Wing Commander IV: Missiles Overpowered?

Juggler

Juggler

Petty Officer
The missiles are so powerful in this game that I'm beginning to wonder if it's right. Fair enough, missiles are meant to be extremely deadly. But I can destroy a fully shielded Longbow with a Pilum FF in a single hit. This seems to make the more powerful missiles useless when against fighters; the only time that I'd need the extra firepower would be against certain capships.

What is everyone else's views?
 
I would... disagree slightly. Some of the missiles had more punch, but I remember sinking to IFFs into a Dragon and that thing still came on strong.

Also, look at the Mace, Coneburst, and Starburst. How many ways can you say, "CRAAAAAAP!!!"
 
I recently replayed the game and found them to be a little too much. I got the feeling after a while that the most important stat of any fighter I took was not weapons or shields, but decoys. :p

In all seriousness though, I wouldn't be upset if they were toned down just a bit...
 
In Wing Commander III my missile loadout generally depended on what ship I was flying and what I expected to be up against. For example, if I was flying a Longbow, I would load up on FF missiles as they can deal alot of damage to light fighters, which a Longbow will have trouble targeting. Whereas if I was going to fly an escort mission or something where I am likely to be up against heavy fighters, the powerful missiles would do the job. But now, FFs will kill just about everything in a single shot. I haven't fought any Dragons in this playthrough yet, but I think a missile that can kill a bomber without even needing to get a lock puts most of the stronger missiles out of business. I still use leech missiles when taking down capship fighter cover, as it seems to minimise the amount of extra ships being launched.
 
A lot of people actually like the combat in Wing Commander IV for this very reason - missiles do the same magnitude of damage to the space fighters in this game that a missile hit would do to a jet in real life. Think about it - even the most heavily armored aircraft the USAF has, the A-10 Thunderbolt, would probably go down if it took a single SAM hit. It made the combat more frantic and more difficult because unlike WC1-WC3, you probably wouldn't survive a missile hit, and even if you did, you would be badly damaged.
 
Yeah, I can see where they're coming from. I just don't like the way that I almost only every use FFs for fighters. Oh, and I just fought a couple of Dragons. I guess that they're the exception.
 
Sylvester said:
A lot of people actually like the combat in Wing Commander IV for this very reason - missiles do the same magnitude of damage to the space fighters in this game that a missile hit would do to a jet in real life. Think about it - even the most heavily armored aircraft the USAF has, the A-10 Thunderbolt, would probably go down if it took a single SAM hit. It made the combat more frantic and more difficult because unlike WC1-WC3, you probably wouldn't survive a missile hit, and even if you did, you would be badly damaged.
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Frantic, yeah. But in my opinion, it did terrible things to the gameplay. If this was any game other than WC - or even if it was a WC game with less story, like Armada or something - I simply would not have bothered to play it through. I suspect there's a lot of other people who also would have simply given up. As a movie, WC4 was great. As a story in the WC universe, it was great. But as a game, it was simply too frustrating to be enjoyable (in my opinion, of course).
 
I take back what I said about Dragons being an exception; I just killed Seether in a single hit with an IFF. That was the shortest 'boss' fight I've had on WC ever.
 
Missiles in the early Wing Commanders were slow, awkward, and weak... I rather liked how they actually hit for something in WC4, when they hit. There were of course missions were they felt rather unfair, but all Wing Commander games had 'that one mission.'

But as a game, it was simply too frustrating to be enjoyable (in my opinion, of course).
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Says the guy who made the 'fifteen Gothri gangbang'-mission. :p
 
Quarto said:
Frantic, yeah. But in my opinion, it did terrible things to the gameplay. If this was any game other than WC - or even if it was a WC game with less story, like Armada or something - I simply would not have bothered to play it through. I suspect there's a lot of other people who also would have simply given up. As a movie, WC4 was great. As a story in the WC universe, it was great. But as a game, it was simply too frustrating to be enjoyable (in my opinion, of course).
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I'm forced to agree with Quarto on this one, while one could make an argument that BWS fighters were fragile when compared to their Confed equivalent, this does not hold water when they can down a Confed or lance fighter without too much of a problem. Also, aren't the ships shields supposed to deflect some of the blast from missles.
 
Yeah, that would be my argument to the whole realistic missiles idea. I'm pretty sure that modern planes don't have shields.
 
I like the IDEA of redoing missiles so they're more powerful, but I think you need to rethink gameplay around them; for example, give everyone fewer missiles, make missiles harder to hit... make it so they really are the only thing that can damage capital ships so you need to conserve them. SOMETHING.

But also you need to set up the change, which is really where Wing Commander IV falls down. The very nature of the game is such that it feels like you're playing warmed over Wing Commander III (not a criticism)... so it comes out of left field when this one game element that should be entirely familiar is suddenly different.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I like the IDEA of redoing missiles so they're more powerful, but I think you need to rethink gameplay around them; for example, give everyone fewer missiles, make missiles harder to hit... make it so they really are the only thing that can damage capital ships so you need to conserve them. SOMETHING.
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Sounds like you're talking about a Wing Commander 1/2 set up. I would completely agree with this, but I would have also liked a more WC3 missile loadout system. Have a fighter equipped with a few different hardpoints and allow you to choose the payload based on what those hardpoints are able to equip. Thats where I think WC4 began to fall short. You could really only choose 1 hardpoint and were often stuck with torpedos you'd never use, or not enough torpedos if you wanted them.
 
Honestly, I always thought the ability to choose the specific missiles was a bit much in Wing Commander III--I'd rather from a gameplay perspective that we were given a choice between loadout *types* maybe, each with good and bad aspects (ie, "strike" or "recon" or "patrol"). Otherwise what's the point of even having Heat Seekers or Dumb Fires... when everyone is always going to choose the better missiles.

That strikes me as the easiest way to police missiles. There are other ways, but they seem more complex. The realistic 'you only have so many in your inventory total' as in Strike Commander sounds great but just comes off as frustrating... and then some kind of 'this missile is worth two missile units whereas this one is worth one' system would be uncomfortable for the opposite reason.

Edit - or maybe the trick is to make the missiles MORE varied. Maybe Heat Seekers can knock out a whole ship should they happen to hit, like in WC4... but ImRecs will just take out the shields.
 
Dumb Fires are useful against capital ships or large, less manoeuvrable fighters. But I understand your point.
 
Yeah, loadouts are great. I think ultimately, everyone who played WC3 tended to choose IRs and FFs. There seemed so little point choosing anything else - and that spoiled things.
 
Yeah I only strapped on DFs in WC3 if I knew I had several capships in a mission. They were great at taking them down. Otherwise, like Quarto said, I also loaded up with ImRecs and FFs.
 
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