Mech Style Game Hints: ------ Keep moving. You are in a twelve meter (or larger) tall metal monstrosity, if you are standing still, it would take a blind man facing the wrong way to miss you. So mobility is necessary, keep moving or you will die quickly. Also most mechs are capable of a torso twist, a twist that let's you bring your upper torso and arm weapons into play without changing your direction of movement. Most people overlook the value of these movements. It allows the player to fire upon targets that may not lie in the path to your mission objective. In addition it allows for some maneuvers that would be otherwise impossible (such as the famed Circle of Death: a pair or more of mechs turn their torsos 90 degrees in the same direction and run around a target firing). It also makes a player harder to hit, but it also makes aiming slightly more difficult. Manage your weapons wisely. Energy weapons are usually unlimited so do not worry too much about accuracy with them. Energy weapons are an effective mix of power to heat/power drain ratio, especially considering that they are unlimited. Ballistic weapons are a different thing altogether. They usually are effective at longer ranges, cause a much lower amount of heat/power drain but they do have an ammo limitation, you can only fire the weapon as long as you have ammunition for it. But, even with this limitation, they are still extremely effective due to the fact that they can cause a lot of damage in a short amount of time. But one does need to be very accurate and one must try not to take too much damage, when an ammo driven mech starts taking large amounts of damage, there is the possibility of ammo explosion. And when there is an ammo explosion there is the possibility of fracticide (when the explosion of one piece of ammo causes the detonation of another piece of ammo, and that piece of ammunition then causes the explosion of others and so on). If the game you are playing gives you the option, be sure to design your mechs intelligently. In a game where you can effectively blast off parts of your target, your body parts can be blown off too. Usually the first parts ot be destroyed are the arms, and with the arms go whatever weapons happened to be located in the arms at that time. To avoid losing your primary weapons, do not place them in a location that is easily destroyed. Ammo weapons are slightly different. You want to place them near the outskirts of the mech. When ammo explodes it causes flash damage to whatever parts and components are around it. So do not place ammo in the head where an ammo explosion will kill you. Take the time to aim. With smaller and lighter mechs it does not make much of a difference. Those mechs cannot take much damage anywhere and a few shots can take them out. But with the larger mechs, those who have the heavy armor and can take a lot of punishment you need to direct your fire to vulnerable locations to avoid the hour long pounding on an assault mech trying to pound through the armor. Take advantage of opponent's weaknesses. If you are in a faster and more maneuverable, if lighter armed and armored mech, than you opponent, run circles around him, make it difficult to connect with any of his weapons. Most of the time if you are in something lighter and you are engaged with something heavier, it is very common for the heavy to carry weapons that can destroy you with just a few hits. The opposite is also true: do not let your opponent run circles around you, it could be a diversion to distract you from the heavy guns that are coming up from the rear that are planning to pulverize you into something that looks like metallic grape jelly. Never be afraid to change you tactics. The tactics for a light, fast mech will not work for a larger, heavily armed monster mech. The same applies for different types of the same weight class. A large, heavy medium range mech will need to be piloted differently than the large, heavy long range mech that has a lack of close range weapons. Always know when to throw the book out the window. While in most of the situations the usual rules of combat will suffice to bring you victory if you are skilled enough, there will always be occasions when the rules of combat will only get you killed. Game designers always love to throw in missions that test your inventiveness and make you break out of your set ways.
