Erkki

FTL

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It's a roguelike, so yeah, a lot of your loadout is going to be based on luck. However, there are a few known quantities. The first shop you visit in the first level will always offer a teleporter and a drone system, so if you want a build based on either, save your money for that. For the rest you'll just have to roll with the punches. Find an ion weapon? Good, now you're taking out enemy systems. Got an extra laser? Better. Beam weapon? Maybe not spend your money unless you know what you're doing.

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I played again for the first time in months; teleported my crew onto an exploding ship in the first sector. There are a lot of little rules one internalises when playing which I completely forgot. Making sure you match damage output with gradually improving enemy shields is a big one.

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I've not quite got to the point where I'm scaling up enough for the last sector, but I've got to the boss and got it's health halfway down. At the moment I can't take the shields down for long enough before it starts destroying my systems and killing my damage output. I've read that boarding to kill the crew is one of the easiest ways to to do it.

The Engi ship has made this a great deal easier than the human one, and after a frustrating yet addictive first 8 hours with the game, a lot suddenly clicked and I unlocked two more ships in the same session (Rock and Zoltan cruisers). Long range sensors are an upgrade I prioritise way over others now, too.

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The best piece of advice I've been given so far is this: Try and clear as much of a sector as you can before you move on. This made a huge difference last time I played (but then I warped into a nebula without oxygen when I was already low and all my crew died... gah).

Also:

- A Scrap Collecting Arm can be a great help if you get it early enough.

- Keeping empty rooms open to space will prevent fires from even starting.

- Doors are worth upgrading.

- When you're boarded, get your crew to Medibay and open everything else to the vacuum of space -- your boarders will try and attack you in the Medibay, where your energy refills automatically.

- You can quickly refill your ship with O2 by opening all internal doors. A lot quicker than just waiting for the O2 system to do it.

- You get more resources if you take out an enemies crew, but not their ship (tip: aim for their O2 and Weapon systems).

- Always focus on risk/reward: If you're getting hammered by an enemy, focus on leaving the battle. 25 scrap isn't going to be worth it if your hull is fucked.

- Apparently it's very helpful if you keep pausing -- I can't seem to bring myself to do that, though.

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Yeah, I only pause to give initial orders; the recharge times on most weapons give plenty of time to retarget. Usually with the Engi ship, by the time I need to worry about micromanaging crew to repel boarders, I have enough drones and weapons available that initial orders can suppress shields and weapons then kill most ships without me having to lift another finger.

Nice to have it confirmed that opening doors affects oxygen propagation; I'd been doing so around repaired breaches because it seemed to help refill rooms with less in. Some really good tips there.

(Oh man, I want to play FTL instead of working now).

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Reading the experiences people have here, I wonder why I don't have such a hard time playing this game as lots of others seem to have - I'm not that good a gamer, and I manage normal with most ships fine enough most of the time. Then someone says something like 'Yeah, what's up with the pause-button?' - mind blown! I pause everything, every time. Probably to do with me playing too much Baldur's Gate back in the day. So my advice: Pause to time your shots, pause to give your crew orders, pause to open/close doors, etc = pause!

And for the boss (no big spoiler, just what you need to beat him, in my opinion - probably said already many times before in here):

have 4 shields, a good engine (for dodging), teleporter (for his rockets) and something to penetrate his four shields (cloaking is nice for those pesky drones)

Ah, yeah, and pause! Should be okay.

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The great realization (which is a little bit of a mechanical spoiler but also basically necessary for success so I don't feel bad mentioning it) is that your speed in a previous sector doesn't matter for subsequent ones. You can hang around the exit until the rebel fleet is almost upon you, jump out to the next sector, and still have as much time as if you'd hurried to get there. This means there is no reason not to saunter across the galaxy (with your vital world-saving information) hoovering up all the loot as if you were playing Dredmor or Desktop Dungeons. (This was mentioned above, I just wanted to clarify that going as slowly as possible won't rob you of time later on...because that's how space works).

Also -- I've found the Layout Unlocking Achievements are all really good at teaching you about various parts of the game and introducing you to the strengths of each ship. If you find yourself (as I often do) thinking that you've no idea how to use a ship effectively, try for some of its specific achieves.

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Then someone says something like 'Yeah, what's up with the pause-button?' - mind blown! I pause everything, every time. Probably to do with me playing too much Baldur's Gate back in the day. So my advice: Pause to time your shots, pause to give your crew orders, pause to open/close doors, etc = pause!

Holy fuck! *Now* I understand how to take on ships with three or four layers of shields. I was relying a lot on autofire, but now I'm keeping it off; timing lasers and missiles to knock down shields simultaneously, then beams to slice in immediately after. I didn't quite kill the boss, due to taking a hammering learning the above lesson a few sectors before then needing repairs over all the upgrades I wanted, but I got it down to 1/3 health. I can see how this is going to work. Thanks!

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Holy fuck! *Now* I understand [...] Thanks!

Man, first I thought you were making fun of me for (re-)stating the obvious.

You are welcome.

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This is making loads of sense now. Just completed it twice in a row with the Zoltan Cruiser then the Federation one it unlocked.

Zoltan:

Stealth is handy to weather out the power surges in the final boss battle, and a lot of play with this ship seems to centre on taking shields down and keeping them down. On my first completion playthrough, I had the EMP beam working with a pike beam (3 damage per room crossed), and kept pausing to sync it with the EMP gun taking the shields down far enough for the beam to do at least some damage.

Federation:

This ship can work really well with autofire on most of the time, due to its extra beam weapon bypassing shields and doing stupid amounts of damage. The primary thing is to upgrade that beam to reduce the cooldown. I combined it with two burst lasers, an EMP bomb, and a hull laser. With that many projectiles and beams firing in each volley, it meant his shields would always go down and leave the hull to take a pounding, so each round of the boss took just a minute or two. Scrap arms seem to stack too; with two of them I was raking in scrap by the last few sectors and had system upgrades totalling way more than the total power output of the reactor. I would *love* to try this weapon config with a pre-igniter; it would basically destroy most ships on contact.

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I had some early burnout with FTL. I figured out how to "beat" the game pretty early (within 12 games or so, albeit on Easy), but then I got tired of it pretty soon after. I managed to unlock the Federation and Engi ships before I stopped playing.

I don't know what it was. Maybe I just approached it the wrong way from the start, but I did feel after a while that there wasn't enough game for me to explore. Trying to figure out how to use new ships is kind of cool, but I didn't get the feeling like there was so much enormous depth to explore. There was enough real-time interaction that, if I wanted to really get into it, I could be slightly more cunning and efficent*, but the difference was slight and there wasn't any point where I was fundamentally looking at the game a different way or seeing new possibility spaces open up.

I'll probably go back and play it again. It was fun. I wish there was more.

*Tip:

If you time your lasers correctly, you can use them to shoot off drones orbiting your ship

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Wow -- I must say, watching the twitch.tv stream must have endowed me with reams of unconscious and conscious knowledge. Playing with the combined power of 2.5 hours of chatroom advice and seeing someone else beat the scary boss, I was able to destroy all three stages where previously I had never beaten the first stage! Thanks, stream.

I wonder why I never tried cloaking and boarding parties on my own? (Except for the obvious problems with boarding parties; though I'm pretty proud that I managed to attain victory even after sending two of my units onto a nearly-empty Rebel ship which seconds later jumped away...I like to think that they befriended the remaining crew members out of necessity and sailed off into the outer reaches of once-again-Federation space, having lots of adventures and adopting a puppy named Jonathon Winslow along the way).

The stream helped me quite a bit as I too never used cloak or boarding parties. I don't know how you'd get past the boss's super weapons without a cloak. Anyway, I beat easy last night at 1 am (which means today ought to be a fun day at work) and I'm tempted to take a shot at medium.

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Hey neato. Cuusoo is a jungle though, small chance of this seeing production. I'd love to have the cool Zoltan minifig though, why didn't Lego think of translucent dudes before?

They forgot the crystal rock guy in the lineup HNNNNGGGGG

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Hull repair drone is amazing, especially on the final sector where you usually don't get to repair between stages of the boss. It also saves wasting scrap on repairing at the shops.

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I tried to view this thread at work but it was blocked by the web filter.  It said something about "erotic, sexual, or adult content (96% probability)".  What the heck are you guys discussing in here?  Did I miss a really big part of this game?

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Maybe this is old news, but I was playing FTL and at one of the stores that had crew members you could hire, one of the Engi crewman's name was Nick Breckon.

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