My most recent game, I wound up with just a Burst Laser II .... and a Breach Bomb II, and a Breach Missile. Bomb the shields, breach the O2 plant, gun down the weapons. Second salvo, bomb the medical bay, breach the cockpit, gun down whatever they've tried to repair the most.

Worked better than I expected against the Rebel Flagship. Boarders are WONDROUS against it, I've decided: pop them into a weapons room, let 'em do their thing. When the crewman is dead and the weapon is scrap, beam back, heal up, and start on the next gun. Those compartments are not connected, so none of the other crew can get in to repair the damage. And the breach bomb/missile, if you can keep their O2 plant down, not only does it's own damage to the crew, it leaves them sucking vacuum for yet more damage.

And it's always fun when you come out of FTL in cloak, or with the augment that lets you fire as soon as you arrive. Oh no, a Mantis ship! Here come the boa- oh wait, false alarm. They're already on fire. ♥

A pre-igniter on the Stealth B is a godsend like no other.

This is why I don't recommend killing all the crew. Since the ship goes into AI mode, those previously unrepairable weapons become repairable and when an AI is in control all systems are repaired at a constant rate.

To be fair, that constant rate is very slow.

Of course but avoiding it means you no longer need to manage your boarders or weapons to keep those systems disabled and can instead focus the efforts (especially with weapons) on keeping the stuff that can be repaired disabled.

What if you take out their weapons but leave maybe one or two crew left alive? Will they still self repair? Also, besides Cloaking, does anyone know a good strategy for surviving the Power Surge drone wave?

No, and that's the reason to leave just ONE crewman alive, in the main area of the flagship.


Yeah, burn down the Drone control center and keep your shields topped off.

Does that stop the Surge or just reduce it?

It doesn't stop the surge, at least I don't think it does. I had drone control chain disabled with a x3 Ion II boat and I still got hit with surges. The regular drones were disabled, and of course I had the main weapon stations also destroyed so it's more or less stops the one constant source of damage that you can do something about and can't readily destroy.

Taking out the drone control just stops their defense drone and the two anti-ship drones they send at you. The power surge wave of 5 or so drones will continue every X seconds.

And since it came to mind, people have already made their own ships for this game, I would love to see someone make a replacement of the Osprey (Fed Cruiser) with the Macross/SDF-1.

I was just about to say I would like to see a ship for the player like the final boss with multiple independent weapon mounts.

Then I realized... how the hell would I get crew there.

Then I thought, could you use a teleporter to teleport crew around your ship? I never tried it.

I think I tried it and it didn't work. I've also tried teleporting enemy boarder that were blowing up my teleporter. No dice.

Teleporters only work for moving your crew from the pad to the enemy ship and back. That's it.

I know... sadly.

That would be an awesome Augmentation for a ship, though: "Site-to-site transporters", let you move people to or from your telepad, within your own ship.

Am i the only one that found the augmentations kind of meh? I mean there are some that are pretty godlike: Weapon Pre-igniter comes to mind as does stealth weapons if you've actually gone the stealth route. Other then those most of the stuff was fairly underwhelming.

The repair arm has saved my hoop more times...

The engi repair nanobots are a nice convenience.

The augments that boost your scrap haul stack so you can put multiples on....

The Repair Arm is a godsend.

If you're a drone-user, the Drone Recovery Arm is absolutely REQUIRED. (Seriously, the Engi ship can burn 3+ drone parts PER FIGHT, without that arm!)

I think the Repair Arm actually helped out in an event once too, I used it to mine some asteroids or something and get some scrap.

That would be so useful. And forget just beaming people within your own ship...

Enemies boarded your ship? Beam the bastards into space. Or, better yet, if you warped out of one hostile encounter with (say) four omnicidal Mantis on your ship, beam 'em onto the new enemy ship and let them go to town.

Or just beam the enemy pilot onto your ship for some fist-to-face time involving your four best hand-to-hand combatants.

Yeah, I'd really really like to be able to decide WHERE new systems get installed. Having a four-space telepad would absolutely rock. And for most ships, a two-space Drone Control is all you'll ever need. Meanwhile, the Engi ship doesn't need more than a two-space Medbay.

Edit to add: CURSES, that patch yesterday broke the trainer I was using to cheat. Dammit.

Unlocked the mantis ship yesterday, it is amazing but you know what's even better? It's B variant, sure it starts with no weapons and only 2 (mantis) crew but it starts with drone control w/ boarding drone and a 4 pad teleporter next to a 4 pad medbay

Wait until you see the rock B - the Shivan.

I seldom use drones, it's just too unreliable to see if you'll get the right drones to actually do stuff on top of the power and consumable costs of running the drone program.

Use Cheat Engine, then.

Finally managed to down the boss on easy. Unlocked the Kestrel B and the Fed ship. Tooling around in the Kestrel B now and LOVING it. Teleport + built in Mantis + Rock guy I bought + 4xLaser to down the weapons and the pilot == MURDERDEATHKILLDESTROY!

In all seriousness though, great game. Now I gotta convince the wife to start drawing artwork for custom ships...

I'll admit, I still play on nothing but easy. Normal just seems too pointlessly brutal. Easy is still a fair amount of challenge unless I hit a sweet spot of gear/opportunity and start rolling the opposition early on.

I managed to buy a rock man and a tele porter first thing, and been on the lookout for a fire beam or fire bombs ever since.

I finally unlocked the Rock Ship. Going to try my first away with it now.

Don't plan on your crew getting anywhere in a hurry.

No, but fires aren't something I worry about now.

Also, I like the layout of the ship.

They should. Your Rock crew may not take damage from fires, but the fires can still fuck up your ship systems,.

A ship system going down to red from fire damages your ship by one hull point.
The fire can kill your atmos system, and your Rock crew CAN die to suffocation.
You're likely going to get non-Rock crew who can die to fire.

Fires aren't "no big deal" just because you started with an all Rock crew. You still have to contain them.



Well yeah, it's a cool ship.

Send a rocky in to stomp out the flames, job done.

I always preferred ships with LOTS of exterior hatches/airlocks. Nothing puts out a fire like the total absence of oxygen.

With good doors, vacuum is a good anti-intruder measure too. Well, for non-rockman intruders, anyway.

Airlocks have dangers of their own.

[edit]fixed




-k

Broken link, KI, think you pasted the text into the url code.

I remember venting a few rooms to deal with intruders only to have them make it to, and destroy, my door control. That sucked.

Which is why, the moment they got to that door control room, I immediately close all doors, and send in crewmen to finish the intruders off.

I think it was a stroke of bad luck and they had shot it as well.

Ah. Yeah, then, that just sucks completely.

This makes me want to play again. I miss my Redtail.

Yeah, I reinstalled. It's been tiding me over today, while (impatiently) awaiting Bioshock: Infinite's launch ... in about four and a half hours.

I'm still undecided on if I'm excited for Bioshock Infinite. I loved the first one, but was rather disappointed by Bioshock 2.

Infinite should be much more like the first one, in terms of quality. Take this, for example: none of the original team, and especially not Ken Levine, had anything to do with making Bioshock 2.

But they did make Infinite.

Geh, fixerd.

It was exactly the link I expected it to be.