Faster Than Light (FTL)

[jth]

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).

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

[Yoru]

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).

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.

[fuser]

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).

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.

[Yoru]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[jth]

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 :)

[Raging Turtle]

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

[luckton]

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  

[kildorn]

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.

[lamaros]

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

[cironian]

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.

[kaid]

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).

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.

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.

[kaid]

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 :)

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.

[kaid]

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.

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  

[Soln]

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.

[Kail]

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.

[luckton]

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*".   

Ion weapons really are a godsend, along with drones.

[cironian]

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)

[Threash]

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

[Soln]

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.

[Kail]

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.

[Pezzle]

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!!

[Sophismata]

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.

[ezrast]

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.

[Threash]

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.

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.

[Kail]

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}

[Soln]

19 hours. Still more to go.  Beautiful game.

[rk47]

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

[Sophismata]

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.

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.

[luckton]

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 

[Sophismata]

Now to shoot for Normal 

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.

[Goumindong]

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.

[Sophismata]

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).

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.

[Vaiti]

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.

[ezrast]

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.