FTL

Mantis, not Mantid.

Stele wrote:

Mantis, not Mantid. ;)

Damn it!

Spoiler:

The tag works!

MWAHAHAHA!!

Well thanks to the awesomeness of SilentSod, I've got this now and I'm going to start playing soon. This should be interesting. Got a lot of pages to read.

EDIT: GAH! Stupid mantis people ate my crew. Love the music though. How do I stop them from boarding me? Or at least fend them off?

BlackSabre wrote:

Well thanks to the awesomeness of SilentSod, I've got this now and I'm going to start playing soon. This should be interesting. Got a lot of pages to read.

EDIT: GAH! Stupid mantis people ate my crew. Love the music though. How do I stop them from boarding me? Or at least fend them off?

The only thing I have found to do about boarding parties is to upgrade your doors so that it takes longer for them to open them. Then just open a pathway of doors to space and suffocate them. Otherwise, I have found them devastating.

JillSammich wrote:
BlackSabre wrote:

Well thanks to the awesomeness of SilentSod, I've got this now and I'm going to start playing soon. This should be interesting. Got a lot of pages to read.

EDIT: GAH! Stupid mantis people ate my crew. Love the music though. How do I stop them from boarding me? Or at least fend them off?

The only thing I have found to do about boarding parties is to upgrade your doors so that it takes longer for them to open them. Then just open a pathway of doors to space and suffocate them. Otherwise, I have found them devastating.

Same. I think someone else up thread suggested this, but get to the med room, then open all the doors to the outside, without suffocating your own crew. As they attack you in there, you heal. If they get there without running out of O2 first... Perfect.

Wow, this is crazy addictive. Only problem is on my second run I'm doing exceptionally well. Except I got back to the exit after the rebels caught up, so I had to fight off one of their ships. I took it out with no damage, but I couldn't salvage it. Ah well. This is fun!

Actually, wouldn't "mantid" be the correct adjective for the Mantis people as a whole? That is, the capsule itself is Mantid, but the inhabitant is a Mantis?

Malor wrote:

Actually, wouldn't "mantid" be the correct adjective for the Mantis people as a whole? That is, the capsule itself is Mantid, but the inhabitant is a Mantis?

Sectors say Mantis Controlled or Mantis Homeworld. Mantis stasis pod, Mantis ship, Mantis boarding party, etc. Everything in game uses Mantis.

Well, that could just mean he was very consistently wrong.

So what can I do about horrible weapon accuracy? Like, atrociously bad? I even had an NPC decide against joining my crew because of the laughable hit % I had that fight.

Put a crewmember in your weapon room. Eventually his weapon skill will improve.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Put a crewmember in your weapon room. Eventually his weapon skill will improve.

Crew mostly affects weapon cooldown rates. Accuracy is affected by the enemy dodge rate, which is determined based on their engines, helm, and crew.

Take out the enemy's engine and/or pilot station to stop them dodging.

So, what's your usual order of enemy systems to hit? Weapons first, I would presume, then Engine? Shields? O2?

omnipherous wrote:

So, what's your usual order of enemy systems to hit? Weapons first, I would presume, then Engine? Shields? O2?

Depends on my weapons. If I'm in the Rock ship with missiles, I hit their weapons, then hull. If I'm in an Engi ship with Ions I target their weapons, which disables their shields. In most other configurations (some kind of bomb/missile and beam/laser combo) I have to punch out the shields first, and then lay into them.

If you hit something like O2 or Medbay the enemy AI seems to drop everything to fix it. So if you take out their shields or weapons, then hit O2/Med with next shot, they will go repair it instead of their weapons/shields, and be pretty defenseless for a salvo or two.

Also depends on what they do. If they have missiles or bombs that ignore your shields, it's very important to disable their weapons. If they launch drones that attack you, then you might have to hit their drone control before weapons.

There's no 100% all the time attack order. Each battle is unique.

Itsatrap wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Put a crewmember in your weapon room. Eventually his weapon skill will improve.

Crew mostly affects weapon cooldown rates. Accuracy is affected by the enemy dodge rate, which is determined based on their engines, helm, and crew.

Oh yeah, that.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:

So what can I do about horrible weapon accuracy? Like, atrociously bad? I even had an NPC decide against joining my crew because of the laughable hit % I had that fight.

There's no way to actually improve your accuracy, but if you damage/destroy the enemy ship's piloting system or engine you will hurt/eliminate their chance to dodge. Attacking the pilot/engine can be a good strategy but often is lower priority than taking out their shields or weapons.

As for the incident you mentioned, slight spolier below:

Spoiler:

In that particular fight the zoltan is angry because he wants you to kill the crew that has taken over his ship and you destroyed it instead.

Scaphism wrote:

There's no way to actually improve your accuracy, but if you damage/destroy the enemy ship's piloting system or engine you will hurt/eliminate their chance to dodge. Attacking the pilot/engine can be a good strategy but often is lower priority than taking out their shields or weapons.

The bridge is always my first priority in an encounter with a ballistics heavy build, it really sucks to launch a missile and have it wasted because the enemy AI just dumped all power into the engines.

Tip for folks new to the thread and game: try to develop one unassigned uber engineer, best if he's Engi race. Leave him on shields when he's new, find an enemy that can harm but not disable your shields (the system, not just the shields themselves), leave the guy on it in that battle for awhile, until he's level three--don't shoot the enemy or you'll destroy it before he's trained. Watch your hull, of course! If you can't find an enemy like that, the same can be done by having hire pair everything instead of whoever is on a damaged station when you're at a safe system. Once he's fully trained, assign him to a central location on the ship and have someone else on shields. From then on, whatever's broken, send him there pronto.

The same weak-enemy training can be done for helm, engines, and weapons.

Is that really in the spirit of the game?...

Yes, the spirit of this game is to win by any means. Including sitting there letting your shields, piloting, and engine guys skill up.

Personally, I prefer to use Zoltan crew to man the engines. Sure, the Zoltan only need to be in the room to give the power bonus, but it frees up my Engi for roaming repairs.

I try to cross-train my crew when presented with the opportunity. I've even managed to promote a guy to level 12, which is gold in all 6 specialties! (It was my Mantis "security officer," who I assigned to complete all ship-board repairs.)

IMAGE(http://imageshack.us/a/img145/6410/itsatraplevel12crew.th.jpg)

Whenever I have Zoltans in a mixed race crew I always try to put them in the engine room. One problem with Zoltans is that if they move around they take that bar of power with them, and the game doesn't compensate for this automatically. For instance if you move one into the weapons bay and your first weapon requires one bar of power, you can't turn it off! Engines are the only system that I never fully disable, so I put them in engines and leave them there. As a plus if you run into an ion storm your engines will always have power.

Yeah putting a Zoltan in weapon systems has screwed me up in fights a lot.

Engine room is where I keep them. And if I somehow end up with 3 or 4 of them I might stick one or two in Shields too. But it's so risky, moving them around to repair can really mess with your power.

Never use one as a pilot if you can avoid it, obviously.

I had a fun run where I managed to pick up a full crew of 8, including 2 Mantis whom I immediately made my Boarding Party of Doom. I wish I could pick them up every run.

Spoiler:

I often get the same away missions (fire on a space station, giant spiders) that have cost me crew 100% of the time so far, so now I'm just flying past those. Do these occasionally give a positive outcome, perhaps with different crew or upgrades to give 'blue' actions, or do these missions invariably kill crew?

I actually just made it to the second phase of the boss for the first time! Damn those drones. Damn them so hard.

It's always a gamble for me to hit as many systems as possible because I never know if I'll hit some fluke and get destroyed. But I know I need the scrap so I just hit as many as I can before I have to jump away.

Yeah, I've been trying to fit more systems into each sector to build up scrap and crew, and for the first time tonight I went too far, hit a dead end, and ended up overtaken by the rebel fleet. There's a lot of variation in the rebel ships, some having multiple anti-ship drones or missile launchers, are really tough.

babakotia wrote:

and for the first time tonight I went too far, hit a dead end,

In options, enable 2. Show beacon paths on hover.

That helps a lot. You can sort of map out your route to the exit and make sure you can reach it by mousing over the jumps ahead.

babakotia wrote:

Do these occasionally give a positive outcome, perhaps with different crew or upgrades to give 'blue' actions

Yes there are upgrades that help, and some give blue actions.

Spoiler:

Spiders: anti-personnel droids squish them easily. I think mantis rip them apart too.
Fire: Rocks stomp fire. Repair droids are immune to fire, too.
Mantis pods found floating in space: target practice :)