Erkki

FTL

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The Vulcan is soooo much fun. 

 

Pre-igniter also eliminates the first, and longest, charge period, which takes care of their biggest negative.

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Engi Cruiser C has an augment that completely disables defensive drones for the opponent's ship, which is kind of crazy.

If you want a missile-focused/combat drone-focused build, there's your ship.

(This augment seems to rarely show up in shops too.)

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Finally killed the flagship since starting again...on easy.  Torus with def 2 drone, ion blast, 2x hull smasher laser 1.  High evasion, shields, cloaking. Flagship has a really hard time doing much damage to me.Hacked my engines but I cloaked everytime it activated the hack so I wasn't hit.

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Fire Bombs, Ion Stunner and Hacking are a frighteningly efficient combination.  Hack shields to seal the doors and trap one guy.  Set fire to room, then stun him to prevent him from putting the fire out.  Drop another firebomb on the weapons after this, and then just watch the enemy dance, trying to salvage anything. 

 

To make it more ridiculous, the game gave me the Explosive Replicator augmentation as well.  I already had so many bombs, they might as well have been infinite at that point.

 

It almost did fall apart during Phase 3 of the Flagship (didn't have enough direct damage weapons to take it out quickly), but I pulled it off with 2 hull points left. 

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I calmed my ass down and finished the game last night on normal. I credit my victory to a few things:

- Long ranged scanners is a very useful and very cheap augment. I think I'm going to start paying the mercs to scout the area for me if I lack scanners.

- Early on I got the +10% scrap augment

- I relinquished and went back to my old standby, stealth. 

- I found three Burst Laser IIs, on top of the starting one. Yeah. The fourth one would have cost something like 250 scrap to equip so the last slot was taken up by a heavy laser instead.

- I had Remo piloting, Scoops on weapons and Breckon on shields. Breckon died literally three seconds before victory  :violin: .

 

It was a lucky run but I had a victory coming. I've relearned the stages at which enemy ships start getting another shield, another weapon etc. and what the player ship needs to have in order to be untouchable in most encounters. 

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I had a beautiful run going on normal, just about flawless.

Then the flagship hits my weapons room with a hacking drone, and the timing works out that it manages to cleanly alternate between cloaking and hacking my weapons.

Okay, okay... It takes 3 jumps for it destroy home base, so i jump away and jump back, whereupon it immediately hacks my weapons room again.

I think hacking might be over-powered.

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I take it you didn't have  your own hacking system?  I've reached a point of deciding that Hacking is close to a requirement for the Flagship, so that I can counterhack it if its initial hack is that crippling. 

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I had a beautiful run going on normal, just about flawless.

Then the flagship hits my weapons room with a hacking drone, and the timing works out that it manages to cleanly alternate between cloaking and hacking my weapons.

Okay, okay... It takes 3 jumps for it destroy home base, so i jump away and jump back, whereupon it immediately hacks my weapons room again.

I think hacking might be over-powered.

 

I basically had that happen to me the other day, but luckily for me I was using the mantis ship and was mostly reliant on the teleporter so it didn't impact me that much.  I still somewhat dislike the teleporter, but I can't deny how good it is especially with the reconstructive teleport and cloning bay.

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I think the power drain hacking causes on weapons is just too damn harsh.

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I was having trouble getting anywhere with Federation Cruiser C, but it just now kind of clicked. Cloning bays, in general, have just clicked.

Federation Cruiser C though. No weapons, a two man teleporter, and a crew that is decidedly slanted away from effective boarding strategies. (Two zoltan, a human, and a mantis.) You have an upgraded cloning bay though, and you do have a Mantis. If you use your guys like suicide troops, it works out.

The ship's unique flak artillery lands and destroys the enemy ship while your mantis/human are aboard it? Doesn't matter, fresh replacements are on the way!
Your mantis is wounded - but alive - after a fight? Can't have that, you need him at his best, vent him to space and spawn a fresh clone.
The ship even starts with emergency respirators, so don't think twice about throwing your mantis into a drone ship to deal some damage, he'll live long enough to destroy something.

In fact, despite the skill loss on cloning, this reckless style of play is allowing my boarding party to cause enough damage to still level up their combat skills.

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I finally unlocked the Tektite. Now I'm that much closer to getting the Crystal ship.

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I was having trouble getting anywhere with Federation Cruiser C, but it just now kind of clicked. Cloning bays, in general, have just clicked.

Federation Cruiser C though. No weapons, a two man teleporter, and a crew that is decidedly slanted away from effective boarding strategies. (Two zoltan, a human, and a mantis.) You have an upgraded cloning bay though, and you do have a Mantis. If you use your guys like suicide troops, it works out.

The ship's unique flak artillery lands and destroys the enemy ship while your mantis/human are aboard it? Doesn't matter, fresh replacements are on the way!

Your mantis is wounded - but alive - after a fight? Can't have that, you need him at his best, vent him to space and spawn a fresh clone.

The ship even starts with emergency respirators, so don't think twice about throwing your mantis into a drone ship to deal some damage, he'll live long enough to destroy something.

In fact, despite the skill loss on cloning, this reckless style of play is allowing my boarding party to cause enough damage to still level up their combat skills.

 

I'll have to go back and try that, it sounds fun.  After my initial suicide Zoltans didn't pan out with their explosive damage, I hadn't used it again.

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I just finished a run with the Mantis cruiser.  I had another cloning bay/reconstructive teleport setup going, but what really saved the day during the flagship fight was the zoltan shield bypass.  Being able to beam through the shields in phase 3 basically meant that every time the superweapon was charged the ship used it on the shields instead, which was totally useless against my teleporter/mind control/bomb combo.  All I had to do was take potshots at the shields every now and then with my lasers to make sure it didn't fire the weapon at me instead.  I also now have a much greater appreciation for the engines and dodging.

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A strategy I really want to try for the fun of it is a reverse boarding party.  Mind Control to turn enemy, teleport to bring them over to my ship to a room vented to space, and upgraded doors to keep them there until they die.   Not the most efficient strategy, but it turns FTL into a space horror simulator, only you are playing the villain/monster.  This amuses me.

 

So just for kicks, I tried this out on the flagship.  It worked amazingly well.  I didn't have the firepower to get through the shields and damage any systems, but a combination of defense drones and high evasion let me survive barrages long enough to take out the weapons, then pick off the crew one by one.  I would have beaten the flagship except I made a mistake and accidentally killed the last crew member with my lasers (once the shields had been sufficiently weakened) and the automatic healing of systems was more than I could take out.  But the theory was sound and could have led to my easiest victory yet had I not made that mistake.

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So just for kicks, I tried this out on the flagship.  It worked amazingly well.  I didn't have the firepower to get through the shields and damage any systems, but a combination of defense drones and high evasion let me survive barrages long enough to take out the weapons, then pick off the crew one by one.  I would have beaten the flagship except I made a mistake and accidentally killed the last crew member with my lasers (once the shields had been sufficiently weakened) and the automatic healing of systems was more than I could take out.  But the theory was sound and could have led to my easiest victory yet had I not made that mistake.

 

Good to know!  I hadn't really had the right combination since I mentioned it, typically seems like I can never get both Mind Control and Teleporter at the same time.  

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Good to know!  I hadn't really had the right combination since I mentioned it, typically seems like I can never get both Mind Control and Teleporter at the same time.  

 

I was using the Mantis cruiser so I had a 4 person teleporter to start with.  I lucked out and managed to get a full crew with 4 mantises (manti? mantes?) for my away team.  The real trick was surviving the weapons fire during the first phase while my mantis crew took care of the gunners.  After the ship was weaponless, it was a trivial matter to mind control a guy, teleport him to my ship, then station 2 mantis outside the room until the mind control wore off, although the mind controlled guy kept trying to man a station so I couldn't place him in a vacuum chamber like you initially planned.  It wasn't efficient, but man was it effective.

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Oh yeah, that's right, I had realized that it wouldn't work as I originally planned because the helpful sods can walk through your doors and take over a station.  I had taken to mind-controlling enemy boarders, and would be so annoyed when they would make a beeline to take over the nearest unmanned station instead of helping kill their former friend.  They especially view the Pilot position as critical, even when there is no enemy ship and no other threat that requires a pilot to worry about. 

 

I've actually been avoiding the ships with teleporters built in to try and break myself on relying on them.  But I've had a bunch of runs without teleporters, I may have to go back now. 

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I've actually been avoiding the ships with teleporters built in to try and break myself on relying on them.  But I've had a bunch of runs without teleporters, I may have to go back now. 

 

I've been wondering if I should do the same with cloaking. I'm not entirely convinced it's possible to defeat the boss without either cloaking or more defense drones than I ever have the scrap and reactor to field, but that's just a conviction and maybe should be challenged.

 

I just beat the boss with the Slug B. Man, what a piece of crap cruiser. It feels like all the variants that start with a teleporter have to be just awful in every other respect in order to balance out the higher initial scrap intake. I probably spent 300 scrap alone just giving the Slug B some decent weapons, into something that could actually output enough damage to beat the boss. I ended up doing a heavy teleporter/mind control run, which worked better than I thought. I ignored mind control for half a dozen games because it seemed to be of very marginal use, but when it's fully upgraded a guy can kill a fellow crewmember and disable a system before it's all done. I slaughtered most of their crew firing breach missiles at the medbay, then cleaned up the ship itself at my leisure. It was an almost effortless run that I didn't think was going to happen when I was in sector five with just a chain laser, one tier of shields, and a halberd beam I had to turn off the chain laser to fire.

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I've been wondering if I should do the same with cloaking. I'm not entirely convinced it's possible to defeat the boss without either cloaking or more defense drones than I ever have the scrap and reactor to field, but that's just a conviction and maybe should be challenged.

 

Cloaking used to be the system of choice for me, but I've stopped using it in favor of hacking.  I use the drones a lot more now, especially the Defense II drone.  I also grab mind control basically every chance I get.

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I had another game with federation cruiser c on normal difficulty and made it to sector 7 before getting wiped out. (Went way too long time without seeing any shops, struggled along with less than five hull points for probably five jumps or more, and finally got wiped by a ship that had multiple missile launchers that my defense drone couldn't deal with. Had well over a hundred scrap for repairs, and my ship was set up quite well to take on the flagship. Playthroughs end that way all too often.)


I had two mantises that were both never quite benefitting from maxed out skills, their intermittent deaths were robbing them of that maximum rating, but a reconstructive teleporter was keeping them alive for much longer stretches than earlier in the playthrough. Something to keep in mind - There are effectively only three levels to progress through on each stat for your crew since bonuses only come when you fill up one of the bars. With nowhere to go after filling up the second bar, cloning a crew with a maxed stat can only knock them down to the second level.


That highly suicidal playstyle is awesome fun though, the Fregatidae might be one of the most entertaining ships in the game. Often, you're just using your boarding parties to keep enemies distracted so they're not repairing system damage you've caused with your flak artillery cannon. (Which will consistently cause damage to your own boarding party.)

My other crew was mostly engis and zoltan, very squishy. At one point, an event dumped like five mantises into my cruiser while i was also taking fire from an enemy ship. For a long stretch of the fight, i consistently had maybe five crew in the cloning queue while my engines and shields were crippled, something that could have gone horribly wrong if i hadn't already managed to significantly damage the other ship's systems. My squishy crew though, i was just sending out the poor engis and zoltan to go whittle down the mantises and surely die, while my own mantises were on the other other ship messing things up over there. (Venting wasn't really an option to clear out the hostile mantises, not by itself at least, i needed to keep the mantises engaged in battle so they wouldn't cause further damage to my engines and my shields.)

Earlier in the game, i did actually lose a rockman when a stray laser bolt hit my cloning bay. I immediately sent all my engis in there to try and repair it before my mantis was lost too, just narrowly saving his life.

It all made for an exciting, entertaining playthrough.

Edit: Also, i had a flak cannon and a halbred beam, which seemed like a pretty effective pair even in the end-game. (Since the halbred has a longer charge, put it in slot one so it won't be disabled by system damage.)

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I just won a normal playthrough with the Fregatidae using the flak artillery's ability to reliably break shields to capitalize on a glaive, which was the sole weapon i had equipped. I fully upgraded a cloak to try and give myself a buffer for the long charge times on both. I also had further upgraded my teleporter and my cloning bay to cycle four of my crew into an attacking ship as a persistent harassing force.

New favorite ship, definitely. I don't think i lost more than five points of hull against the flagship.
 

I just beat the boss with the Slug B. Man, what a piece of crap cruiser. It feels like all the variants that start with a teleporter have to be just awful in every other respect in order to balance out the higher initial scrap intake. I probably spent 300 scrap alone just giving the Slug B some decent weapons, into something that could actually output enough damage to beat the boss. I ended up doing a heavy teleporter/mind control run, which worked better than I thought. I ignored mind control for half a dozen games because it seemed to be of very marginal use, but when it's fully upgraded a guy can kill a fellow crewmember and disable a system before it's all done. I slaughtered most of their crew firing breach missiles at the medbay, then cleaned up the ship itself at my leisure. It was an almost effortless run that I didn't think was going to happen when I was in sector five with just a chain laser, one tier of shields, and a halberd beam I had to turn off the chain laser to fire.

 

Mind control by itself doesn't generally end up being very useful, but it's valuable force multiplication for a boarding party, or you can coordinate the mind control attack with a hacking drone to give the manipulated enemy room to safely do its malicious work. (Or, in absence of those two, just use it to interrupt repairs on a system you want to stay broken.)

As for Slug B, it seems like people cite it as one of the more difficult starts, but starting with a ton of missile parts and a healing bomb pretty much lets your crew live on the enemy ship. It's an underrated boarding ship, i've had a couple good runs with it. (Starting with a decent missile launcher also helps it skirt the issue some of the other boarding-focused starts have, which is helplessness against drone ships.)

Engi B is really brutal start, it just takes one hit to your drone room in the middle of a fight to completely hose a playthrough, unless you were lucky enough to pick up some extra crew early on. Engi A is probably going to be harder in AE too, with anti-combat drones. (Zoltan C is applicable here too, combined with other more severe failings.)

Also, as rough as the other Stealth starts are, Stealth C has some especially peculiar shortcomings. Beam weapons are bad for the other two, but they're worse for C. Beam weapons just melt through super shields, and Stealth C can't even fall back on using the cloak to halt their lock-on.

I'm also having a lot of trouble with Lanius B, but that might just be me, because that ship seems like it should be awesome. I want to use some of my Federation C tricks with it, but you can't vent the Lanius to space to claim fresh full-health clones. Heh. On the other hand, you have mind control to help out your Lanius in early boarding actions. Upgrading the cloning bay to help the passive healing would probably be the first thing to do with that ship.

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Just won a game on Normal with the Tektite, my first win since the Advanced Edition came out. My loadout was: fully upgraded Engines, 3 Shields, full Mind Control, Defense Drone II, Boarding Drone, full Backup Battery, a nearly full crew and a full weapon loadout of Burst Laser II, Charge Laser, Heavy Crystal 1 and Swarm Missiles. The Defense Drone was key: protected me against so many missiles, lasers and drones. The Mind Control was also useful, even when I was just using it to combat enemy mind control. Also, having that many weapons is great. The Tektites starting weapons are really awesome, I loved both of them. I also was full up on Augments: Scrap Recovery Arm, Drone Recovery Arm and Rock Plating. Still, it was a close fight: I only had 2 hull left at the end of it and there was a point in the third fight where my weapons were completely dead and most of my ship was on fire, but the Cloning Bay, plus the fact that there was only one enemy crew left, meant I was able to pull out of the nosedive.

 

Cloning Bay is so good. Med Bay still has its uses, but I think the Cloning Bay is better in most circumstances. It saved my ass against Lanius boarders in the Abandoned Sector.

 

However, even with that awesome run, I'm annoyed because the whole point of me playing with the Tektite was to find the Hidden Sector and get the Crystal Ship. But the Rock Homeworlds never spawned. However, I did get the Stasis Pod event twice, which was hilarious. That was pretty sweet actually, because it allowed me to get some free weapons, since there was no reason for me to take the pod.

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The Tektite is a ridiculously good start, probably one of the best ships in the game. It has huge advantages, namely that Rock Cruiser augmentation, but where the other two Rock Cruisers each have fairly significant failings, this one has basically none. The heavy crystal cannon can be blocked by defense drones, but the swarm missiles easily overwelm them. If you upgrade it with a teleporter, it's only a two man teleporter, but a crystal being and a rockman make for an awesome boarding party. The crystal racial ability lets you easily divide and conquer on an enemy ship, you can lock their crew out of their medbay while you tear it up and then just pick apart the crew after they finally break in. (Speaking of boarding teams with crystal beings, Crystal Cruiser B starts with three crystal beings in its crew, a four man teleporter, and gets cloaking and shields out of the gate. Both of the crystal ships are among the best in the game, but Crystal B can completely spiral out of control. However, like some of the Mantis ships, it lacks ways to deal with supershields and drone ships early on.)

About cloning bays, they tend to end up costing me more in scrap, given that you really do need to upgrade them for the passive healing, while a medbay will easily do its job even if it just stays at one point. Reconstructive teleport also really helps on boarding-focused cloning ships. I also think medbays tend to be more useful defensively, especially if your crew is squishy. Like that story i shared a few posts above, about being swarmed by a boarding team of mantises, they just fed through my clones and i ended up losing a whole bunch of crew experience. Being able to take more risks with dice roll events is very appealing though, just make sure you didn't power down the clone bay in a nebula storm during the prior jump, heh.

There is one thing to keep in mind about the cloning bay on the Tektite though, since a two-block cloning bay only has room one for one crew member, if it's destroyed in combat, you will lose anybody in the queue. You can swarm a four square bay with three engis and fix it fast enough to save somebody, but that will not happen if you can only have one person doing repairs. Definitely upgrade that bay for durability.

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Yeah, upgrading a Cloning Bay is pretty essential for not losing crew in the queue. You're wrong about mistakenly leaving it without power though: crew will get cloned from random when they die from random events whether or not the Cloning Bay has power. There are two exceptions to this rule: if it's the Deal With Disease event, the crew member won't get cloned because the clone would still be diseased; if it's the Engi Virus event and you take the blue Engi crew member option,

the Engi crew will die and the virus will prevent it from being cloned. However, after winning the subsequent battle, the virus will feel bad and possess the Engis dead body with full stats. It's awesome. Happened twice to me one playthrough.

 

Also, I want those crystal ships so badly.

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The Crystal cruiser is rapidly becoming my Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, also.


(The advanced content sucked me back in. Steam tells me I have played 300+ hours of FTL - although much of that was idling, I think/hope - but cannot remember any of the ships I unlocked. So, yeah.)

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