And gawd, that’s cool too. I ragequit a run a couple days ago, which hardly ever happens, because the two Mantises on the back of which my whole Engi B run was working thanks to TP lvl3 + Reconstructive Teleport (that thing is OP as hell, BTW) vanished into the aether when a stupid rebel fighter cloaked one second before my TP came back up, then warped out. Leaving me with one dumb Engi pilot and pretty much no weapons (I’d gone more or less full defence since the nigh-immortal boarding party was so amazing). SO MAD.
In other news, I just unlocked Stealth C. So, you know how Stealth A & B are kinda rough because while they do start with a cloak they have no shields whatsoever and thus get wrecked by asteroids and beams ?
The Stealth C doesn’t have shields either. It also happens to not have a cloak. Its entire defensive suite is one of those stupid zoltan shield drones. It’s … it’s gonna be a challenge, I’ll be honest :).
Anyone else notice that you can now unlock the Crystal ship by grinding? Just beat the game with every A and B.
Fine by me. I could never get a compatible map to unlock it the original way. I hate grinding though. It really makes me learn to hate what I’m supposed to enjoy.
I’m in the process of trying to unlock the Stealth C, but I’ve heard the same. I think a big part of the joy of this game is pure masochism. People are addicted at getting fucked over by the RNG in every possible way. The stealth ship series is funny in that it gets more and more sadistic the further down the alphabet you go:
Stealth A: Actually pretty solid for not having shields. Get another 1 power weapon like Ion Burst and you have a reliable platform for many sectors.
Stealth B: Not only do you not have any shields or Titanium Plating, you don’t have a decent amount of evasion either. You have a great killy weapon to start out with…that takes 17 seconds to charge up to fire and one stray hit to your weapons room kills it :smack: .
Stealth C: Yeah the FTL fairy gave you a huge boulder of coal this year. The only redeeming thing about the stealth series (you know, uh, STEALTH?!) and it doesn’t have it.
9 out of 10 games with Stealth B have been some variation of "Need to pass through a hazard jump point to get to exit. Oh great, its an Asteroid field. With an Auto Assault armed with a mini-beam. AND A BEAM DRONE :smack:
I think that it is possible to evade the shield-wiping powers of the flak weapons. For my most recent encounter with the enemy flagship, the weapons I had equipped were Advanced Flak, Flak 1, and Pike Beam x 2. If both the flaks hit, it would take the flagship’s 4 shields down to nothing. But, on one volley, the shields only went down 2 levels.
I really like the new additions. It’s about time I got back into this game.
Tried the Lanius ship, gotta say three things immediately spring to mind:
It’s way too hard to get more of these guys
I understand why it’s too hard - these guys are would probably be pretty broken if they were common.
Missing that medbay something awful.
Made it to the final stage of the boss. Level 3 hacking unit + level 3 cloaking unit + pre-loaded weapons is fun, fun times. Hack the shields, wait for them to drain, slam the enemy with your weaponry (in this case just a chain laser and a Hull Smasher 2), and then cloak to wait for the next strike. Although I will say the chain does not mesh well with cloaking… I was so close, too - the boss had no shields and was down to just 4 ticks of health. The hacking unit doesn’t seem so bad; it’s the mind control that really got me. I have no idea how to deal with that. Any advice?
Well, hacking the MC room does the trick fine enough. MCing your MC’d guy works too. And your guys can’t be MC’d while you’re cloaked, but then again for phase 3 it’s better to leave your cloak on one pip of power to synch it with the crazy plasma surge.
Else, hope you can survive long enough to both board the missile room (wait until the first MC, else the boss might MC your boarding guys who’ll kill each other before repairing it ! Learned that the hard way. So long, Mr. Mantastic), survive the suicide boarding *then *board the MC room. I suppose the Zoltan shield bypass upgrade would help there but that thing is so situational, I never bought it.
Hacking the MC room doesn’t really work because I’m already stuck hacking the shields. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had the firepower. It feels to me as though 99% of the time, you’re best off just hacking the shields, then blasting them to bits once they’re drained and then dealing with everything else later once those ridiculous 4 shields are down (and a boarding party for the rockets). And yeah, that whole “boarding party kills each other”… Happened to me on phase two. I managed to get the non-MC’d one out of there before they both died, and passed the phase, but it’s not pleasant. Imma try again later. God, why did I stop playing this game? It’s awesome!
I handle mind control by running a guy into the room and out again, so that he gets attacked by the MC guy but doesn’t attack himself. If he gets low, replace him with another crewman. It keeps them firing at your crew instead of damaging a system.
But you don’t need *any *firepower in phase 3 - well, you need something to strip away the Zoltan shield, but after that, who cares ?
If you’ve done things “correctly” up to now, there’ll be one guy left alive in the triple plasma weapon room (that you’ll dutifully leave alive so that the flagship doesn’t go under AI control and start magically repairing systems), the only other weapon will be destroyed right quick by your own boarding party and everyone else on the flagship will jump into their teleporter to board your ship like lemmings. And get killed right quick, hopefully.
At which point, your only concerns become 1) cloaking under the clockwork-regular plasma surge, which is easily done by leaving your cloak at 1 power to keep its cooldown at a minimum and in synch and 2) tanking the triple plasma with your shields. Assuming you’ve got a teleporter of your own (and you should !), then your crew can rampage through every enemy system on their own sweet time, starting with the MC room obviously. Then the shields if you want to hurry things up with your guns. Then you win. The MC is literally the only danger of phase 3.
Uh… I never actually considered just slaughtering the ship. Mostly the medbay that kept me thinking “Yep, no gonna do that”. But if they all go onto your ship…
…I’m a moron. That tip will make that phase so much easier. And Cloaking cooldown is lower at lower power? Another thing I didn’t know that will save my bacon!
I phrased that badly : the cooldown is the same (I think ?) but obviously at higher power your cloak lasts longer even though there’s nothing more to dodge, which means the cooldown itself begins later, which makes it not synch well with the power surges (vs. other types of weapons it doesn’t matter since cloaking freezes their charging bars, but surges seem to charge up regardless). At 1 pip your cloak for sure goes back online just as the surge goes off.
Yeah, with Mantis B I knock out the medbay and kill all crew members in the main hull. That way, in stage two, my boarders can knockout the Droid room unopposed. Ditto for shields in part 3.
Update: If you have Clone Bay and Backup DNA Bank, all crew dead, AND the Clone Bay has sustained full system damage, it is NOT a game over. The ship just sits there until your opponent, environment, or existing fires reduce its hull to zero. Cute.
If you have a level 2 engine (meaning autopilot), could you potentially jump until you could buy/find a crewmember? Or does it still need to be manned to jump?
So I got the Vulcan a few times and… well, I’m underwhelmed. Sure, it’s one gun that will just make shields irrelevant, but it seems to take almost half a minute to get to that point, it needs four bars of power (and of course, you absolutely need one, more realistically two or three to make sure it doesn’t go offline), it’s pretty darn pricy, and I can’t shake the feeling I would be better off with something else in that slot; plus, against ships with high evasion and good shields, just the Vulcan alone won’t cut it - you need something else to make up for those shots that miss. Am I using it wrong?
So I have now unlocked all the new ships and beaten the game on Hard. I did that with the Lanius B, which I think is the easiest ship in the game at this point. It doesn’t have the Level 2 shields, Defense 1 drone, or four-person teleporter room of the Mantis B, but the Lanius boarding crew is great, Mind Control is a wonderful complement to boarding, and the Advanced Flak is the best starting weapon in the game, by far.
For this run, I was able to buy a Scrap Recovery Arm and Reconstructive Teleport in the first couple of sectors, and from there, the game wasn’t much harder than if I were playing on Normal. I went into the final boss battle with drone control and two Defense 1 drones, which eliminated the threats from hacking on Stage 1 and the boarding drones on Stage 2. I used an Ion Blast 2 to take the shields down to nothing, and then hit the flagship with a combination of the Advanced Flak, Chain Laser, and Burst Laser 1. I didn’t try boarding to disable the weapons rooms after Stage 1, because it seemed like it would be hard to kill the whole crew, and it would just prolong the battle and cause me to take more damage.
I discovered a weird bug when boarding the enemy flagship. I sent my two Lanius crew into the detached weapons rooms, and then mind-controlled the enemy in that room. The mind-controlled enemy then instantly jumped to another room in the flagship and started fighting everyone there. I think the game doesn’t allow more than one friendly and one enemy per square, and my two Lanius plus the mind-controlled guy was too many friendlies.
In general, my favorite boarding strategy for Lanius B is this. Teleport the Lanius crew into Helm Control (since it’s the only room that’s guaranteed to be manned), and mind control whatever crew is there. Fight in helm control until the room is deoxygenated and everyone is at such low health that they run out of the room. At that point, the ship has no evade, so you can fire your weapons at whatever room you want to disable next, probably weapons or the medbay/clone room. Move your Lanius boarders into that room, and fight the remaining crew there. If you haven’t killed the crew by the point that this room deoxygenates, you can repeat the weapons/Lanius process until the crew is dead. The deoxygenated room will prevent the crew from repairing that system for a while. If it’s convenient, I take out the enemy oxygen as well, so the rooms won’t reoxygenate.
I love Lanius B. I’m often finding myself leaving Lanius boarders with low health on the enemy ship and jumping away so my clone bay starts cloning them at the next beacon. I must have left at least five clones on various ships in my current playthrough. It would be hilarious if I started running into angry clones who wanted to kill me for abandoning them.
That tip will make that phase so much easier. And Cloaking cooldown is lower at lower power? Another thing I didn’t know that will save my bacon!