Overview
FTL can be frustrating hard in the beginning. Later on after you’re familiar with the mechanics you can simply find unfairly tough enemies within solar flares or asteroid belts without prior notice, and get crippled badly. Nevermind it, just start a new game. A good view of surviving prospects can be usually evaluated in the end of first sector. If you haven’t managed to cash in good, but merely lost your scaps for repairs, then you probably know already it won’t get any easier further on. So, start new game rather sooner than later, if you’re getting tough start.However, there are few things to keep in mind to increase your odds.
The Very Beginning
So, there is that Kestrel ship and three crew members. Remember to have cockipit and engine room manned (see game tutorial if you’re unsure what does this mean). The third crew member can be stationed at weapon room for getting faster shots at enemies, or operating shields for more protective value. I usually pick up shields.
The reason of having personnel in cockpit and engine room is simple: it gives you more chance to evade. As a matter of fact, leaving cockpit will drop your evasion chances to zero. 95 pc. of the battles involves with high evasion.
So, you should consider buying more power capacity and engine upgrades (remember to allocate new power to bigger engines), before anything else.
Also, try to remember to save scraps for a stations you find around. The rebellion zerg is after you, so there are not that much of a chance to come back for revisits. What you do need is more crew. 4 is practically minimum amount for the start, while five and six members is recommended to have. With a bit of luck you can recruit them on stations for few dozens of scrap. A good deal.
Upgrades you like, and the ones you mostl likely don’t
Because engine upgrading is rather cheap (1 or 2 upgrades will be fine for now) it will become more costly. So, other good upgrades you should consider are door upgrades. Fire spreads across your ship with no door upgrading (i.e. level 1 doors) and should you get boarding invasion, the enemies will have free access anywhere on your ship, as well. 20 scraps for preventing that from happening is great.
Remember that usually your only line of defense against enemy missiles is your evasion. Missiles bypass shields so if they hit, you get hull damage, and perhaps even lethal subsystem damage.
Then, you should be able to upgrade weapons. And this is going to cost you a lot more. Depending on the weapons on sale or the ones you have found should naturally overrule any general rule of a thumb. You most likely need two power and two weapon upgrades to get anything smart in addition to your initial weapon.
Also notice that you need a Drone Control accessory in order to have any drones installed. Most Kestrel pilots ignore drones and are happily selling them at the stations for more scrap. Drone control also requires soon power upgrades. They are not completely useless, but they need “ammunition” like missile launchers do. However, there is slight advantage: drone control room is separated, so if your main weapons are damaged a drone control could be still working.
After you have additional weapon installed (anything useful) you can start piling up scrap for more shields. But this is where it is going to be expensive. Additional shield requires two upgrades, and thus, two power additions. That’s a three-digit bargain. Having odd numbers of shield power allocated can be good only if you lose 1 point due to damage, and are downgraded to even-level amount. If you started even-numbered then taking one point of damage to shield control will also reduce your maximum shield by one – until you repair and reallocated power (remember this any time you take damage: 1) repair damage and 2) always reallocate power).
Try to hold shield upgrading scraps on your wallet until you can easily upgrade it twice in order to get any benefits.
You may want skip at this point oxygen generator and hospital upgrades. On the other hand, they are rather cheap purchases, and you don’t have to keep them fully powered. This is sometimes important.
Energy allocation
Let’s assume a situation you can have a great weapon, and you can upgrade your weapon facilities to have maximum energy available for the use, but you don’t have capacity in your core generator.
There are some stations you can shut down more or less temporarily. Oxygen generator can be offline for some time, and so can hospital. If you must, you cand trade one energy from upgraded engines as well. This decreases your dodge, but you can swap the energy back and forth between engine room and oxygen generator, for example. You only need to purchase the energy cap high enough before entering new system.
In combats, pause often. It’s your saviour many, many times.
You can play game through without needing to allocate energy, but after damage repairs etc. it becomes more and more self-evident that this is a good way to learn to play the game.
Combat
The first and perhaps even the second sector can be plain sailing: you just aim your weapons to enemies’ weapons’ system and press autofire on everything, sit back, watch the show and claim your rewards.
Luckily, FTL isn’t that dull later on. 🙂
First thing to learn is to switch sub-targets within the ship. When you have smashed the weapons, it can be good idea to deal some damage to shield control system, or to cockpit. If their cockpit is in ruins they’re not going to jump away (and leave you without rewards). If their shield system is offline you hasten the combat.
See the colour-indicators. Green means unharmed, cyan means temporarily offline (ion blasters can do this temporarily, or Cloaking System that is on cooldown), orange means damaged and red means kaputt, done.
When you aim for weapons (you should most of the early combat phases) you can see enemy’s ship mounting and unmounting weapons. This gives you idea what’s going on inside their ship. If you upgrade your sensor systems, you can literally see through the ship’s hull. If the weapons are down, it sometimes is good idea to shoot elsewhere as well.
Some ships try to escape. Prevent this by ruining their cockipt and/or engine room.
Most of enemy ships come with crew too, and they do repairs just like you do. Therefore upgrading sensors may give you “feedback in advance” when to retarget weapons’ system, for example.
Sometimes you need to dance between enemy’s ship systems. Usually this is between shield station and weapons’ system.
About autofire: Autofire is usually a good option, but not always. When you get a beam weapon you will learn this. Beam weapons will not breach enemies’ shields, but beams are dissipated by shields, and thus total loss of time. However, firing manually can bring forth better value. Wait until your other weapons have just smashed the shields and fire manually beam weapon right after. Boom-boom.
So, if your beam weapon would have fired a second earlier you would have waster your round on shields that are collapsing soon after.
Laser weapons can be set on autofire without a struggle. But missiles are expensive to have on autofire all the time. Missiles can be a real boon in the beginning of the combat as they can be targeted on enemy’s shield station. Thereafter additional weapons can keep shields down, and other weapons can keep other vital systems malfunctioned.
Exploiting crew members’ skills
On early sectors, usually in one and two, you may have got a fight that enemy cannot harm you.
Congratulations, if you like, you can exploit this a bit. Have shield station, engine room and cockpit manned and watch your crew gaining experience. Engine room and piloting skills increase your evasion even further, and shield engineer will reaload shields faster. With peashooter i.e. a weapon that does not annihilate your enemy, you can train weapon’s officers, too