Let's Play FTL: Faster Than Light!

Ey, also, any of you hullies want to tell the class how much damage we took that sector?

I figured you were cheating =P

Sounds like someone is jealous of my advanced technological SWAGG

You are my favorite new LPer.

See, now I'm blushin'.

This LP has been pretty brilliant. Keep it up!

Thanks! I'll do so immediately, in fact!

SECTOR 8 - THE LAST STAND

But this last sector shouldn't be all that exciting. We're just delivering some intel and retiring to a tropical moon to drink space piáa coladas. Right?







- The Last Stand -

See? We've met up with the fleet, I'm sure they can do the heavy lifting from now on.



Naturally, the flagship controls the whole rebel fleet. Without flags, how would they coordinate space ships?



...

Wait, I must succeed? As in, just this one ship? Against the most powerful warship the rebels could build? The one that already wiped out the majority of our army?

Well.

Maybe this is just the invulnerability talking, but I think we can do that.

As an aside, we just got 10 fuel and 10 hull points for free! That's one of the reasons I didn't want to put too much money into repairs, and why you don't need to worry about ending sector 7 with a proper stockpile of fuel.



So here's how this sector works. We need to reach and destroy the rebel flagship before it reaches our base (it's 5 jumps away). It makes one jump every other time we make a jump, and we can see where it's jumping to. Right now, it's in that beacon at the upper left. It's not jumping right now, but when it does it'll be jumping to the beacon below it to the left.

Along the way there are some repair beacons and shops, as well as more typical battle encounters, but you don't want to screw around too much. It's all on the line, and if you let it get ahead of you then you'll just unceremoniously lose!

Finally, instead of the usual encroaching wave of rebels, they'll be taking beacons at random, though we'll still get a warning just before they do so.



Let's head this way. It'll let us hit a repair beacon or two, and we'll be able to intercept the flagship whether it continues south or doubles back east. Of course, this is the beacon the rebels are about to take, so it's going to be a bit tough.





The ships you'll face here are well-outfitted, but they're all rebels - their racism leaves them vulnerable to attacks from more combat-specialized species. Still, expect lots of powerful weapons, boarders, and medbays.











Sometimes enemies will realize they don't have a chance in hand-to-hand combat against rockmen in burning, disabled medbays, and they'll just return to their posts with their last slivers of health. It's almost admirable how devoted they are to their duties.



But it's not going to save them.



See the flagship? That wide line means it's jumping, and it'll be at its destination when we finish our own jump.



A repair beacon gives you some heath as well as a good number of fuel, missiles, and drones. We're back up to full hull strength, and have way more fuel, missiles, and drones than we're ever going to use.



They're going to head back this way, so let's cut them off.



Regular beacons will also tend to have battles, though probably not as tough as those at the beacons under total rebel fleet control.











These battles still give you proper rewards, too.

Looks like if we head this way we'll be able to hit the flagship itself on our next jump. Sometimes it's a good idea to just wait for it to jump nearer, but right now taking the fight to them seems like a solid plan.















Okay. That's it, the last ship we're going to fight before we take on the flagship. Let's make sure everything's in order before we make our LAST STAND.



I've just bought a few more upgrades. The Heart of Gold is looking good! Probably more upgraded than most ships at this point in the game. We've got full shield, engine, and weapon power, enough drone power for both our drones and one left over in case we take a hit, a similar level of redundancy for all minor systems, and an autopilot that'll give us 50% of our usual evasion even without a pilot at the helm. Lookin' good.

Let's take a look at the crew.



Arthur, one of the last few remnants of our "Hitchhiker's Guide" theme. Arthur's our hardest hitter by far, dealing a extra 20% on top of his innate double damage.



Eddie does one thing, and does it well. He's a well-trained pilot, giving us an extra 10% evasion. He's not trained at repairs, but if any crucial systems go down he'll be handy at getting them back online quickly due to his species bonus.



Tomas hasn't quite mastered the shield systems, but is still giving us a +14% bonus to shield regen. More importantly, he's giving us an extra bar of reactor energy, which'll definitely come in handy.







Markel, Nekose, and Lauren are invaluable. They're dealing +20% damage and have the highest hp of any species, plus they're immune to fire. I always feel much more confident entering the final battle with a couple good rock boarders.



Rebekah is giving us a 14% bonus to weapon charge time, which is handy, and an extra bar of energy. Still useful!



Finally, Giles is giving us +7% evasion and a bar of energy. I expect he'll get that up to a full 10% before too long.



Now for our loadout. I'm swapping things up a bit for this battle, there are some special concerns.

I've put our beloved burst lasers back in storage for a bit. I need the slots for our ion bomb, breach bomb, and artemis missile - I'll explain why soon. I've also left the heavy laser II there, to do hull damage, and I'll go into more detail there soon too.

We've got our ol' reliable defense drone, and also a system repair drone that may or may not get any use, but it can't hurt!

We have some very cool augmentations, but they're all long-term, and won't have any immediate effect on the battle - we have more than enough drones even without the recovery arm, and we won't be grabbing more scrap mid-battle. We could have sold these all for a few extra scrap if there was a shop along our way in this sector or at the end of the last one.



Let's do this.

So this thing's pretty big. First thing it does is cloak, so you have some time to just watch it while your weapons won't charge and you can't teleport.

I've rearranged weapons to ensure my zoltan power is going to stuff I'm using. Currently I want the bombs and missile on line, the laser will come into play later. I've got the teleporter at full power, and the rest in my defense array - drone, cloak, and shields / engines.



Eventually it uncloaks. Let's take a look at what we're up against.

So this thing has all the systems, as you might expect. Its evasion isn't very good, but it has lots of HP and four layers of shields. All minor systems are pretty well upgraded - strong doors, lots of healing, and so forth. For some reason they never seem to use the teleporter or drones, which isn't ominous at all.

There are four separate weapons system rooms, each tied to a specific weapon, inaccessible from the main body of the ship, and crewed by a single human.

The weapons are, from left to right: a triple ion blast, triple laser, triple missile, and 2-damage beam. The ions, lasers, and beam are dangerous in tandem, but the missiles are trouble even on their own.



So here's part one of our plan: use missiles, bombs, and boarders to disable three of these four weapons and kill the enemies crewing them. We want the missiles out of the way as soon as possible, because we're relying on cloaks and evasion only against whatever gets past our lone defense drone, but the ion blasts and lasers can take our shields down far enough to let the beam mess up several systems at once, so we want to get things under control quickly.



Once we have them down, they don't have any way to repair them, so we can take our time with phase two.



We want to disable the ion blast, missiles, and beam. We're leaving the triple laser alone, along with the enemy stuck in the triple laser system room. Why? Because this ship has a couple of extra cheats up its sleeve. If we kill all the enemy crew, an AI takes over which can repair systems automatically, and we definitely don't want to deal with that. Leaving the triple laser guy alive prevents that from happening, and as long as we have three layers of shields up we don't have to worry about the laser.



Now, some of you may be wondering why I don't leave the beam weapon online instead - it'll take six energy to negate the lasers, and only four to negate the beam. Alternately, it'd take six to negate the ion weapon, and it wouldn't be as dangerous if that hit us unshielded. That's a good question, but there's an extra complication we'll have to deal with later that makes this the better option.





Okay! So with the quick action of our boarders, some powerful bombs and missiles, and judicious use of defensive systems, we've managed to declaw the flagship without taking any damage! Nice.

Now, we want to destroy the most dangerous system remaining on the ship. Any guesses?



Yep. I want to send in my boarders and clear out that crew, but right now the flagship is a deathtrap for boarders, weapons rooms aside. The obvious reasons are the fully-powered medbay and the advanced blast doors - if we just send a team in, they'll never be able to do any lasting harm. The kicker is that cloaking device - if they cloak while we have crew aboard, we won't be able to get them back until the cloak runs out, by which point they could easily be dead.



Luckily, we have a nice selection of shield-bypassing weaponry to help solve this. We disable the medbay with the breach bomb, knock out the cloak with the ion bomb, and send in the first two boarders to prevent them from repairing the medbay. We may not kill the entire crew, but we can at least start whittling them down.



We send in the second away team as soon as possible. Those doors mean we can't send people out of the room to reposition them (or at least, I don't think we can, I'll have to test that later), so we'll see how dangerous it is to be unable to micromanage boarders - whoever's in the top left spot will be taking lots of damage.



But still, things are going pretty well - we can harry them by knocking out other systems while they're trying to fight out boarders, and the enemy crew is gradually starting to succumb to our assault.



A lot of these bomb attacks aren't strictly necessary, but they help keep the pressure off and we're not going to run out any time soon.



Eventually, we have to pull out - Markel's about to kick his breathing habit. We've left them a nice present courtesy of our breach bomb - a hole in the medbay that's sucking out all the air, delaying repairs and harming crew.





Of course, while our boarders are recovering and the enemy crew is trying to repair the medbay, it's a perfect time to blast them.





Fire is always nice! Ideally we'd be setting the medbay on fire and then invading with rock boarders, but a breach that sucks the air out works pretty well too.



Unfortunately, they eventually get their act together and start repairing things. We don't like that. There's only a few of them left, though, and they're all about to die.

(Except for that poor chump in the laser room, who has no idea what's going on.)

We have the luxury of being able to move things along with our excellent array of explosive weaponry.

They're pretty well boned, no one can survive long enough to repair the breach in the medbay (and therefore no one can even start repairing the medbay itself).



In a panic, they cloak. It's not all that helpful. My boarders are at full heath and ready for them to reappear.



Time to take that damn door system down. Finally we're seeing the power of doors from the other side, and we don't want to deal with that one second longer.





They rush to defend their most precious system, and die in the attempt.

So now they have no way to damage us, repair their weapons, or repair any defenses we disable (which we can do for free with our boarders). So... let's disable their defenses.













The heavy laser finally comes into play. It's not really for disabling things, but why not, right?



Here's what it's really for: blasting that ship to dust.



Say goodbye, rebels.



...

WHAT?!



Turns out the rebels aren't defeated so easily. They've jumped away (somehow) with part of their ship blasted off, but the rest is still functioning. We have to make sure they don't get to our base.



I put another point into doors. Hopefully we won't need it.



We'll also use a different loadout. More lasers, fewer bombs.

It's actually a bad idea to take that artemis missile into this fight, but I don't realize that until too late.



Luckily it's only able to jump one beacon away, and we know where it is. (Also, defeating it delays the "jumps until in range" counter, which is handy.)





So as you might have guessed, this isn't just the same fight minus a few systems. But the slaughter we perpetrated last time is definitely going to help us out. Here's the sitch: everything's been repaired back to full. The cloak and door systems are gone, and the crew's still dead (except that one guy), but the engines are powered up a bit and the drone system is now on line.

The drones make this probably the toughest part of the flagship fight. They have a beam drone and a laser drone, a defense drone, and a boarding drone - plus something else you'll see in a sec.

This, incidentally, is when I make the second tactical mistake in as many minutes (right after the missile thing), when I don't activate our own defense drone immediately...



... which means we get hit by a boarding drone. Luckily it missed any rooms with systems.

Anyway, the initial plan is similar to last time - use boarders, bombs, and missiles to take out the two uncrewed weapon systems and the (robust) drone system. Of course, we can't use missiles for this, because of their defense drone. Whoops.



I'm glad I upgraded those doors, because I can pretty much ignore that boarding drone until...







... that. We still need to do more damage to that drone system, but we've dealt with the boarding drone at least.

Okay, so you see that message that just popped up, above and to the right of the Heart of Gold?


The first time you see that, you're probably about to lose the battle. Even after you've won a few times, it's still scary. Here's the idea:



Right after that pops up, the flagship deploys six more laser and beam drones to attack you. It's not a great shot, but the effect is impressive - a massive swarm of drones flitting about your ship, blasting through your defenses. This completely bypasses the actual drone system on the flagship, so there's no way to stop it - you just have to weather the attack.

Luckily, it only lasts a few seconds. A level one cloak will protect you pretty well. Here's the thing - the power surge recharges at about the same rate as the cloak, so you want your cloak to turn off as soon as possible after the surge. That happens automatically at level one, but at level two or three the extra duration will delay the start of your recharge, so it will still be out of commission when the next surge happens. You can fire your weapons after the surge to break your cloak, or you can just put a single bar of power into the system to keep it at level one (which is what I'm doing).

Meanwhile, we've managed to take down the non-laser weapons and we've bombed the shields and drone systems a bit to soften them up.



We don't want to dawdle, though, 'cause of those damn power surges. Our boarders are getting to work on the drone system (and are going to move on to the shields too), but unfortunately they're also going to have to deal with the breaches we've caused.







Eventually I have to pull them out while team two takes over.



That works for a while, but they eventually have to retreat as well.



On a whim, I start up our system repair drone to go fix that hull breach.



We get the drones offline using another breach bomb. That'll leave them open to missile attacks and will take a bit of pressure off us, but the power surges won't stop.



Now that we can hit them with missiles too, an artemis takes out the rest of their shields. Full power to lasers!



(And then don't fire the lasers in the middle of a power surge.)



Now!





Since the piloting system is down (taking their evasion to 0%), it doesn't really matter what we aim for. We don't want to hit their O2, of course, because we want that one guy to stay healthy.





All that's left to do is keep dodging drones and blasting them with lasers.













Yeah, they pulled that trick again.

But this is the last time. One more battle.

Here's our new loadout. We're going for all the lasers we can muster, plus the ion bomb.



Also might as well spend some more scrap.





Super weapon? That doesn't sound good.



Here's what we're dealing with for the third and final stage of the flagship. Only the laser and missile weapons are left (which is why we're keeping the laser guy alive), and everything's repaired again. Drones are gone. Engines are powered up a little more. Apparently this is when the rebels would start using that teleporter, but... well.

It's also activated two secret weapons. The first is this extra-tough zoltan shield. We have to blast through that before we can teleport or attack systems. The second will show up soon.



So we'll start by shooting the shield, relying on evasion, cloaking, and the drone to avoid damage.





It falls pretty quickly to our massive laser array, and our away team starts to disable the missiles. Meanwhile...

















That was beautiful. We waste no time taking down those shields.

Our boarders start hitting the piloting system while they wait for extraction. As soon as they're back on the Heart of Gold we can blast the flagship to kingdom come.


Oh, right. That.





...

Frankly, that was a little underwhelming.

There are two different types of power surges this time around. The first is what we've just seen - they'll fire six or so lasers all at once. If you've made it this far, you probably have the evasion and shields to just ignore this, unless it happens to align with their regular laser fire and you get unlucky with evasion.

The way things are going, we're not going to see another power surge, so I'll just tell you that the other thing it can do is reactivate the super shield. Apart from all the usual concerns, this also prevents us from recalling boarders until we take the shield down again. Of course, we killed all the crew two jumps ago, so we don't really need to worry about any harm coming to our boarders.

Anyway, enough talk. Let's finish this.



















Let's see that once more:



Aww yeah.





- Victory -

We win. Our (surviving) crew is honored, and the federation overcomes the dastardly rebels.

Roll credits.







AND THEN A HUGE LIST OF BACKERS OKAY

and some stuff about code libraries and fonts



We also get, like, a score? It's based on the amount of scrap you collected (outside of shops), beacons you visited, ships you defeated, and difficulty level. I have ~zero interest in this number.

So that's it! Victory! It's a huge rush to beat the rebel flagship for the first time, because of how often you've died trying to get there and on those terrible drones and thinking you've done something clever but actually you activated a trap card.

There you have it - a single game of FTL. There's plenty more in the game, and I've had to die many times to get to the point of being able to Let's Play this game and assume I'll win, but this is probably a fair glimpse of what it's like. Thanks for coming along on this voyage with me!

As for what's next... if anyone's interested, I'd be able to do a couple of different things. I could talk about the different ships in the hangar, why some of them are so terrible, which ones are my favorites, and so forth. I could try a run on Normal, probably in an abbreviated format, and quite possibly resulting in my untimely death. Or perhaps I could try seeking out the mysterious SUPER SECRET BONUS SECTOR?! Any thoughts?

Also, I wasn't hubristic enough to claim I was going to beat the boss without taking a single point of damage, but apparently I should have been.

That was a really solid run. We had some tough challenges early on, but pretty quickly collected the stuff we needed to get lots of scrap and avoid damage for the rest of the game. Those two scrap recovery arms didn't hurt, either! That's probably the most-upgraded ship I've had, by the end of the game.

I say do a couple of runs with the more interesting ships in the game, explaining how their tactics differ from a usual game.

Like, for example, the Torus that most everybody unlocks as their second ship. That's a fun one.

Sweet. Nice LP, you covered the ground between "amusing" and "explains the mechanics" very well.

What's this secret bonus sector of which you speak?

So there's this event in certain sectors that allows you to get an item. In certain other sectors there's an event that allows you to use this item to get a special crewmember. And then in one particular sector there's an event that lets you use this crewmember to get to a super-secret sector with weird technology, aliens, events, and a special ship.

It requires a chain of coincidences to even get a chance to get there, and I haven't actually ever done it myself. BUT it'd be pretty neat.

If you do, I HIGHLY ADVISE using the Rock cruiser, either one to attempt it. It comes with an augment that removes a lot of the luck from the equation.

I demand a run using the DA-SR 12.

More or less the first three quarters of the images in this update aren't showing. Just wanted to let you know.

Same. But look on the bright side: you're very popular!

Aww geez. Okay, one sec. I'm going to put the rest of the sector 8 stuff somewhere where you'll be able to see it. The other sectors' bandwidth limit should reset soon, but if it's still a problem I'll sort that out too.

Okay, everything for sector 8 should be back online. I might move over an earlier sector or two as well later, but the rest will come back online in a few days, I think. Let me know if there are any more issues.

Yep, Photobucket is pretty good for organizing things however you want in one location, but 1 GB of bandwidth per month is practically nothing. (I recall that the paid account rates were fairly reasonable, but I haven't checked in ages.)

You should do runs with the different ships, at least the ones that are interesting in some way.

All the images work fine now. Great job!

I'd like to hear about the other ships and see the super-secret bonus sector.

All right, here's the plan. I'll do a little presentation on the different ships in the hangar, and then take a couple of them out for a spin. Secretly I'll also be looking for the Secret Sector, and I'll report back on that when there's progress. Sound good?

I don't see how this secret bonus sector can remain a secret if you keep blathering about it.

Anyway, awesome job and hope to see more w/ funky alien ships!

I finally finished this LP. And I've got to say it was a good read. I heartily support a second runthrough if willcoon wants to do it.