How draining works?

posted on October 11th, 2019, 8:37 pm

In theory, every UniBeam and UniTorpedo has the possibility to drain special energy, crew, shields or hull. You can define a chance to this effect to apply, you can define how many of these effects may apply and how long etc. Except that they doesn't seem to work at all! In fact, I can't even find a weapon in FO that would use these methods. All they use is the microogranism classlabel, but that affects only hull or special energy and with a 100% chance.

Does anyone managed to make these effects work?

The really strange part is that the disable effects work perfectly. Why not the drain effects then?

posted on October 12th, 2019, 3:44 am

For a working draining weapon, check the FIeld Of Fire weapon in FO . There are also others, but I've forgotten...

A relevant ODF to look for: kli_fieldoffireAr4o.odf

posted on October 12th, 2019, 7:15 am

I don't have any experience draining hull or shields, since such things are usually handled by a damage ordinance with damagetype set to only affect hull or shields. But energy draining works, a good example of that is the 3.2.7 Arlterium ability on the regular Generix.

I've also gotten the crew draining ability to work on TM adapted photon torpedoes.

Note that all of the draining effects count as affected systems, and will be capped using the "affectedsystems = " command. So for example if you make a weapon with a 50% chance to disable the target's weapons, a 100% chance to drain 50 energy, and "affectedsystems = 1" then I believe that the weapon will only drain energy if the subsystem is not disabled. I think the order in which it checks is based on the order in the odf file but that's just wild speculation, I'm not certain. If you don't have affectedsystems in the file then it defaults to 0 and no draining effects will occur.