Most FPS have a “wield previously used weapon” hotkey, which for me anyway is a lot faster than the main weapon menu. So the question is, given that you can wield one weapon and have one other quickly available, what weapon balance do you keep handy? The generic weapon categories are:
-Pathetic: better than nothing, and uses either most common, renewable, or no ammo. Good for pest killing.
-Medium: Best all-around weapon. Reasonably good ammo availability, reasonable firepower.
-Kick-Ass: Superweapon that quickly expends lots of hard-to-obtain ammo. Often slow or unwieldy to use.
-Dangerous to User: powerful weapon that is hazardous to use at close quarters.
-Special: long distance sniper weapon, or non-line of sight, delayed action, special effect, etc.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily apply just to firearms or tech weapons. For a medieval game for example, the categories could correspond to dagger, saber, poleax, Greek fire, and Bow/ Magic potion, and substitute endurance for ammo, etc.
My problem is that if you have NO idea what’s around the next corner, how do you plan for facing either a Swarm of Pests, a Tank Behemoth, or anything inbetween?
It’s not quite as generic as you’re talking about, but I’ve always mildly preferred to use an automatic/power combo. Some kind of machine gun and a shotgun or something explosive, in other words. I figure I’m either going to have to shoot the shit out of one thing, or a lot of things.
I usually go with an automatic weapon or a shotgun. Something that either fires a lot of bullets rapidly or fires a wide blast with some knockback to it to buy some time to survey.