Walker/Mech/ Heavy Tank Ideas, anyone?

feet = not squishing friendlies.
gaint tank trying to squeeze into position on a crowded battlefield = possibly TONS of dead friendlies.

At least with a giant 6 legged mech your team can camp underneath it for cover and slow creep forward, running between the legs.

The Mad Cat from the original Mech Warrior...

I think you fail to realize that I was supporting Mechs on the battlefield. Also the moment we can make advanced enough AI to make your feet do that, why not utilize the same camera and positioning skills to... Oh I don't know... Fight for us? The problem for AI in games is that they are almost immediately better equipped to handle any weapon or vehicle.

Anyway, the advantage of feet that can side-step mines is quickly offset by the way your legs can easily be blown apart compared to the rest of your body, neutralizing any option to turn or face your enemy unless he accidentally was within your view as you fall. Mech's would really need to have a maneuverability advantage as well as a weapon that would be able to fight off tanks almost as good as the tank can fight off the Mech to make this Mech a better unit, if we assume real-life options. However, we are playing a futuristic game. So we could just put them in the game, give them health and armor akin to tanks or lower and make them fill some unique qualities, such as special maneuverability or a niche weapon slot like powerful AI/AA hybrids as I proposed in the first page.
Never ever make a higher armored, massive Mech with supa-dupa weapons. It would only ruin any chances of MBT's and Lightnings being useful or fun as it replaces their roles rather than augments the battlefield versatility and options.

My apologies I was looking at it upside down. I have been corrected ^^

Another thought struck my brain: Have we discussed the matter of missilie systems, no matter of mech or tank? Sci-fi has them, RL has them, PS2 doesn't have them. tanks with missiles. And i don't mean the Fracture, I mean missile launching systems for those long, unwieldy missiles.





Coming in several shapes and sizes, they could open so many doors in PS2, mostly with guided missiles. Frankly, vehicles have not much in terms of missile systems, except for one single, dumbfired system.

Well in the future ONE single little foot troop could execute a giant leviathan if the LEVIATHAN didnt notice the trump infantry weapon. But that would be too extreme of a gamble for a video game.

Why cant they make the SUPA DUPA mech an EVENT that only happens 1 hour out of the day? Instead of an option available to anyone. Then figure out a way to make that even a community event in all aspects.

Like... "Stop the vanu's uber mech before it reaches Indar Crown!!!!" Then find a way to give all the vanu players a chance to man the cannons before the uber mech reaches the crown.

a once per day opportunity is a bad thing. People shouldn't be bound by time to have the fun of this beast.

One way you could have supa-dupa weapons and armor is by putting a gate on it. For example you could use Cortium. Get an ANT, build a silo, fill it with a certain amount of cortium and you can build one.
This means only players that took the time to collect that amount of resources can get it. You have a chance to stop this by killing the Silo owner or the silo, or just killing the ANT's that try to collect it. Since it's tough to get enough cortium together for just one super-tank/Mech you don't have to fear entire rushes with them and you'll be hard pressed to see 3 together. This also means that you can go all-out on these things with their capabilities and weaknesses. Since it's just 1 vehicle rather than a spammed hundred it won't take too much strain on the server to give it half a dozen different hitboxes and weaknesses. That way you can make it a full boss encounter where players can try to disable (parts of) it, deal extra damage or nerf some of it's components by hitting the weakspots, but that won't be easy.

Exclusiveness promotes coveting. But farming a crop isnt a very fun video game. Giant uber alpha titan fortress mechs should be a global event.

Mechs the size of a defence tower should be manned by 4 or more people.

Mechs the size of lightnings should be manned by 1 person and have slow stepping with cooldown quickness specialization or burst.

I can't deny that exclusiveness is a powerful thing, but it cuts on both ends. The players that manage to get to play this exclusiveness will have a blast, the players who fight it might feel penalized/excluded because they aren't driving it, or they could feel that they were part of it anyway. Then you have the last group that neither drove it nor fought it, who will feel they missed it.

The point of exclusivity in games is that it's universally available but hard to gain. Having an arbitrary system determine when these appear already takes a lot of it away. And how do you earn driving it? Is it first come first served? That will leave people feel bad about not achieving it simply because someone else happened to spawn nearby the moment it started, or if you put it on a timer and alerted everyone in advance you get a mad rush with a few happy people and a ton of unhappy one's who see their attempt to get this mastodon fail. Is it based on some kind of point or achievement thing? What if it spawned when you were offline even though you were first? What if only a select few grinders get this and the only way to compete is make a boring grind yourself?
the way you bring this message is extremely important as well. WOW has a sleep system that was said to 'punish' players for playing too long, as their XP income decreased over time. People hated it with a passion and asked for it's removal. Instead they didn't change a thing, but simply said "it's a bonus for players who go offline so they can compete with people who have more time to play the game" and suddenly the system was almost universally accepted.

I'm okay with game mechanics being in play, but as I've said before those mechanics must be enforced fairly. In terms of maintenance, no vehicle or infantry has to take care of those mundane tasks. And if a mech was inserted into the game I would not expect it to require maintenance either.

But to bend the rules of physics for one particular unit is unfair and unbalanced. If aircraft get to flaunt the rules of physics and go airborne with far too much a load, then my tank ought to be able to take on a similarly ridiculous amount of armour and weapons. This is why it would be unfair to allow a mech to mount unrealistic amounts of armour or weaponry but to not allow a tank to do the same.

This is incorrect for two main reasons.

First, you're getting caught up on the classification of ships and are ignoring actual size and tonnage. Names don't mean much, but the "size" of ships does. Consider a WWII destroyer and a modern day destroyer.

Fletcher-class Destroyer (1941)- 2,500 short tons, 114.8m long
Arleigh Burke-class Destroyer (1988)- 10,800 short tons, 155m long

So yes, our destroyers have gotten larger and larger. They carry more weight and are longer overall. It is true that they have less displacement than battleships, but it's important to point out that size still matters.

Second, even if the overall size requirements have been reduced, a more efficient frame is still superior. Let's say that instead of having a maximum load design, we instead have a target weight of 30t (in other words I need to carry 30t of gear to accomplish the mission). I can build a mech that can carry 30t or I can build a tank that can carry 30t.

Well the tank can simply be smaller and lighter (not to mention less expensive) because it can carry the same 30t in a more compact form. It will not require the footprint, engine, or other greater demands that a 30t mech would require.

Not only is the form of a tank superior to that of a mech for carrying greater weight, but you can simply design a smaller, more nimble tank to carry the same weight as a larger mech.

Uhhh... legs aren't automatically magic and can absorb blows. That's why people can get broken legs from falling. Sure some of the shock can be absorbed by bending joints, but with enough force those can easily break.

It's not difficult to see why you are incorrect here. Just do a mental experiment. Imagine two 10kg objects. Insert small sticks onto the bottom of one as "legs" and attach two long pads to the other as "treads". Drop both from the same height of say 5m up.

Chances are that the legs would have snapped on the first object, but that the second object lands more or less intact. This is because with the first object all the force of the impact was felt by the "legs", whereas in the second object the energy was more neatly transferred. It's not difficult to figure out.

Neither a mech nor a tank will be able to achieve the proper flight surfaces for true flight... unless they were absolutely useless on the ground. But in terms of a more practical form of flight, by direct propulsion from shorter directional jet engines, both forms are roughly equal. The advantage of the tank here comes from the fact that it can carry more weight in a more efficient form.

Why not? Because then it becomes increasingly awkward and your mech could literally be tripping over its own two feet. Not to mention that bigger feet means more weight, which is now less weight that you could spend on actually useful equipment.

To say that legs are more efficient than wheels or tracks is absolutely, positively wrong. I don't know where you got that idea from. And it's easy to see how wrong you are.

First, just go for a 20MPH sprint (human record is 27MPH, so 20 is reasonable). Try to go at it for 100m or so. See how tired you are.
Second (after a rest of course), hop on a bike and ride it @ 20MPH for 100m. See how tired you are in comparison with sprinting.
Third (after another rest), carry that bike on your back. Sprint again for 100m @20MPH.

What you will find is that you are much less tired riding a bike than sprinting on foot even though you are also "carrying" the weight of the bike! I mean that's why we invented vehicles in the first place... because our own legged locomotion is so backwards.

The reason why operating a wheelchair might have been tiring for you would be 1) different muscles (legs versus arms) and 2) a lack of efficient design. But really wheels and tracks are far superior to legs in terms of energy spent. I mean with legs you have to go backwards!

Slow down there, you're starting to over-simplify and over-generalize a bit too much. Our legs are pretty good at what we grew them for: versitile all-terrain movement. The nice thing about legs is, at the weight of a typical human body, it is nearly impossible to find something they can't traverse given enough patience and experience. They're slow, but reliable. Obviously this advantage is quickly lost as you scale up due to the square-cube law, but we do have legs (and try to give amputees new legs instead of bolting a wheel base to their waist) for a reason.

A bike's primary advantage is its ability to retain momentum on a flat surface (and gain it going downhill). Get on ground rough enough to negate that or try to go uphill, you'll start feeling it fast. The other advantage is that our legs are better at putting out torque than RPM, and the gear systems help us turn the former into the latter.

So legs do have their applications, like climbing trees for example. It's just they're best for things roughly human-sized.

Too many red herrings here.

The efficiency advantage of wheels become questionable once you add enough variables. This is a war game, not a driving simulator.

This is why the military is working on legged combat drones over wheeled/tracked ones. Because wheels become problematic when they cannot always be given a smooth/paved surface on which to function.

As far as your human example...uhhh not sure what that's all about. How about we use a Cheetah instead of a human. It has legs too right?

A Cheetah can reach 70+ MPH faster than most supercars and make turns faster than any vehicle, in rough unpredictable terrain. If engineers could reproduce the balance and grace of such a biological wonder mechanically, and scale it up, wheeled vehicles and tanks would absolutely have to share the battlefield with them. As they could go places unsuitable to their wheeled progenitors.

For military purposes potential efficiency loses out to practical functionality every time.

KV-2, Stalin's heavy tank. In the tank games' community it's known as The King of Derp.

As silly as an idea as it was, it still makes more sense than to put the same cannon on a legged mech.

Nah we got anti-gravity n stuff cuz its the future.

A human can walk the battlefield with a rocket on his back, A machine gun across his stomach, 2 handguns, a sleeping bag, a samuri sword at his waist, and a nunchucks in his back pocket and a 12 inch sub sandwich. a briefcase full of drugs and a 12 pack of beer. ALL AT ONCE! While walking in between 2 trees that are 3 feet apart.

Its odd teh way some of you go about arguing against mechs for a video game.

So you put 2 "anti gravity coils" on each shoulder that makes a mech lighter when they are turned on. So it gracefully moves over the land the same way a hippo moves in water.

And if infantry shoot the anti-grav lifter coils then the mech becomes encumbered until nanites repair it.

can your tank get back up when it falls in a ditch?

In the future there will be GIANT doors that only mech's can open. Little humans have no chance to turn the knob. But some mech will just walk up and turn it in seconds.

Robots WILL run better, faster than you.. eventually.

There WILL be more bipedal robots than wheel vehicles in the future.

Its so obvious.

Skip to 42 seconds in this video \/ \/ \/

And then I put those same anti-gravity boosters on my tank. Then I load up my tank with much thicker armour than before. Now the weapons your puny mech mounts can't even dent my armour, making your mech an obsolete weapon of war.

Because the question always boils down to... "why don't we put it on a tank?".

Oh, I guess that's why Boston Dynamics, the legged robot manufacturer, is getting sold off. By Google.

I mean say what you want about the future, but if Google sees no profitable future for legged robots...

Look... We get it... You are pissed off that you wasted 300 bucks on World of Tanks. You can stop now.

And it was sooo obvious you were going to reply with google sell off. I knew it would be your reply as soon as I started. Google is selling robotics division because they dont want to be associated with military robots. NOT because it isnt profitable.

Uh-huh. If they didn't want to be associated with military robots, why would they buy a military robot company in the first place?

But hey, don't take my word for it. How about the Wall Street Journal?

This is of course the same robotics company whose crazy ideas were rejected by the US Marines.

Meanwhile, we actually do have plans for treaded military combat robots. Russia, for instance, fields the Uran-9.



Which due to the superiority of treads can actually mount and fire weapons and, you know, be accepted for service by an armed force. The US has deployed the SWORDS UGCV to combat (though for scary Terminator-related reasons it has not yet fired a shot).



Legged robots for general military deployments are silly fantasy, because structurally legged robots or vehicles barely offer any advantages over wheeled or tracked alternatives and also come with plenty of drawbacks. They're fun things for children to fantasize about, but should be left in the realm of fantasy.