Subset Games Forum

I was thinking about how beams work, and as a die-hard Homeworld fan I thought I'd suggest an ion beam. I figure that if any beam should be allowed to do shield damage, it ought to be one that can't do any hull damage. Plus I currently find the beams to be somewhat homogeneous at the moment.

Some more precise thoughts with respect to a hypothetical ion beam weapon in comparison to the existing ion blasts I and II, heavy ion blast, and ion bomb: recharge on beam weapons tends to be fairly long, so I can imagine base 15-17s recharge on an ion beam. It likely can't suppress one system by itself, but with medium-length sweep it might be able to disable multiple critical systems at an important time. In my opinion this would give it good synergy with the existing beams by being on a similar recharge timer to them and potentially opening windows for a conventional beam to get a solid hull hit in.

Plus given their love of ion weapons this seems like something those silly Engies might reasonably come up with. Thanks for reading!

+1

Cool idea!

take out the does shield damage , give it 3 ion dmg per room and you'd have a nice lil weapon there.

I just created a testing Ion Beam in the game data and it works.
I gave it zero shield penetration, and 3 ion damage.
However it penetrates shields quite nicely.

If there are no shields, then all rooms that are hit are disabled for some time. It does not seem to be longer than normal Ion hit though...

If there are shields, then the first room is not disabled, but all rooms after that are disabled as usual.

Enemy had 1 shield only.

Maybe if I change the power to 1 Ion damage then the shields would totally stop it. I am not sure...

I wanted to create a patch to send to you, but it would be a 120MB file, as it is not trivial for me to produce tiny patch, despite this change being only 20 lines in one file.

Sounds like you are hitting & disabling the shield first. You'll need penetration for it to act like the regular ions. But even the regular ions sometimes hit the shield...

I didn't expect people to be tweaking the game this early, woah. Pretty cool stuff - though it seems ion damage + beams = weird at the moment. It does sound sort of like that level one shield is getting turned off by the initial impact dealing ion damage to the shield subsystem. I wonder how it performs against a heavier shield...

As far as shield damage goes, purely from the perspective of someone in game faced with the possibility of investing in the weapon: I'd rather have an effective but expensive and power-hungry ion beam than another beam weapon that's worthless against anything with shields. Thinking about it out of game, that's just me preferring safe bets over risky ones. Utter nonfunctionality against targets with working shields may just sort of be a beam "thing" in FTL, much like missile shield bypass. On the other hand there's at least one case where missiles can be stopped by specific shields, but I dunno if that is sufficient precedent