FTL - Faster Than Light

[Molach]

And since next sector will be generated randomly for everyone, no need for stealth:


Sector 7
Civilian sector.


A
Pirate in asteroid field.


Long fight, but manage to take out crew. +3 fuel and +75 scrap.

B
Pirate attacking helpless ship. SAVE THE INNOCENT…uh, bribe? You have ..how many shields? Okay, tough guy, bribe on.


Gain +2 missile, +1 drone and +28 scrap.

Buy 2 power bars and one engine upgrade.

C
Repair damage for scrap. But I’m undamaged! Okay, I’ll put them on my ignore list instead.

D
Ship asks for 15 scrap as toll. Well, taking a bribe instead of going for the BigWyn is one thing, this cannot stand. ATTACK! (Besides he only had 3 shields)

They had two mantis crew and no medbay. Teleport into bridge. Breckon kills his opponent rapidly due to his training, and then helps Chriz terminate his.
Gain 48 scrap and a fire bomb.

E
Empty

F (scanning for shops here)
Federation scout chased by rebel! Let’s help him out.
4 shields, but no medbay. He teleports aboard my ship. I send 4 crew to fight back. 1 human is killed, then I pop cloak to avoid a missile fired and trap the last hostile aboard. 3 humans left on ship. Have a nice day…what little of it remains to you.


Killed crew, but too quite high damage from missiles. +3 fuel +2 missiles and 60 scrap. Federation ship gives 3 fuel 2 missiles and 57 scrap.

Buy 2 weapon bars and 2 power bars. I can use a 3-power missile or 2-power fire bomb now.

G (Distress)
Disease on planet. I send down an Engi to calm down the populace. Gain 4 fuel and 40 scrap, along with long-range scanners. Ditch ‘em.

H (Store)
Buy an anti-ship drone. Sell system repairdrone and artemis launcher.

I
Mantis. They board bridge, so I need to retreat captain out. Also fail to kill them. But I use new 2-shot missile launcher to take out shields and medbay, and when I do beam aboard 2 rocks I clean house easy.

Gain 59 scrap and heavy ion.

J
Shop. Buy beam drone and 2 drone system bars, leading to this configuration:


Also buy 1 reactor bar. Gonna use heavy ion as supplement to lasers, to knock down shields while anti-ship and beam drone try to hurt him. Will be pretty random damage, but should work out okay. I can defend myself with the cloak, gonna upgrade that a bit when I can.
In fact I can, so buy another level in cloaking. Level 2 now.

K
Explore asteroid field, find a ship with missiles. +3 missiles and +55 scrap.

L (Exit)
Empty station. I board, see nothing and gain +29 scrap.
Also realize I misclicked, and bought teleporter upgrade instead of cloak. Buy cloak now, along with power bar.

A much better run, think I got a chance now.

With that, we enter the Last Stand.

[Brackard]

Sector 6 - Zoltan

I've never really liked Zoltan space. The extra shield protection from Zoltans drives me nuts. But this is what was decided, so off we go!



Star 1 - Engi Cruiser with two Engi on board. Slice and Dice make quick work of them. A pleasant surprise this late in the game. A Zoltan prisoner is promptly shown to the airlock....err, shown to the nearest planet.

Star 2 - Rebel Rigger loaded to the brim. Lasers and drones and missiles. This is what I expected. Missiles to the drones, then to the weapons, and finally to med bay. Slice and Dice board shortly thereafter to clean up the mess but not after we take a few shots from missiles. Another Zoltan wishes to join us, and he joins his friend in the airlock, errr.. the nearest planet.

Star 3 - Odd moon. Check it out. Nothing of interest.

Star 4 - Another Rebel Rigger. This one is a 3 shields with triple drones and a double burst laser. It's a long fight, trying to conserve some missiles here. I take a point or two damage, but manage to get him down to surrender. I go ahead and accept. Would have been a no brainer had I fully loaded my shields. I go ahead and upgrade shields fully and up to 20 power bars.

Star 5 - Distress call! It's a pirate trap by a couple of Zoltans. Slice and Dice are able to take them out before they're able to fire a single shot. I love it. Strip it down and move on.

Star 6 - A Mantis Scout armed with missiles, bombs, and lasers. I don't know how you guys play without a defensive drone to take out missiles. I am pounded by 3 or 4 missiles before I finally get them to surrender. I take my losses and move on.

Star 7 - Zoltan Scan. Yeah. No thanks.

Star 8 - I make a deviation and head north to Star 8 where the store is. I was hoping to get a defensive drone 1 here, but it's not to be. However, we do have an anti-ship drone II. This is actually pretty solid for the final stage of the end-boss. I go ahead and purchase that as well as repair my ship as much as possible.



Star 9 - FIRE! My rock crew member jumps into the fray and puts out the fire. They give me something for my trouble. I also make enough to up my drones to 4 slots.



Star 10 - Just south of the exit. Nothing

Star 11 - Exit. Nothing.

So I finish with 1 part of my end game strategy, but I could still use defensive drones and another missile. With that preigniter, I could do really well with taking out the early missile launchers which would be fantastic.



Scrap: 15
Hull: 25 (5 damage)
Fuel: 9
Missiles: 22
Drone schematics: 15

Number of crew & race: 2 humans, 1 zoltan, 2 mantis, 3 rocks
Crew skills: All majors gold, also 1 mantis combat.

Upgrades:
-shields: 8
-engines: 4
-oxygen: 1
-teleporter: 1
-stealth: 1
-weapons: 5
-medbay: 1
-piloting: 1
-sensors: 2
-doors: 2
Reactor: 20 bars
Weapons: Burst Laster II, Burst laser I, Artemis, Pegasus
Drones: Repair, Anti-Ship II
Augmentations: Scrap Recovery, Pre Ignitor

[Brackard]

Sector 7 - Civilian

And here I thought we might have a choice. Nope.



Alrighty, so what do we have here. I'd like to take the southern route, but I honestly can't tell whether some of those eastern paths will reach, so I have to take the northern one. So be it.

Star 1 - There an auto-scout (hate them) but I'm able to cloak my way to the base. I grab some scrap and a defensive drone 2. Hmm...this might be really useful, I'll be sure to keep it.

Star 2 - A store. I really wanted another missile, but nothing doing here. I could buy the other anti-ship, but I think anti-ship 2 will be fine (and possibly be able to micro-between defense and anti ship). I consider the burst laser, but would have to give up a missile in the final to use it, which isn't a good trade. I repair the ship and buy a few fuel and move on.



Star 3 - Another scout, another stealth mission. Download files and move on. The blue here is stars I want to hit. As it stands, I probably SHOULDN'T have, but alas, that's water on the bridge now....



Star 4 - Auto Scout with no shields. Tries to flee but we get it before it moves on. The thing had some serious engines on it. Must have hit it 6 or 7 times before engines went down.

Star 5 - Damaged Federation ship in the nebula. We beam them aboard (blue), get their scrap, them shove them out the airlock, errr, onto the next planet.

Star 6 - To the store. Absolutely nothing of interset. Not even worthy of a screenshot.

Star 7 - Pirate attack. Except it's not me. And it's a zoltan. I hate Zoltans. They offer to give me scrap for nothing. Sure thing! I feel bad. Except not really.



Star 8 - Distress! Pirates stuck in asteroids. I shoot them. Zoltan pirates not friends and attack. I manage to take them out (deny surrender) but do end up taking a few points of damage more than I wanted.

Star 9 - Mantis Bomber. I go defensive with defensive drone II. Simultaneously trying to get through with my lasers to little avail. Also fighting off boarding party (including a Zoltan?!?) Finally, bomber runs out of missiles and I go on offensive with offensive drone. Push through with my lasers and take out the med bay. Slice and Dice teleport over and begin removing crew while they try to repair med bay. Another salvo puts fire into the med bay and rockman gives up trying to save it. We take the ship and have our choice of crew. We take an engi and release a rockman.

Star 10 - Slug Cruiser. Ugh. What I thought was going to be no issue ends up ripping me up pretty good. The ion cannons do their job well. I end up jumping rather than fighting it out.

Star 11 - Exit. There's a Rebel ship that doesn't want to fight. That's ok for me right now.



I'm hoping to get a repair here shortly. Otherwise, I think I'm looking pretty good going into the final battle. It's not perfect by any means, but definitely winnable.

Scrap: 291
Hull: 14 (16 damage)
Fuel: 6
Missiles: 26
Drone schematics: 15

Number of crew & race: 2 humans, 1 zoltan, 2 mantis, 2 rocks, 1 engi
Crew skills: All majors gold, also 1 mantis combat.

Upgrades:
-shields: 8
-engines: 4
-oxygen: 1
-teleporter: 1
-stealth: 1
-weapons: 5
-medbay: 1
-piloting: 1
-sensors: 2
-doors: 2
Reactor: 20 bars
Weapons: Burst Laster II, Burst laser I, Artemis, Pegasus
Drones: Defense II, Anti-Ship II
Augmentations: Scrap Recovery, Pre Ignitor

[Molach]

Okay, time to end this.
My ship at sector start:



I took a slightly long route getting to the flagship, picked up some fights to gain more scrap. I got:
+1 weapon for 100 scrap, so I could use all weapons (fire bomb was key here)
+2 reactor - well I just needed power. Keeping cloak up at all times, 0-2-4 in droids and a lot in weapons meant that otherwise I would be forced to take away from shield or engines (dodge).

Flagship - round 1. (Damage is from fighting in the sector, this pic is just as fight starts)



Sad to say, this fight is pretty standard now. First thing to do is beam boarders aboard his missile launcher. He gets a salvo off due to starting out cloaked, but I of course was ready to cloak as he fired his 3 missiles. After that missed salvo there was very little he could do to hurt me. Boarders went home, healed, then got his beam weapon ('just in case' he gets lucky with ion+laser taking out my shield). I then took out ion blasters with laser fire.



Now for the tricky part. My ship is completely safe, so next mission is to kill all crew except the one manning the laser. (Remebering to keep O2 online, otherwise he will die leading to an automated ship which is a bit worse to fight) I firebombed his medbay and fired lasers/ion into it, then sent boarders. Probably a mistake, because he came with 4 defenders. I then targeted a second fire bomb into the fight. Yup, had an idea my rockmen were immune. They weren't, but perhaps resistant. Both survived with less than 10 HPs, and I could teleport them right out. 2 rebels were killed, 2 others severely wounded, and medbay would be on fire & damaged rest of fight.



While healing my rockmen I sent my bug and Lauren the engineer over, they killed last three rebels easy.



Result - one crew left, who cannot defend against boarders, make any repairs or put out any fires in the main area of his ship. (Wonderful ship desogn, can only move crew around when docked with a base - hopefully the gunners have a little toilet in there with them...)

Round 2.
Again teleport into missile bay.



This time no missiles because no cloak and no defender to slow my crew down. Firebomb into shields first, laser fire at drone control, second fire bomb into drones.



Boarding drone hit my O2, always a hassle. But remembered (barely) to get my crew out of there before suffocating, so no harm done. First power surge - no sweat with a cloak.

Second surge - no cloak ready:


Just let one laser hit through, but it hit my cockpit. Temporarily 0 % evade, so gonna upgrade cockpit to level 2, so it can withstand a 1-damage hit at least.

Got a defense drone I from looting the remains, not gonna use it though...offense IS the best defense, when they ain't got missiles.

Round 3.


I power up both drones to take down shield as quick as possible. After I fire bomb the shields, and teleport into missiles. He manages to fire missiles, I cloak. Then the power surge (not timed with his ship-laser of course---stupid AI) Well I missed the screenshot but there were a lot of MISS. Only 2 hit, easily absorbed by shields.
Second power surge IS timed with ship-laser, and I do cloak it...



A few more firebombs, some laser fire...and it's going down, baby. It's going down.




Final score:


No new session best, and 'new high score' means only it's in the top 5.



Hey, look at that. What's that other realms beyond doing there? I took MY save from sector 5, the one with triple lasers forward (quickly, without pics) just to see. That ship won pretty handily as well, just brute-force lasers to take out shields and damage whichever system it needed to. More finesse using the droids, but I still think that just massing lasers/ion/beams is the quicker way to go.

This game does need a 'hard' setting, to be honest. I know choosing a different craft can be considered hard, but still would like the setting so the easy ships can have some challenges too. I don't think any of the saves are auto-lose. If I get time I'll play through the worst save (whichever that is) and see if I can't win that as well.

[Brackard]

Sector 8 - Showdown

So, here we are in the showdown. I actually come into the sector pretty beat up. Fortunately, in addition to fuel, you also get some hull repaired. I never knew that, or paid attention to it anyway.

It'd be nice if we had a repair slot along the way. Let's take a look.



Sweet. I can hit multiple repairs along the way.

So, nothing interesting along the way. More repairs, missiles, fuel, drones. I really don't need them at this point, but I'll take them.

As far as status goes, I'm pretty solid. Drones are setup with Defense II and Attack II. Both will be useful. As you'll see below. This is my general attack plan. Molach likes his multiple lasers. I dislike it. My miss rate is much too high.

So, we hit the mothership. Now I have a slightly different strategy in hitting the mothership than common conventions. Most people will be like Molach, and hit the missiles, the ion, and then the beams. Because of too many issues in Phase II and Phasea III of the battle, I'll go ahead and take the automated ship repair in Phase III for the ability to take out the triple laser quickly in Phase II and Phase III.



So, we start it off. And like Molach, we wait for the mothership to get out of stealth. Unlike Molach, I have the Pre Ignitor, BUT I forget to switch it to missiles. My barrage of lasers totally miss, worthless. Slice and Dice move into the missile bay. My missiles are able to take out the triple laser bay. We cloak through the first missile barrage. Shortly after the second enemy cloak, we're looking like this:



So, with the immediate threat over, it's time to hit interior. When I beam in with the two person team, I generally hit the sensors room. It's the furthest away from the med bay and everyone else, so it gives me more time to double team enemies as they come in. So Slice and Dice begin their grizzly work. The first enemy comes in, gets sliced and diced, and leaves for med bay. He's replaced by two others. As the guy goes for med-bay, I barrage med bay with missiles. It kills the wounded, and destroys the med bay. This allows Slice and Dice to kill another two people before they beam out for healing. (Had to wait for cloak).



We have another four to go. Get back in there and begin again. This time however, things go bad for the enemy. My missile barrage not only takes out the med bay, and creates not one, but TWO hull breaches in med bay. The oxygen loss, in addition to slice and dice put everyone in blinking red around the ship. It's cleanup from there. The ship is mine.



I take down Phase I without a scratch.

Now Phase II. I hate Phase II. Out of the three phases, Phase II seems to have the lease margin of error for me. When things even BEGIN to start getting out of hand, it's all over but the scoring screen. In this phase, I prep before getting in. The defense II drone is setup as well as missiles. Now defensive drones are really cool in this phase. I generally try moving in with a pair of defense I drones. Why? They are able to shoot down the incoming boarding drones. The mothership only has like five of them, and I often shoot them all done without being touched. Defensive I are better than defensive II simply because the advanced also shoot down lasers. There are LOTS of lasers flying around here so possibility that the drone gets through. But I stick with what I have.

Alrighty, let's get going.



Slice and dice immediately beam over to missiles and begin working on that. My missiles fire over. One gets shot down by the drone. The other two (yes, I have pegasus missiles that shoot two at a time - SWEET) hit drone central. One of them causes a fire. Just a matter of time for that to go down. I cloak through the first barrage of missiles. The swarm does nothing. Note the swarm is random each time. I've had an all beam swarm before which was really, really nice. Semi dangerous mixture here with 3-4 laser drones. They do manage to get through once to nick the hull. Could have been prevented. Next barrage of missiles takes out the laser port.



Slice and Dice beam to the shield room and take out shields. Beam back, and clean up. Voila. So far, so good.



So, round 3. We begin with my lasers prepped (burst 1 and 2), and my anti drone II up and going. Out of 5 shots, I think I hit once. I cloak through the first missile barrage. We finally manage to take down the special shield. Slice and dice work on missiles. Unfortunately, a missile barrage coincided along with a special attack and got me pretty good.



Missiles go down shortly thereafter. From there, it was pretty much just pounding the thing with missiles. Lasers go down. Shields go down. Piloting goes down. And before the mothership has another chance to up its "special" shield. It's game over man, game over.



And end game.



And scoring. Yes, that's right, this was my high score.



I'd like to thank Molach for putting this together. I really enjoyed it. If you want to do something similar again, just let me know!

[Molach]

Yes, thanks for playing. And reading.

I've quenched my FTL-thirst for a while, thinking about presenting another roguelike for the crowd here...but that will take a new thread....

[spellman]

Yes, thanks for playing. And reading.

I've quenched my FTL-thirst for a while, thinking about presenting another roguelike for the crowd here...but that will take a new thread....

dun dun duuuuuuun

[Krill]

Why are there so many ways to lose a game with absolutely no control? Like going to a random point and getting invaded by double the number of crew you have?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

Welcome to roguelikia! Rapid development + unfair bullshit is what the genre thrives on!

You probably stayed up playing it past midnight, so at least that's worth something.

If you're boarded and have a tiny crew, the best thing to do is vent everything except the medbay and retreat everyone there.

[NobleHelium]

You might be progressing too quickly. You want to milk each sector for as long as possible so that you get more scrap and other stuff while things are still easy, before the difficulty goes up in the next sector. Of course the chasing fleet will cap your advancement on resources (but not score if you can beat them flawlessly, as T-hawk demonstrated), but you should keep jumping around the sector until then.