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    February 01, 2020

    Faster Than Light | I just now noticed slugs reveals adjacent rooms ��

    I just now noticed slugs reveals adjacent rooms ��

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 11:18 PM PST

    Second jump on sector 1 find

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 11:30 AM PST

    So Close Yet So Far

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 07:40 AM PST

    Guide to Boarding and Enemy AI

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 08:46 AM PST

    So I posted a thread recently where I showed off a run where I made it to the flagship with only level 1 weapons using mostly boarding to win my fights. Some people were interested in boarding tactics so I figured I'd do a short (LOL) write up on everything you need to know about boarding and Enemy AI and how to micromanage your troops. This is probably available elsewhere but since people were interested I decided to do my own version of it. As a disclaimer I currently use Dark Twinge's Balance mod when I play. I don't believe he made any tweaks to enemy ai so that shouldn't matter but if I'm wrong someone can tell me.

    While I really like FTL my favorite ships by far are boarding ones. In fact I like all boarding ship in the game except Slug B whose gimmick is very poorly implemented. The reason I like boarding so much is because there is very little rng with boarding and doing well with it mostly comes down to smart unit management. When you get used to boarding it is a very powerful tactic. On average the reward for killing enemy crew is higher than for destroying the ship and since you are investing less in weapons you can focus much more on defense. In fact you give me boarding, hacking and a clonebay and I will regularly make it to the flagship on 1~4 weapon power.

    Early Game; AKA where lots of enemy ships are Slug B

    At the start of the game, enemy ships with no medbay or clone bay are pretty common whereas your ship should have at least 2 combat prepared units so you can usually just board these ships and kill everyone, no problem. However there is a skill that you must know how to do and master if you want to make any progress on boarding and called troop shuffling. It's basically a skill that allows you to rearrange units in a room to minimize damage on units with low hp while using your healthier units tank damage. This is a skill that's very useful even for non-boarding ships plus it's super simple so it's a great skill to learn

    Troop Shuffling

    Have you ever wondered how the game decides where in a room a unit will go? Well wonder no more. The way it works is that each tile in a room has a priority value wherein the first unit that enters a room goes to the tile with the highest priority, the 2nd goes to the 2nd highest priority, so on and so forth. In a 2 x 2 room the priority is as follows (1x2 rooms correspond to spots 1 & 2 below, 2x1 rooms correspond to spots 1 & 3 below):

    1 2

    3 4

    There is 1 exception to this rule. If there is a manable system in the room (shields, doors etc) then the tile with the highest priority is the tile where the system console is and all other tile priorities are adjusted accordingly. This is only true for members of that ship, not enemy boarders. So for example, if you are on an enemy ship your crew will follow the numbers shown above even in the shield room. If it's your ship you will need to account for manable systems sometimes.

    So say you want to swap the units in positions 2 and 3. Simply pause the game, send both units out of the room and then send them back in 1 at a time such that the unit that was in position 3 is sent back in first. You'll know you did it right because the spaces you send the units to will light up when you do it. This should all be done completely in one pause and when you unpause the units should just switch places. You can easily practice this on your ship even when you aren't fighting and the value here should be obvious.

    Early-Mid Game; AKA Maybe a medical unit is a smart investment after all

    There you are. It's still pretty early in the game but you're starting to encounter ships with medbays and clone bays. You try to board to deal with the enemy but annoyingly they retreat from you and hide in their med bay. Your weapons are bad (or non-existent) so you only have your boarding. Fighting in a med bay doesn't work and you cannot break the clonebay in time. Overall it's not going well. What do you do? Well there is again a usable tactic but this requires you to understand how enemy ai works.

    Enemy AI

    While there are obvious observations about how the enemy moves units around (try to repair systems or attack boarders), relying on boarding in the mid to late games requires precise understanding of how the enemy is going to control it's units. While this might sound difficult it's actually pretty simple. The game has a list of tasks each task has a priority. If you drop a random enemy unit on a random ship it will be assigned to the highest priority task which exists and is not being taken care of. If you dropped a 2nd unit it assigns them to the 2nd highest task. It's also important to note that in the event a new task is created (for example a system is damaged) it will reassign the unit currently on the lowest priority task to that new task. For our purposes all the tasks are listed below in priority number. Note that I have never looked at the code of this game and the following it based on my observations. Some of the finer details might be off but the overall idea is correct.

    • Self preservation: A unit that's low on hp will try to go to the med bay as long as there is a med bay and there is room in the medbay. Similarly a unit on low hp will leave a room with no o2 or that is on fire for one where there is none (though will stay if no other room is safe). However a unit on low hp will not run away from enemy boarders unless one of the two conditions above are also met.

    • Repair shields: The game puts a very very high priority on having shields functional. If they are damaged or on fire they will send someone to deal with it and is one of the few things more important than...

    • Deal with boarders: When an enemy unit appears on it's ship the enemy will assign the unit doing the lowest priority job to deal with the boarder on a 1 to 1 basis. While it might seem at times that more than 1 unit has been assigned to fight 1 of your units this is actually an indirect result of how the enemy deals with task priority and will be explained later. Now the following is very very important. Say you had 6 units on an enemy ship with only 1 enemy unit. Who does the enemy go and fight? The enemy has a priority of systems which is uses to pick which boarder is being dealt with first. That order is Shields, Weapons, Medbay, Engines, Something, Something else ect, I honestly don't know where every single system and subsystem is placed but for our purposes Shields>Medbay is the only really important one. I'll also note that this is on hard. On easier difficulties the order might be different but shields should always be number 1. Oh, Mind Control works a little funny with this one. I will talk about that more below but for now just know that the enemy does not treat a mind controlled unit the same as a boarder.

    • Deal with fires: The enemy cares a lot about dealing with fires. Fires in certain systems (Shields) might actually be higher than Boarders. Fires is also the only task the game will assign multiple people to deal with.

    • Repair systems: Similar to above the game values repairing all other non-shield systems here. It's not super important the exact order but I think it is Shields>Weapons>Medbay> Other stuff maybe engines, piloting, or o2 or something. Basically it's only really important that shields is a higher priority than medbay. Oh and I'll also note that it seems the game increases the priority of repairing o2 if the ship is low on it.

    • Manning systems: When nothing's wrong the game just assigns units to man systems. In order the first 4 are Piloting, Engines, Weapons and Shields (I think on easy and normal engines and shields are switched). Anything after this is not really important.

    • Bonus; Teleporter: when a match starts the game will assign units to teleport to your ship if there is a teleporter. If the crew is 3 or less it sends 1. If it's 4 or more it sends 2. The enemy will pull the units back out if they are low on hp and the tele is off of cooldown. They will then board 1 more time once the tele comes back off of cooldown as long as there is a unit with good hp and you didn't kill the original set of boarders. Under normal circumstances, the enemy will not board you more than twice even if it has the units to. I have however witnessed rare exceptions to this involving being pre-boarded and them having a clone bay or the flag ship but for the most part assume that once you are boarded the 2nd time you are not going to be boarded again.

    Applications:

    So that was a lot of information but how do you actually apply it? Well here's a very simple example. Pretend that the enemy has 3 units at the start of a match and no tele and 1 shield bubble and you're on Hard. If you check the priority you'll see that that they have Piloting, Engines, and Weapons manned. So you look and see an Engi on weapons. You groan because your weapons are a Mini beam and a dual laser and you know that what little damage you deal to their weapons will be healed off quickly. But then you see a mantis on engines and you get an idea. With your weapons charged you fire the dual laser at weapons and the exact second the enemy shield bubble is down you pause and aim your mini beam to swipe o2 first then weapons. The mini beam is the first to connect and hits o2 then weapons while your 2nd shot from the dual laser hits weapons also. How does the enemy respond? Think about it consulting the chart above if necessary keeping in mind that when new tasks are created the unit whose job is currently the lowest gets reassigned.

    So upon hitting o2 a new "repair" task is created that is now the highest priority. The game assigns the lowest priority member, in this case the engi on weapons, to deal with it. Then once you hit their weapons again a new task is created and again game assigns the lowest priority member to deal with it who in this case is the mantis on engines. Upon repairing the o2 the engi's task is no more so the game looks for the next highest task which isn't being handled to assign to the engi which in this case is man engines. Likewise once the mantis finishes the repair (if you let him) the next highest task to assign him is to man weapons. In doing so you've manipulated the enemy into repairing their far more important weapon system at 1/2 speed instead of 2x speed. There are many more ways to apply it than just this but for now we'll just talk about the one we know you're here for.

    Boarding Only anti-medical unit

    Now let's get to the part you are all here for. Boarding only anti-medical unit tactics. So you encounter an enemy ship with 4 crew and a medical unit. For the sake of simplicity there are no doors, no anti personnel, no repair drone and you are immune to the enemy weapons. What do you do?

    Step 1; All aboard:

    First and foremost, once you get to this point a bare minimum of 3 boarders but more realistically 4 boarders on the enemy ship is more or less essential. They don't all need to be manti but ideally you aren't running only Engi's and Zoltans though they will work as the 3rd and 4th boarders if they are all you have. If you have a 4 man teleporter this is easy. If you have a 2 man teleporter then board in some random corner and have them run back and forth non-stop from one end of the ship to another leading the enemy on a wild goose chase. Manti with their speed bonus are by far the best at this though other than rocks most other units will move fast enough. If you are lucky enough to have a crystal this is even easier can you can board with a lone unit and lock it down. This will waste time letting your tele come off of cooldown.

    Step 2a; Cull the herd; Medbay:

    Now that you have at least 4 units on their ship, take your boarders and enter a 2x2 room if you can (if you can't than 2 1x2 rooms will work also as long a your boarders are good). Our goal is to get the enemy numbers down to 2.

    If the enemy ship has a med bay then once 2 of the enemies are on low hp they will retreat to the med bay. All the other enemies will not retreat since the med bay is occupied and will let you kill them.

    Step 3a; Bamboozle them; Medbay:

    Now that you have only 2 enemies left on the opposing ship we can take advantage of enemy task priority to take out the medbay. Send your healthiest 2 guys to the shield room. Once the enemies are fully healed they will beeline it to the shield room. Now that they have left the medbay send your other 2 units to the med bay to begin punching it (note: all units do the exact same damage to systems so there is no advantage in using any specific unit).

    Have the 2 guys in the shield room dart in and out of the shield room. In doing so you constantly creating then deleting a new task. When you step into Shields the highest task is "defend Shields." When you step out it becomes "defend medbay." The end result is the enemy will run around in circles, never really making it to the med bay but never really fighting the guys walking in and out of the shield room. It's important that they do not fight because you do not want their hp to fall low enough to trigger the self preservation task. This will naturally allow your guys in the med bay to have all the time in the world to punch it down

    It's worth noting here that 4 man medbays on non-flagship ships are rare but do exist. While you can take this one out using more or less the same tactic it is significantly harder to do and I would suggest not trying to deal with this ship with just boarding (there are tons of other things you can use to assist your boarders).

    Step 4a; Finish them off; Medbay:

    Step really speaks for itself. With the medbay down have all 4 of your guys gang up on the last 2 guys who will no longer retreat since the medbay is not functioning.

    Step 2b; Cull the herd; Clonebay:

    Exact same as step 2a but we want to kill all enemies which they will let you do without retreating.

    Step 3b; Bamboozle them; Clonebay:

    Send your 2 weakest/lowest hp boarders to the clone bay. Keep your 2 healthiest boarders in Shields. When new guys are cloned they will ignore the guys in clonebay and beeline it to the guys in shields. Just stay in shields fighting any new crew that arrives. If you can, sending more boarders over to assist the guys in Shields is a good idea and you can use troop shuffling to make sure no one's hp gets too low. Eventually the clonebay will fall.

    Step 4a; Finish them off; Clonebay:

    Again self explanatory. With no clonebay cleaning up should be cake.

    With this you should be equipped to deal with most earlyish ships even if you only have boarding available to you. Next I will go over some things that help with boarding.

    Mid Game; Looking for the supporting cast

    There are many systems and items that help with boarding. Simply put they will generally either buy you more time, impede the enemy or help take out the medical unit.

    • Zoltan Shield Bypass: First and foremost is the bypass. Easily the number one thing I want early in the game and 2nd thing I want overall. This one is obvious and if you see it on a boarding ship you want it.

    • Weapons: Weapons are weapons. Ideally you shouldn't need to invest in these very much but they are still nice to have. Small bombs, Breach bombs and Artemis's are generally the best since they allow you to invest very little in your weapons while being able to disregard enemy shields and take out medical units or hamper their weapons. Ions aren't bad for Zoltan Shields. Obviously standard builds work too but ideally you want to focus more on your defenses and not expend scrap on weapons. Good boarding needs time and good defenses buys time. It's also worth noting that once the enemy pilot leaves to deal with your boarders your accuracy goes way up so waiting for that to happen before firing your small bomb or missile can be advantageous. If you use them to take out an enemy medical unit, move your units there to block repairs.

    • Hacking: Easily the most op system in the game it's also the best system in the game at supporting boarding. The main advantage is locking doors and creating areas that enemies cannot enter or escape from. This makes medbay killing significantly easier since instead of needing to dance your units around you can just wall them off when they try to retreat. The doors are only locked as long as there is at least 1 power in Hacking so being smart with when you turn hacking off and on (letting them come in but not letting them go out) makes killing everyone significantly easier. There are lots of choices on what to hack too. If you hack medbay you can start the fight microwaving a few enemies (board into medbay, turn off hacking, wait for the enemy to enter, start the microwave, your own units are immune). Or if the enemy has a scary weapon setup you can hack weapons giving you extra time to kill the boarders before they can shoot at you. There are all sorts of options here. I will say this right now. If I'm playing a boarding ship I assume that I will be getting hacking at all costs and will absolutely avoid getting my 3rd system if I won't have hacking. This is especially noteworthy on ships like Fed C or Lanius B which start with a Teleporter and a non-Hacking system. I basically just assume that all my systems are predetermined from the start. The main reason is I have a very reliable Flagship strategy using boarders which I will talk about later but it requires hacking..

    • Clone Bay: Clone Bay is superior to medbay for boarding ships (Though Medbay is also good), since you can be more aggressive with your boarders especially where auto ships are involved. I would say that as long as you can reasonably deal with auto ships, switching your medbay to a clone bay is not worth it. But if you see Clonebay being offered and you don't have a good answer to auto-ships at the moment then swapping it out is a good move. If you are fighting an auto ship with Medbay and boarding, Lanius obviously can just be sent over no issues. Rocks and Crystals can be sent over with level 1 tele and be pulled out in time before they die. All other units except Zoltans can be pulled out in time with Tele 2. If you are thinking of using Zoltans you might need your head checked cause medbay-Zoltans-boarding is not a strategy used voluntarily by a sane person under any situation.

    • Drone Control with Def Drone 1/Cloaking: I'll be talking about these 2 systems together since they more or less accomplish the same goal. They buy you more time. As I mentioned above, ships that focus heavily on their boarding can afford to invest extra in their defenses at the expense of their weapons which in turn buys you the time to kill off the enemy crew. Ideally your defense will be far enough ahead of the enemy weapon curve that they will be unable to reliably hit you. However there are some things your standard defenses just will not work against coughmissilesarebullshitcough and unfortunately your weapons might not be strong enough to reliably take out the enemy's weapon system. Here's where having a Def Drone 1 (not def drone 2 which can get confused by lasers and let missiles through) or Cloaking becomes useful however the choice of which or when to buy them is a bit harder than you might think. Personally I think the Def drone is superior to Cloaking on ships that are boarding focused. Cloaking will reliably dodge only half the missiles shot at you during a fight. A Luxury you really don't have. Def Drone 1 will at least attempt to block all missiles and although it's not as reliable as cloaking for a single missile, you rarely win in the time it takes to fire just 1 Missile. In drawn out fights with missile equipped ships I generally feel it blocks more missiles than cloaking does. Add in the bonus of Def Drone 1 protecting against Hacking, Boarding Drones and Ion Intruder Drones and the value of it over Cloaking goes up. The final reason I think a Def Drone is superior is the cost. Drone Control with Def Drone is significantly cheaper than Cloaking hence I find you can usually pick one up in the early~mid game without disrupting your ship upgrades as much as long as your drone count is stable whereas I have a hard time justifying the cost of cloaking until the mid to late game. Just so we're clear, I'm not trying to say that Cloaking is bad. It's absolutely great but I feel that boarding ships do not really mesh well it (unless you get it for free, I'm looking at you Crystal B) compared to a standard weapon build. In a standard weapon system Cloaking will all but guarantee you first shot at the enemy weapons allowing you to disable them. However what we need isn't a little time, but a lot of time which overall I find Def 1 + increases investment in shields + Evasion does a better job at than Cloaking when you consider all factors.

    Mind Control: This is gonna be a bit long since there's a lot to say here hence why I saved it for last. I'm not sure why this works but there's a slightly infamous Mind Control strategy that can be used with boarding. Super simple too. Board into Shields. When someone enters, pause, MC the guy who entered, leave Shields (it is important that you do this all in the same pause). This will cause the game to send several guys (3 with a 2 man boarding party) to shields to deal with the one MC'd guy letting your other guys run around scott free to punch something else like medbay, weapons or the faces of other boarders. I'm not sure why this happens but my best guess is that something in the way MC works confuses the game into thinking there are still 3 boarders in Shields even after your guys leave. Since it sees 3 boarders there it perceives that it must assign 3 units there to deal with them (it). Regardless it works and is especially effective on Lanius B which not only starts with both but lets you board with 2 lanius who can drain the o2 from whatever room you are punching down (Weapons, medbay, o2 are the best choices) swinging the fight even more in your favor once the mc wears off. This is actually the one time I might upgrade MC early since it ties up the enemy longer.

    As an extra, I'll also talk about how MC interacts with priority. Picture this. You find a ship that cannot hurt you and you have MC. Seeing that they have no medical unit you get a giddy feeling as you realize you can make these poor souls fight for your amusement over and over again and once they've killed all but 1 crew off you can easily ping down the last guy. Enthusiastically you MC the first guy annnnnnnnnd nothing. They simply ignore the MC'd guy and let him punch the system. You can feel your dreams of turning their ship into Fight Ship slipping away. What's going on and how do we make Fight Ship a reality?

    Remember above I said that MC'd units are not treated the same as your boarders? This is what's causing it. Since the game does not see the MC'd unit as a boarder the game does not create a task to deal with it and as such he is ignored. For all of you still dreaming of Fight Ship I have good news for you, Fight Ship does exist and it again involves priorities. Although no one will be assigned to deal with the MC'd unit we just need to create a situation where the MC'd unit is in the same room as a high priority task that's not being done. In that case the unit assigned to the task will happen to meet with the MC'd unit which automatically causes them to fight. MC'd units are not considered as doing a task so once MC'd any task they were doing is opened up. With that in mind can you see how to follow your dreams of one day making Fight ship? Feel free to scroll up and consult the priority list.

    If your answer was to MC the pilot you are correct. Piloting is the highest priority task when nothing is wrong on the ship so by MCing him the game will sense that there is no pilot and instantly send the unit with the lowest priority to fix that. Then when that new person gets there he will begin fighting the pilot which causes the game to recognize him as a threat so the game will sense another task not being done and will actually send another unit to piloting which will just turn the pilot room into a bloodbath. This is also the reason why when you board it sometimes seems like extra units have been assigned to deal with your boarders. In actuality only 1 of the units has been assigned, the other is on a different task which just so happens to be in the same room as your boarder so he attacks. You can naturally MC any unit as long as there is a unit manning a system lower in priority to get them to fight. Once there is a last man standing he should be sufficiently hurt that you can easily shoot him down with your weapons (remember, lasers and beams deal 15 crew damage in the systems they hit, beams must be direct hits based on the tile the unit is standing in). Fight Ship is here at last.

    Additionally, while most people know you can MC the enemy pilot to kill evasion and make your first volley more reliable, it can be even more useful to MC someone after your first volley to interrupt a repair on a system. If you shot a volley into weapons/shields and they are damaged (but not destroyed) MC the unit repairing them. This will cause the unit to begin attacking the system and since repairing is high on the priority list, the enemy will send a unit over to do the newly available task. If they catch on fire this is even better since you can cause a bunch of units to fight and waste time in a room with a fire spreading. If you are going for an o2 kill you can MC the unit repairing it to stop the repair. It's worth noting that MCing a lone unit in a room where the system is completely broken will cause them to leave the room usually before the other unit arrives so if you intend to have units fight on the enemy ship to stall a repair, try to MC units in systems that are damaged (but not broken) or in rooms with 2 units in them (the enemy will send multiple units to deal with fires for example).

    Mid-Late Game; Annoying supporting cast for the other side

    So you have your supporting cast to help you with boarding but sometimes you'll find the enemy with a supporting cast of their own. Here are some of the people who might try to get in your way.

    • Teleporter: Okay this one doesn't actually get in your way but can help you quite a lot. If you see an enemy teleporter wait for them to send their guys over before you send your first boarding party. The people left behind on your ship should be able to deal with the boarders whereas your boarders now get to fight a ship with fewer boarders on it. This should let you easily finish them off since it's like you have 4 boarders right from the start, just dealing with the enemy in different locations.

    • Blast Doors: The most common annoyance, Blast doors stop you from being able to move around making step 1 harder. Fortunately once a door is broken on the enemy ship it will never come back so you should first board the enemy ship then focus on breaking down doors so you can stall for time as normal. This should be your first priority if it looks like stalling is going to be necessary. Do not wait for your units to be low on hp to try and punch down doors or else you are just going to get your crew killed. If the enemy ship is particularly scary you can also use hacking to unlock all doors in the hacked room which can help buy your units time.

    • Hacking: Hacking can be just as scary on their ship to you as yours is to them. While you have many systems that can just be ignored if hacked, if they hit your teleporting this can be devastating if you do not have weapons/hacking to back up your boarders. So let's first cover what to do if your teleporter gets hacked and they do not have a medical unit. When you see that the enemy has hacking at the start of the fight DO NOT send your guys over until you see what system gets hacked. A big mistake is to send units over immediately only to get a teleporter hack forcing them out. The reason this is such a big mistake is if the hack pulls your units out of the enemy ship the game senses that the tele was used so it puts your tele back on cooldown. I've seen people get into a cycle where they send their units in, they are forced out, they wait for the hack to end, they wait for the cooldown to finish, the send their units in again and 5 seconds later they are forced out again accomplishing basically nothing. As long as no one is pulled out of the enemy ship when it's hacked your tele won't go onto cooldown after being hacked so you can get 20 seconds to fight on the enemy ship. If your enemy cannot heal you'll eventually win like this. On the other hand if the enemy has a medical unit, there's no way around it. You're going to need help from your other systems to disable/destroy the medical unit when the enemy tries to use it. I won't go over them again since they are pretty obvious but I do not know any reasonable tactic vs a medical unit that uses only boarding when your tele is hacked.

    • Cloaking: If you are running a clone bay, Cloaking is a minor irritant that just makes the boarding process take a little longer. If you have a med bay it's a very dangerous system that must be closely monitored and acknowledged. When the enemy ship is cloaked you cannot send troops in and more significantly you cannot pull troops out. If you are running a Clone bay this is not a big deal since dying is itself a form of teleporting back to your ship. If you are running a med bay you must always be ready to have your troops survive 5~15 seconds without you being able to do anything to help them. Do not let your troops hp fall too low and make sure that doors are not locked that would prevent them from running the enemy around in circles. Pull your troops out early if you are unsure if they will survive a cloak and be careful. If you are fighting on an auto ship you have enough time to send your units in and pull them out as long as your tele is at least level 2 and you send them in just as the enemy cloak wears off.

    • Mind Control: Obvious annoyance. If you can, counter with your own mind control. If you cannot then just be careful with your units. Again do not send units to an auto ship unless you are certain that they cannot be mind controlled while there because you will not be able to pull them out.

    • Def Drone/Shield Drone/Anti-Combat: Other than making it harder for you to use hacking/weapons really not too much to worry about here. They don't have any direct affect on boarding other than the Shield drone blocking boarding on and off. If they have a shield drone just use some random weapon to try and prevent them from blocking your ability to pull your units out. There is also a pretty well known exploit to sneak hacking bits past drones which I won't be talking about here. It's easy to find out how to do it elsewhere.

    • Anti-personele: This one is annoying. Usual tactics of running the crew around but everything is a little harder since they have an additional beefy boy which makes it more difficult to get them down to 2 crew and bait them. You can sometimes trick the enemy by shuffling your units in and out of rooms until you are fighting only DNA bearing foes with no room for him to come into the room. If, for some reason, you absolutely have to use only boarding against it and a medical unit then you can just keep breaking them until they have no more drones left. Enemy ships only carry around 3~5 drone bits so if you must you can just punch them till they cannot get up anymore… you know like everything else ;) .

    • Repair Drone: Annoying little bugger who doesn't seem to understand that you broke the enemy medbay/clonebay/weapons for a reason. Low hp so you can just slap it a few times until it learns its lesson.

    End Game; My Super Secret Flagship Boarding Tactic

    So you're cruising along having the time of your life. You're punching the stuffing out of every enemy you meet because you've been reading this guide and are now a master boarder. Then wouldn't you know it, you're in sector 8 and you find yourself face to face with the flagship and you realize, just like all those tests you studied for in school, you have no idea what you're doing. Well don't worry. That's what this final section is for. Here I share with you my personal Boarding Tactic that I always use vs the Flagship. Note that this tactic is intended for 2 man teleporters on Hard mode. On Normal/Easy the enemy weapons are not connected to the rest of the ship so it's easy to board them 1 at a time to disable them and once they are disabled they cannot be repaired. This allows you to take your time finishing off the rest of the crew and is much easier.

    For this to work it is absolutely essential that you have Teleporter (duh) preferably at level 3 but 2 might work also, Shields 4, Hacking (preferably level 3 but not absolutely necessary), and a weapon system that will deal 3 damage vs no shields with a reasonable expectation of success though not necessarily an amazing one. Crew-wise you are going to need 4 boarding capable members although 2 of your members need not be amazing boarders. An engi and human would literally be enough although 4 manti/rocks/crystals/lanius are much more preferred. Also useful would be level 2 o2 (counters a o2 hack), decent engines (4 should be enough but don't let me stop you from getting 8), and buffered systems (if done right you might take a little damage). Anything else you have is just extra and will be useful.

    Phase 1

    Step 1; Preparing for a tactical retreat:

    Whenever I fight the Flagship phase 1 I try to fight it 1 space away from the base. While not completely necessary this does give me 2 chances to reset the fight in the event I get hacked in an essential system and for this to work there are 3 systems that cannot be hacked, period. If you are hacked in Shields, Teleporter or Hacking, power up your engines, run away and try again. If you have it, deploying a defense drone can help you "read" the hack. Defense drones will look at an incoming hacking bit when it gets close enough so if it looks like the hacking bit is going to hit something benign you can depower the defense drone and let it through. Otherwise you can keep the defense drone powered to stop it. I'll also note that even if your weapons are hacked this still works which is ironic since normally a weapon hack is the most devastating hack in the game. Regardless, once the hacking bit does not hit one of the 3 systems named we can continue to step 2.

    Step 2; Safety First:

    Now that you don't have a game ending hack you want to send party 1 over as soon as the initial cloak wears off. Send your weaker boarders into the Ion room (far left). Even if it's just an Engi and a Human this is enough to overpower the human there and eventually take out the weapon. At the same time send a hacking bit onto the enemy shields and if you have it get ready to use cloaking when they fire their missiles at you. When the timing is proper, start your hack and once the shields are down send a complete volley of shots into the Missile room (Second from the right, if you have Mind Control you can use it on the pilot to assist. Go out of your way to not damage any other rooms ie resist the urge to send beam weapons across the whole ship and only hit the missile room). This should take them down. This might seem surprising but you are now basically safe. With Ion down, it is incredibly difficult for the laser and beam weapons alone to deal any damage. They would not only need to time out perfectly but also not miss any shots.

    Step 3; Stay Safe:

    Now that you are safe you want to keep it that way. Your tele should be ready so send your 2nd boarding party over into the missile room or the room next to the missile room (depending if the missile room is on fire or not and if the units being sent are fire proof) and instantly start breaking down the door to the missile room and killing anyone who comes in to repair (as they try to retreat take advantage of the locked door to the shield room to kill them). These 2 units are going to be defending this room to stop the enemy from repairing it until you can get more boarders onto the enemy ship so you do want these 2 to be good boarders. Have them defend the missile room (again either by being in the missile room or waiting next to the missile room for the fires to go out) and once you can pull out your other boarders from the ion room and then send them over to meet up with your first set of boarders. With a level 3 tele this doesn't take very long.

    Step 4; Kill them all:

    Once you have at least 4 boarders on the enemy ship you can migrate over to the shield room and fight there. Just use standard boarding techniques while using hacking to lock/unlock the doors by powering and depowering hacking. Unlock doors when units are trying to get into the shield room. Lock them once they are in so they cannot run away. Use troop shuffling to manage everyone's hp. Keep an eye on the missile room in case anyone tries to go over there to repair them. You can even send over more boarders, even units who are normally not good at boarding, to have more bodies to work with. Resist the urge to use hacking again since you cannot unlock the doors when you do so. Remember you are basically safe now so you do not need to rush things. You might also have the urge to fire on their medbay when you see them retreating there. I would advise against it since you do not want to accidently do too much damage to the flag ship and it's more than easy enough to kill them in the shield room by locking them in. Breaking the med bay also just delays the enemy from returning to shields. Eventually you will off them all.

    Step 5; Make yourself at home:

    Once you've killed every unit (and I do mean all of them, not almost all, not close to all, not "It's fine, I'll leave 1 or 2 for the next phase," every single one) except for the one guy in the beam room (he blocks the ai from taking over), you can basically make yourself at home. Raid the fridge, lick the steering wheel, use the toilet, you've got all day. For those of you in a rush, just begin punching things. Shields, Piloting, Lasers, Hacking, Cloaking, Doors, whatever you want. Phase 1 is a sitting duck. Whenever you are ready, call your guys back and finish it off.

    Phase 2

    Remember how I stressed that you wanted all the units on the enemy ship dead in phase 1? This was to prepare for phases 2 and 3. First send 2 units asap to missiles. 2 unit's punching down missiles will take them out before it can fire as long as they are not interrupted hence why we need an empty ship. Also if you have it deploy a def drone, this will stop the enemy's boarding drone. Nothing else to really say on this. Get your 2nd party of boarders in, once missiles are down move over to shields and punch them down too. Because of the surge we don't have infinite time but with no real resistance it shouldn't be hard to win before the 2nd surge.

    Phase 3

    You can probably predict this one pretty easily. With all the enemy crew dead, getting boarded is no longer an issue. If you have a bypass than board immediately with 2 units who aren't under Mind Control. If you have Mind Control cancel enemy MC with yours. Whenever you can get onto the enemy ship punch down whatever systems you want and hack shields. Cloak the surge if you need to. With the entire enemy crew dead it honestly shouldn't be hard.

    And that's basically everything I know about boarding. If you have questions feel free to ask.

    submitted by /u/allstar64
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    Was Normal always that hard??? (A bit of a rant)

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 10:22 AM PST

    So I've decided to delete my profile before the achievements went live on steam, to unlock them again. Before deletion I won with every ship on hard and got almost all achievements. I was missing: Ancestry, Battle Royal, I don't need no stinking upgrades, and Boarding Objective successful.

    Anyway I've decided that I want to take it "easy" and play on normal first. And last time I deleted my account my first run was a win, and I unlocked like loads of stuff.

    Now my first run ended in sector 1, when on first beacon 3-4 dudes teleported and start wrecking stuff, and then the same happened at second bacon, so I've just rage-quitted.

    So I try again, I get to sector 5, but this time I get boarded by 4 Rockemen during a solar flair, while also fighting a ship. I had a very skeleton crew, and while my weapons were really good 2 Flak I, 1 BLII, it still wasn't enough to survive this encounter.

    After that I went for a last run currently, and I got loads of crew very fast, even got Zoltan ship unlocked (sadly no shield, just Envoy), but then my boarding crew of Rock and Mantis got killed, and it just went down after that...

    Long story short: I somehow get to RFS, but with a set-up I already knew I'll be lucky if I survive first stage. Well guess what? I didn't. Got engines hacked, and I slowly just gave up...

    So yeah, was Normal always this hard? I mean again after winning with every ship on hard, I was on a "losing" streak, where I mostly didn't win, or if I did the win was pretty average and wouldn't even get on the scoreboard, so yeah maybe I'm just bad or am doing stuff wrong.

    Sorry for a bit of a rant. But as said, last time I deleted profile I won my first run incredibly easily. And I'm surprised how hard it is this time round. That's all.

    submitted by /u/pp86
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    Just picked this game up, got hooked, so naturally I had to shit post in the subreddit.

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 11:23 AM PST

    I don't know anything, and I'm discovering there's actually a lot to know.

    I unlocked the Engi ship somehow by luck. Same with Zoltan. Then I hit an odd encounter and thought "wait a sec, lemme Google this" turns out it was to unlock the crystal ship. I got excited, then failed the quest, haha. Henceforth, though, I'ma try and go through without spoiling myself.

    That said, are there any suggestions you can make without spoiling?

    submitted by /u/Mahhvin
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    Crashing after launch

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 05:02 PM PST

    I recently installed FTL on my new computer, and for some reason, every time I start it, it runs for about 30 seconds before crashing. Has anyone else experienced this? If it helps, I've got a RTX 2070, and AMD 3600 processor

    submitted by /u/CessnaSkyhawk
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    Does anyone have the UnlockedAugmentations Mod? It's unavailable right now.

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 06:48 PM PST

    The UnlockedAugmentations mod on the Subset forums links to a broken link. Does anyone still have the mod file or a mirror?

    submitted by /u/JohnElla8
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    Last Patched Changed Flagship Layout?

    Posted: 31 Jan 2020 04:18 PM PST

    I've been playing FTL a lot since october. And I aways play it on normal. Afaik, the Two artillery rooms were always conected to the main portion of the ship, but today i went to play the first time since the achievements patch and... to my surprise the rooms were not connected. I thought to myself: "Maybe i started A run on easy by accident?" But when it ended I went an saw that the score listed the run as a Normal run. So i'm quite confused. Was it aways like this and I just never noticed?

    submitted by /u/sparkleh0rse
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