Guess Who Just Beat FTL For The First Time?

I still haven't beaten FTL ;-;

Just keep at it. I finally looked it up. Apparently my success ratio is 1.8%.

"epictimes" sure sounds like the best place to read about the latest in theoretical physics .

It took me forever to beat it. You are totally able to beat it with just about any strategy. However, there really are a few common strategies of attack and a few of defense.

1) Straightforward Attack: Best used with hacking and weapon preigniters. Just hack the shields, and at the last quarter of the hacking dump the salvo into their shield room. Next salvo dump into shields while putting some into their cloaking room. Then, take down a weapon that can hit you, like missile or ion.

2) Disabling Attack: Use teleporter or a weapon, to take down a missile room including crew manning it. It will basically be out for the round. Next, do it to ion. Then, find a clever way to do it to cloak and shield back and forth, that will allow you to get damage in to the ship itself. Best with a shield bypass for the last form of the flagship, or just something to drop their shield fast with.

Defenses) Survivability is more important than actual fight. You need at least 3 of the following:
1) 3 shields, so you can absorb most the shots of the laser as well as the beam.
2) Engines to consistent 30% evasion, to dodge at least 1/3 shots and make cloaking 100%.
3) Cloaking, for evading unblockable shots like missiles and drone surge and scatter shot
4) Defense Drones, to counter the missiles if you have no cloaking. Even 1 helps, 1 drone often gets 2 of the enemy missiles.
5) Super Shield, if failing all else, will give you a short chance at the beginning of the fight to get them or their weapons manageable, should you not have the evasion/shields/cloak/defense drones to survive salvo to salvo with them.

That only works on easy (and normal?) though. In hard, the missile room is connected to the rest of the ship and they'll come and fight your boarders for as long as there is still crew alive. And if you kill all of the crew, the AI takes over and start auto-repairing.

Also, make sure to train your crew. A fully trained pilot and engine room operator will add 10% to your dodging. In the early sectors, when you have two shields, you can often find a ship that has insufficient firepower to do any damage at all (single laser + beam, or single drone + beam). If you let your ship fight that one for a while without shooting back, you'll train your crew really fast. Also, level 5 engines are highly recommended, as you then get 48% dodge. Start by getting level 2 shields as fast as possible and then upgrade engines. Dodging really pays off in the long run. Additionally it increases your FTL charging rate, so if you are in a really hairy situation, you can jump before taking too much damage.

And if you have any scrap left, upgrade piloting in sector 8 so a single shot to your pilot won't disable all dodging.

His tips are good. I usually upgrade engine first, because it's so cheap to get to 3-4.

I still haven't played FTL

Cheap as dirt, huge playability, very well made as far as balance and thoughtful mechanics. Everything affects 4 things it seems like, so it has 3-4 light counters and counters 3-4 things lightly.

Do you own it?

Normally that'd be a silly question, but with all those bundles and junk nowadays it's more up in the air.

How the ****. I did it 2 times in a row, upon 2 seperate encounters with Flagship, with 2 completely different ships and methods. (The second time was skin of my teeth)

Still though, besides clawing against the crazy specials the enemy can do, I am thoroughly convinced that if you have 3 shields and cloak, or 4 shields, as well as 5-6 engines, then you absolutely can not lose to the last 2 forms of the flagship. Their weapons are insufficient to hit, even the scattershot.

Other than that, I used a halberd beam, hacking, and lanius crew teleporter. I did it with a halberd beam. That says something right there. Not even a mass of weapons, just drop shields and swipe. Except the first form, I actually first focused on dropping missile weapon, hacked their health bay, teleported aboard to drain oxygen, and thinned out the crew.

Nice! Now set FTL to 'hard'!

Step at a time. Both were on Easy, but since I feel I can reliably beat it on Easy, Normal is next.

Also, I did some research on Hard, and if you can either use Lanius and asphyxiation or Rock and Fire and kill the entire crew in one bloody battle, or hack the shield room, you can still mostly use teleporter cheese to disable the missiles. Most crew will have to fight through 2 doors to get to the missiles to assist that guy, and then if you kill him you can use the doors to juke them back out and then go back in again when the doors are back. Just means you have to dedicate a combo to disabling missiles rather than just a single teleported crew.

Now, I beat it on Normal with a Beam-Variant of my Kestrel, just as the Zoltan Type B. Again, Flak is OP for dropping shields and a single chainlaser still fires 2 shots every 4 seconds. Unlocked Type C and Mantis.

I believe I will post my 3 win videos here soon. 1 I have uploaded, 2 I need to edit.

i have a mod enabled that removes the hostile advancing fleet

That is a fair learner's handicap in my opinion. That makes easy-hard reliable to beat because you can take as many turns as it takes to get your ship fully upgraded unless you die in battle in a sector. That is sort of like what "endless" does, except endless has the advancing fleet, but you can jump to as many sectors as you want before advancing in difficulty, and upgrades cost a lot more to encourage "grindyness". Nonetheless, you can play as long as you like to upgrade as much as you want before progressing to the next stage of enemy difficulty, so practically that should be insurance to win in the end.

not always win at the end....even with this i still lose at the flagship a lot those missiles....and the 2n't part with the drones! >.<

Like I posted above, lvl 5 engines and 3 shield bubbles and a cloak pretty much makes you invincible. First stage missiles shouldn't be hitting you. Alternatively, you can have defense drones instead of cloak for antimissiles.

What about a teleporter? In stage 1 especially, much less other stages on easy-normal, you can teleport crew or bomb aboard missile system and disable it. That disables it for rest of fight until next stage. No missiles, effectively means it can't pierce shields. Second stage, no ion helps a lot too. The evade from those engines can get you through drones with only a few hits.

Another big tip, is if you get scrap from the flagship fight or getting to the flagship, always upgrade buffer systems. if you have 6 spots of weapons, buy 7 slots of system power, if your weapons take a hit you aren't stalled in the water. Same with shields, piloting, oxygen, doors, drone, cloak, ect.

Basically, if you have a full upgraded ship, the flagship shouldn't have the firepower to land a hit.

None of you have truly experienced FTL till you've tried the captains edition mod. Epic mod that added so much replayability to the game for me.

I want to do a Captain's Edition Endless run when I unlock one last ship. It is the Crystal Cruiser. While I have beat the Flagship 6 times and feel beating it 6-10 more times on easy would be trivial, it's too grindy so I am just going to play 3-4 games with the Rock Cuiser Type C and name my crystal crew Ruwen and try to find a Rock Homeworld. The easy and quick, albeit roundabout, way of doing it.

Holy crap!