LostAlone wrote:That's not really fair. Lasers, beams and flak are the best weapons not because they are the most powerful, but because they are realiable - That means that you aren't at the whims of randomness as to if you can fire your weapons. It's all well and good to say that you should totally ration your missiles, but that only works if you have anything else that can kill stuff; either ships or crews.
This is only part of it.
- Events will let you sell missiles and drones for extra scrap. The harder the difficulty, the more that scrap is useful. If it takes you 6 missiles to kill a ship, you just waste 20-30 scrap. With an energy based weapon it's free.
- There are many counters to missiles and drones, especially in AE. While your missiles may pierce shields, they don't pierce zoltan shields or the shield+ zoltan shields. They also are basically shut down by defense drones, which are pretty common. Even with fixing defense I's to shoot flak, there's still no equality, considering the flak doesn't use ammo.
As we've established, Missiles are basically terrible. Bombs only shine because they're tactically useful for taking down systems.. but they're not useful for destroying ships (outside of damaging defensive systems) so they're used in moderation.
I would say on an average run where I don't fire or sell a single missile, I get maybe 60 missiles. Since you average 30-40 ships destroyed in a run, that puts you at below 2 missiles a ship. That's not nearly enough to be useful. Even with the augment, you're looking at 90 shots, still only a bit above 2 missiles a ship. Still not enough
So, in theory, since we've multiple threads on this forum detailing why people dislike missiles, you would think that AE would make this easier as it adds a lot of non-missile weapons. AE adds (roughly) 11 weapons. If you ignore starting-ship options, and the crystal weapons. You had 28 weapons in classic and 39 in AE that can appear in non-crystal shops.
Of the 11 new weapons you have 1 missile launcher (swarm), 4 lasers (chain, vulcan, chargeS, chargeL), 3 new Ions (stunner, charge, chain), 1 bomb (repair) and the two flak guns.
Issue here is, most of these new weapons are mediocre to terrible. If you say that of the 28 classic weapons, 6 of them are something you would be really happy finding, and maybe another 3-4 are something you could make do with, that says roughly 1/3 of the weapons are compelling. In a shop that's selling 3 weapons, you will probably find one weapon you might care to buy. But AE added 11 more weapons, with only 1 of them being overly compelling (Flak I) and maybe another 2-3 being niche usage (flak 2, vulcan, swarm launcher). This is exacerbated when you take rarity into account, as the pool of common weapons has grown large enough to make it so you may not see a good rare weapon during the span of a game.
It's not so much that you can't make due with the AE weapons, it's just that every one is inferior (for a human player) to multiple classic versions of the same thing. The exception being Flak, as there weren't any, and Flak I is on par with BL2 for usefulness.
Drones would have similar issues except a.) drones are already generally discounted outside of defense drones b.) the drone module comes with 1 of 3 options, none of which include the AE drones, so you can usually find your defense 1 drone this way c.) most of the new drones have their rarity upped.
