(October 14th, 2012, 17:15)T-hawk Wrote: Killer awesome run with the Crystal ship today. 5318 score, which is about as high as it can go without intentionally milking.It does go higher. 5487 with the Kestrel B (Red-Tail). This ship is a BEAST, starting with the four lasers and a Mantis guy. Again I bought the teleporter in sector 1, which is how you start the snowball in this game.
I lucked into _two_ weapon reloaders (each 15% faster charge), which meant the four-laser salvo could charge and fire and whack enemy weapons before they charged to shoot, then on the next salvo whack the medbay, then teleport over for an easy cleanup. (Nothing but lasers is the simple and effective weapon build. Other weapons just don't work as well. Missiles run into defense drones and the bigger missiles are too slow. Beams are useless without lasers to drop the shield, and unnecessary if you can already drop the shield and whack the enemy weapons system; use more lasers instead for more reliability. Ion guns are useless against anything with 2+ shields, you need too many of them to outrace the ionizing recovery and then you have no room for actual damage. Bombs, at least fast-charging ones, can be okay, though watch the ammo usage.)
Halfway through I got a Scrap Recovery Arm for even more payout. I came one notch shy of literally maxing out the ship, missing only power level 8 on the drone system. For good measure I even unlocked the Mantis ship on this run, and finally picked up the "Astronomically Low Odds" achievement on the boss.