Speaking as someone who has worked combat system design, albeit just for a free amateur MU game...
One thing you have to consider from the beginning is game balance.
Yes, it sounds like that's something you only need to do once all the shinies have been established. To a degree, that's true. You'd want to get everything you want sorted out...before thinking of how you're gonna pit it against each other.
But balance isn't just about massaging the numbers, it's also a fairly important thing to consider from a system perspective, and problems of balance are going to affect your underlying game design.
More to the point here, you're talking about having massive customization. The question is, how much classification are you going to allow? You've already talked about dividing mecha into "Light, Medium, and Heavy" - so that's one limitation right there. Limitations are usually necessary, unfortunately...
Consider City of Heroes. In the original pre-Beta stage, the designers intended for it to be completely open-ended. You'd pick a character, and you'd pretty much be able to freely select powers from a hideously massive list. That didn't work, since it was too easy for a player to totally nerf themselves - or twink themselves out.
The Archetype system was imposed on the game, so characters were divided into more clearly defined roles - tanks and scrappers for melee, blasters for range damage, and so on. Then there's limits to what each AT can do. The designers have hinted that the Spines powerset for scrappers was a mistake, since at one point you could build a Spines scrapper that was more deadly at long-range combat than most blasters...while still benefiting from the defensive powers a scrapper gets. Scrappers aren't supposed to have solid defense and effective ranged attack.
In fact, the designers don't want anyone to have solid defense and solid ranged damage. That's why blaster defenses tend to suck, and why Kheldians have so many limitations placed on them.
So what you have there is a balance decision that affects what kind of character you can make in the system.
There's a certain point to this. MMO players should all be familiar with the concept of FoTM, Flavor of the Month. If someone works out something that works very well, eventually you're gonna see a bajillion people playing with it... customizability be damned, I just want my cookie cutter hyper-effective build so I can pwn people.
How do you discourage that? Do you deliberately set out to cripple certain combinations, or make them impossible? Should you discourage that?
Part of the point of a mecha game should be customization, and a bewildering array of different technologies and weapons. But you need to sort out what the pros and cons of said weaponry are ... and the underlying balance framework tying it all together. Maybe you'd like to establish what, despite all their wildly different weapons ... what every mecha would have in common.
Take a look at Battletech, for instance, where tonnage, heat, and critical slots are the shared limiting factors determining what you can install on a chassis. And in combat, heat's something that affects everything. It has been pointed out that heat in BT might not be the most realistic of mechanisms ... but it exists for a game design reason.
And amusingly, has been converted, from there, into a fairly important part of game lore. If Battlemechs run hot, then it gets really toasty inside a 'mech's cockpit, meaning that pilots need to wear cooling vests and suits ... and there's a real risk of heatstroke. What's part of the game balance, system-wise, has become essentially a roleplay and story element.
So balance - and balance mechanisms - are important.
I recommend checking out Sirlin.net for articles on game design, particularly this one.
-- Acyl
One thing you have to consider from the beginning is game balance.
Yes, it sounds like that's something you only need to do once all the shinies have been established. To a degree, that's true. You'd want to get everything you want sorted out...before thinking of how you're gonna pit it against each other.
But balance isn't just about massaging the numbers, it's also a fairly important thing to consider from a system perspective, and problems of balance are going to affect your underlying game design.
More to the point here, you're talking about having massive customization. The question is, how much classification are you going to allow? You've already talked about dividing mecha into "Light, Medium, and Heavy" - so that's one limitation right there. Limitations are usually necessary, unfortunately...
Consider City of Heroes. In the original pre-Beta stage, the designers intended for it to be completely open-ended. You'd pick a character, and you'd pretty much be able to freely select powers from a hideously massive list. That didn't work, since it was too easy for a player to totally nerf themselves - or twink themselves out.
The Archetype system was imposed on the game, so characters were divided into more clearly defined roles - tanks and scrappers for melee, blasters for range damage, and so on. Then there's limits to what each AT can do. The designers have hinted that the Spines powerset for scrappers was a mistake, since at one point you could build a Spines scrapper that was more deadly at long-range combat than most blasters...while still benefiting from the defensive powers a scrapper gets. Scrappers aren't supposed to have solid defense and effective ranged attack.
In fact, the designers don't want anyone to have solid defense and solid ranged damage. That's why blaster defenses tend to suck, and why Kheldians have so many limitations placed on them.
So what you have there is a balance decision that affects what kind of character you can make in the system.
There's a certain point to this. MMO players should all be familiar with the concept of FoTM, Flavor of the Month. If someone works out something that works very well, eventually you're gonna see a bajillion people playing with it... customizability be damned, I just want my cookie cutter hyper-effective build so I can pwn people.
How do you discourage that? Do you deliberately set out to cripple certain combinations, or make them impossible? Should you discourage that?
Part of the point of a mecha game should be customization, and a bewildering array of different technologies and weapons. But you need to sort out what the pros and cons of said weaponry are ... and the underlying balance framework tying it all together. Maybe you'd like to establish what, despite all their wildly different weapons ... what every mecha would have in common.
Take a look at Battletech, for instance, where tonnage, heat, and critical slots are the shared limiting factors determining what you can install on a chassis. And in combat, heat's something that affects everything. It has been pointed out that heat in BT might not be the most realistic of mechanisms ... but it exists for a game design reason.
And amusingly, has been converted, from there, into a fairly important part of game lore. If Battlemechs run hot, then it gets really toasty inside a 'mech's cockpit, meaning that pilots need to wear cooling vests and suits ... and there's a real risk of heatstroke. What's part of the game balance, system-wise, has become essentially a roleplay and story element.
So balance - and balance mechanisms - are important.
I recommend checking out Sirlin.net for articles on game design, particularly this one.
-- Acyl