primeideal

So in FTL, there's a hidden species called the Crystals, but the quest to unlock their ship is fiendishly difficult in the base game and requires a lot of RNG events to go your way. However, in the Advanced Edition, the version C Rock ship starts with a Crystal crewmember, which makes the unlock quest significantly easier (though still fluky). Anyway, back in the day when I was playing it a lot I unlocked the Crystal ship by going the Rock C route.

Today I was playing Engi A, who start with a combat drone, an Ion Blast, and the Engi Med-Bot dispersal as one of their three augmentation slots. I'm not exactly sure what the strategy for ion weapons is, some people understand this better than me, but I played around with "autofire" because if there's a shield to hit, the ion will default to bringing down the shields first, so you don't have to worry about "do I aim at the shields or what." And normally I'm pretty cautious with drone/missile based strategies, because they're limited in supply; however, this ship starts with no other way to inflict hull damage, so you pretty much have to use the combat drones early.

Early on, I got a pirate to surrender mid-fight and offer a Shields Recharge Booster augment. That's good, everybody needs shields and defense, so fine, I'll take that bribe. The med-bot augmentation serves its role well, my Engi (and human pilot) can cope with boarders even though they're not great in single combat.

( Spoilers and/or tl;dr )

As of today, I have officially unlocked every playable ship on FTL.

Time well spent? No. But something something time you enjoyed wasting...

I still have no idea what the Slug quest entails. I don't like spending much time in nebula sectors if I can help it because ion storms are scary. I eventually unlocked that one by winning with Mantis (Type C, with the big teleporter).

Stealth A is very tricky. All the Stealth ships start with no shields, you have to buy shields at a store. A and B have cloaking. To get two out of the three achievements to unlock B, you probably need to use the scanners to navigate to the end without hitting an environmental hazard (sometimes you just get unlucky and have to go through asteroids/a sun/whatever; more often you just can't get to the end because you have no shields), and also, avoid nine damage in a single cloak. Which basically requires getting to phase 3 of the flagship. (The third achievement is "destroy a ship at full health from a single cloak," which is a lot easier with B because that one starts with a Glaive Beam and level 2 cloaking. Glaive beams require 4 power, so if you take any damage to the weapons system, you're kind of screwed--the game describes it as a glass cannon.)

Stealth C features an efficient supershield generator drone system, in lieu of cloaking. I tend not to like ships that require missile/drone strategies because the scarcity is scary, I'd rather just be able to rely on basic weapons.

It is pretty amusing (/sometimes frustrating) what sort of systems they omit. Like, several ships have no sensors, but that's not a huge problem, you can get by without sensors. Rock B has no doors. Stealth has no shields. Slug B has no medbay/clonebay, you have to use a teleporter and healing bursts to get past the first few jumps until you can sell off the "repair gel" augment and buy a medical facility.

The music, of course, continues to be balling.

Somewhat anticlimactic now, but apparently I am still playing this silly game (I have a lot of downtime, let's be fair), and have won it twice more:

-the Red-Tail (Kestrel B, laser ship), with a flak gun

-and the Nisos (Artillery B). I kept getting augments and drones (and then never used the drones); wound up with two lasers (Blast and Heavy?) and Swarm Missiles with the Explosive Replicator. With that many shots you can just throw everything at the drone room in stage 2 of the final battle and something will hit :p

Edit edit: for posterity's sake, I also unlocked Lanius B (the no-oxygen run is doable, you just have to be careful if you get hacked because it automatically closes doors). Haven't won with it, though.

You know it's a long hiatus when I pick up FTL again. But hey, I actually unlocked some new ships! :O

The Crystal Cruiser is notoriously hard to unlock, and I got it the "easy" way; with Rock Cruiser type C, you have a Crystal crew member to start the game. The "hard" way is first get the mysterious stasis pod, then find a Zoltan science ship that can unlock it for you, to get the Crystal person. Then (both paths) you have to travel to the Rock home sector, and then you have to stumble upon a ship that the Crystal recognizes, and it ports you to an alternate sector that's off the map.

Crystal A starts with two powerful weapons that can pierce shields. There's no type C, but there is the 2/3 achievements to get A->B. One of them is "use a special character power to lock down a room containing four enemy characters." This is doable (wait for one of those Mantis boarding events), but kind of futile--like, you trapped yourself in a room with four Mantis who are better at fighting then you, what did you realistically think is going to happen.

Another one is "use your retaliation power to destroy an enemy ship." The retaliation power is, when your ship takes damage, there's a 1/10 chance that it will blast a "shard" at the enemy. Unfortunately there's not a good way to indicate when this happens, it's just "hey wait a minute their oxygen room broke, we weren't even aiming there, what's the deal?"

So, early on, I stumble across the shady "purchase a weapon for 45 scrap" guy with exactly 45 scrap on hand. Feels like an omen. Buy some missiles (3 power). Later, happen on an ion weapon (2 power). Need to upgrade my weapons all the way to use all four slots at once, but hey, I can do that. Missiles are actually pretty effective for targeting the flagship (first phase), that combined with the Crystal base weapons combined with the ionizer puts me in the fight. I get the first-phase ship down to low health. Lower, lower...its shields come back online...I'm losing hull integrity too...it has one HP left.

We explode.

And then we take it out with us!!

So yeah, that was how I unlocked type B. Type B is another "no weapons and it's expensive to buy them," but it comes with cloaking and shields and a teleporter. I guess the idea is you teleport on, kill all the crew, teleport back? I'm not exactly sure how to use the lockdown power to my advantage. Like, if it's an early enemy and the ship doesn't have a medbay/clonebay, the enemy crew can just run from room to room but I can chase them. Teleporting is still a fragile strategy, though, because what happens when you get an AI ship? (Actually I think they take half damage from suffocation, they're like a weird Lanius/Rock hybrid, maybe for exactly this reason??)

Haven't gotten very far on that, but ready to try some more. :D

Just got past the second stage of the final boss for the first time! Playing with Federation B (Nisos)--randomly lucked into a bunch of different weapons, plus a drone. (I've also unlocked C, which is the suicidal teleporter/clone bay combo.) I don't think there's a big secret to part II other than "hit the drone system really hard, preferably with missiles"?

Last (hopefully?) stage includes a teleporter and "some kind of superweapon," fun.

Probably going to write up a dumb philosophical rambling tomorrow or so, but I'm trying to keep it to one blog per day :p

So various dreamwidth users came up with the idea to post silliness in February (under a variety of names) to ease the acculturation from Tumblr/not be so serious all the time. Me being me, I'm likely to ramble on anyway, but maybe I'll be less self-conscious about it? (ha ha ha ha ha)

melannen came up with a generator I've modified to suggest random combinations of topics, but today I have silly thoughts about FTL. Unlock-wise, I got the "defense drones..." achievement with the rock (the trick is to fire more than one at once to disable the drones), and then today I completed the Federation Cruiser quest! Cool beams. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, instead of Hogwarts sorting or whatever the other tropes are (I like Ajahs from Wheel of Time, myself, but that's another story), the cool new typecasting should obviously be stereotyping characters by species in FTL.

Humans: "common and uninteresting," quick to improve at skills
Zoltans: low HP, can power systems
Engi: robotic, good at fixing things, bad at fighting
Mantis: fast, good at fighting, bad at fixing things
Rock: high HP, slow, immune to fire
Slugs: can sense lifeforms, immune to mind control, live in creepy nebulas
Lanius: only available in advanced mode, don't need oxygen and in fact suck it out of rooms
???? there's some kind of bonus species but I have yet to find their homelands, it's a mystery.

Anyway, with regards to something like Hamilton (because that deserves more silliness and less endless rants);
Hamilton: human. A million things he hasn't done, but he learns fast.
Eliza and Angelica: Zoltans. I guess they could be different species if we're going the mixed-ethnicity angle, but I like the contrast of Eliza being the sweet and non-warry one, and Angelica being all like "electricity! wait till Ben Franklin sees this."
Burr: Lanius. Antisocial and aloof, off doing his own thing.
Washington: Rock? Going around stomping out fires. Maybe a Mantis, but he also has to be a smart executive.
Mulligan and Madison: I think also Rocks. Hercules is big, Madison thinks slowly and then says one-word utterances. Sure.
Jefferson: Slug?
Maria and James Reynolds: also Slugs? IDK what the stereotype is for Slugs (nebulas are scary, I try to avoid them), but I would think they'd be kind of the socially manipulative ones...?
Laurens: Zoltan? Not actually that good in a war.

Anyway, you get the idea.

-Harper's Magazine had a nice feature/review on the Oulipo, some of my writing inspirations, at the back of their new issue. Some of my favorite Oulipian constraints are the lipogram (writing text without a particular letter of the alphabet, such as e), "Exercises in Style" (retelling the same story 100 times in different formats), and "Metro Poems" (composing poems in your head between stops of a train journey, then writing the lines down at the stops).

-I had a couple plane flights the last couple weeks, and what's a nerd to do without internet? Relapse into FTL: Faster Than Light, of course. I have yet to beat the game, but the last few days I'd been trying the Kestrel (the first ship you start with) again to try to get some of the achievements that will let me unlock the next "human-style" ship. Today I got the United Federation achievement with six different species onboard at once.
( Spoilers for the Lanius sectors )
In other news, migraines suck, and I'm thinking about writing a post about the worst song from the best Christmas album. (I'd been thinking about writing it before it came on just now...)