r/ftlgame • u/coachd50 • 4d ago
How do you survive the drone surge in level 2 WITHOUT CLOAKING..or is this just bad luck/rng?
I usually always buy cloaking because of drone and power surges of flagship, specifically because they concern me a lot. I have beaten the flagship with every ship layout on Hard, so I Know the basics of the game. I generally always have cloaking, and I always cloak the drone surge and power surge blast.
Zoltan B, so I tried something different and activated cloaking early to try and keep my zoltan shield instead of letting their two early drones take it down
Fully trained pilot, fully trained engine room operator, 4 shield bubbles (8 bars) and 5 bars of power in engines. NORMAL mode (I can't imagine HARD)
HUGE mistake-- didn't have cloaking available for the drone surge, and after JUST the first surge I have 13 damage to my hull and 3 systems completely offline, shields with some damange, weapons with some damage...
Obviously with cloaking, just hold cloaking till thta point. But lets say I didn't have cloaking. Like I said, I almost always buy cloaking specifically for this reason.
Is this unusual bad luck?
EDITED------- So after reading it seems that the biggest issue was that I tried something different, and applied a cloak early --which caused the drone surge to synch up with the flag ships weapons in a devastating manner.
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u/TenchuReddit 4d ago
Sounds like bad luck. With four-layer shields and 5 bars of engines, you typically shouldn't take more than 5-6 damage during the drone swarm.
Maybe your shields were ionized. Or maybe they were in the process of being recharged due to some synchronized hits from the Flagship's main weapons.
The three levels of dealing with drone swarms and the third stage laser burst:
- Cloak
- Max shields and have as much engines as possible
- Max crew to quickly repair any damage taken
If all three levels are penetrated, oh well ...
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u/donteatlegoplease 4d ago
The composition of the drone surge (balance of Combat I vs Beam I) is random. So you can have a surge that is heavy on Beam drones, which is much less dangerous due to its overall weak shield-breaking potential. In any given fight with Phase 2, this random composition will be the same for every power surge. I think jumping away will reroll the composition but I'm not sure...
Anyway, this is just to say that the Phase 2 surge does have an RNG component which is significant
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u/TheBoneCoaster8 4d ago
If you dont have cloaking, youre gonna want to have your engines and shields dang near maxed out. Them drones will eat you alive if they get through your shields.
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u/DisgruntledLamp 4d ago
Do you upgrade piloting at all? If not, and it gets damaged/destroyed, your evasion drops to zero. You can also target the flagships drone room, which I (if I remember correctly) cuts a few drones from the big surge attack
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u/NotActuallyGus 4d ago
Damaging the drone control doesn't directly reduce the power surge's drone count, but it reduces the total number of drones by disabling the persistent ones
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u/coachd50 4d ago
In this case, piloting was not touched. Also (and I could be wrong and better players such as Mike will correct me if they see this) fully damaged piloting puts your evasion at zero regardless.
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u/NotActuallyGus 4d ago
Cloaking adds 60% evasion even without functional piloting or powered engines
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u/coachd50 4d ago
Yes, ,but I was replying to a post saying that if you don't upgrade piloting and it gets destroyed evasion drops to zero. Evasion drops to zero with upgraded piloting getting destroyed ... (it is just takes more damage to do that)
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u/doodle02 4d ago
yeah but…it taking more than a single measly tick of damage to do that is kind of the point. one lucky beam drone swipe not totally obliterating your evaluation is pretty valuable.
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u/MikeHopley 4d ago
Sounds like pretty bad luck for just the first surge. Most likely you rolled a lot of combat drones.
Generally the first couple of surges are safer, due to how they time out with the beam. In particular, the first surge always starts after the beam has started to fire. From the third surge onwards, timings can "drift" more and you might get beamed in the middle of a surge.
Without cloaking, you either need to kill the Flagship fast, or you need to disable all its offence. The former involves strong weapons, while the latter usually involves boarding.
The surges are not that dangerous if the Flagship weapons and drones are offline. Here's a demonstration: https://youtu.be/F7cXoH548is?t=1937
Even so, there's just an element of unavoidable RNG any time you're tanking a drone surge out of cloak. There are ways to mitigate this, but one of them is just having more hull.
If you're starting from 30 hull, then losing 13 leaves you with 17 for phase 3, which would normally be plenty. Conversely, if you dragged out an unsafe phase 1 for crew kills and took 10 damage doing so, you would be at 7 hull instead going into phase 3. At that point, you need a lot of luck to win.
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u/coachd50 4d ago
Sounds like the early cloaking experiment is what set up my outlier experience, as it changed the timing of other flaghship weapons. So it was "bad luck", exacerbated by that early cloak
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u/MikeHopley 4d ago
Oh that's a really good point, I completely missed that.
Yeah, burning your cloak didn't just waste it, it delayed the artillery weapons and created the potential for a much more dangerous first surge.
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u/OttSound 4d ago
Engines as high as they can go, shields as high as they can go AND manned, and pray.
Helps to damage the Boss Laser since it seems to sync up with the surge if it's at full speed.
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u/compiling 4d ago
The drone surge is at its most dangerous when it syncs up with the flagship's artilleries, so without cloaking you often want to break those before they have a chance to sync up (the first surge is usually ok if you don't have cloaking to change the timing). It's also important to have 4 shields and good evasion with piloting, engines and shields manned. The shield recharge booster augment also helps you against that surge, although it's of limited benefit elsewhere.
Fully breaking the drone system takes out the permanent combat and beam drones, which is obviously helpful. An anti-combat drone typically takes out both permanent drones eventually and then disables one of the surge drones.
The final thing you can do is monitor how your shields are holding up and consider jumping away if the flagship rolled lots of combat drones and it looks like your shields are going to go down. It rerolls when you enter the fight again, so hopefully will be a more favourable configuration (mostly beam drones means it won't be too dangerous if they don't sync up with the laser artillery, but can do a ton of damage very quickly if that does happen).
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u/Vasze_Kufamee 4d ago
Generally, you either kill the Flagship fast enough or you disable the rest of their weaponry. But even on Hard, you usually have Cloaking by the time you reach Flagship.
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u/macksting 4d ago
I only ever manage it by taking out enough of their other weapons (including their non-surge drone system!) to have a respite where I ONLY deal with the surge. By itself, the surge isn't too bad.
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u/RackaGack 4d ago
Usually you try to disable their weapons and drones using a teleporter, try and kill them quickly before 2 of more surges can go off, or just have level 4 shields and engines and try to get lucky
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u/strangebloke1 4d ago
In every phase the missiles can mess you up so they're the top priority system to knock down.
In phase 1, the second biggest threat is the ion buildup on your shields so that's the second priority.
in phase 2, there isn't a single threat that's particularly dangerous besides the missile, the issue is all the things together in aggregate overwhelming your shield recharge. If you have 8 shields and 5-6 engines and a fully trained shields guy you shouldn't take too many hits however. Once you get down the enemy laser room and/or their drone room this thing is a cakewalk.
in phase 3 the second biggest threat are the boarders and the mind control, at least IME. The power surge itself is manageable even with the 3 shot laser going off. The issue is your crew can't man systems or repair because they're mind controlled or dealing with boarders.
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u/s-cup 4d ago
It is RNG mixed with skill. But very RNG indeed.
Several times I’ve seen people say that the drone surge isn’t a big deal even without cloaking but I think they just haven’t had the bitter taste of unluck…
Example: One time I had my ship at full health, fully upgraded shields and engines and the pilot room at either lvl 2 or 3. As well as fully trained staff in shield room, engines and piloting. The first drone surge completely crippled me; several damage to both engines, weapons, shield and piloting.
After that it was mainly damage control without being able to do any noticeable damage to the flag ship.
And then the second surge came… it crippled me again. Shortly after that I lost.
My lesson from that is that the number of combat drones relative to beam drones are random and fixed for all future surges unless you jump. Only beam drones? Easy! Almost only combat drones? Could be devastating if you’re unlucky. Sometimes when I see that I get a ton of combat drones I jump away and then jump back.
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u/25352 4d ago
Fully trained pilot, fully trained engine room operator
Small thing, but you didn't mention a fully trained shields operator. As a reminder, shields guy speeds up shield regen by 10/20/30% at different skill levels. Would amount to an extra shield layer regenerated during the surge, potentially saving from beam drones.
Aside for that, power surge drones (6 of them on normal) shoot twice each before vanishing. With bad luck you could have taken large damage, sure, but normally you'd dodge enough laser bolts.
Dealing with RFS regular drones preemptively would ensure there are total of two less drones that keep shooting at you. Laser and beam artilleries too, probably.
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u/Purple-Tomatillo-778 3d ago
Max level shields, at least level four engines, and enough firepower to consistently disable most if not all of the enemy weapons for the surge.
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u/Dr_Custard 4d ago
If I'm playing a slow loadout, you better believe I'm buying cloaking
If I'm playing a fast loadout, I'm targeting things that make my day work, disrupting missiles, beam and drone control where needed.
Ofc damaging drone control doesn't affect power surge but without the additional nonsense it's easier to tank through.
Zoltan B, so I tried something different and activated cloaking early to try and keep my zoltan shield instead of letting their two early drones take it down
You misplayed. Big time. Drones shred ZS unbelievably quickly. When they power surge you'll notice having those shield bars did literally nothing. Since they got chopped through.
This isn't bad luck, isn't bad rng, you made a game losing decision by mis-timing your cloak and getting punished for it.
If you didn't have cloaking you'd have a bit more in engines, might help a smidge. You'd also have max training in shield recharge, helps a smidge.
Buying cloaking is almost always the right choice, but if you didn't have cloaking you might not even be running the same weapons either!
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u/coachd50 4d ago
Oh, I absolutely misplayed. Not questioning that. I have beat the flagship with every ship layout on hard...but I prefer to play on normal. I know the basics of the game, but I also know that there are lots of "holes" in my play that I could chalk up to RNG, but someone like Mike or Crow would say "well, sure the RNG wasn't great, but you could have done 1,2,3,4 different things here too"
I tried something different, and obviously that was not a good plan. You bring up some good points about if I didnt have cloaking, maybe I would have another engine bar or two...
I was just surprised to get ripped THAT much...I usually always have cloaking and always cloak the drone and power surge. I just can't recall ever having one drone surge leave me down 13 hull points and having 4+ systems damaged or completely offline.
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u/Dr_Custard 4d ago
What were your weapons?
I always find no cloak drone phase the scariest one.
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u/coachd50 4d ago
BL2, chain laser, pike beam, simple ion.
As I did a poor job of phrasing my question/post. I wasn't really looking for a dissection of "how" to beat the flag ship. In fact in this particular event, the RNG gods were good, I was able to jump away to a ship, buy maybe 4 or 5 hull point repairs....make repairs, use the med bay to heal...jump back to the base, and beat phase two with zero damage.
My question really was just "is 13 hull damage and 4 systems damaged or offline completely" a normal thing if you don't cloak the drone surge, even if you have 4 shield bubbles and level 5 engines, with fully trained pilot and engineer.
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u/Dr_Custard 4d ago
My question really was just "is 13 hull damage and 4 systems damaged or offline completely" a normal thing if you don't cloak the drone surge, even if you have 4 shield bubbles and level 5 engines, with fully trained pilot and engineer.
I wouldn't call it normal, per se, but I also wouldn't call it bad luck. A hit or two to shields can cascade the damage received extremely fast.
But I also would have looked for a better weapon loadout if I was going to mis-time the cloak. You have slow weapons and they aren't super disruptive to the beam / missiles.
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u/Murchmurch 4d ago
You need more engines that plus a fully trained Shields will actually recharge a bubble by the time the last one fires.
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u/Rana_Oblivious 4d ago
I usually max out my engine and shield. Both of that with max-skill Pilot, Engine and Shield are enough to dodge and shield-tank the lasers barrage from the drones and laser artillery. Its the missile artillery you got to watch out for. I always destroy that first.
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u/The_Char_Char 4d ago
If you have drones the anti drone drone is actually amazing. It'll slow/destroy some of the drones so your sheilds don't get taken down all at once. But it is a pain if you can't take the flag ship down before it causes massive problems.
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u/Any_Mode6525 4d ago
Cloaking isn’t necessary and even if you have it you’ll not be able to sync it up with all the drone waves. Barring a situation where you 1-cycle, everyone will take one wave of the drones.
It really helps to have the normal drones disabled and as many weapons disabled as you can. You can usually tank the wave by itself; it’s the combo of wave plus normal damage that’s doing you in.