FTL: Faster Than Light

"* "Free up some power by turning off Medcenter when nobody needs to be healed!

- Hit as many systems in each sector as you can without risking your supply levels and hull- the scrap and items you get from doing so are what keep you ahead of the power curve.

- Open doors change oxygen levels faster than closed ones. Generally, keep an open flow from your O2 system to any part of your ship you want to have good air. If you're suffocating boarders try to keep them away from your oxygen system. Close doors on breaches if you're not currently fixing them. If you have to do repairs in a low oxygen area, close doors leading to other low oxygen areas and open doors leading to ones with better O2 levels. Do all this shit while paused!

- If you want to take out the enemy weapon system in the early game, as soon as combat begins put the Artemis on their shields and your burst laser on the weapons. The Artemis fires slightly faster and will drop their shield before the laser gets there, letting all shots hit the weapon system. This will work on any enemy with only one shield point, because a system's HP is equal to the amount of power capacity it has, and a shield system requires 2 power per shield point: even if their shield generator is at level 3, the two Artemis damage will drop it to under two power, allowing your lasers through.

- Look at your enemy's systems before you begin combat! Pause to do so if needed. If they have a teleporter, a cloaking system, a drone control etc., these are things you need to be aware of.

- Identify your enemy's drones! It's easy to waste valuable missiles if you're not paying attention and they have a drone up shooting them down. Mousing over a drone will tell you what it is- do this while paused.

- Upgrade your sensors and doors! Level 2 Sensor upgrade costs only 25 scrap, Level 2 doors costs only 20. The sensor upgrade lets you see the enemy crew, where their ship is on fire, where it's breached, where they're out of oxygen, etc. The doors upgrade makes boarders have to attack closed doors to pass through them and slows fire spread and oxygen loss through closed doors. These upgrades will also increase the systems' health and don't require power to maintain.

- Upgrade your shields! For the vanilla ship in particular, your starting weapons are quite good for a while. It takes 100 scrap total to get your shield from 1 to 2 points- 50 for two levels of shield tech and 50 for two generator points. The amount of survivability this confers is enormous.

- Look at the map before you spend your scrap- is there an adjacent store? You can see distress calls and merchants in every node you've ever been adjacent to. Try to hit merchants in a roundabout way so you have as much scrap as possible when you get there, and make sure to check your map before you upgrade to see if you can go look at a merchant first. I've never seen a store node be dangerous, so you can just upgrade there if there's nothing you want.

- It pays (literally) to be mean. Rejecting someone's surrender offer means less supplies (fuel, drone parts, missiles) and more raw scrap. If they're offering a crew member, as slavers usually will when attacked, that's usually a good deal- if not, decide if you need the supplies in their offer or raw scrap more.

- Getting Shields to 2 provides an amazing boost to survivability for the first several sectors, and should be one of your first priorities for most, if not all ships. Less damage taken means less scrap wasted on repairs and more to spend on things that actively help you. Also, it means you're less likely to be dead.

- Getting doors to at least 2 makes suffocating enemy boarding parties a viable option, if not the preferred option if you're not going for a teleporting crew-killer strategy for your own offense. Why divert your crew away from their jobs to ward off invaders when the empty void of space can do your dirty work for you? Just remember that boarding drones can't be suffocated, so consider targeting the enemy drone control if one's being a pain in your ass.

- Missiles are great for punching through enemy shields to create openings for your other weapons, but you're not going to get enough of them to use them haphazardly. Learn to recognize when an enemy isn't going to be a significant threat and don't waste limited resources on those fights. A lot of early fights will fall into this category if you get two shields early on - they often won't be able to hit your shields fast enough to ever break through.

- On the flip side, when you see a missile launcher on an enemy ship, keep it disabled as much as possible. Enemies don't care about conserving ammo and will gladly take advantage of their ability to ignore your shields and make your life more difficult and/or short.

- Wiping out an enemy crew tends to give better rewards than blowing them apart or accepting surrenders, but it takes a bit of preparation. You'll need to be able to board ships and win fights, set fleshy targets on fire (not an option for rockman targets), hit the crew with anti-bio weapons, or destroy their O2 generator and keep it broken long enough to suffocate them. Plus, there are ships where a crew kill isn't an option. AI-controlled ships and the final boss fall into this category, so crew murder can't be your only strategy.

- When you do get to the final boss fight, you'll need some means to avoid damage when it gets pissed off. If you have 3 or 4 shields, a powerful engine and competent pilot can help give you a good enough dodge rating to survive long enough to cripple its offense (assuming the RNG doesn't shit on you). But if you can get a stealth system, you can activate it just before a nasty volley hits and avoid it outright. Other than that, make it a top priority to destroy the nastier weapons systems.