Captain's Log Supplemental

Out of all the funny things that have ever happened to you, which experience still cracks you up?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Without a doubt?

Cored in a second flat!

I was in a casual game of MechWarrior 4: Mercs with a friend, her smoke signals host (AOL Dial up), and the Op4 was three of her killer ‘Mech configs piloted by level 9 bots (the hardest mode). I was piloting my Shadow Cat, a 45 Ton medium ‘Mech and iirc she had her Black Knight.

I was like, “Ok I’ll go destract them you go flank” and before she could warn me, I jump jetted over the wall and BAM

My ‘Mech exploded as they cored out my Shadow Cat about as fast as my legs cleared the wall hahahaha !!

Crap, we were laughing till it hurt after that one lol. Normally bots can’t fight worth a darn on any difficualty level let along the maximum but when shes the engineer — RUN FOR IT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm, it’s been awhile since I last thought about the ‘cored in a second flat’ thing hehe. That’s one thing I always liked about playing with Lioness, she was brilliant at putting together strike packages. Blending the perfect mixture of weapons payloads to balance both human and bot skills with the desired effect, and to top it off grouping them into strike groups of demi-lances or larger. Often 2 assault ‘Mechs and a heavy or a med, hvy, and aslt.

Some of those configurations were scary :

And I’m a guy who used to train versus like 12 level 9 bots lol.

My favorite part about Mech Warrior was the ability to design ‘Mech configurations. I was never really happy that in competitive play, I usually ended up in ‘Mechs designed for the more natural ‘stand up fight’ of a league drop — weapons were largely limited to the heaviest hitting ones grouped in mass, alpha striking was the goal. Like the common street-fight Highlander every body used for short to medium range work and urban ops.

About 90 tons of jump ‘Mech with low slung arms, big torso sections and tall legs. But that sucker could pack a heavy gauss rifle (the biggest gun back then) plus still cram in clan guass, light gauss rifle (basically super long range), and a capacitor packed particle projector cannon (PPC) — meaning one big alpha strike. It only had a 600 Metre rang eon the heavy gauss but the closer you got, the harder the gauss rifles hit. Heck if you got as close as 400m the heavy gauss would probably critical most heavy ‘Mechs in one center torso shot.

That’s how competitive MW4 play was, speed was a luxury for most, heat sinks dead weight, armour was cheap compared to guns. And if it couldn’t destroy any ‘Mech in the game with two direct hits, your ‘Mech was too weak for combat. Although of course in games where we got points by damage done rather then kills (never very popular) people would mix in some shredders using short or long range missiles.

The only big difference between long range and short range combat was for brawling we took shotguns (LBX Autocannon) and heavy lasers most times, for sniping we took Gauss rifles, PPC, and ER Large Lasers :. So what if I could work a 70 Ton Nova Cat with 7 ER Lasers, minimal reflective armour, 90+ KPH engine and no heat sinks what so ever, and go hill-humping as the Nova-style sniping was nick named, blasting away ‘Mechs ? I much rather have been in a little ol’ Shadow Cat or a Raven zigging and zagging through the battlefield.

In some ways, I envy my old partner in the engineering wing. She never played competitively (good for me because her personal ‘Mech was the Queen of Alpha Strikes) but she also always used the style of ‘Mechs that she preferred to bring into virtual combat (y).

She was always a great one at designing ‘Mechs for all range combat, a skill very few people ever developed well. My own line of bots got used for training but were never quite up to par with Lionesses monsters from a Doom speed run lol.

Although, I did work together a group of bots that cored my shadow cat in half a second once lol.

They were never quite up to that same nightmare configs that she cooked up :-(.

I remember she once gave me her personal ‘Mechs configuration, a 75-Ton Black Knight that had an alpha strike that put 100 ton ‘Mechs to shame!!! When I brought it to bare against’ my friends ‘Mechs they couldn’t believe it hit so hard haha. It was like bringing a midget to a sumo match and packing the death stars super laser !

With Lionesses very much respected permission, I eventually gave my buddies the config so they could stop (wrongly) trying to reverse engineer it on her >_>.

*shakes head*, that girl was a bloody genius of ‘Mech Engineering!