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[Darkmere]

Re; EZ mode ships.... Crystal B is about the easiest mode the game gets. It's basically a score trial to see how much you can completely obliterate before sleeping through the boss battle. You kinda have to earn it, though. Took me about 40 runs just for that on easy, but I did get it without cheating.

[Neonivek]

To admit part of the final battle is luck. I've certainly had great ships ready to take on the final boss only to miss every critical shot while he seems to do no wrong.

[Kagus]

Hehe...  Well, as mentioned, I managed to get the "Astronomically Low Odds" achievement while fighting the boss...  Elite pilot and engine operator, maxed-out and fully-powered engines, giving a total 55% passive chance to avoid a projectile.  And then you get hit 5 times in a row.

He's evil I tells ya!

Re; EZ mode ships.... Crystal B is about the easiest mode the game gets. It's basically a score trial to see how much you can completely obliterate before sleeping through the boss battle.

Care to elaborate in hilarious detail?  I've yet to unlock the crystal ship, so I don't know exactly what I'm looking forward to.  It seems like a bit of a bizarre build, judging from the wiki.

[Leafsnail]

You can gank any enemy system/ crewmember using the crystalman special ability.  So if you can survive long enough to get their weapons offline (doesn't take too long) they're screwed.

[Darkmere]

You can gank any enemy system/ crewmember using the crystalman special ability.  So if you can survive long enough to get their weapons offline (doesn't take too long) they're screwed.

Basically that. You can start every battle by beaming into their weapons room or medbay and sealing yourself in until they are disabled, then pound basically everything else into submission. Crystalmen are resistant to suffocation so you can safely board and disable drone ships with no hassle (as long as you're very careful about your teleporter capacity, it's one of the two ships to have a 4-man teleport pad), and they start with a cloaking device. No weapons, but since you can board from encounter 1, you'll likely have plenty extra to sell off and don't have to spend scrap buying many new systems, since you start with everything except a drone bay.

It's the not-even-serious payoff for getting the proper celestial alignment to finish the quest.

The Crystal A is still overpowered, just not quite as much.

[GlyphGryph]

To admit part of the final battle is luck. I've certainly had great ships ready to take on the final boss only to miss every critical shot while he seems to do no wrong.

Depends on the build, actually. There are a great many builds with which you can literally NOT fail to beat the boss unless you screw up and bad, no luck involved whatsoever.

[Neonivek]

To admit part of the final battle is luck. I've certainly had great ships ready to take on the final boss only to miss every critical shot while he seems to do no wrong.

Depends on the build, actually. There are a great many builds with which you can literally NOT fail to beat the boss unless you screw up and bad, no luck involved whatsoever.

That sounds even more luck dependent.

Mind you, I can imagine the build.

[Darkmere]

It isn't. Some setups are basically autowinners. There isn't luck involved if you play properly.

[GlyphGryph]

That sounds even more luck dependent.
Mind you, I can imagine the build.

What? No. Plenty of builds can beat the boss with no luck involved. Any Boarder/Cloaker build can manager it pretty safely, really.

Other times, you have the game I just finished, which is also no luck involved (but in the other direction).

Vortex vs. Boss. 2 skill-less crew. 2 shield, 22% dodge. Heavy Laser and Heavy Laser MKII and Ion Bomb. No teleporter. Lv1 cloak. Not enough power to power everything.

I didn't survive very long at all.

[Kagus]

That sounds even more luck dependent.
Mind you, I can imagine the build.

What? No. Plenty of builds can beat the boss with no luck involved. Any Boarder/Cloaker build can manager it pretty safely, really.

I'm fairly certain he was referencing the luck involved in acquiring the kind of build that can take on the boss like a cakewalk.

Also, while boarding is nice for taking out the missile launcher and other isolated weapon rooms, I don't really see how a boarder would have that much of an easy time against the boss, unless you're either playing with crystals or you've got the lockdown bomb and a ton of missiles to power it through inevitable misses while trying to keep your away team safe.

[Leafsnail]

Boarders can murder the entire enemy crew except the ion guy, then smash all enemy systems without resistance in subsequent stages.  A teleporter + a cloak + some boarders + almost any weapon should be enough to win.

[EnigmaticHat]

That sounds even more luck dependent.
Mind you, I can imagine the build.

What? No. Plenty of builds can beat the boss with no luck involved. Any Boarder/Cloaker build can manager it pretty safely, really.

Other times, you have the game I just finished, which is also no luck involved (but in the other direction).

Vortex vs. Boss. 2 skill-less crew. 2 shield, 22% dodge. Heavy Laser and Heavy Laser MKII and Ion Bomb. No teleporter. Lv1 cloak. Not enough power to power everything.

I didn't survive very long at all.

Getting to the last sector in the Vortex is basically winning.  Actually beating the game is like, super winning.

[Kagus]

Boarders can murder the entire enemy crew except the ion guy, then smash all enemy systems without resistance in subsequent stages.  A teleporter + a cloak + some boarders + almost any weapon should be enough to win.

Think you mean laser guy, since the ion is destroyed after the first form.

The difficulty then, also, is actually murdering the rest of the crew.  Sure, they're all just puny humans, but there are a lot of them and they have that nice big medbay that desperately needs to go down if you're going to do any real attrition damage to their crew.  And you'll need to do that each time since all systems are healed after every fight.  This is easy with crystal lockdown, but not quite so simple when you're stuck with having to resort to other means.

Then there's the last stage with the respawning super shield.  I'm not sure if that prevents recovering boarders from an enemy ship like cloaking does (another danger of the first stage), but it does prevent both sending them over and shooting healing bursts until the shield is knocked down.  And there's a lot of shield to knock down (gotta love ions).

[Haspen]

Burst lasers and glaive/pike beams and you don't need no teleportah

[EnigmaticHat]

I have a little mental checklist of what I need by the end of the game.  Its something like:

• Either a cloak or strong weapons and defenses (either to survive the superweapons, or to end the fights quick enough that it doesn't matter)
• A non-missile way of destroying or disabling the shield generator
• A way to kill the ship in a reasonably efficient manner once the shields are down.

That's... pretty much it.  Its true that if my ship sucks enough I could die even with all the stuff on the list, but that doesn't really happen because my philosophy is to become more reckless if I'm falling behind.  That way I either die, or catch up.  None of this slowly dying and running from every fight nonsense.