Is it possible...?

[murel]

Hi everyone, I've been trying to set up The Vortex as an anti crew ship with boarding drones and the like and I'm just curious if I've been making a fool of myself or not. Any thoughts?

[kestreladmiral]

I dunno. For myself, the first thing I do is try to find a couple of extra crewmembers but making it anti crew ship with nothing but boarding drones is probably a bad idea simply because you're leaving a lot of systems understaffed. But I really don't know, The Vortex is not by any means a favorite ship of mine. I'd have to try it to see how well it does or doesn't work.

[murel]

what i've been trying to do is hit every store to find a fire bomb or a fire beam preferably and any upgrades I can to weapons (like a chain ion) and a boarding drone then aim to have 2 on shields 2 on engine one pilot one weapon but I've had mixed success mainly because this strategy means I may not be able to put anything into shields until sector 3 or 4 depending on when I find the stuff I need

[Iranon]

I've used it as a boarding ship with some success, but boarding drones are fairly weak from my experience.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Vortex doesn't need additional tech to get crew kills on 1-shield ships. Strip shields with laser and ionise oxygen doesn't risk blowing it up. Ionise shields, hope for fire/breach is faster and can be used to take out key systems if the enemy ship can hurt you.
Choking and Boarding Drones should complement each other nicely, but you're still paying a premium for a poor man's Lanius boarding team.

[Levgre]

Not a good strat. The 2 most effective routes for anti-crew are:

All out boarding which can be well supplemented with a boarding drone, Vortex doesn't have crew for that.

Crew killing weapons, which can even be ion weapons disabling oxygen, although the best ways are setting it on fire, or using hacking + destroying systems, and all these strats benefit tremendously from mind control.

[murel]

I prefer mind control over hacking normally, should those two be used together for crew killing? or does it matter?

[Levgre]

They contribute quite different things. Hacking is super effective at disabling whatever defensive system you need, medbay, oxygen, or shields to get weapons through. It is also good at speeding up oxygen deaths, if that is your route.

Mind control is super effective at keeping things under control, by stopping enemy repairs while also speeding up crew deaths from them fighting each other.

Regardless of which you have, you are going to need other tools. If I just had the choice of one of them, yeah I'd probably take mind control, since there are lots of ways to disable systems (lasers, missiles, whatever). Hacking just tends to disable them best, no concern about shields or dodge (although you have to get around zoltan shields and defense drones)

Ideally you'd have both, both contribute greatly to a weapons based crew kill strat.