Erkki

FTL

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The Shivan is good. I like it better than the Bulwark, because Heavy Pierce is a pretty sweet weapon that can carry you pretty far.

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The shivan is very good, but it has a weird failing in its lack of airlocks, so no venting to clear out boarders or fires. Also, build that door system and then upgrade it, do so with much haste. If you end up with a breach in an empty room, consider leaving it alone and using it as an impromptu airlock. As of AE, i guess the oxygen draining racial trait of the Lanius would also be very valuable on that ship, since their oxygen drain can affect multiple rooms if doors are opened.

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The shivan is very good, but it has a weird failing in its lack of airlocks, so no venting to clear out boarders or fires. Also, build that door system and then upgrade it, do so with much haste. If you end up with a breach in an empty room, consider leaving it alone and using it as an impromptu airlock. As of AE, i guess the oxygen draining racial trait of the Lanius would also be very valuable on that ship, since their oxygen drain can affect multiple rooms if doors are opened.

 

I don't think I've ever built a door system on the Shivan. 4 Rockmen are plenty for dealing with boarders and fires.

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I find that without airlocks I'm pretty much only recruiting Rockmen when using the Shivan.  I had a successful run last night with a full crew of Rockmen except for 2 Engi I kept around for repair purposes.  I never did get the hang of using the fire bomb though.  Seems like it would only be really useful with a teleporter that way I can place my Rockman boarding party in a room that's on fire.  I ended up using the teleporter as part of my successful run, but I had already sold the fire bomb by then so I didn't get to try that strategy.

 

Now that I've unlocked the C layout, it's time to hunt for the Crystal crusier.

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Have decided to try to unlock the crystal cruiser through the A&B victories route after a few frustrating runs with the rock ship trying to do it the traditional quest way.

Started off by recording my 1st stealth cruiser victory with the A layout but boy was it a close thing.

I had a mind control used on my teleport squad the moment before i was about to beam them in to the flagship missile bay, meaning the lone mantis who got beamed aboard took far longer to do his job & I took far more missile fire than i would have liked.

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I'm attempting to get the Crystal cruiser with the Rock C layout.  I really like the Crystalmen, but I wish their ability was a little easier to use.  I'm trying to use one in a boarding party right now, but I can never seem to seal the room off before at least one person makes it inside and I have to fight them instead of taking out a system.  I once tried to activate it while paused, only for him to seal up the teleporter room on MY ship before going over to the enemy ship.

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The crystalmen are really very nice the main choice for me comes when deciding who they partner up with for teleport raids, a mantis or a lanius. 

 

The mantis is great if you just want to get in destroy a system and get out, his speed of attack means the two of them can generally junk a system before enemy crew gain access. I've used this to destroy the FTL drive of a ship who are attempting escape in the past. Obviously don't try this if they have low combat skill or its close to jumping since if it does jump with them on it is disastrous.

 

The lanius is great for making a assassination squad, because the crystalman takes reduced damage from low O2. My standard tactics with this is to drop them into the the rebel bridge a few seconds before my 1st barrage from my weapon.

The theory I'm operating on here is just like my ship, if i can stop the pilot from piloting their dodge chance drops and so i stand a better chance of downing their shields etc.

 

I also use crystal men as bait, dropping them into a room next to whatever system will be my 1st target after getting through shields. You can often get a few crew in the area and do nice damage, a particularly effective tactic vs ships without a med/clone bay.

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I love Lanius boarding parties, but unless I'm using the Lanius ship, I have a hard time getting them.  Right now I'm using a Crystal/Mantis combo to pretty good effect.  The main problem is the Mantis moves so much faster than they'll occasionally get separated when I run from room to room.  I once accidentally locked my Mantis outside of a room using the Crystalman's lockdown ability.  I'm lucky the ship starts with a cloning bay otherwise I would have lost him.

 

Is it just me, or does the Swarm missile miss a lot?  It seems about as accurate as a Flak.  I'm having problems taking out shield systems so my other weapons can do damage.

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I FINALLY got the Crystal Cruiser.  Used the Rock C layout to do it.  And I have to say, it's worth the effort.  Crystal weapons are amazing in the early stages because you can completely ignore the shield system up to a point.  By the time the enemy ships started getting more than 1 shield, I had already found more weapons so dealing damage was never really a problem.  Also the lockdown ability is awesome.  It's especially useful against the flagship.  After disabling most of the weapons, I'd teleport onto the enemy ship, wait until I had 2 enemy crew members in the room with me, then I'd lockdown the room so they couldn't retreat to the medbay.  I basically picked them off in pairs like this until I only had one gunner left who I let live until the end.

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congrats SAM but damn it all to heck, every time i ran the Rock C, either the rock home worlds didn't spawn or i was unable to find the event trigger when i got there.

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Yeah, it took a LOT of tries to get the homeworlds to spawn and encounter the event.  I ended up getting it twice in a row because in my first run with the Crystal cruiser I found the Rock homeworlds and the event again.

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Anyone got any general tips about what sort of build to go for with a mantis cruiser?

Also does anyone know if shop inventories are determined in any way by which ship your running? I didn't see any weapons until sector 3 with my mantis.

It left me feeling it was very difficult to get a decent weapon set up and running, which left me really struggling against auto ships at times.

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Regarding stores: they are completely random, the only way in which they respond to your ship is that they'll stop stocking systems (battery, cloaking, etc) once you have that system installed.

 

As for strategy, do you mean Mantis A or B Wanderer? B has a four person teleporter, which lets you rely almost entirely on teleporting for combat (once you're boarding four at a time, you can clean out a medbay-equipped ship without ever disabling the medbay), whereas A's two-person teleporter means you still have to be able to fight fair a lot of the time.

 

With the Mantis B, I sell off the boarding drone (who needs a fifth border?) and the pheromones as soon as I hit a store, and my first priority is to get a weapon (or combat drone), any weapon, to deal with Zoltan shields. After that I try to get enough firepower to deal with automated ships, while still relying on teleporting for crewed ships. If I can't find enough weapons for automated ships, then either teleporting rockmen, or upgrading the teleporter and teleporting my Mantises will let me damage their subsystems and kill them with whatever wimpy weapons I have. I don't upgrade the shields until I'm positively swimming in scrap: with two bubbles and a defense drone, the Mantis B kills fast enough to not take much damage. Cloaking is even better than it normally is, once I can kill automated drones  I start saving up scrap in the hopes of finding cloaking. If random events don't pay out any crew in the first sector or two, you'll need to buy some at stores, priority goes to Rockmen and Mantises for their combat abilities.

 

The Mantis A plays a lot more fair, you have to be able to reliably breach shields, otherwise your two Mantis boarding crew will be stymied by the first medbay-equipped ship they encounter. Since you start with bombs, that's not hard in sector 1, and since you have both boarding and the ability to kill drones from sector 1, you should have plenty of scrap. Sell pheromones as soon as you need to buy something, and try to keep 70-100 scrap open at all times until you've bought another weapon. Your next priority is upgrading shields , and upgrading weapons enough to equip your new weapon. After that it's hard to give advice given how differently things can go, although it's worth mentioning that cloaking is insane on any boarding build, so try to get that.

 

In general in FTL, I almost never have trouble getting enough firepower. A few important points:

Always try to have a decent amount of scrap on hand at all times so you can buy a weapon or useful system if you find a store. Yes, this often means delaying shield upgrades.

Explore each sector as thoroughly as you can. This means two things: don't leave the sector until the last minute; and when navigating try to see as many new nodes each jump as possible (although distress beacons are higher priority, since a guaranteed encounter is great).

 

Goodness, that post went a lot longer than I was expecting. Hopefully it was helpful, and not too wall-of-texty.

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That is indeed a epic wall of text 93.

 

I generally follow most of those principals myself, it think this may have just been a very unlucky run. I was running the Mantis A and store after store i just drew a blank.

My instinct was to try and build for teleporter + drones + cloaking + clone bay, with burst/charge weapons if they became available. I was rotating the crew manning sensors & doors with my boarding party if the it had took a beating, (i always feel its useful to have a decent combat counter boarding group in addition to the away team). 

Was generally trying to hang onto the Pheromones since they'd allowed me to pull off some pretty spectacular kiting with injured mantis when combat didn't go to planned for one reason or another.

 

I'm wondering if I've picked up bad habbits playing with the rock C & its 4 weapon slots which dont apply well to the 3 slot mantis

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Regarding kiting, I've found that if you're willing to micromanage and pause a lot, you don't need pheromones to execute near-flawless stalling inside an enemy ship. They're not worthless, they're just infinitely less valuable than a weapon or extra shield bubble.

 

I'm not a big fan of buying a drone system: 85 scrap and 2 power is a lot to pay for something that only gets through 1 layer of shields. Sure drones have higher DPS than weapons once the enemy's shields are down (which does make them amazing on ion loadouts), but getting the enemy's shields down and getting those first two hits on enemy weapons are the hard part of a fight, and not only are drones bad at fighting through shields, they're terrible at damaging relevant systems. Of course, sometimes you find no weapons so drones are the only firepower you can get, but given a choice between drones and a decent gun, I'll never pick drones.

 

The three-slot ships do make it a lategame priority to find a weapon loadout that makes use of all eight bars of power (or a couple combat drones, something to let you invest more than 6 power in offense), whereas that pretty much happens automatically on a four-slot ship. However, I don't think the Rock C gave you bad habits about weapon slots, what it gave you was an astoundingly powerful starting weapon that most ships lack. The Heavy Crystal 1 may be the most powerful gun in the game (its competition being the other crystal weapons, and the Burst Laser 2) Two damage and one piercing for a single bar of power is simply more efficient than any other weapon, so I can imagine being a little thrown by the lack of it.

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Regarding kiting, I've found that if you're willing to micromanage and pause a lot, you don't need pheromones to execute near-flawless stalling inside an enemy ship. They're not worthless, they're just infinitely less valuable than a weapon or extra shield bubble.

 

I'm not a big fan of buying a drone system: 85 scrap and 2 power is a lot to pay for something that only gets through 1 layer of shields. Sure drones have higher DPS than weapons once the enemy's shields are down (which does make them amazing on ion loadouts), but getting the enemy's shields down and getting those first two hits on enemy weapons are the hard part of a fight, and not only are drones bad at fighting through shields, they're terrible at damaging relevant systems. Of course, sometimes you find no weapons so drones are the only firepower you can get, but given a choice between drones and a decent gun, I'll never pick drones.

 

The three-slot ships do make it a lategame priority to find a weapon loadout that makes use of all eight bars of power (or a couple combat drones, something to let you invest more than 6 power in offense), whereas that pretty much happens automatically on a four-slot ship. However, I don't think the Rock C gave you bad habits about weapon slots, what it gave you was an astoundingly powerful starting weapon that most ships lack. The Heavy Crystal 1 may be the most powerful gun in the game (its competition being the other crystal weapons, and the Burst Laser 2) Two damage and one piercing for a single bar of power is simply more efficient than any other weapon, so I can imagine being a little thrown by the lack of it.

 

Idd about the Heavy Crystal 1, it's truly over powered.

 

I primarily use drones defensively, I love the Def II but will happily even take a def 1 drone all the way to the flagship fight just for its anti missile power. Shield Drone + Def Drone II is something i'll go for if it comes up, being total overkill but magnificent all the same.

 

But perhaps that's the problem with the mantis perhaps i need to think more about getting through their shields than protecting myself.

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But perhaps that's the problem with the mantis perhaps i need to think more about getting through their shields than protecting myself.

 

That's absolutely it. The best defense is blowing up their offense, and now that you phrased it like that, I've realized that I can generally describe my strategy as "Sink all my scrap into getting as much offense as I can possibly use ("as I can use" is important, no sense having eight bars of weapons in sector 3), spend leftovers on shield + cloaking".

 

If you're using them defensively, I agree, the defense drone 1 can be absolutely fantastic. It's not uncommon to have enough shields that the enemies cannot breach them, or only breach on some rare alignment of their desynced weapons, but missiles will always damage you, stopping that feels great. For that reason, I actually prefer the DD 1 to DD 2. Even if they costed the exact same amount, I'd take a DD1, because the DD2 will often shoot down an incoming laser that wouldn't have breached shields, and then be recharging when a missile comes in.

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Having gotten the Crystal Cruiser, I'm really having a tougher than normal time getting the second layout.  I lost a couple of ships specifically trying to get the achievement for destroying an enemy ship with the Crystal Vengeance augment.  I would bring their hull down to a single point, turn off my shields, and let them hit me until I got it, but between several misses and the darn thing just not activating, it took far longer than I would have liked.  It's still the only achievement I've gotten because I can't ever seem to get 4 crew members into one room and the game has been refusing to give me Rock sectors so I'm not encountering many Rock ships.

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I regret bitching so much in this thread previously. With the new additions (especially hacking) I think the developers have made the game winnable in almost all situations. I've been watching hard mode no pause challenge runs on Twitch and now I feel like if I sit down and take my time I can win the game most of the time and have a lot of fun doing it. I no longer feel like I am at the mercy of the game's whims. An amazing thing about FTL is that in any interesting playthrough of the game at least twice there will be a situation where everything seems totally fucked, but if you persevere and play smart and you can make it through almost anything. Except maybe suicide Zoltan boarders.

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I've been messing around with an endless mod lately.  It's really rough in the beginning because the scaling has been changed so it's entirely possible to encounter ships with 3 shield points and multiple weapons in the first sector.  The rebel ships are especially strong in the beginning.  Once I got a few sectors in though, I really started enjoying the ability to experiment with high level builds.  I've had a few runs in which I've purchased every possible ship upgrade.  The mod also introduces some new weapons and drone types (such as crystal and missile drones that shoot much slower than the normal combat drones but retain the shield piercing properties of those weapon types).  One thing I'm really liking are the boss fights.  In each sector there's a super powerful ship that drops an enhanced weapon or drone as a reward and is the only way to obtain these items.  Right now I have an enhanced crystal weapon that shoots 3 shots and an enhanced fire bomb that does additional crew damage, both with a power cost of only 2 each.  I can take out the bosses without a scratch now and I have more scrap than I can spend.  It's kind of fun being a crazy powerful menace to the galaxy.

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I've been messing around with an endless mod lately.  It's really rough in the beginning because the scaling has been changed so it's entirely possible to encounter ships with 3 shield points and multiple weapons in the first sector.  The rebel ships are especially strong in the beginning.  Once I got a few sectors in though, I really started enjoying the ability to experiment with high level builds.  I've had a few runs in which I've purchased every possible ship upgrade.  The mod also introduces some new weapons and drone types (such as crystal and missile drones that shoot much slower than the normal combat drones).  One thing I'm really liking are the boss fights.  In each sector there's a super powerful ship that drops an enhanced weapon or drone as a reward and is the only way to obtain these items.  Right now I have an enhanced crystal weapon that shoots 3 shots and an enhanced fire bomb that does additional crew damage, both with a power cost of only 2 each.  I can take out the bosses without a scratch now and I have more scrap than I can spend.  It's kind of fun being a crazy powerful menace to the galaxy.

 

And thus began Star Wars: A New Hope (I'm ignoring the 3 prequels here).

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