Let's Play FTL: Faster Than Light!

Hi! Because I am impatient, I will be starting our run using Zoltan Cruiser type B, the Noether. Since Trar both recommended it and requested I name a crewmember after him, I did one better. Talking Tracks is going to expand its railroad monopoly in the only direction left: to the stars.



Yadda yadda yadda backstory and tips. I know this already, you know this already.



Onto the ship itself. Drastically different from both Kestrel Heart of Gold and Bulwark, Noether Talking Tracks has a few features. The Zoltan crew you know (mostly) already, they have less health but provide energy to their room. The weapons I'll discuss, but they're not new either. What IS new is our shielding. Instead of a fully functional standard shield, Talking Tracks, being a Zoltan ship, comes with Zoltan shielding! This lets it block almost any attack in the game, up to and including crew teleportation! It only recharges with FTL jumps though, so we need to disable a ship and win an encounter before it depletes and we find ourselves at the mercy of space.



Moving on. (The first sector was a boring trade I couldn't take.) The new version of FTL came with a good chunk of accessibility improvements, the first you can see here. When you highlight a beacon you plan to jump to, you can see all connecting routes to and from that beacon. Even aside from business opportunities for our company, this prevents players from misjudging jump distances and getting stuck, which is a lame way to lose a run.



Oh look, a tollbooth. Let's see, we can either spend scrap to give our rivals in competition a benefit, or we can buy them out.



BUY 'EM OUT, BOYS

Ben Holladay gets to warming up our considerable weapons array. The two Ion Blast Mk I weapons are the most basic ion weapon in the game, they shoot an ion projectile that deals 1 ion damage, disabling systems (starting with shields if it hits them) but not dealing any damage to hull or crew. The real moneymaker here, though, is the Pike Beam. See that red line on their ship? That's the rooms the Pike Beam will hit when it sweeps across, dealing 1 damage per room.



Meanwhile, the other ship has a fairly standard and deadly earlygame weapon array. The difference between their ion weapon and ours isn't the damage boost, Zoltan shields just take double damage from ion weapons. Nope, that's an Ion Stunner, denoted by its yellow color. New to AE is the stun condition, commonly inflicted by missiles and ion weapons, stun prevents any crewmembers so affected from doing things for a pretty beefy amount of time. Most ships prefer a normal ion weapon to a stunner, but stunners can be VERY useful.

Its other weapon is a Heavy Laser, which is like a normal laser except it does 2 damage if it hits instead of 1. We really don't want to get hit by it.



But before they get a chance, our Pike Beam goes off and cuts a clean arc along their ship, freaking them right the hell out.



So badly, in fact, that they attempt to flee and surrender as part of the same volley! Beam weapons are great, guys.

That's a lot of missiles, but we don't have or need a missile system just yet. So no, you don't get to live.



Aw yeah, ship down! Let's spend some scrap on our shields and get them nice and shiny!



...Oh.

So, a lot of ships start with a weaker system in certain essential areas, often shields or weapons. To prevent players from just buying them up to regular capacity after their first fight, weak systems require a much larger investment of scrap to render functional. Talking Tracks still has an edge over ships that straight up don't have Shields systems (i.e. Stealth ships), but that's still going to be a major Achilles heel, and one we'll want to work towards fixing.



Moving right along.



Ooooh. Mercenaries like this, I usually don't have or want to spend the scrap on, and usually just prefer to fight, but more information on the sector would be nice. Shame, too, since I could totally take this guy.



Nice. Store and Distress are the same as usual, the yellow signs indicate ships of unknown allegiance, and the orange striped circles are hazards native to that beacon. Before I go to that Distress beacon that clearly isn't a trap, though...



A trading post! Let's cut some deals.



Take your time. We CAN travel faster than light, after all.



TREACHERY!

Okay, here's the joke: normally I wouldn't touch this event, but since this is an LP, I want to try interesting stuff to see what happens. In this case, we find out that the refueling depot is quite clearly a pirate trap.

We ALSO find a filled plothole. Pre-AE, if you got into an event that put boarders on your Zoltan ship, the game gave the message "You have no idea how they got on your ship!" Between that and the sudden presence of angry Mantis wanting your delicious energyflesh, it quite rightly annoyed basically everyone. Now, though, AE has added several augmentations to ships, including the Zoltan Shield Bypass. Not only does this justify this nonsense (although in this case our shields were probably lowered anyway), but now players can obtain the same augmentation themselves, letting them board ships through Zoltan Shields.



In the here and now, Philip Thomas has a sudden increase in workload, and a bunch of unsavories have made way onto our ship.



Boarding parties going after the Heart of Gold were bad, but Talking Tracks is crewed solely by railroad investors, none of which is particularly hardy. To compound matters, the ship layout we're dealing with... is frankly awful. If I wanted to constrict boarder movement, I COULD send someone to crew the doors system, but that's also the fastest route I can vent from. Thankfully, one of the boarders, and the only one electing to actually fight our captain, is an Engi, and in an Engi/Zoltan fight, the Zoltan still wins.



Fittingly, the Engi runs off while the actual muscle goes to make engine repairs even more impossible.



Realizing too late the hazard of venting my Doors room, I send Philip Thomas to crew it, upgrading all the doors to security doors, and vent from a different angle. As I do so, I notice someone's playing in our medbay.



I am, of course, all too happy to meet them there.



Shortly after, the goons break into the Doors system, and I respond with the time-honored tactic of venting the entire damn ship and hiding in the medbay.



And that's the story of how I took a stupid risk for the sake of an LP.



After I fix everything up, rather than remembering who was crewed where...

I just hit Enter, and the order "Return to Stations" goes out, and they all automatically do so. You can save stations, and issue the order too, with the buttons under the crew roster. Nice to have!



Oh no the distress beacon was a trap I am very surprised by this



But hey, more new stuff. That weird gun on their port side is a flak gun, which...



Fires a LOT of shots. That's a Mk I, which fires three shots. Compare to Mk I Burst Laser, which fires only two. There is a catch, though: flak shots can be intercepted by defense drones, and they're harder to aim, having a scatter effect. They excel at taking down shields, which is a big problem, but are bad at disabling key systems.



Which leaves us wide open for their Heavy Laser...



It's a good thing that we're CAPTAINS OF THE INDUSTRY



Right, now for something VERY silly.



Why yes I am flying into an asteroid field with no shields whatsoever, WHY DO YOU ASK



Well, no. Our Zoltan shield still works just fine, but the asteroids will make it much harder for us to get out of this one unscathed. One unlucky hit to a critical system could doom us.



That said, our ion weapons eat their shields almost as quickly, and the Pike Beam ensures they don't get things.



Doors is a pretty annoying system to have destroyed and on fire, but I think we can still pull through, as long as an asteroid doesn't hit



Haha psyche it hit an empty room.



Shop shop shop.

The weapons are fairly interesting. The Hull Smasher Laser and the Hull Beam are variants of the Burst Laser Mk I and Pike Beam respectively, which take longer to charge but deal double damage if they hit a room with no system in it. I rather like hull weapons, but I have never used the Hull Beam and can't see myself doing so any time soon.

Stun Bomb is the Ion Stunner in bomb form. Unlike the Ion Stunner, it consumes a missile. Also unlike the Ion Stunner, it stuns for a RIDICULOUS amount of time. Definitely worth considering as a boarding ship (i.e. not us).

As for the augmentations, FTL Recharge Booster you already know. Fire Suppression and Emergency Respirators, though, are new to AE. The former automatically extinguishes fires on your ship, and the latter halves the damage they take from low oxygen. They're nice general-purpose augmentations to have, and I think a few of them have blue events, but if I have 65 scrap I'll probably buy something else.

I don't even have that, though, so I buy fuel and



Oh right, the fire.

Well, time to do what I usually do and vent the ship. Since the door system is disabled, we're doing this Shivan style. Oxygen goes off.



The plan, of course, encounters immediate complications.



The complications then spread into more complications.

When a system is completely destroyed, provided it was not due to a bomb or hull damage, the ship takes 1 point of hull damage. This means that if you're trying to control a fire, it's usually beneficial not to worry about fires in completely destroyed rooms until other fires are dealt with. That charred console ain't gettin' any deader.



But hey, for total damage going into an asteroid field with only a Zoltan shield, that wasn't too bad.



Since it's cheap, I spend a bit of scrap on upgrading the engine. While willcoon mostly kept reactor and system levels equal, I play a lot more conservative with reactor upgrades, since I can always redirect power as necessary.



OH NO YOU HAVE HACKED MY SHIELDS SYSTEM WHATEVER WILL I DO



Cool, they have a Heavy Ion. It does a whole 2 points of ion damage!

Nothing else interesting happened in that fight.



So here's how I explore sectors in FTL. That giant Rebel force approaching? It's just a massive wave, and I am a surfer dude. I try to skirt as close to it as possible for as long as possible, since that lets me explore more beacons without putting myself at too much risk. Obviously, I want a lot of beacons to jump to in order to pull this off, so if the route is congested I'll get to a place where I have more jumps to work with, naturally.



Stop attacking our investments, jerk!



I immediately regret this decision.

Combat Drones pose much the same threat as asteroid fields to Talking Tracks, i.e. a constant threat that wears down our shield quickly and denies us our defense.



Plus, they have a beam weapon, which would normally be stopped cold by shielding of the conventional sort. But Zoltan shields? Nope, they take at least two hits from just about any beam.



I shut the ship down in total before it becomes too much of a threat, though.

I get scrap rewards both for destroying the ship and for saving the outpost, but I probably won't showcase rewards unless they're particularly interesting.



The last beacon before the exit feels fit to grant me a free Stun Bomb, cuz why not. That's not especially useful to me, but I'm sure I can sell it at a shop for something I do want. Maybe a proper missile system.



Finally, at the exit beacon, one last complete and utter trap lucrative investment opportunity.



Remembering all the other risks that didn't pay off earlier this sector, the crew elects to back out.



All in all, a wise decision.

This ship has a crew teleporter, and after our last brush with boarders I'm none too keen on a repeat incident.



Offline it goes.



Oh now you want to trade? NOT GOOD ENOUGH, GO TO THE SPACE VACUUM.



And here we are at the end of the sector. I have basically upgraded nothing, since I want that first layer of shields and the only other remotely tempting thing is either autopilot (so Trar can power systems with his mind) or doors (because Zoltan).



Crew-wise, we haven't got any skill upgrades yet, but Ben Holladay's getting good at the weapons systems. Turns out firing three weapons at once is a good way to improve quickly!



We now have two sector choices. We can either hit an Engi controlled sector, full of everybody's favorite nanobuddies, or the Rebel controlled sector, full of combat, death, hostility, and basically no trade opportunities whatsoever.

Next Time: The Hatred Scale

Rebels, because extra scrap and fewer enemy Engis.

Rebels so we can execute hostile takeovers in exchange for more scrap. Also, this LP is turning out better than I ever expected.

So, a minor bit of lore that willcoon noted in his LP, but that bears mentioning again since it's common to miss, is that one of the main differences between the Federation and the Rebels is the fact that the Rebels are exclusively human. The Federation, obviously, employs anyone willing to work with them, and pirates are universal, of course, but the Rebel movement is rooted in human supremacy.



Anyway we're gonna fly around in a sector full of people out for our blood.



Surprisingly, the first distress beacon we jump to ISN'T a trap. It is, in fact, people needing assistance, struggling to get through an asteroid field.

If we had a teleporter, we could beam them over. A defense drone could shoot down asteroids no problem. A Rock-plated ship would just cruise through and not care at all, blocking asteroids for them.



We have none of these things and have earned only a healthy respect for asteroid fields.



Oddly enough that was probably one of the better selections for a Rebel controlled sector distress beacon.



In much, much worse news, we have discovered one of the things that is new to AE, one of two new environmental hazards.



The Rebel ship is fairly standard and not a big deal, we could take it easily under normal circumstances. But see that warning at the top?



This is an ion pulse!



This is what it does.

Ion pulses spray ion damage over everything in the field, of course targeting shields first if they're up. Pulsars like these are EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. I would sooner take any other environmental hazard over a pulsar.



Now, it might LOOK like they're worse off here...



But getting our weapons ioned is really, REALLY bad. And without a shield, that beam drone is basically automatic hull damage every time it fires with a chance of systems damage.



But then, something neat (if perhaps not very fortuitous for us) happens: the drone happens to fly in front of our ion blaster, and gets hit directly. Shots can intercept both each other and drones when they fire, which is very rare on account of it being in the middle of space. The result of an outcome varies from terrible (your Breach Missile getting shot down by a single Basic Laser) to the excellent (this right here). Ion damage to drones directly, rather than to the drone system, doesn't destroy them, but it does stun them for a while.



That said, we're getting nowhere in this encounter. Time to cut our losses and GTFO.



Next sector is a bog-standard Rebel fighter. In ordinary circumstances we'd just faceroll this guy before our Zoltan shields gave out, but our weapons are still ion-locked as HELL.



By the time they're functional again, our shields are gone, and they can teleport over.



This time, though, I'm going to be smart about this stupid-ass ship layout.



YEAH FIGHT ME I DARE YOU.



No running. Absolutely not.



Okay, that pulsar cost us quite a bit. I think we need to step up our game.



Game officially stepped up. It'll cost some power that we're currently using on our weapons array, but it might be necessary.



I HAVE NO IDEA HOW THEY GOT PAST MY ZOLTAN SHIELD!



Huh, tricky. This could be a trap of course, but having more crew, particularly non-Zoltan crew, could come in very handy. I could have him take over piloting and send Trar in to crew shields.



On his way to piloting, he of course murders the first filthy energyman he sees. Balls.

If this wasn't AE, most players who knew this event (I didn't really, my bad) would never accept the surrender offer, because losing crewmembers is a huge penalty, especially when you don't have many crew to begin with. Even willcoon's Heart of Gold would hate losing crewmembers.

If you have a Clone Bay, which is new to AE, you can instead just have your dude respawn with the skill penalty, a much more tolerable outcome. But we don't, so Trar is dead, murdered by mutiny.



Of course, we exact all sorts of revenge on his killer.



Philip Thomas takes over piloting duties, but now there's no question, we REALLY need autopilot.

(The astute among you may have noticed a nearby store where I could have potentially hired a replacement with that money. Shut up.)

The next ship is, despite the attempt to flee, much simpler on account of the lack of shielding. However, it DOES have a new system that, were it not for our Zoltan shield, would mean really bad stuff.

That's a mind control system, another AE addition. Ships that have a mind control system can convert any enemy crewmember they can sense into a temporary ally. In this case, one of our Zoltan would immediately cease crewing their station and instead start overchanneling into it, trying to blow it up. Dealing with this usually means any other crew you have need to run over there and slow them down, which is a problem if the mind control system is upgraded as the newly hostile crewmember will have a sizable boost to health and damage.



Zoltan shields block the hell out of mind control, for which I am very thankful.



Time to start wrapping this trainwreck of a sector up.



Haha, my upgraded piloting is already coming in handy! Autopilot, engage!



SO WORTH IT.

Most of you are familiar with the Artemis missile, featured on the Kestrel ship and many others besides. Hermes is the next in that line of missile, dealing 3 damage on a hit but consuming a bit more power and taking a bit longer to fire. We'll want to upgrade our weapons system a bit more to get some good use out of this, but believe me, we will be getting use out of this.



Oh hey, another new AE feature we're ignoring thanks to Zoltan shields!

That's a hacking system. When activated, the hacking system launches a hacking drone, consuming a drone part in the process. It then latches onto a system of our ship, locking the doors and allowing them to perform a hacking pulse, the effects of which vary depending on the system. Shields and weapons drain their charge, engines flat-out stop working, medbay starts injuring crew inside, oxygen depletes shipwide... Hacking systems are very strong, but once deployed, they're stuck to that room for the encounter, and you can't hack a destroyed system.



I don't want to get hit by that nonsense, so I'm putting the engines at max power, especially now that I know their shields are no better than ours and take only a single ion to drop.



Plan goes off just fine.



The scrap from such goes to ensuring that boarders will be much less of a problem.



Oh hey, a chance to get more crew back!



Also I forgot to re-enable oxygen, whoops.

Their ship is chump change at this point. Two Basic Lasers? Get outta town, kid.



They don't offer to join our crew unfortunately. However, that quest marker is basically guaranteed to be full of goodies, and I do like goodies.



That about does it for this sector, though. It beat us up and got Trar killed, but we got a Hermes missile out of it. Not really a favorable trade, but it could've been far worse.



Ben Holladay's weapon skills have improved, and he now affords an extra 5% decrease in charge time across the board, letting our spam get even spammier. Pretty soon he'll have mastered weapons and can REALLY do some damage.

Philip Thomas has been doing a little bit of everything and thus has had no chance to upgrade anything.



Given Trar's untimely death by mutiny, we're gonna need a bit of extra reactor power to squeak by.



Next sector time. We can either visit our homeworlds, a place of trade, bureaucracy, and enlightenment, or we can go get eaten alive by a bunch of Mantis raiders. I WONDER WHAT YOU GUYS WILL TELL ME TO DO.

Next Time: Trar Memorial Hermes Missile

Deliver Trar's remains to his next of kin.

Zoltan, because we don't want to over-leverage ourselves and get wiped out in a recession.

Find yourself new recruits at the homeworlds!

Yes, please go to the Homeworlds. We aren't horribly sadistic people, honest!

Zoltan Homeworlds

zoltan. we need [tim allen voice]MORE POWER

In FTL lore, the Zoltan are... I guess the Vulcans would probably be the closest analogue, but rather than mind-powers, they instead are beings of pure energy. Basically, they're valued galaxy-wide as traders, diplomats, bureaucrats, and so forth, but they have a tendency to be rather by-the-book. On the whole, though, this sector should prove much easier on us than the prior one.



First, though, let's double back and hit this distress beacon, THEN we can go check out the secret Federation base.



That is a ton of free scrap and I gladly accept this.



We're running low on fuel, too, but that we can rectify quickly.

Anyway, the next beacon might be familiar to those of you that saw willcoon's LP.



This is the unlock quest for the very ship class we're using. We impress these peacemakers properly, we get access to the Zoltan Cruiser.

THAT SAID. Since most of the unlock quests (not this one, but most) were horrendously obtuse and often required a guidebook in one hand and an RNG seed manipulator in the other, they added alternate unlock methods for basically every ship out there. Simply get to the final sector with the ship just before it, and you unlock the next one! This doesn't hold for B and C type layouts, though. B type layouts still require 2 of the 3 achievements for that ship, and C type requires you to reach the final sector with the B type layout.



But the other half of this quest is way the hell in the distance. For now, let's hit that base.



O snapple, auto drone!



So, this drone has a cloaking system. Again, willcoon got one of these in his LP run.

Personally, I'm not a fan. They're good, don't get me wrong, but 150 scrap is a LOT of scrap, and the addition of a bunch of new system types in AE has given me a good amount of other preferences. Usually, my first choice when buying a new system is a hacking system, but occasionally I go for others.



The cloak buys enough time for their heavy laser to chew through most of our Zoltan shield, but by then, our weapons have charged and we can return fire.



Better yet, once our shields drop, we can actually activate regular shielding!

This is still not a perfect scenario, since heavy lasers trade shot count for shot damage. The Mk II fires only two shots, but that second shot will deal 2 hull damage, and it'll usually punch a hull breach in our ship too.



We pull it off in time, and get a VERY excellent payout in return. I'll discuss the crewmember first. Enzo Martin, being a Slug, comes with innate telepathy, letting him sense the location of any lifeforms aboard any ship, regardless of sensors or atmospheric conditions, which is pretty handy. His psychic powers also afford him complete immunity to mind control systems, which is a good niche defense if our shields give out against such a ship.

The important thing to note is that weapons control icon next to him. As of AE, crewmembers can join your crew with innate skills already learned. In this case, Martin could crew our weapons room almost as efficiently as Ben Holladay. But he's still going to be our pilot to replace Trar, freeing up Philip Thomas to crew the engines again.



Our weapon is the Laser Charger Mk II. Charger weapons are a new addition to AE, kind of like hull or fire weapons. Charger weapons charge up faster than other weapons, but each level of charge only arms a single shot for the weapon in question. This leads to some variability in how you use it: you can either play fast and spam weak shots, or build up a powerful volley over greater time. The Mk II Laser Charger is one of the better weapons for its type, but it consumes a hair too much power for my tastes and for what it does. If we were running a ship that could afford the full charge time, I'd consider it, but Talking Tracks still relies heavily on the Zoltan shield.



Also seriously the homeworlds are just handing out rewards like candy.



The next jump is a distress beacon with Zoltan ships requesting a savior from this Mantis ship. Unfortunately, the Mantis ship has a bit more shielding than we can comfortably tackle with ion weapons alone.



So it's time to put our fancy new Hermes missile to the test. You'll also note I'm shuffling weapons around on the array. This is to best take advantage of Ben Holladay's power, since it automatically allocates to the leftmost weapon in the array. Additionally, if the weapons system takes damage, weapons that can no longer be powered are disabled from the right, so your leftmost weapon should be the one most essential to your strategy.



Just as advertised, the Hermes missile blasts their shields system hard, and Enzo Martin proves his piloting skills by dodging half of their laser barrage.



Between this and them electing to send over the Slug shield engineer that just took a Hermes missile to the face as boarding crew, we basically have this one in the bag.



Hm... kind of a weak offer, but I do need the fuel. Very well, you get to live.



The next beacon has a store! Yaaaaaay

The Glaive Beam is the king of beam weapons, and would be a great addition to our arsenal, except for the fact that it costs a whopping 4 bars of power and takes roughly a year or so to charge. It's still really strong, because the beam does 3 damage, meaning the enemy needs at least 3 bars of shielding to stop it, and if we have that and the Hermes missile intact and running, we can destroy almost any ship... provided we can power them both at once and don't get shot first. Pass.

The Ion Charger is another charge-type weapon, like the laser charger. It's basically an ion blast that builds up several shots, up to 3 per volley. Again, if I wasn't running a Zoltan ship, I'd buy this one instantly. Hell, even with this ship it's considerable.

Hull Missile is similar to Hermes, in that it takes a long time to arm. It deals 2 damage normally, but being a hull weapon, it deals double damage if it hits an uncrewed station. Nice and all, but our Hermes missile is almost all-around better (I think it consumes a hair more power though).

Now that we have Enzo Martin, I'm less concerned about hiring more crew, so I ignore them all. Interestingly, skill masteries have zero impact on crew price.



Systems systems systems. I've already described everything here save for the Battery Backup augment, which decreases the ion-lock time after you use the Backup Battery subsystem, meaning you can rely on it more often. If this ship sold that subsystem AND this augment I'd buy both, because the Backup Battery is excellent.

Of the systems here, I do really like Hacking, and should probably have bought it anyway...



But as of AE, you can see what free Drone Schematic you get when purchasing a Drone System, and this one was selling a Defense Drone. (The price of said system also varies depending on what schematic it gives).



I also buy out their fuel supply and snag the Automated Re-loader. Spam up!



I'm just surfin' over here.



Very glad I upgraded my doors.



Okay hell no get OUT of my medbay you jerks!

Since I have a level of autopilot, I can safely send in my best fighter alongside the other Zoltan to the medbay, where they'll do their best to repel the Mantis boarders before their weapons arm.



I prooobably should've actually powered the engines while doing this, though. There's little point in powering shields until your Zoltan shielding gives out.



Not a huge deal, anyway. The only thing that can hurt us is their missile system, and we can stop that with our fancy Defense Drone, no problem.



hahahaha why are you sending a sole engi to board losers



Right, let's do this.



Well, the LAST time we tried negotiating with Rebels, it went badly, but remembering the words of the Zoltan peacemakers, we're gonna try anyway.



Option 2 here is stupid and pointless. Option 3, I think willcoon said will indicate what the Rebellion is all about (spoilers: human supremacy!). Option 1 is the way to go.



You need to go full pacifist, otherwise they get pissed and tell you that they aren't just gonna be stuck to some backwater colonies all their lives.



So, the rewards for this quest are slightly different. For most ships, completing it will give them a Zoltan shield, which is NUTS. If you can't or don't receive this benefit, you instead get the Envoy to personally aid you.



The Envoy has every skill in the game maxed out, and is a totally awesome benefit for our crew and a great way to replace Trar. We send him, fittingly, to the shielding room.

We also name him Trar Jr. because why not. DID I FORGET TO MENTION YOU CAN RENAME CREW MIDGAME NOW? WHOOOAAAAAH



Let's hang ten, broski!



It's very rare that you have an opportunity to NOT fight a ship in an asteroid field, and had we no regular shielding, we'd consider it.



We have regular shields, Zoltan shields, and a defense drone. BRING IT ON.



The defense drone stops any asteroids cold, and our ion weapons eat their shields alive. Easy peasy.



Since we did kinda break the law (TO SAVE THEIR LIVES) we're just gonna make an early exit.



I can practically feel the ocean spray!



Karma, you temptress you.

(Game you don't NEED to put the Super Shield bypass notice on every encounter, it's pretty clear we let them on board.)



So, one new feature to Zoltan in AE that will usually only harm the player is the fact that, upon death, Zoltan explode rather violently, dealing 15 damage to enemy crew in the room. This makes their cop crackdown boarders actually dangerous, and we have to get creative both with defenses and energy allocation to get through okay.



It's not exactly perfect, and an Artemis missile smashes into the space where the crew was literally seconds before. That said, both sides have their Zoltan shields worn down, and our missiles are BETTER



BOOM SHAKA LAKA



Now for an interesting trick. Our oxygen system is off, and levels almost shipwide are fairly critical, but I need my Zoltan out of the medbay to provide enough power to reactivate oxygen without lowering shields.

The solution is simple: close all exterior airlocks, open every other door on the ship.



Pay close attention to the oxygen levels in the upper left. We're still losing oxygen shipwide, but we've equalized the levels a bit, rendering the weapons and drone control rooms safe to divert energy to.



In doing so, we free up enough energy to power the oxygen system back on, rendering the situation stable once more!

I'm the best at space.



My space surfing pro skills are rewarded with a dirt-cheap repair station just asking for me to spend scrap on it.



Noice.

I'm not QUITE as cavalier as willcoon re: hull damage, so I'll take repairs when they're sufficiently cheap, and this seemed as good a time as any. That hull level should tide us over for a large part of the game.

I also get our backup shields up to level 2, which will come in handy should we find a ship armed with enough spam to render our Zoltan shields useless.



Crew! I'm pretty sure if Ben Holladay hasn't maxed weapons yet, he will soon. Philip Thomas hasn't had a chance to do much of anything on account of all the shuffling, but hopefully he'll get better at engines soon (or I may just throw Trar Jr. to his station and have him on roving power duty). Enzo Martin is gonna stay captain for the entire game, most likely: the only other species I'd consider for captain are Rockmen...



And the mysterious new species, rumored to be the cause of the Abandoned Sector's sudden lack of life.

I mean, we could also go to a Slug nebula, but this is an LP and the Abandoned Sector is new and AE-exclusive content.

Next Time: Lanius

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/imag...20110320042733

Fittingly enough, on my last Zoltan B run I also got Envoy. Keep it coming.

I don't think we've been doing enough new content this run! Let's fix that. Welcome to the Abandoned Sector, unofficial home of the Lanius.



By the way, part of the AE content is new music. I hella recommend you play the Lanius music, both variants, while in this sector. I also really like the Slug and Hacking Malfunction battle songs.



Now, I could get a Lanius ship fight here, BUT I want to see if what I'm thinking of is right.



Look at me and my badass upgraded security systems!



So hey, 5 free fuel, I'll take it. I could get that plus scrap rewards for successfully fighting off the ship that would appear if we just hailed the platform, though.



This station I'm not dumb enough to play with. I think even with an upgraded clone bay, you can still lose crewmembers to this.



Next encounter has a fairly common one: chance your luck hunting down Rebels, or ignore them and avoid wasting time?



Having upgraded sensors lets you avoid the penalty for searching, which is an increased Rebel advance for 1 jump, but since that's not a sure thing, I just fight 'em anyway. Come at me bros.

Three layers of shielding is kind of a lot for this early, but our Hermes missile can cut through without much trouble.



Their drone system kicks into high gear as soon as our Zoltan shields drop, though, and they launch an AE-exclusive twist on the boarding drone. That little conical drone heading for piloting is an Ion Intruder, a deceptively nasty piece of work. They lack any weapons themselves, but every so often, they'll charge up a blast of ion energy, dealing a heavy 3 ion damage to the systems in the room and stunning all crew fighting it. This is a pretty big problem for us, because if piloting gets ion-locked AND our pilot is stunned in a room with a hull breach they haven't been fixing... well, that's self explanatory and also really painful.



Thankfully, our Zoltan shields save the day again, and the ion intruder lacks time to do more than the hull breach.



Ion intruders are one of many reasons that an enterprising captain may want to upgrade oxygen instead of other systems. AE adds a few other incentives, such as Lanius boarders and the risk of oxygen getting hacked. Seriously, the first time that happens to you, you'll start considering oxygen system upgrades heavily.



More vanilla sector encounters! This sector doesn't feel abandoned at all!



Here's where our second layer of shielding pays off. The weapons array would have little trouble against only a single layer of shielding, and the heavy ion will eat our Zoltan shields alive.

The biggest threat of all, though, is that anti-ship fire drone. Those suckers come with a weaker version of the Fire Beam installed, so once our shields were ion-locked by the heavy ion, we'd have both the heavy laser doing damage and the fire drone turning the entire ship into an inferno to worry about.



But we do have two layers of shielding, so we're fine.



MORE SURFIN'.



Bah, pirates. However, our telepathy DOES reveal that one of the pirates, in the shielding room, is in fact a Lanius.

Lanius are WEIRD. As crewmembers, the first outright benefit they possess is asphyxiation immunity. This comes in very handy in a lot of cases, but the main reason for that is their tendency to drain oxygen from rooms they inhabit, at about the same rate as a hull breach. Making use of Lanius on your own ship is tricky since you run the risk of damaging your other crewmembers, but they make for top-notch boarders. They also move slightly slower than average, if you care.



What WE care about is that weapons array. The ion weapon isn't the big problem, and our defense drone should handle the worst of the missiles. No, our worry is the Flak Gun Mk II.



This is what it does after our shields AND defense drone do to it. The systems damage is a non-issue, the issue is how quickly it can take down shields and hull integrity alike.



However, they make a VERY nice surrender offer, so I let them be.



Dude I've seen all of ONE Lanius in the sector, and that was as a pirate on another ship. You're a BIT overhyping them (or the sector is underselling them).



Shop contents! I really do want Hacking, and not just to show it off, but I can't justify selling any of our weapons for it, so I content myself with the Backup Battery instead.

The drones sold here... Anti-Combat Drones cost only a single unit of power and fire a steady stream of ion blasts at any combat drones attacking our ship. They're not honestly that great to have, because the best defense against combat drones is to just have good shielding, but if you have a drone system there's not much reason not to pick one up.

The Beam Drone Mk II looks scary, but having tried it out myself, the performance doesn't seem much better than a Mk I. I think the beam it fires covers a wider area, but it doesn't fly any faster, fire more often, or deal more damage. What a waste.



Hacking Stun is exactly what it sounds like and is a great way to prolong stupid-ass asphyxiation tactics.



But yeah, backup battery it is. We got power for DAYS now.



I also upgrade the medbay, not because it's terribly vital to our strategy, but because it unlocks a lot of blue dialog options.



Lotta backstory on the Lanius here. Not so much Lanius themselves...

You're a jerk that stole a Federation ship and I'm in a cranky mood because we can't trade with the Lanius.



I don't care how shiny your ion charger is, I'm blowing your ship up.



To ensure their flak gun doesn't punch through, I amp up our shields using the backup battery. This gives us two extra bars of power for a short time, as indicated by that timer on the subsystems readout. Once the backup battery depletes, it'll need 30 seconds to recharge, so it's not as straightforwardly good as two upgrades to the reactor, but it's cheaper AND it functions in the dreaded ion storms.



For blowing up the Red Giant gang, we get a second Pike Beam that I will sell as soon as I am able.



I'd LOVE to be able to sell it at that store up there, but I can't guarantee that the Rebels won't be all over us if I do.



OH NO, TEH HAX.

This ship has a hacking drone and an ion weapon, and it manages to launch it and attach it to our ship! Thankfully, it chose the most useless thing possible to hack. When drone control is hacked, they can pulse to stun all our active drones, potentially blowing them up. We have only one drone and we're not using it here.

If they hacked our new backup battery, we'd be down two bars of reactor power for the duration of the pulse. Not fun, but manageable.



Well, the sector was profitable, but for the sake of new content, more or less a bust.



Let's see if we get SOMETHING new out of this.



SO CLOSE. If we had a cloning bay of our own, we could probably download data from it and get a crewmember out of it.



I use the scrap instead to fully upgraded the backup battery and put our engines into supercool state.



Enzo Martin's getting good at piloting now, and our dodge chance with him at the helm is even better.



Anyway, that was lame and dumb. We can take a mulligan and hopefully encounter ACTUAL Lanius ships, or we can say "screw it" and fight the Mantis like everyone else. Your call.

Next Time: All Aboard the Percy Express

Mantis fightan is tempting, but I'm going with the second abandoned sector.

Walk the Lanius

It's not like your crew is in any shape to take on the Mantis sector anyway.

This revived LP is cool. I hope you go after the Lanius.

This seems familiar somehow.



Let's try to find signs of Lanius life, I guess.



There we go! Check out those angles on that ship!



I immediately regret this decision.

That right there is a ship with a cloaking device and a Burst Laser Mk III. The Mk III is the current top of the line, consuming a ton of energy and requiring loads of charge time, but it fires no less than 5 shots. Assuming they all hit, it can deal hull damage through any level of shielding, and the less shielding the ship has, of course, the worse for them.

HOW FORTUNATE THAT THEY HAVE CLOAKING TO STAY HIDDEN DURING CHARGE TIME.



Let's just get that shield system taken care of so our other weapons can do stuff.

We are, as you may have noticed, starting to brush up on the end of our starting weapons' usefulness.



My plan was to keep the shielding system ion-locked long enough to start opening with the Pike Beam, but this takes long enough with all my power-shuffling that they can just cloak again.



By the time the cloak ends, they've charged their Burst Laser, which in turn wears down my Zoltan shield and breaks our drone control system.



This, in turn, lets them board with their Lanius crew, which is kind of really friggin' bad.



Not wanting to tango with that ship anymore, I jump to the nearby store, where the Lanius traders there demonstrate that, unlike the Mantis or Rockmen, the average Lanius isn't really hostile to us so much as single-minded about what they do.



Anyway, fighting the Lanius boarders is difficult because of their ability to drain oxygen from rooms. I think even with a fully upgraded oxygen system, two at once would outpace its benefits, and I can't quite equalize the pressure between rooms with only two bars of oxygen power.



Not for lack of trying, mind, but you can clearly see there's no benefit occurring here.



Eventually the crew fights them off, but not before sustaining enough damage to shields to chip the hull.



This shop is tantalizingly useless to us. We're a mere 2 scrap short of being able to afford a clone bay, which would replace our medbay and let us revive crewmembers that have been killed, VERY useful with a Zoltan crew. But what we really need is a mode of offense, like that hacking system (or that Laser Charger we sold, or the Glaive Beam we refused to buy). Against most ships here, our only means of attack for much of the fight is the Hermes missile, which charges too slowly and has nothing to supplement it.

We also see an augment that I'm sure the next ship we face will buy to use against us. Zoltan Shield Bypasses, as you know, let teleportation work even on Zoltan-shielded targets. It also lets mind control work through it.



All of this is USELESS to us.



You have only two layers of shielding and your weapons look tolerable, so I will gladly risk a fight.



Huh, okay.



Ordinarily I wouldn't upgrade oxygen this far over other systems but I kinda don't wanna deal with Lanius boarders anymore!



Okay, this looks fine. Burst laser, heavy laser, a missile, but on the whole I think we can survive against this one.



I hope I have not doomed myself!



One thing about Zoltan shielding is that, while it's up, you don't really need the shielding system powered that much! Any Zoltan you have in the shields room can go do other things, and you only have to worry about powering the system once your shields reach a critical level.



Like, say, right now. Backup battery online!



Unfortunately, the ensuing volley goes about as badly for us as is possible. Our Hermes missile gets intercepted by their not-a-Hermes missile, while a stray laser shot manages to hit our Defense Drone dead-on, destroying it. Having your defense drones destroyed is rare but possible, and renders them inoperable for a short time even if you have the drone parts to deploy another one.



Of course, the game doesn't NEED to do stupid stars-aligned nonsense to keep us from hitting, because their ship can just, y'know, dodge.

Every ship has a dodge chance, impacted solely by engine strength and whether you have a pilot, automated or not. Unlike shield strength, this is NOT public information, and your only indication as to how good their engines are is how often your attacks miss. There are only a few ways in the game to get around evasion chances:

• Take out their engines or piloting. Piloting is the fast and dirty way, since the system usually has less health, but of course, this means nothing if you can't hit them. Engines has more health and less of an evasion loss when damaged, but that also means it takes more time to repair.
• Use a weapon that can't miss, i.e. beam weapons. The big problem there, as is becoming readily apparent with Talking Tracks, is that beam weapons are stopped by sufficient layers of shielding. Pike Beams are blocked by even a single layer of shielding, and a Glaive Beam, while undeniably strong, would be walled by most of the ships we've encountered to at least a slight degree. This is why the Osprey is one of the most RNG resistant ships in the game: it comes with an unblockable and undodgeable weapon BUILT IN.
• Hack their engines or piloting, both of which carry the same effect: giving you a display of their evasion chance, locking the doors on that room, and setting evasion to 0 on a pulse (I'm not sure if that functions through cloaking or not). I am really beginning to regret not picking up the hacking system way back when we had the chance, and even then hacking isn't surefire: you need to consume a drone part to use it.
• Remove their pilot. The only methods to do this that can't be dodged are hacking (usually to oxygen), boarding (duh), and mind control (in which the pilot starts murdering the crew rather than doing their job). These all require systems most players don't have access to.
• Be an environmental hazard named "solar flare" or "pulsar". Those effects can't be dodged, which is not much consolation when fighting dodgy ships.

The entire point of this discussion is that what SHOULD have been a fairly painless encounter by this sector's standards became one that nearly got Philip Thomas killed. We only have one way of getting around heavily-shielded enemies, and I have an unknown percent chance for that to just not work. FTL has a deserved reputation for RNG swinginess, and one that I won't defend, even though a lot of it has ways around it.



Anyway, because we took so long, our backup battery gives out, returning us momentarily to weaker energy supplies. Not that it especially matters since there's so little we can power.

OH BOY OUR UPGRADED OXYGEN SYSTEM IS SAFE



After what feels like fifty billion years, we finally get our Pike Beam hit on them.



Our run is not going nearly as excellently as the Heart of Gold, and I happily accept surrender.

(I feel at this time it is prudent to remind viewers that I am playing on the difficulty the game deems Normal.)



Anyway, here's the plan. If that store has weapons, we NEED them. If it has hacking systems, even better. However, we clearly can't handle the bulk of the encounters here, so we're going to take it a little easy on the way there.



That trade sounds perfectly excellent to me.



We give ourselves a bit more insurance against unlucky hits to drone control and a bit more engines capacity because fleeing is a kind of important thing we need to do.



SURF'S UP



Okay, sure. They have a ton of heavy lasers and shields, but we can probably take them.



Of course, they have a Defense Drone.

If that was a Mk I defense drone, amusingly, this would just be a run where I put full power into engines and don't look back, effectively making this a blank jump. But it's a Mk II, which means that it'll shoot down damn near anything that approaches their ship.



The plan, therefore, is to focus on spamming ion shots with enough regularity to keep it busy. Once the Hermes missile is fully charged, I can arm it and fire it at about the same time as an ion shot. The Defense Drone will target one of the two, and if I time it just right, it'll target the ion shot, letting the Hermes missile sail harmlessly past because of COURSE they have good engines too why would you ever doubt this.



That said, once my Hermes missiles actually connect it's a sound plan. Granted, I SHOULD be targeting their drone control with this, but at this point I have several important systems to take down and no good order to do it in.



This procedure takes long enough that I both recharge and reactivate the backup battery...



And that their weapons system finally syncs up and lands a severely annoying hit on our weapons system, stunning both crewmembers inside, starting a fire, and basically ensuring we don't get to do things for another five minutes or so.



Yeah next game I'm picking up a hacking system.



Again, if you want a good indication for time passing, check the charge level of our backup battery. Every meter corresponds to about 30 seconds worth of charge...



And once the system is exhausted, it's ion-locked for about the time displayed there.



No you don't get to surrender. NOT AFTER WHAT YOU PUT ME THROUGH.



DROWN IN FLAME AND SHRAPNEL.



Back to surfing.



Good, this ship doesn't have a defense drone. It has a frankly terrifying arsenal of weapons, but no defense drone.



During this fight, I'm trying to test out a theory re: ion weapons. As I understand it, when ion-locked, a system cannot receive power or have power manually deducted from it, and it gets locked for about 5 seconds per ion damage. If it takes further ion damage, it loses additional power and has the timer increased by another 5 seconds.

This is why you see my ion weapons at alternating charge levels. The idea is that by doing so, I can keep their shields ion-locked consistently, provided they don't dodge, and continually lower the power allocated there in the process.



I'm not 100% sure it works like that, but it seems consistent.

Not accepting surrender here either, destroying their ship gives more scrap and I kinda need more scrap.



As demonstrated.



With my hull levels as they are, I elect to avoid the next ship encounter, and am rewarded for my troubles with a bit of lore and piss-all for resources.



Worse, I miscalculated jumps. I can't get to the store without causing the rebels to overtake the beacon.

Screw it, what you got for me?



New stuff first: Reconstructive Teleport is AMAZING AS HELL for boarding parties, especially boarding parties with clone bays. Effectively, whenever you teleport crewmembers, they fullheal. If you're gonna run a dedicated boarding ship, you want Reconstructive Teleport.

Anyway, the rest of this. I want to reach into the past and kick former me in the teeth for not buying hacking here (I think I failed to consider selling one of my relatively-useless Ion Blasts), but no, I sprung for the Battery Charger instead. The rest of my scrap went to repairs and missiles.



Not that the battery charger is bad, mind you, but I could've made encounters SO MUCH EASIER with a hacking system and I didn't do it.

The shop, of course, had no weapons or drones worth buying.



Well, we can't make the exit beacon, so we're just gonna ride this wave as long as we possibly can.



The first encounter is lame and stupid and pointless and I hate it.



Having fewer max HP doesn't matter when you are INVINCIBLE.



We'll get to that space in a second.



At least our autopilot is doin' work for us. I put the scrap into the drone system in anticipation of getting a good offensive drone.



Screw it, I need more resources. FIGHT ME.



They have a Heavy Laser and Flak Gun, both Mk II. Their defenses are as nuts as ever, of course, but we can do this.



If nothing else, our own upgraded defenses are paying off too, and it's almost as hard for enemy ships to kill us as it is for us to kill them.



At this point I have given up wholly on whittling down shields. I destroy their weapons system to ensure safety.



Even after doing so, their flak gun manages to chip away a little more hull integrity.



But we take them down before long.



Oh boy, a Mantis crewmember with a nearly useless skill mastery! Yeah come aboard I guess.



So, now we're going to see the final type of environmental hazard. "But Kalir, that's just the exit beacon, it shouldn't be near a comet or anything."



Allow me to introduce you to Comet-class Anti-Ship Batteries.

Anti-Ship Batteries represent heavy cruisers in the area constantly firing on our position. We are, of course, doing our best to dodge them, but every so often, their sensors will get a lock on us.



If we don't dodge the shot that comes up when that warning appears, it'll blow clean through our ship, doing 3 damage and guaranteeing a breach.



We can't hope to fight the ship here even without that happening in the background, so I make the call and jump to a Mantis sector instead of a Rock sector.



I ensure nothing, least of all survival. If this run makes it to Sector 8 I will be amazed.



Get the hell off of our ship, losers.



Right. Well. That sucked.

Next Time: BUY A HACKING SYSTEM, DUMBASS

Farm nearby beacons then try the store. You can handle Mantis boarders because medbay.

WTB page break

I got your page break right here, mister.