I had my first win yesterday! Well, on EASY, mind, but that's fine. I'll get better as I go!

I also unlocked the stealth ship that run, and ALMOST got the zoltan cruiser. It was a good run!

I started with the red-tail, and grabbed the boarding teleporter early on. Lucked into a rock crewman, and hired another at a store, and the first 5 sectors were lootapalooza thanks to my ace rockin' team! Then I lost them... it was a choice of letting them die taking out the helm and scuttle my chance at the stealth cruiser (since the rebel fleet was gonna engulf that area ahead of schedule if the automated drone got away) or saving them. Goodbye Mike. Goodbye Stalic. You will be missed!

On the plus side, shortly afterwards I was able to recruit two mantises, and they filled in the niche nicely!

I also had enough scrap to grab the basics... Drones, cloaking device, and four really nice weapons. A burst laser III was a lucky find, as well as a halberd beam. But I also grabbed two hermes missile launchers for the end fight, and I'm glad I did!

Add-ons were... Long-range scanners, pre-igniter, and drone recovery arm. I was stockpiling missiles and drones for the endfight, too.

I ROCKED the flagship. In the first stage, I used the hermes + a pre-igniter and popped out two ship assault I drones. Beamed the mantii over to take out the missile launcher of DOOM, and focused on keeping the shields down. It died fast! Had to switch the drones off at one point to teleport my away crew back.

The second stage was trickier... Especially since I'd switched to beams against it. (Had to. It had defense drones.) Still, the same tactics worked just fine. Had a panic moment when a lucky, early missile knocked out my teleporter, and I had to frantically defend while focusing fire on their shields and weapons, but once things were back I was able to selectively cripple weapons, cloak the drone swarm, and inflict a fair amount of damage. The breaching drones were annoying, but with strengthened doors I ended up ignoring the ones that landed in non-vital areas and that worked surprisingly well.

Got through it at half hull. After closing the breaches and repairing, I jumped to a repair beacon... Only to find out that I'd misread the screen, and jumped to the place the flagship was going!

I thought I was dead. Fortunately, switching back to missiles and keeping the drones going did the trick. Once their missile launcher was out, good shields, average engines, and pinpoint cloaking kept me alive. Was actually pretty easy.

Now when I get the chance, I'll have the stealth ship AND the fed cruiser to try out! Quite happy, overall.

Once I've unlocked all the optional ships, I'll muster up my courage and try playing on Normal... :D