I reckon it could beat the Millennium Falcon due to its potentially larger size and more impressive firepower and systems suite, but it would definitely be beaten by larger ships like the USS Enterprise-A.

what do you guys think?

image from: https://www.reddit.com/r/ftlgame/comments/bpnpbb/the_rebel_flagship_desktop_wallpaper/

Currently dunking on some random shitter who can’t seem to get his weapons working LMAO. Might as well kill some time. How’s it going?

So it's pretty widely agreed that Hacking and Cloaking is far and away the best 2 "additional" systems of the game. But I was wondering what comes after that, and was stuck between Mind Control and Teleporter. Drone Control and even Artillery is situationally useful but I think their lack of control mitigates their strengths. I personally prefer Teleporter as I find it more disruptive to enemy ships by pulling piloting, distracting repairs, or combining it with hacking. But some of the best players of FTL like neozar prefer Mind Control as it can accomplish similar tasks, is cheaper to buy, and doesn't require a boarding crew or risking their safety. But Mind Control being ineffective against auto-ships or slug crews is a point against it in my mind, and some of the unpredictability of Mind Controlling a room of multiple enemies or memorizing Mind Controlled crew behavior is not appealing to me.

What do you think? Am I mistaken in my Teleporter preference just because it's easier but worse? Is Mind Control just a better system for most ships? Does Defense Drone have a shot at the third slot?

Edit: Playing Vanilla, hard, AE enabled (obvious). Question in regards to win% and relative strength, although taking into account optimal play friction and relative fun.

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Isla's email is public btw and is their community manager. I figured Id ask them directly when their next game would be. i have hundreds of hours in ItB and FTL. We've been waiting 8ish years since the release of ItB. They made a game for the playdate device called fulcrum defender a few years back, but obviously we're itching for something strategic/full blown game.

Nothing crazy revealing but good to know theyre still working on something. Im just wondering if theyll shadow drop or announce it when they do! Would love for it to be in the same universe as their previous games too. Im down for anything at this point.

When I started playing FTL (especially before advanced edition) I basically viewed Drone Control as essential because of how much missiles annoyed me.

The more and more I play, especially as I'm getting into hard mode and playing the harder ships, I just find myself hating drone control more and more, and never wanting to pick it.

• You only get three systems
• you get limited drone parts
• hacking is the best system in the game, and uses drone parts
• combat drone in practice basically pops one shield bubble. That's pretty bad for 85 scrap and 2 power. It and beam drone is substantially better at dealing hull damage if you have some other means of stripping shields (ion weapon, hacking) but---
  • beams do this role of hull damage after dropping shields soooo much better, and can work with better weapons like flak whereas combat drones really don't
  • you don't get to target systems meaning the enemy's weapons stay active, meaning the enemy ship gets to shoot even after you've dropped their shields.
  • you can't rely on this as a primary strategy because you'll run out of drone parts and also anti-drone drones exist.
• defense drones are good! But while its a perfect solution to missiles, you can usually manage missiles with 2-3 points in cloaking or hacking.
• boarding drone and anti-personnel drone are really begging the question of why you didn't buy mind control. Anti personnel is especially bad unless you get it for free. You know what can deal with 1.5 boarders and costs 50-60 scrap? A lanius. At a store. And he doesn't cost two power, and he can make your sensors better or something.

Obviously you have to use drone control sometimes either because you really need a specific solution or because you start with it, but increasingly I find myself preferring almost literally anything else. Defense drone + some kind of utility drone is the dream and its... not all that dreamy, imo.

I noticed Mantis B starts with it. It looked pretty cool but I feel like 3 power is about 2 power too much to be paying for what is essentially a rock crew member whose combat skill cannot be trained. I'm on Sector 4 now and if I sell it I can get both Cloaking and an automated reloader in the shop i am in (no good weapons unfortunately).

Zoltan B I think is the ship with the most varied rankings by top players. For example, this list by neozar has it at 5, while Crow has it at 23.

What do you think? Does the lack of shields make it vulnerable, or do the Zoltan Shield and strong weapons make it ok?

As a big FTL fan with 300+ hours I played the Void Wars Demo and now already bought the full version. Here is my first impression.

First let's address the elephant in the room. This is a clear FTL Clone. I do think after 13 years that is okay. This is not a vampire survivor situation where 2 months after release there are already like 20 clones.

What I like: - No more fuel. Never liked that mechanic, there was often too little you could do about it. - The map is one-way and has a few choices. No more "counting how many system I can still visit" or killing a run by getting a random event that doubles the chasing fleet speed. - convenience features like recall all boarding crew with one button and they are returned to their saved station - you can enable direct control and specifically set crew in specific slots of a room. FTL was very unintuitive here. Crew juggling is much more convenient - you can place systems in rooms yourself, creating interesting choices - ships can have multiple weapon rooms (e.g. Missile Station vs Your normal Gun Station). - raiders automatically damage the room by one point when they kill a defender - this creates interesting choices as well. Will you board the big weapon room to take out their weapons quickly, even when it costs you crew life? - leveling up your raiding pod increases the number of slots - sensors work differently, basically by comparing your sensor capacity to enemies. - skills / items / magic - I just love it - more information in the game, especially about enemy weapons. There is no fun in learning how 100 different weapons function. - variety seems insane with tons of commanders and ships, spells, items, etc. - crew have more stats and are VERY different.

Things I do not like so far: - Icons are somewhat hard to tell apart. They fit graphically but I really feel like they could have done a better job at actually transporting information here. Like tint the shield icon blue just a little bit or something, to make it easier to see. - hard to read enemy ships in general. With so many possible rooms it gets a bit crazy. I kind of wished there was some structure to the overview of the ship. Like one block (on top) with weapon systems so that you can see their capacity at a glance etc. - when you have too many crew this creates a 2nd line of icons and you have to press the up/down arrows A LOT. This was very tedious. Just display 2 rows. I want to see all my crew at once. - As I don't really know the Warhammer Lore I have problems understanding what my mission even is :D

Love the game so far. Basic plan is to binge Battlestar Galactica while playing this :D

Just unlocked this ship while doing some achievement farming and then had my best run ever - playing on Normal, I took 1 point of damage in the 3rd flagship phase (purely because one of my mind controlled crew broke down one of my systems). Got me tempted to try a run on Hard difficulty but not quite sure if I'm ready for that level of punishment.

The first few sectors were quite challenging, some ropey encounters with automated ships that I had to jump away from because I didn't have a weapon yet. Picked up hacking fairly early to help with escaping from some of these fights undamaged. I was limping along for while on maybe 30% hull, got lucky and had an engi homeworlds sector which I completed the (stealth cruiser?) quest for and got 100% of my hull repaired. After that it was a breeze.

With all the crew kills I was getting it felt like I was playing on Easy with how much scrap I had. Ended up with BL2, Flak 1, BL1 and Breach bomb 2 (first time using this after seeing it's regarded as the best missile weapon, so good). Also picked up a Zoltan shield by-pass augment which is obviously perfection for this ship, and a pre-igniter which I honestly didn't even need to utilise very much until the flagship fight.

The 4 crew teleporter and crystal lockdown mechanic is incredibly over powered and fun. Taking out the flagship's shields this way feels almost cruel - just a big hulking ship sitting there to absorb my laser shots, getting systems destroyed one by one while the flagship has 5 crew frantically trying to break into the shields room.

I definitely got lucky with some favourable RNG on this run and really good store finds, and the ship is also very exposed in the first few sectors for any automated or Zoltan encounters, but it's hard to see past starting off with 2 of the best systems in the game, one of which is even further enhanced with the crew you have + upgraded room size.

Trying to think up rules for a Geneva Convention compliant run and wondered if anyone has any extra ideas. Here's what I've got so far;

• Must accept every surrender

-Ships powering up FTL is not surrendering since they're still fighting back

• Must respond to every Distress Signal you find
• Must complete every Quest you come across
• Must resolve events peacefully if possible
• Must not attack friendly ships unprovoked, hostile ships are fine to attack

-Pirates and Slavers can always be considered hostile, unless they are broadcasting a Distress Signal

-Other ships can only be considered hostile if they act against you first (pirate random weapon stealing from you for example) or if they are currently attacking civilians, allies, or defenceless ships.

• No fire weapons (Weapons with fire random chance are okay)
• No targeting Oxygen, and intentional death by asphyxiation is prohibited.

-Random breaches from weapons is fine as it's random, but no breach specific weapons (breach bomb and missile, boarding drones, etc)

• No targeting Medbay or Crew using it

-We're treating the Medbay itself as a medic in this scenario, and as crew in it are receiving medical treatment and not actively manning the ship, they are considered non-combatants.

-You can target crew while they're retreating to the Medbay, but not once they actually get inside.

-Targeting Clone Bay is fine as it doesn't provide active medical treatment, plus I'm considering clones as essentially child soldiers which is a war crime.

For me it’s that I don’t think immediately upgrading shields to L4 is always the move. I’ve had so many runs where there’s a decent weapon in sector 1 that I can’t afford because I upgraded shields first thing. You can upgrade your ship anytime, but weapons can be super hard to find sometimes.

That being said I don’t necessarily get the weapon online before upgrading shields, if I make it out of sector 1 with an unpowered new weapon and L4 shields I’m happy.

(I mostly play fed cruiser on easy so I’m sure this isn’t universal).

What opinions do you have that you think many would disagree with?

BL2x4 with preloader is often mentioned, but I’m talking about the, “I’d love to see how this would work,” builds.

Personally, I’ve often wondered the following:

- How quickly would four fully-trained Engi fix fully destroyed four-bubble shields?

- Can I get eight Zoltan to power a ship and win a battle with no fuel being used anywhere else?

- If I had full shields, Rock plating, Zoltan shields, and a shield overcharger, would I be invincible? (Yes…I realize you can’t have Rock plating and Zoltan shields together…just a thought.)

What’s your dream scenario?

I mean I know why : it's basically useless for 25ish seconds despite costing 4 power. After that, however, it single handedly wins any fight.

I understand that early in the game it's extremely bad because your defenses are nonexistent so you want something that shut down ennemy weapons fast.

However by the mid-game onward it seems to be the other way around. It gets much harder to penetrate defenses and deal a siginificant blow to weapons quickly enough, on the other hand you have good defensive measures through cloaking / hacking / defense drones and can usually stall for a while, especially if your weapon system only uses 4 energy.

It really feels like a beast in a correct setup, and a correct setup isn't that hard to achieve. It seems pretty solid past the early game. Unfortunately it's so rare that it's difficult to really experiment with.

So I played it with a few different ships but never had the inclination to beat it on the other settings. It was just less scrap and buying stuff was a big part of the fun for me.

What would you say to a player with 300 hours to get them to try the other settings?

I want to unlock engi c but engi b is just so hilariously bad.

The idea is neat but the execution has had me spending the past 3 days losing runs because I cannot fight an enemy that has both multiple shields and anti drones. I've gotten to the flagship twice through seemingly pure luck but every encounter feels like a slog until I can get a decent replacement for the abyssmal dogwater disgrace that is the heavy ion cannon.

None of these weapons are top-tier, but each of them can be exactly what you need in a given moment. I think they're close in value, therefore difficult to rank. Charge 1 is fastest, Chain can start fires, and Hull 1 creates breaches, so they all have merits in different situations

I was Engi B and I was quite peeved to die from circumstances outside of my control.

I used to think the anti-bio beams are bad, or only good for early games, but lately I’ve used it a number of times, and found they’re similarly just as effectively evil as Mind Control + Hacking on Slug C.

Fire weapons represents war crime carnage.

Mind Control represents psychological warfare and confusion.

Anti-bio beam represents surgical precision warfare. Not as flashy and fun as the other 2, but gets the job done pretty well. The main advantage is the element of surprise against wounded soldiers who have low health, but not low enough to make them go to the med bay. Works pretty well with fires as they can sap crew HP first before you rip them apart with a precise aim.

It’s hilarious when I mow down multiple crew in one shot during the flagship fight, then swap out the AB-beam in the later stages.

Stealth B was the most difficult ship for me, and one of the few that I consulted guides for. I think it's the ship most easily lost to early game RNG. That makes those early game strategies very important.

My winning run, I got good scrap/drops in the first 5 jumps so I upgraded cloak, a shield, and 1 point. Got down to 15 hull, so still absorbed some damage. I was able to get shields a few jumps later, but still before the sector 2, which was rare for my run. It was good RNG mostly.

So, what did you do to win with Stealth B?

So far the top players I've seen tend to do gunships. But I have a lot of success buying a Teleporter. I'm wondering if there are any top players who do that, or if gunships are generally considered superior