SDMB FTL Challenge

The Game Room
1

FTL is roguelike game where you captained your ship through a randomly generated dangerous universe that was a big hit a couple of years ago. The game is known for finding all sorts of unique ways to screw you over and the success rate on attempts is very low.

I know a lot of SDMBers played it, and I was thinking of re-igniting some interest in the game with a competition.

Let’s each make 5 runs in the ships of our choice, but not being able to use the same ship twice, and record the results. If there’s interest in this, I’ll extend it out to 10 or possibly more runs.

This will rely on the honor system as there’s no way to prevent cheating, but here are the rules:

  1. You may pick any ship you haven’t already used on a previous run
  2. You only get that run. You can’t restart because you lost a crew member on your first jump. You can’t retro-actively decide this wasn’t one of your “real” runs. You decide at the beginning of your run to make one of your competition runs, and whatever the results are, you record them.
  3. The game will be played on normal, with advanced edition content on. PC and iOS versions are identical as far as I know so either is acceptable.
  4. Your score is whatever your in-game score is listed as, with the following exception: you may add 300 points to your score for every phase of the boss you successfully defeat. You must note when you’re adding that bonus. This is because I don’t feel like the game differentiates enough in score between a run that loses in phase 1 vs 2 vs 3.
  5. For each run you make a post about how far you got, how you died, and any other interesting details about the run. You could spin it into a story if you’d like.
  6. People who are active in the SDMB gaming group who no longer post on the SDMB for whatever reason can still submit their results and I will post them on their behalf under their steam name.

We’ll start with 5 runs and whoever has the highest total at the end will be the winner of the first phase. If there’s interest, we’ll do another set of runs on top of that. I will give until the end of April for people to submit results for our first phase of our competition. We may allow people to enter later during subsequent phases - if you’re getting to this thread late, read the rest of the thread and see how that’s going to be handled.

If you want to make some practice runs to warm back up to the game, or unlock a particular ship, that’s fine, you don’t have to record that. But you have to decide before the run starts whether it’s a competition run or not. If you say no, this is a warmup run, but then you go onto win, you can’t suddenly decide it was a real run.

2

My first run:

Taco Bell Delivery - Mantis B
Starting crew: Justin Beiber (Mantis) and Crocodile Dundee (Mantis)

I got very lucky - my very first jump I killed the crew and got a small bomb, one of the few weapons that can work in an unupgraded mantis ship. This might come in handy if I need to disable a medbay or a zoltan shield. You start with 0 missiles, though, so I wasn’t able to use it against the first few autoscouts I ran across, which are the death of many a Mantis B run. Ended up encountering 4 zoltan ships in sector 1, which is kind of ridiculous. I only had the missiles (even after buying some) to get through one of their shields. Miscalculated the fleet speed at the end by like 1 pixel and faced a rebel ship with a vulcan - could’ve gone a lot worse than it did. Picked up a rock crewman (pilot) and engi crew (engine/damage) at the end of sector 1 and beginning of sector 2, which helps a lot. Now I can build up some decent dodge while my mantis are on the enemy ship.

Sectors 2 and 3 went smoothly. Bought a Zoltan and Mantis crewman, found a burst laser 2, got a cloaking device. No major incidents.

Sectors 4-6 - I picked up a breach bomb 2, decided to swap my boarding drone for a combat drone 2 for the boss fight eventually which was probably a poor choice in retrospect, and everything was going smoothly - I had 4 mantis boarders with maxed melee skill - when I had them fighting 4 Zoltans. I forgot Zoltans exploded when they died, and all 4 of them exploding at once killed 2 of my boarders. I was able to recruit one more (unlevelled) mantis and had to settle for a slug for the last one.

I picked up a weapon preigniter at the very last stage with the weapons of Small bomb / burst laser 2 / breach bomb 2. Not exactly a gunship, but getting those bombs off immediately would help neutralize weapons quickly. But I had to use a bunch of bombs on ships with medbays in the last sector, and I went into the boss fight with only 6 bombs left, all of which I used in phase 1.

I did finish phase 1 - I killed all crew members except the one guy in the beam weapon, leaving him alive so the ship wouldn’t get the autoscout automatic repair status. Phase 1 went very smoothly, I took a few hits but patched it up with a hull repair bot between fights. I was out of bombs, which was a problem, but they were out of crew aside from that one guy, so I’d manage.

In phase 2 I made two very basic and very stupid screw ups, and one intermediate one. I immediately sent two mantis guys to their missile weapons room, but before they could disable it, 3 missiles were incoming. I reflexively cloaked, realizing it was stupid because I needed to save the cloak for the drone phase. The enemy hit my shield room with their boarding drone. Instead of using my remaining two mantises to take him out, I instead sent them over to the next weapon system. So I had no one left on board who could fight off the intruder, subsequently I lost 2 whole points of shields. And since I had screwed up my cloak, the drone phase ended up doing all sorts of damage, setting fires everywhere. It was still recoverable - by this time I had taken down 2 of the weapon systems. I decided I would pull back my units and go right for their shields and finish them off quickly rather than taking out the third weapon station. Between the burst laser and the combat drone 2, it would quickly finish off the ship once the shields were down. I pulled one group back and pushed them to the shield room - and then, intending to pull my other group (still in a weapons room) back to join them, I misclicked and pulled my guys in the shield room back. I was still suffering teleporter damage and only had level 1 teleporters, so that move cost me a whole lot of time. Now I had two boarders in a dead weapons room and two sitting in my teleporter bay instead of working on the enemy shields. And I was still out of bombs, so now I couldn’t hurt the enemy shields, I had damage all over, and couldn’t withstand the amount of fire coming in with the remaining weapon systems and drone phases. Died in phase 2. If I hadn’t misclicked, and instead sent extra boarders to the shield room, I think between burst laser 2 / combat drone 2 I would’ve killed the ship in phase 2 before they killed me, and I had 20+ drones to completely restore my hull with the hull repair drone, so ultimately not winning in this case most likely came down to that misclick.

Final score: 5098 + 300 for finishing phase 1 for 5398. That was really sloppy of me - probably because I haven’t played in about a year - but I was having such a great run that I should’ve easily beat it. I also very stupidly died with 250 credits without having my engines or reactor maxed out. That was just sloppy.

I’m pretty sure that would’ve been a victory had I not been so rusty.

3

I only have four ships available (Kestrel, Engi, Zoltan and Stealth).

The challenge sounds interesting but I literally cannot comply with the rules. And FWIW I have near 100 hours playing the game so yeah…I suck.

Is there an unlock cheat?

4

Have you played on the new advanced mode? Because now, it unlocks ships if the previous two ships have been unlocked.

Also, I accept this challenge.

5

No but I still only have those four ships.

I have not played in months till just now.

6

The different versions of the ships (A B and C) count as separate ships for the purpose of the competition. There’s also a profile editor out there somewhere that lets you unlock all the ships.

7

Ok…cool…can do that.

Before I saw this figured I would re-acquaint myself with the game.

Everything was going pretty well but in typical FTL fashion one system busted my balls.

It was a Red Giant system (so sets your ship on fire) and when I jumped in I had boarders. No ship to fight, just peeps on my ship.

I did pretty good using doors and venting rooms to get the bad guys and my crew fought them off but my guys were hurting pretty bad. So I ran three of the six crew I had to the Med Bay and they all died traversing compartments that were on fire or vented.

It is a lesson in rage quitting. :smack:

Love it. :cool:

8

1531

I know…pathetic.

Things is I was doing pretty good till blammo.

Numerous fights had whittled me down but I was still ok. At the end I had a choice to go to a store and repair or a new system then repair after that.

I wanted more money for the store so went to the other system.

Blammo barely covers it. Not quite sure what happened but I was royally owned in the first volley and died.

Bummer too because I was building a good boarding party.

9

Just started a new game.

First jump is a battle.

  • They teleport a dude over.

  • I open up doors to suffocate him.

  • They hit my O2 room with a missile and destroy it.

  • Everyone save one dies trying to repair it.

10

When you post your results, make sure you include at least the number of the run, which ship you did it with, and which sector you made it to, with a brief description of what killed you and the score.

Run 2. Engi A.

Made it to sector 3. I was doing well and even picked up a second ion blast mark 2 which meant that if I made it, I would be able to chew through the boss’ shields without breaking a sweat. But I went all the way through sector 2 without finding a single store to repair at, and I was simply whittled away little by little. I had tons of scrap and no way to repair, died on my first jump into sector 3. 1393.

11

Run 1, Kestrel B, score 4528, defeated all three stages of the flagship for a total score of 5428.

This was a pretty great run. Early on, I bought Drone Control, which came with a Defense 1 Drone, which saved me a ton of damage. I also bought a Drone Recovery Arm, which meant that I could use defense drones freely, and a Scrap Recovery Arm.

Midway through the game, I was able to buy a Burst Laser III and Weapon Pre-Igniter, which meant that I could pretty much just show up and wreck the other ships, especially as I could upgrade my weapons system to take advantage of the other three basic lasers.

Finally, I bought Hacking and Mind Control. I upgraded Hacking to Level 3, and so I’d kill the crews-- I’d mind control one of the enemy crew, they’d fight and run to the medbay, and then I’d hack the medbay and kill them.

I was pretty overpowered for the battle with the flagship. The first stage, I showed up, hacked the shields to nothing, let loose my volley of eight shots, and completely destroyed their shields. I took about ten points of damage during Phase 2, but nothing too major. In Phase 3, once I took down their Zoltan shield, I hacked the shields, and…yeah.

All in all, a pretty easy victory.

12

Run 1: Kestrel B, Victory
Base score: 4626 + 900 for the flagship = 5526

This run started very strong. I got multiple weapons, drones, and augments as rewards, ended up with a full crew by Sector 3, and was just generally kicking asses. Teleporter, Mind Control, Drone Control with Def 1 and Def 2, two mantises. It was good.

Around Sectors 6-7, I started getting a bit lazy, ended up losing a couple crew members, but kept it going. Maxed out shields and engines and had six shots worth of lasers.

The flagship was a bit scary at parts. Took a lot of fire during the first couple phases, and then got into a long war of attrition during the third phase. I foolishly killed off the last crewman and forgot that doing so would allow the AI to repair the weapons rooms. Once they got a few volleys off, plus some superweapon bursts, my hull was down to 5 points. I barely managed to finish off the flagship, but I got them.

13

Okay, I don’t remember all the deets, but here’s what I’ve got:
Runs 1-8 were practice runs, reminding myself of how the game works, and best forgotten.

Run 1: Flagship with that cool beam, score around 4100. The run began reasonably well, with a lot of happy blue events. But in the final sector, some fool rebel ship hacked my mantis warrior in the camera room and set it on fire with a missile. The resulting deep fried locust bits were tasty and nourishing for the surviving crew, but not just compensation for that cheese maneuver.

I also suffered from the total lack of missiles: while I had a vulcan and a burst laser and a level 3 superbeam (again don’t remember what it’s called), I had no drones or missiles or teleporters, and the boss was a helluva fight. I still managed to take out the first two phases, but during the third phase I had no way to crush the weapons system or people on them, and swarms of missiles did me in.

I think my final score was around 4100.

14

Run 3. Kestrel B. Died in the last stand sector, but before the boss fight. Score 3287. I basically never got a chance to upgrade my original 4 lasers the ship starts with. I replaced one with an ion blast, and I added a combat drone to the mix, but it just wasn’t enough to kill late sector enemies, so one of the pre-boss enemies killed me. Poor circumstances all around - lots of empty sectors, not very lucky with the rewards, leading to a low score.

Run 4. Crystal B. Best ship in the game. 786. Died in early sector 2. It was basically a completely unfair loss with no way to have avoided it. I didn’t see a single store from the beginning of the game, and I ran out of fuel in a sector that just happened to be a sun sector. You can’t wait for more fuel in that circumstance, you just die. I can probably beat the game with Crystal B 80% of the time, and this time I made it 2 jumps into sector 2. Grr.

15

You and me, pal. First practice run ended in sector 1, jump into a “only half energy” node with combat, first missile blows up my O2 and I already only had 40% O2 left from the previous node (a sun+invaders one). Between the required energy to the medbay and the shields+lasers I don’t have enough power left to engines. Second missile also in the O2 kills the Zoltan fixing it, and now all compartments are vented because boarders. Whelp.

16

I just noticed the rule about having to decide in advance that a run was a competition run, so I’ll act that way from now on. I just got to the final guy with a Mantis C ship, was doing great, until he hacked my medbay and managed to kill my entire raiding crew that was trying to heal up. D’oh!

17

Minor correction, I was looking at the wrong run for my Run 3 Kestral A. Score was 3463. And I forgot that I was killed by double boarding drones - one regular boarding drone and one ion. I hate those damn things. If you kill them, they’re going to just breach another hole in your hull and you’ve got the same problem. Best you can do is hope to distract them with destroying a less critical system for a while.

18

Goddamn I hate this game. Ended up at the final boss, doing great–until my weapons systems got hacked, and the timer on the hacking drone is about 1 second shorter than the timer on the bomb that’s so critical to my weapons layout. He can’t really hurt me much, but I can’t hurt him at all.

Stupidgame.

19

These are the voyages of the starship Doperprise…its continuing mission, to explore hostile new sectors, to seek out scrap and to boldly never accept surrender where no man has accepted surrender before!

Gonna try a run with the Engi C. First sector, we head for the safe obscurity of a nearby nebula only to hit a Mantis ship keen on taking our telemetry data. They only have one bar of shields, but so do we. They have two shots, as do we - so we target their weapons before they can do much damage. They manage to scratch our hull but are dispatched without needing a drone.

Our next jump hits an automated scout guarding a space station. The Engi C starts with a hacking module, so we use a drone part to prevent an alert. The station gives us a bit of scrap and an anti-combat drone, a good haul.

Comms pick up a distress, we jump to it hoping someone is foolish enough to bait us. Unfortunately we find a refugee ship adrift. It doesn’t respond to hails, so our choices are to board or leave. We risk a boarding and immediately regret it - the crew has turned cannibalistic and kill our Lanius pilot! Fortunately with a cloning bay he’s back when we return and tries “not to dwell on the fate of his previous incarnation”.

We get our prangs hammered out at a store, but can’t afford anything else. The jump beacons in this sector are annoyingly linear - only one route to the exit, so we have to double back to explore. We bump into a Zoltan pirate hiding in an asteroid field. Could be tricky - with only one bar of shield a lucky hit could cripple us, especially with their flak cannon. We deploy a beam drone, though they manage to maul our weapons and clone bay. A lucky asteroid strike and beam across their shield takes them out.

As we arrive at the exit beacon a civilian ship hails us, claiming that a rebel ship has been harassing them. We’re always up for a ruck so we seek and find. We get pranged with a fair few missiles but the rebel fighter succumbs. To sector 2! We head to an abandoned sector.

Our first encounter is a distress beacon. Lanius are harvesting a Slug ship. We intervene and attack. The Lanius get a hit on our weapons and take our hull down to 50% before we blow 'em up. The Slugs characteristically scarper, ungrateful slime.

Another Lanius encounter at the next beacon, a civilian ship is being harvested. Our Lanius helmsman hails the harvester, turns out they’re a merchant! We flog our anti-combat drone (we already have a scrambler, so enemy drones can’t target us anyway) for the more useful defence drone and patch up our hull.

We get a garbled hail from a refueling platform. Hailing them back, they reveal themselves as Lanius and aren’t messing about, hacking our weapons. They have missiles, so our new defence drone is deployed. Their hacking stings things out, but eventually they hear our catchphrase. “We will not accept surrender.”

The refueling platform gives us a full tank and telemetry data - another two stores within jump distance! If only we had some scrap to spend! Time to get some, we bump in to a rebel scout next jump. Dual lasers take down his shields and our beam drone carves him up like turducken.

We blunder into an asteroid field to find yet more hungry Lanius, with two heavy lasers. We hack their shields to let the asteroids take him out, though he gets a few good hits in on our shields, subsequent impacts take out our weapons, hacking, sensors and piloting. We use the scrap from the victory to fix our hull. Our next encounter goes much better, we get two hits on Lanius weapons while their shields are down. We head to the exit.

To a Rock sector. We’ve amassed enough scrap to afford another shield bar. For a Rock sector our first few jumps are uneventful, although we do get an opportunity to sell some of our missiles. The next jump brings us face to face with a Rock pirate with two layers of shields - tricky since we can only fire two shots and they’ve got missiles and a Burst Laser Mark III (!). We divert power from the engines to our defence drone and hack their shields.

We manage to get in two strikes on their shields, causing a fire. It won’t harm the Rock crew, impervious to the heat, but it’s a welcome distraction. We might have been a bit cocky in targeting their shields before weapons - their burst laser manages hits our defence drone and missiles hit our own weapons causing a conflagration to which we are not immune. We vent the room. The Rock shields are still down, so we deploy a beam drone, or as I call it the ‘slice n dice’. Along with our hacking drone we blow them up, although our engines set on fire first. What do we say to the bad men?

Next jump we play diplomat between a Slug and Rock, the slimeballs want payment for work and the boulderheads claim the work isn’t worth payment. We’re not about to pay their debt for them and tell them to cough up, hoping for a fight and subsequent scrap. Turns out the Rock were correct as their ship blows up and does 5 damage to our hull! The slimeballs jump away before we can vent our wrath on them.

Tune in next time to see if we can build up enough scrap to buy anything but repairs!

20

Next jump has us very near a sun, staring down a Rock ship. Straight away we’re in trouble, as this sector apparently had some sale on Burst Laser Mk IIIs. He has a heavy laser too, so that’s six shots. We have two shield layers, so the math doesn’t favour us. We’ll have to rely on hacking and try to dispatch him before the sun roasts us. Our Lanius is an ideal firefighter though - turn off the O2, have our helmsman drain the room then let the flames burn themselves out. While the Rock are immune to the flames, their ship is not and its systems go down. Our hacking locks them in their shield room while their O2 system smoulders. Having asphyxiated the crew we’re able to grab a halberd beam, very useful.

Or it would be if we had the scrap to beef up our weapons system…and reactor. Oh well. New jump, new Rock ship, twin Burst Laser Mk. Is on this one. Four shots. Another one we’ll have to deal with quick, we send a hacking drone to take on their shields and a beam drone to boot. Our defense drone mk I is useless against lasers. Things don’t start well - in revenge for their suffocated brethren, they repeatedly target our O2 and cloning bay to kill off our Engi crew.

Things go from bad to worse - we can’t hurt them quick enough and our systems are falling like flies. Run away! Run away! Fortunately the next jump is a store. We’ve taken such a beating we can’t even afford the repairs, so we sell off our halberd beam (we can’t use it anyway). The store has a very juicy Breach Bomb Mk II, my favourite weapon in the game, but at 60 scrap it’s out of our price range.

The next fight is a bit easier. The cloak is annoying but with only one bar of shields we don’t have too much trouble. Next jump…oh God I hate this event. No bloody scrap in it either. We don’t have the best anti-boarding build, our Engis aren’t much use in a fight. Fortunately we have a Lanius, so we vent the place and suffocate them.

Oh great, two missile weapons and a boarder! This is gonna be a tricky one, at least we aren’t in front of a sun this time. Fortunately our handy Lanius dispatches the boarder and we get in a few lucky shots against their shields. Our defence drone proves its worth against even dual missiles. An absolute bargain in the next jump - miners want some missiles and patch up our hull in return.

The Engi homeworlds are the next sector, hopefully a bit of a breather. Our lucky streak continues when we explore an asteroid field and find a whopping 40 scrap salvaged from a derelict and get a nice reward for cutting a ship out of trouble with our beam drone. Given what a nightmare the Rock sector was, the Engi homeworlds are suspiciously generous. Maybe they’re feeling sorry for us. Ah! This is more like it, our good Rebel friends with another old friend, the five-shot Burst Laser Mk. III. Our Dual Laser starts a fire and they start to power up their FTL drive. Cowards! We would never run from a fight. With their shields down they are dispatched before they can flee. With the booty we add another shield bar.

We come across a civilian being attacked by a pirate and decide to be big goddamn heroes. They’ve two shields and a missile, so we deploy a defence drone and trust in the “hack and whack” tactic - bring down their shields and fire the lasers. We could really do with some more reactor power and investing some more in our hacking system, I know. With only an ion weapon and missile we’re pretty much immune from their attacks, though our attacks are getting awful slow as they rely on every shot hitting. When they don’t we have to sit around and wait for the hacking to recharge. With patience they are eventually dispatched. The grateful civilian ship offers an ion blast, very useful as it only needs one power slot.

The next sector is also Engi controlled. The first few jumps are uneventful until we bump into our old foe, Rock pirates. We counter his hacking, although it takes out own hacking capability. In retrospect we probably should’ve lost our engines. Oh well, time to test out our new ion. Things don’t start well, our gunner really needs to take lessons from Garrus and get the damn guns calibrated as he can’t hit the broadside of a starship. Their cloak also gives them the ‘alpha strike’ tactic that the AI rarely uses, fire everything at once and overwhelm the shields. Another flak blast wipes turns our weapons and the aforementioned gunner into scrap metal and our shields are still in bad shape. Miss after miss that we can’t afford, as that flak cannon is ripping us to shreds. Run away, run away!

We jump straight into a fight with an automated scout, without any shields. Our gunner shows his stellar marksmanship with three missed shots in a row. After being threatened with the airlock he eventually aims before firing and they go kaboom. I know what you’re thinking - why not target their engines or piloting, trouble is I can’t afford to ignore their weapons - they have enough lasers and ion to punch through our shields and a teleporting bomb as well.

Which it does! One last explosion marks our fate as our ship is torn apart. Losing to a robot, the shame! Although I guess as Engi we’re robots too, so a fitting end at the hands of fellow robots.