FTL Analysis: Laser Weapons

Lasers are your generic workhorse weapon and so I'm going to take a moment to talk about Normal damage.

Normal damage is, of course, the default damage done by the majority of weapons. Each point of Normal damage equates to four things: firstly, it's the amount of Hull damage done when the weapon successfully hits any room on the enemy ship. Second, it's the amount of System/Subsystem damage done when hitting a room containing a System or Subsystem, reducing the effectiveness of that System or Subsystem so that it behaves as if it were a lower level (eg doing 1 damage to a level 2 System causes it to function as if it were level 1) until crew has bothered to repair it. Thirdly, each point of Normal damage inflicts 15 crew HP damage to every crewmember in the impacted room, potentially killing crewmembers. Lastly, when hitting a Zoltan Supershield it's the amount of Supershield pips removed by the hit, though note that 'overkill' damage will simply be wasted. (That is, a 2 Normal damage attack will remove 2 pips of Zoltan Supershield, but if a 2 Normal damage attack hits a Zoltan Supershield that has only 1 pip left, the extra point of damage won't spill over to the regular Shield or the ship underneath the Supershield)

Shields, conversely, completely ignore the exact damage of Normal damage attacks, aside one unintuitive exception I'll be getting into in a later post. Aside that one exception, Normal damage attacks always either completely bypass the Shield or are blocked by Shields but temporarily remove one Shield layer per hit. That is, a Burst Laser I fires two shots in rapid succession: against an enemy with one Shield, the first laser shot will hit the Shield, vanish while removing the Shield bubble, and then the second laser shot coming right behind it will hit the ship instead. Meanwhile, the Heavy Laser II also fires two shots but has those shots do 2 Normal damage apiece, and so it will have the first shot just pop the one Shield bubble, its extra damage only benefiting that second shot that hits the ship, and if instead the ship has two Shield bubbles both of these two-shot laser weapons will pop both bubbles and do no damage to the ship underneath; the Heavy Laser II won't pop both bubbles with its first shot or anything, giving it strictly worse performance against Shield bubbles than a Burst Laser I. (Because it takes more Power and takes longer to charge while getting no benefit against Shield bubbles)

We'll get to other damage types as we get to them, but I'll note right away that other damage types are uniformly more specialized in their duties; a Normal damage weapon can disable Systems, kill crew, pop Shield bubbles, and of course actually kill the enemy ship by depleting Hull, where other damage types can only do some portion of these things. It's also worth noting that Hull damage is done almost exclusively through Normal damage -the only other source of Hull damage is for a System or Subsystem to be reduced to 0 HP, which will do 1 Hull damage... and this is only true if the damage source is either a fire raging in the room or boarders attacking the room. Other tools that can remove (Sub)System HP are completely incapable of inflicting Hull damage, even when knocking a (Sub)System to 0 HP.

As such, Normal damage is important to winning fights unless you're specifically going for a crewkill. As Autoships and the Rebel Flagship are both impossible to defeat via crewkill, Normal damage sources are essentially mandatory. Don't be so enthusiastic about trying out other damage types that you outright chuck your Normal damage sources, as doing so is probably dooming your run.

Another point I should get into since it's highly relevant to the Laser category; the AI plays by different rules than the player when it comes to burst-fire weaponry! The player designates a room, and a given volley's shots will individually either completely miss the ship or hit the room that was picked for that volley. (Ignoring Shields for the purposes of this explanation) The AI's volleys have completely random targeting, including that individual shots within a volley can and will hit entirely different rooms. This is overall an advantage for the AI; it does mean they can't deliberately push to cripple an individual System, but the player can't boost Weapons and Shields as far as the AI anyway so that matters a lot less than you'd think; the player doing 8 damage to a ship's Weapons may only knock out half the enemy ship's weapons in the late game. A player ship suffering 8 damage to Weapons has no weapons remaining. Similarly, an enemy ship with 4 Shield bubbles may be able to shrug off 2 damage to the Shields System without consequence, and 3 damage is only guaranteed to knock out at least 1 Shield bubble, where for the player even 1 damage is 1 Shield bubble lost if they have 4 Shield bubbles, and 3 damage is 2 Shield bubbles lost, guaranteed.

Meanwhile, the AI's random targeting lets them cripple weak-but-important Systems and Subsystems without 'wasting' most of a volley on that attack; if the player fires a Burst Laser II on the enemy's unupgraded Oxygen (Assuming Shields are down for this example), that's 2 hits that did no System damage. If the AI's Burst Laser II knocks out your Oxygen... that may be happening simultaneously to knocking out Shields and disabling a weapon!

This is particularly blatant in the early game, where most Systems and Subsystems are at levels 1 or 2, with only Weapons and Engines being at all likely to be higher, but it doesn't properly go away in the late game. Yes, a late-game ship firing a single Burst Laser II is no longer capable of completely knocking out three Systems/Subsystems with one volley, but late-game AI ships generally have 4 weapons, probably using more than 8 Power; you can literally see stuff like two Burst Laser IIIs alongside a couple of bomb launchers. As such, volleys that get through your Shields late in the game are generally either a lot of shots, or much harder-hitting shots; a lone Breach Missile, for example, will completely wipe any Subsystem and several Systems even if they're fully upgraded.

This random-targeting is also very advantageous when it comes to weapon side effects, particularly setting fires and, less reliably, stunning crew. A Heavy Laser II triggering stuns on both hits is usually useless for the player, because stuns don't meaningfully stack. In the AI's hands, that 4% chance means that every once in a great while two different rooms will have their crew stunned at once. Similarly, a Burst Laser II getting the 0.1% chance to trigger fires on all three shots will, in the player's hands, probably be outright wasting the third trigger (Fire triggers don't 'spill over' into other rooms, many rooms can only contain 2 fires, and even with a 4-tile room an individual hit can generate 2 fires), where for the AI it will suddenly mean you have fires in three different places, potentially making it virtually impossible to firefight properly.

It does mean the AI regularly wastes shots on empty rooms, so usually the AI firing bursts will do less System/Subsystem damage than the player would with the same weaponry... but the AI can spike meaningful damage or danger far more than the player can, and ship layout and development status is an important factor: aggravatingly, the more Systems/Subsystems you install, the greater the odds of the AI hitting a non-empty room!

Similarly, a non-obvious implication is that an element of ship quality is their room count, with more rooms leading to better average performance. Unfortunately, player ship room count is allowed to vary pretty substantially; as high as 19 rooms, and as low as 13 rooms. While most player ships hover in the range of 15-17 rooms, that still means there's a pretty significant divide between the worst-off ships and the best-off ships on this count; 13 is around 2/3rds of 19 (Half a whole number over, specifically), which means that ships with 13 rooms have a roughly 50% increase in the odds of any given System or Subsystem being targeted over a ship with 19 rooms. Over the course of a run, that matters, even if on any given volley you can't clearly say the smaller room count was harmful, and unfortunately the game itself seems to have no recognition of this fact. (Among other elements of ship design the game doesn't seem to recognize as important, but which absolutely do contribute to some ships being awful)

Also, some icon explanations:


Scrap. How much Scrap it costs to purchase the weapon from a Store. Note that selling is simply this value halved and rounded down. (eg a Scrap cost of 45 would result in the thing selling for 22) Scrap being, of course, FTL's money concept.


Power. The number next to this is how much Power is required to operate the weapon. This also defines how powerful your Weapon System needs to be to be able to operate the weapon, as the Weapon System bounds how many units of Power can be applied to weaponry; a weapon that requires 4 Power cannot be powered at all if your Weapon System is below level 4, for example.

So moving on to our most generic sub-category of Laser...

Burst Lasers


Burst Laser I
50
: 2
Charge: 11 seconds.
Fires two shots per volley for 1 Normal damage apiece with a 10% chance to set the room on fire per shot.

Your basic bad Laser weapon, which you will prefer to displace with other, better weapons as you go if you can.

This isn't to say it's particularly terrible. Its primary issue is that the Burst Laser II exists and is 100% superior, and that's not really fair to the Burst Laser I; the Burst Laser II is one of the best weapons of the game by a wide margin, and deviates from the game's usual design rubrics of more 'elite' weapons tending to demand more Power and have noticeably longer delays between volleys such that comparing two weapons of similar physics will frequently result in an identical or worse Power-to-damage/shots ratio on the more 'elite' weapon and/or a worse damage/shots-per-second ratio.

On its own merits, the Burst Laser I is a perfectly serviceable weapon, with a decent fire rate, decent Power efficiency, and decent ability to deal damage/pop Shield bubbles. There are other weapons that perform better in specific ways -the Hull Smasher I is clearly superior at depleting Hull if hitting empty rooms, for example- but if it weren't for the Burst Laser II existing I'd rate the Burst Laser I as a perfectly good weapon to take into the endgame, valuable for its versatility and lack of serious flaws.

Alas, the Burst Laser II does exist, so in a lot of runs you will replace it as soon as possible, if at all possible.

Speaking of...


Burst Laser II
80
: 2
Charge: 12 seconds.
Fires three shots per volley for 1 Normal damage apiece with a 10% chance to set the room on fire per shot.

One of the best weapons of the game. If you get a hold of two of these, that right there is enough to give you decent odds of beating the Rebel Flagship and winning the game!

Indeed, you can readily see that it's almost completely superior to the Burst Laser I; same Power requirement, very slightly slower charge rate, and in exchange you get 50% more shots. This is actually pretty unusual for FTL; most 'higher tier' weapons jack up the Power requirement and raise the charge period by so much it's not necessarily even better damage-per-second (Or shots-per-second), which is rather unfortunate. The final result is that a lot of FTL's most powerful-looking weapons are somewhere on a continuum from 'absolute garbage you should more or less never use' to 'potentially worth using if you loot it, maybe, but probably not worth purchasing'.

This has a bunch of unfortunate consequences.

Right away, it unequivocally pushes the game more towards your success or failure hinging pretty heavily on whether the RNG feels like being nice or not, rather than the emphasis being placed on player skill. It honestly doesn't matter how good you are at the game if you pick one of the ships that can't take on the Rebel Flagship with its starting conditions and then the RNG only gives you the worst of the weapons: you will lose in such a case. Conversely, a run that gets gifted a couple Burst Laser IIs for free is basically set; you don't even need more than bare minimum competency for that to get you to the Rebel Flagship all by itself. (You'll still need to know what you're doing as far as fighting the Rebel Flagship itself, though... but a pair of Burst Laser IIs helps a lot)

It also means a depressing amount of developer effort was basically wasted: FTL has an impressively huge range of weapons on paper, but you should shun a notable fraction of them. And even the less bad ones still merit shunning if you've gotten a hold of enough Actually Good weapons. As enemy ships will never spawn with a notable fraction of weapons... there really are a lot of weapons where removing them from the game would basically just improve it.

(Or they could be re-tuned to be actually worth using, but that formulation isn't quite so good at illustrating how deeply bad these weapons are, and especially how problematic their existence in their current form is)

Anyway, the Burst Laser II is great, and usually the only actually difficult question involved with it is whether you can spare the Scrap to cover its high price. Sometimes your ship will end up kitted out with such a great set of tools that cramming in a Burst Laser II isn't a straightforward improvement, but this is a rarity. It's great at popping Shields, great at doing Hull damage, all for a very affordable 2 Power, with a good enough charge rate it'll get the jump on a wide variety of enemy weapons, which can lead to you taking less damage because you hit the enemy Weapons System before a Hull Missile could launch, that kind of thing.

There's very few weapons that come close to the Burst Laser II's performance, and still fewer that can be accurately described as overall better than it. If you loot it, you're probably equipping it. If you see it in a Store, usually the question isn't 'is this worth buying instead of something else?' but rather is 'do I have enough Scrap and/or sellable assets to afford it?'

It's just that good.


Burst Laser III
95
: 4
Charge: 19 seconds.
Fires five shots per volley for 1 Normal damage apiece.

No, the Burst Laser III in particular cannot set fires. No, I don't know why; it's not like it needed more disadvantages.

Where the Burst Laser II was an unusual example of a fairly clean improvement to a 'lesser' weapon type, the Burst Laser III is much more normal for FTL, which is to say it's frustratingly bad. It takes forever to charge, hogs a lot of Power, costs a lot of Scrap to buy, and is only sort-of-impressive-looking in a metaphorical vacuum.


The fact that it has poor shot value for both Power and charge times is particularly baffling. It's pretty obvious that FTL is operating on the idea that 'big' weapons justify themselves on the basis of Shield penetration. A Laser that fires exactly one shot can never hope to damage a Shielded ship on its own unless it has a really high rate of fire, where a Laser that fires two shots can do 1 damage per volley to a ship with 1 Shield bubble... but the way FTL is designed, this only really holds up if you look at weapons in isolation. Yes, a Burst Laser II can't damage a ship with 3 Shield bubbles, where the Burst Laser III can do damage even through 4 Shield bubbles...

... but the actual comparison is one Burst Laser III to two Burst Laser IIs (In terms of Power needs), which fire roughly 50% more often and fire an additional shot per volley while being less vulnerable to damage to the Weapons System, including from Ion attacks. The only disadvantage the two Burst Laser IIs have is that they cost more to purchase in Stores in total.

Now, to be entirely fair, the Burst Laser II is one of the best, most efficient weapons in the game. Using it to make my point is a bit misleading of how severe the issue is, and one could point out that two Burst Laser Is also uses as much Power as a Burst Laser III while having fewer shots per volley and indeed per Power...

... but this actually still functions as an example of the problem! A late-game player ship is very likely to have their Weapons System upgraded to 6; past 6, Scrap costs spike significantly, while the payoff hasn't gone up any, meaning runs often have no reason to go past Weapons 6. At that point you're really talking a Burst Laser III alongside a Burst Laser I vs three Burst Laser Is. A volley of 7 shots is nice and all, but to actually properly penetrate enemy Shields you'll need to synchronize the weapons, which means firing at roughly the speed of the slowest-charging one... which means your 1 Burst Laser 1's good charge time is useless until you've knocked out enemy Shields. Meanwhile, the ship with three Burst Laser Is is firing more than 50% more often and perfectly able to tear through Shields. In short order it will have knocked out the enemy Shields System and just plain be doing more damage per second, having been less vulnerable to being crippled by enemy fire before having a chance to fire itself.

This being true when the Burst Laser I is one of the less good weapons of the game!

Again: this isn't atypical. If a weapon requires 3 Power, it's probably a bit iffy. If it requires 4 Power, it's probably actively bad. If it takes 15 seconds or longer to charge a shot, it's probably not very good, or at least a bit niche. Even if you get it for completely free... it's often not worth the effort of trying to fit it into your weapons setup.

As far as the Burst Laser III in particular... it's extremely bad. You should generally only use it if you've had extraordinarily bad luck with opportunities to get better. Even ships with only 3 slots for weapons have a hard time justifying it, as it technically being slot efficient doesn't really matter when it has a horrible fire rate and egregious Power demands. It doesn't even have side effects!

I just don't get what the devs were thinking here.

Heavy Lasers


Heavy Laser I
50
: 1
Charge: 9 seconds.
Fires one shot per volley for 2 Normal damage, with a 30% chance to set the room on fire, a 30% chance to breach, and a 20% chance to stun crewmembers in the room.

Bizarrely, the Heavy Laser I can never cause a breach and fire simultaneously. It specifically rolls for the fire chance first, and then if that fails only then rolls the breach chance, meaning the actual breach chance is more like a 21% chance. (Because fire triggers will preempt almost a third of breach rolls) Most weapons roll every added effect simultaneously, no conflict whatsoever. I've no idea what could possibly be the point of this.

While we're on a weapon that can start fires and open breaches, it should be emphasized that in both cases there's no 'spillover' if you roll a fire/breach in a room that's completely filled up with the relevant hazard. That is, if you fired three Heavy Laser Is into a 1x2 room and they happened to all roll their fire chance, this wouldn't overflow fires into adjacent rooms. This is particularly easy to notice with breaches, as a breach roll triggering causes a distinctive and very loud noise without regard to if anything actually resulted: thus, with upgraded/manned Sensors, you can see and hear three shots hit a 1x2 room, each produce the breach sound, but only produce the two breaches. Notably, breach and fire chances can't 'refresh' fires/breaches that are partially dealt with; if an enemy crewmember has mostly closed a breach in a 1x2 room that currently has two breaches, inflicting a breach won't cause the mostly-closed breach to reset to fully open, it'll do nothing aside making the breach sound effect play.

As such, it's better to try and spread around breach and fire-causing effects, particularly the more reliable ones, or at least be willing to aim your following shots elsewhere if you can see that eg the enemy's 2x2 Shields room has 4 breaches already.

As for the Heavy Laser I itself, it's our first illustration of damage and Shield-popping capacity not correlating: a Heavy Laser I shot that hits a Shield bubble will pop one Shield bubble and vanish. Put more clearly, hitting a Shield bubble with a Heavy Laser I shot is wasting the Heavy Laser I's potential.

Nonetheless, the Heavy Laser I is a decent weapon. It only costing 1 Power makes it one of the easiest weapons in the game to slip into your arsenal; this alone is actually incredibly useful until quite late in a run, allowing for a smoother, more immediate return on your investments. Straightforward and obvious is the immediate process of looting or buying one; you get to upgrade Weapons once, presumably upgrade the Reactor once, and then immediately install it and benefit from it. Less obvious is how it actually helps with more Power-intense weapons; say you have a Heavy Laser I and loot a Burst Laser II. Instead of needing to upgrade Weapons and the Reactor twice before you get any benefit from the Burst Laser II, you have the option of upgrading once, swapping out the Heavy Laser I for the Burst Laser II to immediately benefit from the Burst Laser II, and then later upgrading again and slotting the Heavy Laser I right back in. Even for less clearly good weapons this is a useful option to keep in mind; a Burst Laser I, for example, can be worth swapping in if your current problem is that you need more ability to pop Shield bubbles.

All of this would apply even if the Heavy Laser I were otherwise a poor weapon, but it's actually one of the more decent weapons on its own merits, albeit requiring proper support to achieve its potential -and since it only requires 1 Power, it's not that hard to support it, making that qualifier pretty mild. It's straight-up one of the best weapons at stripping Hull off for the Power and especially for the charge time -surprisingly few weapons cleanly beat its charge time of 9 seconds- and is also pretty good at crippling key Systems in the process just in terms of raw damage. That it then has a 50~% chance of either starting a fire or opening a breach means it's even better at System damage than it first seems, as it will pretty regularly create a distraction the enemy has to clear up before they can start on repairing the damage you just did -and if you're lucky enough to get a stun alongside the fire or breach (This will happen on roughly 10% of all shots) then that's a still further delay if you were targeting a System with crew already inside it.

You should basically never sell a Heavy Laser I you got for free unless you genuinely get a kit that's essentially perfect in time for endgame. (This happens, but rarely) Whether you should buy one is a more complicated judgment call, but if you're at a Store and looking for a weapon to buy, a Heavy Laser I is unlikely to be a bad choice.

The Heavy Laser I is one of a handful of tools that's much worse in enemy hands. Part of this is that the strategic benefits simply don't exist for the AI, but it's also the case that the AI's predilections and its exact tuning tend to hamstring it; the AI targeting rooms at random already means they waste its anti-System potential fairly regularly, firing into entirely empty rooms, and the AI's strong preference for firing the very instant a weapon is charged, in conjunction with it being unusually fast-charging and having one of the swifter projectiles of the game, means that the first shot it fires in a battle is almost always wasted on your Shield bubble. (Unless you have a Zoltan Supershield, in which case Heavy Laser Is are a problem for you, but I'll be getting into that mess later)

Since the AI makes no effort to coordinate its fire, this problem can continue for quite a while, where the AI repeatedly wastes its Heavy Laser I shots on your Shield bubble instead of having it follow up on one of the burst lasers or whatever. And since it only fires the one shot, the AI's random-per-shot behavior doesn't provide any advantage here.

Sometimes things will line up right and their Heavy Laser I will slip through while your Shields are down and cause a fair amount of trouble. In the worst case, they'll get a fire or breach while targeting an essential System, creating massive problems for you; this can easily be what sends a decent run spiraling to its doom.

But the majority of the time, it's honestly a relief to see a Heavy Laser I equipped on an enemy ship; there's not very many weapons that trend toward worse performance in AI hands.


Heavy Laser II
65
: 3
Charge: 13 seconds.
Fires two shots per volley for 2 Normal damage apiece, with a 30% chance to set the room on fire, a 30% chance to breach, and a 20% chance to stun crewmembers in the room per shot.

Just like the Heavy Laser I, the Heavy Laser II rolls for fire chance and then if no fire occurs rolls for breach chance.

Unfortunately, where the Heavy Laser I is one of the better weapons of the game, the Heavy Laser II is... not. The Power requirement has tripled, the charge time has gone up by almost 50%, and the shot count has only doubled. That is better shots-per-second, at least, but that tripled Power requirement is painful -and crucially, a multi-shot Heavy Laser is a bit of an oxymoron. Rapid fire weaponry's big advantage is effectiveness at popping Shields, and potentially doing damage to the ship underneath. A Heavy Laser II is wasting its potential if you hit Shields with it -a Burst Laser I will charge faster, use less Power, and even cost less in the Store, while being just as good for that purpose- yet the multi-shot nature is only mildly helpful when it comes to striking a ship. Mostly, it means it's a little less prone to RNG swing compared to if it fired one 4-damage shot.

One of the issues not obvious just looking at the stats is the delay between shots in a volley. Firing a Heavy Laser I so it hits shortly after the enemy's Shields go down is a skill that can take a bit to master, but once you've mastered it the timing is reasonably generous. The Heavy Laser II has enough lag between shots it's much harder to get the timing right such that neither shot hits a Shield bubble; it's doable, but I'd be surprised if anyone can do so reliably, even with the ability to pause anytime in combat.

Indeed, this cuts right to a core issue with the Heavy Laser II: two Heavy Laser Is are just better. They charge faster, use less Power, the timing of getting both shots in while the enemy Shields are down is much more forgiving... it's not until you're running up against your weapon slot limit that a Heavy Laser II has anything to offer over a pair of Heavy Laser Is, aside the consideration of price -which is misleading, since you'll need to burn more Scrap on Weapon and Reactor upgrades for one Heavy Laser II than two Heavy Laser Is, easily offsetting the Scrap difference in the weapons per se.

A run with poor luck with weaponry may run a Heavy Laser II it happened to loot -or bought in desperation- but for the most part it's a weapon to shun. All it really has going for it is that it's one of the better weapons for starting fires and/or opening breaches -if you can get both of those shots landed on an actual room. In such a case you have a 69~% chance of getting at least one fire or breach (Assuming neither shot misses, gets intercepted, etc), which is genuinely pretty high... but there's less flawed alternatives.

Annoyingly, it's a complete reversal of the Heavy Laser I as far as player/AI utility, as it's a fairly dangerous weapon in AI hands. The AI doesn't care much about the high Power requirement (I'll get into this more later, but here's the short version: the AI cheats hard on Power), cares far more about the slot efficiency aspect (Again: more later, but AI cheating is why), it firing two shots lets the AI potentially spread around trouble for you if everything lines up right (Surprise! Piloting is smashed and on fire and Shields are missing a bubble and breached!), and the AI mindlessly firing as soon as possible instead of coordinating weapons fire means its hybrid nature of being okay-ish against Shields but also hitting pretty hard if it gets past Shields is a real benefit.

As a bonus, the AI spreading volleys even makes its breach+fire chance slightly more effective; if you hit an enemy ship with a Heavy Laser II's shots, with one opening a breach and the other starting a fire, this risks the breach sabotaging the fire's effectiveness by draining the oxygen in the room and putting it out prematurely. If the AI plays out this sequence of events, it's all but guaranteed these occurred in separate rooms and so the breach probably won't hinder the fire at all if you end up having to leave them alone for a bit. (Such as because your crew are busy getting healed up from other problems and will literally die if they try to intervene immediately)

This last point is pretty mild, mind; if your shots get a breach and a fire together the AI crew probably piles into the room and puts out the fire before oxygen drains and so the two triggering worked out fine, the fire delaying the enemy getting to closing the breach and both of them delaying repairs getting done. Similarly, if you're in a situation where a Heavy Laser II has started a fire in one room and breached another, odds are decent that either this is anomalous and you just fix both issues before anything really bad can come of either, or it's just one part of your run coming apart at the seams and it doesn't really matter because you're dead anyway.

But even considering that, it's still the case that Heavy Laser IIs are nearly worthless for the player and actually pretty dangerous in AI hands.


Hull Smasher I
55
: 2
Charge: 14 seconds.
Fires two shots per volley for 1 Normal damage apiece, unless hitting a room with no System or Subsystem in place in which case they hit for 2 damage. Each shot also has a 20% chance to breach the hit room regardless.

Enemies never use this. This is probably for the best, though the reasons why it's for the best are kind of a roundabout admission this weapon shouldn't be in the game.

The Hull Smasher I is sort of an interesting idea in theory, but dubious junk in practice. If you're not hitting an empty room, it's just a Burst Laser I that charges slower, costs more Scrap, and replaces a low chance of starting a fire with a slightly higher chance to create a breach. If you are hitting an empty room, a pair of Heavy Laser Is will do the same damage, cost the same Power, and throw in the full range of possible side effects instead of just a breach chance. A Hull Smasher I will cost less Scrap to buy and only eat one weapon slot, admittedly, but it's still a good illustration of why the Hull Smasher I isn't very appealing.

Notably, fire is largely better of a side effect than producing breaches, and you should basically always be endeavoring to hit Systems. Generally, if there's no System worth targeting, that means the enemy ship is helpless and low on Hull anyway, making it a bit moot that the Hull Smasher I can speed along the ship's destruction. There's also quite a few enemy ship designs that have no empty rooms, further hurting the case for its gimmick; even if you think it's worth leveraging, you regularly can't!

A ship that's already got all but one weapon slot filled might appreciate it for being a relatively cheap way to fill that last slot; it's one of the less bad choices for such. Mostly, you should look elsewhere if at all possible, and only turn to this out of desperation. Certainly, you shouldn't be afraid to sell it if that will let you buy a better weapon.

As for why I say it's an interesting idea in theory, I sort of like the idea of choosing between prioritizing Hull damage vs prioritizing System damage because it theoretically moves away from mindless optimization and more toward judgment call or playstyle stuff... but the game is simply overwhelmingly biased toward System damage being crucial. As the most straightforward example, smashing the enemy's Shields System directly improves your ability to remove Hull by reducing their ability to block incoming damage with Shield bubbles; a Hull Smasher I firing into a Shields System misses out on 2 Hull damage, but if weakening the Shield System lets you push through at least 2 more Hull damage from their Shields being reduced then it's cleanly superior to smash Shields instead of hitting an empty room, aside the narrow case of the ship being juuuust weak enough the extra damage from hitting an empty room will destroy the ship immediately.

2 Hull damage is a small enough gap this issue comes into play extremely readily. The Hull Smasher I would need to get a noticeably larger bonus against empty rooms to escape this problem -at least triple damage instead of double. Honestly, probably at least quadruple would be necessary to both escape this issue and make up for how inherently useful it is to be beating down enemy Systems; doing 8 damage a volley if successful would at least raise the minimum 'they die now' threshold enough to be reliably relevant.

The doubly unfortunate thing is this is right at the edges of a potentially significant help to the combat system. If attacking Systems was not an incidental side effect of shooting a ship but actually at least partially competing with doing Hull damage as a default rather than the gimmick of a couple specific lasers, that could potentially open up more variety in playstyles, valid weapon types, what to target, etc. (I'd note that this would be harder to make a smart AI for, but it's not like FTL is trying to have its AI play smart)

Buuut it is just a gimmick on a couple lasers.

So speaking of that other laser...


Hull Smasher II
75
: 3
Charge: 15 seconds.
Fires three shots per volley for 1 Normal damage apiece, unless hitting a room with no System or Subsystem in place in which case they hit for 2 damage. Each shot also has a 30% chance to breach the hit room and a 10% chance to set it on fire, regardless.

Unsurprisingly, enemies never use this either.

Where the Hull Smasher I is usually something you only use if you don't have better options, the Hull Smasher II is a pretty good weapon in its own right!

The crux of the matter is that there's no direct comparisons you can make where it fairly cleanly loses out: compared to a Burst Laser II, it does need more Power and take longer to charge, but it retains the same Fire chance, throws in a Breach chance for free, has said Breach chance high enough a volley expects to generate a Breach if no shots are intercepted by Shields, and of course has its double damage gimmick. Compared to Heavy Laser Is, it technically is flatly worse than just fielding three of those, but at those ratios the slot efficiency is actually very important, and it also costs half the Scrap buying three Heavy Laser Is would cost.  And compared to a Heavy Laser II it trades a slightly longer charge time for an additional shot, which makes it better at breaking through Shields and also means it's 75% the damage of a Heavy Laser II volley if you assume targeting a System and no Shield involvement. That's much better than the Hull Smasher I vs Heavy Laser I comparison, where the Hull Smasher I is half the damage per Power per volley unless hitting an empty room, and similarly the charge rate comparison is much more favorable here: 15 seconds is worse than 13 seconds, but not by anywhere near the margin 14 vs 9 is.

And other comparisons just get less and less equivalent, where you don't have to worry about a beam weapon displacing it or the like.

As such, the Hull Smasher II is actually a fairly attractive weapon, especially late in a run where slot efficiency is becoming a concern. It's also the single best sustainable source of breach-creation in the game, giving it a fairly unique draw, and its propensity for creating breaches means it's actually better at tying up crew and thus keeping Systems from being repaired than the Burst Laser II. The Burst Laser II is better at rapidly overwhelming and destroying enemy ships, but the Hull Smasher II is genuinely surprisingly competitive -and honestly, a weapon being a little bit worse than a Burst Laser II still leaves the weapon pretty viable right there.

Its gimmick of doing double damage against empty rooms is still pretty lame and you should honestly mostly ignore that element, but its solid statline keeps it relevant regardless; double damage against empty rooms is a bonus to occasionally take advantage of, not the primary thing trying to justify its existence.

Chain Lasers

Chain weapons in general are advanced edition content. The basics of them is that they start out with a poor rate of fire, but 'spin up' each time they fire, reducing the time until their next shot, eventually hitting above-average fire rates. This makes them low in utility if you expect to be able to knock down an enemy ship in short order, but potentially superior in longer fights.

Do note that the spinning up is completely lost if the weapon ever ends up depowered, forcing you to start from scratch. Chain weapons should thus generally be put to the furthest left slot to avoid them losing their accumulated spin-up.


Chain Burst Laser
65
: 2
Charge: 16/13/10/7 seconds.
Fires two shots per volley for 1 Normal damage apiece with a 10% chance to set the room on fire per shot. Each volley fired reduces the charge period on the next volley, up to a maximum of 3 times.

So... a Burst Laser I that's better in longer battles...

... when you usually shouldn't be using Burst Laser Is at all?

I don't get this addition. You'll use it intermittently simply because it's not too Power-intensive and isn't completely terrible, but it's usually better off sold as soon as you can slot in some other weapon.

Part of the problem is that FTL is really designed so you want fights to last as little time as possible; this is actually a recurring issue with Chain weapons, that being good eventually is a flaw when you always want to win fast. 

Another part of the problem is that Weapon Pre-Igniters are expensive, and rare to be looted directly. Chain weapons benefit disproportionately from having a Weapon Pre-Igniter, as their first volley is their slowest to charge. Let's compare the Chain Burst Laser to the Burst Laser I to illustrate the point.

With no Weapon Pre-Igniter, the Chain Burst Laser takes until its fifth volley to actually pull ahead of a Burst Laser I in terms of total volleys made; that's a really long time in FTL, longer than some fights will even last.

With the Weapon Pre-Igniter, we skip that awful first 16-second charge period, and go straight to the 13-second one -slightly slower than a Burst Laser I's 11 seconds of charge time, but only slightly, with the third burst coming out at 23 seconds (ie only 1 second slower than the Burst Laser I), and all future bursts coming out faster. That's actually a pretty respectable comparison!

But not many runs will ever get a shot at a Weapon Pre-Igniter, let alone alongside a Chain weapon, so... the Chain Burst Laser tends to struggle to justify itself as anything better than a pure desperation option.

I really don't understand why this isn't tuned as more like a chain version of the Burst Laser II. It would still struggle under the inherent flaws of chain-fire weapons, but it would be pretty clearly worthwhile to try to get working, where this is... technically a slightly better laser-per-second rate than a Burst Laser II when fully spun up? But 'lasers per second' is a lot less important than 'lasers per burst' when it comes to getting through Shields, so the Burst Laser II still usually wins in real conditions.

This touches directly on one of the fundamental problems with the Chain Laser concept: that a big part of effective weapon management is getting your weapons fire coordinated so you get damage past the enemy's shield bubbles. Chain weapons, to be at their personal best, need to simply fire at the earliest opportunity until they've reached their maximum fire speed, but doing so invariably means they fail to line up with the natural fire interval of other weapons in the process of spinning up. Thus, a Chain Laser's initial bursts are often simply wasted if you try to get them going as fast as possible, because they bounce off the shielding with no other weapons getting to follow up.

This problem even follows them to when they're fully spun up, in that you're pretty unlikely to have them paired up with similarly-fast weapons. Say your Chain Laser is paired up with a Heavy Laser I, which at 9 seconds is actually one of the faster-charging lasers; for optimal shield-penetration, you'll need to have the Chain Laser wait a couple of seconds each volley, and thus only be effectively 2 seconds faster on turnaround than a Burst Laser I instead of 4 seconds, up until you manage to suppress their Shields enough that unloading continuously is reliably doing damage.

If you get two Chain Lasers paired together, these timing problems resolve themselves, but now your strategy is very sensitive; if the enemy Ions either of them at any point, or does enough damage to Weapons to knock out one of them, you're running right back into all these timing problems, and if both get Ioned (An unlikely scenario, but far from impossible) then the spin-up problems are made all the worse. Where a different strategy might shrug off weapons being Ioned, taking it as a fairly temporary setback, this double Chain Laser strategy will take almost 40 seconds to get back to peak effectiveness, which is a long time in FTL combat, more than enough time for things to go wrong anew. (Such as one of your Chain Lasers getting Ioned again) This isn't even getting into how it's actually pretty rare for a run to even get the chance at wielding two Chain Lasers -frankly, if you get the opportunity, you might want to do it even though it's dubious just because you may never get the chance again.

Anyway, for the Chain Laser to evade these problems, it would really need to either not mind Shields existing (eg Ion weapons don't need to be as tightly-timed to help other weapons get through Shields, and in fact a sufficiently fast-firing Ion weapon can overcome any amount of Shields given enough time) or be able to single-handedly overcome Shields once fully spun up.

On that note...


Chain Vulcan Laser
95
: 4
Charge: 11.1/9.1/7.1/5.1/3.1/1.1 seconds.
Fires one shot per volley for 1 Normal damage with a 10% chance to set the room on fire. Each volley fired reduces the charge period on the next volley, up to a maximum of 5 times.

Say hello to the best weapon in the game.

Okay, that's overstating things a bit, but the Chain Vulcan Laser really is quite good. It takes roughly 36 seconds to finish winding up, or put another way about three Burst Laser II volleys, but once it's finished winding up a single Chain Vulcan Laser is able to destroy any ship in the game entirely on its own, bashing down Shield layers noticeably faster than they can regenerate so it can then start wrecking Systems and stripping Hull. Only ships that have both good Shields and decent Evasion present any kind of serious obstacle to it if it gets that far.

The wind-up period and high Power demand are legitimate flaws, though, especially in concert. If your Weapons System gets knocked low enough that the Chain Vulcan Laser goes offline temporarily, all the wind-up progress is lost; if you're relying entirely on the Chain Vulcan Laser to take down enemy ships, you're going to periodically run into trouble against ships with Bombs or Missiles, but even without those in specific any ship that has any ability to get through your Shields can get lucky and reset it. If you get really unlucky, this can result in the Chain Vulcan Laser continuously failing to reach maximum firing speed, your ship suffering a death of a thousand cuts even though on paper you really ought to cleanly win. The Chain Vulcan Laser generally only comes into its own once you have Weapons at 6 or 7, so you both have other weapons to help it get started and also so a hit on Weapons isn't more or less automatically wiping the wind-up benefits.

By a similar token, though two Chain Vulcan Lasers is ludicrously lethal once they get going, in practice it's a pretty terrible idea to run two. (If you get the opportunity to even try, which is a bit unlikely) You're better off having the 'upper' half of your 4 Power dedicated to weapons that aren't hit so hard by being temporarily disabled, if you're even going to go up to 8 Weapons in the first place. Which is honestly a bit of a questionable decision if you have a Chain Vulcan Laser; since it can kill ships all on its own, it just needs you to buy time for it to get fully wound-up, so once you've got a Weapon buffer so it doesn't go offline from any stray hit you're much better off investing in protection to minimize the odds of it being knocked out. (And minimize the odds of your ship being wiped out, for that matter)

Regardless, this is a functional use of the chain weapon concept. Unlike a basic Chain Laser, a Chain Vulcan Laser that's fully spun up doesn't need to worry about coordinating fire with other weapons, and so genuinely fully benefits from its highest attack rate; indeed, once your Chain Vulcan Laser is at max speed you might as well have other lasers and whatnot fire at their own maximum speed instead of carefully coordinating fire. (Well, ideally you'd still time the fire on eg Heavy Lasers so they don't hit a shield bubble right after it pops up, but for 'generic' lasers? Fire at full speed) This can enhance the effectiveness of other parts of your arsenal if they have mismatched timing, such that normally you're delaying a weapon's fire a little to keep it in sync with a slower weapon, and now you're just having them both fire at full speed. (Though this particular element is a bit limited; among other points, the Chain Vulcan Laser eats half your maximum Weapons capacity, and few weapons use less than 2 Power so you're unlikely to have a full three other weapons)

Note that both the Chain Laser and Chain Vulcan Laser are in fact used by enemy ships. The regular Chain Laser is another weapon that performs much better in AI hands than in yours, for the usual reasons; the AI isn't coordinating fire anyway, so it doesn't matter that Chain Laser disadvantages are exacerbated and advantages blunted by trying to coordinate fire. Also, the AI cheats on the Weapons System, and the nature of their cheating is such that you can't reliably expect to depower the Chain Laser unless you're absolutely crushing the enemy such that their exact equipment doesn't matter much, making the sensitivity to being knocked out less reliably a flaw.

The Chain Vulcan Laser, by contrast, usually performs poorly in AI hands. Its Power demands are high enough that even the AI's cheating doesn't do much to ablate its sensitivity to being knocked out, its initial contributions are so sad it's far less worrying than many theoretically weaker weapons, and turtle strategies that would give it a chance to fully wind up and murder you are largely unviable anyway; a run that dies to a Chain Vulcan Laser getting fully wound up was probably in trouble due to a bad equipment make up, or bad strategy, or whatever, not because you specifically ran into a Chain Vulcan Laser.

That said, if you usually hyper-prioritize hitting enemy Shields over hitting their Weapons System, you should certainly reconsider that stance when facing a ship that has a Chain Vulcan Laser if you're not highly confident you'll win before it can get fully wound up.

Charge Lasers

Charge weapons are also advanced edition content.

To be honest, I don't really get what the idea behind them is. They let you stockpile shots to fire a burst, which is in theory useful for overcoming Shields, but the tuning of the numbers makes little sense in this regard, with poor maximums relative to comparable weapons and underwhelming fire rates if you don't bother with the charge mechanics as well as poor fire rates if you do bother with the charge mechanics. I don't really get what you're intended to use them for, aside as filler when you don't yet have their clearly superior counterparts.

A couple of weird, dumb fiddly mechanics points to note: first of all, firing a charge weapon of any kind will completely erase any current charge. That is, if you have one shot in storage and are halfway to storing a second shot when you decide to fire, you completely waste the half-charge you've built up, as it's zeroed out by you firing. Second, even though crew manning Weapons will gain experience for every shot fired if you don't stockpile charges (Making charge Lasers one of the better weapons for grinding Weapon experience, actually), if you charge up and unleash a volley of shots you'll only get 1 experience point for the volley, no matter how many shots were stockpiled.

This is not a well-considered weapon concept...

As a further bit of jank, the Weapon Pre-Igniter will only charge one shot... and then you can work around this with a silly exploit involving letting the weapon fully charge, disabling it, pausing, jumping, and re-enabling it at the other side of the jump. Did I mention this weapon concept is baffling and bad? Because it bears repeating.


Laser Charger Medium
55
: 2
Charge: 6 seconds. (12 seconds for a full volley)
Fires 1-2 shots per volley depending on charge, doing 1 Normal damage apiece with a 10% chance to set the room on fire per shot. Can store up to 2 shots.

This is basically a Burst Laser I, but worse, taking 1 second longer to fire a pair of shots with absolutely no advantage in exchange. Cool, you can fire half-volleys faster? That's... mildly useful once enemy Shields are completely down?

I have no idea what the devs were thinking with the tuning here.

Junk. Sell fodder. Only use if desperate.


Laser Charger Large
70
: 3
Charge: 5 seconds. (20 seconds for a full volley)
Fires 1-4 shots per volley depending on charge, doing 1 Normal damage apiece with a 10% chance to set rooms on fire per shot. Can store up to 4 shots.

The most directly comparable weapon to this is the Burst Laser III, which has a clearly superior fire rate (5 shots every 19 seconds vs 4 shots every 20 seconds) but does actually take more Power. Alternatively, you can compare it to the Burst Laser II, which also has a clearly superior fire rate (3 shots every 12 seconds vs 4 shots every 20 seconds; I could alternatively say an average of 4 shots per 18 seconds vs 4 shots per 20 seconds to illustrate how the Burst Laser II is more shots per second) while also using less Power, but the Laser Charger Large is able to fire volleys of 4 shots to potentially overcome Shields the Burst Laser II can't overcome or is at least unlikely to overcome. So it's not unambiguously just a worse version of another weapon, but... it's still underwhelming.

I really don't get why charge weapons didn't have higher caps. For that matter, I really think they should've had an increasing returns aspect to storing charge. Say the LCL here got 1 shot at the 5 second mark, jumped to 3 shots at the 10 second mark, jumped to 6 shots at the 15 second mark, and jumped to 10 shots at the 20 second mark. That would mean that delaying your shots always resulted in more shots-per-second than firing as fast as possible and would allow the LCL to powerfully overwhelm heavy Shielding, actually justifying how charge weapons are Power-hungry and painfully vulnerable to brief Power disruptions.

As-is, it's... not complete garbage, but very, very dubious. You're usually going to be better off selling it, and you should only be buying it if you've somehow made it to shortly before the Flagship fight without getting enough sustainable firepower already.

The one quality the Laser Charger Large has of actual note is that if you're not bothering to stockpile shots it has the single fastest fire rate of any damaging weapon in the game. (Ignoring a Chain Vulcan Laser that's maxed out its fire rate, anyway) This makes it uniquely effective at leveraging periods where enemy Shields are down for a middling period, such as because you managed to completely destroy their Shields System, snapping off shots to knock out other Systems or just keep Shields wrecked even as the enemy tries to repair it. This... usually isn't worth its Power demands and micromanagement needs and so on, but if you happen to have one anyway it's something you should keep in mind during combat.

Note that the AI does in fact use both of these Charge Laser variants, and AI usage just reraises the question of 'what were the devs thinking?' The AI doesn't reliably stockpile shots, or reliably fire every second, or start firing every second if your Shields are currently weak; as far as I can tell they just randomly decide to charge up to a specific point and then fire for no real reason. As in, an AI LCL is willing to charge three shots and then fire for no clear reason. So... the devs clearly had no concept of what play with a Charge Laser should look like.

Non-Standard Lasers


Basic Laser
20 (Only matters for sell purposes)
: 1
Charge: 10 seconds.
Fires one shot for 1 Normal damage, with a 10% chance to set fire to the hit room.

This is used only on the Kestrel Cruiser B and Mantis Cruiser A, out of player ships. It will never be found as loot or in Stores.

However, enemies can equip it, and do so fairly regularly throughout a run. It's particularly common in the early game so the game can stick to its bizarre rule of insisting enemy ships must have at least two separate weapons (It's willing to break this rule if a ship has a Drone Control, but that's it) without this automatically and unavoidably leading to massive damage being done to your ship... but even surprisingly late in a run you'll sometimes see a ship equipped with four weapons, three of which are death cannons and the fourth is a Basic Laser.

As an enemy weapon, the Basic Laser is unmitigated garbage. The AI doesn't coordinate its fire, and the game is perfectly happy to generate ships carrying a Missile and a Basic Laser, where 99% of the time this will result in the Basic Laser just giving you free Shields and Engine/Piloting training. (The remaining 1% of the time is when the Missile knocks out your Shields) The AI is also not very smart about how it handles shutting off weapons in response to damage to its Weapon System; it's not unusual for you to do 1 damage to Weapons and the AI inexplicably decides to shut off a 3-Power weapon and turn the Basic Laser back on. This means that even late in the game, the AI having a Basic Laser at all can be making the ship worse than if it had no weapon at all in that slot!

As a player weapon, the Basic Laser is surprisingly decent. It's unambiguously inferior to some other weapons, such as the Heavy Laser I doing more damage while charging faster and having better side effects, but having a 1-Power generic weapon on hand is consistently useful until your ship loadout is completely refined, as I noted earlier with the Heavy Laser I.

Like yes in the long haul a Burst Laser I is generally going to displace a pair of Basic Lasers simply due to weapon slot efficiency, but a player ship having Basic Lasers is surprisingly positive, to the point that if you had two versions of a ship where the only difference is that one started with a Burst Laser I while the other started with a pair of Basic Lasers, I'd probably argue the pair of Basic Lasers is the better set of equipment.


Dual Lasers
25 (Only matters for sell purposes)
: 1
Charge: 10 seconds.
Fires two shots for 1 Normal damage apiece, with 10% chance to set fire to the hit room per shot.

This is found only on the Kestrel Cruiser C, Engi Cruiser C, Federation Cruiser B, Slug Cruiser A, and Stealth Cruiser A, including that enemies will never use it. It's literally a Burst Laser I, but taking half the Power and charging slightly faster.

Basically, you should never sell this if you have it. You might temporarily stop using it based on current needs and abilities, but it's really good, surprisingly so given the Burst Laser I is not so good and Dual Lasers are a clear variation on such. Only using 1 Power is just such a big advantage that even Burst Laser IIs can't trivially push it into irrelevance.

In fact, Dual Lasers are basically better than the Burst Laser II, their only real loss being that they're less slot efficient. As the Burst Laser II is one of the game's best weapons... Dual Lasers are great.


Laser Charger Small
30 (Only matters for sell purposes)
: 1
Charge: 5.5 seconds. (11 seconds for a full volley)
Fires 1-2 shots per volley, depending on charge, which each do 1 Normal damage, with a 10% chance per hit to set the room on fire.

This is found exclusively on the Stealth Cruiser C, including that enemies will never use it. (And by extension is advanced edition content) It's literally the Laser Charger Medium, but it charges slightly faster and only needs 1 Power.

On its own merits, it's actually very decent. It can sustain fire almost as fast as a Laser Charger Large for a third of the Power, its two-shot volleys are only slightly slower than a Dual Laser and indeed it's in every way superior to a Burst Laser I, and its ability to do both bursts and continuous fire are both valuable in the early portion of the game: charge a couple of shots to overwhelm enemy Shields, hit their Shields System, and once it's damaged so they don't have a Shield bubble charging you can just keep snapping off shots for quick Weapons experience and more chances to set fires and so on.

It's too bad it's only seen on the Stealth Cruiser C, because as I'll cover when we get to it, the Stealth Cruiser C is depressingly bad and not really worth actually playing, making it a bit moot that the Laser Charger Small is a pretty good weapon.

Alas.


Heavy Pierce Laser
55 (Only matters for sell purposes)
: 1
Charge: 10 seconds.
Fires one shot for 2 Normal damage, ignores one Shield bubble, with a 30% chance to set fire or breach the hit room.

This is found only on the Rock Cruiser B, including that enemies will never use it. Like Dual Lasers, it's really good.

It charges slightly slower than a Heavy Laser I and loses the potential to Stun enemy crew, but the ability to ignore a Shield bubble outright is huge. First is the obvious point that at the beginning of the game, when enemies only have one Shield bubble, you get to skip popping their Shield bubble, and can in fact ignore their Shield System entirely in favor of crippling Weapons, or blasting Engines or Piloting if you're concerned they'll escape.

Even once enemy ships have multiple Shield bubbles, the Heavy Pierce Laser going right through a single Shield bubble still makes it a lot easier to successfully slip in damage alongside a Shield-popping volley; the timing is more forgiving, and the RNG is less prone to wasting the shot. (Because if the Shield-popping volley doesn't quite pop all the Shield bubbles, the Heavy Pierce Laser will still do damage, where a Heavy Laser I would end up wasting itself on that last Shield bubble)

You might displace it in the long haul -its value does go down as enemy Shield count goes up, and it's not particularly slot-efficient- but for at least the first half or so of a run it's amazing, and a big part of why the Rock Cruiser B is one of the better player ships.

And if you do decide to move on from it, it actually sells for a decent amount of Scrap, making that transition that bit smoother. Awesome.

----------------------------------------

Overall, lasers are, as far as raw gameplay goes, suffering from strange tuning problem after strange tuning problem, but broadly are functional enough. Not ideal, but better design than some of what's to come.

Stepping away from raw gameplay for a second, I'm absolutely baffled by the category name. These are not laser weapons; they fire discrete projectiles with a visible-to-the-human-eye travel time, with a visible comet tail effect. These are bullets. They are Magic Space Bullets, yes, but that's no excuse to be calling them lasers. I get that the devs want them to be 'energy weapons' to justify ammo not being a thing, as FTL does the scifi-typical thing of taking it as a given that Space Travel Engines are, if not literally incapable of running out of energy, at least capable of producing power for so long that it's reasonable to model it as if they have infinite storage. (Because who cares that your reactor's fuel will run out in a century if your game is taking place over maybe a few months?) But plasma bolts, while ludicrously bad science, are a scifi staple that fits less horribly than calling these Magic Space Bullets 'lasers'.

This isn't even getting into how conceptually limiting it is to present them as lasers. You can tell the devs struggled to think of distinct types of lasers, and this is pretty common with video games that try to use lasers as a weapon; you can't talk in terms of specialist ammo, or have a distinct delivery mechanism, or anything else that video games turn to readily for weapon variety. There's only so many ideas available if you're going with the layman understanding of what a laser is; there's a reason that most games make 'a laser weapon' a standalone category with few or no variations in it, not a foundational category that's intended to have more than half a dozen variations.

The especially baffling thing is the game has a category of weapons whose behavior is reasonably intuitive to connect to the real concept of a laser, but inexplicably that category is called 'beams'. Buh?

This is not the only bizarre misuse of terminology in FTL, but it's probably the most egregious and inexplicable, and worse yet there's a couple other weapon categories whose existence makes it really bizarre they didn't just call these 'railguns' or 'mass drivers' or otherwise imply they're Space Guns Firing Metal Bullets; FTL is in fact perfectly happy to give you physical projectiles that don't deal with ammo concerns. So why insist these are 'energy weapons'?

It's not like I can blame this on the flagrant Star Trek influence. Star Trek's core weapon is a scifi laser by another name, not Magic Space Bullets. So... why?...

----------------------------------------

Next time, we move on to Missile Launchers.

See you then.

Comments

Popular Posts