Can we please talk about the repair sectors in the last stand?

[Clover Creepy Girl™]

I really, really wish I could see the design doc for this game where they laid out those repair nodes. did it say, we have spots where they can repair a bit during the gauntlet final boss, but they will go away A, before they get to them, and B, before they get into their first fight.

Can we please get some sort of mod or patch or something that atleast makes these damned things last until you can actually use one?

[Sleeper Service]

Nope, thats kind of hardcoded. Well, it would be possible to have the sector spawn more repair beacons that then replace normal fight to increase the chance of active repair beacons being present, but then again why would the boss fight have to become easiyer? Why does there have to be a higher chance to repair during the boss battle?


In my opinion the thing to learn here is that you simply can't rely on thoses beacons to be there when you need them. You'll have to adjust to that. The final sector gives you free repairs when you arrive, thats what you can work with and beyond that it's largely you own responsibility to keep your ship intact for and during the boss fight. Sometimes the repair nodes will give you additional supplies allong the way and in rare cases they will even be close to the boss route and offer a chance to repair between battles, but as you allready noticed you simply can't rely on them. All you have to do now is act accordingly now.

[Iso Koala]

I agree wtih both of you. You can`t rely on them, so you must play acording to that.

But they also give kind of half-arsed feeling to the last sector, since the repair sectors are all automaticly mapped, thus giving the last stand a bit of tactical feeling. As if they were tactical sectors you need to use smartly during the last long battle.

But no, they are just bonus sectors, and shouldn`t be relied upon. They would feel more like bonus if they weren`t placed on the map automaticly, and less of a middle finger.

[FDru]

It's pretty rare that I'm not able to get to a repair beacon and I can usually get to 2 of them. It's true that it's not easy to get to one between phases of the flagship, but I don't think you're intended to, really... it's just that it's a possible option if you're lucky. In any case, you still get repairs, drones and missiles and you don't need to fight anything so they are still useful even before the flagship.

[K. the Land-Surveyor]

I don't think the repair nodes are intended to be pit stops between the flagship phases. I think they're meant to places where you can top off on hull and supplies before going into the flagship fight. If you can get to one in-between, that's nice, but I don't think that's what they're there for.

[Clover Creepy Girl™]

See I constantly run into a situation where the entrance is on the far left, and all the nodes are on the far right past the base, where its incredibly difficult to get there and not worth it.

As far as why there has to be a chance to repair, well you are fighting a boss that A, has instant heal between fights no matter what, and B has a hard counter in one fight or another to ANYTHING you could have. If you dont have some sort of counter hacking all it takes is them hacking your weapons to end your game instantly. If you build yourself to handle all of their crap, you arent focused enoguh to actually win, so you have to deal with their cheating, and its possible, but its already extremly overpowered to the point that they dont it.

It feels like the repair being able to be over taken is something like 'ok, your really strong, and matched for the boss, now you have to do it wtihout extremely limited healing. That would be completely fair and ballanced well done, but now its like ok, you are really strong against normal enemies, here is a boss that breaks every rule that you have in the game, and have limited healing. Not just healing, but there is no real way to get enough drones or missiles. It is entirly possible to get the last few sectors with NO shops and have to go into it with minimal stuff.

It just adds a layer of difficultt that doesn't need to be there

[K. the Land-Surveyor]

Originally posted by Smeagol, the Fish Sculptor:

See I constantly run into a situation where the entrance is on the far left, and all the nodes are on the far right past the base, where its incredibly difficult to get there and not worth it.

As far as why there has to be a chance to repair, well you are fighting a boss that A, has instant heal between fights no matter what, and B has a hard counter in one fight or another to ANYTHING you could have. If you dont have some sort of counter hacking all it takes is them hacking your weapons to end your game instantly. If you build yourself to handle all of their crap, you arent focused enoguh to actually win, so you have to deal with their cheating, and its possible, but its already extremly overpowered to the point that they dont it.

It feels like the repair being able to be over taken is something like 'ok, your really strong, and matched for the boss, now you have to do it wtihout extremely limited healing. That would be completely fair and ballanced well done, but now its like ok, you are really strong against normal enemies, here is a boss that breaks every rule that you have in the game, and have limited healing. Not just healing, but there is no real way to get enough drones or missiles. It is entirly possible to get the last few sectors with NO shops and have to go into it with minimal stuff.

It just adds a layer of difficultt that doesn't need to be there

The whole point of the seven and a half sectors before getting to the Flagship is to build yourself a Flagship killer. Building yourself to handle what they have is what you're supposed to do. If you do that, you'll win. I don't understand the comment that follows it, I'm not sure how having stuff to potentially counter what the Flagship brings to the fight makes it so you can't be focused enoough to win. That's what I do when I win.

If you are really insistent about not buying a hacking module, or a defense drone(s) to intercept incoming hacking drones, you can always jump out of the fight and jump back if a critical system gets hacked.

Also, it's not that there's no shops in the last few sectors, you're just not finding them- every sector spawns with shops (I believe it's 1-2 for red sectors, 2-3 for green). Sectors just don't spawn with shops.

Variance does happen, and I can believe getting a couple of really bad sectors in a row, maybe even entire runs. But if you're having this problem consistently, it's probably poor play on your end.

[Clover Creepy Girl™]

Have you actually fought the flagship, or played the game? If you could just 'build a flashship killer' the game would be no problem, but its the fact that everything is random, you can go half the game without a shop with a single weapon in it, that makes it ungoddly difficult.

Again, its not about not buying them, its about your ships having limited amount of spaces to place these systems, and about you not always having access to them.

To beat the final boss you need to have a very percise set of things, its a goat rodeo, and its very, VERY easy to just have one wrong weapon or not run into someone selling cloaking, to end the game for you.

This also is compounded when you are running certain ships that dont have all weapon slots, or have other major issues wtih them. All the repair nodes would do is give you some sort of fighting chance if you havent already had the perfect storm of shops and events to get you what you actually need to beat their cheating boss.

[K. the Land-Surveyor]

Why, yes! Yes, I have fought the flagship. Here's the end result of one of my runs:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=248931101

That was on Normal.

It's a common misconception that you need a precise set of things to beat the flagship. Cloaking certainly makes things easier, but it's far from a requirement. There's no magic alchemical formula of weapons and systems you need to achieve a victory, you just need to make sure your ship can check the boxes before you get to the Flagship fight. If you're curious, here's my checklist:

Weapons that can reliably inflict hull damage past 4 layers of shields.

LV6 Shields (3 bubbles)

LV5 Engines

After that, you have a lot of flexibility in how you want to build the ship. You want to stack defenses (Achievable with things like Cloaking, Crew Teleporter, Defense Drones, maxing out Shields + Engines; any two of those will work), think about adding some flexibility to the ship (Drone Control or Hacking work well here), and trying to arrange contingencies for the more annoying parts of the fights (Make sure you have a way to repel boarders in the third phase; thinking about having a way to break Mind Control; pick up a faster firing weapon to break the Zoltan shield; deny hacking attempts). Finally, you'll probably have a little bit of scrap left over, so pump it into the less important systems to improve their durability so your crew isn't distracted by damage control in the middle of a fight.

Making good decisions throughout the course of the game is really important, too. Going to red sectors to get scrap, going to green sectors when you're in rough shape and need to find shop, avoiding race specific sectors when you're in no shape to deal with their strengths, etc. etc.

[Sleeper Service]

I could not agree more with twitchblade. A lot of strategies work against the boss and even the checklist mentioned here is not universal. You can beat the boss even without any weapons, by just using boarders and there are people that have beaten it with a completely shieldless stealth cruisers.

To me Smeagol the Fish Sculptor kind of argues that the boss fight is somewhat too hard and it would be fair if the game would make it easiyer for the player. But the thing is that a lot of people beat the boss all the time, even consistently with wining streaks lasting ten and more games. They fight the boss as it is, so arguing that the boss schould be easiyer will apear off to players that consistly beat it. Depending on their ability to learn and adopt to the game, most players will eventually get to the point where they can beat the game consisently, some sooner than others.

[gambit]

Originally posted by Smeagol, the Fish Sculptor:

To beat the final boss you need to have a very percise set of things, its a goat rodeo, and its very, VERY easy to just have one wrong weapon or not run into someone selling cloaking, to end the game for you.

I heard this pre AE and after, and it never was true.
On Easy or Normal you can beat it with any combo of 8 main systems, and in most cases 7(if you know how to use them). It is also advised to have all 4 subsystems.
On Hard it's little trickier, but it comes down from ship to ship. Top tiers allow more diversity.
Listen to what other experienced players have posted, and try watching some playthroughs(sp?). Or read guides.

I don't have too much time to play FTL and am probably not amongst best FTL players, but I still have decent 1/3 victories on average with random ship on Hard.

And since somebody posted their Vortex win, I'm gonna be jerk and post mine on Hard. I can't help it :D

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=347352463

[МакТаvish 𒉭]

add me give me game x(

[Epic The Incandescent]

Originally posted by gambit:

Originally posted by Smeagol, the Fish Sculptor:

To beat the final boss you need to have a very percise set of things, its a goat rodeo, and its very, VERY easy to just have one wrong weapon or not run into someone selling cloaking, to end the game for you.

I heard this pre AE and after, and it never was true.
On Easy or Normal you can beat it with any combo of 8 main systems, and in most cases 7(if you know how to use them). It is also advised to have all 4 subsystems.
On Hard it's little trickier, but it comes down from ship to ship. Top tiers allow more diversity.
Listen to what other experienced players have posted, and try watching some playthroughs(sp?). Or read guides.

I don't have too much time to play FTL and am probably not amongst best FTL players, but I still have decent 1/3 victories on average with random ship on Hard.

And since somebody posted their Vortex win, I'm gonna be jerk and post mine on Hard. I can't help it :D

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=347352463

damn you have more patiences then me, kudos for that ♥♥♥♥.



To op if you lvoe the game but are frusterated with it you can certainly mod the game, and if you even go so far as to cheat a perfect ship you will see that even on normal the end boss is cake if you know how to use a build,the hard part is the damned RNG fliping you the bird when ever it can.

Originally posted by Twitchblade:

Why, yes! Yes, I have fought the flagship. Here's the end result of one of my runs:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=248931101

That was on Normal.

It's a common misconception that you need a precise set of things to beat the flagship. Cloaking certainly makes things easier, but it's far from a requirement. There's no magic alchemical formula of weapons and systems you need to achieve a victory, you just need to make sure your ship can check the boxes before you get to the Flagship fight. If you're curious, here's my checklist:

Weapons that can reliably inflict hull damage past 4 layers of shields.

LV6 Shields (3 bubbles)

LV5 Engines

After that, you have a lot of flexibility in how you want to build the ship. You want to stack defenses (Achievable with things like Cloaking, Crew Teleporter, Defense Drones, maxing out Shields + Engines; any two of those will work), think about adding some flexibility to the ship (Drone Control or Hacking work well here), and trying to arrange contingencies for the more annoying parts of the fights (Make sure you have a way to repel boarders in the third phase; thinking about having a way to break Mind Control; pick up a faster firing weapon to break the Zoltan shield; deny hacking attempts). Finally, you'll probably have a little bit of scrap left over, so pump it into the less important systems to improve their durability so your crew isn't distracted by damage control in the middle of a fight.

Making good decisions throughout the course of the game is really important, too. Going to red sectors to get scrap, going to green sectors when you're in rough shape and need to find shop, avoiding race specific sectors when you're in no shape to deal with their strengths, etc. etc.

this is best advice in thread so far.

[Skinny Pete]

Nice use of hacking. Without boarding, you really need something like that. (Of course on Hard, boarding isn't as much of a flagship killer because either the AI or the crew will be fixing systems including that rotten missile launcher.)

[Ray Robertson]

Did someone just say breach. Breach what?

[Skinny Pete]

Originally posted by Ray Robertson:

Did someone just say breach. Breach what?

The missile launcher. The mind control system would be nice, too. That guy had only beams and ions, though, so no way to cause a breach.