FTL - Space Rogue-like hits Steam!

The Game Room
61

I have no idea why I keep playing this game, it’s a weird lab experiment about enragement.

Engi B is the worst thing ever created by humanity. Just completely useless. I was determined to win with it on normal, as a hard more victory, and it’s just so utterly helpless.

After all the failed engi B runs, I decided to do a righteous Mantis B run and kick the shit out of everything. And I was doing so - I had a decked out ship, a fully trained crew - 4 level 2 mantis boarders, and level 2 pilot, shields, and engines - I didn’t use weapons but I had a floating engie for repairs. Great, I’m going to win this run.

Oh, I haven’t seen a store for a while. Running low on fuel. Oh well, I’ll make do. Warp into a sector with an autoscout with all sorts of weapons. Oh well, I haven’t found a real weapon yet (fire beam doesn’t really count), so I can’t beat autoscouts. I’ll warp out. Oh, crap, I can’t warp out - just ran out of gas. Well, hmm… I’ve got a level 2 transporter, and the recharge on a level 2 transporter gives you just enough time to warp in there, damage a system, and warp out right before your boarders suffocate. Not ideal, but I can eventually destroy the ship that way, since I have no other choice.

Except… I beam 2 mantis over there. And they suffocate with timer still left on the teleporter. WTF, that’s not supposed to happen. You’re supposed to be able to reliably teleport them back. Ok, well, I don’t really have options - fire beam can’t really hurt an autoscout, so I send my other 2 mantis over. They make 2 successful runs, until on the third run they suffer the same fate and suffocate before they can be beamed back. WTF? Is there randomness in the suffocation time, or did the game just bend the rules to piss me off?

I was into sector 7 on a really successful run, that was going to be a winner. Grrr.

62

I keep playing it because it amuses me. I usually don’t wait until I lose to quit though.

I disagree. STEALTH B is the worst thing ever. :stuck_out_tongue: (Actually I don’t really like playing either Stealth ship, but B seems worse than A) Engi B is merely annoying to me. Most of the B ships seem to be more specialized and therefore more luck-based than their A variants, with the exceptions being the Kestrel (Kestrel B is stupid good) and the Rock (Rock A annoyed the hell out of me because I KEPT running out of missiles. x.x)

Note that even if you do this perfectly, you’ll still lose your boarding crew, because the final damage you do will destroy the ship and you can’t beam them out.

I’ve never had this occur. Could your crew have been taking damage from another source somehow? Doesn’t seem likely since you had no weapons. Did you have your teleporter fully powered? That’s about all I can think of.

63

Well, I was determined to beat the game on normal with the engi B, which is like a hard mode. That thing is so amazingly awful. I failed like 20 attempts before I finally nailed it. Now I have nowhere to go.

64

I’ve never had this occur either. The only other thing is that you can’t cut it too close with their health. You have to get them out of there well before their health is 5% or so. I’ve had my guys suffocate on my ship, on the transporter pad, because they were out of health when the teleporter kicked in.

You can see their health/suffocation tick down numerically if you cursor over their little icons in the upper left. It doesn’t seem to be random.

65

nm.

66

What race gives the most blue options? Are there any options for having a zoltan crewmember? I haven’t seen any.

In theory, slugs are the most useful- they have no “downsides”, have some good blue options for getting new crewmembers, and detect enemy crew in nebulae.

67

I think Engi or Rock probably has the most blue options.

There’s like, 1 that uses a Zoltan crew member, and the Zoltan Trade station where you can unlock a shop or something by paying 10 scrap if you have a Zoltan crew member. It’s actually kindof a not-very-good blue event.

As far as I know, there are no blue events for Mantis, and I don’t remember ever seeing one for Crystal, but you have those guys so rarely that I really don’t know.

I’d disagree with you about slugs being the most useful - after you get 1 slug on board, additional slugs are no more useful than humans, except in extreme fringe situations. (Slug on board a ship with nonfunctional scanners, and you really need to see another room but can’t move your crew around?) So technically they’re tied for worst once you have one (Unless you have a crew that contains a lot of engies and Zoltan and you really need some people who can actually fight, in which case a human/slug becomes preferable to another engi.) I think overall, Rock crew members are the ones I most appreciate having ‘extras’ of, though it’s hard to argue with a crew of Mantis/Slug/Rock/Engi/Zoltan/Zoltan/Zoltan/Zoltan :stuck_out_tongue:

Recently I’ve taken to upgrading my medbay early, because level 2 medbay unlocks a LOT of blue events. (For the “Single Life Form on Moon” event, the “disease outbreak on the station” event, the “Damaged space station” event and maybe a couple of others, though almost all of them can also be blued by the right crew member.)

68

I pretty much want a slug pilot (no special use of the pilot slot so might as well get the special ability), and for a gunship the the rest zoltan and engi, and for a boarding ship an all-mantis boarding party and engi/zoltan crew. I never use rock or human if there’s another option.

69

There’s at least two Mantis blue events:

[ol]
[li]Letting them oversee the Slug “repairs” for your ship, when it’s a trick to disable a system and trigger a fight. The mantis brutally kills the slugs once they try to sabotage the ship and the rest surrender.[/li][li]Triggering the special fight with that one Mantis captain.[/li][/ol]

I like Rock for boarding, since speed usually isn’t necessary and the extra health is great. Mantis is my preferred, but a Rock/Mantis boarding party is quite nice.

70

My preferred boarding party is Rock/Mantis, but I prefer Rock/Rock to Mantis/Mantis. Rock/Rock requires less oversight, can take advantage of fires, can survive boarding drones without an upgraded teleporter, and ties up the enemy crew longer, keeping them from having free time to run around and do stuff around the ship when you have to beam back and heal.

The extra speed from the mantis is pretty unhelpful unless you get into a bad situation where you have to run around while your teleporter recharges…which is less likely to happen with Rock members.

I also like to have a couple of crew members that aren’t terrible at fighting - crewing a ship with Slug/Engi/Zoltan sounds like a recipe for death when someone boards you.

Humans are only useful if you can’t get something better for the role you need.

71

Not if you upgrade your doors to lvl 3. Then you get to enjoy the most sinister part of the game; you cordon off and suffocate invaders.

My favorite two ships are the Zoltan B - The Noether and the Mantis B - The Basilisk. The gameplay of each is completely different. The Noether starts with two ion cannons and the Zoltan shield only, not regular shields. The initial battles are a race against time to knock out the enemies shields while yours hold. The Basilisk starts out with a four man teleporter and a boarding droid. It’s ridiculous fun.

72

That helps, but does you zero good when your opponents beam directly into your cockpit or something. Even having them warp into a less critical location can suck because losing a level or two of weapons or shields while the room depressurizes can be a problem. Plus it means you’ve spent a bunch of scrap on doors. :wink: Also useless against boarding drones, though those are generally better defended against by defense drones, but sometimes things don’t go the way you want.

I like the Zoltan B as well, but it’s weapons consume a lot of power for what they do, which can lead to needing awkwardly large amounts of scrap to transition to more effective loadouts.

73

Invaders will always attack doors, rather than systems, if they board you. So you can keep them from destroying your cockpit by forcing them to attack a door somewhere else. Less than ideal, admittedly, since you’d have to leave the cockpit unmanned for a while, but IMO it’s better to have crew that are good at their job for 95% of situations than worry about the rare ones where you have a hard time controlling boarders with doors. Boarding drones are a hassle with this strategy, but you can always take care of them by disabling/destroying the drone subsystem on the enemy ship.

74

Huh? I’ve never noticed this behavior. Yes, SOMETIMES attackers will decide that they REALLY WANT to destroy the sensor system or something, but sometimes they’ll just warp into a room and start whalloping on whatever’s there. I haven’t found any way to dictate that behavior.

Yeah, but the thing is, 99% of the time, it doesn’t matter what your crew are unless you get lucky and get a bunch of Zoltans. An all human crew works perfectly fine for the infinite majority of situations, and there’s certainly no reason to get rid of a Rock for an engi if you’ve already gone one aboard.

Actually, this whole discussion is a little stupid, because the best crew is usually the one you have, since it’s almost universally a bad idea to buy crew unless you are starved for people to man your systems.

75

Woops, I somehow left out the critical “without air” part of that. If you vent a room, they’ll stop attacking a system and attack in the direction of the closest (?) room with air in it.

The engi repair rate bonus is a significant factor in recovering from combat damage, they are very preferable to humans in general.

76

A couple observations:

Upgrading autopilot is handy for Mantis B because it frees up the mantis pilot to help with boarding. One of my favorite moments was to warp a boarding party over while the enemy had boarders on my ship. So I turn O2 off and suck all the air off my ship. They all suffocate while I kill the enemy ship crew easily. then I turn the air back on and warp back. Risky, but fun.

The advantages of upgrading autopilot, doors, and sensors is that they consume no power for the upgraded effect. Autopilot is good if your only pilot is mantis or rock and useful elsewhere. If your ship is very slow the dodge penalty is negible on autopilot. Doors are good not just for boarders but helping contain fires with mantis crews.

Humans arent so useless- They make ideal station manners since they have no special abilities so you can keep them in place all the time. 2 slugs are redundant but getting a slug crewmember is the rarest one to get, and slugs give chances to safely get more crewmembers. Engis are great floating repairmen. Mantis are obviously great boarders (pretty sure higher atk means they tear through doors faster also)

Rockmen are incredibly versatile. Whether putting out fires on your own ship, tanking damage, or fighting in blazing enemy compartments, Rockmen shine. Its crucial you don’t get too complacent with the extra HP; any time you have a boarding ship its always safe to have level 2 or 3 teleporter just to be safe.

77

Autopilot is a waste of scrap IMO, especially on Mantis B. Better to just wait till you pick up a pilot. The double starting shields will keep you in good shape. Yeah, you’ll get hit by some missiles, but your dodge is only 10% at that stage anyway even with a pilot, so it’s not likely to make much difference. Better to invest that scrap on something else, including buying a pilot if you run across a store selling crew.

And I think engi or zoltan are better at manning stations… engis repair damage faster to their own station and in the case of zoltan of course the advantage is obvious. I never take humans if I can avoid it, I’d rather have anything else in pretty much every situation.

78

I find it’s worth upgrading autopilot by one level, but only to provide a damage buffer. A level two helm can take one hit and not go down, and it only costs 20 scrap. Same goes for life support.

Both are lower priority upgrades for me, but they’re cheap and they can provide extra blue options.

79

The game is fun, though I think some things are missing:

Engi B ship should have the following: Level 2 doors, Level 2 helm, 2 weapon slots, 4 drone slots, Ion Blast, Beam Drone, Antipersonnel drone, Repair drone. Drone booster should improve all drone abilities (movement, attack) by 15 percent. Downside being: No starting Medbay (only 2 slot room when upgraded) or sensors, level 1 engine, level 2 shields, only enough power for ion blast. This would be truer to the droneship idea while playing up the advantage of only needing 1 crewmember: drain the air out of all but 1 room vs boarders, use ion to bring down shields while letting your beam drone carve up their ship. It would be closer in line to Mantis B (which is also very specialized, but at least plays up its strengths)

There is anti-bio beam, but no bomb version. An anti-bio bomb in a 4 man room would be nice (and challenging to go up against!).

An augment that recovers missiles, similar to repair arm (50% of missed missile shots recovered, -2 scrap recovered per recovered missile)

An augment that reduces the chances of fires starting in a room. They have one for hull damage (rock plating) and system damage (Titanium plating).

80

Level 2 Autopilot is pretty cheap (20 scrap I think). Human crew arent worth it to buy (and the easiest to trade out if you have max crew and the opportunity to get any other race). I forgot Zoltan. I think Zoltan are best on engines since engines are the only manned system that isnt all or nothing (typically pulling power from shields or weapons takes something offline, but pulling power from engines just lowers dodge by 5%).

Again I stand by humans as best system manners. Pilot especially, other systems also. Use nearby engis to help repair/temporarily cover a station while they heal. One significant advantage a dedicated system operator is to level up their skill as quickly as possible. An engi, for example, will frequently be pulled from the station to repair other system, depriving them from building up other skills.

By the way, has anyone maxed repair ability? Its rarely leveled up; how many levels of system repair does it take to level it up?