FTL

How the heck do you guys manage to get so much scrap?
I never play on easy... maybe that's it... Don't get me wrong, I love being in a desperate situation (That reminds me actually... if any of you know X3:TC or just want to read a playthrough (DiD, dead is dead, or, Going Rogue) of that game, I am writing one right now: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic....&start=0&sid=b8a68dcf835ff3366cef6d0920cf4849).

But I really have to choose: go for a second shield or get more weapon energy.
If I am not running out of fuel and hull by that time, that is. Really running out of scrap a lot.

And when the enemies start having 3 shields I am really in deep trouble usually.

I'll try the Engi ship some more, been playing with the Zoltan one quite a bit, and it's nice. The Kestral is fine too, actually kind of homesick for it... but Engi first

And yeah, like I said before: needs more systems to divide power over, more bonuses for systems that have crew, and active crew abilities like overcharge weapon or so would be sweet.

All in all, still having a good time after 8 hours of it, and got my first achievement

 

Agreed, I miss the possibility to explore things more calmly, the game is always pressuring you to go forward. I think it would be better if you had more freedom to explore things on your own.

That aside, the game's good

 

I wonder why they didn't implement the "Rebel Fleet" that is chasing you in a similar manner to how they did the final boss. Could have made the fleet only take out one system at a time from your available systems to travel to, that way. Add some random variance to how quickly the fleet jumps to the next star, and you could have some nice cat and mouse behavior as you tried to explore as much of the sector as possible before jumping to the next.

 

Here's my quickstart guide - your goal is to maximize your scrap earned - scrap lost in each encounter.

The Eng are great because they don't use missiles (less scrap spent per encounter) and they disable systems (more scrap earned in salvage).

With the Eng ship, launch the attack drone, then fire your disrupter at the opponent's weapon systems continuously. Have a crew member manning your shields, and one on your weapons. For most early opponents, you should take no damage at all, and earn 25+ scrap. Assuming you can find a good second weapon or drone, you should be able to move through the game in relative safety.

 

Also, for getting more scrap:

1) Go to nebula systems, they slow down the fleet chasing you, so you'll have more turns to explore systems before moving on to the next sector.

2) If you get the right kind of loadout of weapons / crew / systems / drones, killing off an enemy ships crew instead of destroying the ship means you "capture" the ship, which leads to more scrap, and gives you a chance at getting some kind of special item too (surplus cargo, weapon, etc). I haven't pulled this off yet though.

 

Interesting, I'll try a new aproach, trying to burn the enemys instead of destroying the ship.

Still trying to success with the feds ship before going to new ones

 

Yeah this is exactly how I play (with the Engi ship), but still run into 3-shielded enemies before I have them

 

I'm starting a Let's Play series for FTL, tell me what you think.

 

fffff.....

google wants my mobile phone number.

 

Tell them to go away? I did that and they left me alone for some time.

 

damn...

I didn't save the record to my hard drive either... oh well.

I guess i'll have to do it again.

 

Phase 2 is crazy intense, and they have defense drones in phase 2 so no missle cheese.

Phase 3 is pretty hard as well if you didn't soften up their crew in phase 1 (they start mass boarding you), but at least you can missle them again.

Some tips:

Do NOT kill every single crew member they have. Generally good to leave the solo guy manning their beam alive. If you kill everybody, the ship converts to an AI ship and auto-repairs! Enemy crew deaths carry over from phase 1 onward though, so during phase 1 kill as many as you can.

Having a teleporter is sweet for taking down their standard weapons, which are isolated and easily destroyed by a strike team.

If you have stealth, you can avoid most of the "super weapon" damage in phase 2-3.

I've won it once with the Engi ship on Normal, and died last night with the Fed Cruiser (beat phase 2, but was crippled and just barely died on the way to a store to repair up for phase 3. Sadly, I had access to the FTL free backtracking augment that would have saved me having to travel to said store but I threw it away. Lack of foresight for the loss ("why would I ever want to backtrack, this looks useless").

In other news, the Fed Cruiser's artillery is pretty sweet. You can ignore other weapons (other than a good missle) and really just rely on it once it is maxed. I unlocked the Zoltan cruiser on that run, it doesn't look impressive but I've heard the B layout one is good (2x ion cannons).

 

Agreed. Another peeve I have is that sometimes you can't jump to certain stars that you'd think are close enough that you could. I've gotten "stuck" before and had to backtrack into the chasing rebel fleet, which is nearly always GG early on.

 

The Zoltan B layout sucks. It has two Mark one Ion Blasts. Mark two or no deal. The Engi B is also pretty bad.

One word of advise: Use Bombs. Lots of them. They require little energy, and if you focus on them, you can totally ignore shields. But they consume missiles. Fire and Ion Bombs rule though. And the lousy Small Bombs are still pretty good.

Drones are great too. Boarding drones are like weak manti that can be replaced once they die. They move slow and do half the damage of manti, and they cannot gain melee experience. However, I discovered that Boarding drones cannot be recalled at all, nor destroyed easily. So if they are in one of the rooms that is separate from the rest and destroy the system there, they are useless for the rest of that fight.

 

I tend to dive into a game for a while, and THEN check out the tutorial to see if I missed anything. Having said that, I enjoyed the game so much and seemed to pick up on it well enough, so I never checked out the tutorial for FTL. So, I had assumed that the engine upgrade component that said "FTL x1.5" and such meant that I could jump farther, meaning that I would have a wider array of options on which sectors I flew to if I had my engine upgraded. I didn't think that seemed too far-fetched. Obviously now I know that it refers to the charge rate of your jump drive.

 

okay this is my second attempt at a lets play of FTL