You're well on your way to mastery of this game. Your point about weapon steps is the #1 strategic point about FTL. I call that first step "popping" the shields, to distinguish between that and taking them down via breaking the shield room or hacking drain. Yes, devote most of your weapons loadout to popping the shield bubbles, with one beam weapon to deal the damage after.
Ions are terrible. Regular lasers/flaks always work better. Ignore ions, or at most just use one to pop one shield bubble as if it's a 1-shot regular laser. Newbies get caught up in the idea of fancy stunlock stacks - but that goes to hell and leaves your ions worse than useless in the problem cases of high evasion or cloaking to dodge shots and reset the ion timer.
Flaks are great, just fire them a second before everything else to handle the slowness, you'll get used to that. Also pay attention to physically where it's mounted on the ship (look graphically at the positions for each weapon slot) - put flaks towards the right/forward side so the projectiles don't have to go as far.
Enemy evasion gets high later in the game because their ships have high engine levels, and with Advanced Edition, sometimes the pilots have piloting skill. Yeah, the way to stop it is hack or break piloting or engines.
And yeah, you can only see the session stats right when you finish that game, as far as I know.
Ions are terrible. Regular lasers/flaks always work better. Ignore ions, or at most just use one to pop one shield bubble as if it's a 1-shot regular laser. Newbies get caught up in the idea of fancy stunlock stacks - but that goes to hell and leaves your ions worse than useless in the problem cases of high evasion or cloaking to dodge shots and reset the ion timer.
Flaks are great, just fire them a second before everything else to handle the slowness, you'll get used to that. Also pay attention to physically where it's mounted on the ship (look graphically at the positions for each weapon slot) - put flaks towards the right/forward side so the projectiles don't have to go as far.
Enemy evasion gets high later in the game because their ships have high engine levels, and with Advanced Edition, sometimes the pilots have piloting skill. Yeah, the way to stop it is hack or break piloting or engines.
And yeah, you can only see the session stats right when you finish that game, as far as I know.