FTL Weapon Analysis: Flak Weapons

Flak weapons are all advanced edition content, and unlike Crystal weapons you'll actually see them quite regularly. (Thankfully)

Flak is at first glance most comparable to lasers: you fire a bunch of projectiles aimed at a single room, these projectiles can be intercepted by Shields and will do Normal damage on impact with a room, etc.

However, there's some rather important differences in practice.

The most obvious of these I covered in the beam weapons post: flak weapons fire their entire volley as a big blob that hits Shields roughly simultaneously. A Burst Laser II that hits 3 Shield bubbles has enough lag between that first hit and that third hit that the enemy ship will be most of the way to generating a new Shield bubble, leaving you an extremely tight window to fit beams, Heavy Laser shots, or anything else you would want to hit the ship instead of being wasted on its Shields. A Flak I that hits 3 Shield bubbles instantly pops all three of them, giving you essentially the entirety of a standard Shield charge period to slip in damage. As I've been over before this is a particularly big boon for beams, since they can instantly follow up and appreciate having as much time to do as much damage as possible, but it's hugely better than the spread-out volleys of lasers no matter what your arsenal is.

The second difference is a disadvantage shared with Crystal weaponry; flak shots can actually be shot down by basic Defense Drones, unlike laser shots.

However, this comes with a very significant qualifier: flak weapons include 'fake' projectiles in addition to the 'real' ones. I call these additional projectiles 'fake' because for most purposes they don't matter: they can't do damage to the enemy ship, or pop Shield bubbles, and so on. However, Defense Drones are willing to waste shots trying to shoot down these irrelevant projectiles; as such, flak weaponry being susceptible to Defense Drone fire is actually erratic as a disadvantage, and in fact can be an advantage, since for example you can distract a Defense Drone from a missile by arranging for a flak volley to arrive on the enemy's screen just before your missile does. (Or your Boarding Drone, Ion Intruder Drone, or Hacking Drone) This would be a useful element even if the fake projectiles didn't exist, because flak doesn't cost missiles or Drone Parts, but the fake projectiles mean that fairly often the flak acting as a distraction is 'free' in the sense that a Defense Drone firing on it didn't even reduce your damage output.

The actual implementation of these 'fake' projectiles is unfortunately pretty confusing. In the first place, the game itself doesn't suggest they're a mechanic at all, not even with a vague statement like 'flak is resistant to Defense Drones'. In the second place, the game's audiovisual feedback treats them exactly the same as the actually-damaging projectiles; if a 'fake' projectile impacts a ship, you get all the feedback of a flak hit aside that no -1 pops up to indicate damage happening, and even worse if a 'fake' projectile misses this will actually trigger the 'miss' text popup! This can create situations where for example you fire a Flak I, get a full three hits in, yet get a miss or two popping up; for a player who hasn't looked up flak mechanics somewhere, they'll be left with no idea what happened that they got this apparently-nonsensical outcome.

The third difference is that flak uses the same random-targeting behavior Swarm Missiles do. (Well, it's probably more accurate to say that Swarm Missiles use flak logic, but that's not the order these posts went in, so...) That is, you pick a room, an area centered on that room gets highlighted with a red circle, and the projectiles get randomly assigned inside that circle (Represented by a red dot per projectile for the duration of their travel), with any projectiles targeted outside a room automatically missing regardless of evasion.

Note that this is in addition to standard miss chances. Furthermore, all weapons that use this mechanic have their impact radius larger than a 2x2 room; as such, flak basically always has a chance to miss, even against a ship whose Engines and/or Piloting are currently out of action. In theory you could target a 2x2 room that was completely surrounded by other rooms to escape this, but in practice no ship is constructed in the manner necessary for this to be possible. I don't have the technical skill to dig into the code and figure out what the effective miss chance works out to or the time and patience to do large-scale controlled tests, but I'd guesstimate that a Flak I has a little under a 1 in 6 chance for a given projectile to target outside the room if targeting a 2x2 room.

Though note that in real play there will be other rooms nearby that projectiles can end up targeted inside, and furthermore a 'double miss' doesn't get somehow counted twice; if a projectile failed its regular accuracy while also targeting outside of a room, this effectively 'negates' one of those misses. That is, if we just arbitrarily say a Flak I targets outside a 2x2 room 30% of the time, and assume we're targeting a ship whose Evasion is currently 30%, the obvious calculation arrives at a 49% chance to hit with any given projectile (70% of 70% is 49%), but in actuality it would be higher than that.

Conversely, targeting a 1x2 room drastically lowers the odds of flak hitting at all (It's common to hit with only one shot, and only moderately uncommon to have all projectiles miss), and somewhat counterintuitively the 'outside of room targeting' form of miss does force the projectile to miss the enemy's Shield bubble, regardless of what the visuals might lead you to expect. Notably, there's enemy ships made entirely out of 1x2 rooms (All Autoships, for one), and also a decent number of ships that have 2x2 rooms but where they don't contain (Sub)Systems, or only contain relatively unimportant examples.

Also, it's worth pointing out that flak is better at killing crew than you might intuit. For one thing, a flak hit on a room damages all crew in the room; having a targeting dot end up specifically in the northeast corner of a room doesn't cause that projectile to only hit crew in that exact tile the way you might expect it to. For another, the fact that the projectiles hit all at once works around AI routines; say you have an enemy crewmember down at 45 HP and standing next to a door in their room. The AI is content to keep crew in action at 45 HP, but this is low enough that any single damaging hit will cause them to flee to the Medical Bay if they have one; with a Burst Laser II, if all shots hit the room, the first hit causes the crewmember to flee to the Medical Bay and so dodge the other two projectiles. With a Flak I, the crewmember simply dies if all three shots connect, since they all hit simultaneously.

It should also be pointed out that flak projectiles are some of the slowest in the game. This adds a learning curve to, for example, having a Heavy Laser I follow up on a Flak I clearing the enemy's Shield bubbles; if you wait just one second after firing the Flak I to fire the Heavy Laser I, the Heavy Laser I shot will actually arrive first, wasting it. Once you've got such timing practiced it's not really a disadvantage, but it does mean that early in learning the game you'll tend to get less value out of flak weapons than I lay out in this post.

On to specific flak weapons, though.

Flak I
65
: 2
Charge: 10 seconds.
Fires 3 shots per volley that do 1 Normal damage apiece. Radius is slightly larger than a 2x2 room.

So.

The Burst Laser II is one of the game's best weapons by a long shot, and this was widely-known long before the advanced edition update came along. The Flak I costs 15 less Scrap to buy, takes 2 fewer seconds to fully charge, costs just as much Power, does just as much maximum damage, and then gets all the benefits of being a flak weapon. In exchange, it loses... a 10% chance of starting fires per hit.

I'm sorry, what?

Okay, there's the slightly subtle point that part of why the Flak I is so ridiculously good is that the Shields System and the Weapons System are almost always your priority targets for blasting, and they are some of the Systems most prone to being socketed into 2x2 rooms. The Flak I does perform much more erratically when aiming it at relatively isolated 1x2 rooms, and notably most ships that have a Medical Bay or Cloning Bay have it as a 1x2 room; the Flak I is thus less desirable for boarding-focused strategies, as the Medical Bay or Cloning Bay is a priority target for boarding strategies and Flak is usually unreliable there.

But the overwhelming majority of enemy ships have at least one of Weapons or Shields as a 2x2 room (And many have both as 2x2 rooms), making the Flak I very reliable at annihilating the enemy ship in short order by knocking out their Shields and then wiping out their Hull, and/or at suppressing enemy Weapons so they're not getting in damage as you kill them a bit more slowly. Autoships are the only ship category that never has any 2x2 rooms, Zoltan ships are the only other ship category where it's normal for them to be made primarily of 1x2 rooms, and Slug ships are the only other category where a decent percentage of the designs are stacked toward 1x2 rooms. Notably, unavoidable fights with Zoltan ships are really rare, and if you avoid nebula Sectors Slug ships aren't particularly common either; it's only Autoships that are a reliably relevant hurdle for flak weaponry.

Furthermore, even for boarding strategies the Flak I is one of the best weapons for quickly clearing out Zoltan Supershields; if there's no chance of getting damage past their Supershields+regular Shields anyway, you might as well target the Flak I at whatever 2x2 room exists, even if it's empty; Zoltan ships tend to be made primarily of 1x2 rooms, yes, but they almost always have at least one 2x2 room.

The Flak I is seriously the best weapon in the game, and it's actually possible to defeat all three stages of the Rebel Flagship off of nothing but two Flak I's and some defensive tools like Cloaking to let you survive the Flagship's offenses long enough to kill it. Among other points, flak tends to end up killing a notable fraction of the Flagship's crew if you just aim it at Shields, since crew will rush to repair the damage and then find themselves eating dozens of HP damage at once, killing them before they have a chance to consider running for the Medical Bay.

I'm baffled as to why most advanced edition content is on a continuum from 'low-value' to 'straight-up junk', and yet here's this fairly direct improvement over what was previously the generally best weapon of the game. Like yes flak has its mechanics for missing even against ships with 0% Evasion, but it's not that inaccurate; it doesn't forcibly miss 50+% of all shots or something like that.

A related bit of bizarreness is that enemy ship composition clearly treats the Flak I as if it's one of the weaker weapons of the game; in the very early portion of the game when enemy ships are largely restricted to equipping weapons that demand 1 Power, the game is inexplicably willing to sub in a Flak I over a Basic Laser or whatever. Enabling advanced edition content thus has a potentially very swingy effect on the early portion of a run, because an early enemy Flak I is basically guaranteed to knock off some of your Hull points, and depending on what it's paired with may be very likely to open the way for other tools to devastate you.

I just don't understand the thought process with the Flak I.

Flak II
80
: 3
Charge: 21 seconds.
Fires 7 shots per volley that do 1 Normal damage apiece. Radius is substantially larger than a 2x2 room, and in fact few, if any, ships are large enough and packed enough to avoid wastage even mostly-reliably.

The Flak II isn't anywhere near as ridiculous as the Flak I. It has an unusually long charge time -if I compare it to the Burst Laser III it actually takes 2 seconds longer per volley, when the Burst Laser III's charge time is already awful- and its massive targeting radius means it's always going to have fairly significant odds of a given projectile being targeted into empty space. Fitting a Flak II onto a ship is thus an actually difficult judgment call, rather than the Flak I's 'virtually always keep it if you loot it, virtually always try to buy it if you get the opportunity' degree of greatness.

Even so, it's still one of the better weapons of the game due purely to flak mechanics. Among other points, once 4 Shield bubbles are common, it's a Power-economical way to pop every Shield bubble -two Flak I's will do the same much faster and be more reliable at hitting rooms, but they'll also need 4 Power, which can actually be a problem for fitting them in alongside other weapons. If you're just using it to pop Shield bubbles and treating any damage it does as a bonus, it's great, and doesn't really have any competition at this role.

Among other points, it's especially dramatic about flak being great coverage for other tools, as it fires so many projectiles that even a ship with two Defense Drones will often still have every Shield bubble instantly popped, even if they both target actually-damaging flak projectiles instead of the 'fake' projectiles. In the unlikely event you get to combine the Flak II with Crystal weaponry, this can be a pretty notable quality, and more generally it means it can simultaneously distract a Defense Drone II and still pop all the Shield bubbles, allowing well-timed laser shots to get through.

Naturally, it's particularly spectacular if you have the Weapon Pre-Igniter, substantially diminishing its primary flaw of a painfully long charge time. Indeed, it's one of the weapons where a Weapon Pre-Igniter can end up sucking out all the interactivity from the game, because you instantly cripple almost every ship and they never recover enough to present a problem. To a lesser extent, a Cloak System also ablates its slow charge time, though it's nowhere near as absurd about making fights a cakewalk.

In AI hands, its flaws are notably more relevant -the AI has no concept of aiming to reduce the odds of missing from targeting outside rooms, for one- and its strengths notably less strong, in part because it's rare for it to appear on enemy ships at all and in particular tends to take strangely long to start showing up when you consider that the game is perfectly happy to pass out Flak Is to enemy ships in the literal first Sector. Often by the time a Flak II shows up, you have the tools to knock it out of action before it has a chance to fire, where its long charge time is a crippling flaw, and of course the AI's absurdly generous ship designs mean it being Power-economical isn't very helpful in AI hands. Nor do they make any effort to build their ships to combine Flak IIs with tools that appreciate Defense Drone distraction. Meanwhile, the AI doesn't coordinate fire to follow up on its incredible Shield-popping potential, and will never have access to stuff like the Weapon Pre-Igniter.

This isn't to say a Flak II is a non-threat in AI hands; it fires enough shots it can blast through your Shields all on its own and then do some Hull damage, so if you're unlucky it can be a worse problem than missile weapons. It's certainly more reliably threatening than a Glaive Beam.

But it's still overall tilted to being more useful in player hands than it is threatening in AI hands.

Advanced Flak
60 (Only matters for sell purposes)
: 1
Charge: 8 seconds.
Fires 3 shots per volley that do 1 Normal damage apiece. Radius is slightly smaller Flak I's.

Only found on the Lanius Cruiser B, including that enemies never use it. Arguably the best weapon in the game, with a quick charge and fantastic Power-to-damage/projectiles ratio and no serious disadvantages to counterbalance these qualities.

Never sell it unless ridiculously, insanely desperate. It even costs less and thus sells for less than a Flak I, further emphasizing how bad an idea selling it is.

Otherwise, used the same as a Flak I, just better.

You know, when a Flak I is already absurdly good.

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Next time, we move on from weapons to Drones.

See you then.