Subset Games Forum

Simple question. I am considering giving a fire beam build to starve crews of oxygen by targeting the oxygen first and lighting wildfires all over the ship. Is this possible or is the best bet to use breach bombs and boarding drones?

Yes, fire uses up the oxygen. Breaches are more efficient in terms of O2 loss, but since fire will deal continuous damage to crews (except rocks), it's certainly an option for <deadcrew>'ing a ship.

Fire does consume the oxygen in the room but very slowly, even with the weakest life support system pumping air into the room. Once the oxygen is depleted the fires will start to die down, and venting air is one way to put out a fire on board a ship.

Using the fire beam to help kill enemy crew is in my experience very slow and depending on their weapons, sometimes dangerous. On the upside, the fires prevent enemy systems being repaired since their crew must put out the fires first. The fire also damages systems and causes hull damage when a system is completely destroyed (red). It's a good support weapon if you intend to destroy the ship but not so great for capturing ships intact.

My recent game had me using a Fire Beam + Fire Boms among other weapons. I'm still not a big fan of them but they're effective. And fun too. It's much easier when you get two Fire weapons as the enemy has no time to cope with all the flames.

Breach vs. Fire Bomb. In my heart Breach Bomb is king, but in practise breaches can be repaired faster than fires can be put out. Even by Rocks.

If you are using fire beams you don't really need to target the oxygen system. You can spread fire throughout the entire ship and kill the whole crew in about the same time the damaged oxygen system would cause suffocation in rooms with no fire.

It's worth mentioning that a valuable fire fighting strategy is to turn your O2 off!

While venting or active fire fighting is obviously far quicker, fires will burn themselves out if your O2 system is off.
Usually this happens before the O2 level in the safe rooms drop low enough to damage your crew.

Even with only level 1 doors, fires will typically extinguish themselves before they have chance to spread too far through your ship.

I didn't spot the external doors on my first few flights, so for me fighting fires was
#1 turn off Oxygen system
#2 run crew to medbay
#3 watch fires grow...loose systems, etc....and eventually go out.