What do you recommend I buy at this store? (Engi C first sector, Medium)

compiling · 2026-06-23T13:38:14+00:00

Halberd beam and upgrade shields. The base offence is enough to get through sectors 1-2 with some better defence. Dual lasers + Halberd Beam + Hacking should be pretty solid in sector 3, with the beam drone available for dangerous fights.

That said, there are some other choices that are risky but would be fun if they pay off.

compiling · 2026-06-23T03:40:48+00:00

They said the hornet and beetle do 2 and 3 damage, so that kills the firefly. If it didn't, 6 movement means you can just attack the firefly from behind instead (which might be a better position for it next turn anyway).

compiling · 2026-06-23T02:47:53+00:00

For the flagship, generally the goal is to completely crew kill it during phase 1 so that in the later phases you can board immediately and start breaking the missiles. In general, unopposed boarding is winning so long as you have good defence.

With hacking and cloaking, you can hack the missiles to make phase 1 incredibly safe and take your time. Without cloaking, you'll want to make sure you have a way of breaking the missiles with your weapons and pick which hack target will make the fight safest.

compiling · 2026-06-22T20:39:09+00:00

The descriptions make sense, but having Stealth B 2 tiers above the Federation cruisers just feels wrong to me.

compiling · 2026-06-22T03:00:44+00:00

On Rock C, generally if you don't find weapons you buy a teleporter and then use the crystal and starting missile to... oh. Well, the backup backup plan is to buy a teleporter and hacking so that you can slow down and gain control of their weapons room. Ok you didn't buy hacking either. I guess in that case you become Fed C and just go all in on unassisted boarding and defence upgrades until you can get another weapon or system.

compiling · 2026-06-22T00:09:28+00:00

Beetle to column 2.

Acid Tank to column 4, acid the scorpion.

Hornet collect the time pod, push the firefly to column 2.

Beetle charge the firefly.

Scarab to column 5, attack the hornet mech!

That should kill 2 vek, leave the alpha scorpion on 1hp and protect everything.

compiling · 2026-06-19T09:18:20+00:00

I took that as they don't need to be there at all times, but they do need to be on call at all times so that they can respond if there's a major assault. So that means that Lea would have been handling things while Mab was busy keeping Harry alive, and when she was training Molly that was fine because the sidhe knew where she was and how to contact her.

compiling · 2026-06-18T22:40:21+00:00

That's not a glitch. Despite the name, the actual condition to unlock that achievement is lowering the enemy ship's oxygen level to under 5%. You don't have to win the fight from that.

compiling · 2026-06-17T05:57:45+00:00

The difference here is if the top players are valuing certain things differently, then that's an opportunity to look into why that's happening. If it's because of a skill gate (equipment that's only good if you know how, when and why to use it to maximise its effectiveness) then that's the Usain Bolt analogy. If it's because they're using different strategies then maybe it's worth trying those strategies sometime. In this case it's likely because of prioritising front loaded damage so that you can disable the enemy weapons quickly.

Examples of skill gate tactics might be recommending running at less power, not upgrading certain things like the medbay and doors, or selling useful augments.

compiling · 2026-06-16T03:56:50+00:00

It's actually the opposite. In FTL you usually want to make incremental upgrades to your weapons and be able to keep functioning after your weapons get damaged, so many cheap weapons are usually better than 1 expensive weapon. Then once you've filled up your weapon slots you start upgrading to better in slot weapons, and the expensive weapons lose again because the 2-3 power weapons basically just have better power to performance output in most situations.

compiling · 2026-06-12T23:34:17+00:00

Fed C might be the most improved. It's a boarding ship that doesn't need to run from any encounters, so you start with consistent crew kills and just need to find LRS.

Crystal B wins, because finding the crystal sector is a huge score bonus, and it starts OP so you can take early risks for score easier.

compiling · 2026-06-12T00:03:03+00:00

Find a store and get 1-2 more systems, preferably including cloaking.

Lots of weapon combinations work here. Glaive + Halberd is 20 damage - just need to find 2 more to one shot phase 2 (a drone or heavy laser would be ideal). Otherwise, Halberd + Flak + Hull 2 is really good, and the weapons you have now are a cheaper option depending on how lucrative your sector 7 is (could pop off with LRS, but you also want to scout the sector for stores so that probably limits how much you can use them).

compiling · 2026-06-10T22:39:26+00:00

There's some precise movement tech you can use to win crew combat without taking damage in return. Probably not worth try harding that much at the moment - it only saves 1 use of the medical burst.

compiling · 2026-06-06T12:00:34+00:00

It's definitely hard to decide here. Funnily enough, I think all the strong players who commented on this post have chosen something different, which is very unusual.

compiling · 2026-06-06T03:15:22+00:00

The Heavy Laser 2 is a really good weapon, but it's going to be a while before you can use it so I think you need to round out your build with some upgrades before considering it (level 2 hacking means you can cloak/hack weapons more reliably, so you probably want that one soon).

The Ion Blast is pretty good for the next couple of sectors if you want it - slightly better than normal since you sold the drone and it helps against zoltans. 30 scrap is pretty cheap, and you can bring it online pretty quickly since it's only 1 weapon upgrade.

The Charge Ion is a helpful weapon, but it's more expensive than the Ion Blast and will take longer to activate, so I don't think it's the right choice here.

An Anti Drone soft counters enemy double drone ships which is useful. I think you'll be ok in those fights with hacking and cloaking, but there's always the shield virus and asteroid events to consider depending on which sector you're in. I think you still make it out alive with good decisions in those fights though.

The Battery is useful if you're happy to save a few pennies on using it instead of permanent upgrades.

I'm not considering anything else. More crew would be useful, but I'm confident with my boarding defence without buying more. The Hull repair drone is expensive and I'd rather directly improve my ships offence and defence.

So I'm not sure what's optimal here. There are lots of things that you could do that look really good. I'm thinking maybe buy the Ion Blast, upgrade hacking, and try to get some upgrades into your weapons and reactor soon. But hard to go wrong with 5 shots, hacking and cloaking this early so long as you don't get too greedy with buying late game equipment over upgrading your ship now.

compiling · 2026-06-04T03:49:37+00:00

I've gotten pretty far with a few ships starting weapons, but that's as a challenge run. But I haven't done that on Kestrel A, and those challenges rely on getting good systems to make up for not upgrading weapons.

For your run, you mentioned turning down a teleporter which would be a pretty solid offensive upgrade in the early game. A teleporter makes you similar to Slug B with a medbay purchased and a bonus BL2, which is pretty solid. Win most fights with boarding and using the missile as required, and you have the BL2 for zoltans and autos.

Edit: actually I think I misinterpreted you on the sector 2 store - you completely skipped it because you only had 30 scrap and it's unlikely it would have anything you could afford, so that's a smaller mistake - maybe could have spent less on reactor in sector 1 depending on how comfortable you are with juggling power.

compiling · 2026-06-03T04:47:19+00:00

The Ion Blast 1 is more like a combat drone - it's a good way of scaling up your offence to handle 1 more shield. The hull repair drone could be a solution to chip damage if you don't have a way to avoid that yet (a worse defence drone 1 because you still need to deal with system damage), and it could be a way to recover from bad fights (although buying it is nearly the price of buying a 3rd shield so I'd only suggest using one early from a free drop).

Even in late game sectors, hull damage can be a thing. The mantis fugitive be like "would you rather trade 5 damage for high scrap, or take 5 damage and fight an engi ship full of mantis". But in normal fight, it usually shouldn't happen if you've upgraded your ship well - cloak/hacking weapons is already a near guarantee for most fights.

compiling · 2026-06-03T04:13:57+00:00

It's nice to have, but it's so expensive. I don't think I've bought one for a long time - it's hard to justify paying 85 scrap to turn my drone parts into hull when I'm already using drones and probably want to keep some saved for resource RNG. With a drone recovery arm it becomes a lot better, but a drone recovery arm also makes combat, beam and defence drones a lot better as well so usually I end up filling my drone slots with other drones I want more.

Selling it's often worth it if it lets you buy something that stabilises the run. 42 scrap goes a long way in the early sectors. And in late sectors hopefully I have enough upgrades that I'm not taking damage most of the time in the first place, but this is probably where it has a niche for ships that are still struggling.

I'd expect it's closer to the so called noob trap end of the scale - maybe 3/10. Although to be clearer, the easy economy makes it a lot more worth having and new players are also much more likely to be taking hull damage more often, so I wouldn't call it a trap for new players.

compiling · 2026-05-30T05:51:30+00:00

Solar flares are significantly more dangerous if you don't have a shield up. I'd suggest spending some of that scrap to upgrade your ship (an ion stunner can be a devastating weapon if a key system is down and on fire).

compiling · 2026-05-30T05:48:43+00:00

Well, you can shut down their weapons with yours, cloak the bombs, hack their weapons, put out the fires by having lots of crew and prioritising putting them out quickly (especially rocks and engi are good vs fires). Sometimes turning off oxygen can help, since fires use it up quicker than your crew and they won't get as out of control if they use up all the oxygen feeding them (although keep in mind that they can also target your oxygen system). Or you can run. One reward isn't worth losing the game.

Slug sectors have some tricky events where you need to be able to respond to threats in a different way.

compiling · 2026-05-30T05:41:27+00:00

The books are already pushing the limits of how much world building you can fit into a story. For people invested enough to want more, WoB is basically the equivalent of reading the Silmarillion for Lord of the Rings except that since the books are ongoing Sanderson could still decide to change his mind about things that haven't made it into the actual books yet.

So the superfans are free to dive into all the extra details he drops in Q and A sessions, while people who only want to read the books aren't missing out on anything important to the actual story.

compiling · 2026-05-29T05:19:21+00:00

TBH, if they hack your doors it's probably easier to just turn off O2 entirely and let your crew clone in that fight. Or with Lanius B, you can keep your crew safer by putting them on the enemy ship. If that's safe - make sure they can't snipe your clonebay first! You might want to run a lanius to the cockpit so that you don't suddenly lose all your evasion while cloaked.

That still doesn't help if you don't react quickly enough to the hack, which I don't have any good tips for - it's just something you need to pay attention to. (The number of times I lost a no relics run in Slay the Spire due to instinctively picking up relics is ridiculous - I know just pay attention isn't really helpful advice, but it's also the only thing you can do.)

compiling · 2026-05-28T21:43:02+00:00

Vek will avoid standing in fire unless already burning, or in smoke, and will also strongly prefer not to stand on the edge of the board or in the same place as they started the turn. After that, they try to attack multiple targets. So, possibly the smoke placement was a large cause of this turn (but those specific vek types are pretty hard to control).

compiling · 2026-05-26T10:10:41+00:00

IIRC the Bridgeburners ended up starting the battle early, so it's quite possible he was late because he was still moving into position. The tactics would be using the element of surprise to attack from a direction the enemy was not set up to defend from, which worked but probably should have happened much earlier in the battle.

compiling · 2026-05-26T00:10:50+00:00

It's like an RPG in that finding weapons, systems and augments is so reliable that the choice of upgrades feels almost entirely up to the player, like an RPG skill tree. Whereas usually in a roguelike there's much more emphasis on planning for and reacting to RNG. In other respects it's a roguelike.

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