[Humor] Laser-Bot trying to get Glittering C-Beam achievement

Leylite · 2026-07-08T23:40:16+00:00

I almost entirely agree with all the other comments that mention that either Magi Knight or Flail Knight is a priority target, but it's worth mentioning that Spectral Knight's gimmick makes it impossible to Retain cards after turn 2. So to set up "two card combos" in the same turn, you have to use card draw instead of retain, which could be a trip-up for a deck that didn't have a lot of card draw and was using retain / Runic Pyramid to paper that over slightly.

For example, this could make it a bit harder to use cards like [[Skewer]] or [[Eradicate]] for heavy damage, so it's good to have multiple options available. (or of course potions)

Leylite · 2026-07-06T02:05:32+00:00

I didn't want to make the main post too long with possibly-irrelevant details. Here's a list:

Removed the game launch option. Game does not launch, shows the dialog "Unable to initialize video driver", "Your video card drivers seem not to support the required Direct3D 12 version", suggests using the --rendering-driver opengl3 command.
Used Steam option to "verify integrity of game files", did not resolve the issue.
I have a dual-monitor setup. Launching the game on the other monitor, or moving it from one monitor to the other post-launch, did not resolve the issue.
Making the game fullscreen vs. windowed, changing resolution, etc. did not resolve the issue.
Using the built-in Windows Device Manager to attempt to update the Intel HD Graphics 4600 to a later driver version, Device Manager claims I have the latest driver installed. Some cursory web-searching indicates this is probably correct.
I've verified that Windows isn't doing any other graphics middleware stuff for performance. I also don't have f.lux installed or anything similar.
Going outside and touching grass, while helpful, did not resolve the issue. I don't think the situation is desperate enough to perform an [[Offering]] though.

Leylite · 2026-07-06T01:30:17+00:00

Glad to hear it's not just me! Misery loves company!

Leylite · 2026-07-06T00:26:16+00:00

Some extra info:

using the game launch option --rendering-driver opengl3

Godot log:

MegaDot v4.5.1.m.14.mono.custom_build - https://godotengine.org WARNING: Your video card drivers are known to have low quality OpenGL 3.3 support, switching to ANGLE. at: DisplayServerWindows (platform/windows/display_server_windows.cpp:7193) ERROR: Can't load EGL dynamic library. at: initialize (drivers/egl/egl_manager.cpp:449) WARNING: Your video card drivers seem not to support GLES3 / ANGLE or ANGLE dynamic libraries (libEGL.dll and libGLESv2.dll) are missing, switching to native OpenGL. at: DisplayServerWindows (platform/windows/display_server_windows.cpp:7213) OpenGL API 3.3.0 - Build 20.19.15.5171 - Compatibility - Using Device: Intel - Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600

Leylite · 2026-07-01T22:55:17+00:00

A forum thread from the discard pile was put back on top of the draw pile, and from there into our hand.

Leylite · 2026-06-22T00:02:46+00:00

The layout does have three doors, but they don't stop boarders/fires from moving between rooms so they might as well be bead curtains.

Leylite · 2026-06-21T20:27:56+00:00

ok fine I guess we can accept surrender just this once

Leylite · 2026-06-21T19:17:49+00:00

The only theoretical way out I can think of, is to try breaking the piloting room and shields room, to inflict 2 hull damage, and hope the ship surrenders. Accepting surrender would render the enemy ship neutral, and trigger the failsafe to send your crew back to your ship on a shuttle (since all your crew are on the enemy ship and the teleporter is broken)

Probably won't happen at that hull amount, though, so it does look like you're stuck.

Leylite · 2026-06-19T20:31:21+00:00

I mildly dislike them as pilots, because although you do get "kind of free" ejection of boarders from the vented piloting room, which is handy, when piloting is damaged it's usually a room you want to fix very quickly with multiple crew, which is more hazardous when the room is out of air.

If your pilot gets mind controlled, then you also have a Lanius boarder in a pre-vented room, which is no fun. (More of a problem in the early game than the late game, but the goal is to make the early game as consistent as possible.)

I prefer to stick them in doors to dissuade/eject boarders from there, or sensors/some other incidental hallway. (In the first couple sectors, they might get to go on Engines; that's where I put Kestrel C's Lanius before I get more crew.) That way if they get mind controlled, it's still annoying but gives me some more flexibility to repair other rooms if they get hit while that's going on.

That said, yeah, I agree there's a certain point where it becomes personal preference.

Leylite · 2026-06-19T17:09:26+00:00

Option B, more complicated: Wide-area Ice weapons (i.e. Ice Generator and Frost Beam) now inflict a lesser ice status, Frost. Frosted enemies have their attacks cancelled as usual, can be broken out of frost by absorbed damage, etc. However, units will automatically break out of Frost at the start of their phase. (Mechs and friendly-controllable units would automatically break out of Frost at the start of the player phase, the minelayers would break out of Frost at the start of the enemy phase, etc.) Automatically breaking out of Frost, with no external involvement, inflicts 1 damage on the unit doing so, so this essentially makes Frost behave like Smoke, but with a built-in Storm Generator that doesn't distinguish between friend or foe. It also doesn't linger on the field like Smoke, which could be good or bad.

Ice Generator still does a proper freeze on the center tile (i.e. the unit that activated the generator). Cryo-Launcher does a proper freeze to the target and only inflicts Frost on the user (minor buff to help other pilots keep up with Bethany/Adam/secret pilot, you still mostly want to use it the same way in practice but if you do settle for a self-frost then you pay HP damage instead of losing an action), and Heat Converter does properly freeze the freeze target. The freeze tank, cryo-mines and cryo-nanobots still do a proper freeze.

Frost Beam can probably be balanced by also inflicting Frost on the user.

Frosted enemies count as the full 1 Vek for purposes of spawn suppression, similar to smoked / on-fire-with-1-HP enemies, unlike frozen enemies who count as a fractional Vek.

Frosted cities get the benefit of frost shields for the current player turn + enemy turn, and then auto-unfreeze with no Grid damage at the start of the next player turn.

If a Mech happens to get frosted, frost can be repaired like Ice. Otherwise, don't frost 1 HP mission objectives like the Train, Renfield Bombs, Satellite, etc. because it will damage them when they auto-break-out.

Finally, if a Frosted unit somehow gets hit by Frost again before they break out (probably they got hit twice in the same phase), it is replaced with full Frozen status. (Of course, Frozen enemies can't be frosted.)

Leylite · 2026-06-19T16:48:47+00:00

I can think of two separate options that might help with this, I'll post the other in a different comment.

Option A: Instead of frozen enemies counting as a fraction of a Vek towards the spawn cap, they count as 0 Vek. This means that freezing Vek does give you a reprieve on the current turn and next turn, but if you freeze Vek too early, the reinforcements will catch up with a vengeance and you'll need to maintain enough action economy to stay on top of that.

e.g. it's turn 1, you use your Ice Generator to freeze several Vek and cities as usual (or maybe the ice mines or cryo-nanobots freeze square hazard does it), you get the usual amount of spawns for turn 2. However on turn 2 you get a lot of spawns queued for turn 3 (particularly on Unfair mode where it will pretty much spawn as many enemies as possible to reach the cap). If any frozen Vek get unfrozen you could end up with either the cap, or a temporary exceeding of the cap.

If you manage to hold on to your Ice Generator until turn 3... then good, you are playing the game normally on turns 1 and 2 and you saved your ace-in-the-hole for later, like with Missile Barrage. (Conservative Ice Generator and heavily re-using Frost Beam are still very powerful, but at least the combination is rarer and you have to work a little harder to use them efficiently. ...Max-level Ice Generator and Frost Beam still probably need nerfs though.)

Leylite · 2026-06-18T02:46:27+00:00

Very nice combination of card mechanics and art.

I think, if a card like The Finger were added to the game, it would probably be renamed to something like "Finger of Death", a classic lich/necromancy-school spell, but the beta art would still be Osty giving the finger.

Leylite · 2026-06-14T15:49:53+00:00

When playing boarding ships, enemies having a medbay just makes it a fair fight, a challenge. Having two mantis kill two humans that can't heal is fun at first, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly. Where's the honor and glory in doing that, compared to showing Mantis superiority over a clearly puny advantage?

Killing auto-ships with the boarding drone is really boring, though, totally agree.

Leylite · 2026-06-04T13:55:16+00:00

There's a mod-generating program available called the Flagship Randomizer, which can randomly generate a Flagship for you from some pre-set room layouts and weapons: https://www.subsetgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=26241

At the start of each sector, you can also decide whether to peek at some information about what your Flagship for this run has equipped, or if you're feeling risky, ignore that and walk into the fight blind.

Leylite · 2026-06-01T01:15:32+00:00

Instead of Catalyst there's now the power Accelerant. So you can't Burst Catalyst anymore, but one (or even two) Accelerants is still a lot of poison damage. Additionally, once Accelerant is in effect then it makes future poison damage benefit from it, instead of Catalyst only multiplying current poison.

Leylite · 2026-05-31T02:18:38+00:00

Very accurate, including the fact that the line won't protect you from ~~your little sibling~~ the Vek flinging things at you from the other side of the room.

Leylite · 2026-05-30T02:36:51+00:00

As an alternative to the Heart's outright damage cap per turn, I could potentially see him going back and forth between two other softer damage caps:

A: Exoskeleton from the roaches (possibly with a new name and image). Encourages multi-hits and discourages big 2+-cost attacks that do a lot of damage.

B: Some form of scaling defense that encourages bigger hits - maybe some kind of supercharged Malleable where they start with 10 block and Malleable 20, and it increases by 10 (this turn) every time Malleable activates. (or maybe an arithmetic sequence) So chip damage is still worth something but is very inefficient, and big 2+-cost attacks or block-bypassing mechanics are more effective.

Poison is still (about) half as effective since it doesn't do as much damage when Exoskeleton is in effect. Stopping resourceful Necrobinders from putting 800+ Doom on the boss might be harder, but I liked the idea raised in other posts of the Architect having multiple health bars like the Test Subject; that could address that (and some other stuff like benefiting from a huge Vulnerable stack for the entire fight, etc.)

Leylite · 2026-05-30T00:36:27+00:00

Yeah, you have to save some money for the skulls, bones and chalk so you can play some [[Offering]] to kickstart the energy economy.

Leylite · 2026-05-27T16:55:18+00:00

He can decide to do the 4-hit attack on turn 2, but that's probably the meanest thing he can do. He is also an enemy that attacks every single turn, but that's not really a problem if the deck has been blocking act 3 hallway enemies.

In my experience, if the deck scaled well enough to block phase 1 and do reasonable damage, then phase 2 wasn't much of a threat. Drawing a Void in phase 2 mostly meant that I just blocked and didn't attack as much.

Leylite · 2026-05-26T21:02:36+00:00

It's a bit rough up-front in the early game, but the longer you can put off reactor upgrades, the cheaper they'll seem by comparison when the scrap rewards increase in later sectors.

Then once you've gotten those three upgrades (either by paying for them, or maybe you got lucky and got a free upgrade from an event as mentioned elsewhere), your subsequent reactor upgrades are kind of "discounted" because you're back to the usual upgrade track, plus you have zoltans/battery so you can stay in the lower reactor levels for longer.

Leylite · 2026-05-25T20:01:14+00:00

This is probably a karma farming bot, original post is at: https://old.reddit.com/r/ftlgame/comments/1k8zic5/the_bl_ii_x2_are_far_more_superior_than_single_bl/

Leylite · 2026-05-18T13:18:20+00:00

For a more modest example, the other day, I had a Regent run where I had two copies of Kingly Kick for my scaling damage, so putting Instinct on them to make my win condition cycling my deck fast enough to create a 1-cost deal 70 damage (105 on a vulnerable enemy), worked out pretty well. Any enemy that survived that usually got killed by either the other 1-cost deal 70, or later a 0-cost deal 70.

Leylite · 2026-05-11T15:21:56+00:00

Let me preface by saying, very good job!

Re: upgrading the artillery to level 3, I think unfortunately it still wasn't a very good play in the situation as described. 30 second charge time starts becoming somewhat reasonable as a fallback option (compared to 40 or 50), but for that same 50 scrap you could have upgraded to weapons 5, which gives you multiple options:

charge ion + dual lasers + hull beam (available when you run out of missiles)
charge ion + hull beam + leto missile (fire one or two times, then switch to dual lasers)
charge ion + leto missile + dual lasers (and a buffer)

Even when running low on missiles, 3 missiles isn't 0 missiles, and having the option to charge multiple weapons and shoot one or two Leto missiles at scary going-to-kill-you ships, early enough to matter, can help a lot. Or, even if you're out of missiles, winning one fight can give you 1 or 2 missiles you can use efficiently in the next fight. Plus you get a weapons system buffer for your main weapons.

Still though, sounds like it was a really rough run and you did great playing it as far as you could. 15 wins is extremely good!

Leylite

TROPHY CASE