Not really, you take the weapons out of auto and make them all shoot at the rate of the slowest.

I'm partial with a mix of lasers and hull breachers and 1 missile/bomb.

First, you use your missile/bomb to target the shields and weaken them. You can leave it on auto thereafter to always target the shields.

Then, you fire the lasers and breachers in tandem at their weapons system and keep firing it manually (there is a pause button if you have coordination issues) so that they always fire in tandem.

With a bit of luck, the breacher(s) will cause a hull breach and the laser(s) will start a fire.

That will give their repair crew the hell of a time trying to fix it.

Have you guys compared the Burst Laser MK 1 to the Dual Laser yet?

Because you should, as there is basicaly no reason to use the Burst one.

The Dual Laser shoots the same number of shots and does the same ammount of damage, but it has a (slightly) faster charge time AND only takes 1 point of power

Those 2dmg upgraded beams can still do damage against a ship whose shield is at 1, and if you're meticulous with your positioning to maximize room coverage, you can still tip the battle in your favor.

1dmg spread across 5 rooms is 5 lifebars gone and a big repair mess, from a weapon that can't be dodged. That's nothing to sneeze at.

After playing for a longer time now, I will say I have favored the lower Mk versions. The burst laser 2 is one of my favorites. Many times I just sell the higher end, longer charge, higher energy use weapons off, except when they are my only option. In seperate instances I've picked up and used the burst laser mk 3 and glaive beam. The glaive was instrumental in taking down the flagship. With the burst mk 3, I liked that one volley could take down a shield 4 (irc 5 shots) and do damage still. I still sold it when I had a chance though.

Since those games I have thought about this subject (higher mk seeming worse) and I'm starting to think that maybe this is not necessarily the case. In terms of damage per energy, they generally are, but my thoughts run along the lines of having multiple options available. A single burst 3 frees up one slot compared to using a mk2 plus an mk1 (total of 5 shots in one round if manually synced). This allows (in ships with 3 slots) for you to run a laser, beam, and missile (2 of the 3 with weapons 8 if they all are 4 power) , and be able to send out similar sized volleys (for burst) with a single slot. I think this could be the advantage of the higher mk versions. The more I play the more I move toward thinking DPS does not matter as much in this game as does timing damage and using other capabilities (cloak, boarding, drones) together. I plan to try this in game when I get the chance to test if it works.

A nice little trick I learned to use with Autofire is this...With Autofire "on", you can have say two/three of your lasers targeted at whatever system you want to take out, synced together as closely as possible. Fire a missle at the enemies Shield generator (hopefully a hit) then follow up your targeting with your lasers on the sheilds again, or perhaps the weapon systems if sheilds have been damaged sufficiently; then right click on your missles to power them down (removing them from Autofire, and immeaditly left click them again ONCE. This will power them up, but will not fire them until you manually click on them again and target again. I do this often to conserve missles, just using them when needed to take out an enemy system for a bit, and letting the lasers do their work in between. Of course, when the enemy has one of them damn defense drones whipping around, taking my missles out, that throws a fly in the ointment >:-#. But much of the time, I find this works quite well with the autofire function always "on". But of course, as you said....it all depends on the playstyle one is using overall...

edit: just saw that Magnitus above basically said the same thing, lol. props to Mag, my bad

I'm having a tough time justifying the "Hermes" missles. They only add one damage over the Artemis, but they cost two extra energy. I think they should be lowered to two energy.

Yeah, I hear you...I will sometimes just use it as a "first" missle shot to really damage the enemie's sheilds or weapons, then depower it to activate a couple of my other lower energy use weapons, to continue the attack. Much to costly energy wise, to use an entire battle...

Another thing, what is the point of autofire when you can just pause the game anytime? You can select targets while your weapons are still charging. Auto fire does not give you an advantage in speed or rate of fire.

Absolutely, in my last play-through I would wait until all my weapons were charged and then use an ion bomb. Assuming it hit the target (shields), I would unleash everything as soon as their defences went down. Two hull laser mkII and a burst laser mkII Potential damage of 11 iir (system-less rooms) assuming everything is on target.

Regarding the various grades of lasers, I prefer weapons with more individual shots than overall damage. It's better for getting through shields and you have a better chance of something hitting the target.

I've found it useful in the first two sectors with the engi ship. The ion canon fires every four seconds or so with an upgraded gunner. It's useful just to keep enemy shields down. But beyond that, I've never seen a use for auto fire myself.

Well first, the burst mkIII fires 5 shots. and some ships only have 3 weapon slots(but 3 drone slots instead of 2).
while stacking mkII is better, it is very hard ot actually find that many in one playthrough. there is truly no point in upgrading 2 MKIIs for an MKIII, but getting that mkIII is better than hoping to get something slightly better later.
what counts is whether you can piecre the enemy shields or not. with an MKIII you can basiscly destroy every shield there is in the game.

same goes for the pikebeam vs halberd beam. sure the pike hits more rooms, but only if there are not enemy shield and then it only does one damage to every subsystem.
It gets worse when the shields regenrate and suddenly your pike can only hit 2 rooms before the shield nullify your beam.

Less clicking if you don't have to change anything. I also saw a thread where someone used it to train his crew with a weak weapon while he left the computer (against an enemy that couldn't harm him anymore).

I've been playing this game since it came out and I would have to agree that upgrades are not in fact upgrades at all.

You get a better upgrade from using different weapon types rather than going for a higher iteration.
That being said nothing has been done about it and nothing seems to be going on with it.

Strangely enough I can't seem to find in (order to buy) things like dual lasers (2 shots for 1 energy) though it doesn't matter much with my favourite tactic being a missile to the enemy shields then a halberd beam across usually 4-5 systems.

At the moment I'm running the infinite worlds mod or whatever it's called.
Running the basilisk with a bio beam and the 5 shot burst laser you can effectively drop shields knock off 90% enemy health and catch them before they get to the plentiful on all ship types medical bay.
It's such a shame that such combat is not viable in the base game due to the end boss having the cheat of an AI autopilot.
Jeez was I pissed off when I finally unlocked the mantis cruiser made a decent build that was wiping everything that could be thrown at me off the edge of the galaxy to have a default fail at the end due to close combat being irrelevant to the boss. I mean I had to teleport to each gun battery on the thing after knocking out the medical bay it's not like it was a cop out tactic.

My only other qualm is that obviously ships can have their weapon bays separate as a mechanism yet all player ships have the one mount for the enemy to blast off *rolls eyes.

There is certainly room for improvement here and balancing if the FTL team put a little effort into it.
Have a single main-point for a tier 4 weapon and two tier 2 mounts separate, that will limit stacking of the major advantage having an 'appropriately' balanced high level weapon for one.
But of course this will not come about will it :P

Ok for what it's worth, here's my thoughts. Please forgive me if I link the quotes incorrectly. I haven't really done it much.

There's plenty of opportunity to get more crew. It's not like you're doomed to be forever alone.

Precious reload time is kind of subjective, since I've had setups with weapons that recharge quickly, but I will still let them sit until my longer loading weapons are charged, and it's still the best thing to do.

Yep, I consider it just a convenience, for certain points to avoid repeated manual targeting.

I agree with this for sure. These are stellar points. Consider the MKIII laser.
If all your non-piercing weapons don't add up to more than 4 damage, you have a 100% chance of NEVER damaging an enemy ship with 4 shields, so having 5 shots on 1 gun has significance. And when attacking ships with less than 4 shields, victory will be even quicker.
Obviously, you can use missiles to damage a ship early, conveniently bypassing their shield. But really, when it comes to suggesting a MKIII laser has little value, that's not exactly true. I've had a MKIII laser with other lasers to supplement it, and that works nice. Even if you fire a MKIII along with a single shot laser, that's worth a lot.

So, if the argument that I THINK I'm hearing is that higher level weapons increase in power, but their power requirements don't rise equally, then yes, that's accurate. The trick is, it's possible to be more effective with the more costly weapons despite this, which is their value.