# Mech rebalance: New Year's Edition

Mechs currently are in a rather sorry state, not being fun enough to use but also painful to deal with. This doc sums up how mechs should be reworked in order to remedy issues with their gameplay feeling. This is not intended to be a nerf to mechs, rather a sidegrade mixed in with a buff.

### Project goals
* Make mechs more engaging and fun to pilot. They should enable roboticist's power fantasy, instead of being a clunky tool.
* Give mechs a limit on how long they can remain active in an encounter, forcing them to retreat to the backlines, or from the fight entirely. This should be long enough for mechs to comfortably win skirmishes, but not being able to persist throughout the entirety of drawn out fights like raiding a cult base or an AI sat.
* Remove as much RNG from mech fights as possible. Being completely kneecapped due to an unlucky malfunction roll after getting hit twice sucks massively.

### Things to avoid
* Positronic brains and MMIs should not be able to pilot mechs in full capacity. Pilots and their equipment should be primary limiting factor for mech availibility, not resources (over whose distribution cargo has zero control, and are essentially infinite in longer rounds).
* Mechs should be able to rapidly engage in fights, but have a harder time disengaging, allowing for switches in cat-and-mouse gameplay between mechs and human fighters.

## Core changes
* Mechs no longer can roll random malfunctions from damage. Instead, there's a chance that a piece of equipment on the mech gets damaged, with further damage lowering weapon accuracy (and potentially destroying it). High AP weapons have a chance of damaging mech batteries or internal equipment.

* Mechs have an internal "heat" gauge. Using equipment, firing weapons and moving (when overclocked) increases heat, which is passively dessipated after a second of not accumulating. Capacitors now determine how much heat a mech can sustain before overheating. Mechs produce heat wave particles when hot, and smoke or sparks when malfunctioning.

* Overheating resets mech's heat gauge, but also gives mech a malfunction and has a chance to damage weapons, equipment or the mech itself. The more malfunctions a mech has, the higher chance of overheating causing permanent damage is.

* Servos lower the amount of heat produced by melee and overclocked movement. Mechs also use megacells now, and mech chargers are grid-hooked instead of relying on APCs (see reasoning below)

* All mechs, not just Gygax, can enter overclock mode from their UI. Doing so disables overheat gauge reset, but makes movement and melee produce heat. Additional heat over mech's heat capacity will make the gauge turn blue, making the mech glow red hot, heat up cabin air and damage both the mech and the pilot.

* Instead of relying on 3 hardcoded utility slots, mechs now have a limited "equipment complexity" consumed by both equipment and weapons. Any amount of equipment can be installed as long as it can fit into mech's complexity. Scanning modules grant additional points for every tier above first. This remedies the repair drone issue, as changes to radio and internal tank allowed significantly stronger equipment installed together, while before it was restricted to one per mech (This is an extremely severe issue). We can add more "minor" modules now that players aren't restricted by 3 slots, such as scopes, AOE fire heatsinks, or foam dispensers.

* Stronger mech melee has its cooldowns increased across the board. Mechs can instead equip [melee weapons](https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/84649) which have high AP and demolition multiplier being highly efficient in mech duels, that PR was way ahead of its time.

* Powercells and megacells now blow up with a zap when destroyed, zap's power based on cell's current charge. Changing mech's battery requires all of its' wires to be cut, or the new battery will create a zap, discharging a portion of its energy upon installation.

* ~~Phazons no longer can phase through walls, windows and airlock, instead they make **themselves** semi-transparent, intangible and silent (but also unable to fire weapons) when activating their ability, at cost of rapidly generating high amounts of heat. They still can pass through objects, people and other mechs for quick repositioning.~~

* Positronic brains and MMIs no longer can pilot mechs. Instead, when installed they act as COMP units, being able to control mech panel and equipment (not weapons) when the mech has a pilot, or move the mech around and use melee at a higher cooldown when it lacks one.

* Piloting mechs efficiently now requires specialized equipment. Sealed cabin mechs require special uplink goggles in order to not have restricted vision while piloting, and combat mechs require a pair of controller gloves to not have increased weapon and equipment cooldowns. Some of these spawn in locked crates in robotics and armory roundstart, more can ordered from cargo. This moves primary restriction for how many mechs can exist at once from resources (which is a rather pointless and, at times, frustrating restriction) to pilot equipment.

* These also exist in form of MODsuit modules (pre-installed into civilian MODs as a nod to their Nullsuit orgins?), alongside a Rodeo-Jack module which allows pilots to rapidly eject in combat if there's a posibrain or MMI installed into their mech but limits their movement with a tether until they jump back in (faster than normal, but not instantaniously), and shares mech and MODsuit power. This should be the main point of installing posibrains into mechs, as to allow them to still act somewhat independently while you fetch something or perform minor repairs. (Possibly extend to MODsuit-installed AIs but not pAIs?)