FTL - ohcrapshieldsaredown!

[Xanthir]

having a full four shields at the end boss is pretty useful absolutely mandatory.

Meh, I've done the boss with three shields. Not hard if you

Spoiler:

have 3-bar teleporter, beaming individual mantises/rocks to the weapons, and use a combo of high engines and 1-bar cloak bursts to avoid fire (especially during the drone/laser bursts of its later forms).

[Scuttlemutt]

Personally I think having 47% dodge by the final boss is more mandatory than 4 or even 3 shields; That basically means you take 47% less damage (which I mentally round to 50% for simplicity) overall from non-beam weaponry, and it's easy to get with a combination of half-upgraded engines and max skill Pilot+Engine Room. I feel this is more important than sheilds, because shields will do nothing against Missles and will eventually be shut down by Ion. Plus it's a lot more energy efficient than manning drones to shoot down everything instead (altough using two Defense Drones for missles and high shields for the rest works well; NOT Defense II Drones because it's handy not having them be distracted from missles by shots that your shields can handle)

[BoomFrog]

Indeed I almost never get level 4 shields unless I have some kind of defense drone and can't find a store to buy cloaking. For 180 scrap and 2 power, cloaking is much better damage reduction, especially against the boss where in phase 1 you can dodge the missile volley, and phase 2 and 3 dodge the powersurge attacks. Even without cloak, I agree that engines are higher priority then max shields unless you have a defense drone, because missiles suck.

On boss strategy:

Spoiler:

Send two guys to kill the missile launcher asap. Focus your weapon fire on taking out the ion weapon, with those two offline you can take your time to pick apart the rest of the ship assuming you have 3bar shields, and decent dodge you'd have to be very unlucky for the laser to pop your shield and the beam to fire at the same moment. Still take down the beam next just in case of course.

I never do any "skill farming" as it feels like an exploit.

[Larry]

So I've been getting a bit frustrated with this one, losing a string of games to (usually) mantis boarders around sector 2 or 3. This one time, 4 pirates beamed on board at the start of sector 2.
Last few games I've upgraded my doors and waddayaknow, no boarders in sight.

So today I said 'stuff it', and re-rolled on Easy. Everything's going swimmingly, with a few close calls. Level 2 teleporter, 2 mantis commando team, cloaking, stealth weapons, pre-igniters, crew members and weapons and scrap galore.

I've made it to the final sector, for the second time ever. Two jumps from the flagship and I've just learnt a very, very important lesson.

Spoiler:

It pays to be careful with breach bombs, auto-fire, and boarding parties. Sorry, Debbie and Angelina

[Izawwlgood]

Yeah, on boss strategy;

Spoiler:

The weapon systems are free standing structures; you can easily take them down with boarders or concentrated weapon fire and SEVERELY limit the flagships damage output. Such that after the first 30s of the fight, the boss is effectively toothless.

[wam]

Thanks for all the advice guys. Haven't had a chance to try any of it yet as I have now broken my laptop screen.

[setzer777]

I kind of think they should make enemy boarders stronger (or at least smarter) in the next patch. Ever since I learned the "open the airlocks and hide in the medbay" trick, I don't think I've ever suffered significant damage from boarding parties. Maybe make it so that the enemy first tries to destroy your door system or medbay?

Alternatively, they should make it so that enemy vessels with medbays use the same strategy against your boarders.

Edit: They could also make it so that medbays don't function while enemies are in the room (or perhaps they only function if you have Engi nanomachines doing the healing).

[Izawwlgood]

That defensive strategy isn't always an option though. If life support, or the medbay itself, is damaged, you can't really get away with it, AND, it's sort of a last ditch gambit, as damage to your shields, engines, or weapon systems can leave you dead in the water, so to speak.

[setzer777]

That defensive strategy isn't always an option though. If life support, or the medbay itself, is damaged, you can't really get away with it, AND, it's sort of a last ditch gambit, as damage to your shields, engines, or weapon systems can leave you dead in the water, so to speak.

Except that any enemy with a teleporter always uses it immediately in combat. If I see a teleporter I can open the doors immediately and they'll still send their boarders - at that point they almost always head for the medbay before doing significant system damage. Even if they have missiles to take out systems, by the time those charge up and do their damage the boarders are usually close to dead anyway.

Edit: Actually, I don't even have to wait for the boarders to die. As soon as they are engaged in combat in the medbay I can close all the doors and send other crew to repair anything. I think a simple fix would be to have the enemy sometimes wait before sending boarders and not always do it at the very beginning of the encounter. That way there's a chance they'll damage systems with their weapons first making the defensive option more of a dilemma.

[BoomFrog]

I think programing the AI to intelligently vent rooms on it's ship to fight boarder/fires is a difficult programing problem. You need to evaluate which chain of rooms to vent, and which rooms don't need crew any time soon. For example if the computer ever vented it's door control room you could damage that room and totally screw the AI. I've had that happen to me when I pulled the medbay trick, and when half your ship is vented including the damaged door system and damaged O2 system, it is not fun. Or rather it is fun.

I think the easiest fix would be boarders avoid the medbay unless it is either completely broken or it is the only room on the ship that is not vented/on fire. Also they leave the medbay if a better target presents itself. Then the medbay trick doesn't work anymore unless you're willing to vent the cockpit. They still suffocate while trying to beat down the blast doors but that's what blast doors are for.

[SurgicalSteel]

I think programing the AI to intelligently vent rooms on it's ship to fight boarder/fires is a difficult programing problem. You need to evaluate which chain of rooms to vent, and which rooms don't need crew any time soon.

This sounds like it could be solved with an adaptation of pathfinding algorithms. If we take rooms to be nodes, and doors to be edges, should be pretty fast considering there are only around a dozen or so nodes. High fitness rooms are vented, low fitness rooms are not. Fire in a room raises fitness, enemy in a room raises fitness, friend in a room lowers fitness, system damage in a room lowers fitness. Determining chain of rooms should be as simple as evaluating the tree (air locks are leaf nodes). Actually sounds like an interesting problem that would be fun to solve.

[BoomFrog]

But it would open up one more AI behavior to be exploited although I suppose that's part of the fun. Add an extra low fitness to ever venting the doors control room and I like your plan.

[Izawwlgood]

AFAI remember, no enemy ship has door control or doors to space?

[BoomFrog]

Well that would obviously be added at the same time. Although actually I am sure I've seen ships with door control. If they have blast doors you can disable all the locks by damaging the doors system.

[Scuttlemutt]

Ships can be generalted with Door Control subsystems; they just never use the manual open/close aspect of it. It is there just to get Blast Doors, mostly.

I haven't seen an enemy ship with a door into space, though.

Spoiler:

Not counting the flagship on the second and third stage, after you blow off the chunks of the ship they connected to.

[Jack21222]

I just bought this game when it went on sale on Steam, It took me about two dozen tries, but I finally beat the game (only played on Normal). Using the Red Tail, I had a good start, and the game rewarded me first with a Halbred beam around sector 2, and then a Burst Laser Mk 3 around sector 5. For the final boss, I was swinging those two plus one of the basic lasers AND an anti-ship drone, and the final boss just MELTED.

The Red Tail is by far my favorite ship. I tried playing the Rock A ship for a while, but I had a lot of problems finding a weapon. The Engi A ship is fun for a bit, to get the hang of drone warfare, and the Engi B ship is terrible. I look forward to using the Federation Cruiser now. I love this game.

[rmsgrey]

Playing with the Kestrel-A, I managed to reach Sector 8 for the first time thanks to a couple of Mantis boarders, some ion weaponry and the Bio beam, then proceeded to demolish the boss. Playing with the Federation Cruiser, I was going strong again when, fighting in an asteroid field, I lost concentration, and my boarding party fell foul of some chunks of rock picking off the remaining hull of the enemy ship. Shortly after that, I lost 2/3 Zoltan crew-members to a fire (the medical nanos I'd picked up were offline) and when I got to the second stage of the boss without having been able to recruit any more crew (having rejected some crew applicants before I started losing them), it managed to attrit my hull to destruction faster than I could shut down its weaponry with a boarding drone...

[pseudoidiot]

I picked this up a few weeks back on a sale. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. So far my best run was my second-playthrough. I got to the final sector in the Kestrel, but not quite all the way to the final ship. I have yet to reach the final sector again after I don't know how many playthroughs. Seems like I did better when I wasn't trying any particular strategies or thinking ahead, which is kind of frustrating.

Haven't played in a few weeks in favor of other things, but I'll probably still pick it up from time to time.

[rmsgrey]

I picked this up a few weeks back on a sale. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. So far my best run was my second-playthrough. I got to the final sector in the Kestrel, but not quite all the way to the final ship. I have yet to reach the final sector again after I don't know how many playthroughs. Seems like I did better when I wasn't trying any particular strategies or thinking ahead, which is kind of frustrating.

Haven't played in a few weeks in favor of other things, but I'll probably still pick it up from time to time.

My one tip would be to try to kill off enemy crew (rather than blow up the ship) whenever you get the chance - more scrap and more random items that can either be sold or used makes life much easier...

Of course, that relies on finding the right stuff to support a non-destroy strategy - locking down the O2 with ion weapons (and having good enough defences to avoid taking damage while the enemy slowly suffocates), sending in strong boarding parties, using weapons that damage crew rather than hull, setting fires, or concentrating fire on occupied rooms and getting (very) lucky in damaging crew faster than depleting hull will all work.

[pseudoidiot]

Yeah, I do that when I can.

[elminster]

My bro got this game on our steam account recently. I read about it beforehand, so was interested to play it.
Killed the boss twice now and my main thoughts on it are: It's pretty good for an indie game, but it's far too dependant on random things.

The first time I beat the boss was pretty much just a string of luck (Cloak + Cloak weapons augmentation + weapons already charged + good weapons = even killing rebel ships before they can touch you). Learning how to play it better by the second win showed how much luck is involved.
It's a little annoying how you can't always tell if you're going to be able to go from one nebula to one near by.

[Jack21222]

It's a little annoying how you can't always tell if you're going to be able to go from one nebula to one near by.

Sure you can. Just turn on the option that shows you lines when you hover over the nebula.

[rmsgrey]

One of my recent games was going well until I entered a sector with valuable quest markers in the bottom right corner, one beacon halfway up the right-hand side, and the exit in the top right. It was only when I reached the last quest marker that I realised that the lone beacon didn't connect. To anything. My only route to the exit was to take six jumps through the rebel fleet. The fourth one killed me....

[elminster]

It's a little annoying how you can't always tell if you're going to be able to go from one nebula to one near by.

Sure you can. Just turn on the option that shows you lines when you hover over the nebula.

Oh... so you can. I'm not sure why it's not switched on by default really. It seems like it's a feature which is better on than off, even if it's just to show that it's there.

[krikkitelder]

Got this game a couple of days ago and I have been hooked since.
I'm not sure if my luck was out, or I wasn't using the most uber of strats (i've never really looked twice at fire-bombs and the more exotic weapons), but I finally finally managed to defeat the flagship on easy after 41 attempts (with a fair few of those games being achievement runs to unlock layouts, or to try and unlock ships).
I had reached the final boss about 5 times prior, but had only got him to stage 3 once.

Spoiler:

In the end I used maxed shields, decent engines, a fully powered cloak, teleporter with 3-4 boarders (I lost my mantis boarder in stage 1 due to lack of micromanagement *ouch*) and a combo of ion, laser and missile weaponry to beat the boss.
Phase 2 was the trickiest but my cloak could avoid one round of drones and my shields/evasion prevented most of the damage from the second round. Disabling the drone control and diverting people to beating back the boarding drones and fixing the breaches they caused was high tension but once it went down the rest of the phase was easy.
Third phase was a cakewalk, level 3 cloak, 4 shields and decent evade made the power surges irrelevant.

God this game. No idea how i'm going to go when I man up and take on Normal mode.

[Xanthir]

Note: fully-powered cloak is actually a disadvantage for the boss's level 2 and 3 surges. You want to put your cloak at 1 power, which makes the cloak+recharge time *almost* the same as the boss's surge time. If you cloak a little early at first, you can cloak through two or three surges right at the beginning, which is super helpful.

[wam]

I feel really stupid as I have been playing for ages and still never beaten the boss!

I have got it to level 3 about 5 times and always died.

[Xenomortis]

If you manage part 2, I'm surprised you fail at part 3; the second phase is definitely the hardest.
Just focus on getting his missile system down and use a level-1 cloak to dodge his energy attacks. If you have full shields and engines, you can usually survive a missile or energy attack, but you don't want to roll the dice too often, so get the missiles down with a boarder (or focused attacks).
I never bothered with missiles; just a couple of laser weapons to get shields down and a beam weapon to do hull damage. If your lasers are able to get the shields down, then any beam weapon will do.

[wam]

Ah but everytime I have gone into level 3 with a nearly dead ship and no convenient repair station!

[rmsgrey]

I prefer bombs to missiles - they bypass defense drones - as does a crew teleporter (I think boarding drones do too). Just, whatever you do, don't sell off all the weapons that hit shields otherwise the third-form of the boss with its Zoltan-style energy shield is going to be impossible to hit...

[elminster]

Just beat it on normal with the Osprey with the burst laser 2 (start with it), artillery beam (start with it as well), heavy laser 2 with no cloaking or boarding.
It was rather strange how easily it went really. I lost a total of 4 crew members from random events in the whole run, but only once lost anyone with significant training and still ended with 5 at the boss.
Almost maxing out engines for high dodge was probably one of the key parts. I could barely scratch them without the Ospreys built in weapon (The 2 weapons I got only has 5 shots, and 4 shields would negate all but 1); 2 auto reloader augmentations and maxed the artillery beam done >60% of my overall boss damage.

Although... it still seemed like a random string of luck.

I have noticed there's a few ways to abuse the AI. Vent the air out of boarding parties room, and have someone repeatedly leave and enter the room to massively delay their escape.
You can also grind experience levels against npcs that can't actually win.

Edit: Wow, I won 2 times in a row and this time with the Adjudicator. Had an epic battle which was a complete stalemate on a special encounter. It was in sector 6 near the end and I knew if I couldn't get any weapons there was almost no way I could beat the boss. Special encounters tend to give items in later sectors.
I ran out of missiles, only had halberd beam left and 2x mark 1 antiship drones. He had 4 sheilds which regened fast enough that it would almost never go down to 2. My best boarders were a rock and engi, I the rest were zoltan.
There seems to be some kinda bug where teleporting a zoltan would temporarily power it and unpower it after leaving so, even if you have 3 left over power, it will still take as long as if it was powered by 1 less. This meant that zoltans could just about be killed unless you run around and teleport them back the fraction of a second after you can teleport again (If you only have 2 in teleporting).

So... I had to distract the people in the sheild room long enough for 4 consecutive hits on the sheild (they regen at least 1 by the time the 4th hit goes off) and then use the beam the instant it drops below 2. After about 15minutes of teleporting healing the drones managed to get the 4 hits I needed to do damage. It was all worth while when it dropped a burst laser mark 3. I had close to 300 gold built up purely because the last 5 shops didn't have any weapons and there was nothing I needed other than weapons.

Another bug I noticed, is that boarders will try break through doors even if there's one open next to them.

[rmsgrey]

Another bug I noticed, is that boarders will try break through doors even if there's one open next to them.

If you were boarding a hostile spaceship and the crew opened a door for you, would you go through it?

[Menacing Spike]

Another bug I noticed, is that boarders will try break through doors even if there's one open next to them.

If you were boarding a hostile spaceship and the crew opened a door for you, would you go through it?

What if I knew they read this thread?

[rmsgrey]

Another bug I noticed, is that boarders will try break through doors even if there's one open next to them.

If you were boarding a hostile spaceship and the crew opened a door for you, would you go through it?

What if I knew they read this thread?

What if you did?

Presumably you already had something in mind when you boarded their ship, so why let their mind games distract you from it?

[Xeio]

I should probably try this on Easy at some point.

But hey, I made it to the last area after enough tries, even though I let the boss thing blast the base. Had no way to kill something with 4 shields and a point defense drone to shoot down my missles.

[elminster]

On the plus side, they really got the retro feel down with "normal" actually being challenging. Back in the old days, completing games on the hardest difficulty was a monumental task. These days I always put it to the most difficult setting for first proper play.
I did set it on easy at first on FTL to get a feel, but only to realise that it was the retro version of easy. Then completed it in easy before going to hard normal

Last game I played had an super annoying 2nd stage boss fight. I got super lucky through the play through, but almost no shop sold good weapons. I ended up maxing out engines, max energy for the zoltan crusier 29 energy achievement, had the Glaive beam, 4 zoltan, 2 engi, 2 mantis, etc. Richest I've ever been in terms of total spent.
1st stage boss, took a total of 3 hull damage. Second one, got the "Astronomical low odds" achievement (Hit 5 times in a row with max engines. Also had 2 star engine/captain that gave 55% dodge, which means about 1.8% chance of that happening) and they got lucky often enough that I just got hammered.
Got a highscore of like 4456, was so sure I'd win as well =/

[rmsgrey]

Took my recently-unlocked Zoltan Cruiser for a spin - found myself in the Rock Homeworlds in Sector 6, with a quest next to the exit in the bottom-left, active weapons of paired burst lasers and an ion 1 and level 1 defense and attack drones. Managed to find the first stage of the Rock Cruiser unlock - which added a quest marker to the top-right of the map, separated from the exit by a star-less void. Plotting my route, I figured it would be 5 jumps to get from that quest to the exit. I wasn't wrong. Somehow, I managed to fight my way through the rebel fleet to the exit, using up my last drone parts on the way, and managed to complete the unlock by reaching the quest marker in sector 7. Against the boss, having carelessly lost my boarding party late in sector 7, I managed to take out the first form fairly easily, then had no way to survive the drone surges of the second...

[EdgarJPublius]

This game is way too addicting. I have no idea how many times I've chained games together, just selecting 'restart' whenever I explode without thought, but it's probably a lot.

[wam]

Finally finished this yesterday!

Boss is much easier when you get good with your cloak so can miss the mass of drones and the hull smashers.

Also had a boarding drone which did a lot of damage, esp wave 3 where it could hurt/kill the boss's crew before they beamed over.

[rmsgrey]

Finally finished this yesterday!

Boss is much easier when you get good with your cloak so can miss the mass of drones and the hull smashers.

Also had a boarding drone which did a lot of damage, esp wave 3 where it could hurt/kill the boss's crew before they beamed over.

I usually (when I get to the Boss at all) aim to take out most of the crew during the first stage - I'll leave the guy manning the ion cannon alone. Having him alive keeps the shipboard AI from kicking in and kicking ass, but he's trapped so he can't repair anything I care about and can't board my ship.