Starbound's guns.

I'd honestly like to see a mix of energy and ammo based weapons having every gun use just energy seems out of place specially when the gun looks as if it should be reloaded after a few fires

 

If something like this could be spawned with only energy out from the barrel of a gun, I'd be pretty miffed:

 

I dunno. I love ammo, but at the same time I'm not sure if it'll work for Starbound.

In Terraria, I felt like I never could use my ranged weapons ever. I was always too worried like "WHAT IF I NEED THESE BULLETS LATER" and I just kept on never using them ever. Then towards the end, you would just buy bullets from vendors and never ever run out anyway. I think that the energy weapons can work, but just need some tweaking. Right now, the starting guns are really really really pitifully weak, but they also use barely any energy at all.

I think it'll work better if it takes up quite a bit of energy and gives your shots a bit more damage. That's the best I can think of till I can play the game.

 

Psh. Wookies say otherwise.

I'm in the no ammo party. One less thing to have to manage when spelunking for an extended period of time.

 

Well kinda, look at Minecraft, there are mods and app's to let you mod.
And from the sounds of it, starbound will be even more easily modded.

 

Still waiting for a game that can be modded easily by someone with no artistic or coding talents. Someone invent a machine that will take ideas from my brain and automatically add them to games!

 

While don't really care one way or the other here is another option.

1. Weapon "canisters" (you can think of it as ammo if you wish) can be in your inventory or perhaps an equipment slot.
2. Firing the weapon drains the canister. While the canister is equipped or present in the inventory your weapon does full damage (or perhaps more with rare canisters).
3. Once all your canisters are empty different things could happen. This could be a set property for all weapons or maybe could be different depending on the weapon.

• Your weapon damage is cut (10%, 20%, 50%, testing would be required) while firing without a full canister.
• Your weapon begins to drain energy.
• Your weapon begins to become damaged very quickly with each shot.

 

On energy/ammo

• Energy can stay, if/when there will be energy shields in game it would make nice balance between having more shield and using melee, or sacrificing defense for ranged combat
• "Ammo only" doesn't give such tradeoff, it is basically "just go and farm more bullets". Which is boring
• "Special" ammo types could be fun if they were balanced in a way that gives tradeoffs, and still use energy, like:
  • Fire ammo - benefit: chance to burn, drawback: more energy
  • HE ammo - benefit: small aoe, drawback: much slower projecticles
  • Sniper ammo - benefit: much higher projecticle speed and less spread, drawback: reduced fire rate
  • Eco ammo - benefit: less energy usage, drawback: shots spread more

As for damage levels, I feel that ranged weapons that are much weaker in DPS front is a good thing. The thing is, using ranged weapons is almost always much less risk than going melee, DPS difference balances that.
Ammo be balancing factor, but it isn't a very good one, "farm bullets for boss" isnt very interesting activity compared to "search dungen for a bit better gun"

It also probably will make gamplay a bit more varied, as good player can attack boss in melee while he is vunerable, and then switch to ranged when he have to dodge boss attacks. If ranged dps was similiar to melee, most players would just go ranged all the way

 

I voted to stay with the current system. I would want to try it out first hand before I make any suggestions on what they could change/improve.

That being said, our sample size from what we've seen is EXTREMELY small. With so much potential with the RNG aspect of random guns and probably some custom made ones we'll find via quests or whatnot, we really don't have anything to go on.

Then there's also the ever ongoing balancing that the devs work on constantly. I remember that there was a balance change even within i49 from the first stream I watched to the second Yogcast stream. The first being that the melee weapons were taking probably about 8+ hits to kill a monster then on the yogcast it went down to about 2 swings. In short, things are subject to change.

Then there's also potential various weaknesses to consider and I don't know how in-depth Starbound will take that. I mean, we already know there's various elemental damage types in the game. Fire, lightning, poison etc. A gun that shoots flaming ammunition may end up doing way more damage against monsters weak against fire than a regular melee weapon of appropriate level. We just don't know yet.

And of course I expect various degrees of power even within guns of the same level tier. A fast shooting low energy cost weaker gun vs a slow shooting high energy cost powerhouse gun, etc. I believe with the wide variety available to us, I think we'll all find different guns that suit our varying playstyles without having to add something like ammunition into the game. Again though, we'll just have to wait and see.

 

My take on guns.

1. No ammo ever. To hell with inventory management and grind.
2. Yeah, melee at least at start should be more damaging option.
3. First guns, instead of being assault rifle peashooters, should be closer to pistols/muskets with somewhat more damage per shot, but way lower rate of fire and projectile speed.
4. Also, continuous shooting should deplete starting character's energy way faster.

3 + 4 = no bullet spam, more finesse.

Of course, later in game there could and should be more automatic weapons, including spammy ones with low energy usage, but they should not be default guns. That sort of weapon is the best for dedicated kiter, equipped with movement/jumping enhancing techs, and not that good for other character "classes". For example, there are lot of people who'd prefer to play sniper with low rate of fire heavy hitter gun, while others would like to deplete their energy with short range area-damaging flamethrower before going melee. Assault peashooters are boring.

Oh, and perhaps first guns with some punch should require both hands to use. There could be less powerful handguns, of course, with additional bonus of being potentially coupled with a sword.

 

Other. I am not sure yet. I see pros and cons to every possibility. I won't know for sure how I feel about it until I play the beta.