Gear nobody uses?

[KDR_11k]

The game has a ton of equipment that while probably realistic to have is something I'd never bother with, is there anyone who actually uses these things?

Ground cameras/radar: You'd have to be in a very desperate situation to use ground units for your recon jobs and if you want to guide artillery or get a radar you can't even bring a gun? I can see the theoretical situation of leaving a vehicle with a radar behind on an island to tell you if the enemy carrier is there but now that we can build turrets that seems extra useless. For near-carrier missions the carrier will always provide radar coverage.

Smoke launchers: By the time I actually have the launcher and the ammo unlocked I also have enough access to artillery that I won't be going into direct ground combat anymore. Do these do anything useful?

TV/Laser guided missiles: Require as much attention as a cruise missile but do the damage of an IR missile, why not stick with the fire and forget missiles then? You can even launch two IRs at once and actually get a kill while these missiles need to be guided to a target twice to kill anything.

Air launched torpedos: Now okay, that's not a real distinct item because they're still ammo for torpedo launchers but what's the point of launching them from the air now? Countermeasures are so common now that torpedos have like a 30-50% chance of hitting anything, their main strength is that they're long ranged fire and forget weapons. If you're flying a plane towards an enemy ship anyway might as well use bombs, a light bomb does as much damage as a torpedo (medium bombs will sink a swordfish in one hit) and countermeasures do nothing against them.

I mean, I'm really not even using ground combat units past the early game but Bears can be useful despite the requirements to get them going, both in a direct fire and artillery role. 40mm guns tho, I never really use them because I don't get them before ground combat becomes obsolete and a 100mm kills much quicker.

Just feels that despite the already very streamlined equipment set there's still a lot of bloat there. I wonder how the devs play the game? Do they actually use all these things?

[CobraA1]

Agree for the most part . . . although I did recently use air-launched torpedoes. They can be launched when the island is blocking carrier's torpedoes, and they can be launched at a further distance than bombs, keeping the aircraft safe. Although I may start using more bombs because of the countermeatures.

I also tend to put gimbal cameras on vehicles with no weapons or fixed weapons, just so I have a way to look around while driving them.

A lot of the ground combat stuff makes more sense in multiplayer, where you have some people dedicated to driving the ground vehicles and a combined arms approach can be more effective. That said, I personally don't like sending the vehicle carrying the virus bots to make an island capture alone, as I have sometimes missed tagging some enemy forces from the air.

[Ataxio]

Fairly accurate OP. Laser missiles I find use with. I keep two on my recon plane with two fuel tanks. I find the Laser missiles useful for taking out aircraft on runways that have not launched yet.

But yes a vast majority of gear seems redundant or useless. The game can me played entirely without using ground forces at all & when doing so they are impotent compared to air units with OP weaponry like rockets or 20mm guns.

I would still prefer to have more then less however, even if a lot of equipment is effectively useless. With as bare bones as the games is in terms of core game play, we need every little bit of flavor we can get. One thing you did not list are IR missiles which I find extremely inefficient once you master 20m gun runs. I really wish we had a way to launch these from the carrier or other vehicles in a more intuitive way.

[KDR_11k]

IR missiles are decent precision weapons, especially since you start with a whole bunch of them so you got plenty even before securing a production site and you're not risking airframes. You can launch a bunch of Razorbills that can reliably strike a single target each and quickly land again, the AI can handle that with IR missiles.

[FOARP]

The devs need to MGCGA (Make Ground Combat Great Again) by nerfing the deck gun and making the islands bigger. In reality, though, this game could do with a sequel rather than upgrades to the clunky base game as it stands.

[Ataxio]

The reason I say IR are so weak is because 20mm does it's job way better. Basically just making them fun tools to use over efficient ones.

[KDR_11k]

Originally posted by Ataxio:

I would still prefer to have more then less however, even if a lot of equipment is effectively useless. With as bare bones as the games is in terms of core game play, we need every little bit of flavor we can get.

Ideally I'd hope they would either replace them with things that are more useful or change them to be useful. CCGM has so many different weapons for each vehicle that you can have much more variety between runs just from the random blueprints you find, would be nice to have something similar here. If we had proper modding we'd already see expanded arsenal mods but the mod interface is too limited for that...

[Skelly]

>One thing you did not list are IR missiles which I find extremely inefficient once you master 20m gun runs

Agreed 100%. They can however be nice if you're trying to coordinate a lot of units at once and don't want to bother with the micro required by the 20mm cannons. I rly rly rly want TV guided missiles to be good because they're so fun to use but their damage output is about the same as an IR missile while requiring the extra micro, only being able to fire one at a time, and they weigh twice as much in your inventory making it really hard to justify having.

[TomOfFinland]

Originally posted by CobraA1:

Agree for the most part . . . although I did recently use air-launched torpedoes. They can be launched when the island is blocking carrier's torpedoes, and they can be launched at a further distance than bombs, keeping the aircraft safe. Although I may start using more bombs because of the countermeatures.

Jesus christ this gave me PTSD from the launch days. I spent almost an hour re loading a save because I wanted to figure out how the AI controlled planes can attack enemy ships with torpedoes.
I managed it the first time but after re loading the save and trying again and again and again, I never got it to work again.

[Fezix93]

Air launched torpedoes are incredibly useful. The trick is to do it "stealthy" by staying outside the target ship's radar (scan it twice to see its range on the vehicle control screen), and fly a Razorbill to the edge of this zone. Then launch away. If the Razorbill doesn't get detected and the target ship never triggers into patrol mode, I have found that it will rarely "notice" the incoming torpedoes and therefore won't launch the countermeasures. Air launched torps are also good for getting torps on targets when there is an island or something blocking the line of sight from the player carrier to the target.

TV guided missiles are niche, but they can be good to launch on approach to an island and guide them to the enemy hanger to take out an islands air support before they get airborn. The island airforces are usually clustered together underneath the protective hanger on the island runway, so weapons that attack from directly above have little effect. The TV missile can be guided to enter the hanger from the side, and then detonate while the enemy air wing is on the ground.

Laser guided missiles are useful fallback weapons if/when you run out of cruise missiles or for situations where you want to use a cruise missile but it doesn't make sense to use an entire cruise missile against the target, such as a single seal.

The other stuff you mentioned I imagine would be useful in a player vs player environment, where (like others have said) you have more of a combined arms situation and you might be leaving more ground units behind to defend an island and want to increase their survivability, especially for important islands.