Erkki

FTL

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According to Steam, i've probably added around a hundred hours to my playtime with the game since the AE stuff came out, way more time than i had spent with the game originally. Like you though, a lot of that is probably the game idling. AE is phenomenal though, the changes make it feel so much more intricate and thought-out.

I also have all the ships unlocked, so i'll continue to tease everybody about how awesome the crystal ships are. (Hey, hey, i just won a normal playthrough with Crystal B, despite getting completely hosed by shops never selling weapons until the very end. All i ended up with was two emps and a heavy laser. I also swapped out my medbay with a cloning bay and turned my crystal guys into a suicide squad. So i defended myself with an advanced defense drone and my cloak, crippled enemy ships with emp and powerful boarding crews, and then slowly whittled them down with my double heavy laser. Beat the flagship with a single hull point remaining, yikes.)

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This is a super basic question, but I just realized it was the reason I had stopped playing FTL originally:

 

Are missiles just the worst to defend against?

 

In the vanilla game I ended up ALWAYS targeting attack systems to disable missiles if the enemy had any.  Shields have a guarantee, whereas the piloting just gives you a dice roll.  Seemed like a no-brainer to pick the former for upgrading, but then I'd spend every fight against missiles just making sure the enemy couldn't bring them out.  Felt really stale after awhile.

 

Am I doing missiles wrong?  Is there a complexity that I'm missing out on?

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You basically have four ways to defend yourself against missiles. (Not counting explicitly offensive actions, like hacking or emp.)

1 - That evasion stat, and since engines are easy to level up a few times early in the game, that is usually enough by itself to minimize the amount of damage you'll take early on from weaker missile launchers. Try to have at least 35-40% evasion by the time you get to the late sectors though. (Your crew's piloting and engineering experience will be a big part of that.) That said, once you start running into ships that have multiple missile launchers or more powerful missile launchers, you'll need some extra help...

2 - Defense drones are the most effective counter, and it's not a huge cost if you specifically wait to buy a drone system that comes with a basic defense drone. (It'll be 85 scrap.) The basic drones target only physical objects: Asteroids, missiles, and actually also those rare shield-piercing crystal weapons. (They may or may not also attack flak projectiles, i'm not completely clear on that as of yet. They certainly can't destroy them, and there might be some other conditions to whether or not they fire on them, variables between the different types of flak weapons or something.) Advanced defense drones target energy projectiles too, and also recharge faster, but can in some cases actually be less effective than the basic drone, since they'll tend to miss shooting down missiles if faced with a lot of projectiles to track.

3 - Cloaking is the other very good counter for missiles. Wait for an enemy to dump his missiles and then immediately cloak. Those missiles will almost certainly miss you, since cloak works as a massive evasion adjustment. Then for the remaining duration of the cloak, they also won't be able to lock-on for their next shots. Your clever use of the cloaking system has just bought yourself plenty of time in the fight.

4 - Super shields block missiles and mostly everything else, but late-sector weapons tend to just melt through them in seconds. Super shields come in two flavors though: The Zoltan super shields that charge only during a jump, and the super shield drone that intermittently charges up one bar of super shield during battle. In my time playing, the super shield drone has actually proven to be a fairly viable alternative to the advanced defense drone, but suffers from similar failings against large volumes of weapons fire.

Cloaking is the only one that will really help you against the flagship's burst-fire missile launcher, but in phase 2 and 3 of that fight, you need to use your cloak to avoid its special attacks instead. Always destroy the flagship's missile launcher first.

Again though: Don't ignore your engines! I always put more into my engines than into my shields. You basically never need more than three shield layers, especially if your evasion is good.

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fairly sure the def drone just shoots down part of the flak shot.  Basically a reduced damage situation

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That would seem to make flak a way to distract defense drones long enough to allow missiles and boarding/hacking drones to slip through.

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Defense II drones shoot at the flak projectiles, but they shoot at everything.  Flak also misses fairly often on its own.  What bothers me about using the defense drones is that sometimes they just straight up miss the thing they're shooting at so the hacking drone will eventually get through.  I wish there was an augment that messed up the enemy's targeting system causing them to miss more.  Maybe make it rare and expensive to compensate.

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Flak and hacking in particular are really interesting in the way they mess with the structure of the game - I think that a lot of the AE content is at least in part about flattening out the gap between optimizing for the journey and optimizing for the boss battle at the end.

 

The addition of hacking to the Flagship makes the final battle sort of arbitrary, though. If it lands on your shields or guns, you are probably hosed, whereas it might immobilise your _doors_, in which case things are a little less fraught.

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Doors can suck real bad if it manages to kill your O2, happened once and I was screwed by the time I got in

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You basically have four ways to defend yourself against missiles. (Not counting explicitly offensive actions, like hacking or emp.)

1 - That evasion stat, and since engines are easy to level up a few times early in the game, that is usually enough by itself to minimize the amount of damage you'll take early on from weaker missile launchers. Try to have at least 35-40% evasion by the time you get to the late sectors though. (Your crew's piloting and engineering experience will be a big part of that.) That said, once you start running into ships that have multiple missile launchers or more powerful missile launchers, you'll need some extra help...

2 - Defense drones are the most effective counter, and it's not a huge cost if you specifically wait to buy a drone system that comes with a basic defense drone. (It'll be 85 scrap.) The basic drones target only physical objects: Asteroids, missiles, and actually also those rare shield-piercing crystal weapons. (They may or may not also attack flak projectiles, i'm not completely clear on that as of yet. They certainly can't destroy them, and there might be some other conditions to whether or not they fire on them, variables between the different types of flak weapons or something.) Advanced defense drones target energy projectiles too, and also recharge faster, but can in some cases actually be less effective than the basic drone, since they'll tend to miss shooting down missiles if faced with a lot of projectiles to track.

3 - Cloaking is the other very good counter for missiles. Wait for an enemy to dump his missiles and then immediately cloak. Those missiles will almost certainly miss you, since cloak works as a massive evasion adjustment. Then for the remaining duration of the cloak, they also won't be able to lock-on for their next shots. Your clever use of the cloaking system has just bought yourself plenty of time in the fight.

4 - Super shields block missiles and mostly everything else, but late-sector weapons tend to just melt through them in seconds. Super shields come in two flavors though: The Zoltan super shields that charge only during a jump, and the super shield drone that intermittently charges up one bar of super shield during battle. In my time playing, the super shield drone has actually proven to be a fairly viable alternative to the advanced defense drone, but suffers from similar failings against large volumes of weapons fire.

Cloaking is the only one that will really help you against the flagship's burst-fire missile launcher, but in phase 2 and 3 of that fight, you need to use your cloak to avoid its special attacks instead. Always destroy the flagship's missile launcher first.

Again though: Don't ignore your engines! I always put more into my engines than into my shields. You basically never need more than three shield layers, especially if your evasion is good.

 

 

Thanks!!  Appreciate the details!  I was definitely ignoring the engines.  I'll give it a go during my lunch break tomorrow!

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Flak and hacking in particular are really interesting in the way they mess with the structure of the game - I think that a lot of the AE content is at least in part about flattening out the gap between optimizing for the journey and optimizing for the boss battle at the end.

 

Flak is a super interesting addition to the game. It's easy to look at it and assume it's just another weapon thrown into the mix, but it has a lot of strange little traits that really mess around with the established rules of the game in weird ways. Namely, it's really actually now the best weapon in the game for breaking shields. (Amazing when combined with beam weapons.) It would then be easy to look at that and assume that maybe emp no longer has a purpose, but flak actually allows it to fulfill a different and arguably more valuable role. (You know, disabling systems other than shields.)

At the other end of things, flak cannons are actually really poor damage dealing weapons against systems and hulls since they're not only subject to evasion rolls, but once they break through shields, their randomly determined scatter can end up not actually overlapping with a room on the ship. There are new hostile ship layouts in AE - i'm pretty sure they're new - that seem specifically geared towards messing with these new scattering weapons.

 

The addition of hacking to the Flagship makes the final battle sort of arbitrary, though. If it lands on your shields or guns, you are probably hosed, whereas it might immobilise your _doors_, in which case things are a little less fraught.

 

I've said already that i think hacking is a little wonky balance-wise, yeah. There's a huge, huge disparity between the severity of different systems being hacked. (Oh ho! They hacked my sensors, i'm in real trouble now!)

 

Mind control feels like a system that has a lot of nuanced and elegant interactions with other mechanics in the game, it's really powerful when properly coordinated. Hacking though... It's basically just a huge dice roll when you're fighting against a ship that has that system, and when on offense with it, it feels like you're just bludgeoning your way through the game systems to make up for deficiencies in your build.

Also, has anybody really tried to do a drone-focused ship in AE? It used to be quite viable in the base game, but with the new ways to defend against drones, i'm not so sure anymore.

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Also, has anybody really tried to do a drone-focused ship in AE? It used to be quite viable in the base game, but with the new ways to defend against drones, i'm not so sure anymore.

 

I was at a friend's house grading tonight while he beat the game (on easy, of course) with one. The short answer is no, it doesn't seem nearly as viable. From the early game until the endgame, he had to invest as much scrap in his weapons suite as he would have without drones, so it's no longer the alternative to traditional weaponry that it used to be. Granted, a Combat Drone II and a Defense Drone II meant that he pretty much took no damage at all during the boss fight, but before that point he was almost entirely reliant either on his charge lasers or teleporter to kill an enemy ship. I know for a fact he would have rather had hacking, which doesn't have the random chance of being shot down that the Combat Drone did.

 

It's kind of disappointing. I still see drones as useful, but pound per pound of scrap the least cost-effective way around which to build your game now.

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I think the additions in AE make drones great for defense and moderate to terrible on offense.  A single defense or anti-combat drone can shut down an entire drone build, both for you and the AI.  I've had a couple of hilarious stalemates where I'm facing off against a drone heavy Engi ship, with neither of us able to damage the other due to our drone defenses taking out everything the other ship throws at them.  I'll usually try and get a drone system if it comes with a free defense drone or I managed to pick one up along the way and try to balance it with a system repair or anti-boarding drone, but I've basically given up combat drones altogether.  Everything else seems more efficient and reliable when it comes to actually dealing damage.

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Yeah, I think the Anti-Combat Drone is the only thing I wish they hadn't added.

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Yeah, I think the Anti-Combat Drone is the only thing I wish they hadn't added.

 

I can probably understand why they ended up being in there, i think i can imagine the circumstances in which combat drones would be even more powerful in AE than they were in vanilla, they probably thought they had a good reason for trying to present more of a counterpoint to it. The thing just is, even in vanilla, so many pieces have to fall into the right place to end up with an effective drone build. Even with drone recovery, there's a massive strain on resources when you start trying to launch multiple drones in a single fight. With all the the powerfully effective new gear for the core weapons system, and the old weapons being more useful by association, it doesn't really make sense that the already difficult-to-utilize combat drones would need to be nerfed alongside that under the premise that, in certain rare circumstances, they might be overpowered.

 

On top of that, from the standpoint of being the player, i don't understand why i would want to use anti-combat drones. Combat drones are dangerous in the first couple sectors, but once my shields and engines are upgraded a bit, i basically stop ever worrying about them. (I guess anti-combat drones would probably be useful for the stealth curisers, which are extremely vulnerable to the various combat drones early on.)

I'm also going to say that hacking probably needs a small nerf. The issue i have with it is just... Weapons, engines, shields, and drones are systems serving incredibly critical functions, but it normally takes a good deal of effort to pummel them to a breaking point either through physical damage or emp damage.

Hacking kind of circumvents that latter element of balance. It, in regular intervals, can completely cripple those systems, and it feels like an unduly significant dice roll when its coming from the AI ships. (Which will spam hacking drones at you until they either land one or exhaust their stock.) Hacking just feels like a very blunt and clumsy mechanic to me.

Basically the only two issues i have with AE, presently.

Also, I just had the thought that an upgraded cloak and supershield drones would probably be awesome together, the 15 seconds of cloak perhaps giving the drone time to set up a stronger supershield. I'll have to try that out.

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Cloaking is the only one that will really help you against the flagship's burst-fire missile launcher, but in phase 2 and 3 of that fight, you need to use your cloak to avoid its special attacks instead. Always destroy the flagship's missile launcher first.

Another note on cloaking against the flagship's special attacks, I find it's better to keep your cloaking to level 1. You have to wait for your cloak to wear off before the cooldown counter activates, which means the time before you can cloak again is longer at higher levels (even though the cooldown itself is the same length). Having your cloak primed in time for the special attack is generally more important than having a longer cloak.

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Hacking kind of circumvents that latter element of balance. It, in regular intervals, can completely cripple those systems, and it feels like an unduly significant dice roll when its coming from the AI ships. (Which will spam hacking drones at you until they either land one or exhaust their stock.) Hacking just feels like a very blunt and clumsy mechanic to me.

I can see this, although I don't really know how you would fix it. The thing about hacking is that it's so much fun and so interesting. How would you change it while still keeping its appeal?

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I see what you're saying about hacking. It's kind of like a Swiss Army Knife, it immediately compensates WHATEVER your weakness is. No matter what your strategy is, Hacking will compliment it in a way that almost no other tool will, with no real downside. I don't think I've ever actually run out of drones. I've gotten low, but never run out. And there are only two counters to it, defense drones or hacking the enemies hacking station. Even if you have those systems, if you only get one shot to deploy them to counter.

 

All that said though...it's so much fun! Sealing crew in or out of rooms, poisoning the medbay, draining oxygen, stripping shields before a massive barrage. I guess one way to balance it would be to increase the functional cost of a hack. Make each drone have an increasing chance to burn out, like 25 percent chance on first use, 50 percent on second use, etc.

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I think i would like to see hacking at least have a cooldown if a drone is destroyed before it lands, like how all the other drones have cooldowns when destroyed. The way the AI spams it at you is probably the most bullshit part of it.

Maybe there could be a way to have a crew member in a hacked room try to counter the hack, just another thing to repair. That would work well with the drone sealing the doors to that room, and that would add the dynamic of needing to coordinate hacking with other kinds of attacks like mind control/boarding parties/stun weapons/etc to secure your control.

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I think i would like to see hacking at least have a cooldown if a drone is destroyed before it lands, like how all the other drones have cooldowns when destroyed.

Or let it behave like a missile rather than a boarding drone, with a chance of missing or being dodged.

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The most direct way I can think of to nerf hacking would be to increase the cooldown so that like cloaking, timing becomes everything.  Not that timing isn't important but it feels less important with hacking. 

 

A thing I would really love that's probably not easy to implement is to have one of your crew do an EVA and physically attack the hacking drone like any other intruder.  It would remove that person from the ship and leave them vulnerable to weapons fire.

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Some kind of EVA component would be really interesting if handled well, or even just being able to suit up crew so they can safely conduct operations in low-oxygen environments both on your own ship and on an enemy's. (Perhaps once they take any damage, their suit is "ripped" and they start taking damage from the lack of oxygen.)

I think bolting too many systems onto FTL would really run the risk of ruining it though, the game strikes me as very precariously straddling a line between complexity and elegance in its design.

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If you wanted the crew to be able to attack the drone, you could just have it teleport inside the room like a bomb.

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Sadly, Felicity died after successfully repairing the door system, in the doorway between the cloaking and shield rooms.

 

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The second you repaired that door system, if you had sealed the exterior doors and opened all the interior doors to equalize the air pressure, you might have been able to pull that off.

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