FTL Weapon Analysis: Bombs

Bombs are the second class of weapon that expends missile ammunition, and like missiles they completely bypass enemy Shields. However, where missiles fire a projectile that can be shot down but passes through Shields, bombs are teleported directly into the targeted room, and thus cannot be targeted by Defense Drones or intercepted by enemy weapons fire. (Though Zoltan Supershields do intercept bombs, and in fact Fire Bombs and Crystal Lockdown Bombs will do literally nothing if caught by a Supershield, completely wasting the shot) It is possible for a bomb to be destroyed if the room it teleports into takes damage before it detonates, but this just means you should either aim bombs at rooms your other weapons aren't targeting, or try to time your shots so the bomb won't get caught up in your other weapons fire; you can't do something like fire at your own ship to blow up an enemy bomb.

Unlike missiles, bombs do not do direct Hull damage, and indeed only two types of bomb have any potential to deplete Hull. Even if a System is completely wiped out by a bomb hit, this will not do Hull damage. (As contrasting with if fire or boarders completely wipe out a System, which does 1 Hull damage)

This might seem like a disadvantage, and there are times it can be undesirable, such as when fighting the Rebel Flagship or if the missile-ammo-weapon is literally your only way to affect an Autoship, but in most situations it's neutral or even advantageous. Missile ammunition is simply not generous enough to rely on missile weapons as a Hull-depleting attack source; missiles are best used to knock out key Systems, such as crippling Shields so other weapons can get through them, or slamming the Weapons System before some slow-charging dangerous weapon can fire... and bombs do those things just fine. And if you're trying to crewkill the enemy ship, not doing Hull damage means not having to worry about destroying the ship before you can successfully kill the crew. Given crewkills give better rewards than simple ship destruction, this is quite advantageous.

Bombs are great, and if you shun bombs in favor of missiles you're likely making a mistake. The reverse is far more reasonable.

Also, one bizarre quality of bombs is you can aim them at your own ship. Indeed, one bomb is heavily designed around this fact, but plenty of bombs can be used in a pinch to help fend off boarders. This isn't a particularly great plan overall since boarders seek out Systems and Subsystems and you'd generally rather not drop a bomb on those, but it's something to keep in mind. There's even a semi-exploitable point that bombs can be used to prevent Hull damage by aiming them at a System that is on fire or being attacked by boarders, since a bomb knocking out a System doesn't do Hull damage. Notably, bombs can't miss if you're aiming at your own ship, unlike when aimed at the enemy ship; if you're trying to use bombs to kill enemy crew, it's more reliable to target them while they're aboard your ship than while they're aboard the enemy ship. (Assuming you haven't disabled their Piloting or Engines, anyway)

One frustrating quality of bombs that's not immediately obvious looking at the following icons is that even though every bomb launcher has a unique graphic it's not actually possible to tell ahead of time what kind of bomb an enemy ship is equipped with; where most weapons have their light turn green to indicate that they're fully charged, bombs have that and have the bomb appear on the end of the weapon, resulting in the graphics in this post. Prior to that point, all bomb launchers look completely identical!

Bombs the enemy actually uses are sufficiently alike in functionality this isn't too horrific, but if your ship lacks Sensors there is a very, very big difference between most bombs being dropped in an empty room vs a Fire Bomb being dropped into an empty room. The latter can be a run-ender, depending on your ship's layout and crew complement. The former is completely ignorable. (Well, unless it's a Small Bomb that gets lucky...) As your enemies normally fire off weapons the very instant they're fully charged, you don't even get a good look at a bomb's launcher as it's firing unless you train yourself to reflexively pause the game when you hear the bomb teleport noise so you can look at the launcher in its deployed form. (There is a brief delay after firing before the graphic reverts to the not-ready form)

As such, even though there's only 3 bombs enemies use -Small Bomb, Ion Bomb, and Fire Bomb- bombs still suffer from some problematic opacity, where you can't tell what to plan for not because the game intentionally has hidden information but because the devs caused a hidden information situation as a side effect of a purely aesthetic choice. This is really not a thing that should've been allowed to happen.


Small Bomb
40
: 1
Charge: 13 seconds
Does 30 crew damage, 2 System damage, and has a 10% chance to start a fire.

Missile-comparison-wise, this is closest to the Artemis, and is actually the only bomb where the bomb/missile comparison probably favors the missile; the Artemis does just as much System and crew damage, charges faster, has the same Power requirement (In player hands), and throws in breach and stun chances on top of the fire chance.

Of course, the Artemis can't actually be purchased, so this only means that ships that start with an Artemis should probably not be replacing it with a Small Bomb.

Note that while it's one of only two bombs that can start a fire, its odds of doing so are terrible and ammunition means that even if a fight is no threat to you it's not actually reasonable to keep on fishing for that fire chance. If you get lucky and start a fire, cool, but for the most part you might as well play as if the fire chance doesn't exist.

Among bombs, the Small Bomb is the least Power-intensive way to kill crew and/or damage Systems, making it easy to slip into your kit for a potentially good benefit. It's less ammo-efficient than eg a Breach Bomb II, but this isn't as important as with missiles -where the strongest missile is four times as powerful as the weakest missile, and thus using a weak missile means your ammo effectively goes a quarter as far as using a strong missile, with bombs the Small Bomb can be reasonably described as the weakest bomb and its most direct superior -the Breach Bomb II- is only 50% stronger. As such, the Small Bomb's ease of being slotted in can be worth putting up with the loss in ammo efficiency; a run that's lucky with ammo and overall economical in its use of missile ammo won't necessarily run out of ammo at any point just because it persisted in using a Small Bomb instead of switching to a Breach Bomb II when it had the chance.

The crewkilling potential in particular is fairly notable. It's actually pretty common, particularly in mid-early fights, for Normal damage weapons like lasers to end up leaving multiple enemy crew close to dead in the process of trying to blast apart the enemy ship, but you only rarely can capitalize on this with Normal damage weapons because often the point at which the crew are collectively 2-3 hits from death is also the point at which the ship is a couple hits from blowing up. A Small Bomb can let you take those situations and spend 1-3 missile ammo to secure a crewkill, which will have better rewards and thus on average tend to recoup the missile ammo spent. Slaver ships in particular are strongly prone to giving a free crewmember on top of standard crewkill rewards if you crewkill them, which is worth a minimum of 45 Scrap; spending 3 missile ammo on that is effectively spending 18 Scrap for something that would cost you more than twice that to buy in a Store.

The System damage is less notable, but still nice for letting you break into heavily Shielded ships, or doing some damage to their Weapons System to delay a problematic weapon from firing, or preventing a ship from escaping if it starts to make a break from it, since it's attached to a bomb and so bypasses Shields. And it's worth noting that Shield System mechanics and bomb tuning is such that there's no bomb that will always have better capacity to meaningfully knock out Shields than a Small Bomb; the Breach Bomb II hits harder, but say you have an enemy ship with Shields at level 5. In that case, the Small Bomb and Breach Bomb II will both knock out exactly one Shield bubble, even though the Breach Bomb II did more System damage. Depending on the rest of your kit and all, that one extra System damage may genuinely not matter at all.

So yeah, even though it's clearly less ammo-efficient than a Breach Bomb II, the Small Bomb isn't actually harmed that badly by this fact.

In enemy hands, it's the default early bomb. (Though it's actually bizarrely rare for enemy ships to have any bomb launchers in the truly early portion of a run; an Artemis launcher in literally the first Beacon you go to? Pretty likely. A Small Bomb launcher before your second Sector? Pretty much never) Unlike early Artemis launchers, early Small Bomb launchers tend to be only occasionally a threat; most player ships start with less than half their rooms filled with (Sub)Systems, so most Small Bombs will end up doing nothing. They have to get their 10% chance of starting a fire to accomplish anything in that case, which is low enough odds it's not shocking for an enemy ship to outright run out of ammo without ever starting a fire. So even before considering the possibility of missing your ship outright, it's not surprising for a Small Bomb launcher to not cause problems at all.

Even if they hit a room or crew, it may still fail to matter. Taking out your Door Control is just free Repair experience if no fires are started and no enemies board your ship. Taking out Sensors is similar, but even less useful. Piloting being knocked out is annoying, but can be harmless. Shields is basically the only System where it taking damage is basically guaranteed to create actual problems. A Small Bomb hitting Shields is something you can easily complete multiple runs without it happening.

Similarly, crew taking a hit doesn't necessarily matter; if they don't die or abandon duties to avoid dying, and you've got a Medical Bay (Most player ships start with one), you heal them up without consequence. If you have a Cloning Bay instead, even death may be pretty harmless!

Of course, every once in a while a Small Bomb will hit something when it counts, so crew die or you take Hull damage because other tools get through your defenses, so you shouldn't completely dismiss it as a threat...

... just mostly.

Breach Bomb II
60
: 2
Charge: 17 seconds
Does 45 crew damage, 3 System damage, and always generates a breach on hit.

Enemies never use the Breach Bomb II, surprisingly.

Missile-comparison-wise, this is closest to the Hermes Missile. The Hermes Missile charges 3 seconds faster, costs less Scrap to buy, and has equal performance at wrecking Systems and killing crew (While actually doing Hull damage as well), but the Breach Bomb II requires 1 less Power and is guaranteed to create a breach where the Hermes Missile can do all of breach/fire/stun but its odds of any given one happening aren't particularly great.

Alternatively, you can compare it to the Breach Missile, which does better damage (Doing Hull damage, for one), usually breaches while throwing in fire and stun chances, but still takes 1 more Power, costs slightly more Scrap to buy, and takes 5 seconds longer to charge. (Which almost negates the per-hit damage gain when looking at things in terms of damage-per-second...)

In any event, as it doesn't do Hull damage it's a bit more focused, used to knock out key Systems and/or work toward a total crewkill. (As opposed to, say, finishing a fleeing low-Hull ship before it can escape, which is something a Breach or Hermes launcher could do)

Comparing it to a Small Bomb, the Breach Bomb II is unfortunately another example of FTL overcompensating for the expected value of the 'better' weapon. It does 50% more damage per shot and its side effect is guaranteed instead of really unlikely, but it takes almost 50% longer to charge and demands twice the Power; there's ammo efficiency to consider, yes, but conversely the Breach Bomb II taking so much longer to fire comes with a host of not-immediately-obvious flaws, so on balance the Small Bomb tends to come out ahead. A guaranteed breach is nice, but not amazing; the AI is quite aggressive about closing breaches, and unlike the player will never simply fail to notice a breach, so mostly it briefly ties up enemy crew. Breaches on enemy ships rarely last long enough to de-oxygenate a room for even half a second... so unless you support it with boarders or stuns or something, the crew damage potential of a breach is largely hypothetical against enemy ships.

It's less egregious than some examples, but still. A Small Bomb tends to be better.


Fire Bomb
50
: 2
Charge: 15 seconds.
Does 30 crew damage and always generates a fire on hit.

To be completely explicit: this does not do initial System damage. Conversely, though Rockmen are immune to damage from standing in a burning room, they are not immune to the Fire Bomb's impact damage. Same for internal Drones; they'll be unaffected by fires, but harmed by the initial detonation. It's unintuitive, but how it works.

The Fire Bomb is one of the more well-rounded, versatile, and cost-efficient Bombs... if used well, anyway. It can be used to disable key Systems, prevent enemy crew from repairing key Systems, crewkill ships with potentially a single bomb, and even contribute Hull damage if you just want to blow up a ship. It's important, however, to have Sensors upgraded or manned, or at least have a Slug in your crew, so you can see where enemy crew are and what species they are so you can target the Fire Bomb appropriately; dropping it into an undamaged room with Engi and/or Rockmen in it will generally accomplish little, possible being a complete waste of Missile ammo if the enemy ship has a Medical Bay. Dropping it in a room manned by a Mantis, with the ship's lone Engi on the other side of the ship, can give the fire time to grow beyond the Engi's ability to put out.

Fire Bombs go especially well with Rockman-based boarding strategies, as you can drop the bomb and teleport the Rockmen in after it detonates, and now the enemy crew can't fight the fires because they're too busy fighting your boarders. This can be useful even against enemy Rockmen, since the fire will do System damage; this combination can be used to get Shields down so other weapons can start doing work, or to destroy a Medical Bay so you can start making progress on crewkilling the enemy.

Hacking is also very synergistic with Fire Bombs, as Hacked rooms lock themselves against their own crew. This can let you seriously delay enemy firefighters, giving a fire plenty of time to intensify and do System damage. Furthermore, the computer copes poorly with the combo twice over; where a room might normally get 2-3 crew running to fight fires, a Hacked room will often have only one crew attempt at any given moment to get in to fight the fire. Even better, the computer doesn't account for having to cut through the door when deciding that crew are too hurt to stick around; often a fire in a Hacked room will lead to non-Rockman crew breaking in, ineffectually trying to fight the fire for a bit, then starting to cut their way back out the room and burning to death before they can escape.

Crystal boarders can be used to similar effect against some enemy ship designs: teleport the Crystal into a room that is necessary for the enemy crew to pass through to reach the room you want to set on fire, and use Lockdown while you drop a Fire Bomb into your actual target. This is a bit limited and rare of a synergy and honestly not as effective as Hacking, but it's neat to pull off and it does avoid spending a Drone Part, which can be important if you're running low.

Even against ships with a pure Rockman crew, if they're big enough simply dropping the Fire Bomb in a System room far from all current Rockman locations can give the fire time to rage and help you.

Of course, there are some notable flaws with Fire Bombs.

The big one is that they're more or less completely worthless against Autoships, as those have no oxygen and no crew; dropping a Fire Bomb into an Autoship room will normally result in just wasting ammo, the fire going out before it can do any System damage. By a similar token, Fire Bombs are very limited against Lanius ships, since those also have no oxygen; you can at least do crew damage, potentially getting a crewkill, but it'll be horrendously inefficient in ammo terms. It's worth keeping in mind if the Lanius Ship is nearly out of Hull and you're really close to a crewkill, but by default you shouldn't be tossing Fire Bombs at Lanius ships.

Small ships with Rockmen-heavy crews are also rarely worth bothering to toss Fire Bombs at if you're not using Rockman boarders (Or offensive internal Drones, I suppose) to distract them from firefighting. Small ships with Engi-heavy crews are slightly better, but still tend to be wasteful to toss Fire Bombs at, and if they have a Medical Bay it's probably a complete waste of time if you're not going to use Rockman boarders to tie them up.

For most individual uses, there's at least one other bomb that will do the job faster and with less finickyness, but the Fire Bomb's versatility is very useful, making it easier to justify purchasing it. It's especially helpful for ships with only three Weapon slots, where slot efficiency is particularly important, but it's rare that you'll hit conditions where you'd clearly rather replace it with a series of specialized options.

Also, it's one of the more fun tools in FTL. If it were bad from a playing-to-win perspective, I'd probably still use it for fun periodically.

As an additional bonus, it provides three blue options. They're individually on the rare side, but collectively are merely uncommon, and all three of them are decent payouts. So that's one reason to hold onto a Fire Bomb, above and beyond their combat effectiveness and fun factor.

In AI hands, Fire Bombs are the most reliably threatening of the bombs. A Small Bomb that ends up detonating in an empty room accomplished literally nothing literally 90% of the time, and the other bomb the AI can use is similar; useless or close to useless if aimed in an empty room, which of course the AI will do regularly. For the Fire Bomb, ending up aimed in an empty room can outright be an advantage, such as if your Sensors are missing or knocked out or you're in a nebula Sector, such that you may fail to notice the fire getting started at all before it's gotten really bad. But even outside that case, a Fire Bomb will force you to do something in response, and only occasionally will your response get to be the 'free' one of just venting atmosphere without consequence.

While we're on the topic of fires, a few points to note: first of all, fires actually deplete oxygen. This is particularly obvious if you turn off Oxygen entirely, as rooms with fires in them will deplete noticeably faster than other rooms, but it's also possible for a fire that rages long enough to end up going out because it drained the oxygen so far the fire 'asphyxiated'. The goofy thing is that crew don't breathe; non-Lanius crew will start taking damage if in a room that's really low on oxygen, but only Lanius actually cause a room to drain oxygen faster than if no one is inside it. Again, this can be seen really readily by just turning off oxygen and then watching all rooms deplete equally fast, instead of the rooms your crew are actually in running out of oxygen first. One assumes the constant oxygen depletion across the ship is meant to be caused by crew breathing, but the actual mechanics are completely divorced from that idea.

Second, fires grow and spread over time if nothing is done to stop them. The more tiles in a room are on fire, the longer it takes to put out the fire. Furthermore, fires can spread through doors to other rooms entirely; this is handled pretty strangely, in that fires don't 'attack' doors or anything, but stronger doors still make it take longer for a fire to get to the other side of a door. A Level 3 Door Control that's manned can actually result in a fire ending up putting itself out by virtue of draining all the oxygen in the room before it can get past the door, whereas basic doors have barely any impact on the speed at which fires spread; fires tend to completely fill the room they're in before they try to set alight adjacent rooms, but this holds true even if you open the doors!

Note that by extension fires do actually have to 'walk' from room to room via doors the same way crew do. A fire will never jump through a doorless wall; the game is not actually trying to model heat transmission. This is particularly important to keep in mind if you're trying to leverage fires against one of the handful of ships that has rooms with no door access to other parts of the ship -and isn't an Autoship, because why are you trying to use a Fire Bomb on an Autoship?- but in general is relevant to things like deciding where it's safe for injured crew to travel on a burning ship: injured crew don't need to worry about a fire appearing in a room just because it's adjacent to a burning room unless there's a direct door connection.

Third, fires 'clone' their damage on crew and the System; the fire doesn't spread its damage equally among crew and end up doing less damage per-head if more crew are crammed inside the room, and crew actively firefighting do nothing to slow the rate at which the fire does damage to the System. This makes fires particularly effective against massed crew; setting the enemy's Shields System on fire and then teleporting Rockmen inside can easily end up with four enemy crew burning to death because they really want to keep the Shield System intact but your Rockmen are in the way of firefighting.

Fourth, as I've alluded to a few times already, while fires don't do Hull damage per se, if they reduce a (Sub)System to 0 HP the moment this happens the ships takes 1 Hull damage. This is kind of an annoying mechanic, honestly, as 1 Hull damage per System burned to the ground is way too small to matter much of the time, yet it will intermittently create situations where eg you're trying to get a crewkill but there's a fire raging that will blow up the ship before it kills the last crewmember because you got the ship's Hull a little too low. It also doesn't make any kind of logical sense; why can a fire rage indefinitely without causing long-term damage to the ship so long as it's occurring in a room with no essential Systems, but burning an essential System to the ground causes a bit of Hull to melt? Am I supposed to assume all (Sub)Systems have explosive components cooking off at the exact point the (Sub)System reaches the point of not functioning at all? Seriously, what is this?

Fifth, fires are broadly tile-based in the way crew is, aside that certain Systems will, on most ships, have a tile that's impassable to crew but fires can spawn in just fine. Among other points, this means larger rooms can accommodate more fires, which makes the worst-case fire scenario harder to deal with in a 2x2 room than in a 1x2 room; the more individual fires are spawned in a room, the longer it will take to completely put out the fire. You might intuitively expect a larger room to be less deadly to your firefighters from the larger space taking longer to reach deadly temperatures and fill to the gills with smoke, but FTL just has a binary 'fire yes/no' state for deciding damage; more fires do not produce more damage, fires in larger rooms don't do less damage, nothing like that. As such, larger rooms meaning more fire tiles being allowed to exist means potentially a longer chunk of time to put out the fires means more danger of crew needing to retreat or a (Sub)System completely burning down before you can put out the fire in its room or otherwise things going wrong.

Sixth, since I just brought it up, you might expect fires to produce smoke and the smoke to be its own hazard. Nah. FTL's ships are apparently made of materials that burn smokelessly, or this is a universe in which fires don't produce smoke, or whatever explanation you want to make up; point is, there is nothing resembling an attempt to model smoke. Fires disappearing in a puff of smoke when fully put out is the closest you'll get to that.

Seventh, fires themselves have an invisible per-tile HP meter whose exact mechanics nobody across the internet seems interested in pinning down and I haven't been able to manage it myself, but broadly speaking your firefighters are knocking down this invisible HP meter, a given tile of fire vanishes when it reaches 0, and fire HP actually persists if firefighters abandon a room entirely but will slowly regenerate; if a crewmember mostly finishes fighting a fire, then flees the room to avoid dying, and a couple seconds later another crewmember rushes in to finish the job, this second crewmember won't take long to put out the fire. If on the other hand you just have a crewmember flee to the Medical Bay, fully heal up. then run back to resume firefighting, you may find all your progress was undone while they were away.

Another point I don't know the exact details of is that having crew firefighting tends to prevent new fires from forming in a room, but it's not a hard-and-fast rule; a Mantis firefighter in particular is so bad at the job fires will grow faster than a lone Mantis can beat it back, but even if you cram four Rockmen into a room you'll sometimes see a fire tile spawn even as other tiles are being extinguished. That said, new fires have their invisible HP meter start out nowhere near full, so in the event of four Rockmen having a new fire tile spawn as they're working the fire tile will generally be stamped out in no time flat.

Overall, FTL's model of fire, while very much weird at the edges, is actually one of the best attempts I've seen to try to model the potentially very gameplay-interesting aspects of how real fire works, in terms of sustaining itself, spreading if not stopped, requiring active effort to put out if a fire really gets going, etc. Most games that try to incorporate fire as a mechanic at all limit it to damage over time, sometimes with a limited capacity to spread but often not even that, and generally either with no mechanic for trying to put out fires or with very silly mechanics like 'someone who is basically a walking torch can stand in ankle-deep water for a split-second to instantly douse the fire, and will be completely impervious to being set alight so long as their shoes remain wet'. (As in, for example, XCOM 2 and Bioshock) It's shockingly rare to see a game try at all to incorporate fire physics as a mechanic, and it's even rarer for it to be remotely this competent or interesting.

That said, while I enjoy FTL's fire mechanics overall, I find it incredibly strange that this game of all games decided to have fires not only exist but grow and spread. What are your ships made of, exactly? Steel is not strictly impossible to set on fire, but for most purposes it's accurate enough to say 'steel doesn't support fires', and the visuals heavily imply a mix of metals and plastics for the materials; as striking as it would be for FTL to have the spaceships be made of lumber or something else capable of supporting virulent fires, I don't believe for a second such is the intent.

Ion Bomb
55
: 1
Charge: 22 seconds
Does 4 Ion damage, with a 20% chance to stun crew in the room.

Boom! 2 Shield bubbles gone.

More uniquely useful is the ability to disable all the enemy ship's weapons in one hit. (If you just want to knock out Shields, regular Ion weapons are usually better) Right through their Shields! This can be a lifesaver when dealing with eg a ship carrying one or more of the heavier missile types, especially if you've got somebody with maxed Weapon training and an Automated Reloader Augment so the Ion Bomb will arrive before, for example, a Breach Missile launcher reaches full charge, or even better a Weapon Pre-Igniter so you're ready to go before anything.

Unfortunately, its utility is much more limited when fighting the Rebel Flagship. The Rebel Flagship doesn't have a centralized Weapon System in any phase, its weapons are (If you're not playing Hard) all pretty easy to permanently knock out with damaging bombs or missiles or boarding action, and in the later stages its most dangerous tools are impossible to Ion; you just need to do Hull damage as fast as possible in those phases, which Ion Bombs are dubious at helping with.

The one qualifier to this is that the final stage of the Rebel Flagship has a 12-point Supershield that it will refresh intermittently; an Ion Bomb can be a surprisingly big help to pushing through that in a timely manner. Just remember that if you have a Zoltan Shield Bypass you won't be able to do this trick; your Ion Bomb will either land inside the ship or miss it entirely in that case.

Outside the jankiness of the Rebel Flagship, the Ion Bomb is a reasonably powerful tool, and conveniently costs only 1 Power, making it surprisingly easy to slip into your loadout. It's held back by its incredibly long charge time, but not as badly as it would be if it weren't a bomb -you want to use it strategically anyway, so not being able to spam it is a lot less of a flaw than if it were one of the laser-style Ion weapons. It's primarily a flaw in terms of making it unable to preempt most weapons without a Weapon Pre-Igniter. That's a flaw, yes, but stuff like slow-charging lasers has that and a bunch of other problems from taking forever to charge.

The Ion Bomb is the third and final bomb enemy ships are allowed to use, which... ends up a bit backward, because the game has it as the rarest, most 'elite' bomb (Even though it only needs 1 Power?...), but it's actually overall the least threatening bomb; if it hits an empty room, it definitely didn't do anything, where a Small Bomb probably didn't do anything. If it hits crew, it might stun them, but it can't directly hurt them. If it hits a (Sub)System you don't care about, you don't even have to send crew to fix the damage!

Indeed, in practice it tends to be directly inferior to conventional Ion weapons for AI purposes; conventional Ion weapons will reliably hit the Shields System, which is the only room you're basically guaranteed to be unhappy with an Ion Bomb hitting. Sure, the Ion Bomb does an impressive amount of Ion damage when it does hit, but... it will do so only very rarely. And it can't stack Ion damage the way an Ion Blast Mk. II can...

The closest thing to a qualifier here is that it one-shots a Zoltan Supershield. With its absurd charge time of 22 seconds, this rarely matters; usually other weapons will have already knocked out your Supershield by the time it fires, or at least knocked it down to 1 or 2 points so it technically doing 8 points doesn't really matter. As the player can never approach the Rebel Flagship's 12 points of Supershielding, this 8 damage is always overkill even against a maxed out Supershield; once again, conventional Ion weaponry tends to be better at this task.

Crystal Lockdown Bomb
45
: 1
Charge: 15 seconds
Encases the targeted room in impenetrable crystal walls temporarily, preventing crew from entering or leaving the room.

Enemies never use this, which is probably for the best given how inept the computer is at managing spatially-focused tools. It also has the unusual quality of only being possible to find in the Rock Homeworlds Sector and the Hidden Crystal Worlds, making it one of the rarest weapons to actually get a shot at. On the plus side, the Mantis Cruiser C starts with it, so it's totally possible to use it fairly reliably regardless if you really just want to give it a whirl.

This is one of a few bombs where being able to aim it at your ship is actually very much worth remembering. You can use it to trap enemies so they can't escape venting atmosphere, delay enemies getting into a room while your crew heal up for another go, buy time for Rockmen to catch up... it's not great, but these are options worth keeping in mind,

Do note that this does not prevent fires from spreading or oxygen from draining through doors. It's only crew that it stops, and it doesn't discriminate, so be careful; you don't want to trap your own crew in a burning room or the like.

Offensively, this is mostly useful for boarding-focused ships. It can be used by shooting-focused ships to do stuff like prevent Engi from getting into the Shields System so you can do damage that sticks, or in conjunction with a Fire Bomb to give a fire a bit to rage without enemies getting to suppress it, but for boarding-focused ships it can let you pick off crew, kill crew even if a Medical Bay is present and you can't damage it, do System damage with enemy crew unable to interrupt for a bit... lots of very important utility. A shooting ship just gets much less out of it.

Surprisingly, it took a patch for this to be made available outside the Hidden Crystal Worlds, which is a bit of a horrifying thought given that a Crystal crewmember and a Crew Teleporter is largely superior. Being able to get it in the Rock Homeworlds at least gives it the possibility of not being overshadowed in a run.

Though the details of that particular mess are for later posts.


Healing Burst
40
: 1
Charge: 18 seconds
Fully heals friendly crew in the targeted room. No effect on hostile crew.

Enemies never use this.

Technically, Healing Burst heals a fixed value, but it adds 150 HP; that's the highest crew HP goes in the first place, so you have to be messing around with mods or something for it to not be a full heal.

The fact that the Healing Burst discriminates is crucial, in that it makes it actually useful for supporting both aggressive boarding actions and protecting yourself from boarding actions, since it won't heal enemies. Do keep in mind that it takes a few seconds for the launcher to fire, the bomb to actually appear, and then finally to detonate: getting the most out of a Healing Burst means arranging for it to detonate when your crew are close to death, but you should be launching it much closer to 50% of standard crew HP so it will actually detonate in time.

Sadly, while this is a mildly interesting idea, it's not terribly appealing of a weapon. If your ship has a Medical Bay, it costs nothing for you to teleport crew back for healing, as opposed to the missile ammunition that launching a Healing Burst costs, and if the enemy ship lacks a Medical Bay or Cloning Bay any damage you manage is permanent -and many enemy ships have neither a Medical Bay nor a Cloning Bay. If you don't expect to take Hull damage, it's better to teleport for healing. In fact, as Hull damage is cheaper to repair than missile ammo is to buy, there's an argument to be made that it's cheaper to accept Hull damage than to spend missile ammo! (Albeit it's a somewhat misleading argument, given that you loot missiles regularly, where free Hull restoration is rare outside the final Sector)

If you have a Cloning Bay, you don't even need to heal crew to avoid permanently losing them. It's only useful for keeping up the pressure on enemy crew.

If the enemy has a Medical Bay, an offensive bomb is far more relevant than a Healing Burst, so you can actually start killing enemies. This is less dramatically true if they have a Cloning Bay instead, but still true.

So I have difficulty imaging why you'd buy the Healing Burst, and if you loot it you should probably just sell it.

The Slug Cruiser A starts with a Healing Burst, and in fact is designed around this fact...

... to its detriment...

Surprisingly, the Healing Burst does unlock a blue option. Just one. The event in question also has blue options from the Crew Teleporter and from having an Engi Medibot Dispersal Augment, both of which are largely superior -the Augment provides bigger material rewards and avoids spending a missile, while the Crew Teleporter has equal material rewards but also avoids spending a missile. The bizarre thing is each blue option reliably provides a pre-leveled crewmember, where which skill they have is determined by which you used: Engines for the Healing Burst, Shields for the Augment, and Combat for the Crew Teleporter. So I guess if you really want someone already at level 1 in Engines skill and happen to get this event while having a Healing Burst, you might as well...

... though I have difficulty imagining why you'd care...


Breach Bomb I
50 (Only matters for sell purposes)
: 1
Charge: 9 seconds
Does 30 crew damage, 1 System damage, and always generates a breach on hit.

Like the Breach Bomb II, this is never used by enemies. Unlike the Breach Bomb II, it only exists in the form of the Slug Cruiser A starting with it.

Missile-comparison-wise, this is most comparable to the Leto, with identical charge speed and Power usage and doing 1 damage to enemy Systems. The Breach Bomb I then does double damage against crew, sells for more than twice as much if, say, you run low on missile ammunition and so want to replace it with something else, and replaces 10% chances of fire/breach/stun with a guaranteed breach. The Leto will occasionally get lucky and create more problems for the enemy than the Breach Bomb I is capable of doing, but usually the Breach Bomb I is blatantly better.

This is especially true since crewkilling enemy ships is consistently better-rewarded by the game anyway, and the Breach Bomb I is far and away better at that.

The primary exception is Autoships, where crewkilling isn't possible and breaches are worthless.

Anyway, you usually shouldn't sell this because it's irreplaceable and quite useful, but it sells unusually well for being a weapon that a ship can only have by starting with it, so you're a little more likely to sell it to cover an essential purchase than with most such weapons. Don't sell it by default, but don't forget that selling it is a decent option in a pinch.

Also, compared to the Breach Bomb II, this is overall better at pure crewkilling -worse for ammo efficiency, but better by every other metric- but Breach Bomb IIs are better at knocking down Systems. As such, if you don't have other weapons eating the slots, it can actually make sense to have both equipped at the same time for different situations.

Compared to a Small Bomb, this does less System damage, but it charges faster, does equal crew damage, reliably inflicts a breach, and costs just as much Power; as one of the main utilities of both bombs is the crewkill potential, the Breach Bomb I tends to come out ahead in practice.

Advanced edition content

Two new Bombs, both of which probably shouldn't be in the game.

Advanced edition is overall a big improvement, but there's still stuff like this...


Stun Bomb
45
: 1
Charge: 17 seconds
Does 1 Ion damage and stuns all crew in room for 15 seconds.

Notice that it's possible to permanently stunlock enemy crew by getting enough Weapons skill and/or Automated Reloaders to bring the Stun Bomb's charge rate below its stun duration. This actually happens at the second Weapons skill level, so it's pretty easy to achieve!

Alas, since it burns ammunition, this is of dubious utility, especially when the Ion Stunner exists, can Stun enemies in the Shields room by hitting the enemy Shield, and doesn't spend ammo. Ion Stunners don't even use more Power! And remember: enemy crew heavily prioritize protecting the Shields System, so they're really prone to clumping up in there in combat.

You might use it anyway -it's not like you're guaranteed to get an Ion Stunner in every run- but it's a pretty dubious purchase, and I'm honestly a bit baffled it got introduced alongside the Ion Stunner. You can use it to stun enemies on your ship, but... so? Similarly, you can use it to stun enemies in any room you like even through Shields, but, again... so? The stun is indiscriminate, just like the Ion Stunner, and enemy crew aggressively pursue your boarders, and there's a huge delay before Stun Bombs actually arrive and detonate; your ability to stun crew to prevent them from responding to your boarders is really limited. You can use stuns in conjunction with fire and Rockmen or in conjunction with Lanius so the environmental hazards will get more time to do their job at no risk to your own crew... but an Ion Stunner can do that by just dropping your crew in their Shields System.

The ability to target your own ship is similarly dubious. It can buy time for your crew to catch up and do free damage, but honestly, investing in your Systems and Subsystems will have much the same utility as far as stalling -particularly upgrading your Door Control- and if you want to spend a unit of missile ammo on supporting your crew, Healing Burst is more straightforward and won't Ionize the System enemy crew are attacking, and damaging Bombs have a similar outcome in terms of temporarily knocking out a System while helping fend off enemy crew... and in fact repairing damaged Systems gives crew experience, and knocking a System out completely can prevent boarders from doing Hull damage!

This honestly probably shouldn't be a part of the game, and it confuses me that it's advanced edition content. Did they seriously still have such a poor grasp of their own game?


Repair Burst
40
: 1
Charge: 14 seconds
Fully repairs a targeted System or Subsystem.

Unsurprisingly, this is never used by enemies.

... not that it's all that useful in player hands, mind...

... oh, and bizarrely, it will actually heal enemy Supershields... but not your own, because I guess the developers hate the idea that Supershields might be any good in player hands? I can't think of any other reason they would make this bizarre choice...

Regardless, while I find this less intensely confusing than the Stun Bomb, I honestly think it's a lot worse in practice. Most Systems and Subsystems only come in 3 levels, limiting how impactful a Repair Burst even can be, with only Weapons, Shields, Drones, and Engines allowed to go up to level 8.

In theory a Repair Burst is appreciated for perfect storms of bad luck, where eg a ship has a couple of heavy Missile launchers and happens to have both target and hit Shields, knocking it from full to 0, as you can launch the Repair Burst to fix it before things have an opportunity to snowball... but not only is it extremely rare for such to happen, more importantly that's the kind of situation where you're probably just going to die if you can't disable or destroy the enemy ship really fast. Only bombs can do a bunch of System damage right through your defenses without also causing Hull damage...

... and it's not actually possible for enemies to do that with bombs! The only bomb they use that does immediate System damage is the Small Bomb, which only does 2 System damage. That would require all four weapon slots were Small Bombs to be able to take a System from 8 to 0, when enemy ships try to avoid repeat weapons and will never have more than 2 copies of a given weapon. Even if they were willing to do 4 Small Bombs, they'd need a Drone Control to actually follow up with other attacks... and honestly, the dangerous thing about so many Small Bombs would be how quickly it would kill crew.

Furthermore, it's always better to have crew do repairs if you can, as it costs no resources and gives your crew repair experience, potentially making them better in future; repairing (Sub)Systems with a weapon is costing crew multiple points of Repair experience in exchange for a measly 1 Weapon experience.

On top of all that, it doesn't close breaches or put out fires. You'll still need to send in crew to clean up if either of these happened, and fires can directly do System damage. Among other points, this means one of its main theoretical niches -supporting a boarding-centric strategy by making it less necessary to have crew on standby for repairs- doesn't really work unless maybe you also have the Fire Suppression Augment.

Also, even with a boarding-centric strategy you should still be trying to have people manning Piloting, Shields, and Engines to minimize the odds of damage occurring in the first place. Unless you've somehow ended up with something stupidly unlikely like a crew of eight Manti, you're going to have vaguely repair-competent crew on your ship.

The sad thing is, if this had done Hull repairs, it would actually be decent enough, even if it was only 1 Hull. Being able to, for example, repair Hull between Rebel Flagship stages by expending missile ammunition would actually be very useful.

But since it only repairs System damage, it's... pretty close to worthless.

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Bizarrely, bombs largely don't provide blue options. The category is sufficiently variable it makes sense to not have universal bomb blue options, but you'd really think that eg the Repair Burst would unlock some blue options. But nope!

Most bombs are good enough to be worth using anyway, so this is better than with missiles, but... still weird.

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In terms of fitting into the design space, bombs work a lot better than missiles.

I could complain about the ammo issue, but AI usage of bombs is hampered severely by the random-targeting nature of AI weaponry; if a bomb doesn't start a fire or produce a breach, then it being aimed into a room that has neither crew present nor a (Sub)System in place accomplishes literally nothing. It's actually very normal for the AI to have their bomb launchers be effectively wasted weapon slots, where all their shots either miss or technically hit but don't actually accomplish anything. Even if a fight drags long enough for them to run through their ammo, they may have only one or two bomb launches do anything useful. As such, while the limited ammo carries a strategic component for the player that the AI doesn't care about, it's debatable whether the limited ammo mechanic is actually more hostile to the player or to the AI in this case.

Similarly, since bombs don't inflict Hull damage, the fact that they bypass most defenses the same as missiles doesn't include implications like the AI 'death clocking' the player with them. They instead fill similar niches for the player and the AI, aside that the AI is less reliable at leveraging them; a support tool that can open the way for other tools to actually win the fight, but not very useful all by itself.

Mind, it's fair to argue that bombs being so incredibly ineffectual in AI hands is its own design problem, but they're genuinely much closer to equivalent, and FTL broadly constructs itself in expectation that the player will be smarter/better than the AI; that this particular case is so extreme is a problem of degree, not of kind.

Anyway, crucially bombs are clearly conceptualized as a support tool; where missiles are largely given boring stat blocks, bombs do a wide variety of very different things, up to and including the particularly non-standard cases of the Repair Burst and Healing Burst being 'weapons' you use to patch up your ship and crew rather than damaging the enemy ship. Bombs are imperfect at living up to this role, but a far sight better than missiles are at living up to their own design.

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Next time, we move on to Beam weaponry.

See you then.