I was wondering why they removed weapons like cloned sheep and homing airstrikes etc, from W:A. They were pretty cool weapons IMO. I guess maybe they were just tests...?

The Homing Missile Strike was removed because targeting a worm with no terrain above it totally kills it.

[citation needed]

http://worms2d.info/Homing_Air_Strike

You just cited a wiki

Every missile deals about 25hp damage and IIRC, the default settings sent 6 missiles homing into a worm, which meant an instant in most cases.

Same goes for the homing cluster.

The missiles were rather low powered (from memory, I would hazard a guess that they caused less than 25hp damage) and you can safely assume it fired 5 missiles like every other air strike @ standard power setting.

But even if the missiles did deal 25hp damage each, you'd never hit a single worm with all 5, assuming the terrain is destructable.

Cheers for the answers! But what about say, cloned sheep? Would that weapon be added to Worms Armageddon in the future? I know we have mad cows and the sort but I guess it'd be cool to have them back. Eh, just a thought! ;)

The missiles were rather low powered (from memory, I would hazard a guess that they caused less than 25hp damage) and you can safely assume it fired 5 missiles like every other air strike @ standard power setting.

But even if the missiles did deal 25hp damage each, you'd never hit a single worm with all 5, assuming the terrain is destructable.
Huh?
5 x 25hp = 125hp, which is an instant kill for any worm that is standing on top of an island with the default 100hp used.
And yes, the missiles were accurate enough for that.

You just cited a wiki

Better than useless posts :cool:


I also liked the homing cluster weapons but just because of the overkill they caused I think it was good that they were removed.

I also liked the homing cluster weapons but just because of the overkill they caused I think it was good that they were removed.
IMO, these two homing weapons should have reduced damage per missile/clustlet, so that even a direct hit of all of them doesn't cause a kill.

Something like 10-12hp per missile will total in 50-60 max damage for a full hit.
Maybe also reduce the turning rate of the projectiles, i.e. dumb them down from pigeon to homing missile.

Homing missiles were meant to be a bunker buster. If you can reduce there damage without reducing blast size then go for it.

My point was that the worm moves after the first contact, and not all 5 missiles are direct hits.

I just installed the game and played with the homing weapons for 20 minutes or so, to prove someone wrong (me, apparently). The default setting is 5*30hp clusters from the homing strike, and it is quite possible to kill exposed worms with the weapon, if you know where to aim the cursor. But after about 50 uses of the weapon, I never caused more than 130hp damage and only reached numbers above 100hp a hand full of times.

It was no more overpowered than the banana bombs damage or a holy grenades blast (Both of which share the same crate probabilities), aside from the fact it can be used passively.

Taking everything into account; there's no documented facts about why the weapons weren't included in W:A and in my opinion, the reasons suggested in this thread are likely wrong. I think a more likely suggestion would be that they were seen as too similar to other weapons/not unique enough.

The banana has randomly dispersed, bouncing clustlets and the Holy Handgrenade is equally bouncy and requires to sit still. Both are thrown projectiles and have a high rate to backfire with their large blast and damage range.

All that makes them many times more difficult to use and to actually insta-kill a worm with it on purpose.
The homing strike is as easy as point-and-click, while still having a reasonable chance to get an insta-kill.

As for the homing cluster, that could be abused as a close-range insta-kill weapon by planting it next to a worm and aiming it at that worm. Boom!

The cloned sheep are the most reasonable of that bunch and I can only think they got scrapped because five sheep released at once have a much higher tendency to backfire.
However, they are a superweapon, so the player should be aware that he's handling something powerful.



Having said all that, I wholeheartedly want all those removed weapons officially back in WA in their former glory, no matter how unbalanced they were.
Nowadays most people play customized schemes anyways.

The strike is passive and can be used from any position, a targeted worm is almost guaranteed to take a reasonable amount of damage from it and the close succession between explosions can knock a worm a great distance.

However, the weapon can only be used to attack the top/side surfaces of any map, it only effectively damages a single worm/location and still requires a reasonable amount of knowledge to be used to the best of its ability.

It has its pros and cons like every other weapon.

The banana has randomly dispersed, bouncing clustlets

Regular banana bomb clusters do not bounce. If I had to label any standard weapons from Worms 2 as "overpowered", it would undoubtedly be this.

I too would like to see these weapons return and have thought of ways to balance them or at least make them more unique.

1. Homing cluster: Because homing defeats the purpose of clustering, the clusters should shoot out towards the targeted location with high velocity but not directly home in, allowing them to "cluster" towards that location.

2. Clone sheep: Make them manually controlled. The player can move the sheep horde around and even choose when to jump with them. The player only really controls the first released sheep but the others will copy the player commands too but with a delay making them essentially turn and jump in the same spot as the first.

3. Homing air strike: Make it a multi-target strike. The player chooses 3 locations and the air strike fires 2 missiles to each location. There will also be a small location restriction, preventing the player from targeting a location that's too close to another - a bit like reversed girder restriction but from another targeted point instead of the worm.

Chip, unlike much of the stuff written on these forums, those are actually great ideas.

Very good ideas indeed.
They are equally thought out as Run's Worms Unlimited ideas.

I just wrote these ideas down in my mental Worms notebook.

Did someone notice that the cloned sheep don't explode immediately at pressing spacebar? Every of those sheeps has a mostly random tiny delay before they explode.

Cloned Sheep was fine in my opinion. Its high probability to backfire is part of the gamble, there are a bunch of weapons like that with such a chaotic potential, this is just another one of them.

Plus I can't see how a controllable cloned sheep would work, if the horde follows the first sheep released, copying its movements, what happens if a part of the terrain gets altered after the first sheep goes past it? Or if the worm turns around to release them in both direction as a lot of players tend to do with mad cows?

Or if one of them suffers from the small probability of turning around on certain surface types. A logical thing would be that you detonate the first one and then gain control of the 2nd one etc. Manual control/detonation of each "one one after the other".

If you make all the sheep somehow follow exactly the leader sheeps movement then they'd all blow up one after the other in the same spot (On indestructible terrain) making them pretty pointless lol. It could work if you made each subsequently controllable sheep have only short time to control after the current leader sheep blew up, like 3 or 5 seconds.