FTL - Faster Than Light

[TheMeInTeam]

Question is, what progression gets you to 3 ion weapons?  On Hard, you can't afford to keep ion guns in storage in hopes of getting more later.  They always get sold like everything else for scrap to go into shields and systems.

TBH by far the most common progression is "start with an ion weapon".  You just need one thing of any type that does damage.  They're actually less expensive than most other weapons which helps.

Aside from buying an ion blast 1 or stunner to tack on for 1 power --> 1 layer down, or an ion charger if you have something that charges slower like pike or halberd (hacked evasion lets charger remove 2 shield layers for 2 power and keep them down a while), it's hard to justify buying an ion weapon if you don't have one already.

I will believe you on that win rate.  But I also contend that those games would also be won with other weaponry besides ions.  You do note that ions require other support like hacking and defenses.  I think the proportion of games where that support will win with ions or fire/bio/etc but not with whatever conventional damaging weaponry you come across is exceedingly small.  Not quite zero, but I'd be surprised if it's any more than 2%.

You can believe me or not, though I do have most recent 7 games streamed, winning 6 (all 7 were winnable, choked a Fed A lategame pretty bad on the one loss, that one stung...with better luck OR better skill I'd be 7/7 ).

Whether conventional weaponry also wins w/ support systems is not what we're interested in for this discussion (we both value support systems similarly).  8 laser projectiles w/o support systems is pretty awful vs RFS.  With good support systems they can win reliably, usually with green health.  What matters is the decision making that gets you to a winning setup for least cost.

When you sell any weapon to buy another, we're usually talking about a 30-50 scrap differential.  The new weapon doesn't just have to be better, it has to be better by enough to justify the scrap given up to acquire it, sometimes at direct expense of having a good system like hacking or cloaking earlier.

Cloaking is the big thing that screws up ion builds.  You need 50% more ion output to overcome the time advantage of level-2 cloaking (10 seconds on, 20 seconds cooldown.)  That's the big hole I've never seen covered in arguments for ions.  One misstep resets everything.  If you aim your ions/hacking/boarders at cloaking, then you're not using those against weapons/evasion/medbay.

Cloaking "screws up" builds in general, particularly flak 2/slower ones where you have to wait for 2 cloaks.  Vs these you have a few options, depending on what you have on your ship:

• If their weapons aren't threatening, you throw ions on piloting + cloaking.  This can be due to crappy enemy weapons, cloaking/hacking, or defense drone vs missiles.
  
• If you have something like my Engi A setup from last page, you can literally just ionize 3 systems (piloting, weapons, cloaking). No crew kill but still an easy win.
  
• If you're running a 4 slot ship so your hull damaging weapon isn't a drone, shoot the cloaking
  
• I'd almost never ionize medbay w/o enough ions for 3 systems, and only then if I've drained the target's oxygen.
  
• DD2 can similarly be handled by targeting drone control once you're through, though depending on what else is on such a ship hacking drone control can also screw its offensive drones.
  

2 damage to weapons in your first volley is usually enough to establish that, and 90% of games do supply enough bursts and beams to hit that hard.

I'd say that if you can't anticipate a way to reliably put at least 2-4 ion damage on enemy weapons in < 20 seconds based on current sector that you probably should be fishing for better offense.  Probably a good rule of thumb for any layout really.

Useful side note: the way ion damage works, if you hit enemy weapons with hull damage (say a heavy laser after shield ionization) then follow up with an ion, the combo will take down two weapons guaranteed.  This is similar to how you'd want to bomb or missile shields first, then hit with ion, then with burst lasers in that order.

But I disagree that ions are the fastest or most effective way to get there in any more than a tiny proportion of games.

Nothing is going to touch flak 1 and burst/dual lasers for "fastest" damage.  There's a good reason >> half my non-boarding builds wind up with that stuff (and ions are pretty terrible boarding support).  Again, it's a matter of switching cost/what you have available *right now* that can win the game.  With setups like that Kestrel C, which could easily win most battles with crew-kill rewards by simply cloaking/hacking weapons and shooting at piloting + oxygen with ions (ionizing cloak rather than oxygen when necessary), switching out weapons would just cost money and lose out on crew kill scrap rewards...not much upside there.  Prior to enemies having 4 shields and some freebie weapon drops, getting a few ion hits on shields --> shooting enemy weapons + putting 1 additional ion damage on them completely shut down opposing offense.