FTL Faster Than Light discussion thread

I have done a lot of runs with that engi A ship, but cannot get it to work out. Ion II fires lethally fast once your dude knows his way around the guns, but I never back it up with something that seriously kicks ass. Or get good enough drones to defend myself.

How did you fend off boarding parties, Digustipater?

I picked up extra crew as fast as possible. I had 2 Mantis and a Rockman who were basically there to repel boarders and man the doors/sensors when needed.

I called a ship "Skilldorado". I came across two Scrap Recovery Arms. Yep, I won.

Gary Sax wrote: I have done a lot of runs with that engi A ship, but cannot get it to work out. Ion II fires lethally fast once your dude knows his way around the guns, but I never back it up with something that seriously kicks ass. Or get good enough drones to defend myself.

How did you fend off boarding parties, Digustipater?

Just to be clear, I want to make sure you aren't missing the obvious. Someone else complained about "cheesing" boarders with cycling dudes and stuff, but I rarely have to do that.

By Sector 3 I usually have upgraded the doors once and my first extra guy (after Piloting, Engines, Weapons, and Shields) goes on Door duty. That puts the doors on level 3, which are tough as hell. When boarded, unless super unlucky, you can open the airlocks to vent all the O2 from wherever they are. They will pound on the system until the O2 runs out, but then they try to get into the next room--they usually don't even take a bar off the system they started in if you do this quickly enough. (You can turn off the O2 in your ship to make the vent work even faster, but that's a little dangerous if you forget). By the time they hack through the door to get to fresh air, they are half-dead or more and even your Engi can kill those guys, especially with the Medi-bot Dispersal.

Even if I don't have an extra guy on doors I might move the Shields guy over depending on what their weapon set is. You can run a guy through their room and they can't immediately follow unless you have the weakest doors.

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In Engi A you can also just put a couple points into Medbay and be basically unkillable with the Medi-bot Dispersal and hand-to-hand them. I don't like that because it ties up my guys, but having a buffed Medbay, even if unpowered, is still a good idea because of all the "blue text" options a buffed Medbay gets you.

Beat it without too much trouble on my first run with the Lanius ship. Getting some good weapons and Pre-Igniter early on let me just upgrade everything.



For my last system slot, I went with Mind Control over Cloak. Partly to get one of the Lanius' achievements, and also to counter the flagship's mind control (invaluable I've found). I don't really miss cloak all that much. I didn't have too much trouble taking the flagship down with my load out. Now to unlock layout B by flying no O2 all the way.

What weapons are in the screenshot? The ipad version looks different than the PC version.

Gary Sax wrote: What weapons are in the screenshot? The ipad version looks different than the PC version.

A tap brings up a more detailed weapon menu:


I would pre-ignite the Breach Missile (4 damage), Pike Beam, and Ion blast, then switch the missile's power over to the charge laser once the missile fired, since I couldn't get enough power slots to power everything at the same time. Also, the pre-igniter only charges one of the four charge lasers rounds.

So I would hit the Shields or weapons with the missile, then take out the rest of the shields with the 4 shots from the charge laser, then immediately get a pass with the Pike Beam, which I could usually hit at least 5 rooms. Seemed to work pretty well.

Got the enemy ship down to four to five health in the final stage and lost. ARGH.

Using stealth ship A. Once you manage to buy a shield module for it, you're in awesome shape. Could fire while hidden as well. Thought I had it. I fought off all their boarders but in the meantime there was fire all over my ship which brought me down. Didn't have enough fire power, but did have the defense II module which was HUGE. Used: Burst laser II, mini beam, Flak cannon II.

The whole game I was dying to get a glaive beam or something more powerful to replace that starting beam with. If I had, the final ship would have been toast without a lot of trouble. The mini beam just didn't have the punch.

Yeah, it tops out at three damage, and it's such a pain to get to actually use. So close! Keep at it--round two is the toughest one and if you can't heal up in between it can be a rough go in that last round.

I couldn't figure out what the correct cloaking strategy was against the boss, I cloaked when it said power surge but I'm not sure that was right.