FTL - Faster Than Light

[Gustaran]

Uh, T-Hawk...
...the timing on that shot? You're a robot.

You are exaggerating - I am sure he could have waited at least 0.035 seconds longer before jumping away...

[T-hawk]

It never occurred to me that you guys would find that unusual. That's totally normal. I routinely pause with incoming shots in positions like that, so I can do things like fire a weapon just before it gets hit, or pull power out of a system just before it gets ionized, or even jump away just before the piloting gets hit.

It's not any kind of crazy robotic timing. The window is maybe a third of a second. That's plenty. If you've ever stomped a goomba in Mario or struck a note in Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, you've hit a timing window narrower than that.

I can certainly do crazy robotic timing - I full combo songs in Guitar Hero like Sullla does in DDR, and do this in 2d shmups - but FTL isn't that.

[Gustaran]

Yay, after innummerable tries, I finally beat the damn Rebels Flagship on hard!

41 ships defeated, 98 beacons explored, but only 1396 scrap which according to T-Hawks report is a rather low number.
Used the Kestrel A's Burst MK2, bought two Burst MK1s for 50 scrap each and found a HeavyLaser I, so I had the preferable standard laser setup in the end.

Two things I noticed:

- Hull repair drone is really really good. It helped tremendously in the middle game, because I did not need to spend anything on hull repairs. In addition the option of full repair between boss fight phases is close to OP as well.

- If you can only afford one level of hacking it is indeed the best idea to hack pilot for dodge reduction as has been mentioned on this thread before IIRC.

It never occurred to me that you guys would find that unusual. That's totally normal. I routinely pause with incoming shots in positions like that, so I can do things like fire a weapon just before it gets hit, or pull power out of a system just before it gets ionized, or even jump away just before the piloting gets hit.

It's not any kind of crazy robotic timing. The window is maybe a third of a second. That's plenty. If you've ever stomped a goomba in Mario or struck a note in Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, you've hit a timing window narrower than that.

I remember Street Fighter 4 has quite a lot of 1 frame links, which even pro players occasionally miss. Still, FTL is not know for being a reaction based game and it is a cool screenshot after all.

[T-hawk]

Nice! Yeah, the Kestrel's starting Burst II alone probably makes up about half a difficulty level worth of difference.

The scrap numbers I've found seem to be bimodal depending on Long-Ranged Scanners, consistently around 1400 without or 1800 with. Intermediate numbers come if you go without LRS but get a couple timely sector map reveals. Boarding ships come in a few hundred higher as well.

The Hull Repair drone is pretty good if you come into it randomly, but that 85 is too much to spend on buying it.

[Gustaran]

Yeah, the Kestrel's starting Burst II alone probably makes up about half a difficulty level worth of difference.

I feel the same way, but when you check AE ship tier lists on reddit the Kestrel A basically never makes it into the top 10.

The scrap numbers I've found seem to be bimodal depending on Long-Ranged Scanners, consistently around 1400 without or 1800 with.

Still, those numbers might be deceiving. I am fairly sure I made at least another ~150 scrap from selling looted drones, augments and weapons which will probably not show in the "scrap collected" column. Same thing with crew, depending on the ship and bad luck with events you might have to purchase crew members and sometimes there is absolutely no need to do this, which can make another 100 scrap difference or more.
It is also important to know events and results. I sometimes check on the wiki, events like Zoltan First Contact can give a very nice boost if you choose the correct option.

The Hull Repair drone is pretty good if you come into it randomly, but that 85 is too much to spend on buying it.

Of course - I used it to great effect, but only because it was a drop. That being said I feel the layout of sector 8 is an important factor in the boss fight difficulty (ok, depending on the state of your ship). Sometimes you can easily visit two repair stations, maybe even between phases, sometimes you can't even safely reach one.

[T-hawk]

The ion weapons are still something that I'm trying to get a good feel for. There's a fine line between an ion weapon that knocks off one shield bubble and does nothing else, and the cascading ion sequence that eliminates all shields and keeps them permanently depowered. I need to play around more with the ion weapons to get a better handle on how they function with more than one of them in operation at a time. They feel like the weapons with the highest skillcap to use effectively, since they never directly deal damage.

So I finally actually tried a real run relying primarily on ion weapons last night. With Engi A, an Ion Blast I came early on to add to the starting Ion Blast II. Later I got a second IB2 to replace the IB1.

Problem 1, you can't afford to use a combat drone in every fight. Even a Drone Recovery Arm wasn't enough since fights would last so long that the combat and defense drones would keep getting hit and destroyed.

Then I got a Chain Laser for damage. So what I'd have to do is ion the shields and weapons for a while, then switch over to the laser for damage. The Chain Laser is actually a pretty good companion, the fast charge able to take advantage of the shield stunlock.

Problem 2, cloaking. Goddamn that cloaking. Any cloaking above level one would interrupt the ion stunlock, even with two IB2s both going. The chain laser would get absolutely nowhere.

Problem 3, enemy systems in general. I had so many fights that went like this. Need to ion the piloting to kill the evade to get to the cloaking. Need to ion the cloaking to keep the stunlock going to get to the piloting. Catch-22. Not to mention getting through the shields in the first place too, or the weapons to keep the damage off me, or even the hacking that's on my oxygen to set a time limit for the fight. There's just too many targets and not even dual Ion Blast IIs can keep up with them all.

Ion weapons are a trap. They feel all complicated and skill-testing so you feel clever in making them work. But there is no upside ceiling there, no reward for playing the skill properly. Anything ions can do, burst lasers can do just as well and more reliably and much faster.

That shield stunlock looks so tempting... but it's something you just don't need to do. An equal amount of regular lasers will get through the shields too in bursty fashion rather than continuous... and that's all you need because the lasers will also deal damage. Stunlock to open the way for a combat drone looks like such a great idea... if you can afford the drone part and the enemy doesn't have an anti-drone and the enemy doesn't have a missile that hits your drone system and the combat drone doesn't bump itself into some laser or asteroid. There's just too many contingencies that fail too often. It's the Danger of Cool Things. Stick with simple stuff that just works.

At the last store in sector 7, I just gave up and sold out the ions for a Flak II, Breach Bomb, and hacking to drop the shields. This smacked through the flagship phase one a million times better than anything ionic would have.

(I lost on flagship phase 2, but for entirely different reasons: my crew was all Engi who couldn't get rid of a boarding drone in the shield room, which eventually destroyed the shields for the drone surge to kill me. But this ultimately points back to the failed ion approach - thanks to buying too many repairs and drone parts, I could never afford Cloaking which is the silver bullet against the drone surge.)

I feel the same way, but when you check AE ship tier lists on reddit the Kestrel A basically never makes it into the top 10.

That's a popularity contest, which will reward being splashy, which the Kestrel A and its BL2 aren't. Everybody likes the boarding ships because boarding feels more cruel and satisfying, kind of ignoring the cases where boarding doesn't work. For gunships, the Federation artillery, the Stealth ships, and even the Kestrel B (four guns) are more splashy than Kestrel A.

[Sullla]

Ion weapons are a trap. They feel all complicated and skill-testing so you feel clever in making them work. But there is no upside ceiling there, no reward for playing the skill properly. Anything ions can do, burst lasers can do just as well and more reliably and much faster.

Thank you for posting this! I've had the same feeling ever since I started playing FTL, only I kept reading all those posts in the FTL forums about how ion weapons were so awesome, including a bunch of people claiming that Engi A was one of the best two or three ships in the game. I've been doubting myself for the longest time, thinking that I was missing something here about the ion weapons. Glad to hear that I'm not the only one thinking that lots of lasers are generally the best way to go.

I also think that the Kestrel A is one of the better ships in the game, largely because of the Burst II Laser. The default starting ship tends to get overlooked because people are tired of using it by the time they have everything unlocked. Tier lists like this one that grant all of the highest spots to boarding and ion ships have never made much sense to me. I just roll my eyes at anyone who sees the Kestrel B as the 10th best ship in the game, or has Lanius B as the 17th best ship (WTF!?)

[T-hawk]

Engi A is good for newbies who don't yet understand the principle of salvo firing. The ion blast on autofire plus the combat drone just work with no tactical skill needed. These players are going to lose in sector 6 to an autoscout with three shields and cloaking, but they don't realize that the failure point was the unreliable ion setup, and hey the Engi got them farther than the Kestrel did, therefore it's a good ship. My very first win way back when was with Engi A.

[sunrise089]

Isn't the Artemis on the Kestrel A pretty good too?

[T-hawk]

For about two sectors, then you run out of missiles. It's good to start but you'll be replacing it.