Completed Lets blow shit up in space! (Faster Than Light)

[Lindblum]

Torus, Engi supremacy!

 

[lightbane]

Red Tail bcause Red= Faster.

 

[golgepapaz]

Yeah stealth cruiser is hard (Yet to finish with it). Engi one is very funny.So Go with Torus..

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, Engi-A it is. I've played a bit, not sure if I should post one big update or two little ones.

Edit: Eh fuck it I'll split it up.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Glorious update time!

Behold the mighty Goatse in all her glory. Crew names allocated to people who's votes did not win as a consolation prize.

Great big empty sector. No nebulas and no scanner.

First beacon was a merchant. Guy wants us to deliver drone parts.

Kind of a no brainer. Especially nice for us; even if we get double crossed, we can keep the 5 drone parts and this ship certainly needs them.

Goal is close by, not that it matters much since we've got nowhere in particular to go and therefore no other plans but to beeline for the quest.

Mercenary ship. And a Zoltan at that. If we had scrap, we could pay him to either map the secotr for us or delay the rebel fleet. Since we don't have scrap, we can only choose to fight him or somply move on.

This ship is actually pretty good vs Zoltans, so I pick the fight. Note the green bar next to his normal shields. Zoltan ships have a 'super shield' which functions as a 5 point shield that absorbs damage from anything (even missiles or beam weapons) before it goes to normal shields. OInce the supeer shield goes down it stays down until the ship jumps to another beacon. This generally means these fuckers get a free round of attacks in before they can possibly suffer any damage, and they fuck over ships that rely on burst firing the enemy weapons down before they can fire.

However, we have two advantages here. First; ion weapons do actual damage to super shields, and double at that. Our weapon there tears through that thing fast. Second, our anti ship drone spams shots quickly. It's drawback is that it targets randomly and we can't time it's shots, but for just eating through a shield, it's perfect. These fuckers do still manage to land a missile on us though.

They beg for surrender...

Refused.

We already have drone parts to last us a while, what we desperately need is a ton of scrap to buy certain key items from any stores we can find. Drone schematics or additional weapons would be great too. Pretty much anything is better than fuel and missiles and drone parts right now, if we have the option.

We actually ate quite a few shots towards the end there and our crew is banged up. However, we don't need to bring everyone back to the medbay. Just switching it on is enough on this ship;

It starts with this augment, which makes the medbay heal all of your crew onboard, although at a slower rate than if they're in the medbay. Still a huge convenience.

The weapon we start with is an odd one. It does only 1 ion damage per shot, and requires THREE power to run. However, it fires once every 4 seconds. Assuming every shot lands, this is enough to chain the disables together, so given enough time this single weapon can fully disable even a 4 point shield. Of course, if it misses a shot or two, or gets disabled by enemy fire, we'd have to start from scratch. So this won't be nearly enough to end the game.

We find a distress beacon on our next jump. May as well board and investigate.

Well shit. Crazy armed scientists chase us off and one of the crew falls sick.

The sick crewman turns on us. Not a good start to the run.

So yeah, now it's just Black and lightbane. Agassi is now a zombie or something (and also is not on our ship, Agassi was an Engi and the invaders are all human). And we've got 3 boarders to fight off.

We employ standard anti boarding measures.

The fight takes a while with so little firepower, but is won with no more casualties. Agassi.

Next beacon has pirates trying to charge a toll on us. Not in the mood.

Awww isn't that cute.

Rewards in this sector have been rather underwhelming. Not even a store. Not that we could afford anything.

Moar distress.

Moar assholes with guns.

Moar easy victory and blank beacons that could have nearly anything.

Dude we just had this conversation with the dead guys over there.

It's kind of harder to show whats going on in screenshots with ion weapons, since the disabled systems blink blue, they appear normal half the time. Though as you can see, their shields are disabled right now, not even a hollow bubble under their hull.

This enemy has a somewhat rare weapon: a bomb. Bombs are like missiles in that they bypass shields. Unlike missiles though, bombs do no hull damage, and can't be shot down by drones. Instead, they damage systems and personel in the rooms they target. Of course, the enemy is retarded and just bombed an empty airlock, which does nothing at all.

Well, at least we keep winning back a drone part or two after these fights.

Ooh a storage cache. Hope it has nice gear. Or any gear, honestly.

A quick victory at the cost of a few hull damage. Theres not much we can do about missiles at this point.

The cache was empty. Not cool.

Lets take our rage out on this guy.

Didn't even take damage this time thanks to some nice evasions.

Yet another average reward. This wouldn't be so bad if there were a store we could use.

Of son of a bitch, I though this beacon was connect to the one in the bottom right. This can get you killed very easily, a lot of sectors have troll layouts like this, where the exit is only accessible from one direction.

We need to waste some fuel backtracking now...

And on top of that, now we have little time to spare for searching more beacons.

We find a rebel scout on the one we do have time for before hitting the exit.

Pretty easy pickings when the drone plays smart.

:yawn: Gimme a god damned laser already.

Cutting it pretty close here.

But we make it without getting caught by the fleet.

Gah. For any other ship this would mean a lot of free scrap. But we need those drones.

Onward to Zoltan Sector. Our ship would not do well in an ion storm at all, and those only appear in nebulas, and we can't see them coming.

Plus, this place will have more Zoltans to beat up.

Black has already reached level 2 in weapons, thanks to the fast reload time and how long these fights take.

Ouch. That is troublesome. Fortunately he's an engi, so he can patch it up fairly quickly.

:hmm: Fucking beam weapons man. Not cool.

Oh come ON. Also, note how the shitty ship layout makes it take forever to vent the engine or shield room. The nearest airlocks are very far away and require venting every room in between, so it's not safe to go repair.

Oh yeah, thats perfect. God forbid you ever hit an empty room or fail to start fires and hull breaches you lucky green cunts.

So, we're down 12 hull since we started this fight, and have lost 4 different systems entirely. At least weapons just came back online, and the enemy shield system got taken out by the drone (which has ignored their weapons pretty much entirely.)

And here's our shitty reward that doesn't even come close to covering the costs.

I'll have black repair the systems while lightbane does the hull breach. Only system repairs give repair xp, and I'd rather have our engi level up so he can repair things super fast.

Another distress beacon. Lets go for it, sometimes these lead to stores or free repairs.

Nope, it's two ships fighting in an asteroid field. Fuck that shit.

Note that we still have to actually charge our jump drive to get out of here, unlike normal beacons where it just automatically charges if no enemy ships are near.

Being in an asteroid field is kind of like having an anti ship drone on your ass the whole time. 1 damage rocks constantly pelt your ship with random targetting.

Unlike drones though, the rocks have a random frequency, which can sometimes overwhelm shield regen speed, especially if you only have 1 shield and nobody manning the system.

Fucking cunt rocks hit our piloting, stalling our jump drive gauge until we can repair it.

Also we're now down to 5 fucking hull points.

Out of the frying pan and all that. Where the fuck are all the stores?

Well shit. Their weapons are kind of weak, but they have an anti ship drone too. Oh, and more hull than us.

Our drone has made the brilliant tactical decision to harm their piloting and weapons system without harming the drone control. Their drone, OTOH, went straight for our shields. Which are down.

Sooooo.... yeah.

Going to restart since that was such a short (and abysmally unlucky) run. Restarting gives you the same ship and names but is otherwise the same as starting from scratch. Just saves on the time spent renaming. Wish me luck on this run.

 

[Smashing Axe]

You had so much scrap! What's your usual tactic for starting? I normally try and get shields to level 2 asap, it cuts down on your damage costs which in turn means you have more scrap to spare in future due to savings in repairs.

 

[Ashery]

That wasn't an "unlucky" run. You were sitting on 100+ scrap and didn't upgrade your shields.

For stores, there are a few strategies you can use to optimize the amount of scrap you have to spend while keeping up on the ship upgrades. My preferred method is to plan a short, yet flexible path to the exit that allows me to take advantage of most of the right side should I not run into a store. If I *do* run into a store, however, I'll have time to hit up several nearby nodes before doing my shipping and then making a beeline for the exit. This isn't a fixed strategy by any means, but adopting its general principle should keep you from hoarding scrap.

 

[Damned Registrations]

We could have upgraded shields, but the thing is, that ship needs FIVE energy to mount any offence at all, both the ion and the drone have to be active. So we'd need to upgrade the reactors too, unless we give up engines or oxygen. On top of that, we were very rapidly approaching the point where we'd be totally fucked without more offence. If we hit a shop and I had no scrap, we'd be dead for sure. You can't afford to sit around for 30 seconds in every fight while you whittle the shields away while the enemy has full weapons and drones active. Even a single 2 damage missile on the enemy ship can cost you 20 hull that way if it hits the wrong system. Shields would have helped us out with the last fight and the asteroids, but note that the single fight where we lost the most hull, the enemy had an ion weapon, which would have wrecked our shields anyways.

My general strategy early on is to be adjacent to as many nodes as possible to find as many stores and distress signals as possible. Also to use nebulae to stay longer if it's safe to do so. Better to take the risks early than late imo, especially if you intend to go out of your way to unlock shit later on.

 

[Ashery]

We could have upgraded shields, but the thing is, that ship needs FIVE energy to mount any offence at all, both the ion and the drone have to be active. So we'd need to upgrade the reactors too, unless we give up engines or oxygen.

Except that you had over a hundred scrap to spend. Even if you continue to hoard scrap to some extent, you should have, at the very least, upgraded your shields once your hull strength was in the red. And you're exactly right in that you were at the point where you couldn't sit around for thirty seconds, but the thing is, you're only right in so far as that you couldn't sit around for thirty seconds with only a single shield bubble. The ion weapon wouldn't have been much of a problem, by the way, as it was likely only an ion burst mk1. That is to say, the enemy wouldn't have been able to build up ion damage.

It's definitely better to take risks early on if you're looking at it from the perspective of "wasted" time, but I've got a win rate to maintain

 

[Damned Registrations]

You can keep your win rate, I want those damned ships unlocked.

 

[procrastinator]

and lightbane our weapons guy

Good call not to put Azira there

Though I might be able to get irfanview to crop them for me.

I've used imagemagick for this very purpose with a great success.[/crookedbee]

to our brave crew.

 

[lightbane]

Well that was... A fast game indeed What about Round 2?

 

[Azira]

Yeah, I suck at this game. Though I have managed to reach the last sector once, thought I had a good ship with 3 mk2 burst lasers, but was cut down quickly by the boss anyhow. Definitely need to play a few games on easy to learn this game better.

 

[Cool name]

This Let's Play is interesting to me because you play so different from how I do. You do love taking risks.

If I might give you a little advice it is a grave mistake to not get the second shield bubble as soon as you get 50 scrap for all ships but the stealth cruisers. You will lose many runs that you could have won doing so. Notice the following:

You did fight a slug interceptor with a single shield bubble, a single shot laser, and a small beam. With two shield bubbles the ship would have been unable to hurt you. Your Ion Blast Mk.II would have been enough to keep both the shields and the O2 shut down. You would have captured the ship intact.

The same scenario did present itself with the second rebel rigger you got. It had a drone but you could have micromanaged the Ion Blast to keep both the drone bay and the O2 shut down if you did use your drone to keep the shields down. While harder to pull off you could have also used the Ion Blast to break the enemy drone's timing so that it would shoot at a time that would allow you to have at least one shield when the beam did fire. If so you would be able to focus on the O2.

Did the first rebel rigger have a single shot gun, a beam, and a beam drone? If so you could have shut down its O2 and capture the ship intact in the same way.

Those encounters are not rare in the first few sectors.

Two ships captured would offset the cost of the second bubble. They can also give you crew and equipment. Three ships would put you ahead.

A second shield would also allow you to use the slug interceptor to raise your starting crew to level 3 in weapons, shields, engines, and navigation. An Ion Blast Mk.II crewed by a maxed gunner shoots twice in the time it takes the shield to come back online from its first shot. You would also have ten percent more dodge.

On a different topic I would like to add in a normal fight against a single bubble ship you should not aim your Ion Blast to the shield generator but to the weapons. The first shot ionizes the shields when it does hit the bubble and the second one ionizes the weapons. Then the shield comes back up and it starts again. I did not notice you doing this.

I do wish to make clear I am not criticizing you. I am just offering a different perspective. Please do not take my words as disrespectful.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Some decent points, though I'm not inclined to spend 30 minutes waiting for my ion blast to disable the oxygen on an enemy ship long enough to kill them, not when a single miss will fuck the timing. Same with scumming for xp. Though if you're into that, another trick that works is lowering your shields and raising them against an enemy that can't hurt you (Like one with only ion weapons or unable to repair or whatever.)

I think shields are pretty overrated. Weapons that are stopped by shields are rarely a threat anyways, the only exception being light beams. If the enemy has a mark 3 burst laser, there's little difference between having 1 or 2 shields. If they have a missile, there's no difference at all. I find it's a much safer bet to take out their weapons ASAP. The Torus is shit at this job though; if you alternate between shields and weapons with the ions you're keeping them both disabled by 1 point. Assuming they have 2 energy in shields, and not 3, in which case you're fucking yourself because the first shot does nothing to the shield, and you're effectively letting them repair 2 damage every time the disabling wears off. Disabling 1 point of enemy weapons is fairly pointless, it'll just shut down the most ineffective weapon anyways. And of course the drone does whatever the fuck it wants, but I'd rather have the chance of it hitting something important and at least causing hull damage than the chance it plinks the shield uselessly. I really dislike the starting setup the torus has. The weapons are weak, and unlike most ships a teleporter isn't a viable option because your crew is shit for that.

Ultimately, if I were going for win rate alone, I'd put some into shields by the point we were at. But getting to the rock homeworld and not being in good enoguh shape to unlock the ship would piss me off WAY more than a death early on does, so I'd rather take the risk and magnify the benefits of any stores we find.

 

[Monocause]

Damned Registrations:

Never finished the game with the Torus but had quite a few of semi-successful runs (ie. reached the end boss). You were unlucky indeed not to find a shop and not to find anything that could help increase your damage output, but 120 scrap just sitting there in the storage is just wasted scrap. Even an investment in the engines would be the better choice than not doing nothing since higher base evasion rate means more XP for the pilot, which turns to more evasion rate later.

Also:

I think shields are pretty overrated. Weapons that are stopped by shields are rarely a threat anyways, the only exception being light beams. If the enemy has a mark 3 burst laser, there's little difference between having 1 or 2 shields.

I can't follow your reasoning. Well of course that when the enemy has mark 3 burst lasers than two layers of shields is useless - but at the time you meet well-equipped enemy ships like these you should have at least three shield layers and other stuff. We're talking about early game here, and two shield layers extend your survivability by quite a lot.

Weapons that could be stopped by better shields are what essentially killed you in your playthrough

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'm gonna spend all our scrap and die with no weapons next time I play just to make my point

 

[Cool name]

You are right. Please do keep playing as you usually do. I do enjoy reading your adventures. To see someone play as I do all I need to do is to start the game and do a run.

I am sorry if I did bother you previously. I do enjoy discussing strategies for the game. I did let myself get carried away.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Update time!

Our voyage begins with losing 2 hull. Pretty standard for this ship.

This is a very odd event. I get it fairly often but... well you'll see.

Free scrap for us anyways.

2 scrap for fuel is an excellent bargain. We'll grab all we can.

Going to name our next ship the SS Filthy Pirate.

Sonofabitch has an anti ship drone.

And of course our shields went down, which means their beam weapon is raping us too. Our drone has insured that their air supply is kinda stale though. They'll surely die... never because they have a medbay anyways.

Shields back up and the drone finally hit their drone control, with the second to last shot of the battle.

Well, that is a pleasant surprise at least.

Even if it is a worthless, inferior human.

Once again, sector 1 seems devoid of stores. Woooo. Time to finish our quest.

This is the message I get every time I do this quest. I once had a blue option to take a potshot with a missile launcher, but it didn't amount to anything. I think you're supposed to have really strong weapons, maybe multiple missile launchers or bombs, and it'll let you attack. But I _always_ get this mission within the first couple sectors when my equipment is total shit.

And usually this happens. Sometimes you get away unnoticed though.

Anyways, we downed it with more minor losses and reveal a distress beacon.

Gah. If only we had the right ship for this. We'll try to help though.

I figured this might happen, but we had two lame ass humans anyways, and we really only need 1 engi.

The newcomer was the one that died apparently. And we get into another typical fight.

Ehhh... I really want an item. Kill them all.

Oh shit.

He's got a heavy laser too, it'll hurt bad if a rock takes out our shield and the laser lands on our hull.

See the missile and asteroid headed for our ship? This could really suck.

But it doesn't. They hit each other. If a missile or a drone happens to get hit by a meteor or laser, it gets blown up. Normally this happens because of defense drones, but it can happen randomly too. I've lost a few offensive drones just because they floated in front of an enemy laser. In this case, the missile and asteroid took each other out without hitting us.

We actually got through without a scratch. Very nice.

Time to rescue some people from the evil rebels. Who are armed with an incredibly pathetic ship lacking almost every system in the game.

Hurray for bonus rewards.

STILL no fucking store. Nearly time to leave.

Gotta help our bros out.

We're getting chipped down a bit each fight, but I pretty much expected that. We've got some decent scrap again.

Though what I really want is an item.

Hnnngh.

I'm not sure if we'll make it back in time, but I decide to risk going to the store. Which was pointless, it's selling useless crap for us.

This is gonna be close. *crosses fingers*

Phew. Just barely in time.

And we finally got an item drop. Of course, it's an icnredibly useless item. I'd pretty much only use this thing if we somehow got to sector 8 without finding a mark 1 defense drone. 4 energy just to stop missiles is insane.

Onward to pirate land.

Here's hoping we don't die to boarders. They could easily kill us if they get a shot on the medbay and board there before we can repair it.

Interesting sector layout. Time to hunt for more stores.

Empty. Distress beacon?

This is a free crewmember if we had the right gear. But we don't.

Instead we risk shielding them and it pays off. A good trade.

And we killed some totally irrelevant ship. MOAR SCRAP FOR THE SCRAP GOD.

And a store. With 192 scrap and a drone to sell, we can buy pretty much anything we want.

Too bad they have almost nothing we want. We'll grab the sensors.

Actually, we'll grab the rockman as well. He'll probably come in handy at some point, and a 3 man crew is a bit sketchy. Now at least we can man the 4 main stations.

We get shields too. At this point we may very well end up becoming a boarding ship. We've had no luck with weapons at all.

More distress. These are common in pirate sectors. Both because of people needing to be saved from pirates and pirates laying traps.

This will hopefully lead us to another store.

Nice job game.

I *think* our shields can hold this off.

Yeah, we're doing fine.

That is... a pretty weak offer.

Significantly better.

Another easy kill.

And extra scrap. Not too shabby.

Hmm, this could go either way depending on asteroids.

Well we took a hit, but luckily it wasn't anywher important.

And two more hits after that, but again, they hit systems that didn't matter.

We'll get patched up and leave ASAP.

Agassi does all the repairs solo, in the hopes that he reaches level 2 quickly. Having good repair guys for when key systems fail is very nice.

I'd rather not visit an ion storm on this ship, but theres no other nodes to go to except the exit, and I want to milk things before it gets impossible with these weapons.

Luckily we didn't find an enemy ship.

Free crew! Nice.

Yet another human though.

Chance at even more crew. Though we're going to fight for it obviously. The enmy has a shitty weapon set, we'll be fine.

Hurray for free kills. We've been lucky this run and encountered almost no burst lasers or missiles past sector 1.

They never tried to surrender. Ah well.

Well, we got options. Where do you guys want to go? I'd take the rock sector personally. Although they're about the same in terms of difficulty (zoltan might even be a tad easier, rocks often use missiles), the rock sector branches afterwards, while the Zoltan is going to shoehorn us into 2 nebula sectors in a row.

Oh, and our shield loving crewmember has levelled up. 20% faster shield recharge now.

 

[The Vault Dweller]

When I first heard of FTL I thought I'd buy it if it lived up to it's promise. I heard from many it did. I figured I'd buy at the next 50% sale, but reading this makes me struggle to not buy it now. Yes I realize it's only $10, but I'm spend-thrift.

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller

 

[Azira]

This is the message I get every time I do this quest. I once had a blue option to take a potshot with a missile launcher, but it didn't amount to anything. I think you're supposed to have really strong weapons, maybe multiple missile launchers or bombs, and it'll let you attack. But I _always_ get this mission within the first couple sectors when my equipment is total shit.

I got a blue dialogue choice in this quest recently.

Spoiler

If you've got a firebomb launcher installed and two missiles to spare, you can finish this mission. I believe the reward was rather crappy though, but complete it I did.

 

[Azira]

In other news, I really suck at this game. I managed to get a win, but only by playing on easy difficulty. When playing on normal I rarely get past sector 5, if even that far, even when I follow the advice given earlier in this thread about using scrap on shields/engines and farming xp on enemies that cannot hurt you.

I now play on easy, trying to unlock the other ships. I have unlocked the Engi cruiser, the Zoltan cruiser (blind luck on the very first playthrough) and finally the Fed cruiser. All other ships are still locked, I have yet to see even the start of the unlocking quest chains, even though I've spoiled myself and looked for hints online.
So I decided to play on easy with the express purpose of trying to find the unlock quests. I won't cheat and download saves from online, nor will I hack the game, but it sits ill with me that I've played 20+ hours already and haven't beaten the game on normal difficulty yet, nor unlocked even half of the ships.

 

[TOME]

Go for Rock controlled territory. I don't think we have seen one in this LP.

How long is this game? If I understood correctly it is only 8 sectors and crew skills can only advance to level 3? And how much there is different missions/weapons/ships/etc. This seems like a great game but I'm getting a feeling that it is awfully short.

 

[Azira]

Finishing a game, as in winning it, will take at least a few hours I've found.

Thing is, this is so random that you have to change your plans as you go along. You cannot count on finding what you want at shops, and indeed, the "wrong" random encounter can fuck you up without you being able to do anything about it.

This is a roguelike, and they're about "having fun", ie dying horribly more than succeeding.
I like it. Short a single game may be, but I find myself returning for more and more abuse, though I've dialed down the difficulty for the time being, trying to unlock more ships. Once I have those, I will play at normal again.

In short, I'd recommend this game. If you're a Eurofag like me though, you get the best deal buying the game directly from their website instead of through Steam. Steam charges 9.99€, whereas you only pay 9.99$ if you buy it from www.ftlgame.com

 

[eklektyk]

i love how randomness fucks our esteemed LPeer every time....