Let's Play FTL: Faster Than Light!

My current plan is basically exactly what the ghost of Trar suggested: orbit this shop for a while, snag some scrap, and buy the first cool means of offensive I can reach.



And if that means we're going to be pirates ourselves, then HOIST THE JOLLY ROGER.

The dirty secret of these encounters here is that while it looks like basically a bonus fight... it's not. It's really, really not.



Yeah, arming a ship with three layers of shielding, a Flak Gun Mk II, and a Burst Laser Mk II. Totally a transport ship, dudes.

My initial plan is to trash their weapons and then keep them from fleeing, but y'know what? That'll be too damn slow and we NEED this scrap.



BALLS TO THE WALL TIME.

FTL jumps work slightly differently for enemy ships, but not appreciably differently. They can't charge an FTL jump if their piloting or engines are damaged, and they need a capable pilot. Our Hermes missile can ransack any piloting system in one shot if it hits, so we're doing that first, then following up with a shot to engines as soon as we get the chance.



Amazingly, our defenses hold together through their volley and we start a fire in their engine room.



Three missiles and hull damage later...



Balls, what a waste.

Unsurprisingly, these encounters give the best rewards if you go for a crew kill, but since the best means of that requires boarding and they can easily jump away with your crew on board, it's best not to try it unless you can lock escape away. Still, that's a good chunk of scrap, and we could've gotten worse (like, say, drone parts and nothing else).



Afterwards, I check out Grozoly's repair skills, and come to a not-so-startling conclusion: never make your Mantis crew repair stuff if you can help it. Even the best Mantis mechanic is less competent than a completely untrained human. Similarly, an Engi that has mastered hand-to-hand combat still loses hard to a human who hasn't.

Zoltan, curiously, can actually keep pace with most species as fighters, both because they can always stand back and offer supporting fire without being directly in combat, and because their damage output isn't hindered like Engi. They also have that suicide attack, but that's not worth abusing even with a Clone Bay. 15 crew damage is pretty weak unless at the tail end of a prolonged fight.



I'd really like to circle the shop some more, but our current hull condition forces me to reconsider. Let's hit the shop, 94 scrap should be enough.



My heartfelt sympathies to you.



They didn't have anything really amazing or new, and I knew exactly what I was buying as soon as it appeared. We are now the proud owners of a hacking system, and our ability to kill enemy ships has increased severely.



Before I showcase what I mean, a quick trade.



Right. This ship isn't too bad to fight against. Mantis ships, thankfully, tend to favor teleporting bombs as weapons, which don't deal hull damage.



Once their crew sets up, I start indicating one of two ways I can now abuse the hell out of hacking. As you can see, I now have a drone on their engine room, locking their Engi inside and giving me a readout of their engine levels and evasion chances. 20% evasion is nothing to write home about, but it is still annoying.



I wait until the Hermes missile is charged, and then activate the hacking pulse. This drops their evasion to 0 for the duration, more than long enough for the missile to ram into their piloting, punching a breach in it. With their Engi safely locked in the now-useless engine room, their ship is crippled to high hell, and all it cost me was a single missile and drone part.



They respond by sending the rest of their crew over to try to destroy the hacking system early.



GOOD LUCK I'M BEHIND 8 SPACED ROOMS



With their offenses safely neutralized, I switch over to the old Pike/Ion combo to finish them off.



Annoyingly, one shot gets through at the last second, but even so, that ship went down a LOT smoother than most of the encounters as of late.



We need this thing way stronger if we're gonna do the shenanigans I have in mind, though.



And here's our next contestant!



As you can see, hacking piloting is largely the same as hacking engines, it just changes the room locked. It is, however, worth noting that a fully destroyed system cannot be hit with a hacking pulse. In the case of most systems, we don't care (there's no reason to drop their evasion to 0 if it's already there) but this matters very importantly when going for interesting crew kills, such as by hacking oxygen or medbay.



Their weapons aren't as scary as the former ship, so I'll just go right for their shields and get the Pike/Ion combo up early.



One threat of enemy ships using bomb systems is that they are all visually identical up until the second they fire. That Stun Bomb is basically a non-issue since the enemy AI is too dumb to use it in the best situations (use it on crewmembers dealing with fire or breaches), but an unexpected Breach or Ion Bomb can ruin your day real quick.



We're doing a lot better now that we have hacking, but we're running low on missiles. We still need a better weapon to add to our stockpile of fun.

After putting a bit of scrap towards the eventually-necessary third layer of shields, we happen upon this scene! Thankfully, our Pike Beam can cut them out safely and swiftly.



Shooting the rock to destroy it CAN save them, but it can also cause a vicious chain reaction that deals you some serious hull damage.



Oh yeah, reactor upgrades. Those are important I guess.



Oh snap, boarders AND a sun beacon!

The boarders are humans and idiots besides, and we kill them and jump away before the first solar flare hits.



Unfortunately, we're forced to jump before our crew heals, and we end up in a slightly worse situation.



Given the setting, I elect to hack shields instead. Again, we get a full power readout and lock the shield crew in.



Not only does this let us lower their shields at our discretion, but we get a concrete data readout of how our ion weapons work. And it turns out that yes, you can whittle down shields through asynchronous ion shots.



I only just barely screw up the hacking pulse, leaving it a bit too late for the shields to lower fully for the flare, but it does the trick anyway, and with their shields down, we can follow up with the Pike Beam, no problem. That purple bar under their shield layers indicates the hacking pulse draining them. A fully upgraded hacking system can drain even fully upgraded shields.



The only problem is that hacking pulses ion-lock your hacking system for a huge length of time afterwards regardless of intensity. Like cloaking, it's sometimes beneficial to only pulse for a short time, both to free up reactor power and to keep your hacking system more available to pulse more often (although the effect is less noticeable than with cloaking).



Sadly, the solar flare does a bit more hull damage before we can finish them off.



More sadly, there's only one path to the exit beacon, cutting off our super fun happy explore time before it really picks up. Not that I'm complaining, we're actually doing much better now that I finally got the boots off my hands and the diaper off my head and bought a hacking system.



Probably the second most infamous event in FTL, after the GIANT ENEMY SPIDERS. This escape pod contains one of three things: a desperate human escapee who will gladly join us for rescuing them, a Mantis who would consider us freeing them a message from the god of mercy and which would also join us, and a psychotic warrior that will instakill the first chump dumb enough to open the escape pod and then start fighting the rest of the crew.



If you have a clone bay, always open the escape pod. If you don't, you really shouldn't bother.



The next jump is boring and Mantisy.



The good news is that I'm getting MUCH better at Talking Tracks' stupid ship layout.



The best part about venting the whole ship like this is the part where I can just instantly refill it by fully powering oxygen! Fully upgraded oxygen systems are AWESOME, guys!



And the exit beacon itself gives us a really weird option.



If you told me to point out what I thought the worst (non-starting) weapon in the game was, I'd probably have to say it would be the Hull Beam. Functionally, it's very similar to a Pike Beam, but it covers a much shorter area (slightly longer than the range of a Halberd Beam) in exchange for charging slightly faster (of all the beam weapons in the game, only the Mini Beam charges faster!) and dealing double damage in systemless rooms. Oddly enough, it costs 5 more scrap than the Halberd Beam, which has the very critical advantage of being able to punch through weak shields. With the Hull Beam, you could use it after the enemy's shields are lowered, or you could use basically anything else for much better results WITHOUT the prerequisite of fully lowered shields.

We have a fully upgraded Hacking system, though. We're going to use the Hull Beam, and we're likely going to take it to the final sector and the Rebel flagship, and it is going to be stupid and glorious.



Only question is: how do we get to that encounter? More Mantis shenanigans, or a leisurely cruise through a civilian sector?

Next Time: The Worst Weapon in the Game

Civilian. I'm bored of the bugs already.

All these random boarding encounters are doing you no good in the scrap department. Go civvies.

Civilian sectors have no exciting backstory intro things. They are exactly the same as the first sector, save for the universal scaling that happens throughout the game as you progress.



To wit: no sector 1 ship is this ridiculous.



My first act in this fight, and likely for most fights for the rest of the game, is to hack their shields and then fire the Pike and Hull Beams as soon as it connects. The shorter of the two lines is the Hull Beam's trajectory, which as you can see leads to it dealing about 7 damage. The Pike Beam's path, in comparison, hits more systems but only deals 5 hull damage.

Also: they have a Chain Ion, generally considered to be one of the best ion weapons in the game. Chain weapons are another new type in AE, in that they start off with a longer cooldown than a comparable weapon, but the more they fire, the better benefits they acquire. In the case of the Chain Ion, the damage it deals when it hits ramps up by 1 each time, to a cap of 4. This is, in no uncertain terms, completely bonkers, and other chain weapons are comparably nuts (the Chain Vulcan Laser can eventually recharge faster than most shields), but you need good defenses to let the system warm up.



Look at all those numbers. Look at those surrender terms. LOOK AT THE HULL BEAM ACTUALLY BEING USEFUL HOT DAMN

This is kind of misleading, though. In most cases, the Halberd Beam is better, since it can pierce through weak shields, and without hacking or a LOT of missiles, the Hull Beam can't do anything most of the time. On the other hand, Halberd Beam requires a bit more power than the Hull Beam...



Much like most ship builds in FTL, sometimes we can't just walk all over the enemy ship. It goes without saying by now, but Zoltan shields stop hacking attempts cold.



By the time I wear down their shields, they've got mine down, and even with hacking, their offense of a Burst Laser Mk III and a Flak Gun Mk III beats us. We're leaving.



The solar flare still takes a bite out of our hull, though.



These guys we can fight. They are straight out dumbasses.



The hell are you doing using an Artemis missile with two Ion Chargers, anyway.



They almost make it away, but I've got another hack attempt lined up. Go down faster, shields!



Just in time!



Yeah let's check the distress beacon, sure.



4 fuel? That's NUTS. But we're close to the Last Stand, which gives us 10 fuel just for reaching it, further cementing my opinion that it's supposed to be considered postgame.



I hand it over and get one of the worst possible rewards in turn.



Really shouldn't be trying surfing with this low of fuel, but the exit beacon is close enough to chance it.



That's a lot of missile systems. Suddenly buying the drone control system doesn't seem like such a bad idea after all.



Better yet, we bring down their Laser Charger with our first volley, AND they don't start fleeing.



On the other hand, that's a Breach Missile.

Breach Missiles are the king of damage. A single one does a whopping 4 points of hull damage as well as punching a breach into the room it hits. Hull Missiles might be more economical, but if you have a Breach Missile, you don't have to care about economy. You fire that thing at a system and that system will not be at working capacity for the rest of the fight.



That said, Breach Missiles charge hella slow.



I upgrade our weapons system, the eventual end goal there being running our Hermes missiles as well. If we get another cool beam weapon, even better.



HAHAHAHA NOPE



Oooh, ion storm.

Ion storms are a nebula-only hazard that you probably know well by now. They halve the working capacity of your reactor, sharply limiting your available power reserves. However, it has no effect on the power output of Zoltan crewmembers OR backup batteries, putting us in very good shape.



At first, I didn't want to use a hacking system since the defense drones they have would just shoot it down...



After the initial Pike Beam, though, I remembered a stupid exploit regarding the hacking system.

Defense drones work by relying on very specific targeting judged by whatever they're aiming at's current direction and velocity. Since missiles, asteroids, flak and both types of boarding drones maintain a constant direction and velocity, this isn't remotely difficult for them. Anti-combat drones have it a little tougher since combat drones bounce all around the field, but their movement isn't that complex either, and they're only likely to miss when the drone uses its thrusters to change velocity.

Hacking systems have two speeds: on and off. If you depower the system midflight, it stays put, but turning it back on resumes its flight. By rapidly toggling power to the hacking drone, it'll have a stuttering flight that makes it virtually impossible for defense drones to target.



I don't have to take this surrender option, but I'm a little worried about that missile system, so I do.

Right, time to visit the store before we move on.

These augments are new, but we already have full augment capacity, so we don't have the space for any of them. I'd consider buying the Reverse Ion Field, which has a 50% chance to negate ion damage to our anything, but eh.

The Backup DNA Bank is only useful if you have a Clone Bay. If your Clone Bay is unpowered or destroyed, normally any crewmembers that die will die for good, although you have a small window of time to turn the Clone Bay on. Having the Backup DNA Bank prevents this from happening, meaning that as long as you turn the clone bay back on eventually, you'll always get your crew back. It's nice to have for emergencies, but not really essential.

Stealth Weapons prevents your weapons from decreasing the time of your cloak and is thus completely pointless to us.



In the interest of resource maximization, I buy all their drone parts and sell off our Ion Blast in anticipation for the Mind Control system.



Prior to AE, the only ship that couldn't hold every single system in the game was the Federation Cruisers, and the game handled that by saying it couldn't get cloaking systems. Now, though, you have an upper limit on system types, but no restrictions as to what systems they are. So if we buy the mind control system, we can't get a crew teleporter or a cloaking device, which I am personally completely fine with.



Kind of an odd choice, but I'll be fine with it, and it'll come in handy on the flagship.



There's room for only one more jump before we have to leave, so.



Understandably, it's a complete waste. I think you need either a crew teleporter or an anti-bio beam to pull this off, otherwise they just sneer at you and say "git gud".



Oh well, let's get out while we can.



The next sector is also the final sector, and I'm frankly amazed we've survived as long and as well as we have.



Here's our systems. We'll be getting scrap a-plenty in the Last Stand, so expect to see many of these systems upgraded further.



Our crew. Maybe I should just resign Philip Thomas to auxiliary power and have Grozoly crew shielding.



And our gear. I could've sold the automated reloader to pony up more scrap for the Reverse Ion Field, now I think about it. Ah well.

Next Time: The Postgame

The Last Stand isn't too painful if you come in powerful and can jump to repair stations in between phases. Advanced FTL Navigation helps a lot.

Looking forward to you explaining why and how it's bad!

Time for the Last Stand. This sector has a unique song all its own, but it also plays no other music during the sector, so you are encouraged to find and play some different music during it. Try this one I guess.



Anyway, the Last Stand is basically really stupid, and an EXCELLENT example of why roguelikes shouldn't have final boss encounters. Yes, the whole point of our daring intel mission, our life-and-death skin-of-our-teeth blaze through the sectors... is to tell them to shoot the biggest ship.

In fairness, it's a big ship, and very powerful, but what do you expect a lone intel runner of a ship to do where several battlecruisers fail? I guess the idea is that we bypass the bulk of the fighting, but even so.



Anyway. The Last Stand doesn't have a conventional Rebel Fleet advance, instead being a battleground between Rebel and Federation forces in full. Due to the nature of it, plus the sizable reward here for reaching Sector 8 at all, I personally consider surviving through Sector 7 to be a normal win, with clearing Sector 8 and destroying the Rebel flagship to be a postgame victory, not unlike, oh say, killing John Carmack in DoomRL.



As you can see, the entire sector is at risk of Rebel attack. That glowing red jump beacon is going to become a Rebel-controlled point after this jump, effectively the same as getting caught by the Rebel fleet in normal play.

The Base is our defense objective. If the flagship gets there and spends enough time there unimpeded, we lose. Thankfully, the flagship itself is a long ways away, so we'll have some time to take it easy, which is important because those hull repairs simply weren't enough. The red line indicates the flight path of the flagship, which means that one of our three guaranteed Repair stations is useless from the word go.



Repair stations are a oneshot guarantee of loads of hull repair and resources, making them essential to survival if you take a lot of hull damage.



My hope is to be able to reach that second repair station and use the scrap to get vital upgrades, ideally to weapons.



To nobody's surprise, the fights in the final sector are completely ridiculous, although exclusively against Rebel ships. Aggravatingly, all of their rooms have systems, so our Hull Beam becomes even less effective than usual.



Before long, they send boarders over, but now we have a very clever plan...



We activate the mind control system, and one of the Rebels turns on the other, loudly proclaiming that some of his best friends are Zoltan. Between that and Trar Jr. selectively applying his pacifist ideals, the other boarder bites the dust quickly.



Lacking further opponents, our new ally decides to camp out in the oxygen room until a better plan comes along.



Even tries to fix it up once a stray missile hits it. What a pal.



Mind control is very much temporary, however, so be ready to fight back once it wears off.



What does the base itself do for us?



Jack and squat. It's always a blank beacon, which is important if you don't want to face stupidly overpowered Rebel ships, but that's about it.



The RNG decides now would be an EXCELLENT time to slap us in the face, with the Rebels waiting until we're one jump away from the repair station before taking it over.



Rather than jumping headfirst into that scenario, we instead opt to wait it out and let the flagship make the first move.



Would've liked more power to the weapons system, but this will have to do.



So, time to fight the final boss of the game.

I will start by indicating one of the several ways the flagship cheats harder than any ship beforehand. The first such way is the weapons rooms. If you want to avoid being attacked by a ship in conventional FTL, as long as you can damage the weapons system enough, you're fine. Here, you have no fewer than four separate weapons rooms, each housing a different weapon type. They count as artillery weapon stations too, so damaging them doesn't instantly disable the weapon in question, just slows its charge. The only saving grace is that these rooms are isolated from the ship proper (except on Hard mode), so killing the gunner and disabling the system prevents it from working outright. Most strategies revolve around doing this before the flagship builds up enough momentum to really put the pain on.



There's four weapon types: a triple ion blast, a Halberd Beam, a triple heavy laser, and a triple Leto missile launcher. That last one is the most critical, since your shielding does a lot of work against the other weapon types. The Flagship also has a system repertoire to match our own, with both a hacking system and a cloaking system. The latter isn't a big problem for us, since we just need to wait for the cloak to dissipate and our weapons charge quickly enough, but the hacking system is keeping our defense drone busy fulltime.



Doubly so once it finally gets through and begins hacking drone control.

The Flagship saw some difficulty changes in AE, as you may have noticed by now. The Hacking system is completely new, and changes the first phase from a relative non-issue (although still likely to facestomp new players) into one that can and will destroy players outright when it first connects. If you get a system hacked that you're unprepared for, you may need to jump away and get somewhere else. Drone Control is certainly annoying, but passable, since it only defends against the triple missiles.



We turn the mind control on full blast to keep the triple missile gunner from repairing it, and he immediately mistakes his laser pistol for some kind of welding tool.



Yes I'm making my Mantis repair things.

See this is why I don't like Zoltan crewmembers. I could have any of them head over there to fix things (Trar Jr. would be ideal) but that energy is simply too valuable to waste elsewhere. Philip Thomas' best contribution for the game has been identical to a 20 scrap expenditure.



Right, missiles down and staying down. Their hacks don't worry me anymore. Now to divert all energy into offense.



Shields down, all beams charged...



Take this, Rebel scum!

But the flagship pulls out the second item in its bag of cheats, and jumps away regardless of the severe hull damage dealt to it.



Yes, the Rebel flagship is a multiphase fight. Because nothing really emphasizes the whole learning-by-death and randomization elements of a roguelike like boss phases you have to memorize to survive, right?



Anyway, it's now time to take on phase two, with drones.

Prior to AE, the drone system (and systems from the third phase OF COURSE THERE'S A THIRD PHASE) existed in all iterations of the flagship, so the fact that it suddenly installed one here isn't QUITE a cheat.



The fact that all its systems are good as new is still a cheat, making that the third. How did anyone even fix the missile system there's nobody there?

Answer: the Flagship is also an autoship, but ONLY after you kill off all the crew. The fourth cheat in its repertoire is that if you go for the expected way to circumvent the whole multiphase shenanigan, it just turns on the shipboard AI and keeps on truckin'. Since this means all its systems begin slowly auto-repairing, most players usually leave one crewmember alive (usually the dude at the triple heavy laser).



Anyway I cheat in return and send a hacking system to their drone control. I considered shields, but I really want to be able to handle the dronespam, and I can't guarantee that system will stay destroyed otherwise, especially as they have a defense drone. Speaking of.



YEAH NOT SO FUN WHEN YOU CAN'T INTERCEPT MISSILES, IS IT

If you're curious, the other drones the flagship uses, aside from the defense drone, are the combat and beam drones orbiting our ship, and the boarding drones it periodically launches. Thankfully, our defense drone is doing an excellent job shooting them down.



But what's this? A power surge, you say?



And suddenly, robobees.

This is the fifth way the flagship cheats. Every so often, the second and third phases will initiate a power surge, which is basically a supermove. In this case, it creates about fifty billion extra temporary drones to attack our ship. Destroying drone control (or hacking it) does nothing to stop this (sixth cheat!). No matter what, the flagship will initiate power surges until either your ship or theirs is dead.

Thankfully, this WAS nerfed in AE. In older versions, I think it was more likely to call up combat drones than regular drones, which basically meant that unless your engines and shields were super ridiculous, OR you cloaked at exactly the right time, you basically lost your shields and took like 6 hull damage every time they did it. Now, though, they're more biased towards beam drones, which are more tolerable even if their regular weapons lower your shields.



Shortly after, one of their boarding drones finally gets past my defense drone.



Not to worry, all we have to do is fight them in close combat.

The biggest threat of boarding drones is that they create a breach in the room they hit, making it much more dangerous. However, our upgraded oxygen system lets us amp up the supply, negating the effect of the breach and effectively rendering the boarding drone as a solo Rockman boarder.



It is worth noting that the flagship CAN run out of Drone Parts, but unless you have a hacking system or a defense drone, they're very unlikely to, so you're best served by destroying it fast enough for your ship to avoid too much damage.



This is not a lesson I learn very quickly. With my hacking system locked onto their drone control, I should've just been focusing on dumping as many missiles in their shielding room as possible.



Eventually I figure it out, but not before taking far too much hull damage.



THERE we go. And yeah, at this point they've stopped deploying defense or boarding drones. We've depleted their supply outright!



And that's shields down. Let's wrap this up.



8 damage for 2 power. Hull Beam is secretly pretty rad if you can actually make it work.



But yeah, third phase is coming up.



Putting the last bit of scrap towards maxing out mind control. Not much else I can spend it on!



And yeah, my choices here are Rebel ship fights that kill me and only award fuel, or the flagship again.



Cheat the seventh: double strength Zoltan shield! They also warn of a super weapon, which is exactly what I'd do with my ship when it has 2/3 its hull missing.



We have to wear down the shield to be able to do anything, so we warm up the beams and put them on full blast, aiming to focus down the shield.



Before we get remotely close, they have enough time to wear down our own shield AND fire off the superweapon. The eighth cheat fires roughly ten heavy lasers at once, which is basically a complete diceroll even with maxed out defenses. There's always a slight chance that one will get through unless you cloak just as it fires.

They also get close enough to arm their teleporter and mind control systems.



For the latter, our mind control system gets directed at our affected crewmember, neutralizing the effect entirely. If you aim to do this, use minimal power on the system, as you won't confer the benefits of mind control to your crewmember, but merely cancel out existing effects.



As you can see, the third phase having mind control as well as teleportation makes it significantly harder than previous editions.



We finally wear down their Zoltan shield, but by now they've beamed over half their crew. We can't take that kind of invasion on.

So we won't. Let's hack their teleporter and bounce their entire crew back to their ship.



Too little too late, though, and Talking Tracks takes a fatal hit just before their superweapon warms up again. Didn't even get to see its ninth cheat, where it recharges the Zoltan shield fully midfight. AE does have a way to recharge Zoltan shields with the Shield Overcharger drone, but they don't have a drone control anymore, and the Shield Overcharger goes SLOW.

We also didn't build our sensors high enough to view weapon charge or power levels of their ship, so we didn't get to see that blocked outright for the tenth cheat.

I really, REALLY don't like the flagship. FTL is an excellent and amazing game, but the entire premise and execution of the final sector is just terrible, flying contrary to the expectations of the rest of the game solely to put forth a supposedly dramatic final showdown in a game and setting that REALLY doesn't necessitate it.



That said, the rest of the game was really fun, and I'm amazed we did as well as we did considering how up-and-down our run was.



CAN YOU TELL I DON'T USUALLY RUN ZOLTAN SHIPS



But yeah, here's my personal high scores for comparison.

Now, let's try that again, but this time we actually blow up the Flagship.



Two ships have gathered some support in addition to Noether. The first, the Vortex, is a ship with barely any crew, but several onboard drones to handle tasks automatically.



The second, Shivan, is a favorite of mine that starts with no door control system, but it has a lot of hardy Rock crewmembers and a Fire Bomb, letting it deal with boarders in exciting ways.

Vote for either ship. Or one of the other ships in the hangar, I'm not picky. I JUST WANT TO GO INTO SPACE

Next Time: Less Cheating

Shivan Shivan Shivan.

I kind of like the flagship because it really is a pretty intense fight with good music to go with it, but it's horrible as the last part of this game, ESPECIALLY if you're not properly prepared.

I think both of these ships are flat terrible, so I will happily watch you suffer through either.

Oh, and my take on the flagship: It's nice as an optional challenge. I don't like that the game suggests that it is a part of the game proper, because the game does not adequately prepare you for it. The flagship is difficult, but that's not the real issue. The real problem is that FTL spends most of the game teaching you specific lessons that don't apply to the flagship. Kalir kind of covered this, but those lessons are:

• Kill the crew, beat the ship. The autodrones are the sole exception to this rule. Eliminating the flagship's crew makes the fight somewhat easier relative to a fully-crewed flagship, but significantly harder than a one-man flagship.
• Knock out the trouble system. Usually this means taking out their weapons system. The flagship has four weapons systems, but that's fine -- no one said it would be easy. The really annoying part about the flagship is that its strongest capabilities are not tied to a system. This is at its most egregious in the second phase, when eliminating the drone control system does nothing to the drone swarm.

Add to that a whole host of narrative inconsistencies, as Kalir pointed out, and... well, it's pretty poorly designed.

I vote for Fregatidae, because I've seen your high score list and still don't believe you won it. I demand EVIDENCE!

When you say a ship can be crewed by Rockmen, I have to choose it, so long as you rename them to Rock, Roll, Bass and Blues.

Well I WAS gonna run the Vortex because I haven't played it in a while, but Bunk Moreland gave me a naming theme. I can't compete with that.



So, Shivan. It's not really a bad ship, despite Mogri's every claim to the contrary. It starts with a fairly standard layout of most systems, plus an upgraded oxygen system, a full crew of four Rockmen, and a pair of very nice earlygame weapons, the Heavy Pierce Laser and the Fire Bomb.

However, as you can see, not ONLY does it not start with a door system... it doesn't have exterior airlocks. And even if you do later buy a door system, you can't actually use it for anything except oxygen equalization or crewing until you upgrade it. This makes boarders a unique challenge that you have to get CREATIVE to handle, especially given your crew's slower walking speed. As you recall, Rock crew boast complete fire immunity and a respectable total of 150 health, but move significantly slower.



But hey, we'll learn as we go. Set off, USS Thomas Light, for everlasting peace!



One nice thing about having a Rock ship is that Rock crewmembers and your innate augment of Rock Plating have a lot of blue events for both of them.



In this case, we act as goons for the mining colony to keep the situation under control. Having an upgraded medbay or an Engi (who I strongly suspect played a large part in the development of medbay technology) also works here.



Everyday I'm surfin'



Nobody has ever paid your toll and NOBODY EVER WILL



READY!

So, the Heavy Pierce Laser. It is mostly identical to the Heavy Laser Mk I, but it's only found on Shivan's initial loadout. It can pierce through a single layer of shielding, ignoring it entirely! This makes it a supremely powerful weapon for the first few sectors, but it tapers off in usefulness very fast.



That said, this thing is better than an Artemis missile early on. It's pretty rad. But enough about that, let's discuss the other weapon Bass is arming now.



Blues hops off shielding to go crew the sensor array.

The Fire Bomb is one of the game's teleporting bomb weapons. Although they can be dodged and consume a missile, they deal no hull damage to ships, and in the Fire Bomb's case, it deals no systems damage either. Instead, bombs tend to excel in crew damage and disabling systems without destroying the ship itself. This makes these weapons uniquely helpful to boarding ships, and once we get a teleporter (which we'll be saving scrap for as often as possible) the USS Thomas Light will be a force of nature.



The Fire Bomb is pretty straightforward: it deals damage to crew in the room and starts fires in the room. It's slow to do damage to systems, and if the crew is particularly able, it might not do ANY systems damage, so you usually need to supplement it with something else.



The upshot of this is that even before getting a crew teleporter, the USS Thomas Light can eliminate crews while leaving ships mostly intact, although you have to be careful not to let fires get out of hand and destroy the ship anyway.



Remember, a fire that completely destroys a system deals 1 point of hull damage!



But we've got this in the bag.



For Sector 1 on Normal, those are some NICE rewards.



Step 1 for any variant of Shivan should be upgrading weapons if you don't see any shops nearby. Running both your weapons at once leads to a pretty sharp increase in firepower, and you kind of have too much energy to use reasonably for the most part.



This beacon can be dangerous, but eh, it's early, let's do it.



Boring but good.



This event works best if you have upgraded scanners.



If you have them upgraded (or if you have the Lifeform Scanner augment because you are dumb), this event gets a blue option for guaranteed success.



What I didn't know is that the event has a chance for success even without! I will happily take a fully upgraded oxygen system, thank you very much!



Hahaha nope.



Hm... yeah I think we can take it.



Unlike Talking Tracks, we have no Zoltan shield, so hacking systems, teleports, and mind control work as soon as we start the fight. Thankfully, nobody's using the medbay right now, and Roll is fine where she is.

More worrisome is the weapons. That's a Burst Laser Mk II.



True enough, it gets past our shields, but our ship is plated with Metool-grade armor, and we're able to negate the hull damage outright! Systems damage still occurs, though. Rock Plating is great, guys.

Unfortunately, the station itself was a bust. Dang, I wanted a new weapon.



SURF'S UP, BRO!



Hey loser, fight me.



They have only a beam drone and a mini beam. We can only take damage this fight if we choose to. Let's firebomb 'em.



Being able to power both weapons at once means we can open up by damaging one of their key systems, sending crew in to fix it...



And then firebomb it, damaging the crew inside and delaying their repairs!



We'll want upgraded sensors soon, so Blues can stick to his station rather than alternating between sensors and shields.



Anyway, we almost, but not quite, destroy the ship. I'm happy.



We have almost enough scrap for a teleporter, but not quite enough. Still, we could also use a decent weapon before we leave Sector 1...



FTL ships tend to come in a few different grades of effectiveness. You have the ships that are basically built to roll the game, you just need to wind them up and set them down. Mantis B (The Basilisk) and Federation A (The Osprey) both fit this category.

Just behind it are ships that have ALMOST everything they need to do amazingly, they just need one or two things to line it all up. Shivan fits this category, as does Lanius A (Kruos) and Engi A (The Torus).

Next are the ships that don't really have a plan for how to build them, but their capabilities are all-around good enough that you can basically roll with whatever you get. Most Kestrel ships fit this class, as do ships like Slug C (Ariolimax).

Following that is... most ships. Most of them aren't bad/dedicated enough to be gimmick ships, aren't versatile enough to do whatever they need, or simply have some kind of significant drawback to an otherwise solid setup. I consider Zoltan B (Noether) and Stealth A (The Nesasio) in this category.

Past that are ships that are so burdened with gimmickry that you have to ask yourself "why do I even want to play this", and which you won't get an actual answer to, just a Xom answer. Engi B (The Vortex) and Federation C (The Fregatidae) are two excellent examples here.



So, what does Shivan, and by extension the USS Thomas Light, need to win?

Well, Engi crew would be nice, but they don't really help it win.



What it really needs is a crew teleporter. Firebombing a room then teleporting rockmen into the aftermath is POWERFUL.

Aside from that, it needs some kind of good weapon to handle ships outside of the first couple of sectors. Fire Bombs take a notoriously long time to kill ships, and it's expensive to do so.

Unrelated: the Repair Burst bomb is a bomb I have used only once, on the DA-SR 12 Stealth B ship. When fired, it fully repairs the systems in a room it hits. My take on it is that if you really let a room get so damaged that you need the Repair Burst to fix it, you're doing all sorts of things wrong, or the game is gonna kill your face off anyway.



But in the here and now, we buy the Hull Smasher Laser Mk I. Functionally similar to a Burst Laser of the same grade, but it trades charge speed for the capability to deal double damage to rooms without a system. It might not look like much, but like the Hull Beam, if you can get past their shields, you can put on a world of hurt. Unlike the Hull Beam, it can lower shields temporarily, making it useful as synergy with other laser weapons. Between this and our Heavy Laser, we should be set for firepower for most of the game now.



All we gotta do is save up for a crew teleporter.



I am immediately pleased with my purchase.



So, ships like this? Don't even bother with the Fire Bomb. It just takes too long unless you can luck into burning down their piloting, and the enemy AI tends to be hellbent on fixing piloting.



I blow up their Anti-Combat Drone with the Hull Smasher laser, wasting some time.



Even so, within a volley or two I've dismantled their ship.



Let's get some better sensors up and running, eh?



Newish event in AE: the upgrade shop! These guys will upgrade one of your less-vital systems at a discount, but the system they upgrade is their choice.



They must be so confused when we explain that we don't actually have a door system on our ship.



Anyway, sector selection. We can either do another civilian sector, or we can wander around a featureless nebula and get completely lost, rendering our newly upgraded sensors useless.

Next Time: Stage Select

doesn't matter which one we pick, we can do red sectors after it for the entire rest of the game.

so i pick the civilian sector in hopes of getting enough scrap for a crew teleporter

The USS Thomas Light should go to the civilian sector, for everlasting peace!

Talking Tracks lost due to a severe Maple Syrup deficiency.

Take on Nebula Man!

I like how I named this ship after one of the most pacifistic-yet-heavily-armed roboticists there is.



This sector starts off brilliantly by taunting us with a shop we cannot do anything about. Remember, stores are basically pointless if you haven't got the scrap to make them worthwhile!



Sup, Rebel scout.



They have more lasers than we do, but our lasers are infinitely beefier.



One problem with ships like these on Shivan is that the crew will risk life and limb to remedy any hazards... up to a point. Once their life hits critical levels (about 15 or so) they will instantly flee from basically any hazard on their ship, both making crew kills in this manner slow and fairly expensive (if the fires go out, you need to reinstate them, which costs bombs) and likely to backfire by destroying the ship as fires spread unchecked.



To wit: crewkilling them cost me 5 bombs. Most ships only take a missile or two to eliminate unless they've got REALLY good engines or defense drones.



Also, much like boarding parties, firebombing their ship is made harder if they have a medbay or Engi crew, since both let them combat fires much more effectively.



This pirate makes matters more complicated by sending a boarder to complain to Roll about how she's a poor gender role model.

The USS Thomas Light has no doors, so boarders are a bit more problematic, but this is a lone Rock boarder, so it can't outrun my crew.



While Blues takes a leisurely saunter over, we take down their weapons, freeing up power that would be devoted to engines so we can activate the Hull Smasher.



Ordinarily we wouldn't even bother with attacking shields, but the Hull Smasher laser wants them as damaged as possible, to let more heavy-damage shots through.



Our heavy laser catches the Rock boarder as they head back to the medbay, killing them. We are HEROES.



There's no way in hell we're reaching the store, and finding the other store is fairly unlikely in this sector...



So screw it, the earlier we get level 2 shielding, the better.



Eeeehhhhhh... we need the missiles, but not the drone parts, but do I really need the reactor power in the first place hnnneeeeeehhhhhh



I take it and am rewarded for my early expenditure with the presence of the other store. Lame. Oh well, let's gather scrap anyway.



Oh hey, we can crewkill these guys and our defenses are solid. LET'S DO IT



How to crewkill as Shivan without boarding. Step 1: shoot a room. Any room, pick your favorite. Piloting is an excellent choice, but oxygen works well too.



Step 2: once the crew piles into the room to fix the newly damaged system, firebomb it. Or if fire starts in that room anyway, pick another room and firebomb it.



Step 3: do whatever.



Step 4: Repeat step 3 until ship either explodes or the crew dies.



Step 5: Reconcile what you have wrought upon these poor souls with who you believe yourself to be as a person.



Step 6: Get almost useful loot.

The Ion Intruder is actually a really nice drone schematic for us (shipboard drones take no damage from fire or oxygen loss), but we need a Drone Control system before we can run it. If we really need to, we can sell it, but I'll hang onto it for a while on the off chance a Drone Control becomes available more easily than a Crew Teleporter.



Surfiiiiiiing



Oddly enough, Rock Plating doesn't offer a blue option for this event. However, the Scrap Recovery Arm, an augment that increases scrap gains across the board by... I forget, 15%? That augment has a blue event.



In any event, I decide to chance it and am rewarded with a hefty helping of fuel.

The store doesn't sell a crew teleporter, so I'm not kicking myself too hard, but it DOES sell Drone Control with a defense drone.

It also sells a Doors System! Ships that don't start with basic systems for whatever reason can find them for sale in stores, available at full functionality (so if a Stealth ship buys a Shield system, it doesn't then have to upgrade it like Noether). While this obviously lets you remedy the glaring weaknesses of certain ships, in many cases it's considerable to skip out on that system entirely in favor of more system options. This doesn't apply to subsystems, though, so refusing to buy Doors doesn't free up more slots for other systems.

Other stuff of note in this store: the system repair and anti-personnel drones are shipboard drones, which most players will deal with either from boarding drones landing on their ship, or by playing the Vortex once and then swearing never to do so again. System repair goes to damaged systems, fires, and hull breaches and automatically fixes them up, consuming only 1 bar of power, while anti-personnel drones seek out and attack boarders. While they enjoy total immunity to fire and oxygen loss, they are extremely slow, meaning that the threats they respond to can easily get out of hand before they start fixing them. Still, they're not terrible.



The rest of the store is fairly unremarkable with one exception. That Chain Vulcan Laser is the top of the line for chain weapons. At first, it's a Basic Laser that takes up 4 units of power, boo. However, every time it fires, it decreases its charge time. After doing this five times, it fires once every second BEFORE recharge boosts are counted. The Chain Vulcan recharges faster than most SHIELDS do, meaning if you have and can run this, you can point at a ship and destroy it eventually, and there is very little that can stop you (Defense Drone Mk II can do it, but those are rare as hell).



I'm still unwilling to sell the Ion Intruder in cargo, so I just buy missiles. If I really need to sell it, I'll do so at a store with a crew teleporter.



Why yes I would love to trade some firebombs for a crewmember.



I don't even have to use the firebombs to start though, since the Heavy Pierce Laser can start fires AND cause hull breaches when it hits. Seriously, in earlygame, this thing is NUTS.



STILL NO FIREBOMBS YET!



I CANNOT MAKE THIS UP, FIRES JUST KEEP HAPPENING



Oh hey, Slug ship augment. All Slug-made ships come with Slug Repair Gel, arguably less an intentional augment and more just a design choice by its ocean-dwelling inhabitants. Basically, their ships automatically seal up hull breaches regardless of location. That's the black smoke effect in their weapons room.



I almost miss their jump attempt in my leisurely observance of their panicking.



Fixed.



Cool, a fitting reference right out of the gate. Welcome to sensors, King.



Aw, no surfing.



More pirates hounding civilians, and that's an Engi crew. Okay, I guess we can just shoot them to death.



Still gonna go for oxygen because I am a decent human being.



Nothing else of importance happened in that encounter though.



The next jump is...



The Pony planet.

As per an event created by such a diehard fan, choosing the option that would cause offense to the subject of their idolization leads to horrible things, and choosing the route of peace leads to good things.



Well, not always, but usually. But yeah, there is no downside to being peaceful to the spaceponies, no benefit to trying to sell them into spacepony zoos, and no blue event that can alter the outcome of things.



Meeeehhhhh... don't need data and that scrap is about what I'd get for blowing up the ship anyway. Sure, gimme.



This sector is just full of taunting beacons, isn't it.



Oh hey, new event! This one actually has a blue event for mind control systems, where you tell the announcer to revise their opinions and open up a store, which would be nice, but eh. Usually, searching the stores results in a hostile auto-ship fight, but...



Sometimes it pays off, big-time.



The FTL Recharge Booster is exactly what it sounds like, and while it's certainly not bad, it's more useful to us as a thing to sell. Like, it does mean that we can't get devoured by ion piranhas that ruin runs as easily, but eh.



Sector choices: the one full of autoships we can't firebomb and empty space, or the one full of Lanius ships we can't firebomb? Hm.

Next Time: I have run out of oxygen_____

Lanius, because you can still laser them to death.

Abandoned Sector. One day one of those will be interesting.

Go to the Abandoned Sector. Lanius Man and the rest of the Mavericks are there!

LANIUS

Lanius have no oxygen, therefore no firebombery. Go Nebula.

Yeah, our firebomb can't do much to Lanius ships, but any other ships can be toasted no problem, and Lanius ships... well, we have lasers aplenty. We're good.



Hm... yeah let's hit it. Kind of early, but again, if we need to sell stuff, we can.



We're selling stuff.



With the FTL Recharge Booster and the Ion Intruder sold, we get up to 102 scrap.



Enough to get the Crew Teleporter up and running and some fuel for the road. NOW WE'RE HOT!



And what better opportunity to test this sucker out!



They decide to make matters a little more complex by sending an Ion Intruder of their own, which is certainly vexing, but our oxygen systems are maxed out, so we can take it.



Without it, Rock would be at danger of losing a lot of health while we also lack a dodge chance. Annoying, but we can live with it.



The Ion Intruder heads to the teleporter just as we drop a fire bomb in their weapons room. You can have it, loser, we're going on a ROAD TRIP



JUST CALL ME HEAT MAN BECAUSE I'M TOO HOT TO TOUCH



Firebomb, rock boarders. This is Shivan at its finest, right here.



Well that's an uncomfortable store position.



Huh. That'd be a pretty terrible trade, but what's this about the translator?



No idea what it does, honestly, and I've never run into this encounter with enough scrap to check.



Oh well!



Unfortunately, the shop placement means we'll have a hard time surfing.



Lanius ship, so we can't board it without getting our boarders killed, and we can't firebomb it.



Oh well, we got laserspam and the hack is to a relatively harmless system. Medbays that are hacked turn those delicious nanobots into deadly viral bees of murder, so if we're in a hacked medbay, we take damage.



FRIGGIN' DODGE CHANCES



Because Bass can't aim worth a damn we find ourselves taking unnecessary shots. Or rather, because their ship has supergood engines apparently. Bass can't really be blamed for that.



Anyway, the ideal plan against ships with 2 shield levels is to fire the first shot of the Hull Smasher, then immediately target the Heavy Pierce Laser at their shields. This will render it much more effective for the fight while still letting the Hull Smasher do its work.



It's still a kind of slow method, and against ships with heavier shielding we'll need better weapons or crewkills. Here, though, it suffices, though we take some hull damage.



Fires and hull breaches do still delay Lanius repairs, but fires don't last long and breaches can't damage them for obvious reasons.



But hey, we pulled it off!



Eh. It's worth more to us now that we're running a proper boarding ship, but the Fire Bomb does way better for our purposes. We CAN combo it with the Fire Bomb by dropping it in a burning room, but that's frankly overkill, and expensive on our missile supply besides.

A lot of Lanius encounters can be avoided by having Lanius crew, who can easily translate and diffuse situations.



We have no such crewmembers. Of note here: they have a small bomb on their ship, which does 2 systems damage, but not hull damage. It also started several fires in our weapons system, making it much harder to repair.



This is where having an Engi crewmember truly shines. We can get those systems up and running way faster than our slow Rock crew could, leaving us with little downtime between our offensives.



Shields are down for good, with that breach there.



Yes I go for the crewkill shot. No I don't need to.



Ahahahaha what okay!

The Scrap Recovery Arm is one of the most hilariously good augments to get for free, as it increases all scrap gain by a percent amount.



AND THE VERY SAME ENCOUNTER ALSO GIVES US BREACH MISSILES, OKAY.



As mentioned earlier, Breach Missile have a heavy cost in both energy and charge time. However, they also deal a whopping 4 damage with a virtually guaranteed hull breach on hit. That's better than friggin' Anti-Ship Batteries. AND IT'S OURS NOW.



Let us celebrate by ramming headfirst into the Rebel waves!



Flak Gun Mk II is pretty dangerous, so let's get that disabled quicklike.



Right, that wasn't too bad. Bit of hull damage, but we've got fire on our side. Their ship has an Anti-Personnel Drone that makes for a pretty big threat as it's fireproof, but it will ONLY try to kill us, and not fix systems.



That's a limitation to drones. They do their job very well, but they only can do that one job.



Drone destroyed, and the rest of their ship is pretty toasted.



I send Bass and Blues back to the medbay for a job well done and firebomb their drone control to ensure that they don't deploy more anti-personnel drones.



They do, but it just sits idle in the drone control. Note that it's healing the fire damage it's taking now that it's unpowered. Drones in the drone control system automatically heal much like regular crew in the medbay, but if they're unpowered, they apparently lose their fire immunity.



HANG TEN



Let's get enough power to run the Breach Missile as well as another weapon type.



Oh no, boarders! And here we are without a door control system!



OH WAIT, IT'S FOUR HUMANS AND WE'RE ROCKMEN



To make matters easier, they boarded at literally the best spot on our ship they could. We have no trouble getting to positions in time to counter them.

If we were too slow, the Fire Bomb that's charging could be used to even the odds. Our crew has high enough health that it wouldn't do too much to offset us if fired directly into a room with our own crew, and the fire can be quickly put out either by having enough crew in there, or failing that, temporarily disabling oxygen.



Still have to be a bit careful, swapping out crew to the medbay, but on the whole, this encounter went very well.



The true Dark Surf begins here. I can jump to the close beacon that is guaranteed to be taken, or the far one which is really kind of hard to tell. I choose the near one.



Pirates! Take 'em down!



Like us, they have a medbay and a teleporter. Unlike us, they send only one of their crew over, because they are dumb.



The plan here WAS to firebomb their medbay, but our bomb missed. And their weapons are more deadly than ours, so we'll just handle the boarder first.

DANGER, DANGER, SHIELDS DOWN

Okay, not totally down. But they are damaged pretty heavily, and that weapon loadout they have thrives on low shields.



We get our crew in there to fix it while the fire in their medbay deals some damage on our behalf.



With the worst of their assault under control, we get our crew and a second firebomb ready.



Ordinarily a Mantis can keep pace with a Rock in a fight, but with the Mantis having just fought a fire, it's in too poor of shape to really do much.



Bass finishes it off and turns to help Blues fight off the other one.



Nice. I think the scrap displayed here is before the increase from the Scrap Recovery Arm, but I'm not sure.



Yeah it is. We get an extra 3 scrap AND a hull tune-up. Nice!



But now the danger begins, as the Rebels are gonna catch us on our next jump no matter what.

It was still worth the risk to try if you ask me, because the beacons by the exit are so far from anything else that we'd be wasting time if we didn't.



That said, we'll need all the defenses we can muster now.



That is a LOT of lasers.



They also have boarders to send in to make the captain's day tougher, so I send in Blues. The faster we spin up the FTL the better.



Even with our pretty solid defenses for this stage of the game...



A few shots still get through. I don't need sensors fully operational, so I send King over to engines to help Roll.



The Rock Plating only marginally helps when our shielding system takes a hit. Get back over there, King!



And we take a direct hit from the Anti-Ship Battery, thankfully not to a system we need. At about this time, Blues and Rock handle the boarders, but even so, we're taking lots of damage here.



We get a chance to jump away and take it, because anything else at this beacon is preferable to fighting this thing.



Respite! Prizes! Bragging rights for having dove facefirst into the Rebel waves and lived to tell the tale!



Anyway yeah. Our Breach missiles are technically deadlier than the Anti-Ship Batteries, in the same way that getting hit by a monorail is technically deadlier than getting hit by a bus. The important part here is that not only does maximum oxygen keep pace with oxygen loss from a hull breach, it actually outpaces it entirely! We now risk nothing by sending crew in to repair it.



Our excursion into Rebel space didn't really earn us much, but it was fun!



Since there's no shops for a while and we have plenty of scrap, I get a few system upgrades in place.



Huh, that's a pretty scary ship.



I'M GONNA WRESTLE IT.

They hack our piloting, which reduces our dodge chance and halts FTL spinup. Not really too big a deal unless they synchronize it with that Flak Gun, at which point it is a VERY big deal.



My plan is just to blow up their ship before they align the stars like that.



Shields demolished, but the follow up Heavy Pierce Laser to weapons misses, so we're taking a flak attack.



And they end up dealing nearly as much damage as our Breach Missile. Ouch.