I lost three Zoltan crewmembers and ended up spending most of the rest of the fight with my entire crew on the enemy ship. 
Thank god for Reconstructive Teleport.
Gah! I’m a newbie to the game, but finally made it again to the flagship: full fully-trained crew, four shields, vulcan, swarm missiles, pretty good setup. Killed the first stage–and now I have two crew members left, thanks to the hacking drone that targeted my oxygen.
In retrospect I shoulda targeted their hacking station to begin with, or maybe hacked the hacking station. If only I’d thought of that in time.
Are you sure? I thought leveling up only affected accuracy.
Yeah. How frequently shots will miss is a function of evade, which is determined by the evading ship’s pilot and their skill level (or autopilot), the level of the evading ship’s engines, and the skill level of the person manning them, if there is one.
Weapons skill just decreases weapons cooldown.
She’s right. Leveling up only affects charge time, nothing else. Advanced Mode now shows the exact crew bonus for a manned system if you mouse over the system. I believe untrained is +10% weapon charge speed, one star is +15% and two star is +20%.
AFAIK, there’s no way to increase your weapons accuracy aside from reducing your opponent’s evade. Or by using beam weapons, which are always 100% accurate.
ETA: Ninja’d by my own girlfriend! What is the world coming to?
Hey, you’re right. I have been playing the game all wrong this whole time!
ETA: ninja’d by your girlfriend and you. 
Great username/post combo 
That’s what comes of playing it on easy
Arrghhh!
(:D)
I think they either nerfed hard since the launch of advanced edition, or they nerfed boarding in the beginning. It took me a whole lot of runs to beat hard for the first time during the first week it came out - mostly using mantis B and crystal B, the clear best ships on normal.
But after not playing since that victory, I came back yesterday and made 2 runs with the Kestrel B. The first one was going really well but failed because I couldn’t find a store in like 25 jumps and just got whittled away. The second run I just blasted through the game, beating the final boss in under 2 minutes of total time, racking up a 5750 score even without trying to score whore. It was easier than most of my wins on normal, and it seemed like I had more scrap at all times than I did on my previous boarding-oriented runs.
Which either means boarding rewards were nerfed at the launch of AE, which I haven’t seen any information on, or they’ve made hard easier since the first time I beat it.
Maybe you just got better at the game, or had silly luck that one time ? 
I’ll try to make another few hard runs to see if it was just a lucky run. My gut says that they nerfed the boarding rewards so that gunships are almost as good, and because of the hard boss design, gunships can be much better there.
There’s no doubt in my mind that gunships are a much better strategy for the final boss on hard mode. Because of hacking and/or mind control, you’re far more likely to quickly get hits in to the shield room, and because the weapons rooms are now integrated with the rest of the ship, the “board and clear” strategy is less viable.
That’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying that the loot you get in every pissant fight on the way to the boss have been normalized between boarding/non-boarding ships.
It’s possible - I haven’t logged into the game recently and haven’t seen the patch notes, so I don’t know for sure. But then again, would that be a bad thing ? Boarding scrap really does make/did make things run a lot smoother. But rogue-likes thrive on the whole multiple paths thing, where having options and being flexible rules and while there are always *bad *decisions ultimately every path is workable long as you know what the fuck you’re doing.
But if one path is always better than another, there’s not really a decision to be made, is there ? That path becomes The Path and everything else is a challenge run.
That’s what he was saying in his first post, not the one I responded to 
ETA - Or at least in the second half of that post.
So here’s a fun little tip for the rebel flagship on easy. Got crew that aren’t fully leveled? Knock out the three “problem weapons”, leaving just the laser, put your shields on high, set a weapon that can’t pierce 4 shields on autofire, crank up your engine, and just go make a cup of tea.
I tried Hard for the first time last night. Dunno if I just got lucky with the RNG, but I managed to beat it with the Kestrel B with 5 hull left.
I also beat hard on my first run, but with the Kestrel A. I’ve been wondering - is there any interest in doing an ironman challenge on hard? You get a single run with type A(or other) of every ship(so 10 runs total), no restarts, and we can compare notes on results. The game has become slightly dull, and I thought this might liven it up again.
Why are you magic?
The same reason you are?