Sector one, and somewhat two, is based on a lot of luck with certain ship builds. No shields? Better hope you don't run into beam weaponry. But then again, in just about every game ever made, your survival will depend on luck, and by the time you've invested a significant amount of time into a run of FTL you have had the time to invest against RNG fuckery. For example, to make up for the inability to guarantee a run in with a shop, I start building up for facing the flagship around sector five. The early sectors are all about high risk ships dedicated to getting as much scrap as possible, mainly by boarding, and storing flagship critical equipment in the storage. To prevent a single critical system from being put offline by a hacking drone or an absurdly lucky missile shot, invest in redundancy by upgrading systems more then needed, or having multiple offensive options for each type of ship. Of course it is still always possible to have a hacking drone down your weapons, keeping you from breaking though a zoltan supershield fast enough to get your own hacking drone, or your teleporters, or your bombs, or your drone onto the enemy ship before they land several hits on your weapon system THROUGH 50% evasion and a defense drone. I still call hacks on that one run