In particular, Commonwealth fortresses and CSCs should have ample supply of standard missiles available for the player.
That would be nice. It seems like the biggest availability issue is with high end NAMI missiles. Lucifers don't replenish because they're premiumAmmo and rarely appear at stations other than Commonwealth Fortresses. Broadswords do replenish, but not very often, so you have to keep checking the stations where they appear.
The NAMI heavy is the only thing I've noticed this with. NAMI standard and Ares Launcher seem okay.
The other launchers, I've never really used(mainly due to the fact that their ammo is rarely found in enemies, and mid to late game weapons are generally more useful than launchers anyways)
I've found the Rasiermesser launcher very useful for the freighter playerships with limited weapon slots. The missiles for it are relatively easy to obtain in large quantities. The Gotha 400 works excellent against capital ships and the Gotha 10 is an excellent basebuster. In my last playtrough with the EI500 I used it to kill Phobii and also the Iocrym Command ship died quickly from a barrage of Gotha 400's.
Never managed that with any other launcher (except Ares launcher). The NAMI heavy could do it but it suffers heavy from lack of available missiles, never managed to get enough missiles for it to kill a Phobos or The ICS. (in unmodded games)
I should definitely try out the Rasiermesser launcher with the Freyr. It's probably perfectly balanced, but the high cost of buying one and the rarity of finding its missiles in the wild has kept me away from it.
They are quite ubiquitous in the late game systems. Every friendly station sells the missiles and they are also replenished. You can get great quantities of missiles from Rasiermesser stations and factories. You can loot them from the Kobol as well. I also tend to manufacture them at teraton factories.
So I started a game using only unguided missiles/MAGs and without backtracking to see how that would go. I'm in the system before Charon and it's going OK, except that I'm out of missiles and there don't seem to be any stations in the current system that stock Makayev missiles. So if I want to keep going with no backtracking, I won't be able to fight anything in Charon. Here's the game record. The major culprits are 1: There hasn't been a Starton since the first Black Market station, so I have tons of illegals that I haven't been able to unload at a profit and money has been tight. And 2: The number of Makayev missiles that appear seems large, but it turns out not to be when you go through them at 10 per second.
For 1.7 Alpha 1 I've made the following changes:
- Increased the average count for most missiles.
- Increased the inventory of missiles in most shops. CSCs and fortresses now have more missiles available.
- Fusion triggers now come in cases of 24 each, which means a Tinker can craft a case into 24 XM900 missiles.
- I've also made XM300 illegal, so they basically only show up at the Black Market.