[2.21 - 2.50b1] Ion Blaster Guns Incorrect Out of Sector Damage Logic. (Fixed in 3.00)

[Imperial Good]

This behaviour was observed by using the current stable branch at time of posting running an unmodified game with ventures enabled.

Ion Blasters deal insane damage out of sector. Of course they are meant to do so for shields, after all that is kind of their point. However what they are not meant to be doing is the same damage to ship hulls. Currently out of sector they do the same, extremely large, damage irrespective of if they are damaging shields or hulls. The result is they are without argument the most powerful out of sector gun in the game, by a large margin.

I first noticed this when one of my Minotaur Raider was losing badly to a SCA Minotaur Raider with Ion Blasters equipped when out of sector. Not only did its shield melt away, but it was losing huge chunks of hull every round. Obviously teleported in to save it and effortlessly got away since Ion Blasters do very little hull damage, with the turrets dealing more than them.

As a test I built a Nemesis Vanguard and placed 5 Ion Blaster Mk2 guns on it. No turrets or damaging deployables were installed on it so the only damage it could deal is from the Ion Blaster Mk2 guns it has. I then found a SCA Minotaur Raider to be a victim for this ship. In sector with manual control, attacking the victim ship with this Nemesis will near instantly remove the victims shield but slowly tickle its hull away, as one would expect from Ion Blasters since they do as good as no hull damage but fantastic shield damage. Reloaded and ordered the same engagement out of sector. This time the Nemesis effortlessly killed the Minotaur Raider in just 3 rounds of combat. In fact the kill was so fast, the Minotaur Raider did not even turn hostile.

Here is a test save which can be used to see this behaviour.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9gdtjnmfgmcs ... ml.gz?dl=0

The Nemesis Vanguard called "A Ion Test" is set to follow the victim SCA Minotaur Raider. Once it is sensed you can pause, remove all orders from it, order it to attack and then resume. It will extremely quickly kill the victim ship, despite having theoretically terrible hull damage.

One can see the in sector logic works correctly by taking control of the ship and attacking the victim ship with just the Ion Blasters. A full heat cycle of them will take the victim from full shields (near instantly removed) down to 85% hull. If one then leaves the sector and orders "A Ion Test" to attack the victim it will die near instantly.

The correct out of sector behaviour should be that Ion Blasters quickly remove the victim ships shields, but then deal very little hull damage to it. This would be closer to the in sector behaviour of them and mean that using other guns like Plasma would be needed to quickly finish off ship hulls. If such differentiation of damage is not possible, the logic might have to be programmed to use some fraction of the shield damage value of Ion Blasters as their out of sector combat damage, eg 30-to 40% so that it still does more hull damage out of sector than it should, but nowhere near the current huge amount it does.

Currently as it stands due to this bug Ion Blasters are the best guns out of sector. Far better than Plasma by a large margin. Kit out a squad of Nemesis with Ion Blaster Mk2 and watch as they melt everything out of sector.

[Imperial Good]

This issue has not been resolved by the 2.50 beta 1 "Improved out-of-sector firepower calculations.". If anything it has been made even worse. In 2.50 beta 1 the same test Nemesis 2 ticks a SCA Minotaur Raider out of sector, down from 3 ticks representing a massive increase in damage per tick.

[Alan Phipps]

That last is probably better reported in the Public Beta forum.

[Imperial Good]

This issue appears mostly fixed now in 3.00.

Ion blasters still can overkill shields dealing significant damage to hull, especially with small ships, but once shields are down they deal their expected, minimal, damage to the remaining hull. This might still allow one shotting of S ships, but for M, L and XL ships the behaviour is sufficient to prevent Ion being over powered out of sector.