Zeus - God of Myths?

The Zeus - A God of Myths

This issue, Ol’ Vettie sets out to explore the mighty Zeus. The Mighty Zeus. Think about that for a minute. This mech draws its name from mythologies God of Gods, Zeus. So why is it that this mech falls short of the name’s promise?

We all know that mythology is made of myths. It is my opinion that the Zeus follows suite. It is an 80-ton Assault Battlemech. It is a very capable mech. This one has all the beginnings of a classic, but somewhere fall short.

The Zeus can hold 16+ tons of Ferro Armour. It can take BAP and LAMS. It has very good speed for its size. It has good slots, 3 three-slot energy, 1 four slot ballistic and 1 four slot missile, a nice load out.

One of my favorite configs for the Zeus is 3 large lasers, a heavy gauss rifle with double loads and an LRM 15. Many will drop the missiles and add speed and maybe a heat sink. This config really hurts you at 600 meters. The LRMs are more of a pest to enemies than they are to do any amounts of damage. But at 600 meters or less, you can bring the heavy gauss and the large lasers to bear on your opponent.

The Zeus has a couple of good things going for it. For an 80 ton mech, it is very nimble and handles like a much smaller mech. For the cost of those LRMs, or 1 of the large lasers, the pilot can get this baby up to 80kph. An 80kph Assault chasing you with 3 large lasers and a gauss rifle will put a hurt on even the best of mechs or pilots.

The Zeus is rather short for an assault adding to what should be one of the better mechs available to the Inner Sphere. It reminds me of an 80 Thanny, because of the missile arm that rarely gets used. This mech does not have jump jets, but it is fast. I have found the best use for the Zeus is a support role. Again the 600-meter range comes to mind, but coupled with another Zeus, or any support mech, lots of firepower can come to bear at the mentioned range. Do not forget that the Zeus is capable of housing 3 PPCs, thus extending that support range.

Defensively, is where the Zeus lacks in my opinion. It does not have ECM, but does have BAP, so unless used in passive role, or well behind the expected battle line this mech sends out a huge radar signature. Although the mech is relatively short, it is very square in shape, with huge shoulders. When the Zeus comes into range of an enemy, the shoulders start to take damage simply because they are so big.

I have always found the Zeus to be fragile for its weight class. The CT is not so large, but the RT and LT are and dwindle fast under fire. If a pilot chooses not to load missiles, then the right arm is simply to be used as a meat shield. Problem with that is many elect to remove armour from the arm to allow more weapons, or speed or heat sinks or extra ballistic ammo. The damage transfer from the arm to the torso happens very quickly. The lesser the armour in the arm, the faster the arm dies and torso damage happens. Even though the Zeus has standard internals, it takes damage at a rapid rate.

The arms hold 1.6 tons of standard armour when full but the arms seem to get blown away fairly quickly, leaving the pilot with only torso mounted weapons (energy only). To use them, you must expose your torso to return fire and those torsos take damage almost as fast as the as the arms. I do not know how much internal armour belongs to the Zeus, but it takes damage like an endo steel mech, not a standard armoured mech.

If you can stay back and fire with teammates, closing as a group, the Zeus is a powerhouse. If you find yourself alone, you are going to take damage at an alarming rate and you have to use the speed and nimbleness of the mech to get out of a tight situation, do not try to stand toe to toe and frag it out, the Zeus wont last.

Personally, I like the look of the mech and the way it handles. I also think it can carry a good energy based weapon load, which restricts it from certain uses. When at full ferro armour, you have 42 tons to use on weapons assuming you select the electronics that are available, however the majority of the slots are energy slots so you need to think about heat management and heat sinks. One or two good ballistic choices and the amount to spend quickly is reduced. The Zeus doesn’t handle heat well, so heat sinks are a must.

Time has come to rate the Zeus. This is a tough call. I have seen the mech used with very positive results. When I pilot one, even if I use spec armour, it seems to crumble under me quickly. You don’t see many on the battlefield. That may be because for the same 80 tons, a pilot or DC can get a Victor that has ECM and possibly jump jets (if needed). I would like to see the Zeus reduced to a 75-ton mech, but otherwise keep its specs. I think you would see many more of them. It is not a bad mech and if used correctly can be very deadly. On the plus side, it can take a good load out to the battle. On the minus side, if it makes it to the battle, it does not seem to last very long.
Vettie rates the Zeus at 2 ½ to 3 minutes, poor to below average for its class. At 80 tons, there are better choices.

Zeus – The God of Myths

Well in my original review of the Zeus I said that the mech was, well, basically weak. From what I can tell, MP3 added nothing to it. The slots are the same as before, the electronics are the same as before, the speed is the same and the size is the same. Nothing seems to have changed, nothing.

I did a bit of an experiment. I made a config of EACH of the 80 ton battlemechs in the game. I made their load outs to be popular configs that we each see in many open servers. For example, the Canis had 2 Clan Gauss Rifles and 2 ERPPCs with all the electronic goodies like jumpies and heatsinks. The Talos had 2 Hyper 10s and 2 Large Lasers. The Victor had a Heavy Gauss, a PPC and 2 Large Lasers. For the Zeus, I took the config listed in the previous review. The Zeus had 3 Large Lasers, a Heavy Gauss, BAP, LAMs, 80kph and full armour.

The object of this little experiment was not only to see how the Zeus survived among others of its class, but to see which 80 ton beast was the king of its class. I see the server to 15 minutes. The map was the coliseum. The visibility was set to clear in the day time with normal radar settings. The Coliseum is supposedly a 100% heat efficient map and the fact that it is ‘enclosed’ keeps the combatants from wandering off without shooting or being shot. The battle type was set to destruction, meaning that kills were all that counted.

For the players, I used all level 9 bots (I will get into the bots a little more in detail later). By the way, I named the bots the name of the battlemech they were representing. The battlemechs were a Canis, a Gargoyle, an Awesome, a Talos, a Thug, a Victor and a Zeus. For those interested in the configs I listed some above, but I will give you all the configs here.

Let me explain a little about configurations. For each mech, I built it as if I were taking it. Other than enhanced optics, if it had an option for an electronic, I took it. Because of the nature of this particular battle, speed was not so much an issue, so I would lower the speed to fill the armour or to fit in advanced gyro or, well you get the idea. I will say that the speeds were not lowered too much. In fact, the Victor was set at 67kph. I have many configs that run a Victor at that speed. 67 and 72kph are what I consider to be standards for the Victor. The Canis was at 71. Basically, I am saying the speeds were NOT nerfed so much that it affected mobility or maneuverability.

The Canis, as stated above, was loaded with jump jets, full ferro armour, 2 Clan Gauss and 2 ERPPCs. The Gargoyle had full ferro armour, full electronics, 2 Clan Gauss and 2 ERLLs. The Awesome was set up with full reflective armour (another test since I was testing things), full electronics and 3 PPCs. The Talos had full ferro armour (even though it comes stock with reactive armour), full electronics, jump jets and 2 hyper 10s and 2 large lasers. The Thug was set up with full reflective armour, full electronics and 2 CapPPCs. The Victor had full ferro, full electronics, jump jets, a heavy gauss, a PPC and 2 large lasers. The Zeus came with 3 large lasers and a heavy gauss, full ferro armour and full electronics.

As you can see, each mech was loaded with a very viable battle config. Two mechs were given spec armour as I wanted to see how much, if any, their survivability was affected using spec armour over standard ferro. The Talos was given Ferro over its normal reactive armour. This is again because I was using configs that I would use in the opens.

After double checking the setting for the server and that I had the right battle configs, I hit the start button and jumped in my camera ship. The server was set to waves so that each mech would get a fresh start and not be pounded over and over by regenerating mechs. It soon became apparent that the Zeus was totally out classed by the others. It was almost saddening.

At the end of the brawl fest, the Zeus had managed 1 kill. In contrast, the Talos topped the scale with 15 kills followed closely by the Victor with 12. I had expected the Canis to be at the top just because they are so hard to kill. Bots do not aim for the horns, but they will leg and disarm a mech.

Let me say a little about the bots. I used level 9 bots for each mech. I name each bot after the mech so when it was all over the score screen would show the clear winner. The bots in MP3 were set back to the original bot scripts the Microsoft issued with the MW4 Mercs game. Jeho did this because there were some instances in the campaign and some maps that would crash the game because of the bot scripts that had been modified by MekTek. I never came across this but apparently it is so because Jeho put the original bots back in MP3. I really hate that because they are dumb. Level 9 bots do the best job, and they rarely miss when they shoot. However, the bots we had in MP2.1A were much better. At level 7, you still got an opponent that rarely missed but would not necessarily charge your position, but instead would fight more like a team. Level 8 bots would even go passive on you. Level 9 didn’t miss when the fired anything other than missiles but still had a tendency to charge you. Hopefully, Jeho will figure out what the issue was before he and MekTek are through with MP3 because I miss those (MP2.1A) bots.

I set 2 battlemechs up with reflective armour, but I sort of screwed up my test. I should have included a ferro based model of each to compare kills / deaths against but I will do that another day.

The main purpose here was to see the Zeus in action against its piers. I ran this test 3 different times with the Zeus in different positions in the ‘server line-up’. I thought that if it dropped in different areas, or next to a different mech, it might have a better chance of getting more kills or lasting longer in each round. It didn’t seem to matter. The most kills registered to the Zeus during the 3 different battles were 3 kills. It placed last each time. If you were wandering, yes the Talos finished 1st all 3 times.

So my original review of the Zeus stands. It has a short life span on the battlefield. It takes damage way to easily and it dies way to fast. I plan to run some similar tests with Zeus against smaller opponents. It’s too bad; I like the looks of the Zeus and the way it handles. This mech would be a good one for those players that like to stay way in the back during a battle and run up to shoot only when one of the bad guys is cored, or legged or lost both its arms and has a slim chance of doing much damage if it got to return fire on you. Sorry folks, the Zeus sucks.