Shields Are A Crutch: The Stealth B in Advanced Edition

Overview

This is a brief guide and tip compendium for the DR-SA 12, otherwise known as the Stealth B. Since it is one of the more difficult ships to fly, I think it deserves a Steam Guide, and with Advanced Edition out there are new tools to assist the Stealth B. I hope it helps.

Introduction

With Advanced Edtion recently released, I thought I would try to give a little back to the community by making a guide for what is quite possibly my favourite game ever. Hence this guide.

The DR-SA 12 is the second Stealth Cruiser Layout in FTL: Faster Than Light. It is by no means my favourite ship nor am I particularily successful in it. However, I thought it might be useful to compile some of the strategies I’ve used during my many hours of playing Standard Edition and combine this with some of the interesting Advanced Edition content that I think makes the Stealth B more fun to play.

In addition, many players will want the help, since you now need to get to Sector 8 to unlock the Stealth C, which I am certainly not qualified to comment on since I haven’t even flown it yet!

I will discuss briefly how to unlock the Stealth B, followed by a summary of its strengths and weaknesses and ending with my opinion of how to play it and enjoy some success on Normal Difficulty.

At the end, there will be helpful tips added from the comments section of the guide, with the permission of the commentators, of course. You will subsequently be added to the contributors section if your tip is selected.

How You Met Your Mother(ship): Unlocking the Stealth B

In order to unlock the DR-SA 12, you need to complete two achievements from the Nesasio, the Stealth A cruiser.

The Nesasio has its own challenges that are not the subject of this guide. However, the achievements are:

• Bird of Prey – Destroy a ship from full health in a single cloak.
• Phase Shift – Avoid nine points of damage in a single cloak.
• Tactical Approach – Get to Sector 8 without jumping to a beacon with an environmental danger.

None of these achievements stand out as being particularily easy. However, I think that Bird of Prey should be saved for last seeing how easy it is to achieve with the Stealth B. Therefore, I think that you should hunt for Phase Shift, by cloaking during a dangerous fight in the later sectors, or even the Flagship, and Tactical Approach, as you will likely want to avoid environmental dangers regardless.

The only issue with Tactical Approach is getting a mandatory jump path that leads you through an environmental danger, but you should be able to get it in a few runs, assuming reasonable luck.

Getting to Know the Stealth B Via Heavy Drinking

The DR-SA 12 is not an easy ship to like. Nor is it an easy ship to fly. But it does have a unique playstyle all its own.

The Stealth B is equipped with:

• Weapons – A Glaive Beam, which takes four power and deals three damage per room it hits, with a medium beam length.
• Shields – Predictably, none.
• Crew – Two Humans and one Zoltan.
• Engines – Level 2.
• Reactor Power – Only seven units.
• Major Subsystems – A Level 2 Cloaking Device.
• Minor Subystems – Level 1 Doors, Level 2 Sensors and Level 1 Medbay.
• Special Augmentations – Long-Ranged Scanners, which will tell you what awaits you at all adjacent beacons.

Just by looking at it, the challenge of the DR-SA 12 should be clear: you must survive long enough to fill the critical holes in your ship’s design. This is often luck-based but can also be somewhat mitigated by good planning.

The “Strategy” of Early Game

While, in theory, you could play the stealth B in any way you please, like any other ship, certain methods will be slightly more effective. Remember, you must always be ready to change your strategy depending on what items drop and what is available in stores.

In the beginning, however, your options are quite limited:

• Your first action should be to move your Zoltan crewmember to the Engine room. You cannot afford to have the Glaive Beam accidentally power off if the Zoltan dies or has to leave the room for whatever reason. The engines are the only other place you can put him where he can contribute the free power bar as well as man a station. Use one of the Humans on Weapons.
• Observe how you only have 7+1 power but need 9 to power the Weapons, Cloak and Engines at full. Then leave the Engines at one bar since the other two systems need all the power they can get.
• Take a deep breath.

Now, you must decide on how to proceed with your jumps. Most other ships can only jump away and pray for the best. You have slightly more options in this regard:

Since you have Long-Ranged Scanners, the Stealth B has the option to avoid combat as much as possible. This can let you earn rewards and upgrade your ship without risking a loss, but it can also kill your crew or cause damage in other ways. As well, the rewards are less than if you had fought for them.

Combat will give you important scrap and can yield other supplies such as weapons and crew. You need all the help you can get. However, if you encounter the wrong ship too early, you can be finished before you’ve begun.

Regardless, you need to get 70 scrap so you can upgrade your Cloaking to level 3. This will make early battles much less risky and allow you to fight most enemies with no damage taken. Whether you choose to avoid combat until you get 70 scrap or risk fighting with only level 2 Cloaking is up to you.

I also recommend you upgrade your reactor again as quickly as possible for another 20 scrap, so you can power both your engine bars.

The Stealth B combat strategy in the early game is as follows:

• Wait until the enemy ship fires its first main volley, or depending on the enemy armament, when the most damaging weapon fires, and then Cloak. It’s hard to be comprehensive about what you should wait for, but you want to have as many weapons fire at you as possible while still cloaking in time to avoid most of the damage. Sometimes you can afford to risk a small missile or laser if you will avoid a Burst Laser III, Flak Cannon or the like.
• If the enemy has a Beam weapon, you will need to cloak right before when you believe the Beam will fire; you will need experience to know when that is. if they have an Attack or Beam Drone, you can either risk a couple of shots and avoid the ship’s main volley as well, or you can cloak immediately and hope you fire before the Drone does too much damage. If it’s a Fire Drone, let it fire and vent the affected rooms as fast as you can, turning off Oxygen if necessary.
• Your dodge change is not guaranteed when you Cloak, however, you can boost it to 85% by using your power bar for Oxygen while being fired at, then moving it back afterwards. I hate doing this, so this is why I get a new Reactor bar as soon as possible.
• With Cloaking 2, you should decloak a few seconds before the Glaive Beam finishes charging. Again, it is hard to be comprehensive about where to fire the Glaive Beam at, since ships have very different layouts. However, your priority shoud be: Drones (if any), Weapons, Shields, Hacking (if it is on your Weapons or Cloak), and then as many other rooms as you can fit in the beam path. If you have an option, hit Shields first so that the subsequent beam hits do more damage.

This is why it is so important to get Cloaking 3 as quickly as possible. With Cloaking 3, the Glaive Beam will finish charging before you uncloak, which means the only time you are at risk in an early game fight is when you dodge the first volley, or against a Drone.

In many early fights, your initial shot will destroy the enemy ship if you placed it right. If you didn’t kill them, their weapons should be crippled and you should have no issue charging for a second shot.

If you’ve gotten Cloaking 3 and two Reactor bars, you are probably near the end of Sector 1, so I consider this the end of the Early Game.

Mid Game: Luck, be a Laser Tonight

Once Sector 1 is over, your scrap will be low, but your options will be slightly more open. You must begin to work on keeping the Glaive Beam relevant and powerful while still staying alive.

• You can buy a Shield system (125 scrap plus 45-50 scrap to power it). This gives you a much-needed defense against Drones and an important safety net against laser shots that you don’t dodge with the cloak. As well, if things go wrong, and your Weapons or Cloak is hit, you might be able to survive long enough to fight back.
• You can buy a new weapon to supplement your Glaive Beam. Ships with 2 shields greatly reduce the Glaive Beam’s effectiveness and can cause you to take a lot of retaliation damage; you’ll encounter them soon. Any weapon that drops shields for the Glaive Beam is a keeper, and the lower the power, the better it is. Ion Bombs are the clear winner here, but weapons like Flak Cannon Is, Burst Laser IIs, or the new charging shot weapons will all help. However, unless you have found a weapon for free in your travels, I can’t recommend this route due to how expensive the Weapon system is to upgrade at this point in the game.
• Alternatively, you can replace the Glaive Beam with two or three other weapons whose power totals to 4. This will greatly depend on your random drops and what is available in stores, but just remember that slow charging weapons aren’t necessarily bad on this ship. All that matters is that you can get through the shields and disable the weapons before your Cloak fails. This option has the advantage of being much more affordable then supplementing the Beam with other weapons.
• You can buy a Drone Control System. While Drone Controls are phenomenally useful, I have always thought the attack options were a bit lacking, and while the Defense Drone 1 is great it cannot help you versus lasers. In addition, even though you get to see which free Drone Schematic you get now, it still might be a System Repair drone and you can’t afford to waste the space. I would hold off on the Drone Control until later but you can try it if you want.
• Finally, the new option for Advanced Edition is to buy a Hacking system. This is by far my favourite option so far: You can use the Hacking Drone to lower the shields, then fire the Glaive Beam, and you can do it all while cloaked. However, this option leaves you vulnerable to any ship that has a Defense Drone.

What option you pick will have to depend on what is available in shops and what you might find enroute. I do not recommend buying a Teleporter, Mind Control, Backup Battery, Clone Bay, extra crew, or any minor system upgrades at this time. You may have the option later but you must survive until then.

Let Me Tell You A Story

If you make it to sector 4, and haven’t ended up like this:

You must starting preparing to fight the Rebel Flagship. There are many combinations of weapons and subsystems that have a chance of winning, so let me tell you about my most recent win in Advanced Edition with the Stealth B (on Normal).
I had:

• Level 3 Shields.
• Level 4 Engines.
• Level 3 Cloaking
• Level 3 Hacking.
• Drone Control with Defense Drone I
• Glaive Beam (4 power) and Flak Cannon 2 (3 Power)
• Stealth Weapons, Long-Ranged Sensors and Drone Recovery Arm (I had a Scrap Recovery Arm which I sold to buy Stealth Weapons right before the boss)
• Some random assortment of humans, Engis and Zoltans as crew

I was initally very worried about the Missile Launcher Room, because I had only a Defense Drone and no way to stop the room from firing. However, calling on my Sector 1 skills, I cloaked right before the missiles hit and dodged them. I drained the shields with my Hacking Drone and hit the boss’s Shields and Missile room resulting in an easy win for Stage 1. My Defense Drone stopped the enemy hacking drone from ever attaching.

Stage 2 is the hardest so I was a little skeptical. However, this is where Stealth Weapons really shined: I cloaked before the first wave of missiles and since I didn’t lose cloak time when I fired, the Cloak lasted through the Drone wave as well. I was able to hit the Drone Control and then attach my Hacking Drone to the shields. I had to weather one volley of missiles which luckily only destroyed my O2. I was able to recloak before the 2nd Drone wave and hit the Shield room and Missile Launcher room with my weapons. Fighting through the third drone wave I finished him. My Defense Drone again stopped all Boarding Drones and a couple of missiles.

Stage 3 went similarly to stage 1, but I had a lot of problems with the enemy boarding parties and Mind Control, since my crew was weak and I had no upgraded doors or anything. However, I was able to beat this stage as well with only 3 hull lost.

This was a very good run and by no means typical, but it shows you what you might need to aim for to beat the game. In general, I think I would have been successful without the Drone Recovery Arm, with Hacking 2 instead of Hacking 3, and with a different combination of weapons. However, Stealth Weapons was very important and I don’t know if I would have beaten the boss without it. Keep this in mind when assembling your arsenal for Sector 8.

Tip Compendium

Finally, I will be assembling any tips and suggestions posted in the comments section in this area.

[RKS] Krusa27 recommends that you save some scrap for a blast door upgrade early on, or at least before the flagship. Now that the Door system can be manned, you can move a crew member from Shields to Doors to help in difficult boarding situations such as the Rebel Flagship stage 3.

Kotli suggests that you pause the game before firing the Glaive Beam (or any beam weapon) and check the beam placement in order to hit the maximum number of rooms. Remember, you only need to graze the corner of a room for it to count. With Advanced Edtion, any room you will hit with the Beam attack will gain a white outline when you are firing.

spaghetti-sensei pointed out the major improvements in Defense Drone IIs: They cost 30 less scrap and 1 less power to run, and they will try to prioritize missiles over lasers and ions if they can. This makes them much more viable to use as an upgrade to Defense Drone I.

The Soviet Klondike Bar advises that if you intend to keep the Glaive Beam, you should upgrade the Weapons system early (for 50 scrap) to give a ‘buffer’ level of damage that you can take before the Glaive Beam shuts off if your weapon room is hit. You will need the extra weapon levels eventually anyways for a supplementary weapon.

BOSS: Manpac65 recommends using only Level 1 Cloak for the boss (unless you have Stealth Weapons). Even though all three Cloak levels recharge at the same speed, the shorter Cloaking duration on Level 1 Cloak allows it to be up for every Super Weapon charge on Phase II and III. which can save you from being destroyed.

Thanks to these players for their tips, and thanks for reading and for your own advice and suggestions! I hope this guide was halfway helpful for you flying the Stealth B.

Good luck!

Update History

April 6th. 2014: Guide Created

April 9th, 2014: Added tips by [RKS] Krusa27, Kotli and spaghetti-sensei.

April 25th, 2014: Added tips by The Soviet Klondike Bar and BOSS Manpac65