Loadout Advice: IMG "Hydra" Gunboat

[zhen_rogue]

Dont fire all at once.... in case of lagg only 1 or 2 out of the 3 will "count"... making the last one just lost energy.. fire in rapid chain 1.2.3

have a separate group for razors and pulse (same speed/range) then other guns. keep pulse inactive and use a hotkey.... that way, right clicking is razors, and eg. scroll wheel is pulse.

This all makes sense, other than it seems I need 10 fingers on each hand to make this work.

I'm assuming to fire "1.2.3 rapid chain", you need to physically push the [fire weapon 1, fire weapon 2, fire weapon 3] keys in rapid succession. If these are default mapped, they are the 1, 2, and 3 keys respectively. Granted, that's not TOO hard to do, but when using WASD flight controls for strafing, countermeasures, mines, engine kill, thrust, etc., it means taking your hand away from the flight controls to roll off a 1,2,3 salvo.

Unless I'm missing a trick about weapons groups here?
If I have 3 weapons assigned to a group, and I right-click, they all 3 fire at the same time.
Is there a way to set up your fire control so that they "stagger" instead?
e.g. Clicking right click only fires one of the three weapons at a time - so that rapid clicking (or even holding down the mouse busson) cycles through whatever weapon isn't still down on it's refire cooldown timer instead.

Or maybe there's some other facet of energy management/weapons grouping, or some keystroke toggle i'm missing here?

My current setup is:
WASD - default movement
1 - activate weapons group 1
2 - activate weapons group 2
3 - activate weapons group 3
tab - thruster
space - toggle mouse flight
q - EK
c - CM
e - mines
f - batt
g - bot
shift+d - missile
shift+e - CD

I would love to use Mouse3 (scroll wheel) as another button to use, but I can't seem to figure out how to un-map the scrolling part of the button from speed control.
Pushing my scroll wheel does nothing right now, beause rolling my scroll wheel up/dpwn likewise acts as W and S to change speed. When I try and use my Mouse3 in a firefight, if I don't concentrate hard and only push perfectly straight down, what happens is my wheel rolls a bit at the same time and kills my speed to 0.

Thanks again for any advice/clarifications here.

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[aerelm]

Well, I have 7 keys on my Mouse, so you can tell, my story is a bit different, but a quick note;

WASD - default movement

Put W and S to Strafe Up and Down, and use Mouse Wheel as Speed Control.
Vertical Strafe saves your Life one day, trust me!
(Specially on a Ship like IMG GB that is much more like a Horizontal Line from Front than an actual ship! -.-)

[Panzer]

(Smoke)

My on GeeBee uses a full-primary turret load atm. It is imo most versatile, but sadly excelling at neither of the intended tasks in particular. Let's define those tasks:

A gunboat for me is something that decides a low-numbers battle of at most 3 small things (mix of bombers and fighters) engaged by two or three similar-sized enemies. Or wrecking smugglers. For the former you'd be well-advised to load a rocket launcher and either solaris turrets or primaries. Bear in mind however, that gunboats are probably the easiest to kill while using smalls. Three... or two bombers crack you easily, even if you're not alone. So use the boat in low-intensity engagements or waste ammo cash every time.

My suggestion is set the boat for AA. You can compensate the anti-GB deficiency by having a bomber accompany you.

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[Prysin]

(Smoke)

My on GeeBee uses a full-primary turret load atm. It is imo most versatile, but sadly excelling at neither of the intended tasks in particular. Let's define those tasks:

A gunboat for me is something that decides a low-numbers battle of at most 3 small things (mix of bombers and fighters) engaged by two or three similar-sized enemies. Or wrecking smugglers. For the former you'd be well-advised to load a rocket launcher and either solaris turrets or primaries. Bear in mind however, that gunboats are probably the easiest to kill while using smalls. Three... or two bombers crack you easily, even if you're not alone. So use the boat in low-intensity engagements or waste ammo cash every time.

My suggestion is set the boat for AA. You can compensate the anti-GB deficiency by having a bomber accompany you.

what panzer says is very true... but note that not everone can get a bomber wingman to assist him in his/her tasks all the time.

Best suggestion would then be to use cerbs.... their slow and its hard to kill fighters with it, but if/when you learn to use them for anti fighter/bomber too, then your one helluva scary enemy.... untill then your just a sitting duck.... so make sure you get some buddies to practice with BEFORE trying a "full cerb" loadout...

as a rule: ALWAYS HAVE 1 MISSILE IN ANY LOADOUT. Its more often then not, useful in most your encounters. Against smugglers its great, as it can blow their thruster off

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DHC Discord

[Durandal]

Full guns or one missile and full guns.

Razors work wonders against bombers but only if you have three, and frankly it's not worth the trade off if you're going up against fighters and Tridentes as well.

Pulses are only really good for larger stuff.

Solaris and Cerbs are useless.