FTL revisited. Advanced edition, Captain's edition, and other mods.

Anyone else revisit FTL with advanced edition? I finally went ahead when TB ran a "Rockin' Mods" episode on it, with the Captain's edition mod.

Having fun, but it feels even harder to get the best gear for the final encounter(at least on the weapon side, some of the new drones are very nice). There's also a sandboxy sub-mod(Infinite addon to the Captain's edition) that increases all upgrade costs a lot, but lets you go to an unlimited number of sectors. That addon has another sub-addon that has procedurally generated gear.

There's also a large number of other mods, quite a decent mod community. Lots of ship replacements.

Oh and there's a nice mod manager to help you patch in multiple mods(very useful since they have to be repacked into data.dat).

My old save is gone since I'm on a new computer, and have to unluck everything from scratch, but I just won my first game since revisiting, with the Torus(engi A ship).

Captain's edition mod link: http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15663
Master mod list: http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2645

 

Thanks. I am now trying CE with Infinite and Endless loot.

 

I have had FTL for a month or so and just started playing in the last week. Unfortunately, you can't get the unlocks working in advanced mode or at least they don't work for me. I have to play in the non-advanced mode to unlock the basic stuff. I really like the game but haven't used any mods yet. So far I have only played on easy and shudder to think what happens in the harder modes.

 

That's strange... I had to start unlocking stuff from scratch as well, and I've already unlocked the Kestrel B, Engi ship A&B, and the Federation cruiser A(victory with Engi A). I've only been playing with advanced on, and with the Captain's Edition mod(tried the infinite mode, but turned it off so I could do unlock runs without the heavy upgrade costs).

 

I went "waah!" last night as I dropped a few dollars on the new OST... only to find out that I'd gotten it for free on Humble. This is not the first time this has happened.

But I gave it a quick whirl but I suck massively at FTL so I can't really say much.

 

While I haven't tried the Captain's Edition (I haven't beaten the base game with all the ship types yet), the AE was enough to get me to dive back in.

The addition of the hacking and Mind Control systems really disrupt my previous "I Win" strat of "Board everything in sight for max Lootz." It is very counterproductive when half of your mantis boarding crew decides to switch sides, after all.

I still wish there were more events that had potential blue options, though. Finding those was really fun in the original release.

 

Well I just beat the game with the federation cruiser A... cakewalk. I had Burst laser mark 3(starter), burst laser mark 2, chain burst laser, a plasma weapon(starts fires), ion drone 2, light anti-crew missile drone, and of course a maxed out artillery beam... It was a bit OP.

Oh and my remaining system slot was taken by the cloaking system, it's just that good. Though hacking would've been the most aggressive choice... (hack shields or helm).

Sidenote: maybe there's some differences in how you unlock stuff in AE... I got the Zoltan ship for beating the game with the Fed cruiser. Normally that's an event unlock.

 

On Advanced, I was using the Kestrel Cruiser and the unlock said I needed 8 systems and 3 subsystems to unlock. I got those and nothing happened. I then played another game without being in Advanced and it unlocked for me after I got the 8 systems and 3 subsystems. So I have been keeping Advanced off in order to unlock stuff from the basic game.

 

I just spent somewhere around six hours playing this. It is amazing. Very well done. The only reason I stopped playing is that it crashed. Oh well. I will play again.

 

Hacking is very OP unless your enemy has defense drones. You can entirely disable their weapons and spend your time taking them on in any of a bazillion different ways with them unable to effectively fight back.

 

I still like cloaking better. It isn't dependent on a consumable like hacking is, and you can time it to dodge the missiles once launched or trap boarding parties on your ship. Basically, AE didn't change my end-game loadouts much at all- still want cloak teleport and some burst lasers to knock down shields as needed.

 

Well, unless your ship has the artillery beam, you can have both.

Basically you can have a combination of 3 of any of the below:
Artillery beam
Cloak
Hacking
Teleporter
Mind control
Drones

(More if you don't have some of the basics, like shields or oxygen, the total maximum number of systems is 8, but you'll generally have shields, medbay, oxygen, engines, and weapons. Subsystems like sensors, doors, helm and battery backup are not included in the limit).

I almost left out drones since it's such a nobrainer, but I could see the point in having a teleporter/mind control/cloak boarder ship. Offensive drones hit a bit too randomly for boarding parties, then again in CE there's ion drones, and defensive drones are still very useful.

Oh and I guess you could make a modded Lanius ship with no oxygen, freeing up an extra system spot.

The Stealth ships can of course skip installing shields... but I wouldn't recommend it.

 

Sidenote I'm currently on a run with the Engi B ship to unluck the C ship... and I picked up hacking and mind control as my two system choices(ship starts with 6 systems in place, the regular 5 and drones). It's been working beautifully so far, I can really cause havoc on enemy ships, and I just picked up a light artillery laser 3(2 power, fires 4 shots, pierces shields and only damages crew), it makes killing off crew very easy, especially combined with mind control and hacking(mind control the helmsman, wait for other crew to go fight him, trap them in the room with hacking, and bombard with the laser).

 

I find myself liking the combination of hack/mind control/boarding. Winning without cloak is tense but doable with maxed out evade and some luck.

 

I just want to share this little gem I've been running with on my infinite CE run.

Spoiler

Stormwalker is usually a garbage ship, in my opinion - lacking vital systems for simple survival and with an abysmal loadout, and a 2-tile teleporter ... with slugs of all things. But I felt like running with it just to try it out, and one of the first weapons I picked up was the amusingly-named "Heavy Light Auto-Laser". This is the most terrifying weapon I've ever run across.

2 Shield piercing, a 5.6s cooldown, and crew damage along with 1 normal damage letting it take out AI ships? This thing is insane. The effector served me well but eventually got dropped in favor of an explosive replicator, which may have been a bad move, I might drop it for something more practical eventually... this ship is an unholy terror though. Might just go all the way to the flagship with this.

 

I might have a go with the infinite add-on again when I get home from work today, only this time I've unlocked some ships so I'm not stuck with the Kestrel A... I'll do the run with Engi C(with the CE sub-mod to revert to vanilla loadouts so I get the Defense Scrambler augment), and hopefully get some OP drones, like the missile drones.

 

Sounds like a very nice weapon. I did about 10 sectors after work last night(up to 3rd sector progression wise), and seen mostly junk, the best I got however was a pulsing hull laser 1, which has a 14 second cooldown, does double damage to systemless rooms, and the pulsing adds +1 ion damage... so two shots with 1 normal + 1 ion damage each, it's quite nice for 2 power.

Oh and for the final boss fight I've kept a missile weapon, I forget the name, but it's a "tight spread"(+1 system damage) missile on a 5 second cooldown, 1 damage, 5 shield piercing... I think 3 second stun too, 1 power cost. Set that to autofire on shields and they'll never get back up again(1 normal + 1 system damage every 5 seconds). Very missile costly of course but I've got over a hundred missiles stored up already, will probably have like 500 by the time I go fight the boss.

Also picked up a "quality"("overall good stats") pike beam, 14 second cooldown, low chance of fire, low chance of breech. Pike beam is of course really long, so it can cover anywhere from 3 to 8 rooms depending on the target ship(3 for a few of the auto drones, otherwise it's mostly 5+).

Haven't had much luck finding good drones though, got a heavy anti-hull drone and a boosted defense drone, as well as the starter beam drone, but no drone recovery arm, so I mostly just hack shields and take ships apart with my dual laser, hull laser and pike beam.