Do automated reloaders stack

ftl-faster-than-light

My current game is going very well and I have a more powerful arsenal of weapons than in any of my previous games (2x burst laser, breach bomb mk II and anti-bio beam). I also have one automated reloader augmentation already, and now I just found a shop that sells a second one.

Do two of these augmentations stack, or would I be wasting scraps by buying the second one?

And if they stack, do they stack multiplicatively or additive with each other and any other factors like crew experience that decrease reload time?

Best Answer

Yes. Any augmentation you can buy twice, stacks. If it doesn't stack you will be unable to buy it in a shop, and you'll get scrap instead of it as an event reward.

More precisely, any augmentation with <stackable>true</stackable> in the game resources is stackable and can be bought more than once, and the Automated Re-loader (AUTO_COOLDOWN) is so flagged.

It's known that Scrap Recovery Arms stack additively rather than multiplicatively; other stackable augmentations likely work the same way.

Related Solutions

Does ion weapon damage stack with cloaking and teleporter cooldowns

Yes, assuming the ion device does sufficient ion damage, you could lock it down while it was on cooldown. Note that if you only do partial ion damage you'll reduce the effective level of the cloak. Though that is typically more than enough; a cloak has a pretty long cooldown by weapon standards. You can keep shooting him too, and it will keep adding ion damage. I've never seen ion damage pile up I should note; I said it "reset the timer" but it's possible I was just seeing ion damage when the previous "debuff" had run out.

How ion weapons work. To answer your question in the comments, assume the enemy has a level 3 cloak, and you have a 1 point ion weapon. Hitting the cloak with your 1pt ion weapon would do a one point of ion damage, which is worth 5 seconds"disruption" and 1 power bar of damage. This will "disrupt" the cloak and reducing the cloak time by 5 seconds (the "answer" below is correct on that).

Damaging Piloting on Automated ships

Having just used Marius' strategy to detect the evasion of an automated vessel, I discovered something very interesting about automated ships and their evasion with regard to their piloting section!

I used a hacking drone on Engines but didn't activate it. This allowed me to check the dodge chance for the automated foe. I also did not damage its engine system. I then used a beam weapon that dealt one damage each time to hit their piloting to see what effect it would have:

Undamaged piloting (gray)     : 30%
1 Damage to piloting (orange) : 25%
2 Damage to piloting (orange) : 25%
3 Damage to piloting (red)    : 0%

Interestingly, this shows that automated vessels gain a +5% bonus to dodge from their piloting when it is undamaged, and lose that bonus whenever it is injured. This is equivalent to having an unskilled pilot switch from manning the subsystem to repairing the subsystem. Further damage does not affect the subsystem until it is destroyed! This makes some sense because automated vessels do automatically repair damaged systems/subsystems.

The primary strategic takeaway is only slightly enlightening, as it doesn't occur often: If you can only deal 1 or 2 points of damage to a subsystem, don't prioritize piloting too greatly. You are probably better off focusing on shields/weapons/drones, as you aren't dropping the dodge by very much. Note that this is only relevant with level 2/3 piloting.

Note that this was done on a sector 7 automated vessel on EASY. Thus, I suspect it is possible for NORMAL or HARD versions to lose 7% or 10% evasion if it is true that automated vessels are considered to be skilled, or masterful with their "invisible crew".