... I have never considered it was possible to do crew kiddnaping on that ship without mind control... Really clever strategy of yours! Is there a video like this for the Hard version of the Flagship?
I've never seen / heard anyone talk about this (correct me if I'm wrong), but if you're about to go through nebula beacons it is a good idea to have an odd number of power bars in the reactor. Since ion storms cut your power in half, rounding it up to the next integer, you would have the same power with an odd number of bars as the next even number. Say you enter an ion storm with 9 power bars. You'll still get the same 5 as you would if you had 10. Any thoughts on this?
"I don't want to spoil your first experience of fighting the boss" - Translation: I want you to experience the sensation of every atom of hope you've ever had be instantly blinked out of existence without any chance of emotionally preparing yourself
Nope, that's a tactic. You can fire beams during their cloak if you already started placing them. Or if you have "vision" on their ship -- which means mind controlled crew or your own boarders -- you can fire any weapon regardless.
just won my first game after like 80 hours by just... taking the first sectors slow and watching this video for the flagship. crazy how easy this game is with basic micro and patience
Thank you for your tipps. Although I try to follow your advice, I always, always die, even on easy. 😞😖 I just don't have enough scrap to repair my ship and upgrade anything.
Hitting their o2 usually gets them to stop repairing other systems. Most times they prioritize things as o2, weapons, then shields. So slap the o2 any time you can to slow their returning to the fight.
Great video Mike. I've been playing this game at a relatively high level for about 8 years, but it wasn't until seeing your ion stacking in practice here that it became clear why you and other players are always advocating for these types of builds. Once the ions are stacked, it takes the full cooldown time for even a single shield bubble to reappear. It seems so obvious now - after all, it's why pulsars are so scary
It's definitely very strong in the right circumstances. I'll still admit that ion builds tend to be a little more "situational", especially the decision to buy the first ion.
my main issue when i play is bad rng when it comes to stores... i get an ass load of scraps every game but i very rarely get weapons in my stores, its always crew, ship modules and if i get weapons its usually ion, i dont get it
Amazing guide. Came back to FTL after a few years and these tips got me to the flagship for the first time ever. Whenever I engage an enemy ship I hear your voice telling me to "shoot them, in the weapons". Whenever I pillage vaccinations for a local plague, I think back to your advice about not being the good guys.
I remember finally having a few games under my belt... I was rocking in a Mantis boarding ship. Excellent game. One of my best. Everything going my way. Perfect crew. Ship is in great shape. Got scrap to spare. And yeah... I killed all the crew on the flagship... Thinking that would be that. Best ending right? Heh. Proceded to get WRECKED by that flagship AI. Nothing I could do. I didnt have much in the way of weaponry. I had a bio laser and a burst 1 i think. Thats all i needed for my boarders. I had 4 mantis! I Didnt need guns... Oh FTL you cruel mistress. Never made that mistake again.
Great video, sent it to my newbie friends! My only criticism of this video is saying not to upgrade engines. Now you shouldn't upgrade too early, or past lvl 5 because it gives diminishing returns, but if you have lvl 5 engines and someone manning it, not only do you have around a 45% chance to dodge which is insanely powerful, but going invisible makes you have 100% evasion. This is how I managed to win my first runs, not having that evasion can be deadly when facing the flagship.
Glad it was helpful! Maybe watch the part about engines again though, I'm saying almost exactly what you just said. The only real difference is that I probably see level engines-5 as a lower priority than you do. I like engines-5 but it's a bit of a luxury, and I'm comfortable on engines-4 for the Flagship. That's still 100% evasion in cloaking too.
@@mikehopley Yeah I was typing that about halfway through the video and I lost my comment, my bad. I know it is 100% but that's with external factors. I am just much more of a ship oriented player than a crew one, in terms of skills specifically
@@TheJemShuffle Without trained crew, you'd need level 7 engines for 100% evasion during cloak. Or with partial training, you can get that with level 6 or even level 5 engines. 100% cloaked evasion isn't essential either. 95% evasion is also very reliable, although guarantees do help with tactics.
I feel foolish because I just realized that manning only affects the "system power level, S" for Doors and Sensors, not for Piloting. Piloting is also a "subsystem" so my brain just latched onto the notion that it behaves like Doors and Sensors, but the level doesn't get increased by manning, you get a manning bonus. I've been in the habit of walking my pilot away from the console just before the pulsar hits, thinking I was sparing myself from a possible extra ion damage 🤦♂ I don't think I've ever made that decision while receiving incoming fire, so I don't think it's actually cost me anything other than time/attention to execute moving them away and then moving them back. I'll continue to consider doing this for Sensors and Doors, but will stop needlessly doing this for Piloting 🥲
Not to worry, there are so many nuances in this game, it's impossible to keep track of everything! Also the sensors and doors issue is a pretty minor optimisation. It's fairly unlikely to matter if your sensors/doors are down for (say)10 seconds instead of 5. Though I know how you play -- you're like me, or maybe even more meticulous! Along similar lines: I used to think a destroyed system would never be hacked, so on my shieldless runs (with level 1 shields), I would repair the shields system.
How does this setup fair during the run though, not against the flagship? My immediate gut reaction is that it seems too resource hungry to be sustainable. In later sectors you are very dependent on the Ion bomb hitting, since if it misses you're punished with a ~20 second wait before being able to try to do damage again, so it seems like you'd end up hacking piloting every time. So now you're spending a missile and a drone part each fight, maybe even a couple of missiles. Meanwhile, my instinct is that you're going to struggle to back up the ion attack with physical damage, because you'll need to get up to 5 power to run any other weapons, so against late game enemies against whom you need to put like 4 damage into their weapon system to keep them neutralized, I feel like you'd really struggle.
Good question. To start with you don't necessarily use the exact same setup the whole run. For example I might go with something like double Charge Ion + Heavy Laser first, then add the Ion Bomb, then later swap out one of the Charge Ions for the Pike. I think my progression in this run was something like that. Using a drone part every fight is not really an issue, I mostly plan around that anyway on most runs, because being able to use hacking all the time is so good. And you don't need a drone part every fight anyway, especially with the double Charge Ion setup for example. Missile usage is also just not a problem in practice. Ion Bomb hits hard for its missile use, and as I mentioned, I'm not necessarily using it the whole game long. If you're running an ion-stacking setup like double Charge Ion, you also don't just leave them on shields. Once you have a stack on shields, one of them is enough to maintain it, and the other can suppress weapons, so the enemy ship really can't do much at all. For a similar reason, you can run ion + damage setups before you even have "enough" upgrades. For example, double Charge Ion + Pike can run off weapons level 4, stack ion rapidly, and then swap one of them for the Pike. One important idea is that in regular fights, mostly I don't want to use the Ion Bomb on shields. I want to use it on weapons, which is devastating when it lands. It will switch off a lot of weapons, often all of them, for 20 seconds. With these setups there's a lot of flexibility to hack evasion or weapons, or even shields. For example, Charge Ion + Pike Beam + shield hack, hit weapons with the Pike and scatter crew to drop evasion, then land 3 ions into weapons. Now you switched off all their weapons for 15 seconds.
Probably the best way to use this tactic over multiple volleys is starting O2 at 100% and just leaving it off. That gives you a timer for every volley. You can use the "arbitrary time" option at ftl-timing.mikehopley.org/ . The formula for volley N would be (8.1 * N) - 0.9, i.e. 7.2 seconds for the first volley, 15.3 for the second, etc. This will also work with different venting patterns as described in the app documentation. Without the shields buffer against this specific enemy, I now would NOT use the tactic, because blocking the Heavy Laser just opens you up to the Mini Beam hitting shields instead. If the Mini Beam is removed, I would use the tactic.
I forgot -- Kazaaak is also an all-Mantis crew. Thanks Ray. Also I just remembered that "interfere and help the Zoltan ship" is all-Mantis too. - EDIT - There are five events in total with all-Mantis crew, see here: ftl.fandom.com/wiki/Mantis_Ships
I ran into the Zoltan wise man the other day which also gave me an all-Mantis ship. The wiki page on "Mantis Ships" has the full list of exceptions (for any who come back to this video and are curious)
Turns out you don't need to keep the drone "warm", you just need to let it fully recharge before depowering (a second or more). If you do that, it will store its charge until you turn it on. This makes the micro very clean. Thanks to mekloz for that.
Scrap recovery arm is overrated. It's proven that it's unefficient if it was bought in mid sectors and risky in early sectors. Also it does take 1 augment slot, so don't buy it.
i've spent weeks and 30 hours playing FTL with no succesful runs - i watched your video last night and my first attempt the next day i beat it for the first time thanks to your advice. great video man
9:52 honestly kinda wish the sheild drone did this instead; where it would surround the enemy ship and on it's intervals duplicate up to 5 times to reduce the chances of an enemy shot going off. also for it's design just if the 8 + 2 second formula wasn't so bad and just be like 8 seconds consistently or maybe just start at 6 seconds before ramping so you don't need to be frame perect againt heavy lasers with the stealth c. the design is so bad makes long battles easier but requires stalling with both cloaking and hacking to get full use a tool only useful duing in fight repairs. might as well just be an augment Phase Shift when cloak ends you have 2 super shield layers
I think the shield thing needs an asterisk: Upgrade shields early IF you don't have zoltan shields. Zoltan always goes first, and engine with zoltan can make it so you don't need the shields at all.
Yes, there are exceptions but I'm glossing over those in a beginners' guide. Other cases are Stealth cruisers, which don't have shields (weapons buffer for A & C, cloaking-3 for B) and Mantis B, which has two shields already (rush engines-3). I don't actually recommend engine upgrades on Zoltan ships before shield upgrades, that's not the most consistent play. Bad fights (drones, asteroids) will strip your ZS really fast and then you'll regret it. On Zoltan A I rush a weapons buffer then hoard, on Zoltan B I rush the *first* shield then hoard, and on Zoltan C I just hoard. I'll still make sure I have two shields for sector 3. Rock A is another example where I don't rush shields ASAP. On that ship I'm floating 18 scrap for stores, so I can buy a teleporter without selling Artemis. There's a lot of thought that goes into optimising early game strategy for different ships, and again that's not for a beginners' guide. I cover many ideas in more depth here: ftl-ships-guide.netlify.app/
thanks to a rabbit-hole of research (and significant help + brainpower from kajelad), I can (annoyingly, maybe) point out that 29:56 to 30:04 (deleting 2 crew by ending the phase when they are sitting in Cloaking and Doors, and then the clarification that this doesn't work on hard) needs a small qualifier: on hard mode, any crew in Cloaking (or in the empty room between Cloaking and Hacking) at the end of P1 will survive, and will be deposited into the empty room between shields and lasers (empty room between Cloaking and Hacking will go to the empty room between shields and missiles) at the beginning of P2 any crew in the doors room at the end of P1 (even on Hard) will be deleted (or will die, whatever) in P2, the Drone Control room and the empty room between drones and the rest of the ship are "safe" -> they will be transported to the extra rooms flanking shields. the vertical empty room next to drone control (the one that is the mirror of Doors from P1) is "unsafe" -> any crew here at the end of P2 will die
