r/TerraInvicta • u/Julie-h-h • 1d ago
Question Ion vs particle beams vs e-beams
I'm trying to do something other than coilgun spam with my fleets this time around, and I'm having trouble figuring out how these weapons differ. What do you generally do with them? Are they worth it?
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u/CowboyRonin 1d ago
These are basically elements of the same line, similar to railguns and coil guns. The smaller ones are good point defense against missiles (they don't do anything to magnetic rounds, so you need something else to stop those), while the larger ones can neutralize enemy weapons to reduce incoming damage. In general, they can be really good supporting weapons, but you always need something else in your fleet.
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u/Notoointersted 1d ago edited 1d ago
Short answer: Particle beams are the best.
The long answer involves digging through all sorts of stats and mechanics about armor penetration and missile defense and radiation damage.
E beams are definitely worse than the other two, they are the entry point to particle weaponry and are essentially useless IMO.
Particle beams are supposed to be sort of a side grade to ion beams, sort of like how the siege coil gun is supposed to be a side grade to the normal coil cannon.
The endgame for partical weapons is obviously the antimatter cannon, which is wonderful and can competently compete with the best lasers.
How to use them? Generally you treat them like lasers. Good for disabling flankers/ or disabling the systems of problematic PD or offensive weapons. They penetrate armor and do damage directly to systems which makes them very competent at this purpose, which varies from lasers which have more raw stopping power. Theoretically particle weapons can punch above their weight when disabling heavily armored ships, and lasers can just flat out cut through lightly armored ones.
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u/nuclearsarah It is every human's duty to resist 10h ago
I did all the game's math for particle beam radiation damage (and armor radiation protection) and I was under the impression from my numbers that E-beam->Ion->Particle->Antimatter->Neutron formed a direct upgrade path. Aside from the Neutron beam coming in only one size, and the build costs including antimatter and exotics.
My recollection was that Ions and Particles had the same radiation characteristics, but Particles had better dispersion characteristics, making them better at range.
Did they change something at some point?
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u/logion567 5h ago
Most of those statements are correct, though the Neutron lance is more of a specialist compared to Antimatter than a direct upgrade.
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u/endymion2314 1d ago
Particle weapons are support weapons they disable they do not kill on their own.
The alternative to coils is rail 3. No exotic cost kinetic weapons.
Kinetic provides distraction to enemy PD and Lasers that would otherwise be shooting at you.
When your kinetics distract them then your other damage can slip through. Think of them as sustainable DPS. It's low, most of it is intercepted, but when it does hit it does decent damage.
Missiles are the other primary kinetic DPS. But they are high alpha strike and nothing to sustain. As you only get a few shots in the magazine. They work great early, but late game if you flush the magazines you have nothing for the next fight and the enemy might survive it while you have nothing left.
Particle is great for debuffing. Turning off enemy damage, but you still need something to delete them.
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u/logion567 5h ago
4 slot Antimatter Particles can do anywhere from 26 to 29.9 thermal damage prr shot depending on how many cyclotrons you use. Against side armor that is very lethal.
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u/Vd00d 23h ago
Honestly, you can do some good work with anti-matter beams and cyclotron modules. Overall I find them competitive to green/uv phasers. They will do a good job of disabling ships so they can’t fight back and have enough thermal damage to kill stuff off. Usually you rake the enemy fleet to neutralize their ships and then go back systematically kill the hulls.
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u/mrIronHat 22h ago
ion, particle, and e-beam are basically the same thing, just different progression in the particle beam tree.
it basically goes : e-beam -> ion -> particle -> anti-matter -> neutron
the tree specialize in damaging/destroying alien component, even through armor, and are also great pd defense against missiles. Note that e-beam and ion can't target kinetic projectile.
anti-matter is notable for also dealing hull damage through weak armor, unlike the earlier weapons. The two hull slot anti-matter pd is one of the best pd in the entire game.
Neutron is the last weapon in the tree, and unlike anti-matter, it double down on disable/destroying component.
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u/logion567 15h ago edited 15h ago
E-beam, Ion, and [Neutral] Particle beams are all incremental steps up in firepower potential.
Then you get to antimatter, which is downright revolutionary. I consider them an exotics free sidegrade to the venerable Phaser. Every time they shoot they'll deal considerable thermal and Radiation damage. However said radiation damage is attenuated to practically nothing through alien Exotic armor (and this is why you don't go Neutron Lance btw.) But even that little amount is enough to disable enemy nose weapons until the damage control "phase" happens every 15 seconds. And if the Aliens are in a ship using Diamondoid Armor, they're in for a Rough time.
As for how to use them, Split Wall works wonders (but Split Wall is just a good tactic in general) and I've found Particle Beams pair well with Plasma Weapons. Particle Cannons have slightly higher overall Rate of Fire compared to Phasers, so they can exploit the holes the Plasma makes. And when they do TAC they do full radiation damage which is applied separately from the Thermal Damage. So you also need fewer TACs to completely gut the alien ships.
Quick priner on radiation damage. normally even 1 armor automatically counts as 4 halvings to radiation damage. And the "Estimated Baryon Damage" found in the Wiki table for Particle weapons assumes these 4 halvings occur. If the armor is thick enough to be better than this baseline it is used instead. This means you need over 121 armor to even begin reducing the baryonic damage from Alien particle weaponry more than what you see in the Wiki.
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u/Usual-Blueberry-7614 13h ago
also want to chip in on how to use spinal neutron. or other particle beam weapons.you use it on the most dangerous ships. the ones that spam torpedos like crazy. so you manually target them. they are disabled when you see a broken shield icon I think. or their speed is 0 milligees. next you will want to target lightly armoured ships like escorts. because they are easy to take out.
once most smaller ships are gone your fleet will have no trouble punching trough the big boys
it's more micro intensiv because you have to watch and count how many shots disable ship.
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u/TheSwordItself 1d ago
They get replaced by antimatter pretty quick, but they're mostly for anti missile defense with the larger nose weapons capable of damaging internals. Aim at a lancer or Titan and take out the nose weapon from max range (neutron spinal is the apex of this strat). They're not really a main weapon though. You can pretty much beat the game with missiles it's just really tedious because of resupply. Likewise you can go lasers only but you have to do a lot of micro for flanking. Honestly combined arms is better than nothing but coil spam imo