FTL - Faster than light

[daveodeth]

attack and retreat to the med bay. keep one person at the wheel. If you can get them fighting you in the med bay then it's an easy gg.

[Lorfarius]

If they are near airlocks just open them and the room they are in to drain the oxygen and a bit of their health. Then I shut the doors and usually send 2 of my guys to tackle them. Keep an eye on them though as you might need to run them back to medical if their health gets a bit low.

[Massive Invisible Dog]

Good tips. It's the part I like the least at the moment, it just seems far too difficult without any obvious upgrades to help it. I assume the main one that would help is upgrading the doors, but can I upgrade my crew as well?

[Rudi von Starnberg]

Mantis and Rockman crewmembers are excellent against boarders (and for boarding enemy ships), as are the secret race. Strength in numbers helps too. In general you won't be faced with boarding parties before sector 3 (maybe 4, but I think it's 3) and that should give you enough time to get up to strength with blast doors and a better-equipped crew and so on. Even engis can beat boarders if they're fighting in the medbay though.

[Lorfarius]

No but as you find different races some of them are better prepared for fighting. The Rock folk come to mind as they have a third extra health.

You can always use a drone inside the ship to defend it but finding it is the issue. Fighting becomes easier once you use a mix of of blast doors (a top update I reckon) and knocking out oxygen. Always keep an eye on fighting members and make sure they can dash back to the med bay, just keep in mind that the enemy can't follow you throughout the ship they have to bust down the doors. Also back into the med bay with bad guys if you can as your crew members heal.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

You can 'upgrade' your crewmembers too by having them do things - each can gain up to two levels in each skill, and fighting is one of the skills that can improve.

[The Bag]

I'm loving this, furthest I've got is sector 7 so far. Reminds me of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space in a lot of ways: http://www.digital-eel.com/sais/index.htm

One game ended very quickly, second jump facing some rebels. Destroyed their ship but they cause a fire on mine which quickly spread through the front sections of the ship. Taking out senors, navigation, door control, and killing the pilot and crewman trying try to put out the flames in rooms which couldn't be opened to the void cause the door control was down. Which left engineer Flip alone, in a dead ship...

First priority was to try and repair the door control, this was done by surviving in a room with no oxygen for as long as he dared until he could stagger back to the med bay. But this was getting him anywhere, he knew he had to stay in there until the job was done or die trying. Luckily he managed to fix it with 2% health left and got to the med bay just in time. Doors through out the ship closed and rooms started to fill with oxygen again. He continued his repairs, first sensors, then navigation, and then rerouted power from the weapons to shields and engines.

Unfortunately this had taken so long the rebels has made serious advances into the sector and Flip had no choice but to jump to a rebel held system, there he destroyed the rebel ship and had to make more repairs. Again he had to jump to a rebel system, this time he relied on the shields to hold out against the rebels and sit and wait for the engines to charge. With 10% hull integrity remaining he could make a jump, but looking at his charts he had no option but to jump to another rebel held system. He had hoped, against hope, to get out of the rebel systems, to find someone to help crew this ship but no, as he made that jump he knew it would be his last. He left navigation and weapon to the weapons room, all power rerouted to weapons and shields - this was it, he knew he couldn't win against this rebel ship but he'd inflict as much damage as possible before his inevitable demise.

[SaintM]

I'd have walked him to the airlock and opened the door. Better a quick death than risk capture by the rebel scum.

[Hexx]

Does how long you stay in each zone affect the advance then? I know which zone you're jumping from does but hadn't spotted any other effects.

[SaintM]

I've not noticed it have any effect on the approach of the rebel fleet.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

Yeah, the rebel fleet is entirely dependent on jumps you make. Nothing else.

[ravnaz]

Just hit S5 in the Enterprise Mk3.

Kirk is at the helm, Spock is manning weapons and Bones is on shields.

Managed to fend off Mantis boarding parties using a combination of airlocks and fighting in the medbay.

[ravnaz]

RIP Kirkner. Lost to alien spiders.

[SaintM]

Did he manage to make sweet space love with them first though?

[ravnaz]

That wasn't a crew member I named. It was a name chosen by the game. I had another crew man called Kirk though :-)

Made it to S8. Got nailed in the 1st encounter.

[Wiper]

It's desperately annoying when you go through a full run of the game only to get to the final area and know you've no chance of winning due to never once having seen a weapon capable of dealing more than 2 damage in a single shot (while using the stealth ship, so a maximum loadout of 3 weapons) - even with drone support, getting through four layers of shields was impossible, so despite sending my crack rockman boarding squad in to clear the weapons of the mothership, I was then left incapable of doing any damage. Eventually ended up sending my entire crew on a suicide boarding detail, two at a time...

[Wolfshoes]

Been playing this all day, it's great. Furthest I've got is to the mothership but my own ship was half a wreck before I even started the fight, so it didn't last too long.

[Guest]

What a horrible game - its kept me up till 3am!

I've been playing on Normal, got the sector 8 on my second attempt. Helped I had a rock and mantis aboard, they saw off a few attackers.

Excellent this. Awesome time waster.

[Bojangle]

This is totally brilliant, and the soundtrack is just lovely.

[Unofficial Who]

What are you supposed to do when you get boarded? I'm finding those incredibly hard to deal with.

Get your crew to deal with them. Or open up sections of the ship to space.

[Lag]

Can't get hold of this. DNS lookup failed authorize.payments.amazon.com

will try a different connection today.

[Alask]

I'm loving this.. apart from it kicking my arse. Has anyone had any joy with boarding enemy ships? It's never gone very well when I've tried it. Even on the game I got lucky and teleported 4 mantis over, they still ended up dead and my ship destroyed while I prayed they'd actually finish off the enemy.

Possibly I need to focus the boarding party on taking out the health bay first and then worry about the rest of the ship? That or get super lucky and get that healing beam weapon so I can actually keep the boarding party alive.

[Wiper]

If the enemy have a medbay you really need to disable it before attacking them, even if you've Mantis crew. Ion weapons or missiles are your friend in this.

[Schnibbles]

It's highly entertaining outfitting the Engi Cruiser with at least two Ion weapons, then focussing fire on the O2 of your enemy. If it's a ship without a medbay, bob's your uncle; victory without destroying the enemy or any need for a boarding party. The only thing that having a medbay changes is that near the end you knock out that too.

I'd be intrigued to see if you could go full ion on the mothership - I won against it with the Engi cruiser with two ion weapons and a shitload of drones, including the thoroughly thoroughly awesome Defence Drone Mark II. Hitting the O2 and asphyxiating the crew would surely make it impossible for it to do its jumping around malarkey...

[Choo]

Hitting the O2 and asphyxiating the crew would surely make it impossible for it to do its jumping around malarkey...

The ship AI takes over .

I lost a whole day to this game yesterday. It's awesome seeing kickstarter give us games made from pure passion like this one.

[Unofficial Who]

Massive facepalm. I'd been powering down things like the med lab and wondering where I'd be able to buy ship upgrades to powers and abilities.

Turns out you can do it at any time in the ship menu when not in combat by converting scrap.

Now I have a nice cruiser with 2x shields and a whole range of nasty weapons. Sector 7 here I come!

Edit....died ten minutes later!!! Dammit.

However....

stealth ship unlocked. Yeah!

Edited September 18, 2012 by tssk

[Wiper]

Finally won the game (on easy) yesterday, in the generic ship. Nearly threw in the towel after losing two of my crew in my first two jumps; carried on searching desperately for replacements but didn't find a single store selling crew/pick up any from events until the fourth section. Despite such inauspicious beginnings, managed to pick up an unbeatable combination of equipment: three multi laser mk IIs, one ion blast, cloaking and the stealth weapons aug. With a fully levelled up gunner, no enemy could withstand the barrage, while activating the cloaking field just after the enemy's first volley inevitably meant I'd get four full bursts of fire against them before even a risk of damage - and was perfect for dealing with the massed drone assaults of the second boss fight.

In other words, as we already knew, success really is a case of lucking out on the right equipment.

[Lag]

Went to bed very late last night / early this morning because of this game. Very addictive. Still haven't beat it on easy, although I did wing the boss. I find myself getting quite attached to my crew.

A major flaw in my captaincy was demonstrated when I continued, in the excitement of battle, to bombard an enemy ship I had teleported Mantis O'Regan and Shelly to. Imagine their surprise as, after loyally tearing apart enemy crew and ship components, I didn't teleport them home. Farewell comrades, you will be replaced remembered.

[Argh]

I love this game. Please excuse the gushy, mushy thought-splurge that now follows. I could neither contain it, nor explain it any more than I have done:

Are they planning multiplayer for this? I'd love to dice it up with another human player; trying to take out his hull while the fucker boards me and starts trashing my weapons room.

I'm seeing a huge online game where hundreds of players start in "sector one", which is the outside ring of a massive, 8-sector-layered "universe". So, there are, say 500 sector ones, then 300 sector twos, and so on, down to a single sector 8.

Each sector is like a single player sector map, only slightly larger and the exit is always in the middle. X number of players start at random points around the edges of this sector. And then, off they go...get to the end of that sector, helping or hindering each other whenever they meet at a system. Jump to the next sector, meeting the survivors of the sectors adjacent to yours, who are also advancing to the next sector, which dovetails into your new one. There'd be more than one of the X players in your own sector getting through, too, of course.

The idea needs work though, because how would you stop people just racing ahead through the sectors, just to be the first to get through to sector 8 to face....umm, yeah, I also need an "end game" scenario! Co-op boss battle? Elimination tournament between the first ship to arrive from each of the sector 7s? Something cooler than that, that I haven't thought of yet?

But, what about having a quiet moment to work on your ship after a battle, if there's no pause? What's to stop another player jumping into your current jump point and trashing you? That can be explained away through any number of hand-wavy reasons, just so as not to spoil gameplay. Maybe after a fight you go into a pre-warp bubble outside of space time, so you can't be touched by another passerby until you're ready. Or maybe it's just brutal, and if you get attacked while you're not ready, tough shit. Fight/flight/explode; the choice is yours! ("Stop exploding you cowards!")

I would also like an expansion to the single player where you can a) fight against multiple enemy ships at once. b) control multiple ships (build up a mini fleet, basically). c) Control fucking massive ships, with loads more components and crew. d) Co-op control of said massive ships. e) No, I'll stop for now...

FTL is just the sort of game I wished I'd made, and resembles numerous game ideas I've had over the years that have been birthed and finally drowned in the bubbling pool that is my mind.

And breathe....

Edit: Hmm, how would you deal with people camping "spawn" points in, say, sector 2? Maybe you'd still have to use the Rebel fleet mechanism. Keep moving, or the rebels will sweep up everybody. (The rebs simply come in from all sides of the sector, now. Now that the exit is in the middle.)

Edit 2: Don't be surprised if you see this post almost verbatim on the FTL forum in a few minutes....

[Unofficial Who]

Possibly my game of the year. Oh and my new

stealth ship

hasn't made it past sector 1 yet!