IREs are situational. Against Exowaves they're incredibly powerful... otherwise yeah, they're overpriced.
Perhaps Keith could raise the energy use of Guardians and such? Since you don't need to "build" them you could make their energy use whatever, giving IRE's a more defined purpose. Guard Posts could also have a higher energy use.
IREs have a minimum multiplier of 8 and a maximum multiplier of 30. The actual multiplier against a specific target is the target's energy / 256, so it does minimum damage vs stuff with 2048 or lower and maximum damage vs stuff with 7680 or higher.
Guardians currently have 500*mk energy cost, so yea, they would be getting minimum damage except for the mkV variants. I could change it to 1250*mk and that would cause the IRE to get a small bonus vs mkIIs (mkI guardians are fairly rare), and fairly good bonuses against IIIs, IVs, and Vs.
I'll probably just go ahead and do that irrespective of the poll, just for color. Thanks