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[Mr Space Cat]

You can also use hacks with boarding to create a stronghold in an enemy ship where you can funnel enemies into the room to fight your crew. The hacked blast doors delay enemy reinforcements, giving your crew an advantage usually, and let your crew attack the room while they're at it, and hacking resets the doors on demand.

Hacking also gives a great solution to pesky medbays keeping the enemy crew alive, or you can hack oxygen and starve the ship to death while you constantly send in suicidal clone boarders to attack and keep the oxygen system destroyed.

[Moogie]

I've just been encountering too many ships that have anti-drone defenses, I suppose. Either stunners or Defense MK.IIs deplete my drone supplies pretty quickly.

[BigFatStupidHead]

I was having a pretty fun game with the Lanius A. I'd turned it into a weaponless boarder with a reconstructive teleport, and would hack then board their oxygen bay. Asphyxiation boarders! Eventually, my ship was destroyed by a missle just after the last enemy crew died.

The hacking bay really makes some interesting tactics for boarding.

[Mr Space Cat]

So, you cannot kill the rebel flagship by suffocating its crew to death, an AI system takes over similar to an auto-ship and you have to deplete its hull.

This was bad for me because I had no missiles left and no non-missile weaponry, only fire bombs and small bombs. I was relying entirely on my raiding party killing crew to beat ships. This resulted in me spreading out my 4 raiders to have each attacking one room to deplete the health slowly by one per room as the ship slowly rebuilt each room.

I was two units away from killing the first phase, but the ship's missiles recovered unexpectedly and several volleys took out too much health. In retrospect I could have tele'd each raider to their own weapon system to keep the ship mostly weaponless. Too bad I'm already dead.

[Leafsnail]

Lanius B is absolutely ridiculous, as far as I can tell.

Update: yes, it is.  I got a Hard Mode win using its starting weapon as my only source of hull damage.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Advanced Flak is by far the best gun in the game.  I went into the flagship fight with 3 points worth of weapons and two boarders, and it was still pretty damn comfortable.  The damage output of the starting gun is just insane for 1 power, and that combined with the occasional precision strike from the breach bomb (works great when followed up with Lanius boarders of course) was enough to seal it for me.

The Breach Bomb also allowed me to trigger AI Flagship in the third round without fear - the AI can't repair breached system, so I just dropped one on the missiles and never had to worry about them again.  In fact I'd say AI flagship actually made the third stage a lot easier, since I could just smash all their stuff with no opposition.

Mind Control was useful because it let me counter the flagship's Mind Control.

Reconstructive Teleport was also pretty cool, but really with a level 3 clone bay you don't need to worry about crew death too much anyway.  Which is just as well because I lost loads of crew to oxygen fuckups.

[GlyphGryph]

The nice thing about the reconstructive teleporter with the clone bay, is that even at lv3 the clones come back at very low health, don't they? So they do a lot more damage before dying.

[Leafsnail]

Clones come back at full health.

[GlyphGryph]

...hmmm.... what led me to believe they didn't then...

[Thexor]

Possibly the 25 HP stat listed on the clone bay? That's the amount everybody heals for free when you jump.

[Leafsnail]

It is a bit odd because it means sometimes you might want to kill off your crew.

[Thexor]

I'm pretty sure that's why the passive heal on each jump is there - it discourages killing your own guys when they've just taken passive damage. Remember that each death costs a bit of skill XP, so you still want to avoid it!

[Leafsnail]

That's true for like, engineers and pilots, but I think I'd take +70HP over a 10% damage boost when it comes to boarders.  Particularly since they're obviously going to die in the next engagement anyway if you don't "heal" them.

[EnigmaticHat]

What would you guys recommend for the Torus on Normal difficulty? No joke, I've failed like 20 times in a row now. I don't have nearly this much trouble using other ships. I tried picking up lasers, I tried drones, I tried hacking, I tried mind control. The Torus is just such a weak starter, that by the time I get any offensive capabilities besides a Combat drone I'm already in sector 5 and still hilariously under-equipped. I've been restarting any time the run starts to descend into "spending too much money on repairs" territory, but even the runs where I'm picking up lots of scrap still don't throw any decent weaponry at me.

Core system upgrades.  And a cloak.

Seriously, the ion mark II can take out ANY shields.  The combat drone specializes in killing unshielded ships.  Starting with both you're pretty much fine as long as you can defend.  So get those shield layers, upgrade your engines, and save up some scrap/sellable gear for the magical moment when you find a cloak in a shop.

I mean still grab any good drones or weapons you find, but don't feel super pressured.  You have a very solid start, your main weakness is boarders and your healing augment has you covered.

[Pnx]

Did you know that if you mind control someone, you can teleport them back to your ship? If they have a teleporter they'll try to teleport them right back when it wears off, but otherwise abductions can be an effective way of getting rid of crew members when they have a medbay or some other circumstance that makes standard boarding difficult.

I just used it to cheese the final boss on the first phase and get rid of all but that one crew member (I didn't have to do this, I was definitely in a position to win without doing so).

I get really amused by the idea of them just suddenly stopping in the middle of trying to repair the engine and saying, "I must go now, my people need me." then teleporting off.

[Dermonster]

Did you know that if you mind control someone, you can teleport them back to your ship? If they have a teleporter they'll try to teleport them right back when it wears off, but otherwise abductions can be an effective way of getting rid of crew members when they have a medbay or some other circumstance that makes standard boarding difficult.

I just used it to cheese the final boss on the first phase and get rid of all but that one crew member (I didn't have to do this, I was definitely in a position to win without doing so).

I get really amused by the idea of them just suddenly stopping in the middle of trying to repair the engine and saying, "I must go now, my people need me." then teleporting off.

Are you telling me I can do reverse boarding runs.

Because I got 'Teleport everyone over to my ship so I can murder them horribly' from that.

I know what I'm doing when I run that oxygen-less ship!