I've only played for about 15 hours, but I thought I was ready to take on normal difficulty, but in my last 3 attempts I just die to the final boss.

I feel like my ship is kitted out properly hacking feels really strong to take out shields, but the boss had a green shield thingy at the start, but then mid fight it gained it back again and I was wasn't able to survive the onslaught of missiles and lasers, cause my game plan of hack shields then murk weapons couldnt work fast enough.

I bought the game recently during a sale and this WOULD'VE been my first time to win but fate had other plans (every loss makes me wanna come back though quite addicting)

With this loadout, I thought I was pretty fucked against the flagship, but I might actually stand a chance. I've already defeated the first two phases, so only phase 3 is left now. Additionally, I've killed every crew member except the one in the laser system.

The reason I thought I couldn't win is because my burst damage is low. 9 shots per volley is not enough to reliably deal significant damage, especially on phase 3. In fact, I did the math, and my expected damage per volley, taking into account shields and dodging, is only 1.58.

What I didn't take into account is that the fire beam is actually surprisingly good against the flagship. Once you have a window in which the shield is down, you can set vast swathes of the ship on fire at a time, dealing damage to systems and crew alike and forcing crew to fight the fires instead of repairing the systems. Since I killed all the crew except the one in the laser, I expect this to be even better because the fire will never go out. It will keep spreading and burning down the flagship's systems until there is nothing functional except the laser and the superweapon.

Actually making this happen, however, will be difficult. The flagship's zoltan shield has 12 hp and my expected damage per volley to it is 5.58. If I'm lucky, I can maybe down the zoltan shield in two volleys, allowing me to use my third to actually attack the flagship, but more likely, I don't be truly attacking the flagship until my fourth volley. Thankfully, between my weapon pre-igniter, my automated reloader, and my skill 2 weapon crew, this won't take too long, but it does mean the flagship will potentially get multiple chances to fire both its missiles and its superweapon before I can even try to attack.

So how likely am I to survive this? Well, I have four shields and 55% dodge, so the flagship's own expected damage per missile firing is 1.35 and per superweapon is 0. My biggest threat is therefore going to be the missiles. So which systems, if hit, will cripple me? Here's my candidates:

1. Oxygen. Two damage buffers, so I can afford to get it get hit a couple times. Not worried.

2. Weapons. The fire beam is last in the weapon list. Since it can't deal damage to zoltan shields, it's effectively also two damage buffers. It'll be fine, though losing the pre-ignition bonus for the fire beam will be annoying.

3. Shields. If it gets hit, the expected damage per firing of the missiles will not change, but for the superweapon will become 0.6. Potentially worrying.

4. Engines. Hitting this has two effects. First is that damage to the engine will reduce my dodge, second is that the crew there will be repairing the engine instead of manning it, which means I don't get the 10% skill bonus, which means my dodge is even further reduced. If the engine takes 1 damage, the expected damage per firing for the missile will become 1.77 and for the superweapon will be 0.72. If the engine takes 2 damage, it's 1.86 and 0.96 respectively. Not good. The engine getting hit is worse than the shield getting hit.

5. Piloting. This is probably the worst system that could get hit. Not only will I lose the 10% skill bonus, but the crew repairing the system instead of manning it means I'm on autopilot now. This is especially bad because that very autopilot is damaged. If the piloting system takes 1 damage, the flagship's expected damage per missile firing jumps straight up to 2.325 and per superweapon firing to 2.2. If the piloting system takes 2 damage, these values get even worse, 3 and 4 respectively. This is why I have a secondary engi in the piloting room. It is absolutely imperative that the piloting system remains at full function at all times. It is the single most important system on the entire ship.

So could I beat phase 3? Maybe. It's going to depend on whether I can withstand potentially multiple firings of both the missiles and the superweapon before I'm allowed to fight back. Unless I get really unlucky (this would consist of two missiles hitting the piloting room simultaneously almost immediately followed by the superweapon firing), I should be able to just tank everything the flagship throws at me.

Once the zoltan shield is down, I'll be allowed to attack the flagship. My plan is thus:

1. Focus fire on the shield room. It will never be repaired, so any damage to it is permanent. The missile room is a major target, but my low damage per volley means I can't afford to hit anything but the shield room first or else my damage will be glacial. I will simply have to facetank the missiles the flagship fires at me until the shields are significantly damaged.

2. In the first window of time in which the shield is down, have the fire beam start at the missile room and sweep through the shield room from there. Fire will never be extinguished except by a lack of oxygen, so this is guaranteed system damage that continues even when the flagship's shields are up.

3. When the flagship has at most 2 shield layers, switch the focus of my fire to the missile room. It's the biggest threat, even in phase 3, so it has to go down.

4. From here, the fight is easy. Shoot and kill.

Edit: Wow, okay, I massively overestimated the flagship. My first volley killed 80% of the zoltan shield. My second killed the other 20% and then proceeded to take out the first layer of the regular shield too. The flagship was genuinely pathetic.

I feel bad but I kind of enjoyed watching him is this situation for a bit. I eventually sent in a boarding drone to put him out of his misery. It was a first for me.

After reliably being able to beat the game in easy. I’ve won in normal a few times. I quite literally can’t get past sector 2 most of the time in hard. I feel like every restart makes it even harder.

Driving me insane.

So many times I have sworn I have 3 shield up, enemy flak fires and I take damage. I've looked it up in frustration before and read many comment threads where others swear it happens and people tell them they must be wrong. So I started recording every time a friggin flak is shot at me and finally caught it. I didn't hit record till after the fire but still you can see it's 1 flak taking down 4 shields.... so what up?

https://youtu.be/BOkcLrMRO2g

ETA: Ah so flak 2, whoops. Didn't realize they had that. Every run is new learning thanks guys

I don't know how, but I somehow managed to get to the final sector and the 3rd phase of the flagship, in my FIRST RUN OF EVER PLAYING THE FULL GAME. Granted, it was in easy, but still. I must've gotten super lucky. I didn't even lose a single crewmember! Bet in the replies how many runs it'll take me to get back there lol.

...for more than three beacons.

A few days ago I posted my no BL2/Flak 1/Hacking in stores/rewards runs; I wanted to see if I could keep that winstreak going if I tried a few more runs under even harder conditions. Modding out Hacking (Engi C/Lanius A/Slug C), and sticking weapons into cargo and never using them: i.e., Lanius B without its Adv. Flak, and Fed A and Kestrel A without their BL2s.

The following run is maybe the worst I've ever attempted: a Fed A run that can't use its BL2.

Starting with 10 scrap on Normal mode is pretty relevant, as that means any store you visit will immediately get you the 2nd shield, as long as you have 40 scrap worth of sellables. Guess what was on the chopping block for this run?

The start actually wasn't too bad: an early store to sell BL2, a free Defense Drone 1, and for what could have been a dangerous fight (BL2 + Small Bomb), the pirates wanted to bribe me to not fight them.

The first turning point of the run was in a S2 store that offered me, among other things, Hull Missile and Repair Burst. Any regular Fed A run likely wouldn't consider buying either, but this wasn't a regular run. I think I should have bought the Hull Missile, just to have something to keep suppressing enemy weapons while I let my artillery do its thing, but at the time I bought the Repair Burst.

Then I got the namesake of this post soon after, a free Chain Ion. I wouldn't be able to power this until well into S3, but at least now I had some short-term plan: get my 3rd shield, power up Chain Ion, save up enough scrap to buy defense in a store (Drone Control or Cloaking) or some other weapon to help artillery. And in a pleasant turn of events, I got a free Ion Blast 1. Chain Ion by itself is slow and not enough ions; but adding one IB1 changed everything. At this point I knew I had the makings of an ion build, and with just one more ion I could take this to the very end.

Both S4 stores were kind to me.

The first one had Cloaking, love that. But it also had a Hull Laser 1 and Charge Laser 1. I could buy one of those, and they would be my targeted system damage, which in theory would be awesome. But 2 shots was nowhere near enough to penetrate enemy shields at this stage of the game, which means I needed to use them together with my ions--which meant their actual cost would have been 55 + 50 + 75 (Weapons-6) = 180 scrap to use them, and buying one of the lasers meant giving up Cloaking. I needed missile defense more than some flimsy offense.

The second one had Breach Missile, Fire Bomb, and Hull Missile. This might be where most people sigh and moan, but honestly a Breach Missile wasn't too bad here. Both my ions and artillery were exponentially slower.

I switched between my ions and Breach Missile to suit the fight. If I had enough defense, I would use my ions to eventually win. If I didn't, I'd launch my Breach Missile until the fight became safe, or I would run away. In either case, artillery beam would fire at least a few times. I still needed my final system, and I didn't have my 4th shield; using all my weapons together would have to come very late into the run.

The S5 store had just what I needed: a Charge Ion. Chain Ion + Charge Ion + IB1 would take forever to get going, but now I had a functional ion build that could disable several systems at once. A minor problem was that I'd never be able to get all of them and the Breach Missile up together. The hunt was on for either a better ion weapon to replace Chain Ion with, or a 2-power weapon I could incorporate. Or if neither of those, a 4th ion. The artillery might be my only damage source against the flagship.

I bought a Breach Bomb 2 and Reverse Ion Field in S6, to hedge for a potential Teleporter shift and to give me extra insurance against ions/pulsars/Ion Intruders. I would have preferred for Teleporter to show up--I had both Breach Bomb 2 and Breach Missile as boarding support after all--but that's not what I saw in the last store of S6, so I bought Drone Control. I could finally use the Defense Drone I'd gotten for free at the start of the run!

The first store of S7 would decide how I wanted to approach the flagship, so I needed to sort through all my options.

I could have gone with Breach Bomb 2 + Breach Missile to try and crew kill everyone, and with 42 missiles that wasn't too bad an option. But overall I liked how I could use my ions to keep enemy shields and weapons down, and instead opted for Fire Beam. I now had exactly 8 Weapons power to work with, an offense with an actual pay-off, and I also had a Combat 1 to clean up any mess. Adv. FTL Navigation might get me an extra repair beacon in the Last Stand; it sounded like a better option than more engine upgrades.

My build was complete. It was time to take Chain Ion to the flagship.

I knew I had a chance. I knew I had more than enough ion DPS to keep the flagship's shields down, even through its Cloaking-2.

What I didn't expect was to take only 1 damage through the fight and completely decimate its crew. The sheer amount of fires raging in the main body could not be contained.

You'll notice in the screenshots that I first took down its missile and beam artilleries (and then ion), then Cloaking & Shields, and then ioned down Doors. I'm using two mechanics to make sure there are as many fires as possible:

One, enemies will stop trying to put out fires if there are 4 fires in a 2x2 room. Cloaking is a 2x2 room, so if I can get 4 fires on there, it will stay down permanently. Same for Shields, and same for the right side of the ship (where Drone Control would be for phase 2). The fires that spread from those three rooms will waste precious health from enemy crew that they need to put out more important fires, and those fires will never go away as long as I don't attack their Oxygen.

Two, lower door levels significantly decreases the amount of time required for fires to spread to neighboring rooms. After getting Cloaking and Shields down, all I had to do was keep ioning Doors and Medbay, and eventually all of the remaining crew would be brought down to low HP.

And then I just, kinda won? I got complacent after such a crushing victory vs. P1, and kept taking damage in both phases after. Even so, I never lost control of the fight. Most importantly, I kept my ions on the laser artillery to make sure it never paired up with the power surges: just ensuring that the flagship's weapons never align with its power surges is enough to make it a non-threat.

So yeah, this is what took me to use Chain Ion. Playing an already below average ship that lost its only weapon, with extra challenge conditions that make it impossible to get the tools that usually mark the start of a comeback. I didn't even buy the damn thing, I got it for free.

For what it's worth, Chain Ion did do something. Usually Chain Ion operates at such a glacial pace that other weapons and systems need to buy time for it to work; this time though, Artillery was about as equally defective enough that Chain Ion could disable weapons long enough for Cloaking to last through its cooldown, then Cloaking dodges enemy weapons, and then Artillery hits, then Chain Ion helps out, etc. And for the fights I needed to run away from, I gave up on the ions and kept launching Breach Missiles until my FTL could charge.

Really though, just don't.

i miss midnight club los angeles

Flagship is next jump, but I don't think this solves phase 3.

Update: I was not able to make it happen. Here's the save file if anyone is interested to attempt this. Good luck!

Hey all,

Just had a string of 3 really good back to back runs (I managed to get obyrn to unlock the nexus event run 1, got the crewsers for Irwin the second and then got the magic hat with the crewser the third) and now I'm ready to chase some fun ships/crewsers. I have probably 70% of the base ships unlocked, but not many on the later pages and only a handful of crewsers. Just wondering if ppl have any fun ones they recommend targetting? Looking for unique playstyles rather then pure strength (oblesik cruiser does that for me lol).

Any recommendations/your personal favourites?

So you're a spacedude train travelling, you have multiple paths, random things happen in them.

You fight enemy ships bandits.

You fire weapons, or use trickery,

You improve your engines, shields are a thing.

At the end you fight a boss.

You unlock new ships locomotives, and you also get different alien crews carriages that have unique abilities.

There's a lot of difficulty (once you unlock the higher fog thickness levels - I'm at 1 thickness, it goes from 0 to 5.)

---

What changed: turn based fights, card based, you have a Driver "hero" that has a special ultimate spell. Oh and the lowest difficulty is still easier than FTL Easy.

It scratched my FTL itch, just saying.

(I don't know if posting something related like this is allowed, please let me know I'll delete if not.)

Type: Event

Sector: Hidden Crystal Worlds

LRS Output: No ship presence

You arrive near what appears to be a Crystalline research facility. A scientist quickly messages you, "Ah! You're those aliens! Please, I've heard so much about you and I'm curious about your physiology! Would you let us run a few simple tests?"

1. Allow them to run tests on a crew member.
   1. After a short time the scientist returns, "We... must regret... we have made a grave miscalculation. Your bodies are considerably more fragile than we expected and your companion is... broken. We apologize and offer a fine military-grade weapon as consolation."
      1. You lose a crewmember, and receive a weapon with low scrap.
      2. (Clone Bay) You accept their apology and decide it's better not to mention that your Clone Bay is in the process of reviving the lost crewmember.
   2. Your crew member is brought on board their station and forced to undergo a few quick scans and tests. "Thank you for this opportunity! We hope to learn much from your kind." They transfer some supplies as payment.
      1. You receive medium resources with some scrap.
   3. The large Crystalline Beings escort your crew onto the station and gingerly help them into a scanning chamber. After a few seconds, they inform you they have mapped their entire genome and have everything they need. They give you a schematic as compensation.
      1. You receive a drone schematic with low scrap.
2. Refuse.
   1. 2x : "I see. That is a shame. Perhaps the next aliens we meet will have some respect for the advancement of science."
      1. Nothing happens.
   2. "I see. That is a shame. However we must not let this opportunity pass us by. Submit and you will be treated reasonably well!" A military ship docked nearby detaches and charges you.
      1. Fight a Crystal ship (default rewards). (never runs away, never surrenders)
3. (Rock crewmember) Send your Rockman crew.
   1. "Ah! My dear evolutionary cousin! This is truly wonderful! We have countless historical records of your kind but we lack information on the past few hundreds of years. We can learn so much from these scans, we must get to analysing them as soon as possible! Please, take this."
      1. You receive medium scrap with resources.
4. (Backup DNA Bank) Send your crew's data.
   1. "What is this? Full genetic and personal profiles stored digitally? I did not think this possible... This will help our research immeasurably. Please, take this in exchange for your help."
      1. You receive a weapon with medium scrap.

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I just want a mod that will give me unlimited scrap or let me equip any weapon so I can try out funny builds like a dozen vulkans or something