Damn I don't visit the gaming side much but I'm glad to see this game has a strong following. I was actually already doing a lot of the tips in the thread so I'm glad.
I've made it to Sector 8 twice and both times got obliterated by the flagship and its drones. I'll get that fucker next time.
For sure!
Sweet. Finally finished the game on Easy with the Kestrel.
I didn't even have that much power on me. I had 6 lasers total (starter one, the one a level below it and a hull laser that only shot twice).
The star of that run were the boarding party. One Rock and one Mantis wrecked havoc on pretty much anything that came up. I ended the game with 700+ scrap.
I also had a Drone system installed, which helped greatly, as I had one Anti Personal Drone and a Repair drone that I would manually swap when needed.
I also got the all systems achievement along with it.
Pretty great experience. Game truly is amazing.
Congratulations! There is so much more to this game than meets the eye, it's amazing. Only a few days ago I noticed that the cockpit is a special station, in that it has two different states: "somebody in it" and "being manned". If you have a guy in there, but he's busy repairing it, putting out a fire or fighting someone, it will still enable evading, as if it was manned, but it will not give you the 10% (+ mastery level bonus) the pilot itself provides. This, according to a dev post, is to provide balance, since, otherwise, there's no point (in fact, it's harmful) to it having more than 1 durability (it gets disabled as soon as someone hits it, and takes longer to repair). I should compile a more understandable explanation and add it to my tips.
I beat it on easy three minutes before it hit midnight where I live. Only took me 15.8 hours. Finished 2012 off with a bang.
A literal bang, in fact! I will admit I was playing FTL until a few minutes before midnight, as my GF had to work that night and I was in no condition to go to any friends party.
How is that even possible? And how are you supposed to use the Nessario anyway, it has no shields, I get my ass kicked the minute I get into a fight if I try and use it.
I've finished the game with the Nesasio. That ship ROCKS. Cloaking and high enough evade can easily tide you over until you buy shields (for 150 scrap, sold in most shops). Heck, in one of my games with it I didn't bother with shields until like sector 6. Priorize engines and cloak, use the cloak early to get a first strike advantage, and you should be fine.
With decent weapons, you can tear apart ships before they even fire a shot most easily with it; heck, its starting weapons are enough to destroy most ships in the first couple of sectors. Cloak, wait for both to charge, shoot the laser at its shield room or weapons, then trace a beam starting with the room you want to destroy first. With good practice you can hit 4-5 rooms even with the minibean in most ships (remember that touching even a pixel of a room's white space will count, try to angle them very slightly across walls).
The one thing that will murder you is beams, more so beam drones. If you're not confident that you can disable its weapons in the initial barrage, try to avoid confrontations or otherwise jump ASAP when you get in a fight with something with a beam.
It starts with Long-Range scanners. With a little luck in the nodes with ships in them, they can all be avoided. With additional luck, the randomized events will supply enough fuel to just keep hopping through.
That is the exact opposite of what you want to do. You use the long-range scanners to fight every ship you come across, giving you a huge advantage early one. If you avoid ships you have no hope to overcome the downward slippery slope, unless you get lucky indeed with events that you should probably not be gambling on anyway.
And with respect to how you're supposed to use it: it has a VERY swingy early game, as far as I can tell. It can do maybe 3 points of damage per full strike early on, but starts with 4 engine and cloaking. Ideally, you want to be able to knock out their weapons between the cloaks and dodging. And as always, running is an option. But after that, you'll want to hopefully get enough scrap to get some real weapons and a shop offering something workable. If you can get together something to actually fight with, you're set.
Let me also add that a ship with cloaking benefits a lot from slow-charing, powerful weapons. At level 3 of cloaking you can charge any weapon in the game with impunity, as even though you'll be out of cloak by the time they charge, the enemy won't have time to charge any of its weapons.
Edit: This Nesasio talk prompted me to try a Nesasio Normal run. So far I'm doing good; I spent the money that I was saving for the shields in a Glaive Beam, which is the exact kind of weapon the Nesasio needs (slow and powerful).
Around the beginning of sector 3:
Around the end of sector 4:
