FTL - Space Rogue-like hits Steam!

The Game Room
41

Defense drones can pay for themselves in a hurry if they shoot down a couple of missiles, and odds are you have drone parts to burn anyway, unless you’re doing some sort of heavy drone attack strategy. And they are pretty much the ONLY defense against missiles, which are quite mean. At most points of the game, one well(or rather, poorly) placed missile hit can mean the difference between a total cakewalk and a fight that actually costs you hull and effort.

Frankly, I’d argue that the anti-personnel and system repair drones are the more-or-less useless ones unless your ship is badly under crewed and you need to make up for that. System repair DOES trigger some nice blue events, but most of those can also be “blued” by appropriate crew members, so the usefulness of these drones varies widely depending on whether you get decent crew or not. On the other hand, there is basically no other defense against missiles (except cloaking, which will help but won’t do nearly the job of a defense drone.) Sure, you can always blow out the enemy’s weapon systems, but they’re probably going to get at least a shot or two off first, unless you’re going for some crazy alpha strike potential, in which case you’re probably not paying power for drones anyway.

Attack drones are pretty good, though beam drones are kinda meh for me. They do lots of damage, but only in specific circumstances, so I generally won’t pay for them. Actually, I try to avoid paying for drones at all. Defense 1 is about the only one I’ll actually pay scrap for. Everything else I can mitigate some other way, but missile damage ruins my day.

42

Enemies using missiles are damn near non-existent in my experience, and those that do have terrible aim (then again, I’ve seen more of them with my Zoltan ship than any other, so the Zoltan shields probably accounts for a lot of that). Those few cases where they actually are using missiles that actually hit, concentrating fire on their weapons systems is perfectly effective.

And my ships are rarely undermanned…until I’m stupid enough to let my crewmen actually fight boarders. Or sending anybody but a drone to repair a section with a breach.

43

Defense drones are the main reason to even get a drone system.

Anti-personnel, boarding and system repair drones have the problem of doing exactly what crew does, only poorly: while they’re potent once they start working, they’re slow to get where they’re going, uncontrollable and cost power to run, and power is generally a more precious resource than crew.

Anti-ship drones do what weapons do, only less efficiently. They do a bit more damage than a comparable 2- or 4- power weapon, but you can’t control their timing or targeting, so it tends to be a wash. The only thing going for them is that they let you boost your damage output cheaply if you’re already fairly high up on the escalating cost for weapons systems, or running out of slots.

Hull repair provides a more scrap-efficient way to replenish hull, but it’s not enough efficient to be worth buying unless you’re really getting your butt kicked on a regular basis - and if that’s the case, you really should be buying a solution to that, instead.

Defense drones, on the other hand, provide a unique capability: they shoot down incoming missiles and boarding drones. Mark II shoots down ion and laser shots in addition, so is more broad-spectrum defense at the cost of being less reliable at anti-missile, as you’ll often see it taking out an incoming laser shot and thus put itself on cooldown for the Hermes missile coming in right behind the shot (ouch). Mark II is a very strong overall defense, though, about equal to 2.5 shields, and ion-proof.

As missiles are very much the strongest weapons in the game, the ability to reliably counter them is invaluable, and shooting down all 6 of the boarding drones sent out in the Flagship phase 2 is practically worth it by itself.

44

You guys are seriously playing a completely different game than I am.

How the hell do you keep your crews alive when you’re using them as cannon fodder against boarding parties (far more common than missiles, IME), or sending them into fires/ruptured rooms?

Defense Drones have never done anything for me except waste a slot in my drone panel. Anti-personnel and system repair have kept my crew alive - and manning their stations, instead of running around trying to fix other stations things (and getting killed by fire or lack of oxygen in the process), or keep boarding parties from slaughtering them.

45

Fire and breaches are immobile sources of static rates of damage. Boarders are only somewhat more mobile: their attack logic is quite simple and they won’t chase anybody down as long as they still have things to do in their current room. Any danger to your crew from those sources is thus utterly predictable and 100% controllable by your own positioning and timing. It’s even safe to teleport them onto airless AI ships: they’ll lose exactly 90 HP by the time a level 2 teleporter recharges.

The only risks are from less predictable sources, such as enemy weapons fire, but even that is often completely predictable. An enemy with two Heavy Laser Mk.1s will not ever get through a 2-strength shield. An enemy with a Heavy-1 and a Leto launcher, on the other hand? Him you have to worry about.

46

Completely different game, seriously.

Missiles are the single least common cause of failure for me. I’ve been taken out by missiles less often than I’ve won. (That’d be twice.)

Fires I couldn’t put out (especially due to solar flares). Crew attrition due to O2 deprivation, skirmishes with boarding parties, or random events rolling the wrong way. Simple overwhelming firepower. Those are common.

Missiles are a danger only when I’ve had bad luck with weapons acquisition and haven’t got the firepower to get through the enemy’s shields, or only have drones, so I can’t actually aim. (And I’ve gotten through 6 or 7 combat-heavy sectors with nothing but an ion gun and an anti-ship drone, repeatedly.) If I can get through the shields and choose my targets, hammering their weapons system is way more effective than wasting a slot on a defensive drone.

47

Don’t be afraid to vent your ship. Get your crew behind a door and open a channel from the fire to space. It’s the safest and quickest way to stop fire.

Swap your crew out for boarding parties. Have a couple fight the boarders, then send them to the medbay and send in more crew to fight. If you can fight in the medbay, even better; you will always win.

In my current game, I have 2 humans, 1 Zoltan, and 3 Mantis. I think I only hired one, the rest were given to me through story. I have four crew manning the various stations and two of the Mantis just hang around. When boarders show I have an immediate response team, and if I need to sabotage the other ship they’re a great away team.

The single best tip I’ve received in playing the game is explore as much as you can. Jump to the next sector only when the rebel fleet is nearly on the exit. While you do run the risk of running into a difficult enemy or jumping too close to a star, in general you’ll earn quite a lot of goodies. I used to make a direct beeline for the exit and race to the next sector, but I was invariably underequipped for the later sectors.

48

Yep, that’s what I do. It’s usually successful, unless the fire started in the door control room, or a boarding party took out the doors, before the vacuum killed them. (I didn’t say fires cause me problems often, just more often than missiles.)

Only works for me about half the time. The other half, the crewmen die before they can get to the medbay. Either I cut it too close, or the mouse is in the wrong place/doesn’t register the click, or they have to cut through vacuum or another part of the party.

My preferred way to deal with boarders is to make them suck vacuum. If I have an AP drone, I send it in to speed up the process. Anything to keep them from attacking my crew and wrecking my ship. Unfortunately, that has the same problems as fighting fire with vacuum.

I had a run like that once. Hell, I had a full crew, and even swapped them out a couple times. Annoyingly I was trying for the ‘six different races on the Kestrel’ achievement, and couldn’t for the life of me get a Slug. (Couldn’t hire one to save my life, either.) (Think I ended with 3 Engi, 2 humans, a Zoltan, a Rock, and a Mantis.) Usually, though, I’m lucky to have one surplus, and I’ve had a few runs I couldn’t even man every station.

49

Even if you can get through their shields (which can start to take some time when they are packing 3 or 4 levels) unless you are packing a MONSTROUS amount of damage, you’re in no way guaranteed to disable their missiles just because you hit their weapon systems. Their stuff works the say way yours does. Let’s say they have 3 levels of shields, and evade only 30% of the time, but have 7 bars of weapons, of which 3 are missiles (This is not uncommon by sector 6 or 7, and actually kinda weak for an opponent in sector 8).

If you have 7 bars worth of firepower (which for me is a ton), it will take you three volleys to be guaranteed of taking out their missiles, and that’s not even accounting for the fact that they will most likely be repairing between your shots. It just takes too long for me to completely cripple weapon systems in the later game, and in the meantime, I have to not take damage from missiles. Sometimes I get a decent beam and the power to run it, but even then, it’s likely to take more than one volley to be assured of putting the missiles down.

In terms of boarding actions, honestly, I just… don’t have problems with them. You pretty much alway outnumber boarders, so just throw a couple of lads in there, pull them out when they start getting down to ~25% HP (Seriously. Don’t cut it close. Pause, move the wounded out, bring in some others. I feel no qualms about pausing here, because it’s not easy to accurately select the wounded crew otherwise.). If you don’t have any additional “spare” crew to swap in, fine, just run the injured folks to the medbay and let the attackers beat on whatever system they’re attacking for a few seconds while you heal. If it’s an absolutely critical system, vent the air from that section so they move on to something else.

If you have a decent crew aboard you only need 4 of them to man stations, max, and depending on what you’re up against, the only station you ever NEED to man is the pilot. You should basically almost never (there are exceptions. I had an event that dropped 6 enemy crew on me once. That was ugly.) lose crew to boarding actions unless you’re ALSO getting hammered by the enemy ship, in which case, the problem isn’t really the boarding action, and actually the fact the enemy ship is hammering you.

If your ship is catching fire with any regularity, it means you’re not investing enough scrap on your defenses - enemy weapons fire should mostly not get past your shields + engines. Similarly, if your shields are up, solar flares should only set 1-2 squares of fire, which should be easy enough to overwhelm with crew - one crewman is generally more than sufficient to put out one fire, and many fires can be dealt with just by venting the affected areas.

It’s also worth noting that overall, those fires and breaches that are killing your crew are probably coming from missiles, because laser weapons have comparatively low chances of inflicting those. (Though it could be bombs, too.) You should be giving serious thought to why your crew is constantly taking damage from fires and low O2 and such.

50

Most of these problems- especially the boarder related ones- can be solved by pausing more often.

When an enemy boards me, I pause immediately and assess. If I have guys not manning stations, then I send them to fight and unpause (or deal with ship combat if necessary). I carefully watch their hit points, and pause when they get to about 25%, and send them to the medbay. Then repeat.

I never lose guys to boarding actions any more.

I’ve won the game (on Easy) now with the Engi Cruiser, the Kestrel (Mk II), the Fed Cruiser, and the Zoltan Cruiser. Things I’ve noticed: Burst Laser Mk II is better then Mk III in terms of power efficiency- it’s probably the most useful weapon in the game. I’ve never had more than two at a time, but a ship equipped with 4 Burst Laser Mk II’s would be incredibly flexible and effective (that’s 12 laser blasts going out each volley- and they can be directed at 4 different locations). The Ion Blast Mk II is also great- just a 4 second cooldown time. Beam weapons are great if paired with weapons that can take shields down in one volley, otherwise, they’re pretty much useless. The Glaive Beam can destroy ships with one shot (carefully aim it to pass over as many rooms as possible) if the shields are down.

51

I’m now 0-4 on easy. Twice I failed to reach the last area. Twice I lost to the rebel flagship phase 2. This game is really hard! I feel like I’m so strong going into the phase 2 fight, after having completely smashed phase 1. I’m just helpless in phase 2.

52

By the way- there’s a mod out there (you can find it on the FTL website’s forums) that gets rid of Rebel pursuit, so you can explore every beacon before going to the next sector. The final stage stays the same, so you still have to fight the boss.

It makes the game a lot less hard, but I’m really enjoying building up my ship with totally monstrous firepower (and figuring out all the best weaponry combinations!).

53

There are tons of mods out there already, but honestly, I haven’t heard of any that I felt would actually IMPROVE the game. Though I do approve of the devs decision to allow you to view node connections BEFORE jumping to that node, so no more “I really, REALLY hope this node connects to the exit, or I’m going to have to jump through like 4 nodes of rebel fleet to get out of this sector” stuff.

You’re right about pausing more though. You don’t need to do it -constantly-, but anytime you feel like there’s a time sensitive decision, it’s a good bet.

Phase 2 of the flagship is probably the hardest; Obviously you’ll want to prioritize doing some damage to their drone control. Life is much easier if you have cloaking though, because you can just cloak through their “power surge” events.

54

I finally defeated the rebel ship with the most overpowered setup I can imagine. I had 7 crew, two of them rock men who stopped any fire and repaired damage like crazy, and two of the power generator guys letting me use more power than the maximum upgrade. I had three burst laser mark2 guns and 1 fire bomb. I had max stealth and the shield recharge/weapon recharge/weapon primer mods. I got 3 full weapon volleys off before they got one, and half their ship was on fire with 3/4 of the crew dead before they could shoot back in phase 2.

Take that, rebel scum!

55

Okay. You got me hooked. The Blarship Blenterprise has embarked on its repetitive mission to attempt to clear the first three sectors without being destroyed.

56

One anti-boarding strategy, I’ve yet to see mentioned is upgrading doors to blast doors either lvl 2 or 3. When boarded flying The Kestrel, I’ll plot two oxygenless routes to the invaders, but leave as many doors in their way as possible. The thrills you get while manning your stations and fighting the ship while the boarders furiously and futilely try to pound their way through your deathmaze is positively demonic.

When they’re oxygen starved and trapped by blast doors they will also forgo attacking systems - even oxygen - in a mad dash to not suffocate.

57

I’ve gotten to the flagship almost every time I’ve played; I’ve beaten it’s Phase One form once, and never beaten phase two.

58

Phase two is the hardest, in my opinion.

Spoilers for strategy.

[spoiler]The trick to beating phase 2 is that you need to be able to do one of the following:
A) Deploy a defense drone to shoot down incoming boarding drones
B) Hit them in the drone control hard enough to shut down said drones.
C) Endure the boarding drones while you blow up the ship.

A) is the simplest, but requires drone control and a defense drone (doesn’t need to be defense 2. Actually, defense 1 is better in a lot of ways because it doesn’t waste its time shooting down stuff that’s just going to bounce off your shields anyway.)
B) is not hard - it can be as simple as having a good anti-system bomb, or as complicated as a collection of ions, lasers, and a beam.
C) Is also not hard to GET (it mostly just means good shields and heavy blast doors together with good firepower) but it’s the hardest to manage, because if you get unlucky and a boarding drone slams into your cockpit or something, things can ugly. (Technically, this can also happen with B, but it’s less bad.)

Both the teleporter and cloaking are a big help for phase 2 (and 3) because you can use boarders to destroy the flagship’s weapons, since each is an isolated room with just one crewman in it, and you can use cloaking to get huge evasion during the power surges. Neither is necessary, but I really like having boarders to destroy that infernal triple missile launcher, at the very least. You don’t need to upgrade either component (cloak or teleporter) to do this perfectly fine.

The “drone swarm” shouldn’t be a huge problem for you if have either cloaking or 4 shield bars and non-terrible evasion, as long as you keep your ship from getting torn apart by boarding drones in the meantime.
[/spoiler]

59

So who’s beat normal and with what ships? I’ve beaten normal with the Mantis B, which seems to me like the best ship overall, but I haven’t tried them all yet. But 4 man teleporter + 2 point shields = money. You need to get lucky with the crew, but if you get a team of 4 mantis boarders and some other guys to run the ship, you just slaughter enemy crews. And that leads to getting a lot of scrap.

Until you scavenge up a weapon, you’re pretty much useless against autoscouts, and for some frustrating reason they start you out with a boarding drone, which is the last thing you need, but 4 man teleporter + mantis + double shields is such a great combo. I think on my victory run I didn’t even use damaging weapons until the final stage - just ion weapons to keep their weapon systems disabled while I ate their crew.

60

I’ve beaten normal with every ship except maybe for Stealth B and the “secret ship” that I haven’t managed to unlock.

Mantis B is, like a lot of the “advanced” ships, extremely strong against some opponents and completely defenseless against others - honestly, both of the Mantis ships can be screwed pretty hard by running into unmanned drones or Zoltan shielded vessels early on, and honestly, I’m not a big fan of ships where it comes down to “die horribly if you don’t get item X or Y, win hilariously if you do.”

As a result, I prefer Slug A, because the anti-bio beam is in many ways superior to actually bothering to board the enemy, and the ship doesn’t have the same weaknesses with regard to weaponry (since, really, you’re screwed against scouts until you can salvage a shield breaking weapon, though upgrading your teleporter can allow you to annoy them a bit.). Plus the breach bomb is a phenomenal weapon.