FTL - Faster Than Light

[T-hawk]

On advanced, EVERY time I go vulcan, I lose the game because it takes too long too punch through shields of high dodge ships late game.

Funny you mention this. Through 10 wins on Hard and about 40 runs total, I never even saw a Vulcan. Until last night.




Problem is, this happened with Mantis B, which is of course all about boarding. And you can see I already lost one of my Mantis crew.* And I already have a Swarm missile which is ideal for smashing medbays for boarders to clean up. I really should have bought that Mantis there in the store. But that's a frickin Vulcan gun. Couldn't pass it up. I'll find scrap later to upgrade to weapons level 4.

But a single mantis and a zoltan don't make much of a boarding party. I lost the zoltan too a couple fights later when he got killed too quickly for the teleporter to recycle. A lone Mantis couldn't win anything, I ran from several fights, and got killed by something or other with a hail of missiles.

First shot at the glorious Vulcan and I never even got to use it.

(*Two actually, to an accident boarding an automated rebel scout. With a level two teleporter, I was carefully beaming back the mantises just before they suffocated each time, as is standard strategy. Two hull points left. I teleported them to damage the weapons system, which they did... and then the auto-AI repaired it instantly after... such that the mantises dutifully attacked and damaged it *again* to kill the ship and themselves before my teleporter recycled.)

[Gustaran]

On advanced, EVERY time I go vulcan, I lose the game because it takes too long too punch through shields of high dodge ships late game.

I much prefer something like double flak or burst laser because you don't fight shield recharge.

Yes, Flak and Burst Laser Mk2 is always better, but if you can't get your hands on them a Vulcan is a viable setup in the correct circumstances.

I think the viability depends largely on your setup: If you play on hard difficulty and are already in danger of falling behind the curve, I doubt a Vulcan will be a lot of fun.
On the other hand, if you play on easy or normal with an early Scrap Recovery Arm and can accumulate enough defensive resources (defensive drone, cloak) etc. a Vulcan shreds everything.
I once had a Vulcan paired with two Burst Laser Mk2. Add a level 3 cloak to negate part of the long chargeup time and it was a sight to behold.

[antisocialmunky]

On advanced, EVERY time I go vulcan, I lose the game because it takes too long too punch through shields of high dodge ships late game.

I much prefer something like double flak or burst laser because you don't fight shield recharge.

Yes, Flak and Burst Laser Mk2 is always better, but if you can't get your hands on them a Vulcan is a viable setup in the correct circumstances.

I think the viability depends largely on your setup: If you play on hard difficulty and are already in danger of falling behind the curve, I doubt a Vulcan will be a lot of fun.
On the other hand, if you play on easy or normal with an early Scrap Recovery Arm and can accumulate enough defensive resources (defensive drone, cloak) etc. a Vulcan shreds everything.
I once had a Vulcan paired with two Burst Laser Mk2. Add a level 3 cloak to negate part of the long chargeup time and it was a sight to behold.

After watching Sullla's stream, I can say that gattling lasers have the same issue as ions and probably all the rapid fire weapons in this game:

1) It takes too long to get to the point late game where you can keep the shields down
2) It is easy to have all the progress vs shield wiped away by either a lucky missile hit that takes your weapon down, cloak, or evade hax

Better to have the ability to overwhelm the shields or bypass them entirely than go the low constant dps route.

[Sullla]

I believe that the Vulcan is being undervalued in these last few posts. No, it's not an all-crushing "win the game no matter what" button, but when leveraged properly it can be devastatingly powerful.

Think of the Vulcan as a much better version of an ion cascade setup. Just as having enough ions on hand can permanently shut down enemy shields, the Vulcan will systematically shred through an enemy ship's shield unit once it's done charging. The Vulcan is better, however, because it will be dealing hull damage in addition to system damage, rather than only system damage the way ions do. The Vulcan is also arguably the only weapon that can singlehandedly win the game without needing anything else, and that's a pretty big advantage.

Obviously there are the drawbacks, which are very similar to using an ion setup. The Vulcan can struggle against ships with Cloaking, or Defensive Drone IIs, or heavy evade. Unlike an ion cascade setup, however, I've been able to win in all of those situations with a Vulcan. In fact, I've yet to come across an enemy ship that the Vulcan couldn't kill so long as I kept it charged up and firing away.

Here are a few tactical suggestions that have worked for me with this weapon:

* Always put the Vulcan in slot 1. Always. I've seen so many people on Livestream lose the game because they forgot to do this.

* The Vulcan is not designed for the early game. Do not use it until you have a lot of upgrades in your weapons system. For example, I would never use the Vulcan unless weapons were at least level 6, and preferably higher than that. Using a Vulcan with level 4 weapons is an invitation to disaster. Don't press your luck.

* The Vulcan works best when firing on enemy shields. Don't target enemy weapons, the shields will keep regenerating and blocking most of your shots. Again, think of the Vulcan is being like a better version of an ion setup. Even against level 8 shields, once the Vulcan is done charging, it will start getting hits through to the enemy shield unit, and once that happens, it's only a matter of time. Strip away all of the shields, and then go to work on weapons/engines/etc.

* Additional lasers, beams, and Hacking all pair well with the Vulcan. It synergizes poorly with the Teleporter (don't do what T-Hawk did above ) Defensive stuff like defensive drones and Cloaking are great for waiting out the chargeup time.

I don't have a great Vulcan run recorded on Livestream to link here. If I get a nice recording, I'll try to post it in this thread. I've done it several times offstream though, with that weapon absolutely trashing the last few sectors, up to and including the flagship. It's trendy to trash this weapon and talk about how overrated it is. The Vulcan's still really good though!

[uberfish]

Defense Mark II / Cloaking on the other hand are weaknesses specific to the Ion approach.

One major problem with the Ion setup can be phase 1 of the bossfight. I made it to the boss yesterday with Stealth A and an "Ion Blast II/Halberd Beam/Heavy Laser" setup. Problem: If you don't have hacking to disable the cloak, the bossfight will end right there, because the moment you are getting close to ionizing the shields, the boss will cloak and the ion damage will wear off.

A missile launcher or bomb can solve this problem too.

[T-hawk]

A missile launcher or bomb can solve this problem too.

But if you have one of those occupying a slot, and enough ion stuff to add up to stunlock... then where do you have room for damaging weapons?

While I'm here, check out this tip:

[uberfish]

Beams do so much damage once the shield is down that you can afford a situational slot. last run I played I picked up a pike and halberd beam on a Rock A, so I kept the starting Artemis launcher and added a Hacking and Ion 2 for redundancy. Didn't even upgrade the weapon battery past level 6, so I could only run three out of four weapons at any one time.

[Gustaran]

Beams do so much damage once the shield is down that you can afford a situational slot. last run I played I picked up a pike and halberd beam on a Rock A, so I kept the starting Artemis launcher and added a Hacking and Ion 2 for redundancy. Didn't even upgrade the weapon battery past level 6, so I could only run three out of four weapons at any one time.

My problem was that I didn't have a hacking module to disable the cloak, so obviously it was not available to deplete shields either. I don't think the bossfight will go very well considering a 3 weapon setup that consists of 2 beams and an Artemis launcher.
Artemis does 2 damage per hit, so in order to destroy the shields completely you would need 4 hits. With 20% boss dodge rate and large cloak intervals that allow substantial repairs this is not a setup I would like to rely on. It might be different with a 4 weapon ship, so you bomb/missile the cloak and then use the Ion Blast II to target shields (which seems to be the only viable ion weapon in such a setup, since sacrificing two weapon slots for ion again hampers your damage output).

BTW, I read an interesting advise for boss fight phase 3: If too many of the invaders threaten to overwhelm you, it seems it is possible to jump away, kill the enemy crew members (who remain on board of your ship when you jump away) and jump back later to restart phase 3. A word of caution: If you jump into a location where an enemy ship with a clone bay waits, the killed enemy crew supposedly will revive on the new ship.

[uberfish]

Well, on phase 2 of the boss with that ship I couldn't hack because of the defence drone (I don't know about the power exploit anyway) so I used just Ion 2 + one beam and killed it, it just took longer. So, phase 1 should also be doable with Ion 2 + one beam + a missile/bomb to disable the cloak.

[antisocialmunky]

I believe that the Vulcan is being undervalued in these last few posts. No, it's not an all-crushing "win the game no matter what" button, but when leveraged properly it can be devastatingly powerful.

Think of the Vulcan as a much better version of an ion cascade setup. Just as having enough ions on hand can permanently shut down enemy shields, the Vulcan will systematically shred through an enemy ship's shield unit once it's done charging. The Vulcan is better, however, because it will be dealing hull damage in addition to system damage, rather than only system damage the way ions do. The Vulcan is also arguably the only weapon that can singlehandedly win the game without needing anything else, and that's a pretty big advantage.

Obviously there are the drawbacks, which are very similar to using an ion setup. The Vulcan can struggle against ships with Cloaking, or Defensive Drone IIs, or heavy evade. Unlike an ion cascade setup, however, I've been able to win in all of those situations with a Vulcan. In fact, I've yet to come across an enemy ship that the Vulcan couldn't kill so long as I kept it charged up and firing away.

Here are a few tactical suggestions that have worked for me with this weapon:

* Always put the Vulcan in slot 1. Always. I've seen so many people on Livestream lose the game because they forgot to do this.

* The Vulcan is not designed for the early game. Do not use it until you have a lot of upgrades in your weapons system. For example, I would never use the Vulcan unless weapons were at least level 6, and preferably higher than that. Using a Vulcan with level 4 weapons is an invitation to disaster. Don't press your luck.

* The Vulcan works best when firing on enemy shields. Don't target enemy weapons, the shields will keep regenerating and blocking most of your shots. Again, think of the Vulcan is being like a better version of an ion setup. Even against level 8 shields, once the Vulcan is done charging, it will start getting hits through to the enemy shield unit, and once that happens, it's only a matter of time. Strip away all of the shields, and then go to work on weapons/engines/etc.

* Additional lasers, beams, and Hacking all pair well with the Vulcan. It synergizes poorly with the Teleporter (don't do what T-Hawk did above ) Defensive stuff like defensive drones and Cloaking are great for waiting out the chargeup time.

I don't have a great Vulcan run recorded on Livestream to link here. If I get a nice recording, I'll try to post it in this thread. I've done it several times offstream though, with that weapon absolutely trashing the last few sectors, up to and including the flagship. It's trendy to trash this weapon and talk about how overrated it is. The Vulcan's still really good though!

I'm 0-3 with the vulcan against the boss ship.