Railgun replacement: Ion cannon

Mouse

Replace the current railgun with an ion cannon.
The Orbital Ion Cannon from Command & Conquer

The weapon would have 2 main components:
- A limited-range, low-damage beam that collides with geometry but passes through aliens & structures.
- A high-damage burst that appears at the end of the beam.

Because the beam passes through aliens and its the burst that does most of the damage, the ion cannon would be suited to attacking things beyond the alien front line - going through the bone shield & the clog wall to damage the gorge tunnel.

As the weapon is charged, the damage would stay the same, but the range of the beam would gradually increase (This would work best if there was some sort of range finder involved). So you could either rapidly fire a lot of short range beams, or you could fire a couple of long range beams.

twiliteblue

Hmm I really liked the feel of the AVP2 predator shoulder cannon. Maybe railgun could have an energy bar that partially depletes per shot, with a charged shot fully draining the energy causing a long cooldown.

SantaClaws

Wait, so you'd want this beam to actually be STRONGER in cqc, since it rapidfires at close-range? Balance wise this is a horrible idea. How are you supposed to counter that as alien?

RadimaX

maybe it can be 3x CC technology similar to aliens 3x hives stuff that are OP. hell even give aliens similair beam to close off games but as an infestation explosion that retracts extra slow infesting everything on it (could be group of exos, or marines making gate highlighting all of them before aliens move in for the attack) anything new to the game i would not mind no matter how much tweaks it have to go trough with pricing, cooldowns, damadge type, damadge amount its all tweakable. Imagine even a flare marines throw out and it starts blinking faster then "airstrike" comes with that type of laser (goes trough roof if inside ofc)