Status Effects

Zero-K has a lot of status effects, special debuffs that can be applied to enemy units to help suppress them and support your armies in battle. They work by filling separate damage meters underneath the target's hit points, and generate various effects.

EMP damage

EMP damage stuns enemies, completely disabling them and preventing them from moving, using abilities, or returning fire.

• When an instance of EMP damage is applied to an enemy, it is checked against the enemy's current health and converted into a stacking percentage.
• When EMP damage reaches 100% or higher, the unit is stunned.
• EMP percentage on units decay at a rate of 2.5% per second. The moment the unit's percentage drops below 100%, it is no longer stunned.
• Even though EMP damage stacks, it doesn't stack freely: every EMP weapon has a maximum percentage it can raise a unit to. This is described in the weapon stat block as a maximum stun time - each second effectively being a 2.5% maximum over 100% since EMP decays at that rate.
  • For example, a Venom has a maximum stun time of 1s, which means it can at most raise an enemy's stun percentage to 102.5%.
  • Meanwhile a Widow can stun a unit for 30s, which means it can raise an enemy's stun percentage to 100 + 30 * 2.5 = 175%.

Against shields, EMP damage is divided by 3 and converted into normal shield damage. If a weapon deals normal and EMP damage together, the EMP damage is applied last.

EMP is yellow, or in the case of the self-destructing Imp, blue.

Disarm damage

Disarm damage is a particular type of EMP that will leave the afflicted units able to move, but unable to use any weapons or special abilities (this includes jumping, using build power, regeneration or receiving income from the commander's Vanguard economy module). Disarmed units flash yellow instead of blue. Disarm percentage has a separate bar tracked independently from EMP percentage.

Slow damage

Slow damage, similar to EMP, does not reduce enemy hitpoints. Instead it gradually decreases the move speed and rate of fire of enemy units. Like EMP the slow health of a unit is the current health of the unit. The reduction is the slow damage taken divided by the max health of the unit. Slow damage maxes out at 50% and cannot be increased past that point. Like EMP damage, slow damage also deals 1/3 of its damage against shields and automatically heals by 4% of the unit's current health per second once it has stopped taking further slow damage. Weapons with slow ability are purple.

Many slowing weapons are actually disruptors, represented as purple projectiles or beams with a white core. These do both normal and slow damage.

Capture damage

Dominatrix stuff.