FTL Faster Than Light discussion thread

FTL is all I am about these days. For those that are curious, it's a "roguelike-like" set in space. You captain a ship shown in top-down perspective and have to deliver vital information to the federation before the wave of rebels reaches the home system. That wave is a depicted as an arc of woe that eats away at the star system you are trying to navigate as you get to the exit beacon and jump to the next stage. If it catches you, you are likely so humped.

The roguelike-like aspects are:

• each game is atomic--progress is saved as you go along, but there are no saved states other than the current one. You die, you start over. This will happen a lot.
• the loadouts of enemy ships, encounters, stats, starfields are all procedurally generated.
• you can pause the game at any point and make orders, there's a pseudo turn-based element to the game because of this. Beating it takes about 2 hours on easy, and you'll spend probably 1:45 of that in Pause.

Win the game, perform certain feats, and you'll unlock more blueprints for more starting ships. There's definitely a catch-em-all thing going on with me here, but I ain't complainin'. The game is great fun and cheap. It even shows up in Humble Bundles, so if you've gotten in on those you might have it already.

Anyway, I want to discuss some more advanced methods in here than is really appropriate for the "What Are You Playing" threads. I am working up some thoughts on ideal beam weapon use, but feel free to discuss anything you want.

I currently play Easy, no AE. And have: Kestral AB, Stealth AB, Zoltan AB, Rock A, Engi AB, Federation A, Lanius A, but no Slug, Mantis, or Crystal.

I play on easy as well. I feel a bit guilty about it, but whatever.

The only thing I've ever been able to do successfully (beat the last boss) is go laser barrage w/boarding parties. The last boss is so vulnerable to boarding and it's really your best bet.

I ALMOST got the stupid crystal ship but the crew member died in a random battle before the last event that would have gotten it for me!

I played FTL pretty hot and heavy for a couple months last summer, but I just couldn't muster the patience to get good at it. You really do need to learn how to do things properly to even sniff success, and it didn't engage me enough to get to that point.

It's a fun game though, and I really liked how it reminded me of something I'd play in 1994.

Man, I don't feel guilty at all. This game is so crazy hard you'd be nuts to do it any other way. Normal is just masochism. I don't even know who Hard is for. Lottery winners?

I have beaten the last boss in a few ways now. Boarding parties is a good one, but you want to make sure you keep at least one guy alive--I usually try to keep the dude in the laser weapon alive, as my shields take care of those by the end game. If you kill everyone it goes to AI and that's worse than a ship of dudes.

Other options to consider are Cloak--at least two bars, so you can cloak for the duration of the Drone surge in Stage II and avoid the laser pile in Stage III. And drones, with Defense Mark II being the shiiiiiit. If you can have Defense Mark II working with a Boarding drone you can get a lot done with your weapons. The Hull drone is pleasant to be able to switch to after the fights too, to clean things up.

Going into the final battle you want the following:
At least three shields.
At least 45% natural dodge.
Two of the following: Teleportation, Cloaking, Drone Control (Dfs II, other?)

Weapons are a mixed bag. You need to figure out how to beat Shields and how to beat a Mark II Defense drone (shoots missiles and lasers). You can use pretty much any array of things, but timing is the key. If you have, say, a Burst Mark II (three little shots) and some heavy lasers--fire the little shots first. Before they even make it to the other ship fire the heavies. That way the shields/drone are down/kept busy by the little ones and the heavies might sneak through for bigger damage on target.

Contrast that with Burst Mark II and beam weapons. Beams don't care about drones, but even one shield will drain them appreciably or keep them from getting through at all. There, you need to fire the Mark II and see if it takes the shields down. Pause in that second they are down to aim and fire the beam.

The timing is even more subtle when you mix in ion shots and missiles, because they are on target slower than lasers which are on target slower than beams.

I have had 0 luck with ion weapons in this game...

They are tough to work with. Basically, unless I can help it, I will only ever use Ion Bomb (takes out two shields for a pretty long time, and hits Zoltan shield for 8) and Heavy Ion Mark II, which fires every three seconds once the staff are trained up and you get a re-loader. That will take a three layer shield to zero if you can apply any other pressure at all. Two of those will take a four-layer shield to zero and you don't have to do anything else.

I play on normal with AE and have unlocked everything besides stealth C (hopefully will get it tomorrow) and Lanius B.

Everything in the game boils down to "Don't get hit" and "Collect scrap" and they are interchangable pieces of advice.

You need to keep upgrading your ship in order to win. If you fall behind a little you won't be able to get through the enemy shields and lose no matter what you do. The game is extremely binary about it, either you can hurt the enemy ship or you can't and if you can't, you are going to lose even if you can survive your current battle.

Anything you should try to get in the game is

- Scrap Recovery Arm, Cloaking, Flak II and Weapons Pre-Igniter are overpowered at any cost. Get them if you can or if you want to win on Hard. Long-Range Scanners are also amazing.
- Hacking, Teleporter, Drone Control (For Anti-Missile MkI), Zoltans, lesser Flak weapons, Burst Laser MkI/MkII, Decoy Buoys, Hull Repair Drone, Vulcan and Glaive Beam are all great so get as many of them as possible.
- Weapons that don't cost as little energy as possible. You simply can't cram enough stuff without reaching the hard cap if you have weapons taking three energy units, stuff like Heavy Laser MkI is much better than Heavy Laser MkII because it only takes one energy unit.

Everything else is just fine. Avoid investing on Missiles (Later ships have a 45% dodge chance so don't bother), Fire Beams, Bio-Weapons, and Beams (Unless you have a way to pierce shields, like Flak weapons).


I can beat the game on Easy and Normal with all the ships I've unlocked. I feel Hard reduces the width of the path to success to a degree that makes it not that fun because bad luck or simply getting hit by missiles because you aren't playiung the Zoltans makes a big difference but it's the only level I'm challenged at.

I've unlocked every ship and all layouts on the PC. Although after spending 25+ hours solely trying and failing to unlock the crystal ship (pre-AE), I used the game editor to unlock it. It seems much easier with AE though. I've beat it 7 times with various ships, all on easy. If I every get back to the PC version, I'll see how Normal works out. But I always use AE content.

On iOS, I've only unlocked a handful of ships, but I'm still working on it.

Ion Blast II can be one of the best weapons in the game. It'll eat through shields like crazy.

Unless my ships starts out with the drone system, I never buy or use it. Although I'm running an Engi ship at the moment and it seems pretty useful. Maybe I'll try and broaden my playstyle to incorporate them more.

Beams are tough. They're great if you can knock out shields, but I usually don't bother with them for the final boss unless I have missiles or bombs to take out the shields completely, if only for a brief second. Sometimes I keep it as a backup for that moment they are actually useful to do a ton of damage.

My basic boss strategy is to teleport some guys into the missile room to take that out, and then move onto the Ion cannon, then the beam weapon. After that, if I can take out the med bay, I'll teleport in there and try to kill off as much of the crew as possible.
I only ever use cloak at level one, because you want it to end and recharge as soon as possible to avoid the next wave.

It all depends on if you can get the right weapons to break through the flagship's shields. My best run was with two Burst Laser Mk III (10 laser shots) and Weapon Pre-Igniter. I only took 4 damage total over all three stages.

Just faced the Flagship with Engi A. Ion Cannon, Pike Beam, Swarm Missile, Combat II drone, Defense II drone, and anti-attack drone. The drones worked really well. Too well in fact. I had no idea the flagship would go down as fast as it did and I lost my boarding party. Round 2, sent another crewman over to disable the missiles, and again, took it down so fast I lost that crewman. Round 3 is where it all fell apart. Mind Control is a bitch. Hit my pilot which destroyed piloting, which zero'ed out my evasion. With no more expendable crew to use as a boarding party, I got wrecked by missiles, their boarders were causing havoc, my drones all shut down. Went down in flames.

I have to say though, using those drones were pretty great.

Ion Cannon MK 2 is the best weapon in the game. Set it to auto fire and pick what system you want to shut down forever. Heavy Ion is too slow IMO.

If you get two of these suckers you can shut down weapons and oxygen and just suffocate enemy ships as they float helplessly.

For the boss I use 2 sets of 2 boarders to tear up all weapon systems but lasers, then kill the rest of the crew after shutting down the medbay. Or if the dice gave me lots of offended I go for shields and rip them up fast.

The key with Beam weapons is they hit or they don't. Time on target does not matter. Beam aiming can be a game of pixels, because spending one pixel in the room does as much damage as dragging the beam across the whole thing. Here's a 5-room hit:



Even with the mini-beam (just over a "square" long) you can get three- and even four- room hits depending on the configuration.

You also know the direction of your beam. This matters for things like Glaive Beam, where starting on the Shields can add points more damage over the course of the rest of the beam. The first hit lowers the shields and the rest of the rooms hit take an extra-point.

Think about what you are taking out as well. Weapons and Shields are obvious, but as alluded to above, you should think about taking out O2, Medbay, and Piloting. Piloting is usually only a couple of bars, so you can red zone it with a laser shot or two. That makes their Evasion drop to ZERO until they fix it. Hitting the O2 while they have fire or a breach is also effective. They need to fix it or they die; and while fixing it, the rest of the ship is less manned. That's important to note as well--a guy fixing an orange system counts as manning that system for recharge time/dodge and so forth. If you can get them to commit their guys to fixing the Engines and O2, and they aren't Piloting as a result, well, bully for you.

//edit

This ship was awesome. If you can make it out of the first two sectors you should be able to win. Glaive Beam is so sick. I was one-shotting ships like crazy--and I got the Pre-Igniter and it was amazing. I finished the game with two hits on hull--no stores or repairs in between either. I was just unhittable. Well, combined with the Flagship being very hittable. Ion Bomb to weaken shields, Burst Laser I to briefly take the last shield out, then four rooms of Smashed Potatoes and Glaivy.

Thanks for the topic. It makes me want to try again.

I won the game once, but thought the game result was highly dependent on the encounters you get, and that combat requires way too much precision and cheesy cycling, especially when the boarding starts.

Disgustipater wrote: Round 3 is where it all fell apart. Mind Control is a bitch. Hit my pilot which destroyed piloting, which zero'ed out my evasion. With no more expendable crew to use as a boarding party, I got wrecked by missiles, their boarders were causing havoc, my drones all shut down. Went down in flames.

I have to say though, using those drones were pretty great.

Yeah, I had the exact same experience in AE. Rocked it to the Flagship, then Mind Control on my pilot and the whole world was on fire. I will either have a Slug pilot or spend the $$ on Mind Control in AE going forward.

//and go for it Sevej! I find I either lose in Sector 1 or 2 or make it to Sector 8. Not a lot of in-between. Sector 1 can eat you up if you stumble into an asteroid field though, jeez.

If I have the time to waste, sometimes I cheese it up by letting a ship who cannot penetrate my shields shoot at me until Piloting, Engine, and Shield operators are maxed out. Usually in sector 1 or 2. If I have an ion cannon or other laser that wont do damage, I'll max out my weapons guy as well.

jeb wrote: a Slug pilot

Genius. I only went with Mind Control once, and it was on the Mantis Cruiser that didn't have sensors, which means I can't target anyone. I'm an idiot. Also, I definitely prefer the MedBay over the Clone Bank. The only thing I like about the Cloning Bank is you can be riskier on encounters (like giant alien spiders) and not lose a crewman.