Thanks, these was among my goals while I was developing Mech Designer. I'm glad I made it.
Btw, what features of Mech Designer you Brother
@RecklessCaution and your friends have found the most useful?
(First off, I apologise for how long it took me to answer you, wanted to really think about it)
Well, apart from the Screenshot feature that lets us easily share builds, a big one is basically
everything you've done with information on Heat, from Alphas-to-Overheat to Environments to Heat per Turn to Heat on Jump to being able to Disable all your weapons and see how much heat you'll sink to something I've found
very useful -
selectively re-enabling weapons, so you can see what, say, not using your Support Weapons or other shorter-ranged weapons will do to your heat curve, or see what disabling one high-heat weapon will do, or so on. It's really changed the way I think about heat and cooling down after an Alpha or two, and so on.
Some other things are being able to see Damage and Stability Damage from melee damage, which has made me rethink what kind of Actuators I favour on different designs, as well as the Focused and Scatter damage being listed seperately, which allowed me to more easily see how much of my damage will be hole-punching and how much will be sandblasting (although mass Medium or Small Lasers are listed under Focus, when mounting so many of them leans them more toward the sandblasting kinda thing, that's not something that's easily accounted for in the program, requiring the user to realise the difference between doing a lot of damage all in one packet and doing a
whole bunch of 20-35 damage (depending on Small/Medium and whether they've got any dam+), but really a few missions' play should teach them that) - not that that wasn't something I wasn't already aware of, but moving the calculation from my head to the program allows me more headspace for other considerations.
But the all-encompassing Heat feedback,
especially being able to disable and reenable weapons selectively, and the Melee-related damage numbers, were the two biggest ones for me, since they changed the way I approached designing refits, simply by giving me more information to base decisions off and allowing me to see what different situations and choices in combat would change. Apart from, of course, being able to see the entire possible design space, all the possible mech variants and weapon/equipment options, which has allowed me to plan things I want to build for later or know what kind of equipment I want to hunt for.
So I must again thank you for how much further insight this program has given me into the nitty-gritty of how things work, and allowing me to make more informed decisions about the mechs my pilots will be riding.
