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

[Damned Registrations]

Well, update time!

We're heading for the rock sector.

Sweet, store right off the bat!

First we'll sell off this crap.

However, they aren't selling much we want to buy. I picked up a second anti ship drone, which is kind of nice, except it'll burn through our drones faster if we use it obviously. But at least it's an option for tougher enemies.

But there's not much else worth buying. The Hull repair drone is nice, but also very expensive. We don't need either of those ship systems. We repair the hull and move along.

Spend some scrap so we can actually use both drones at once if need be.

It's a big empty sector out there.

This is kind of pointless since we just repaired. This guys can be handy if you need them though, and later on they offer better rates than the stores for hull repair.

And we run into our first enemy here. Double shields and a missile. Does not bode well.

One of their lasers is a mk 2 burst as well, so thats a volley of 4 shots potentially. As you can see, shields are not holding. But at least they hit the oxygen instead of something more vital.

We continue to suffer damage, and finally their shields drop so our drone can get busy.

We're really getting pounded. I take the deal just so they'll stop shooting us a bit sooner. Their weapons are still totally unharmed, shitty ass drone.

The fight brought lightbane's piloting up to level 2. Only adds an extra 2% evasion, but every bit counters.

Going to swing along the bottom in search of more stores.

More rockmen itching for a fight. We take them out without too much trouble. Those missiles are annoying though.

We're in kinda rough shape, but they might repair us if we save them, so I decide to go ahead and fight for them.

Goody, a slug ship instead of rock. Though it's another mk 2 burst laser. Those are REALLY popular with enemy ships, and our shields can't cope very well with them.

I decide to go all out on this fucker and deploy double drones, at the expense of oxygen. Hopefully they don't get a shot in against our O2 to keep it down when we need it. Also, they have an Ion Blast 2 like us. Could be trouble for the shields, theres no real way around that.

Fortunately, they don't land any nasty shots and our drones are tearing them up.

Victory at the cost of 2 drones and a point of hull. Given that drones cost 8 scrap each, hull 2, and we spent fuel to jump here, this isn't much of a profit.

We get a 5 point hull repair from the guys we rescued though, so it's not that bad after all.

Note that this node isn't connectted to anything else along the bottom. We're gonna have to make a lot of jumps to find all the potential stores here, and would have been fucked if we had gone down here thinking we could jump near the exit from there.

Nice. We've got no use for missiles right now. 45 scrap is fair enough, though stores charge twice that to buy the things.

Looks like we have some fighting to do.

More asshole pirates.

Hmm, their weapons aren't too threatening though. Hopefully we can take out the ship or the missile launcher quickly.

Weapons are down! Nice shots from the drone.

And it stays that way. Easy win thanks to the RNG.

Yet another mediocre reward.

But we can visit a new store now!

Son of a cunt! Still no weapons, and even the drones are lame. The augments too, for this ship anyways. Stealth weapons on the stealth ship would have been awesome.

We patch up again, and clean out their drone parts.

Yet another tough ship.

As long as we can keep their shield down, the defense drone should get things done eventually.

Assuming our ship doesn't burn up first. Fucking missiles man.

The fire is finishing what the weapons started, our drone isn't even online any more, even though we had 2 units over what we needed. I opt to just flee from this encounter, we're going to take a beating by the time the drones are repaired.

Luckily, we don't have enemies at the spot we fled too. That would have sucked.

Instead, some free loot. Not too bad.

We'll chill here for a while until everything is fixed.

Agassi hit level 2 repair from all that, 10% faster now, on top of the x2 engi bonus.

Woo! More free stuff.

And now we get to choose the next sector. We could get some nifty events in the slug homeworld, but I've already got their ship and would rather be in the Zoltan sector right now. Better chance at shops I think, and easier fights too probably.

Of course we're kinda boxed in by ships to start off. Same plan as last sector, looking for a store with something worth spending scrap on.

Urgh. Not what I wanted to see.

So, burst laser, anti ship drone and missiles. This could hurt real bad real soon.

I send out the double drones and hope this ends quickly.

We still take a beating though.

But we won. : x

Meh. Sitting on this much scrap, anything short of a weapon or nice augment won't impress me.

We'll jump here, just in case a store is in either of those bottom two nodes.

Once again, our ill equipped ship finds nothing at a beacon. Ah well.

We found yet another store though, which is great.

Son of a fucking whore!

Has anyone been keeping count? How many stores has this been with no weapons for sale. Urgh.

We grab the defense drone and patch up again. Note that it costs 3 scrap per point of hull now.

We buy out the drones too. We're going to need them, we're in the midgame sectors now.

We're forced to warp to a beacon with a ship, but luckily it's not hostile.

Next beacon is though! And that is a bigass missile launcher they have. We do NOT want to get hit by that thing. Thank god we have the defense drone now.

Their laser can't fire fast enough to overwhelm our shields, so this should be an easy fight. Set the ion blast to autofire one shields, put the drones out and relax.

You can see our defense drone doing work under the bottom hud there. Those are at least 2, probably 3 damage missiles.

Another shot, this time the missile comes from above. Drones can actually fail to defend depending on relative positions and so on. But I think the Engi ship is easy for it to cover, since it's so small and round, the distance between it and any room it has to defend is pretty short.

Note that even after hitting successively 4 times, our ion blast 2 still hasn't built up enough of a buffer for missed shots-

To avoid having enemy shields come back even from a single miss.

And now we have to hit it another 4 times to bring the shields down. We'd be SO fucking dead without that defense drone.

It's actually taken so long our O2 is reaching danger levels. I turn off engines since apparently our drone has us covered pretty well (though it did miss one shot, and our evasion dodged the missile for us.)

Not going to settle for a lame surrender reward when we have them dead to rights like this and had to spend 2 drones to do it.

Much better. Nearly double the reward.

Remember that peaceful Zoltan ship? They gave us a map for this sector. We're gonna beeline for that store now. Good stuff.

Zoltans are pretty trustworthy bros generally. Their ships are a bitch to fight, but you don't have to fight them too often, even in their own sectors.

Free scrap and some crappy food! Hallelujah!

Fucking TRIPLE shields. Their weapons look shitty though.

I double drone it anyways. Could still turn ugly super fast if they landed even a single hit on our weapons or shields.

Won without a scratch.

Rewards get bigger as you move along in sectors obviously. ~30 scrap is fairly normal for this point for a blown up ship.

Yet ANOTHER drone store. I wouldn't have even minded if one had at least had boarding drones. You know what? Fuck it. Fuck this shitty ass ship and it's lame weapons. I'll take the teleporter, and we'll find a fucking mantis or rockman, and we'll be a boarding engi cruiser, no matter how shitty that is.

Bring it on nebula!

Oh man, did I call this shot or what? Come on baby, daddy needs some badass insect crew,

Free scrap along with the crewmember. Who is-

A Zoltan. Meh. Could be worse. Note that his max health is only 70. Definitely not a boarder. Zoltan crew add a unit of energy to whatever room they're in though. We shove him in the shield room (though Agassi is still manning them) and you can see the benefit as the yellow bar in the next screenshot.

Hoo boy. This could be interesting.

Well.

First weapon we manage to get isn't even a fucking weapon, of course. However, this is pretty good support for a boarding crew. And we have the missiles to spare for it. Even a sub optimal boarding party can win if you heal bomb them. Might also open up some weird options in certain events, I rarely find this things, and even more rarely buy it.

But we've made it to the exit. We could visit those nebula nodes and double back before the fleet gets here, but I'd rather save the fuel. 10 isn't a whole lot.

Hmm. Decision time again. Both places are nebulas. The Slugs will probably fuck with us if we head there, especially given that we lack a slug of our own. But I'll leave it up to you guys. Also keep in mind where the path branches after these- the slug nebula is up top, and will give us the option of a civ or nebula for sector 6, while the uncharted nebula gives us civies or hostiles. I'll leave it up to you guys. And then blame you when we inevitably die because HOLY FUCK SECTOR 5 NO WEAPONS FOUND WHAT THE FUCKING HELL.

Ahem.

 

[The Vault Dweller]

A healing "weapon" . Well amazing luck finding that right as you decide to switch from drone engagement to boarding parties. Still I have a feeling battles of small groups in small ships with fragile equipment everywhere is going to be even more tense than ship to ship combat.

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller

 

[Damned Registrations]

Cloak is kind of pointless when your weapon charges in 4 seconds. And if we cloak while the drones are beating shit up, the ion effect will wear off and shields will come back. Lastly, we're tight on energy as is, and I'd rather not tie any up in cloaking. Depending on how things go, we might end the game without it. It's certainly viable, especially with a drone swarm and a boarding crew. We'll just have to beef up our other defenses instead, like engines and shield. Which will make the energy WAY too tight... but we got a zoltan, and we don't need a cloak if our offense is good enough.

Just need to cross our fingers for some more appropriate boarding crew (should be a cinch with our current gear, you end up tossing even useful people out when you get teleporters earlier than this.)

As a side note, the heal bomb is by no means an amazing find. Pretty much any bomb works well with the boarding crew. It's more like we were incredibly lucky to have settled on boarding before getting that, because it's totally useless otherwise. It doesn't even sell for much.

 

[Azira]

Go to the slugs. Slugs are amusing. Who doesn't like telepathic, slimy creatures?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Your argument is strangely compelling...

 

[Cool name]

I will vote for you to go visit the slugs.

And do not worry about being a boarding engi cruiser. My best win was with one. Three anti-ship drones plus boarders and a bomb launcher do work prettily.

 

[Azira]

Even though it's cheesy and I'm a lesser being for doing so, I've been playing my last handful games on easy difficulty with the Engi-cruiser, and yes, boarding is indeed viable with that ship.

Easy difficulty is mainly so I can unlock the other ships with a minimum of frustration, as I did get plenty frustrated playing on normal. Now though, on easy I can consistently win with the Engi cruiser, and I've recently unlocked another ship, the rock cruiser. Could've unlocked the slug cruiser as well, had I not chosen the wrong option in the very last part of that quest...

It's time for me to go normal again soon. Even if my last five attempts (all in the federation cruiser) were wretched failures.

 

[Mrowak]

Holy shit, how did I miss this LP?

I simply love this game. It's one of those rares that make you appreciate every single feature and the way they were put in a singular package. There isn't really a single major fuckup you have to deal with in bigger titles - everything has its uses. Its only fault is that it left me wanting for more - more subsystems, more ships, more crew, although this could potentially undermine its elegant simplicity.

 

[Azira]

There seems to be plenty of mods out there, that adds all those things if you want them Mrowak. The officianl forum has a mod sub-forum.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Update time!

Here we are in glorious reublic of Slug. I decide to move our rock dude over to the teleporter in case we want to board and put our lightbulb in the engine room. The rockman had some engine experience, but it's easily the least valuable skill, and with their 150 Hp and fire immunity, rockmen make great boarders. Though their slow movement is a pain.

Well, we have yet another store on offer right away. Lets check it out.

Troll store, of course.

Given that we're clearly never getting a chance to buy anything ever, and will probably die here in this awful nebula, I opt to do something kinda dumb and pump two more points into drone control. We'll see why I did this in a sec.

Boom, our first slug ship enemy. Just a standard pirate encounter though. But he's got serious firepower, and a cloak. He also has a medbay, which makes boarding a bad idea unless we can damage it first. Which is up to chance of course.

Well, we'll throw up our defense drone and wait while he charges his missile launcher under the cloak.

When he drops out of cloak, I dump power into drone control and launch our remaining drones- all 3 out at once takes 6 power.

And we get an achivement for doing just that! Which is why I dumped our points here. This unlocked the Type B engi ship for us. So even if we die here, the run will not have been a total failure.

Now to suck more power out of our ship to power the ion cannon, since the drones aren't going to get through the shield alone.

After a while, I relaize it's taking forever to take the shields down because I'd forgotten to turn on autofire. Apparently that resets when you load a save. Oops. That cunt landed a missile on us in the meantime too, even though we had a defense drone up.

And ANOTHER fucking missile. At this point I realize our defense drone is not, in fact, still up. Most have gotten shot down or something. :fuck:

Well, it's back up now. But we ate a pair of 4 damage missiles for failing to notice quickly enough.

Ah, our first taste of how much slug nebulas suck. When slugs surrender, they don't tell you what the fuck you'll get if you let them live. Do we want what's in the box?

Fuck no. Do we look that stupid? (Do not answer.)

Ah, the joys of wandering through endless nebula clouds.

Standard Slug practice number two: asking you inane questions. There's actually a nasty one that fucks you over if you skip by the wordy dialogue before the question.

But in this case, we just get to pick which system this asshole hacks and shuts down for the duration of the battle. If the system is upgraded enough, it can stay online barely, but we probably can't manage that. We'll lose our oxygen and hope the medbay can keep us afloat if it gets to dangerous levels.

Also, this fucker has a nasty weapon layout. 2 ion weapons and a beam that can carve us to bits. And again, a medbay so boarding is a bad idea. Slugs often have medbays. Especially this late in the game, half of all ships have medbays anyways.

Their beam is fucking us up. Not much we can do about it.

Fucking us up a LOT. At least it isn't hitting vital systems.

Ok we're actually going to die here if this doesn't end fast. I was stupid to think we could handle this with 1 drone, and put the other on now. Our O2 is dangerously low now, and we've got little hull left. Also, the O2 is damage, so we need to repair it to get it back online even after the battle.

Phew. That was brutal. Didn't think it'd be that hard, I initially thought their beam weapon was a different type and didn't add another drone until much too late.

Wait, why the fuck does lightbane have 1 hp in a room with no oxygen?

So, we're back down to 5 crew. This sucks. to lightbane. Boarding is going to be even harder now.

And we find yet another troll store. The anti ship drone Mk 2 is actually pretty nice, especially if you're low on drones like us, but we don't have the scrap to spare now since some dick spent 105 to unlock a ship. We need hull repairs, badly.

There went about half our scrap. We buy the fuel too.

And the drones. Fuck. We are so screwed.

We may as well buy this cheap fuel too. There's really only one thing we want to buy at this point, chances are it won't show up anyways and even if it did it might not be enough to save us.

Besides, pretty much every encounter from now on is going to be 40+ scrap. Too bad we get a bunch of empty nodes instead. Not that we can win many fights, but freebies would have been nice. Guess those are rare in slug sectors.

Well, lets take the risk.

Payday! Though we're still a long way off from a good place.

More empty nodes. If we had better engines or sensors or something this might have been an encounter instead though, who knows.

I even spent extra fuel to get one more jump in before leaving, but we just didn't get a whole lot here. Hope the next sector is better.

We'll take the civilian sector thanks. Safer, more shops, all around a good idea if you're as fucked up as we are.

This ought to be fun. Sector 6. Still 1 weapon.

His weapons don't look too bad but 14 scrap for a map is a sweet deal at this point. Hope we can get a miracle store.

There are two by the exit beacon. We'll beeline for them.

Even the aggressive encounters are nicer in civilian sectors.

That is a nasty looking ship though. Well, at least their weapons seem sub par.

And they're trying to escape. Yet another situation where boarding is an awful idea. Though you can prevent escapes by taking out piloting or engines.

And the fuckers have 2 drones to back up their weapons. This is pretty much what ships are like this late though. Well, ships that aren't fucking weak like ours.

They fuck us up a bit before leaving. We only managed to do a single point of hull damage to them. They probably could have killed us to be honest.

Another rebel ship. Lets cross our fingers and hope we can take them.

Drones again...

At least they only have one though.

Hmmm, this is not working terribly well. They do lack a medbay though, and aren't going to flee, so we can board them.

Agassi just mastered shields. You get a little yellow icon and a sound effect when level ups happen. You can also see the double stars on the hud.

We fire our heal bomb... and it fucking MISSES. FFS.

This is the part where we play the Benny Hill theme and run between rooms to avoid getting killed, while waiting for either the heal bomb to reload or the teleporters to get repaired. But the teleporters are on FIRE, and we only have 3 crew on board, so I wouldn't count on that.

And davion seems to be at 1 hp in a room with an enemy...

he died of course. But the healbomb arrives in time to save the rock man. 150 hp of face smash ready to go all over again.

Hmmm, things seem to be not working out for us.

At this point I realize, the enemy combat drone is the mark 2 version, which fires faster than shields regen all on it's own. That explains why were were totally fucked and never had a real chance here to begin with.

Farewell crew of the Goatse. Your noble sacrifice unlocked me a ship and surely entertained some sadistic bastards.

A bit of info on the achievement system: Well there are a set of generic achievements just for fun (a favourite of mine is the one you get for suffocating the enemy crew to death) each ship hull has it's own set of 3 achievements themed for that ship. Getting any 2 of these 3 unlocks the type B version of that hull. I already had the middile one for the Engi A (kill a ship using only drones... pretty easy) and we got the 3 drones at once achievement in this playthrough. They other one we could have tried for is to have 4 enemy systems or subsystems locked down with ions at the same time. Obviously, this would require more ion weapons. Lots more.

Anyways, behold the piece of utter shit we have unlocked. No offensive drones (those are basically good for selling and thats about it on a normal ship), since the drones we have will be needed to account for our ship having only 1 lame ass crewmember. Good luck with that shit. The weapons also suck (the heavy ion puts out less ion damage per second than the ion blast 2, though I think it might be just barely capable of locking down shields, at least if manned well enough and it never misses) and the free augment is basically a joke. 50% increased movement speed for our repair drones. Oh yeah, that'll save us.

We won't actually be taking this ship next though. I've already started the next run with the Redtail. Barring any chances at a ship unlock, we'll be playing pretty optimally, though without any xp cheesing. Should be an easy win, and I'll show a lot of the most effective things to do with a good ship. Should help new players more than the previous runs, which have been more about making the best of bad situations with some of the worst ships.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

God speed sir. I haven't played this one in awhile, as my interest died out after finally winning on normal I think. Looks like they added an option to see what systems connect to which before you jump to them. That would have saved me some good runs prematurely ended by suddenly realizing I was cut off from the jump sector.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I think they might have tweaked some encounter rates as well, I'm not seeing a lot of the stuff I usually see, and I've done a lot of runs. Maybe these have just been weird runs though. All though stores with no weapons certainly was.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Combat would never end if we cloaked. Every time we cloaked the enemy shields would come back online.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You can, but it won't accomplish much. That's one shot every 15 seconds, less when you consider the time the cloak is ready but there's nothing to dodge if you're trying to use it to dodge slow weapons. For something like the ship that killed us (drones), you're looking at dodging one shot out of every 12 or so. We'd be better off upgrading engines.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You really think we were going to get through 3 shields without boarding them? We'd have to land FIVE shots in a row to take the shields down. Given that they probably have 25% evasion at least, our odds of doing that are pretty slim. Recall what happened on the last ship with 3 shields- they had time to warp away when we'd only done a single point of hull damage. And any misses or damage to weapons would have set us back to square one.

Which, incidentally:

Look at that, they hit our weapons. If we'd been relying on the ion cannon, that'd be kind of like them having a 30 second cloak they can fire during.

Boarding was definitely our only option. Even if we had a cloak and level 4 shields we'd still lose this fight with these weapons. Engine upgrades would have helped, but our offense is nearly 0 without boarding at this point.

Also recall that the teleporters paid for themselves by letting us rescue some crew and getting scrap out of it. Cloaking generally just lets you avoid fights.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Update time!

So, here is our mighty rape ship, ready to go.

Onward! To violence and riches!

Or not.

Oh wow. Cute. This is easily the hardest combat encounter you can possibly get in the first system. Solar Flares are very dangerous, and Zoltan ships take a long time to destroy and get some free shots right off the bat thanks to their super shield.

Well, we are a totally overpowered ship though, so we're not really fucked at all.

Although they're just basic lasers, the fact that we have four of them, to be targetted as we see fit, is incredibly useful. On top of that, they have a pretty short loading time, which means we can take out weapon systems before they even fire. Well, slow weapon systems. Obviously we're not going to take out enemy weapons that are just as fast before they can fire.

I guess I should mention the solar flare thing? Basically, every so often a chunk (or multiple chunks) of our ship catch fire and suffer hull damage. The effect is lessened if our shields are up, but still occurs. Obviously this is annoying as hell because it's totally unavoidable damage, and can potentially set fire to really imporant shit. The enemy suffers the same effects of course, but they don't really give a fuck as long as they can cause some damage before they go down.

At any rate, we win in short order. Just like the meteor field, we'll need to charge the jump drive before we can leave. Luckily our engine is still up, though Azira will take forever to fix it (Mantis crew repair at half speed.)

Oh come on!

Reward is probably not worth the trouble we went through.

Fucking bullshit solar flares.

Whatever, engines back up, we can leave soon.

Lets leave this hellhole.

Nice. We'll probably never use that drone buts it's free scrap when we sell it, so who cares.

More free stuff. Obama must be the space president right now.

Feels nice going to a distress beacon knowing that even if you get back stabbed you'll easily crush the enemy.

This is pretty much always worth doing, unless you're dangerously low on fuel.

10 scrap per fuel is a great deal.

Onward!

More free stuff. We'd actually be even better served with some weaklings to fight at each of these nodes, but this is certainly nothing to complain about.

Though that quest beacon is going to make getting to the exit a bit tight.

Giant alien spiders: not something to fuck with when you have only 4 crew. Totally worth it under some circumstances though.

Good luck with that shit guys!

Boom! Free stuff.

Should get at least a couple nebula nodes before the exit.

Look! A flying pinata!

Their weapons aren't going to come back online.

Unlike a lot of ships, you can easily spend a ton of scrap early on with this ship without worrying about missing your chance at getting what you need for the mid game. 4 lasers will work just fine until sector 4 or 5, and a teleporter + and mantis is a winning combination.

Kind of an irrelevant deal. We'll take it, just because we don't need missiles at all right now.

This guy is totally fucked.

Technically we could win this fight without firing a shot, the asteroids alone would win it for us.

Thanks to that quest we don't have time to check out the store and go to the exit before the fleet arrives. But we have no scrap anyways, it's unlikely we'd find anything cheap enough that was really nice.

Nice, tons of cheap fuel.

And we're heading to the rock sector. For reasons which are secret. We can totally handle their shit though.

This is what I like to see.

How dastardly of them.

Since they're armed with ions and missiles, we'll drop shields to 3 power and pump engines to full.

Turns out to be needless, the initial volley wipes out their missile launcher.

Yarr.

Ah, another store. We'll visit another node before going there, to get a bit more pocket change.

Rock sectors tend to have a lot of pirates waiting in hazard fields like this. Well, a lot of pirates in general to be honest.

Another easy win for us though.

Note that despite being in very few battles that all ended quickly, our weapon's guy is nearly level 2 already. The beauty of firing 4 guns at once.

Next encounter gives Azira a chance to practice his mantis style kung-fu.

Kablaam!

Seems we fought to rescue a scrap ship. Totally worth it.

Lets see what that scrap can buy for us.

We can sell the beam drone too.

Oh man, fire bombs + boarding crew is a GREAT combo. Even better if we had rockmen, but even without, as long as we have level 2 sensors (dirt cheap) to keep an eye on the fires, it's just amazing.

And here's our chance at getting a rock or mantis for the boarding team.

No dice, they never offered to surrender. I think they must have dropped the chance of that happening to make buying slaves more appealing.

Weapons upgrade though! Hell yeah. Note we're keeping the fire bomb in reserve for now, it's not necessary for boarding yet, we don't even have a teleporter.

More easy prey, these guys can't even pierce our shields.

And we found another store.

And a weapon. Mk 1 burst is pretty shitty though. Mind you, almost anything is better than a basic laser.

Crossing fingers for awesome store.

Well, there's our teleporter. The reloader augment can be nice as well, if you're gonna focus on blowing shit up through sheer brute force. You can even stack multiples of it.

And THIS upgrade is insane... if you have a cloak. We'll probably get a cloak eventually but it's not worth getting this early, compared to all the extra money we'll make off that teleporter.

Upgrading the teleporter shortens the cooldown, which is very useful for getting people back out before they die. Arguably even more important is that, even if it's not powered fully, an upgraded teleporter takes more damage to disable, so a single stray laser won't take it out and leave your guys stranded until it gets repaired.

We'll hold off on the upgrade for the moment though. Here's our first victim!

They do have a medbay though, which is annoying. Also, that is a Mk 2 burst, which can breach our shields. A solid little enemy we got here.

We'll open up by taking their weapons offline.

Note that their burst laser is only half charged when we fire. This is why the Redtail is so good early on, even compared to ships with better (but fewer) weapons.

And now they're totally disarmed and we can fuck with them at our liesure.

I take out their medbay with a couple shots and beam straight in- theres probably some poor fuck trying to repair it, it's a high priority for them (and rightly so.)

Oh shit, we set it on fire! Repairs are impossible until the fire goes out anyways, which makes beaming over this quickly a bit of a waste. Though we can stop them from fighting the fire and make it spread, we'll get hurt by the fire too.

We almost lost a guy because of the extra damage from fighting the fire. This is why sensors are so nice. Still, it looks like their O2 caught on fire too. They're in deep shit.

We'll get our fighting bros patched up and send them back in. Why the hell am I using our weapons guy for this? Because he was closer to the teleporter I guess. Derp.

Their O2 goes all the way offline from the fire. Fires also consume oxygen in rooms they're in, so they're actually in deep shit right now even if we don't go back in.

But annoyingly, they manage to repair the medbay while we healed up. 2 more lasers.

And we're back in. This is actually kinda dicey, since with only 3 hull left, if their remaining systems caught fire and got destroyed, the ship would blow up with our crew on board. But I'm pretty sure they contained the fire.

Note that we can check the exact health of enemies as well as our crew in the hover tooltip. We'll easily win this fight thanks to Azira's double damage and the fact that they were already fucked up by the fire and lasers.(actually they're rock crew so they took no damage from the fire.)

Our hueman is probably going to be our weapons guy in the long run, so I don't feel it's useful to give him combat xp.

We move him out jsut before he'd get the kill to let Azira fight 1v2.

Of course he wins handily.

Winningthis way gets us extra rewards, and chances at weapons and crew and the like.

We only got a couple of xp for azira on this attack, but we'll have plenty of time to fuck shit up and get him capped. We're gonna board eveyrything we can.

We do still have to beam them back aboard of course. Ending combat recharges the teleporter instantly, which can be really nice in dicey situations (Like say a ship with no O2)

Boom! Now we'll know what we're up against before we go in o we don't get any nasty surprises like boarding a ship with mantis crew or something. Except in nebulas. Have I mentioned fuck nebulas?

Another shot at crew. We'll take every chance we can get.

Oh cool. This is actually the reason we came to this sector.

The weapon can actually be pretty nice, but we want that chamber.

Success!

We get a tiny bit of scrap too.

The pod doesn't do anything for us... yet.

Cheap repair guy is convenient. You can rack up a lot of extra hull damage while boarding if the enemy has a weapon still online that can get through shields. It's usually worth it anyways though.

Onward! In retrospect, mantises might have been better, they tend to board US often, which is an easy fight to win, and then they have little crew left to defend. But we needed the option of htting up that green sector.

Moar distress. Finding a lot of that this run.

And the teleporter pays off again. This usually results in free crew.

But not this time.
And the alternate reward we get is a shitty hull repair instead of free scrap or something. Should have left him to die.

We do find a store though!

And long range scanners. We're gonna board SO MANY ships.
[

 

[Lindblum]

Wow I see you've made the RNG your bitch.

 

[lightbane]

Powergaming to hell and back!

Moar!

 

[Damned Registrations]

To hell and back? Oh no. When we reach hell we're going to keep going.

Time to start some shit.

Well, so much for boarding this particular ship. There's an outpost to save though.

Thatnks to some significant luck, we manage to fuck up their weapons before they get through our shields.

They really shouldn't be missing this often. Our evade is only 15%.

OTOH, we're not faring much better.

But in the end, we manage to disable them with just a scratch.

Also, we got a capped gunner now.

Lame reward. Though we DO need that fuel.

Niiiice. Our fuel is in decent shape again now.

Moar FIGHTAN!

Now this is more like it. Retards board us and they send only one guy, and they don't even have a medbay!

Azira is gonna finish him off quick and then start some shit.

And we managed to disable that fuckass huge missile launcher they have. Do NOT want to get hit by that thing.

We'll send our pilot over with Azira, no need to evade that laser or risk our awesome weapons guy.

Does the air seem stale in here? Oops. When I repaired the O2 after the last fight, I used the Zoltan, which powered it for us. I forgot to reallocate the power after he went back to shields.

Dweller is getting fucked up, so he leads one of their crew on a merry chase while Azira performs a fatality on the guy in the weapon's room.

We got more fuel too. Boarding tends to do that.

And Azira got some valuable xp.

We're gonna be rolling in scrap soon, and need little in the way of upgrades from stores now, so I'm gonna spend on ship upgrades much more freely. We'll start with teleporter upgrades, to help us keep our boarders alive.

Going to throw the firebomb into the weapon rotation as well. With 25 missiles and the loot we'll get from boarding, we can easily afford to use it.

*Crossing fingers for more crew*

Well, still a nice find.

Onward! Kill them all!

Fucking rebel sectors are filled with these things, as one might expect. Hell for a boarding ship. This one has no shields though, so we'll take a crack at it.

Gah.

Stupid missile launchers. We crank the engines and drop the shields to 1 bubble since they have no lasers.

After their initial shot from the cloak, we can handle this easily even with only 3 lasers.

Cha-ching.

Sure lets fuck with the nebula, I'm feeling ballsy.

Luckily they had shit weapons.

Bam! More fuel! More scrap! More missiles!

Time to get out of Dodge.

Another automated ship. But hey, people to rescue. : x

Fucking missiles. Also, missing sucks.

They fucked up our shields too.

But of course we win.

Winning!

Another Zoltan eh? So very winning. Felicity indeed.

Look at their shit weapons. Though they probably have weapon drones in that case. But who cares? We got 5 crew now, all aboard the enemy ship!

Son of a fuck, they had a third laser hidden on the left side of their ship.

Have I mentioned that the Redtail's airlocks are fucking EVERYWHERE and let you put out any fire pretty much instantly?

We'll firebomb their weapons for good measure.

Right on target. Unlike most bombs, firebombs don't do system damage instantly, they rely on the fire for that.

They'd rather put the fire out than stop us from wrecking their systems? Thats fine, we can raack up some xp trashing shit.

In fact, Azira hits level 2!

The fire is too much for one guy to stop anyways, and totally destroys their weapons before he flees.

Exactly the rewards I like to see.

More shields? More shields!

Probably the last ship we'll fight in this sector.

You know what? Thats not even fucking worth it. We don't need a radar station, or a fight with a double shielded auto-assault.

This'll cut the exit close to the fleet, but if worse comes to worse I'm sure we can fight our way out anyways.

Fucking rebels wasting our time...

Well, looks like we get away without a fight.

Even though we're using missiles, we're getting so many and use so few that we can easily afford to sell a batch here.

Niiice. This was why why came to the rebel sector, in case this green node was Zoltan.

Distress beacon? Don't mind if I do.

Gah. These are annoying without the right setup. And for some bizzare reason, teleporting them off the lab isn't an option.

We'll just go for the rescue, rather than risking crew trying to save the station. All we get for our efforts is some scrap, and at the cost of hull damage. Not cool.

Another store in sight. Lets visit this place on the way though. If we're lucky, we might find...

THIS.

Gee, do we seem like the kind of people to make deals with aliens that return from the dead?

We sure are! Check this mother fucker out!

125 Hp as well.

Wonder what this thing does? Eh, I bet nobody cares. Maybe I'll just end the LP here and go start another one.

 

[Lindblum]

You sick

 

[Azira]

Gosh darn it, you lucky SOB! Only in sector 4 and you got a crystal crewmember? You might actually unlock that ship..
And that skill it has, oh wow. I've only had a crystal once, then my ship got boarded by 5 manti and was that run...

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's actually the first time I've ever had one. Gotten the stasis pod a million times but never got it open.

 

[Cool name]

Crystal crewmembers are very good combined with mantises.

And try to get that ship no matter what. To die for it is more than worth it. The Carnelian, its B-Layout, is probably the best boarding vessel in the game.

As a random bit I will add the automated reloader augmentation you did mention in the previous update does even work with the Osprey's and the Nisos' artillery beam if I am not mistaken.

 

[JoKa]

I just unlocked the Crystal ship yesterday...it took me dozens of tries, the reliance of three random events in the right oder (and especially the need to have one specific sector for the last event) is pure bullshit. but it feels good to finally get it
And lockdown is quite useful to focus one enemy crewmember down and kill single systems, as it prevents people to enter the room after using it for ~15-20 seconds.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Update time!

So apparently this covers the room in blue gunk (crystals I guess?) and depletes the energy bar by the portrait.

Seems to have trapped our guys inside. Could definitely be useful for boarding, as it would allow us to murder people without letting them escape to other rooms, or to destroy systems without having enemies show up to stop us.

Doesn't seem like we can break our way through either, though maybe a large enough group could manage it.

Well then, now that we go this fucker I am quite eager to get him home to collect our reward. Lets head to this store first to patch back up.

:hmm: Some decent stuff on offer here. 'Hull' weapons do double damage on rooms without systems, which is kinda useful but I don't value them much. However, they also have a chance to cause a hull breach, which is rather nice, as it prevents repairs like fires do. Aside from that, this hull laser is basically like our Mk1 burst. Which could be kind of nice. However...

We'd need to dump some money into weapons to get a decent volley going, and forgo the fire bomb. I'd rather focus on our boarding party.

Besides, we needed fuel pretty badly, which sets us back. Then we need to repair.

Which leaves us barely enough for picking up our second mantis. We could use our crystal dude as a boarder (to great effect no doubt) but I'd rather keep him safe on board until we get him home.

So, welcome Nathan aboard. Crystal dude is now our new engineer. And we have an extra Zoltan pissing around in the shield room.

Lets test out our new mantis pal.

Though these fuckers have repair drones, which will annoyingly repair shit (like a medbay) instead of fighting people in the room.

We teleport our guys into the O2 room. Why do this when it is next to the medbay?

Because these fuckers have dual Mk 2 burst lasers, for a 6 laser volley, and I want to firebomb that shit. This'll keep them far away from it, so they have to waste time walking if they go to repair it.

Fucking lasers man. At least it was only the O2.

They got guys in the medbay patching up but it's too small for 3, so we're gonna be able to off this guy. Nice.

And I firebomb the weapons again because I left autofire activated. Oops.

Our guys are getting pretty fucked up now. I firebombed the medbay as well for good measure, but that damned repair drone fixed their weapons. However, the lasers aren't synched any more, so we should be fine.

We're healing up while their mebay explodes.

And I firebomb it again for good measure. Meanwhile, I've forgotten to fix our own O2 supply. We're still over 50% though.

Time to beam back and finish things.

Oh sweet delicious fuel, how I've missed you. Fucking automated rebel ships wasted so much of it.

We took a few hits during the fight, but nothing serious. Definitely a worthwhile fight.

MOAR power! I want to start relying on our evasion more as we progress towards the end here. When enemies fire ~6 shots at you, 35% evasion is like an extra 2 shields. Not to mention the chance to dodge missiles.

Nebulas aren't terribly attractive right now, but we want more scrap, so lets head in.

Ugh. Lame. It even has 3 shields. We can't even hurt this fucker. We'll have to just warp away.

Hmm, or will we?

I guess the crystals don't do anything to the system the room is in. However, with 125 hp and level 2 teleporters, this guy can easily last long enough to do some damage before being safely beamed back, even on an airless ship.

And this thing's weapons are total shit.

Wow, he hasn't even taken 50 damage yet. I think these guys are resistant to low oxygen damage or something.

We leave him in there a while longer to fuck the weapons up even more before beaming him back. Just for the free xp.

Next target is the shields. Now we can use our lasers to finish the job.

We'll go after piloting first, giving our shots 100% accuracy. Don't want to shoot our friend.

Beam him back for some healing and...

Switch targetting to their shields.

Fucking autorepair is annoyingly fast though.

Still, we got this in the bag.

Of course, no fuel and shittier reward in general, but still better than having to flee.

And our blue dude got some scrapping experience.

Mmm, another store. Lets check it out.

Oh man, this is the grand daddy of augments. Having your weapons pre loaded when you jump is is insanely useful, especially with long recharge weapons like heavy missiles or burst lasers, or beams. Alas, we lack the resources at the moment. And it doesn't fit our current weapons anyways. If we'd been buying weapons instead of teleporter + crew, we'd totally go out of our way to get this though.

The repair arm is kind of tempting. It lowers our scrap rewards a bit but gives us small free repairs in exchange. However, it takes a while to pay off, and our scrap rewards are pretty large. Though we do take a lot of damage while boarding. In retrospect, it's probably worth grabbing.

But fuck it. I want fuel.

Next beacon has some morons trying to board us. I think our SEVEN crewmembers can handle this.

At least there are 4 of them, so it's sort of a challenge, almost.

But we fuck them up and reap the xp.

Hmm, time for some more fights before we leave.

Rockmen huh? These are... interesting to fight with boarders, especially mantis. You can do some cheesy shit.

They have bombs of their own it seems, along with a bigass missile launcher.

We'll start by beaming into their weapons room to fuck it up. Rockmen are slow so we might be able to damage it before they even get here, especially with dual mantises.

But not quite.However, when we get the poor fucker who came to stop us low enough, he starts walking to the medbay. We run ahead of him and wait in the rooms he walks into-

and murder him just as he gets through the door. You get free shots on enemies walking through rooms, even if they're entering it to fight you or teleporting in. Remember this if you need a tiny edge on boarding, it's often good to beam into an empty room for those free shots and wait for them to come to you.

Also, they somehow destroyed our piloting without causing any hull damage. Odd. Maybe it's only a chance? Or only caused by fire? Anyways, lets burn out their medbay. It'll be gone by the time they need it.

Fucking missiles man!

And their goes their medbay.

This fight is kinda rough on our guys. Fucking rockmen hp is hard to deal with, and these guys seem experienced.

Shit, I don't think Nathan's got this after all. Retreat!

Both dangerously low. But in separate rooms I can only beam out one of them. Better meet up in piloting.

Azira cutting it close too, had to run through a fire to get here. Some ninja ass bullshit.

And Nathan at 1 hp. But we got them out.

They'll be good to finish things in no time.

Fucking missiles!

Should have firebombed that shit ages ago.

Fuck you missile launcher.

Time to finish things.

Hmm, they're not here. Odd.

Here we go.

Say good night rock man.

Wait, when did Muckefuck-

Well, we're back to 6 crew. to our brave weapons master.

Ugh, that'll pay for the hull damage at least, but FUCK, losing crew always sucks, even if it is just a human. God damned heavy missiles.

Repairs going to take a while on systems too. Look at all that wrecked shit.

Hull breaches everywhere too. Crystal dude helps fix those a lot.

Time for a better medbay I think. Though the difference isn't that great just for level 2.

Well, guess you're the new weapons guy green man.

Might be better to have Tee Lek do it since he's got more hp and will be farther from the medbay, but I want him really safe anyways.

We're so fucked up I'm going to burn 3 fuel just to backtrack to this store for repairs. No sense risking a run this good.

There goes all the fuel and scrap we earned from the fight, so we basically lost a good crewman for nothing. Fucking breach missiles are OP.

At least we had time to do this with all the nebulas around here.

Hmm, these can be pretty random, but have usually given me nice stuff. Lets try our luck.

Well SHIT. So much for 6 crew. We better not have lost the crystal guy. Never seen this outcome before.

There goes our walking battery.

Guess the crystal man is on weapons after all.

Well, both paths offer 1 shot at the Rock Homeworlds we need to get to, so I guess we'll head here cause fuck the rebels.

Probably a trap.

Oh, a chance at getting mroe crew.

Just what we needed.

Finally a rock man. Where were you 4 sectors ago?

I'm always annoyed by messages like this in games. If it's so overwhelming go ahead and say so, but at least let me go down guns blazing for the cause if I want to. "You decide to pussy out" is not what I like to see described to me.

Whatever. Lets fight some shit.

Totally standard mantis ship. Teleporter, medbay, light weapons and good shields. Perfect target for us.

Gah, fuckers went for our sensors.

And my attempts to herd them into our medbay are proving fruitless. Fuck this shit, we can just man fight them. I'll start a fire on their ship on the far side from where I saw their engi before sensors went down. It might spread before he can put it out this way.

What the fuck are these crazy bastards trying to do?

Fine, we'll abandon the cockpit and vent it too. And they still won't go to the medbay (the nearest air supply.)

Fine, we'll fuck you up in the weapons bay.

Ugh, they managed to hit our teleporters. Sucks to not have a pilot.

We'll repay the favour by firebombing the other side of their ship. Wish we had sensors to see if it's engulfed in flames. Their engines aren't red, but they're not green either.

And fuck your shields!

Next shot is to firebomb their medbay. Going through a lot of missiles for this.

Sensors back up. They're in rough shape alright. Mantises don't put out fires very well.

It even spread to their piloting.

MOAR FIRE.

God burning shit up is so fun.

When a fire gets this big it's nearly impossible to contain without controlling the air supply.

We'll fuck up their engines while the fire does the rest of the ship.

Nice, insect bro levelled up.

Fires got oxygen starved since their O2 is dead. Time to end this.

Damned mantis is actually fucking us up in kind.

Whatever, lets leave, he can't save his ship anyways.

Poor fucker is waiting in the shield room to die. The AI knows it'd never repair the O2 or medbay before he died.

We'll put him out of his misery.

Buh-bye.

No fuel? Nice scrap though.

And Azira is a black belt now. 20% more damage on a mantis is brutal.

More bloodshed! Onwards!

No teleporter for them, just a fleshy human crew.

Although that IS a mark 3 burst laser they're rocking. That could suck for us.

Lets beam aboard and get this shit started.

Firebomb just as their first wounded arrives in medbay...

Fire not going to last long with two guys fighting it though.

But we've killed half their crew already anyways.

And there're more firebombs where that came from.

Fucking lasers man.

Of course they have a double medbay. Urgh.

Whatever, it still burns down, and we're fucking the weapons up too.

Lets check on their firefighting progress.

They don't seem eager to fight us any more.

There's the straggler.

No fuel again. But the scrap rewards at this point can pay for a fuel/missile budget at stores if we must.

Yet more fighting in store. This is the sector to do it in for us though.

Another juicy mantis target. Bigger ship is usually more trouble but also a bigger reward.

These guys even have a door system. This can be the death of a boarding party if you notice it too late.

And of course they're boarding us. We managed to lure them to the medbay this time though.

So that will be dealt with quickly.

Mantis ships often have Engi aboard for some reason. Makes boarding them after wiping out their boarders pretty easy.

We'll start with their dooor systems. While we eat a giant laser volley.

Woo! Hurray for misses! And their dumbass engi got raped trying to stop us.

Sensors back online. Looks grim for them.

They keep sending guys in 1 at a time while trying to repair shit too.

Ugh, they landed some shots this time. Still not nearly as bad as that one fucking missile launcher.

No fuel? One missile? Argh!

Well, we are sitting on 200 scrap though. Kinda wanted to pick up cloak, but...

Engines ahoy! This can be nearly as good in the long run.

And we find another fight to pick. Long range scanners ftw.

Small ship this time. No medbay again, but 5 crew. Gah.

Once again, I employ standard anti boarding procedure...

And once again these crazy fucks beeline for some airless deathtrap rooms. Whatever.

Have fun suffocating to death you bastards. Your ship is on fire btw.

Powerful weapons they got, but the AI doesn't use them very well. Ion Bombs are insanely good, but he just wasted it on our O2, which at best makes piloting not an option for a while. The Mk 3 burst is going to overwhelm our shields with 0 evasion though.

Luckily for us we got level 2 teleporters, so one shot can't put them offline.

Enemy boarders nearly dead.

They don't even manage to beam back.

And the fire from that initial bomb has spread. They only have a single mantis trying to stop it.

They have a door system too, so we won't do anything rash like beam into the weapons room with a fire and potentially 3 enemies.

They follow us into the shields to get murdered. Dweller being a bro and getting our O2 back online.

Oh sweet sweet fuel! We're saved.

Could head up this way...

But fuck it, lets go for the exit. We're in rough shape after all those fights.

Haven't seen free scrap in a while. This was nice.

Hmm, we could check this node, but before that lets see where we can go for the next sector...

Oh hell yes.