• Breaking News

    Friday, December 11, 2020

    Home Unlabelled Faster Than Light | I made the Kestrel in Terraria

    Faster Than Light | I made the Kestrel in Terraria

    December 11, 2020

    Faster Than Light | I made the Kestrel in Terraria

    I made the Kestrel in Terraria

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 09:57 PM PST

    Slug B, no medbay or clonebay, way to go. Slug B rocks if you manage to get reconstructive teleport augment. The teleport functions as a healing system saving system slot for something else. I had this layout right before the rebel flagship phase 1 with normal difficulty.

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 04:24 PM PST

    WTF I love Zoltan B now

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 08:48 AM PST

    So I used to be firmly in the camp of Zoltan A being the best of the three zoltan ships, but remembered B being good despite having not used it for a good couple of years. I tried it out again and... yeah. It's ridiculous! Zoltan A is still busted and in the mix with Stealth A, Crystal B, Slug C. But for me Zoltan B pips it. It's brutally strong! I don't even know where to start with this monster, there's so much to say.

    Now I understand why there are some people who doggedly rank this ship as among the very best. Once you know, you know! I think the mighty Zoltan A looks better on paper because it has no scrap hole to fill for shields and halberd beam>pike beam. In practice it's a different story. Essentially, your early game strategy with Zoltan B is:

    ​

    • If enemy has no drones, focus ions on weapons. If it has offensive drones, focus ions on drones, then weapons once drones are down
    • Use pike as soon as it charges
    • Win

    I'll try and break it down.

    ​

    Weapons

    So lets compare Zoltan B's weapons to those of Zoltan A, another ridiculous ship. Halberd is better than pike, but 2 ion blasts + pike is better than halberd + leto missile, by quite a way. How so? Let me count the ways:

    • It's more versatile
    • You get an extra weapons power that you don't need to buy
    • Probably the most synergistic starting weapon loadout in the game, greater than the sum of its parts, but halberd + missile can't even be used together at the start
    • Double ion blast scales into endgame better than leto missile
    • It's much safer as you disable weapons much faster
    • It doesn't consume ammo
    • In a lot of scenarios the damage/time to kill is surprisingly similar
    • Pike's lack of shield piercing is offset by the ion blasts, Zoltan B has better shield piercing than Zoltan A
    • You can use your entire loadout at once without upgrading
    • You can crew kill much easier
    • It's more resilient - you can still kill ships just fine after getting a point of damage in weapons, unlike Zoltan A which has to switch to leto missile and lose all halberd charge time
    • You train weapon skill much faster than with Zoltan A, which is useful for beams
    • Plus your weapon loadout doesn't need much (or anything) to go through the entire game!

    ​

    Between your weapons loadout and the zoltan shield, it's very difficult for sector 1 enemies to hurt you before you take away their offence.

    The cooldowns of ion blast and pike beam give those weapons some of the best synergy in the game. Ion blasts can miss - but you get 2 volleys of double ion blast before your pike beam charges - 4 shots. If you hit one shot from your first volley, your pike beam will always do full damage before shield recharge (this would not be true for halberd). If your first volley misses, the second volley hits just after the pike beam charges. It's great!

    Here are the outcomes in sector 1 based on how many ion blasts hit from your first 2 volleys:

    • 0 hits: 0 damage on enemy, wait for next volley
    • 1 hit: enemy shields down, full pike beam damage at 14.4 seconds after which drones/weapons down to 50% or fully disabled for rest of fight - enemy unlikely to break through zoltan shield (requires drones+weapons+luck)
    • 2 hits: enemy shields and either weapons or drones at 50%/fully disabled, full pike beam damage at 14.4 seconds after which fully disabled for rest of fight - enemy will not break through zoltan shield
    • 3+ hits: faceroll

    I did some napkin math to see what the chances of those outcomes are. I'm basing it on a 25% dodge chance which seems to be around the max for sector 1. Correct me if my Steiner math is wrong, but with 25% enemy evasion you're looking at ~0.4% chance of hitting 0 shots out of your first 4, and ~4.5% chance of hitting 1 shot which in most cases results in zero damage if you target your ions correctly. So that's 95% of a better outcome, which is an auto win unless they do something cute like hacking your weapons. I like those odds!

    Then you start looking at how well the weapons loadout scales. Technically the ship can go through the entire game with just the starting weapons if you really beef up defence (not the best option though). Slot any laser/shield busting weapon into slot 4 and you have an endgame loadout. Any additional ion weapon other than chain ion/ion bomb has you steamrolling the game, especially if you get mind control/hacking to take out piloting! It's crazy to be able to slot in a single ion blast for 30 scrap and absolutely dominate. Or you can tack on damage by putting a heavy laser/burst laser/beam in slot 4, it still works great after buying a system or two. The weapons loadout is very versatile in its feasible upgrade options.

    All this makes it really easy to hold out for the systems you want as well. You're not taking much damage and your weapons last a long time, so it's easier to save up scrap with this ship than most others. Zoltan B really loves cloaking + stealth weapons.

    Also, pike beam is the signature weapon for using cheeky swipes if you like using them (I do). It lets you 1 shot some sector 1 enemies, force an instant surrender on others (great for asteroids), and can allow the pike beam to do 2 weapon damage on weapons in some loadouts, same as a halberd. Cheeky swipes make this ship even more OP than it already is by a significant margin.

    Shields

    You have a zoltan shield which lasts through nearly every fight if you target the enemy properly. All the same, sector 1 is a race to 100 scrap so you can buy 1 shield bubble. After that, you just crush the early game. Sector 1 on hard is surprisingly easy to get 100 scrap in barring the odd time where FTL decides to bend you over (which can happen to any ship).

    The lack of a shield often doesn't even come into play because you have the opportunity to disable beams/drones from around 9 seconds in - the very fastest enemy weapons fire at around 8 seconds for 1 damage. Zoltan shield can take 5 of those! Even drones often do no hull damage or very little because they're quite slow. Just target your ion blasts at the drones and you can hold out nearly every time.

    The main weakness before you get shields is of course asteroids and you will take some hull damage at those beacons. But if your pike beam is in slot 1, as long as your weapons don't get hit more than once, the enemy isn't a problem even with drones. I've been playing around with sector 1 asteroid fields and disasters come from either finding an auto-scout with hacking in an asteroid field that then hacks your weapons (pretty rare), or more commonly from getting a fire in engines/piloting. As long as that doesn't happen, your zoltan shield holds out long enough to escape with between 3 and 8 hull damage, maybe a fire/breach or two. You're often still in green, which costs peanuts to repair early on. So even the hard counter for this ship is survivable most of the time without much health lost. Especially considering the pike beam can often get enemies to surrender with 1 hit, giving FTL way less time to screw you.

    The other weakness is having a 100 scrap handicap. The thing is, it's really not much of an issue! First, as long as you don't buy anything 100 scrap comes fast in sector 1, then you hit beast mode. Second, you're 100 scrap down but have 3 weapons, 4 weapon power and a zoltan shield. That's a lot of value! It isn't that the game docked you 100 scrap, more that Zoltan B has it's scrap distributed elsewhere. That plus the safe start means you generally feel ahead, not behind.

    ​

    ​

    After playing with it again I honestly can't believe how strong this thing is. It compares favourably to so many ships. It has better ion offence than Engi A, better starting weapons than Kestrel B, equal/arguably better sector 1 defence than Stealth A (minus long range scanners), with realistic potential to end up with much better defence than Stealth A. It suffers less of a defence penalty than stealth ships because shields are cheaper and you don't need to find a store to get them. There is zero urgency to find a sector 1 store - in fact they're best avoided before spending 100 scrap on shields, meaning a very consistent early game. It even has an ideal spot for a non boarding Lanius! Just shove it in doors!

    Again, on paper, other ships seem stronger. But when you actually play with Zoltan B, you find so many advantages it almost seems unfair. There's more to say, but I think that's enough. If there was ever an S tier ship, this is it!

    ​

    ​

    TLDR: Zoltan B - the B stands for Bruh

    submitted by /u/rshotmaker
    [link] [comments]

    Got my ass kicked in Phase 3 of the Flagship. The teleporting and mind control just wiped me out. How do you beat this guy? (On Easy with 29 hours of play time)

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 10:36 AM PST

    Elven Honors Forum Release Trailer

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 04:08 PM PST

    Hey everyone, created a trailer for Elven Honors, a christmas mod I've been working on. You can check it out here.

    Elven Honors Forum Release Trailer - YouTube

    Elven Honors adds a lot of christmas themed content, as well as updates FTX, Joy to the World, and Winder Wonderland Weapons to work with MV.

    submitted by /u/Sallyspartan
    [link] [comments]

    I doodled and coloured a Zoltan and Engi, by request from a friend!

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 08:35 PM PST

    Don't Do It, ISS! This Ends Badly! It's No Joke!

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 09:18 PM PST

    How good is the FTL german translation?

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 08:32 AM PST

    I'm trying to learn German, and since FTL has a lot of text, I was curious how good the translation was. I've heard a lot of games don't do a good job with them, is FTL the same way?

    submitted by /u/yoboi42069
    [link] [comments]

    Close call with enemy boarders.

    Posted: 10 Dec 2020 11:20 AM PST
    Read more
    at

    No comments:

    Post a Comment