Started playing this game maybe a week ago and I've beaten the boss a couple of times on easy, a couple on normal difficulty. Enjoying it quite a lot. One of the ships I've unlocked is The Osprey, however, and I'm finding that one much harder to win with. A system slot is wasted by the honestly crappy artillery beam, which probably isn't ever worth upgrading until possibly just before the end boss (if you have extra scrap). But that means I'm down to 2 other subsystems, which I almost always make drones and teleporter because I need to defend against missiles with a defense drone and teleporting onto enemy ships is so useful. But I always seem to get to a point in sector 5 or 6 where I just haven't developed enough, don't have strong enough weapons, or haven't found a defense drone (or hull repair drone which I find is so useful it's verging on mandatory for the final boss if you don't have stealth).
|
FTL - Faster Than Light
|
|
Yeah, as we said upthread, people badly overrate the artillery beam, it's way too slow and doesn't deal focused damage against what you need to break.
I mostly don't recommend adding a teleporter to ships that don't start with one. The higher rewards are fun, but there are always situations where boarding doesn't work (auto-scouts, high level medbays), it takes quite a while (like a whole sector) to pay back the 90 cost, and it really never pays out enough to make up for consuming the system slot away from cloaking or hacking. And yeah, weapon management is the biggest key to not falling behind in the mid-game. Forget the ion trash and any other gimmicks like fire weapons; the way you win is by firing huge bursts of 5-10 projectiles ideally followed up by a damage beam at the instant their shields are popped. 
Well, I finally managed to complete the game using The Osprey. I'm gonna contradict myself a bit, but the artillery beam wasn't *too* bad for "backing up" other weapons in the first part of the game and - once fully upgraded and powered, which is expensive considering the result - doing a great deal of the hull damage to the boss.
I was reading a guide on Reddit and one thing I took to heart was that it said that you should see which weapons you happen to get along the run and try and go with that rather than trying to "re-build" the ship how you want it, which is too expensive. Well, I ended up with 3 laser weapons so used that and a missile, and at the boss stage, that and a beam, to do damage. I got the stealth subsystem, which always makes things quite a bit easier, and though I wasn't able to kill that many of the crew off in boss fight round 2 - meaning quite a few were teleporting on-board in round 3 - I discovered that it's not *that* problematic. After a while of scuffling with their boarding parties, I found that their hull had been ground down to 4 points. My ship was in bad shape, but survived another minute and the artillery beam did indeed finish them off. I'm now trying The Vortex, a ship that starts off with one Engi and some mediocre weaponry. Making this work is gonna be... fun. I suspect it's going to involve quite a bit of dice-rolling until I get a favourable first sector, with maybe 2 free crew members. (April 22nd, 2022, 14:23)jez9999 Wrote: Well, I finally managed to complete the game using The Osprey. I'm gonna contradict myself a bit, but the artillery beam wasn't *too* bad for "backing up" other weapons in the first part of the game and - once fully upgraded and powered, which is expensive considering the result - doing a great deal of the hull damage to the boss. T-Hawk's Engi B (Vortex) run certainly hit some nice dice rolls early. But this is very much a game where "adapt to the situation" is the approach, not "go for this one build every time." http://dos486.com/ftl/series/page1.shtml
Just beaten the final boss with The Vortex, and it's actually the first game where on multiple occasions I've been spoilt for choice as to what strategy I was going to use.
The two main differences I employed this time: First, was able to buy long-range scanners early. Chose to go to ship encounters on every possible occasion. When new to the game this feels bad, with the constant fighting, and you think that 'peaceful' events are a nicer way of getting scrap, but the constant fighting route *always* gets you a lot more scrap. You need to go down this route, especially if you start with a weaker ship that needs a lot of upgrading (and purchases of crew members!) Second - and I don't really remember seeing this emphasized in strategy guides nearly enough, but maybe I've not been reading them enough - I really focused on a distinct 2-step weapons strategy. Step 1, take down shields. Step 2, deal the damage. Time things correctly so that damage is dealt with shields taken down. I think you basically have to use this strategy, whether step 1 is done with ion weapons or lasers, and whether step 2 is done with lasers, beams, or whatever. The majority of your weapons loadout should actually be devoted to step 1; the first 2 of 3 weapons if you only have 3, I'd say. And you only need one weapon at the end to come in and "stab them in the belly", as it were. I started out with a burst laser to take down shields and a heavy laser to do damage, then later I moved on to a breach bomb mk2 targeted at the shields room, followed by a laser charger mk2 to finish off shields and maybe do some damage (it does help quite a bit that I got a pre-igniter, but still...), and then the heavy laser 1 to deal more damage. I could've switched that third weapon with a decent beam. But the fundamental point IMHO is that 2-step strategy, and timing it right so that damage is dealt immediately when shields are taken down. Nothing else will really work. Relying on teleporting will be a disaster the second they have a strong enough crew, or a Zoltan shield to stop you doing it. Teleporting is a "nice-to-have" on top of this crucial fundamental attack strategy. Took me a long time to find stealth, but luckily I managed to find it near the end in sector 7. This made the final boss fight a lot easier. I held off on buying teleporters earlier on, figuring that I'd get the opportunity for either them or stealth in sector 6 or 7, and that if stealth came up, I'd like that instead. Luckily it did come up, but teleporters probably would've otherwise and I could've used them on the final boss to do my "teleport in and destroy that darn missile launcher" strategy. Of course, on the third incarnation of that boss, you have to get through a Zoltan shield first, underlining the necessity of designing for the first step in the aforementioned 2-step strategy. One other note; laser weapons work great for doing damage until your crew decide to start missing their shots. Which against some tough slug ships, for some reason, they frequently did. This hugely prolonged the battles and made them harder. One option is to hack their piloting before you shoot, giving them a 0% evade rate (although I always seem to forget to hack for some reason!), but probably a preferable stratagem for step 2 of the aforementioned 2-step technique is to have a beam weapon at the end - which CAN'T MISS - with step 1 being a strong volley of laser shots to take down shields, or a flak weapon (even more reliable at taking down shields, but sloooooow projectile). Ion weapons are kind of, meh... I don't know how to think about them. They can be very effective in pairs or triples, but that means buying multiple weapons, and powering them, which is expensive. And you need *decent* ion weapons. And the ion bomb uses up missiles. And they can miss quite easily. So I'm inclined against them somewhat. Anyway, just felt like putting into words some rather important info I felt I'd learned this time round.  This changed my game from a struggle to survive into a rather nice voyage of choosing from multiple victory options.Just noticed that I can't seem to get the session stats for that playthrough!  So I can't see things like 'scrap collected'. Looks like the only opportunity you have to get that is to click 'stats' immediately after game over; after that it's gone. Is there any way I can get session stats for previous games? You ought to be able to click on a top score or ship best on the stats screen and get the session stats for that session IMHO.
You're well on your way to mastery of this game. Your point about weapon steps is the #1 strategic point about FTL. I call that first step "popping" the shields, to distinguish between that and taking them down via breaking the shield room or hacking drain. Yes, devote most of your weapons loadout to popping the shield bubbles, with one beam weapon to deal the damage after.
Ions are terrible. Regular lasers/flaks always work better. Ignore ions, or at most just use one to pop one shield bubble as if it's a 1-shot regular laser. Newbies get caught up in the idea of fancy stunlock stacks - but that goes to hell and leaves your ions worse than useless in the problem cases of high evasion or cloaking to dodge shots and reset the ion timer. Flaks are great, just fire them a second before everything else to handle the slowness, you'll get used to that. Also pay attention to physically where it's mounted on the ship (look graphically at the positions for each weapon slot) - put flaks towards the right/forward side so the projectiles don't have to go as far. Enemy evasion gets high later in the game because their ships have high engine levels, and with Advanced Edition, sometimes the pilots have piloting skill. Yeah, the way to stop it is hack or break piloting or engines. And yeah, you can only see the session stats right when you finish that game, as far as I know.
Ya know, I think I am starting to get the hang of this game! Using the same 2-step attack philosophy as mentioned before, I managed to complete it in the stealth ship The Nesasio.
In spite of what you said before T-hawk, well, I did go for ion weapons on this run as the main shield-remover (hey, I'm always experimenting). Or more precisely, *an* ion weapon, the Ion Blast 2, which fires fast enough to stack and take shields down, even if it misses sometimes, especially when you combine that with my weapon number 2, Dual Lasers. Stayed with me from the beginning on the game, and were enough to finish off otherwise-weak shields, and often do extra damage. The main damage-dealer, however, was the Glaive Beam I found about halfway through. Obviously that could do massive damage, and took out some ships with one shot alone. I'm still not sure I'd do it again, though, unless the circumstances were just right. The combination of these weapons required all 8 weapon power bars, and purchasing them, the weapons system upgrades, and extra reactor power was very expensive, requiring lots of other things to be sidelined for quite a while. I got through it, but felt like that could've been a serious mistake in tougher circumstances. I stayed with a lvl2 shield and lack of a door upgrade for far too long, for example. Anyhow, I had planned to get a second ion weapon to backup this first one, but having all 3 weapons slots used, as well as all 8 weapon power bars used, obviously prevented this. I've long been wary of power-hungry 4-power weapons like Glaive Beam for this exact reason, but I wanted to try using the thing. It's pretty fun, even if perhaps not the most tactically efficient weapon! I also again used Long-Ranged Scanners. I've gone from thinking there wasn't much point in that augmentation to wondering whether it might actually be a mandatory find early on in order to guarantee a high-scrap run. This ship is actually fitted with the LRS augmentation from the get-go, and I saw no need to ever sell it, which is more than I can say for the Titanium System Casing, which was sold in sector 2 as soon as I was buying the shields. As a ship that starts without shields, I'd have thought that this was on purpose - you were "meant" to play through the whole game relying purely on stealth with this one, and that there was some reliable tactic to do this - so it was much to my amusement that pretty much all the guides for this ship say that the first thing you should rectify is the obvious design flaw - the, erm, lack of shields. Without them, beam weapons and enemy combat drones become a huge and often unavoidable problem very quickly. Although I understand it's possible to go for a shieldless run, it seems to be extremely difficult and considered a tough challenge. So much for 'stealth alone is enough, see, we painted the ship black!' Ah, and I even managed to remember to screenshot this run's stats this time! Not having studied this screen much before, I'm not sure how those numbers look in the scheme of things. 50 ships defeated, 98 beacons explored, 2130 scrap collected, 8 crew hired. Looks OK to me... presumably the scrap would be significantly less on a Hard difficulty run? Not that I yet feel confident to have a go at playing on hard yet, any more than I dare try a shieldless run! I'm still going for unlocking all the ships and achievements. Are those achievement pics all meant to look kind of washed out, by the way? They do to me, even if you unlock one on hard difficulty.So yeah, another good run, for me at least. And this was a seriously sub-optimal run. I was hampering myself with things like not deploying my defense drone immediately on boss fight 1, allowing them to immediately hack my shields, forgetting to use hacking (I really really forget to do that... I might as well not have a hacking system when I buy one, I use it so little), and timing stealth in the third battle at what i'm sure were non-optimized moments so that the first 'mega ion burst' was fielded by my shields instead of the stealthed 100%+ evade rate (talking of which, I also forgot on several occasions that in addition to needing my gold-experienced crew members manning piloting and engines to get that evade rate, the engines needed to be at 4 power bars minimum... the engines are one of my favourite places to drain power from temporarily, so even though my evade rate was taken down to 90% or 95%, I still got whacked by a fair few projectiles that should've been guaranteed evaded.) At least I did remember to deploy - and keep deployed - my defense drone on boss fight 2 though. I'm sure this shot down 3 or 4 boarder drones that would've been a huge PITA (sometimes those guys actually lose me the battle). Very satisfying to see them explode on intercept instead of landing. I still occasionally get a little bit confused as to what strategy i'm gonna use for my ship's long-term weapons combination - the general question I'm asking is "how am I ultimately going to deal with level 4 shields, and then do damage, taking into account that sometimes a Zoltan shield will first need to be taken down" - but I'm feeling less like I'm thrashing around to stay afloat in the deep end and more like I'm learning, which is way preferable. The game has a way of sucking you in.
April 24th, 2022, 18:12
(This post was last modified: April 24th, 2022, 18:12 by haphazard1.)
Looks like a fun run, jez999.
 The long range scanners, if you get them early, do help a lot with getting more total scrap. But like almost everything else in FTL, you do not have to have them. Working with what a particular run gives you is definitely a big part of the fun. Sometimes you get a nearly ideal set of stuff, and sometimes you struggle to find anything useful. Being able to put less-than-great gear to use and keep pushing forward can make for a particularly satisfying run. Hmmm, now I feel like playing some FTL myself. 
The Stealth ships can go either way on shields or not, the game is open-ended enough that you can pick your own challenges. If your goal is win percentage, yeah you probably want to buy the shields when you can. Although not doing so does have the one more advantage that it does leave a system slot open for something else.
Ion Blast 2 is alright. At 3 power for a 4-second shot interval, it's equivalent to a 3-shot laser that charges in 12 seconds, which is okay-ish though not exceptional. The Glaive Beam is all-or-nothing, as you've learned. It's effective although clunky. It feels great when it kills in one hit, but that really isn't necessary, one stroke from it should cripple any ship enough that it'll never recover anyway. For cloaking on flagship phase 3 - what you want to do is trigger cloaking a little early relative to the first laser surge, so it ends as quickly as possible after the surge passes, so that its cooldown can recycle just before the second surge impacts. (DON'T cloak the first missile volley on phase 3, cloaking the laser surge is more important.) Also, the fourth shield layer and engines 6-8 do help noticeably against the surge, although those are expensive of course. Yeah, Long-Ranged Scanners is the best augment in the game, that extra scrap income makes all the difference. 50 ships killed, 98 beacons, 2100 scrap (without boarding), 8 crew are all solidly right at or a bit above average. The scrap total doesn't tell the whole story - it also matters how many surplus items you get to sell for scrap value. That said, the game isn't really built around chasing high scores or scrap totals, although you can do so if you want. Have you learned about milking enemy ships for skill training? Find an enemy ship that has no way of penetrating your shields - most typically this happens in sector 1 or 2 after you upgrade to two shield bubbles, when you find an enemy ship with no more than a two-shot laser and no missiles or beams. When you find this setup, you can sit idle as long as you like until your pilot and engines guy both reach max evasion skill. You can also get skill in shields and weapons with this - set one weak weapon to autofire if it won't ever break through and damage the target. Opinions vary on the legitimacy of this tactic, but I've always used it.
FTL has been a popular game around these parts since it came out almost a decade ago. If we don't discuss it as much nowadays, it's because many of us have played it to death over the years. I've written a ton about FTL on my website which may or may not be a useful resource to you. For that matter, by pure chance I also Livestreamed FTL this past week on Friday and tossed it on YouTube with a very standard run for Hard difficulty:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f_Nu3FkZrDs" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> |
