Mech combat? What's the point exactly?

Apart from when my guild has a battle royal, what is the point of Mech combat?

At the moment there are 2 bots with 1500 HP from a user with 1500+ kills and I am only allowed to send in one at a time.
Lambs to the slaughter.

If anyone wants to buy my 17 totally feeble underpowered mech kits, please do!

When you start to acrue victory points you can trade them in for vouchers to an NPC (don't remember where, exactly- I came across her by accident once) that will allow you to get things you can only purchase in the CE store with RL dollars. As a rookie mech jock, the thing to do is just hold onto the mech until you see some other rookies in the arena. Don't try to battle with a guy that's got his uber mechs in there. Also, during holidays, the Devs award free mech packs that are probably better than what you can afford to buy in the PM and such.

I do a bit of mech combat from time to time, though lately I've taken to sub-molling the parts. I haven't tried mech combat since the new interface was installed, so I may give it a shot again. Truthfully, it's not for everyone. YMMV and whatnot.

Occasionally, a 1275 Raptor 1 will beat a 1500 Predator. I could be wrong, but there is a Speed Difference between a lightly armored Raptor and a heavily-armored Predator that will make the larger Mech miss more. Maybe its just luck, who knows? But I have tossed tiny Mechs in the arena and, although they lose more often than not, they have beaten bigger Mechs from time to time

Why give away your free mechs? I have often enough see a more powerful Mech being killed by a free Mech. While the change is smaller, it is not impossible and as for the enemy having 2 Mechs walking around, I don't know how it is after the changes to the combat zone, but before when ever one of my mechs was in a fight and my other mech so happens to be on that spot to, it just waves at my mech and walks away, I have never had that both mech would attack the other mech I was already fighting.

As mentioned before, Mech Victory Points (VP) can also be traded in for vouchers that you can then spend in the CE store.

Well, it's fun. And yes, go to Spark in Ferra to talk to the NPC who will award you gift certificates for the CE Store based on the number of victory points you've accrued. I believe the going rate is $1 store credit per 200 victory points... 200 victory points is at most 20 wins (against mechs with no mech points won already... if the mechs you kill already have kills, you get victory points even faster). At the moment I have about $36 I could claim if I turned in my victory points, but there's nothing I'm looking to buy right now so I'm saving them.

Aside from the free store credit (and fun! It... it really is pretty fun) you get in-game credits whether your mech wins or loses, so especially if you got the parts free you may as well use them. You'll get a hand full of credits either way.

Also... look, everyone started off with no kills, only being able to drop a single mech in at a time, only having the "lesser" mechs available. You put mechs in, they win, you go up in Mech Commander level. As your Mech Commander level increases you can put a second mech in the first Arena at the same time, then you unlock the higher mech arenas (which don't see much action, to be fair), and you unlock the ability to field better mechs.

Raptor 1's and 2's are more than capable of winning. A couple hundred HP is two, maybe three hits from mech combat. Your opponent only needs to miss maybe three more times than you and you've got a solid win... and yes, faster (smaller) mechs have a slight advantage in making their opponents miss more often. And the damage system is so random, even if your opponent doesn't miss he might only do 70 damage while you do 120. My Predator mechs are torn apart by Raptors just as often as they are by other Predators. Those mechs equip the same weapons, the same armor... you might be at a disadvantage because your base HP before armor is slightly lower, but you've still got a fair chance to win. Don't get discouraged because someone fields a mech with slightly more HP.

IMO it could do with more competitions (similar to our guild battle). How about a bonus prize during a certain day or time of day?

There were mech competitions, with decent prizes.
http://coreexilesforum.com/index.php?threads/mech-week-winners.1080/
You just have to kill around 10 mechs to be able tosend two mechs on alpha arena. not so far...
I don't use raptors1, for me they have too low chance for survive.
Remember, use Jump AI to Predators, and other to Raptors.
And last remark - you have to kill only 410-420 mechs to get Engine 4. Don't look on game cash you have to invest into it

See you on Arena

One of my recent mechs, a raptor 2 with medium armour and kinetic weapons triumphed twice in a row, and then was ko'd in a drawn battle witha predator, so it is possible to get lucky.

While I don't think I'd ever want to invest too much in mech combat, I've got so many mech parts now (some even higher level ones that I'm just waiting for the mech commander level to use), that it doesn't matter, and it's an extra bit of fun while playing the game, which is really the point.

other games have massive pvp, where players lose their progress or get Ko'd by other players for rank. the closest thing Ce has to this is mech combat, which is more a casual sport, indeed given the randomness of combat it's almost more like your betting on a winner than actually competing yourself against others, which suits me fine.

Have you ever placed on offer on GBM?

Competitive selling isn't pvp, ---- believe me, I've played games where everytime you logued out you would! die because someone would unfailingly kill you. This wasn't so bad if it didn't interupt your game progress, but I've actually seen some games where you'd end up with negative xp through penalties you got from pvp.

There are also space muds where people will blow up your ship just because your there, irrispective of how much you've spent on it, so compared to that, having to rejigger your contracts on the gbm a bit is light relief.

That's why while I enjoy mech combat as a sport, I wouldn't want it to have lasting in game effects such as acctually damaging the losers' progress in the game other than losing the mech, or awarding prizes that could only! be got through mech battles and no other way, or would give winners an amazing advantage in the rest of the game.

I'm however extremely confident in Coops and the other staff to keep Ce a friendly, none pvp game and just have mech combat as the fun extra it is.

Hee Hee -- I think Pikolinianita was making a joke

Yeah i think that comment was taken more seriously than intended... thou than again i know of sales that did end fatal.
As for mech combat couldnt agree more with dark empathy no matter how hard i tried. Thou to be honest i dont think mech battles are pvp either since players dont actually take part in it other than equipping the mechs.

Agreed Lithany, I'd class mech combat as a little more of a spectator and management sport, something like horse racing.

It's ok, Esc
But It was not so much sarcasm as you thought. Few times I add player to friends list, wait until She\he logout, that outbid her/him. Very like pvp in other games .

Still not so bad, sinse once your offer is filled, the other person will get their contract filled, I've certainly had that happen to me on occasion, ---- and if your really stuck, there's always doing private deals through chat which usually works.

none of this happens in other pvp games, there you just get repeatedly beaten up by random players, often to the detriment of your game.

Last year, for audiogames.net I investigated a space empire management game called unification wars. I was pleasantly surprised, sinse unlike other games of this sort, unification wars actually had a fairly straight forward interface, and missions that unlocked different parts of the game.

so I'm going along, happily doing missions. i finish the first tutorial set of missions and start on the next, then suddenly boom! I'm attacked five times, all the fleet I built up in the tutorial is wiped out, and I lose all the resources I got, because of course, newbie protection ends after the end of the tutorial missions.

i tried playing the next day, but as soon as I built anything, someone attacked me, and I was always back at square one with none of the next set of missions done.

Needless to say, I left the game pretty quickly, but was quite sad sinse I've never seen a stratogy game with missions and story before, but there was absolutely no way to just! play for completing the missions without geting the bejaggers blown out of you by other players.

That's the worst! sort of pvp, and exactly the sort of thing I'm very glad doesn't happen in Ce, even with gbm contracts.

That's true esc, however that's not usually how pvp in online brouser games works, sinse most don't have a real time interface.

it's usually a matter of finding another player, ---- most often someone who is offline, though occasionally games will let you battle online players. The computer will fight a turn based battle with them automatically, using how they deployed their troops,s et their character stats and equipment and the like against you. Usually if there are special buffs you can use in none pvp matches these are disabled, and usually there is some kind of level lock or experience penalty to prevent a level 10 player attacking a level 1 player, but still it tends to be a little irriatating, especially when it is the focus of the game, and when the losing player actually loses progress.

Most often it's damaging in space stratogy games, where you will build up your empire and your fleet, stat manage things, then suddenly have someone else invade you and remove all that hard earned progress.