And sure weapon gifts are a thing, but they cannot be relied upon to save players from unfavorable circumstances, eg: players being stuck using neutron on Asteroids and Comet Chase in Weekly challenge. Not to mention, it could be used to differentiate spacecraft families from each other, eg: H&C’s cannot switch weapons, Mullers have 2 slots, BX’s have 3 slots and VF’s have 4 slots.
But to really gauge community interest, I’ve decided to make a poll:
Do you want primary weapon switching in CIU
Yes
No
0voters
The poll will close in a week, so be sure to vote quickly.
I feel like being able to just choose a few weapons beforehand is important because currently you have to rely on RNG to give you the weapon you want, and that would still be an issue(altho less often) with that solution. Like what if you want to have vulcan chaingun ready in case a comet chase appears in the middle of a hybrid mission? By allowing the player to choose weapons beforehand, you can, but you can also have something better for the other waves. Rn the problem is that you just choose the meta weapon for the mission and hope that there won’t be anything in the mission that could screw you up(tho it would be great if missions that only allow 1 attempt would just show all waves included, I have 0 clue why that’s not the case already).
I guess these cases won’t happen often(and not outside of the one-attempt-only missions), but I think it still would be nice to solve this issue.
Of course, it could be solved in other ways too.
Anyways other than those cases, I wouldn’t mind that option you quoted, so long as weapon switching becomes a thing at all(tho does that mean that your second weapon starts at 0fp if you’d have to get it in-mission? That’s kinda oof…maybe it can have same starting fp as your main gun).
I think the starting weapons can be chosen, (say, switching between three different missions). The gifts you pick up can replace the weapon you have at the moment. So for example if you have Ion, Neutron and Laser, and you want to pick up Vulcan, it can replace whichever weapon is active when you’re picking it up (say, Neutron). So now you can switch between Ion, Vulcan and Laser. I think it would also introduce an element of decision making since you’d have to decide which weapon you want to replace. The only problem I see with this approach is how to handle gifts of weapons you already have dropping, perhaps those could be replaced by firepower ions, unless multiple copies of the same weapon can be in your slots. Alternatively picking up a weapon that you already have in an off-hand slot could just add +1 fp.
If this really makes things too broken, maybe mullers can use OneWing’s weapon switching method, while bombers can switch between 2 weapons and VF’s 3 weapons.
No arguments here, fully agree.
Indeed, this would make CIU gameplay more dynamic instead of just replying on weapon gifts to change weapons.
There’s also the second benefit of encouraging the community to develop specialized weapons with more unique functions, since players can choose between weapons for different occasions (eg: Absolver would finally not be left out and instead be a part of player loadouts). Right now, players have to make weapons that cannot perform too poorly in certain scenarios or overperform in others, lest they face criticism for balancing problems. Switchable weapons would allow more leeway for fun weapons.
Just as I anticipated. However, there are only so many buttons on a mouse, and not everyone has a mouse with forward+back buttons, let alone one with many special functions like I do.
Maybe this and the current special weapon cycler could be their own manual mountables. They cannot be mounted together, thus they can share the same cycling control.
Memes aside, I think that iA is not a huge fan of this input method combination idea. I don’t want the touchscreen controls to get any more bloated than it already seems, either.
Shrug. It would really help the game, however. It’s impossible to make weapon choices now when all you can rely on is random drops which are horribly unreliable, and sometimes having a specific weapon in specific cases is important. People clearly want it too. Also I believe I suggested that for mobile, tapping superweapon icon could make it switch. Works fine and doesn’t take up any space, so we could have a button for this too.
