[quote name='2Fast']Man, I lost about three hours tonight tinkering with my various hounds and trying them out. Also, I've been wondering about a few things:
1. Does having a radiator help?
2. Are the missile counter and shield accessories worthwhile?
3. What about the accessories that let you ascend and glide, are they any good?
4. What is the most important place to protect your hound with armor, the cockpit? Does anyone have a good set-up for shielding the cockpit?
Thanks in advance for any and all help.[/QUOTE]
1. Radiators are best for protecting against incendiary - reduces or stops extra damage to your generator by fire. Also, a small benefit is a radiator can make you harder to spot by thermal vision - rarely useful though.
2. Missile counters are good when you know you're going to face missle mechs but the trade-off is when there are no missle mechs, you're still stuck with the extra weight/power of the counter when it might have been better used on something else. You might be better off either having enough speed to dodge some shots or recognizing missle mechs early enough to stay out of range. A note when using counters is that it's best to have them pointed straight up (chromehounds defaults stuff to face forward if it can, which is useless.)
Shields are the best accessory and with some experience, you'll see that most good mech designs have the cockpit covered in front and/or to the sides - a strong shield will double the strength(or more) of almost any cockpit except for a few, super heavy morskoi models.
3. Hovering is pretty worthless except for a few maps with a ton of cliffs/dead ends. Even then, they're limited since they only let you go DOWN a cliff without taking damage (you turn them on just before landing) - they don't give enough boost for you to go UP any cliffs unfortunately. Really more of a gimmick but can be fun once in a great while. Since they're so rarely used, people think you're glitching or something when they see you floating.
4. The cockpit is by far the best place to protect with armor - as it's been pointed out, you can lose everything else and still be in the fight. If you leave it exposed, you're just asking to get taken out in 1-2 shots. The most common way you protect it is by using a spacer (an example - take some legs, put the cockpit on, then the generator directly above it. On the front of the generator put on the angled spacer and point it down so it gets in front of the cockpit. Then slap some armor (the bigger, the better usually) on the spacer and you have both you cockpit and generator covered from the front. There's endless variations on this and when you're fighting battles, always be on the lookout for good mechs, then borrow their design.
Hope this helps