FTL Analysis: Crystal Shots

This is where I reiterate that I'm talking about Secret Stuff and you should bail now if you wish to experience the game without such things spoiled.

More than you already are by this post's name, I mean.

Anyway.

Crystal shots are 'super' weapons that can only be found in the Hidden Crystal Worlds, aside that two player ships will start with some of them. (Two as of advanced edition, note; the Crystal Cruiser B isn't armed at all, and so by extension doesn't have Crystal weapons, so originally it was just one ship) In practice, this means you'll basically never see them -enemy ships also won't equip them outside the Hidden Crystal Worlds- and they don't really matter.

I put 'super' in quotes because while the game clearly intends them to be extra-awesome versions of familiar weapons, they're... not very good.

Their 'super' quality is that they all ignore a single layer of Shields. That is, if one Shield bubble is currently up and no more, the Crystal shot will travel through the Shield bubble without affecting it and hopefully hit the ship underneath, exactly like a missile. In most other respects, they function almost exactly like a laser weapon.

In exchange for this very narrow benefit, they always charge slowly, regularly replace a chance to start a fire with breach and stun chances (When fire is vastly better a side effect 99% of the time), tend to be Power hogs, have slow-moving shots, their projectiles can be shot down by regular Defense Drones... oh, and if there's more than one Shield bubble, their primary benefit does literally nothing. They don't do something like pop two Shield bubbles per hit.

This is a terrible trade past the very early game, which is a problem since the Hidden Crystal Worlds are literally impossible to access early enough for the trade to be positive. In practice, it gives the Crystal Cruiser A and the Rock Cruiser C some mildly quirky early-game utility that fades away as you go deeper into a run because honestly you're probably going to try to replace the Crystal weapons.

As insult to injury, the fact that they all cost so little to buy in turn means they sell for very little, meaning the Crystal Cruiser A and Rock Cruiser C are impaired at the process of trying to replace them.

I really don't understand what the devs were thinking with the Crystal weapons. It's extremely obvious they're very bad; did they seriously think they're actually good? Did they not playtest them at all? How did this happen?

In any event, on to specifics.


Heavy Crystal I
20
: 1
Charge: 13 seconds.
Fires one shot per volley that does 2 Normal damage with a 10% chance to breach and a 20% chance to stun crew in the room.

So basically take a Heavy Laser I, make it take 40% longer to charge, remove its fire chance, and lower its breach chance. It is somewhat nice that you have a wider window to hit in when using burst-fire to briefly pop the enemy's Shields, enough so I actually rate this as somewhat competitive with Heavy Laser Is even after Shields are above 1 bubble simply because it's really easy to waste a Heavy Laser I shot. It also helps that either way you're needing other weapons to fire first for Shield-popping purposes, and so the Heavy Laser I having one of the best charge rates in the game is less of an advantage than you might expect; it will usually end up having to wait at least a little bit, outside of the enemy ship being so wrecked it's unimportant how good your weapons are...

... but it's still bizarre how handicapped the Heavy Crystal I is. Just being able to be shot down by basic Defense Drones is a fairly seriously disadvantage, and the ability to ignore exactly 1 Shield bubble is not an amazing game-changer advantage. If its parameters were literally identical to the Heavy Laser I aside the Shield-piercing and susceptibility to Defense Drones, it would still be debatable whether it was an improvement over the Heavy Laser I! So why does the game behave as if this is obviously a superior weapon?

The Crystal Cruiser A and Rock Cruiser C both come with one copy of this, making it by far the most-represented Crystal weapon. This gives it the best ability to strut its stuff and actually look kind of competent. At the very beginning of a run, when nothing has more than 1 Shield bubble, it's basically all the upside of using a missile launcher without the cost of spending missile ammunition, and in that framework it's pretty darn good. Once 2 Shield bubbles are a regular thing, it starts becoming a little lackluster, needing support of some kind to either temporarily pop a Shield bubble or to knock the Shields System down to 1 bubble, but with such support is still like an unlimited-ammo missile launcher and so decent enough.

Once you're solidly in the mid-late game with 3-4 Shield bubble ships everywhere, though, its ability to ignore one Shield bubble is only mildly useful, or potentially virtually worthless depending on what else you're using (Who cares about ignoring Shields if you've got Ion weaponry keeping their Shields at 0 forever?), and its dubious charge time, slow projectile speed, and susceptibility to Defense Drones are really dragging it down. Odds are also decent you've been not needing to spend missile ammunition in fights, and so will have picked up a rather large stockpile: at that point you may well just fire missiles at everything for the remainder of the game without running out. Similarly, burst-fire laser weaponry will still usually be more useful, or an Ion weapon, or really just about anything else.

The Heavy Crystal I just doesn't stay relevant, and is only moderately good even in the earliest portion of the game that gives it the most opportunity to shine.

As alluded to earlier, this can technically show up in enemy hands, but only in the Hidden Crystal Worlds, where all enemy ships are Crystal ships equipped with Crystal weaponry. As such, I don't see much point to talking about the utility in AI hands, because for a real player they'll probably have exactly one run in their entire playtime of FTL that reaches the Hidden Crystal Worlds, and it's not like the Hidden Crystal Worlds are some difficulty spike where you need my advice or the like. The novelty factor of getting to be in the Sector at all is probably going to matter far more to a real player's decisions there than anything I might say about enemy Crystal weaponry.

Heavy Crystal II
20
: 3
Charge: 19 seconds.
Fires one shot per volley that does 4 Normal damage, always inflicts a breach, and has a 20% chance to stun crew in the room.

This is unique among Crystal weapons in that it doesn't quite match to any non-Crystal weapon. It's closest to being equivalent to the Heavy Laser II, but the Heavy Laser II fires two projectiles for half the damage of the Heavy Crystal II's one shot, which has a host of implications that make it somewhat misleading to simply go with that comparison. 

Running with that comparison for a second anyway, the Heavy Crystal II takes 40% longer to charge, and loses a fire chance... in exchange for switching from 'decent breach chance' to 'guaranteed breach'. That's actually decent!

Alternatively, one could compare it to the Breach Missile... in which case it actually looks quite good. It loses the ability to completely ignore Shields, and that's a non-trivial flaw, but it has a better breach chance (100% reliable instead of mostly-reliable), twice the stun chance, equal damage, a better charge rate, doesn't use missile ammunition... the only other loss is that Breach Missiles can start fires, which isn't a huge loss given breaches will fairly quickly put out fires. A fire alongside a breach is only useful for delaying the enemy closing the breach, or occasionally causing crew to flee the room prematurely.

The Heavy Crystal II is certainly a flawed weapon, with a horribly long charge time and being particularly painful to have miss as a result, but it's by far the closest to actually being a 'super' weapon out of the Crystal weapons...

... which makes it frustrating you may well play dozens of hours trying to get into the Hidden Crystal Worlds without ever seeing it. And it's not built into any player ship, either. So basically you can play the game for literally hundreds of hours without the Heavy Crystal II ever mattering in the slightest.

In practice, its existence primarily serves to taunt wiki trawlers and the like, not add real value to the game experience. Why wasn't this put on the Crystal Cruiser B? Why didn't they release a Crystal Cruiser C with it when they released advanced edition?

Frankly, if you do get a hold of it, you're probably going to use it not because of whatever its tactical value might be, but because probably you're only going to get to play with it literally the one time, making my commentary about its tactical value pretty irrelevant itself.

Which makes it incredibly frustrating that it's the only one of these Crystal weapons that's distinctive enough you might plausibly care to use it past the extreme early game. Seriously, why didn't the advanced edition update put it on a ship, or otherwise make it available outside Hidden Crystal Worlds Stores?

Crystal Burst I
20
: 2
Charge: 15 seconds.
Fires 2 shots per volley that do 1 Normal damage apiece and each have a 10% chance to breach and a 10% chance to stun crew in the room. (This is two separate 10% rolls that can both succeed simultaneously)

So basically a Burst Laser I, but it takes about 40% longer to charge, and replaces the extremely broadly useful quality of 'sets fires' with the much less useful 'breach and stun' combination.

Alternatively, a Hull Smasher I has the same volley size, slightly faster charge rate, much higher breach chance, and does double damage against empty rooms.

Either way... the Crystal Burst is reasonably competitive when looking at a ship with only one Shield bubble, letting you either skip the process of knocking down Shields to accelerate your damage and thus sooner shut down Weapons, Engines, whatever, or let you knock down Shields twice as effectively to open the way for other weapons.

... and instantly becomes the worse choice if the enemy ship has any more Shield bubbles than the one, suddenly needing to waste shots on Shield-breaking, or needing other tools clearing the Shields, while taking longer to fire and not having as good a payoff when hitting compared to its close equivalents.

The Crystal Cruiser A starts with one copy. This is the only way you'll ever see a good showing from the Crystal Burst I without messing around with mods. It's not even all that good a showing, either: if you get a hold of a Burst Laser II, that's honestly pretty much 100% better and should be slotted in over it immediately, as against ships with 1 or 2 Shield bubbles they both end up doing the same damage, but then the Burst Laser II charges faster and has superior performance per volley in every other circumstance. And okay yes the Burst Laser II is one of the best weapons of the game, but it's pretty illustrative of the general problem with the Crystal weapons: they're tuned to be at best roughly equal to equivalent weapons in the best-case scenario of the enemy having a specific Shield bubble count (And by 'roughly equal' I mean 'clearly worse than' once you account for their inferior charge times and susceptibility to Defense Drones), and far worse in any other scenario. This is part of why it's so baffling the game behaves as if they're cool, powerful weapons: the devs were completely consistent about tuning them precisely to have their best-case scenario be pretty underwhelming.

There's games I've played where the devs clearly didn't understand that proportionality was more important than raw number differences in their design (ie games that went 'let's say "strong" attacks always gain +3 damage', ignoring whether +3 damage was a +50% increase in damage output or a quadrupling in any given case), or that cleaved very closely to proportionality in a system where other factors were more important ("We'll have this attack be 50% more accurate while doing 2/3rds damage. That's literally the same thing, on average, right?" No, your armor system is subtractive, so this weak attack is actually doing 1/3rd normal damage in real play), and so made fairly glaring errors in tuning. There's also games I've played where the devs provided a powerful-sounding advantage to something, and didn't realize their game design made it not very powerful at all, or were too aggressive about trying to offset its advantages elsewhere, where the final result was bad but broadly the thought process that had led to it was reasonable.

This, though? The FTL devs were extremely careful to precisely tune the Crystal weapons to be inarguably bad, and yet the game behaves as if they're impressive and cool weapons you obviously want to buy and use. I just flat-out don't understand what kind of thought process could lead to this design, short of a deliberate, knowing goal of producing bad design. It's baffling.

Crystal Burst II
20
: 3
Charge: 17 seconds.
Fires 3 shots per volley that do 1 Normal damage apiece and each have a 10% chance to breach and a 10% chance to stun crew in the room. (This is two separate 10% rolls that can both succeed simultaneously)

So take a Burst Laser II, make it take about 40% longer to charge, make it take 50% more Power, and switch fire chance for the much less useful breach+stun combo.

Alternatively, a Hull Smasher II costs as much Power, has a slightly better charge rate, has a much higher breach chance while retaining the actually-good fire chance, and will outright do double damage against empty rooms.

Since it is literally impossible to hit the Hidden Crystal Worlds early enough to have shield-piercing be all that wonderful an advantage -you won't be encountering 1-Shield-bubble ships anymore- this is just junk, and you should only buy it for the cool factor of trying something out that you'll probably never see again, not out of any expectation of it being any good. The only actual positive here is that the Burst Laser II and Hull Smasher II are both expensive, while the Crystal Burst II is cheap. That's... something.

Seriously, why are these weapons so consistently bad?

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Next time, we cover the other 'physical projectile' category added by advanced edition: Flak weaponry. Thankfully, it's actually good!

See you then.