My first win against the final boss was on normal with the Kestral. But I was basically kitted out. I had gotten the +10% scrap augmentation in sector 1 and basically rode that to have lv. 4 shields, all the +5 evasion engine upgrades, paired burst III lasers with the preigniter and the reloader going as well.
If I go boarding I tend to use paired mantis if I can get them. Also, for the final boss you can get quite a bit of mileage out of just killing the crew on weapons, you just need a sensor to see when you've done the job. I tend to target the missiles first, then the ion, then the hull lasers. Basically try and shut down his damage output as quickly as possible.
Sareln Wrote:If I go boarding I tend to use paired mantis if I can get them. Also, for the final boss you can get quite a bit of mileage out of just killing the crew on weapons, you just need a sensor to see when you've done the job. I tend to target the missiles first, then the ion, then the hull lasers. Basically try and shut down his damage output as quickly as possible.
I find that just a pair isn't enough to win cosistently; I had one game where I basically went pure boarding, and had 4 Mantises who could go 2-2 against enemy boarders or crush a ship rapidly. Max defense and porters works really well if:
Enough mantis and/or Rockmen
A way to kill the AI-only scouts (Fed ship is good here: Artillery Beam always works)
My very first game was going pretty well. (Normal difficulty, no easy crap for me.) I got lots of free scrap through the first two sectors, found two more crew, and upgraded my shields and bought a shield recharger. Most enemy ships couldn't touch me through that. I even looted some weapons and a drone, although kept falling just short of having enough cash to buy a drone system at each such store. And I couldn't power the weapons - I had lasers that took 2 and 3 power, but never quite scraped together the cash to push the weapons system to 5.
Until... at the exit node for sector 3, I managed to run myself out of jump fuel. So I sat there at the exit node, while Rebel ship after ship kept arriving. I ran out of missiles too, and then couldn't outrace the shield recharge rate of any enemy ship. This went on for like an hour, neither me nor the enemy ships dealing any damage to each other, and eventually each rebel would run away. Finally a rebel Elite Fighter arrived with enough weapons juice to put me out of my misery. Scored 910 on the first game.
My one complaint - where do you click to sell consumables at stores, or is it not possible? Several times I wanted to sell off surplus missiles and drone programs to buy a more durable good, but the option doesn't seem to be available.
As far as I know there isn't a way to sell excess missiles or drones, which is a shame as it would be very useful sometimes.
What is the luckiest run people have had? I was flying the Federation Cruiser and ended up with two burst II lasers, a burst III laser and a weapon preigniter. Eleven laser shots in the first second of an encounter
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
“I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
My second game with the Torus ship (unlocked for reaching sector 5 with the original ship) went really well. It comes with an attack drone, and I found another in like my second battle. The combo of two drones and the ion gun that the Torus starts with easily wiped out everything in the first three sectors. Drones unlike weapons don't need charge-up time, so the drones would drop the shields and the ion gun disable the weapons before the enemy could shoot. I rounded out the package by getting up to 5 crew early and some other assorted upgrades like doors and an anti-personnel drone.
Around sector 5, the drone + ion combination started falling behind and I swapped over to more conventional weaponry. It was touch and go for a while on the supply of consumables - drone parts, and twice I jumped to a store with my last unit of fuel! Sectors 6 and 7 start ramping up the payouts,40 or 60 scrap per fight... and I chanced upon the legendary Weapon Pre-Igniter at a store. I hocked some spare weaponry and the anti-personnel droid to buy it, and resumed winning at life. No need for ion stuff after that; I'd let the attack drones soften the shields before I fired the pre-charged weapons, and wipe out the enemy weapon room before they'd shoot at all.
So I reached sector 8, in the first game that I got through 5. Spoilers for the boss sequence:
I beat the first two fights with the boss ship. But I was in trouble thanks to an unlucky map layout. I had gone through both repair nodes on my way to the first boss fight, and didn't realize they couldn't be reused. The map was very linear, with only one path from where I was back to the starting base. I couldn't get there without encountering the boss again.
So I had to go into the third boss fight with only half a hull. We fought, and I had just a sliver of an edge of an upper hand. I killed a few boarders, knocked out one weapons room, and survived one salvo of his big weapon in staying just ahead of the damage on repairing. The boss's hull was halfway down, and I was just about to knock out the second weapons room. But my own hull was too low thanks to missing any chance at repairs, and all I could do was watch in horror as one last stray missile destroyed my intrepid Torus.
I'll win this thing yet. The one big missing piece from that run was a Drone Recovery Arm, which I never found. With that, I would have saved 100+ scrap on buying drone parts, and might have had just enough extra juice (bit more engines for evasion, if nothing else) to win.
And yeah, I logged a win last night, still Normal difficulty. I found and powered enough good weapons* where one synchronized salvo could knock out a weapons room of the boss. That really pulled its teeth. And once I understood how to use the cloaking device (didn't realize that shooting your own weapons causes decloaking), avoiding the big attacks was easy too.
*including a Burst II laser, which the FTLgame.com forums correctly gauge as the best weapon in the game. It looks unassuming, 3x1 shots for 2 power at a moderate charge-up time... but work through the math and it turns out Burst II is the best dps/power ratio in the game by a wide margin. (Burst III with its slow charge time actually has dps just barely exceeding Burst II and consumes twice the power.) And lasers are effective and useful in every fight, not situational like many of the missiles and bombs.
The mathematics of the game are pretty interesting. Overcoming enemy shields is a wild race between damage output and regeneration. Any tiny weapon upgrade can be a make-or-break swing, if it takes the rate at which you can penetrate shields from 3.1 seconds (outraced by regeneration) to 2.9 seconds (you'll eventually win). There's a really stark breakpoint halfway through the game where the enemies step up from 2 shields to 3, dramatically harder to pierce. At that point, you mostly have to give up on overcoming shield regen (like with attack drones) and instead build for big weapon salvos to break through with bursty damage.
Still lots to do after one win, of course. Gotta unlock and try all the ships, particularly the races designed for shipboard invasion.
Logged my first win tonight ... used Red Tail (Kestrel B), got Crew Teleporter as my first and started boarding enemy ships as often as possible (gives more stuff to kill the crew on the ships than destroying them) ... had max Shields, lvl 9 Engines, max Teleporter and lvl 7 Weapons (found no good weapons at all, thank mercy for my pre-igniter, helped getting the battle going much faster ... ended up using a Helbard beam (best weapon by far i got), Small Bomb, Burst laser II and a Basic Laser, and mass Teleport attacking (had 4 Mantis, 3 Zoltan and a Human when i got to sector 8)
My highest score is 4010 (another Red Tail win), in which game i managed to run out of things to buy that would actually be remotely usefull (found 2320 Scrap, never used Drones and Cloaking)
was a bit tricky early on in the second fight, since my pilot was instraglibbed by 2 Missiles and a Boarding drone coming just afterwards ... my regular boarding party (Mantis+Rockman ... only ever found one of each) was busy trying to kick out a boarding crew from my Shield Generators) so i hadn't knocked it out yet.
Weapons for this run; Ion Bomb (bit long load time but the ammount of damage and low poweruse makes it more than worth it) Burst Laser I, Burst Laser II and Hull Laser I ... bombed the shields and then fired everything at one point (Offensive systems first and then their Shields)
