Quote:Many people don't. The metric for ships and weapons and everything else is often not win rate but more like "how satisfyingly does this let me gloat while winning." Not "how often does it lose to that sector 6 rebel scout with four shields and 45% evasion and cloaking where all my boarding and ion and fire tactics can't help." Bursts-and-beams are the right ticket to deal with everything, but get so underrated because there's no gloating as you just immediately kill instead.
I still think you guys underrate going ion-heavy. Running the math, high ion output should be able to ionize piloting + weapons down before all but fastest weapons get 2 volleys if your output is decent (3-4 ion weapons, or a few faster ones). Being on the lower end of ion output requires you to hack evasion to guarantee fast times, but this is true for other weapons vs 45% evade too (even 8-10 projectiles from flak + lasers won't guarantee you getting through vs that quickly).
Would I take two flak 1's, a BL 2, and a heavy laser instead? Yes I would, you would, anybody who's played well on hard for a while would prefer these. If every run gave that, we'd almost never lose. Builds like this or pre-igniter are the only ones that permanently disable enemy weapons + piloting faster than loaded ionization, after that the time to reach "no damage victory" per fight is comparable. The "no damage in most fights" is what matters for win rate.
What the game gives you free or has available for sale is RNG; the more different weapons/setups you can use to consistently beat enemy ships without taking damage and handle RFS, the more likely you are to see winning combinations and put them together for less scrap. Since you really need 3 ion weapons for them to work decently in late game, these don't litter my winning screenshots; I only go ions in maybe 25% of games (depends whether you count just using one as part of a volley) but win rate is comparable.
- https://i.imgur.com/eXqzDui.jpg - 5 weapon power is on the weak side, systems still carry this comfortably.
- https://i.imgur.com/TnRxwTw.jpg - better!
For non-boarding gunships, the fire beam is a better "win harder" pickup than a scrap recovery arm. It even costs the same
. By this I mean it's dangerous to buy it on hard unless you're already secure defensively, and tends to run away in cases where you can get away with it. Better for 4 slot ships since stuff like this isn't a liability vs scouts:https://i.imgur.com/BVKrvDy.png
Crew TP is contingent on proper weapon support or hacking. Since you can trick AI into pulling its pilot you can screw evasion badly and even 2 man boarding shreds most non-RFS ships w/o damage. Boarding on RFS is variable to ship setup and I like the variance; cloaking/hacking builds TP ions and beam to death then slowly kill all crew in phase 1 while being immune to damage. Hacking/MC with decent weapons usually hacks medbay --> kills 2 RFS crew --> bombs/breaks medbay + boards 2 more + MC to overrun RFS crew. Other combos are more weapon reliant, usually boarding ions and shooting out missiles before doing plays on enemy crew with fighting --> shoot medbay. Lots of good stuff.