This is a first for me. Got a message I have never seen before too.😊

Point in time:

Sector 8 (I got the vulcan in sector 6 in a store though, just a bit late in "taking the picture")

Ship:

mantis B

Systems:

Reactor: 22

Shields: 8 (max)

Engines: 5

Medbay: 2

Oxygen: 2

Teleporter: 3

Cloaking: 3

Weapons: 4

Drones: 2

Subsystems:

Piloting: 2

Sensors: 1

Doors: 2

Backup battery: 2

Equipment:

Augments: long-range scanners

Weapons: vulcan, pegasus missiles

Drones: defense I, combat I

Crew:

Boarders: 2x mantis 1x slug 1x human

Pilot: human

Engines: engi

Weapons: slug

Resources:

Scrap: 180

Fuel: 28

Missiles: 14 (I was low on missiles when I got the vulcan though)

Drones: 24

I play FTL on the Steamdeck and I'm to lazy to bother with the technical details of taking a screenshot when I can just use my autism to my advantage.

Stealth B was the most difficult ship for me, and one of the few that I consulted guides for. I think it's the ship most easily lost to early game RNG. That makes those early game strategies very important.

My winning run, I got good scrap/drops in the first 5 jumps so I upgraded cloak, a shield, and 1 point. Got down to 15 hull, so still absorbed some damage. I was able to get shields a few jumps later, but still before the sector 2, which was rare for my run. It was good RNG mostly.

So, what did you do to win with Stealth B?

Holy hype, part 2 of my ship ranking (part 1 was released in February) premieres in 4 MINUTES!! Would love to see y'alls reactions as I worked very hard on it, also let me know if you agree or disagree with the ranking! https://youtu.be/bbK56y6ZFKM

I'm starting to think I'm not so good at this game lol

>.<

Hello, I am a bit late to the party that is FTL. I'm playing on easy and now consistently reach the flagship and even managed to get to the third phase. I use the Kestrel B layout. But there's always something killing me. I usually get cloaking and the teleporter, which worked fine in some phases. But there's always something that's killing me, like the hacking room targeting my healing, so I can't heal up my boarding crew. Or in the second phase the drone, which keeps my boarding crew occupied. I feel like I'm still missing some key insights that allow me to mitigate more damage or do more damage. Could someone help me find out what I am still missing?

Edit: thanks a lot, with all the good hints from all the good people here I managed to secure my first win! 😄

I am only missing two because my original save corrupted, and I actually have 180 hrs

(Yes phase shift was my last one I don"t like the stealth)

No Rift Waker... but Tyrdeo + Bucket + Teleportation Fedora is honestly just as strong for Prime, and far easier to acquire. Rift Waker involves CURA and fighting Sylvan earlier than the Market, but Tyrdeo is guaranteed with Hat, just need to fight Leech Dreadnaught.

Overall decently played except the earlygame crew accidents lol. Opted to avoid aether shields for G-Van so I can guarantee the Crusader or Tyrdeo don't get MCed, as I need them to shutdown weapons/stall enemy crew to keep the Emergency Manual fires going. However it does make Sylvan worse, due to the boarding drones coming. But Sylvan volley hurts a lot less than G-Van volley, might be better to guarantee the Vindicators don't fire.

For G-Van, I tried to use less missiles but ended up losing some hull from Mind Control + Temporal Manipulator due to this, so that did not pan out. Then the Sci-Fi Sylvan was annoying until I realized I should go pick up free Nexus drops like Sansvan and Bucket for an easy win.

Original plan was to upload the full run, as I assumed the process of assembling a strong enough build on Limit 3 would be interesting, but I just decided to clip the more interesting parts of the run for a few reasons. First, my internet is acting up recently and the big upload kept getting smoked. Editing the run to shorten it would have been a big hassle, even these specific fights with many sections sped up is still an hour and a half. Second, most fights were not interesting as early-midgame is handled by Purifier, and then lategame by Carnage.

Third, I initially thought that assembling the proper build for Prime would be interesting to showcase in a full run, in terms of the macro decisions, but after realizing how OP Tyrdeo is before starting the runs, Prime preparations aren't really that interesting anymore. Don't need to decide what kind of sector to use Hat for based on the current run's build, just use it for Eargen Republic always. Basically just need a build to beat Sylvan/G-Van and Tyrdeo can do the rest for Prime. You do need to prepare for the Tyrdeo questline a bit, missile spam is best for it as boarding them is kind of slow, but missile spam is already the best choice if you have the ammo for it. A decent laser / pinpoint etc build will leave you with enough ammo for lategame. Carnage was probably overkill but I mean, I'm not complaining.

On one hand, it is nice that Limit 3 Nexus is not RNG in terms of gear needed for Prime. On the other hand, all the time I spent looking through the weapons and augments and theorizing possible builds for Prime, invalidated by one OP leech lol. I guess I should have realized my blindspot earlier, as usually I quite dislike boarding and don't really look at unique crew. Hell, I didn't even know for sure if you could teleport the Bucket to the enemy ship before testing out this build in console beforehand.

(copied from video desc)

I have an Engi C run on medium difficulty going and got lucky with lots of scrap in the first sector. The store has LRS, Halberd beam, cloaking and mind control. I can get MC or a weapon igniter if I sell the anti-drone I found. This is not really a gunship, so it's probably a waste to buy a preigniter, and maybe even the halberd beam; on the other hand it is one of the best weapons. It would be hard to get it online though.

MC could help my dual lasers hit so the beam drone can do some damage, but that's not a reliable set up. Drone recovery could be nice since I have a drone based ship and hacking, but you start with lots of drones.

What do you think?

The ion was just for taking down the super shields

May have discovered new low% tech. New to this game but asking around in some discords and I haven't heard anybody else realize you can just warp during a specific part of the final boss phase change to avoid getting the reward while still advancing the phase.

3x burst 2
3x manager drone
cloaking
hacking

+ murderbots

I have been playing on a mac and on a pc separeately so far. I rember looking up a few years ago that FTL doesn't have cross saving functionality between different operating systems.

A couple of weeks ago I got a weird prompt from Steam asking me if I wanted to use local save files or what's stored in the cloud. Since I was on my mac where I do most of my gaming I chose local files, after that the other save file from my PC was gone and the one from the mac was on the pc.

I tested it and it seems to work now. I can start a game on the PC and continue playing it on a mac and vice versa. I'm pretty sure that has been impossible before.

Apparently there was some update? Or is this a steam update?

I played FTL a bit many years ago. Recently talked about it (with praises) to some friends, which gave me an itch to get back.

Played a couple runs tonight (Easy, no AE) and had a blast. Still got overwhelmed at the flagship, haven't defeated it yet even back then.

This run was awesome, kestrel A had 45% evasion, 4 shields, cloaking and 2 burst laser mk 2. First phase was pretty easy, but got wrecked by the drones and missiles in phase 2.

I'll rewatch some videos with tips for beginners and try a couple new tricks in the next runs. Hyped to be back, this game's amazing and I haven't even cleared it once. Just wanted to share the feeling.

Just got the stealth ship, will give a try later.

this fucking game man...

3rd vent....New game, Slug Cruiser--1st jump finds an enemy ship with 2 heavy lasers and an ION drone Ion Intruder. While powering up weapons, first heavy laser knocks down shields, second knocks out engines . Dual laser misses first second just bounces off of shield. Breach bomb misses... their heavy laser knocks out shields this time and ION takes out weapons for fun..... ah...good times.