FTL Analysis: Beam Weapons

Beams are unique in several ways.

First of all, all beams completely ignore accuracy checks: you're not allowed to initiate a beam weapon on a currently-Cloaked enemy, but evasion is irrelevant and if a ship initiates a Cloak partway through a beam 'volley', the Cloak won't protect against the ongoing beam at all. This is fairly unique; boarding with a Crew Teleporter is one of the only other ways to take aggressive action against enemy ships without worrying about evasion... and that's not a weapon.

Conversely, beam weapons are unique among weapons in that they are affected by Shields but cannot (directly) harm Shields. Other offenses ignore Shields entirely, or are intercepted by Shields and pop their bubbles, or are Ion shots and don't pop Shield bubbles per se but still negatively impact Shield functionality if they hit a Shield bubble. Zoltan Supershields are a weird exception where beam weapons get to actually do damage to the Supershield -twice, even. But outside that case, a beam hitting a Shield is a beam that's losing damage for no benefit.

For the beams that do Hull damage (Which is most of them), their damage is also handled unusually. Where other Hull-damaging weapons either hit the ship and do their damage or miss it entirely and do nothing, beams do Hull damage for each room they pass through. Not room tile, room. Their damage is thus impacted heavily by how a ship is laid out -a compact ship with a series of 1-tile-wide rooms stacked together horizontally (Or 1-tile-tall rooms stacked vertically, but this isn't really a thing) is hideously vulnerable to beam weapons, whereas a ship made primarily of 2x2 rooms with lots of empty space and all its 1x2 rooms connecting from end to end will take far less damage.

In practice, you'll want to get good at aiming diagonally, as the game doesn't actually care about how long the beam touches a given room, making it optimal to aim so you'll cut briefly through the corners of rooms. (Your enemies do not understand this, and always start their sweep from the center of a room, and so generally do less damage with beams than you can achieve in equivalent circumstances)

As such, for Hull-damaging beams, I describe their length, and frame it in terms of the maximum number of rooms it's possible to hit. (As opposed to by the in-engine numbers for length you'll find on wikis and whatnot)

Two things to note before getting into the specific weapons. Firstly, the game does provide visual feedback on whether a given room will be hit by your current positioning when selecting beam targeting. If a room lights up with a yellow outline, it will be hit. If not, even if it looks to your eye like the beam is overlapping the room? The beam won't hit that room.

Second, Shield status is checked at the moment a beam crosses into a new room. As such, Shields can reduce your total damage by popping up while the beam is ongoing.... or a beam that started before Shields went down can end up doing some damage anyway if a Shield bubble is popped or otherwise goes away. This latter point is particularly pertinent to enemy usage of beams, since your enemies simply fire weapons as soon as they're ready, rather than trying to use them when they'll be most effective, but is also pretty relevant to keep in mind as the player for reasons I'll be getting into later.

Though I should also point out that a beam can be visually intercepted with it not mattering mechanically; if the Shield bubble comes up after a beam has entered the last room in its sweep but before its sweep has reached its endpoint, you'll get the beam being visually blocked by the Shield bubble for a second without it having blocked any damage. This is a minor detail, mostly worth pointing out because if you're not aware of it you can arrive at incorrect conclusions about how a battle played out.

Anyway, specific beams.

Direct Damage Beams


Pike Beam
55
: 2
Charge: 16 seconds
Beam Length: Enough to hit up to 7 rooms against ideal ship configurations.
Does 1 Normal damage per room hit.

The Pike Beam is, of all beam weapons, the fastest-moving, so much so that even though it also has the longest beam length it still completes its sweep well before any other beam weapon does. Among other points, this makes it the best beam at slipping in good damage by firing just after the final enemy Shield bubble pops.

Note that while it can hit 7 rooms in real play, very few ships have the layout necessary for this to be possible. It's generally better to think of its maximum damage as 5, because there's plenty of ships where the Pike Beam cannot hit more than that, but ships are pretty consistently designed so 5 damage is in fact possible. (That is, very few ships are designed so 5 damage is impossible to achieve) Among other points, the largest ships are prone to having a larger proportion of 2x2 rooms, where even if you can draw a line that is always passing through a room, the damage is still below 7 because you're drawing through a 2x2 room somewhere in there.

Anyway, I like the Pike Beam in concept, but its execution is less than ideal. In theory it's an exceptionally efficient source of damage, as 7 damage for 2 Power and with a charge time of 16 seconds is impressive numbers; the Flak II is the only non-beam weapon able to deliver 7 damage in one volley, and it takes 1 more Power and 5 more seconds to charge, and the Flak II is one of the better weapons of the game, so surely the Pike Beam must be a really great weapon, right?

In practice, it's one of the worse weapons of the game. It will, as noted earlier, virtually never be able to hit its ostensible peak damage; 5 damage for 2 Power in 16 seconds is strong-sounding when comparing against other weapons (It's 0.5 more damage per second than a Burst Laser II, after all), but still less amazing-sounding right there. And against some ships you can't even get that much damage out of the Pike Beam!

More importantly, the Pike Beam is wholly reliant on other tools clearing away enemy Shields to have a chance of doing anything. This leads to your actual damage per second being worse, whether in the sense that you delay other weapons firing to keep them synced with the Pike Beam, or hold off on firing it until you're going to send a volley anyway. As a concrete example, say you have a Burst Laser II; either you have it sit on full charge for nearly 4 seconds, or you have it fire immediately, then have the Pike Beam sit on full charge for 8 seconds to take advantage of the second Burst Laser II volley. Either way, trying to make use of the Pike Beam leads to less good results than its raw numbers suggest.

In practice, it's often even worse than that sounds. Say you fire said Burst Laser II against an enemy ship that has 2 Shield bubbles: usually 2 or all 3 shots will hit, at which point the Pike Beam gets to immediately follow up. Every once in a while, though, only 1 shot will hit, and now the Pike Beam has to wait a full 12 seconds for the Burst Laser II to recharge, idling on full charge that whole time instead of putting it to work. If your Pike Beam were instead a Burst Laser I, you'd be able to fire it alongside the Burst Laser II to increase the odds of popping all Shield bubbles and getting damage through; given damage getting through at all can cascade into making it easier to do more damage in future, that's pretty significant!

So slotting a Pike Beam in over some less Shield-sensitive weapon tends to lend itself to a gamble-y dynamic, where the RNG can give slightly unfavorable results and so you do literally nothing, or it gives you the results you need and you do above-average damage. I'm not a fan of that right there, but what I'm actually driving at is that the Pike Beam's 'win big' result isn't actually that big; if you're regularly going to do no damage, the times you do get damage through need to be pretty big spikes to make up for the missing damage, and the Pike Beam isn't actually powerful enough for this to be something it's liable to manage.

And this is a bigger problem than it sounds due to the cascading failure nature of FTL's combat. Reliably getting a little damage through can let you chip the enemy Shields System so following volleys do yet more damage, with this further crippling Shields so yet more damage happens on further volleys, up until their Shields are zeroed out or the enemy ship is dealt with permanently. This makes the difference between 'can't reliably penetrate Shields, but does good damage when it gets through' and 'can reliably penetrate Shields, but only for small damage' favor the latter more than you might intuitively expect.

This is further exacerbated by the Pike Beam running off of beam mechanics, specifically the part where a beam firing can hit any given room only the one time. This means the Pike Beam will never do more than token damage to a given System; while it can lightly damage multiple Systems at once, this isn't as useful as one might hope. Systems in FTL are pretty strongly hierarchal in importance; annihilating Shields or Weapons is almost always more useful than spreading the equivalent amount of System damage across multiple Systems -even if you're still hitting Weapons and Shields while spreading around damage!

As such, focusing on the Pike Beam's Hull damage potential actually downplays a(nother) major weakness of the Pike Beam. A different weapon getting 2-3 damage through will generally be focusing that damage on a single room, and for example having the enemy's Shields so damaged they can't fully repair them before your next volley goes out is a lot more useful than having incidentally knocked out Oxygen or something. Furthermore, against more durable ships that lack a Medical Bay or Cloning Bay, concentrating damage tends to lead to crew deaths; crewkilling a ship is largely better than blowing it up, but even if you blow the ship up in the end, killing crew can still tilt things decisively to your advantage, crippling their ability to repair and man key Systems and so snowballing into a faster victory. The Pike Beam will virtually never get crew kills due to beam mechanics and its minimal base damage.

Long story short, the Pike Beam isn't so terrible you ought to default to immediately selling it or anything else so extreme, but it's difficult to justify having it part of your arsenal as anything other than an interim solution while you're waiting for something better, and honestly it's particularly difficult to justify purchasing it given its low value.

Which is a bit frustrating, since on paper it's a source of damage that isn't susceptible to RNG...

The Zoltan Cruiser B starts with a Pike Beam, so if you want to give that ship a whirl -or unlock the Zoltan Cruiser C- you'll need to learn how to use it regardless, but outside that scenario, it's easy to end up just perpetually avoiding it.

In AI hands, the Pike Beam is uncommon and generally unthreatening, simply because the AI's lack of coordinated fire means it will regularly waste itself entirely on your Shields. It's also hit really hard by the AI's beam-drawing methodology, where the AI may do as little as 2 damage even if you're playing one of the ships that is actually possible to hit 7 damage with, and may never rise above 4 damage because they don't draw diagonally and most player ships are designed so a straight line has no chance of reaching 5 damage. (I'm actually not sure any player ship can be hit for 5 damage with the AI's beam-drawing methodology)

It's also the beam hit hardest by the way the AI approaches Cloak usage, in that the AI will usually hold fire on all weapons until the Cloak runs out and then instantly fire all of them at the same time. With most weapon types, this has the side effect of having the AI effectively coordinate its fire. With beam weapons, this results in the beam having substantially wasted itself on your Shields before their other weaponry has a chance to potentially knock out your Shields; with the Pike Beam's lightning-fast sweep, it will generally complete its sweep before any projectiles have a chance to arrive, where slower beams have the potential to get at least a little damage in at the latter third or whatever of their sweep.

Every once in a while things will line up so the AI happens to fire its Pike Beam when your Shields are fully down and so actually do some damage. If you play long enough, at some point this will even be what takes you to zero Hull.

But even then, the ship would probably have killed you faster if the Pike Beam had been almost any other weapon. It really is that ineffectual in AI hands.


Halberd Beam
65
: 3
Charge: 17 seconds.
Beam Length: Enough to hit up to 5 rooms against ideal ship configurations.
Does 2 Normal damage per room hit.

A mechanic that starts mattering at this level of firepower, and which the game does an extremely poor job of inculcating an understanding of into the player, is that damaging beams have a completely unique relationship to regular Shields. All other weapons ignore Shields entirely, or treat hitting them as hitting the Shield System directly, or strip a single Shield layer per hit regardless of their damage number, while beam weapons perform a subtractive calculation. That is, the Halberd Beam will do 2 damage per room hit if the target is currently unshielded, and do nothing if the target has 2 or more Shield layers, but will do 1 damage to each room it hits if the enemy ship has exactly 1 Shield bubble up.

The game does technically inform the player of this (In the 'tip' section when hovering over most of the beam weapons), but it's not that clearly explained and the player's visceral experience with beams will be heavily slanted toward 'beams are useless if Shields are up at all'. As there's no popup informing the player of a subtraction occurring or anything of the sort, it's entirely possible to go a long, long time without becoming aware of this mechanic. Among other points, this can lead a player to thinking the Zoltan Cruiser A design is much, much worse than it actually is. (Mind, it's still quite bad, but much better than if the Halberd Beam actually were completely useless against Shielded targets)

Also note that if you can afford the Power, you're usually better off buying a Halberd Beam than a Pike Beam. You pay 10 more Scrap, 1 more Power, and take 1 second longer to charge, but you get a weapon that can do some damage even if you don't quite pop the last Shield bubble, does double Hull damage in many situations (Many ships will let you arrange the full 5 rooms a Glaive Beam can hit with no possibility of the Pike Beam hitting more rooms), and of course is much better at crippling Systems and Subsystems due to the greater per-room damage. The Pike Beam's primary advantages of consequence are the lesser Power usage and that its beam sweeps very fast and so circumstances are a lot more likely to line up for it to get a full sweep or at least almost its entire sweep through before the enemy Shield bubble returns. These aren't nothing, but overall the Halberd Beam is the better choice, contributing to the difficulty in actually justifying using the Pike Beam.

Anyway, the Halberd Beam does suffer from a decent portion of the Pike Beam's problems, but the bump in damage helps a lot. There's the relatively obvious point that, given how rare it is for the Pike Beam to actually be able to hit 7 rooms in one sweep, the Halberd Beam's doubled base damage does in fact equate in most cases to doubled peak damage. That's a huge improvement in the damage per second in spite of taking slightly longer to charge, as well as a less dramatic boost in Power-to-damage efficiency in spite of requiring 50% more Power. Notably, enemy ships cap out at 22 Hull at a time; 10 damage at once will kill most ships on the second use, or on the first use if you're in the early portion of the game!

The fact that it can partially penetrate Shields also has a host of favorable implications. It means an early Halberd Beam can actually devastate ships with only level 2 Shields; start from the Shields room, and you'll lose only 1 damage to their Shield, since you'll instantly knock their Shields System below its ability to sustain a Shield bubble. More broadly, it means it's okay -not ideal, but okay- to fire when you've only knocked the enemy down to 1 Shield bubble, instead of expending the charge being completely worthless. If that lets you finish off the enemy ship, or kill wounded crew, or damage a System you want damaged, that can be worth inefficient damage. That makes the Halberd Beam less sensitive to combat RNG than the Pike Beam.

It also makes the Halberd Beam less demanding of precise timing from the player: if you fire it a little late, so the enemy Shield bubble pops up partway through the firing, you don't instantly stop doing damage at all.

So the Halberd Beam is actually a fairly solid weapon.

By extension, it's notably more relevant in AI hands. It's far more likely to do damage at all simply because it only needs you to be at 1 Shield bubble to get in some damage and thus the AI's lack of fire coordination is less of a flaw, its shorter maximum length doesn't really matter given the AI's beam-drawing routine can't hit the maximum number of rooms anyway, and its beam sweeping more slowly is actually largely an advantage since it raises the odds of some portion of the sweep occurring simultaneously to the player dropping below 2 Shield bubbles and thus getting at least some damage in. Since, as I've already touched on before, the AI gets absurdly generous ship designs such that high Power demands aren't really a flaw, it requiring a relatively demanding 3 Power isn't really a flaw. It is, in fact, essentially 100% superior to the Pike Beam for AI purposes, as opposed to being merely mostly better when talking the player perspective.

As I alluded to earlier, the Zoltan Cruiser A starts with the Halberd Beam. It's... really badly built for communicating the positive qualities of the Halberd Beam... but it starts with one.


Glaive Beam
95
: 4
Charge: 25 seconds.
Beam Length: Enough to hit up to 5 rooms against ideal ship configurations.
Does 3 Normal damage per room hit.

why

Okay, to be entirely fair, the Glaive Beam is the only beam that can do damage through two Shield bubbles, and against an unshielded target it can easily do 15 damage in a single hit. It can actually one-shot early-game ships through Shields by simply starting from the Shields system. No other weapon can match this per-'volley' damage.

Even so, it's Not Good. Just comparing it to the Halberd Beam, you're getting 50% more damage per volley, but per second the Glaive Beam only technically is better; multiplying the Halberd Beam's charge time of 17 seconds by 150% gives you 25.5 seconds, vs the 25 seconds the Glaive Beam takes. Which is to say that over an extended period, the Glaive Beam is technically better damage, but by such a tiny margin it's noise. Meanwhile, the Glaive Beam costs more Scrap to buy, requires more Power and Weapons System capacity to run, and due to its larger charge time it's vastly more vulnerable to being interrupted by the Weapons System taking hits and is completely incapable of preventing another weapon from firing first -the Glaive Beam has the single longest charge of any weapon in the game, after all.

(Okay, with an experienced crewmember manning Weapons you'll drag its charge time down to 20 seconds, which is faster than some weapon base times... but enemy weapons are basically always manned, and the next-slowest weapons still end up below 20 seconds if manned by inexperienced crew. You'd need an Automated Reloader or to prevent the enemy from manning Weapons to actually get ahead -and notably, Autoships cheat and man Systems even when they're damaged!)

So if you're not firing into Shields, a Halberd Beam is just better in practice.

If you are firing into Shields, things get better, but... not much. That its damage per second becomes noticeably higher if firing into 1 or 2 Shield bubbles as compared to the Halberd Beam doing the same is the only way that this particular comparison actually helps it; the Power demand is still high, the Scrap cost is still high, the charge time is still tremendous and has numerous problematic implications.

It also forces comparisons to other weapons: a Glaive Beam fired into 2 Shield bubbles will do 5 Hull damage completely reliably with a charge time of 25 seconds and a Power demand of 4... and a Flak II will also do 5 damage fairly reliably against most non-Autoships (Which the Glaive Beam can't hit its full room count against, reducing its damage), while taking only 3 Power and 21 seconds to charge and popping the Shield bubbles, thus clearing the way for other weapons. And then the Flak II will still be useful against ships with 3 and 4 Shield bubbles, where the Glaive Beam absolutely needs other tools clearing away the Shields to contribute anything against 3-4 Shield Bubbles.

So what's supposed to be the draw of the Glaive Beam, exactly? It's not slot efficiency; both comparisons I made were 1-to-1 comparisons, not 'two Halberd Beams are better' or something. It's not damage per second. It's not having a niche nothing else quite matches.

Another, less obvious problem with it, is the intersection of it being a Power hog and yet not standalone-functional outside maybe the early portion of a run. With Power hogs that can put in work without assistance, you can often shave off a lot of the implied cost by simply swapping things out -that is, if you want to implement a Flak II, one option is to upgrade Weapons and your Reactor once each, and swap the Flak II in over a weapon that needs 2 Power, instead of having to upgrade Weapons and your Reactor three times. With the Glaive Beam, though, this isn't really an option; eventually ships consistently have 3 and ultimately 4 Shield bubbles, at which point the Glaive Beam literally can't do work without help. As such, incorporating it into your arsenal carries a somewhat-hidden cost of hundreds of Scrap: the absolute cheapest scenario is upgrading Weapons from 2 to 6 and the Reactor from 5 or 6 to 9 or 10, in which case you're paying 185 Scrap on upgrading Weapons and 80 Scrap on upgrading the Reactor.

Again, that's the cheapest possible scenario, and in real play you're not going to be at the exact right numbers for this to happen. More likely is that you're upgrading Weapons from 3 to 7 and thus paying 250 Scrap on upgrading Weapons, while for upgrading the Reactor you're probably spending 100+ Scrap. The Glaive Beam is not powerful enough to be worth spending 450 Scrap to buy it and make the upgrades necessary to implement it into your arsenal while actually being useful. Nothing in the game is that powerful.

The one and only qualifier of substance to the Glaive Beam being awful is that the Weapon Pre-Igniter exists. With the Weapon Pre-Igniter and another weapon or two that can clear away Shield bubbles, a lot of enemy ships can be destroyed with no chance to fight back even quite late into a run. Indeed, it has no real competition for this particular alpha strike potential; no other weapon can deal up to 15 damage off one charge, and almost none can come particularly close in even optimal conditions. So... if you get a Weapon Pre-Igniter, maybe keep an eye out for a Glaive Beam in a Store, and maybe hold onto looted Glaive Beams in hopes of getting a Weapon Pre-Igniter. You'll certainly be upgrading your Weapons System heavily if you have a Weapon Pre-Igniter, so that helps with that issue at least.

Without the Weapon Pre-Igniter, it's just bad, and honestly if you loot it without already having the Weapon Pre-Igniter you should probably just sell it.

I'm honestly baffled the devs thought the Stealth Cruiser B would be a viable ship relying solely on the Glaive Beam. Though that's for a later post...

Annoyingly, in AI hands the Glaive Beam is in fact the most threatening beam available to them, taking the same principles I described with the Halberd Beam and magnifying them; its qualities conspire to make it less hampered by the AI refusing to coordinate fire, while the AI cheating on ship design means its intense Power demand basically doesn't matter. Its only flaw that remains a real flaw in AI hands is its hideously long charge time -which, to be fair, is a real flaw, since a ship that's doing well is often going to be messing up enemy ships before the Glaive Beam has a chance to fire. Some strategies can defeat many ships outright before the Glaive Beam gets a chance to fire, and even just getting Weapons temporarily disabled or Hacked or whatever can lead to winning without it firing even if the fight actually took more than 25 seconds. (Well, 22.5 seconds in most cases)

Buuuut it's worth noting here that FTL actually has loadout biases. The relevancy is that beams, especially the heavier beams, are most commonly found on Zoltan ships, and Zoltan ships always come with a Zoltan Supershield. Without getting too much into the details right now, Zoltan Supershields are powerful in AI hands for buying them time to charge weapons and whatnot, among other points having the crucial quality of blocking the Crew Teleporter and thus substantially slowing the most accessible strategy for swift victory.

So often, even the hideously long charge time is less of a flaw in AI hands than in player hands, though the full details of this particular mess are for a later post.


Hull Beam
70
: 2
Charge: 14 seconds.
Beam Length: Enough to hit up to 7 rooms against ideal ship configurations.
Does 1 Normal damage per room hit, doing 2 Normal damage when hitting rooms that contain no Systems or Subsystems.

The Hull Beam is not actually 100% better than the Pike Beam, but it's pretty close. Both it and the Pike Beam have the same maximum room potential (Even though the Pike Beam's maximum length is internally noticeably higher), use the same amount of Power, and then the Hull Beam actually charges faster and will often do more damage thanks to doing doubled damage against empty rooms -which the nature of Beam weapon targeting means the Hull Beam will often catch at least one such room in the process of cutting, even if you heavily prioritize catching Systems. The Pike Beam's primary advantage is that it sweeps faster, which is something, but tends to not offset all the advantages the Hull Beam has.

Do note that the double damage for hitting open rooms does not allow the Hull Beam to penetrate Shields. The Halberd Beam is better if you don't expect to be able to reliably wipe out all the enemy's Shielding.

Actually, in general the Hull Beam's primary issue is that the Halberd Beam tends to beat it out. The Hull Beam's 3 second edge in charge time, lower Power requirement, and lengthier beam aren't worthless, but there are plenty of ship designs -such as the Rebel Rigger- where you can only catch up to 5 rooms and/or where maximizing rooms hit tends to also mean hitting mostly or entirely Systems. In conjunction with the Halberd Beam being able to do damage through Shields, making it less disastrous to mistime a shot, and the fact that it is noticeably better at suppressing Systems... the Halberd Beam is usually better if you can afford the Power requirement.

Which makes it intensely confusing that the Hull Beam costs more Scrap than the Halberd Beam. Only 5 more Scrap, but what?

Still, it's relatively easy to fit in to your kit in terms of Power, and is usually a pretty clear upgrade over a Pike Beam, so it can make sense to buy and use, particularly for the Zoltan Cruiser B where it's an overall upgrade. It's also solid enough that if you loot it, it's worth considering making use of it instead of defaulting to selling it; it may be overall worse than a Halberd Beam, but it's not actually bad.

In AI hands, it's basically a marginally better Pike Beam, but still far less threatening than a Halberd Beam, for basically exactly the reasons I've already laid out. I don't think I need to reiterate those.

Beams That Don't Do Normal Damage

Bizarrely, both of these will actually damage Zoltan Supershields, doing 1 damage on initial hit and 1 damage at the end of their 'volley', just like a Pike Beam or Hull Beam does. I don't get why the devs felt the need to kick the Supershield while it's down.

Though that topic is for a later post.


Fire Beam
50
: 2
Charge: 20 seconds.
Beam Length: Enough to hit up to 5 tiles against ideal ship configurations.
Attempts to set fire to each tile the beam passes through, with an 80% chance of success on each individual tile.

The Fire Beam can take a bit to wrap your head around since normal beam usage involves maximizing rooms hit, whereas with the Fire Beam room tiles hit is the point. With regular beams, cutting through completely empty space is better if it lets you catch more rooms. With the Fire Beam, you'll ideally never have it pass through a roomless chunk of the ship.

Anyway, if your ship can arrange to knock down Shield bubbles (Which, if it can't, is generally either a sign you're a boarding ship, or a sign you're doomed), the Fire Beam is shockingly good. 2 Power isn't terribly unwieldy, the 20 second charge time is only moderately inconvenient for most weapon configurations, and setting fires can readily lead to crew-killing ships -thus providing you with bigger payouts- while tying up enemy crew on the firefighting (Thus reducing the ship's efficiency at dodging, fire speed, Shield recharge, etc) and potentially doing System damage to further cripple the ship. This all comes with the caveat that it's essentially worthless against Autoships and Lanius ships due to their complete lack of oxygen generally putting out fires before they can do even one point of System damage, but a lot of the time it's a really good weapon.

It requires a lot of support to be good against the Rebel Flagship, and if you're too zealous about using it you'll kick the Rebel Flagship into being an Autoship, so you might want to swap it out for the Rebel Flagship fight, or at least the later stages if you clear out a lot of crew in the earlier stages, but still, it's pretty great for most of the game.

It's really too bad no player ship starts with one. In addition to being pretty competent, it's fun to use, which is not something I can say about very many weapons in FTL.

The Fire Beam also has a single blue option, exclusive to it. Bizarrely, it's an event to help some pirates bully a settlement -and it actually gives better rewards than fighting the pirates! Why does this exist in this game where we're supposed to be playing vaguely Star Trek Federation Good Guys??

Regardless, if you don't mind terrorizing imaginary civilians, that's another reason to hold on to the Fire Beam. Note that the Fire Bomb can also be used in this event, but is strictly worse, since it spends a unit of missile ammo.


Anti-Bio Beam
50
: 2
Charge: 16 seconds.
Beam Length: Enough to hit up to 5 tiles against ideal ship configurations.
Does 60 damage to any crewmember it passes over. Internal Drones will take 30 damage instead.

Enemies will never use the Anti-Bio Beam, which is probably for the best. They'd be utterly incompetent with it in all likelihood, and killing crew has radically different implications for the player than for enemies; killing an enemy crewmember secures you a permanent advantage against that particular ship, but ceases to matter once you leave the Jump Beacon. (Aside the Rebel Flagship actually tracking crew losses across stages... but then it turns into an Autoship if you completely wipe the crew, so it's still different from the player; you Game Over if all your crew die and you don't have a Cloning Bay) Losing a crewmember costs the player forever, unless you happen to get a lot of free crew events such that you'd go over the limit anyway. And it still is costing you for however long it takes to reach that point, which is almost always longer than one fight.

Anyway, like the Fire Beam, the Anti-Bio Beam requires your ship is able to pop Shield bubbles in a timely and consistent manner, and it additionally realistically requires Sensors 2 or manned Sensors 1 or a Slug crewmember so you can see the enemy crew, and is flat-out worthless against Autoships (But actually works fine against Lanius ships, unlike the Fire Beam) as well as requiring support to deal with Cloning Bay ships, but aside those caveats it's amazing. Almost all crew can be killed in 2 hits by the Anti-Bio Beam, and a crew-killed ship provides better rewards than one you destroyed. Enemies don't properly account for the existence of the Anti-Bio Beam, either; they won't scatter crew, they won't notice someone has 60 or less HP and run them to the Medical Bay, etc. Indeed, due to the AI's obsession with defending/repairing Shields, it's very easy to get them to clump together and wipe out multiple crew at once. Many ships are also small enough the enemy crew can't be particularly far-flung anyway.

This does all come with the caveat that it's dubious to bring it into the Rebel Flagship fight, as you do not want to wipe out the Flagship's crew, but even then it can be useful to bring it into the first stage -taking out a lot of the crew is useful, and carries forward into later stages of the fight.

Unlike the Fire Beam, the Anti-Bio Beam also actually starts on a ship, and in fact the Slug Cruiser A is decently well-equipped to take advantage of it. If you're willing to dive into Nebula Sectors, you also have above-average odds of specifically acquiring it, as the Slug Home Sector is guaranteed to have an event somewhere in it that results in a fight where the enemy will always attempt to surrender at low Hull and if you accept their surrender you're guaranteed the option of taking an Anti-Bio Beam.

Though you shouldn't take that option if you're trying to unlock the Slug Cruiser A... and you won't necessarily find the event... and it's designed so it looks like it's a different event with much less appealing rewards if you accept the surrender... this kind of deliberate trolling of the player is something FTL is bizarrely fond of doing, and always to the detriment of its design. I'm baffled as to what the motive could've been for this kind of nonsense.

Anyway, the Anti-Bio Beam in specific provides blue options in a couple of events. One is the infamous 'giant alien spiders' event, where it's your best possible option, reliably giving a big payout at no risk and no cost. The other is an event where you need to capture a ship intact by crewkilling it -the game literally won't let you start the fight unless you have one of a few tools for crewkilling on hand. It's a pretty good payout if you pull it off, though keep in mind that actually destroying the ship will inexplicably cause it to explode, doing a ton of damage to your ship -don't take this event on unless you're confident your ship can reliably pull off a crewkill.

Special


Mini Beam
20 (Only matters for sell purposes)
: 1
Charge: 12 seconds.
Beam Length: Enough to hit up to four rooms in ideal ship configurations (Though most ships you can only hit 2-3 rooms), or exactly two tiles.
Does 1 Normal damage per room hit, and also has a 10% chance per tile of setting that tile on fire.

The Mini Beam is the only beam weapon that simultaneously does damage while having a non-damage-based side effect. It's also restricted to two ship design -the Stealth Cruiser A and C designs, specifically- as you'll never see it in Stores or loot it.

However, enemies use it extremely often in the early game, and in fact it's one of the most common weapons for them to use in the early game. (Notably, basically anybody can use it, where other beams are rarely seen outside Zoltan ships) It will eventually be largely phased out by weapons with higher Power requirements, but for the first couple of Sectors don't be surprised to see it on every other ship.

The Mini Beam is not one of those obviously super-powerful starting weapons, but in practice it really is overall fairly powerful, in part because many enemy ship configurations don't provide the opportunity for the longer-length beams to actually do more damage than the Mini Beam. It's also the fastest-charging beam weapon by a fair margin, among other points fast enough that supporting it with eg basic laser weapons only requires you very slightly delay them firing, as opposed to significantly delay them, not to mention it's the only beam weapon to only need 1 Power to function, making it easy to eg temporarily swap it out for something else, then upgrade Weapons once and fit it right back in.

As such, you should only rarely actually get rid of it, as it's actually quite good, and rarely fully loses relevance. You generally have to end up with your maximum Weapons Power cap used up by an amazing set of weapons with no room to fit in even 1 Power more for it to be worth just selling it. Especially since 10 Scrap is unlikely to be a decisive boost.

The actual maximum damage of four is much rarer to be able to achieve than you'd expect, as generally speaking trying to draw through a corner shared by four rooms will inexplicably result in the game refusing to have it hit more than three of those rooms, no matter how you finagle the line. As in, you can wobble one degree back and forth to change which room is being excluded, but perpetually still be excluding a room. But then against some ships the game will accept that you're overlapping four rooms...

... and, making it really obvious this is some manner of bug or oversight, which direction the line is 'facing' can change whether it hits three rooms or four rooms. As in, you can draw the line, have it cover only three rooms, then start the line from the opposite point but cover the exact same pixels, and suddenly it's hitting four rooms. 

In enemy hands, the Mini Beam is moderately threatening. Its brief sweep hampers it, but its low charge time means it will pretty regularly end up overlapping with other weapons knocking out your Shield bubbles, and while its damage in AI hands is generally lower than in your hands, it's only by a modest margin -the AI will reliably do 2 Hull damage with it, as opposed to you often being able to manage 3. The potential for it to start a fire or do minor damage to a System is also more notable, as the player has more frail (Sub)Systems to potentially care about being knocked out, and the player doesn't have the AI's automatic perfect awareness of everything going on in their ship; every once in a while you'll have a Mini Beam hit you while Sensors are down for some reason or another, and end up with a fire raging because you didn't notice its audio cue in the chaos of combat and things going very wrong as a result. The AI will always instantly know about a fire you start on their ship, and will generally prioritize putting it out, limiting the peak potential of the firestarting component in player hands.

There's some qualifiers here, where an enemy ship can sometimes end up with a kit poorly-suited to knocking down your Shield bubbles and so the Mini Beam is worthless, but those qualifiers themselves have qualifiers -the big one being that some player ships don't start with Shields. For such ships, a Mini Beam is the big threat in the early game, with only some Drones being comparably threatening... and Drones are always a rarer sight than Mini Beams until you're at the point where Mini Beams are being phased out. (At which point you've hopefully bought a Shield System...)

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Overall, beam weapons are a category that tends to look better on paper than in practice: beams consistently have high potential damage for their charge time and/or Power requirements, never miss, and do damage instantly, allowing them to preemptively knock out a wider range of weapons than most other weapons. After all, for a weapon with a projectile, firing a second sooner than the enemy doesn't actually have any possibility of preventing the enemy from firing -by the time your projectiles arrives, they've already fired. A beam weapon can potentially negate a very slightly slower-charging weapon by hitting the Weapons System.

Unfortunately, beam weapons are held back pretty heavily by the need to pop Shield bubbles before they can put in good work. This RNG-proof weapon set doesn't get to do anything until your RNG-susceptible weapons have cleared the way, and beams taking time to deliver all their damage makes it easy for you to open up an overly-brief brief window and so firing the beam ends up wasting a lot of its damage potential. Only the Mini Beam largely escapes this latter issue due to its tiny line and fast travel speed, and it's restricted to two Stealth Cruiser variants.

That said, it's worth considering keeping a single beam weapon equipped, even if you never actually power it -there's a single event in which beam weaponry provides a blue option, in which it's the clear best blue option, and where the payoff is pretty significant. The event itself can be encountered in most Sectors, so it's pretty common to encounter it at least once in a run, and two or three times isn't particularly unusual. Hilariously, even the Anti-Bio Beam and Fire Beam are valid for this, even though that makes no in-universe sense. (The event involves cutting asteroids)

Conversely, the Beam Drones and Beam Artillery are also valid, with the only difference being that the Beam Drones cost a Drone Part in the event. So the Federation Cruiser A and B don't care about this component of beam weaponry, and Drone-equipped ships care slightly less if they have a Beam Drone in their loadout.

Anyway, even though advanced edition didn't produce new beams or directly upgrade any existing beams (Contrasting with missiles gaining stun chances, for example), beams are actually one of the main weapon types to be clearly improved by advanced edition in practice. This requires a bit of an explanation of the problem being addressed.

See, one of the things that limits beam effectiveness past the very early game is an intersection of Shield bubbles caring about projectile count rather than damage on individual projectiles, Shield bubble regeneration starting the second the outermost bubble pops, and the nature of all base-game multi-shot weaponry. Say an enemy ship has 3 Shield bubbles and you have a Burst Laser II alongside a Hull Beam; we'll also just say the enemy ship has 0 evasion for this example. In that case, your Burst Laser II fires three times, popping all three Shield bubbles, thus opening the way for your Hull Beam to fire...

... for less than a second.

Yeah, by the time a third projectile arrives. a ship is normally most of the way to generating a new Shield bubble. This is a nuisance with a lot of weapons, actually, among other points being part of why it's so important to coordinate fire, but while a Heavy Laser I ends up with really tight timing that takes experience to slip in after the enemy Shields are all down but before the first replacement bubble appears, it's actually physically possible to do this; beams will have it outright impossible to slip in their full damage under those circumstances. Even the Mini Beam's short, reasonably quick sweep is too slow for this!

At the beginning of the game, with 1 Shield bubble, this issue of course doesn't exist; you just fire your beam the second their Shield pops. Once they move to two Shield bubbles, you start seeing beams lose damage, except you can mitigate it by simply firing two separate weapons simultaneously. Once they have 3 Shield bubbles, that's your entire weapon slot set committed to getting around this problem while still firing a beam, except actually several player ships cap out at three weapons total, and at 4 Shield bubbles it's just impossible with base game content to completely work around this issue. You also can't plan around assuming you can set up such conditions anyway.

Point being, as a run progresses, this issue becomes more and more glaring/unavoidable -this is actually something of a recurring issue with FTL's design, where the design has a bunch of elements that work pretty well in the extreme early game, where enemy ships have a couple weapons and 1 Shield bubble and a small crew and so on, but mechanics that worked fine at that scale have problematic implications once you go past it at all.

Now, even in the base game you can reduce this issue by using Ion weaponry. A Shield bubble layer ceasing to exist because Ionization takes away the ability to cram in enough Power to support that many Shield bubbles doesn't start the Shield recharge timer; thus, if an Ion weapon is your first shot to hit (And actually knocks their Shield System below its ability to support their current Shields, which is ultimately a big if thanks to the AI cheating on Shield Systems), you get a longer window to fire in. This is easiest to illustrate by moving our example to an enemy ship with two Shield bubbles; the Ion hits, knocking them to 1 Shield bubble, and then your Burst Laser I or whatever hits the one Shield bubble and you instantly fire your beam with the maximum window. But even at 3 and 4 Shield bubbles, the principle holds true, just... less effectively.

But it is less effective, enough so to really cut into beam effectiveness as a run goes on unless you have enough Ion to completely Ionize their Shield System. (Generally, if you reach that state quickly, you win the fight with most loadouts, though)

Thankfully, advanced edition added two new tools that help mitigate these issues. I'll be taking about each more later, so just the pertinent details here.

The first of these is flak weaponry, which can be loosely compared to multi-shot laser weaponry in many ways, with the difference that's key to this topic of having their projectiles arrive as one big bundle: thus, where a Burst Laser II knocks out three Shield bubbles over a long enough period to give the Shield significant time to recharge by the time the third shot hits, a Flak I instead pops three Shield bubbles simultaneously, at which point you just pause the game (Or be prepared otherwise) and fire the beam immediately for full effect.

The second of these tools is Hacking, which is enormously complicated but the relevant point is that you can target enemy Shields with Hacking to drain the Shields over time, with this outright reversing the normal Shield recharge rate for the duration. When backed by weaponry popping bubbles, you can have the enemy Shields zeroed out for several seconds, refusing to recharge, and once again get to fit in a full beam sweep, even against a late-game ship.

(Thankfully, both Hacking and Flak aren't negatively impacted by the AI cheating on System level, either)

As such, if you either played the game before the advanced edition update or started out doing what the game recommends of playing with advanced edition disabled and ended up turning your nose up at beams, consider giving them a second chance when playing advanced edition, especially if your run is starting with flak or Hacking or acquires them before getting a chance at a beam weapon.

I mean it when I say advanced edition is an overall improvement to the design. There's bizarre missteps, sure, but there's also bits like this where the game successfully at least partially patches a pretty major problem with the base game's design.

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Next time, we move on to the semi-secret weaponry. If you're obsessive about skipping spoilers -well. Frankly, I'm not sure why you're reading these posts, but regardless, I guess you could skip past them to flak weaponry. I'm not going to scrupulously avoid referring to the semi-secret weapons past the next post, though...

Regardless, see you then.

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