Subset Games Forum

I am a moderately experienced player attempting to unlock and attempt to win with all the ships in vanilla FTL before moving on to the advanced edition. I've managed to get to the stage where I can win on normal most of the time with the Red-tail, Engi A, both federation cruisers, the noether and the mantis A and can occasionally win with the kestrel (no idea why I’m so much worse at playing that ship). There are two ships however, that I am currently struggling to beat the game or even get past the initial sectors with, and I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice on how to use them effectively. I just seem to have difficulty playing as these ships. My normal reaction would be to blame the games' RNG factor, but playing FTL for some time has taught me that almost all bad luck can be minimised with skilled play, and that when I was just starting out on easy and blaming the RNG for my inability to get past sector 2 I was not the game that was a fault. Therefore I think that I just need to figure out (or for someone to tell me) how to play these ships effectively to succeed.

The first ship I am having difficulties with is the slug ship A, the Man-of-war. I just can't seem to figure out how to best play this ship, and tend to just be worn down and die somewhere in sector 3 or 4. I know that this ship is evidently supposed to be an anti crew ship, with the laser to take down shields, the beam to kill the crew and the bomb to destroy the medbay, and can see how that would give better amounts of scrap and other rewards, but I have significant problems putting this into effect. For one thing this strategy seems to require a lot of time spend sitting around allowing your opponent to damage your hull, which would indicate that the focus should be early defence upgrades and saving up for drone control (hopefully with a defence drone) at a store, but by the time I manage this enemies are starting to have 2 or 3 shields and my starting weaponry is no longer sufficient (due to a single miss meaning the anti-bio beam cannot be fired). Therefore the solution would be to instead buy a better laser weapon (Burst laser 2 comes to mind) to take sown more shields, but doing so and getting it operational requires neglecting defences, which creates significant problems.

An alternative solution might be to transform the ship into a boarding ship, but I’m not sure how this would be done as the ship has a crew shortage and this would require buying a teleporter. The lack of sensors also would be a problem even on a ship with slugs.

So, in short, I am struggling due to not being able to work out how to upgrade this ship properly. How would you advise doing so? Are there ways to get around reduced defences in favour of operating more laser weapons? Is it possible and useful to transform this ship into a boarding ship early? And also, how should I adapt this ship to be able to fight the flagship, given enough time? Will anti crew weapons + bombs with laser support be enough?

The second ship that I am struggling with is the mantis B, the Basilisk. I know, I somehow can't win with the Basilisk. My inability to do well with one of the best ships in the game shows that this is evidently a problem with how I play rather than the ships themselves. With the Basilisk, its four man teleporter makes it one of the most powerful ships in the game later, but I just can't seem to get past the first few sectors with it. It seems that if I encounter an auto-drone or a ship with a zoltan shield (later on) I can't do anything at all and if the enemy ship is stationed near a sun I will take significant damage that may well end my game if the oxygen, medbay or teleporter (while I'm boarding) are damaged. Against normal ships, while there should not be many ship capable of penetrating two shields and a defence drone in the first few sectors, there are enough (due to the appearance of bombs and burst laser 2's) to cause significant damage that can again end my game if the aforementioned systems are damaged due to poor repair rate of mantises and having to pull my crew back from the enemy ship to make vital repairs, which allows them more time to kill me in.

The second problem I have is when I encounter a manned ship that cannot damage me but has a medbay. With no way for me to damage the medbay, boarding usually results in me having to run round attempting to manoeuvre my crew so that I can either kill someone before they can run away or damage the medbay while it is undefended, but both of these seem to be impossible to me. The boarding drone seems rarely to cause enough disruption to allow this to succeed. Is there any way to succeed in such a situation with the starting two boarders? Is there some way to make it so that you kill enemy crew before they can run to the medbay?

Otherwise, if there is no way to win in the above situations should I just run away? The thing is, if I am supposed to do so then having only one point in engines doesn't really help, and also enemy ships are only going to get stronger whereas if I am unable to defeat them then my situation is not going to improve.

Is there some way to get around these problems? If I can find the scrap, would buying crew at stores allow me to board ships with medbays and win? Otherwise would bomb/missile weapons work if I can find a store that sells them? Or should I attempt to get standard weapons and use them to defeat most ships while using boarding where possible?

I know that the mantis A is a weaker ship, but I seem to be able to succeed with that much more easily. The bomb knocks out medbays and securing additional crew is easy if you can board enough ships. All I really need offensively for the flagship is a bomb/missile weapon that does 3+ damage to deal with the medbay for the flagship stage A and some way to deal the last point of damage in each stage and take down the zoltan shield in stage 3, which allows me to focus mostly on defences. My point is, I can see how to win with the Mantis A but haven’t yet figured out how to do so for type B.

Anyway, sorry for the length of the post and any grammar/spelling errors I haven't removed. Any help with any of these questions would be greatly appreciated, as I am confident that the problem is my lack of understanding as to how to play these ships effectively. While I'm at it I’d also like to say what a brilliant game this is, and my incompetence with these ships has by no means diminished the enjoyment of playing. I'm looking forward to finishing up on vanilla FTL so that I can move on and enjoy the advanced edition content.

Tips for Mantis B:

If you run into Auto-Scouts, don't bother fighting, just run. If you have to, deploy your boarding drone. It will kill the systems, dealing damage to the enemy ship.
In asteroid fields/missile ship encounters you can micro between your defense and boarding quite well. Wait until you see an asteroid fly across your enemy, then quickly switch off your boarding and power your defense. Missile is almost the same, just do it when they launch the said missile.
You can't do anything to Zoltan Shields. Either get Bypass or just run.

The best way to play Slug A is typically to go with the intended anti-bio beam strategy. It's typically very effective when you can breach bomb the weapons (only do this if they can hurt you), then shoot them with the laser. On the second laser volley, you can sneak in the anti-bio beam.

Medbays complicate this plan, of course, and they're a big reason that this ship doesn't do so well on hard mode. These encounters can drain a lot of missiles or force you to take a lot of damage.

Slug A's offense is pretty slow if you do it this way, but once you beef up your defenses and maybe get a bit more firepower for disabling weapons, it becomes a solid ship. Hacking is very good, since it gives you a guaranteed sweep of the anti-bio beam every 20-30 seconds.

META_mahn wrote:If you run into Auto-Scouts, don't bother fighting, just run. If you have to, deploy your boarding drone. It will kill the systems, dealing damage to the enemy ship.

This is bad advice. The boarding drone can kill auto-scouts, and you should kill any ship you can. Auto-assaults are trickier, but you can beat them if you upgrade your teleporter. With a level 2 teleporter, you can damage a system twice then beam your mantis back to your ship before they suffocate. Get the auto-assault down to 1 hp, let the enemy repair each system a little bit, put your mantises in the empty room (if there is one), launch the boarding drone, turn it off, teleport your guys back, turn on the drone, and finally let it kill the ship. It's a pain, but it works.

Regarding tactics against medbay ships, it's often effective to chase a damaged enemy to the medbay. You can often get in enough hits to kill them before they get there. You could use the boarding drone and one mantis to do the bulk of the damage and station the other mantis in the path to the medbay.

Another option is to put a guy in the shields room as a distraction, then send the other guy to attack and destroy the medbay. Since the enemy (erroneously) considers the shields to be more important, they will leave the medbay undefended.

Slug A used to be my favourite ship pre-AE, and it's still a contender.
It's hard to make general recommendations: its advantages are individually situational, but there's almost always something strong you can do.

The Breach 1 is a fantastic weapon. Using it in earnest burns through missiles, but thanks to the cooldown its damage over time is very good for 1 power and the breach slows repairs. Even better when the enemy has to abort attempts due to lack of oxygen.

While I love sniping enemy crew, I'm only lukewarm about the Anti-Bio-Beam... more specialised than it needs to be. Nothing comes with Fire Beam or Hull Laser 2, so it's the best we have.
In AE, increase in rewards for taking ships intact seem smaller, it's not worth to take heavy damage for it. See if you can render a ship safe, for example by un-synching identical weapons, then snipe away.

The package of an efficient general purpose weapons, a flexible bomb and an anti-crew weapon gives you many opportunities. Shame that a ship that rewards finesse starts without sensors... the Slug ability doesn't fully compensate because it doesn't show beaches/oxygen levels.
As with other understaffed ships, crew cycling can prevent unnecessary damage - manning Shields rarely makes a difference, but if it does it's a big one.

Last not least, you have a quality-of-life augment that's not really needed, and while the weapons are good, neither bomb nor beam is essential. If you stumble across something great in a shop, you can sell a lot of stuff.

Ok, thank you all for your advise. I will try out these tactics.

I think my problems with the basilisk are mainly due to me playing to aggresively early on and not fleeing when I should. I think that until this ship gets additional crew it cannot really fight ships with medbays, whereas with 3+ crew it will be possible to damage the medbay while the enemies are distracted. Therefore presumably I should run from such encounters until I have at least 3 crew.

I had no idea that you could actually board auto-scouts with a level 2 teleporter and survive. I can see how, In conjunction with the boarding drone dealing the last point of damage this could be used to bring down crewless ships and will no longer have to run from them in future playthroughs.

As for the slug ship, I had only been using the breach bomb against enemy medbays for fear of running out of missiles and had not been correctly using them to disable threatening weapons. I still think that this ship needs an additional laser weapon to succeed in taking down enemy shields later on but until then I can focus on defences.

I think my problem might also be due to the fact that I am playing in vannila FTL without advanced edition, and thus there are less options to deal with enemy shields aside from aquiring more weapons.

Anyway, again, thank you all for your help and I will be sure to apply this advice in future games.

Bithainium wrote:I think my problem might also be due to the fact that I am playing in vannila FTL without advanced edition, and thus there are less options to deal with enemy shields aside from aquiring more weapons.

Actually vanilla FTL is generally easier. While you're restricted from having other stuff, so are the enemies.

5thHorseman wrote:

Bithainium wrote:I think my problem might also be due to the fact that I am playing in vannila FTL without advanced edition, and thus there are less options to deal with enemy shields aside from aquiring more weapons.

Actually vanilla FTL is generally easier. While you're restricted from having other stuff, so are the enemies.

This indeed true (which is one of the reasons I am attempting to unlock and win with most of the ships without AE first. However, what I meant is that there are fewer options to allow the bio beam to succeed in vanilla FTL. Whereas in the advanced edition you have hacking to deal with enemy shields and mind control to eliminate evasion and allow your lasers to more frequently knock down shields as well as flak weapons and presumably other additional anti-shield weapons, in vanilla FTL your only options are more laser weapons or stacking ion weapons (offensive drones might work as well, but they would be more difficult to acquire).

Anyway, using the advice from this thread I made several more attempts on normal with the slug ship and on the second one (after dying to early missile proliferation on the first run) managed to win the game. As suggested I used to breach bomb to disrupt threatening enemy weapons, and upgraded my shields and engines early and thankfully did not encounter too many enemies with missile launchers. I ended up receiving multiple crew early on due to rewards from killing enemy crew and used the extra scrap to buy long ranged scanners. As was suggested I sold the ships augment as soon as there was something useful to buy (a crew teleporter) but was unable to find any more laser weapons and therefore sold the anti-bio beam. I beat the flagship by boarding and ended the game with a weapon array of three bomb weapons and the starting laser. During the run I was given a scrap recovery arm and bought another and due to the extra scrap from them and long ranged scanners ended the game with more scrap than I could use, so I think my victory was probably due to that rather than the slug ship itself.

I therefore agree with what has been said above how the slug ship is supposed to gain extra scrap and other rewards early from anti-crew warfare and then use that to either keep the bio beam relevant by acquiring more weapons or else transform the ship into something else. The only way I can see to do the latter in basic FTL is to transform it into a boarding ship, but there are probably many more options in advanced edition.

Thank you once again all who helped me by giving me advise. Many people seem to say that Faster than light is extremely luck based, but it seems to me that once you have figured out how to play a particular ship properly you can win regardless of luck (or at least minimise its effect). I look forward to trying out the Basilisk again as well as moving on the advanced edition.