FTL: Faster Than Light - Advanced Edition

[Menckenstein]

This is the best thing I've played in years. Fuck.

 

[Trash]

And that's it. Every combat encounter is about firing at a shield room most of the time.

Not if you want to actually get out of the first sector. I for example find that boarding is extremely powerfull, if risky. The boarding drone is awesome as well. There are plenty of strategies with the game being all too happy fucking you over with not providing you with the tools for your chosen one. My best games so far have been as an opportunist. Use whatever you find and adept your approach to what you got.

Am now having a hilarious run where I find the biggest pulse laser in the first sector and now have to basically power down everything to use it. I call it my flying glass cannon run.

 

[MetalCraze]

It doesn't matter which sector it is.

AI is pretty dumb and attacks your rooms completely at random. So while every single one of your shots keeps hitting the hull of his ship because all shields are down - the enemy keeps wasting 2 out of 3 shots just to constantly bring down mine. Even when he sends his troops to my ship they don't try to hunt down my crew (and don't even try to attack weapons/shield room unless they got there via a random chance) so it's all about having some guys depleting their HP while wounded guys run back to medbay.

My ship gets destroyed pretty much only when I have a low hull and fly into enemy sector before I'm able to jump out / take out enemy weapons room.

 

[fuzz]

My bad. This topic seemed negligible to post when I searched for "faster than light".

 

[Lottie]

i am just gonna quote myself here, so you larpers weep a bit
i am disappointed in damnedregistration though, i thought more of him

Game is broken on easy. There are no choices.
Every game in Crawl is different because of actually playable different characters.
Here, there are few differences in good builds, as far as I can predict after my third try and first win.

There are some nice things there, albeit not in the gameplay...
If you move away one of those energy giving dudes away from the cloak tile while the cloak is on, the timer drops to the lower energy level one. Cant exploit it. It shows that the devs actually had a beta test with people who arent complete morons.



Strategic always win guide:

early birds get the worms or something
shield +1 - 50s
energy +1 - 20s // +2 is too much yet, just turn off oxygen in combat
engines +2 - 45s
crew +1 - 40/45/65s or free
xp exploit - find a ship with 1 or 2 energy weapons that wont pass your shileds, park yourself in combat and wait till 3 of your crew reach level 2 in shields (xp increase on restores), engines and steering (xp increase on enemy whiffs). Takes about 10-20 minutes, let FTL run on your second screen or smoke something... Engines and steering give on level 2 each 5% more evasion! Now you have 2 shields and 40% evasion, enough for the Endboss.
energy +2 - 45s

midgame the game opens up a bit (seemingly...)
guns - best things first, you'll need to kill shit, rockits and lazors, you'll see what the vendors have or what you find, fireweapons are shit, continuous lazors are sweet, you need some lazor with 3 shots, your first one will do
drones - seems like an expensive version of guns... didnt try much
crew teleport - aah, tempting, but is a waste of resources in a crucial time of game , >150s (75s + 30s, without upgrade too slow, ~50 for energy) to get it running, plus 2 crew members
all for what? some extra creds for the few ships that are capturable? and additional time in combat for enemy ships that have medbays... no thanks, get some firepower

now, endgame
you need 2 things for complete breakage
cloak 150s (gives you that first shot with that sweet rocket to the enemy balls (guns), upgarde it depending on how long your guns need to load )
weapon preheater 120s (gives you that second free shot without retaliation, probably securing untouched wins till the endboss)
auto reloader 60s (15% less time for reloads... meh but hey, its 60s...)

generally jump as much as you can (nebulas..) but consider that every lost crewmember are wasted credits that could have went to more gunpower...
accept surrender only if the reward is really good, like 6 fuel, 6 rockets, 20 scraps (on easy)
the zoltan should optimally give energy where its always needed, that would be for either guns or shields, anything else is suboptimal

and the game is too random, you cant really recoup your losses, every loss is not just a loss, its a missed upgrade and lost time! its a worse negative feedback loop than losing units in panzer general, not very roguelike


Combat (is shit) win guide:

shoot the enemy weapons... win
pause quickly at the start to activate weapons (what a retarded shit came up with that idea, why not fuckin pause it automatically...)
waste only ~1 rocket, the very first shot ( typically, even enemies with 2 shields wont manage to recover the damage to shoot back while you only need to slam them with your über laser with 3 shots... )
cloak ^^
find that awesome preheater...

Mirco (is retarded) win guide:

get doors +2 (+3 optional, 60 fucking bucks... )
vacuum and wait in small rooms if outnumbered, fall back to medbay
vacuum and wait in big rooms if you outnumber them

with teleporter +2 you should be able to beam back and forth easily if you land in small rooms and fight inferior numbers
run and dance on doors for time

dont forget that you are in combat, enemy ships can teleport away, get blown up by you, asteroids, fires, micro combat and god knows what else, every lost crewmember is a missed upgrade!


somewhere late in sector 7, my level 2 captain got killed in some shitty event, got replaced by butters the slug........... lost 5% evasion!!!! fuckers... had to buy it back
killed the endboss with that thing (had like 700 credits), all 3 fights, goddamn, what is this? megamen? fuck!

Now, on to "normal" for me... but I think the game is too random if you dont play an optimal build.

God I suck at this game.

hoverdog sucks, who would have thought




game is irredeemable garbage, illusions of choice, larp fest
just jumped into sector 7 on "normal" (on first attempt, no counting name rerolls for a russian terrorsquad, thats as far as i can larp without killing myself), doing better than on "easy"
"normal" means less scrabs and better equiped enemies, it doesnt matter though if they dont get to shoot............................
enemies also evade much better so i contemplated for a moment a change of strategy, like shooting the cockpit or something, but hey, why change a working, superior tactic? ftl is a shit game
same build kinda creep'ed on me, by just being the most efficient
vitaly, my elite gunner got killed by slugs! in microcombat without me even noticing...

13+ hours wasted, fuck me sideways, never again gonna play shitty crap on release
unins000.exe

in summary:
2 shields
40 evasion
big guns
cloak
preigniter
win

yay :rolleeys:

ze end

 

[Lottie]

hey, skydick, whats your score?

 

[Destroid]

stuff

I'm guessing you had to play it 10x to be really sure how shit it was?

 

[Jaedar]

VICTORY HAS BEEN ACHIEVED!

Fucking fight was tense. Had to retreat from second phase to regear and then come back. And then I started running out of missiles.

But in the end the foul flagship was destroyed, but two brave mantises gave their lives to see it happen.

And all without stooping to easy


Also: Crew teleporters are awesome, if you have an upgraded one and two mantis it will carry you through half the game no problem.

 

[Renegen]

Just finished the game for the first time, with the Engi cruiser (on easy). Defense first. The last sectors were laughable as I would go battle after battle without a single hull hit.

Starter Ion, Heavy Ion, Heavy Laser for damage/system hits
1 Defense drone II, 2 anti-ship drones I
3 shields
a whole lot of energy

Nothing could stand in my way. The final boss was challenging but only in his final form, I repaired in between.

I also got all 3 Engi achievements in that one run, they are really easy to get and I got a stealth ship in a quest event. Feels good to unlock 3 ships with 1 playthrough.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Game keeps fucking with me today. Go 4 sectors without finding a single weapon or useful upgrade, then find something decent only to be instantly raped by some uber warship 'scout' with 6 energy in weapons and shields each and a boarding crew of 4.

 

[tindrli]

im in sector 5 now .. slugs nebula.. and they have god damn light cruisers all over the place..
5 human crew one of them is a marine. yes i know it sucks but thats what i got. and i manage to get my hands on the cloaking tec. but didint use yet.
Weapons are: Artemis(saved our ass countless times), Burst laser lvl 2, Burst laser lvl 1, Healing bomb. I have one Heavy Ion in storage but dont know what to do .. i need the damn bomb so i will probably replace BL1 if i survive long enough.

i still wonder, if their goal to finish was 10.000 and they manage to collect 200k, why we would need to pay for anything extra, patch or dlc or anything?? i mean they could make a sequel of this game for free!!!! and still be rich!!!!

shit.. died while i tried to repair after destroying a boss ship lvl 1.. damn elite fighter

 

[Damned Registrations]

God, every time I think I have an unstoppable shit the game proves me wrong. Mk3 burst laser, Mk2 heavy laser, Mk1 heavy laser, and a pre igniter. And a level 4 artillery beam. Fucking unstoppable right? WRONG. Meet The enemy ship: Level 8 shields, 2 anti ship drones, heavy ion cannon, missile launcher, hull smasher lasers. And of course enough energy to power all that. And enough engines for about 40% evasion apparently. How the fuck could I possibly fight such a monster? I'd need like 3000 scrap to build/buy all that shit. No matter what I target my shields are going to go down, and then every other system on my ship in about 10 seconds.

 

[JudasIscariot]

Captain's Log Stardate 16.09.2012/AD

Playing game on netbook. Can't see much. Don't know how much scrap I have on hand, can't reroute power to anything.

...

Text garbled. Don't know if I am sending my crew to die horrible deaths or on a milk run. The God of RNG seems to favor us this day because no one pulled a redshirt on this run.

Managed to unlock the Engi ship. Very proud of myself until I landed in an ion storm that disabled all power to the engines. No Zoltan to be had to give power and no way to reroute power.

I have learned that I hate susnpot events because going from one sunspot to another is just RNG telling me to go fornicate with myself.

 

[Black]

My brave party of Engies just got buttfucked by like a drop of 6 mantises. On easy. Dick move, game.

 

[Turisas]

My Kirk kicked the bucket immediately after maxing out the ship captaining skill (whatever it's called), those fucking space spiders couldn't kill the newbies with no skills, noo of course not.

And how are you ever supposed to afford the stuff from stores? Barely scraping by, buying missiles and other necessities. Should've had separate currency for commodities, not a shared one with ship upgrades.

 

[RK47]

fucking fun

 

[good little toastboy]

Here's what I gathered about the Slug cruiser so far: You need to beat up slug ships in their home nebula until they surrender. When they offer you an Anti-bio beam instead ask for information. In the next sector will be a quest marker. As I think I've tried all the options there you probably need a slug crewman or a sensor augmentation to get blue options. At least they find you with their telepathic skill, so you should be able to do the same.

Getting better, two wins on normal with Type B of the Federation cruiser and Type B of the Zoltan ship. I feel teleporters are almost mandatory to win the game, at least they are very good at killing the boss' guns and the crew stationed at them. One might be able to do the same with bombs or breach missiles though. Stealth is very useful but absolutely not needed. 40 or 45% evade and four shields are enough for phase 3. Defense drones on the other hand are AMAZING, especially in phase 2 of the boss fight.

After losing some crewmen to space spiders (which are no joke) I've only engaged them when I had five or more crew. Worked every time.

 

[JrK]

You need a slug or sensor level 2 indeed, I just unlocked it yesterday.

My experience:

• Defence drones are almost mandatory, especially against Stage 2; it completely shuts down any attack on your ship if you have decent shields and evasion. The only thing to keep in mind is teleporting attackers, but I've never found those to be problematic as I always try to get a full crew. Cloaking is glorious but in my experience inferior to defence drones.

• You need firepower at a certain point in the game, and burst/dual lasers are the best thing because each single shot disables a shield. Teleporting bombs are better than missiles since they cannot be shot down. I didn't find ion weapons to be very effective, except the Ion III thing you start with on the Engi cruiser. Beam lasers require too much energy and are useless if you cannot bring down all shields.
• Weapon pre-igniter is glorious.
• Weapons don't show up enough in the stores, and when they do it is useless crap like Ion I and the weakest beam, or firebombs.

 

[tindrli]

Im in sector 7 again .. current configuration is:
full crew (2 marine mantis full level )
1 Basic L, 1 Heavy L, 1 Burst L, 1 Hull L
Full Shields, full cloaking tech online Lvl 2 No drone control and only stealthy weapons, and i just lost opportunity to find a store without having an empire blockading the gate.
Is it possible to will a boss ???

 

[RK47]

Actually if Ion Disabling property does what it says, it really pays off to let it target the enemy weapons system while you let the drone and another weapon focus on the shields.
That way, you take less damage and buy more time for your offense to finish the job.

I'm really digging this game, so much randomized win in simplified game play. There's no easy choice to be had, and the stakes gets higher as you travel to higher difficulty sectors. Good game.

 

[tindrli]

WON!!

GREAT GAME!!

 

[Volrath]

Game is stupidly addictive. But are there any plans to be able to build your own ships in the future? Like choosing your own layout and such?

 

[Renegen]

how to defeat the flagship's final form: 4 shields

 

[Jaedar]

how to defeat the flagship's final form: 4 shields

I did it with 3 shields and some engine upgrades.

 

[Azael]

Liking the game quite a lot, but don't know about it's staying power compared to other "roguelike inspired" games, I doubt I will be playing it for as long as Binding of Isaac. Combat becomes something of a chore later game, or maybe I'm just doing it wrong. Still, going with a boarding crew of two mantis and a boarding drone is pretty damn fun. Are there any bigger teleport rooms though? I find a boarding crew of two to be quite insufficient when they have upgraded medical rooms.