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Also, for those thinking of being clever and using boarding to kill all the crew on the flagship, be aware that it has a backup plan in case you do this. I'll let Momplestiltskin show it off if he/she wants to. Also, this thread got me to fire up the game again and yep, it's still horrible for my blood pressure. I got about 75% of the way through the first sector and ran into an ion storm with a rebel ship armed with an attack drone and a laser. Naturally the ion storm mostly took out my shields and/or weapons while not bothering to touch the rebel's weapons or drones. I'm sure if I'd toughed it out I would have won eventually, but instead I just quit. I'll let someone else deal with playing this game, thanks.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:22
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First Tube posted:Are you not watching the videos or something? Er, uh, I just wanted to leave open the possibility that they're trans? 
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Apr 11, 2014 06:44
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Jesus, what's the flagship's autopilot dodge rate?  You needed 4/7 shots to get through to damage it once its shields were already damaged, and I don't think you once succeeded at that. Getting that fire in the engine room was a huge break for you, and helps show why weapons like the firebomb can be helpful even though they don't directly do damage. The ion bomb is still better though.
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Apr 11, 2014 20:48
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Yeah, sure, I'll enroll in our little ship of doom. Who needs oxygen anyway?
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Apr 12, 2014 06:11
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Renegret posted:e: I haven't tried the cloning vats before. How much of a penalty do crew members take when they die? I feel like you want to keep your guys alive to try and preserve their skills, and if you do that then you're essentially wasting a slot you can put a cloak device or something like that in. Several of the stations don't have especially relevant skills. Shields, repair, and combat are all skills that, while nice to have, are not dealbreakers if you put a complete novice in charge. I could see the cloning vats especially being welcome for your boarders, who are inherently going to have higher mortality.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:32
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Dirt5o8 posted:I've done runs with the Kestrel, Osprey, Torus, and the Zoltan. Can I get a hint on how to unlock another ship? Or is it just luck? When I last played, all of the ships had specific unlock conditions, i.e. it's not "just" luck. However, those unlock conditions rely on you having access to the right encounter cards. E.g. the unlock might require you to go to a Rock system (which requires such a system to be generated on your route), then to find a specific set of three encounters in sequence (as the start, middle, and end of a quest chain). The Crystal ship is particularly stupid-rare to get a chance of unlocking. I'm sure you can find specifics if you search online. Assuming they haven't changed this, IMO it's perfectly legit to just cheat to unlock the ships instead, since you shouldn't have to play a bunch of games over and over again just to randomly get the chance to maybe unlock one of the ships you want to play as.
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Apr 13, 2014 22:24
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I found myself unable to resist trying the game again despite its tendency to induce rage in me, and holy hell the Lanius A with a teleporter is insane. Teleport your Lanius into the medbay, wait for enemy crew to arrive, hack the medbay, suddenly a) the enemy is locked in with you, b) the air is going away, and c) when you activate your hacker the medbay drains health instead of restoring it! Also, the final phase of the boss fight isn't impossible without mind control; you just need to shut down their ability to use it. Bombs, missiles, and hacking the mind control unit all work well. That run was ridiculous in general, granted that I was playing on Easy. My final loadout was a Charge II, Flak I, Small Bomb, and Ion Bomb, and I had the augments for faster reloads, long-range scanning, and full-heal-on-teleport (which is pretty bloody useful when running a teleport-based game with a cloning bay, let me tell you). Silly thing about the cloning bay: since you can't heal units normally except by jumping, in the last couple of fights I intentionally stationed badly-injured "generic" units (i.e. ones without lots of systems skill) in airless rooms to force them to die and come back at full health.
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Apr 14, 2014 00:50
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You took a fair amount of hull damage from that rebel drone ship, actually, since every time its bombs completely destroyed a system, that was 1 point of hull damage. That happened, what, four times? Also, losing your second Lanius is a huge blow. Lanius just don't play well with other races. It's weird; the AI seems to prioritize hacking/boarding the cloning bay on Lanius A ships. Or is it just my imagination?
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Apr 14, 2014 19:01
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Yeah, sure, enqueue me please. As soon as we get a ship without a cloning bay, deaths will be a bit more permanent, which may cycle the roster faster 
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Apr 15, 2014 04:18
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Red sectors can be amazing, mind you. I'm not a huge fan of Rock systems, since they tend to have tons of shield-piercing weapons and Rock crew are a pain to kill with boarders (stupid 150 health), but even a Rebel Stronghold isn't the clusterfuck of "you fight a high-level Rebel ship and then have to flee before you can loot it" that you'd expect it to be. ...at least, not on Easy anyway. And there's one  encounter in the Rebel Stronghold...I hope that Momplestiltskin gets a chance to show it off.
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Apr 15, 2014 16:38
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anilEhilated posted:This is pure theorycraft since I never played the advanced edition, but the upgrade seems to really just add convenience: you can always just kill and reclone your boarders (especially when they're mantises who are just so much better at fighting than everyone else) after the fight is done so you'll have a fully healthy invading force anyway. You can't always just kill Lanius crewmembers, though. So it's useful there. But yeah, the main utility is in making sure you never lose momentum with your boarders; they're always ready to go back on board the enemy ship, or come back and fend off enemy boarders / fix burning systems.
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Apr 15, 2014 19:02
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PotatoManJack posted:Yeah, this was always something that struck me as odd. Maybe I'm just to used to the trope of the rebels being the good guys who are fighting oppression, but it felt weird to be the federation that needs to take out the rebel scum. Rebels = Sith. Problem solved. Had a run as the Noether (Zoltan B) make it up to the last stage of the boss before dying. It turns out that Flak Cannon 1 + Chain Laser + 2x Pike Beams isn't very effective when your enemy has level-4 shields...but by the time I figured that out, there weren't any new weapons available before the endgame. Oh well.
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Apr 16, 2014 02:18
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Shadowlyger posted:Or you could have a boarding drone or an anti-personnel drone. Or an Anti-Bio Beam, but that pretty much requires using Slug Cruiser A. Or a clone bay. Clone bays are fantastic for avoiding all the "whoops you just lost a crewmember" effects. Sure, you don't "win" the encounter, but you didn't lose either!
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Apr 16, 2014 05:06
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Ironically, the clone bay would normally be a clear win if you're using Lanius boarders, since most of their damage comes from asphyxiation instead of from bonking people on the head, so who cares if their combat skill degrades? But you can't kill off Lanius at-will, so you're stuck with whatever health level they have when they teleport in. Clone Bay + Reconstructive Teleport seems almost strictly better than medbay, but that's a pretty substantial scrap investment.
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Apr 16, 2014 21:18
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psluuthor posted:Except you might not find it, or there may be something better available, or it might show up much later on after you've already lost several people. You are suggesting that folks buy that augmentation along with reconstructive teleport in order to make a clone bay better than a medbay when you could be using those two augmentation slots and extra scrap for lots of other stuff and not have to rely on being lucky enough to get those specific augmentations. It just doesn't seem practical to me. I'm the one who noted the value of Reconstructive Teleport. I'd absolutely have trouble justifying getting it and DNA banks just to avoid losing crew, and it alone is pretty expensive (70 scrap, if I recall correctly). Neither is remotely necessary to get value out of the clone bay. Honestly I say if you're running a clone bay and something disrupts it while you have a dead crewmember in there, then you just suck it up and deal. That's similar to sending a low-health crew into the medbay and it getting blown up, killing the crewmember in the process. I mean, it's a bit more likely (since you can't always choose when crew get sent into the clone bay), but it's still pretty rare.
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Apr 16, 2014 22:33
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Momplestiltskin posted:Oooh that is very interesting about the Federation cruiser. Before Advanced Edition it did not have any quest to speak of, and you unlocked it just by beating the game. Now it seems I have a ship unlock quest to check out next time I see a Rebel Stronghold! Not gonna lie, it's a pretty awesome quest. And refreshingly free of bullshit RNG dependency chains.
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Apr 17, 2014 20:28
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ViggyNash posted:But I already had it, and type B. That's why I'm annoyed. Can't the game at least give me the ship after that? Alas, no. At least you aren't playing the original version where every single ship besides the Kestrel and the Engi and Federation cruisers had an unlock quest that you had to randomly stumble across if you wanted that ship! "Win the game with this ship and you unlock the next one" is practically merciful compared to the old way.
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Apr 17, 2014 21:49
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Mind-control will also be quite useful for killing off the crew in the main section of the flagship, as the AI has no compunctions about killing its own mind-controlled crew and they can't benefit from the medbay. Of course, you can also just hack the medbay. Rank-3 mind control makes your mind-controlled enemies into absolute beasts, incidentally; one guy can just about fight two opponents to a standstill. EDIT: VVV you should take out the beam weapon in phase 1 if only so it can't be repaired during phase 2, where it's a legitimate threat. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Apr 18, 2014 |
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Apr 18, 2014 16:58
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I just scraped through to a win with Stealth B. That ship is...weird. The Halberd Beam is really loving powerful so you don't want to get rid of it, but at the same time it uses 4 power which means any further investment in weapons is horribly expensive. And you're going to need further investment in weapons, because at bare minimum it doesn't work any more once enemies get 3 shield pips. I'm kind of curious what the scrap values of the various ships would be if you priced out their systems, augments, equipment, and crew. I get the feeling the only reason the Stealth ships make grade is because Cloaking is such an expensive system, but IMO it's overpriced and should probably cost more like 100 scrap considering the amount of utility it gets you. Then again, I'm an Easy scrub so what do I know?
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Apr 19, 2014 05:07
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I just had a bizarrely successful run with the Rock A. I didn't get a single non-ammo-using weapon until sector 6, but I got a teleporter early, and between that and buying every single bit of ammo in every store, I was able to keep going. Then in sector 6 I got two Burst Laser IIs and a Charge Ion, which is just a ridiculous combination. I also got the Crystal Crewmember in sector 3...and then the Rock Homeworlds were nowhere in sight  At least his lockdown ability was handy for murdalizing crew regardless of whether or not they had a medbay.
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Apr 19, 2014 20:28
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citybeatnik posted:Well I've also picked up the game. Get the second shield bubble as soon as reasonable. The Kestrel A has a fantastic weapon loadout and shouldn't need extra weapons for a long time, though, so there's little pressure to level them. Instead, level your engines a bit, get more crewmembers (remember to man the doors and sensors), and upgrade the doors, medbay, piloting, and sensors when you can -- there's a fair number of blue options that require them. You'll also want more systems. Cloaking is fantastic and always useful; a teleporter is good if you have enough crew because taking ships "alive" gets you better rewards; hacking and mind control have lesser effects but are still handy. I have real trouble recommending drones though. A Defense Drone 1 will shoot down missiles, and that's about the best use of drones available.
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Apr 19, 2014 21:20
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berryjon posted:Oh god, a four space teleporter? That's just the sort of BS that FTL needs to be competitive. The Mantis B has a four-space teleporter. You also start with a whopping 2-Mantis crew so have fun on autopilot!
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Apr 20, 2014 02:26
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Carbon dioxide posted:Are hostile sectors in general high risk - high reward deals? As far as I can tell, it mostly just skews what kinds of enemy ships you run into. Civilian sectors and unaffiliated nebulae can have just about anything, everyone else biases towards the appropriate ship type (and Rebel sectors skew towards droneships, so gently caress 'em).
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Apr 20, 2014 16:28
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Ugh, Rock Cruiser B is a pain in the rear end to unlock. The three achievements (of which you need 2) are a) kill a ship with a defense drone while only using missiles; b) kill an enemy crewmember in melee while the room they're in is on fire; c) unlock the Crystal Cruiser with a Rock Cruiser. a) is not only RNG bullshit, it's spendy RNG bullshit. Especially since enemy ships with defense drones seem to be a lot more rare than they used to be. b) is nigh-impossible because as soon as an enemy crewmember gets to low health they'll flee any room that's either on fire or out of oxygen, which basically means you have to set the entire ship on fire to get them (which in turn pretty much mandates getting a fire-setting weapon). And of course c) is the gold standard of RNG fuckery.
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Apr 20, 2014 21:55
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Iny posted:It actually uses the words "on their ship" in the achievement text. I remember because I've been staring at it for a while wondering whose ship because it's not at all clear from the text, which refers to both your crew and the enemy crew immediately beforehand. Ironically, immediately after complaining about those achievements I had a run that got both of them (but not the Crystal Cruiser unlock of course, that is forever out of my reach apparently). The drone one was just a matter of actually finding a ship with a Defense 1 drone; the "is it hot in here" one ironically I got without boarding, just by getting a fire completely by accident in a room I had hacked. That run was maddening as hell, incidentally. I got a teleporter in sector 3, but my crew of 3 maxed rockmen (helm/engines/weapons respectively) and 1 engi wasn't going to be doing boarding missions, and I got no new crew until sector 7! At which point, my options were Zoltan, Zoltan, Human -- not exactly a great prospective boarding crew. I was also stuck using my hacking device to do all shield draining so I could cut my enemies apart with a pike beam, because the stores had no weapons in them. That said, I did win (on Easy), so 
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Apr 21, 2014 00:55
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I generally feel like you have to have either boarding or hacking to have a reasonable shot at the flagship; preferably both. Boarding makes the weapons batteries trivial to take out, at which point it doesn't much matter what your hit rate is in phase 1, and (if you kill off the entire enemy crew except for Mister Laser Battery) phases 2 and 3 become vastly simpler as you can just send your boarding team over to sabotage the enemy ship with no opposition. Hacking allows you to: a) Kill off crew by isolating them in the medbay (get them there by shooting it so they move in to try to repair it) (or alternately, use hacking to counter the flagship's hacking in phase 1). b) Disable drone control in phase 2 (or alternately, kill off crew if you couldn't do it in phase 1) c) Disable mind control in phase 3 Obviously you can win without either of these, but they greatly simplify the process. Mind control I find to be less useful against the flagship, mostly because it has so much crew that losing one crewmember doesn't hurt it much. Best-case would be to get the AI to kill off its own crewmembers, but that's not always feasible to arrange. As for mind-controlling the pilot: assuming that mind control follows the same rules as normal combat, as long as the ship has at least one coaligned (i.e. not mind-controlled) crewmember in the cockpit, evasion will be normal; otherwise it is 0.
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Apr 21, 2014 19:48
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Duuk posted:Once I found some decent guns and ignored the drones on the Engi A (named affectionately Dogshit), it ended up working pretty well. Actually found a Vulcan in a store in sector 6 or 7, very nice piece of machinery it is. My biggest problem with combat drones is that their aiming is completely random. Two of them can put a lot of hurt on in a hurry, but almost never on the systems you actually want disabled. Plus unless you have a drone recovery arm you can't afford to use two drones in every fight.
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Apr 21, 2014 20:43
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Honestly the O2 system is usually only an issue if you run into the Slug event where they magically hack it without using a hacker. The odds of the flagship deciding to hack your O2 were pretty low, and if it hadn't you would have been fine unless you got the magic combination of "O2 on fire, open doors to evacuate air, door system gets destroyed". And I can't really fault your decision to upgrade teleportation, since being able to bounce your boarding crew back and forth between your ship and the flagship at high speed can be quite important. But there was probably something else you upgraded that should have been spent on getting L2 O2 first.
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Apr 21, 2014 22:27
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Momplestiltskin posted:Unrelated note: I have not been having much luck in my test runs with Stealth B on normal, so I switched over to easy out of frustration. I had forgotten just how big of a difference it is. I ended my first game on easy with a fully powered Vulcan and Glaive Beam, 2 automated reloaders, stealth weapons, max shields, max cloaking, max hacking, max mind control. Killed all phases of the boss in about 5 minutes total. Almost makes me want to go back to Easy full-time. I really want a difficulty level that has Easy-level scrap rewards and Normal-level ships. The combination of harder ships and lesser rewards on Normal is a nasty double-whammy.
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Apr 22, 2014 20:25
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Momplestiltskin posted:I am fairly certain that is how it was pre-AE; the only difference in difficulty level was scrap rewards. I like the change, but boy it does make certain ships, especially stealth b, just an absolute bitch to play. Certain encounters (namely anything with offensive drones and especially beam drones) will just ruin your whole day and there is absolutely nothing at all you can do about it. Ehh, I'm not so certain about that, since I had the same complaint pre-AE: Easy was too easy, Normal too hard. And yeah, the Stealth ship can get wrecked fast if the enemy has drones, and every enemy has drones when you play as the Stealth ship because the RNG is an rear end in a top hat. Stealth A, at least, if you stealth right before the drone fires, then they should only get one shot off before you can fire back, which if you're lucky will take out their offensive capabilities. Stealth B though, you get to wait 25 seconds before you can fire, hooray! Even with the extra cloaking time (level-2 vs. level-1 on the A) that's still like 12 seconds of completely unopposed drone fire.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:22
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Doopliss posted:But yes, I wish there was a way you could run gimmick ships without having so many archetypes that you're completely helpless against. The main criminal here is Rebel droneships, which completely invalidate boarding*, mind control, and fire weapons, and make traditional beam weapons, Flak weapons, and "Hull" weapons notably less effective due to their spaced-out rooms and lack of rooms with no system in them. Your only option against droneships is to beat their hull down, which just isn't all that interesting. * Barring Lanius, or technically an upgraded teleporter can retrieve your crew before they asphyxiate but they won't accomplish a whole lot in that time.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:40
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Beams are great for undodgeable damage across multiple systems, and the more powerful ones can deal huge amounts of damage. Especially towards the late game, that "undodgeable" aspect becomes really useful since you can often sling 4 projectiles at a system only for 3 of them to miss (even assuming shields aren't an issue). They're slow to charge and need backup weapons to wear shields down, of course, but that doesn't make them useless.
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Apr 23, 2014 16:33
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Once I finally figured out that ion storms always hit your shields first, I started de-powering shields immediately before the storm hits, and then re-powering afterwards (until I figured that out, ion storms were rage city as I complained that the storm always took out my shields and never my opponent's weapons...). Of course, then they hit two of your other systems instead of just one, increasing the odds that either engines or piloting will get hit and loving you out of getting to escape, but I think the odds of minimizing the damage you take are better this way. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 18:55
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One weird thing about the game is how skillups work. Pilots and engines get skillup from successfully dodging projectiles (when not cloaked, anyway), which means that they won't get much skill at all until you upgrade your engines (and also that pilots of the Stealth ship tend to suck). Once the engines are upgraded, however, they tend to rank up very quickly. Shields get skillups from getting shields drained, but only a very small amount. Consequently, your shields guy won't skillup very quickly at all, especially if you wait to man shields until after you've put a couple of ranks into your engines. I routinely have my shields crewmember at only maybe 50% of the way between green and gold skill by the boss, because I generally prioritize doors/sensors ahead of shields.
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Apr 23, 2014 22:21
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PotatoManJack posted:But that's kind of the point to a rogue-like as well isn't it? You're supposed to learn along the way, and when you do finally get the tools you need and are able to win the game, it feels all the more rewarding. The problem being that you can have a "viable to sector 8" build that will fail against the flagship, guaranteed. Ideally the game leading up to the final boss should be teaching you the tools you need to beat that boss, but that's not reliably the case here.
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Apr 28, 2014 04:10
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Duuk posted:Woo, update! I want it. But no medbay. Just 2x Vulcan, 4 pip of weapon, pilot, and engines. Start with 1 Lanius crewmember so you don't get an O2 system either. You have to buy everything else. On the bright side, you're unlikely to take systems damage early on with no systems!  quote:Stuff about rockmen vs. mantis Movement speed is the killer for me. Healing rockmen after fights is so loving tedious, and you can't safely kite your rockmen around the enemy ship if they get in trouble. Rockmen boarders plus firebombs is a pretty hilarious combination though.
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Apr 28, 2014 19:19
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There should be an achievement for fighting off the flagship with a Burst Laser Mk II, Ion Charger, Swarm Missile Launcher, and Pike Beam. For added annoyance factor (because that's how FTL achievements work!) you should have to do it as the Red Tail so your ship's the right color.
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Apr 29, 2014 01:27
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Duuk posted:But it is okay! Because you can hide in the sensor room while the ship is venting. I think my favorite bit is how the only airlock is in the cockpit. I do want to see the "4 pips in weapons, 1 in engines, 1 in piloting, 5 in reactors, 1 Lanius crewmember, 2 Vulcans, and nothing else" ship. EDIT: alternately, a human instead of Lanius, and a medbay but no O2.
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Apr 29, 2014 22:59
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My go-to strategy for the flagship is Teleporter/Cloak/Hacker: * Teleport into the missile weapon, kill the crew there, and destroy the weapon. It'll get one volley off before going boom; cloak through it (this volley comes shortly after the laser volley). Retrieve your crew, then send them to the ion weapon and then the beam weapon. Leave the laser weapon alone. At this point, as long as you have at least 3 shield pips, the flagship can't hurt you, so you can afford to depower engines and shields (if you had 4 pips) and power up weapons. * Hack the medbay, and depower the hacker. Fire at the medbay until you damage it, luring some crew into it (firebombs work fantastically for this, incidentally). Activate the hacker, and it should kill the crew as long as it's been upgraded at least once. Repeat until most of the crew is dead; at this point you can kill the rest off with standard boarding tactics as long as you keep the medbay locked down. * Beat down the defenseless ghost ship with whatever weapons are handy. For phase 2, things go similarly, except that you want to save your cloak for the power surge, and take out their drone control after you take out the missile launcher, before going for the beam weapon. In phase 3, you can hack the mind control device to get yourself some breathing room. Amusingly, this will cause their one remaining crew to get mind-controlled instead.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:57
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berryjon posted:Can someone tell me what it's meant by 'Destroying a Full Health ship in one cloak' Achievement for the Stealth Cruiser? I've tried a couple times to kill an Auto-Scout in Sector 1 by waiting for the guns to charge, cloaking, then killing it, but I still haven't unlocked that particular achievement yet. According to the wiki, "In sector one, upgrade your cloak to maximum, find an unshielded auto-scout, and use your weapons. This should unlock the achievement."
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Apr 30, 2014 04:09
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