Add guided missiles to vanilla space engineers (post warfare 2)
Hello
Now that warfare 2 has officially come out, one of the main lack for many players in space engineers has been fixed; the lack of main/static weapons for large ships, because lets face it, missile launchers were the only game in town and they just felt underwhelming. Most players thus used mods or made wacky (though effective) weapons like AI-guided torpedos and the like.
Now, i would like to propose one simple change that has been suggested before and already exists on the worskop in several mods:
Guided missiles.
Give large grid missile launchers (and in my humble opinion, only large grid missile launchers) the ability to fire guided missiles.
These guided missiles would then fly at the targeted grid and target semi-random subsystems (they wouldnt all fire at the same component).
This would provide a motivation to have more point-defense on larger ships, would make AI ships more dangerous, as they would be able to damage attackers without needing to rotate their ships, would make missile launchers actually interesting as secondary armaments on larger ships and most importantly: homing missile swarms are just cool.
Why should this capability be added to vanilla, if it already exists as mods? Because everything a large grid missile launcher does, the artillery/railgun does better. They do more damage, more concentrated, in a more satisfying way. As such the missile launcher on large grids is largely replaced, and i think every weapon in vanilla should be worth using. The point is not to make the missile launcher equal to the artillery, but instead to make them viable to be paired as a secondary weapon smoothly alongside artillery or as a more compact but broadly weaker primary weapon.
What about countermeasures? Im not sure. I would first need to see how the guidance system would work, if gatling turrets/interior turrets or decoys are fairly effective against them, and all of those are a bit in the air right now with the weapons no doubt being adjusted in the near future. Perhaps i might advocate for a laser turret that is terrible at doing damage but is able to deflect missiles well, or flares for small ships. It is certianly possible that missile launchers could be rebalanced to be an 'early game' weapon and easy to use, but they get countered easily by point defense turrets, thus smoothly incentivicing the transition towards using artillery and the like. It would necessarily be a topic of a lot of testing and debate by KSH.
If you agree with this post, give it a vote.
Any suggestions into the comments below.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day!
(PS: i submitted this same feedback in the space engineers multiplayer feedback section, but there isnt anybody actually using that part of the forum but I noticed too late. I also dont know how to delete that one, so if a mod happens to see this and could do that, it would be much apprechiated)
I like this feedback
As described in the post above, I would personally say that homing missiles should be at least half-deflectable by point defence.
How this would be achieved is highly debatable. Generally taking current missile statistics as an example i would recommend that the fire rate of the launchers would have to be lowered and their reload time extended. Alternatively, missiles fired from the large grid launcher could inherently have lower HP value to make them easier to shoot down when compared to small ship or turret fired missiles. I would then also advocate that missiles would then be cheaper to make (no uranium needed to make them, for example)
Missiles have this ability to destroy anything on the surface of a craft (turrets etc) and that could be problematic in terms of balance, if they are super-spammable with homing and no counter.
As described in the post above, I would personally say that homing missiles should be at least half-deflectable by point defence.
How this would be achieved is highly debatable. Generally taking current missile statistics as an example i would recommend that the fire rate of the launchers would have to be lowered and their reload time extended. Alternatively, missiles fired from the large grid launcher could inherently have lower HP value to make them easier to shoot down when compared to small ship or turret fired missiles. I would then also advocate that missiles would then be cheaper to make (no uranium needed to make them, for example)
Missiles have this ability to destroy anything on the surface of a craft (turrets etc) and that could be problematic in terms of balance, if they are super-spammable with homing and no counter.
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