Some damage types not working?

Anybody? Should I report this problem as a bug?

I'll give it a shot this weekend and let you know. I usually play only Balance Mod...

If that is indeed the case, then these weapons really are useless.

I'm currently playing a game against the AI where I'm amusing myself by capturing as many of their ships and planets as possible (as opposed to destroying/glassing them). I figured that a combination of boarding parties, weapon disrupters and/or weapon phase accelerators (I'm playing temporal) could allow me to capture ships without a scratch. Using the simulator, I pitted enemy ships against first a group, and then a swarm of drones so equipped without any apparent effect (at least, the rhythm of the enemy ship's shots didn't seem to change).

I'll test this weekend against the stock game and let you know. For that matter, I might mod the damage for these weapons to something much higher and test that as well.

Well, that was enlightening.

With all due respect to capnq's comments above regarding the simulator, here are the results of my tests.

- 'Only Weapons' damage types do not effect Weapons Platforms under any circumstances. You can't knock a planet's defenses using them. So much for capturing planets undamaged (unless you want to soak up damage while landing troops).

- 'Increase Weapon Reload Time' does work, but only to a degree. The damage given for the weapon is the number of milliseconds added to the next shot's reload time. That is, it won't effect the current shot for the target weapon's reload time, but rather the next one. The 'damage' is capped at 2500 milliseconds. That is, no matter how hard or how many times a ship is hit with an 'Increase Weapon Reload Time' weapon, the next reload for all of it's weapons will not be delayed by more than 2.5 seconds.
- 'Disrupt Weapon Reload Time' also sort-of works, but it has a serious bug. It increases the time for the current shot's reload. In theory, you could prevent a ship from ever firing at all if you keep hitting it with such a weapon. In practice, this is nearly impossible: the 'damage' is again given in milliseconds, and is far too low (in BM the weapon disruptor tops out at 33-37 milliseconds at point blank range). The second reason is that the game seems to be programmed to never allow a reload delay to exceed 2.5 seconds after being hit with this weapon. This applies even in cases where the weapon itself normally has a longer reload time! This means that a weapon could actually fire more frequently than normal if it's hit at the right time by a 'Disrupt Weapon Reload Time' weapon.

Interestingly enough, both 'Increase Weapon Reload Time' and 'Disrupt Weapon Reload Time' damage types work on Weapon Platforms.

In light of these findings, I think these weapons are virtually useless. Even if their damanges were modded to something more useful, the 2.5 second cap on both makes them not worth the bother, especially consdering the availability of 'Only Weapons' damnage type.

(By the way, these findings were confirmed in both stock and BM.)

So it appears. I couldn't find anything in SETTINGS.TXT that looked like it might change this value.

I guess the question is now: should I report this as a bug? Maybe suggest that the limit be made adjustable?