the Game Wrote:Haha!I am the dread pirate Tuco, prepare to die!
I wonder did he spend most of the game asking you "If you work for a living, then why do you kill yourself working?" and pondering on how "there are two kinds of people in the world, my friend"?
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The pilot turned to his crewmates."Well, thats one sector down, but we still have a long way before we are safe in federation space. Our two allied vessels have both come down with mechanical failures, so we must carry on this mission"
The engineer piped up "But why are we already jumping into the next sector? Shouldn't federation HQ call back with instructions?" Weps, as emphatic as the weapons he operated, answered blunty "We'd be roasted by rebel laser fire before those dallying sods could agree on where to hop" "Well, next jump we can afford a slight delay before jumping, but this jump was a no-brainer - we'll get help from our zoltan allies rather than fleeing through a sector already overrun by the rebel scum"
There was clearly discord amongst the crew, Weps muttering about "target practise" and Engi lamenting the loss of "engine upgrade from scrap material" but as they already found themselves in Zoltan space they quickly laid their differences to rest and stared at the starmap intently.
Where to go now? And more importantly, what to upgrade?
Molach's save Zoltan sector
Won the vote. Somehow.
Sector 2 is up!
Sector map ship stats (easier to edit at end of sector):
So, plan here is to follow the yellow brick road. With possible addition of green if I have the time. I've had the chance to run through another couple of games after watching how these were played. My biggest problem it seems is that I've simply not gotten to enough stars before jumping to the next sector.
So, we'll see how we do here.
Star 1: Zoltan Energy Fighter. Ion cannon and single bolt laser of some type. Long battle, but no damage taken. +1 missile, +1 drone, +16 scrap.
Star 2: Slug Interceptor . No issues. Surrender: 2 fuel, 2 missiles, 16 scrap. Not. Boom. 3 fuel, 2 missiles 19 scrap. Slightly better. They weren't giving us everything! Unacceptable!
Star 3: Hmmm... Energy Bomber in the energy field. Take out shields and the rest should take of themselves. Just worried about the first round of weapon attacks. Power up the missile for the weapons, and attack the shields.
Drone did a little bit of damage, but by the time my burst laser was ready, the asteroids had taken down the energy shield, burst through the regular shield, taken out the Zoltan's shield GENERATOR, taken out the helm, and in general, was giving the ship a beating. One volley of burst laser put the ship under. We have a fire at the helm which was put out with little issue. 3 fuel, 1 drone, 23 scrap.
Star 4: Zoltan Energy Fighter. No issues. Take it down. Fuel 1, Missiles 2, Scrap 19, Anti ship I Drone. Not a bad haul. We see a store here as well. Saving scrap for the store run.
Star 5: Engi Scout. No issues. Level 2 shields took care of everything. 2 fuel, 1 drone, 19 scrap.
Star 6: Rebel Rigger. Lots of fighting this time around. Drones. Boarding drone hits us in the AFT! Their weapons are no longer the target. Drone room is. Took the drone down, took drone control down. Enemy weapons are no issue, so just concentrate on making sure drone doesn't come back up.
Surrender: 3 fuel, 1 drone, 14 scrap. Again, NOT. So we get 1 fuel, 1 drone, 22 scrap. About a wash. (1 extra scrap there!) Heal up, fuel up.
Star 7: Mantis Black Market store.
Now here's where it's going to start getting interesting. How do people's play styles differ, especially early game. If I had a mantis or rock, I'd go teleporter and upgrade my sensors as I do enjoy that part of the game. As it stands, where we only have three crew, I think I'm going to go with the drone control for the anti-ship drone I have (a little more firepower). With the rest, I want to repair my ship and purchase the energy upgrades to run the drones. I leave the store with 38 scrap.
Also, this is where I stand in regards to the rebels catching me. I might not have enough to make all the jumps, but we'll try our best.
Star 8: Military exercises. Nothing of interest here.
Star 9: Mantis Scout. Let's play with drones a bit, just because. Also boarded, except I forgot to actually INSTALL the attack drone.... That sucks.
A missile fired, taking out their weapons, burst laser at shields. And we're boarded. Fortunately, just a single mantis which we take out 2 on 1. The fight is mundane after that, taking it out with burst lasers. 2 fuel, 1 missile, 17 scrap.
Star 10: Intruders on the ship! They knock out sensors before boarding. They attack the bridge. I retreat to the drone room, only to realize there are 4 (or 5) of them and retreat to med bay and wait. Drones destoryed. Helm destoryed. Some back and forth into med bay throughout the struggle. Shields offline. And then they bring the fight to med bay. Yeah, the party ends there. My crew alive. Heal the crew, repair the ship.
Star 11: I decide I can't wait and make for the exit. It was simply too close and another detour would end up me fighting something I wasn't ready for. At the exit, I meet slavers. Attack the slaver scum!! (Mantis Scout)
Dammit, shields still down from the boarding attack and I take 2 damage unnecessarily. Missile and burst take out the weapons system and cleanup after that. The slavers offer us a slave as tribute which we accept, and we leave the Zoltan system one human higher. Welcome Lisandra to the crew. She was going to be sold for...entertainment purposes so she's very happy to be aboard. I assign her to shields.
1) First up, some Zoltans want to scan me and my crew. Figuring the experience has to be less invasive than airport security I say “Why the hell not”. They give me the delicious sounding “stiff dough cakes” and a small amount of scrap (15). We only have the three original crew members so I use the scrap and some change to upgrade my doors.
2) Auto assault with an ion blast and a duel laser. I stop the laser from firing, then kill it pretty easily. Get some fuel, scrap and missiles.
3) A Zoltan Elder wants me to look into a great eye. Hoping that the eyes were plural and actually belonged to some sort of fabulous space woman, I had my crew take a peek. After regaining consciousness, our only vague recollection was that their used to be a guy manning the weapons. For his sake I hope that ‘Mr Weapons’ did indeed run off with a space-broad. I’m still having him courtmarshalled for desertion though.
4) Autoassault, missile, dual laser and antiship 1 drone. Realising rather late that it also has two shields I power up the artemis. Unfortunately, my missile and burst lasers all missed and his were exceedingly accurate. I had my weapons and shields damaged and my O2 completely down before finally managing to take out his missile. Finishing the droid off was then fairly routine, however I am down to a quarter of my hull. I need more survivability so I upgraded engines to level 4.
5) Landing in the middle of an ion storm, there was an option to pursue pirates for fuel, ammunition or just let them leave. The sensible option probably would have been to let them leave, but I thought they might have a cool weapon. The initial missile exchange led to hits to both our weapons systems, fortunately my system is more powerful and my weapons apparently stronger. His weapons completely disabled, I chipped away at him until he wanted to flee and then missiled his pilots bay for the kill. My reward for risking my remaining crew. 11 scrap and 2 missiles.
6) Nothing happened.
7) Energy fighter with bombs and a heavy laser. Provided he doesn’t go for my shields with a bomb damage should be minimal. Turns out it was an ion bomb and his initial shot went to my engines. Easy money.
8) Worried about my ship I ran to a store and fixed up the ol’ girl. With only 46 scrap remaining there was nothing else interesting to purchase, so no shopping sprees today.
9) Zoltan energy fighter in an asteroid field, he has a dual laser, pike beam and a beam drone. Hmmm, if both my shields go down he could really wreck my day. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.
10) Rebel rigger; beam, dual laser + boarding drone. Happily the drone landed in an unoccupied room, and I have level 2 doors. After disabling their drone control, there was no real problems.
11) Engi scout, dual laser, heavy laser and a defense drone. Flawless kill for 23 scrap.
12) Visited another store, with 110 in the bank and considering the dire crew situation I bought a Zoltan and a mantis. Zoltan went to weapons, and the mantis went to shields until he can be used for more… aggressive…purposes.
13) Exit of the sector and some slaver scum appeared. I attacked them until they bought me off with the offer of a Rock Slave. Here’s a final peek at the ship.
Number of crew & race: 2 humans, zoltan, mantis and Rock
Crew skills: Pilot approx 1.6, Human engineer nearly to 1 on engines and 1/3 weapons. All the rest are zero skilled.
Upgrades:
-shields: 4
-engines: 4
-oxygen: 1
-weapons: 3
-medbay: 1
-piloting: 1
-sensors: 1
-doors: 2
Reactor: 11 (12 with Zoltan charge)
Weapons: Burst Laster II, Artemis.
Drones: Current N/A
Augmentations: None
Well Brackard and I certainly ended up differently. Considering you didn't nearly die, I think your setup has definitely ended up better. Mine has a cool mixed race crew though.
Here's my original planned route. Bounce around nebula for a while, make a run for the exit.
Molach gave me a ton of fuel, no point buying this. I then made the decision to buy L2 doors, just to keep me safe from boarders.
That would come in handy for this event, which could potentially get you into a ship fight AND get boarded. However, just got some scrap out of it. Made the decision to upgrade engines.
First enemy of the season! Can't even touch me. Got 1m, 1dp, and $25 out of it.
Oooh, this event. It can kill crew, or give a ton of scrap. Eh, my crew are underlevelled humans, what's the worse that could happen?
Okay losing crew sucks anyway.
Forgot to grab a screenshot for another autoscout.
A nebula storm event. Hmm, I want some more missiles, so let's pick that one.
Ugh you jerk all your weapons are low power and you can afford all of them.
Took some light damage from the guy.
Next jump was empty. Yellow bars represented my predictions of the rebel's movements. Also decided to drop more money on engines.
Whoo, out of the frying pan! Luckily this isn't a very heavily armed Zoltan ship. Its only scary thing is its Ion bomb.
Luckily, because the AI is stupid, they dropped their Ion bombs on empty rooms and did nothing of value. Got 1f, 1dp, and $25.
Spotted a shop! Unfortunately I spent some money earlier. Hence, I reassessed, decided to land a couple more jumps before the shop in anticipation of anything nice.
Clever plan, Mr Zoltan, hiding out in an Asteroid field which will drain your magical Zoltan shield in seconds.
He actually was a bit scary, because he had a gun and a drone and the asteroids dropped my shield a couple of times. Got 1m, 1dp, and $25 out of it.
First live rebel of the sector! No nasty guns, easy peasy.
Wait, it has a boarding drone? Uh oh. First thing I did was drop a few shots into its drone control, to turn off the boarding drone.
For some weird reason, the drone seemed to instantly break the door after the drone control got fixed. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Oh well, couldn't let it run around and drop weapons below 2 power, so I sent Engines to distract it for a while as I took out the rest of the ship.
Finally, the shop! Ugh, nothing too fancy. Ion II is pretty nice but I wasn't going to be able to afford it for a long time. And I wish I could set up a boarding ship . So, Burst I it is. Kinda weak, but I want more shots per volley.
Too bad I don't have any!
Yes!!! I love early slaver events, as they are basically free crew events.
A few shots later...
And we have a shiny new Engi friend! Too bad I got no scrap out of it to upgrade my weapons to 4 power to fit both my lasers.
Choices for the next sector. Hmm, since I think we're still on the poor end of the risk-reward spectrum, let's choose Rock Sector.
Got some pictures to edit in, but tomorrow. Text for now:
Sector 2
I start by upgrading the medbay.
I did?
Yeap, this is not how I would normally play this. I’d save scrap for either another shield upgrade or to upgrade weapons in case I get my hands on one. Or just save cash to buy a teleporter, which really rocks. So this is a event-driven choice. I’m gambling that I will get events that give me good stuff for having a good medbay. Like, extra crewmembers. So I do something very unexpected and see how it pans out.
I really need more weapons, though, missiles are running low.
Plan:
(pic)
Actual:
(pic) - I went to the nebula, then stayed in upper quadrant. Went to shop, then looped around to gather up scrap before shopping again. Went to two nodes after exit.
A: I participate in a study, gain 15 scrap. Buy sensors level 2
B: Automated scout. Shamefully use it to train crew, as it only has a 1-shot laser and an ion cannon. +2 fuel +1 missile and +25 scrap. Engi and pilot at max skill now.
C: The great eye! I look into it’s depths….and my pilot starts aging in reverse, disappearing into nothingness. Ah, karma. Okay, no more training crew by letting scouts shoot at me. Nice. I was gunning for +crew this trip, not less.
[Comment: I believe there are 4 outcomes from this, since we all got the same we must conclude that random events are decided upon sector generation. Upgrading ship in a way that gives blue options is probably only way to get different results.]
D: Auto-scout again, but now with missile launcher and a ship attack drone. Engage missile, aim at his weapon system. Take 1 point of damage, spend 2 missiles but win. Get some pilot training in too. +1 missile +16 scrap. Take piloting.
E: Ion storm, so very low power. I can hit a fuel ship or ammunition ship or let them leave. Go for ammo ship. His missile misses first shot, and I hit him hard in weapon system. Cleanup time. +2 missiles and +10 scrap.
F: Nothing here. Buy engine upgrade and a power bar.
G: Engi ship. Harmless to me with 2x single-shot lasers. +3 fuel +16 scrap
H: Shop.
I: Distress. Give 3 fuel, gain 30 scrap.
J:
(pic)
Tough fight. Boarders + ship. Good thing I got that +piloting…Send both crew against boarders. Lucky there is little danger from the ship. And I have a quick medbay….handy.
Clean up, needing two healings. They went after my scanners (passed shield room on the way there). Good thing they didn’t take out shields, that might have been hurtful. +3 fuel and +25 scrap. (Piloting is atm 3-5% dodge chance. Nothing to cheer about)
K: Auto-scout. It does 1 point of damage, laser took shield and beam hit a room, but then my laser hit. Easy cleanup. +3 fuel +2 missiles +25 scrap.
H: Back to shop. Buy scrap recovery arm and automated re-loader. If I had been 4 crew now, teleporter instead. Scrap recovery should pay it’s way back before long, but it’s still a gamble. Automated reloader is to cover for my missing weapon officer. Well, he is still here but got upgraded to pilot.
L: Exit. Fight a slaver scum. Easy, and get a slave when they surrender. +1 crew. Human. Make him a new Weapon officer. I now decide to visit two more nodes to improve my ship as much as possible before the end. Means I’ll have to fight a rebel fighter at exit beacon before I can jump. Bring it on.
M: Enemy boarders. No ship. 4 humans, they damage my weapon room while I hit & run. Then they go for the medical bay. Big mistake.
N: Easy ship. Kill a boarder, then belatedly remember to gun for O2 room. Have to kill it. +2 fuel and +19 scrap.
L: Again. A tough enemy…
(pic) Rebel fighter
Dual missile launcher, doubleshields. Power up missile and aim everything at the weapon room. Take some damage.
End state:
Scrap: 25
Hull: 11 (19 damage)
Fuel: 21
Missiles: 9
Drone schematics: Who cares
Number of crew & race: 3 humans
Crew skills: Pilot is well trained, halfway to weapons, 1/3 in shields, some repairs and some fighting. But he has +1 piloting. Engine +2. Weapons raw recruit.
I am a laser/teleport guy rather than drones. I've tried engi cruiser, they can be good, but risk is running out of them drone launch thingies, and then you're if-you-see-kaye-ed.
SLowcheetah got a nice crew, and has good potential. Would rather have 10 damage and 30 scrap at this point, but still. Perfect condition gives some leeway. But offensive capacity needs to be upped soon.
Brackard has a good setup, can be both offensive and defensive with the drones. But it's got drones.
Nicolae has that extra laser, a good selling point, that.
And there is mine, long-term with the scrap recovery arm is good, but it is banged up and hasn't gotten any better from last sector, apart from better dodge chance. A risky choice. Or shall we say, brave choice? Anyway, got some pretty useless upgrades, and no 'blue options' to justify them.
Think I'll decide later too.
Couple of thoughts on drones - and on easy in general. On easy, it seems to be pretty common to add the drones, teleporter, and even stealth, along with associated energy upgrades. As it stands now with my ship, we really shouldn't even really NEED drones for at least another sector or two. And when you do need them, you should be able to switch back and forth between missiles and drones. I rarely have a problem of making it to final sector and have a drone problem. But that's just me.
Looking at the ship setups:
Cheetah - I do like the crew setup there. The best assault crew out of the lot so far anyway.
Brackard - Well rounded, but I do lack crew variety. Note that Rocks toss lots of missiles if not mistaken, something the drones could make short work of.
NC - Short on crew, but as Molach says, the extra laser is nice.
And Molach - Rough run. Recovery arm isn't a big enough draw on easy - we should have plenty of scrap (surely not ALL players will have crap runs).
As for voting - I'll vote myself, and if I can't vote myself, then Cheetah.
I'll go with the group and vote rocks as well for next sector.
On average, everybody thinks they are above average.
![[Image: sector2.png]](http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/4/sector2.png/)
![[Image: 13-map.jpg]](http://sumcbabydaze.org/games/ftl1/13-map.jpg)
![[Image: 14-store.jpg]](http://sumcbabydaze.org/games/ftl1/14-store.jpg)
![[Image: 15-map2.jpg]](http://sumcbabydaze.org/games/ftl1/15-map2.jpg)
. So, Burst I it is. Kinda weak, but I want more shots per volley.
