I don't know what double-posting etiquette is around here, but it's been awhile, so I'm going to stick the rest of this in its own post.
Haha, awesome box shot 
Chromehounds was a great game with not enough polish. I dream of someday seeing a high-budget game bring 'realistic' modular combat robots into the limelight, but for now I can play Cogmind and pretend. =)
MWO isn't a bad alternative.
If you recall, I used to be playing Cogmind on an older laptop - I actually got a new one just a couple weeks ago (with numpad!), so I was able to try Mechwarrior Online out! Unfortunately, I found the mechs to be
really ungainly and frustrating to control - a first for me, normally I dislike all the mech games that having them flying around like they weigh nothing at all. Perhaps I need more time to get the control scheme down, but in any case, the level of customization I'm after is significantly more than what even MWO provides. The Early Access game
M.A.V. is basically a bit-for-bit indie Chromehounds, and I'm hoping it will someday be solid enough for me to jump into.
I will say the boost to durability was a massive boost to the 'all treads, all the time' option, though. Before, I would be forced to use legs or other methods of propulsion intermittently, which took away the unique benefit of committing oneself to this sort of build. The straight doubling of their durability was significantly more than expected, but boy am I grateful!
It was more than originally planned, too .
I was thinking +25%, then when it came time to implement I decided to go all out with it on the premise that if you're going to commit to being slow and fighting everything, you really can't be worrying too much about propulsion in the meantime, not to mention you have a 100% chance of triggering traps (though you're slow enough that you'll often see them first)--how did traps figure into your run?
Honestly, I was expecting an increase of only 20-40% - again, not that I'm complaining. However, I was basing my expectations on my experience (and troubles) running a flying, stealthy Cogmind, where finding more flight units was a near-constant issue. (I suspect part of the issue was me just not having the right playstyle/strategy for stealth) With treads being the their 'equivalent' on the far end of the spectrum, I found it reasonable enough they should be hard to constantly acquire and maintain. But I'm perfectly happy with this duality where the slow, brawl-y treads can take an incredible pounding and keep on ticking. =P It should be whatever fits your vision of the game.
Traps had a pretty minor effect overall - I often used a Structural Scanner, and I'm slow enough that usually the scanner and/or my baseline sensors would detect at least one trap in an array before I triggered any of them, and I'd know to swing clear or destroy them with explosives. I'm a bit surprised that I was never once blocked from going in a direction I really needed to, though. I'm not sure if that means the placement of line and block arrays should be upped or not - I didn't fear them like I did minefields, and they don't have the ability to hit you before you can see them like singles at doorways can, but I think too many of them could be very frustrating, especially as players won't always have an explosive weapon handy. My only notable experience with traps this run was using an explosive weapon to clear a few Ambush traps in a line array, but for some silly reason I decided to assume that they were all gone after one shot, and stepped in a tile I didn't explicitly know was clear - but I was actually rewarded for it with one of the new little 'events' you've put in!
My first Alpha 3 run had a much different experience with traps, though - once I wandered into a minefield array of the traps that damage and sever parts. IIRC, the first one severed a storage unit, which made a big mess. Then, when I stepped a couple squares over to retrieve a part, I triggered another one! At that point I decided the minefield was probably thin enough to continue forward... bad assumption. I think I got hit another couple times before I made it through. In hindsight, I should have just stood still and waited for my sensors to identify the rest after recovering my parts from the second trap. I had a similar experience trying to press through a minefield of EMP traps - yay, more corruption!
Later on, I lost the whole run, which was shaping up great, to a chute trap that I had already identified. >.< Feature request: can we please require a confirmation press before stepping on traps we know about, similar to how collisions work? Anyway, I had gone for a few too many utilities at the expense of weapon slots, so once... down there, I didn't have
quite enough firepower or speed to escape. Again, in hindsight, I might have been able to get through either by kiting (I'm not used to being faster than things with my treads), or by dropping everything and rushing past, but I was too curious watching how they devoured my poor Cogmind. =P
I've never once intentionally used traps to my own benefit, and given my ability to avoid them via other methods (namely, being crazy slow and using up one slot on a Structural Scanner, which provides at least some other benefits) and their
generally non-catastrophic effects, I felt I had better things to do with my hacking attempts and other resources than working to locate/convert them. Traps were a net difficulty increase for me, but not a huge one, and perhaps overall not quite enough of one, though I should really do a few more runs before I say that. But they
did work very well as a way to increase environment variation and interactivity - you can call them a success on that count in my book. In fact, I feel more features that do this sort of thing would be very welcome. I understand the ideal of keeping environmental complexity low, but I think there's still room for more - I vote for more features in this vein as development continues. =)
I think with a lot of power sources and the right utilities you might even be able to make yourself deadly (and nearly invulnerable) even without relying on much armor.
I was thinking the same thoughts after killing a bunch of Hunters and getting my hands on their Imp Cloaking Devices in Research, but obviously I didn't have the power to run those at the time. As you might have been able to tell, I usually skimp on power slots as well as propulsion in my ruthless pursuit of utility slots, but when I reached the final evolution, I finally felt like I couldn't utilize even more very effectively, so I went with x2 new power slots to ensure I wouldn't have power issues on sublevel 1. Thanks to that, I got to try out an Adv Force Field in all it's glory. I think a few good Cloaking Devices, especially combined with one of those, would make for a very formidable defense. I hesitate to try it, however, because it would necessitate investing in a 3rd and possibly even 4th power slot fairly early on, and then hoping you run into the utilities to harness that power. Plus, replacements would be a big problem when attrition eventually takes its toll. The plug-and-play nature of armor makes it both more accessible and less risky, in my experience. I'll have to try it out at some point, but I'll be nervous taking that build into pitched battle - plus, relying on those will make me piss my pants even more when a Brawler comes around a corner at close range!
