Thanks for checking out my demo Tomo.

>I also don't know what Ammo what Gun needs

>I have no Idea what half of the Stuff is supposed to be

You can see more details about weapons and equipment by holding right click on them, it shows their ammo requirement and a description of what they do, as well as some stats. I definitely need to improve this though, I didn't have time to add an 'ammo warning' icon in the mechbay that tells you if a weapon requires ammo after placing it.

Stuff like armor and structure type currently don't have descriptions unfortunately.

>Weapons and other Equipment doesn't show up on your Mech, shame.

Yeah, sorry. That's supposed to happen but I haven't set up the weapon spawning system in a good enough way to be able to re-use it for the mechbay yet, but I'll be fixing that soon with a refactor.

>Its also empty at the Moment which is boring for the Combat, I think it should have some Stuff to cover behind and/or blow up

I'm definitely working towards that. This map is generally just empty as a 'free-for-all' type thing, but most actual missions and instant action maps will have much more stuff to use for tactical positioning.

>Overheating doesn't do anything if you override it. I can easily go to 500% without anything happening.

I think it's tweaked to be a bit too forgiving at the moment, but you can actually stay above 100% for a while due to the RNG. 

When you overheat, all of your component's internal structure slowly takes random amounts of damage, bypassing armor, and doing random critical hits. If you have any equipment - such as heatsinks, or explosive ammo - the critical hits can destroy them and cause essentially a chain reaction. If you're already overheating and your heatsinks blow up, it's going to be a lot harder to *stop* overheating - etc.

>1v1 Combat quickly turns into just strafing around the Enemy in case they have Directionlocked Weapons and firing away in bursts. Don't know if thats intended, but it feels a bit same-y and boring. Maybe better AI and different Terrain alongside proper Team battles instead of only 1v1 could fix this more. Or different Achievements to Win then just destroy the Enemy.

Yeah, that's essentially exactly what I was thinking. I'm going to be adding more interesting mission objectives, more enemy 'roles', like a mech that might hide behind a hill and fire missiles at you, or a scout that harasses you, etc. There will also be ally commands you can give to your team for better strategy, and the maps will be much more complex and less empty. I'm hoping that will alleviate the issue a bit, but we'll have to see. It's going to be a while before all of that falls into place.

Also, if you wanted to play 2v2, there's already an option in the game to enable that if you check the "gameplay" tab in the settings.

Anyway, thank you for the in-depth feedback, I appreciate it a lot.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. It's very useful to have the perspective of someone who's played many mech games in the past.

I'm definitely going to be overhauling the UI many times until I get to a point where I feel it's easy enough to understand. There are already tooltips if you hold right-click on equipment / weapons, but there definitely need to be more, and there's a bunch of areas where the mechbay UI has major failings - like, for example, the game doesn't explain what the different armor types (composite, KREM, reflective, EDA) even do, same with structure type and engines, etc. A lot of this is on my radar, and a lot of development time is going to go towards making the mechbay more comfortable and simple to use, considering it will account for 30-40% of the game.

I'm limiting the size of battles at the moment as anything beyond 1v1 is almost entirely untested, and may lead to performance or weird AI problems - but there is a setting in the 'gameplay' tab to enable 2v2 battles, if you'd like to try that out.

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks for trying it. 

I'm also having issues figuring out how to encourage customization. My idea for a campaign at the moment involves a lot of 'looking ahead' to see what types of enemy and environment you'll be up against, so you can plan and build the right type of mechs for the job.

>an issue I had which I want to point out was that using the automatic weapons overheats my mech instantly whereas auto-lasers and single shot weapons work fine

First thing's first - the game has exactly zero balance at the moment, and I'm waiting until a few more major features are done before I'm going to make any changes. So, it's probably just a lack of balance issue.

That being said, how many heatsinks did your mech have? I do a pretty bad job at explaining heat mechanics in-game, but a mech without heatsinks can only dissipate something like 4 heat per second.
Which automatic weapons were they? Some single-shots like the Gauss Cannon and Particle Cannon generate a large burst of heat per-shot, and some automatics produce very little, such as the Chaingun and Autobeam Laser.

It's going to be quite hard for me to determine what is and isn't a bug with such a large variety of possible mech builds. If you want, you could send me the .mvar file of your mech design, which is located in:

C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Shrine Dynamics\Mech Encounter\VariantData

Either way, thank you again for the helpful feedback.

Thanks for checking it out! I really like the fact that you played it on a 4:3 CRT, I decided from the outset to support 4:3 aspect ratios and I even design the UI elements around it.

The prebuilt types are unfortunately kinda shit right now, and don't feature very many of the possible weapons - it's one of the easiest things to update, so I'll try and get some better ones out in a bit.

>it quickly grew stale once I realized it was just circle strafe around eachother until someone dies

Yeah, this is my biggest issue right now, too. My current plan is to add more passive equipment and also some active equipment that you can use for defensive, movement, team support, or further offensive purposes. I'm also going to add maps with better cover, and more complex mission objectives than just "kill everyone".

Additionally, having more complex team formations, both friendly and enemy, may help - I'm planning on some pretty cool 'role' based AI, where you can get for example a missile mech hiding behind a hill, and a scout mech that runs around you to get a target lock so the missilier can blind-fire you. You will be able to, hopefully, tell your AI teammates to do things like this, too. 

I've already noticed the game gets significantly more fun when playing with AI teammates, even if they're pretty dumb. (You can enable the secret 2v2 setting in the menu if you want)

I'm hoping this will get some semblance of strategy out of the current systems. As of now, It's definitely more in an 'rpg' direction of having your stats, all pre-determined before the fight, matter significantly more than your actual performance. I'd like to even that out.

>might be interesting if overheat is affected by the location

It's absolutely going to be!

>might add some strategy if you can customize your mech for a campaign

You'll be able to see a bit about what you're going up against, and the environment before you start a mission. A large portion of the 'strategy' will be planning ahead effectively with a decent build and fitting fireteam roles.

Last thing - there's actually a mechbay tutorial if you press the "help" button in the bottom left of the mechbay, but It's definitely going to be overwhelming to most people, especially if you haven't played a Mechwarrior title. I need to find a way to onboard people into the mechbay better, considering it's going to account for easily 30-40% of the entire game.

Again, thanks for the feedback!

I absolutely agree with a majority of this. Thank you for the feedback.

>List actual resolutions instead of just Low/Medium/High

The actual resolution of the game window is modifiable with the resolution dropdown. The "virtual resolution" dropdown allows you to preset resolution / aspect / filter settings. It shows the actual in-game resolution below.

I'm sorry that I really don't explain this in-game, same with stuff like "filter mode", which changes the virtual res upscale/downscale filter, which I added last minute and didn't really think about it making sense.

>Actually, just drop the "retro" bullshit entirely

I agree somewhat, but I'm targeting a specific audience which played mech games in the 90's. All of the [Retro] 4:3 presets were actually options in Mechwarrior 2.

I'm going to be keeping it for "nostalgia factor", and because I've already implemented it and I don't like removing options from the player, but I've been starting to move away from it. The 'welcome' screen that has you pick 'classic', etc. will not exist in the final game, making the retro feature optional and essentially hidden.

>Being able to adjust armor values this precisely doesn't make sense

Armor can be used as 'filler' for when you have, for example, 64t / 70t used by equipment / weapons and want to simply fill the remaining space - that's why it has to be granular like it is.

Unfortunately I forgot to re-add a feature that would have made this make more sense. You should in the future be able to just click a button to 'auto-fill' armor into components, up to the tonnage limit.

>Mechs overheating from firing guns/missiles makes no sense.

I agree, and my original game jam version had each weapon take heat damage separately, but I decided to go back towards a single heat bar because it's a decent enough abstraction and leads to more interesting gameplay decisions. It's not going to be a "strictly simulation" game.

>The TTK is absurd.

You're absolutely right, and the main answer to this is that I have not balanced the game whatsoever, and the default stock designs are shit. If you were to use two particle cannons, you could almost instakill most mechs. I'm not going to be balancing (at least, not much) until I've finished two more features that will drastically effect the balance, otherwise I'll have to do it all over again. Features such as...

>How are you supposed to avoid damage? Combat just seems like a DPS race.

Active and passive equipment should be one solution to this, but I know it's an issue. My other plans are improved maps with cover, team coordination with your battery of mechs, and more complex mission objectives that will hopefully lead to interesting encounters.

>Wish it had actual penetration mechanics

Weapons are going to be customizable with a "tag" system and I'm considering adding penetration so that the gauss cannon can be tagged to become a railgun that goes straight through armor and does high crit to destroy equipment easily.

Sorry for the longform response, once again I really appreciate it - It's difficult to get quality feedback, especially honest feedback, while working on a project like this.