Cortium Bomb is useless

I have tried using the cortium bomb a couple of times in some player made bases and it's almost totally useless.
The description of the bomb says it delivers large damage over a wide area.
My 90 year old grandmother with a feather duster could deal more damage than this thing.

I placed my bomb in a large base next to an area that was surrounded by turrets and modules and near to a Spawn Tube, retired to a safe distance which I guessed might be 100 metres (but appears to be about 5 metres or probably less). After 20 secs the bomb goes off with about as much energy as an indoor firework.
Made two of the modules and one of the turrets smoke a bit , the spawn tube which was about 5 metres from bomb was left undamaged.
I could do more damage to the modules and spawn tube with my emisarry Pistol than the cortium bomb did.
If it did 5 times the damage over 10 times the current area it would still be weak.
In it's current state it's not worth buying.

thats good news
glad atleast one of the stupid new "EXPLOSIONS EVERYWHERE!" additions of Escalation isn't going to be ruining the game.
i'm sure Wrel will "fix" that though, you wanna throw it too? instant detonation on contact? coming right up!

Sounds good to me that way.

Construction requires a lot of effort and time, it would suck real bad that all that work could be blown up just by a single bomb, and by the way the Orbital Strike already does exactly that.

Ironically, it sucks at dealing with construction. Once again, a brilliant description from the devs.


I've had quite a bit of fun blowing up enemies however, as the blast goes through walls. We all know those bases where people pile up next to walls/sunderer garages due to choke-points. It even works through spawn rooms, so if you're a real *******, you can place them next to spawns and get some kills, causing a lot of confusion - especially when the spawn room is packed.

1. Look at the mini-map for a cluster of enemies next to a wall.
2. Place your bomb as close as you can to the wall on the opposite side of where the group of enemies is.
3. Go walk around/kill some people/restock for a minute, BOOM you should get a few memey kills.

Many friendlies don't realize they can get killed by the bomb, so will proceed to sit on top of it until it blows up. Expect a lot of teamkills, but it's pretty funny in some scenarios where you can use it as a ghetto C4 to scrape together a few more kills - unfortunately it doesn't display the stats, so I can't, track how many people I've killed with my bombs overall
I wouldn't recommend trolling spawns with it, simply because it's a real dick move. However play around with it once in a while, it can get very funny in the right situation once you understand how it works.
One last thing, the bomb goes through walls and shields, but not roofs. Don't go around as a light assault thinking you're 007 placing a bomb over a packed room; you will be quite disappointed. The bomb also can not be placed if there is anything above it, it considers itself "indoors". Quite annoying when trying to place bombs next to the wall of a point (as a light assault) and not being able to place it because there's a tiny bit of railing above the little ledge preventing you from placing the bomb. It's a huge pain on Hossin also due to the may trees overhead.
I would like to see it work indoors (or at least outside despite being stuff overhead), and maybe actually work against construction though.

Would be nice if it could breach a wall, or kill a module or something. If after all the time it takes to detonate it's not destroyed, I feel it should at least kill one construction item, or deal SIGNIFICANT damage to them, as it says.

Skyshields now block an orbital strike, although I believe the module gets destroyed in the process.

They are also pretty costly, and it is hard to build your own orbital base without getting nuked by the base you're trying to nuke, as they have a head start on you.

Interesting about the walls, must give that a try

Whilst I wasn't expecting it to be a one man destructive device for taking out a whole player made base it would be nice to see it do more damage than my pistol. You can only carry one of them and if anyone is defending the base and has enough savvy to recognise the bombs 20 second countdown bleep you'll probably lose it anyway.
It should at least take out a turret or a few modules, as i said I can take out a module with my pistol faster than this bomb can just make it smoke a bit.

Escalation really excelled in bringing death to spawn rooms!

The CB costs only 20 merit to restock. It destroys sky shield modules with one blow. If you make a quick flail/silo/AI module base, drive to an enemy base as stalker infil, place bomb next to the ssm while the owner is on a cortium run, once the ssm is gone you can shell their base into dust with the flail single handledly. You can destroy partially unattended fully built bases alone in a few minutes, simply because the cortium bomb can take away the only protective meassure against the flail. CB is not useless

btw, how do you disarm it if you're on the opposing faction?

People have been starting to use these on my sundy and the timer is super long. I haven't tried using engineer repair tool yet.

probably by holding E when close enough, maybe an emp would bust it without blowing it up.
maybe try as infiltrator?

Well it's just as easy to do that and with no merit cost at all with the explosive bolt Crossbow.
I can take out the module with the crossbow quicker than the Cortium Bomb and if you are stalker cloaker and someone arrives at the base to defend it you can try again when they have left. If you use the bomb there's a good chance they will defuse it and you will have to return to a base or sunderer to get another bomb.

The Cortium bomb from what I tested it is very bad at its job right now. So if you want it damage against object is it need to be in less than arms reach. If it isn't touching it will do like 0 damage the description kind of lies about doing large area damage. It is extremely weak against people shooting at it three rounds will destroy it. I have added a video of how well it works in a compact base.

haha, this is exactly why I don't want to tell people how to do it; it's quite funny watching them all confused trying to "defuse" the bomb.

Basically it's another prime example of the dev's wonderful wording(s) in game. By employing the word defuse, you'd think you actually have to interact, maybe to something slightly intelligent to get rid of the bomb. WRONG!

Defuse in dev language apparently means "shoot the damn thing"! The bomb can be shot at by both friends and enemies, and is very weak. It takes maybe 5 bullets to "defuse" it. Next time you see a bomb, shoot it, it just disappears, no explosion, no nothing.

You shoot it. Which is odd because with C4 and Tank mines you can safely disarm them with the Repair tool and shooting those will blow them up.

I would suggest reworking it so that it has a very small explosion radius, and must be interacted with to defuse instead of shot or greatly increase its health/resistance. Damage should be enough to ensure the structure dies with just one, and raise the timer to like 90 seconds or so, but make it so that it can only break 1 or 2 adjacent structures. That way you have a breaching/demoliton objective that the base raiding team has to defend from the base building team.

Makes sense right? There's a bomb with a timer on your vehicle ..... so YOU SHOOT IT.

GENIUS DEVS LOL

The considering of placing any of the new deployables under a tree/bridge as indoors needs to be fixed. Especially annoying on Hossin where the giant trees are everywhere.

It's a good thing for me it didn't do much apparent damage to my base since I had no idea how to disarm it. The article said these things could be disarmed but I just stared at it, trying 'E' and my repair tool and nothing happened. Blew up in my face. Didn't hurt my base though.

You gotta shoot it. I agree though actually interacting with it to disarm it would be awesome.

So, basically is a one module or spawn tube killer, unless they are all placed tight, I like it that way.

I would change the description to reflect the reality.

Some changes are in order, we are expecting some kind of defusing mechanic other than the "Shoot the damn thing!" usual way, and that Outdoors only limitation is very disappointing.