FTL

Do I need to be in the Kestrel to unlock most of the ships or are they unlockable from any ship?

One of my favorite tactics (with 1 or more crystals) is to either trap 1, and only 1, of the enemy crew in the room I beam into, equals at least 1 dead crew, before I beam out. Or beam directly into an empty medbay and lock his crew out until it's destroyed.

EvilDead wrote:

Do I need to be in the Kestrel to unlock most of the ships or are they unlockable from any ship?

Any ship can unlock A Types of any other. B Types must be done in that ships "A".

Stele wrote:
EvilDead wrote:

I'm finding the second stage of the endboss a pain in the A. I'm rarely running into the laser power to knock out the shields and his defense drone and evasion takes care of my missiles. The teleport team does a fine job of handling the guns but the drones always seem to whittle me down. The teleport team never can do damage to the main area due to the medbay keeping his guys fighting. Its just doesn't feel nearly as balanced compared to the rest of the game as it really favors particular load outs.

I've got to the point where I never use missiles if I can avoid it. Small Bomb I can almost always find. Breach Bomb only when I'm very lucky. But missiles get shot down so much in the boss fight, and even sometimes in the final sector or two that it's not worth it.

Small/Breach Bomb + Halberd/Glaive is my favorite setup.

2nd favorite is a pair of Burst Laser MkIIs. 6 shots usually punches through any shields, even with a couple misses. Sometimes still need a bomb, or just some more Burst Lasers, or one of the above beams to finish it off.

After I posted that this morning I beat the game. I had a bunch of luck where I received and abundance of 2 - 3 shot lasers and a fire bomb. The fire bomb was exponentially easier then missiles. I ended up using the Burst MK2 combined with the heavy hull laser. I would fire the Mk2 a split second before the hull so the HL would have a chance to breach after the shields were gone.

Did you have your own defense drone? Without that you have to board and take down his missile launcher early in all 3 phases.
Or cloak? It seems like without that his super-powers in phase 2 and 3 will kick your ass. If you don't have cloak you better be loaded with firepower and take him out before he does the super-attacks more than 2 or 3 times.

I had L3 cloak and a defense drone and managed to take out his weapons with a boarding squad. The problem was I just couldn't damage the main area and he won the war of attrition. Teleporting my squad to his drone room ended up in their deaths. As you pointed out the missiles are useless. You would have to fire a barrage of them to get a hit but that would require a couple Pegasus launchers and a huge stock of ammo.

Edit: Now I feel really dumb. I just realized that you have to manually use the cloak. I thought it was just on a auto timer that reduced the more you put into it. So, had a cloak but never used it!

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:
EvilDead wrote:

Do I need to be in the Kestrel to unlock most of the ships or are they unlockable from any ship?

Any ship can unlock A Types of any other. B Types must be done in that ships "A".

Thanks!

And some ships are easier to unlock others. Like one ship unlock requires you to have an Engi crew member, and some ships come with those at the start.

Alright I got the first two parts of the Crystal Ship quest in S4. Surely somewhere in the branches of 8 or 9 sectors that is left I can finally finish it.

Calling it a night and save-scumming this one, just in case. Update sometime tomorrow.

Also would be nice to finally unlock Rock B.

Finally beat the game today on easy. I feel like I could have done it sooner but I always wind up getting distracted by something stupid and make a pivotal mistake. I had a pretty killer setup at the end though on the Red Tail: 2 Burst Lasers Mark IV, 1 Small Bomb, Full Cloak/Teleport, A Defense Drone Mark II, 3 Mantids and a Rock Person, and the other 4 posts fully staffed. Rotated power throughout the systems as needed. Boarding is totally the way to go for lots of scrap. The last fight was a cakewalk when I disabled the weapons and cloaked through the hard parts.
Also unlocked the Mantis ship on the same run.

I think I'm ready to graduate to normal

I've just stayed with Easy. That's hard enough.

I think I unlocked all (nearly all?) the ships on easy before I felt that I was ready for Normal. It let me figure out which ship I liked best, and felt that I had the best chance of winning it all.

Easy and normal seemed about the same difficulty for me. I have no idea how you guys are finding enough scrap to upgrade all this stuff, much less buy or find the weapons, drones, teleporter, and cloak.

Jolly Bill wrote:

Easy and normal seemed about the same difficulty for me. I have no idea how you guys are finding enough scrap to upgrade all this stuff, much less buy or find the weapons, drones, teleporter, and cloak.

I can't speak for normal but on easy its just about avoiding hull damage so you don't have to pay for repairs. Level 2 shields are key to have in the early game. Later on you can put money into the teleport and use boarding crews to get more salvage. Also, hit as many nodes as you can before leaving the sectors.

And of course there was a patch. Hope my save game still works. Want my shot at Crystal Ship...

Notes:

Version 1.03.0 Changelog

Changes:

-Colorblind mode (available in options) makes many color pallette changes and adds additional symbols to help out our colorblind players. I apologize for the delay in getting this into the game!
-Hotkeys added for many actions in the game, customizable from within the Options menu
-Indicator for when the enemy is attempting to jump away (and if it's able to)
-Cloaking will automatically cooldown in non-danger situations
-You can now pause using the middle mouse button (one handed gaming for those of you who need to hold your child in the other!)
-Orange room borders for very low O2 have been replaced with hazard stripes on the floor (should be more obvious for everyone)
-Ctrl+click (customizable in Options) when aiming will allow you to specify a single weapon to auto-fire (or not auto-fire if auto-fire button is toggled)
-Minor balance change: System Repair drones power requirement reduced to 1

Major Bugs:

-Cloaking will provide the +60 evasion even if you don't have a pilot
-Beams will correctly damage crew (and start fires if the Fire Beam)
-Odd numbered Shield Systems will now properly repower after ionization
-Tough Little Ship, Astronomically Low Odds, and all of the Crystal Cruiser achievements fixed
-Repair/Anti-Personel Drones will always properly disappear whenever unequipped (or sold) - this will let you unequip them to make room for repair men if you system is destroyed
-Potential fix for rare crash when selecting weapons

Minor Bugs:

-Fixed: Zoltan Bonus power wouldn't update while paused for drones
-Federation Cruiser Artillery cooldown imagery properly updates during pause
-Fixed: Sometimes incorrectly displays the teleporter/shuttle text when your crew dies after battle
-All enemies (including boarders) will now have names
-Tooltips will properly clear when events/sub-windows open
-System limits/effects caused by events (or nebulas) update upon arrival, not after the event
-Cloaking system glow fixed
-Zoltan Trade hub event fixed - blue option will actually do something now
-Fixed: Quest beacon tooltips were sometimes inaccurate
-More Typos/Grammar Fixes

-Ctrl+click (customizable in Options) when aiming will allow you to specify a single weapon to auto-fire (or not auto-fire if auto-fire button is toggled)

This is huge, and will make micro-managing weapons a lot easier.

Yeah I've got to where I rarely auto-fire anymore, so I can focus weapons. But with the ion cannons, I want them shooting as much as possible.

Thank god for the Windows 7 "Previous versions" feature. Steam cloud overwrote my local save and a bunch of ships I had unlocked disappeared as well as victories in the stats page. Apparently FTL keeps high scores, unlocks, and saves in 1 file!

Stele wrote:

Yeah I've got to where I rarely auto-fire anymore, so I can focus weapons. But with the ion cannons, I want them shooting as much as possible.

Adding a macro feature to the firing system would be awesome where you could always have one weapon fire immediately after another. You would think this kind of thing would be standard in a super advanced future weaponry system.

-Minor balance change: System Repair drones power requirement reduced to 1

That's more then minor for me. I will always try to have one now, while before I would usually skip/replace it with something that would help prevent me from getting damaged in the first place.

-You can now pause using the middle mouse button (one handed gaming for those of you who need to hold your child in the other!)

Right, it's a baby I'm holding in my other hand....

Stele wrote:

And of course there was a patch.
Changes:
-You can now pause using the middle mouse button (one handed gaming for those of you who need to hold your child in the other!)

Don't you dare laugh, but that's probably the most useful feature, right there. At least for me. ^_^

I may have to bite the bullet and play this on easy. I've only seen the final sector once, and only have 3 ships unlocked (all type A) playing normal since day 1 I got it. Must suppress my pride!

I am a big fan of the selective auto-fire though. Keeping an Ion cannon going while manually managing the rest will be great.

Glad to see this game is still moving along! It's been a long while since the last update but it IS only two guys working on this.

To guys, swimming in lots and lots of money. Good for them.

Carlbear95 wrote:

I may have to bite the bullet and play this on easy. I've only seen the final sector once, and only have 3 ships unlocked (all type A) playing normal since day 1 I got it. Must suppress my pride!

I am a big fan of the selective auto-fire though. Keeping an Ion cannon going while manually managing the rest will be great.

I thought you could do this before, it was just a bit more complicated. After clicking autofire you could remove the aim of a weapon you didn't want going by pressing the appropriate gun number then right clicking. When you re-aimed the weapon I'm pretty sure it didn't engage its autofire.

I just managed to beat it on normal for the first time. It was by the skin of my teeth as I had one bar left by the end. Felt great. I also didn't lose anyone the whole run. I had two scrap arm collectors so by the end I was basically maxed out in a cruiser. So with the cruiser special weapon, three shot laser, super rail laser beam, and hull beam. When I hit I really hurt. Also had a mantis boarding crew to wreck their missiles, my one weakness. It was fantastic really, if I was a little more lucky and had a another repair station it wouldn't have been so dangerous. Oh and that special weapon was supremely annoying.

Stele wrote:

Alright I got the first two parts of the Crystal Ship quest in S4. Surely somewhere in the branches of 8 or 9 sectors that is left I can finally finish it.

Calling it a night and save-scumming this one, just in case. Update sometime tomorrow.

Also would be nice to finally unlock Rock B. ;)

Finally! After 3 screwups, and thank goodness for savescumming, I have the Rock B and Crystal ship!

First: My Crystal crewman died on an away assault mission. Wasn't even sure if there was a Rock Homeworld.
Second: Chose the wrong path? Never saw a Rock Homewolrd.
Third: Checked the other path. There was an actual Rock Homeworld for maybe the first time ever in my game. I scoured the Rock sector, found 2 missions, but not the one for the ship. The Rebel fleet caught me and I fled to S8. But at least I had a new save to start with at the beginning of that sector.
Fourth: Found the mission on the third jump. Rock B unlocked. Made it to the quest. Crystal A unlocked.

Whew. Now I am only missing the Stealth ships and Crystal B. Also finally got to try a Crystal weapon that I bought from a store in the Secret Sector. Very cool. Thanks to replacing one of my ions with it, I killed my away crew on the final boss. Still, won the game again with Rock A!

Now off to try new ships!

Can I still say I beat the game even if I used a trainer? I'm a bit ashamed of myself, but I was just sooo frustrated!!

what's a trainer?

A trainer is basically a little program that emulates or automates cheatcodes. Instead of typing in GODMODE (or because the game doesn't have such codes) you just load up the emulator and click a button to do the same thing. The last time I used one was for the PC version of the first Halo. It had all sorts of stuff like Godmode, Infinite Ammo, and my personal favourite Stop Time! I used it to perform all sorts of shenanigans like stopping time, firing hundreds of plasma rifle shots (which hung in midair) then releasing time and watching it splash over some hapless Elite like a massive hadoken. Good times.

Trainers usually modify the memory of another program; by adjusting values while the other program is running, they can cause unusual effects, like never running out of money or health, or bullets that do ridiculous damage, or access to stuff you shouldn't yet have access to.

Occasionally, trainers will actually modify the program code itself, but those are much less common. It's usually easier to modify memory. Once the trainer author knows where, say, health is stored, it's much simpler to check that value five or ten times a second, setting it back to full whenever it decreases, rather than modifying all the possible spots in the game where health might be modified, and changing them.

Sometimes programs will try to be clever about not allowing simple modifications like that, but those are quite unusual, and can always be defeated, given a sufficiently clever cracker.

edit: well, always if the program is self-contained on your computer. If it's a multiplayer game, or MMO, the state may not be stored on the local computer, which makes trainers anywhere from less effective to completely powerless.

Trainers are people that train you in the art of ninjutsu or masked wrestling. These trainers have begone to train people in video game fu. A good trainer can change a clueless soccer mom that doesn't know the difference between mario and lara croft into the next starcraft champion and into a weapon of mass destruction. Few people know that pressing left,right,left,right,up,up,down,down on the right part of the body can kill a man and unlock a secret code in one game.