Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Aklyon]

Engi B is for when you want to spite all the boarders with your lack of oxygen and security bot.

[Kagus]

Woohoo!  YAVP

Finally beat the boss, and in a resounding victory as well (despite having lost a couple crewmembers during my first fight in sector 8, thanks to COMPLETE PLAYER STUPIDITY)!

And yeah, it does unlock the achievement for beating the boss on easy if you do it on normal, although it won't say "unlocked on normal", which is a shame...


Red-Tail, wound up having maxed-out shields and weapons systems, packing a burst Mk.I, a heavy ion, basic laser and halberd beam.  Took the boss out quite nicely.  I also had a teleporter so I could send someone over to sabotage the missile launcher, and a basic cloak for emergency evasions.  Wound up taking down the first form with no hull damage.


And now...  It be Dickship time, yarr!

[Darkmere]

I like both of the fed cruisers, it just takes some getting used to making a stonewall defensive ship and having to skimp on the main weapons to get the artillery beam up to par. Fortunately, with 4 shields and 45% evasion you can pretty much ruin the flagship at your leisure.

[Kagus]

Yeah, first proper run with the Dickship resulted in all three achievements and another boss kill.  My weapons going into the final battle were a Breach bomb II and a hull missile.  The bomb was quite helpful for taking out priority targets, but the real champions were the drones.  I picked up a defense Mk.II (I can't be the only one who would've been just as happy with a Mk.I, the damn thing would waste shots on missed lasers and then fail to target a missile that actually hit me) as a random event, and spent a lot of cash getting a hull repair drone.

Repair drones are fantastic.


Then it was just a matter of plunking a bomb down on the weapons, putting the defense drone up and just sitting back while the artillery laser did its fabulous work completely ignoring the endgame shield stacks (also, silly me thinking that 4 shields was the maximum).

Also, I have got to stop blowing up enemy ships while my boarding team is still on it...  God damn I am an idiot.

[Aoi]

I like both of the fed cruisers, it just takes some getting used to making a stonewall defensive ship and having to skimp on the main weapons to get the artillery beam up to par. Fortunately, with 4 shields and 45% evasion you can pretty much ruin the flagship at your leisure.

I pretty much did the same thing and took out the flagship without (or only a few) hits: Max shields, max evasion, Mk2 Defense drones, stealth, that item that lets you fire through stealth, and ion cannons. Which means the artillery beam was the only offensive I had, but... =P

Edit: ...Or am I mixing up my games? Saw a post mention no cloaking on the federation cruiser...

[GlyphGryph]

The Fed Cruiser is, in my opinion, the single toughest ship to beat the game with. It was also the last ship I beat the game with.

It's also not only terrible, but horribly unfun to play, and I will gladly never ever ever use it again. Blech.

Stealth Ship B all-the-way for the easy enjoyable win (or crystal for a victory lap), but Mantis, Slug, and Rock are all pretty fun to play.

[Mephansteras]

Pretty sure we had this conversation before, but I find it interesting that our experiences are about opposite. I can't get a Stealth Ship win or really anywhere close, but I have lots of fun with the Fed Cruiser and have won with it on a few occasions.

Sign of a good game, really.

[Darkmere]

Yeah, I can't fathom ranking any fed cruiser lower than engi B or either stealth ship. Or Rock A where you spend 1/4 of your entire offensive potential being dodged in the first encounter of the first sector. The zoltan ships are also pretty poor in my experience due to extreme vulnerability to power fluctuations, ion weapons, boarders (lolz what shield?) and how awkward the ship progression and layout is. Once you get the going, they're decent, but it's a struggle to get there.

[EnigmaticHat]

The Fed Cruiser is, in my opinion, the single toughest ship to beat the game with. It was also the last ship I beat the game with.

It's also not only terrible, but horribly unfun to play, and I will gladly never ever ever use it again. Blech.

Right after I beat the game for the first time (which took a good long while) and won the Fed Cruiser, I played another game with it and immediately won.  And then never played it again because its boring as fuck.

The thing about the fed cruiser is, all your damage can come from the artillery beam.  All you need is a way to counter missiles, and then you can throw all your money into defensive system upgrades. Its OP because, unlike most ships, you don't need random drops or weapons from shops.  Its also soooooooooo booooorrrrrriinnnnnggggg because the artillery beam takes forever to kill things.

[Kagus]

Couple things I thought might be worth mentioning...  First of all, the arty beam counts for the Slice and Dice achievement (it decided it was going to just slice an auto-assault drone in half, and suddenly I had the achievement), and for whatever reason it counts towards the experience of your gunner whenever it fires (even though, so far as I can tell, the gunner's expertise has no effect on the artillery beam).

Just tried out the Fed Cruiser type B, and on the very first run had a strolling victory.  Never even had particularly good weapons; when the boss came I just had a burst Mk.II and dual laser to beat down the Zoltan shield, then switched over to fire bomb for taking out the weapons.  Everything else was all on the Dicklaser.

No cloak, not even hull drone this time around.  Just a defense mark one.  Never left the green zone health-wise until I shut down all weapons on the final form to just let the fires sloooowly kill it, because it was going too quickly...  That's when I earned the "Astronomically Low Odds" achievement and started getting a bunch of damage, so I decided to turn the ejaculaser back on again.


I quite like the Zoltan ships.  Particularly the type B, actually.  Sure, starting off with no real shield is a pain, but the ion blasters you get allow you to take down most early enemies and suppress their weapons while slicing them apart with the pike beam.  Any initial hits you would have taken are blocked by that delicious Zoltan shield, which helps you get past the early-game missiles with nary a scratch.  Also, I think the Noether has a slightly better layout than the Adjudicator.

But again, my experience thus far with the Fed cruisers has been that they're effectively easy mode.  With them, the best offense really is a good defense.

[monk12]

Yeah, the Fed Cruiser is easy to win with, but boring to play (at least, boring to play in a way that doesn't effectively make it some other ship.) The Stealth ship is pretty good IMO, but god damn if I can play the Rock ship effectively. They're called MISSiles for a reason, and I usually run out of ammo too quickly to make them a good long-term strategy. I've won once with it, and that was just because I found a good weapon in the first sector don't remember if it was a random drop or if I got it at the shop, but it carried me through half the game along with a boarder strategy.

[Jim Groovester]

I hate the Fed Cruiser.

The Artillery Beam is expensive and crummy.

And then the ship is so huge that defense drones have a nasty habit of not shooting down Breach missiles when you're at three hull. It's not that they don't try, it's that the missiles hit before the defense drone laser gets to them.

And no cloak!

I find it beyond infuriating. The only thing I find possibly even more infuriating is fighting an Energy Bomber with the Stealth Cruiser in Sector 1.

[Kagus]

Or having only Zoltans and drones in sector 1 when you're doing a slug run...

Speaking of slug runs, attempting my first Stormwalker go.  It's...  Unusual.

I've won once with it, and that was just because I found a good weapon in the first sector don't remember if it was a random drop or if I got it at the shop, but it carried me through half the game along with a boarder strategy.

My main goal with the rock ship is to get another achievement on it so I unlock the type B.  Starting off with a fire bomb and rockman boarders sounds quite lovely, even if they do lack in the door department...

EDIT:  Yeah, slug run didn't last particularly long.  I mean, heal-bombing your crew can be nice in the short term since it automatically bumps them up to full, but I wouldn't want to trade that for a medbay, especially not when my one other source of damage is also based on missiles...  Particularly when your boarders are slugs, and not something actually good at fighting.  So, it's basically just the same principle as the type A, but worse at it.

I would've preferred to see something either fire-based or with enough ion weaponry to go for suffocation kills (huzzah, something even slower than the artillery beam!).  Seems sluglike enough to me, especially when considering all the other boarding-based ships there are (the ones that are actually somewhat decent at it, namely).

But, still...  Spirit of the challenge, I suppose.

[EnigmaticHat]

What I hate about the rock ship is when you fight enemies early on that have no empty rooms.  So much for those hull missiles...

[Kagus]

Hehe, just managed to pull off the DDDDD achievement on the Bulwark, and unlocked the type B rock ship.

Damn, that thing's pretty awesome.


Starting with four rockmen has its advantages...  For example, solar flares basically don't bother you at all, except for the occasional flare where it manages to cheap-shot a point of hull damage.  Otherwise, your crew don't take any damage from the flames, and even your advanced O² system lets you pretty much negate the draining effects of having a raging inferno inside your ship (it also makes it so that a couple random events in slug nebulas aren't nearly as threatening as they otherwise would be).

Plus, it's pretty obvious that this thing is supposed to evolve into a boarder at the first available opportunity...  Which lets you plant a firebomb in a nice room, then teleport straight into it and fight the enemy crew like the giant craggy fire demons you are.  Works hilariously well against certain ship types, and can even be used to singlehandedly give you a foothold in ships that have medbays without having to punch out the medbay itself.  Lots of fun havoc you can wreak with that baby.

One of the best parts, however, has got to be the starting weapon.  The heavy pierce laser is an absolute beast.  2 damage on a 9 second base cooldown, and ignores one layer of shielding.  This thing'll breeze you through sector 1 and parts of 2 like nothing.


On top of all that, it's one pretty damn neat looking ship.