The benefitst of double weapons?

[Malidictus]

Back before 1.2, I never saw the point of double weapons, both because the double versions sucked and because I couldn't be arsed to micro-manage them. Now that we have proer MK3 double weapon variants for everything and the gunners auto-switch them, I've had to revising the idea. Is there a benefit to using them now?

On the surface, sure - some weapons are better against armour, some better against shields. In theory, a gunner would break shields then switch to strip armour. However, the double weapons are always a cross between a late-game weapon and an early-game weapon. For instance, is there any benefit to my gunner switching AWAY from a MK3 Railgun to fire a MK3 Plasma? The game doesn't really give me much in the way of stats so I can't really tell.

I'd like to use double weapons since it makes for a wider arsenal (looks cooler, at the very least), but I'm not sure if that's an actual upgrade or downgrade to the single weapons. Any thoughts?

[floatstarpx]

I find them very useful if I'm switching my power management around. If I want to push more in to shields, I can switch down to non-energy weapons! (also if reactor is knocked out by EMP or damage!)

[Malidictus]

Hmm... That might not apply to me, as I tend to keep my power mostly balanced.

Having tried out the double weapons, though - the gunners do seem to be decently smart about what to use when. I was worried that they'd always be shooting Plasma at distant ships, for instance, but nope - they switch to railguns when ships go past a certain distance away from the ship. Not so much with Particle Beams, though - they almost always seem to be shooting machineguns in those combos. Kind of wish they'd switch to particle beams if the enemy is too far away, as those tend to be generally more accurate.

In general, though - the double weapons seem a LOT more practical now that gunners are smarter about using both of the weapons. And if I'm not happy with what they're using when, well... I always have the option of disabling the auto-switch and forcing them to use the weapon of my choice :) So really, there's no downside to using double weapons, since they can function as single weapons anyway. Especially with a MK3 variant of everything.

But good lord the cost of those things! :) I lost my ship "saving the world," and realised that I was paying upwards of 10 grand per gun. That 50K I'd saved up went almost entirely for turrets! They are worth the cost, though, I think.

[Asphe]

Given the current difficulty and assuming you can afford everything... probably not. More of a side-grade.

You can go either all energy weapons or all kinetics and eliminate the hassle of micromanaging it. That way, you can build a playstyle around 'energy' or 'kinetics'. Now if the difficulty was ramped up a bit more, to the point where you would see a major benefit of switching between damage types (and you'd need your engineer at her console)... then it would be a nice upgrade.

Get them for the looks ^_^.

Maybe the devs could do something like extra points for higher difficulty (i.e. no extra crew member, no auto switching between damage types, no auto-tagging/etc. The more challenges, the more XP / money you get). Make it a bit more challenging (yet still optional), especially early in the campaign.

Or have a boss that's immune to one type or the other (maybe even changes his immunity depending on your current loadout / last damage taken). That would give the 'double weapons' a bigger niche.

[Malidictus]

Eh, I'm fine with difficulty as it is. I think part of the problem is there aren't very many ships with tough shields in the game. Most of the time, the shields drop from a few hits from the respective energy weapon and the crew instantly switch to the kinetik weapon. Be nice if some ships had low shields but high health while others had high shields but low health.

Additionally, I really wish that gunners were better at picking weapons for range. They're reltatively good about sticking to the Railguns at long range, but for some reason they almost always switch to machineguns for long range over particle beams. Especially against fast-moving fighters at long range, that's just guarantees a miss. I end up occasionally having to force-switch them to particle beams just to get the job done.

Basically, I would have hoped that gunners would swap to faster projectile weapons at longer ranges, and they don't seem to do that consistently. I DEFINITELY don't want to give up weapon auto-switch, either :) That's the only reason I bothered with double weapons in the first place. I'm certainly not going to micro-manage my crew to the extent of manually switching weapons between shields and hull.

To be perfectly honest, though... I'm not really convinced that the "hull or shields" distinction is really worth having. All enemy fighters have both shields and health, so it kind of doesn't matter which weapon we pick or what they're good at. I'd personally prefer a distinction between range and DPS. Basically, give me the choice between weapons which are good at long-range precision marksmanship but have lower DPS, or weapons which can't hit well at a distance but hit really really hard up-close. That way, it would be worth switching when ships drive close to me, then switching back when trying to snipe distant targets.

[Asphe]

You can drop shields better than twice as fast using energy weapons... IF they hit. Likewise you can blow hulls up a lot faster with kinetics... again. IF you hit.

A lot of times, I also find that 'hit rate' trumps energy / kinetics. i.e. I use one of two styles... pure energy (max engines, whatever's left for weapons) with railguns as they do seem to have good accuracy... except against fast agile targets that are close in... fortunately the enemy will inevitable do a long strafing run and die for their trouble and pure kinetic (max engines, whatever's left to shields). The thing with kinetics is their 'muzzle velocity' seems a lot lower... so they suffer an accuracy penalty. Particularly at long range. To compensate, I go with the explosive autocannons... i.e. high rate of fire / area damage (hull/armor).

Missile are a good adjunct to kinetics too, I'd mount them fore and aft and the semi-seeking missile will nail long range targets (and strip their armor). They don't do so well against close-in target but they make a nice boom when they hit.

But the dual-weapons are kinda nice if you're starting a campaign. More often than not, your crew does properly swap weapon types vs the right enemies. It's not 100% and probably not that great versus bosses. But if you like to use things like the EMP pulse, it saves you the trouble of pressing # then clicking on the Backup button plus you kinda need high level crew for that too. In this niche example, you can have your crew employ energy weapons... right until the emp pulse, then using kinetics versus stationary targets will be a snap.

[Malidictus]

Publicado originalmente por Asphe:

A lot of times, I also find that 'hit rate' trumps energy / kinetics.

Yeah, that's been my experience, as well. To be honest, I kind of wish Space Crew didn't really have the "standard RPG mechanic suite" of different damage types with bonuses and penalties against different health types. The game already models accuracy and range pretty well, and those alone could have been the deciding factor. This quite a bit off-topic, but...

High-level gunners are always pinpoint-accurate and lead targets perfectly. They miss for one of two reasons. Limited turret traverse speed often don't allow gunners to aim at the proper lead point (they'll fire anyway) and slow projectile flight speed makes shot miss if enemy craft deviate from their stable trajectory. All weapons appear to have the same traverse speed and this doesn't seem to be affected by gunner experience. Consequently, faster projectile speeds almost always trump anything else. A weapon which consistently lands shots on target will trump all other weapons, even if they hit harder. Incidentally, focus appears to simply max out a pilot's accuracy (if it isn't already) and remove turret traverse, allowing them to snap to targets instantly.

Now imagine a world where some weapons had fast turret traverse and fast projectile speeds but low overall DPS, while others had high DPS with slow traverse and projectile speed. The former would be good at long range and against fast target while the latter would be good at short range and against large targets. Rather than having to rely on hidden stats that I have to read descriptions for, I could tell which gun is good at what just by sight. I can, for instance, tell that Railguns and Particle Cannons are better than most other weapons because one is hitscan and the other has a very fast projectile. The trouble is that Miniguns are also pretty dang good up-close, as well...

More to the point, though - gunners could swap between weapons based on enemy distance and nature, favouring more accurate weapons against distant targets and agile fighters, but switching to harder-hitting cannons against slow ships or point-blank. To me, that would make more intuitive sense than the shields/hull distinction. But again - that's off-topic.