@@veryspicywater The hack can be considered "free" because it comes from the event. If the enemy ship has hacking, they could even hack your weapons while your shields are permanently disabled. The event "hack" is not really a hack at all of course, it's a totally different mechanic.
This is all great stuff. Possible constructive comment: It's a little difficult for someone who is not used to pausing every tenth of a second to follow what's happening. You are explaining it, but because during the lengthy sections where there is pause spam, I'm more having to picture it in my head, rather than seeing it in real time. And I'm not very good at picturing things in my head (see: aphantasia) What would really help someone like me, or others who need the visual, is if you can do a version of it at full speed, with possibly a pause afterward to explain what just happened, with text on the screen for hearing impaired people and folks like me who really like to read. The bottom line is I am very much a visual learner, or I learn by doing. When people are verbally explaining stuff I cannot see, it doesn't click for me. And I know it's not uncommon for folks like me to exist. Would be helpful on the presentation side. I've watched many of your videos and you are very much a master at this game. I'm just a student of your work and I feel like I'm flunking the course due to how I learn as opposed to something else. Thanks for listening to this feedback, you don't have to change a thing to be great. I'll muddle through.
What a great comment. Thanks for taking the time to explain that. I'll at least try to keep it in mind. There are some practical issues that I think will limit how much I can cater for specific learning styles or accessibility needs. One issue is time. I used to make paid-for video content and even there, I had to prioritise my work quite heavily. I even made my own website and I was very keen on accessibility, and trying to do things "the right way" to avoid excluding people. A good example is video captions. With my paid-for content, I wanted to add captions for all the videos. It was an unbelievable amount of work just to caption one video. You have to painstakingly make a text file with timestamps for everything you say. Nowadays I think I could do that stuff with less work, at least on TH-cam. TH-cam generates captions automatically, and I think you can then edit them to correct the errors. For a paid-for video I would probably do that. The problem is that all of this takes TIME. And given I make zero money from this channel and have no help, the time I can spend on it is very limited. And in reality it's not just a time constraint, it's an enthusiasm constraint. The more difficult I make content creation, the less enthusiasm I have for actually making it. Editing additional text into videos -- like putting actual text graphics in the video -- is even more time-consuming. I've used that on occasion but I need a compelling reason. You mentioned doing stuff at full speed and then pausing afterwards. In many cases I won't be able to do this, because I don't have the skill. I'm not skilled at pauseless FTL, and many of the tactics I'm demonstrating are impossible (or at least extremely difficult) without pausing. Additionally I think many people will find it hard to follow what's going on if I don't pause and explain step-by-step. In general, I'm unwilling to put significant work into improving the production values of my videos. That sounds like I don't care, but I do; it's just that I have to be pragmatic, and work within the severe constraints of my time, ability, and enthusiasm. There are much, much better produced videos available on TH-cam. A good example from roguelike gaming would be @aldenpotamus . Unfortunately, given this is a minor hobby and not a job, I don't think I can manage that level of quality. As I said at the start though, I will try to keep this in mind. Maybe I will see some practical ways to improve it.
thank you for making content like this. it's thanks to your ship guides that I've been able to claw out few hard mode wins! Lanius A, Slug A, Zoltan A, Crystal B, Stealth A, and aaaalmost Rock C have all beaten the flagship under my semi-competent command (Crystal B is a cakewalk in any difficulty though haha). and it's always just extremely cool to watch someone play a video game this well. was having an exhausting morning but your shieldless Kestrel A video cheered me up and got me excited for the day again. genuinely inspiring stuff, I appreciate it a lot!
Thanks so much, I really appreciate that! Such a kind comment, really makes my day. Though I would commend you to see those Hard wins as down to your own skill. Guides can definitely help a lot, but ultimately every game is different and it's the captain who makes the decisions.
I've been a big fan of ions + damage (particularly heavy lasers) even prior to AE. When you hit enough of a critical mass where your starting few projectiles are good, you can temporarily lower or disable evasion, you can follow up with a big damaging weapon to permanently lower or disable evasion, and from there your build just snowballs and crushes the enemy - you can decide whether to keep hitting shields with ions or start ionizing their weapons/artillery. Obviously Zoltan shields + cloaking make it a lot more practical to get that off the ground, but even just e.g. conventional shields and a Defense Drone 1 can be pretty good for that. Charge Ion, Ion Bomb and Heavy Laser are just super good weapons for this kind of build, very power efficient and very powerful! That money saved on upgrading weapons can then go into getting the defenses up faster to make the whole thing more reliable. Maybe an early shields-bubble-3 etc.
Great video Mike. I've been playing this game at a relatively high level for about 8 years, but it wasn't until seeing your ion stacking in practice here that it became clear why you and other players are always advocating for these types of builds. Once the ions are stacked, it takes the full cooldown time for even a single shield bubble to reappear. It seems so obvious now - after all, it's why pulsars are so scary
It's definitely very strong in the right circumstances. I'll still admit that ion builds tend to be a little more "situational", especially the decision to buy the first ion.
Had a recent run on Zoltan B with some similarities... ended up keeping the Ion Blasts and Pike to the end, adding a Flak along the way. I was kinda expecting the run to get put out of its misery, but never had a truly terrible battle (worst by far was the infamous ZS double-Heavy 1 in s1), and just kept plodding along, knock down one shield with the blast, the rest with the Flak, do a bit of damage to weapons, ion a weapon if possible, and Pike to work them down overall. Hacking shields or weapons kept the meager build going s4+. Also had a Hull Laser 1 in the middle there. Ended up floating 300 scrap end of s6 (looking for Cloaking, found s7, MC too), yet scored just under 5k (39 ships, 100 beacons, 1501 scrap). Nothing crazy in terms of "high strategy" plays or whatever; selling Scanners to get Hacking was the most "sacrificial" move.
Well done! I like the play of using ion to take down a weapon, a lot of people don't think about that. 1500 scrap is quite low, sounds like you made good use of the scrap you had.
How does this setup fair during the run though, not against the flagship? My immediate gut reaction is that it seems too resource hungry to be sustainable. In later sectors you are very dependent on the Ion bomb hitting, since if it misses you're punished with a ~20 second wait before being able to try to do damage again, so it seems like you'd end up hacking piloting every time. So now you're spending a missile and a drone part each fight, maybe even a couple of missiles. Meanwhile, my instinct is that you're going to struggle to back up the ion attack with physical damage, because you'll need to get up to 5 power to run any other weapons, so against late game enemies against whom you need to put like 4 damage into their weapon system to keep them neutralized, I feel like you'd really struggle.
Good question. To start with you don't necessarily use the exact same setup the whole run. For example I might go with something like double Charge Ion + Heavy Laser first, then add the Ion Bomb, then later swap out one of the Charge Ions for the Pike. I think my progression in this run was something like that. Using a drone part every fight is not really an issue, I mostly plan around that anyway on most runs, because being able to use hacking all the time is so good. And you don't need a drone part every fight anyway, especially with the double Charge Ion setup for example. Missile usage is also just not a problem in practice. Ion Bomb hits hard for its missile use, and as I mentioned, I'm not necessarily using it the whole game long. If you're running an ion-stacking setup like double Charge Ion, you also don't just leave them on shields. Once you have a stack on shields, one of them is enough to maintain it, and the other can suppress weapons, so the enemy ship really can't do much at all. For a similar reason, you can run ion + damage setups before you even have "enough" upgrades. For example, double Charge Ion + Pike can run off weapons level 4, stack ion rapidly, and then swap one of them for the Pike. One important idea is that in regular fights, mostly I don't want to use the Ion Bomb on shields. I want to use it on weapons, which is devastating when it lands. It will switch off a lot of weapons, often all of them, for 20 seconds. With these setups there's a lot of flexibility to hack evasion or weapons, or even shields. For example, Charge Ion + Pike Beam + shield hack, hit weapons with the Pike and scatter crew to drop evasion, then land 3 ions into weapons. Now you switched off all their weapons for 15 seconds.
Great video! One thing that wasn't very clear to me was targeting the pike beam when they cloaked. Did you have to fire it immediately after the cloak, or is it enough to 'start' the targeting beforehand, and then you're locked on for the entire cloak?
Thanks, and good question! I definitely didn't make it as clear as I could have done. What's happening here is that the Pike Beam charges shortly before they can repair cloaking, but we don't know exactly when. So ideally we wait until they cloak, and then use it to cancel their cloaking. The only way to do that here is having it "half targeted", meaning you click on the first room but don't click again until they cloak. This is necessary because you lose "vision" of their ship when they cloak, and cannot target it. If you have boarders on their ship, you will keep vision during cloak and can target any weapons anyway.
Nope, that's a tactic. You can fire beams during their cloak if you already started placing them. Or if you have "vision" on their ship -- which means mind controlled crew or your own boarders -- you can fire any weapon regardless.
Good analysis between the ion stacking and heavy laser DPS. Now we just need to figure out how to survive Sector 1 free shield hack events...
One of the most dangerous events for sure. Most of the time it's still okay, but occasionally there's no way out.
Why do people call it “free shield hack”. I always see Rand using the term free, I assumed it was just him. Is this a more common term?
@@veryspicywater The hack can be considered "free" because it comes from the event. If the enemy ship has hacking, they could even hack your weapons while your shields are permanently disabled. The event "hack" is not really a hack at all of course, it's a totally different mechanic.
This is all great stuff. Possible constructive comment: It's a little difficult for someone who is not used to pausing every tenth of a second to follow what's happening. You are explaining it, but because during the lengthy sections where there is pause spam, I'm more having to picture it in my head, rather than seeing it in real time. And I'm not very good at picturing things in my head (see: aphantasia)
What would really help someone like me, or others who need the visual, is if you can do a version of it at full speed, with possibly a pause afterward to explain what just happened, with text on the screen for hearing impaired people and folks like me who really like to read.
The bottom line is I am very much a visual learner, or I learn by doing. When people are verbally explaining stuff I cannot see, it doesn't click for me. And I know it's not uncommon for folks like me to exist. Would be helpful on the presentation side.
I've watched many of your videos and you are very much a master at this game. I'm just a student of your work and I feel like I'm flunking the course due to how I learn as opposed to something else.
Thanks for listening to this feedback, you don't have to change a thing to be great. I'll muddle through.
What a great comment. Thanks for taking the time to explain that. I'll at least try to keep it in mind.
There are some practical issues that I think will limit how much I can cater for specific learning styles or accessibility needs.
One issue is time. I used to make paid-for video content and even there, I had to prioritise my work quite heavily. I even made my own website and I was very keen on accessibility, and trying to do things "the right way" to avoid excluding people.
A good example is video captions. With my paid-for content, I wanted to add captions for all the videos. It was an unbelievable amount of work just to caption one video. You have to painstakingly make a text file with timestamps for everything you say.
Nowadays I think I could do that stuff with less work, at least on TH-cam. TH-cam generates captions automatically, and I think you can then edit them to correct the errors. For a paid-for video I would probably do that.
The problem is that all of this takes TIME. And given I make zero money from this channel and have no help, the time I can spend on it is very limited. And in reality it's not just a time constraint, it's an enthusiasm constraint. The more difficult I make content creation, the less enthusiasm I have for actually making it.
Editing additional text into videos -- like putting actual text graphics in the video -- is even more time-consuming. I've used that on occasion but I need a compelling reason.
You mentioned doing stuff at full speed and then pausing afterwards. In many cases I won't be able to do this, because I don't have the skill. I'm not skilled at pauseless FTL, and many of the tactics I'm demonstrating are impossible (or at least extremely difficult) without pausing.
Additionally I think many people will find it hard to follow what's going on if I don't pause and explain step-by-step.
In general, I'm unwilling to put significant work into improving the production values of my videos. That sounds like I don't care, but I do; it's just that I have to be pragmatic, and work within the severe constraints of my time, ability, and enthusiasm.
There are much, much better produced videos available on TH-cam. A good example from roguelike gaming would be @aldenpotamus . Unfortunately, given this is a minor hobby and not a job, I don't think I can manage that level of quality.
As I said at the start though, I will try to keep this in mind. Maybe I will see some practical ways to improve it.
thank you for making content like this. it's thanks to your ship guides that I've been able to claw out few hard mode wins! Lanius A, Slug A, Zoltan A, Crystal B, Stealth A, and aaaalmost Rock C have all beaten the flagship under my semi-competent command (Crystal B is a cakewalk in any difficulty though haha). and it's always just extremely cool to watch someone play a video game this well. was having an exhausting morning but your shieldless Kestrel A video cheered me up and got me excited for the day again. genuinely inspiring stuff, I appreciate it a lot!
Thanks so much, I really appreciate that! Such a kind comment, really makes my day. Though I would commend you to see those Hard wins as down to your own skill. Guides can definitely help a lot, but ultimately every game is different and it's the captain who makes the decisions.
I've been a big fan of ions + damage (particularly heavy lasers) even prior to AE. When you hit enough of a critical mass where your starting few projectiles are good, you can temporarily lower or disable evasion, you can follow up with a big damaging weapon to permanently lower or disable evasion, and from there your build just snowballs and crushes the enemy - you can decide whether to keep hitting shields with ions or start ionizing their weapons/artillery.
Obviously Zoltan shields + cloaking make it a lot more practical to get that off the ground, but even just e.g. conventional shields and a Defense Drone 1 can be pretty good for that.
Charge Ion, Ion Bomb and Heavy Laser are just super good weapons for this kind of build, very power efficient and very powerful! That money saved on upgrading weapons can then go into getting the defenses up faster to make the whole thing more reliable. Maybe an early shields-bubble-3 etc.
Exactly. I learned the strength of this particular variety from reactorless runs, where power-efficiency is essential.
God damn those heavy laser timings were sexy. Great vid
Thanks! That was the new thing that made me want to make the video.
Great video Mike. I've been playing this game at a relatively high level for about 8 years, but it wasn't until seeing your ion stacking in practice here that it became clear why you and other players are always advocating for these types of builds. Once the ions are stacked, it takes the full cooldown time for even a single shield bubble to reappear. It seems so obvious now - after all, it's why pulsars are so scary
It's definitely very strong in the right circumstances. I'll still admit that ion builds tend to be a little more "situational", especially the decision to buy the first ion.
Had a recent run on Zoltan B with some similarities... ended up keeping the Ion Blasts and Pike to the end, adding a Flak along the way. I was kinda expecting the run to get put out of its misery, but never had a truly terrible battle (worst by far was the infamous ZS double-Heavy 1 in s1), and just kept plodding along, knock down one shield with the blast, the rest with the Flak, do a bit of damage to weapons, ion a weapon if possible, and Pike to work them down overall. Hacking shields or weapons kept the meager build going s4+. Also had a Hull Laser 1 in the middle there. Ended up floating 300 scrap end of s6 (looking for Cloaking, found s7, MC too), yet scored just under 5k (39 ships, 100 beacons, 1501 scrap). Nothing crazy in terms of "high strategy" plays or whatever; selling Scanners to get Hacking was the most "sacrificial" move.
Well done! I like the play of using ion to take down a weapon, a lot of people don't think about that. 1500 scrap is quite low, sounds like you made good use of the scrap you had.
Love these videos of yours, excellently made!
Thank you!
How does this setup fair during the run though, not against the flagship? My immediate gut reaction is that it seems too resource hungry to be sustainable. In later sectors you are very dependent on the Ion bomb hitting, since if it misses you're punished with a ~20 second wait before being able to try to do damage again, so it seems like you'd end up hacking piloting every time. So now you're spending a missile and a drone part each fight, maybe even a couple of missiles. Meanwhile, my instinct is that you're going to struggle to back up the ion attack with physical damage, because you'll need to get up to 5 power to run any other weapons, so against late game enemies against whom you need to put like 4 damage into their weapon system to keep them neutralized, I feel like you'd really struggle.
Good question. To start with you don't necessarily use the exact same setup the whole run. For example I might go with something like double Charge Ion + Heavy Laser first, then add the Ion Bomb, then later swap out one of the Charge Ions for the Pike. I think my progression in this run was something like that.
Using a drone part every fight is not really an issue, I mostly plan around that anyway on most runs, because being able to use hacking all the time is so good. And you don't need a drone part every fight anyway, especially with the double Charge Ion setup for example. Missile usage is also just not a problem in practice. Ion Bomb hits hard for its missile use, and as I mentioned, I'm not necessarily using it the whole game long.
If you're running an ion-stacking setup like double Charge Ion, you also don't just leave them on shields. Once you have a stack on shields, one of them is enough to maintain it, and the other can suppress weapons, so the enemy ship really can't do much at all.
For a similar reason, you can run ion + damage setups before you even have "enough" upgrades. For example, double Charge Ion + Pike can run off weapons level 4, stack ion rapidly, and then swap one of them for the Pike.
One important idea is that in regular fights, mostly I don't want to use the Ion Bomb on shields. I want to use it on weapons, which is devastating when it lands. It will switch off a lot of weapons, often all of them, for 20 seconds. With these setups there's a lot of flexibility to hack evasion or weapons, or even shields. For example, Charge Ion + Pike Beam + shield hack, hit weapons with the Pike and scatter crew to drop evasion, then land 3 ions into weapons. Now you switched off all their weapons for 15 seconds.
great videos man. quick question: would you ever analyze multiverse?
Great video! One thing that wasn't very clear to me was targeting the pike beam when they cloaked. Did you have to fire it immediately after the cloak, or is it enough to 'start' the targeting beforehand, and then you're locked on for the entire cloak?
Thanks, and good question! I definitely didn't make it as clear as I could have done. What's happening here is that the Pike Beam charges shortly before they can repair cloaking, but we don't know exactly when. So ideally we wait until they cloak, and then use it to cancel their cloaking. The only way to do that here is having it "half targeted", meaning you click on the first room but don't click again until they cloak. This is necessary because you lose "vision" of their ship when they cloak, and cannot target it. If you have boarders on their ship, you will keep vision during cloak and can target any weapons anyway.
I did this with a Glaive Beam on engi ship. Glaive beam with pre ignite is so OP.
👏😊
excellent. well played
Do you just have fast fingers, or do you use a mod or tool for those fast unpause/pauses? If so, which one?
Press the space bar and the middle mouse button together, instead of double-tapping space.
I don't know... Ion build for zoltan c?
Yeah who would do that? Only aesthetes and hipsters, right?
6:00 Pulls them out of cloak - is that a bug?
Nope, that's a tactic. You can fire beams during their cloak if you already started placing them. Or if you have "vision" on their ship -- which means mind controlled crew or your own boarders -- you can fire any weapon regardless.
Is that timer a mod?
I'm also interested in that timer
It's Znix's testing tool: gitlab.com/znixian/FTL-test-tool