FTL is getting a free Terraria style update

I can definitely see how the RNG can be extremely frustrating. I just assumed it was part of the difficulty of the game, which made it a tad more enjoyable.
 
Best advice I can give is, DO NOT AVOID DANGEROUS SECTORS.

Want more money and more loot? Head towards Nebulas,and Hostile sectors.

Generally I prefer to go against Mantis Sectors vs Rock I hate fighting ships with missiles.

Plan our route through space after your first sector. Avoid friendly area's generally you will do well.
 
dbu8554 said:
Never had this encounter, but never deal with giant spiders usually a bad idea.
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mantis pods have never been an issue for me. but fuck spiders. only had once where it didn't go bad and the reward was paltry given the high likely hood of random crew member loss.
 
I always do all the random events lol. Some days they just eat the shit out of crew, but lately I've been getting so much crew I always have to turn them away
 
Mantis pods... man, they suck! HARD! I think 90% of them are crew killers. I only have had 1 good pod. I would jettison it every time, as the gain is basically one mantis crew member. Getting it is pretty bad either way. If you have a lot of crew, you don't need another. If you have little crew and need more crew, the chances of death is way too high.

Spiders, on the other hand, at least you can win against it with blue choices. I don't think I've seen a blue choice for the Mantis pod.
 
Blue choices with the spider what do you need for that?

Tried my first run with Rock Ship for demolished barley made it to stage 8 and got beat once I was there kept running out of missiles on my way to sector 8 it was terribad.
 
For blue choices with spiders, I believe you need either a Rock Member (Can't remember if this is correct or not) or a Boarding Drone. Aside from the boarding drone, if it wasn't a rock member, then I can't remember, but there should be another one. Boarding drone doesn't make them happy though, lol. But you do get returns without loses.
 
Rock crew member for fighting fire encounter

Boarding drone for spiders.
 
The worst thing is you don't have a choice of which crew member. Why would you use your highly skilled pilot, instead of your noob security guy to fight a giant spider or open a pod?
 
FTL is a great game tho as others have mentioned the RnG in some games can be brutal. wish i knew about the 'no rebel fleet' mod, need to try that one.

if you don't get a decent start in the first couple of sectors (good amount of scrap, a couple of extra crew, a couple of good starter weapons, etc), it's not worth wasting time struggling to get by till the last sector.

i'll usually restart a game if i get a store that's at the start of a sector in the 1st or even the 2nd sector. nothing worse than finding a store at start of game full of rare equipment (you have no chance to afford) that is unlikely to pop-up in later sectors.

hitting up the wiki saved me a ton of time thru my many, many play-through.
http://ftl.wikia.com/wiki/FTL:_Faster_Than_Light

weapons you can get are pretty random tho my personal favs are the burst lasers II's (version III's though awesome use too much energy especially if your using drones, Mk2 defense is a must for most game).

buy the end of the 2nd sector i like to have at least shields, cloak & a transporter.

for augmentations, getting a Scrap Recovery Arm at start of game helps immensely. for mid to late game i usually dump it in favour of a 'Weapon Pre-Igniter' (probably the best one), 'Stealth Weapons' & 'Drone Recovery Arm' (great for repairing hull with repair drones, jump after 3 slots repaired and you don't lose that drone).

regarding the boss battle, i like to have at least 2 fully leveled 'away-fighter' crew (mantis or rock). when 1st meeting the boss, transport your killing machine marines into the isolated weapon bays (i target the missile weapons bay first) then rinse and repeat for the last 2 isolated weapons bays. once they're down, the boss fight is a cake-walk.
 
Never understood the love for the defense drones. Never seemed highly effective for me. I prefer the anti-ship Mk II drone. Bastard keeps shields down more effectively than anything else, allowing you to do pin point strikes at will. Combine it with a drone recovery arm and even the boss is not a problem
 
Nimisys said:
Never understood the love for the defense drones. Never seemed highly effective for me.
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They stop missiles. Defense Drone I, only shoots at missiles and does a fairly effective job as long as only 1 is fired at a time.
 
Has anyone noticed any changes to how either shields work or ion weapons? I'm noticing sometimes that when my ion weapons hit shields they won't even take off 1 bar?

Or maybe this is how it's always worked? Never really used ion weapons much before but trying the new Lanius ship which starts with one.
 
It's how it's always worked, afaik. If they got an extra bar, then you'd need 2 dmg.
 
Oh? I always thought 1 shield bar was always 1 damage and 1 shot. Basically every shot would take down a shield bar but a 2 dmg (or higher) single shot would still only take down 1 shield bar.

At least that's how I remember it working. Hadn't played for quite awhile before advanced was released.
 
BladeVenom said:
They stop missiles. Defense Drone I, only shoots at missiles and does a fairly effective job as long as only 1 is fired at a time.
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Defense Drone II is excellent. It shoots down missiles, boarding droids, hacking droids, flack and even lasers. Combine with a shield and you are covered against most forms of attack.
 
limitedaccess said:
Oh? I always thought 1 shield bar was always 1 damage and 1 shot. Basically every shot would take down a shield bar but a 2 dmg (or higher) single shot would still only take down 1 shield bar.

At least that's how I remember it working. Hadn't played for quite awhile before advanced was released.
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I think it's the way it works is what makes it confusing. 1 shot takes down one shield. But Ion damage damages the system. A shield bar is 2 energy bar.

So if the enemy has 2 shields, and 4 energy slots for the shield system... The first shot will take away 1 of the 4 energy slots, making the first shield bar go away. The second shot, though will affect the 2nd of the 4 energy slots, so there is still enough for a shield bar to function.
 
Is there any counter to the hacking thingy? I've cloaked when it launched and it actually waited until I uncloaked to attach. Will a defense drone kill it in flight?

I've had the boss hack my oxygen twice now on the first encounter at the end. If you don't focus on the triple missile you're completely fucked so I haven't had a chance to test it.
 
pothb said:
I think it's the way it works is what makes it confusing. 1 shot takes down one shield. But Ion damage damages the system. A shield bar is 2 energy bar.

So if the enemy has 2 shields, and 4 energy slots for the shield system... The first shot will take away 1 of the 4 energy slots, making the first shield bar go away. The second shot, though will affect the 2nd of the 4 energy slots, so there is still enough for a shield bar to function.
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I understand now, the ion weapons don't actually damage the shield but the shield subsystem. Just like if they were to hit any sub system if the shields were down.

Never really used ion weapons before so didn't notice that's how it worked.
 
I tried out the Higher-Res backgrounds mod too, highly recommended. Just an FYI, if you use a mod-manager to install any mods, it'll undo the "No-Fleet-Pursuit" mod. You have to unpack the data file and change it manually.

Also, if you take a ship without sensors, can you still buy sensors later?

Opie said:
Is there any counter to the hacking thingy? I've cloaked when it launched and it actually waited until I uncloaked to attach. Will a defense drone kill it in flight?

I've had the boss hack my oxygen twice now on the first encounter at the end. If you don't focus on the triple missile you're completely fucked so I haven't had a chance to test it.
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I believe defense drones will shoot it down. You can also disable or damage their hacking room.
 
BladeVenom said:
Yes, but if I remember correctly that first sensor bar is kind of expensive.
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iirc, it's 40 bucks for the system, and it comes with 1 bar. Rest is normaly payment.

Other stuff has the expensive stuff though, like weapon systems and shields are very expensive for their first 1 or 2 bars.
 
Been messing around with an interesting tactic enabled by the new mind control system. You can mind control enemy crew and then teleport them over to your ship.

Also apparently it's a bad idea to kill all the crew on the Rebel flagship :p

The starter ship (and variants) for me anyways still feel like the most reliable (or effective) of the ships. My first play through using the type B version (in advanced edition) made it to the flagship stage 2. Likely would've beaten it had I known what happens if you kill all the crew (also had an unfortunate decision to shoot at an enemy ship in an asteroid field with crew on it fighting still). By comparison multiple runs with new Lanius ship have been much less successful (although did get to Sector 8 once).
 
Never killed the crew of the flagship. My co worker said they get auto repair then or something. I don't know how you can, tbh, with the massive amounts of things firing at you.
 
Serpent said:
Never killed the crew of the flagship. My co worker said they get auto repair then or something. I don't know how you can, tbh, with the massive amounts of things firing at you.
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Kill the other weapon operators, but leave one guy in the laser. Then kill the rest of the crew. That way the ship never goes into auto mode, and in the 2nd and 3rd wave the ship is undefended.
 
Serpent said:
Never killed the crew of the flagship. My co worker said they get auto repair then or something. I don't know how you can, tbh, with the massive amounts of things firing at you.
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Basically the easiest way is to kill the the crew in each weapon cell and destroy that system. First being missiles and then the triple laser.

I typically also build very high defensively with shields, evasion, and drone defense and/or cloaking as well.

The hard part before the advanced edition was due to the full blast doors and medical bay but like I used the new possible mindcontrol/teleporter combo to just beam them over to my ship one by one.

Ideally you would want to just leave one crew alive (laser guy). Since (as I found out) when you actually fully de-crew it just turns to AI mode with auto-repair (much faster than the drone ships you encounter). Also according to the wiki I believe it's systems still get full crew bonus without needing actual crew.

I do have a gripe though with game mechanics that aren't explicitly mentioned and work contrary to other established basic game rules. It seems just like an easy out design wise to add difficulty.
 
I finally beat the fucking boss. Twice. On easy. I kinda cheated the first time though.

Once with the Kestrel A....actually 7z'd my save because I was fed up with that fucker. I had a good ship, I did not want to have to start all the way over by some RNG event. Utterly destroyed him (4 shields, nearly maxed out FTL drive, 3 puny lasers + glaive beam). Took his shields down with the lasers, glaive beam'd his ass like a hot knife through butter.

But I didn't want it to be that way.

So I started a 2nd run with the Engi A ship. Had a few laser cannons, cloak, Attack drones I & II. Drones picked apart his shields, nailed him while they were down with the lasers. DID NOT 7z my save on that one....that was 1 run all the way no losses.

I got back to him with the Mantis and had fun boarding and destroying his weapons but could not stand up (long) to the 3rd form. All you really have to do is equalize the triple missile cannon and he's a lot easier/manageable.

Still working on unlocking the Crystal Cruiser; finally have all the other ships. Once I get that, I'll quit playing on Easy; that one (especially) is such a PITA on the requirements.
 
4 Burst lasers 2 destroys the boss on Easy. I need to beat it on Normal, but losing on the way there gets so damn frustrating. Not to mention the RNG preventing me from getting my weapons.
 
Recently started putting more time into this game...gotta say, it's a mixed bag. The game itself is really fun, but you can get some random events that completely screw over your entire playthrough. One obnoxious one is the plasma storm that halves your reactor output. So I am trying to fight of a ship with limited weapons, but by the time it goes down my oxygen supply has been decreasing and I can't shift power fast enough before my whole crew dies. :mad: Why, given limited power, would the ship choose to divert power away from oxygen is beyond me. This was on the second to last sector, too.
 
MavericK96 said:
Recently started putting more time into this game...gotta say, it's a mixed bag. The game itself is really fun, but you can get some random events that completely screw over your entire playthrough. One obnoxious one is the plasma storm that halves your reactor output. So I am trying to fight of a ship with limited weapons, but by the time it goes down my oxygen supply has been decreasing and I can't shift power fast enough before my whole crew dies. :mad: Why, given limited power, would the ship choose to divert power away from oxygen is beyond me. This was on the second to last sector, too.
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Try a backup battery for your next run. It's cheap and doesn't take up slots used by other systems. It'll save your ass in a pinch and actually makes plasma storms a lot of fun. Slug crew with a backup battery will own just about anything in a nebula.
 
Alright, thanks for the info. I don't remember seeing a backup battery..is that in the Ship menu or do you have to find it at a Store?

That was another thing, Stores seemed fairly sparse when I played and almost none of them had anything worth buying.
 
I don't know this for sure, but I think stores appear more often in Civilian and Nebula areas.

Battery is bought from the store, but only available in plus mode. When they halve your engines, do you keep your engines going? I usually get rid of Engines if I need oxygen.
 
MavericK96 said:
Alright, thanks for the info. I don't remember seeing a backup battery..is that in the Ship menu or do you have to find it at a Store?

That was another thing, Stores seemed fairly sparse when I played and almost none of them had anything worth buying.
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Backup battery is in stores, and is a system upgrade I believe (in the same category as transporters, cloak, etc.)

Best stores are in the hostile areas, but they don't have the good stuff or crew you'll find by complete accident or through the random quests.

One playthrough I found a Flak II in a store and bought it, it made the end-boss almost too easy to beat when coupled with a Halberd Beam (Flak II got rid of shields and does some system damage, then Halberd Beam damages systems and crew).

I've found the two strategies that I'm best at are:

1. Shield damage and/or delay (either by weapons or hacking drone), followed by weapon damage to the hull and systems. Fire beam to distract enemy crew from repairing is a plus.

2. Fire team via transporter to kill enemy crew and damage systems, but only good if I have Mantis or Rock crew. Lantis crew members are great too, but need to upgrade the basic transporter to get them back if health gets low.

My favorite weapons:
1. Halberd Beam (busts through level 2 shields)
2. Flak gun (absolutely obliterates shields, does moderate system damage)
3. Missles (just stay stocked up)
4. Fire Beam (still need something to get rid of shields though, like a burst laser or flak)
 
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