I've found myself wishing for an optional shooting pattern for your ships..

[Haggenstein]

Currently having multiple of the same weapon equipped and firing simply unloads all weapons simultanously, which can get pretty grating to listen to IMHO.. So i've been swapping between the activated weapons to manually stagger the firing timings of the different weapons, such that they give an even firing rate, instead of "bursting" them all at the same time..

What i thought i'd suggest was a checkbox option in the loadout menu to do this automatically, for all of the identical weapons you have equipped!

Also, i sometimes find myself wanting to add additional Plasmas but not for the damage, for the extra shots before cooling down.. an option to alternate the two plasma weapons, instead of unloading both would be great!

Having 6 Plasmas firing with perfectly staggered, even timing would be a lot of fun i think

[CBJ]

I think I can understand why this might seem like it would be a nice idea in theory, but I'm fairly sure it would be terrible in practice. Imagine getting a target in your sights and pressing the fire button, and having only one of your six weapons fire at that point, the exact right moment, while the others are all delayed and miss as a result. I don't know about other people, but that would drive me crazy and I'd switch it off immediately!

[Raptor34]

Seems like something for modders to test out first before devoting dev time to it. It sounds interesting, but I don't know how it'll work out in practise. Namely things like hit rate and heat rate.

[stooper88]

I'm happy with the firing patterns as they are but just want to say that staggered firing isn't necessarily always bad. Other games implement it not just for visual or aesthetic reasons, but for actual gameplay mechanics. As stated in previous replies, there will be added complexity in maintaining/balancing the firing rate and DPS, but it can be done. It will require distributing the firing rate across the number of hardpoints each type of weapon is equipped under.

This debate has appeared in other games as Volley vs Ripple fire, where Volley represents all weapons firing simultaneously in unison and Ripple represents staggered or sequential firing. Under ideal circumstances (i.e. where aim and trajectory are perfectly determined), volley fire will maximize the damage inflicted and minimize the time to kill. In contrast, when the target has not been perfectly "locked in" or the target is significantly agile, ripple fire allows firing to be continuously adjusted so that more shots land on the target. Instead of every shot either hitting or missing, some shots will connect while others will not.

Another advantage of ripple fire is that it doesn't commit all weapon resources with every firing execution, so resources can be preserved for additional targets. If a weapon is capable of one-shotting an enemy, and you have 4 of that weapon equipped against 4 of that type of enemy, then ripple fire will allow greater flexibility in eliminating those threats if you fire conservatively. Volley fire, on the other hand, will unnecessarily consume resources from every weapon with each target fired upon, in turn prolonging the engagement as more time will be required to reload or cool down weapons.

To borrow again from Everspace 2, below examples illustrate how these two types of firing methods can be practically implemented for projectile and beam weapons alike.

Projectile and beam weapons firing in sequence (Ripple fire)



Alternate weapons firing in unison (Volley fire)



However, it needs to be clearly noted that it would not be trivial to implement this feature. Aside from the development effort involved, there would need to be careful design decisions, such as which weapons would fire under which methods and how would the player be given control and how much control would players receive, etc.

[GCU Grey Area]

an option to alternate the two plasma weapons, instead of unloading both would be great!

I often do that by setting up half of my weapons as a primary group & the other half as secondary (usually primary guns on the right & secondary guns on the left so they match with the HUD). I can then fire the two groups sequentially - fire the primary group until they're close to overheating, then fire the secondary group (while primary cools down) & so on. Still retains the option of firing everything at once, if I really need to, by pulling both triggers simultaneously.

[LameFox]

I think I can understand why this might seem like it would be a nice idea in theory, but I'm fairly sure it would be terrible in practice. Imagine getting a target in your sights and pressing the fire button, and having only one of your six weapons fire at that point, the exact right moment, while the others are all delayed and miss as a result. I don't know about other people, but that would drive me crazy and I'd switch it off immediately!

The flip side to this is that you don't miss all at once either, nor overkill as extremely with heavy weapons, wasting heat and reload time. There are settings for staggered firing in the mechwarrior games IIRC and it seems to work out okay there. But then, those games have a lot more customization options to work with when it comes to equipment and heat management.

[azaghal]

Currently having multiple of the same weapon equipped and firing simply unloads all weapons simultanously, which can get pretty grating to listen to IMHO..

To be honest - I really, really think the game needs some heavy sound volume rebalancing in general. I have found this to be an issue myself, and what it usually turns into is me dropping the headphones off my head - particularly since I love using Nemesis fully decked-out with bolt guns in front (for that nice dakka). Theoretically, it is possible to address the volume to some extent via modding (I did that in a heavily modded VRO playthrough with some local patches).

On a bit of a jest side... You could achieve some staggering etc by using the equipment mods that mess with the reload and cooling times (thus the feature can be declared as consistently implemented - it's there, but nobody really likes the way it works).

Since someone mentioned the mods - I wonder if stagger could be implemented by creating copies of weapons with certain tweaks to their firing parameters (you would have to buy one of each, though) - but this is really just off the top of my head, not sure if it is actually feasible (if there exists some kind of windup parameter).

[Scoob]

I think the ability to cycle fire weapons than have a set clip-size would be amazing. So many times I've been caught in a "reload" between being able to fire volleys that a kill takes longer due to missed opportunities to deal damage. If the game allowed me to fire weapon 1, then 2, then three it's be far better. Sure, I'm perhaps doing less pure DPS on a target, but I'm more consistently hitting it meaning it's shield won't recharge and it cannot engage travel mode.

When chasing a ship, I'll often manually do this to a degree. I'll set up weapon groups so I can fire ONE gun constantly until it near-overheats, then I'll switch to the second one and so on. This is GREAT when trying to force a ship to bail and also useful when neutering a larger ship ready for boarding.

With slower-firing weapons this would be even more useful I think. Firing off a four Mortars at once means all four might miss, firing four in turn means that (hopefully) you;ll at least be landing hits. When it comes to Missiles too, stagger-firing several in a row might be more beneficial.

Thought: a timed delay between firing might also largely eliminate the risk of overheating, as each gun is fired for less time.

Of course, the main reason for this is because it's COOL. If we could configure a ship so an AI pilot use the weapons in the same way too... well, it sounds like fun to me.