Worked fine for me. It just wasn’t very good (the new ship, anyway.)
There is SO MUCH new stuff in the game that judging it by just the new ship is incredibly myopic. Even playthroughs where you use literally exactly the same stuff as before will be wildly different due to new events and enemy ships that will use the new stuff on you. (Having a hacking drone attached to your weapons room is super painful. x.x)
I think the game became markedly harder, but that might just be that I now have less comprehensive knowledge.
Yeah, I haven’t tried playing with the regular ships yet.
I’m excited about this, but plan on holding off on new content until summertime road trips, when I’ll pick it up for the iPad.
Why does the new ship suck?
It’s a whole new species, and they suck all the oxygen out of any room they’re in. So you basically have to confine any other crew away from them. I guess if I could find a third one it would be pretty awesome because I could fly around with no air in my ship all the time.
The boss fight is harder if you’re a boarding ship. I learned this the first time I saw the boss, as a totally boarding oriented ship. Two of the four weapons operator positions aren’t isolated like they used to be, they’re part of the main ship, so in order to take out the weapons you need to take out the main part of the crew. Which means you need some way of handling the level 3 medbay - hacking, breach bomb, something like that.
I had a really good run on hard with a Mantis B, but I had been saving 150 for a cloak for the last 3 sectors - I passed 10 stores and not a single one had a cloak option. So I went into the boss fight without a cloak, which is rough enough. But not knowing the change and not being able to properly handle the medbay - almost no chance. Also, I didn’t realize how hacking worked - he hacked my teleporter right off the bat, and I didn’t realize it would work, cooldown, and then work again - I thought he randomly hit my teleporter system 3 times in a row. So I sat there in the fight when I really should’ve ran and came back. The addition of the hacking to the final boss makes it much more random - if he hits your weapons if you’re a gunship, teleporter if you’re a boarder, or pretty much anyone when they hack the cockpit, you’re probably screwed.
The end stage has new mechanics - the federation base is closer to him (and further from you), but he has to sit at it for 3 sectors to win, not just arrive there.
Wow, the new stage 3 boss fight is… it’s definitely a Thing. Also hacking drones are such bullshit to fight against, it’s not even funny. What counters them ? Anti-drone drones I suppose ? I’d been tossing those as they seemed kinda shit, drones not being much of an issue in the original game, but I’ll try to keep one around from now on.
On a more positive note, did you know you could teleport mind-controlled people ? E.g. just before the MC breaks and into an empty room of your ship with level 3 doors and no air ? It’s like playing Dungeon Keeper all over again.
Also the Vulcan gun. If you run into it, sell your soul to buy it. It’s good. It’s very, very good. With a fast firing ion gun or two it becomes ridiculous. Flak guns are meh… unless you can stack a ton of them. Then it’s like firing a gigantic shotgun. Everything melts.
Not a big fan of the charging lasers/ions. The charging missile is neat from an ammo conservation standpoint I suppose, but doesn’t fire fast enough that they don’t get capped by DDrones one by one.
They seriously nerfed the lvl 1 defense drone. It used to snipe roughly 90% of incoming missiles, now it’s only 50% effective.
Yeah, but then it always was a little *too *good. On the plus side, the lvl 2 one seems to shoot off incoming lasers once in a while ? I could swear I saw it happen. It’s also only 3 power rather than 4.
I just realized there’s now a third ship type for all the existing ships. Yay!
There’s a hack blocking upgrade that only seems to be available from Engi traders.
Well, anti-drone drone is a bust. Those things really *are *useless. So it seems only blowing up the hacking room would reliably work. Swell.
So I’d been wary of trying the hacking upgrade for my own ship because, while it’s extremely annoying to fight against in some cases, sometimes the AI sends theirs to your doors, O2, something silly like that. I thought it targeted at random.
Now I’ve tried it and boy is it awesome. And it only costs 1 power, too. Way, way better use of drone parts than most drones. The best thing about it is that unlike a drone that does one thing and one thing only, you can tailor what you want your hacking probe to do by firing it at various places. Also lock the doors to a room, which can be very useful as part as either a boarding strat or a suffocation strat.
Here’s what it does when attached to :
- weapons : passively displays their charging bars, you can shut them down & drain their charge by activating
- shields : activate to slooowly drain, pretty much like shield charging in reverse. Not very impressed, but maybe with a lvl3 hack it’s worth it
- O2 : vents O2. Not very fast, but again probably worth a laugh w/ a lvl3 one
- Doors : haven’t tried, seemed silly.
- Cloaking : prevent from cloaking while hack drone is active. If already cloaked, activating the drone will immediately uncloak the enemy ship (!) but they’ll still have the cooldown from their cloak. HUGE against the boss.
- Mind Control : immediately cancels any enemy MC AND controls one enemy crew. Again, they keep the cooldown. Pretty funky. Do note that you can also cancel MC by using your own MC on your guys.
- Hacking : turns off their hacking. Meh.
- Deck & Engines : gives them 0% evade as long as drone is active and they can’t jump, same as an ion charge or something. When you need that last shot to hit before they can hyperspace out.
- Med/Clone bay : haven’t tried. Probably shuts it down temporarily
- Teleporter : prevents its use. If any boarders are on your ship, immediately sends them back home.
- Drone : not sure, probably just shut them down but I wonder if it would turn boarding/anti-personel/repair drones against their owners. That’d be hilarious.
Drone bay stuns the drones, med bay hurts the people inside rather than heals them (pretty funny since it also locks the doors, probably good for a boarding strat). I haven’t had the opportunity to use it on the cloning bay. I’m guessing it kills the crew currently being cloned or something. I also haven’t tried doors. Though I should note that when selecting hacking the room you mouse over will tell you the effect of hacking it outright.
Thank you for this advice. I was unfamiliar with the Vulcan, but I took your word, and wow. It’s amazing. Zoltan C with the Vulcan was incredibly powerful. It fires so damn fast I got two people up to ** within a couple sectors. So then I found ANOTHER one at a store, so I bought it and worked hard to beef up my weapons system so it could support both. I managed to get the second Vulcan up by Sector 8. The flagship melted. I swear that must have been a speed record. Each stage only time for one power surge.
I should also mention that I had Stealth Weapons and Cloaking along with the two Vulcans. It was delightful.
Haha, oh my stars, twin Vulcan+stealth 3 must be straight-up ridiculous indeed 
Yeah, it takes its sweet time to spin up, and woe be unto you if your weapons room gets damaged/ioned/hacked along the way, but when it reaches max. spinitude it’s buh-bye guys 100% of the time. A single one fires fast enough to blaze through any number of shields on its own, it’s beautiful.
Speaking of Zoltans, I learned the hard way that now they explode when you kill 'em. Ouch. Although that could be a boarding strat with a clone bay… Hmmmmm…
Hard mode is a motherfucker.
11 Mantis B runs, three made boss, one made phase 2. 3 Engi A runs, none past sector 3. 1 Kestral B crap run that improbably made boss fight phase 2.
I’m not sure if this is just a hard mode change, but the boss only isolates the outer two weapon bays now, and the inner two are integrated into the ship generally. With all the crew, level 3 doors, and a level 3 medbay, it’s very difficult for a boarding ship to disable the interior weapons, including the missile launcher. That’s good design, I guess, since boarding ships were overpowered, but man, hard.
On the other hand, it’s hard to get enough scrap to get a good ship together on hard. So I think the ideal strategy may end up being to take a boarding ship and change it into a gunship before you get to the boss, so you can collect all the boarding scrap but you can blast the boss dead. Or if you’re a gunship and you can land two Vulcans, or maybe a Vulcan and ion blast 2, then you’re in good shape.
Using Mantis B I can win on normal about 70% of the time but I haven’t even made phase 3 yet on hard, and the one time I made it to phase 2 was because I found a Vulcan at a store right before the boss fight.
The hacking system makes the boss fight even more shitty and random than it was before. FTL is obviously random number based, but it usually takes a confluence of events to really screw you, and often you have some decision you could’ve made to get a better result. But the hacking module - if it hits your pilot or your engines or your weapons you’re screwed - no dodge, delayed FTL out. If it hits your teleporter as a boarder you’re screwed. It feels way too much like “flip a coin, tails you die”
On my last mantis B run, I had it hit the door system, which is just about the most harmless place it could hit, right? But the oxygen is on the other side of the door system room, and I had a fire in there that disabled the oxygen, so because the hack locked the doors to my door control room, guys would have to go pound down the door in zero atmosphere, and by the time they got o the oxygen room they didn’t have enough health left to repair it. I had no way of recovering. So even when I got lucky, and the hack module hit something unimportant, it still killed me.
It’s reversed from normal mode then, where the outermost weapons bays are now linked, but the frontal ones are still disconnected. I’d wager the easy boss has the old design.
They also fixed a few random ships (slug scout I think ?) that were always a pleasure to encounter because their O2 room had no door so you’d always get boarding scrap from them. On the bigger model, the engine room had no door either, that’s fixed too.
Agreed. Needs a reliable counter patched in. At present, the only workable way to deal with the coin toss is to have a hacking module of your own to fire at theirs.
I had a fun loss tonight on a Kestrel : after some boarding shenanigans and an unlucky breach missile hit, I found myself with no opponent, no air on the ship at all, a busted O2 room but a working clone room that was juuust too far away from the O2 for a new spawn to go and fix it before they keeled over. It was like the *Saw *guy invented a perpetual motion machine.
The easy boss does still have the old design. Weirdly, everything in easy mode is now harder than before except the boss.
Unlocking the C variants involves getting to sector 8 with the B variant, which is a challenge for some ships even on Medium. Namely:
Stealth B lacks decent evasion, glaive takes 17 seconds to charge up
Slug B is just a bunch of fail.
Mantis B is good once you get some momentum but auto assaults hurt.
Engi B isnt droney enough, needs 4 drone slots or level 2 cockpit to deal with having only 1 Engi that will be stuck at the helm most of the time.
Zoltan B needs a shield upgrade asap because you can’t rely on just your super shield anymore.
Many of the B variants get hard countered early on. Mantis and stealth B get better later on with the right gear, but I feel slug zoltan and engi B are just handicapped and end up being mediocre ships end game.