Super Area Weapon (Several Bugs)

[deathmerchant]

So I discovered the Super Area Weapon from a ruin and started using it extensively in my strategy. It's a super weapon, of course I will!

The basics: it shoots out like a beam to a point, then expands outward. It damages everything, including the ship that fired it and your own bases.

Now here's three strange things that happen, probably bugs:

1) If the target is destroyed in one hit, there is no "area" effect. So if you want to annihilate a bunch of smaller ships, it won't work, you'll only obliterate the one you target.

Now this turns out to be okay, because often you just want to kill one thing. But it defeats the purpose of the weapon, so I think it's a bug.

2) Sometimes (I don't know why) it does no damage to the ship you actually fire at, but the area effect will still kill things around it (including you). Illustrative story: I warped in 6 ships with S.A.W's (plus other ships) to overkill a small pirate port, they all fired at the same time but didn't touch the port! Wtf?! But the area damage spreads out and guess what? Killed all of my own ships. Lesson Learned.

This has also happened when targeting smaller ships. I think it is related to being in a fleet with ships without area weapons, as it doesn't seem to happen to not-fleet ships and ships that are in fleets composed ONLY of ships with area weapons. Something about fleet targeting messing the damage up, maybe.

3) When destroying a pirate port with the S.A.W., each shot will trigger a "destroyed port" event. Meaning if it takes 6 shots to kill the port, you'll get 6 events in a row giving you credits, finding the location of an abandoned ship, etc. Clearly a bug. A hilarious result was the finding of coordinates to 5 star bases at the same planet, which a pirate was conveniently at hand to take.

So IMO the blast radius should always trigger, and it should always do damage to the initial target. But currently the blast doesn't always trigger and the initial target isn't always damaged. The area weapon should be a specialty weapon, with a niche use for hit-and-run bombing of strategic targets or a last ditch effort at obliterating a threat.

[Strat_84]

ORIGINAL: deathmerchant

Now here's three strange things that happen, probably bugs:

1) If the target is destroyed in one hit, there is no "area" effect. So if you want to annihilate a bunch of smaller ships, it won't work, you'll only obliterate the one you target.

Now this turns out to be okay, because often you just want to kill one thing. But it defeats the purpose of the weapon, so I think it's a bug.

I'm going to be nasty about this one, but it is well deserved in my opinion.

Actually what you witnessed is not really a bug, but rather an inacceptable side effect of the wonky changes that were applied to the area weapons mechanics during the patching of Distant Worlds: Legend.
The area weapons used to shoot a blast of energy around the ship carying the weapon. Then it was turned into a blast of energy shot at a distance at an enemy target. The coding must still be the same, only the target changed. So as soon as the target is destroyed, the blast vanishes.

In the past I already kindly reported and explained why this change made area weapons even worse and was against any sane logic especially with the introduction of tractor beams but it was just ignored. I guess sometimes the pride of a developer is more important than the results.

[deathmerchant]

I figured the developers would be open to fixing this broken mechanic. Whats the point of area weapons if I can't use them to kill a group of small targets? I suppose this is problem exacerbated by the "super" version of the weapon, as normal versions would not kill things in one hit and so almost always explode into an area.

There are definitely good uses for the weapon despite the limitation that you must target a large ship that won't be one-shoted. Such as strategic nuking of a large port:

imgur.com/a/itpfO

I killed many of my own ships there by accident as well, but the enemy had an absurd defensive position.

They could role-play the limitation by saying area weapons are like the super-weapon in Ender's Game, where the weapon feeds on matter and dies out if there is nothing to keep the chain reaction going. (But the mechanic needs to be explained in the area weapon help section either way, I shouldn't have to find out by surprise.)