Too many guns

[Sigma]

I'll ignore Psi and the Resonance weapons, since one has variable attack power and the other are alternatives to existing weapons.

I've struck out which weapons I think could be conceivably removed from the game due to lack of use or poor placement in the tech tree:

Hand Weapon (1)
Laser (2)
Particle Impactor (4)
Gatling Laser (5)
Missile (6)
Chaos Gun (8 )
Fusion Laser (10)
Tachyon Bolt (12)
Plasma Shard (13)
Quantum Laser (16)
Graviton Gun (20)
Singularity Laser (24)
String Disruptor (30?)

Thoughts on this? One could argue that Missiles could be removed and the tech could jump straight from Impactors to Chaos Guns, but since Missiles are a requirement for Air Power and there's a ton of stuff in that same tier that people will probably go for before Superstring Theory, I figure that Missiles can probably stay around for a while.

The jump from Plasma Shards to Singularity lasers is justified because by the time you reach Advance Spaceflight you're likely already teching at a pretty high rate, so the time between getting Shards and Singularity Lasers is probably comparable to the time between getting Chaos Guns and Shards.

[Green1]

Missiles are a whole other sort of weapon than impact weapons or plasma rifles. There really should be a differentiation for that. You do not usually carry missiles to a Vietnam type infantry fight in the fungus. You use missiles for anti-air/ anti vehicle/ anti facility, improvement or city in the real world.

Missile chassis though, is fine. Those would be the difference between SCUDS and a group of soldiers with an anti-rover launcher.

[JarlWolf]

The way I imagined weapons for the longest time in SMAC was that the Missile units weren't all equipped with explosive missile weapons, rather they had some sort of artillery or a few specialized troops carrying missile/rocket launchers, while the rest carried conventional weapons. I think that an improvement for missile would be that its a specialized sort of unit: Make them better against certain types of targets or something, or some sort of advantage but translate it to cost.

The reasoning for this is the missile chassis has a soldier behind one of those treads with the missile, and if you look at the tread itself it almost looks like a rocket barrage or a form of multi barreled howitzer. Weapons above conventional ones have these treads and the treads either represent heavy weapons or they are there to symbolize the mobile generators and other such support systems needed to keep the weapons functioning.

[Kilkakon]

The Prog weapons were a nice alternative beeline.

Laser's pretty huge though. Means that workers can be killed easily rather than using a lot of health up.

[Geo]

Last weekend I checked on the animations of SMACX's caviar files. Gatling and Missile weapons have nice ones. Shard is kinda meh IMO.
It's a shame they play so fast you almost can't see it ingame.
Same with the scout, prog scout, and probe movement.