Overview
Simple tips to make your experience more fun and be able to win against the boss. Possible spoilers inside.
Ship Systems
The biggest part of FTL is knowing where to allocate scrap for your systems and subsystems as well as allocating power to those systems. First, let’s look at the available systems. They are located at the bottom left of your screen.
Shields protect your ship from lasers and beam weapons. Each shot from a laser weapon will turn off one shield for a time. They will come back up assuming your shield room does not get damaged. It does not matter how much damage any single laser shot does, one shield bubble will stop it. Shields do not stop rockets or teleporting bombs. And it takes two power for each shield bubble.
Note that ion damage will be taken up by shields. One tactic early on is to power down your shields when an ion blast is close to your ship (pause the game), let the ion blast go past your shield’s boundary and then power up your shields again. Most often, the ion will hit an empty room or a system of lesser importance. This will keep your shields up the stop the other weapons’ on the enemy’s ship.
If you have a single layer of shields, this is enough to stop most beam weapons and as a bonus, your shields stay up. Beams never make a shield bubble go down as is the case with lasers. However, there are a few beam weapons that can bypass a certain number of shield bubbles. The Halberd beam and the Glaive beam are the most notorious for cutting through 1 level of shields and 2 levels respectively.
You should try to get at least 2 shields (4 power) by sector 3.
In the screenshot below, I upgraded to level 2 shields in sector 2 (though you can wait until sector 3). I’m missing one power for engines. I will buy one more power as soon as I can. I used some of the scrap to buy an automated reloader.
Engines are probably the most underrated system by new and expert players alike. If you want to succeed at this game, do not discount the awesome advantages of engines. I would say that engines are very much the most important system on your ship.
What do engines do? Many things. And none of them directly visible which is why it is so easy to forget about them. The first thing engines do is bring up your evasion. Evasion works on almost everything except for beam weapons. Beam weapons are always accurate. A 25% evasion means that on average, 25% of enemy shots will miss meaning that much less scrap to spend on repairs. It’s not just that, but in game while the fight is going on, it means you’ll be able to last longer and make your life that much easier.
The second thing engines do is charge the FTL engines faster. This may seem like a useless side effect, but every now and then, you’ll get into situations where you need to get out of there and regroup. Not having your FTL engine charged up means you’re likely not going to make it in those situations.
Piloting goes hand in hand with engines. Having piloting and engines manned at the same time can give you a full 20% bonus in evasion once your two crewmembers are leveled up. Never have your pilot leave the cockpit. EVER! Once he leaves, evasion goes to zero which means no matter how many points in engines you have, all of the enemy’s shots will hit. ALL OF THEM! This means you will most certainly die.
Try and get at least 4 points in engines at least by sector 3 or 4. Try to get them even earlier if you can and have it manned. Always keep an eye on your evasion during battle. The #1 cause of failure in FTL IMO is the lack of evasion. With 6+ power in evasion, you can beat the final boss on normal with 3 shields and no cloak fairly easily on normal.
In this screenshot, I’m upgrading my engines to level 4 in sector 3. I’m severely lacking in firepower, hence my buying teleporters and a clone bay. I will buy more power for engines as soon as possible. The next priorities will be level 3 shields or more weapons. Definitely more weapons if I can get them.
Medbay is for healing your crew. You need never keep any points in this during a battle unless you immediately need to heal some crewmembers. Simply tranfer a point from another system temporarilly and then transfer it back once the crewmember is healed.
You can get some “blue” events if you have more points in the medbay, but your scrap is probably better spent elsewhere.
It can be useful to put an extra point of power, but only if you can spare the scrap. During battle, I often unpower the oxygen room completely and use it for other systems. The oxygen doesn’t go down that fast anyhow. And the fight should not last that long. Once the fight is over, repower oxygen and wait until you’re back to 100% before moving on. Just be careful you don’t forget.
You only need to put enough power into weapons to power the weapons you want to use. For each system, you need the scrap both to increase the level and also to power it. In this guide, we’re not going into specific weapons, but only about overall gameplay.
Having said that, I will mention that the Burst Laser II and Flak I are by far my favourite weapons. For two power each, they fire 3 shots. Burst Laser II fires three lasers in succession while the Flak I fire 3 shots all at once meaning that shields will be disabled all at once. And they both have around 10 second cooldown which is relatively short.
A nice tactic if you have both these weapons is to fire the Flak I first and wait for it to hit the shields of the enemy ship. Once the shields are down, pause the game and target either the weapons room or the shields room on the enemy ship with your Burst Laser II and then unpause the game. Rinse and repeat. Do not use autofire ever unless you have weapons that require it like the Vulcan. And yes, the Vulcan is a LOT of fun if you’re lucky enough to get it.
Subsystems are systems that don’t need to be powered up. They always have power. Simply upgrade them and that’s it. No need to buy system power.
Don’t spend any points here. Just have it manned and never have that crewmember ever leave his/her post during a fight. EVER! Best to use a strong crewmember if you can to fight off intruders. Rockmen make perfect pilots because they’re slow anyways and have 150 hp compared to 100.
This is one subsystem I’d spend money on. Try to get at least level 2 doors. If not, rush someone to the door room in order to have better doors so you can suffocate intruders. You simply open outside doors up to the location where the introduders are. Keep your crew away. No need to fight. If this is during a battle, sometimes you don’t have that luxury (ie. cockpit). But most often, you can use this tactic. Watch out for Lanius intruders. They don’t need oxygen.
Sensors are nice to have. But really, level 2 is all you need. And even then, I don’t find it that important. It all depends on what tactic you use. Sensors don’t work at all in nebulas. I like nebulas because you can visit so many more beacons. But a lot of people don’t like the ion storms and other dangers that can make fights a lot more difficult. I really like these, so perhaps I’m different.
We’ll talk about other systems and subsystems later.
How To Fight
Fire your weapons!
Seriously though, there are so many different way to fight that getting to know them all is key to winning in FTL. Some styles don’t even require weapons for the most part.
The next sections will go into a few different tactics.
Brute Force
We’ll start with the default style of brute force. You want better weapons than your opponent, or have the first shots in order to disable their weapons before they can take a shot at you. Nothing to explain here really. Shoot and don’t be shot.
But there are a few things that can affect the outcome. One of the most powerful is to use cloaking to charge up your weapons before the enemy even has a chance to power up. When you’re cloaked, the enemy cannot charge his weapons and vice versa. Cloaking however, comes at a steep price (120 to 150 scrap) and only if you can find it. There are many games where you simply won’t be able to get it.
Another way to stay alive longer is more shields if the enemy has laser and ion weapons. If they have rockets, then you’ll need higher evasion or use cloaking in a different manner. Against a ship with rockets, you don’t want to cloak at the start of the fight in order to charge your weapons. No. Instead, you want to charge up as normal and when the enemy launches a rocket, it’s at this point that you cloak. The rocket will miss and you can then power up your weapons the rest of the way or do some much needed repairs to system, etc. and then shoot him once the cloak wears out. This tactic is especially important against the boss. Never use more than ONE power in the cloak during a boss fight. If you use more, you will most likely not make it without a lot of luck. The reason being that the timeout will be too long if you use more power in cloak and won’t be able to use it for the next surge.
Hacking
Hacking is a lot of fun. This can come in handy if you encounter a ship with lots of shields that you would normally not be able to take down. If you encounter a ship with 3 shields an you have a burst laser II, you’re not going to be able to do any damage except from rockets. But if they have high evasion, you may be out of luck here too. What to do?
You can hack their shields. Even with just one power in hacking, you can take down two levels of shields. Pause the game and fire your burst laser onto their shield room. When your burst laser recharges, you should be able to now get through their shields.
If a crewmember has been taken over by mind control and you don’t have a mind control room of your own, you can use hacking to hack their mind control room in order to disable the mind control. Works great.
Are you firing rockets and lasers and most of them keep missing? They have high evasion. So hack their cockpit to give them zero evasion and fire away. Every single shot of yours will hit. You’ll still have to get through their shields, but no more misses for the duration of the hack.
Hacking weapons is nice, but I find it has limited use. It can help in getting the first shot in. But the timeout makes it almost impossible to use again to good effect. Hacking an enemy teleporting bay is cool when you just don’t have time to deal with boarders. It’ll teleport them back.
Hacking medbay is great when you have a teleporting crew. This way, the enemy will be harmed by the medbay. Also the doors are locked, so you can defeat them before they get healed.
Teleporting
Teleporting may be the best offense you can have. However, there are a lot of things you must be aware of to make things go right. It’s all too easy to mess up, but not to hard to do right once you know how it works. Also, it’s ridiculously fun.
Teleporting onto an automated scout is not a good idea. With only level 1, they won’t make it back. If the enemy has cloaking, you cannot teleport back while the enemy is cloaked. So if you’re low on health and the enemy cloaks, you’ll need to run around until they decloak. I’ve never been that successful when this happens. Losing crewmembers is a real setback. Don’t teleport onto an enemy ship when in an asteroid field as the enemy ship can get destroyed by means outside your control. Same with fights that are too close to a Sun. And don’t teleport onto an enemy ship that is powering up FTL. If they leave while your crew is still onboard, bye bye. This is true even if you have a clone bay.
And that brings up the question of what’s best? A medbay or clone bay. I have to say it’s the clone bay by far, especially if you’re starting out. Why? Because most dangerous cases simply don’t matter anymore. You die on the enemy ship? No worries. You low on health? Doesn’t matter. If you have a medbay, you’ll want to teleport them back. With a clone bay, you leave them there and teleport more people to the enemy ship. Completely different and entirely devastating tactic.
Look at these screenshots (click to see full size).
As you can see here, I used a boarding crew of four whenever possible. On most ships, you can teleport two people at a time. So you want a relatively short timeout so you can send more people. The best race to use is by far the Mantis. They are fast and have do one and a half times damage as any other race. Rock crew are good too because they have such high HP (150 health instead of 100).
You’ll want to disable their medbay or clone bay before boarding, or at some point before the enemy’s crew health gets too low. Hacking works well. But what works best is using your weapons to disable it. Teleporting bombs and rockets work really well here.
At the beginning of the game, very few ships will have a medbay or clone bay, so teleporting early on is a very powerful tactic. Also, you get WAY more scrap when you win a battle and the ship is still intact.
What makes teleporting even more devastating is that it works through shields (though not Zoltan shields).
If you’re using teleporting, you need to know about how to do the swap. This tactic is critical for successful runs. Suppose you’re fighting with two crewmembers. One of them is getting low on health while the other is doing rather well, you’ll want to switch them positions so that the one with the higher health is doing most of the fighting or taking the brunt of the damage.
You should find a youtube video of this to see how it’s done. I will link one if I have the time.
This is how you do it. You pause the game. Click on the first crewmember and then right click on another room. Do the same for the second crewmember. You then click on the guy who is not in the top most or left most square. Next, you right click in the room you’re in. This crewmember will then be first in the room and will go in the first square. Then you do the same with the other person. Unpause. They will switch positions.
The thing to remember is that once you’ve made everyone go to other rooms, the first person you click to go into the current room will take the first square which is usually the top most or left most square. So you can re-order your crew even if you have 4 people in a 2×2 room.
During a boss fight, you will want to teleport two people into the missile bay and afterwards take care of everyone in the main part of the ship in phase 1. This way, in phase 3, they will have no one to board with and you can board them as you please and destroy their shields and/or drone bay.
In a game on normal, here I am getting a teleporter at the end of sector 2 because I could not find any weapons. By sector 3 on normal, ships with level 2 shields will start appearing. A Burst Laser II is nice, but only one shot will get through. With a teleporter, I can bypass shields and attack the enemy crew directly while ships are still small. Hopefully, I can find more qualified crew (Mantis or Rockmen along the way).
Drones
I’m not a big fan of drones. They need a separate system that needs its own set of upgrades and requires even more power which makes it very expensive. But they have their uses.
One of the drones I like the most is the Defense Drone I. It will shoot down asteroids, flak, hacking modules and most importantly missiles. I find it almost never misses taking down missiles. For this reason, the Defense Drone I is really nice to have, especially early on in the game when you have low evasion.
The defense drone II is nice, but takes more power and shoots down lasers as well which can be annoying when there’s a missile being shot at the same time and it decides to shoot down a laser instead.
The super shield drone can be useful, but I think it’s far too slow to really be effective. Because it is a super shield, it will stop all incoming attacks. It is especially useful against missiles. But if the enemy has lasers or an attack drone, your super shield drone is useless.
I find attack drones to be very annoying to use. They fire one shot. And the enemy’s shield will be back up before it shoots its second shot. Only if you need that extra layer of shields down is it useful, and if you’re relying on drones for this, then I doubt you’ll be enjoying your game anyways. I find the attack drone II to be even worse. Overall, I find all the attack drones to be useless like the fire drone and beam drones. These only work with the enemy’s sheilds down… and if their shields are down, then what do you need drones for?
One drone that is VERY useful is the Hull Repair drone. For one drone part, you can get 3 to 5 hull points repaired. If you have the drone recovery arm, you can get 2 free repairs at each jump if you jump away before the third point is repaired. This is because the drone recovery arm will save any active drone.
The anti drone drone (yes, I used drone twice) is mildly useful. I’ve actually found it useful in phase II of the boss fight. But only mildly.
How you use drones is up to you, but I find that I’d rather not use them. If I do, I use the defensive drones or repair drones. The only time I’ve seen the attack drones useful is if you can get two or three of them at once. You can take two or three levels of shields down and if you can damage the enemy’s shield room, you’re golden. But the cost of drone parts is prohibitive. Can be fun at times though.
Beating The Final Boss
The boss comes in three phases. Each phase will be dealt with in the following sections.
Phase I
Before you even get to the boss fight, you will want three things.
1. Three or four levels of shields (6 to 8 power).
2. At least 5 power in engines with fully leveled up engine and pilot crew.
3. Weapons that can take down 4 levels of shields.
Phase I is the easiest phase and is where you should do the most damage. There are two things you want to know about first.
1. Enemy crew that are killed don’t come back in future phases.
2. Killing everyone means that the enemy’s AI takes over and makes winning VERY difficult.
So kill everyone you can except for the guy in the laser room. People playing on hard don’t need this guide (the rooms are connected on hard).
The very first objective of this round is to disable the missile room. It is the third room from the left. Or the second room from the right. This weapon launches three missiles at a time. This is one of the reasons evasion is so important in the final boss fight. If you have cloaking, then use it AFTER the missiles are launched. Avoiding three missiles is a great use of the cloak. Without a cloak, transfer all power you can into engines until the missiles have gone past your shield’s boundary. I know the shields have no effect, but that seems to be where the hit/miss decision is made. Having defense drones are VERY useful here. They can even shoot down two of the missiles on occasions.
If you have a teleporter, instantly teleport two crew into the missile bay. Once the enemy crew is dead and the missile bay disabled, the enemy can no longer shoot rockets/missiles and you have basically won this round. All else is secondary and you should not panic if other things are happening. The missile bay is by far the greatest threat.
If you have a teleporting crew, the next job is to kill everyone in the main part of the ship. You’ll need to disable the medbay which is difficult to do since there are so many crewmembers that will fix it. You can use teleporting bombs. Watch out for the cloak. If your boarding crew is low on health and the enemy cloaks, you could end up losing them. If you have hacking, I’d hack the medbay. It locks the medbay and can give you time to kill a few enemy crew at a time.
However, once the medbay is disabled and you can get 4 people onto the enemy ship, you should be well off. After everyone is dead, disable the shields as well as the cloak.
Note that regardless what tactic you’re using, you may want to also disable the ion weapon. It can be annoying if it hits a few times in a row.
If you don’t have a teleporting crew, there are a few things you can do after you’ve disabled the missile bay. Try and destroy the cloaking room. This will send a few people over to that room to fix it and if you destroy the boss while they are in that room, they will not return for the next fight because that part of the ship gets destroyed permanently.
Another thing you can do is try to get enemy crew into the same room. The shields room works great, especially if the enemy cockpit is damaged since your shots will not miss. What you want to do is damage it enough that multiple enemy crew will come and fix it. Once they are in the room, use a teleporting bomb or use whatever firepower you have at your disposal to kill a few enemy crewmembers. If you have hacking and haven’t already used it, this is a good time to use it on the medbay. This tactic requires the boss to have a lot of hull points. This is why the player should be open to a longer fight in phase I.
So if you have no teleporting, you will need to get rid of a few enemy crewmembers this phase and the next to make the third phase easier.
When attacking the boss ship, it may be a good idea to disable their piloting. With their piloting down, all your shots will connect. The boss ship has a high evasion, so you’ll need to do something about that to get the most out of your weapons.
The last thing I didn’t mention is enemy hacking. They will hack something on your ship. If they hack shields or engines, it can be a tough fight. If they hack oxygen and you only have one level, you may want to bolt and try again. If they hack piloting, you’re pretty much dead. Now, it’s only hacked for a limited time, but it can be really difficult. What you can do is try to damage their hacking room. They will try again and likely hack a different room. I always like to take hacking as a system because it allows you to counter not only enemy hacking, but also mind control. Try not to use hacking against the boss for offense, but rather as a preventative measure. Having said that, if the boss is pretty much disabled and you have a boarding crew, then by all means use it on their medbay or whatever else.
Here’s a recap of this strategy in a recent game I played (on Normal, phase II and III follow from this same game).
Objective #1, disable the missile bay.
With the missile bay disabled, I turn my attention to objective #2, disabling the medbay and killing everyone onboard except for at least one person in one of the weapon bays.
Here I am finishing off the last two guys. Note that I hacked the medbay as an added bonus since disabling the medbay is a little tricky.
And this is what your ship should look like after phase I on normal. I sent over a couple more boarders to disable the cloaking and shields.
A few things. I don’t have many points in engines because I am cloaked. So I’m at 95% evasion and their missile bay is disabled. When not cloaked, I put all the points I can into engines. How did I not get hit? Only the first missile volley can hurt you. I cloaked when the missiles were launched. After that, the boss is essentially harmless. You just have to watch that not too many of the ion shots hit you. But there’s cloaking for that. Otherwise, you can do what you want. It did help that I have stealth weapons. However, I did all this with my weapons hacked.
Phase II
This phase is about the following three things:
1. Missile bay
2. Boarding drone
3. Drone surge
The first part is the same as with phase I. If you have a teleporting crew, send them over to disable the missile bay. In this phase, there won’t be anyone there so it should go a little faster. Even if you don’t have a teleporting crew, there should be no one there. If there is, make sure it’s truly empty this time around.
Then you need to turn your attention to the drone room on the enemy ship. There will be a boarding drone and this is where a lot of people panic too much and lose the game. Only attack the drone if it’s in an important room. Otherwise, leave it alone because if you attack and destroy it, the boss ship will just send another one. This is why it’s so important to destroy the enemy’s drone bay. Not only will it disable the boarding drone, but the attack surge will only have a few drones. Something that any ship can handle easily.
That’s basically it for this phase. Destroy missile bay then destroy drone bay. If you have standard weapons and no teleport, you’ll likely have to damage their shields first, but attacking their drone bay will yield the most results. It has another advantage in that this part of the ship will be destroyed at the end of the battle. So any enemy crewmembers you can draw into this room will be killed permanently and won’t be able to board you in the next phase.
One last thing about this phase is if you have cloaking. When cloaking the first time, you may put two bars of power into it after the enemy launches missiles at you. The duration of the cloak should last long enough for the drone surge as well. For all future cloaking, use only one bar of power otherwise the timeout will be too long and you won’t be able to protect against the surges. And only use it for the surges, not the missile attacks. Your evasion will need to deal with that. Not following this advice will likely yield some very difficult fights.
Here’s a recap from a game I recently played.
Objective #1 is the missile bay again. This time, there’s no one there. So it’ll be even faster to take it down.
Here you can see that while I’m disabling the missile bay, I concentrate my firepower on the drone bay. The drone bay is objective #2. There is a third thing I’m dealing with and that’s the breach drone. I need my cloak for avoiding the power surges. So I wait until I fire at the drone bay first and then I moved my guys in. Notice that I did not move my pilot nor the guy on engines. Evasion is all important.
Here we get to the first power surge. I’m still dealing with the breach drone, but note that my cloak is still available. In the image, I pointed out that you only use one power bar in the cloak. This will allow the timeout to expire by the time the next power surge happens.
I’ve sent all further firepower (and I fire all three weapons at the same time) onto the drone bay, our objective #2. As you can see in the screenshot below, the drone bay has been dealt with and with no one on board to repair it, it won’t come back up. With the drone bay disabled, there will be very few drones during the surge which is happening below and they won’t stick around for long. But even so, I have my cloak timeout that just expired in time for me to use it again.
I’m now sending boarding crew over (4 in all) to disable the shields.
With all objectives dealt with, this is what your ship should look like after phase II of the boss fight on normal.
Phase III
This phase consists of these items:
1. Missile bay
2. Laser surge
3. Super shield
4. Mind control
5. Boarders
Right at the beginning, you have to deal with the super shield. Do NOT use your cloak. Seems like a good idea, but it isn’t. Just fire everything you have to get that super shield down. It has 12 hits in case you’re wondering.
Next you have to deal with the missile as per the last two stages.
Mind control is annoying. I wouldn’t do anything except maybe have one crew fight against the mind controlled crew to keep them busy. If they’re in an unimportant room, leave them be. If they are in the engine room or shield room, I’d leave them be. There are too many power bars for there to be any immediate concern. The crewmember will fix the systems once he snaps out of it. A mind controlled pilot is a big concern though. Make sure someone else is in there. Once the super shield is down, you can either disable the enemy mind control room, or hack it. Hacking it works really well, even with just one point of power.
The laser surges can be dealt with in one of two ways. If you have cloaking, put one power bar into it and use the cloak for every surge. The timeout should be done by the time the next surge comes along. Not always, but you should be good for most of them.
If you don’t have a cloak, then high evasion is where it’s at. You need to transfer anything you have into engines. This is where the battery can be helpful. Take power out of oxygen or anything else temporarily and put it into engines. Low evasion is by far the reason most boss fights fail. If you have 6 power in engines, you should be fine. Shields most definitely help, but evasion is what will make you win. I’ve often not even used cloaking even though I had it because I had high enough evasion that it wasn’t necessary. I’ve even had all shots miss. This is when you start to realize that too much emphasis on shields might not be the best way to go.
Then there are the boarders. If you have a teleporting crew, they should have all been dealt with in phase I and you don’t need to deal with boarders at all. If you don’t have a teleporting crew then hopefully, you’ll have killed many of them already using the tactics described in the previous two sections. If there are any boarders, try to lure them to the medbay or make them suffocate. I would not try to fight them head on unless it’s in the pilot room. I can’t stress enough how important piloting (aka evasion) is to win against the boss. If you have mind control, this can be very useful here. Having a couple of mantis even moreso.
As one more trick up the boss’ sleeve is the ability to use a power surge to replenish its super shield. That’s right. You’re about to win. You think everything is under control. You have a few boarders, some systems are on fire, but everything is manageable. The boss only has a few more hitpoints. Once your weapons charge up, he’s done for. Then BAM, super shields. Twelve more hits you have to muster up before you can start damaging the boss ship again. This is one part where attack drones are actually useful. They’ll just chip away at him.
To sum up, disable the missile bay and then kill as many crewmembers in the main section as possible. Once you know what systems to attack, it’ll make boss fight real easy… sometimes this easy where you still have full health:
Here is a recap of phase III in a recent game I played.
Objective #1 here is disabling the super shield. I intentionally took a hit from the enemy’s missiles as I want to save my cloak for the power surge. As soon as the super shield is down, I teleport my crew to the enemy’s missile bay in the same way I did for the previous two phases. In this phase, the boss has mind control. While the super shield is up, I keep him busy with some of my other crew. As you can see, my slug is regenerating in the clone bay as he did not last long against the mind controlled crewmember. Oh, and autofire gets turned off immediately after I took this screenshot. It was on while taking down the super shield since the charge laser doesn’t need to charge multiple shots.
Now, I will send my firepower to the shields. And send a hacking module to the mind control room on the enemy ship. The boss will no longer be able to mind control my crew.
You can now see that I’ve hacked mind control and my crewmember is no longer under enemy influences. I’ve taken another hit from another volley of missiles since I wanted to keep my cloak available for the power surge you see below. Again, only use one bar of power in the cloak. While cloaked, I can move my Engi to do some repairs without being too worried about my evasion going down. The oxygen room should be fixed relatively quickly and besides, I sent someone else to finish fixing it in case I have to move the Engi back to engines right away. I can’t stress it enough, evasion is king.
I now focus all my attention on the enemy’s shield room. BTW, I currently don’t have any power in oxygen as I’d rather use it elsewhere at the moment.
I’m done disabling the enemy’s missile bay. I bring my crew back and keep firing on the shields room.
Aside from two rounds of missiles that hit me, I suffered no other damage.
