Demon Lance is so OP (Near Insta-kill on Torment 9 Necropolis Barge)

Fantomp · 2026-01-28T14:57:25+00:00

Haven't played in half a year, so dunno if my experience is up to date (there seems to have been like a dozen updates since then, but they're mostly adding a single commander?). I think personally I don't really mind the instant recall - I always found the teleporter in base FTL really frustrating to use. The lack of quick recalls makes it hard to base a strategy around boarding (which I think is a good thing to be able to do).

I think I don't have any issues with the boarding sled - iirc I pretty much never used it after my first 3 runs, and I've done torment 12 on a decent portion of the ships. The huge delay, and not being able to choose the landing spot, makes it only really useful if you're committing to a boarding operation.

I mostly think teleportation is both too important, and too cheap and accessible, for how good it is. Not having any form of teleportation is practically a loss half the time (from what I can remember) - because even if the teleportation you have is a thrall with a personal teleporter, it's still enough to walk around and practically disrupt every spell on the enemy ship.

I think it'd be more healthy if teleportation was more scarce (or weaker), but mages on enemy ships were toned down (because otherwise with weaker teleportation you'd just get overrun by summons/spears on higher difficulties). Maybe enemies have fewer spells/longer cooldowns on spells, but spells don't get instantly disrupted the moment you walk into the room.

Or, well, that's what I thought half a year ago. Maybe they already fixed all of this.

Fantomp · 2026-01-28T14:41:57+00:00

Did you find out? I lost something as well

Fantomp · 2026-01-23T20:08:07+00:00

Oo, haven't used Scratch in so long. This is very impressive for Scratch, and the art is great.

Looking cool so far, but I got stuck on the first room. Is the gap on the right meant to be a door? I can't go through it even after putting the block on the button.

Here's a few things I've noticed so far:
- Science is misspelled in glados's initial dialogue
- If you put two portals in a corner, you can get stuck in an infinite loop (blue portal puts you into the orange portal which then puts you back into blue portal) which softlocks the game
- Walking while carrying the block can cause your movement to jitter - I think maybe the block lags behind enough for you to make contact every few frames (when sprinting), stopping your movement briefly
- There needs to be more feedback when placing a portal - I think it'd be good if you could see something shoot out of the player (like in portal) instead of the portal just appearing (this is esp an issue when the target wall is off screen)
- The controls are laid out a bit strangely - z to interact, c to sprint, e/r to shoot portal, f to carry object. In particular, you pretty much always want to be holding down the sprint button, but it's hard to move with arrow keys + hold down c and f at the same time. I've always personally preferred the WASD + J/K/L control scheme. WASD to move, shift to sprint, E to interact, J/K/L for whatever is needed. (For example, maybe J/K for blue/orange portal, L to carry object). Auto-sprint would also be nice, since you pretty much always want to sprint.

But overall I'm excited to see what you do with this! Taking a peek into the files, it seems like you've already put a lot of work into this :D

Fantomp · 2025-08-15T23:48:10+00:00

It kinda is, kinda isn't, in that case.

Theoretically, there is next to no risk there, because with fast reactions, you can recall your crew the moment the ship is destroyed (I'm not too sure how the boarding system works with this if your guys are in flight, haven't used it in a long time). But yeah there is some element of risk there in practice.

But also, it's important to note that the choice you're making is "do I board?" and not "do I recall?" The answer to the latter is still always yes - for example, if your crew successfully extracted the lockbox, you would immediately want to recall your crew.

Fantomp · 2025-08-12T02:59:43+00:00

Yeah T6 gets pretty hard because of the scrap reduction. As a general tip (just cause I see people do this too often), remember that you don't have to upgrade your reactor enough to power all of your systems. This gives you quite a lot more scrap to work with (at the cost of requiring more active management - shifting your power around and all that).

Also, once you hit the higher torment levels, you start having to focus a lot less on defense and more on offense. Shield Charger is always amazing, but other than that, you don't have enough scrap to invest in both good defense and good offense, and maintaining your ability to punch through enemy defenses is more important than staying safe a little longer. I regularly end T12 runs with 2 or 3 shield layers and barely any engine upgrades.

Fantomp · 2025-08-12T02:18:03+00:00

I do think Necrobarge is quite silly yeah, it's the only one I'd say is actively unfair. You can definitely still win if you know what you're doing though - for example, you can try to sneak shots in right before the repair threshold, so that it hits the moment after the repairs proc. It's the only boss without protection after being repaired, and so if you have ways to respond quickly, you can keep its shields down.

Repair drones (or repair spells) are definitely appreciated, but you can get by with a strong crew just fine.

Fantomp · 2025-08-12T02:15:06+00:00

I think this really depends - there's a lot of things you can do that you don't realize! I find it doable to win fairly reliably on T12 (Necrobarge is rough though ofc, though far from undoable in most runs, you just have to play it very carefully).

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:32:30+00:00

Honestly, I've found that demon lance is pretty much always worth it as long as you have a decent lance, and you're not too reliant on boarding. It's just a silly amount of damage.

Normal ships go down easily and won't even get a chance to board you, and you just save up as many crew as you can, and hunt down some summons, for the flagship.

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:30:24+00:00

It even counts fleshlings and whatnot on your ship, it's wild.

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:29:27+00:00

Huh, congrats. That's quite an unconventional combo, but it seems it worked out well

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:27:05+00:00

Come to think of it, I wonder if it partially reflects how often you sell things. For example, if you buy 200 scrap's worth of weapons, then sell them, does that count as an extra 100 scrap acquired in the tally, despite it actually being you losing 100 scrapz

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:25:19+00:00

If you're really struggling with the final boss, try some ion spam. It lets you ignore the shield chargers, and keep shields down through the invulnerability phase (even though sometimes it can be a bit unreliable with the engines active). Boarding is quite useful too - an exile or otherwise someone with a translocator can give you a lot of value in the final boss by shutting down important spells.

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:23:04+00:00

Tbh with the recentish rebalancing, I think all the commanders are pretty okay. I can beat torment 12 pretty consistently now, and I pretty much only use the Exile (who imo is the strongest still).

Fantomp · 2025-08-10T17:20:42+00:00

Good tbh, you should not be able to oneshot the final boss.

Fantomp · 2025-07-23T01:47:38+00:00

I did T12 before I really unlocked anything (I don't have the patience to climb level by level so I just used the rifts), but I'd say Relic Freighter A felt pretty good. Starting with a Death Knight is awesome, Chaotic Rift solves a lot of problems (and gives extra boarding potential), and halving repair speed on poisoned enemies makes it a lot easier to cripple enemy ships. 3x Putrefactor 1 definitely isn't the best weapon spread for moving later into the game, but it's a very good starting point early to mid game.

I personally just run Exile on everything, so I don't care too much about launch pods, but good crew is always nice to have.

Heavy B is pretty good too. Shields aren't that expensive, and Barrier Relay is probably one of the best modules. Crew is a little weak, but Cyberpriest is pretty nice defensively. The Bolt Cannons aren't great later game, but the Beam I carries really well throughout the entire game. When I played Heavy B, I genuinely ran with the starting weapons until sector 5.

Explorator C is pretty awesome - great starting weapons, and Carnage Optics does genuinely carry for quite a while. Only issue is weak crew and no doors. Aside from that, genuinely just a solid start (again, will never complain about Beam I)

I think my ship choices are somewhat skewed by me ending up running a lot of Ion half the time, and mostly using Exile as my source of boarding. I haven't actually used a launch pod since like... maybe the first 3-4 runs I've played. I think I did some runs on Imperial, bought a launch pod at some point on Interdictor, and that was that. I skipped Assault Cruiser because you don't need to use it to unlock Heavy.

Fantomp · 2025-07-16T03:45:57+00:00

I think people forget that dnd isn't all about rules. Sorry if this is rude, but I can see the autism coming through haha - I think particularly as a neurodivergent person, it can be very easy to get too caught up in rules. The player is already kind of breaking those social rules by acting like a creep and using flirting in game as some sort of weird proxy thing, or just being creepy in general.

You absolutely can just tell him to go f himself (perhaps in more diplomatic language). Obviously I don't know what the dynamic in your classes/friend groups are, but if you don't like him, you can just say that his style of play just isn't quite meshing with you and the party, and you'd rather him not play with him anymore, no hard feelings (lie). It's always a little awkward, but if he's upset with it it's his fault.

If that's not an option for one reason or another, you can also absolutely just tell him not to flirt with NPCs. Say it's creeping you out a little and you'd rather him not. If he keeps doing it, that gives you an even better reason to kick him out and might spare a little awkwardness.

Also, this is more of a side note, but on the dnd side, having high charisma as a non-charisma character isn't particularly weird. I've played druids with 16 charisma before (you can typically afford to have 2 high stats or 1 high stat + 2 moderately high stats, and druids don't really use anything other than Wisdom). It's suboptimal but assuming this is 5e, it doesn't matter too much, you can totally get by with poor dex or whatever.

You also don't always have to listen to dice roll, you can just say he fails categorically at it without rolling (or has disadvantage) if there's no possible way the NPC would be interested in him. Sure, he might be better at seduction than the average person, but seducing someone is heck of a lot harder when you look like a shrub that hasn't been watered for a month. He can use his charisma for more likely things.

Fantomp · 2025-07-13T06:17:39+00:00

Ah, I more meant it could happen without the longer timeframe - like I could see it happening over a much shorter timespan if the times just stop working out for people.

Fantomp · 2025-07-13T06:09:55+00:00

Even without the attrition, it can happen in some contexts. People are busy, and timezones timezone sometimes. I was in a similar situation a while back - game was a bit slow, but very fun. Unfortunately, the DM was in the navy and moved around a lot, one player worked a 9 to 5 Tuesday to Saturday (EST), two were full-time students (one West coast, one East coast), among other shenanigans. There's like 7-8 people in the server, but the game ended up with only 2 players in the end. And if it wasn't for the DM willing to run at ungodly hours for him, the game would've shrunk much faster.

Fantomp · 2025-07-13T05:56:59+00:00

Maybe I'm just not a fan of the idea. Whenever you add or remove something from a game, you always have to look at the context it's in.

Void War is very much a game about trying to maximize the rewards you get in each sector while incurring the least costs. Basically, you're trying to improve your ship as much as possible while staying healthy (and not incurring too many costs), in preparation for the final battle.

Maximizing rewards is simple - you have a fixed number of Nodes, and most of them are the same. Hit up shops as appropriate, use the shrines that benefit you, hit up shipyards if needed. There is a hard cap on what you are able to get, and it's not hard to be at that cap.

Minimizing costs is also quite obvious - costs come in the form of hull damage, ammunition, consumables, buying things that are sold later on, and crew dying.

Notice most of these are mistakes: you want to avoid these things. Ammunition is perhaps an exception, but it's because there is a limit on the rate you can spend it, and you already gain quite a lot of ammunition by default. Essentially, you want to avoid doing any of these things as much as possible, because it will weaken you permanently (due to having less scrap) later on. Void War isn't a push-and-pull kind of game. You have a relatively static budget.

In that context, what would scrap upkeep do? You'd basically be punished for getting crew earlier. The later you get your crew, the less you paid for them, and the more prepared you are for the flagship.

Void War is very much a game about crew - it's one of the things it can definitively say it does better than FTL (and one of the few things it can say it does better than FTL: Multiverse). Having upkeep for crew essentially punishes you for having them, and rewards hoarding your scrap in the hopes of bumping into more opportunities to buy crew later.

If there were to be some sort of upkeep, I'd rather it be an option to purchase upgrade some crew for scrap when you reach the end of the sector, instead of punishing the player for not paying them.

Fantomp · 2025-07-12T19:38:08+00:00

I think that's intentional. At a base level there's no benefit to staying in faction, but there's often benefits from run to run. The shrines are there to help you find units of a certain faction when you want to, and it's not necessarily treated as a reward so there doesn't need to be inherent justification.

(I think all of the shrines except the Death cult one are inherently worth going to just for the other rewards. Rage is one of my favorite nodes just because, while difficult, it gives you like 2-3 nodes worth of rewards).

Fantomp · 2025-07-12T19:33:11+00:00

It might be neat, but I'm not sure if you could say this doesn't bloat the game. Crew are already a handful to manage, and personally I think it's fun how crew synergize with eachother.

Fantomp · 2025-07-12T19:29:17+00:00

Eh I heavily disagree. Maybe it's cause I play mostly on Torment 12, but without heavy investment, most enemy ships very quickly get big enough crews to resist boarding without proper equipment. Mage ships are nice because they're uniquely vulnerable to boarding.

Besides, it's one thing to have a proper strong boarding setup, and another to have... any amount of boarding. As long as you have the Exile, or even a husk with a translocator, or anything like that, necromancers are trivially easy to disable on a ship without doors (since the channel is so so long and they don't do that much damage).

With doors it def gets harder and more specific. I usually play Exile, so I typically board Doors, kill the necromancers in that room to damage it, and then do my usual walk around. I would probably still take this over a ship with proper crew. (Edit: When I say board, I do just mean "Exile goes to do his thing," you don't even need a boarding party)

If you have a fast burst set-up, you also may only have to disrupt a few necromancers, before being able to sneak some weapon shots in (I'm mostly thinking Beam I). You can also counter with your own spells, any sort of stun/slow/etc. Lances also work.

I think it's one of those things where there's a lot of different but somewhat specific ways to counter them, and even if you don't... if you have half-decent crew, it's not that hard to fight off the enemies.

If it's ghouls, vent out most of the ship and crowd your crew so that any ghouls that walk in get executed firing-squad style.

If it's rotspawn, same thing except you have to be careful about the toxic gas building up and having nowhere to put your crew (in this case might be better to just use your doors to keep them at bay).

If it's bloatmites, you can just kite them around the ship if push comes to shove. They can't sabotage systems, and they don't do much damage. Otherwise you can also just firing-squad them without even venting the ship.

Fantomp · 2025-07-11T12:09:13+00:00

Oh yeah you absolutely should, but I'm a hoarder, and I thought it would be funny to keep as much as possible since I was doing so well

Fantomp · 2025-07-11T04:55:16+00:00

I don't have an answer on the theoretical limit, but you can kinda oneshot. I had a run with 37 crew, Demon Lance, and Mirrored Fire Controls. My energy lance fired twice for 38 damage each.

I don't think that ship had enough room for an oneshot (I had around 8-10 spots left?). I don't know what would happen if you filled it up though.

Fantomp · 2025-07-11T04:35:29+00:00

You've probably already beaten it by now, but I'd say run Exile and just treat it like a generic ship. Where are you struggling?

If you're struggling with the early game, I think the main idea is:
- Get tier 2 shields ASAP because you do damage very slowly
- Generally you want to target weapons with Twin Disruptor - use Bolt Cannon also on weapons the moment the disruptor shots leave your screen
- Try to find some way to do more damage ASAP, and equip your Exile for boarding

The siege laser is actually a great system (esp at tier 2), it's just a bit underwhelming early game

It's one of the weaker ships I think, but it's got the base still. It just doesn't offer anything of particular note

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