FTL - Faster Than Light

[T-hawk]

So close!

My second game with the Torus ship (unlocked for reaching sector 5 with the original ship) went really well. It comes with an attack drone, and I found another in like my second battle. The combo of two drones and the ion gun that the Torus starts with easily wiped out everything in the first three sectors. Drones unlike weapons don't need charge-up time, so the drones would drop the shields and the ion gun disable the weapons before the enemy could shoot. I rounded out the package by getting up to 5 crew early and some other assorted upgrades like doors and an anti-personnel drone.

Around sector 5, the drone + ion combination started falling behind and I swapped over to more conventional weaponry. It was touch and go for a while on the supply of consumables - drone parts, and twice I jumped to a store with my last unit of fuel! Sectors 6 and 7 start ramping up the payouts,40 or 60 scrap per fight... and I chanced upon the legendary Weapon Pre-Igniter at a store. I hocked some spare weaponry and the anti-personnel droid to buy it, and resumed winning at life. No need for ion stuff after that; I'd let the attack drones soften the shields before I fired the pre-charged weapons, and wipe out the enemy weapon room before they'd shoot at all.

So I reached sector 8, in the first game that I got through 5. Spoilers for the boss sequence:

I beat the first two fights with the boss ship. But I was in trouble thanks to an unlucky map layout. I had gone through both repair nodes on my way to the first boss fight, and didn't realize they couldn't be reused. The map was very linear, with only one path from where I was back to the starting base. I couldn't get there without encountering the boss again.

So I had to go into the third boss fight with only half a hull. We fought, and I had just a sliver of an edge of an upper hand. I killed a few boarders, knocked out one weapons room, and survived one salvo of his big weapon in staying just ahead of the damage on repairing. The boss's hull was halfway down, and I was just about to knock out the second weapons room. But my own hull was too low thanks to missing any chance at repairs, and all I could do was watch in horror as one last stray missile destroyed my intrepid Torus.

I'll win this thing yet. The one big missing piece from that run was a Drone Recovery Arm, which I never found. With that, I would have saved 100+ scrap on buying drone parts, and might have had just enough extra juice (bit more engines for evasion, if nothing else) to win.

Okay, this thing has been worth $10 easily.