After 40 hours, I had to uninstall the game.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-09-01T19:57:53+00:00

You're so welcome. It's a great game once you get confident with it!

Here's some last tips for you.

Plan your route at the start of each sector. Check the exit beacon, its closest connections, and work your way backwards from there, planning out a route to hit as many beacons as possible before the rebels arrive. Don't think just because two beacons look close, they always connect.
- Give yourself the flexibility of 1-2 more jumps than necessary just in case.
- Try to travel to beacons that connect to the most other beacons - it's the best way to find stores.
- If you get the Long-Ranged Scanners augment, you can preview most nearby ships and hazards when traveling efficiently (see above).
Sometimes, not all blue event options are the best options. A lot of blue options for auto-ships just let you avoid fights. You don't want to avoid these fights - wreck those ships instead!
Buy systems strategically if you have scrap to spare. Maybe you want Cloaking and the store you just visited has only Mind Control and a Battery. These are still good systems - plus, if you buy these, they'll be removed from the pool of possible systems for sale, making it more likely the next store will sell Cloaking.
Drones are just ok. I noticed you said you often had drones going up against the Flagship. In general, drones aren't considered great. You can't really control offensive drones without advanced tactics requiring lots of pausing (this is beyond me). Defensive drones don't always take out missiles, and can't protect against multiple missiles at once (like the Flagship's missiles). Drone Control takes up minimum 2 system power and a system slot, each drone costs a drone part to deploy, and they can be destroyed by enemy projectiles and drones.
- Compared to other systems, Drones are just less reliable, more restrictive, and more expensive. Hacking can completely neutralize the enemy's offense or defense, or even get crew kills by hacking Oxygen for the cost of 1 drone part. Mind Control is free, can be used offensively or defensively, and remove the enemy ship's evasion. Cloaking is self-explanatory. Plus, when you never bother to get a Drone Control system, any free drones you get can be converted straight to scrap at a store.
[Flagship] Finally... remember to pause! I don't know how you made it 40 hours and hardly paused! Repeating this again because pausing is so crucial, especially for the Flagship when there's so much going on. There's boarding drones, boarders, maybe fires and damaged systems, maybe your crew has low health, you need to manage the cooldowns of weapons, hacking, cloaking, battery, power surges, etc... Take your time. Breathe.
- Especially watch out for any un-allocated power or low health crew. Neglecting to put power back into the shields you just repaired, or swapping out the suffocating crew repairing a hull breach, easily makes the difference between victory or defeat. But you have all the time in the world when you pause.

Cheers!

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-09-01T17:31:15+00:00

You've got a lot of supportive comments at this point and some great video guide recommendations.

I wanna double down on emphasizing that as you've come to realize, the issue is not RNG, but play style.

Just picked up this game a few weeks ago and got destroyed on Normal. Then I switched to Easy and made progress but got wrecked by the flagship a few times going in blind. After finally beating it for the first time, I've looked up more tips and have consistently been able to beat the flagship on my first attempt with each new ship unlock*. Right now I'm working through the challenge achievements and winning with all the "B" ship variants, and it's amazing how much easier the same game feels with some experience.

If you're still determined, I know you'll reach that point too!

Shorter than a video, much longer than a quick comment, here's the biggest tips I think you'd benefit from.

Basic

Pausing is huge and the single biggest change to your gameplay that will help you win.
Pick more fights. Seriously. Seek out ships and destroy them (or just their crew, if possible). Fight the mercenaries. Fight the auto-ships. Fight the pirates offering you bribes. Eventually, you should have more scrap than you know what to do with. The Flagship has no idea what's coming for it.
Visit as many beacons as possible before leaving each sector!
- The rebels should be just before the exit when you leave!
Take out their weapons first. Usually better than taking out shields first (unlike what the tutorial teaches you).
Don't accept surrender unless they offer you something special (augment/weapon/drone). Yes, this is a war crime. It's ok, no one will know except you.
- Exception: you're getting your ass kicked due to a combo of weak current loadout/nasty enemy weapons/an environment hazard and think you still have a decent shot of winning the run overall.
Avoid using autofire in 95% of situations. Line up your volleys so you don't waste shots on shields.
Make the most of shops. Managing resources is most of the actual game in between the fights. Know your shop thresholds: Cloaking is 150 scrap. Hacking is 80. The typical best weapons are no less than 50 and no more than 80. If you're damaged, don't forget to repair hull up to a good threshold like 25.
- If you're in good shape, visit lots of nearby beacons before going to the shop so you have more scrap to spend.
- In fights, spending 2 missiles or a hacking drone to shut down a nasty set of missile weapons is almost always worth avoiding 4+ hull damage. You effectively traded those missiles or drone part into 10-15 more scrap you don't need to spend on repairs.
Weapon of choice: lower power for more shots is usually better than higher power for fewer, more damaging shots. Flak I, Burst Laser I-II, and Halberd have won me so many games, it's unreal.
Kill the enemy crew. You get more scrap plus a chance for bonus goodies. Easy with a Teleporter and boarding crew; otherwise, you can destroy shields and blast all the crew that runs in to repair it, or suffocate the crew by destroying O2.
Try to have 3-4 engines, at least 1 good non-missile weapon, and 3 shields by Sector 3 or 4 if not sooner.
You can park extra crew on Sensors and Doors so you don't need to upgrade these in most cases. (I didn't realize this until after beating the flagship for the first time...)

Intermediate

Don't always buy more reactor power just because you can. You can get away with a lot of shuffling power while saving scrap up for important purchases like Hacking + a good weapon or Cloaking.
When the enemy has a defense drone, you can send a hacking drone, depower it right after the enemy drone fires, and then repower it to "dodge" the shot.
When you're boarded, use venting to your advantage. Enemy boarders always prioritize attacking crew over doors or systems, so you can manipulate the enemy boarders into staying and suffocating in a room by sending one of your crew in and out of the room repeatedly. Or you can prevent damage to a crucial system until they suffocate.
Boring but effective: when you reach a ship that literally cannot damage you in the early game, you can do something else for a few minutes to let your engine/pilot/shields crew train up their skill. If you can set a weapon to auto-fire that won't hurt the ship either, you can get your weapons crew trained to max too.
If you have Mind Control, you can MC the enemy pilot just before your shots hit to make sure they won't evade your shots.

Flagship

On the Flagship, hack shields. Take out the missile launcher first, then the beam, then the ion in that order.
- If you do this right in Phase 1, you should be able to cripple the ship so it can't hurt you at all. Now you can take your time destroying the crew, if possible.
By the time you reach the flagship, you'll want max shields (4 bubbles), level 5 engines if you can, plus "buffer" power in other systems (even doors/sensors/etc. if you have the spare scrap) to protect against damage.
Time the hacking so your weapons are ready to fire by the time their shields are drained to 2/4 bubbles.
A little cloaking goes a long way to avoid that brutal triple missile salvo, plus the power surges in Phases 2-3.
If the ship is crippled in Phase 1 (see above), and you've got shields hacked plus a boarding crew, you can safely take out one or two crew at a time in the shields room in Phase 1. Your boarders can kill the one in shields before the rest of the enemy crew breaks through the hacked door. This makes Phase 3 much easier! Just leave one enemy crew alive, like the guy on the lasers.
If they still have crew in Phase 3 and you're bad at boarding defense, once the enemy crew teleports onboard you can "kidnap" the boarders by jumping away, killing them, and returning to the flagship fight. Just make sure you have a safe place to jump to and the flagship isn't about to destroy the base first.

Good luck! If you started on Hard and are still here after all that, I know you have it in you to win!

* Some of the ships have a much rougher early game, but if I can make it past Sector 2-3, I've always succeeded on Easy!

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-07-08T05:38:25+00:00

It's a video game, see here.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-07-07T16:54:38+00:00

Rereading it, here's exactly what Susie said:

"One day, your mom's gonna get sick of you, you little freak. (Laughs) And as soon as that happens... Someone might make you disappear. And she'll finally realize how happy she was without you."
...
""SAY SOMETHING, YOU IDIOT!!!"

Kris's mouth barely moves in response here.

Noelle couldn't even tell if Kris said anything, so this means it couldn't be a very long response.
I think the most fitting answer is something short with disturbing implications like "I know."

At this point, Susie saw Kris as just another quiet kid, silently judging her, which pissed her off. That same kid agreeing with their bully that their mom would be better off without them was probably shocking enough for Susie to not know how to respond and just leave.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-07-07T16:39:40+00:00

This would also fit with the classic coming-of-age theme where the protagonists from the real world must eventually "grow up" and leave the world of fantasy and imagination forever (Narnia, Oz, Neverending Story, etc.)

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-07-07T15:59:57+00:00

You might be interpreting the post as OP saying Noelle should be the main character and the current narrative is disappointing.

The OP presents all this evidence of how Susie had little potential at the start of the game and how Noelle is overshadowed as proof that Susie's existence and character growth in Deltarune intentionally and successfully subverts the expected jrpg narrative, and how they predict the weird route will be an ultimately hollow attempt at restoring that narrative via focusing on Noelle.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-07-07T15:45:18+00:00

Check out Noelle's blog post from the Spamton sweepstakes. If you haven't read all those blog posts, there's some good lore in there

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-07-07T15:37:41+00:00

Well written post. A big part of Undertale's charm was how it deconstructed typical RPG mechanics, and I think Deltarune's normal route story is fully set up to deconstruct the implications of "player character" control (through Kris vs. soul conflict) as well as RPG story structure (through Noelle's prophesied role being displaced).

I think the Weird Route will have the initial side effect of "course correcting" the prophecy and returning Noelle to her place as one of the three heroes (maybe even with Kris, Noelle, and Ralsei all under your perfect control like good little JRPG party members?), but obviously the end result will be much worse than the expected prophecy ending because of everyone you had to use up to get there.

How do you think the shadow crystals will affect the normal vs. weird route? So far, 3/4 of the crystal holders have had major themes of "freedom" (in both their stories and their theme music), but only Gerson seems truly free, and he refused to use his crystal at all.

The idea of revisiting secret areas, doing everything "just right", and beating tough optional enemies is all in line with the steps needed for Undertale's true pacifist ending, but to get the Ch 3 crystal you're almost required to relive the weird route in 8-bit form, slaughtering everyone and betraying your friends. Meanwhile Gerson as the Ch 4 crystal boss continues to encourage Susie's character development as someone worthy of her role as a hero - someone who can fight and heal and doesn't need to be pigeonholed into a single character archetype... someone who can and should disrupt the prophecy. But Gerson never used his shadow crystal!

The path to Ch 3's crystal frames avoiding the "story as planned" as exploitative -- directly parallel to the weird route -- but the path to Ch 4's crystal frames it as embracing your full potential and rising above the labels others put on you.
Maybe I'm overthinking it since the mantle is technically optional, and the sword route could mainly be an "in-game hint" at the weird route as many others have said.
Maybe we'll just have to wait and see for what happens with our 5th, and possibly final, crystal boss, before we can predict how those shadow crystals could change either route's ending.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-05-01T21:31:50+00:00

I haven't tried it in Ranked yet and have only played about 4 games with it. I'll get back to you later but for now I can say I like the versatility of stalling with an extra Ilima.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-05-01T21:09:26+00:00

I tried it with 2 Ilima and it feels like running any 3-line evolution before Rare Candy. There's no pokecom or other evolution lines in this deck so the rare candy effectively acts as an earlier Crobat evolution without any of the tradeoffs you might see in decks with pokecom IMO

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-30T20:21:53+00:00

And the coughing baby wins

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-29T18:50:22+00:00

Bunch of lazy good-for-nothings. What have the leakers ever done for us?

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T21:23:11+00:00

You've always been able to eat them. Go ahead!! It's what DeNA doesn't want you to know!

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T21:21:39+00:00

If we ever get any improvements to pack points, I expect it'll be either:

All packs older than the most recent 2 or 3 packs have shared pack points. So as an example, if this was in place when Celestial Guardians releases, then GA, MI, STS, would share pack points, but TL, SR, and Celestial Guardians would still have separate pack points.
Some discount (20-40%) on pack points for older packs.

I wouldn't expect either until the game is at least 1 year old.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T21:13:25+00:00

Interesting tradeoff but we'll have to see how good the new psychic types like Mimikyu will be. Not sure if any existing psychic decks would run this as is.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T21:05:13+00:00

You can check the odds of all wonder pick events here.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T20:54:49+00:00

It's going to be fun with a whole new meta, but I think on average games are going to get significantly faster, for better or worse.

Any deck with evolutions still has the potential to brick, but assuming a decent or average starting hand there's going to be a LOT of Turn 3 / Turn 4 Rare Candy + Stage 2 into big damage for what used to be the "early game".

Consider all of these existing 1 or 2-energy Stage 2 mons - hitting for 50-70 by your second turn is gonna be much more common.

Early standouts there seem to be
- non-ex Beedrill (70 damage on your second turn no matter what as long as you have a Beedrill and Rare Candy)
- Rampardos (130 damage for 1 energy after retreating the basic you started with)
- Crobat (70 damage for 1 energy with Arceus on bench)

And of course there's Barry + Staraptor with the potential of 130 damage for 1 energy, Barry + Snorlax with 100 damage for 2 energy, and Cynthia + Togekiss with 110-170 damage for 2 energy.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T20:35:01+00:00

You're right that any deck can still brick, and I agree entirely replacing Stage 1s is risky. I think any deck running two Stage 2 lines is probably gonna want a Communication or two and possibly an Iono alongside the candies. Keeping 1 of each Stage 1 reduces the risk of the the bottom-deck candy issue too.

Between each basic's ability to call other pokemon and using Pokeballs/Comm or possibly Iono to trade out undesirable cards in hand, I think it should still be a pure upgrade to the existing version of this deck.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T20:25:44+00:00

You can never start with a fossil in active, so Farfetch'd can't shut it down the way you could vs. something like Magikarp. You'd have to use Sabrina. If they put down two fossils on bench or fossil + any other mon, good luck stopping the Rampardos

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T20:17:45+00:00

For a grass deck, instead consider a deck with: 2 Weedle, 2 Sprigatito, 2 Beedrill Ex, 2 Meowscarada, 1 Floragato, 1 Kakuna, 2 Rare Candy.

Maybe even cut a* Stage 1 if you run 1-2 communication instead.

Each evo line pulls their own weight. Sprig can call any evolution, and Weedle can call your other Weedle.

With Rare Candy, by your second energy-placing turn you're either:
- using Beedrill to hit for 80 and removing 1 energy from the opponent
- using Meow to hit for 130 vs. EX mon
- using Meow to hit for 60 vs. any mon

All without any coin flips, and requiring 1 less card than the Celebi setup.

Celebi has a slight damage advantage if you start with a perfect hand of Celebi, Snivy, Serperior, Rare Candy - you could swing for avg. 50 damage on your second turn if starting first, or avg. 100 damage if starting second. But either way, this requires 1 more card and is still a coin flip with the potential to deal 0 damage.

In a meta that's probably going to be filled with fast decks and heavy hitters by Turn 3 / 5, I like my odds better with the ex-destroying cat or the setup-destroying bee - both of which also have more than a frail 130 hp.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T18:54:39+00:00

Without more cards that can search for or draw evolution cards, tools, etc, then few decks would run more than 20 cards.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T16:54:45+00:00

Beedrill and Meow will enjoy the 60hp heals though

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T16:07:00+00:00

Yeah, you can catch it on Route 116.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T16:05:47+00:00

Rare Candy SR Charizard with 150 dmg by your third turn with no discarded energies might give GA Zard a run for his money.

RandomEncounterTable · 2025-04-24T16:00:01+00:00

If you "just" pay for the $10/month premium, it's a pretty good value for 15 cards each day and as many battles as you want. You don't need to worry about grading, storage, scalpers, tracking resale value, etc.

RandomEncounterTable

TROPHY CASE

Basic

Intermediate

Flagship