Ground based vehicles (units other than mechs, VTOLs, WIGEs and infantry, but includes Tracked, Wheeled and hovercraft, exception mechanized infantry also get road benefits) get a +1 to their movement speed if they spend their entire turn on a paved hex, basically a road speed if you will.Ī Timber Wolf as we all know and love according to the basic rules is a 5/8 mech. Typically a mech/unit is noted with a Walking speed and a "Running" speed, if it has TSM or MASC it would be noted in as well, however this is not the over all top speed of a mech or ground vehicle. It didn't work very well, as you could build a fairly useless unit with a massive CV just by packing it full of advanced construction materials.Just how fast are battletech units? What kind of speeds are they are capable of?Įach movement point on the ground is equal to 10.8kph (6.71mph). It was introduced in 1996's Maximum Tech (a wonderfully munchy old book) as a more game-oriented replacement for the previous system, Combat Value.ĬV was this weird sort of adjusted-cost system that tried to boil down c-bills into a 4-digit number and adjust for the effectiveness of every item ingame. I don't really know enough about the support points system to comment on it, but I consider it critical that there be some kind of balancing scheme that's based on logistics rather than just blank tactical considerations.īV has been around a long time now but I do remember when it was new. Once you get to the Republic era, as we've both noted the costs system gets pretty far out of wack, but it's still a halfway decent means of representing the "resource intensiveness" of a unit. Those cases where the Mad Cat won were usually due to either complete destruction of a side torso or fluke head hits with 15+ point wepaons if we discounted the latter on both sides as they're often not a good measure (The " Hellstar testing principle") it actually bumps things up to about 85% favouring the Mad Cat Mk IV.Ĭ-bill balance is.well, used to be a form of game balance insofar as it let you balance a scenario according to the economics of 3025. When a Mad Cat is denuded and taking internal structure damage, a Mad Cat Mk IV will still have armour. (And in at least one case the armoured Gyro did make a difference). I found that the Mad Cat Mk IV was able to beat its predecessor about 80% due to the massive armour increase gained from the FL. Those one point stray LRMs - and they crop up a lot on cluster hit tables - do no damage. Silver Bullet Gauss clusters also do no damage, which means an opponent using a SBG has no reason to fire it at a Mad Cat Mk IV beyond wasting ammo. That same hit will denude a Mad Cat Mk IV of head armour, but still not do structure damage.Īnd as mentioned, there's the extra protection you gain from cluster hits. True, both of them will still die to a fifteen point head hit (Clan ER PPC, Gauss Rifle, etc) but it's a key difference.Īmusingly a Large Variable Speed Pulse Laser at short range does eleven points of damage, which will leave a Mad Cat with only one point of internal structure and again a chance of a critical hit. (The other is the Enhanced ER PPC, a weapon that only existed for a few years and, as such a Mad Cat Mk IV would likely never meet). However, off the top of my head, the only twelve point weapon I can think of is the Bombast Laser on its highest setting, and even then that's incurring a significant to-hit setting. There are a lot of ten point wepaons PPC, Inner Sphere ER PPC, AC/10, LBX-10, Ultra AC/10 (Single shot mode) Clan ER Large Laser, Clan Large Pulse Laser, Plasma rifle and so on. In order to actually penetrate the head armour in one shot, you need to do twelve points of damage to the Mad Cat Mk IV's head. That in turn means it survives with one point of armour remaining, which is a critical difference. If the Mad Cat Mk IV is hit in the head with a ten point weapon, then the damage is reduced to eight points. That one point means a chance of a critical hit, which could in turn translate to either killing the 'Mech (Cockpit) or severely impairing to crippling it (Sensors). If a Mad Cat is hit in the head with a ten point weapon, of which there are plenty, then one point of damage goes to the internal structure. Both have the same nine points, but the presence of FL provides a massive advantage to the newer 'Mech. One key thing that I found swung the argument massively in favour of the Mad Cat Mk IV was the head armour.
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