the reach needed to fend off Rail Gunners and other ERPPC users while the ECM allows me to close with the 800 to 850 range to get that PPC splooge on target.

Anyway, Sunder propagates change. People adapt to different configs and they find a way to overcome even the best ones. The varied styles of play and weapons in use make you think a little before just selecting any old config and going toe to toe with someone. Most of the players in there are or were part of league teams and they elect to play Sunder for fun. They are all good in their own right and most are very good players. Its pretty rare that you have a dominant player anymore, but it does happen.

When you see someone on top of the kill board over and over, brains start to working and folks figure out what he or she is doing and they figure out a way to combat it. Be it a new config of weapons or a new tactic, they come up with a way.

You will see all sorts of play on Sunder. Leggers, cherry pickers, n00b rushers, brawlers and finesse players, you will see them all. People use everything in the weapons lab too, from Inferno Rocket Launchers to Long Toms to machine guns to small pulse lasers (my favourite). You will see base rushers (known as base rapers) and you will see heavy defenders. People with throw IHRL on a Tenchi (a cheap tactic in my book) with a machine gun or 4 and go and shut mechs down and begin to strip away their armour or weapons or whatever. I personally hate this. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to kill a shut down mech, but hey, that’s what its all about, everyone doing their own thing. You will see Avatars loaded with nothing but speed and Arty strikes running passive and straight to the objectives. Again this is ok, its part of the game, but I think most folks prefer a fire fight to the map respawning while you are in the middle of a fight.

Its all there. Everything MechWarrior 4 Mercs was made to do is seen on this server. Some of the best players around hang out in there, shooting and killing and dyeing. Hell, I even hang out in there. I hope to see in there soon.