FTL: Faster Than Light

[Paul Debrion]

I'm surprised we didn't have a thread for this game yet.

Things I've learned from deaths so far:
-Venting the rooms to put out fire is not a good idea if your life support system is damaged.
-Rock people are fantastic for putting out fire and beating the crap out of boarding parties.
-Some gas clouds are made of pure evil.
-Life support always gets hit when you're not paying attention to it, ALWAYS!

[Garlyle]

Things I've learned:

-Beyond everything else you absolutely NEED to have extra weapons for the end of the game.  You can escape most encounters in sector 8 and use repair stations to your advantage, but when push comes to shove you are going to need enough... anything to take down that monstrosity.
-Bombs are the best use of missiles.  No, they don't do hull damage... but they can't be downed by defense drones and are more likely to start fires and/or damage crew, which is a massive delay to how fast the enemy can repair it.  Missile-fueled weapons, afterall, are there to take down the enemy's shields later so your main weaponry can deal damage.
-If they're asking for help with alien spiders or a station fire... don't.  Just don't.  You'll lose crew members.
-Pilot rooms are easy to disable, MUCH easier than engines which have more health.  Disabled pilot rooms = enemies can't evade your shit.
-If you can get enough shields and can start slugging the enemy's weapon systems you can make it through entire sectors without damage.

[Ionasal kkll Solciel]

Teleporters are OP - every single damn time I fight a Mantis ship, they basically wreck my shit by porting into the engines and proceeding to the life support.
Unless you get insanely lucky, you never have enough crew. Even if you have enough to man every single system, the others can help patch up fires and breaches without sacrificing the manning bonuses.
Fire - there's a reason why there's an achievement for having every single part of the enemy ship on fire at the same time.
Beams take a while to charge, but they can be devastating to more compact ships, such as Energy Fighters. 2 hull damage per room, up to four rooms long? Hell. Yeah. Get the shields down first!

[Garlyle]

Teleporters are OP - every single damn time I fight a Mantis ship, they basically wreck my shit by porting into the engines and proceeding to the life support.
Unless you get insanely lucky, you never have enough crew. Even if you have enough to man every single system, the others can help patch up fires and breaches without sacrificing the manning bonuses.

Use your medbay to combat intruders on your ship - rotate crewmembers between combat and healing.  Hell, if you can get the enemy fighting you IN your medbay you will win the fight.

Certain crews have more difficulty with this than others though; the Adjudicator ship is staffed entirely by characters with only 70 HP... runs just pretty much brickwall the moment something teleports onto the ship :/

[Ionasal kkll Solciel]

Use your medbay to combat intruders on your ship - rotate crewmembers between combat and healing.  Hell, if you can get the enemy fighting you IN your medbay you will win the fight.

Naturally, I try... but the Type A Kestrel ship has the life support far away from the medbay, meaning if they try to focus it down, I really have no choice but to drag everyone over and try to lure them away (emphasis on try - they tend to go right back to hitting the life support, engines, and weapons), and in the midst of it, the enemy ship is still firing at us.

I have no problems with (eventually) repelling enemy boarders - it's them attacking the life support and weapons that kill me every time through attrition when the enemy ship still fires missiles.

[Garlyle]

Finally beat the game!  Engi Cruiser, type A (aka The Torus).  Only on easy, but I did it.  The final boss is... well, most definitely A Thing.

The Torus starts out kind of weak-feeling.  Engi might be great at repairs, but that can't repair the hull itself.  You get really micromanagey with the ion cannon in order to make your drones kill the enemy ship, because that's really the only option you've got.  It turns into a beast later on though... its unique augment essentially is "My entire ship is a medical bay", so intruders are almost a nonissue and any damage they do is repaired fast by Engi.  The early and easy access to drones is huge as well - at the end of the game, thanks to a Drone Retrieval Arm, I essentially had infinite use of three automatic turrets circling the enemy's ships, and my actual drone parts could be used on hull repair drones.  There were lasers flying out of every orifice of this ship, to boot.

The ship I got for completing the game is interesting... but the Layout B of the Engi Cruiser is even more intersting. 

Spoiler:

There's only one crew member.  ONE.  ...And there's no sensor system on your ship.  It does, however, start out heavier armed than most ships and with a set of self-defense drones to deploy.

[Hanzo K.]

Out of curiosity, how much is this game? I've heard good things about it.

[Yugian]

10$ at most i beileve?

[Garlyle]

Naturally, I try... but the Type A Kestrel ship has the life support far away from the medbay, meaning if they try to focus it down, I really have no choice but to drag everyone over and try to lure them away (emphasis on try - they tend to go right back to hitting the life support, engines, and weapons), and in the midst of it, the enemy ship is still firing at us.

I have no problems with (eventually) repelling enemy boarders - it's them attacking the life support and weapons that kill me every time through attrition when the enemy ship still fires missiles.

Figured out a few things last night... namely
-Multiple multi-laser turrets (like the ones the Kestrel starts with) are amazing if you time them to work in tandem
-Upgrade your doors to massively slow down invaders.  If they end up in a good spot, you can also manually open some doors to drain out oxygen and suffocate invaders without ever risking your crew!

I also got, apparently, halfway to a pretty major secret last night according to some research done afterwards. 

Spoiler:

I managed to get a member of the secret eighth race, but unfortunately my last sector between then and the last stand didn't give me the event needed to make full use of it and unlock the ninth ship...

Got my second game clear though, with the Adjudicator.  The ship was packing level four shields, near-maxed engines, 8 bars of weapons (two multi-laser guns, a Halberd Beam), and a couple drone systems for defense

Spoiler:

because you pretty much need it for the final boss

.  Unlike my first clear they never even took enough hull damage in total, but I've gotten a lot smarter about taking on the final boss. 

Spoiler:

The third turret from the left - just up and to the right of the shields - is the most dangerous, since it fires missiles; if you disable that, it's way easier

.

Also accidentally discovered you can destroy enemy drones with well-timed missile shots!

[JT]

Just beat this for the first time on Easy. I used the Type B Kestrel cruiser with two Pulse II's, a Small Bomb, and the Pegasus (which I only used

Spoiler:

on the third stage of the boss

). I had literally every system maxed out by the end except for drones, which I never bothered getting at all.

Spoiler:

Well-timed cloaks make all the difference in the world against the boss. Also - as has been already stated - the missile turret is your #1 priority.

Another interesting thing to note: If you board and kill an entire enemy crew, you get more scrap and stuff than if you just destroy their ship. With slaver ships, a lot of times you'll get a free crew member. It's probably a good idea to get the teleporter early on and have at least two dedicated crew members for boarding, this way you can level up their combat skill as fast as possible. Also protip, don't blow up the ship while they're still on it.

Oh, and level 1 blast doors are a requisite purchase. If you get hit with a large boarding party early on and you don't have them, you're pretty much fucked.

[Ionasal kkll Solciel]

Burst Lasers are okay, but late on, their damage/accuracy is too low to reliably punch through any shielding without hitting the Bridge or Engines first. If you have the Teleporter and they don't have a Medbay, always aim for the bridge - as long as your guys are in there, their dodge is reduced at minimum to one-half what it should be, and you can still wound them with your normal weapons on the Shields or Weapons.

Beam weapons are super-effective on Zoltan Super Shields - they get damaged based on the damage you would have dealt, whether that be one or ten damage. This can be used to disable them quickly.

I'm just about to die again to the final boss, this time because I chose not to pick up the Teleporter early on and didn't see the damn thing again, despite now having extra crew (no Mantis, though, annoyingly). Following the strategy of bouncing every which way, including into nebulae and through red zones, seems to work wonders for keeping supplies up, but even with the Scrap Recovery Arm, I don't have near the output I'd like to have in power and resources.

And yup. Somehow I defeated the first stage, but the battles to it drained my missile supplies so heavily that I couldn't do the volley missiles required for me to punch past the drone and take out the systems. With only a Pike Beam (useless) and the Burst Laser II, I pretty much could do nothing.

[orinrin]

I decided to pick up this game so I could have something to play while the replacement parts for my desktop arrive.  The game is pretty damn fun.


My first serious run took me a lot farther than I thought it would.  The entire ship was on fire and there were oxygen leaks all over, but somehow Butters managed to pull through and patch everything up (right before he died from lack of oxygen).  In hindsight, it probably would have been a better idea to put points into shields instead of maxing out the engines.

Burst Lasers are okay, but late on, their damage/accuracy is too low to reliably punch through any shielding without hitting the Bridge or Engines first.

Funny you mention that, because my ship had nothing but burst lasers equipped during the last stand fight!


_{(That's probably what almost got me killed though.)}

[Garlyle]

I don't find burst laser accuracy to be any better or worse than other weapons (Compare something like the Breach Missile, which I swear to god never hits).  The most important thing is that you need "more than enough" of them.  A single shot laser is borderline useless; if you're outputting a total of 6 or 7, however, it's more than enough to poke the hole for a beam weapon to do some damage.  It's definitely not the strongest strategy, but it gets you through pretty much everything without needing to use actual ammunition, letting you save up tonnes of missiles/drone parts for the last stand.

[Ionasal kkll Solciel]

Aw damn it, I screwed up the negotiation quest. There goes a new ship for a while.

Also lost a Mantis on my boarding party due to an asteroid hitting the enemy medbay just as the Mantis entered it. Thankfully, I found a slaver ship not too long after and slaughtered everything for another Mantis, but damn it, that Mantis just got promo'ed.

I think my problem with Burst Lasers is that each individual shot has its own accuracy roll, and unless you have ones that do two or more damage, missing even a single shot can make the whole salvo useless. Fully powered and manned with a promo'ed, Pilot/Engines has (I think) a 50%-odd chance to dodge each shot. Not quite so bad with individual shots, but with volleys, the percentage of three shots hitting successively is really damn low. Add a second Burst Laser II, and the chances of four hitting in time before shields go back up at any point is slightly higher. But most of us don't have the time, power, luck, or scrap necessary to get two or three Burst Lasers to get necessary kill power. Plus, it's entirely possible you'll miss a wave altogether, putting you right back at square one against ships with promo'ed repair crew.

EDIT: WOOT! First clear! With half my systems simultaneously on fire and destroyed, oxygen dipping below 50%, and intruders still on my ship, I managed to make it through... somehow. Thank god for Ion Bombs.

[Pepperized]

Been playing this game to extremes, there is a reason that the crystal ship is damn hard to get, it's SO powerful.

For those not as lucky as I, I recommend using the Rock ships.

The stealth ship is dissapointing, having no shields really hurts. Even with layout B, which starts with the best weapon, it's incredibly hard to use.

[Funkies]

Been playing this game to extremes, there is a reason that the crystal ship is damn hard to get, it's SO powerful.

This is driving me nuts.  Three runs in a row, and I pick up anywhere between two and three "Damaged Stasis Pods" without coming across a research vessel.  I was stuck with one as an augment when up against the final boss... and things did not go well.  I wanted to eject the pod into the flagship, but alas I saw no such option.

Overall this was a worthy $10 purchase as I'm getting tons of fun out of it.  Being able to save and jump back in is a nice thing.  I don't see that in many roguelikes (at least those I've played), so I can dig it.