Siege (anti-station) weaponry

[An Ning]

Bases are a pain in the neck to destroy even in the early game because they are so much more powerful in shield and hull compared to ships.

While it's understandable, as they are stationary, large, and expensive, it makes wiping out an enemy faction tedious, time consuming, and somewhat boring (especially as destroying a station doesn't impact the faction into begging for ceasefire... if it did, then that would be different).

I suggest the creation of "siege weapon" systems -large 3-6 slot weapons with devastating damage, long reload, no seeking/tracking, and no movement (only aimed down a ship's length).

Such weapons would make attacking a faction's stations more efficient while being nearly impossible to use in combat against ships and requiring ships designed around handling their weight and recoil as a balance.

 

...not to mention... the explosions from them would just be fun -especially in asteroid fields

Edited June 5, 2023 by An Ning

[Wanderer]

Post been posted somewhat a while ago, but eh; I think the idea would be great, but what is being described sounds like coax weapons (I think they are still in the game, I have started playing a few days ago after a several year break). I don't think just having them fixed, like coax weapons, would make them tedious enough in a fight to grant large firepower.

To build on the idea given, which sounds nice imo; what if we take a page out of the book of that one boss that has a death laser thing that is aimed at you and turns green, after which you have a second before it fires? Make it so that you have to hit the "fire" button for a given amount of time, e.g. 3 seconds (maybe make it dependent on damage or slot size) before it fires. If lengthy enough it becomes very tedious to use in ship-to-ship combat, but very useful to stations.

An example idea would be: some coax guns would have an "anti-station mode", either fixed (as a trait) or assigneable by the player (like autofire is assigned these days instead of it being a trait). When one decides to fire it in the anti-station mode one needs to hold it for an amount of time equal to the number of slots in seconds and the weapon will then fire, dealing more damage than normal, with more damage for more slots/weapon.

 

Some ideas that may be included:

- Energy draw during the pre-fire fase

- A new type of slot; like defensive, civil and armed turret slots, siege slots. Prevents quickly switching between standard coax and siege coax mode

- Disabled (for whatever reason) against bosses, as that'd make it... a bit more lame. Maybe the charge period can't be interrupted by enemy fire?