Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Do they even care about accuracy anymore?

Not to dog Alexander Knight, as I'm sure he is trying hard using the tools he has available, but in this thread (p22) on the forums he lists the Nephilim (Capture Team) [HMG] with the following stats:
Type:  BA
Size:  1
MV:  4"f
Armor:  3
Structure:  2
Damage:  2/1/1
PV:  6
Specials:  BTAS6, CAR6, LMAS

So granted, CGL hasn't released errata for SO to do conversions, but even then, this seems nuts.

First, the move.  4", or 2 battletech MP.  However, DWP's are mounted with the tasers.  So this unit should only really be moving 2" until the tasers are used.  Perhaps BTAS6(-1 MP) would work for that.  Essentially, this battle armor is twice as fast as it would be in a BT game.

Second, "CAR6".  Nephilim's are 2 tons each, with 6 per squad, so really that should be "CAR12" as something with only 6 tons of cargo couldn't carry a squad.

Third, damage.  Ugh, one-shot sorta weapons simply should not count the way they are treating them.  The entire squad of 6 can fire 12 LRMs, *once*, yet in the conversion, as well as Battleforce, this unit suddenly becomes able to fire those 12 LRMs forever.  So this unit now has a long range attack, with twice the MP, yet the PV stays as it would be in Battletech, where a 1 shot weapon doesn't count for very much.

And finally, "LMAS" is for a CAMO system, "MAS" is for Mimetic armor, at least according to the latest Strategic Operations stuff I can find, and it appears the values are reversed.

He also keeps mentioning things like "2,703 out of 4,513" completed.  Here are the current counts of items officially released in the BattleTech Universe (minus TRO 3145, which isn't out yet, but Alexander includes):

3162 BattleMechs and IndustrialMechs
81 ProtoMechs
1180 Combat Vehicles
173 Conventional Infantry Platoons
525 Aerospace Fighters
296 BA
5,417 supported by Alpha Strike

252 Support Vehicles
48 Buildings
153 Dropships
23 Handheld Weapons
24 Jumpships
4 Mobile Structures
38 Small Craft
20 Space Stations
98 Warships
660 not supported, or partially supported, by Alpha Strike

Even without the Aerospace Fighters and Conventional Infantry, both of which are supported by Alpha Strike, there are still *hundreds* of units that aren't being counted.

I am starting to think they are doing these conversions by hand, and oh my god, what a stupid thing to do.  The amount of errors and inconsistencies, tagged on with vanishing support for released products, will make any such list impossible to be used for any form of balance, and honestly, you may as well just pull numbers out of your ass in some of these cases, as the results could be more accurate.  Sheesh, hate me or not, give me an hour of time and I can have all 5417 (plus many of the other units) knocked out by the end of the week.  I just can't fathom how a company would voluntarily waste so much time when they have people like me, whom they could never afford, are so eager to volunteer to help.  Heck, if they'd have been more receptive they probably wouldn't hate me, but love me instead, as I could save everybody over there massive amounts of time.  Oh well, I digress.

So, bitching over, onto good stuff!

I sent the 80 cards that are in my color file to a playing card printer.  The backs will have the alpha strike cover, the fronts will have all the cards.  I should get them in a week and may post my first youtube video showing all about it.  Since they were double sided, and I only ordered 1 batch, and a few other unnecessary price hikes, with shipping I paid $17 for the 81 cards (1 is blank).  I can even get them printed on *plastic*!  Though double the price (so more like $28, since $6 was shipping)

I am thinking of taking the BV calculator for weapons and using it, as well as other BV calculating things, to *recalculate* BV for Alpha Strike units.  Thing is, BV/100 simply does not produce an accurate representation of a units value (assuming BV is, haha).  You can look around and see obvious issues with this quite easy.  I'm sure smarter people than myself could come up with better algorithms, but I'll give it a try.

I think CGL regrets posting that pretty card image that Herb posted on facebook.  It seems to have gone away on the forums.  While perhaps they are like "hey, that bad-syntax asshole is copying our shit!", it isn't like people being able to print these on paper is any substitute for the good cards they could sell individually.  Heck, I'll be buying 4 or 5 boxes of them (so I can have a full lance/star of everything) and I can print these things all day long.

I came across a forum here about the health of BattleTech.  It was kind of enlightening on all the reasons people just avoid the official forums.  That place is a politically drama filled playground, and a horrible place to visit for many folks apparently.

Ok, enough bitching for real this time.  I setup phpBB and have been configuring it.  I think its mostly done, not exactly a whole lot to do.  Got it running with my battletechengineer gmail account, created a battletech forum with a couple subforums for projects of mine.  I want to register a new DNS name for it but just not sure what to go with, or if I should just use cooltexan.com.  I was thinking something like whm6r.com (my favorite mech), successionwar.com, thestarleague.com, battletechsource.com, and so forth.  Any good ideas that aren't registered feel free to shoot my way.  I will make it available before the end of the week, promise.

However there *are* a few other Battletech forums out there.  The only thing I'm offering they aren't is pretty much no restrictions/rules (just don't be an ass to others) and more tie-ins with the products I've made, or could make if the support was there (like a replacement for all the probably-never-to-be-released heavymetal stuff).  

Though I am trying to support canon Alpha Strike, I find it difficult as it is so broken in many ways.  I'll will have alternate data, and cards, for my own system which mirrors BattleTech better, supports campaigns better, support all the optional rules better, and speed up quick strike by getting rid of some things that simply don't make the game more fun, and bog it down.  I may try to make this work with the $3300 in Robotech Miniatures I have coming soon too.  However, Robotech Tactics I think will be far more fun than Alpha Strike, with far better looking miniatures, though the universe is extremely small and shallow in comparison.

Oh, and what the heck, I posted stuff about doing Alpha Strike cards and had like 30 comments, then I actually post an Alpha Strike Card Maker and get 1.  That leads me to think that my app sucks ass (complain and I'll fix it) or that I haven't created enough controversy lately :)

Final thing.  All my current projects and downloads will soon be removed from online.  They will have new links up, and a forum account required to download them.  I might even make the forum hidden unless you have an account, as I get a *huge* number of hits from a hidden forum (well, hidden to most folks anyway, muhaha) over at bg.battletech.com.

4 comments:

  1. Yeah, it's weird.

    OK, so I'm a techie. Back in 1989 I was entering all the 'Mechs out of the TRO into a system I'd put together which would print record sheets for them. Then I extended it to be a unit designer. I truly cannot understand why Catalyst hasn't done this, even if only for internal use.

    (These days I tend to use SSW as a designer, and wrote my own system to search for designs by parameters -- "give me something with at least four walk MP and an AC/20" -- and print record sheets. I haven't caught any transcription errors yet, though I'm sure they're out there.)

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    1. I've wondered the same thing when they make comments about building things by hand. I know they're strapped for time, and need to not go crazy with spending cash, but having an updated internal version of SSW seems like only an idiot wouldn't realize how much time and money it would save in the long run.

      It's not like they don't have enough fans out there with the experince to whip something up for them for a reasonable fee.

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  2. I've not been on a computer yet to download your card maker.

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  3. I haven't had the chance to download yet. Been too busy at work! But I will!

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