Oi. You two, get a roo… Oh. Right. Carry on.
Congrats you two!
And super awesome proposal Oft! 
At least those two won at FTL (after a fashion but in the best way) even if it was a Kobayashi Maru style maneuver.
So far I have well over 80 hours in the game and I have yet to win a single play through.
Some might think I suck horribly at the game and that may be true but I think I have most of the nuances covered. I can get to the end on about 50% of my play-throughs but at the mothership something always gets me in the end.
I have been SO close SO many times…very frustrating. Any insights appreciated. (Note I have tried multiple methods from cloaks to evasion to teleporters to big guns.)
Also never get the Crystal ship sequence. Have gotten parts here and there but never the whole thing. Seems even less likely with Advanced on. Does it only work with the original settings?
My first thought would be ship selection. Which ship(s) have you been using? I’d start out with one of the easier ships-- Kestrel B, Engi A, or Zoltan B for a weapons-based ship, or Lanius B, Mantis B, or Crystal B for a boarding ship. These will give you more scrap, either through extra rewards for killing the crew (the boarding ships), avoiding damage, or helping you win early battles. This means more scrap, which helps beef up your offense and defense.
My second thought would be that you might need to refine your flagship strategy. I don’t want to tell you my strategy; I’d rather you figure a strategy out on your own. But, my thought process for preparing to face the flagship has two major components. First, how am I going to damage the enemy flagship? Second, how am I going to survive the waves of damage that come my way? There’s also an interplay between the two; the better your ability to do damage, the less need to tank. The three stages of the enemy flagship also call for three different approaches, so you have to consider whether your setup has sufficient flexibility to handle all of them. You can also benefit from exploiting the profound weaknesses of the layout of the enemy flagship.
The Crystal ship is actually way easier to get under the Advanced settings. In the classic version of the game, you had to successfully complete the quest for the crystal ship, which was nigh-well impossible. In Advanced mode, you can unlock it simply by unlocking the two previous ships, I think.
Correction: I’m not sure what exactly you have to do, but it does involve doing something with the preceding ship(s). Check the game or the FTL wiki for more accurate details!
Kestrel-B or Engi-A mostly with stabs taken with a few other ships.
Seems to me teleporter and cloak are far better than anything else. Buffed ship weapons and shields and whatnot are still not a good match for the mothership.
… even on easy? :eek:
Most was on normal (it’s just a thing with me that I try not to play on “easy” settings if at all possible). I switched to easy a week or two ago but have not played that much to say one way or another if it’ll help.
Holy cow, the FTL proposal made the front page of Kotaku!
So did you beat the mothership?
The game was rigged so nearly every event at every beacon was the proposal. She ended up having problems with running out of fuel by the start of the second sector. Also, it would have been a bit of a slog to go through eight sectors of marriage proposal, so I modified it again to only do the proposal in sector 1 so she could load up on weapons and scrap (I also added a fuel reward for one of the blue options). Then she cut a swath through the rest of the game. I’m pretty sure she beat the Flagship but she’d have to tell you for sure.
On an unrelated note: I decided to do an (unmodded) Engi A run. Got a Burst Laser Mk I in one of my first encounters, and ultimately ended with BL1, BL2, Ion 2, two combat drones and a defense drone (and recovery arm), hacking, and cloaking. I was a veritable wrecking ball. I forgot how good Engi A was until F.Pu mentioned it.
Congrats you guys!
On an unrelated note; can someone list all of the available/unlockable ships (just A type) in the classic version of the game for me?
Thanks in advance!
Zeke