FTL thread

im not seeing the youtube appeal, its not very exciting to watch if you dont know whats going on. but for all i know its super popular on there, it would shock me to learn that. besides that its ridiculous to hold something like that against a game.
either way, binding of isaac came before this and is way more popular. and before that there is spelunky, though again it was never as popular as binding of isaac.

Mind control and hacking are OP and I love it.

Does it even matter how exciting a game is? It seems to me that appeal of the let's plays are the personalities of the host rather than what's actually being played.

t. Pebble people

Basically this, also:

I like hacking more, it has more duration and control that mind control.

Drones are worse than missiles, far too random. Missiles are second worst weapon.

Defense drones for missiles are pretty reliable actually. And they're great for taking down shields. If I ever chance on them for a decent amount of scrap I'll usually buy a few to ware down a ship while I Ion the shields and then move power to my guns. Unless a later version changed all this.

Drones have a fucking huge DPS at a pretty damn low energy cost if you can disable the enemy shield.
Investing 2 points into your drone bay is also cheaper than what upgrading your weapon bay would cost you, it's a pretty cost effective offensive upgrade, but yeah it has the drawback of shooting random rooms.

You're fucked, op. Might as well restart. Anyway, if you're not playing the advanced edition with a shitton of mods, you're not playing the game.

Defense drones are not a weapon. Offensive drones are what I was talking about. Ioning the shields to use combat drones on a ship can shred it, but never in such a way that damage to your ship is minimalized. Having good ship weapons you can use to take down the enemy ship's weapons is far superior in everyway than watching combat drones shoot empty rooms or already destroyed systems while ignoring the enemy ship's weapons as said weapons continue to damage your ship.

I'm also not a huge fan of ion weapons. The only good one has a cooldown of 4 seconds. The rest are better replaced with a weapon that can lower shield levels if necessary and do damage if not.

It isn't cost effective when you have to repair your ship constantly. You have no control over what the drones target. It is a complete crapshoot in a game that already has a high enough RNG struggle.

You're saying all this like you would only use drones and nothing else. A good balance between weapons and offensive drones and knowing when to implement them is OP honestly. Especially if you get a strong beam weapon for once the shield is down.

Doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is dealing damage and not taking it yourself.

Why invest in drones (other than the defense drone) that may hit a desirable target when I can instead have weapons I can aim to assuredly do so? Why waste power on those drones when instead that power could go to more valuable systems such as hacking, shields, engines, or my ships actual weapons?

Beam drones are the worst of the lot. Totally worth having one just to have it do one damage because it wasted the beam on a single fucking room.

Did you even read what you posted?

But repairing rooms is free user.

Sometimes you might desperately need an extra hand with the ship and drones are good at support. Also boarding bots are good against the flagship's secluded rooms.

Like the other user said. Solid fire rate and relatively simple and cheap to get working. They're like cover fire to keep the other ship under a constant barrage to keep their shields down while you can plan to fire in key points with your actual weapons. They don't consume much power for what they are either. And as the other user said the trade off is random room hits. But a shield hit won't where it hits so it's absolutely viable for that segment of the fight so you're not required to keep them activated. The un-shielded portion of the fight is completely up to the context of the situation however. Where you can pull out some guns to target key points.

The thing is though that if you're even ok on energy you can almost always use both drones and weapons. Assuming I were in a shop with shitty weapons and a good drone I'd usually pick the drone depending on my ship. Shit I even get some use out of the siege drone sometimes.

This guy never got Engi work slaves apparently. I'll admit though if you're good enough you can pretty much avoid having to repair to much all together. Ever since I started playing more aggressively I learned the true value of certain weapons.

I've been playing a lot of this recently andI have a couple questions:
Why is the Zoltan B the best ship in the game?
Why are slugs such fucking kikes?

Repairing your ship hull costs scrap unless you have a repair augmentation or the hull repair drone (which both also usually cost scrap.) Way to be retarded there user.

What's it like being so stupid?
Also, there is no point to drones for "cover fire" when weapons can do the job better.

Say you have your weapon bay at LV 5 already, getting another weapon online, if you have a decent one available would surely cost you more than adding a single attack drone, which does far more damage than the energy it takes too.
They also help you getting through shields, but yeah if you just go for the OP weapons like Flak there's little point to even bother, but hey it's not like the game is full of RNG and sometimes you just have to make do with what resources you get right? :^)

With LV5 weapons you can take care of maximum shields. Why bother spending 75-85 scrap on a drone system, and then an additional 50 scrap on power (assuming you don't just want to juggle power from other systems for the sake of a random ass drone) when you can upgrade shields/engines or some other more useful system?

The only time I get drones is for defense drones. Any other drone schematics I get usually get sold netting more scrap for useful systems.

Even with RNG by the time you need better offense you have usually passed a dozen stores alone that usually carry more useful weapons. Three two power weapons are better than having an offensive drone (which also uses 2 power, minimum.) Assuming all you have are two weapons that fire two shots, and a heavy laser requiring one power you would be better off than relying on a drone that might never hit a vital system in an entire battle. The other weapons lower the shields, and the heavy laser takes the enemy ships weapons offline.

A slow battle is better than one where you are practically guaranteed to suffer hull damage, which is the only real damage that really matters in the first place.

>FUCK
anyone got the best way for editing a save file?

Why do devs make such glaring difficulty shifts with select weapons like this?

I dunno you tell me.
This goes back to lower energy use for a higher fire rate and generally being more convenient for having defense and alternate drones. But you're acting like a spaz so there's no point in taking you seriously.

Because it's usually cheaper then higher level weapons and they come pre-installed on a few ships. And even then you said yourself. Defense drones, hull repair drones and siege drones are all very useful and attack drones come pre-equiped with a drone system last I checked. There's literally no reason not to use them if you happen to chance on a system and have the scrap unless your ship isn't really meant for them. Seriously though Hull repair drones are fucking OP. Getting a drone system for that alone is worth it.

See what I said above. There's plenty of drones available outside of laser drones. Which are extremely minimal on energy use.

This is pretty false actually. Good weapons that are actually worth using that have a better rate of fire aren't very common. And usually cost more energy to get using anyway.
They also usually have shit rate of fire with a long charge time. If you happen to get a fucking Glaive Beam or a Flak I then I would probably take it over a drone system. But how often do you find those?

How bad are you that you can't negate hull damage in a quick battle? Ironically enough the ships that give me the most trouble are Rogue ships with a Drone system.

Flak+Beam is fucking OP. Flak in general even though it's not accurate is such a hull breaker it's not even funny. Does a ton of damage to crew members as well. If I ever get more than 1 Flak I cannon it's usually a gg.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I once lost to his last form when we both had 1 health left.

This is exactly why I don't focus on 1 primary method of damage. If it were me right here I'de fucking jump and run.

Real pity this run. I hard one if not the strongest defenses including that anti ion augment yet look at that fire power, I can only do a bit of damage and that is if I'm lucky. I jumped out of course but even normal rebel ships can take 50% of my hull.

What're your guys' strategy for the final boss? I usually can beat the first form easily but that 2nd phase drone swarm shit kills me almost immediately half the time

Cloak.

Yep. Guns should be a lot cheaper or rewards more plentiful, sometimes you either can't get a weapon setup going or you only get high end weapons with no decent ones available at the shops. Hacking is very finicky as an alternative as it's costly to get online and will dry your drones in no time early. Taking in surrenders for drones with how bad scrap payouts are is simply not viable.

On a side note, no pause is fun.

This.

I'm not a very imaginative man.

Take out the fucking missile as soon as you possibly can in any way possible. If you have a siege drone or a transport system this makes it cake. after that use the best method you can to deal as much damage to the hull as possible. You simply can't win in an attrition method because none of the flagships systems are reliant on the barrage events. Even max shields will be broken through like butter. High dodge chance will negate is maybe but unlikely. You're almost always going to sustain hull damage. Only thing you can do about it is cloak. Also embed related. Fucker basically punched the ship to death.

One job user.

CODEMONKEY

With the way evasion and the Flagship works in this game, you pretty much require cloaking or you're entirely up to luck. The trick is sticking to level 1 cloaking and draining it as soon as it's safe by firing weapons as the power surge clock still ticks even while you're cloaked. If you don't have cloaking you're pretty much fucked unless you got a strong weapon setup with pre-igniter. So, I stand on the base for first phase, take out missiles immediately and focus on the rest. For the second phase stand and wait on the base, endure the first volley of missiles and cloak on the drones, then take out the missiles. For the third phase, I go after the flagship outside the base, cloak the power surge, let them board for as long as I can handle and then get back to the base and deal with the crew, then fight them on the base. Taking out piloting before the zoltan shield goes up again is a good idea as the flagship becomes a sitting duck.

high evade is something i always do, makes things so much easier, just having evade at about 45% will make the flagship easier since all attacks except the laser come in volleys

pls answer ;_;

Took me about 2 weeks of playing the game to realize just how useful and cheap upgrading your engine was. Took a week after that before I actually started to evaluate situations and realize that I didn't always have to fight. Except slave ships. Always fight a slave ship. Free crew members are a fucking god send. If only you could blow up ships after they surrender Would be cooler if doing this gave you a reputation as a back stabbing bastard and punished you by making enemy encounters more common and certain shops wouldn't accept your scrap

Just searched for a profile editor and of course none of them work.
So much for not wasting more hours unlocking shit I unlocked years ago!

What said.
I played it quite a while ago (only on normal) and cloaking was the shit.

Still if you want to do a playthough without cloak, keep in mind that dodge > shields. Going from 3 to 4 layers of shields is expensive as fuck, because you need to buy two upgrades. Furthermore, aside from not doing anything against rockets and bombs, one additional layer doesn't help against the final boss, because he shoots too many damn lasers at once. 51% evasion (all but the last engine upgrade + fully experienced crewmembers in engine room and helm) and 3 layers of shielding is better.
You'll have streaks of bad luck and you'll have streaks of good luck. Such is life with the RNG.

If you have a lot of luck early on (like finding tons of shit you can sell for scrap), get the fourth shield upgrade in addition to your almost fully upgraded engines.

Assuming he has zero slug crew members.

Got the vulcan, pre igniter and autoloader once and I still lost to some serious bullshit

Frag has always been super comfy.

As mentioned before, long range offensive droves are useful to help overwhelm a shield+recharge subsystem. This may help provide openings where lasers or beams (I prefer beams due to accuracy and near instantaneous strikes, although the attack itself lasts longer). Attack timing and weapon cycling (laser bolts following right behind ion charges, or heavy fire following low-powered bolts) is pretty damned important. A drone recapturing module is fantastic with a drone subsystem, especially a super-shield drone. Boarding drones are pretty damned useful for disrupting the enemy crew (esp when you don't have a teleporter), if they are at high skill levels and the Ship's A.I is comparatively sucky.

High leveled weapons are extremely expensive in its cost and required reactor power. I have an unhealthy love for the low powered ion cannon which can be spammed at a relatively high rate when the gunner's skill level is maxed…

Flak usually has long ass charge times, but is damn powerful when it works

Jumping out of battle with an enemy hacking drone destroys it!

Yeah missiles suck in a lot of different ways, but they can do moderate to massive damage to systems/subsystems, punch holes in the hull or set fires (increasing repair times and exposing enemy crew to a hazardous environment), and explode enemy crew to bits. I like to throw caution to the wind by forcing enemy crew to gather in a room, either by damaging a system, a boarding team or mind control, then pairing bombardments with missiles or bombs with timely retreats.

He's pretty shallow tbh. Not much of a personality and does add breaks. It's clear he sees this more as a profession than a hobby which makes me lose interest after a while.

On more than one occasion, I've fapped to a Lanius sitting on my face and using his ass to suffocate me

Fucking pissed tbh. I fucked up hard on 3 of them but 2 were pure bullshit. I had my shield hacked on one while they sent a fucking boarding drone on my weapons while its missiles landed every hit on my teleporter and again on my shield. Was mad.

>not literally violent sex with a mantis

Did it. Went Engi this time because I'm a fag but I got lucky with a Flak I and a stronk fucking laser I wish I could remember the name of. Add that with the default Ion gun and advanced attack drones and a laser defence drone as well as a laser drone (switched to Anti attack drone for second phase) it was more or less a breeze. I was down to 5 hull points because I had no repair items and no repair bases were anywhere near the central base

The most expensive weapons are at most 90 scrap, and they are better than any drone.
Unless you are playing a modded game, there are laser drones and beam drones, neither of which are better than even midtier weapons.
As compared to what? A level II drone? That's what is required to get past even one level of shield unless the drone gets a lucky shot. If your response to that is "your other weapons help" then you already defeated your own point. Those other weapons are better because they can be aimed. Rate of fire only matters for weapons that take longer than 20 seconds in the first place. What you define as a "good" weapon also seems to be pretty retarded, which makes sense since you think drones are "good."
The glaive beam sucks. A halberd with a shield lowering weapon to accompany it is far better.
You are retarded. My point there was that your supposed quick battle with a randomly firing drone will increase the chances of taking damage because the drone is not firing on vital fucking systems. A slower battle is not desirable, but it is better than one where a fucking retarded drone leaves the enemy ship's weapons active the entire battle.
And you called me bad. Hacking or WEAPONS YOU CAN AIM would alleviate this problem. Ditch the drones for once and maybe you would find out.

You know you can use both right? It's an option. And again defence drones are top tier.

And? Like I said they deal damage over time and share damage along with weapons. Even mid-early game you can distribute power and get an effective strategy going.

A level 1 drone can cost up to 2 energy points to use. If your focusing on high damage weapons then they will likely take the same or 3 or 4. Assuming you had 3 Flak I cannons and 1 attack drone but only had 5 or 4 energy on it then a drone would absolutely be handy in this situation. And even then 3 Flak I's and a laser drone to take out the ships Hull is very fucking useful. You don't see to understand that their main job is to reduce Hull over time. Not deal damage purely to sectioned rooms.

You suck faggot fucking fight me.
Empirically wrong to somebody who doesn't know how to volley correctly and drop a shield jut in time to lay a beam down. Gitgud scrub.

It reduces a shield so you can? Are you genuinely stupid enough that you think that I'm implying that I would only focus on using drones only with no weapons?

If you're using drones to the point where this happens you're a bad player period. Nobody said using drones and only drones was a viable method. But it probably could be if you wanted to play with a bit of a hindrance. I've seen some fun runs where the player just boosts everything in shields and engine and watches their drones go to work. It actually works if you use them effectively and are lucky enough to find enough drone types to make it work.
You've obviously never fucking played the added content with drones that shoot down hack dockers and missiles and have a shield booster drone that makes it near impossible to remove shields while they send a fucking boarding drone on your ship with a laser drone slowly chipping you down along with their 1 ion cannon that fucks your shields up. Stacked drones can be fucking OP and you're bullshitting if you think otherwise.

Defense drones are good, and hull repair is good too if you get it for free.
They deal randomly targeted damage which is my entire point. It is far better to replace them with a guarantee.
3 flak Is wouldn't even need a drone at all. You should be able to cripple critical systems with that much firepower, and then "reducing hull over time" doesn't even fucking matter. The enemies hull will fall if you can damage them period. There is no special reward for doing it a little faster with a drone.
Half the ships with drones I encounter have anti-drone drones anyway.
Slow charge, heavy energy cost, easy to bring down if weapons are damaged by even one bar. A halberd is far better because you can accompany it with other good weapons. You don't even need the "top tier" weapons that much, and in fact the only one I bother with is the vulcan and that's also has many of the problems I just listed. No wonder you think drones are so good with their 2-3 energy usage. You think the "good" weapons take up 4.
After I just fucking said to do that with a halberd. At least follow the conversation competantly if you want to put on such a pathetic front of being good.
No, I never even hinted at that. I already said that if your response is "the weapons I use with the drone" then you already defeated your own argument. Those weapons are better and the drone is a waste.
Continue your strawman all you like.
You mean mods.
Also stacked drones can be OP, but investing in that is a retarded waste of resources.

You can exploit these by powering hacking down and back up. Bit of a pain to pull with level 2 defense drones, but still possible. Anyway, drones fall flat by late game unless you got really good synergy with your weapons. Even then, it's still a bit of a gamble.

Boarding, incineration or asphyxiation are the superior methods. When you kill the enemy crew without destroying the ship, you get much more and much higher quality rewards.

You buy them on the spot if you see them honestly. Makes the Flagship a fucking cake walk.
You don't get separate damage is mine. And hull damage is what the game ultimately comes down to in the end.
You act like you wouldn't want one anyway if given the choice.
This is assuming you have 3 fully functional Flak I's ready. In any situation an attack drone or anti projectile drone would still be helpful.
You can shoot them with good timing or just take out drones since they're usually the first to go. Hacking also negates this. But yea they suck, they're also helpful to have on your ship though so take it what it's worth.
3 fucking damage per room. Can kill ships in a single swipe.
A Glaive beam is all you need if you can bring their shields down. Drones do this and Ion's do this. No different than using a Halberd.
9 fucking hull damage and excessive damage to systems IS a good weapon. You're just not using it because you like to spread shit. As you say, if you're getting shot at to have your weapons taken down you're doing a poor job. I usually keep an Engi in my weapons room as I find it to be the most important system to keep functioning. I will say that Glaive beam has little place early game but even then seeing one take out a ship in 1 go is fucking spectacular. You need to stop listening to meta strategies and start using weapons the way they were meant to be used. They can fucking demolish if you're good enough.
Point is that if you're going to use that method a Glaive beam is infinitely (3 extra hull damage and a near guarantee system destruction) better. If you get this shit with pre-igniter, Ion's and a Zoltan shield if you're on a luck roll the battle is essentially already over. Shit the first 2 are pretty much OP until the final sectors and the Flagship.
My argument was never that weapons didn't need to be used with drones though.
Except for the reasons I presented earlier. Cheaper and added defense and alternative drones. Your only argument here is for attack drones. Of which there's maybe 4 or 5 in the whole game. All of which are useful in their own context.
Continue goalpost moving all you like. First it was just drones in general now it's attack drones. Unless you want to actually say that anti projectile drones or hull repair drones are useless which you can go right ahead. Those may be the most game breaking things in the game though so you'll have to explain how in depth.
This has happened to me. Explain a single thing I described that's not in the vanilla game.
It's overall cheaper than upgrading a weapons energy usage to +8 along with the needed power cells and weapon cost. Assuming you don't get lucky and find them.
You use what's conveniant at the time and maybe get lucky with some stacked items. Optimal is whatever you can bang together in a decent fashion to fight an ass fucker of a boss.
You can exploit a lot of things in the game to work to your favor. I wish they would remove this one though because it makes the specific drone a bit of a pushover. I can't defend it but I don't think it's a good function of the game so I don't need to. It's a shit exploit.

It's a necessary exploit for a poorly thought out mechanic.

Thought you were the same user my bad. But not really no. A good part of the game is its ability to change up the gameplay by rendering a function useless or less effective. I think removing the ability to hack until you've dealt damage to the drone or the drone station is a more organic and fair way of doing it. Especially the former because you always feel like a badass when you nail a drone down.

When you lack handouts and shops up to sector 3 to prepare your weapons you're forced to rely on hacking as your primary offensive tool. On hard you can't afford to skip too many fights or you fall behind.

Thing is if you can always run. Even on hard you might have to make this decision. Sometimes you get shit that's just the counter to all of your methods of attack. The most basic advice for this is to just assess risks ahead of time and try not to be completely powerless when 1 system goes down. The game is kinda built around not doing that.

Captain's Edition has some soundtracks that rival the base game's.

Realistically that's a 50/50 chance. Sometimes the game won't give you shit, sometimes the game will shove a dozen different bombs up your ass with no missiles, sometimes you'll get a free flak and halberd, sometimes you have to make due with hacking for the lack of weapons. It's manageable on easy and normal (or depending on how solid the initial setup of your ship is), but hard is brutal with scrap rewards. You can postpone level 2 shields and evasion or cloaking to afford weapons early, and even then you have to pray the stores have decent offerings or you'll get some slow, disjointed weapon setup that leaves you vulnerable for the first enemy volley, but then you're soaking up damage and possibly losing before even hitting sector 3. Also, by going out of your way to check all possible stores on a sector you're giving up precious scrap. Either you get a solid start or a solid middle or you're fucked. Running away every time you're guaranteed to take too much hull damage simply doesn't work. And that's why something as common as defense drones nullifying a resource draining system so hard is silly.

Rockmen space theme will always stick with me as the games most "iconic" songs that stand out. It's really a good pump up song for battle. Perfect for the Rockmen.

I really think there should just be a 4rth item in the shop poos sometimes for hard only. You can sometimes get completely fucking jousted in a run but often it tends to be my fault. I've had runs where I barely scrape by for 80% of the run thinking maybe I'll just get to the flagship and die to be able to say I got far enough only to find a god tier weapon or item that would get my on a roll and somehow manage to take down the flagship by the skin of my teeth. The RNG to this game is its worst and best element. Could use a few touch ups and maybe more space backgrounds but otherwise I can't complain. I will say as a good word of advice is to never skimp out on slowing the Rebel fleet down a little. It's usually worth the few extra jumps of leveled scrap.

FTL is the only game that I have a legitimate love/hate relationship with. It's so easy for your run to get screwed over yet it gives you just enough room to romp that you get into it right before it breaks you.
I've been less stressed out playing Nethack blind than I have playing FTL.

Yes, Rockmen Battle is the most iconic one.

I actually have the pangs to come back to this game. I stopped after beating it on hard with every ship. Guess I'll have to captain's edition.

I don't think I want to bother with hard mode much though, my most fun runs were on normal.

I never once said that defense drones or hull drones are bad, and the context was always drones being used offensively. The glaive beam does a lot of damage yeah, but its power usage never really validates that damage since by the time it can really shine you need to lower 3-4 layers of shields anyway. Even if you are doing one damage per room, for 4 bars of energy that's not a good investment to me. I prefer to keep weapons down unless those weapons are of little threat or less of a threat than some other system. A weapon that can bring shields down and deal damage is a far more optimal choice. I tend to sell the glaive when I get it unless I do not have a good assortment of weapons.

Attack drone and a simple laser weapon that fires at least 2 shots should usually get the job done. I've landed a Glaive bean on the Flagship simply by timing my volleys. The beam actually eats through a shield at reduced damage as well. If you can use that on the shield system you might get away with tanking its shields in 1 pass.
You're doing 3. Typo?
Honestly it depends on the situation. If they got a fuck load of missiles or something I might consider it but usually I just deal a much hull damage as possible and take their captains chair down to make evade 0. I then just smash them with a Flak or an equally shield destroying weapon and attack directly on their hull. If the ship is dead before it can get through 2 volleys it's not worth taking the shields down. Especially if you have a decent evade. Shields are honestly overrated on taking down with many ships since by end game they just have way to much system health to justify the time spent on it. By the time you widdle it down it down you're using dealing with about 20 other things killing you. It's better to just deal overall hull damage while taking down key. It all goes to strategy however. I feel like a quicker ship death is more important than removing basic systems. I'de rather just wail on them with 0 evade.