Greetings MechWarriors! Forged in many months of battle with LosTech code, our next release marks the beginning of the long-awaited Battle Armor overhaul. Much like the 0.8 update series cycle gave Aerospace Fighters tighter integration with ground gameplay (while curbing abusive tactics and loadouts), the 0.10 series will make Battle Armor a fully realized pillar of MWLL’s combined-arms gameplay.
Battle Armor have never been a satisfactory element of Living Legends’ combat ecosystem. The Elemental and Longinus are essentially placeholders for a broader catalogue of assets, and their killing power has always been higher than appropriate for a medium suit. Now, with light and heavy suits on the way, the medium Battle Armor suits have been entirely re-balanced and reworked.
Until now, Battle Armor functionality relied on the Nanosuit from Crysis Wars, which we could not modify. In order to move forward, we had to break this dependency and write a new Battle Armor platform from scratch. In the process, we made many small refinements to every aspect of existing BA behavior: radar detection, movement and jump capabilities, damage modifiers, armor and health regeneration. These changes are meant to make Battle Armor less frustrating to fight for other unit types. And now that these variables are modular and under our control, we can add new Battle Armor suits with different statistics, rather than being limited to a single universal suit.
On the player-facing side, the Elemental and Longinus suits now have an entirely new set of equipment! The default Bearhunter Autocannon and the confusingly-named BA AC2 have been replaced with light and standard Machine Guns, respectively. You'll spawn with a Light Machine Gun by default. The Manpack PPC has been tuned to reduce its dominance, and supplemented with a Recoilless Rifle for precise attacks at medium to long range. Finally, the BA SRM2 has been significantly buffed up, at the cost of a limited ammo count; it replaces the buggy old sticky grenades, which have been removed.
Other game systems are also being updated to better interact with Battle Armor, both as allies and enemies. Infantry bays are being worked into the Goblin, a new medium tank for the Inner Sphere, and the tried and true Clan Hephaestus scout hovercraft. While not quite ready yet, the goal is to have a single player able to spawn inside the bay - or merely hitch a ride - and buy BA equipment. The ultimate goal is to make BA a constant, expected presence on the battlefield rather than an unexpected and unusual surprise. Because new players (and skilled players in clumsy assets) often struggle to deal with agile, skilled Battle Armor, the new Point Defense System has been added to the vehicle equipment roster. This automated turret will engage any Battle Armor which dare to enter its line of sight at close range, prioritizing BA the pilot has targeted. Furthermore, in other areas of the game, two new maps are included with this release - TC_Outskirts and TC_Palisades - and the Vulture/Mad Dog torso and arms have been redesigned to help ensure this 'mech doesn't lose its side torsos (and often its main punch) as easily as it did with the previous design. Lastly, a couple new Special-class camos have been added - Shatter and Ghost Bear Alpha.
Some preview screenshots:
The new code foundations for Battle Armor proved to be a significant development bottleneck, and while some of our coders worked to crack the problem, we had time to take a look at a few existing gameplay systems: the heat system (specifically overheating and auto-shutdown), powering down and exiting vehicles, and ejection. These systems have been tweaked or significantly reworked in order to make gameplay more engaging and interesting. A hotfix is included with this release, fixing several issues like those pertaining to the in-game economy, infantry bays, maps and game mechanics, and tweaking some of the Battle Armor weapons and updating and adding sounds specific to overheating and laser impacts. The full details may be found in the patch notes included below.
In future releases, we plan to implement the first entirely new options for Battle Armor - the heavy Gnome and Phalanx suits. Furthermore, the player will spawn in a defenseless light powered armor suit, which is only capable of jumping up to reach and enter ‘Mechs, and Battle Armor suits (including the aforementioned planned heavy suits or the classic Elemental and Longinus) will need to be purchased just as any other asset. Light and Assault suits are on the way afterward, as well as heavy VTOLs for transport, if there are no showstoppers. While these changes may sound exciting, please keep in mind they will be implemented over quite a broad series of updates. We hope you enjoy the update, and as always please leave feedback at our forums (Forum.mechlivinglegends.net) or discord server (discord.me/mwll).
Additionally, we have a community-hosted tournament coming up mid-November - the ThreeV3 Team Single Elimination Tournament. It will take place on November 15th at 2300 UTC and 17th at 1900 UTC. You don’t have to be part of a unit or clan to participate, and can sign up to be put into any team that has a spot open when the even starts. As of this posting there are already seven complete teams slated to partake in the tournament. More information can be found on our forum here Forum.mechlivinglegends.net, and the signup document can be found at Docs.google.com.
Finally, here is the aforementioned changelog:
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------------- VERSION 0.10.0 ------------
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--- BUG FIXES ---
- Battle Armor damage modifiers are correctly working now, this means machine guns do the correct amount of damage to Battle Armor
- Fixed SA and LMS game mode kills being always logged as teamkills when sv_logKills is set to 1
- Fixed an issue where the vehicle turrets (AMS were unaffected) would fire when the left mouse button is pressed
- Fixed 3rd person view being available in the APC passenger seat
- Fixed Rusalka showing outdated paperdoll
- Fixed Anubis cockpit hitbox not following the torso as it moves
- Fixed Thor and Loki not exploding and going critical on destruction
- Fixed Osiris explosion
- Fixed Chevalier turret speed
--- GAME SYSTEMS ---
- e_clouds setting has been locked to 1 for gameplay reasons
- Rangefinder max distance doubled to 3000m
- Both server and client will print the MWLL version and revision at startup in the log now
- The C-Bill donation system now prevents you from being able to donate money to a dead player, and will also show a warning on the screen.
- A log message will warn you when you try to change your name in a server where player renaming is disabled
--- GAMEPLAY ---
- ASF and VTOL ejector seats now actually push you out like actual ejector seats
- We continued our work on the BA. This iteration allows us to balance the health, armor, regeneration and damage modifiers for each single BA now.
- BA now have inertia, instant strafing is no longer possible
- BA jumpjets use a new performance curve, jump setting side to side and forward more responsive,
- BA jumpjets refuel delay reduced from 1.5 to 1 second
- BA jumpjets max fuel slightly increased
- Decreased air resistance and floatiness
- BA SRM ammo is now limited to 8 in the players inventory + 1 loaded in each tubes (10 total)
- BA grenades have been removed
- Stocked BA SRM ammo will be removed when entering in a vehicle driver seat (APC is excluded from this)
- Weapon changes
- Flamer: heat damage slightly reduced
- New weapons:
- Light Machine Gun (replaces Bear AC)
- Medium Machine Gun (replaces BA AC2)
- Medium Grenade Launcher
- Medium Recoilless Rifle
- BA pulse laser
- Rework of the vehicle interaction system
- Exiting from any vehicle driver's seat is not possible anymore while the vehicle's engine is running and when the related league mode option is disabled
- There are 2 ways to leave a vehicle now: hatch escape and ejection sequence. Ejection sequence is available only on vehicles that come with an ejection seat. The ejection seat can only be used once.
- Vehicles that come with an ejection systes are: Mechs, ASFs and VTOLs
- Vehicles that DO NOT come with an ejection system are: Tracked and wheeled tanks, Hovercraft, APCs and Long Toms
- By pressing the interaction ("F" by default) key while the engine is running, the ejection system will be activated, if present and not already used.
- If the ejection system has already been used or it is not available, a new sequence is triggered in order to exit the vehicle: the hatch escape.
- Hatch escape can be done anytime (unless league mode prevents it - in that case the vehicle would have to be shut down before), but unlike the ejection is not instant and needs 3.5 seconds in order to be completed. In this sequence, the vehicle will start the shutdown sequence and all the controls will be locked.
- Shutting down will force the asset to stop, and lock all the controls for the whole duration of the sequence, which is 3 seconds
- Shutting down during a jump is not possible anymore
- We reworked the heat punishment system, in order to make the whole system easier to deal with. Note that these set of changes are not meant to make the gameplay easier, but to give the auto-shutdown meaning which just used to be a net negative by taking control from the player and still taking all the damage from the heat incurred.
- We distinguish 4 different heat levels: safe, danger and overheat and off scale
- In the safe zone (below the yellow line), the mech will never shutdown nor will take any heat damage
- Reaching the danger zone (between the yellow and the orange line) only heatsinks will take heat damage. If shutdown override is not engaged, heatsinks will gain a heat damage resistance bonus. It will also make the vehicle visible to enemy radars at any range (heat spike radar penalty)
- Reaching the overheat zone (over the red line) will cause overheat damage, and applies a different set of penalties. They will be removed 4 seconds after leaving the red line
- Max speed cut to 45%
- Weapons, jump jets and MASC / boost are disabled
- Override will NOT prevent the movement penalties from being applied (weapon lock will be removed if you engage override)
- If the vehicle takes more than 17.5% of heat damage to its main compoment (center torso / hull), it will start the auto-shutdown sequence.
- As soon as the shutdown sequence kicks in, the vehicle will gain a 65% protection against heat damage.
- After an auto-shutdown the vehicle won't be able to power up for 8 seconds.
- As flying assets don't have an auto shutdown system, they won't be protected by this security system.
- The shutdown override can be enabled at any time (default: H key), but once enabled it stays active for 60 seconds and cannot be disengaged manually, meaning that it has to be engaged manually every 60 seconds.
- Vehicle and the heatsinks will always take full damage from overheating when override is active, which can be fatal in the red zone.
- Single heatsinks will sustain much more heat damage than double heatsinks
- When reaching the off scale point (900 degrees) the vehicle will immediately shut down.
- Selling vehicles is not possible anymore in LastManStanding and SolarisArena game modes
- Mounted turrets now will focus the currently selected target, if it's shootable, rather than engaging the closest one
--- NEW ASSETS ---
- New Goblin 45 ton tracked tank with a single infantry bay. The bay has no spawn ability
- New slimmer torso and new arms for the Vulture as well as a new cockpit interior
--- ASSETS ---
- Tier changes:
Mithras: 2, Osiris: 2, Solitaire: 4, Avar: 5
- Ticket changes:
Chimera: 4, Regulator: 5, Goblin 5: (new)
- Hephaestus got an infantry bay without spawning ability
- Sparrowhawk armor rules changed to avoid overly vulnerable bomber variants
- Fafnir armor redistributed to center, left and right torso
- Mithras reworked to half track, engine power increased and lateral friction decreased to improve acceleration
- APC passengers are shielded from damage
- Cauldron Born armor redistributed to side torsos (small amount)
- Shadowcat base chassis cost reduced by 2k
- Novacat Armor redistributed to arms (small amount)
- Partisan tank sized up to actually being 80 tons, long barrel support added
- Raven size significantly reduced especially the beak, hitboxes reworked, head hitbox size decreased
- Laser-AMS repositioned on the Awesome and on the Thanatos
- Huitzilopochtli mass box tweaked to alleviate sliding
- Ryoken hitboxes reworked, long barrels removed so that the torso is more vulnerable from the sides
- Rifleman build rules tweak, LAMS count at half weight for Rifleman, extra tonnage gained converted to armor
- Thumper Rommel moved from tank build class to artillery build class
- Global increase for energy and kinetic modifiers against ASF.
- Different numbers per size/strength of planes still.
- Generally, smaller and harder to hit planes got larger increases than larger, slower planes.
- Increased kinetic-air and kinetic on Vtols
- Chimera - JJs and iJJs cost one ton less on the chimera since it sits at the bottom end of the medium class.
- VTOL radar detection ranged changed to active 1200m and passive 700m
- Morrigu breaking power reduced to prevent violent breaking
- Daishi, Warhawk external holder hitboxes bloat decreased
- Reduced light-kinetic modifier against hovercraft from 1.5 to 1.3
- Cougar base chassis cost reduced by 4.3k
- Puma base chassis cost reduced by 350
- Vulture Armor redistributed from arms to torso (small amount)
- VTOLs damage modifiers reduced from 1.1 -> 1 (energy); 2.05 -> 1.9 (lightkinetic); 1.4 -> 1.2 (kinetic); 1.75 -> 1.2 (heavykinetic)
- Solitaire armor reduced by half a ton to remove the extra rmor it recieved from its unhittable(bugged) cockpit.
- Solitaire Backtorso armor reduced to bring it in line with the max allowed percentage present on all other mechs (0.7->0.6)
Variant tweaks by asset
- Ares Prime
- Argus C
- Avatar D, F
- Atlas B
- Awesome A, B
- Blood Asp A, D, F
- Blacklanner E, G
- Bushwacker G
- Cauldron Born B
- Chevalier D
- Chimera B, G, E
- Cougar A
- Daishi A, B, C, G
- Demolisher Prime, C
- Donar C
- Epona A, C
- Fafnir A, C, D, E, F
- Harasser G
- Hawkmoth C
- Hephaestus A
- Hollander C
- Huitzilopochtli Prime
- Loki A
- Madcat Prime, D, F
- Madcat MKII A, F, G
- Masakari E
- Mithras C, D
- Morrigu Prime
- Novacat B
- Osiris B, E
- Partisan E
- Puma G
- Raven E
- Regulator Prime, A, B, C, D
- Rifleman Prime
- Rommel C
- Ryoken A
- Shadowcat B
- Solitaire G
- Sulla G
- Thor Prime
- Uller Prime, G
- Visigoth F
- Vulture Prime, C
- Xerxes A, G
--- WEAPON CHANGES ---
- ATM-Standard lockon time to 0.9/1.2/1.5/1.8 from 1/1.3/1.6/2.0 seconds
- UAC/10 overheat time decreased to match UAC/20 DPS
- UAC/10 price increased by 2k
- Removed impulse recoil from UAC5 to help hovercraft handling
- Machine gun:
- Damage increased from 2 to 3.5
- Overheat time reduced to 8 from 12
- Spread halved
- Damage dropoff increased from 300m to 1.9 damage at 1600m
- MRMs
- Increased recycle time of MRM20/30/40 to match LRM10/15/20 timings.
- Firerate slowed down to 1200 rpm to hopefully alliviate some hit detection issues
- Normalized firing pattern among the sizes
- ERPPC: price decreased to 8k from 9k cbills
- Thumper:
- Reduced ROF to 9 from 10
- Ammo per ton reduced to 8 from 15
- Price increased by 7k
- HAG: Spread lowered (havled on the HAG/20)
- Sped up recharge time on the HAG/30 by one second
- Sped up recharge time on the HAG/20 by two seconds.
- RAC/5:
- Spread tightened to RAC2 levels.
- Damage fall off now begins at 650 instead of 500.
- AC/5: moved to high explosive ammo
- Clan LRM 15: decreased to 5.5 tons from 6.
- Clan LRM 20: decreased to 7 tons from 8.
- Heavy Gauss (Air): charge time increased from 1 to 1.5 seconds
- Clan UAC2 price increased by 200
--- NEW EQUIPMENT ---
- New Point-Defense-System turret that shoots Battle Armors exclusively (mounted on Goblin and other tanks)
--- AUDIO CHANGES ---
- Betty sound "Shutting Down" is played on all the vehicles now
- New additions to the sound system to curb volume bloat with the exception of automatic weapons for technical reasons
- EQ filter removed from Clan assault mech run sound to get rid of distorted hum when many of them are close together
- Added pressure wave crackle to ASF engine sound
- Added new victory and defeat transmission for Innersphere. Clan transmissions get more variations
- Group fired weapons of the same type have a very subtle chorus effect applied to distinguish them from chain fired or single weapons in a group
- Bass boost for HVAC10, HAG30, 40 and Large, ER Large, Heavy Large and Large Pulse Lasers
- All Laser impacts can be now distinguished by weapon type and weapon class, works best when Laser fire sound is not audible
- Rear Firing Laser has a firing sound
- The manpack PPC has a charge sound indicating readiness
--- VFX CHANGES ---
Damaged turrets no longer create a trail of flames hanging in midair when moving.
--- HUD ---
- Small update to the map view in the ASF / VTOL HUDs
- Added SRM ammo counter to the BA HUD
--- NEW MAPS ---
- New map: TC_Palisades
- New map: TC_Outskirts
- New map: added TC_StoneRose as official map
--- MAP CHANGES ---
- TC_ValleyForge:
- Changed the location of the forward factories,
- New base weight: 0.25
- TC_Dune:
- Layout changed
- adjusted structures near repair bays
- new minimap added
- TC_ThunderRift: Mechtraps removed
- TC_Bogs: Changed position of some objects
- TC_Dustbowl: Tweaked day/night cycle to be more visible at night
- TC_Inferno: Factories in side bases are now hardened against criticals
--- Extras ---
- New Shatter camo available in Special category
- New Ghostbear Alpha camo available in Special category
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------------- VERSION 0.10.1 ------------
--------------------------------------------
--- BUG FIXES ---
- Possible fix for slowed economy
- Removed melee attack from BA Recoilles Rifle and from BA MP-PPC (caused a crash when used)
- Fixed Hollander unable to buy Thunderbolt 5 ammo
- Fixed Rusalka F not able to buy bomb reloads
- Fixed Rusalka B being able to buy bomb reloads (was not intended)
- Fixed all aircraft exiting / ejecting issues
- Fixed incorrectly reported BHP / BAP equipment on the HUD
- Fixed overheat/ low charge alarm for weapons not playing
- Fixed not being able to buy ammo from forward bases
- Fixed Goblin spawning underground when bought in a forward base
- Fixed BAP/BHP showing up wrong in the HUD
- Really fixed flame daisy chain from damaged turrets
- TC_Palisades:
- Fixed an issue where BA could not capture a base
- Fixed runway repair bugs
- Fixed IS VTOL spawn-in-hangar bug
--- GAME SYSTEMS ---
- New server cvar: sv_stats_logfile (default value: 1)
- This cvar, when set to 1, will make the server produce an XML logfile containing game stats in Documents/My Games/Crysis Wars/MWLL/Stats/ after a game ends
- Setting it to 0 will make the server stop writing stat logfiles
--- GAMEPLAY ---
- Increased safe explosion distance for BA SRMs
- This reduces likeliness of BA killing themselves when firing their own SRMs
- BA Recoilless rifle balance tweak
- Increased rate of fire by 50%
- Decreased damage by 50%
- Decreased bullet speed by 33% (900 to 600 m/s)
- BA MP-PPC balance tweak
- Increased rate of fire by 38%
- Decreased damage by 38%
- Override is now a switch and can be enabled / disabled any time
- Overheat movement penalties are now applied to the actual max speed of the asset, not to the throttle
- This will prevent overheat penalties to mess with the current throttle value
- Overheat penalties timer reduced from 4 to 2 seconds
--- AUDIO CHANGES ---
- Added new overheat alarm sound
- Added new overheat warning message when reaching the yellow zone on the heat indicator
- Changed Pulse Laser and XPulse Laser impacts sounds to be more in line with the general atmosphere of MWLL
- Heavy laser fire sound pitch brought in line more with their individual type
--- MAPS ---
TC_Palisades:
- Moved western BA spawn closer to mechbays.
- Added forbidden areas inside main factories for opposing teams.
TC_IvoryTower: Fixed 4-bays factories
TC_StoneRose: Removed duplicate spawnpoint icons
--- VFX ---
- Added trail VFX for Recoilless Rifle bullet
KNOWN ISSUES
--- GAMEPLAY ---
- If you are lucky, your pulse lasers occasionally will fire an additional laser pulse. Despite being useful in some situations, this is not intended. Sorry! :)
- In the Coupled Unlocked mode, when the reticule is very close to the center of the screen, the torso will stop moving, but the reticule will keep trying to recenter.
- The Oro and Rommel cannot turn while reversing.
- Air LBX does not collide with mechlegs
- BA SRMs always update in the HUD correctly whether they are selected or not, but only after they have been selected once after a respawn happened. After they have been selected, weapons can be switched, and they will always update correctly.
- When left empty, each BA SRM tube needs to be manually reloaded (can be initiated by using the fire button)
--- GAME SYSTEMS ---
- Crashes can happen. Workarounds are available in the Troubleshooting guide.
- You might get stuck in the connecting screen. This depends on your ISP, but if that happens, a workaround is available in our Troubleshooting guide.
--- MAPS ---
TC_Palisades: Both ASF factories will only build one ASF at a time.
--- HUD ---
- Certain HUD elements might overlap other UI elements.
- BA SRM ammo counter does not update until the weapon was selected and the reload on them was triggered once
--- CONTROLS ---
- DirectInput Joystick support has been removed due to instability. You can continue using your joystick by following this guide: Wiki.mechlivinglegends.net
Again, we hope you enjoy the update, and really look forward to hearing your feedback!
