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

I tried the mantis ship A with the teleporter. How does using the teleporter to kill off all of the lifeforms give more scrap? I have found I usually get only 20 some scrap and that was over a couple of dozen battles. Is there some way to destroy the ship afterwards to get more scrap? Or maybe armaments or something?

EDIT: These questions are mainly for The Apprentice as they said they used this for max loot. But I am willing to hear from anyone that can shed some light on these questions.

 

If a ship's systems are destroyed by fire after they surrender (or their crew dies in the fire or something along those lines) then it'll take one hull damage. This can destroy a ship after it becomes neutralized. Sadly, you get no extra scrap if this occurs. It might be different in Captain's Edition (I don't use it) but I don't know, this is merely what I have seen happen.

It's not really a revisit for me, since I decided to buy the game roughly on the day Advanced Edition came out. This turned out to be a terrible idea as I had a lot of projects for school I had to work on and clearly FTL and school cannot coexist.

Also, my most annoying death has just occurred: killed by the Flagship in her third stage with 2hp left (and no shields!) because pretty much everything was on fire, including the weapons. I desperately flailed to put out the fires, only for most of my crew to get killed after the weapons room got hit by one of the missiles (and worst of all, I couldn't even suck the air out or wait for the fires to burn out all the oxygen because the doors and O2 were also down). That was infuriating as I was using Kestrel A and I can only seem to not suck with the Adjudicator (halberd beam+1337 hax0r drones=tons of damage). Ah, well, Losing Is Fun, and at least I wasn't playing on Hard. (And on a random side-note, it seems like with every ship I have there's one thing that always puts my run to a speedy end. For the Kestrels, it's fire, for the Engi Cruisers plus the Red-Tail, it's a lack of decent weapons, for the Mantis and Lanius cruisers it's missiles, and for the Zoltan cruiser it's boarders. As for why I have few fire problems on Adjudicator but frequently die in fires on the Red-Tail is beyond me.)

 

I had a similar death with the abjudicator... but just won with the noether(zoltan B), which I consider vastly superior to the A version(both in floorplan and initial weaponry), just starting a run with the slug A now.

 

At least I know I'm not alone with firey doom

I don't have the Noether unlocked yet, but I'm actually fine with the Adjudicator's weaponry as long as Advanced Edition is enabled. Leto really sucks, but you can at least sell it and once you get a hacking system you can simply drain enemy shields and beat them down with the 6-10 damage the Halberd Beam will do. It's also quite nice when combined with either of the Flak cannons or Burst Laser II.

I like Pike Beam, but it's a lot more common than Halberd and thus i'd rather start with Halberd than Pike. I feel like Pike would be better in combination with other weapons rather than being the mainstay of your arsenal like Halberd is. That's generally how I use it, actually. Of course I've never used Noether, so I can't really say much about it's weapons.

Also, for whatever reason, the Swallow is growing on me. Odd, because it seems like a downgrade from the standard Kestrel. (I put the Pike to good use there because it's starting weapons are meh unless used with something else. Dual Lasers are pretty great. That run was actually going pretty well until I tried to save the clonebay from burning down, then two gold-level people died trying to put it out after it burned down. Plus half the ship was on fire again anyway.)

 

It's not just about the pike beam(which btw I consider quite a nice weapon, the beam is more than twice as long as the halberd's beam, and it charges faster and costs 1 less energy), it also comes with 2 ion blaster 1s, which can lock down shields and one other system in most fights(once the weapons crew is skilled enough).

 

I just tried to install the Better Planets and Backgrounds with the Captains Edition and the BPaB patch and the Infinite add-on and lastly the Endless Loot add-on. It does the patching with Slipstream fine until it gets to the Endless Loot add-on and then throws exception errors. I tried to increase the java headspace but I probably wasn't doing it right. If anyone else has done this with Windows XP I could use some help in getting it working. I have 2 Gigs of RAM on my computer it that matters with the java headspace.

 

First step is to try a smaller set of mods and see if it works. Memory is not the problem. 2GB is more than enough for the petty task.

Remember that mods do care what order you have them in. And sometimes it will work if you find the right order for the mods you use.

 

I followed the instructions on the ftl forum thread for Captains Edition including the order to load the mods. There was a bit about an exception error and it said to increase the java headspace. I tried that but may have not done it correctly, I don't use java much. I was hoping that someone else that installed CE also ran into this problem and might be able to give me some advice if they solved it. In the meantime, I am going to continue working on it and see if I can get it working myself. If I do, I'll post the solution here.

 

I haven't run into any patching problems... but I also don't use the better planets and backgrounds mod.

Aside from trying without that, my best advice is to update to the latest version of Java. If that doesn't work... it might be a 32bit vs 64bit problem...(IE: need 64bit java and have 32bit java).

 

I'm starting a modding project for FTL, a composite weapon project. CE did something like this for infinite loot(with prefixes that modify stats), but I thought I'd take it to the next level and make all weapons be multi-part composites, possibly even 3 parts, with stripped down base weapons so that tacking on stuff doesn't make them too OP. IE: Instead of dual laser, you have a base "laser" weapon, dual is a prefix that gives it +1 projectile, and then it could get an adjective like heavy that might give it +1 damage, +1 power use, x1.25 cooldown or somesuch for a 2 power 2 damage 2 shot weapon with slower cooldown named "dual heavy laser".

There's limitations with the slipstream mod manager how many weapons I can have in the XML files due to size... but I'm shooting for 10-20k weapons. (For example 40 base weapons, 20 prefixes, 20 adjectives gives 16000 weapons, but there will be exemptions, some combinations would be too OP or buggy, anything with negative damage for example heals, so it's possible to make a weapon that kills crew but heals hull, and all sorts of nonsense).

Oh and I'll do something with drones too, for more variety and flavor of attack drones, with factors like shield piercing, fire/breach chance, stealth, and different damage types.

 

Finally got Endless loot installed! Here is how I did it in case anyone else has the same problem I did.


Open a DOS Command Window in the slipstream directory and type the following command.

java -Xmx1024m -jar modman.jar

This will open the slipstream mod manager with 1GB of headspace and allow you to install the Endless Loot addon for Captains Edition mod for FTL.

 

Whoops! I somehow missed this. Prob not relevant now. On the off chance it is...

If you defeat a ship by wiping out the crew instead of destroying it, you roll for loot on a higher loot table. While this is generally done by boarding, it can also happen due to fires, oxygen loss, or just a lucky hit on the room the last crew guy is in.

Anyway, the higher loot table has higher scrap rewards, and also higher chances for crew members, weapons, and extra consumables. On earlier sectors the bonus scrap isn't as obvious (I think it is just a 20ish% multiplier), but it adds up dramatically over time. I've had ships that are fully kitted out thanks to boarding and scrap arms.

 

Once you get two fire bombs, you can guarantee the death of all the ship crew by autofiring them at the oxygen generator room. They still cost missiles, but usually only five or six before you can stop firing. Be sure to stagger the shots so they are not firing together. You want the second to fire halfway through the recharge of the first.

*Edit* Clone rooms can sometimes make this a bit more tricky, but without oxygen, all oxygen dependent crew die quicker than a fully powered medbay can restore their health.

 

Well, I've been working on unlocking more ships(and kind of brute forcing the crystal ship unlock), and stumbled upon the most OP infinite loot weapon possible.



Yeah I don't think the Rebel Flagship is going to be much of a problem. That's 24 damage at the cost of 2 missiles per shot btw.

 

Yep- if you make it to the Rebel Flagship, I don't think it will stand a chance. For THREE freaking power? GG man.

 

Yeah that run was easy peasy.