That is to say, weapons that do something useful that doesn't involve damage. The majority of the game's weapons focus on damage over utility, or utility through damage. I think a few completely non-damaging utility weapons could make flying a little more interesting and add more variety to loadouts, if done correctly.
To that end, I am posting a few ideas for utility weapons, in the hopes of creating some kind of productive discussion.
Types of Utility:What end effect would you want from a utility weapon? I have a few ideas, but I'm interested to see what more experienced or imaginative people could come up with.
- Disabling of weapons. Most disabling in GoI is done through destroying components, but I can imagine some ways that wouldn't require this.
- Escape. Anything that could let you go faster, disable enemy weapons, slow down your enemy, hide you from your enemy or deter them from attacking you.
- Cover, stealth or distraction could help when trying to approach a sniper line.
- When sniping, weaponry that mitigates cover (flares), slows down enemies, deters them (mines are a damaging example, hard to think of a pure-utility deterrent).
Charybdis Smokebomb Sling: (or "Mammoth Tar Launcher")A light gun that shoots smoke bombs. These would fly in a ballistic arc then deploy, much like mines - although they'd start releasing smoke instantly rather than using proximity detonation. The smoke would be non-damaging, but release in quite a large radius. Imagined usage would be to create "artificial cover" to get close to sniping teams. I'm sure it could be used more inventively, though.
The clipsize would be only 1, and the reload would be Flare-slow, or worse; it should need 2 of these guns to maintain constant smoke coverage.
Archimedian Distractor (Swizy's idea, although he didn't come up with the silly name...)From the receiving end, it would look like
this. The gun would fire a wide beam of light that can illuminate an entire enemy ship in super-bright light
There would again be no damaging effect, but the target ship would not be able to see to snipe components and would have trouble landing hits with any weapon. To help the idea of "blinding" ship, it'd be nice for targets to lose Line of Sight and be unable to spot enemies; so they will lose spots if they don't have an unblinded ally to maintain LoS. Another interesting bonus could be the ability to illuminate clouds, flare-style - although clouds should provide protection against the blinding effect. I don't think it would be seriously invading flare territory as it is not fire-and-forget; you need to keep the weapon trained on the enemy constantly to maintain a spot through a cloud.
If it uses ammunition at all, I'd argue for quite a large clip with another fairly long reload time. With no damage, it would only really suit a light mount.
This thing could hopefully be used both offensively or defensively to create some interesting battles.
