The Hard Mode Morgue: Failed Hard Mode Runs Portmortem

Overview

In this guide I will log failed hard mode runs and analyze why they failed so that myself and others can learn from them. Hard mode FTL is pretty hard and there are a lot of pitfalls that can ruin your run and whenever I have a bad run I will update this guide and add a postmortem.

Introduction: A Good Ship

In this guide I will post my own failed FTL hard mode runs as they happen, and I will analyze where I screwed up and how to avoid it. I’ll add new sections for each failed run. I have beaten hard mode with every ship, and I like some more than others and generally think I have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t in this game.

Before I post bad runs, let me first give an example of a good ship that is likely to result in a good run:

This is a very generic but good setup that I always try to emulate when I play FTL on hard. It’s the boring old Kestrel, the ship the game starts out with, but on this run I was fortunate enough to establish the following three factors:

• This ship is rocking two Burst Laser II’s. This fact alone will almost ensure success with even remotely correct play. The Burst Laser II is generally agreed upon to be the best weapon in the game: it offers 3 laser shots for 2 power, it can focus damage on a single target, and most importantly it has a relatively low charging time, ahead of most missiles and bombs (or at least, before they can hit you). Fast weapons are incredibly important in FTL: they let you control fights by quickly shutting down threats to your ship. Slow weapons, even strong ones like the Glaive Beam, leave you open to attack and RNG.
• The ship is already starting to build a decent crew. The three starting humans are nothing special (they can and should be discarded in favor of different crew once you are full) but the Mantis is a useful crewmember, potentially leading to a boarding setup or at least offering boarding defense.
• The ship has decent, but not excessive, defense. Two shield pips are appropriate for an unstealthed, non-Zoltan ship in sector two. To mitigate damage from missiles, the ship should eventually pick up hacking so that it can hack the enemy weapons room to buy time for the weapons to charge, but at this stage the BL2’s should be able to take care of all threats without suffering unacceptable damage.
• The ship has some scrap in reserve and didn’t spend it on luxuries like doors or sensors, it’s in a good position for its next upgrade.

Note how the ship has decimated the Mantis ship: by skillfully using the burst laser’s focused fire you can strategically shut down systems and force the death of the enemy crew, even without hacking or boarding, and despite the fact that this enemy has a medbay. This is another reason why focused fire is so important, it lets you pick the enemy apart in a way that beams or drones generally cannot.

With this ship, I cruised through the game painlessly, got to the end and beat the flagship. This shouldn’t be surprising as it’s a generically great ship. What follows will show what happens when you build the wrong kind of ship in the wrong way.

Postmortem #1: Engi A with Flak II

If you have read some of my other guides, I am not much of a fan of drones in FTL, and therefore Engi A is a ship I tend to struggle with. I thought I finally had a good run going when this happened in the final phase of the flagship:
(I’m sorry, I didn’t take the screenshot while the ship layout was still visible, but this should still tell you everything you need to know)

A disappointing result, especially since, at a glance, there is nothing really wrong with this ship. It has a few things going for it:

• Excellent defenses, four shield pips and engines that can max out at 45%, plus a defense drone and mind control against boarders!
• Strong weapons despite the limited number of weapon slots, the Hull Lasers together fire for a total of 5 shots while the Flak II can throw as many as 8 shots at the enemy, so that’s 13 shots!
• Fully upgraded hacking and mind control! Hacking is an overpowered system and mind control is a useful tool for shutting down an enemy ship’s evasion. Given enough time and using hacking and mind control in combination, a ship’s shields and evasion can be completely shut down, especially on the flagship where a hacked shield room prevents access to the mind controlled pilot’s room.
• A decent crew makeup. As many as 5 Engi are present here for extremely fast repairs (1 was fully leveled up in repairing), complemented by a Mantis and a human for dealing with boarders. There’s even a Zoltan for some extra power.
• Good reactor power, including a fully upgraded battery!
• Other systems are all in good shape as well, Medbay, Piloting and O2 have two pips, doors are fully upgraded.

Judging by all the above this should have been a cakewalk. In fact, I arrived at the flagship at nearly full health, having blown up everything on the way in the final sector easily enough and I was sure this would be a win, but it all went out the window in the second and final phases. As can sometimes happen in FTL, RNG was partly to blame here – a few unlucky missile hits here and connecting drone lasers there – but I tend to think that the RNG in this game should be beatable by clever play. So what went wrong?

The main reason for the failure of this ship is the inclusion of Flak II as the main weapon. I got this weapon in a random event early on and, reasoning that the Engi A only has a few slots and therefore should rely on relatively powerful weapons, I hung on to it. Unfortunately, Flak II has a dreadfully slow charge time. This got me into trouble a few times during this run, since even with hacking it did not permit me to shut down enemy threats every time fast enough to get my first salvo off. Flak II also has another glaring flaw: its spread is far too wide for most ships and most of its shots pass harmlessly by the enemy. This is a huge problem when trying to fire on autoscouts and other slender ships. Unlike Flak I, which can reliably fire on a single 4-space room, Flak II has no ability to focus fire, often missing the room you desperately want to shut down. Flak II violates the “fast, focused firing” rule of FTL.

Instead, I tried to use Flak II to shut down enemy shields so that the Hull Lasers I picked up in shops could do their work. The Hull Lasers are pretty good weapons; they don’t have unreasonable charge times, can focus and cause breaches and fires that can shut down autoscouts and slow down repairs. However, in the later sectors I still needed to wait for the slowpoke Flak II to finish charging before I could put the Hull Lasers to use.

Fortunately I was able to pick up Hacking. Hacking is my favorite system because it is versatile: it can shut down a dangerous weapon room to buy time for your salvo, or it can decimate shields or support boarding. However, hacking has negative synergy with Drone Control, that Engi A comes with. As you can see in the shot, I had a Defense Drone I, which protected me from missiles on many occasions. Unfortunately, using both of these systems in a fight results in dwindling drone supplies, so I had to buy a lot of drones and use them conservatively. I never actually ran out, but had only three of them left for the final fight. On top of this, Defense Drones have a nasty habit of getting shot down by stray lasers, leaving you open to a big fat Hull Missile that you thought you could just shoot down. I do like Defense Drone I, but otherwise Drone Control just kind of sat there throughout my run, never becoming very useful.

Lastly, I found that Defense Drone I is not nearly as useful on the flagship as it is during the run. I had come to rely on the drone throughout the run for dealing with missiles, but the flagship fires three missiles at once, and the only three ways to avoid being damaged by those completely is to (1) shut down the missile room ASAP, (2) use stealth or (3) have an insanely high dodge value and get lucky. At best, the Defense Drone I will stop a single missile that might have missed you anyway and leave the other two to hit their targets. It didn’t stop the flagship’s missiles from hitting me on several unfortunate occasions, including one hit to piloting during phase II just before the drone overcharge, resulting in severe damage before I was able to fight back. By then it was already too late: I had no tools for dealing with the Zoltan shield in phase 3 before it was able to overwhelm me with boarders and finally kill my hapless Engi A with the missiles and overcharge shot. During normal runs, I would have used focused weapons during phase 1 to not only shut down systems, but also take out individual crew members on the flagship to make phase 3 easier, this is another reason why the Flak II failed me: it forced me to act as fast as I could before the flagship could cloak and didn’t let me take down the ship on my own terms.

• Flak II is an inconvenient weapon during the run, and even worse during the flagship. It absolutely needs Stealth in order to be useful at all. I will avoid ever using it again on a non-stealthed ship. A situation where your salvo depends on Flak II is bad news.
• Defense Drone I is useful, but doesn’t offer real protection against the flagship and eats up drones that should be used for hacking.
• The run itself went comfortably enough, causing me to get cocky and overspend on utility like Mind Control and other stuff. At one point during the run, I had an opportunity to buy stealth if I sold Flak II, but I did not take this chance because I thought it would leave me with too few weapons, in retrospect, this probably would have saved me since stealth, unlike drones, is highly useful on the flagship.

Overall, an unfortunate and slightly embarrassing run that could have been saved with more clever spending and ditching Flak II at some point. RIP.