Ion Weapons can't do more than 1 damage, and reinforce can't reduce you below 1 damage.

Doesthis effective allow ion weapons to effectively bypass reinforce?

Unknown. It will either (effectively) reduce the number of ion tokens received, or have no effect at all on weapons that are capped at 1 damage. If forced to speculate, I'd say the former is more likely.

If you land 4 hits with ionnturret against a reinforced ship with 0 agility(or who rolls blanks) then reinforce will reduce it to 3 hits.

1 does 1 damage.

2 hits inflict ion tokens.

Looks likely, yeah.

11 minutes ago, TasteTheRainbow said:

If you land 4 hits with ionnturret against a reinforced ship with 0 agility(or who rolls blanks) then reinforce will reduce it to 3 hits.

1 does 1 damage.

2 hits inflict ion tokens.

That's 1e Reinforce. 2e Reinforce is supposed to reduce incoming damage by 1 to a minimum of 1, rather than adding evades at all.

Oh does it work in that step? I figured it just wasn’t allowed to neutralize the last bit damage.

17 minutes ago, thespaceinvader said:

Looks likely, yeah.

That's 1e Reinforce. 2e Reinforce is supposed to reduce incoming damage by 1 to a minimum of 1, rather than adding evades at all.

Does it reduce damage, or does it reduce the number of dice rolled by one?

We probably need the rule book and timing chart for 2.0

Nevermind, misunderstood something

nothing to see here

move along.

It probably reduces [hit] results at the same time that Crack Shot would be removing [evade] results.

But that's easier to shorthand as "reduces damage."

46 minutes ago, Crimsonwarlock said:

Ion Weapons can't do more than 1 damage, and reinforce can't reduce you below 1 damage.

Doesthis effective allow ion weapons to effectively bypass reinforce?

It probably does. Ion bombs took out a star destroyer in Rogue One. They are powerful weapons, but even a ion torpedo will only ever do 1 damage, the main point is to inflict ion tokens.

If you need a more narrative explanation, the damage is likely from consoles/components shorting out from the ion energy.

I never like this answer, but I think this one will be impossible to figure out without knowing the timing of the two effects in 2.0 rules.

The ability cancels damage to a minimum of 1 the damage you deal is 1 then you dish out ion tokens

the whole purpose of the status type weapons (Ion, Tractor, Jam) is to bypas this kind of shenanigans anyway

a reinforced hull or shield won’t stop you getting any of these statuses only a higher agility

Need rules

But going by designers' word, reinforce cancels 1 damage from the final result (to a minimum of 1)

Note reduces "damage" and not cancels results, like evades would

There are plenty of mechanics like this in Armada. no greens but dice can still be cancelled by certain defense tokens. Or, damage can be reduced independent of dice results (just total damage, so if you take 6 hit results across 3 double-hit dice and brace to halve damage, you take 3 damage without canceling any results)

...so it should be effectively worthless against ions

And it won't cancel faceup damage if a critical is rolled

From what we know, anyway

2 hours ago, ficklegreendice said:

Need rules

But going by designers' word, reinforce cancels 1 damage from the final result (to a minimum of 1)

Note reduces "damage" and not cancels results, like evades would

There are plenty of mechanics like this in Armada. no greens but dice can still be cancelled by certain defense tokens. Or, damage can be reduced independent of dice results (just total damage, so if you take 6 hit results across 3 double-hit dice and brace to halve damage, you take 3 damage without canceling any results)

...so it should be effectively worthless against ions

And it won't cancel faceup damage if a critical is rolled

From what we know, anyway

It cancels the hit before you roll defense, to a minimum of 1, so a 1 agility / range 3 ship could still block that one 1 hit/crit with their defense roll.

Nevermind. Misunderstood something

41 minutes ago, Forgottenlore said:

No, it definitely isn't doing that. We know it is reducing damage. The only question is the timing between reinforce reducing damage and ion weapons converting the damage to ion tokens

If you look at the wording for ion torpedoes, it says you spend hit or crit to cause the target to suffer 1 regular damage. All other hits and crit results inflict an ion token.

Since the results are spent to inflict a maximum of 1 damage, all orhers are turned into ions. Reinforce will do nothing to them, because they are not damage. The wording implies only 1 damage will be given.

Now if reinforce had wording that it cancels results, then ion tokens would be lessened.

I think the idea is that results are different from damage, even though the uncancelled results usually result in damage.

That's effectively true of any attack that only deals 1 damage. Ion's not exactly special in that regard. And if you think about it, the Reinforce token will always get to cancel 1 incoming Ion token be cancelling its correlated hit icon. And the Ion weapon will still deal 0 damage if it whiffs.

2 minutes ago, Tvboy said:

That's effectively true of any attack that only deals 1 damage. Ion's not exactly special in that regard. And if you think about it, the Reinforce token will always get to cancel 1 incoming Ion token be cancelling its correlated hit icon. And the Ion weapon will still deal 0 damage if it whiffs.

I'm not so sure, can you reinforce against flechette stress, ion charges or tractor beams. They said the've calmed down cannons so maybe they've calmed down reinforce as well?

If the effect is "Reduce one damage to a minimum of one damage" I can see it being ruled either way. Take away hit die, as long as you still receive at least one damage would reduce the ion/stress but it wouldn't work against tractor tokens, as they don't deal damage.

all depends on the wording

reduce damage != cancel HIT/CRIT results

if reinforce reduces damage, it does literally nothing to ions

if it cancels results down to a minimum (ala r4-d6) then it probably still does nothing, depending on the timing

real talk though do we even have a verbatim explaination how Reinforce works? All we know is "it reduces the damage to a minimum of 1" from word of mouth far as i know, which can easily actually mean "Cancels 1 hit or crit before comparing results if there are more than 1 hit or crit result"

I actually expect it to just cancel a die, not modify the "damage total" result.

absolutely no clue

I'm more on the "reduce total damage by 1 to a minimum of 1" camp because writing a conditional die canceling clause is going to get messy

I don't think Reinforce reduces Ion Damage. So in a way Ion damage counters Reinforce since it already can only do 1 damage.

I was going on the assumption that Reinforce would cancel results during the compare results step, since that is when damage gets dealt, which would mean the hit would get neutralized before it could be spent on Ion tokens, but it’s true we don’t know the exact timing yet.

So it’s kind of useless to speculate at this point.

Something interesting that came up while listening to the latest episode of Gold Squadron that might add to the useless speculation. The Dead to Rights ability on the Kimogila specifies that the defender cannot use "green tokens" to modify defense dice. They were thinking that would prevent Reinforce tokens, but if Reinforce 2.0 works the way a lot of people are thinking, preventing damage after the cancel results step, then Reinforce isn't a dice modification and will still be usable in the Kimogila's bullseye arc.

Whew. We really need that rule book.

This would pertain to the tractor beam as well. The new TB lets you convert all non-neutralized (evaded) hits or crits into tractor beam tokens. It does no damage. From what I understand here, the reinforce would do nothing at all against a tractor beam cannon.