FTL

Ugh. So apparently you need missiles for the boss?

Got my Kestrel B all the way to S8 without them, or without losing a member (yay 2 achievements), and then got my ass solidly handed to me. Could never punch through 4-bars of shield.

Stele wrote:

Ugh. So apparently you need missiles for the boss?

Got my Kestrel B all the way to S8 without them, or without losing a member (yay 2 achievements), and then got my ass solidly handed to me. Could never punch through 4-bars of shield. :(

Well, you can always use those rapid-fire lasers to whittle the shields down. 2 lasers with 5 shots each, synced, punch through everything. If you have a beam weapon, make it fire right after the laser barrage. Aim at shield room and watch them weep. Or use an ion bomb, it ignores shields and will disable them. There are always multiple ways around shields, it definitely is not missile only. I am quite sure I beat the boss without any missiles the first time.

Queueball wrote:

The ship is the osprey, in general I feel like the auto beam weapon isn't worth it until maybe the boss fight. The load time on it is so slow, that it tends to coincide with when you have crew on board and are about to win. Eventually I decided it wasn't worth the damage to keep losing boarding parties accidentally.

It's quite powerful once you level it up to 4. It becomes a pike beam basically that pierces any and all shields. If you also max out shields and get a defence drone you can tank most enemies and let the beam take care of them.

wanderingtaoist wrote:
Stele wrote:

Ugh. So apparently you need missiles for the boss?

Got my Kestrel B all the way to S8 without them, or without losing a member (yay 2 achievements), and then got my ass solidly handed to me. Could never punch through 4-bars of shield. :(

Well, you can always use those rapid-fire lasers to whittle the shields down. 2 lasers with 5 shots each, synced, punch through everything. If you have a beam weapon, make it fire right after the laser barrage. Aim at shield room and watch them weep. Or use an ion bomb, it ignores shields and will disable them. There are always multiple ways around shields, it definitely is not missile only. I am quite sure I beat the boss without any missiles the first time.

Yeah, this is good advice. I generally prefer lasers to missiles, since they can't be deflected by defense drones.

The key to lasers/beams is to never use autofire. It's all about timing. And also, sometimes you have to be willing to focus on the enemy shield room and ignore the weapon room, even if that means you take more hull damage.

Missiles won't help much when the boss stage has those defense drones running.

gore wrote:

The key to lasers/beams is to never use autofire. It's all about timing. And also, sometimes you have to be willing to focus on the enemy shield room and ignore the weapon room, even if that means you take more hull damage.

That may be what I screwed up. By the time I was in S8, I had upgraded lasers, so I had guns with 9. 10, 12, and 13 sec recharge. Needed to turn off auto-fire and punch through all at once.

Just started... I think I'm in trouble.

Rage quit this afternoon.

So of course after unlocking both A and B variants of the Kestrel and Engi, I wanted to find more ships. Checking the wiki tells you some of the side missions that lead to ships.

So I found one of them (Zaltan mabye?), a quest in the same system I was in. But things were going pretty badly on the Engi B ship for me, with only a couple crew. I had built my 1 up to 3, but then lost her in a pointless mis-click, not sending her to infirmary fast enough.

Anyway, I had the quest, and although it only looked to be 2 jumps away, it turned out to be 4, having to go the long way around. But finally I was in the sector next to the quest. All I had to do was survive long enough to jump. The enemy took out my oxygen first, and then my droid control. Without my repair droids and only 2 crew members, it was hopeless. I tried to repair, but ran out of air before we could fix anything. What a clusterf*ck.

In retrospect I could have probably went back to pilot station and just jumped with my 20% of oxygen or whatever left, and maybe completed the mission before dying in the next sector. Ugh.

Holy crap this game is fun.

I love that this game is still going. I was worried after a few weeks of quiet. It's too good a game to let die.

Maybe skimming because I've avoided most of this thread because spoilers.
BRAIN HURT!
Cargo: Defense II
Defense Drone Mark II
It fires faster than Mark I and can also shoot down incoming lasers.
...
It can shoot down.. not deflect or absorb... shoot down incoming lasers. I can't wait until I can equip armored lasers, to keep my lasers from being shot down by enemy drones.

Also, my first run where I've survived long enough (easy mode!) to see the rebel fleet closing in on the map. I was wondering what would keep me from just hitting every checkpoint.

I really love the Zoltan ship. That shield, wow.

Still I've been having trouble making a good run. The cutting laser weapons are really cool. But they only seem to cut through 1 bar of shield? Once I was getting to harder ships I started struggling.

Also I've had horrible luck building my crew. On some games I end up with a full 7 or 8. Mostly from missions, a few from stores. But the last 4 games with Zoltan A, B, B, and A, I have never got more than 4 crew members. I'm either broke when I hit the store or just have not hit the right missions. Been a frustrating night/morning. Because inevitably I get invaded later on, and with so few crew and no anti-personnel droids I get my ass kicked, and things fall apart.

I know this has probably been mentioned before, but I call bullsh*t on the fact that boarding teams just disappear when the last ship jumps away.

I was using the Mantis ship in the B configuration, and my boarding team is my main weapon, and just like that, poof! No longer exists. Despite the fact that I was ripping them to shreds from the inside, and had killed all but the isolated weapon crews. You'd think that they'd just be stuck on the other ship until I caught up, which was immediately. Nope!

Alright, the rage is passing... I think I can move on now.

I have yet to use a boarding party. I don't seem to have enough guys to spare. And I worry I would blow the ship up while they are there or something?

Do you just only use Mantis units for that? Would love some strategic advice. I'm sure there's some strategies I'm missing...

Mantis and rock units work great, and maybe crystal units, but I haven't tested them to be sure. Humans will do in a pinch. Boarding is weak vs slavers since they usually have a lot of crew, zoltran ships which have hardened shields that need to be taken down before you can teleport and is useless vs ai-ships. The goal is to kill the crew, since that gives the best reward. Teleport into a room where they will be forced to respond and you won't be outnumbered. If you have a 4 man teleporter this is usually weapons, with a 2 man it's O2, doors or engines. If they have a sickbay, you'll need to knock it out and kill the crew trying to repair it.

Once you've killed a few crews, manpower in no longer a problem, as a good percentage of the ships you take will have a prisoner on board which will join you.

I hate the Engi-B. I think it's the worst of all the available ones. My 1st win on normal was with the Engi-A though. Crystal border(s) are nice in that you can lock out, or in, enemy crews; it let's you kill them before they can run back to their med-bay.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

I hate the Engi-B. I think it's the worst of all the available ones. My 1st win on normal was with the Engi-A though. Crystal border(s) are nice in that you can lock out, or in, enemy crews; it let's you kill them before they can run back to their med-bay.

Yeah, Crystal dudes are the best IMO. The lockdown combined with extra health means that you can whittle away at enemies safely.

Mantis are good of course, rock work in a pinch. Humans and slugs... eh. They're OK, but I won't use them unless I have at least one stronger unit to go with them.

Upgrading senors is really important for a boarding party strategy. And strategic use of your ship's weapons to take out the medbay and/or clusters of enemies is very important too.

Yeah I hate the Engi-B ship too. Not that I have even half the ships yet, but it's clearly the worst of the first 6 I've used.

Thanks for the tips on boarding guys. Giving it a try. Made a mistake jumping on an AI ship though. Mantis died, but Rock survived until I could bring him back. I panicked because it was one of those "the ship is going to jump out and alert the fleet" things and I wanted to take out their engines real quick...

One trick with the engi-b is to vent the entire ship all the time, except the pilot and the medbay. Helps a lot with boarders and fires. But yeah, the lack of a strong weapon or an offensive droid to start is definitely a big hurdle.

VICTORY IS MINE!

Holy crap. Finally.

Eng-A ship.

Picked up a rock crew pretty early. Then in S5 or so I picked up the stasis pod, and rare crystal crewman the next sector. I thought I was going to get other rare ship in S7, but alas, my crystal man fell in an invasion. I was pretty annoyed to come that close and lose it. But then finally beating the boss in S8 made up for it!

My final layout wasn't super impressive. Had shields maxed at 4. Engines up to 4. Cloak at 2. Weapons at 7 (a 3-bar 2-shot laser I found, the starting 3-bar Ion, and a 1-bar Ion Bomb), and Drones at 4. (starting attack, a 2nd attack, and a rank 1 defense). For the boss I had drones out most of the time. 2 attack ones on 1st/3rd phase, 1 defense/attack on 2nd phase. Didn't get a chance to repair between waves either... think I won with about 6-8 hull left.

Still a lot of ships to unlock. But nice to finally win the game.

Once.

On Easy.

Whew.

Yeah still haven't beat it on normal yet. Mainly cus I'm not using engi a which i beat it on easy with. I was using the federation cruiser withe the auto laser thingy. That's great but it's a horrible combo with boarding parties. Also I don't think boarding is that great for the last boss. Sure you can break things, but unless you can take the damage you can't do it fast enough.

I'd say boarding the boss or otherwise eliminating it's crew is almost essential. The boss is just like your ship, it has crew manning stations which make the connected system work better/faster (especially the weapons). It also has extra crew who conduct repairs. The more crew you eliminate the weaker the boss gets.
Consider using anti-crew items like fire weapons and boarding drones. A fire in the medbay will torpedo the crew of any ship! Weapons that cause breaches also work well because they cause unavoidable damage when a crew member has to fix them in an airless room.

Fed ship is pretty nice. Made it all the way back to boss in first run.

Failed, but that's another matter. I didn't have nearly the good droid setup, and was down to 3 crew members. Lost Mantis and Rock in a raid, and really struggled the last 2-3 sectors just to survive with only 3.

Tamren wrote:

I'd say boarding the boss or otherwise eliminating it's crew is almost essential. The boss is just like your ship, it has crew manning stations which make the connected system work better/faster (especially the weapons). It also has extra crew who conduct repairs. The more crew you eliminate the weaker the boss gets.
Consider using anti-crew items like fire weapons and boarding drones. A fire in the medbay will torpedo the crew of any ship! Weapons that cause breaches also work well because they cause unavoidable damage when a crew member has to fix them in an airless room.

I've beaten the boss quite a few times and only eliminated the entire crew once. There are definitely multiple approaches.

My first build was offensive drone heavy. It involved targeting weapons systems with my main weapons, missiles first, then ion. After that, my shields could hold against the two remaining weapons, so everything is set to attack shields, once the shields are lowered the attack drones take the boss out pretty quickly, damaging the odd systems while they do it.

I've also used the cloak approach which works pretty well, but it's low on my list of favourites.

I tend to prefer using weapons that fire quickly with little damage. It's the best way to keep those shields down, and to ensure some amount of damage when there is a high miss rate. Honestly I love 2 or 3 Burst Laser IIs(IIIs are slow and have a lower shot:powerreq ratio compared to 2 IIs) and an Ion Blast I or II. Then have 1 Defense MK I, and 1 or 2 Anti-Ship MK Is. Each shot doesn't do much damage, but you're firing so many things that a good portion of them have to hit and make it through the shields.

Leave exactly one or two crew alive on the boss ship, and neither should be the at its weapon stations. If you kill them all, it goes rogue.

I just beat the game on easy with a Federation cruiser maxed out on firepower, it was insane. I had four weapons and the autobeam thingy maxed out. Also had the weapon pre-igniter and the reload speed boost. Couple that with high shield, and a good crew. I was a death dealing machine, and it was fantastic. Wasn't really much of a challenge but I did repair once for the third battle. Probable didn't need to.

Of course this was one easy...

Oh I finally peaked at how to get some of the other ships, and well damn they look hard.

Certis wrote:

I went a little stir crazy waiting for FTL to come out so I ended up roleplaying with Hedgewizard on Twitter. I'm not proud. http://storify.com/Certis/ftl-twitte...

I know this is old. But this text-adventure is exactly like playing FTL.

For the others like me who just jumped aboard this week, worth bringing back to the front.

And yes, this means I'm re-reading the whole thread while watching football today.

So I looked around for some more tips last night. I probably should go back and read this whole thread because I bet they're already here somewhere.

Anyway, the usual:
Coordinate your weapons, don't just auto-fire blindly.
Boarding party advice: mantis, rock, crystal, like you guys said.

The stuff I didn't realize:
Up your engine power more than auto-pilot. Engine power is your true dodge chance. Auto-pilot only kicks in if your pilot leaves the cockpit for something. Also you can put power to engines on something like the final boss when it does barrage, and be able to dodge a lot, then put power back into your weapons or whatever.
Similarly, take out the opponent's pilot station and it cuts their dodge chance down to nothing. This would have helped last night when I was whiffing against the boss and had trouble getting his shields down.

Probably a few more tips that I've forgotten already.

Also turning on "show jump paths" or whatever the option is called helped immensely. I lost a game Fri night because I thought I could make it to the exit on a northern path but couldn't. Had to go back 3 jumps into the rebel pursuit wave and eventually died after back-to-back-to-back fights.

Argh!

Had a nearly invincible Zoltan B run going. Seriously I don't think I've been below half health. I still have all 3 of my starting crew. I was totally kicking ass. Picked up a 2nd laser to match the starter one. Just ion-ion-ion-ion, and then laser-laser and everything dead.

But I could never find a decent drone. I got a Defense 1 which I knew I'd need for the boss, but never another. And never a bomb. I know missiles won't do squat on the boss.

All that time of breezing... and now I sit here, trading shots with the boss for 20 minutes, never being able to take it's shields down but it never being able to stop me either. Ugh.

At least I unlocked the Rock Ship. Guess I'll just forfeit this round. So stupid.

Yeah, I find that the worst thing that can happen in the game is getting to the boss with a ship that's strong enough to survive indefinitely but unable to do any damage. It's definitely not uncommon.