really 40% damage reduction for hiding in some brush? Laser's maybe but all damage really?

There really should be different levels of cover - low/light, heavy/high, etc. Hiding behind a massive rock should be more beneficial than hiding behind a bunch of trees.

Actually come to think of it, hiding behind trees should (mainly) provide a significant reduction in to-hit chance (more than it currently does), as opposed to massively reducing damage - though the end result could (potentially) be similar, it would make more sense that way.

The damage reduction for tree cover is borderline ridiculous. I don't agree that it should provide a bonus to evade or reduction to to hit chance though as tageting systems would not be affected by tree cover. What is could do is either disallow or provide a massive reduction in called shots. If the pilot cannot actually clealy see the modules they are aiming at then they should not be able to easily selectively shoot at them.

Hey, trees are dense, and after passing through a few of them I'd expect any ballistic weapon to lose some speed, or any energy weapon to diffuse some of it's... uh... energy, or any missile barrage to lose a few missiles, before finally hitting the intended target.

The real question is how standing in ANKLE-DEEP BUILDING RUBBLE provides the exact same defense.

They should have really implemented FIRE. I would have thought, with the traditional BT focus on heat build-up, that starting a forest fire (e.g. with lasers or exploding missiles) should be a thing - with the resultant massive increases to heat for anything near it, let alone in it.

Ideally any fires started should spread too.

I remember this being a thing in the ancient Battletech PC games (Crescent Hawk's Inception, and Crescent Hawk's Revenge). Well the fire starting anyway - can't recall if it spread or not.

Didn't smoke from fires also provide visual cover, or something like that, in the original tabletop game? Because why should your melee-mechs sneak through the treeline when they can turn them into a handy smokescreen.

Also: Uprooting trees and using them as clubs. Who needs lasers and cannons when you can cram an oak tree straight into someone's cockpit?

It would truly be awesome if the mechs (the ones with actual arms and hands at least) could rip trees out and use them as clubs. Not sure it'd be better than using cannons or lasers, but for melee it almost makes sense - though in that case one would expect the mechs to be like those in the Anime world and just come equipped with massive swords or something.

It would still be cool though. Either that, or if one of the assault mechs could pick up a light mech and throw them into another mech!

Also, missiles are implemented in a quite basic manner - one would expect any missiles that don't hit you to hit targets near you, for one thing. This would make missile use a bit more strategic, in that it might not be a good idea to fire missiles while a friendly is nearby - not to mention that we need a proper area-effect weapon of some kind. Hopefully they get around to implementing friendly airstrikes or artillery.

Naval Autocannon, ho!

This needs to be in the game.

Though it's strange it's called a "naval" autocannon, when it seems to be land-based. I guess because it's designed to destroy "ships", which are technically in the "navy" (or space-navy at any rate).

They are usually mounted on Warships and used against other Warships ;)

Makes sense.

Wouldn't mind any kind of artillery in Battletech - not really fussed what type since it'll be off-screen either way. I'm sure they could mount some kind of autocannon (maybe even a smaller version) onto the Argo or something...

If the Fortress-class hadn't exploded on impact, not only would it have dropped off up to eight lances of 'Mechs, but it would have been able to use the Long Tom mounted on its nose (the top, when landed). That would have spiced up the battle a fair bit.

The second big DLC is supposed to be Urban Warfare. It's as good a setting as any to introduce artillery (not for the actual street fighting, but for getting into the city in the first place), unless the third DLC lets us reclaim that Star League castle and rebuild it. Then *that* would be the best DLC for introducing artillery.

And yeah, most DropShips in the Battletech game world do make use of hull-mounted artillery, but a simple autocannon wouldn't help much on the Argo since it's apparently never used to actually do the atmospheric segment of deployment, and there's no space battle element to BATTLETECH.

The Argo is designed to carry Battlemechs, so has very few space left. The dropship weapons are designed to defend it from aerospace fighters while landing and from otherr threats like mechs on ground. For really big naval weapons you usually do need warships, which are much bigger (huge jumpships with very few docking points for dropships compared to a normal jumpship which mostly consists of the KF drive and alot of docking points).

If you want to take a look at different Mechs and Ships other than sarna.net a very good site is Mechfactory.

Interesting - cheers for the link.