How many ions a day keep the rebels away

ftl-faster-than-light

Some say you cannot teach new tricks to an old dog. I found that decapitation is the best way to ensure the error of mistaking a mantis for a dog never happens again.

Anyway, I went to kick some Rebels' asses today with the Vortex for the first time. Sadly, there wasn't much kicking going on without a crew. New crew members were of the greenish brittle kind or engi. As tempting as it was, buying a trusty teleporter made no sense. You ain't winning no fight with light bulbs and plumbers my dear!

I embraced the nature of the ship instead, with a final setup looking like this:

  1. ion weapons:
    1. Heavy Ion
    2. Ion Blast I
    3. Ion Blast II
  2. drones:
    1. Combat II
    2. Defense II
    3. Anti-Combat

To my surprise it worked1. However, I often could not decide what ion weapon to use against what system of an enemy ship at what moment. I mostly just pointed them all at the shields to keep them down and let the combat drone do the work. This worked even against those wimps hiding behind 4 layers of blue protection.

Is there a proven strategy to orchestrate multiple ion weapons for maximum efficiency? That is like a laser can lower shields to allow a beam weapon to go threw and deal more damage. Could I have disabled additional systems while keeping the shields down by aiming one ion weapon at that system occasionally?

In theory, reducing a system with ion damage should take more ion damage than keeping it low, freeing ion damage resources for other ion damaging tasks. Being able to ion damage additional systems appears to be advantageous.

My unit of choice is 'throats per minute', so I'm not exactly sure what to look for when optimising ion damage efficiency, here are the specs:

        energy req     ion damage    recharge [s]     damage/time
heavy       2               2           13               0.154
blast I     1               1            8               0.125
blast II    3               1            4               0.25

The blast II clearly wins on ion damage / time, but it also requires a lot of energy. Dealing 2 ion damage at once is great, but missing a shot that took 13s to charge is very unfortunate.

Is this just a numbers game or is there more to it than ion damage / time?

On a recent raid of a slug ship, I found this related information:

Additional ion effects will both reset the timer and add to the ion counter, allowing an ion barrage to completely disable a 4x Shield.

If the hit of an ion projectile not only adds to the ion count, but also resets any decrease of existing ion damage, then I wonder if I'm right in thinking that not only dealing the most ion damage / time is important, but doing so with the most ion projectiles / time has a certain importance, too?
After all a well scheduled impact of an ion projectile at 0.00001 resets to 1 and thus "adds" almost one full ion damage.

Could any of my dear fellow federation allies shed some light on this please?

1but barely, "working" as in The burning, heavily damaged ship managed to beat the flagship with its last almost dead zoltan, barricading himself in the room of the doorsystem that he frantically tried to repair, protecting him from the intruders to gain some time the combat drone needed to finish off the mothership.

Best Answer

I would definitely not just keep aiming at the shields. Once the shields are down then they only need to be kept down, not melted like cheese in a microwave.

I would keep the Ion Blast II on the shields as it has a fast enough fire rate that it will keep the shields down, even if it misses occasionally. I'd then use the other ion weapons to selectively disable key parts of the ship. The exact parts depend on what kind of ship you are fighting; you'll have to figure out what is the biggest threat. The idea is to get into the situation where you are dealing steady damage with your combat drone, but absorbing the enemy's attacks with your shield and defence drone. If there is no immediate threat then I'd probably keep the Ion Blast I charged but not targeted; ready for an immediate attack if the enemy tried to warp or if I had a run of misses with the Ion Blast II on the shield.

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