FTL: I could use some tips

The Game Room
1

For the uninitiated FTL is a real time/turn based space exploration game. You trick out your ship, hire crew, make story choices and explore the universe while running from The Rebels. It’s essentially Firefly if The Rebels were Reavers instead of Browncoats. It’s a popular PC game, but I just picked up the iPad port which is fantastic and I’m now and addict.

Anyway, I play on easy and never really get that far. On my 7th try last night I finally got to The Rebel flagship which just proceeded to tear me to pieces. The few times I’ve managed to scrape together the credits (sorry, ‘scrap’) to get better weapons I can’t afford to power them and whatever i run into just out shoots me or boards me or some other calamity happens. I like the ‘fly by the seat of your pants on the edge of survival’ feel but there is a whole bunch of game I’m missing because I’m always busy scrounging at subsistence level.

So do you have a general advice? Build shields early? Is a large crew important? When do you upgrade and what should I go for first?

2

I haven’t played it in a while, so I don’t remember a lot of specifics. I will say this: pause frequently, and plan. If you’re playing it in real time, it’s way too easy to miss things: that small fire has gotten out of control and spread, one of my crew is severely injured a-oops! now he’s dead, my laser has been primed to fire for 30 seconds but I was paying attention to something else and I missed my chance, etc. Every action should be as efficient as possible. Weapons should fire as soon as they’re ready, crew members shouldn’t be loitering in the med bay after they’re done healing.

Timing is often important in battle. One volley may wipe out your enemy’s shields, but only for a few seconds. So, if that’s likely, make sure you have another weapon ready to fire so you can take advantage.

3

This very relevant thread has plenty of strategy talk in it.

A lot is going to depend on whether or not you’re playing with the recent expansion.

4

Attack your enemy’s weapon systems when possible. If they’re using four lasers and a drone it’s probably not worth it, but if it’s just a missile and a laser then keeping one of those inactive may be the difference between coming away unscathed and winning a Pyrrhic victory that cripples your ship.

5

yeah you should turn off the expansion until you get the hang of things. the Kestrel B should be the easiest early ship, as it allows you to target up to 4 different systems at once. take down the enemy shields and weapons and you should sustain less damage and have more cash. what do you typically do in an encounter?

6

Stop playing on easy. Seriously. It’s more forgiving of mistakes, and you learn less.

7

I don’t know if this is good advice, really. If he can’t beat the game yet, dying sooner is not necessarily going to be a better way to learn.

My suggestion is boost your shield to 2 bubbles, and your engines a few notches, as soon as you can. A lot of the fights you face can be largely mitigated with two shields, and getting up to 30+% dodge will make a missile fight more forgiving for you too.

Focus on what you can currently do; buying a lot of different things hurts you, because they’re not as immediately effective as a speciality and you need to slowly learn how to combine them to be effective. Start with laser weapons, because bombs and drones and boarding and so on are somewhat more advanced tactics.

I can’t remember what ship starts with four single-blast weapons, but start with that one. Fire all of the lasers together in a volley at your enemy’s shields. Then fire your blasts at their weapons. Then their helm, or drone control, or anytbing else affecting you. That’ll get you through 75% of your early fights with little problem.

8

Looks like you start with the Kestral, which is a burst-laser and a missile launcher. I still think it’d be advantageous to start with a laser strategy, so:

If you’re facing an enemy with one shield, save your rockets. Your laser will eventually wear them down. If they’re reliably piercing your shields or hitting you with missiles, missile their weapons once to give yourself a head start.

If they have two or more shields, rocket the shields. Then alternate lasering their weapons and shields to keep them locked down.

Upgrade your shields to 2 bubbles as soon as you can. Most enemies can’t reliably pierce that, and if they’re beam-based, they usually only have an ion or a single laser. They can’t pierce your shields, and you can laser them at your leisure.

After upgrading your shield and maybe your engine once or twice, look to getting another laser, and save upgrades to power it. Always fire your lasers together in a volley; this means saving a blast or two if your second weapon is still charging.

Then add upgrades and more lasers as desired, and pick up a cloak somewhere down the line. The cloak will let you dodge rockets, which will be your biggest weakness.

9

I say it is the better way. Dying is an inherent part of the rogue-like genre. Living and dying in different ways is fun and it’s how you learn and get better at the game. If you(generic) don’t enjoy that part of the process, and are playing to ‘win’, then the genre isn’t for you.

10

I get tons of enjoyment from the game and I always play on easy. Normal and Hard are not any fun for me, and for many others.

11

While I generally agree with you about rogue-likes, FTL has a definitive end that can be reached relatively quickly with better play, and Sitnam’s explicit goal is to experience the rest of the game. I think Sitnam’s got the “dying in different ways” part of the genre down solid. :smiley:

12

  • you want to have at least a second shield by the time you enter sector 3, a third by sector 5

  • don’t neglect your engines. Engines increase your evasion rate (and are further boosted by crew skill) and let you dodge shots

  • don’t spend your scrap in the field (unless it’s to buy those shields at the last minute, and the power to run them). When you get to a store, then you can first sell all your useless stuff and start thinking about what to buy, how much to repair, what to upgrade, and leave the store without a coin in your pocket.

  • Don’t hesitate to sell stuff that’s kinda good if it lets you buy stuff that is AWESOME. Quite a few ships start with some upgrades, in the grand majority of case you sell those at the first shop.

  • stuff that is awesome : Flak I, Burst Laser II (not III), Vulcan, Halberd Beam, Breach Bombs, Long Range Scanners, Scrap Recovery Arm, Reconstructive Teleport, Zoltan crew. The Repair Arm is a trap, it sounds good but it eats all your upgrade money.

  • beams never, ever miss but you have to take away the shields first : the grand majority of beams do only 1 point of damage, which is absorbed by any shield. Beams with 2 damage can go through one shield, and so on. Also, beams do damage not by how many *squares *they hit but how many different rooms. One pixel per room is enough. Even the piddly minibeam does 3 damage if you aim it well.

  • when you buy a drone room, the first drone is free but not all drones are created equal. If you hover your mouse on the drone room in the shop it’ll tell you which you’ll get. If it’s a repair drone, you’re getting screwed. If it’s an attack drone, meh. Unless you already have one yourself, you want the drone room with the defence drone I, it eats missiles

  • don’t dash for the exit of the sector. Ideally, you want to hit the exit one turn before the Rebel fleet reaches it. The rest of the time, zig-zag between jumps to find the most fights/events. Long Range Scanners help a ton to optimize your route.

  • but don’t run out of gas.

  • decide early on whether a fight is worth fighting. There’s no shame in running away. E.g. if you have three shields and just enough weaponry to deal with 3 and do one point of damage, and you run into a ship with synchronized burst laser IIIs and 3 shields, jump away. You might well win that fight, but it’ll ruin half your ship in the meantime.

  • when you’re boarded and you don’t have enough crew to fight them, run everyone to the medbay, power it, and open every door on the ship. Now close back the doors of the medbay.

  • fires can’t burn and spread without oxygen. One fire a lone non-mantis crewman can fight. Two, engis can deal with. Everything else : open a path of open doors from space to the blaze.

  • on combat : you want to fire everything together if possible (with the exception of missiles, bombs, ion). That way the first few weapons nuke the shield, and the rest go through. Targetting priorities : weapons, shields, helm, engines. If they repair abnormaly fast, fry their drone room.

  • If they can’t possibly damage you for one reason or another, try to kill the crew rather than the ship - that gives you a lot more scrap and the odd free weapon/drone/component. bust or disable the shields, then focus on their medbay and O2. Cease fire. Blow up the O2+medbay as soon as it’s repaired. Wait some more.

  • A strong boarding crew lets you kill the crew every time for constant massive paydays. It’s a good idea to try and develop one. Mantises, Rocks make great boarders. Engis and Zoltans emphatically do not. Lanius don’t play well with non-Lanius. Basically, as soon as you have either 2 combat guys or 6 total crew (1 to fly the ship, 1 to fix the engine, 4 miscellaneous, you’ve got yourself a boarding party. Start shopping around. You probably want to upgrade that teleporting room ASAP for safety purposes.

  • cloaking gives you 80% free evasion (which should put you above 100%), and enemy weapons can’t charge during cloaking time. Cloak after their best, longest delay weapon(s) fired but before the shots reach you for maximum effect. Don’t upgrade your cloaking unless you’ve got Stealth Weapons.

  • for the boss fight, you want : shields 3 or 4, at the very least engine 6, a cloaking system, either enough weapons to do 7-8 points of damage per salvo or a decent boarding crew. A defense drone would be greatly appreciated, as would a hacking room.

  • there are lots of blue events for upgraded sensors, the upgrade is useful and it’s only 25 scrap. Take it early if you can

[QUOTE=Astral Rejection]
I can’t remember what ship starts with four single-blast weapons, but start with that one.
[/QUOTE]

Red-Tail, starting ship type B.

13

Oh, speaking of optimizing your route : each time you jump into a nebula node, the fleet only moves forward 1/4th of normal, except in nebula sectors where it’s only 1/2. Slowing down the fleet is nice, as it lets you hit even more nodes before you’re forced to bug out.

14

Finally, a quick note on sectors :

  • Civilian sectors : much fewer fights than usual, more distress and lots of shops. Don’t bother going there unless you’re already loaded with scrap. Then it’s Christmas.
  • Pirate controlled : pirates typically have hodgepodge ships with hodgepodge crews. Expect some boarding, but they’re usually not very competent.
  • Rebel controlled : Rebel riggers are a pain in the dick to fight as they are loaded with shields, defence and repair drones, and then they run away. Rebel fighters are glass canons, but the “canon” part hurts. On the whole, avoid if possible.
  • Nebula : lots of automated drones, which often don’t even have shields but have high evasion. Beam fodder supreme. Also the Rebel Fleet will take ages to move forward, which lets you hit lots of nodes. Always very nice… but don’t go there unless you have 15+ fuel, or you’ll squander that potential. They also feature more anomalies than usual. Asteroid fields and Suns are usually no big, but both types of Ion ones can ruin your day.
  • Rock controlled : Rock ships often have good missiles. Rock sectors also feature lots of asteroid fields. Don’t go there if you don’t have 2 shields and a defence drone at a minimum. If you do, then it’s easy money.
  • Mantis controlled : Mantis love to board but they’re usually flimsy, don’t have good weapons and have token Engis for repairs. Easy money, particularly if your entire crew fits inside a medbay.
  • Zoltan controlled : Zoltan ships all have their signature shield which you must chip away at before the fight can “really” begin. Don’t go there if you rely on alpha strikes with missiles, bombs or boardings to mitigate damage. Late game Zoltans are no joke. Don’t look into the Eye.
  • Engi controlled : so you remember Rebel Riggers ? Engi ships are all like that. And Engis natively repair super fast. And they love to disable half your ship with ion guns. Pain. In. The. Dick. Thankfully, Engi sectors usually don’t feature much fighting to begin with, and if you’re running a boarding ship they’re a pushover.
  • Slug : on the plus side, it’s a nebula and slug ships typically don’t hit very hard - they like beams, but the AI doesn’t know how to make beams work at all. They also won’t board you. On the down side, they’ll hack your O2 and/or engines a lot. If you have a hacking room of your own, it’ll flat out counter that. If you don’t, upgrade your O2 room in the first node (no need to buy power, just having 2 pips of O2 room is enough) and you should be OK. Don’t drink with slugs.
  • Abandoned sector : Lanius don’t breathe, so they don’t have O2 rooms or air on their ships at all. That’s bad news if you rely on boarding, and it also means they have 1-2 more power for their other systems. Late game, they’ll have 4 shields and lots of pain for you. Early on, they’re not so bad and those sectors have quite a few “free scrap” nodes.

Every sector will at the very least have 2 shops (3 in green sectors I believe), and the nature of the sector tends to reflect on what they sell : Engi shops sell lots of drones and ion weaponry, etc…

15

i would advise against this. you do not want to be left stranded in a ship with a broken oxygen room and no air in the ship. at the minimum, you should try to leave the oxygen room oxygenated so you can repair in peace. micro the doors so unaffected rooms don’t run out of air.

eta: i think the Rebel ships chasing you aren’t affected by Nebula sectors, only the Nebulas in other sectors.

16

I can only speak from experience on pre-patch, but here’s my advice:

  • Cloaking. Unit. Seriously, get one of these, get it to 3, and abuse the ever-loving hell out of it. It’s basically free time off if the enemy isn’t repairing their ship, and a ton of free time to set up your weapons before they can even get the fight started. Additionally, if you don’t have one of these, Rebel Flagship phases 2 and 3 will just demolish you with power surges in a way which is not even close to cute.
  • Teleporter. Again, no excuse. I don’t care if your crew is Engi and Zoltan, get one of these babies, try to invest in some boarding member who can kill things… You’ll need it for the flagship, where you have to kill off their triple rocket launcher before it literally ends you. I have a success rate of 0% against the flagship if I don’t have both of these.
  • Halberd beam sounds amazing but falls off hard against later enemies. It also costs a massive amount. Totally not worth it.

…Eh, I ain’t got much.

EDIT: @Kobal: Halberd beam is good? O.o

17

No, that’s absolutely the wrong tac. That is because boarders will never go to or stay in a room without oxygen. So if you leave the O2 room with some and vent everywhere else, then that’s what they’ll try to break. Which is emphatically not what you want :).

By leaving only the medbay oxygenated, you’re funnelling every single boarder towards it. 2-3 will get in and fight your dudes (who’ll get healed faster than they take damage), the rest of the boarders will mill around and suffocate or try to do damage to the nearest room. But mostly they’ll die before they damage it. If need be, you can leave a second, damage resistant (like your engines) or non-critical (like hacking, cloak or mind control) room with some oxy to draw them there, then vent it too once they’re in. In which case they’ll keep hitting it while they die, then try to run to the medbay soon as one of their friends dies, and take more suffocation damage along the way. But I’ve hardly ever needed to do that.

Also, a level 1 medbay provides just enough healing to counter the damage done by zero oxygen. Which means that even if your O2 gets busted somehow while in the middle of the manoeuvre, and provided you have 3 crew with full health available, you can run one to the O2 room from the medbay, start the repair, run a second one who’ll take up the repairs while the first one runs to the safety of the medbay, and finally run the third to finish the repairs. The key is to never leave the O2 room unattended so the repair bar doesn’t go down.
A level 2 medbay makes the whole process even easier, since it heals faster than asphyxiation hurts. So you can just heal everyone to full before starting the daisy chain, and can possibly make it work with just 2 guys (never tried). And naturally, Lanius and system repair drones can repair just fine without air, which is very welcome on Engi B.

Of course, if you have more crew than can fit in the medbay, then venting the whole ship’s not a great idea - but then you also have enough crew to fight fairer.

[QUOTE=Budget Player Cadet]
EDIT: @Kobal: Halberd beam is good? O.o
[/QUOTE]

Sure. It only takes 3 power ; can eat through one shield (e.g. the one left up by your ion guns, or that missed laser shot) ; doesn’t fire too slowly - once every other salvo, more or less ; and does a shitton of damage (4-5 IF it goes through one shield, 8-10 without) PLUS breach. Breach slows down repairs a lot and helps kill the crew as well.

It’s the Glaive beam that’s no good - while it does 3 damage, it fires slow as molasses and takes 4 power.

Oh, but speaking of power and time-to-fire : when your weapons bay takes a hit, the rightmost weapon on your bar will get deactivated first, then the second to last and so on. So it’s a good idea to put your smallest, fastest weapons on the right and move the slow or charging ones, or the decisive “panic button” ones (like breach bombs or Pegasus missiles that you don’t necessarily want to use every fight but will shut down the enemy weapons room RIGHT NOW while you repair your own stuff) in the leftmost slot.

18

They are, but much less since otherwise it’d be too easy.
At a rough estimate I’d say they move forward 3/4th or 8/10th of their regular speed. Definitely enough to let you hit 2-3 more nodes (unless you jump to the few regular nodes obviously)

19

At “Easy” a new player is still going to die every single time they play, so really this advice makes no sense. There is no difficulty level FTL can be played at at which a new player is not 100% certain to die.

You’re MUCH better off starting at easy to encounter different situations and learn how the game mechanics work.

20

With the new mechanic that lets you man the door room to fortify doors, I’ve been having luck with a modified “suffocate the invaders” tactic. Where you send a guy to the door room and progressively vent the invaders.

I then use my guys as a stalling tactic, so if they get in the engine room I’ll send someone there to distract them long enough that they won’t do significant ship damage before the oxygen runs out.

If you just get an event with borders, it’s usually better to vent everything and corral them into the medbay, but when you’re fighting an actual boarding vessel it’s a really useful way to kill (or significantly weaken) a boarding party while still keeping your ship relatively well manned.