Desperate Measures, the expansion for MechCommander 1, introduced LB-X versions of Autocannons. Exactly how they work is a bit nebulous, but combining the in-game information, the official strategy guide, and player-created guides, it seems that each shot either connects or doesn’t (there aren’t separate hit chance calculations), and then if the shot does hit, damage is spread across areas adjacent to the hit — apparently even including to the firing mech if the target is close enough to it.
Combining this information with weapon stats, the expected outcome is a variant of ACs that does more raw DPS, but with less “punch” or penetration because the damage gets distributed across more areas of an enemy mech and so will tend to hit armor instead of managing to deal internal structure damage. That seems like a reasonable-enough tradeoff especially given that they have more generous ammo reserves than the non LB-X versions.
In reality, their DPS is actually atrocious, and I don’t know why.
Let’s focus on the long-range Clan Light LB-X Autocannon, since it seems like it would be the biggest improvement of the LB-X ACs. The Light Autocannon already does pitiful per-shot damage which causes it to spread said damage across a mech, so by virtue of already sucking, what should’ve been the biggest downside of using the LB-X version is negated.
| Light AC Type | Tons | Recycle Time | Ammo | Cost | Raw DPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clan LB-X | 8.5 | 1.75 | 260 | 3,560 | 0.86 |
| LB-X | 9.5 | 1.75 | 260 | 3,270 | 0.86 |
| Light AC | 9.5 | 2 | 100 | 1,410 | 0.50 |
| Clan Ultra | 11 | 1.33 | 112 | 2,740 | 0.75 |
The Clan Light LB-X AC looks pretty respectable here, with about ~1 DPS per ton at long range (which is above-average for a long range weapon) and with a near-infinite ammo supply.
Despite that, during the normal Desperate Measures campaign missions you probably won’t bother to use it much, as for whatever reason the game quickly drowns you with a deluge of the best weapons in the game like Clan ER PPCs. In the original MC1 campaign I went into the final mission with exactly 10 Clan ER PPCs total. Maybe I got a bit unlucky with my salvage (despite going to some effort to headshot / leg a lot of mechs no less), but in any case those things were rare and consequently only the best mechs got them. When I finished the Desperate Measures campaign, I literally had more Clan ER PPCs than I could fit onto my mechs. So yeah, no need for “above-average” weapons when you have “best”.
Buuuut Desperate Measures also includes 3 standalone missions1 where you start with no mechs / equipment / pilots and are instead given a pile of RP to buy whatever you want from unlimited stock at the store. This means that for the first time — at least in official singleplayer content — you now care deeply about how cost-efficient weapons are.
A Clan ER PPC — a 13.5 ton weapon which has 1.11 DPS/ton (but very strong punch / penetration) — costs 21,450. So you can see how the Clan LB-X’s much lower cost could be quite appealing for these standalone missions that emphasize cost-efficiency.
I tried this approach, going so far as to have LB-X be my primary source of long range damage.
To say that it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped would be underselling just how badly it went.
Sitting down to debrief on how the hell my on paper disgusting drop of 4 Mad Cat As for the frontline with an army of DPS-for-cost-optimized 4x Clan Light LB-X Cougar Ws in the back utterly failed, I decided to use the mission to do some testing. Unlimited quantities of mechs and equipment lets the standalone missions pull double duty as sandbox test environments.
Here are elite pilots in Turkina Ws that are fully loaded up with Clan Light Ultra Autocannons (top-right side) and Clan Light LB-x Autocannons (bottom-left side) respectively, firing at Turkina As. Both Ws fired for the same period of time.
To make this worse, the yellow armor on the left side’s test is only just yellow; if I had stopped the test a couple of volleys earlier, the Turkina A on the left would still be mostly green.
Thinking this may just be an issue with the Light LB-X, I repeated the test with the [Medium] LB-Xs and Heavy LB-Xs, even making sure to put Vixen in the LB-X-equipped mech just in case this was (somehow) a pilot gunnery issue. Again, both the LB-X and non-LB-X mechs fired for the same amount of time.
The results might not look too bad at first glance, but look closer and you’ll realize that the non LB-X’s victim doesn’t have orange CT armor, they have orange CT internal structure and all of the CT’s armor has been stripped. Just like with the Light versions, the results here are not close. Somehow the LB-X versions are wildly underperforming.
Just like with the Commando/Uller movement speed, I don’t know why this is happening. I again had enough curiosity to both briefly peruse the game files and fire up Ghidra and see if there was a quickly-discoverable explanation for what was happening, but again didn’t find one (and didn’t want to do a deep dive into MC1/MCG code just for this).
It’s once again not impossible that this is somehow an issue just for me, or for a subset of players based on some kind of configuration / system setup issue. Maybe it was a known bug that got patched in one of the near-description-less official patches still available online in a few places?
Naively one might expect a bug like this to be common knowledge within the MC1/MCG playerbase, but my experience with RoN shows that players can be surprisingly bad at noticing damage bugs, even in cases where they affect everything, so it’s not impossible that this bug does affect everyone but it’s not widespread knowledge.
The official MechCommander Gold strategy guide says “The Clan Light LB-X Autocannon is another solid weapon. It’s generally preferable to the Clan Light Ultra Autocannon […]”.
If this is a widespread bug, then it seems that Commander Harrison’s advice would apply to the guide writers too: “You think? Don’t think, MechWarrior, find out“.