Do you have a car? (or have ever ridden in one) Is it exactly as good as every other car on the road? Of course not. Some are better than others. Some are newer, some older. Some newer cars are not as good as previous models. Some cheaper cars are better than more expensive ones.
My point is that balancing the mechs against each other is not something that should be done. What makes a cheap car attractive is that it is, in fact, cheap. It should not be expected to perform as well as an expensive one, nor last as long. But if you needed 50 of them for a fleet to outfit a team of delivery drivers, you'd likely go cheap.
What I am getting at, in a roundabout way, is that in warfare there are concessions to be made, and some equipment will be outdated. Some will be outright bad. But it will be cost-effective (or a sunk cost), and therefore still used. That is just life.
I can already hear you calling me names, so let me answer the complaints immediately. "Why would I ever play a bad mech?": you say. "That wouldn't be entertaining at all": You state.
Quite correct, of course. Balancing needs to be done. I just do not feel that attempting to match the performance of each mech, so that all are approximately equal, is reflective of lore, reality, or reason. The balancing, I feel, should be accomplished in the rewards system, not the play system.
In this system, bad mechs would be bad, and slow mechs (Cough, cough, Urbie) would be slow. Therefore, if you manage to cap a point with an Urbie, that should be a bigger reward than if you used a Spider. Taking down an Atlas with that Spider, however, should pay far better than doing so with a Direwhale.
Under my proposal, matches would not be balanced on tonnage, but on c-bill value of the mechs. C-bill cost is a fairly good proxy for an effectiveness rating, in the absence of role-based rewards, and could be tweaked to be even more accurate. You would have the unmodified mechs not counting as much against the total, because they shouldn't, as they are less likely to be effective. The heavily min/maxed mechs would count greatly against it, because they are much more likely to be effective.
Within each class, more expensive usually means more effective. This means you could even preserve the 4/4/4/4 system. Although you may not need to. This would make the teams balanced, but individually reward players more for piloting mechs with a better "kills/cost" ratio. This would reflect the grim realities of the expense of warfare. I also would like to see a prestige system employed, but this would further complicate the game with the steepest learning curve in history. Also, that would be another post.
Good Hunting.
