Ya know, I think I am starting to get the hang of this game! Using the same 2-step attack philosophy as mentioned before, I managed to complete it in the stealth ship The Nesasio.
In spite of what you said before T-hawk, well, I did go for ion weapons on this run as the main shield-remover (hey, I'm always experimenting). Or more precisely, *an* ion weapon, the Ion Blast 2, which fires fast enough to stack and take shields down, even if it misses sometimes, especially when you combine that with my weapon number 2, Dual Lasers. Stayed with me from the beginning on the game, and were enough to finish off otherwise-weak shields, and often do extra damage. The main damage-dealer, however, was the Glaive Beam I found about halfway through. Obviously that could do massive damage, and took out some ships with one shot alone. I'm still not sure I'd do it again, though, unless the circumstances were just right. The combination of these weapons required all 8 weapon power bars, and purchasing them, the weapons system upgrades, and extra reactor power was very expensive, requiring lots of other things to be sidelined for quite a while. I got through it, but felt like that could've been a serious mistake in tougher circumstances. I stayed with a lvl2 shield and lack of a door upgrade for far too long, for example. Anyhow, I had planned to get a second ion weapon to backup this first one, but having all 3 weapons slots used, as well as all 8 weapon power bars used, obviously prevented this. I've long been wary of power-hungry 4-power weapons like Glaive Beam for this exact reason, but I wanted to try using the thing. It's pretty fun, even if perhaps not the most tactically efficient weapon!
I also again used Long-Ranged Scanners. I've gone from thinking there wasn't much point in that augmentation to wondering whether it might actually be a mandatory find early on in order to guarantee a high-scrap run. This ship is actually fitted with the LRS augmentation from the get-go, and I saw no need to ever sell it, which is more than I can say for the Titanium System Casing, which was sold in sector 2 as soon as I was buying the shields. As a ship that starts without shields, I'd have thought that this was on purpose - you were "meant" to play through the whole game relying purely on stealth with this one, and that there was some reliable tactic to do this - so it was much to my amusement that pretty much all the guides for this ship say that the first thing you should rectify is the obvious design flaw - the, erm, lack of shields. Without them, beam weapons and enemy combat drones become a huge and often unavoidable problem very quickly. Although I understand it's possible to go for a shieldless run, it seems to be extremely difficult and considered a tough challenge. So much for 'stealth alone is enough, see, we painted the ship black!'
Ah, and I even managed to remember to screenshot this run's stats this time!
Not having studied this screen much before, I'm not sure how those numbers look in the scheme of things. 50 ships defeated, 98 beacons explored, 2130 scrap collected, 8 crew hired. Looks OK to me... presumably the scrap would be significantly less on a Hard difficulty run? Not that I yet feel confident to have a go at playing on hard yet, any more than I dare try a shieldless run! I'm still going for unlocking all the ships and achievements.
Are those achievement pics all meant to look kind of washed out, by the way? They do to me, even if you unlock one on hard difficulty.
So yeah, another good run, for me at least. And this was a seriously sub-optimal run. I was hampering myself with things like not deploying my defense drone immediately on boss fight 1, allowing them to immediately hack my shields, forgetting to use hacking (I really really forget to do that... I might as well not have a hacking system when I buy one, I use it so little), and timing stealth in the third battle at what i'm sure were non-optimized moments so that the first 'mega ion burst' was fielded by my shields instead of the stealthed 100%+ evade rate (talking of which, I also forgot on several occasions that in addition to needing my gold-experienced crew members manning piloting and engines to get that evade rate, the engines needed to be at 4 power bars minimum... the engines are one of my favourite places to drain power from temporarily, so even though my evade rate was taken down to 90% or 95%, I still got whacked by a fair few projectiles that should've been guaranteed evaded.) At least I did remember to deploy - and keep deployed - my defense drone on boss fight 2 though. I'm sure this shot down 3 or 4 boarder drones that would've been a huge PITA (sometimes those guys actually lose me the battle). Very satisfying to see them explode on intercept instead of landing.
I still occasionally get a little bit confused as to what strategy i'm gonna use for my ship's long-term weapons combination - the general question I'm asking is "how am I ultimately going to deal with level 4 shields, and then do damage, taking into account that sometimes a Zoltan shield will first need to be taken down" - but I'm feeling less like I'm thrashing around to stay afloat in the deep end and more like I'm learning, which is way preferable. The game has a way of sucking you in.
In spite of what you said before T-hawk, well, I did go for ion weapons on this run as the main shield-remover (hey, I'm always experimenting). Or more precisely, *an* ion weapon, the Ion Blast 2, which fires fast enough to stack and take shields down, even if it misses sometimes, especially when you combine that with my weapon number 2, Dual Lasers. Stayed with me from the beginning on the game, and were enough to finish off otherwise-weak shields, and often do extra damage. The main damage-dealer, however, was the Glaive Beam I found about halfway through. Obviously that could do massive damage, and took out some ships with one shot alone. I'm still not sure I'd do it again, though, unless the circumstances were just right. The combination of these weapons required all 8 weapon power bars, and purchasing them, the weapons system upgrades, and extra reactor power was very expensive, requiring lots of other things to be sidelined for quite a while. I got through it, but felt like that could've been a serious mistake in tougher circumstances. I stayed with a lvl2 shield and lack of a door upgrade for far too long, for example. Anyhow, I had planned to get a second ion weapon to backup this first one, but having all 3 weapons slots used, as well as all 8 weapon power bars used, obviously prevented this. I've long been wary of power-hungry 4-power weapons like Glaive Beam for this exact reason, but I wanted to try using the thing. It's pretty fun, even if perhaps not the most tactically efficient weapon!
I also again used Long-Ranged Scanners. I've gone from thinking there wasn't much point in that augmentation to wondering whether it might actually be a mandatory find early on in order to guarantee a high-scrap run. This ship is actually fitted with the LRS augmentation from the get-go, and I saw no need to ever sell it, which is more than I can say for the Titanium System Casing, which was sold in sector 2 as soon as I was buying the shields. As a ship that starts without shields, I'd have thought that this was on purpose - you were "meant" to play through the whole game relying purely on stealth with this one, and that there was some reliable tactic to do this - so it was much to my amusement that pretty much all the guides for this ship say that the first thing you should rectify is the obvious design flaw - the, erm, lack of shields. Without them, beam weapons and enemy combat drones become a huge and often unavoidable problem very quickly. Although I understand it's possible to go for a shieldless run, it seems to be extremely difficult and considered a tough challenge. So much for 'stealth alone is enough, see, we painted the ship black!'
Ah, and I even managed to remember to screenshot this run's stats this time!
Not having studied this screen much before, I'm not sure how those numbers look in the scheme of things. 50 ships defeated, 98 beacons explored, 2130 scrap collected, 8 crew hired. Looks OK to me... presumably the scrap would be significantly less on a Hard difficulty run? Not that I yet feel confident to have a go at playing on hard yet, any more than I dare try a shieldless run! I'm still going for unlocking all the ships and achievements.
Are those achievement pics all meant to look kind of washed out, by the way? They do to me, even if you unlock one on hard difficulty.So yeah, another good run, for me at least. And this was a seriously sub-optimal run. I was hampering myself with things like not deploying my defense drone immediately on boss fight 1, allowing them to immediately hack my shields, forgetting to use hacking (I really really forget to do that... I might as well not have a hacking system when I buy one, I use it so little), and timing stealth in the third battle at what i'm sure were non-optimized moments so that the first 'mega ion burst' was fielded by my shields instead of the stealthed 100%+ evade rate (talking of which, I also forgot on several occasions that in addition to needing my gold-experienced crew members manning piloting and engines to get that evade rate, the engines needed to be at 4 power bars minimum... the engines are one of my favourite places to drain power from temporarily, so even though my evade rate was taken down to 90% or 95%, I still got whacked by a fair few projectiles that should've been guaranteed evaded.) At least I did remember to deploy - and keep deployed - my defense drone on boss fight 2 though. I'm sure this shot down 3 or 4 boarder drones that would've been a huge PITA (sometimes those guys actually lose me the battle). Very satisfying to see them explode on intercept instead of landing.
I still occasionally get a little bit confused as to what strategy i'm gonna use for my ship's long-term weapons combination - the general question I'm asking is "how am I ultimately going to deal with level 4 shields, and then do damage, taking into account that sometimes a Zoltan shield will first need to be taken down" - but I'm feeling less like I'm thrashing around to stay afloat in the deep end and more like I'm learning, which is way preferable. The game has a way of sucking you in.