Proposal: Weapon mechanics change to something slower and easier on the eyes

freakium

Just another spitballing thread to alleviate my boredom.

With the way energy weapons are currently handled, we're seeing a smorgasbord of lights and colours on the screen enough to cause seizures. There are simply too many lights spewing from our ship.

What I propose is to simplify all this so that there are less calculations to deal with and in the process, make the game more canon.

Weapons currently fire in volleys that are simply too fast. 1 beam array fires 3 times before there's about a 1 second cooldown. What if we change this so that a slotted energy weapon fires once every 3 seconds or so and additional slotted weapons will fire right after it like normal?

So if a ship has 1 beam array slotted, visually you'll get something like:
1##### (1 second cooldown) 1#####

And with 4 beam array slotted, you'll get:
1234# (1 second cooldown) 1234#

Fore and aft are already separated in the game so this means that we'll have at most 2 energy weapons firing from the ship. One from the fore and one from the aft. This proposal means that energy weapons will fire for about 0.6 seconds followed by a 1 second cooldown. I don't know everything about the current ship mechanics but I do know subsequent energy weapons are queued up to be fired. What I'm thinking is additional energy weapons will now fire only after the one before it so you'll never get any overlapping energy weapons fire.

So, instead of visually seeing a player with potentially 8 beams firing at a target, with a 5 player team potentially firing a total of 40 beams at a target, you'll only get a max of 10.

casualsto

Indeed that's something to look upon. But you do realise. Some people will just mash the Fire Button eagerly. But the mechanics change to this is probably a risky design-change. Yet it would look more appealing if the beams would be more "eye pleasing".

freakium

Oh I fully realize they are less than likely to do a full revamp of the firing mechanic. This is just a food for thought sort of discussion as to how they might be able to change it.