Faster Than Light | My RNG can be blessed and cursed at the same time

My RNG can be blessed and cursed at the same time
All ships on Hard, without shields
Just won with 3 shields! Crazy good loadout but I still didn't expect to pull that off!
balboni.xml
I just bought myself a copy of FTL!
I'm barely out of sector 1
US oil prices be like
Finally broke 7K!
First win with federation cruiser? i think so!
Looks the same to me
speedhack for mac?

My RNG can be blessed and cursed at the same time

Posted: 12 Aug 2021 11:38 AM PDT

submitted by /u/cmdr_kaferant
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Posted: 12 Aug 2021 11:23 AM PDT

Playlist on YouTube -- mostly just the Flagship fight. Some of the runs were streamed on Twitch.

I've been using my broken shields mod to play without shields. It reduces the shield system to one bar -- so your shields don't work, but they still take up a system slot.

I play very slowly, especially on stream. If you watch these, you might want to use YouTube's player settings to speed up the video.

Highlights

I've picked a few that I think might be interesting, or just provide examples of different setups:

Slug C showcases fast weapons, Reloaders, and Stealth Weapons.
Engi C, early Drone Recovery Arm, drone micro and a triple combat drone Flagship.
Mantis A, crew kill phase 1 and an inventive way to "one-shot" phase 3 with 3 Pike Beams.
Zoltan B, because it's fun to sell two Burst Laser 2 and LRS at one store. One-shot example.
Rock A, interesting phase 1 with carefully planned system targeting. Stressful phase 2.
Stealth C, also no cloaking. An incredible run all the way. Terrible store luck.

Difficulty appraisal

The game is a LOT harder without shields. I imagine you knew that!

When I started this, I wasn't sure how many ships were realistically possible -- I mean, without incredible luck. I expected the boarding ships to be the worst, especially Mantis B and Fed C.

Many ships took around 1--3 attempts, but some took a lot more. Fed A was the worst, by far. That ship took so many attempts -- maybe 30, or even 40? It dies so easily in the early game, and has nothing to sell. Even Fed B is a lot better.

The boarding ships were definitely bad (except Crystal B), but not as ungodly awful as I expected. Fed C took only one attempt, but I think that was pretty lucky. Mantis C took only one attempt (streamed). Mantis B took several attempts.

I mostly did the easier ships first. As I progressed, I found myself operating at increasingly higher levels of play, and becoming accustomed to the difficulty. I feel it has developed me as a player.

About the Flagship

I think the Flagship is a brilliantly designed boss fight, and I love how it relates to player progression.

As a beginner, it's an enormous, overwhelming challenge. But as you master the game, the Flagship becomes trivial in most cases. That personal progression is satisfying.

More generally, in regular games, an expert player's ship typically out-scales the difficulty curve. It varies by game of course, but typically sometime around sector 5 enemies become harmless because your ship is too strong.

One thing I love about shieldless runs is that they really shake up the difficulty curve. It also varies a lot by the ship you play; some ships have an absolutely hideous sector 1!

The Flagship is incredibly dangerous when you don't have shields. You have to push much harder for strong offence. In regular games, quite often you only need to make good decisions for the first 3 or 4 sectors. In shieldless games, strategy usually matters for the whole game.

In many cases, I made detailed plans for the Flagship fight, running to multiple pages. I first did that for my original reactorless Zoltan C run (here is my plan for that run). It can be quite daunting, but also satisfying when you come up with a clever plan that was not at all obvious.

Although I lost plenty of games on bad ships (mostly early), I only lost once against the Flagship -- and that was also attributable to bad play when tired and fed up. So that's over 96% win rate against the Flagship without shields. It's interesting to reflect on what this might imply strategically about regular games too.

Data from these runs

Scrap ranged from 1273 (Engi A) to 1983 (Lanius B), with an average of 1642 scrap. That's around 200 scrap lower than I would expect in an average regular run. Perhaps this is just the result of running from more fights and often heading directly for the Federation Base in sector 8.

The major augments at the Flagship were as follows:

Zoltan Shield	Weapon Pre-igniter	Stealth Weapons	Automated Reloader
4 ships (Zoltans, Fed C)	13 ships	8 ships	4 ships

I had hacking on every ship except Lanius B, where I bought cloaking instead (helped by great weapons). My hacking was always fully upgraded.

I had cloaking on every ship that could also get hacking, except on Stealth C because I chose "no cloaking" as an additional challenge. My cloaking was always fully upgraded.

I bought drone control on 9 ships. I bought mind control on 6 ships. I never bought a teleporter. I had an empty (main) system slot on one ship, Stealth C, because I just didn't have the scrap to spare.

I had Backup Battery on 23 ships. I would often be in sector 5 with minimal or zero reactor upgrades. My lowest-power run was Stealth C on 13 reactor with no Battery or Zoltans. Excluding Battery and Zoltans, final reactor was as follows:

13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21
2 ships	3 ships	3 ships	3 ships	2 ships	3 ships	9 ships	1 ship	2 ships

Very often, especially on bad ships, I would be in sector 6 or even sector 7 before making any engine upgrades. My final engines were as follows:

Level 3	Level 4	Level 5	Level 6	Level 7	Level 8
1 ship (Engi A)	7 ships	15 ships	3 ships	1 ship	1 ship

To give an idea of my weapons usage, I've split them into the following categories:

One-shot beams	One-shot beams, with help	Fast weapons, no beams	Mixed weapons, no beams	Mixed weapons, with beams
9	2	5	2	10

When possible, I would take an all-beams "one-shot" build. Even here it can be useful to have a fourth non-beam weapon (or Artillery Flak!), in case your weapons get hit and you lose the one-shot. I don't use cheeky swipes.

Otherwise I'd get as close to a one-shot as possible -- which might mean a really fast two-shot. Often you can "manufacture" these pseudo one-shot builds by making good use of everything at your disposal, and planning a long way ahead for the Flagship.

Sometimes I would swap a weapon out for different phases.

A really strong build kills phase 2 before the first power surge. Otherwise, you need to cloak the surge and kill it soon. Drones and beams are often useful for finishing them off while you hide under cloak.

I would rarely go all-beams before the Flagship. Usually it's safer to hack enemy weapons than enemy shields, as you can't one-shot some enemies. A lot of safety comes from upgrading hacking and cloaking, and alternating them while you hack weapons.

submitted by /u/MikeHopley
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Just won with 3 shields! Crazy good loadout but I still didn't expect to pull that off!

Posted: 12 Aug 2021 11:58 AM PDT

submitted by /u/nyancatgamer337
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balboni.xml

Posted: 12 Aug 2021 05:28 PM PDT

It was the summer of 2021. Since I had nothing better to do, I had resorted to one of my weirder pasttimes; browsing some sketchy websites. You're probably thinking that I'm stupid for doign it but I had a virtual machine and vpn set up so I didn't think anything bad could really happen to me. Imagine my surprise when on one of these ad sites I saw a banner ad for my favorite game, FTL: Multiverse! I of course clicked on it to see where it would go and it brought me to some weird post on a filesharing site advertising "Multiverse 7.0". This was really weird, because I was still on 4.11 (hotfix 2) and Kix hadn't graced us with an update in months. Had he been working on a new update this whole time and posting it to this secret webpage? I didn't recognize the poster's username, it was something like "sunny dog", I can't really remember, but I figured there couldn't be any harm in checking it out. I downloaded the zip and looked through it, and all the folders seemed normal so I put it in my mods folder and patched it. Everything seemed normal but the title screen was different. The FTL Multiverse logo was blood red and it had a hyperrealistic image of the kestrel on it, except the stripes were red. The splash logo was just a bunch of corrupted text but I didn't think anything of it. The title screen usually changes on every update so I supposed this was just the new one.

I went to start a new run but only the starting kestrel was unlocked but it had 4 human crew and a new weapon I didn't recognize called the "reaper beam". I thought that maybe the unlocks were changed so I continued as normal. At the starting sector it instantly set me to a new "Impossible" difficulty and didn't let me change it. I usually play on hard/extreme so I was up for the extra challenge. The first sector was unusally easy with the weapon on the ship since it had full shield piercing and did 10 damage (but 60 second cooldown and 5 power) and I breezed through most of it. However every time I killed anyone is always increased notoriety and the dialogue was unusally graphic talking about how the enemies were brutally sliced open by the beam and bleeding out. The elite at the exit beacon didn't drop anything and the rebel just said how sorry he was for everything before it described how my crew killed him in excrutiating detail. Sector 2 only had one option and it was a sector I had never seen before called "empty" so I went there. Every beacon had nothing on it except for one I found with a strange message in messed up text. The only option I had was "continue" so I did it and it didn't seem to do anything. With nothing in there by the time I got to the exit beacon I only had no fuel left and there was an event that just said "Do you want to Balboni?" and the options were Yes and No. I clicked yes and it took me to a secret sector like the crystal sector in vanilla. I was out of fuel though so I had to wait at that beacon. When I opened the sector map it said the sector number was 666 and the name was Balboni Sector and instead of distress beacon the option said "Do you want to Balboni." Usually when you have no fuel its better to turn it on so I clicked yes.

Before I waited, I rearranged my crew a bit in case I had to fight and I noticed that the human walking animation seemed hyper-realistic like it had too many frames it felt unnantural. The textures on the humans seemed off too but I chalked it up to my new gaming pc rig, but the music was the space cruise track but slowed down I waited at the beacon and a big ship showed up with the ship class ???. It looked like a rebel battleship but it had red stripes like the kestrel on the main menu and it had 4 heavy lasers. In the event the rebel ship hailed me but instead of text the rebel started speaking out loud and called me by my real name. Then it disabled my weapons system by one power and the music started slowing down and played backwards as I went into battle. I tried to fight it but it easily destroyed me since I only had 2 shield layers. When I died the death screen showed a long text box detailing how my crew agonizingly died in the vacuum of space begging for their families and I swear that I could hear someone softly crying. I went back to the hangar and there were no ships unlocked any more and I couldn't play. On the main menu it showed that I could continue a game but it always too me back to my ships's floating wreckage. I couldn't help but notice that Kix finally added gibs to the ship but they seemed weirdly realistic as the insides were covered in blood and scratches that shouldn't have been able to be seen in the pixelated art format. When I tried to click New game it promted me with "Do you want to Balboni?" and I could only select "no" and it would take me to the hangar where I couldnt do anything. I tried to reinstall the game an it actually worked, and I could do the whole thing over again but every time I try to get past it I keep dying. Every time I reinstall it the music gets more and more distorted and the red on the main menu seems to spread.

I decided to look into the game files and search for "Balboni" and it turned up one result called "balboni.xml" and when I tried to open it my computer screen went black and when I reloaded it the entire mod was just replaced with a black image and that same file balboni.xml. I have a screenshot of the Balboni sector here https://imgur.com/a/ofGonTs.

Does anyone know how to survive the balboni sector? Keeps ending my runs and seems pretty rare I need help.

submitted by /u/MrAgentTHeKatGuy
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I just bought myself a copy of FTL!

Posted: 12 Aug 2021 04:34 PM PDT

Let's GOOOO!

I've always heard that this game is awesome, but I have never gotten around to playing, nor even watching it and I don't know why ... But that doesn't matter now.

"Ad astra per aspera!"

submitted by /u/Timomu123
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I'm barely out of sector 1

Posted: 13 Aug 2021 12:53 AM PDT