whalleywhat
Member
You're basically Lawrence of Arabia in the story anyways. You show up at the base a little bit bloodthirsty and insane and minus a boy who stepped in quicksand and they're like "You did what?! Uh, sure, go fight the boss."
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FTL |OT| Stories of the Space Oregon Trail
- Thread starter Toma
- Start date
You're basically Lawrence of Arabia in the story anyways. You show up at the base a little bit bloodthirsty and insane and minus a boy who stepped in quicksand and they're like "You did what?! Uh, sure, go fight the boss."
*lol*
That's true.
"Captain Whalleywhat, your crew log shows that there was an Engi named Dood onboard? What happened?"
"I sent him to his death in a valiant and stupid maneuver that could have been easily avoided."
"Oh? Well here take some fuel and get out there and save us!"
I still think the captian of the Kestrel really needs to talk to the Federation about installing some kind of fire prevention system. It seems rather primitive to have to put out the fires by hand.
That's what happened for me as well, so far. Once a room loses its oxygen supply, the dudes stop attacking the systems and just keep moving till they find a room with air.
electricpirate
Member
Aaaaannnd I let my PC go to sleep with the game open and paused.
Game crashed,
bye bye saved game.
Running a pretty sweet bird too, Able to fire 7 lasers at once, and a fire bomb aboard, with cloaking, full engines and full shields on stage one of the final battle.
Game crashed,
bye bye saved game
.Running a pretty sweet bird too, Able to fire 7 lasers at once, and a fire bomb aboard, with cloaking, full engines and full shields on stage one of the final battle.
I was reading a bit more on this game and how to play, like the tip sheet in the OP... and then when I went to play I got my ass kicked even worse than when I went in blindly
Won a fight against a rebel ship and was all like "YEAAAAH!" but then the game said "you had to flee before looting the ship" so I got zero goodies from it
Another few questions - how do I acquire and deploy drones? How do I get my crew to board enemy ships?
Drones are acquired like any other weapons, but you need a Drone Controller (80 scrap at some stores) to use it. To board ships you need a Crew Teleporter (75 scrap at some stores)
or you can unlock a ship like the Engi ship that comes with Drones
It does suck that you get nothing but 1 fuel for winning battles against the Rebel Fleet. Running out of missiles isn't normally a big deal to me. I'd certainly rather run out of missiles than Fuel
Harlock
Member
Unlock new ships seems very annoying, because you need to do very specific things, not just progress in the systems:
http://ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Ships
http://ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Ships
rohlfinator
Member
I had a pretty sick run going last night -- got a second Burst Laser Mk. 2 after the first encounter, so I've been tearing through pretty much everything in the first 4-5 sectors and fighting everyone I can. I also picked up a Pike Beam, a Mk 1 Defense Drone, and a Mk 2 Anti-Ship Drone. Right now I'm sitting with a ridiculous amount of unused missiles and scrap.
I'm looking forward to loading my save tonight (and probably crashing and burning within the first five minutes).
I'm looking forward to loading my save tonight (and probably crashing and burning within the first five minutes).
This ship is found by first acquiring the damaged stasis pod and then managing to bring it to the Zoltan research facility. Take the blue option to look at the capsule, and you will have the chance to have a crystalline being on your crew. He will then direct you to a quest in the rock homeworlds where you must find the warp point that gives another blue option.
electricpirate
Member
It's when you get really cocky that you do something really dumb.
Didn't do that. We arrived and he's all "lol, what are you looking at me for?".
IndieJones
Member
This game 'clicked' for me last night because I stupidly hadn't realized you could upgrade your ship at any time - I was playing as if you could only use scrap to buy things at a store. So I'd seen the upgrade screen before because I'd seen the crew and equipment screen, but... I don't know what my brain did. Anyway. Spaceward, ho!
Shamelessly added to the Wall of Quotes.
I had a decked out ship once and ran out of fuel. I got a bit low and then went through an unlucky string of seeing nothing.
I've made it to the final boss (on easy) about a half dozen times so far and every time I'm either ill equipped to deal with the ridiculous drone form or something totally dumb goes wrong (I forget to repower my O2 and all my dudes choke out, or run out of moves to get to the third form) and I end up failing. I've only even fought the third form once and he smoked the hell out of me. His boarding party seemed overpowered and made short work of most of my 5 survivors, and his barrages were coming way too fast for me to stealth through.
Something's gotta give. I've heard of people beating this on easy within 5 or 10 playthroughs. I've been playing this game NON STOP for the last couple days and it feels impossible. It wouldn't be so bad but the actual journey to him is starting to get very rote and tedious. There's rarely any danger and making sure I've got as good a chance as possible means visiting as many nodes as possible to get lots of scrap which means a play through can last ~3 hours depending on how many nebulas I traverse.
Anyways, whine whine, etc. Off to go play again...
Something's gotta give. I've heard of people beating this on easy within 5 or 10 playthroughs. I've been playing this game NON STOP for the last couple days and it feels impossible. It wouldn't be so bad but the actual journey to him is starting to get very rote and tedious. There's rarely any danger and making sure I've got as good a chance as possible means visiting as many nodes as possible to get lots of scrap which means a play through can last ~3 hours depending on how many nebulas I traverse.
Anyways, whine whine, etc. Off to go play again...
Well, there wasn't a quest marker when I did it, so I guess you just have to get lucky and hope you find the right node. Which I didn't.
Super defense is the best defense... 4 shields, and Type 2 defense drone I've found to have been pretty critical. You can also up your evade rate by levelling up the engines as well. Then as long as you can take out the missile launcher, you'll be in a pretty good place.
whalleywhat
Member
I beat the game with one Burst II and two Hull Lasers (which are just slightly slower than Burst II). But that's 7 shots compared to 12.
Eh, don't feel too bad. Some of it's luck and some of it's strategy. You also need to realize when it's one or the other.
It took me 30ish playthroughs or so. The big thing for me was just enjoying every run with the expectation of death. That made me try different things and allowed me to get creative.
Yeah, there's no quest market for that, it'll just tell you that you see something akin to a warp gate if you encounter the right event
Got the Mantis cruiser, thanks for the advice. I don't want to look through the wiki, at most gather information from peers online because discovery is an important part of a game. Didn't use the Wiki for Terraria until I had to figure out how to smelt hellstone (that would no longer be necessary since the game now tells you how that works) and discovery was the greatest joy of that game too. That said the Mantis cruiser doesn't look good, only a 2 space teleporter without good weapons to make up for it? WTF? I think I'll stick with my beloved Crystal B for boarding (chalk another victory up for that thing BTW).
It's obvious but keeping the gunner on the laser turret of the flagship alive while killing everybody else means the AI doesn't come online and the ship doesn't gain autorepairs while it also doesn't have a crew capable of repairing its systems. The laser turret doesn't break off in later stages and isn't as dangerous as the missile one so that's the perfect guy to keep alive.
I wish it was possible to pick where the other two guys end up if you teleport four people into a two square room.
and if you have a crystalman you get the blue option to open it. You only get a quest marker once you're in crystal space.
Got the Mantis cruiser, thanks for the advice. I don't want to look through the wiki, at most gather information from peers online because discovery is an important part of a game. Didn't use the Wiki for Terraria until I had to figure out how to smelt hellstone (that would no longer be necessary since the game now tells you how that works) and discovery was the greatest joy of that game too. That said the Mantis cruiser doesn't look good, only a 2 space teleporter without good weapons to make up for it? WTF? I think I'll stick with my beloved Crystal B for boarding (chalk another victory up for that thing BTW).
It's obvious but keeping the gunner on the laser turret of the flagship alive while killing everybody else means the AI doesn't come online and the ship doesn't gain autorepairs while it also doesn't have a crew capable of repairing its systems. The laser turret doesn't break off in later stages and isn't as dangerous as the missile one so that's the perfect guy to keep alive.
I wish it was possible to pick where the other two guys end up if you teleport four people into a two square room.
A few questions now that I've played the game a few hours (incredibly addicting and amazing, gifted to my friend the same night and he's been hooked as well). I've only reached sector 5 (Yay! for unlocking a new ship type) so far and always get destroyed easily there.
1. How do you cloak? I purchased a cloaking device, had power to it, never seemed to do anything, not sure if I need to manually activate it.
2. Any tips for boarding? Never bought a teleportation device yet but figured I am missing out on major bonus scrap/items by destroying every ship I run across.
3. When/Why would I aim for any specific part of the enemy ship? I always destroy the engine so they can't get away. I've tried aiming for the weapons systems/O2 systems but they repair them so fast it doesn't seem like it helps (also I seem to miss a lot when aiming for anything but the engine).
4. How fast do you all normally go through galaxies? Do you explore every single star even though the rebel army reaches you, or do you try to stay just ahead of them?
I think once I have a better understanding of all of that I will be able to make some serious progress later.
Bonus story: My first ship, I had no idea how to shoot (i was powering up the weapons, hit auto-fire, nothing happened). When I was getting low on hull hp, I figured out how to shoot, started firing back and destroyed the other ship. Then I thought that the red rooms meant, repair them, so I sent my crew into the red rooms figuring they needed to be repaired...they all suffocated... Shortest mission ever... I truly felt like Zap that night...
"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide-mission."
1. How do you cloak? I purchased a cloaking device, had power to it, never seemed to do anything, not sure if I need to manually activate it.
2. Any tips for boarding? Never bought a teleportation device yet but figured I am missing out on major bonus scrap/items by destroying every ship I run across.
3. When/Why would I aim for any specific part of the enemy ship? I always destroy the engine so they can't get away. I've tried aiming for the weapons systems/O2 systems but they repair them so fast it doesn't seem like it helps (also I seem to miss a lot when aiming for anything but the engine).
4. How fast do you all normally go through galaxies? Do you explore every single star even though the rebel army reaches you, or do you try to stay just ahead of them?
I think once I have a better understanding of all of that I will be able to make some serious progress later.
Bonus story: My first ship, I had no idea how to shoot (i was powering up the weapons, hit auto-fire, nothing happened). When I was getting low on hull hp, I figured out how to shoot, started firing back and destroyed the other ship. Then I thought that the red rooms meant, repair them, so I sent my crew into the red rooms figuring they needed to be repaired...they all suffocated... Shortest mission ever... I truly felt like Zap that night...
"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide-mission."
CosmicQueso
Member
I've been there. I was feeling really good about my chances to. Got cocky. I said "you f'er, you're coming to me this time and I shall slaughter you". But it kept hanging out a couple stars away. I thought it mighta been scared. And then GAME OVER.
Dammit.
1. It's manually activated. Click the little power button beside it.
2. Biggest thing to look for when boarding is see if the enemy has a medbay. If he does it'll be almost impossible for your boarding crew to be more than a distraction unless you take it out. Crystal troops are great for this as you can teleport them into the medbay and then use lockdown to prevent anyone from getting to it while you destroy it.
3. Depends on what your objectives are. I typically prioritize shields/weapons depending on what weapons the enemy has. If he can't breach my shields then I completely ignore his weapons and go for whatever else. If I plan to board, going for the medbay is a good option.
4. I try to stay just barely ahead of the rebels so that I can explore as many nodes as possible while fighting as few rebels as I can because they aren't profitable.
Keep in mind that my strategies are all based on easy mode. I haven't worked up to normal yet.
electricpirate
Member
There's a power icon next to the icon for your cloak on the lower left hand corner.
Get teleporter to level 2, get level 2 on your camera, don't board AI ships. Beam in and out to weaken them, and try to damage their medic bay.
There are a lot of ways to think about it. Early on I like to go for weapons/shields to bring guys down fast. Later on I start by concentrating fire on the bridge, then focus on shields or weapons.
As slow as possible, I try to hit every node and I go out of my way to hit nebulae to slow down the rebel fleet. Every jump is scrap, and and a chance for loot, and you need as much of that stuff as possible.
How much harder is normal? Are there any new events or anything? Just been cruising through easy since I started playing and I'm curious how higher difficulties change the game.
Also is anyone else finding beam weapons to be ridiculously overpowered? A lot of the crewed ships have rooms that you're able to angle the beams in such a way as to hit 4-5 rooms easily. Almost always damaging or knocking out 2-3 subsystems.
Also is anyone else finding beam weapons to be ridiculously overpowered? A lot of the crewed ships have rooms that you're able to angle the beams in such a way as to hit 4-5 rooms easily. Almost always damaging or knocking out 2-3 subsystems.
Thank you both for the quick and informative responses. Follow-up questions on this.
Is there a button to activate the teleporter similar to the cloaking device?
Does it automatically select which teammates go, or do I get to choose somehow?
And finally, are they automatically teleported back after 20 seconds (is what I believe the timer is on level 1) or do I have to somehow teleport them back?
The cloaking device shows a speech bubble with an on/off button, click that to start the cloaking cycle. You stay cloaked for the duration the upgrade screen tells you, after that it's a 20 second cooldown (each blue circle on a stunned system corresponds to five seconds).
Boarding is awesome but I don't think I can give you too much advice since my tactics all revolve around the crystal lockdown ability. I did notice that the AI does not redirect guys to your boarding force until you actually damage the room you're in, if you teleport on top of a guy the AI will often not reinforce until he's dead. Avoid fighting in enemy medbays though, the regeneration is very strong. Disable that thing with your ship weapons if you have to (preferably just after badly wounded enemies ran into it to get healed). Oh and if you have reason to believe that the enemy will jump away then get your crew outta there, any crew left on their ship when it FTLs away is lost. I don't know how advisable it is to board automated ships with normal crew, crystalmen can survive long enough to break a subsystem and teleport out again but you usually don't get them.
I wouldn't aim for the engine first unless you get a specific message telling you that the enemy tries to escape or you need to lower his evasion. Disable the weapons as soon as you can, no weapons = no damage. Unless he's got some nasty drones, then you should shoot the drone system. On later enemies you won't get around shooting the shield generator so do that until the shields are low enough to manage, then go for the weapons. Also note that whenever the enemy re-routes weapon power to other guns (they slide in/out) their reload bars are reset so they won't fire soon even if they do get repaired quickly.
I try to stay in a sector until exactly one jump before the rebels reach the jump beacon. There's no value in engaging the rebels, the game will not give you any real rewards for beating the advanced fighter you face when you get caught (presumably to prevent people from grinding the rebels). Don't put too much emphasis on getting many nodes though, the rewards scale with the difficulty of the sector so the loss from visiting fewer nodes isn't that big, it's more important not to waste your resources on the rebels.
EDIT: The teleporter has two buttons (one for teleporting out, one for getting people back), it'll teleport everybody in the teleporter room when outgoing (even if it has more people than fit into the destination room, it'll place the surplus in a nearby room) and everybody in the target room when recalling.
Boarding is awesome but I don't think I can give you too much advice since my tactics all revolve around the crystal lockdown ability. I did notice that the AI does not redirect guys to your boarding force until you actually damage the room you're in, if you teleport on top of a guy the AI will often not reinforce until he's dead. Avoid fighting in enemy medbays though, the regeneration is very strong. Disable that thing with your ship weapons if you have to (preferably just after badly wounded enemies ran into it to get healed). Oh and if you have reason to believe that the enemy will jump away then get your crew outta there, any crew left on their ship when it FTLs away is lost. I don't know how advisable it is to board automated ships with normal crew, crystalmen can survive long enough to break a subsystem and teleport out again but you usually don't get them.
I wouldn't aim for the engine first unless you get a specific message telling you that the enemy tries to escape or you need to lower his evasion. Disable the weapons as soon as you can, no weapons = no damage. Unless he's got some nasty drones, then you should shoot the drone system. On later enemies you won't get around shooting the shield generator so do that until the shields are low enough to manage, then go for the weapons. Also note that whenever the enemy re-routes weapon power to other guns (they slide in/out) their reload bars are reset so they won't fire soon even if they do get repaired quickly.
I try to stay in a sector until exactly one jump before the rebels reach the jump beacon. There's no value in engaging the rebels, the game will not give you any real rewards for beating the advanced fighter you face when you get caught (presumably to prevent people from grinding the rebels). Don't put too much emphasis on getting many nodes though, the rewards scale with the difficulty of the sector so the loss from visiting fewer nodes isn't that big, it's more important not to waste your resources on the rebels.
EDIT: The teleporter has two buttons (one for teleporting out, one for getting people back), it'll teleport everybody in the teleporter room when outgoing (even if it has more people than fit into the destination room, it'll place the surplus in a nearby room) and everybody in the target room when recalling.
1. There is a button.
2. It will teleport whoever is sitting in the teleport room on your ship. Does anyone know if you can teleport enemies that are moving through this room?
3. You have to manually teleport them back. The timer just tells you when it can be used again. You can either teleport people back or teleport more in.
electricpirate
Member
No new events in normal, but the lower scrap and faster ramp up of difficulty regarding enemy ships makes it damn tough. I beat the game on my 4th play through on easy, on normal I've gotten to the final boss once, and capped out around zone 5 every other time.
Beam weapons are great as long as the shields are down. If you can't get their shields down then they are worthless.
I had an engi ship with the Ion blaster mark 2 and the halberd beam. Really nasty combination, but even with the ion blaster, a slight mis time basically rendered the entire 15 second set up worthless.
Get one or two mantis crew members to use as marines when you're boarded. Even one mantis plus one other non-Engi crew member should be able to take down boarding parties if you have blast doors. If you have any problems just use the blast doors to delay boarders while your crew heals. Pull your guys out after they've done a bit of damage to heal at the med bay and then send them back to finish the boarders off. If the boarding party is particularly large and/or your med bay is far away you might lose a subsystem and probably a few blast doors while your guys run back and forth.
Another tactic is throttling your oxygen by venting it into space in high risk corridors or areas of the ship where you don't have any crew. Just throttle it enough to be low but not dangerous, in case you need to run through for whatever reason, and whenever a boarding party comes aboard in that area you can more quickly vent the remaining oxygen into space. A good example of this would be the sensors wing of the Zoltan Adjudicator ship.
Might be worth a try then. I beat easy on my second run through with the Kestrel. Since then it's mostly been exploring and playing around with other weapon/crew combinations.
Sure, but unless you get REALLY unlucky with your store options and weapon drops you should be able to get something to take shields out. I had a problem once where I made it to the Sector before The Last Stand with just the starting weapons on the Adjudicator so I had to rely on the Leto missile launcher to take out shields. I ended up going to the last boss with just the stock beam and an upgraded missile launcher (the one that shoots two missiles for the cost of one). Got to the second phase of the final boss but lost because that sector setup was kinda shitty (all the repair areas in the top left corner) and defense drones were taking out my missiles.
I was doing that for awhile during the beta, then switched to easy. I figured practice against the boss would help me beat it on normal.
Nah, the tutorial's for learning the basics. Strategy you learn by figuring it out yourself or reading the internet if you don't want to figure it out yourself.
Unless you didn't realize that you had a med bay that could heal your crew, but I think the tutorial covers that? It's been 4 months since I played the tutorial, heh.
I played easy for a while, but saved scrap. My transition to normal was much easier than I was expecting.
Just barely missed unlocking the secret ship. I managed to awaken the character and find the Rock homeworld sector, but I couldn't find the right planet before rebels closed in. FFFFFffffffffffffffffffffff. On the bright side, Victory Achieved (with Rock vessel.) That ship is fun, but you have to find some way to wean yourself off of missiles super-fast.
I still think the captian of the Kestrel really needs to talk to the Federation about installing some kind of fire prevention system. It seems rather primitive to have to put out the fires by hand.
It's called being in space. You just open your ship.
Just like it is stupid to have fire extinguishers in submarines when you are surrounded by water.
Jesus!
That doesn't take into account situations like, what if the fire is in the cockpit or the medbay where you have fleshy meatbags with no space suits. Clearly special medbay sprinklers are needed.
electricpirate
Member
Wow, so I just realized that the room turns orange when it runs out of O2.
No more guessing at "Is this too pink?"
No more guessing at "Is this too pink?"
You'd be surprised how much the medbay can counter-act the effects of no oxygen. At lvl 1, the medbay healing rate and the suffocation damage are exactly the same. If there's a fire in the medbay, send as many people in the medbay as possible, and open all the doors. They'll take damage from the fire, but they'll probably survive if you micro them around well enough.
It works great against intruders too. I made it through two mantis sectors in a row by waiting for them to board, opening all the doors, and running to the medbay. You don't even need to upgrade your doors.
quit whining lol. 85 hours playing only on normal, seen the boss 5 times, defeating him ze-ro.
I think they depend on the type of sector (race territory/homeworld, nebula, etc) but I don't think they're tied to the sector number. Enemy strength and rewards are tied to the number though.
Also thanks for the ego boost Jintor, I was already feeling bad about having needed 20 hours for my first victory and only having won twice when everybody I tend to IRC with had already beaten the boss on the first day.
Also thanks for the ego boost Jintor, I was already feeling bad about having needed 20 hours for my first victory and only having won twice when everybody I tend to IRC with had already beaten the boss on the first day.