Alright...thinking out loud time (ignores all the groans and dodges the rotten tomatoes...*THUNK* #&*^!  who threw the pumpkin?!?)

ahem...pilot/ gunner skills.  Primarily for campaign play with units.

I'm thinking of a five level division. The five levels being (no surprise)
Green...Regular...Veteran...Elite...and Legendary.

Okay...nothing special there.  However, these are going to have a graduating improvement path based on kills made.  Breakdown as follows:

Green Pilot.  Initial Pilot (Stability) Mod.: -2   Gunner (To Hit) Mod.: -2
Improve one skill with 2 kills.  8 kills moves Pilot to next level.

Regular Pilot.  Initial Pilot (Stability) Mod.:+0   Gunner (To Hit) Mod.: +0
Improve one skill with 3 kills. +12 kills moves Pilot to next level.

Veteran Pilot.  Initial Pilot (Stability) Mod.: +2  Gunner (To Hit) Mod.: +2
Improve one skill with 4 kills.  +16 kills moves Pilot to next level.

Elite Pilot.  Initial Pilot (Stability) Mod.: +4   Gunner (To Hit) Mod.: +4
Improve one skill with 5 kills   +10 kills moves Pilot to next level.

Legendary Pilot.  Pilot (Stability) Mod.: +5   Gunner (To Hit) Mod.: +5

This could apply to armored vehicle crews, naval units, aircraft, and infantry squads as well.

Comments? :idea:

I know Kevin's response to this...
:-)

Certain game concepts are a hard sell.

I just happen to get goosebumps whenever I see certain scenes from certain shows containing giant robots....:-)

I know it's silly, I still like it.....

I don't think that I've played in as many game sessions as I have games.

I have WARMACHINE, and it's sorta cool. I don't ever see playing it. I know no one that's interested in it and I can't see spending all that money on 'official' minis, when I'm a stone's throw from making my own.

I have many games I bought because at a cursory glance, they looked sorta cool. I have some games for 'completeness' - I have literally hundreds of 'demo' games on my hard drive that I've only just glanced at....honestly, most are crap, but some are gems that were released when they failed to meet the sales goal.

Exactly

Armor Corps is not Starmecha/APE Corps...they are two different levels of abstraction, aimed at different ends.

Why do I get the idea I'm shifting from 'the Art Guy' to 'the Content Guy'?

..crap, I still need to work on those maps....

Green, Regular, Veteran, Crack, Elite.....?

Alright for now....add it in....

I love the idea of MJ12 producing individual mecha miniature pieces that can be combined to play Mechamada (one can dream can't they).

That's the only game that I am playing at the moment.  Stupid way of spending hundreds of dollars since I'm a 15mm fan, but these days, if the game remotely interests me and there are players available, I'm all over it.

I like the idea of both games.  One of my first games was Battletech and insanely sized mecha running about killing everything will hold a big soft spot in my heart (maybe that's why I do like Warmachine so much).  The fact that Mechamada can run small skirmish mecha battles (which I love) and Assualt Corps can run large mecha battles (which I also love) definitely means both should be worked on (I just wish I had more time to do playtesting but I can't ever find a second player at the moment).

-Bren

Generic world, eh?  Hmm...yeah. Could do that...just pick a fictional planet out wherever that was widely colonized.  Several settlements banded together into a few different power blocks....while a couple big corporations also began to assert their own influence over planetary politics for control of resources.  Of course some of the blocks resist this and scattered warfare broke out for control of territories and the resources therein.

Fairly generic in concept and again, provides plenty of opponents.  My personal favorite is the Ares Corporation of Mars.  Supplying the more violent and least ethical of the competing power blocks. War is profit...let there be war. :twisted:

Hmmm...

Let me write something up along these lines....

Well, I got the ok, so assuming you're okay with using this as a 'prequel' to something else I'm cooking up, here's the first page....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Man is the most adaptive creature in the Heavens...

Earth had remained the same for nearly seven millenia before  we left our cradle. The advent of the 'Space Age' should have been called the 'Aeronautical Age', as man stayed anchored to his birthplace for almost a full millenium before he had grown enough in knowledge to leave his ancestral home. While it's true that man had built orbital facilities in the decades that followed, they were still dependent on constant resupply from Earth. The failure of almost any system aboard those facilities meant, as often as not, evacuation - and periodically death to those aboard.

In AD 2937, man finally developed the tools to enable him to travel to other stars in less than a single lifetime.

The news of FTL travel reached all of mankind in less than a day. Planetary news and computer networks had been in place for centuries, so if you were isolated from knowledge, it was your decision to be isolated.

Mankind had been on the verge of such a thing for centuries, but the level of control of the minutae of nuclear-level structures had evaded him. Slipping from one dimension to the next needed a level of control that was several orders of magnitude more energy-intensive than anything he had attempted before. The two century long persuit of fusion power was child's play.

Man has always been his own worst enemy...

While some had pursued the dream of moving to other worlds circling other stars, some pursued the goal of fuedal knights - to create armor that no weapon could penetrate.

The creators of Powered Armor were trying to offset the staggering losses in war. Even 'limited wars' that had been the norm since the advent of the atomic bomb tended to use up a lot of people. Earth had been steadily loosing population since most of the world had joined America and western Europe in economic status. Money and education had a tendency to reduce the drive to procreate. There was no need to raise a dozen children to help on the farm if the farm machines only needed minimal programming and attention.

Rather than try to minimize war, those that wanted power decided to make it less difficult (for them, not the soldiers) to wage.

Japan was among the first to use them in the battlefield, as an engineering recovery vehicle. After a few incidents, the impromptu addition of some body armor panels and weapons gave them a fairly effective (if expensive and short-ranged) powered armor for use in dangerous situations.

It was a slightly improved model that lifted with the expedition to Wayside, the first of the Terra-settled worlds.

I have done a couple of attempts at using STARMADA as a core for creating a Mecha-combat engine. The problem is that each time it feels *too much* like STARMADA-converted-to-Mecha-Combat.

I have a couple of ideas on how to make it feel unique and still use the wonderfully solid core that Starmada has to offer. I will keep you all posted if anything develops.

Yikes! that was some big map, here's the zip file

I'm going to have to wait til I get home on my lunch hour to look at the files *stares at the clock intently attempting to manipulate time*   

Been pondering the damage system and thinking that instead of hits doing damage and then adding a dice roll with additional system/ physical damge...that it seems a bit, well, clunky.

Proposed changes:
Weapon DMG is the number of points caused rather than dice rolled.

Armor ablates with damage from hit.

Mecha Armor Rating increases by x3.  Armored Vehicles Armor by x2.

System damage is rolled for at 1/2 A/SR, 1/4 A/SR, and mecha is non-functional at zero A/SR.

Minor changes would be made to affected enhancements to account for this.

Or am I being a bit too nit-picky with this?

Hmmm,

The change would make combat quicker in that there would be less dice to roll.

Not to sure how it would work overall, since the best weapon can do 3 Dmg so a unit with 3 armour now would take 3 hits.

Might still work if bump up weapon dmg slightly to compensate.

'Course I might have got the wrong end of the stick again would not be the first time.