Faster Than Light

hacking 3 drains all 4 shields, you just need good timing because it takes 10 seconds.
imagine hacking 3 and two beam weapons.

Hacking is very interesting. One cute trick is if you are boarding ship beat people up till they retreat to a med bay. Hacking the med bay locks the doors and basically sprays acid on everybody inside it basically turns your opponents med bays into an abattoir.

Hacking shields on something like the flag ship is a great way of opening the gates for your weapons to do their job. Great if you didn't get super lucky with your rolls. The hacking stun upgrade has some hilarious win capability. Couple that with fire bombs and its super fun to hack a room thats on fire that people are repairing. Bang now everybody is locked in a room thats on fire and can't do anything about it as the fires grow bigger.

Quineloe_sl said:

Dunno if it's possible to defeat the flag ship without a cloaking device now unless your ship is balls tough. They now have access to the rocket launcher system, so no more just boarding and taking it out slowly. Only managed to do phase 1, hacking drone doesn't work on phase 2 so that one's a gimmick you shouldn't buy anyways. It probably won't work on phase 3 either.

Click to expand...

One trick if you want to run a hacking heavy ship keep on the look out for the defensive drone scrambler system. It makes the defensive drones unable to target any of your missiles/hack ing drones/boarding drones/ion assault drones.

I have mixed feeling about hacking drones, they are useful but I loathe the fact that you can't retarget them. I lost to the phase one boss using the Zoltan B because it hacked my weapon system after I hacked its cloak despite my defense drone... I had no teleport so I had no way to disable its weapons without my own. It was infuriating to sit there and realize that I was doomed because there is no way to abandon your previous hack and focus on something else despite all logic, after all it is a drone right? Launch another one FFS!

I did jump away to try a reroll but it happened again anyway hah well that was hour and change down the drain. Anyway it motivated me to try again on Rock B and things went a bit differently... weapon pre igniter in sector 1, flak 2 event reward, bought a glaive beam and I hacked their hack for good measure to avoid any nonsense. I also ended up getting the most OP crew that I have ever experienced so far; 5 rockmen, 1 mantis/human/engi good times and never felt the need to pay for doors haha.

I've had no luck unlocking other ships. I've got the engi and the stealth ship, and layout B of the starter ship.

If you enjoy it keep plugging away, half the fun for me was going after unlocks and playing the different load outs. I'm half way through the type C's... stealth B run is going to be a pain in the butt .

Gask_sl said:

If you enjoy it keep plugging away, half the fun for me was going after unlocks and playing the different load outs. I'm half way through the type C's... stealth B run is going to be a pain in the butt

.

Click to expand...

HAHAH if you think stealth B is a pain in the ass just wait till you see what the reward is /sheesh.

kaid_sl said:

HAHAH if you think stealth B is a pain in the ass just wait till you see what the reward is /sheesh.

Click to expand...

Haha I will look forward to it.

Just had an interesting Lanius B run; 2 flak, swarm missile, chain ion and 3 zoltan for power. Pretty much ravaged the entire game with Lanius boarding party until last node before final sector when the enemy jumped away in the nick of time stealing my Lanius death squad... poof... even though I had the DNA storage augment and a maxed out CB I guess I've found its limitation; you can be torn apart by mantids, blown up by missiles, atomized in a ship explosion or burnt to a crisp but god forbid an FTL jump happens .

Anyway despite that hiccup the swarm missiles just ravaged the Command Ship's shield room and I mind controlled the crew over and over while bombarding the med bay to stop any boarding shenanigans later on. I suppose that's why this is the first time I've seen this weapon over multiple playthroughs, pretty OP.

Hehe ships jumping away is number one killer of crew for ships with clone bays. There are a few events where your crew "dies" but actually is still alive doing something and they say something about federation laws prohibit producing a clone of somebody who is still alive. So it is actually consistent with their game universe that your boarders flying away won't clone but really if you see jump imminent get your boarders off its not worth the risk trying to delay the jump just get out.

slippery_sl said:

I really like the layout of the Rock A ship. That's the best layout ever for spacing things

Click to expand...

I like rock A my biggest gripe is it is a pure missile boat and you need a bit of luck early getting some non energy weapons. I was doing a normal run through on it and got an explosive replicator in the first sector. That thing is great on pure missile boats like rock A and let me keep using my missiles pretty agressively the whole game.

slippery_sl said:

I really like the layout of the Rock A ship. That's the best layout ever for spacing things

Click to expand...

Yeah that is handy and it's pretty funny that the type B has no external doors whatsoever... but with a 4 rock starting crew who needs them.

You were right about the Stealth C Kaid it looks pretty painful, I really wish that at least one drone heavy ship would start with the recovery arm, it would be fun and a real motivator to pursue the drone angle all the way. Now that I've unlocked all of the C's and upon further reflection I've come to the conclusion that the Slug B is my most hated ship; I lost so many games by running out of missiles and never finding a suitable weapon or medbay. Finally ended up getting a vulcan for the first time and that was an entertaining game. The Stealth B in comparison with that or the Zoltan was cake but I got lucky with finding shields early.

How about you guys? Which ships do you love/hate? I have an attachment to the Zoltan B despite the trouble it gave me, I just enjoyed the temp shield/beam start you have to play around with.

I once had Flak1 on DA-SR, it was pretty silly. Every single ship was 1-hit up without getting hit until 4 shield enemies in sector 7

Mind control on pilot, then flak cannon takes down shields to nothing and glaive destroys the ship

Gask_sl said:

Yeah that is handy and it's pretty funny that the type B has no external doors whatsoever... but with a 4 rock starting crew who needs them.

You were right about the Stealth C Kaid it looks pretty painful, I really wish that at least one drone heavy ship would start with the recovery arm, it would be fun and a real motivator to pursue the drone angle all the way. Now that I've unlocked all of the C's and upon further reflection I've come to the conclusion that the Slug B is my most hated ship; I lost so many games by running out of missiles and never finding a suitable weapon or medbay. Finally ended up getting a vulcan for the first time and that was an entertaining game. The Stealth B in comparison with that or the Zoltan was cake but I got lucky with finding shields early.

How about you guys? Which ships do you love/hate? I have an attachment to the Zoltan B despite the trouble it gave me, I just enjoyed the temp shield/beam start you have to play around with.

Click to expand...

Slug B is probably the hardest of the original ships. A pure boarding ship with no med bay having to rely on bombs. Before you could easily get unlucky and simply run out of bombs and fizzle due to that. Now with clone bays finding a med bay or clone bay early is pretty easy most shops will have one or the other so it makes starting that ship off MUCH less painful. Get it a mind control unit and its pretty good since you have all slug crew to start with which makes you immune to mind control.

The hardest ships to start with are in order of bane of my existance are

Stealth c seriously a stealth ship with no shields and no stealth. I have gotten it to work on easy but even there its a lot of luck with your early opponents and some luck dodging to get some use of the super drone shield generator.
Zoltan C the initial weapon layout is pretty decent for a drone ship but it clearly is a hey look at this new battery backup system ship and as such it is hideiously fluky trying to get it started. One unlucky colateral death of your beam drone or a couple misses with the ion can mean you power back down and wind up having to wait another 20 or so seconds before you can do any damage the whole time you are likely eating missiles over and over and over again.
Slugb B: this one used to suck bad its a bit less bad now that you can obtain something to clone them or heal them more consistently.
Engi B 1 crew and a pretty awkward weapon mix this ship takes a lot to get it really rolling and is really prone a couple unlucky hits wrecking you.

Favorite ships

Engy A sounds funny but I have had tons of good luck with it good starting layout and three drone slots and fast firing ion.
Mantis B/C two mantis four man boarding ships you really cannot go wrong with multiple mantis and a four man teleporter
Crystal A/b these are all good A is good for normal combat B is a boarding ship well designed for its role
Rock C very excellent ship with a good layout and good crew.

Just got my first advanced hard victory and it was quite an experience . I used the Mantis C and after a score of starter to sector 8 failures I finally managed to get a sector 1-2 that didn't have super med/clonebay, missile, burst ships right off the bat... you'd be surprised how often that happened. So many times I'd jump off and BAM 25-50% hull damage and maybe a lost crew or two (they like to target the clonebay) before I could finally defeat the enemy crew; mantis C has no weapons just a 4 unit teleporter and some crystal lock/stun bombs. Anyway I managed to plug along using pure boarding strats, not that you really have a choice, though I did grab a flak early on but it wasn't of much use except as an expedient to kill drones.

Aside from the meager scrap available in hard mode and a lack of anything good in the stores the RNG truly smiled on me this game to an astonishing degree; I picked up a full crew from events, 2 mantis, 1 rock, a human, a slug + the mantis/lanius/engi you get to begin with. Apart from that I also got a free DNA bank which was vital as I never saw one in a store and a Breach II that was quite handy. So in the end I ran the boss with a flack, an S Bomb, Breach II, 4 crew boarding and cloak/hacking for systems.

The last attempt I made was with a dual defense drone/teleport/MC set up that proved useless; the hard mode boss must have a faster hack launch or something because in 3 jumps the hack made it through both drones to hit the same critical system which doomed me. This run his hack hit my hack which was just fine and I preceded to bomb the hell out of the cloak/medbay (piloting hack ftw) and butcher the entire crew in phase 1 with my 3 mantis 1 rock squad. Then a repeat for phase two using the breach to defeat the auto repair and at the end as a reward aside from the scrap I'm given a Zoltan Shield Bypass of all things for phase 3 .

It was like God was smiling on me... damn what a fun run and the first time that I can remember killing the boss without a burst/chain something or other.

Here's my top 5 scores if anyone cares, feel free to share yours also folks.

Clicked back... thank you for logging in! Here's your duplicate post!

Whoops.