FTL Analysis: Ion Weapons
Ion weapons are weird and don't behave entirely intuitively.
The basics of what they do are straightforward to describe: they disable Systems and Subsystems without doing any actual damage, with a hit on a Shield bubble instead being directed straight to the Shields system, including that crewmembers in the Shields room can be stunned by hitting the Shield bubble. (Most Ion weapons are able to stun crew as a side effect)
The details, though, are... weird.
'Ion damage' is how much Power an Ion weapon locks out from a System... except no, against Weapons it's how many weapons are disabled by the hit (Note this is specifically Weapons; Drone Control doesn't lose control of a Drone per point of Ion damage, it just has a bar of Power usage locked out like other Systems), and against Subsystems it doesn't matter at all, they just get completely disabled by any Ion hit. Ion damage also locks out the enemy's ability to man that System or Subsystem, even if it's still partially operable; even a single Ion hit will slow down all weapon charge speed or Shield recharge by denying the enemy the ability to man the room.
Furthermore, Ion damage stacks in an odd way, with any hit against a System refreshing the Ion 'damage' timer on that System if it hasn't already timed out. Notably, this means any Ion weapon with a sufficiently fast fire rate can overcome arbitrarily large Shield bubble counts singlehandedly, which is unique to Ion weaponry. Conversely, if a non-Weapon System is ever allowed to time out its Ion damage, the entirety of accumulated Ion damage will vanish at once; among other points, this makes improbable miss streaks particularly impactful to Ion weaponry.
All this means Ion weapons are disproportionately valuable to any ship that isn't ignoring enemy Shields somehow or another, allowing even a lightly-armed ship to peck the most heavily-Shielded of enemy ships to death eventually. It also means having higher Ion damage isn't nearly so valuable as having a higher fire rate on Ion weaponry.
Do note that each Shield bubble on a ship demands 2 units of Power, and therefore Ion weapons will only negate a Shield bubble every other point of Ion damage. In an immediate sense, they are thus actually worse at Shield-popping than lasers are, in the sense that two laser hits will pop two Shield bubbles and potentially let a third laser hit the ship underneath, whereas two shots of 1 Ion damage apiece will vanish only one Shield bubble in the here and now, same as one hit of 1 Ion damage.
Oh, and Ion weapons do double their listed damage against Zoltan supershields. They don't do any System locking or anything when hitting a Zoltan supershield, though, so Zoltan supershields are still unusually protective against Ion weapons.
Basic Ion Weapons
Ion Blast
30
: 1
Charge: 8 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage, with a 10% chance to stun crewmembers in affected room.
The most basic, generic Ion weapon, the Ion Blast is solid at its job, not clearly beat out by any other Ion weapon or otherwise overly-deficient. It is in fact arguably the best Ion weapon by default, particularly in the base game where the competition is very limited.
Solidly good, worth buying in Stores.
The basics of what they do are straightforward to describe: they disable Systems and Subsystems without doing any actual damage, with a hit on a Shield bubble instead being directed straight to the Shields system, including that crewmembers in the Shields room can be stunned by hitting the Shield bubble. (Most Ion weapons are able to stun crew as a side effect)
The details, though, are... weird.
'Ion damage' is how much Power an Ion weapon locks out from a System... except no, against Weapons it's how many weapons are disabled by the hit (Note this is specifically Weapons; Drone Control doesn't lose control of a Drone per point of Ion damage, it just has a bar of Power usage locked out like other Systems), and against Subsystems it doesn't matter at all, they just get completely disabled by any Ion hit. Ion damage also locks out the enemy's ability to man that System or Subsystem, even if it's still partially operable; even a single Ion hit will slow down all weapon charge speed or Shield recharge by denying the enemy the ability to man the room.
Furthermore, Ion damage stacks in an odd way, with any hit against a System refreshing the Ion 'damage' timer on that System if it hasn't already timed out. Notably, this means any Ion weapon with a sufficiently fast fire rate can overcome arbitrarily large Shield bubble counts singlehandedly, which is unique to Ion weaponry. Conversely, if a non-Weapon System is ever allowed to time out its Ion damage, the entirety of accumulated Ion damage will vanish at once; among other points, this makes improbable miss streaks particularly impactful to Ion weaponry.
All this means Ion weapons are disproportionately valuable to any ship that isn't ignoring enemy Shields somehow or another, allowing even a lightly-armed ship to peck the most heavily-Shielded of enemy ships to death eventually. It also means having higher Ion damage isn't nearly so valuable as having a higher fire rate on Ion weaponry.
Do note that each Shield bubble on a ship demands 2 units of Power, and therefore Ion weapons will only negate a Shield bubble every other point of Ion damage. In an immediate sense, they are thus actually worse at Shield-popping than lasers are, in the sense that two laser hits will pop two Shield bubbles and potentially let a third laser hit the ship underneath, whereas two shots of 1 Ion damage apiece will vanish only one Shield bubble in the here and now, same as one hit of 1 Ion damage.
Oh, and Ion weapons do double their listed damage against Zoltan supershields. They don't do any System locking or anything when hitting a Zoltan supershield, though, so Zoltan supershields are still unusually protective against Ion weapons.
Basic Ion Weapons
Ion Blast
30: 1Charge: 8 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage, with a 10% chance to stun crewmembers in affected room.
The most basic, generic Ion weapon, the Ion Blast is solid at its job, not clearly beat out by any other Ion weapon or otherwise overly-deficient. It is in fact arguably the best Ion weapon by default, particularly in the base game where the competition is very limited.
Solidly good, worth buying in Stores.
A trick if you want to be a little lazy that works well early in a run is to turn on autofire and set your Ion weapon(ry) to target the enemy Weapon System; this will result in them effectively alternating between disabling Shields and disabling Weapons without requiring you to micromanage them, as they'll disable Shields by being intercepted by the Shield bubble, then hit the Weapons room you're actually targeting, then re-disable Shields from the Shield bubble returning, and so on.
Ion Blast Mk. II
75
: 3
Charge: 4 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage, with a 10% chance to stun crewmembers in affected room.
On ships with a sub-standard three weapon slots, this is an excellent option, able to effortlessly self-stack and rapidly knock out the enemy Shields indefinitely all by itself.
On ships with the full four slots, though, a pair of basic Ion Blasts set up to alternate firing when at the halfway mark of each other are the exact same thing, but using one less Power. Given you only have 8 power to work with in Weapons in total, period, four-slot ships are often more concerned with Power efficiency than slot efficiency.
Two basic Ion Blasts even costs less Scrap before accounting for not needing to upgrade Weapons and the Reactor as much!
Of course, even on four-slot ships you may end up running an Ion Blast Mk. II for lack of other options, but if you can arrange to sell it and replace it with a pair of basic Ion Blasts, that's usually the better choice.
Ion Blast Mk. II
75: 3Charge: 4 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage, with a 10% chance to stun crewmembers in affected room.
On ships with a sub-standard three weapon slots, this is an excellent option, able to effortlessly self-stack and rapidly knock out the enemy Shields indefinitely all by itself.
On ships with the full four slots, though, a pair of basic Ion Blasts set up to alternate firing when at the halfway mark of each other are the exact same thing, but using one less Power. Given you only have 8 power to work with in Weapons in total, period, four-slot ships are often more concerned with Power efficiency than slot efficiency.
Two basic Ion Blasts even costs less Scrap before accounting for not needing to upgrade Weapons and the Reactor as much!
Of course, even on four-slot ships you may end up running an Ion Blast Mk. II for lack of other options, but if you can arrange to sell it and replace it with a pair of basic Ion Blasts, that's usually the better choice.
Either way, note that two properly-spaced Ion Blasts or one Ion Blast Mk. II are enough to fairly reliable overcome any amount of enemy Shielding even with late-game evasion rates. There's always a chance you miss enough times in a row they break out of the lock, but it's not particularly expected unless the battle really drags, which it shouldn't.
It's also worth pointing out that since the AI won't deliberately stagger fire and gets absurdly generous ship designs, an Ion Blast Mk. II is functionally better than a pair of Ion Blasts for the AI.
Heavy Ion
45
: 2
Charge: 13 seconds.
Does 2 Ion damage, with a 20% chance to stun crewmembers in affected rooms.
Junk.
It can be okay if aimed at enemy Weapons successfully, letting you disable two weapons with a single hit and thus draining their charge, and it's also actually one of your better options for knocking out a Zoltan supershield quickly, but trading away rate of fire for damage is, as previously alluded to, a raw deal for Ion weapons. The Heavy Ion can't self-stack on its own unless you have an experienced crewmember manning Weapons and the Automated Reloader Augment on your ship... and even then, it'll be very sensitive to missing.
So: not completely worthless, but niche at best and mostly just bad. You should usually endeavor to replace it if you loot it, and should only rarely consider buying one.
Heavy Ion
45: 2Charge: 13 seconds.
Does 2 Ion damage, with a 20% chance to stun crewmembers in affected rooms.
Junk.
It can be okay if aimed at enemy Weapons successfully, letting you disable two weapons with a single hit and thus draining their charge, and it's also actually one of your better options for knocking out a Zoltan supershield quickly, but trading away rate of fire for damage is, as previously alluded to, a raw deal for Ion weapons. The Heavy Ion can't self-stack on its own unless you have an experienced crewmember manning Weapons and the Automated Reloader Augment on your ship... and even then, it'll be very sensitive to missing.
So: not completely worthless, but niche at best and mostly just bad. You should usually endeavor to replace it if you loot it, and should only rarely consider buying one.
This is one of the less confusing examples of an 'elite garbage' weapon in FTL, in that there's an obvious framing that makes the Heavy Ion sound like it's cleanly better than a pair of Ion Blasts, and said framing is even mostly accurate; it does cost less Scrap, cost the same Power, have basically the same Stun rate per volley... the only part of such a framing that's simply false is the charge rate element, where it can be tempting to say that two Ion Blasts require a total of 16 seconds to charge to make the Heavy Ion sound like it even has a better charge rate. If FTL were a game where you could only apply charge to one weapon at a time, even this part actually would be true.
Anyway, the other part of why I'm relatively sympathetic to this case is that the crux of the problem is the not-immediately-obvious point that Ion mechanics are inherently stacked to favor fire rate over per-shot damage. I would readily buy that the devs genuinely did not recognize that implication of the rules in time for release; that's exactly the kind of rule implication that's easy to overlook.
So it's not ideal this falls into the 'elite garbage' pattern FTL is so prone to, but where a lot of 'elite' weapons feel like they outright have to be intentionally unviable (Seriously, why is the Burst Laser III so bad?), the Heavy Ion genuinely looks like non-obvious rules implications tripping up the devs.
Mind, the advanced edition update makes me doubt they ever recognized this aspect of the design, which I'm a lot less sympathetic to... so let's get into the advanced edition content.
Advanced Edition-Exclusives
Ion Stunner
35
: 1
Charge: 10 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage and is guaranteed to stun crewmembers in affected room.
Take your basic Ion Blast, slightly reduce its fire speed, but make its Stun guaranteed.
For pure Shield-suppressing work, the Ion Stunner is directly inferior to the Ion Blast, but if you're inclined to actually do damage to the enemy Shields it hinders the enemy's ability to perform repair, and so in practice can be actually pretty straightforwardly better at suppressing Shields... unless you're dealing with an Autoship, anyway. (You might expect Autoship repairs to be suppressed by Ion damage, but no, their repairs can only be stopped by blowing the ship up entirely)
It's particularly useful if you're using Lanius to board enemy ships. Normally it's bad to be tossing stuns in the middle of a boarding action, since circumstances tend to conspire to make it so time favors whoever is being boarded, but since Lanius overcome their enemy in no small part via their passive de-oxygenation effect, stunning everyone in a room is easily to their advantage, and in fact may result in them getting kills on enemies who would otherwise have fled to the Medical Bay before they could be finished off.
In general, the Ion Stunner is a solid weapon, worth holding onto and using. Even if you have multiple Ion Blasts, the Ion Stunner can be worth keeping on hand rather than selling, in case you decide to swap it back in later. Among other points, it can be a big help when fighting the Rebel Flagship, mass-stunning the crew they invariably send to repair their Shield System so you can either make actual headway on damaging the Shield or kill off crew instead of them fleeing to the Medical Bay.
Advanced Edition-Exclusives
Ion Stunner
35: 1Charge: 10 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage and is guaranteed to stun crewmembers in affected room.
Take your basic Ion Blast, slightly reduce its fire speed, but make its Stun guaranteed.
For pure Shield-suppressing work, the Ion Stunner is directly inferior to the Ion Blast, but if you're inclined to actually do damage to the enemy Shields it hinders the enemy's ability to perform repair, and so in practice can be actually pretty straightforwardly better at suppressing Shields... unless you're dealing with an Autoship, anyway. (You might expect Autoship repairs to be suppressed by Ion damage, but no, their repairs can only be stopped by blowing the ship up entirely)
It's particularly useful if you're using Lanius to board enemy ships. Normally it's bad to be tossing stuns in the middle of a boarding action, since circumstances tend to conspire to make it so time favors whoever is being boarded, but since Lanius overcome their enemy in no small part via their passive de-oxygenation effect, stunning everyone in a room is easily to their advantage, and in fact may result in them getting kills on enemies who would otherwise have fled to the Medical Bay before they could be finished off.
In general, the Ion Stunner is a solid weapon, worth holding onto and using. Even if you have multiple Ion Blasts, the Ion Stunner can be worth keeping on hand rather than selling, in case you decide to swap it back in later. Among other points, it can be a big help when fighting the Rebel Flagship, mass-stunning the crew they invariably send to repair their Shield System so you can either make actual headway on damaging the Shield or kill off crew instead of them fleeing to the Medical Bay.
It's also the one and only case of stun being more appreciated in player hands than in AI hands. In player hands, the Ion Stunner being a reliable option for stunning opens up a bunch of options in terms of eg stunning enemy crew and then launching a bomb into their room to finish them off instead of worrying about them leaving the room before it detonates, or stunning enemy crew just before you teleport in your boarders so you get some free crew damage in, or stunning enemy crew trying to flee to the Medical Bay so you can run them down and finish them off...
... whereas in AI hands it basically just means the Ion Stunner will reliably stun crew in the Shields System as it impacts your Shields; anytime Shields are down, the AI random-targeting behavior means it will often be firing into empty rooms, or at least rooms empty of crew (eg hitting Oxygen), and so only a relatively small portion of shots will have their stun infliction meaningfully exist. In practice the Ion Stunner tends to noticeably lower the true performance of a ship relative to any other Ion weapon the AI is willing to equip; even a Heavy Ion will tend to do better simply because the Ion Stunner doesn't fire fast enough to expect to self-stack in AI hands.
Ion Charger
50
: 2
Charge: 6 seconds. (18 seconds for a full volley)
Can stockpile up to 3 charges. Each shot does 1 Ion damage.
Ion Chargers are, bizarrely, the most straightforwardly good charge weapon in the game, and indeed are one of the best Ion weapons in general. They're worse than a pair of basic Ion Blasts if you can spare the weapon slots, but otherwise? They're reasonably Power-efficient, they're slot-efficient, they're actually Scrap-cheaper than a pair of Ion Blasts, and they fire fast enough they can fully suppress Shields simply by being left on autofire with no micromanagement. The stockpile effect isn't particularly useful, but they're sufficiently solid anyway that this isn't a strike to their viability. (A strike against the game's design, but not in a way that's particularly impactful to the actual player experience)
Indeed, they're the best balance of Power efficiency, slot efficiency, and actual performance of all Ion weapons.
Ion Charger
50: 2Charge: 6 seconds. (18 seconds for a full volley)
Can stockpile up to 3 charges. Each shot does 1 Ion damage.
Ion Chargers are, bizarrely, the most straightforwardly good charge weapon in the game, and indeed are one of the best Ion weapons in general. They're worse than a pair of basic Ion Blasts if you can spare the weapon slots, but otherwise? They're reasonably Power-efficient, they're slot-efficient, they're actually Scrap-cheaper than a pair of Ion Blasts, and they fire fast enough they can fully suppress Shields simply by being left on autofire with no micromanagement. The stockpile effect isn't particularly useful, but they're sufficiently solid anyway that this isn't a strike to their viability. (A strike against the game's design, but not in a way that's particularly impactful to the actual player experience)
Indeed, they're the best balance of Power efficiency, slot efficiency, and actual performance of all Ion weapons.
It's weird. Nice in this local case, but still weird. FTL just... doesn't seem to have a coherent model of how to handle weapons, not even the relatively local consideration of individual archetypes like Chain or Charge. Usually games have a coherent model on such topics, even if the model is a bad fit to the game's actual reality. I'm simply confused by this degree of incoherence.
Chain Ion
55
: 3
Charge: 14 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage, adding an additional Ion damage each time it fires, to a maximum of 4 Ion damage per shot.
Horrendous junk.
4 Ion damage per hit when fully wound up is nice and all, but it takes forever to get there and the fire rate is far too slow to self-stack, even against sitting ducks. If you have literally no other Ion options it can be worth running to try to help push down enemy Shields, I guess, but 99% of the time you should sell it as fast as possible if you loot it, and you certainly shouldn't bother to buy one from a Store.
I don't really get why this exists, given how obviously terrible it is. It's especially weird since it was added by the advanced edition update, and is inconsistent with how all other chain-fire weapons work, where they get fire speed improvements, which would be great for an Ion weapon. So.. why?... what possible thought process could arrive here? I'm genuinely having difficulty thinking of an explanation that isn't some form of 'they wanted it to be unusably bad'.
Chain Ion
55: 3Charge: 14 seconds.
Does 1 Ion damage, adding an additional Ion damage each time it fires, to a maximum of 4 Ion damage per shot.
Horrendous junk.
4 Ion damage per hit when fully wound up is nice and all, but it takes forever to get there and the fire rate is far too slow to self-stack, even against sitting ducks. If you have literally no other Ion options it can be worth running to try to help push down enemy Shields, I guess, but 99% of the time you should sell it as fast as possible if you loot it, and you certainly shouldn't bother to buy one from a Store.
I don't really get why this exists, given how obviously terrible it is. It's especially weird since it was added by the advanced edition update, and is inconsistent with how all other chain-fire weapons work, where they get fire speed improvements, which would be great for an Ion weapon. So.. why?... what possible thought process could arrive here? I'm genuinely having difficulty thinking of an explanation that isn't some form of 'they wanted it to be unusably bad'.
The AI never uses Chain Ions, either, so the fact that it exists barely matters. I have mixed feelings about this given the Chain Ion would actually be serviceable in AI hands; on the one hand, it would be yet another weapon that's far more useful in AI hands than in player hands, but on the other hand at least it existing would be reasonably meaningful instead of it just being a trap for learning players who reasonably assume that surely it must have an actual place in the design.
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All the weapons in this post unlock exactly one blue option. The event in question can show up in almost any Sector, so it's not uncommon to encounter it multiple times in a run, and Ion weaponry is one of the three best solutions -the others being having an Engi deal with it, or having level 3 Cloaking and using that. As such, above and beyond the combat utility Ion weaponry brings, it's great to hold onto one and keep it equipped just in case you get this event -the payout is really good.
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Overall, Ion weaponry has a workman-like competency to its design; it's not perfect, but aside the wildly bizarre case of the Chain Ion there's no particularly egregious problems here. No cases where there's a vast gulf in performance in AI hands vs player hands. No cases of a weapon's numbers being self-evidently unusably bad. (The Chain Ion's issue is the inexplicable decision to make it ramp up damage instead of fire speed, not that the numbers are directly comparable to and inferior to 'lesser' competition) Certainly nothing like how missiles as a category has fundamentally different functionality in AI hands than in player hands.
It's honestly a pleasant surprise; scifi games are broadly fond of 'ion' weapons being a non-lethal tool for disabling shields/enemy technology in general, and what I'm used to seeing is that such 'ion' weapons tend to be inherently without merit. The details of why they're without merit varies, but broadly they tend to be a very narrow tool whose primary job isn't very valuable and which they aren't even particularly exceptional at. (eg in games where 'ion' weaponry is anti-shield weaponry, they don't do ten times the shield damage of equivalents in other categories, but more like 50% more damage)
FTL having an 'ion' weapon category that is actually basically functional is, strangely enough, a notable bar to have successfully passed.
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Next time, we move on to Bombs.
See you then.
FTL's ion weapons is probably my favourite implementation of the concept from any sci-fi game! It's effectively just "armor corrosion" damage from fantasy games, but I quite like the specifics of how it works.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to make up a reason for chain ion working this odd way, I would say the devs tried giving the "default" version to the AI, and it occasionally lead to soft stalemates where the player can't do anything but the AI can't kill the player either (their other weapons are offline for some reason or another). They tried the final version instead, and the problem went away (because the weapon is now garbage), and didn't look back into it after they removed it from enemy ship generation altogether. But any other guess is as good as this one.
I mean, armor corrosion is accurate enough when looking at how Ion weapons interact with Shields in particular, but Ion does do a wider variety of things, and in fact part of how it's reasonably compelling is that it's support tool that does more than one potential thing in a reasonably organic way. (Support effects in games are often either very narrow, as in 'this Spell lowers enemy Armor, and does nothing else', or feel very arbitrary in their grab-bag-ness, as in 'this Spell does like a dozen different things depending on what you target it at, all of which were arbitrarily defined by the developer')
DeleteI'm not sure how a soft stalemate would happen involving the Chain Ion. One of FTL's few clear successes is that it's a game where it's really, really hard to end up in a futile 'can't win but can only lose by deliberately throwing the fight' situation -it's still possible, but it requires really finicky setups where both ships have crew alive but too injured to do repairs/make the run to the Medical Bay, and have all their offensive Systems disabled, and have breaches in specific blocking off everything that could be repaired to get back in the fight, which is a collective picture that is extraordinarily difficult to have actually happen -you'd, what, get a double-knockout on Weapons, where you both fire a volley and have those volleys knock out each others' Weapons while creating breaches? Having already knocked out and breached the Medical Bay, or being on literally the one Slug Cruiser that starts with no Medical Bay and no Cloning Bay. A rapid-fire version of the Chain Ion in AI hands would inevitably lock up your Shields entirely, which would mean other tools would start killing you; that's not a foundation for a softlock.