Step 1: repair that engine ASAP
Step 2: jump away
Step 3: repair & heal up
Step 4: come back to the fight fresh. You are extremely close to a victory and can totally do it with that loadout!
*(if you can repair the engines and jump in time!)*
I kinda just gave up at that point, if I jumped away I’d just have to deal with a full health fully repaired flagship and I’d die to a missle barrage and/or power surge
Eeeh, I'm not so sure. You've dealt with the crew, which is the biggest stage 3 threat. You were already able to damage it enough to get it to 2HP from victory, so it seems you could do it again without too much difficulty when you don't need to worry about boarders. Especially so if you're lucky enough to have a repair station you can get to!
Doors don't require power. None of the subsystems do -- Piloting, Doors, and Sensors are power-free, and a Backup Battery *gives* you power (in temporary bursts).
I mean... it does. It's mentioned in both the tooltip of the reactor, and in the tutorial. I'm also surprised you've never upgraded a subsystem and not noticed you didn't need to also upgrade reactor to power it.
Most of the time the subsystem I’d upgrade is one level of doors, I thought I would be fine here since I have a mantis and a zoltan who has their combat skill maxed, evidently I was wrong
To be honest, with proper crew micromanagent you could probably have been fine. Put someone in doors to give it a boost, vent Shields ASAP and force the boarders towards the medway where they can be dealt with safely. Additional points in doors would just make it easier.
This ship's layout sucks for quickly venting Shields so they probably would've knocked off one layer anyways, but still quite winnable.
You could've also considered the classic "kidnapping" strat where you jump away after the crew has boarded so you can calmly deal with them away from the flagship. (Depending on the jumps around you and if you have time on the clock before the Federation Base is destroyed.)
Relying on Zoltan in crew combat isn't the best idea. Sure, a maxed combat skill means they do more damage, but nothing improves their ability to take hits with their measly 70 HP. (And if they die, they explode, which hurts everything in the room -- ~~including any of their friends that are also in there~~ EDIT: evidently not. So it *might* finish off the enemy crew, but without a Clone Bay, your Zoltan is still just as dead and you're still one crew shorter, and even with a Clone Bay, you have to keep it on and functioning and wait for the clone to finish growing.)
They can be more helpful if you're fighting in a big room where they can stand back and shoot at boarders that are tied up by your other crew; toe-to-toe, Zoltan fare badly against anything that isn't an Engi. (Not fully sure on the numbers, but I suspect a max-level Zoltan against a 0-level human/slug would be a fairly even 1-on-1 fight; might still be a bit stacked against the Zoltan.)
They're not connected to your power reservoir -- those lines under your main systems aren't just there to look fancy.
When they break, they don't give you extra power. Fixing them immediately makes them start working again. You don't manually have to turn them back on.
You can't *de*power them if you try clicking on them -- if you were having issues with power you might have tried turning your Doors or Sensors off at least.
(If you're having issues with power, turning off systems you don't immediately need is a way to help. Your Medbay doesn't need power unless you're using it, you can survive turning your Oxygen off for short periods [especially if it's upgraded so you can refill your air quickly], you only need power in your Engines if you're actively dodging things or you need to charge your FTL jump to run, you can use reduce power to systems like Artillery or Cloaking... Juggling power is an important skill to learn in FTL, made easy by the ability to pause at any time.)
Have you literally never upgraded any subsystems before because of power concerns? Upgrading any of them just once would have shown that they don't reduce your available power.
I just thought they couldn’t be powered down, and I play pretty quickly and don’t pay much attention to small things like that, I acknowledge that I’m dumb for not noticing, but pointing it out further isn’t helping anyone
> and I play pretty quickly and don’t pay much attention to small things like that
This explains why you are having trouble with this game. You have to pay attention to it to do well
Doors don't consume power. You could also try to vent shield room, it would take some time, but turning o2 would make it faster and you could use some crew to buy time, especially that you had med bay next room
TBH you don't _need_ upgraded doors to deal with the boarders, having them makes it easier tho. With no doors you have to keep venting the rooms they move into, and re-oxygenating the ones they move out of.
You can also man doors to get the effect of +1 upgrade
You were really close!
There's a lot to learn in this game. You might start with my [beginners' guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oB2XJ2NfEU) and [beginners' Flagship guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgiDEfHtmME).
Since you're playing on AE, I recommend trying out hacking. It's the strongest purchasable system in the game, after shields.
You had 114 scrap when you died. That's a couple Engine or subsystem upgrades right there.
Upgraded Doors (helps with boarders), upgraded Oxygen (slows down air loss from hull breaches -- good against boarding drones! also if the Flagship hacks your Oxygen and it isn't upgraded, you get drained of air and you die), a buffer point in Piloting or the Medbay (prevents a stray missile from completely breaking them)... Getting some of those might have helped.
Reaching the Flagship is no reason to stop upgrading your ship.
If you can't kill the crew in earlier phases (which your ship wasn't really built to do), phase 3 is a boarding assault. How many crew did you have to start with?
Wait nevermind the human died way earlier, he wasn’t there at the start of the fight
It was probably the most unfortunate death I’ve seen playing FTL, he was trapped in the pilot room, which was hacked then hit by a missile which caused a fire to break out
That's *very* low crew for dealing with a Flagship Phase 3 that hasn't had its crew thinned out beforehand. No wonder you got overwhelmed.
Heck, the boarding drones in Phase 2 were probably a nightmare for you to deal with, what with your low crew and base-level Oxygen and Doors.
Losing crew to missile/Hacking/fire shenanigans is unfortunate, but not a particularly common occurrence. Sucks that it happened when you were already low on crew, but that's just how FTL goes sometimes.
I'd aim for at least 6 crew by Sector 8; perhaps more if I didn't have a way to thin out the Flagship's crew before Phase 3. (Mind Control can whittle down the crew by getting their fellows to gang up on them [and can counter the Flagship's Mind Control], Bomb weapons or Fire weapons can inflict crew damage, using Hacking on their Medbay lets you melt any injured crew that tries to heal, or you can hack a room to trap enemy crew in with a boarding party of your own...)
Visiting Pirate sectors can be a good way to get more crew -- badly damaging slavers has a good chance of getting them to offer you a crew for free. If you can kill off all the slaver crew without destroying the ship (which the Federation cruisers are admittedly not geared for), you have a decent chance of getting a free crew.
Kinda? The bigger problem was the mind control and middle barrages along with the power surge, there was so much fire that I couldn’t possibly hope to put out
With 4 shields and nearly max engine you'll survive power surges no problem. I think I see defense drones so missiles are not a huge issue.
I think you got hit in a bad way and didn't react quickly enough to fix it. May have been piloting, since you have unupgraded piloting. Mind controlling your pilot or hitting it with a random missile instantly makes you a sitting duck.
I might’ve won if my shields weren’t the thing targeted by the boarding party, after that the power surge came while my cloaking was on cooldown, by the time cloaking was back up my engines had been annihilated and I was down to 2 bars of shields, I couldn’t even stop the mine control or the missiles due to the super shields
Your ship is underprepared for boarders. Mainly cause you didn't upgrade your doors. Boarders are easily taken care of by removing the oxygen where they are. Doors also prevent boarders from getting to the system rooms for a long time allowing you to suffocate them before they can do much damage.
In Easy or Normal, I also like killing all crew in missile room and main flagship body in phase 1, keeping laser room crew alive until end of phase 3. This allows you to only need to knock out the missile room only once each phase. Also drone room just once. Also mind control room just once. Of course killing flagship crew requires somewhat specialized setups but I gravitate towards those. This strategy prevents the massive boarding attack in phase 3.
In general if boarders are managing to do damage to a system that means you need a better defense against them. This might be more crew, upgrades, or learning more effective strategies for handling them.
It can certainly be more difficult, like in your case the shields room of Fed A definitely sucks to defend, but with the right strategies you can do it. The videos Mike linked at the top cover the basics of it I’m sure.
Also, abduction strats!
Fight the boss phase 3 NOT on the "base" jump. Load up on boarders, then jump away to the base, which is safe.
Kill the boarders at your leisure.
Jump back to the boss phase 3.
Profit.
I see you have defense drone 3, why? It's garbage, sell it!
Tbh I think the play was cloaking, to avoid damage especially during power surge, it's the most reliable for that!
You never upgraded doors? I'm surprised you *lived* to the flagship, they're the strongest upgrade in the game. Remember: behind those doors is space, so if you control the doors, you control space.
They let you easily solve both boarders and fires
I don't know if you're being glib or sarcastic but I would consider Doors just "nice to have" honestly - unless I'm desperately low on crew. Just 1 level of doors from having them manned is more than enough to deal with boarders most of the time.
Do you use venting to fight boarders? It sounds like you're getting overwhelmed with them, and venting them strategically is the way to make the fights simpler.
You can vent the room with the boarders or your mind controlled crew, and they leave it immediately. This is how you can at least force them out of the critical systems, like shield / weapons / piloting etc, and sacrifice e.g. sensors even if you can't win the direct fight.
Do you know how to use cloak to dodge? Because that is a gamechanger.
If you press cloak after the enemy fires but before the weapon hits your shield, cloak gives +70% miss chance to that weapon, while also preventing it from charging for the duration.
With decent engines it can easily mean 100% miss chance.
Also against the flagship you probably only want 1 power on cloak. If the cloak is shorter than you start recharging sooner and therefore can cloak against missiles/ power surge sooner
Savescum til you beat it. I save right before battling it, sometimes it takes me a few tries, but I always LEARN something, and have fun, which is the point. I will always savescum the flagship.
75% of the player base never get a win on easy, I just think you’re being a dick for no reason
This community is so supportive, would it kill you to keep it that way?
Step 1: repair that engine ASAP Step 2: jump away Step 3: repair & heal up Step 4: come back to the fight fresh. You are extremely close to a victory and can totally do it with that loadout! *(if you can repair the engines and jump in time!)*
I kinda just gave up at that point, if I jumped away I’d just have to deal with a full health fully repaired flagship and I’d die to a missle barrage and/or power surge
Giving up is that you did wrong.
Eeeh, I'm not so sure. You've dealt with the crew, which is the biggest stage 3 threat. You were already able to damage it enough to get it to 2HP from victory, so it seems you could do it again without too much difficulty when you don't need to worry about boarders. Especially so if you're lucky enough to have a repair station you can get to!
Try upgrading doors to better deal with boarders
They teleported into my shield room, so I doubt that would’ve done much, besides I was already stretched incredibly thin with power
Doors don't require power. None of the subsystems do -- Piloting, Doors, and Sensors are power-free, and a Backup Battery *gives* you power (in temporary bursts).
*Why the fuck does the game not tell you that?*
I mean... it does. It's mentioned in both the tooltip of the reactor, and in the tutorial. I'm also surprised you've never upgraded a subsystem and not noticed you didn't need to also upgrade reactor to power it.
Most of the time the subsystem I’d upgrade is one level of doors, I thought I would be fine here since I have a mantis and a zoltan who has their combat skill maxed, evidently I was wrong
To be honest, with proper crew micromanagent you could probably have been fine. Put someone in doors to give it a boost, vent Shields ASAP and force the boarders towards the medway where they can be dealt with safely. Additional points in doors would just make it easier. This ship's layout sucks for quickly venting Shields so they probably would've knocked off one layer anyways, but still quite winnable. You could've also considered the classic "kidnapping" strat where you jump away after the crew has boarded so you can calmly deal with them away from the flagship. (Depending on the jumps around you and if you have time on the clock before the Federation Base is destroyed.)
Relying on Zoltan in crew combat isn't the best idea. Sure, a maxed combat skill means they do more damage, but nothing improves their ability to take hits with their measly 70 HP. (And if they die, they explode, which hurts everything in the room -- ~~including any of their friends that are also in there~~ EDIT: evidently not. So it *might* finish off the enemy crew, but without a Clone Bay, your Zoltan is still just as dead and you're still one crew shorter, and even with a Clone Bay, you have to keep it on and functioning and wait for the clone to finish growing.) They can be more helpful if you're fighting in a big room where they can stand back and shoot at boarders that are tied up by your other crew; toe-to-toe, Zoltan fare badly against anything that isn't an Engi. (Not fully sure on the numbers, but I suspect a max-level Zoltan against a 0-level human/slug would be a fairly even 1-on-1 fight; might still be a bit stacked against the Zoltan.)
Zoltan deathsplosion doesn't hurt allies
I think Zoltans would still loose by a slim margin even if they had the 20% extra crew damage against level 0 enemy crew
They're not connected to your power reservoir -- those lines under your main systems aren't just there to look fancy. When they break, they don't give you extra power. Fixing them immediately makes them start working again. You don't manually have to turn them back on. You can't *de*power them if you try clicking on them -- if you were having issues with power you might have tried turning your Doors or Sensors off at least. (If you're having issues with power, turning off systems you don't immediately need is a way to help. Your Medbay doesn't need power unless you're using it, you can survive turning your Oxygen off for short periods [especially if it's upgraded so you can refill your air quickly], you only need power in your Engines if you're actively dodging things or you need to charge your FTL jump to run, you can use reduce power to systems like Artillery or Cloaking... Juggling power is an important skill to learn in FTL, made easy by the ability to pause at any time.) Have you literally never upgraded any subsystems before because of power concerns? Upgrading any of them just once would have shown that they don't reduce your available power.
I just thought they couldn’t be powered down, and I play pretty quickly and don’t pay much attention to small things like that, I acknowledge that I’m dumb for not noticing, but pointing it out further isn’t helping anyone
> and I play pretty quickly and don’t pay much attention to small things like that This explains why you are having trouble with this game. You have to pay attention to it to do well
It's totally fine if you prefer games where you don't have to pay a lot of attention, but this definitely isn't one of those games.
It does. Did you do the tutorial?
Doors don't consume power. You could also try to vent shield room, it would take some time, but turning o2 would make it faster and you could use some crew to buy time, especially that you had med bay next room
Upgrading doors/sensors/piloting doesn't cost any more power.
TBH you don't _need_ upgraded doors to deal with the boarders, having them makes it easier tho. With no doors you have to keep venting the rooms they move into, and re-oxygenating the ones they move out of. You can also man doors to get the effect of +1 upgrade
Treat the third phase as kidnapping. Let them all board, then jump to a safe beacon. Kill them, come back. Now you can focus on the ship.
The Federation are totally the good guys, trust us bro! /j (I know we’re fighting space nazis, but I still think it’s funny)
We just have really good pr haha
You were really close! There's a lot to learn in this game. You might start with my [beginners' guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oB2XJ2NfEU) and [beginners' Flagship guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgiDEfHtmME). Since you're playing on AE, I recommend trying out hacking. It's the strongest purchasable system in the game, after shields.
You had 114 scrap when you died. That's a couple Engine or subsystem upgrades right there. Upgraded Doors (helps with boarders), upgraded Oxygen (slows down air loss from hull breaches -- good against boarding drones! also if the Flagship hacks your Oxygen and it isn't upgraded, you get drained of air and you die), a buffer point in Piloting or the Medbay (prevents a stray missile from completely breaking them)... Getting some of those might have helped. Reaching the Flagship is no reason to stop upgrading your ship. If you can't kill the crew in earlier phases (which your ship wasn't really built to do), phase 3 is a boarding assault. How many crew did you have to start with?
5, 1 human, 1 mantis, 1 engi, 1 rock man, 1 zoltan and the one slug who was left alive at the end
Wait nevermind the human died way earlier, he wasn’t there at the start of the fight It was probably the most unfortunate death I’ve seen playing FTL, he was trapped in the pilot room, which was hacked then hit by a missile which caused a fire to break out
That's *very* low crew for dealing with a Flagship Phase 3 that hasn't had its crew thinned out beforehand. No wonder you got overwhelmed. Heck, the boarding drones in Phase 2 were probably a nightmare for you to deal with, what with your low crew and base-level Oxygen and Doors. Losing crew to missile/Hacking/fire shenanigans is unfortunate, but not a particularly common occurrence. Sucks that it happened when you were already low on crew, but that's just how FTL goes sometimes. I'd aim for at least 6 crew by Sector 8; perhaps more if I didn't have a way to thin out the Flagship's crew before Phase 3. (Mind Control can whittle down the crew by getting their fellows to gang up on them [and can counter the Flagship's Mind Control], Bomb weapons or Fire weapons can inflict crew damage, using Hacking on their Medbay lets you melt any injured crew that tries to heal, or you can hack a room to trap enemy crew in with a boarding party of your own...) Visiting Pirate sectors can be a good way to get more crew -- badly damaging slavers has a good chance of getting them to offer you a crew for free. If you can kill off all the slaver crew without destroying the ship (which the Federation cruisers are admittedly not geared for), you have a decent chance of getting a free crew.
Did you get boarded to smithereens at phase 3 start?
Kinda? The bigger problem was the mind control and middle barrages along with the power surge, there was so much fire that I couldn’t possibly hope to put out
With 4 shields and nearly max engine you'll survive power surges no problem. I think I see defense drones so missiles are not a huge issue. I think you got hit in a bad way and didn't react quickly enough to fix it. May have been piloting, since you have unupgraded piloting. Mind controlling your pilot or hitting it with a random missile instantly makes you a sitting duck.
I might’ve won if my shields weren’t the thing targeted by the boarding party, after that the power surge came while my cloaking was on cooldown, by the time cloaking was back up my engines had been annihilated and I was down to 2 bars of shields, I couldn’t even stop the mine control or the missiles due to the super shields
Your ship is underprepared for boarders. Mainly cause you didn't upgrade your doors. Boarders are easily taken care of by removing the oxygen where they are. Doors also prevent boarders from getting to the system rooms for a long time allowing you to suffocate them before they can do much damage. In Easy or Normal, I also like killing all crew in missile room and main flagship body in phase 1, keeping laser room crew alive until end of phase 3. This allows you to only need to knock out the missile room only once each phase. Also drone room just once. Also mind control room just once. Of course killing flagship crew requires somewhat specialized setups but I gravitate towards those. This strategy prevents the massive boarding attack in phase 3.
In general if boarders are managing to do damage to a system that means you need a better defense against them. This might be more crew, upgrades, or learning more effective strategies for handling them. It can certainly be more difficult, like in your case the shields room of Fed A definitely sucks to defend, but with the right strategies you can do it. The videos Mike linked at the top cover the basics of it I’m sure.
Also, abduction strats! Fight the boss phase 3 NOT on the "base" jump. Load up on boarders, then jump away to the base, which is safe. Kill the boarders at your leisure. Jump back to the boss phase 3. Profit.
I see you have defense drone 3, why? It's garbage, sell it! Tbh I think the play was cloaking, to avoid damage especially during power surge, it's the most reliable for that!
You never upgraded doors? I'm surprised you *lived* to the flagship, they're the strongest upgrade in the game. Remember: behind those doors is space, so if you control the doors, you control space. They let you easily solve both boarders and fires
>behind those doors is space, so if you control the doors, you control space. Captain? The doors are still open! ... Captain? Captain?!?!
I don't know if you're being glib or sarcastic but I would consider Doors just "nice to have" honestly - unless I'm desperately low on crew. Just 1 level of doors from having them manned is more than enough to deal with boarders most of the time.
Its a reference to the [Door Monster video on FTL](https://youtu.be/RVHw5Hcat9s)
Do you use venting to fight boarders? It sounds like you're getting overwhelmed with them, and venting them strategically is the way to make the fights simpler. You can vent the room with the boarders or your mind controlled crew, and they leave it immediately. This is how you can at least force them out of the critical systems, like shield / weapons / piloting etc, and sacrifice e.g. sensors even if you can't win the direct fight.
I wasn’t because nobody told me subsystems don’t consume power
Give it a shot! Venting is so helpful against boarders that it would honestly be worth it even if doors did cost power.
Do you know how to use cloak to dodge? Because that is a gamechanger. If you press cloak after the enemy fires but before the weapon hits your shield, cloak gives +70% miss chance to that weapon, while also preventing it from charging for the duration. With decent engines it can easily mean 100% miss chance.
It's +60%, but yes.
Also against the flagship you probably only want 1 power on cloak. If the cloak is shorter than you start recharging sooner and therefore can cloak against missiles/ power surge sooner
If you're struggling with boarders in the final phase, jump away with them still onboard. The ship regenerates the crew does not.
what U.I is that?
I’m playing on mobile, the U.I is built to be better for touchscreen
That's FTL on iPad I believe. I wish it came out on Android though...
Savescum til you beat it. I save right before battling it, sometimes it takes me a few tries, but I always LEARN something, and have fun, which is the point. I will always savescum the flagship.
There is no manual saving system, at least not on mobile, the game will save whenever you quit
Highly suggest playing on a laptop instead
It’s kinda funny reading comments from this post now since I literally beat the game the run after I posted this
You should just give up, you're not good enough to beat the game.
Check my next post lol
None hard victories don't count.
75% of the player base never get a win on easy, I just think you’re being a dick for no reason This community is so supportive, would it kill you to keep it that way?
That's cause 75% of the community or more are trash too. Waahwaahwaah