What should I target?

[Lokei]

I usually target the shield with my stronger weapon and with my weaker one I target the engine. After I get them to red I target the weapons and if they're still alive I target the oxygen room. I've seen some people say targeting the healing room is a good idea, but I'm not sure, so can someone tell me what to target and when? I'm also a bit confused on another topic. When I upgrade my shields for the first time, there's a blank space and a blank bar and I can't power, why?

Edit: I also usually die due to enemies coming on board and my crew being bad and outnumbered, what can I do about it and should I upgrade the doors? Also when I upgrade the pilot, where do I activate auto-pilot?

[Wormling59mep]

Well, it's usually situational, and depends on your weapons, but here's some things you should consider:

Usually go for the shield first, unless there is something really important that needs to get done first (escaping ship, 1 hull point on your ship left, your only weapon is a missile launcher, ect).

When the shield is down, I usually go for weapons unless this is true:

1: Ship is escaping (On the top, it will say "FTL charging"). When this happens, definitely target the piloting room and then the engines.

2: The weapons aren't tough enough to penetrate my own shield.

3: I have a crewmember in the enemy weapon room (try not to).

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If the enemy's weapons are too weak to hurt you, here's some courses you can take:

Definitely try to knock out the pilotting room. Doing this will put their evasion at 0, making almost all, or all, of your shots actually hit the ship.

If the plan is to kill the crew, shoot the medbay/clonebay as soon as you can, and if everything is taken care of, and you are feeling kind of torturous, feel free to knock out the oxygen, although keep in mind if you are trying to kill the crew only, this could do unneccisary hull damage to the enemy.

[Wormling59mep]

Part two:

Shield take two reactor power for every one bubble of shield. Therefore, make sure that when you upgrade your shields, upgrade them two at a time. Zoltans are pretty good crewmembers for shields.

Autopilot activates automatically if you upgrade the pilotting subsystem. These subsystems (Sensors, doors and piloting) don't require reactor power. They just require an upgrade.

On to crew safety:

Upgrading doors is probably the best you can do. The safest way to kill invaders, and the most practical, is to open the airlocks and drain the room(s) they are in of oxygen. However, your crewmembers can gain skills by crewing things. For instance, a crewmember crewing the piloting system gets experience from piloting and will eventually be better at piloting, ect. This also applies to fighting, so if you have a crewmember or crewmembers you want to train to be better fighters, let them take these opportunities to gain experience. When actually fighting enemies, the best place to engage them is the medbay, especially if you are outnumbered, as unless hacked by the enemy ship, you recieve healing and they don't. Also keep this in mind when on an enemy ship while boarding.

The best crewmembers for combat are Mantises, as they do more damage and are faster than any other race. However, these two are also good candidates for reasons I will list:

Rocks have more health, but they travel much slower.

Humans are kind of dull, but they gain skills faster.

[Brosef Iosif]

Answer will always be: it depends. The typical answer is target the weapons/drones depending on the enemy's most potent output, this simply because a weaponless enemy is a much safer target than a unshielded enemy. Remember that this is a long run, enemies just need to gradually bring you down but your objective should always be to take as little damage as needed.
Now obviously if the enemy can't damage you with his weapon setup at the beginning of the fight, you should target either piloting or engines to prevent them from dodging and escaping, or shield if your weapons barely get through them.
At the beginning of each fight, pause! Then assess the situation, how many shots does the enemy have, what sort of weapons, how many crew members, any weakness etc. then select the best target. After several playthrough these will be easier to do.
Use lasers, ions and flaks to bring the shield down and use beams for best damage. Use bombs and missiles sparingly and always when nothing else will do.
Absolutely play on easy at first! There is zero shame in that and that's how it's supposed to be done.

About shields, each shield bubble (in the upper left) demands two energy bars. Having an odd number in shields isn't useless as it acts as a buffer in case your shield system gets hit but it indeed doesn't bring you one more shield. Maximum shield is 8 that translates to 4 bubbles of shield (mind you some enemies don't play with your rules and can have up to 5 bubbles, very very rare though).

About counter-boarding. Uprgrading doors is essential, if you have a spare crew member, having him in doors auto-update them to 1 grade as long as he is there. You should learn how to counter board by opening doors to the void and stall enemies with doors and crew while suffocating them. You can lead them to your medbay and kill them here. Use mantis and rock people to kill the enemies more reliably. If you play with the Advanced Edition (not recommended until you've won at least once or twice without it), you can use the mind control to great effect against the boarders so that they kill themselves or waste time injuring themselves while air is coming out.

Auto-piloting is engaged simply when there is no pilot in the piloting room. It's an automatic feature, no need to active it.

Good luck!

[Lokei]

Thanks a bunch to both of you guys, but even with my piloting upgraded I remember it still asks for a pilot in the pilot room.

[Brosef Iosif]

Auto-pilot is just a safety measure, you should always have a pilot in your piloting system! It's THE most important system to have a crewmember in overall. Upgrading piloting is mostly useful to act as a buffer so that it's not completely down in one shot, get it to three is not that useful, unless you're loaded with scraps of course.
Manning stations importance are overall (imho of course):
Piloting > Engines = Weapons > Shields > Doors > Sensors
Rocks, slugs and laniuses are best pilots, mantis and zoltan worse.

[Lokei]

Originally posted by Brosef Iosif:

Auto-pilot is just a safety measure, you should always have a pilot in your piloting system! It's THE most important system to have a crewmember in overall. Upgrading piloting is mostly useful to act as a buffer so that it's not completely down in one shot, get it to three is not that useful, unless you're loaded with scraps of course.
Manning stations importance are overall (imho of course):
Piloting > Engines = Weapons > Shields > Doors > Sensors
Rocks, slugs and laniuses are best pilots, mantis and zoltan worse.

Oh, I see, thanks

[MoKuS]

I go for shield first and then weapon unless I have only missile weapons. Otherwise weapon first.

[Outis]

If you have the fire power to punch through shields and deliver a damaging blow to the weapons room, by all means hit the weapons room first. The weapons room is the most danger to you. (unless you got enemy boarders)

If you lack the firepower to punch through shield, then you will have to play a battle of shield attrition and attack the enemy shield room until you can punch through the shields.

Cloaking and evasion are the key to survival in this case until you can take down the shields.

Mantis and Rock Boarders are extremely effective too if you can not punch through shields.