What are your guys thoughts on pilotable vehicles? they could be fun, though I'd say you'll probablly need some new multiplayer modes to make the best of them, or ways of limiting resources so you'll be inclined to use them in a battle. Or maybe a respawn option, so if you run out of lives, you can respawn as an inferior vehicle.

Also, since I've thrown vehicles into the debate, let me also toss in aircraft and Vtols, though I think regular aircraft are impossible to impliment... but vtols might be possible

no.
EDIT: as for aircraft, giving them a constant movement speed would do it (so that instead of the "neutral" being 0, it could be 60)

Really? I didnt know you could change constant speed to something other than 0... BTW, I wonder what would happen if you were to bump into the side of a mountain with this...

Aircraft on maps that max out at 4000x4000 meters? No friggin way. They'd give a real use to Rifleman but they would exit map area in a matter of seconds at a decent aerospace speed. They also fill roles that really don't need to be filled. This is MechWarrior for a reason and any aerospace asset could have its job done by a 'Mech just as easily if not better anyway.
Vehicles, as I recall, were attempted but the way that they rendered (using the 'Mech model) meant that the tanks rendered into the side of hills instead of conforming. The actual tanks couldn't be made pilotable and due to lack of compartmenatalization would be too weak to be a real competitor with 'Mechs anyway.
The whole 'run out of lives' thing is a non-issue in MW. Although it is possible to set a max number of respawns per game, no one does.
To put it succinctly, no vehicles.

I wouldn't be worth the effort. With the way the game is set up, tanks and aerofighters would be pretty much useless against mechs. As others have said, this game is primarily about mech battles and it shows. BattleTech is the combined arms games, but this is MechWarrior.

Apart from the coding side of it, the problems with having vehicles in MW will be balance. Vehicles/Aircraft are all inferior to mechs in the BT universe, a mech would always win one on one. To achieve balance, you'd have to make vehicles more realistic, go against what BattleTech is about and MW4 has already been bashed for being "un-CBT" as it is by most players. It would be a nice idea, but its a heavily flawed one.

No, actually, Aerospace assets and some conventional vehicles weren't "all inferior" to Mechs in CBT. Like Magnus said, CBT does have a more comvined-arms feel for it.

A 100 or 90 Ton Aerospace Fighter or Bomber or Tank can usually stand toe to toe with a mech.

You know, something like a Challenger X MBT or Chippewa...

LAMech is what i would like to pilot

Hasn't the staff been giving a flat no to vehicles for like, half a decade?

Yes we have, and you guys keep bringing it up for some reason.

Just hypotetically, if we WERE to make vehicles (and we're not) they'd be even LESS used than BA and infantry (which aren't used at ALL) since we have very few people playing this game (for a multiplayer game).

The tanks would only be effective in 12v12 games. or something like Battlefield / MWLL, not MW4.

As stated previously, this is mechwarrior, it is a mech combat simulation. Besides that, taking a tank or an airplane is a waste of server room when you could have a mech instead. If you're really into controlling vehicles, then the best thing to do is to give them AI, include a bunch on a map, then be able to order them around as if they were lancemates. Actually piloting one isn't useful.

i totaly agree. tanks and fighters die way too easy to compete with a mech in this game. play some of the singelplayer campaigns and youll see how weak tanks are. no one would want to use them after the first try. however- i think it would be cool if bots can be set up with tanks or fighters in groups of 2 or 3 per bot. so tanks could be part of onlinegames in form of bots. of course they are easy targets but it would give multiplayer a bit of a combined arms feel without having to change the whole balance.
5 or 6 vendetas per team can be a pita. demolischers can ruin your day up close . herassers with inferno srms cant be ignored up close - at least on hot maps. at least it would cause some distraction on the battlefield
there are the socalled battlefield maps. those have lots of tanks and supportstuff. even for a mech its hard to survive in the middle of them.

3 demolishers are nothing to laugh about. playing with a bot level9, they can tear those lights/meds apart in no time.
face it - triple AC20 hit in the CT will seriously cripple any mech.... hmm... well, i could do the AI for them but that's about it

Quad panzers will chew you up then spit you out, then head for your spawn to do it all over again. They can also hillbug. Demolisher+quad panzer are the scariest vehicles in the game.

Vehicles are already included in maps, but they generally lack usefulness (unless there's a horde of em) since they follow their own agendas instead of working with the human players. If they could work with you through AI like sharkz said or be commandable, their value would increase.

I could come up with the script they could use. Jeho would have to come up with them and their ability to use scripts
I'm not so sure about comandability, but i could make them work for you ... i've done it with mechs before, don't see why it wouldn't work for vehicles it'd just be a tad more complicated ... just the way i like it

but i fear that would make the game suck for BA/Lights, since anyone would just pick an Assault and a pack of demolishers/quad-panzers... the way i was thinking, they'd follow you and cover you - engaging the best possible target. depending on how they would be organized (a cluster / swarm or individuals) i could go various ways - but it'd all fall down to this: each of them would pick his ideal target and then bid which one they'll all shoot at. Since their AI would be good, they'd hit as well.

Now, imagine an assault, with three tanks around him, and a light trying to make a "circle of death" run / attempt. The assault could simply ignore him because the three tanks would definatelly pick him as the favourite target and hit him. with three AC20s. and kill him right there.

so, it falls down to this -
1) Swarms are dangerous since they can hurt. alot. trust me
2) individual exploration serves no purpose because they don't get a chance to act, and their expectancy variance is huge
(example - finding a shut down mech vs finding a lance of mechs)

the problem is - there's no middle ground here.
using the same example, we can do a theoretical simulation.
Group A is consisted of three demolisher tanks working together.
Group B is consisted of one demolisher working on his own.

B pops behind the hill to find two mechs. He makes the decision to shoot either the one he's most probable to kill, based on tonnage and remaining armor. He gets killed. Efficiency = 0 ~ 100% (if he kills the mech)

A pops behind the hill to find two mechs. They find the ideal target considering their damage potential. There's two options here now: the players might shoot at the same one, or shoot two different ones. They might not even kill them, but we're covering all options here. They might shoot, but at least one will surely shoot and hit. Efficiency (as a group) : 15 - 100%. in the case where they all shoot - the shot mech will probably not be able to hit any of them because of the huge rock he'll get, so only one of them will get shot. you see where this goes....

The way i was thinking it was:
make them into celular swarms with zero exploration interest. all their concernes would be to find a friendly mech, and follow it, finding the most favourable one based on distance and it's speed compared to theirs (they'd be more likely to pick a mech they can follow than one that will run away from them), which means they favour assaults.

Group C is consisted of a 4LGLAS HGauss Sunder and 3 tanks. The sunder pops up behind the hill, soaks up the damage from both mechs, shoots back. the tanks follow the sunder, and probably shoot the same target. That guy is pretty much dead in the next shot, whatever he is.

Yep, that works I don't think backup would be available in every map though, and there could be a minimum range required for vehicle weapons so that BA would have a way of killing them, or the maneuverability of the really tough vehicles could be reduced.



A player would have to be kind of dim to get in close with an assault+demolisher escorts in a light mech though. It would be like ignoring 3 other human players. Instead they could stay back and keep the demo's attention, so that when the guys on his/her team go after the assault they could buy them a few seconds before the tanks switched targets.



Yes I agree, having them cover you like that is the simplest way of doing this. I didn't really get what you were getting at with those situations though. If you meant balance stuff, the demolishers aren't always the best things to use as back up, because they're painfully slow and short ranged. Quad panzer isn't bad, but they have pretty thin armor. Also all vehicles are fairly easy to hit: I would rather have a bunch of elementals covering me, since they're small, hard to hit, relatively fast, and can dish out a good amount of pain for their size. Not to mention the changes to detectability they're receiving.

Being able to give out orders probably isn't as easy to do, but it could add another interesting layer to the game. For example only a C3 M equipped mech could send out orders for the IS side, and for clans only mechs with sat uplink could do so. Or with certain mechs like the novacat, only BA would be commandable; by default, vehicles/bot BA would have the behavior you described. If this were done and vehicles were present on a map, whoever took on the role of drop command would feel a lot more like...they were in command lol.

Ah as usual I'm theorizing again

i could make the same script for BAs really
well, similar one at least.

It would be really interesting if you could figure out why mechai's don't respawn between (waves) rounds in mulitplayer and are able to fix that. Would open up a new world for some maps I've been dying to make with huge battles.

could you do a large elevator by moving something that wouldn't become non-solid when it moves. Like maybe a car or inverted hrothgar

I really like the AI idea RkShaRkz, As for good balanced multiplayer AI, though i'm not an AI expert, I have a few ideas. First off, Acquiring targets, I've seen some rather poor ai that Instantly acquire you and fire, its quite annoying. For instance, say you run into an AI, and then you duck behind a hill, and just as soon as a part of you moves into LOS it shoots you, no matter where you pop out. I hate instant reflexes like that.
So It would be natural to put in some sort of delay between acquiring a target and shooting. it would be even better if the AI would lose target acquision when the target left LOS, say the target went to cower and temble behind that hill. If we're all going to have Radar LOS, why not have The AI follow this as well? Another good addition would be to increase the targeting delay the further the target is from the AI. Also you might want to add small minimum range for the larger vehicles, just enough to keep battle armor from being devistated inside would be good. Did I also mention in battletech, vehicles can't attack infantry in the same hex as they are?

is it possible for battle armor to crush vehicles under foot just like a mech would?

Another old school AI technique i've seen is AI shooting at where the player used to be, that is, Aim were he was a split second ago. So the faster you move, the furter the shots would be off target and if you didn't move fast enough the shots would hit, what do you think of that?


Final thoughts here, imagine if these AI vehicles were implimented, These guys could take up a fair amount of your precious ammo, (well, it really depends on your weapon of choice) this can be a problem for highly ammo dependant designs. However vehicles are fairly easy to kill, I see myself mounting a few small or medium energy weapons for use against any pesky vehicles that might show up. This could actually encourage players to deversify thier designs and deter them from mounting only one type of weapon.
Last thought here, a pack of vehicles would scream artillery target im my mind.

The ai acquires targets by radar. we're changing the radar. meaning the whole thing will resolve itself internally.
as for target acquisition - the only difference between a lvl5 bot and a lvl9 bot is in the delay. you can't make them *better*, only faster.


try it.


everyone knows how to trail their targets. and precognitive shooting isn't anything new, the math is just a bit more complicated, but nothing i couldn't manage. they shoot just fine now tho, so no need to fix something that's not broken.


true. suddenly a 2LTPPC 2CG config would be at a great disadvantage against those little ************s

thats great, I wonder how noticable the change in AI behaivor would be, I wonder if it'll make any impact on single player...

I can't right now, i'll need to dig up my old cd's and install it again, been a while since I've played

Hey is it possible to get a bot to move towards a point designated by a targeting laser? or fire apon an object designated by a targeting laser?

While I'm not asking for player piloted fighting vehicles I would like to see vehicles become a bit more useful. I do not know what new tricks the Mektek team have up their sleeves (mo toys!) but I suspect much usefulness could be include though better scripting. Air asserts would use their greater speed and mobility to stay out of range of most ground base weapons and pink away at their max missile/gun range. The same could be said of the ground-based tanks. The PPC gunboats should snipe from >800 while the short ranged tanks would hide behind cover and wait for the mechs to close. The light suiciding base rushing mechs would have something to worry about with a couple of devastator tanks acting as objective goalies.

As for other uses for vehicles I think the air assets could act as sensors or extensions of the C4I grid. Having those eyes in the sky should really help your C2 situational awareness. Also the lighter scout vehicles could act as spotters using their Seismic/IR/Radar sensors while the heavy tanks or turret controller vehicles could haul around a master C4I node. They could be put on a short patrol lease so they might not be parked in the same place every game.

If we did get a new MP4 toy for vehicle upgrades I think it would be nice to be able to change the load outs of some of the fighting vehicles. Having a duel guass devastator, fast myrmidons with LtGuass or Rac2s or even an Arrow launching missile carrier, helo or strike fighter would do much to keep us mech pilots guessing. Now toss in a few heavy tank mounted Long Tom gun carriers or static turret mounted Long Tom mortars well hidden behind fort walls and heaven help the poptarters.


(BTW, any way to add a free master C4I node to any team with a HQ/Comms objective? You would think a base would have some sort of command and control setup in place in addition to what ever is mounted on the mechs. It would give the defenders a bit more of a home field advantage.)

my guess is - for the worse. but it depends on the missions' scripting really. we'll see when it comes out.


don't think so.

i could do some vihicles if there is interest. some more tasnks or aeorspace stuff would be nice to have flying around. i once had a sniper artillery tank in the works - no big deal to finish.

hell yes there is interest O.o
but then again, i'm pretty much interested in everything mektek related anyway ^^

do some moddeling? don't think so.

i thought i was pretty clear back on page1 tho

yes you were pretty clear that there will be no pilotable vihicles - but the last posts in this threat gave the impression ai controlled vihicles were possible. if it is possible id make some to fill some tactical gaps - like artillery. but if it is not possible then..well...then it isnt possible i guess

It's not known, and it's not currently a goal of ours. Anything is theoretically possible, but we all have limited time and need to budget it accordingly.

my last posts in this thread were just "first ideas". the other ones were pure speculation.
oh, and VB said.