Right now pressing the key bound to an alternating weapon group cycles the weapons in it, but sometimes i'd really like the possibility to automatically switch to another weapon. How and why?
First, why?
Let's observe this Medusa (through a mirror possibly, as Perseus taught us):
As you can see i'm using the left AM blaster, so if i'm forced to engage a ship on the right i have 2 choices:
1. turn the ship until i'm able to fire the blaster
2. press the key again to switch to the other blaster
The first can be done easily with a medusa (she's agile and has an omni shield protecting her back) but can be very risky with other ships.
The second is unintuitive and "slow" (at least for me: I hate pausing the game for anything other than giving orders
) and if i happen to have more than 2 weapons i have to hope that the next one is the right one.
What I really miss here is a way to swith instantly my active weapon.
So, how do I do that?
Simple, when i move the cursor outside the firing arc of my selected weapon it switches to the first weapon in the group that covers the new position.
So if i just move the mouse to the right of the Medusa my current selected weapon switches to the second amblaster, allowing me to fire it without turning the whole ship or mashing keys.
Of course, there are issues with my idea:
- What if i just wanted to turn the ship (you know, the turn-to-cursor thingy) but not actually wanted to use another weapon? That can be "solved" by changing the condition needed to switch weapons:
Instead of being "is the cursor outside of the weapon arc?" it is "is the weapon outside the weapon arc +X degrees?". X is some sort of adjustable sensibility for this feature (yay for more sliders!), so that it can satisfy everyone.
- another problem comes out when you have to shoot with an alternating group while operating an omni shield. If you move the mouse away from the weapon arc you would change the active weapon, but you may not go back to the original weapon if you have some overlapping arcs. Annoying, but the issue can be sorted out by having a key that makes the current weapon "fixed", so that even when moving the mouse it won't make it switch to another one. If I know that i need to keep that weapon selected no matter what, i can just press that key and everything will be good. It will still cycle through all the weapons as soon as i fire, but moving the mouse won't do anything.
So, what do you think?