FTL - Faster than Light, Space Rogue - ( INDIE )

Vonhelmet said:
This game is like some sort of abusive relationship. Everything sort of goes fine, then all of a sudden you make one mistake and you DIE HARD SO QUICKLY.

I love it, but good grief. I'm playing on easy and I'm yet to complete it after umpteen attempts.
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Heh, my 7 year old beat it on easy the other day :D

(albeit I was supervising fairly regularly)

Some tips, in case it helps:

- Use the pause button a lot - treat it like a turn-based game.
- Ditch auto-fire after the first couple of sectors, if not earlier. Time weapons so that they hit the shields at the same time, even if some charge up faster than others.
- take as much time as you can exploring each sector.
- Don't allow yourself to take too much damage, it wastes scrap getting it fixed. Invest in shields/ defence drones/ brute-force quick attacks or whatever suits your ship.
- train your crew. You might get chance to 'spam' the training where you come up against a ship that can't breach your shields. Let them keep hammering away whilst your shield, pilot, engine crew level up. Similarly, if you have a weak gun that can't breach enemy shields - leave it auto-firing.
- upgrading engines is very handy, particularly late game. Against heavy firepower, your shields crumble - dodging 50% helps a lot. I always used to under-utilise this.
- Don't send crew to investigate giant spiders or riots etc unless you get a blue option. It's not worth losing crew to the roll of a dice.

In my opinion, the Kestrel's Burst Laser II is the best bang-for-buck weapon in the game. 3 shots is great vs shields, and only 2 bars of power. My recent Kestrel success involved 2x Burst Laser IIs, a Pike beam, and a small bomb (another favourite weapon)
 
Just had my first go on 'hard' difficulty, using the Red-tail....

And beat it :D

Got a free halberd beam early, and also bought weapon pre-ignition early, so had to brute force everything throughout - was always behind on shield and engine levels, so defensively weak.
Got an ion bomb, and ion blast. which complemented the strategy well.
 
I finished it today for the first time on easy after 39 hours of play :eek:

I was using the kestrel. Got 8 crew so everything was manned plus a mantis and rock on hand for teleporting over and causing trouble. I ditched my missiles in favour of lots of lasers as I hate getting caught out with no ammo and besides, after a certain point missiles are hard to use as more enemies have defense drones. I had two burst laser IIs and two heavy lasers, so I could batter the enemies with 8 shots at a time. I had to take care not to go overboard when I had my guys on their ship as I could have easily killed them myself! The lasers did the job on the flagship without too much bother and the teleporting guys nailed the weapons. Job done. Now to try with the engi torus...

Edit: I just won with the torus. I got lucky and picked up an ion blast, so I could knock out lots of stuff, and then used combat drones to kill the ships off. Later on I got a second ion blast II to go with the starting one, and a burst laser I. I could set all those to auto fire which meant there was much less micromanaging where my weapons were firing. By then I had two combat drones and enough drone parts to throw both of them at anything properly hard, and of course the flagship. Hurrah!
 
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72 hours in and still playing a couple of hours most nights. :)

I have unlocked all the ships except the last one, so I am now going through trying to unlock config B on all the ships.

It is going to take me a while. :)
 
Beat it with the Osprey this evening. The artillery beam is handy but it wasn't a deal breaker for me. I didn't put enough scrap into shields so it was a close thing towards the end but I got an ion blast II which helped a lot with bringing shields down and then got lucky picking up a second burst laser II and then a III so with a bit of timing and patience I was getting 11 shots off in each volley which cut through the the flagship easily. The artillery beam was just a bonus for setting fires.
 
Vonhelmet said:
Beat it with the Osprey this evening. The artillery beam is handy but it wasn't a deal breaker for me. I didn't put enough scrap into shields so it was a close thing towards the end but I got an ion blast II which helped a lot with bringing shields down and then got lucky picking up a second burst laser II and then a III so with a bit of timing and patience I was getting 11 shots off in each volley which cut through the the flagship easily. The artillery beam was just a bonus for setting fires.
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I reckon artillery beam is the key advantage to the Osprey. Put all your scrap into defense and let the beam do its thing.

One of the easier ships, I find, as you've always got that beam attack, even if you don't get lucky on picking up other good weapons.

Of course, finding lots of burst laser IIs makes any playthrough pretty straightforward :D
 
Sometimes I think I like the burst laser II and III too much :)

I will pretty much buy them if I see them regardless of my current load out. I will keep them stored if I am not in a position to power them.

Having said that, 2 burst laser II's and a III with a weapon Pre-ignitor is just about as good as it gets. Followed closely by a burst laser III and glaive beam. :)
 
Well, I am 78 hours in and I think I have seen it 3 times. If you can the shields down, it is awesome.

About the only weapon that I found more rare is the Vulcan cannon, which is also very powerful. It was so easy to take out the flagship the one time I got it.
 
My first time completing the game was using Glaive beam. I dropped down to Easy after failing around 30 times on Normal. It's the only time I've been successful using Glaive. I've probably only had it on the ship about 3 or 4 times in total.

I've only had one go on Advanced Edition, so have never come across the Vulcan. It sounds ace, from the wiki page, though :)
 
Yep, once the Vulcan gets going, it is unstoppable. In fact, I think perhaps it is a little too powerful.

I have to admit to not doing anything other than Easy mode. I am trying to unlock the mystery ship and that is a lot of run-throughs, so I want it as easy as possible. :)

Perhaps it is my inexperience but I am actually not a big fan of advanced mode. However, since you have to be in it to use the Lanius ship, and to unlock the C variant of other ships, I am slowly getting used to it.
 
I got a halberd beam yesterday which was amazing when coupled with lasers to take down shields. I still lost on the flagship, though, as I didn't have enough for defence, and the boarding drones tore me apart from the inside.

Easy win with the osprey tonight. I maxed out shields and engines so I was very hard to hit. Maxed the artillery beam and got a second BL2 and a couple of defence drones. I barely took any damage on the flagship.
 
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I have found that the most important thing with the flag ship is to take out the missile launch on the right as soon as possible. So I always make sure I have a crew transporter and ideally two Mantis to transport over. As long as you have at least 3 shields then you should be ok for the rest, although you will probably have time to take out the ion cannon on the left as well.

I actually managed to pick up a couple of lasers and the glaive beam yesterday. I was in the strange situation of having to stop firing on the flag ship during the first phase because my Mantis were still aboard and I was in danger of killing the ship too quickly.
 
Aaargh, finally got the crystal guy, went to next system hoping for a Rock World...and it was the final one.
 
Smokey Deza said:
I just used to send in the rock guys after I set their ship alight :D
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Never tried it that way before. Might have to give it a go next time. :)

Kelt said:
Aaargh, finally got the crystal guy, went to next system hoping for a Rock World...and it was the final one.
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Annoying, isn't it? I have only got as far as the crystal guy as well, so I am trying the alternate unlock method. Only the mantis ship to go.:)
 
shahpor said:
Never tred it that way before. Might have to give it a go next time. :)



Annoying, isn't it? I have only got as far as the crystal guy as well, so I am trying the alternate unlock method. Only the mantis ship to go.:)
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All part of the charm of the game :)

Crying shame the devs never made an FTL2. Bigger universe, longer campaign, more ships, quests, races etc.

Would be an insta buy from me.

They're working on another game now, probably unlikely to see FTL2 anytime soon.
 
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