FTL: Advanced Edition

[ImperiousLeader]

Managed my first victory at Normal (yes, I had been playing on Easy). Won with the Red-Tail, quite a sweet ship.

And yes, still awaiting AE. Or at least more news, like a release date.

[Draconi Redfir]

Good news everyone! I've finally unlocked the zoltan ship B! i did not however defeat the boss with the class A variant. no telepoters yasee.

Still. just need to unlock the rock, slug, and crystal ships and i've got the set!

[Fargazer]

There is officially a release date of April 3rd!

[GPuzzle]

Sweet!

On FTL related news, I started playing it 8 months or so ago, I got several ships (including the Crystal B) before beating the flagship and only now I've defeated the flagship with the Mantis B! God, I love that ship.

Also, I didn't play through Easy. I started playing on Normal.

[Fjolnir]

My only question is how will the clone bay interact with engi medibot dispersal?

[Fargazer]

My only question is how will the clone bay interact with engi medibot dispersal?

I have no idea, but its out, so I wager we'll soon find out!

[Toastkart]

My first foray into the advanced edition ended in glorious disaster. My second run through made it to the boss, who has received a substantial upgrade. He immediately stuck a hacking drone on my oxygen room and no amount of effort on my part to destroy his hacking module succeeded for long enough to stave off asphyxiation for most of the crew. Managed to beat the first phase, but lost 75% of my health and all but two crewman.

The only new weapons I was able to try out was a flak cannon 2, which was nice but had a huge recharge, and a charge laser, which seemed to suck. Not sure what it was supposed to do.


Also, the advanced edition seems to have broken my mods, the only one of which I really care about at this point though is the high res backgrounds. No luck in getting it to work so far, but I'll keep fiddling with it.

[Fargazer]

I gave the Lanius a try, and so far I've been doing poorly. The cloning room is a bit odd at first, since I'm so used to healing everyone before jumping, and now I can't!

Zoltan explode on death now. That should be interesting.

[AmberVael]

Yeah, the new ship is kinda poor... too much disabling, not enough actually killing in its build.

I do like a lot of the additions though. I tried out a cloning/boarding build, and it was working pretty nicely, especially with mind control thrown in the mix. I was too greedy and pushed for it too early though, and so kinda messed up my run and crashed and burned.

I've tried Mind Control in two different runs- I don't think it is good on a standard ship, since it costs so much to do and has a short duration. You're better off with something else. On a boarding based ship though, it can do some serious work; you effectively remove one opponent and gain one extra ally, which can make a serious difference.

I also managed to get two flak I guns on a zoltan ship, and it absolutely murdered everything. Flak guns are terrifying if you use them right- generally, just time them to take out enemy shields and deal extra misc damage to the ship, while using more precision weaponry to disable the most troublesome functions of your enemy. The plus about flak guns is that they fire so many shots for so cheap, which is why they are good for taking out shields.

[GPuzzle]

I gave the Lanius a try, and so far I've been doing poorly. The cloning room is a bit odd at first, since I'm so used to healing everyone before jumping, and now I can't!

Zoltan explode on death now. That should be interesting.

Zoltans explode on death now? Dear Lord, I'm thinking about getting a nearly endless supply of missiles, a Heal Bomb, a Clone Bay, a DNA bank and a teleporter and go kamikaze on the enemies.

[Tengu_temp]

I love flak guns. So amazing at breaking shields. Hacking is difficult to use, but can make all the difference when used correctly. The jury's out on the lasers that shoot the faster the more they fire - they are potent in theory, but hard to coordinate with other weapons in practice.

Mind control has three uses in my book. First, if you upgrade it (especially to level 3), the MCed enemy is powerful enough to kill one or two other crew members. Second is to mess with systems - mind control keeps enemies from repairing the damaged system, and if you MC the pilot, suddenly their ship is unable to dodge for some time. Third, you can use it to counter the enemy's own MC.

I don't like the cloning bay, charged weapons or the Lanius ship. The ship seems to have been made in order to showcase as many new functions as possible, but on its own it's rather lacking in basic functionality.

I noticed the game got more difficult in general. Since FTL started to get a bit too easy for me, I guess that's pretty good.

[Lunix Vandal]

Just won with the Lanius B -- as AmberVael noted, Mind Control is awesome for boarding layouts, which the Shrike definitely is. Starting with 2 Lanius, a Teleporter, and Mind Control lets you start boarding almost immediately to great effect. Sure, you can't full-heal after each fight, but the experience penalty for cloning is small enough that dedicated boarders will make it back quickly. Your starting Advanced Flak is just icing on the cake. (It's a Flak Mk I with slightly smaller spread, 8 seconds per shot, and that only needs 1 power.)

It also helped that I found two additional Flak Is, Breach Bomb, and a Prefire Chamber. Shotgun the system of choice for up to 9 damage and instakill their Medbay, then park an asphyxiation-immune boarding party in the ruins? Beautiful.

Spoiler: Flagship

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If you can deal with the addition of the Hacking Module in Stage 1, the Flagship is still highly vulnerable to having its crew torn apart, leaving only the mook in the Burst Laser pod to stop the ship's AI from taking over.

Spoiler: Flagship STAGE 3

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Stage 3 has Mind Control on top of its normal mass-boarder strategy. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Charged weapons have two purposes, I think -- with autofire off, they're similar to the Burst Lasers, designed to overwhelm a target's defenses with a single massive volley. With autofire on, however, they have faster fire rate than most other single-shot weapons -- Autofire Charge Lasers are comparable to packing two (desynchronized) Basic Lasers in one weapon slot, and Charge Ions are just fast enough to stunlock a system indefinitely (and for less energy than an Ion Blast II).

[IthilanorStPete]

Downloaded the Advanced Edition last night. Haven't played it yet, but it looks interesting. I like having alternate ways to unlock the various ships; one thing I noticed is that I immediately unlocked the Mantis ship. Handy.

[Grif]

Good lord, flak cannons are a horror if you're just barely scrapping by.

[tyckspoon]

Oh god ion pulses wtf.

[Weimann]

So, question, did the ships reset or something? Because I could have sworn I had more than I currently do. But it's been a while since I played, so I might just be making things up.

[Lunix Vandal]

Good lord, flak cannons are a horror if you're just barely scrapping by.

Yup. I find they're maybe the only weapon that's more important to cloak away from than missiles.

Other things I've noticed that are maybe not obvious:
- Fire no longer consumes takes much longer to consume the air in the room it's in. This means you (almost) have to either vent it out or have crew extinguish it, or else it will spread indefinitely.
- Ion lockouts no longer block repairs -- which means continually ionizing a broken system is much less useful.
- The cooldowns on Hack and Mind Control are considered ion lockout, and don't start until the hack/control duration is finished. If you interrupt a hack/MC by ionizing the system, be ready for the AI to immediately reactivate it as soon as the ion wears off.
- The passive heal-on-jump from the Clone Bay doesn't require power, and always works to its maximum effect. Even if you don't have the spare reactor power to run it at full (or even to keep the thing turned on), it's well worth the 80 scrap to max out the heal.

And some Hack pointers:
- If your crew isn't combat-capable, hack the teleporter on an enemy boarding ship for an easy return-to-sender button. As a bonus, the hack's lockdown effect will then delay the boarders from manning stations on their ship. Since most enemy ships only have a Level 1 teleporter, the hack will be nearly recharged by the time they send another party over.
- When facing a highly durable target that's also fairly dodgy (*cough*Flagship*cough*), hack the pilot or engines to reduce their Evasion to 0 and all but guarantee that your next volley will hit. If your gunner is experienced enough to reduce your cooldowns to about 8 or 9 seconds,* you can fire two auto-hit volleys in one full-power hack.
- If you're boarding (or using antipersonnel weapons), hacking the Medbay can be quite helpful. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that an intact Medbay is the worst place for boarders to fight, an intact hacked Medbay is a defender's nightmare, especially if you add the extra damage output of Mantis or Lanius to the mix.
- Activating the hack on the Clone Bay will permanently kill anyone who was waiting to respawn -- handy if you don't otherwise have a way to bring it offline, but you do need to pay attention to when crewmen die so you don't waste the cooldown.
- Activate a hacked Mind Control system to immediately end an active MC. Unlike Ion, this will cause the MC to go on lockout for its full normal duration. Hacking their Cloak or Hack system works similarly -- it will end an active cloak/hack and lock it out until your Hack is nearly ready again.
- Hacking Weapons (or Drones) can be useful when they have something scary (Flak, Missiles, Burst Laser III, multiple Anti-Ship Drones), but loses its value quickly if you have a strong enough burst to knock the system offline and/or have a Cloak and high Evasion. In my opinion it's preferable to hack the Shields or Pilot in order to make my burst stronger, rather than to delay theirs for a few extra seconds. This is especially true on the Flagship, since hacking one weapon pod does nothing to the others.
- Always check for an active Defense Drone before you launch a Hacking Drone -- like Boarding drones (and the new Ion Boarders), they can be shot down before they attach, wasting the drone part. Once it's attached, though, it seems nothing can remove it, and stacking on Zoltan shields after-the-fact (via the new Shield drone or Flagship shenanigans) won't block your hack.

... Yeah, hacking is pretty great.

*10-second and faster weapons (e.g. Flak I, Dual Laser, Basic Lasers, and Heavy (Pierce) Lasers) can do this with just a max-level gunner -- simply land the drone and wait for things to charge, then pause and fire everything simultaneously. 11- and 12-second weapons (Burst Laser II, Artemis missiles, and the two-shot Charge Laser variant) additionally require either the reload-speed ship augmentation or some extra micromanagement so that the hack starts just before the game rolls for the hit or miss.

[AmberVael]

So, question, did the ships reset or something? Because I could have sworn I had more than I currently do. But it's been a while since I played, so I might just be making things up.

Mine didn't. I still have all the stuff I unlocked.

[Impnemo]

Zoltan suicide vests do 25 damage, at least in same square.

Oh and the charge laser? Youd think it would work well with the pre-igniter right? It turns on the first charge of the weapon, not the full thing. Very disappointed.

[Gnoman]

Is it just me, or do a lot of ships have a really nasty shield that they didn't have before? Was fighting a ship (forget which kind) in sector 3 earlier, and it took almost 20 minutes to take it down because I couldn't get past the shield reliably (to the point where any yellow damage to the shield tended to be fixed by the time I got a second volley through) using a burst laser and an Ion Charger. The only time I got through was when I managed to time a full shot from the charger right before the laser hit.

[Starsign]

Advanced edition feels like it's tightened Normal's difficulty up. Usually I can get somewhere but now I sometimes see ships with three shields by Sector 3. Trying to beat this on Hard is going to take a long, long time and a very good plan on how to handle the upgraded Flagship.

On another note, I have got Engi C and Zoltan C. (never again will I play that wreck known as Engi B ) Engi C might actually be my new favorite ship. It requires very careful manipulation of your drone supply, but having hacking from the get go alongside a functional weapon setup is really nice. And with Defense Scrambler, progress is no longer suddenly halted by a Defense Drone. Unfortunately I still haven't completed Advanced mode, even on easy. Anyone have advice for Engi C builds? I feel like capitalizing on Defense Scrambler for another drone is a good idea, but what other drones are good for attacking outside of a Combat Drone?

Zoltan C on the other hand... is flat out garbage. Might actually be the worst ship in the game, no joke. In theory it looks promising: Engi ship for Zoltans with a Battery Backup. In practice, well... first the ship only has 2 power, which means you need to upgrade immediately (and you need about 90 scrap just to get a total of 5 power) or switch between your ion charger and beam drone. The other problem is that your ion charger generally needs awhile to charge if you want to take down anything past 1 shield (and that's if it doesn't miss) and then hope the Beam drone will hit something helpful like weapons or pilot. Combine this with a requirement for luck better than "good" and you have a ship which can't kill anything in Sector 1. The ship does have potential to be absolutely awesome later (get a crew teleporter, abuse the clone lab to make suicide Zoltan boarders), as is it doesn't look like it can even get there. While Engi B and Slug B have a half chance of functioning past Sector 1, this ship won't make it PAST Sector 2 without an insanely good RNG item pickups.

[Ailurus]

So, got my first AE win. Red-tail, final weapon config of 2 ion blasters, burst-laser mk 2, and a fire bomb. Systems were Teleport, Hack and Mind Control. Crew was 2 rocks, 2 mantis, 1 Lanius, 2 human, 1 zoltan.

Hacking and MC both make taking over a ship via boarding easier. Upgraded and combined, they're enough to take over some ships without even sending the borders over. The downside to this combo, though, is that skipping both drones and cloak makes late-game missiles really, really scary. Can still be dealt with by hacking the weapons room and storming it with boarders and mind-controlled crew, but its still scary.

And some Hack pointers:
- If you're boarding (or using antipersonnel weapons), hacking the Medbay can be quite helpful. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that an intact Medbay is the worst place for boarders to fight, an intact hacked Medbay is a defender's nightmare, especially if you add the extra damage output of Mantis or Lanius to the mix.
- Activate a hacked Mind Control system to immediately end an active MC. Unlike Ion, this will cause the MC to go on lockout for its full normal duration. Hacking their Cloak or Hack system works similarly -- it will end an active cloak/hack and lock it out until your Hack is nearly ready again.

Followups on these two, since MC and Medbays are my favorite targets for hacking.

A fully-upgraded hacking station dropped on a med-bay will outright kill anything except a crystal or rock (and maybe even those too, just didn't have a chance to catch a full-health crystal or rock inside a medbay). A hacked medbay is essentially a humanoid-sized roach motel - rebels check in, they don't check out.

As for mind control, that just made me grin once I realized all it does. Not only does hacking their mind control free your guy, but it also mind controls one of their guys at the same time. So, you can end up with a boarding party of your guys plus two of theirs (your own mind control station, plus their hacked one) if you time it right.

[Jasdoif]

My only question is how will the clone bay interact with engi medibot dispersal?

Having just attained the combination...the dispersal doesn't do anything. The hover tip for the dispersal even says it "requires powered Medbay to function."

[Silverraptor]

So how does one unlock the C variants of ships. I have all but crystal ship unlocked with both variants, and this 3rd one is annoying me multiplied by each ship I have, and you get the point. Especially now when there isn't an obvious "how to unlock" instructions when I briefly looked through it.

[Jasdoif]

So how does one unlock the C variants of ships. I have all but crystal ship unlocked with both variants, and this 3rd one is annoying me multiplied by each ship I have, and you get the point. Especially now when there isn't an obvious "how to unlock" instructions when I briefly looked through it.

To unlock a C variant, you need to get to the final sector using the B variant of that ship. (There are unlock tips if you hover-over the outline in the ship list, but I wouldn't call a hover-over "obvious"....)

[Silverraptor]

Thanks. Now I know what to shoot for.

And I was reading the debate about the stealth ship and it feels a little embarrassing to say this, but the stealth ship is my favorite ship. With max engines, cloak, and pilot and engine crew at max level, and I would get my evasion at 120% (No, I don't know how that makes sense). It was perfect for when a large laser and missiles barrage from the enemy to just immediately say "Nope, try again."

As for the shields on the thing, I don't think too hard about getting them to be counterintuitive. I saw it as an invisible ship weaving in and out and the shield blocks that 1 lucky shot that hits you as they fire randomly into space. Place, those beams are annoying.

I don't remember the exact layout, but I had one stealth ship, forgot which variant, that had 2 glaive beams and some kind of ion weapon, blaster or bomb. Max engine, pilot, 2 shields, stealth weapons augmentation, pre-ignition weapons and reloaded augmentation (I sold the sensors in sector 7 close to the beacon to jump to sector 8) and that was a scary little slicer and dicer ship. I beat the boss on normal, all 3 stages, and only took 4 hull damage. It required a lot of micro, but since I play both lol and sc2, it was easily in my management. And it was a beast to cut ships up like they were butter and you a hot invisible knife of instant death!

I used to play this game religiously way back when. But its been so long since I have, I'm glad they added more content. But I'm disappointed there is no multiplayer feature. I feel like they could easily add something for 1v1 where each choose a certain ship, get fixed amount of scrap, 3-5 shop random shop screens, and see which person has the better ship. It may not be perfect, but it could've had potential for fun.

[Lunix Vandal]

So I just found the Chain Vulcan and holy cow is it awesome. Starts as a single-shot, 4-power-requirement laser with 11.1 charge time ... but from the sixth shot on it fires every 1.1 seconds, before gunner and augmentation bonuses. "Enough to bring down even the toughest shields" indeed -- my Zoltan B likely would have killed the Flagship if the Hack Drone had landed anywhere other than my Weapons System (and then by freak accident perfectly staggered the Hack and Cloak to more or less permanently lock out the rest of my guns). It was a long, slow death by a hundred-some-odd missiles. Can you imagine having two Chain Vulcans? DO WANT.

Related note: If you ever see an enemy ship with what looks like a three-barreled minigun (usually Sector 6+ pirates or rebels), absolutely do not let their weapons system remain intact for more than 30 seconds. You will regret it.

[Blackdrop]

Interestingly, the Federation cruisers can now mount the stealth drive. The best part is the Artillery Beam charges and fires while the cloak is activated, and doesn't seem to drain the cloak any.

[Tengu_temp]

After beating the game with Slug A equipped with the default weaponry, chain laser and flag gun II, I must say that I like chain weapons now. They just require careful use, but their versatility cannot be underestimated.

This was also my first run on the final boss without a mind control system, and I must say - I think mind control is more important than a stealth system now, just to counter the stage 3 mind control. Otherwise it can seriously mess you up.

Also, invader drones are evil - they can stunlock crew long enough for them to suffocate if it's a room with a breach. And they cause one by entering, so...

[Thiyr]

- Fire no longer consumes the air in the room it's in. This means you have to either vent it out or have crew extinguish it, or else it will spread indefinitely.

Actually, experience I had yesterday disagrees with that. I had a weapon system fire in an enemy ship which got extinguished despite them having no crew above 5 health, while their oxygen system was up. I also noticed that if oxygen is off, burning rooms run out of oxygen faster than their unburned counterparts. maybe they tweaked the numbers?