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[Kagus]

Personally, I feel that the Leto/Artemis launchers are nastier early on, simply because they're too damned fast and they're so common.  Plus, at 1 energy each, they're difficult to shut down unless you've got a really nice firepower starting package or it's a ship with really low energy.  You start getting so much attrition damage after a while.  It's why I've taken to prioritizing my engines for crewmember placement (that, and it means that they level up alongside the pilot, which makes for a very nice curve).

[Jim Groovester]

I think you're wrong about the Basilisk losing to weak enemies.  There are some ships you can't possibly kill early on, but it also has possibly the best starting defenses in the game (two shields and an defense drone - that makes it virtually untouchable for a good while).  That means you can just run away from Zoltans and Drones, and still come out ahead because you're boarding everyone else.

One bomb/solar flare to your engines or helm and suddenly you're a giant punching bag.

If they have a crew you can kill them, but you might not always have a ship to come back to. Or a ship with oxygen, as is usually the case.

The Basilisk is among the best of the starting ships but it is ridiculously vulnerable to certain specific situations that aren't completely uncommon.

[GlyphGryph]

Worst sector one ships are beam/ion combos. Even if you play it smart and drop your shields to let the ion go through, you are still playing with fire. Sometimes literally.

[monk12]

Well that was just the most "screw you" weapon that popped into my head, I guess it wouldn't be as bad in sector 1, but the point remains - you get beat up too badly (if not by missiles then by drones or beams or whatever) and it's just a downward spiral of never being able to afford any upgrades because you spent all your scrap on repairs.

Don't repair your hull in Sector 1 unless you're literally down to your last few points. Let it run down to red, in my experience it's way more important to have the scrap for that first shop. If the first shop is a wash (drones with no drone control and shitty augment selection is basically the only combo you really can't make use of off the top of my head) then buy some shield and the power for it and maybe do some basic repairs just so you can limp into the Sector 2 shop. Pretty much all of the base ships are good enough to make it that far, most are good into Sectors 3 and 4 (though obviously some ships suffer from the "string of hard counters" problem that's hard to dodge without long range scanners.) If you have the astounding bad luck to have the same combo in the first two shops in addition to lacking the good fortune of picking up a weapon or something through a random event, then yeah, that run will come down to whether you can dodge your way to the next Sector shop with enough scrap to buy something.

I suppose my point is that bad starting luck is plenty to make the game very difficult and prevent a high score outright, but it's another order of magnitude to have that luck persist long enough to make the game flat unwinnable.

[Kagus]

Woo!  Well, I set out in the rock type B to try and get the crystal ship (didn't even pretend to give me a chance, sector map was unwilling), but instead I managed to unlock the mantis cruiser!

Damn fool KazaaakplithKilik hid himself waay on the far side of the map in one of the very last beacons...  It's only because I made an effort to get as many stops as possible that I wound up finding him before moving on.  Had to put in a rebel fight for it, but I consider that as being worth it.

...especially seeing as I'd gotten hilariously lucky and was stocked up with an absolutely monstrous amount of firepower, along with cloak, teleporter, defense drone and the rest.  Needless to say, another boss smashed (no damage taken, either).


Time to make a mantis fool of myself!

EDIT:  Wow.  First run with the Gila Monster, I make a jump and find an optional drone event.  Didn't want to bother with it, so I jumped again.  Another optional drone event.  Then a blank jump.

And then a drone near a star, with an Artemis launcher to smash my oxygen to bits and an ion bomb to disable my engines so I could neither charge the jump nor avoid more Artemis missiles.

And then the solar flare took out my door system.


Yep, time fer a restart...

[Urist Imiknorris]

I just surgically dissected the rebel flagship with the Red-Tail. Fun fact: With a pre-igniter, two Breacher Bomb Mk. IIs (and a ton of religiously-hoarded missiles) and two dual lasers, one can effortlessly kill every crewman in the ship's main area. Just toss breachers at their medbay until it drains of air and they stop trying to fix it, then aim your bombs at wherever the crew are until they're all dead (except the guy on the triple heavy laser). Then bomb out their shields and laser it to death. For round two bomb their drone bay immediately, and when round three comes along it's basically helpless.

I think that was the easiest fight against that thing I've ever had. I was just sort of basking in the fact that I had destroyed every system except doors, sensors, and laser cannon in the first fight - I only ended it when I realized that the lone crewman was running out of air.

Of course, I'm one of those pussies who disables rebel fleet pursuit because I want to explore everything.

EDIT: It's also infinitely satisfying when a hostile boarding party teleports into your medbay full of mantises.

[Kagus]

Just had a Basilisk win against the flagship, and I am really starting to see the glaring weaknesses that the boss has.  Still though, that's kinda the whole point...  Taking on a brute like that in his own game should be an insurmountable challenge.  That's why you're supposed to use the force and send a blast down that one unprotected exhaust vent, and...  No, wait, different thing...

Basilisk was really quite fun, because you get to see just what a change having a four-person boarding party is.  Not once over the course of every event and every shop did I find a bomb weapon (there was a pegasus missile launcher at the start, but that was it), so I thought medbays would be a big issue...  Then I discovered that when you have four elite mantises (or just two mantises and two rockmen as it was for a while) in a room together, they're capable of overpowering a crew to the point that the medbay will be full of recovering soldiers and the rest of the crew won't be able to pack in, so they just stand and die.  Other times, the DPS is so great that they can't even make it out the door before they just fall dead to mantis phlegm.


But to point out how susceptible the boss is to boarders, when I was trying out the Nesasio first time around, I wound up winning thanks to my elite boarding team...  This "elite boarding team" was comprised of an engi and a slug.  Thanks to some truly sadistic RNG rolls earlier in the game, I'd lost not one but two actually decent boarding groups, and these were the only spare guys I had left.  They were still enough on their own to overpower the weapon rooms, but taking on the main area required some tactics (also some bombs).  In the end, they still managed to depopulate the ship and then sabotage the shields system, which meant...  Well, it meant what it always means.

I also unlocked the stealth type B on that run, and hoooeee!  That thing takes some hilarious amounts of luck to not crash and burn horribly.

[Darkmere]

Just having boarders isn't an auto win vs the flagship per se, but it helps immensely. I was doing a run with the Shivan (Rock B) and ran out of bombs trying to set enough of the ship on fire for my two boarders (lost the other two to bad luck and bad timing) to make any decent progress. by the end I had given up trying to keep the door controls down to the circular queue of flagship crewmen that just went to poke my boarders then rotate to the medbay and repeat. I finally had to down it the hard way (I also had no cloak of my own), with a burst laser 2, heavy laser, and hull laser (after they shot down two beam drones). It was a win, but far from a high score.

[GlyphGryph]

Stealth B is awesome. Just remember that you should literally dedicate every effort to getting a shield ASAP - without it, you can't train your pilot and engine dude, and one stray shot will take out your weapons or cloak rendering you helpless.

But it's got so much damned power this isn't nearly as hard as it might seem - most enemies will die before getting off even one shot if you play your cards right.

(buying an early extra level of the cloak or weapon room is actually a really good idea too)

I like it because by the time you get to the end of the first sector you probably know whether or not you will win. :3

[Leafsnail]

The Glaive Beam is such a fun weapon to use that I forgive all the Stealth B's flaws.

[Darkmere]

I unlocked stealth B on my many runs trying to get Crystal ships in the fleet. I don't think I've ever used it, though. Perhaps when I'm done with my NaNoWriMo novel.

[Neonivek]

Yeah, the beginning seems to be more luck-based, but once you get past the first sector (or two, if you had bad luck but survived the first one), it's mainly down to skill.

It never stops having a luck factor. It isn't that unusual to be hit by an event and then have vital crew members die (and depending what point of the game it is, that one crew member could be the difference between life or death)... or to go against a ship that manages to missile or bomb strike you several times in the same spot killing your crewman.

As well some parts of the game are luck simply because if you don't know what you are doing, you won't know you are doing it. (WOW that is vague), ok let me be more clear. There are several machines, ships, events that you won't know how to succeed at, or how to use them, in advance and often the only way to do them is to have a VERY particular setup (such as ONE species).

That is actually the only flaw I attribute to FTL. In a game about using skill as the limiting factor of luck, they basically have a TON of trial and error. They honestly expect you to play the game with a guide in front of you.

Which only affects me because I refuse to spoil the game with a guide. Something which I honestly think is non-existent now a days.

[Darkmere]

It's about risk management. Once you've played the game enough to know what the risks are, you can negate as much risk as possible. If you let a crew member sit in the same room for several volleys until they're on the verge of death instead of healing them or running away, that's a risk you chose to take. I also can't think of a single no-win scenario off the top of my head where you can't at some point just skip the encounter completely, except for ships where you didn't have enough of the proper defenses or forethought to just leave when you engines came online.

Unless you're arguing that the game should just give you odds on every encounter so you don't have to play it to figure out the encounters... including a manual on every encounter in the game, inside the game.

[Mephansteras]

I always die using the stealth ship against enemies using beam drones. They always hit me before I have shields, and the cloak just doesn't stay up long enough for me to avoid getting damage. And then they inevitably take my engines/cockpit off line so I can't dodge or escape.

Bastards.

[Neonivek]

Ohh no of course not.

As for a no-win scenario, you know there ARE situations where you actually cannot retreat right?

The luck factor to me isn't a flaw of FTL. It is those trial and error sections, which are RARELY (if ever) enemy encounters (and those encounters tend to be things like destroying an enemy before they can run away or removing their crew).

Or to put it another way. There is a lot in the game where I feel if you had absolute mastery of the game. You would still fail a lot because quite a bit in the game requires you to KNOW that it is going to happen and prepare long before it becomes important.

It is the Psychic factor when combined with the luck factor.

It is actually what makes it hard to keep playing the game at times because I want to do something particular, like get the slug ship, and I have to have the stars align AND get the encounter to do it correctly.

Oddly enough, I think fighting the last boss with a less than optimal build is more fun then optimal builds (which tend to outright trump the boss). It is actually find to just try squeezing away victory (you won't win with suboptimal mind you)