Netrunner: Femme Fatale breaks subroutines one-by-one rather than paying X credits for X subroutines

[archmage]

Femme Fatale does not break subroutines; however, in two games I played against a friend, they were able to place a Femme token on a piece of ice and break each subroutine individually. This is not how Femme works; instead, you pay X credits to bypass the ice entirely, where X is the number of its subroutines.

I made sure to check that Femme was not at sufficient strength to break the subroutines. Something weird's happening here.

[JoelCFC25]

You are right, but the system as currently designed does not have a mechanism for identifying how many subroutines a piece of ICE has (this is quite complicated, given all the cards that can add subroutines to ICE that it doesn't have by default).

So as a design conceit, players simply use the "break subroutine" ability to achieve the same outcome as "pay 1c per sub to bypass". The log message inaccuracy is purely cosmetic.

Also, regarding icebreakers generally--they do not have preventions in place to ensure they've strength matched before the "break sub" abilities become operable. You can click to use them during the Corp's turn, for example. As is true in many parts of the system, the responsibility lies with players to know and apply the rules correctly.

[archmage]

Right! Seems like it's working as intended, and I just didn't know how it worked :)

Closing this issue.