in case anyone is considering the ios version, it runs perfectly. in fact, i will say it is better than the pc version. the game is ideal on a touch interface and portability is very nice.
Actually, I find Engi B to be easier overall than Engi A early on, because it has a decent albeit slow weapon system that can take him well into sector 3. Get your second shield with the first 50 scrap you scrounge (if need be shut down engines and O2 to power it, the fight will be over soon enough) and you’ll have no issues lasting until you find some real weapons and/or a crew and/or drones. Missiles will still be a problem, but they are for most ships anyway and in the first few sectors it’s just Artemis. If they have no missiles or bombs you can feel free to move your xenophobic pilot to the gun room, the AI has trouble syncing its lasers and beams. You can deal with 2 shield ships by using the heavy laser to eat one, then the heavy ion immediately after to strip away the second one and shut down the room temporarily.
Engi A however gets shutdown *hard *by Rebel Riggers or Engi & Zoltan ships with anti-drone drones. For 1 shield ships you can sort of twist your ion to zap both the shield and the drone room then fire your own drone, but you’ll get hammered by their regular weapons the whole time or until your drone gets the bright idea to land a shot in either of the three rooms. 2 shields and an anti-drone is goodnight for you and with only 1 engine you’re not running away any time soon.
Slug B is indeed a bunch of fail. Don’t think I’ve ever made it to sector 3 with one, nevermind win.
Does anyone have a good use for Lanius crew members? I don’t really want to take them along as mixed crew. They de-oxygenate the sector they’re in, but unless you have an all Lanius crew, it doesn’t seem to be terribly useful. You usually don’t want boarders working alone in a room either, so I’m not sure if using them that way is useful either. And they’re rare enough that it would be difficult to find enough of them to crew a ship with them. They have no other advantages. The only thing I can think of as far as them being useful is when you get into a situation where you need to repair broken oxygen on a low oxygen ship while everyone hides in the medbay - which actually happens fairly often, so I suppose there’s that.
Yeah, I wouldn’t pursue them specifically in a regular ship (they’re certainly worse than Engis or Zoltans), but one crew is one crew and they do work well as defensive fighters/fixers if you’re venting happy. They also provide a good safety net against fire/fire weapons so I tend to put them on critical systems I really don’t want to see cascade fail during a fight - shields and weapons mostly, or anything within walking distance of the O2 since as you say they can save your entire crew by fixing it.
If you somehow wind up with two of them, you’ve got a very efficient boarding party though. Both Lanius designs start with 2, so I’d pursue a boarding strat aggressively on those ships.
If you had a two-Lanius boarding crew or a crew made up entirely of Lanius it’d work fine.
Thank you! Using my Lanius as boarders as early as possible helped me get the 20% oxygen achievement and unlock the Lanius B. Which turns out to be pretty awesome. I haven’t had much time to try it, but it may well be one of the best ships in the game.
Also, I learned the hard way never to use Mind Control on an enemy boarder while on my ship. Blast doors open for them and they go to repair or man systems, only to start attacking them again when the MC wears off. Hilariously inconvenient.
Yeah, this was annoying since I was expecting him to fight his buddy.
Definitely needs to be a better way to deal with Hacking drones. Do Defense Drones shoot them down?
Vulcan is saucy. Twin Vulcan + Stealth 3 + Stealth Weapons must’ve been HILARIOUS.
I really like the flak guns, actually. They’re an excellent way to smoosh shields. Must LESS a fan of the swarm missiles.
Charge up Ion cannons actually seem pretty useful if you use them in combination with other slow-recharge weapons - you basically get three rapid fire ion blasts followed by a standard level of ion blast fire. Works well on shields. Not so sure about charge up lasers.
Haven’t used the Lanius much except as the Kestrel C, where having him in the engine room (conveniently next to the oxygen scrubbers) was actually pretty convenient.
Battery backup is pretty awesome.
Is the clone bay useful? I kinda tried to avoid actually using it, which meant that I was getting only the ‘passive heal’ on jump, which was pretty annoying.
Edit: oh, and if you didn’t know, you can cancel enemy mind control by mind-controlling the guy back with your own mind control.
I have successful runs with Kestrel B and Stealth A (That one was a bit of a miracle, but whatever.) and a pretty large number of failed runs with various ships that made it to Flagship Stage 3 before getting squished. x.x
Defense drones do shoot down hacking pods. I recall a enemy def drone preventing me from hacking them.
Nice to know about the mind control cancellation. That will come in handy the next time I’m facing an auto-MC ship with no crew of its own for me to control. Thanks.
I made a copy of that save game where I had two Vulcans, Stealth Weapons, and Cloak. It was too good to just play once.
The clone bay is pretty damn interesting, actually. It makes boarding much easier, IMO. Combined with the Backup DNA Bank aug, it’s really fantastic. With that, I’ve had my entire eight person crew dead and the bay just dutifully clones them. I imagine if the bay had been broken, it would have been game over.
The experience penalty for cloning is fairly minimal, maybe 2-3 small ticks. It’s low enough that I often kill off crewmembers if they have less than 25 health to “heal” them before I jump to the next sector.
What sucks is when you don’t have the Backup DNA Bank and an Anti-Ship Battery whacks your clone bay from full to broken in one shot, right when it’s reconstructing one of your critical crewmen. That was sad.
Has anyone beaten hard yet? I have now given it 25 runs. Made the boss 7 times, phase two 3 times. Most of the boss fights have resulted in me getting my cockpit or engine hacked, which has resulted in too much damage in phase 1. I guess I need to run a defense drone, I didn’t realize they shot down hacks until I had my own hack attempt shut down by the boss in phase 2.
I haven’t even bothered; The new normal is pleasantly challenging, so I see no reason to even attempt a resource starved run on hard.
That said, what? Do you not run a defense drone against the boss normally? What do you do about the missiles before you break that system? What do you do about the stupid boarding drones? Defense drone is like the one thing I consider effectively mandatory for flagship fights.
Also, what does the Backup DNA Bank actually DO? I couldn’t figure it out from the description.
Backup DNA allows you to clone people who died when the clone system was offline.
As far as the defense drone - you can only have one additional system on your ship now between cloak/drones/mind control/hacking, possibly other systems for other ships. I’ve been playing around with hacking and mind control. In particular, I’ve been trying to kill the flagship crew by boarding and hacking their medbay at the right time, so I haven’t had drones. But given how often I get screwed by phase 1 hacking, I suppose I should.
As far as the enemy missiles go - you can only shoot down one anyway, so you mostly just deal with it with cloak and high evasion.
AHHHH.
High evasion is important, yes, but cloak? Cloak is only viable against the missiles in phase 1, because Phase 2 and Phase 3 have other things you probably want to save cloak for instead. Though Phase 2 CAN (or at least, could, dunno if it has changed) be not too bad if the randomly spawned drones are all/mostly beam drones.
Does ANYONE use Beam drones? They seem awful. I love beams, but you need to be able to use them during that critical window where the enemy shields are down. Being unable to time the attack of a drone means it’s pretty much impossible to do that.
Using ion (and now flak) based weaponry combined with a beam drone is extremely deadly. Beam drones ruin ships in very short order if you can keep the shields down.
If you can get the shields down to nothing, beam drones are better than combat drones (or whatever the laser-shooting ones are called, now) because beam drones can’t miss.
They attack faster and sometimes across multiple rooms too. They’re extremely deadly to a shieldless target.
You can partially time the attack of a drone by deploying it, waiting for it to get into attack position, depowering it, then repowering it when you want it to attack. It’s not always effective, but it’s not bad if you’re relying on a single shot plus a beam drone, which is the case for at least one of the ships.
Earlier tonight I had a run with a fantastic ship on hard. Everything upgraded at least once, 6 shields and 6 engines, good weapons, lots of power. Crystal 2. 2 Mantis, 2 Crystal, everyone maxed at their skill, just how I like it. I made it through phase 1 and 2 while only losing a few HP each time - and I had a repair drone so I could top off after each fight. So I go into phase 3, having wrecked phases 1 and 2, with a full crew, with a fully repaired ship, and proceed to die in under a minute without inflicting a single point of damage on the boss.
I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but a missile hit my cloak to start the fight, and then two hits of something did 3 damage to my engine room. They mind controlled the guy in my engine room, so I couldn’t repair in there without killing one of my crew. So I tried to dance in and out of the room, to get him to fire at my guys rather than the engine, without hurting him, but while I was doing that, another hit to my engine room and it was dead. Now I’m sitting with 0 percent evasion and no cloak. Next omnidirectional burst takes out 1 level of shields, and starts some fires, and there’s just no way I can catch up. Just got destroyed in phase 3.
Oh, also, I had a defense drone deployed during phase 1, but I got hacked anyway. Not sure if it was one of those “chance to get through” things, but it definitely doesn’t stop it 100% of the time.
So I came back at it a few hours later, deciding that if I couldn’t beat the damn thing I was going to self immolate. I made it to the boss again. I forgot to deploy my defense drone right away. My weapons were hacked. Great. Between the boss cloaking and the long recharge of my weapons, I’m barely able to get any sort of shot off. But I did manage to get the outside weapon pods with my boarders, and then redeployed them to the hacking module to give me some breathing room. The fight is going on quite a long time on account of the hacked weapons, and I’m taking moderate damage here and there despite a defense drone, max shields, and 48% evasion. I started the fight down about 10 hp, but at this point I’m down to having just 4 hp left.
Eventually I kill about half their crew, 2 weapons are out, and I get the hack system out of commission long enough for my weapons to start working. Burst laser 2, flak 2, ion bomb - makes short work of their shield room and the remaining weapons. I kill all but one of their remaining crew (deliberately keeping him alive to spare me from auto repair AI mode) and destroy the rest of the ship.
There are no repair sectors left, and I have no hull repair drone. I’m just going to have to go into phase 2 with 4 hp. I send all 4 boarders in, and with only 1 crew guy available, they can’t really fight me off - I go to the interior weapons and box him out with my crystals. Once the weapons are down, I just need to time my cloaks right. I lost 2 hp during this phase. I go into phase 3 with 2 hp.
Mind control on my boarding party delays me repeating phase 2, but I’m able to use the ion bomb to disable the missiles while I time the cloak right to dodge both the plasma fire and the special omnidirectional fire at the same time. Eventually I get my mind control guy back, head back over, disable the weapons, and repeat. At one point I take one damage - I’m now sitting at 1 hp.
But since I kept the one crewman alive, and kept him boxed out of anything important, there was no autorepair. The weapons stayed down, and I just had to cloak for the special events. So I wore him down, and with 1 hp, I won.
Seconded. 2xFlak 1 guns + 2xfire drone (+drone catching arm upgrade, which along with the defence scrambler is pretty much mandatory for any drone-centric strat) was pretty effective. Wasn’t quite fast or surgical enough to take out the final boss before it blew me up in phase 2, but it was a very entertaining run otherwise. Burn, motherfuckers, burn.
It certainly gave me a new appreciation for Flak guns. They seem to actually work twice per attack : as soon as they hit they will always wipe shields away and never seem to miss those, and afterwards they may or may not hit their actual target and do some damage. They really do make a good complement for beams.
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Is the clone bay useful? I kinda tried to avoid actually using it, which meant that I was getting only the ‘passive heal’ on jump, which was pretty annoying.
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Dunno, but I’d like to have an answer too. One thing I wondered in particular is whether they allow you to replace crew that vanishes during events, like fighting giant space spiders or something.
I’ve lost crew to the “fire fighting” event and they are restored by the clone bay. However, I’ve also lost crew to the “abandoned diseased space station” event, and they couldn’t be cloned because “the disease would follow them into their next life.” So I think it’s not cut and dry, but the clone bay definitely provides protection against some forms of crew loss.
Also, the clone bay will start cloning crew if they are on a ship when you jump away, I think. I tested it either with me leaving crew on an enemy ship or the enemy ship jumping away with my crew still aboard and it worked, I just can’t remember which scenario I tested.
Also, congrats, Beef, for winning on Hard mode. That’s impressive.