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 ~0.1 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 0.111 DPS/ton (but very strong punch / penetration) — costs 21,450. So comparing that to the Light LB-X costs above, you can see how the Clan LB-X’s very low relative 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“.
I wonder if the problem is that LBXes are supposed to fire three shots at once;
the defines have them doing just about exactly a third what the ingame tooltip says they should – https://github.com/oseparovic/MCGExtracted/blob/master/MISC.FST/compbas.csv – and of course they have triple the ammo any other AC does. LBXes are lighter than other ACs but they don’t free up *that* much payload.
The projectile impact def (https://github.com/oseparovic/MCGExtracted/blob/master/data/objects/OBJECT2.PAK/892.txt for IS LB-10x) seems like it’s supposed to do an explosion and has a DamageChunkSize var that nothing else does, but presumably something isn’t working right. The guns do have a special flag, so if release was a rush and nobody noticed they weren’t hitting as hard as they should…
Again, probably something that’d have to be run by Rizzen. They seem to be the ‘usual suspect’ when it comes to Mechcommander modding, or at least the major one still in recent circulation.
Patches I’m not sure. The Sarna one for MCX has a readme claiming it’s purely a multiplayer thing, warning people if someone abuses a bug.
Another weird behaviour with weapons is that sometimes you’ll see a mech take damage, be destroyed etc. instantly when the relevant weapon fires, instead of after the projectile hits. Sometimes before a previous volley of missiles from the same attacker arrives.
Buggy-due-to-development-rush would certainly be a unique and never-before-seen phenomenon :P. 1/3-of-intended damage does seem to *roughly* match what I observed so yeah maybe it’s just something wrong with how the multi-hit is being handled (like damage being split across the 3 areas instead of each of the 3 areas getting the full value because it’s already using the reduced value). If that’s right then the easy workaround would probably be to just triple (or whatever the “right” value is) their damage value to make up for it. Maybe another thing for my suspiciously long “todo at some point” list.
Yeah the main (?) MC1 patch floating around is — as I understand it from looking at several sources while hunting down info on the MC2 patch — just a multiplayer warning for when someone was abusing a jump jets glitch. Which is a funny thing to patch instead of, you know, actually removing the glitch haha. It’s always possible that there’s more going on than what’s documented (as we’ve seen!) though.
I did also notice the instant-damage thing! Didn’t think it was notable enough to write about though 😅. I actually first noticed it while watching Nutritious’ 1-mech challenge – he LRM-boated a few missions and sometimes an enemy mech would die or lose components the instant his mech’s LRMs came out but before they actually landed. Thought it might’ve been a once-off bug but then saw it happening several more times. I think I briefly tried to reproduce it in-game but couldn’t get it to happen reliably, so I’m not sure what the deal is there. I’m struggling to imagine what circumstance in game / code allow weapons to *sometimes but not always* hit instantly, but clearly there has to be *something* making it happen so I guess I need to think more creatively about it!
No clue how the LBX code works. Wouldn’t know where to begin, I’ve nodded a few things but .exes are a field beyond the usual. If it is that, buffing the LBX-20 (or just shooting it at a couple of light mechs to see if multiple locations take damage in one hit) could diagnose it but… sounds a bit too neat and easy.
My guess on the “pre-hit” thing (which is purely a guess) is that it’s clear at least some of a shot’s outcome is rolled in advance, since we can visibly see a laser bolt etc take heroic manoeuvres to make sure that a fated hit always arrives no matter what the target might have to say about it.
If the damage is *also* pre-rolled and crits calculated in advance, and the damage is correctly applied on-hit but the crit/delimb/destruction function is applying the effect immediately, that would have the apparent outcome. It would be a bit of an odd way to go about it to my mind and might cause some race conditions with damage order, but I could see something like that smuggling itself in by way of legacy code (ex. from a turn-based or proof-of-concept direct port of the tabletop combat rules) and being ignored because it usually works out the same and is largely cosmetic.
They didn’t, after all, fix the “all guns or ammo in one arm” thing, and *that’s* significantly gameplay-affecting. No resources I guess, gamedev in general and FASA in particular have always been a mess.
Another possibility might be that the visible missile is only cosmetic and accompanied by a faster invisible projectile that delivers the actual damage, but the way shots behave doesn’t seem to fit with that. Though it’s not just missiles, I’m pretty sure I saw an AC/20 do it last night when oneshotting an Uller. Missiles are just slow enough and long-range enough it shows up more clearly.
Def not a one-off though, I remember it from forever ago. Unless it’s some weirdness from too-fast PCs – IIRC by the time I got it we were onto Windows ME at least.
Edit/addendum: that is, Battletech applies damage first to armour, then any damage that hits internal structure rolls for a critical hit that can do all kinds of things. (And there’s a 1/36 chance for a lucky through-armour crit check, for those golden bb FASA Moments we love so much). Code I don’t know but Mechcommander seems surprisingly faithful behind the scenes from some of the stuff in https://github.com/oseparovic/MCGExtracted/blob/master/MISSION.FST/gamesys.fit and all the internal components listed in the csv, and the tonnage/crit breakdowns in mech defines, assuming they actually do anything in game.
So I’m assuming that behind the scenes hits that only damage armour and hits that damage internals are handled somewhat differently.
Man, the guns-in-arm thing was such a pain in the ass at times, but I’m glad it’s at least documented by players. It also seems like it shouldn’t be *that* hard for one of us to fix, even if the solution is something simplistic like distributing weapons in a fixed order (so that it’s deterministic behaviour) across the mech’s arm and torso slots. Even just alternating between arms would prevent stuff like this absolute horror from happening: https://hachyderm.io/@MHLoppy/116308370578550343 Another thing to add to my to-do list and then never get around to I guess 😛
Re: the amount of stuff behind the scenes, yeah I was shocked to see the level of detail in the game data when I was looking through it. If I had to put money on it I’d guess most of it actually ended up never being used, given that even a key system like heat gets completely ignored in MC1 (and then in MC2 got a simplified implementation only). At the same time I wouldn’t be shocked if they actually did use a few of the stats in ways that are hard to notice during moment-to-moment gameplay.
TBH that Warhawk arm is also illegal – per Sarna that gun cluster is 11 crits, plus shoulder & upper arm actuators is 13, plus iirc Warhawks usually have a lower arm actuator for 14 crits wedged into a location that only has room for 12. No wonder it fell off!
On a stray thought I did take a quick poke at the arm thing; as far as I can tell it’s sorting weapons when you begin a mission. I’d edited a mech in a pre-mission save to have an autocannon in each arm, but after beginning the mission the mech and its entry in the temp folder was back to one-arming it. Presumably the temp files do something but again this looks to be on the exe end of things.
The ModDB articles do touch on it in “loadouts” but it sounds like mostly speculation likewise.
Heat I don’t blame them for cutting. I could see some decisions like being fully sinked for max rate of fire vs a “bracket” build that can use all its short-range guns, or all its long-range guns, but not both, vs an “alpha” setup that does disgusting damage then jumps away to take a nap, but I suspect it’d be far too much micro in a game that already has a fair bit.
I’m pretty sure it does have ammo explosions, or at the least losing ammo to location destruction, which I suspect had a few players scratching their heads when a mech died or ran out of ammo too fast.
Well, on a whim I took a stab at finding the game (exe) code that handles placing weapons, and I’m pretty sure I found it. After making a very blunt change, I seem to have placed all weapons in not-arms and sensors in whichever arm is the left arm on the paperdoll (I don’t remember if the paperdoll is mirrored): https://imgur.com/a/oopSVvA (the weapons lists are image edits so that the full lists can be seen)
I expect somebody with my level of competence could probably have a reasonable solution in a week or two of work, or someone more competent than me could do it in a couple of hours (my thing here isn’t a solution, just a test that I correctly identified the code).
Something interesting about this is that both of my pilots punched out / died after I blew off their left (?) arm. Based on that, this proof-of-concept change might have actually placed the engine or cockpit in their arm LOL.
Ah for fuck’s sake, I got a brain worm thinking about why the code I was looking at didn’t work, and every time I stopped working on it I just ended up coming back. Luckily for both of us, for the two weeks right before you left your comments I’d actually been doing some hardcore work on Rise of Nations and the time estimate I gave for how long it would take to fix assumed my level of skill from before my patching spree. Because I did that intensive patching work, I’ve actually gotten meaningfully better at a few things. Still not “fix it in a few hours” better, but 1 day instead of 1 week.
I’ve managed to undercover the cause and implement a patch (albeit a bit of a janky one) which correctly distributes “large” weapons across both arms and side torsos instead of just piling it all into the left arm. I’ll do a writeup about it later and leave RiZZen a note, but I was right in my initial assessment that it wasn’t that hard to fix. https://imgur.com/a/vlFGILI
The modder’s curse, seeing something not-quite-right and being compelled, like a vampire seeing a pile of loose change, to sort it out.
Before the update I was going to say that you may have been underestimating yourself given that what you had earlier was more progress than had been made on this in 30ish years. Shoulders of giants and modern tools etc but still.
Had been noodling a little but I suspect I’m generally a much slower operator; was thinking about something that would try to get as close as possible to the mech’s usual loadout distribution for consistency/flavour, but I’m not sure weapon location has anything to do with where the visual effects (muzzle flash, projectile etc) fire from. Probably in one of the unknown filetypes in Shapes, .hsp probably. But that’s just cosmetic.
Imo making small changes to the exe (when it has debugging symbols available like both MC1 and RoN do) is pretty low-hanging fruit in the grand scheme of modding, and the tools and some beginner-friendly tutorials for getting started have been around since at least 2020 or so. Since working on RoN patching I’ve been perpetually surprised by people’s generally near-complete unwillingness to engage in learning how to do it given how fantastic some of the learning materials that have come out are and how much power it gives you to change things.
Trying to replicate the position of stuff in the loadout feels a bit strange when the mech editor for the game doesn’t even support choosing component locations and the printouts for the mechs won’t tell you where things are, but god speed in your pursuit of flavor 😛
Thinking about it now, I kind of wish there was a (..well done) modern remake (or like.. SEQUEL!?) that allowed for a bit more depth in mech customization. Customizing and iterating on loadouts is one of the big appeals of the MW/MC (and HBS Battletech) games for me, but it’s so simplistic in MC1. I guess in a way it matches the relative simplicity of the combat though; there’s not much reason to try most of the loadouts because slapping XYZ weapons on a mech if you have them is just stronger lol. I think the only time I changed loadout strategies much is when I was defending a base with a known repair bay (switch to using more ammo-based weapons), but I otherwise just kept a mental list of like 10 weapons to choose between and barely touched the rest of them. The curse of player optimization I guess 😔 Edit: stuff like being pushed to switch loadouts based on mission environment would’ve been great too, like (if heat were modeled in game mechanics) hot/cold biomes, fighting enemies that use a lot of AMS, fighting areas with lots of terrain (bad LoS) etc so that there’s an actual reason to tweak the loadouts.
MW5:Mercs had a short-lived “MechCommander” mod that I would’ve definitely tried out if it was still being updated. Something like an official / more polished version of that I’d be pretty happy with.
I’ll have to defer on exes. I’m a trial-and-error tinkerer at most, and I’ve always been either fiddling with exposed modder-friendly files or having direct access to the original source code; the impression I had of .exe modding is that it’s the Deep Magic (well, deep-er), and I’d never had any reason to look closer.
Weapon placement thought was before I took a closer look ingame and noticed how wacky the effects are.
Loadouts, true. Battletech as a system always has been kind of prone to convergence when over-optimised though, usually on energy weapons and specifically the Clan ERPPC, ERLLaser and LPulse. Environment effects and the newer damage-type-resistant armour can affect that, as with combined arms; a Hellstar will eat mechs and tanks for breakfast, but can’t do anything to infantry. They have been tweaking the rules lately to even things a little but the need to keep statlines the same to avoid invalidating decades of unit designs means there’s only so much that can be done on tabletop rules.
Well it’s written up now, so I guess you can decide what depth of magic I’ve had to do vs how much it is just explained by sitting down and testing how things work 😛
https://mhloppy.com/2026/05/mechcommander-weapons-left-arm-bug-fix/