Overview
General guide to optimize ship part selection, room sequencing, and optimal play.
Ship part evaluations
The single most important ship part in the game is shield because it largely trivializes damage because you get that amount of shield for every room. It’s got the highest upgrade priority for the first one. Fire rate is also a high pick because almost every other ship part has the downside of lowering fire rate. Fire rate is also the only part that can be upgraded indefinitely. Its easily one of the best starting ship parts because you can’t just take shield all the time and expect to win. You do actually have to deal damage sometimes.
Don’t be afraid to take the hp loss for homing or multishot. Both of them are very strong. Multiple homings increase the homing strength. They’re generally not worth it. Doubly so because laser and homing means that you just have 100% accuracy immediate shots. Your general goal is to simply fill the screen with bullets. Why aim, when you both don’t need to, and when every ship part also decreases accuracy?
The one point that I will state is that I really haven’t evaluated the bots very effectively. I think they’re fine but ultimately, I find building up the ship both more fun and more effective. I’ve been pretty pleased with rocket bot, but the rest of the bots have generally proven lackluster The other important combo is piercing+ricochet+rocket 2 translates to hitting the final boss 3 times for every bullet you fire. Making it one of the easiest ways to beat the game, and most effective at doing it quickly. That set of ship parts also just makes the rest of the game very easy. Combined with homing, multishot, and any amount of fire rate the game mostly plays itself.
Rocket randomly allows you to hit things that are flying or otherwise untargetable. It also lets you hit the minibosses while they’re flying as well, but only if they’re close to the wall. The shots won’t home in on enemies that are flying, but the rocket blast will hit them. Rocket 2 doubles the explosion size and if you have piercing or ricochet makes the effect last an additional hit. Piercing+rocket will have the shot explode when it hits the first enemy and go through them. Rocket 2 means it will explode on the second impact as well.
Damage sounds good, but ultimately has felt like a downgrade for a long time. If you have a high level fire rate it makes damage great, but otherwise damage has just always felt like far far less damage than fire rate, or simply just not having it. This is largely to to the accuracy negative attached to it as well. If you both can’t hit and have 75% of the fire rate it doesn’t matter that the enemy takes 2 shots to kill instead of 3 if you can’t hit it.
Nanobots is reasonable. They’re actually better than damage. They do excellent damage on bosses, and don’t reduce your firing speed. Making them substantially better than damage. They do need a level or two, but at 2 they feel pretty solid. A good upgrade choice if you can’t find fire rate.
Piercing will activate before ricochet. Rocket activates on the first hits of the shot. If you have multiple rockets, then the area gets larger, substantially I will add, and activates on more hits. Rocket will activate when it hits walls just like ricochet. Ricocheting counts as a hit for purposes of rockets. I generally haven’t found piercing worth upgrading. The first pierce is the most important and I’ve generally found the second pierce to not do a whole lot.
Rough Tier list
S
Shield
Fire rate
Laser(with homing)
Piercing(with rockets)
A
Homing
Multishot
Rocket
Nanobots
B
Ricochet
Piercing(no rockets)
Rocket bot
C
Damage
Mortar bot
Laser(without homing)
D
Helper bot
Laser bot
F
change list
11/15/20 update: at the behest of a commenter it does appear this has changed. nanobots appear to spawn on hit now. However having nanobots 3 did not dramatically improve their spawn rate. Its possible that these may actually be fine for bossing, but for room clearing I still get far too many spawns of nanobots that do nothing for me to change my opinion of them. Their range is maybe a quarter of a room. It is possible that a nanobots+fire rate build might kind of work, but at that point why upgrade nanobots over fire rate? fire rate always works nanobots just appear to get a greater spawn chance as they level.
4/18/20 update: I found myself in a run today and nanobots overperformed at a measly rank 2. at 3 and 4 I was pretty consistantly getting multiple spawns early in the room. I’m not sure if things have changed or not, but it looked pretty fine. It is only really good if you lack damage for bosses. However its quite good at that. Probably to the extent that its much better than damage on my normal runs. Nanobots into low A tier from F. I’m pretty sure they’re better than damage for bosses and thats about the only time you really need more damage.
ricochet to B tier because I didn’t have it on the tier list at all.
Damage to C tier from B