It's strange to come into this now. I got into FTL as a result of reading about it on Sulla's site. Interesting writeups and I obviously learned a lot from them. After rookie jitters screwing my first run, I won my 2nd attempt on normal, and rarely lost doing victory laps to unlock all the ships on normal (including crystals from winning with all A/B variants). Some of the ship quests are pretty stupid (tactical approach, tough little ship, crystal quest line, intentionally spamming 2 or more missile weapons at dd1, etc) so I was happy to get these out of the way before hard.
I have an 80% winrate over past 20 games on hard now, and have come to agree with most of what I've seen here and disagree on a few things. Some points of divergence:
- Loot by sector: popular thinking was that you get more scrap from red sectors, but on Reddit someone actually tracked the scrap yield from sector type/number and it's not obvious that reds are actually better (and Zoltan sectors have a surprising number of battles for a green, more than some reds across that sampling IIRC). From my experience if you're hitting 100+ unique beacons per run on hard the vast majority of times you'll get 1650 or more scrap regardless of sector choice on hard, and that will consistently win if you spend it well (variance is pretty large too, I've had 6 green sector (one red between start and sector 8) runs where I had 2000 scrap in end screen on hard).
- I agree with Thawk that Mantis C is a top tier ship. I originally had it average, but given what you can do with boarding control I'd only give it such a grade in no-pause variants now. This thing has few bad early matchups and continues to scale well all game long.
- I disagree about Zoltan C - this is at least an average tier ship in my book. A lot of variance comes down to pushing zoltan into drones and not running the battery at all unless it looks like zoltan shields will be compromised. 90 scrap engines is a bit more than the drone control system usually costs, but this thing still has Zoltan shield. Affixing another weapon in addition to 2 power one doesn't cost much so this is sector 3 viable in < 200 scrap. You might lose to something like asteroids + offensive drone super early, but it's not alone in this regard and it scales pretty decently. Still the worst Zoltan ship and I agree that A is ridiculously good...especially if you can use the trick where you can double-tap one room with a single beam firing for 4 damage with halberd.
- Ions in general get too much hate, this weapon class is misunderstood both here and on reddit. For example, early game Engi A should not be shooting ions at shields, but rather at weapons, powering/depowering combat drone to get most out of the open shield windows. This is one of a handful of ships that can disrupt heavy laser/beam combos reliably. I consider it above average for its consistently solid early game, but not top tier.
After that, there are two uses for ions: 1 power to remove 1 shield, or sufficient throughput that you can break shields and hit weapons with them in < 15-20 seconds regardless of evasion. Here are two examples: average throughput, good systems https://i.imgur.com/JeGWJCv.jpg and excellent throughput https://i.imgur.com/kWXAojV.png. The latter can get crew kills. These setups remove the threat of enemy weapons at a speed similar to all but the best weapons in the game ( < 20s). Note I'm not targeting shields, with enough throughput piloting + weapons is better because target systems never lose ionization even for brief period shields are back and you can't miss. While I'd take 2x flak 1 and BL2 any day, runs are not always so generous. These setups both trivialized the flagship. Edit: against cloaking, just ionize it rather than oxygen and deploy an offensive drone.
- Fire weapons: drone is trash. The others are a replacement for boarding/crew kill and make most sense on 4 slot ships. Until very late game you can simply use them for more rewards in easier fights and use other weapons if you see something threatening. If you have good systems they can also crew kill flagship in phase 1, and RFS AI can't do anything about fires so it's really easy to burn out its missiles/shields in later phases then, but this is somewhat niche. Makes sense for something like cloaking + hacking + MC and fire bombs. Cloak/hack missiles phase 1, kill the crew, enjoy easy remaining phases.
- Federation anything - I agree with low placement for C, but even A is average at best, and only gets that due to BL 2 and nice crew. Arty beam is awful. No target control, slow, and worst of all it hogs a system slot where I'd even prefer MC or drones to it. I actually like Fed C's late game more than Fed A or B because flak arty at least syncs up with other weapons (not boarding though), but none of these are good ships and Fed C has some potential early fights that are awful to drag it down.
- For win consistency on hard, Lanius B is seriously a top tier ship. It isn't just the lanius boarders, it's that it starts with two systems and the most power-efficient weapon in the game. It has no bad early matchups, consistently pulls crew kills, scales up its weapons easily despite starting with 1 bar (getting 2nd weapon online is still cheaper than many ships), and needs very little beyond what it starts with to win outright. I'd still put Crystal B higher - cloak, 4 man TP, and crystal lockdown need even less help to win...but this is a top 5 ship easily.
- Stealth B is the worst ship in the game on hard, even more RNG than Rock A or Engi B. Fite me
. I don't care how much you watch where the offensive drones aim, whether you're going into cloak 3 ASAP, or whatever. Bad RNG in earliest jumps can end the run and it happens more frequently than any other ship. There's also no ship in the game that needs more scrap help to become sector-3 viable (transition to 2 bubble enemies). Glaive vs 2 shields doesn't cut it, but attaching other weapon via buying weapon control 5/6 plus shields by itself costs more than you can reliably make before sector 3 on hard, and that's not counting cloak 3. Sulla talks about Zoltan C's scrap situation but it's a mere pothole compared to this! That one can make it into sector 3 with decent power, shields 2, two weapons, and an offensive drone for less scrap than you need to just utilize shields + 2nd weapon here.
- Below hard I'd instead set Rock A as worst, since you are only guaranteed 2-4 shops before you run out of missiles, and there are rare games where those shops offer no TP and no non-missile weapons. Game over.
I have an 80% winrate over past 20 games on hard now, and have come to agree with most of what I've seen here and disagree on a few things. Some points of divergence:
- Loot by sector: popular thinking was that you get more scrap from red sectors, but on Reddit someone actually tracked the scrap yield from sector type/number and it's not obvious that reds are actually better (and Zoltan sectors have a surprising number of battles for a green, more than some reds across that sampling IIRC). From my experience if you're hitting 100+ unique beacons per run on hard the vast majority of times you'll get 1650 or more scrap regardless of sector choice on hard, and that will consistently win if you spend it well (variance is pretty large too, I've had 6 green sector (one red between start and sector 8) runs where I had 2000 scrap in end screen on hard).
- I agree with Thawk that Mantis C is a top tier ship. I originally had it average, but given what you can do with boarding control I'd only give it such a grade in no-pause variants now. This thing has few bad early matchups and continues to scale well all game long.
- I disagree about Zoltan C - this is at least an average tier ship in my book. A lot of variance comes down to pushing zoltan into drones and not running the battery at all unless it looks like zoltan shields will be compromised. 90 scrap engines is a bit more than the drone control system usually costs, but this thing still has Zoltan shield. Affixing another weapon in addition to 2 power one doesn't cost much so this is sector 3 viable in < 200 scrap. You might lose to something like asteroids + offensive drone super early, but it's not alone in this regard and it scales pretty decently. Still the worst Zoltan ship and I agree that A is ridiculously good...especially if you can use the trick where you can double-tap one room with a single beam firing for 4 damage with halberd.
- Ions in general get too much hate, this weapon class is misunderstood both here and on reddit. For example, early game Engi A should not be shooting ions at shields, but rather at weapons, powering/depowering combat drone to get most out of the open shield windows. This is one of a handful of ships that can disrupt heavy laser/beam combos reliably. I consider it above average for its consistently solid early game, but not top tier.
After that, there are two uses for ions: 1 power to remove 1 shield, or sufficient throughput that you can break shields and hit weapons with them in < 15-20 seconds regardless of evasion. Here are two examples: average throughput, good systems https://i.imgur.com/JeGWJCv.jpg and excellent throughput https://i.imgur.com/kWXAojV.png. The latter can get crew kills. These setups remove the threat of enemy weapons at a speed similar to all but the best weapons in the game ( < 20s). Note I'm not targeting shields, with enough throughput piloting + weapons is better because target systems never lose ionization even for brief period shields are back and you can't miss. While I'd take 2x flak 1 and BL2 any day, runs are not always so generous. These setups both trivialized the flagship. Edit: against cloaking, just ionize it rather than oxygen and deploy an offensive drone.
- Fire weapons: drone is trash. The others are a replacement for boarding/crew kill and make most sense on 4 slot ships. Until very late game you can simply use them for more rewards in easier fights and use other weapons if you see something threatening. If you have good systems they can also crew kill flagship in phase 1, and RFS AI can't do anything about fires so it's really easy to burn out its missiles/shields in later phases then, but this is somewhat niche. Makes sense for something like cloaking + hacking + MC and fire bombs. Cloak/hack missiles phase 1, kill the crew, enjoy easy remaining phases.
- Federation anything - I agree with low placement for C, but even A is average at best, and only gets that due to BL 2 and nice crew. Arty beam is awful. No target control, slow, and worst of all it hogs a system slot where I'd even prefer MC or drones to it. I actually like Fed C's late game more than Fed A or B because flak arty at least syncs up with other weapons (not boarding though), but none of these are good ships and Fed C has some potential early fights that are awful to drag it down.
- For win consistency on hard, Lanius B is seriously a top tier ship. It isn't just the lanius boarders, it's that it starts with two systems and the most power-efficient weapon in the game. It has no bad early matchups, consistently pulls crew kills, scales up its weapons easily despite starting with 1 bar (getting 2nd weapon online is still cheaper than many ships), and needs very little beyond what it starts with to win outright. I'd still put Crystal B higher - cloak, 4 man TP, and crystal lockdown need even less help to win...but this is a top 5 ship easily.
- Stealth B is the worst ship in the game on hard, even more RNG than Rock A or Engi B. Fite me
. I don't care how much you watch where the offensive drones aim, whether you're going into cloak 3 ASAP, or whatever. Bad RNG in earliest jumps can end the run and it happens more frequently than any other ship. There's also no ship in the game that needs more scrap help to become sector-3 viable (transition to 2 bubble enemies). Glaive vs 2 shields doesn't cut it, but attaching other weapon via buying weapon control 5/6 plus shields by itself costs more than you can reliably make before sector 3 on hard, and that's not counting cloak 3. Sulla talks about Zoltan C's scrap situation but it's a mere pothole compared to this! That one can make it into sector 3 with decent power, shields 2, two weapons, and an offensive drone for less scrap than you need to just utilize shields + 2nd weapon here.- Below hard I'd instead set Rock A as worst, since you are only guaranteed 2-4 shops before you run out of missiles, and there are rare games where those shops offer no TP and no non-missile weapons. Game over.