zeek wrote:I don't understand how the math works on this one. They will get at least one swipe if not more before you can fire both your dual laser and your mini beam. Mini beam takes 12 seconds to be ready to fire. You can cloak for 5 seconds. That means 7 seconds of punishment. Rate of fire of a drone is not consistent. So, we can't say how long between swipes but that's going to be more than one swipe. Either way if it takes out one of your weapons we'll hope it's the mini beam otherwise you aren't going to do any damage. Now you can do 1 damage to their drone system if both shots hit. This is far from a safe situation and may or may not disable their beam drone for as long as it takes for the system to be repaired. You're still going to be attacked by any other weapons their ship has. You're relying on luck to survive a situation like this.
The math is quite easy, in fact.
1) You only need 3 encounters (often 2) to get 20 scrap for cloak upgrade. 10 seconds is all you need to mess up the drone systems.
2) If you encounter a beam drone on your first jump and thus only have 5 seconds cloak, bear in mind that the drone system probably only has 2 power bars in it, and a single shot will disable the drone.
3) Drones take their sweet time before getting into firing position. Usually you have 3 seconds before they fire, and they slow down before firing, which serves as a visual warning for you to activate cloak. If you pay attention to what is going on, there is no way that anything fires before you do. I speak from experience.
4) You forget that, in an emergency situation, you control which weapon gets disabled, by choosing weapon order.
There are a lot of little things to keep track of with Nesasio, and all of them add up to make it a very powerful ship. There is no luck involved, but lots and lots of micro.
Starting a cloak at 5 seconds is just not good enough to avoid all damage. You can say all you want but it just isn't, once it's at 10 seconds then yeah, it's more doable, and it highly depends on what the enemy throws at you.
It is there on your 4th encounter. Damaging the system for 2 points when enemies often have no more then 3 power bars is very helpful to avoid damage. Add to this that AI keeps disabling weapons when it repairs more powerful ones, and depowers them if they get hit, and this is as good as it gets.
10 combats per sector in the first 2 sectors is close to impossible. I rarelly see more than 6 and for scrap. Average of 12 per combat on the first, average of 17 on the second. even summing 10 combats, which I doubt very much you can easly do that's 290 scrap. But it's more likelly to assume you're gonna get some 220 to 230 scrap in the first 2 sectors.
On average, I get 7-8. This is where the sensors come into play. As for scrap, you can consistently get 300+. I average on 350 (with a few events that double your reward). These measurments were taken across several games. You don't need to assume things, just try it out.
Teleporter is close to useless with 2 humans to fight. Sure they can do it, just barelly on most cases and hardly without anything to help them. If you had 2 mantis or 2 rock, then yeah, no problem...
You can board with everything, even Engis. I've done it with Engi A. Very micro-intensive, but effective nonetheless. As for the help, there are always weapons.
Barely or not, they CAN do it, and that is all that matters. How can you call a teleporter useless after acknowledging that baffles me. And don't forget, even if you can't overpower them (which happens very rarely), just keep them busy and prevent them from bringing their weapons back online while your ship dismantles theirs.
Drones... I dunno, an offensive drone might help quite a bit early on, but it has to be very early on and 80 scrap for the controler and buying the drone if it is even available... Kinda complicated.
I didn't pull the numbers I gave you out of the blue, you know.

130 scrap is nothing for this ship.