f13.net

Is anyone else playing this? It's a roguelike space sim, and it's pretty fun.

I bought it but haven't gotten a chance to load it yet.  I keep hearing awesome things about it though.

Just got wiped out in the sixth sector by some slug invaders, dammit!

Got it some hours ago and loving it so far. It's brutal, but awesome and very addicting :awesome_for_real:

For us Europeans, it's cheaper on the developer's site (http://www.ftlgame.com/), and you'll also get a Steam key.

Loving this, so far.  At first, I thought the idea was to outrun the enemy fleet as a first priority, but I think the better strategy is to stick around to level up as much as you can.

And those goddamn "incoming solar flare" encounters can eat a fucking dick, holy shit.  "Hey, captain, everything is on fire, we take damage if we try to put it out but the med bay is toast, but if we don't get them out right away our O2 is gone and we'll die from that, also engines and bridge are fragged so we can't jump away, and there are still pirates shooting at us, what do we do?" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U7rOUSvYM8)

I lost my entire evening to this game. It's really fun, and the unlocks can be frustratingly difficult.

This is a really amazingly fantastic game. I will spoiler some "advanced tips" so that people don't lose the "why didn't i think of that"

Dealing with suns


Dealing with Invaders



Dealing with enemies that have Ion Cannons


General Power tips

I will second that Mantis Sector pretty much means you're going to be hiding in your med bay 24/7

This is an addictive little game.  I sort of wish it were a bit more rogue-like (more turn-based), but it's plenty entertaining as-is.

Fourth try, managed to get the final ship down to 10% hull before I blew up. Not having an easy way to repair your hull in the final sector is a real pain.

I had a really good run up to that point; there is definitely a sense of snowballing. If you get ahead on resources and crew, you tend to loose less than if you're already behind, which I guess makes sense and seems balanced in a twisted way. Having a full complement of crew really helps deal with invasions, and having maxed out shields and engines means you survive a lot more.

I have tried out various weapons now, and I'm coming around to the bomb-type weapons, they can really help you pin down an enemy's shields. I had Ion Cannon/Burst Laser/Bomb on my last run and it worked pretty well. The pike beam has a lot of potential damage, but it won't go through shields, so it tends to only be useful once the fight is won in my experience. Burst lasers and missiles seem like a much better option there. I also quite like the weapon pre-igniter augment.

Another tip is to try to move your crew around as little as possible. Given the length of the game, and how easily crew-members can be lost, there's no point trying to get them maxed-out in more than one skill. Get a maxed out Pilot, Gunner, Shield Guy and Engineer and then use the rest of your crew as roving repair/defense bots.

Going to have another go with my newly-unlocked Zoltan ship, will see how it goes.

Bought this last night, lost four hours to it. I managed to get to the final boss once, but I was hilariously underpowered compared to it.

Kinda wishing my laptop battery was newer, or that A380s had AC outlets inside, as this would be the perfect way to kill my 8-hour flight tomorrow.

Heard about it at work.  Seems pretty polished too.

Mutter mutter, that last boss is more bullshit than you probably know yet. I've yet to fully beat that sector on anything:


Non spoilery weapon stuff:

A pure burst laser build is crazy good. I tend to run three burst 2's on those playthroughs, and you can sync them to basically melt systems through shields. Beams are absolutely godlike if you have a bunch of stuff to bring shields down a bit. The rule is that they penetrate shields but lose 1 damage/room per shield that is up. So if you have a 2 damage beam you can auto pen 1 layer shields.  Ion Bomb on their shields + Beam is usually pretty decent.

The hard one to use is the anti-bio beam, which does dick all through shields. The Slug Cruiser is really just wonky to start out with. The Zoltan cruiser with a pre-igniter is hilarious however.

Re: Kildorn's boss attempt

Yeah, the end guy is kinda killing this for me, it's too big of a difficulty cliff.  I can generally kick everyone's ass all over the sector and then he just fucking waltzes in and flattens me.  If you don't have a really good missile defense, you're screwed against his first form.  If you don't have a really good drone defense, you're screwed against his second form.  If you don't have a powerful enough offense to punch through his rank 4 shields, you're screwed against all his forms.  He's got four separate weapons control rooms, so I hope your shields are good enough to tank it because that shit is not going to be disabled.  And you need to repel boarders through the whole thing, too.  Even with maxed power, it's rare that I can fit enough gear to deal with everything, all the time.

Yeah, the final boss is just...ugh.  It feels so random if you manage to win or lose.

If you can pierce the shields at all, you can wipe out the weapons pretty easily. They're isolated with one crew, so they can't be reinforced and repaired. The third one over is the dick multi missile launcher.

That said, I can get to his third form, but that's about it. Boss after boss after boss seems like a really dickish ending concept given how the rest of the game works.

I was having an awesome run until I tried something stupid (and got my mantis pair killed), I lucked out with a Kestrel and got 2 mantis and an engi in the first sector from chain slaver events. So I installed a teleport pad and just rolled around the galaxy sending two star melee mantis dudes onto every ship I encountered. It's LIKE a bomb launcher! <3

I guess I'll try focusing that one, next time.  Just seemed counter intuitive to aim at one of his four weapons pods when I could be taking his ridiculous shield array or that goddamn cloaking device offline.  Plus, relying on drones as much as I do means I often can't choose -where- I hit, they just kinda spray fire all over.  Ugh.

finished the tutorial at work. can't wait for lunch break to give this an extended play.

EDIT: Lunch break is ovah.

(http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m20/r3dknight/ftl.jpg)

If you're relying on drones you've probably got some ion cannons. Shoot his weapons.

I've beaten him with Kestrel A, B, and Engi A. The hardest part is getting to him with a cloaking device, 3 shields, and enough weapons/defenses to take him down.

It's pretty much the cloak requirement that kills me. I get there without one, and it's the primary way to deal with his power surge attacks. Without one I take 1-2 hull damage through shields every time, and will eventually die due to the back to back nature of the encounters.

I messed up recalling a boarding team last night, and had a 10 hp rock man doing the Benny Hill on the enemy shit while I waited for the porter to come back online.

I love this game so much.

If you are wondering how to unlock all the ships, here (http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=779) is a handy guide. Some of them, are basically impossible without the guide. Remember that you're looking for 'homeworld' sectors, not 'controlled' sectors.

I haven't beaten it; I got to the boss twice on normal and then decided to switch to easy to start to unlock all the ships. I do agree the boss is a bunch of bullshit, though. I think the game still needs some tweaking; I'd like to have the different sectors' shops be a bit less random.


If you want to get some experience to your crew, get level 2 shields and watch for a ship that can't pierce / do damage to you. Then, just go make a sandwich. If you have a weapon that can't kill them, turn it on and get all 4 of your crew to 2 stars.

If you're trying to give your boarding party xp, they get xp on last hit and also whenever they destroy a subsystem. So feel free to split them up and move them around. Also, consider a firebomb or ion for the enemy medbay when you teleport over. You get a LOT more scrap (+1.5x+2x) as well as unique events like taking your pick of slaves on a slaver ship when you kill the crew, so you'll want to get a boarding crew as fast as possible.

You can shoot out the o2 on a slug interceptor and suffocate the crew. It's a good way to get extra scrap in the first sector.

You should buy every Zoltan you come across in a store. +1 power is worth progressively more as the game goes on and practically pays for itself even on the initial purchase. It also does not count towards your ship cap, allowing you to power more after you've maxed your energy.

I've never gotten this to happen and I've tried it multiple times after reading it was possible.  :heartbreak:

I just noticed that apparently the rebels will pursue you slower while you are in a nebula; so by studiously avoiding nebulae I may have been making the game harder for myself.

Apparently? That tip is next to your cursor on every single jump point you mouse-over that is in a nebula. There is even a blue cloud surrounding all the valid points. A nebula sector just means that most of the points will be like that.

In a nebula sector the fleet is delayed about 25% [50% for a regular sector nebula] for any node, you don't get any benefit for being in a nebula in a nebula sector.

I hadn't read the tooltip previously.

Managed to get the boss down at last, despite losing my two best fighters in the penultimate sector by blowing up the ship they had invaded... Now to try and beat him on normal difficulty.

Ugh, FINALLY beat this.  Spent most of yesterday trying to get that Engi cruiser type B to work well, because I like the idea behind it, it just never works the way I want it to.  Switched to the type A today (I keep playing Engi in the hopes of unlocking that one ship you need them for) and lucked out in finding a second Ion Blast 2 in the first sector, which I just barely managed to afford.  Once I managed to keep them both powered, nothing in the game has shields for very long.  Managed to get a Hull Beam, which is completely useless if the enemy has shields but does monstrous damage if they don't, and became a death machine.  Kept losing crew to stupid mistakes, and I couldn't afford a cloak or repair drone, but I did snag a Defense 1 drone for the final fight.

Yeah finished the game by pure chance.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/829607/awesome/FTLGame%202012-09-19%2000-49-39-94.jpg)

Lost a crew early sectors due to asphyxiation :why_so_serious:
But decided to carry on and managed to beat a pirate ship that rewards me with Burst Laser III.  :drill:
Pure death. My alpha strike consists of BL II x2 and BL III blows most encounters up.
Didn't even use teleport of drones for the final fight.

Is this playable on a mac and without a mouse?  Or is this a game where reflexes matter?

you can pause in combat to issue orders -
as for mac , i dont know.

Steam says it's out for mac, but I'm not sure how you'd play it without a mouse.

I should have been more clear, I have a macbook air and generally just use the touchpad (which is great, but not the same as a mouse).

Not twitchy - think turn-based tactical game (xcom?) but you have to manually pause and issue commands. Or not pause and issue commands. Or auto fire and die.

Should be fine, I've been mostly playing it on my laptop using the "pointing stick".

I've been playing on my 4-year-old MacBook Pro, using the multi-touch touchpad. It usually works just fine. You need to be able to left- and right-click, which you can simulate by two-finger-tapping the touchpad on most Macs made in the last 4-5 years.

There's some slight annoyance when I can't quite get the double-tap timed properly, but it's not disastrous thanks to the pausing capabilities. My flow just ends up being pause, act, unpause instead of trying to do shit in real time.

Been playing on my macbook air also with no issues with touchpad/CPU(2012 i5).

One this is the total randomness thinks go from fine to pear shape quick. Haven't been close to beating final boss but one thing I've noticed is I'm always low on crew. Can never afford to buy crew from shops and I keep loosing them on away missions.

I've been semi-close to beating the final boss, but I fucked up the strategy. I needed to focus more on murdering the crew in the first phase, as the second phase had too many drones and too thick shields for my weapons to do shit. If I'd murdered the entire main-area crew in Phase 1, I could've easily disabled the drones and shields with my gold-starred mantis boarding party.

Oh well, next time.

This game is pretty fun. I'm about to enter the last sector with my best ship to date: I got two scrap booster augmentations early so I have pretty much every system maxed, I just don't have much in the way of weapons apart from lazers. Going to have to hope my boarding parties can do the job while full shields, defense II robot, max evasion and cloak do the job. Oh, and the ability to shoot while cloaked - breach bombs incoming.

I have a hull repair robot to get to full hull too, but I know I'll stuff it up somehow...

Edit: Success!! Lost two of my best fighters in round one, when for some reason I couldn't beam them back aboard after their surgical strikes on the enemy got them killed - wasnt due to cloak so I dunno why. Still had a good run! Quite easy after the charmed run I had powering up the ship actually.

Game became much easier once I made every effort to win battles by killing crew and not destroying them, and remembering to no spend any scrap unless I had a reserve left for the next shops. Not being about to afford the vital element of a ship plan sucks a lot.

Hope they keep expanding this in some way, a very entertaining little concept.

Finally managed to beat the boss on "Easy". I had the Engi Type A with Ion Blast II, Heavy Ion and a Burst Laser II, two Anti-Ship 1 drones and a Hull Repair drone. No augmentations besides the Engi autoheal, I did have a Pre-Igniter but decided to sell it at the last shop to get the Hull Repair drone (and glad I did). Also, shields at 4.

The first two phases I didn't even take much damage, about 4-5 points in each phase. But the last phase was total chaos, when the boss went down pretty much everything on my ship was on fire, all systems down except weapons, my guys were dying all over, ship had 4 HP left and enemies were roaming all over my ship :)

This is the best ten bucks I've spent in a while.  Great game.

This.

I think the Engi ship is the best for me so far.  Still haven't beaten the game yet, but I'm making progress.  On my last play, I was shredding things up:

- Weapon Pre-igniters so I can fire off when the fight starts
- Drop an Ion Bomb on the enemy shield systems
- Laser blast the weapon systems and ion blast anything 'significant' (transporters -> enemy drone system -> propulsion)
- Deploy two anti-ship drones
- Fucking profit  :drill:

Finally beat the boss with a Slug cruiser. Two bombs, two burst lasers. Just targeted bombing and eliminating every crew but one in the first wave. Hull repair drone is nice, cloak is essential to dodge the crazy superweapon shit.

To beat the last boss pretty easily (on easy), get the following (not always possible):

You'd think that after blowing up my elite boarding party for the fifth time I would start paying attention to the enemy hull display... Nope. :uhrr:

If one is low on crew hit up pirate sectors early. There you will find slaver fights more often and if you find a slaver almost always they will give the option if you beat them to accept a crew in lieu of finishing them off. Doing this you can pretty typically fill a a crew up pretty fast. Downside is you lose out on some scrap doing this so you have to balance it out.

The hull repair drone is a godsend and you don't even need to have it equiped during the boss fight stuff. Keep it in your inventory and swap it in after a fight to heal up. This takes a lot of the randomness of the final sector out as sometimes you will just get screwed by the repair depot placements and without a hull repair drone attrition will finish you off.

The engy ship is an excellent one it was the first ship I beat the end guy with it has a great balance of weapon slot and drone slots. One thing I highly recommend is save up 150 scrap and hold it until you can find cloaking in a store. The end fights have triggered things that give warning and you can cloak through them. The really funny thing is its best not to max out power on the cloaking device for end fight because level 1 cloak refreshes fast enough to use every time the longer cloaks last to long and don't refresh fast enough.

On phase 2 and phase 3 even a level 1 cloaking device can be the difference between a win and a loss.

I also typically hold onto a bomb or missile of some kind for end boss. I typically won't use it at all during the other sectors so I have a ton of ammo for the boss. Being able to set a bomb to just auto attack the shields makes the boss much easier. Also fun trick the main guns of the enemy ship are not connected to the rest of the ship so if you have a teleporter it is REALLY easy to wack the tripple missile and tripple laser launcher since they only ever have one crew defending. If you are doing this attack the weapons from left to right in order of power.

I can't get past fucking 2 sectors on normal.  How the hell do you manage not to run out of missiles or anything?  If you play though on Easy does it make Normal bearable?

edit: wow not able to get far on Easy.  So the secret to winning is copying sav files, and using someone's hack script?  

Reading this thread (http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2550) is mindblowing because I can't afford to keep anything together let alone buy what they suggest.

I don't generally use missiles.  As far as I can tell, you can't maintain a positive rate of flow if you use them as  a main weapon (i.e. you tend to spend more in a fight than you win, on average) which means if you're packing missiles, you either end up spending a lot of time with them powered down and stowed when you run dry, or you have to keep rotating in backup weapons, or you're blowing all your scrap buying ammo and can't afford to upgrade anything.  Plus, they don't generally seem THAT much more effective than just blasting away with lasers.

What specifically are you running in to?  It's possible that you're making some kind of mistake, but bear in mind that this is the kind of game where sometimes a bunch of relatively ordinary shit happens and then you die, because little problems tend to cascade (both for better and for worse, since if you can get ahead of the power curve, you can snowball into a rather badass ship by the end).  If you're having trouble, by all means try it on easy, you might learn more stuff more easily and any ships you unlock on easy are available on normal, too.

I can't even imagine this game on Normal considering how harsh Easy can be at times.  I'm surprised that we have received an update or patch to address some of these concerns, but then I can also see the devs saying "Fuck you, the game's hard.  DEAL WITH IT!  *sunglasses*".   :why_so_serious:

Ion weapons really are a godsend, along with drones.

Every time I won, I did not use any missiles or drones at all until reaching the boss. Not only do you need them for that, but it also saves money along the way and sometimes gives you a surplus that can be sold off for extra scrap.

I'd say that the biggest difference between easy and normal is the cash. With the reduced scrap drops you really need to have a plan on normal, while on easy you can spend some on the wrong upgrades and still do fine. The enemies are generated slightly stronger, but only by about 1 sector. So I'd say to stay on easy until you've beaten the boss there once.

Although the conventional wisdom seems to be to take out the shields first or split between shields and weapons, I fare best with putting my first salvo completely on the weapons. If they can't shoot back, I can take my time with the rest without taking any hull damage. Because repair costs will kill you in the long run. Oh, and going for boarding also rocks for extra rewards, if you have the crew for it.

Lastly: I just love the second Kestrel layout since its 4 lasers last quite a few sectors if you don't find any weapon upgrades early and they can be upgraded bit by bit if you do. Pew Pew! Who needs Ions? (except for the boss)

I thought easy was a breeze after playing on normal for a while.  Specially with the engi ship, ion cannons are incredibly good.

Problem is the tutorial starts you with missiles and then as an example tells you they're needed to get through the target's shield.  So you kind of end up using them on your first playthrough until you get better weapons and learn to min/max your power.

You only NEED missiles if you can't overcome your enemy's shield.  Like, if the enemy's got level two or three shields and you've only got two guns that take longer to fire than for their shield to recharge, you're never getting through, no matter what.  Missiles allow you to bypass that problem.  Bolting more guns on to your ship will also bypass it, by blowing the shields away, and is my preferred solution.

The Kestrel-A starts out with a Burst 2 laser, which fires three shots.  Assuming all three hit, you can punch through a level two shield with that alone and still damage the ship inside.  In my opinion, the Burst 2 is really good, one of the best all around weapons in the game.
It also starts with an Artemis launcher, which is one of the worst in the game in terms of damage per missile (though one of the best in terms of damage to power ratio).  It's better than nothing, but I don't generally use it if I have a reasonable alternative.

The problem with mixing lasers and missiles is that they don't compliment each other too well.  If you've got enough guns, you can burn through any shield in the game and chew through the shield generator in a few volleys.  If you've got a bunch of missile launchers, you can ignore the shields completely and just hit their weapons and other subsystems, but you're blowing ammo to do it.  If you've got a mixture of guns and missiles, though, your missiles aren't going to be helped by the guns damaging the shields, and the guns won't get any help in punching through the shields from the missiles.  Which means your guns will be plinking harmlessly off the shields and doing nothing, and your missiles won't be doing as much damage as they normally could since a bunch of weapon slots and power is going towards feeding a bunch of guns which are basically doing nothing.  Unless you start hitting the shield generator with the missiles, in which case, you may as well just pack more guns and save yourself the ammo, in my opinion.

Pretty good game.  Worth the cash if you enjoy this kind of game.  After what seems like a billion frustrating starts I have gotten the hang of things and actually win sometimes.  Unlocking better ships has been tough, but I have the engi ships, and Engi ships are awesome! 

There are some mods popping up that I might try out a bit later.  I would love a star wars mod.  Unlocking the Falcon etc.  Drones could be tie fighters/Bombers and X/Y wings etc.  Pity I have no talent at all for such things =P

Play this game!!

You should only be using (at most) one missile per fight for the first two sectors, as a general rule. Some fights can be finished without any missiles at all. If possible, you want to avoid taking damage, because repairs will cost you a fair bit of cash. So don't be afraid to trade a missile to preserve your hull.

If you can take out weapons with your laser, then you don't need missiles. If you can't, send one missile into their shield, then hit the weapon with laser fire. If the enemy weapon system is still down when your laser recharges, take out piloting. Otherwise, hit the weapons again to reset the enemy cooldowns.

On all of my successful playthroughs I have never "saved" missiles, but never spammed them except for tough fights or over-shielded enemies. Still end up with 20 or more by the last sector.

Picked this up and had some fun. The type A engi is a little frustrating because I did really well with it once (coasted through the last few sectors without really taking damage but got torn apart by boss phase 2) but now I can't get it past the early game hump. I'll do okay up until things start having 3 layers of shield because I can't find a single weapon beyond the starter.

On the plus side I don't seem to have many problems with ammunition or crew dying so maybe I'm doing something right.

You use one missile to bypass the shields and take out the shield generator and let the lasers do the rest, they work quite well together at speeding up kills.

I'm not sure, this seems to go against my experience.  Say I have three ships: the default one with a Burst 2 and an Artemis missile, one with a set of Burst 2 and Heavy 1 lasers, and one with an Artemis and a Hull Missile.  All of them eat three power, total.

The "guns only" ship with the Burst 2 and Heavy 1 gets in four shots per volley.  Assuming everything hits, you're doing damage to anything with a shield rating of 3 or less, and if you're aiming at the shields, you can have them completely disabled in three volleys (first volley dealing 4-3=1 damage, second volley dealing 4-2=2 damage, third volley dealing 4-1=3 damage to take out all 6 system levels).  After that, you'll be dealing five damage every volley.

The "missiles only" ship with the Artemis and the Hull Missile is doing four damage per turn (six if you're using the Hull Missile on empty rooms), but burning tons of missiles to do it.  However, they start dealing this damage immediately and can ignore the shields and just burn the weapons systems down, keeping your ship safer.

But the "hybrid" ship with the Burst 2 and Artemis doesn't do as well.  The first missile gets the shields down to 5 power.  Assuming we're not firing any more missiles, the first volley from the Burst 2 deals 3-2=1 damage.  The second volley deals 3-2=1 damage again bringing the shields down to 3, and the third volley deals 3-1=2 damage, and the shield goes down (though it still has one system level left).   From this point on it deals only three damage per volley.

The ship with the guns alone gets the shields down just as fast and deals more damage overall than the hybrid ship, while the ship with the missiles alone deals more damage and completely ignores the shields (while expending a ton of missiles to do so).  So the hybrid ship is the slowest option of the three, unless it's firing missiles constantly (in which case it manages to be basically equally effective, though more expensive to run, compared to the gun ship).  At least, that's how it looks to me.

_{Edit: fixed a math error with the hybrid ship, oops}

19 hours. Still more to go.  Beautiful game.

a bomb on the shield room is always good for boss fights.
that an teleporter + dual mantis is essential for good scrap.

Actually, the lasers only ship is better than you think, because the heavy laser hits for two with a good chance of fire. However, I would argue that the heavy laser is a much better weapon to pair with a burst laser, since the burst tends to deplete shields really effectively.

The actual advantage of the hybrid in this case is that you can laser the weapons, to reduce incoming damage, and rely on the missiles to increase your viability over the fight. 3 missiles will deal 6 system damage, taking out the shield generator; and all the while your lasers have taken out their weapons.

Remember that the Artemis does two damage.

FINALLY beat this on easy the other night using the Zoltan Cruiser Type B.  My loadout for the boss:

- Ion Blast I
- Ion Blast II
- Glaive Beam
- Hull Laser I
- Maxed Stealth w/stealth weapons mod
- 7 crew, a couple of them Mantis, but still only the three Zoltan you get from the start
- Nearly maxed Nav
- Maxed Shields

Now to shoot for Normal  :ye_gods:

As long as you max your shields and have at least 2 good lasers, the boss is easily beatable.

You don't need to max engines, but it also helps a bunch. Remember that due to MATHEMATICS, every point of evasion is more valuable than the last - getting the miss chance over 50% is tremendously useful.

Ideally you want at least 3 full bars of shields, 40% dodge (anything over 40% is wasted), stealth (2 better than 1, but 1 ok), and decent weapons with plenty of ammo (bombs are really good).

If you have that you stand a good chance of beating the boss so long as you know what you're doing.

You don't need stealth (it's useful, though), and a high dodge is never wasted.

I have beaten the boss with the starting weapons (Artemis, Burst Laser) and a Heavy Laser I; he's really not that tough. More lasers make it much easier.

Currently talking with the Devs of this.

Discussion of mobile ports for Android and iOS. Both are for sure happening, they are taking their time and doing it right. Which I say kudos to.

I'm trying to convince them that Steam-cloud integration, proper Stem-cloud integration is also worth while to invest into. Think they have their hands full with new content however, if they are listening to me about the integration I guess we will see it in a content patch in December or something.

Just beat the game on normal. Three mkII burst lasers, one heavy ion, max shields, 40-something evade, level 1 cloak, kickass away team duo. Scrap collector and weapon/shield cooldown modules. Didn't handle phase 2 very well, largely because I was expecting the drone assaults to actually stop once I blew up the drone control, but otherwise performed nicely.

I want to unlock mantids and just kill everything with multiple uber away teams. They seem OP.

I've lost so many games to phase 2 for the same exact reason, and I always seem to forget. By the time I get there killing drone bays = no more drones in my mind

Thanks for the recommendations, I'm really enjoying this game.  I wasn't too sure about it when I saw the steam page,  I was afraid it was going to turn out like Gratuitous Space Battles... 

I got boarded and killed on the second jump I ever made and next thing I knew it was 4 am.

Until you find out unmaned drones have no oxygen.  Or someone blows up your teleporter while your ship is on fire.

New stuff coming!

http://www.ftlgame.com/?page_id=106

http://vimeo.com/79104930

Fucking A.  "Works on everything, more stuff, and it's free.  Yr welcome."

 :yahoo:

I am a huge fan of FTL and seeing this makes me very happy. Its a great lil time killer game at work as its super easy to just put down as needed and you can plink on a star or two in lull times and then put it away no fuss no muss when busy.

I have a game on Normal saved just before the boss and...

I'm honestly scared to do it.

The good news is that the boss is no different on Normal than it is on Easy.  If you made it that far you have already survived the worst that Normal difficulty throws at you.

Love the hell out of this game.  Purchased it awhile ago but never actually played.  Started a few weeks ago and officially got addicted.  Only just now at the point where I can resist playing it.  Unlocked all the ships except two so far, and after beating the game on easy a few times, killed it on normal twice (Once with the stealth cruiser Type B, and once with the Mantis cruiser Type B).

The Mantis B is such absurd fun.  I finally unlocked the Crystal B, though, which gives it a run for its money.  Though Zoltan Cruisers and Auto-Scouts are incredibly frustrating for both layouts before you get some sort of weapon.

If you upgrade your teleporter, you should be able to beam you guys back out right before they suffocate.

I got the event to unlock the Mantis cruiser yesterday, but didn't have the Crew Teleporter installed.  Woops!

Anyone able to recommend a strategy for unlocking it?

Far as I know, it only unlocks in Mantis worlds (maybe even only the home world specifically).  Just route your play through towards all the red areas, and go into any mantis controlled zones.  Explore as much as possible, and it should pretty constantly kick off.

It requires being in the Mantis home system and getting a particular event, but you also need a level 2 teleporter, a level 2 medbay, and apparently you need to incapacitate the entire enemy crew.  I just suck at boarding.

I've been playing way too fucking much of this game.

Trying to do a run with the Cruiser, having finally unlocked it, and I want to get the achievement for not upgrading the weapons -- finding the challenge with that is not getting blown up with missiles since without upgraded standard weapons it's really hard to knock out their missile launcher before taking a bunch of kicks to the junk.  One of these attempts I'll get a defense drone and then I can cakewalk to victory.

I finally got a normal kill using the zoltan deckplan A ship.

Really the boss did not seem much worse than normal it was just the sectors leading up to it tended to be more prone to screwing me over.

You need an upgraded medbay as well as an upgrade teleporter to do it. If you don't have your medbay upgraded enough the captain of the ship you board dies and you don't get the ship unlock.

This is one of the problems that is really annoying in normal mode. Hitting a bunch of missle boats early on and just getting reemed by them over and over and over again.

My issue is more with getting up the scrap to afford and upgrade the teleporter, while also getting enough Mantis or Rock crewmembers to actually make boarding work, and not losing them like an idiot.  Is it viable to just dump two Rock guys in the enemy's Oxygen system and kill that?

That unfortunately is to slow I think. You need to go in and finish it pretty fast or you will fail out on the event with the captain dying. I tried it once just using boarding bots and it was to slow.

Burst Laser II, Burst Laser II, Burst Laser III, Weapon Pre-Igniter.

 :grin: :drill: :grin: :drill: :grin: :drill: :grin:

Not much power left for anything else, but even a level four shield is no match for ten simultaneous laser blasts at the start of the fight.

Yeah, there are some crazy ass builds you can do, but it's all about your Donald Duck and, frankly, I've never been that lucky.

That's what won my first victory.  I was using the basic Cruiser and found another Burst Laser II in one of the first stores I found.  I was immediately OP and coasted to victory.

UI/AI improvement that would make having multiple identical weapons less OP than everything else -- let me set my auto-fire to synchronize my shots to match the slowest weapon rather than having everything firing at its own frequency.  In theory you can turn autofire off and fire each round manually to sync them up, but yawn.

Yeah, but you still need to be able to take off that last bar of health.  The Mantis B gives you the boarding drone to do that, but the Crystal B doesn't.  And you can't board the zoltan at all, so a weapon is the mandatory first upgrade.  Still, my highest scores by far - and the easiest games - are with those two ships.

I always synch up my laser fire... I don't know why you wouldn't unless the fight is already a cakewalk.

Yes it is one of the harder unlocks. I was doing it with the federation cruiser that starts with a mantis crewman so I knew for sure I had that available. Having all the bits needed is hard enough and then you need to get some serious luck to actually find the event. It sounds like they are working to revamp how ships unlocks work in the FTL advance edition which is probably a good thing. Random is fine but some of the ship unlocks need some pretty silly chain of things falling just the right way to get them to happen.

The crystal ship is the only thing I have not unlocked. The amount of shit you have to have happen to get it is crazy. I cannot count the number of times I magaged to get the crystal crewman and have never yet even seen the rock homeworlds offered when I had the crystal crewman.

Wait, people actually use auto fire?  I've put a shit ton of time into this game and never turned it on once.  Seemed almost totally useless.

Certain things work quite well with autofire, and it can be quite handy in limited amounts if you need to manage crises on your ship.

How on earth were you using ions without autofire?

Depends on the weapon lay outs if everything is pretty similar speed or super rapid firing like the higher end ion cannons it works great. For some weapon lay outs especially for ships with 3 or more shields you may have to turn it off to concentrate fire.

Playing with the Slug cruiser for the first time and very much finding that one needs to not use autofire to get mileage out of the bio-beam weapon.  That thing is pretty awesome as long as they don't have a medbay.

I like it when people pile into the med-bay.  It tells me where to send my boarders or concentrate the firing.

BUT NOT BOTH.

I finally got the crystal ship A and B floor plans available. Good lord that took me a long time plugging away to get the moons aligned correctly for this one sheesh.

I am really looking forward to the advanced edition I wish they would give a ballpark of when they think it will be out.

FTL @FTLgame
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Both FTL on iPad and the free FTL: Advanced Edition expansion will be released on April 3rd!  - http://www.ftlgame.com/?p=688
4:36 PM - 27 Mar 2014


Looks like the advanced edition free expansion goes live next week WOOTS.

The crystal ship B is basically gamebreaking.  Only the AI ships at the start give you any trouble, and even those you can cripple and run away from.

Well early on until you get a weapon early zoltan ships are pretty much the big FU button as well as you cannot teleport through that until you break it down. But yes once you get it that is up there with the mantis B floor plan for boarding monster ships. Four position teleport pad right next to the med bay. If you plan to wreck stuff boarding its hard to go wrong with either of those and the crystal peoples lock down ability makes them awesome for porting directly on weapon system lock down two or three of them totally wipe out the weapons and then mop up the crew as needed.

They ironically are also one of the best ships to actualy board the AI ships as they take about half the suffocation damage normal troopers do. So if you have any weapon at all capable of doing hull damage it takes AI ships out the best of any of the pure boarding layouts.

AE update is now live, Steam autoupdated about three hours ago. The new race is pretty scary.

Besides the new content (which can be turned off), the base game received some new features and UI enhancements, especially "save/restore crew member positions" is very handy.

Yaaay, that was my least favorite thing about restarting a game.   :grin:

Okay had a couple games on the side at work today. The changes overall are pretty damn nice. Some really good quality of life changes and the new systems are pretty fun. Got to the end guy a couple times but once I got shot to pieces the jump before him by a new hazard planet with a planatary battery that just ate me alive. The second time the bastard hacked my O2 supply and just choked me out never could keep it up long enough to keep any air aboard the ship.

The new hacking thing and mind control the two new systems I messed with are good fun. Fun mind controlling somebody to attack their own shields especially if you can hijack one of their mantis crew. Plus side with slugs the slug telepathy is enough to locate and mind control people which makes them super nice when you are trying to use it in nebula because you need LOS on a target to use it.

Some fun new systems there was a new ship upgrade that allows you to shoot teleporters/mines through zoltan super shields one that gives any missile launcher a 50% chance to not use up a missile when it fires.

For new weapons the charge laser was okay but not great. The chain laser is interesting its cool down gets progressivly faster and it really starts shooting quick once it gets rocking.

The most fun weapon I played with was the flak2 aka the junk shot. It is like a big space shotgun not very accurate but can do up to 7 damage for 3 power and fires reasonbly quickly. Great weapon for shield stripping.

Played with the new races basic ship its pretty fun it has hacking station chain laser and ion stunner to start with. The ion stunner is interesting it drains charge out of things like weapons and shields and stuns personal.

This manages to be even more fun and complex, while the power management has become and even worse pain in the arse.

Cloning is cool tho.

Both of the new raced ships are pretty fun. The deck plan b is pretty awesome makes a good boarding ship and a good combat ship. The advanced flack is pretty amazing 1 power for 3 damage on pretty fast recycle rates. I had that and two flak mk1s and you could have named the ship the junk shot with all the trash I was flinging at people.

I have unlocked a few of the deck plan c options. I really don't care for the stealth ship but I wanted to see if its deck plan c was any better. OMFG the thing has no stealth AND no shields that thing would cost a mint to make usable ick ick ick that thing probably outdoes slug floor plan 2 for the champion of the worst ship in the game.

How do you unlock the C plans?  I didn't see any indication on the ship selection screen.

(edit) Oh I see, you just need to get to sector 8 with the plan B version of the same ship.  Easy enough.

Did they add anything that fixes the randomness of the unlocks?  That's what made me put it down last time.  I wasted like two days trying to unlock some ship I needed an engi crewman in the engi homeworlds for because I kept not getting the homeworld to show up or I kept not getting the quest or it would spawn in an unreachable area or something.  It was very frustrating.  I can deal with dying because I fucked up, but when literally the only reason I'm playing a certain run is so that a random event will proc and then it doesn't, I stop having fun really fast.

Yes, it looks like they added a new unlock method -- beating the game with any ship unlocks the next ship in the list.

The battery backup though does help when the crap hits the fan punch it and give yourself some more power for emergencies.

Yes there basically are three ways to unlock ships now. To unlock the next floor plan A ship either do the quest for that ship if applicable or beat the game on any difficulty with the previous ship. To unlock B floor plan ships you need 2 of the three achivements for that particular ship and to unlock floor plan C you need to get to sector 8 with a B floor plan ship of that type.

So you can unlock something fast if you get lucky and the quest gods are kind to you. Otherwise you can make steady progress just playing the various ships and winning vs the flag ship.

The two special case unlocks are the

lanius which requires you to I believe unlock four ships

Crystal ship requires you to either unlock everything else or do its quest. Interesting thing to note if you unlock the floor plan C rock ship it starts with a crystal crewman right at the start so basically a fast way to do it is unlock that and then just play the rock ship until you find the rock homeworlds. Having the crystal crewman is enough to make the hidden sector appear for you and given its a quest it shows you where it is and is always there if you find rock home worlds so unlocking the crystal ship now really is not bad at all.