Oxygen? Yeah, seems super situational to me. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even start with the system on my ship if it were up to me… I just can’t see any consistent use for it…
Something good about Clone Bay is that many of the events where you can lose crewmates become irrelevant. It doesn't make you 100% safe from those events but it does negate many risks.
I remember thinking that when I got one where my captain was lost, until I read the text box that said he wasnt coming back due to "intergalatic law" or something like that
@@vicenarybuffalo2296 Its any event that just takes your crew member away, i.e the sick planet or slavers. Oh and also the Great Eye event where it literally phases your crew member out of existence.
It is exactly these kind of events where I did not power the clone bay, making it irrelevant... And I never upgraded it to a point where the DNA was saved with an unpowered or destroyed system.
@@M3dicayne I'm almost positive it still works for events (other then the few permanent death events) even unpowered but, even if it doesn't, all that needs to happen is before jumping take one power out of another system to power clone bay and if it's a battle pause and put the power back.
I feel like some of the systems, I upgrade them once not for the upgrade feature, but so that they can take a hit and not get broken straight away. Piloting being the biggest one for that to me. I don't use the auto-pilot, but I don't want a single hit to take me to 0% evasion
Same. Cloaking is the big one for me. I find higher levels of cloaking are nearly pointless, level 1 does what it needs to, but you absolutely don't want to have Cloaking broken when you need it. Or O2. Who cares about refill rate, it's just avoiding those scenarios where both 02 and Medbay are broken, and you're also on fire/breached.
Thank you! I recently got back into FTL and I can't for the life of me even reach the flagship. Engines, cloaks, etc were things that I've been sleeping on so hopefully it'll now improve my runs after focusing on them.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 Hmm. Alot of these systems I don't even bother to upgrade to the second level until the last zone because I'm trying to get other stuff. But once you get to the last zone, your odds of being able to buy any new systems or weapons are basically the next best thing to zero (you have to be extremely lucky to find a shop in the last zone before a boss battle), so you might as well splurge whatever scrap you have left hardening whatever systems you can against damage. BEFORE the final boss battle though, I don't usually find getting that second bar just for hardening against damage to be worthwhile unless I'm really sucking on shields and evasion for some reason.
My personal favorite strategy is to mix Mind Control with teleport. Rather than boarding a ship, you mind control an enemy crew member, use your teleporter to move them onto your own ship. Then the AI will attempt to man an unmanned system. It does not check to see if that system is safe. So you can for example, vent the teleporter room all the way to your un manned sensor system. The AI will path through all the damage, and then stand there in the vacuum until it dies. Repeat as needed Profit
I prefer mind control plus hacking since you can check and mind control shields forcing everyone to try and break down the doors making the ship dead in the water.
In the multiverse mod, you can manually control a mind controlled enemy as if they were a crew member, so now you can just move them to an airlock and wait while they just stand around and not breaking down the doors.
Though in Multiverse, crew with combat bonuses are far more prevalent so it's far better to control ones such as MFK Elites and watch them murder their friends rapidly.
I like Leveling up piloting once by around sector 6/7. just for the sake of system armour. it costs very little and it stops you from dropping to 0% dodge chance if it gets hit. And if you invest in engines as much as you do, then dropping to 0% dodge can really mess you up.
I like engines so much since it forms a positive feedback loop with your pilot. Pilots only skill up when you dodge, so the more engines you have -> more dodges -> pilot skills up faster -> even more dodge!
You can usually crew train pilot + engines in 1st or 2nd sector if you want. Engines 5 is still useful to pick up before 4th shield layer, but after that 4th shield layer wins mathematically. Though most ships should have 4 shield layers and engines at 5-7 on hard anyway.
In terms of the Drone System, I think one of the best uses for it is the Hull Repair Drone. Being able to heal for 3-5 HP per drone part is REALLY useful for keeping yourself healthy between fights, especially the Flagship. Worst comes to worst, you can use the Hull Rep drone mid combat to tank more damage than you really could.
Hull Repair is nice, but it also costs more than a Burst Laser II. If it drops for free then I think it's a worthy reason to get Drone Control, but buying it AND drone control is something like 160-170 scrap (depending on the drone the Drone Control comes with)--that's a lot of scrap for 3-5 hull per drone part. It's good, but that scrap is often needed more urgently elsewhere--especially on Hard mode. But again, if one falls in your lap--especially early? Then I agree, it's good value.
you should try using defense drones, then those pesky missles dont stand a chance! and it usually shoots 2 of 3 flagship missle volleys which is a run saver.
one neat thing is that if you have drone recovery arm, hull repair becomes free with this drone. it does 3-5 healing, but if you just use it for 2 healing then jump you keep the drone part.
There's two ways to look at the Pilot subsystem: How much benefit do I get from upgrading it? or How bad is it if I DON'T upgrade it? Not upgrading the Pilot subsystem is a good way to lose the game since a single hit completely knocks out all evasion. It and the engines are essentially the same system.
Clonebay + Reconstructive Teleport is most OP combo tho. It only get countered by Zoltan shields and shipless boarders, but otherwise it's easy money. I actually like Clone Bay when it's upgraded, especially for Rock boarders (they have so much health that Clone bay actually clone them faster than Medbay , and they don't need to make trip twice). It have few good blue events and can prevent "red" events when You'd otherwise lose crew.
For even more situational goodness, with Zoltan Shield Bypass they can very much neuter everyone with Super Shields, including the final fight, even without weapons.
- Battery is cheaper per power bar than getting more when you have a lot, so it's usually worth buying. Lets you get more rolls for other systems to get it out of queue too. I'd put it generally useful. - Arty beams/flak arty belongs in D IMO. Usually consider them worse than other subsystems and they block a slot. - Cloaking is not the best subsystem. That would be hacking. Cloaking isn't far behind it, though, and belongs where you put it. Hacking doesn't just carry offense, you can cloak/hack weapons in perpetuity, hack medbay to ruin targets with boarding, hacking evasion for guaranteed hits. This can save otherwise bad offenses in a way that cloaking can't, and thus it gets placed a bit ahead. Especially because in vanilla FTL, it's a lot cheaper than cloaking and can depower to bypass defense drones w/o spending scrap like in MV. - I put boarding same place as you, but it can carry flagship fight even on hard. Uncontested boarding once you crew wipe is quite good even vs RFS. - Rock B does not have doors, so that's the only time you'd consider them for purchase. - I put drones in generally useful, even though I hate using them. Especially if you have to micro time offensive drones with your weapon system AND power swap it to dd1 as needed. I can do it and get the benefits, but it sucks. Similar to MC, it's a lot better in Multiverse with stuff like dd4 and ancient drones that give a ton of power etc. - MC on enemy pilot isn't as good as hacking it, but doesn't consume resources, is cheaper, and still tanks evasion by a lot. Lets you spread fires or block repairs too. I put it where you do, but am probably a bit higher on it. For most ships cloak/hack/MC or cloak/hack/crew TP are the best system combinations. - You can hear fires if audio is on, even w/o sensors, so they're really not that important. Slug/scanner are almost strictly better.
Something that might be worth mentioning is that upgrading some of your seemingly useless systems can open up more blue text opportunities to gain new crew members. Two that come to mind are Crew Teleporters and an upgraded Medical Bay. If you have some spare scrap it can definitely be worth dumping it into a level for them. Any upgrade also acts as another tick of health for that system so it doesn’t go offline after sustaining one hit, so it’s not like you’re getting nothing out of upgrading it even if the bonus isn’t immediately helpful.
Also (just in general) I dont think you use the mind control very well. You often forget to use it. Its really good if you want to keep a system oppressed when they have multiple big targets. Say they have big weapons but also have cloaking, then its great to just get enough hits to take down cloaking, wait for a little bit for a crew to come along and fix it then MC them, and thats pretty much the cloaking gone for the rest of the fight. someone then usually goes off to fight them. so reducing the enemy crew count by 2 can be quite important. also MC'ing the pilot right as you fire can be extremely useful too as allowing all of your shots to connect can be incredibly useful.
tbh, you can sum up why cloaking is good by just saying cloaking gives you agency to control how much damage you take and where. If your defense drones fail to shoot down a missile, or if you're failing to dodge a bunch of lasers with your engines and shields, you can easily cloak to guarantee you survive. If you evade enough shots naturally to where your shields stay up, don't need to cloak! if your shields go down and you're at risk of taking damage, use the cloak and you can get out of that situation! It's also a useful system at even level 1, as most volleys don't last more than 5 seconds. The only real exception is the need for higher levels of cloaking to avoid the phase 2 power surge, or if the missiles are not well timed with the power surge (can't cloak both in 5 seconds)
One more round of counter-analysis! -Engines: Definitely S Tier. In addition to the obvious evasion boost, the faster FTL charge gives you much more leeway in picking fights. Some ships absolutely cannot get by without early engine upgrades (Stealth B and C are prime examples). -Backup Battery: It's a great system, but it's highly circumstantial. If you have a lot of fancy toys and high energy gunboating, then it's going to pay for itself come Flagship. That said, I beat the game in every ship before Advanced Edition, and it's not necessary. C tier is appropriate. -Artillery Beam/Flak: D-Tier for me. It's an okay filler weapon early on and gives you inevitability. But as you say, it's inconsistent. Only time you should ever build into it is if you land an early Cloak (level 2+), because it synergizes nicely with your first barrage. Highly circumstantial. -Cloaking: S-Tier. Utter gamebreaking system that messes with the A.I. and meta so badly. Only thing that can juke the super attacks of the Flagship with any real consistency. The only thing I will say against it is that the cruisers that rely solely on it for defense tend to have absolutely dreadful early games due to a lack of shields. With Shields+Cloak though is godly and will pay for itself several times over in saved hull repairs over the course of the game more often than not (or give you a powerful out vs the Rebel Flagship if bought late). -Clone Bay: A-Tier at worst. I find Clone Bay to be superior to Med-Bay because it allows me to be far more aggressive with my crew. I admit, it took me a while to come around to Clone Bay myself, because it does take a completely different mindset to how you play FTL. This is especially true if you're an older pre-AE player who learned how to med-micro crew. That said, once you learn how to adjust your risk management strategy and learn when to tactically respawn crew, it's quite rewarding and gives you some extra benefits MedBay can never offer (mostly event-related; for example, the infamous murder spider event is of little consequence with a Clone Bay at its worst, whereas your star pilot might just randomly get YOLO'd by RNGesus if you have a MedBay). -Teleporter: A-Tier early, C-Tier late. Boarding strats provide more scrap and higher chances at getting loot vs destruction. Since scrap economy is paramount to actually winning this is obviously a very strong system and why so many boarding ships occupy the upper quartile of skilled FTL players' lists That said, its value wanes as the game goes on, though it never truly falls off completely. The only thing holding this back from an S-Tier(Early) is the necessity for strong boarding crew and solid micro skills to provide any value. -Door Controls: B-Tier. Doors level 2 is a life saver and fairly cheap for its effect as it slow both boarders and fires, giving you more time to ventilate either away. It's not a maximum tier priority, but I cannot count how many runs I've saved from early demise by upgrading my doors just once by Sector 3. -Drones: B-Tier, nearly A-Tier. Shame about the ammo-dependency; I still think it's an unnecessary limitation. Anyway, contrary to what's claimed here, Combat/Beam Drones actually have a higher average DPS than all but the best ship mounted weapons. What actually holds them back vs gunboats is the ability for gunboats to coordinate barrage attacks. Due to how shields and subsystem damage works, this yields a metagame that always favors the gunboat. Again: Drones are not nearly as bad as they're made out to be here, but they are still supplementary to your main gunboat/cannon strategy. -Hacking: A-Tier, but only because of the exploit that prevents anti-drone defenses from working as intended. If that exploit didn't exist, it'd be C-Tier in end game, just because so many ships have defense drones. Thankfully, the workaround is there. -MedBay: C-Tier. A-Tier with Nano-Healing-Bots (Engi-A augment; also available as a quest reward in Engi space). Solid for funneling boarders. Otherwise, it's straight forward anti-attrition. -Mind-Control: C-Tier. A-Tier for Boarding Strats. The ability to nullify Piloting straight up is pretty strong. Especially when you're restricted to inaccurate weapons by circumstance. It's also the best system for supporting boarding strats. Slugs are rare enemies anyway. -O2: D-Tier. Basically exists as a technicality. Top tier FTL players run mostly vacuum ships even before Advanced Edition, and that should give you an idea of how unimportant this system really is. -Piloting: D-Tier. You only upgrade this to pad your subsystem's health rather than the stated effect of the Auto-Pilot. -Sensors: D-Tier. At best, a single upgrade gets you access to a handful of blue text options. Otherwise...well, it's not really that important. -Shields: S-Tier. You do not know true suffering until you've done Stealth C on Hard and it's entirely due to the lack of Shields. Like Engines and Cloaking, it's one of those things where the collective defensive benefits are greater than the sum its parts. Tier 2 shields is usually the best early/first investment you can make. -Weapons: S-Tier. Gunboats rule. It is technically possible to win with only boarding and drones, but the odds of success are really, really low even with the best ship for the attempt (Crystal B or Mantis B). I've personally seen that done exactly once and have never done it myself. So for all practical purposes not related to enacting the Gambler's Fallacy over and over again, Weapons are of paramount importance.
Counter-Counter Analysis: Crew Tele can board flagship's missile room, disabling it and killing the crew member who can repair it. There is no doors to the missile room, no one to replace that dead crew member.
Hacking is 100% the best subsystem in the game. Nothing else touches it. With cloaking you can cloak/hack cycle weapons indefinitely. You can drop evasion to 0 with an engine hack. You can hack shields. You can hack enemy drones. You can crew kill with it. If the drone defense thing didn't work it would absolutely be worth an extra 55 scrap to get the defense scram if you could find it. It's THAT good of a subsystem.
@@Setixir It's good, but you literally can't win without some combination of Shields/Engines/Cloak. The same is absolutely not true of Hacking, and that's because the game's core dynamic isn't designed around it. Still, it's very much worth picking up most of the time.
You forgot to say cloning also save your crew in events where they should have die Also ships with 3 drones + drone recovery arm are so satisfaying and make run very easy (or i just better play with drones idk)
Drones get a bad rep because so many great gunboat options exist, while comparatively, there aren't that many good drones. But the drones that are good are incredibly solid options. Being able to divide your offense between two subsystems has other benefits as well.
@@atmosdwagon4656 guns can be (and are by default) a primary source of winning battles. Aside from starting sectors you just can't rely on drones alone to win fights. So it is not just about of variety of good drones vs gun options. It is about the total lack of drone option to base your whole game strategy on. So weapon system is essential for gunships and excellent thing to have on any other ship type. Drone system is an ok support system which can be substituted by better and more reliable systems most of the time.
@@tutzdesYT Pretty much, but my point was never that drones could replace guns outright. Combat Drones have a higher DPS than all but the best guns and any sort of Ion Blast makes Beam drones incredibly strong options. That said, I'm still scratching my head as to why they cost ammo when it's clear they were meant to supplement your offense rather than replace it outright.
Also the wiki likes to shit over the [Drone Reactor Booster], it literally increase Drones speed by 25%, in which the wiki says "dude, they boost drone movement from 50% to 62.5% how lame", yet they forget that [Combat Drones] don't have [Attack Speed] but [Movement Speed]. Tested it with the Vortex vs Torus and Yes, Vortex killed ships around ~50% faster with Combat I due to positioning faster which resulted on higher DPS.
I think it's the opposite man. If you play SUPER well, you definitely want the battery. If I play well I've got so many systems going, I've got to either have some Zoltan fxers or a backup battery if I want to run everything.
You can also depower engines/drones temporarily as needed, but yeah battery doesn't cost that much compared to power bars. Upgrading it usually isn't worth, but most ships should buy it (and remember to use it).
Advanced medbay is so useful. It feels like 1 in 5 events has a blue option for medbay, and a lot of those events don't have good outcomes if you don't have it.
The other problem with the teleporter is unless you drop 3 or 4 crew in their ship, you are not accomplishing much. Sure, in 1 v 1s you do better than the AI because you can be more clever, but overwhelming is just better. Most ships cannot support more than 2 crew teleporters, making it relatively mediocre as a killing strategy, especially later on when enemy crews can be 5-7 aliens and you don't really have the time to mess around while they rain hell upon you.
Mind control can be great. A leveled up mindcontrol creating a "berzerk" enemy (boosted stats) can make your fights easy. Downside: 1) against scout drones its only a battery that you can depower to give energy to other systems 2) no vision => no use. But a lvl2 sensor is cheap, but nebula fights would be a problem. + blue events bonus Btw you should reconsider the rankings including blue events. Med bay vs Clone bay are on same level if you consider blue events using clone. Beamevents with artillery system... etc
@@godlyvex5543 Correct, though ship autopilot is a lot worse than manned piloting, even at level 3. So it's a worthy consideration for MC. Competitive alternative use is to shoot out enemy weapons, then MC once they have 2 crew in there. More or less ends the fight, but it's more of a support subsystem than a primary one.
You don't "play bad" and lose boarders, sometimes RNG affects you and there is little you can do, not often and yeah if you really think things through this situations are less common. The thing is that clonebay is not to circumvent "being bad", it allows you to be extremely aggressive with your boarding as well as when defending, sure you might prefer medbay and so do I around 60% of the time but you are completely omitting the fact that with certain playstyles clonebay works nicely.
Also the clone bay is always better if you can get the backup DNA bank, your people are never lost so long as your clone bay is not destroyed while everyone is dead. Where-as Engi-medbot dispersal is so much harder to get, at least according to my experience.
also not to mention that about 2 risky lose crew events that you wouldnt take with medbay is all it takes to make your money back when you buy clonebay. Super useful!
@@harrgerth3863 yeah between that and aggressive boarding, clonebay opens up a wide array of possibilities. I think you can actually send crew to enemy's pilot just before shooting so that he drops evasion in order to fight or send them to an important system which moves people away from their station (or into another one ) and not be afraid of shooting. Medbay is great but clonebay is great as well.
Losing crew to boarding with medbay is not beholden to RNG in vanilla FTL. Also not MV, though there are a lot of new threats to memorize/more ships where you can't realistically do it. Clone bay getting shot out is a risk too. I still like it for the events, but medbay boarding should not lose crew. If you do, you made a mistake. Sometimes a nuanced, detailed, hard to foresee w/o lots of experience mistake...but a mistake nonetheless.
When I played FTL, I liked using a repair drone drone recovery combo which allowed me to get 2 hull repaired for free each jump, or heal more/during a battle if you have drone part to spare.
i find that hacking plus mind control is a good combo because if an enemy crewmember is in the hacked room, and you mindcontrol him, the rest of the enemy crew cant stop him because of the hacked doors
Mind control and teleport trivialize the final boss. You can pick off enemies one by one even without any good weapons just by mind controlling someone and then teleporting them onto your ship. Leave one and it's (almost) a guarantee. I messed up once because the one I left was in the beam weapon, so on phase 3 they died (since that part breaks off) and the ship went into AI mode.
did you know if you have both a teleporter and mind control you can teleport enemy units onto your ship? you can use this to beat the flagship with ease for all 3 phases because the crew does not re-spawn after it jumps away. just make sure not to kill the guy manning the blaster.
Great vid, and I generally agree on the list. I’d drop cloak 1 spot, bump mind control and back up battery up 1 each, and clone bay up 2 for the vast number of events it allows you to do without worrying about losing a crew member, but I’m mostly leaving this comment for the algorithm bump. You make great stuff, can’t wait to see more
The video misses one key advantage of the clone bay- you can revive crew lost in events. This means you can take options that would normally be too risky.
I rate a lot of these things very very differently. First of all, boarding is very strong, assuming you have a 4 man teleporter. 2 man teleporters are still good if you have decent crew members for it. And yes, you can beat the flagship with it. (especially if you have a clone bay) Every time you smash a system they take a point of hull damage. If you kill the flagship crew it's basically over. It keeps power to the oxygen even though it has no crew. You can station someone in each weapon room, and leave them there, completely nullifying any threat on phase 1. If you have a clone bay you never have to recall your crew. You can instead send more crew. It's better with an upgraded clone bay and teleporter. Boarding allows you to completely take out their shields and cockpit pretty easily too, which allows your weapon fire to deal significant damage and support your boarders by destroying the med bay. In boarding combat, your melee skill doesn't actually matter that much, so the skill loss is irrelevant. If the flagship gets taken over by AI, you've basically won. It's very hard for the flagship to do anything after that, and as long as you have good shields and engines, you can survive the drone surge and laser burst in phase 2 and 3 with minimal effort. At that point, you really just need a way to get through the super shield in phase 3. And of course the icing on the cake is the extra scrap from killing crew throughout the game instead of blasting the enemy ships to pieces. With this setup, even automated enemies with no oxygen are easy to handle. That's what the clone bay is for. Just send your dudes in and let them break systems before suffocating and getting cloned. You only need light weaponry to make a good boarding build work. It's far less reliant on finding good weapons, as you only need to upgrade systems to make the build better, and you can dedicate your scrap to shields and engines rather than the weapons system which is very expensive. Clone bay requires a very different playstyle compared to other builds. If you treat it too much like a bad med bay, then you aren't utilizing its strengths.
It's usually better to just leave 1 guy alive so that the flagship never gets taken over by the AI. Reason being is that if there's 1 human alive that single guy has to go around repairing everything, but once the AI takes over it does the same thing that the automated black ships do and auto-repair rooms whenever they want. So usually you can just leave the beam guy alive and essentially soft lock the flagship from repairs.
@@bloodwolf2609 It's beneficial for the enemy to repair its systems though. You need them repaired for your crew to break them again. More DPS that way, and if they get a system or two back to one bar it's really not gonna hurt you, especially if you can put a breach in the important rooms (AI can't repair a breached room)
@@Zebo12345678 oh I didnt know that about breached rooms, I suppose it makes sense for a boarding only with no weapons to let them repair and re-break for damage, but usually I just have hybrid boarding and weapons so once all their shields and weapons are gone its just free to shoot them if they cant reapair, but your way makes sense too.
@@bloodwolf2609 I play a lot of modded FTL, so breaching weapons and pure boarding loadouts are more common than in vanilla. That's why I used those strategies I mentioned. The whole "AI can't repair breaches" thing is from vanilla though. Basically, the auto repair _tries_ to repair the room, but breaches take precedent (just like if it were crew doing it) and the AI has a 0x modifier for breach repair, which means it gets caught up infinitely trying to repair a breach it can't do. It's unclear if that's a bug or an intended mechanic, but it's very useful vs auto ships!
Drones could need some love. Issues: - high energy cost for the same 2-3 power each drone need you have a more stable, controlled weapon. The only benefit here in case the system itself is damaged/hack you dont lose your full offensive power, but... in most cases you need the full burst anyway. At lategame if you loose even one wepon there is a chance you cant peel the 4 layer shields off - need drone part and unlike missiles it is rares and hell expensive - easily shut down a weapon just shoots until you have a working system however if a drone is fully opertional a) maybe it isnt even effective at all (beam drone is useless until you have something to peel shields off) b) can be shot down by a random projectile c) can be countered (defensive drones hard counter your parts) d) enviromental hazards effect them hard. Asteroid field? That will cost a lot. + can the enemy have drone jammers what you can have as augmentation? - augments are not... amazing either. drone recovery arm would be amazing if enemy drone parts could be collected too or even better just pick up the schematic itself if it floats around you? This could be an interesting balance decision because +20-40 scrap IF you can collect, carry it AND take it to a store...
Love the ftl stuff. I’ve got about 200 hrs in the game. Just redownload from steam on new labtop last night and it’s so fun! Been watching your teir list videos to get a reminder and an outside opinion. The doors down one vs the med bay up one and maybe drones should be same teir as crew teleport. No risk of your crew dying. Can do board and breach for 1 drone piece or protect or heal up your damage bay. Idk it’s a great list and great insight. Thanks for all the work you put in… 2 years ago! 😂
I'd swap Hacking and Cloaking. Hacking just removes so much randomness from the game and with power on-off cheese (toggling the power to get past defense drones), you can use it against literally any target. With it, you don't rely on the RNG to get the weapons you need to get past the flagship's shields. Cloaking is very useful, but it's expensive and on my recent Hard runs I was still able to win without it. With Hacking, you can annihilate the Flagship before it can get off too many rockets and power surges. Hacking gives the added bonus of cutting the Flagship in half, greatly slowing down repairs to their piloting / shields / rocket turret. I'd argue that it's mandatory to have one of the Medbay or Clonebay (looking at you Slug B), but once you have it, you never need to pay scrap to change to the other. Upgrading 1 power to Medbay is useful -- it has lots of blue options that avoid crew loss. I'd also put Clonebay at "nice bonus" because it lets you take many dangerous options like the aliens spiders without much risk. Upgrading piloting 1 bar is also very nice. It prevents a stray rocket from completely knocking it out and bringing dodge down to 0.
I used to feel exactly the same about the clonebay, but it can be really useful with certain builds. Particularly boarding, you just need to upgrade it, and you can crew kill bigger ships. Also, you don't have to worry about giant alien spiders. I'd say in vanilla, medbay is better, but on multiverse it's a tough call if you get offered a clonebay cheap. You really don't lose that many skill points on a crew death either.
In Multiverse I actually prefer Clone Bay to Medbay due to the combinations of eg. fragile overclocked zoltans, and Medics/Regenerating Crew also nasty anti crew weapons/borders
Everything you said about doors is why I prefer having clonebay on non-boarding runs. I don’t often have to actually deal with boarders, and having clonebay let’s you take risky decisions and events with your crew.
Good analysis, just a few important things that you didn't mention, or that I'd emphasise, from my own runs: -upgraded medbays and oxygen are harder to break. Also being able to heal up faster and replenish airless rooms faster (typically to fix a broken system after venting boarders) has proved decisive in quite a few battles -upgraded sensors come into play in more than a few situations, typically attempting to find ships in nebula areas. -Upgraded Artillery and a defensive build are really easy to do effectively. Just get Defence drone 1, good shields and settle for long battles. The only challenge was cracking fleeing ships in time before they charged their FTL. The vast majority of runs I managed to pick up suitable main weapons to deal with this. On the occasions when I failed to do so, it was admittedly disastrous though. -Defence 1 drone is so good, it's put Drones in 2nd tier for me. It saves me so much money not repairing damage from missiles, I'd say the investment pays for itself twice over in an average run. Especially useful against that horrible triple shot launcher on the flagship.
Clone bay is always superior! Get the teleport add-on that heals your dudes when you board and un-board. And on the final battle, you shoot your guys over 2 at a time to hit the weapons systems; you start with the missiles system.
По поводу мультивселенной: можно использовать контроль разума вместе с телепортом для почти гарантированного уничтожения экипажа. Это позволит отбить потраченный лом, ослабит врага и даже даст дополнительнын варианты выбора. А ещё я считаю, есть два варианта обороны: полные щиты, 1-е двигатели и 1-я маскировка; или отсутствие щитов, минимум 5-е двигатели, 5-я маскировка и какой-нибудь защитный дрон (или 2).
Hey Spearmintz, great video! Even with several hundred hours in this game, it was nice to see what a fellow player thinks of the systems. A couple little details though I thought were worth mentioning: Rock B actually starts without doors, being the only ship to do so. The autopilot bonus is actually a little worse than you said. The autopilot only kicks in if there's no friendly crew in the room at all, meaning that starting with an unskilled pilot with 40% dodge with level 2 piloting, the pilot would stop manning the system, bringing evasion down to 35%, and then he would leave and the autopilot would activate, with the evasion dropping to 17% because FTL hates rounding up to make things easier for you. Finally, Drone Control and Artillery especially can make things harder for the player, because both situational systems take up a valuable system slot that could be better used by something else. Especially on Mantis B and Federation C, where both ships are only allowed one additional system because of drones/arty, making them feel almost like a direct hindrance most of the time. Other than that, I think what you said makes sense and is correct. Thanks for reading my two cents lol
Power swapping to get the most out of drones takes more knowledge + micro too. Rarely see players use combat drone to break shields so ion can hit weapons faster than opposing weapons in Engi A for example, but in some early fights that outright guarantees against damage early on (assuming the shots don't miss, that is). Can also be used as part of a weapon system volley with depower + power at right timing (depower just before drone light turns green), which again rookies don't use at all and would be hard for the no-pause challenge players to do reliably too (though not impossible). Even used optimally it's worse than alternatives, but it's way better than artillery systems.
12:00 Killing the whole crew on the flagship actually makes it harder for you to win, because the ship turns into a giant auto scout and gets auto repair.
Not true at all. Autorepair is pretty slow, and boarding uncontested + breaking multiple systems rapidly in phases 2 and 3 makes them a lot less threatening. Once a system is broken, a single crew hanging out in the room can prevent missiles/lasers from firing again by repeatedly breaking them. Similarly, AI can't repair hull breaches or rooms with fires, and in vanilla FTL RFS doesn't drain oxygen when it loses crew. Ships with crew TP generally should wipe out RFS crew in phase 1 and then immediately board/break missiles + drones ASAP in phase 2. Then either use Zoltan bypass or clear supershield and break weapons + MC in phase 3, too. It's a bit harder to crew wipe RFS safely on hard in phase 1, but in phases 2/3 having missiles + lasers connected to main ship by doors means that uncontested boarding is even better there.
I agree with Trevor, killing the crew is most of the time a big mistake in vanilla. The TP is situational. The RFS AI is a 20% base dodge autoship with 30 Hull, auto repair and powersurge. You'd like to let a crew alive and bait him in O2 or medbay, preventing the ship to dodge or repair shields and artillery
@@Masteuhrcard Yes, and TP our crew, it's less people to repair domages on your ship when you have so many chance to take dommage in this partucular battle.
You never kill the whole crew, you kill everyone except for the guy in the laser department. I’ve found even tier 3 flagship fairly easy when they can’t repair shields or piloting.
I prefer to have level 2 of everything just because when a system is destroyed you take extra hull damage. So if the system is level 1 it is just a weak spot.
Drones would be S Tier if he knew about the hull repair drone. That saved me so many runs! So many runs the flagship did more than 40 hull damage and I still won.
The only reason I would put Hacking higher personally is all the blue events it can trigger. Most of the time it's stopping yourself from getting hacked which is incredible, or even hacking an abandoned ship for free area scan and scrap. I think it's S-tier for sure.
a niche use for level 2 O2 is that (iirc) if a room has a breach, it can keep the O2 above the level where your crew suffocate similarly, a niche use for level 2 medbay is that it heals faster than suffocation damage also, while not at all necessary, killing all the crew of a ship gives slightly higher rewards than outright destroying it (besides in rebel controlled space; those are still only 1 fuel)
Mind control can prevent enemies from repairing a system, it should be noted- any enemies that enter the same room will have to fight, instead of repair
Honestly i always get at least oxygen 2 by the 4th system. If a level 2 or 3 hacking hits your oxygen 1 you get like 20-40 seconds till you die unless you target enemy hacking (which keeps their weapons online) or have a clone bay and just accept 100% fatalities.
I love the teleporter for the final fight, especially with cloaking. Makes taking out the flagships big guns easy as you can send a crew to overpower tbe defender and destroy the system before they get a chance to fire.
My favourite strategy with boarding (against the flagship) is to teleport into it's artillery and kill the crew inside, or force them into the main hold with mind control (if you mind control someone in a room full of friendlies they'll be forced out) where they'll die due to the large amount of crew inside the main section, then I slowly but surely make my way around to killing every single crew member but one (to make sure the auto repairs come in and repair the permanently broken artillery once they have been destroyed each phase)
Mind control is definitely a great multi purpose system. It can assist with boarding offense and defense, it can counter enemy MC, it can stop a system repair from happening and help deal more damage to it, and best of all with an extra crew parked in sensors or a cheap sensor upgrade you can typically mc their pilot for your crucial first offensive volley to guarantee no misses and maximum damage. Helping to put the enemy into recovery mode on that first volley can be crucial. I agree that it isn't as useful as hacking and is way below stealth, but it has a lot of uses for almost any build or play style.
Sensors (at least until level 2) are super underrated in my opinion. They're fairly cheap to upgrade, make non-boarding crew kills easier by seeing the health of the enemy crew and fires on the enemy ship, makes it possible to use mind control aggresively without needing a Slug crew (which can be used for crew kills or lowering evasion by MCing the pilot), and comes with some neat blue options. For 35 scrap, that's some pretty great value in my opinion.
Personally I like the clone bay more because it protects you from events that kill your crew. Like the giant alien spiders, if it kills a crew then you can just clone him and move one
If you have the cash, upgraded O2 means you can repair a room with a hull breach, especially if you open the doors to the adjacent rooms. Also, it is super fun to use level 1 mind control and transporters to empty an enemy ship of crew (unless they have a cloning bay). Speaking of which, a clone bay plus reconstructive teleport is also fun for a boarding run.
I like to upgrade the oxygen if I have extra scrap late game. It gives the system some extra cushion if it gets hit so I can prioritize other things to micromanage in the flagship fight for example.
Cloaking is great "If you struggle winning the game, use this" Funny you mention that, my first win on Normal before the DLC was with the Stealth Ship lol
Same. Stealth A isn't even a good ship, but the fact that it shoves cloaking in your face was enough to push me to a win before I knew what Inwas doing.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 Yes, it really forces you to change tactics and exploit cloaking as hard as you can. Actually doing a stealth run in Multiverse right now lol.
Additional thing about engines-upgraded engines means your pilot and engineer train more quickly (more misses == more xp). vital to get early if you aren't doing crew training cheese
I learned the hard way why the clone bay can be key to success, but I do agree that it's very situational. In my case, I was playing multiverse and happened to get a lot of free zoltan crew members through good luck in events, having one, I used the upgrade that doubles their power output at the cost of reducing their health and shortly after I found myself powering level 3 shields with 2 zoltans (no reactor power invested), engines with one and partially powering my weapons. I thought medbot dispersal would be good enough to compensate as it's not a hard augment in multiverse, picked up zoltan shields and became a power house.... until I found the one guy with powerful missles that can aim, quickly lost almost all my crew. I recovered but the setback eventually led to the run being thrown. So yeah, just felt like sharing that to ease the pain a bit lol, was such a good run rng wise.
I can agree that autopilot doesn't help that much, but upgrading oxygen or piloting near the end is super useful. The easiest way to death spiral on the flagship is getting smacked in the piloting and suddenly getting hit by everything.
Only thing I will say for clone bay, is in certain circumstances where you have a couple extras (in the lanius ship at least) for a boarding party, you don't have to worry about stat loss, cause you throw them out and get more back. But completely fair rating, cause it is very situational trying to suicide kill off some people for better loot.
The main problem with backup battery is that unless you max out your reactor power you might as well have spent the scrap you used for the battery on more reactor power
Backup battery is 35 scrap for 2 temporary power, which isn't much worse than regular power. Reactor upgrades for 2 power become more expensive than that quickly. Also, if you don't purchase it, it stays in your shop subsystem pool and you get fewer shots at cloaking/hacking in future stores. Most ships should buy it.
My main issue with the clone bay vs med bay ratio is that there are just too many run ending scenarios an upgraded med bay can solve that the clone bay can't. Venting out-of-control fires. Forcing a boarding crew to fight against impossible odds. And of course, my favorite. The doors are broken, the O2 is out, the ship is devoid of breathable air. The clone bay doesn't clone fast enough to cycle out your crew members, whereas a fully upgraded med bay allows you to relay a full size crew between surviving in a complete vacuum and fixing the problem.
But the clone bay also lets your crew survive random events that would otherwise kill them. A clone bay means you can take a lot more risk with the random text events and get more rewards for them.
Mind controlling + bording is evil on the enemy flagship. Mind control the enemy, then teleport them on at the time and gang up on the one. Repeat until the enemy ship is empty
11:25 the clone bay negates 99% of the events that kill your crew, not being able to heal your crew is kind of annoying, but its worth it for the events. Although its also a risk if your clone bay gets destroyed or ioned while your crew are regenerating then theres nothing you can do, unless you have backup DNA bank.
Theres so much advice I disagree with in here. Clone bay is just plain better than med bay if yoire boarding. Its not about being better with micro and not losing crew its about flexibility. I can kill auto scouts with boarding if inhave clone bay. I have access to a ton of risky events with clome bay. Giant alien spiders? No problem Boarding yields higher scrap rewards so teleporter is extremely valuable if you start with it but rarely worth buying it unless you absolutely cant find any offensive upgrades. This reads like a tier list of someone who plays on easy and normal.
Lets gooooooo. I’m sure you already had this idea in mind but I remember suggesting something like this a few weeks ago so I’m going to take credit Good video as always, keep it up!
my tactic (not agains flagship) is to hack oxygen then kill it with weapon or hack the med bay + teleport (hacked med harm enemy/ turn off hacked so the door dont block enemy - use troop to lure them in - turn on hack lv 3 - all full health enemy die ). I like to this cause troop kill get more than ship kill.
I like how making tier lists on every conceivable game concept of FTL is becoming this running meme of your channel Make a tier list of the space backdrops.
For many scraps, Hack for closing doors and cut acces to the crew + incendiary weapons. You don't specialy hack a big system with this strategy but cut acces to maidbay or/and burning systems with 2 doors locked, that's so good.
One of the two times I did win I was an Engi ship with a couple weapons pretty much solely used on the shields and ion on other systems when I had the chance. The power house though was my level 2 attack and defense drones, or at least a set up like that. Also I had a repair drone that pretty much saved my life throughout the run even though I didnt use it in the last fight
@@spearmintz1 No lie, I literally watched a few of your tier list guides these past few days due to playing FTL again. You reminded me how addicting the game is again after all these years lol.
My hot take on o2s: I slept on them when I was a nub and now I always get at least level 2-3 by the Flagship, and my win rates went up considerably because the Flagship always, *_always_* spams Boarding Drones in phase 2, which causes a hull breach. If it goes in your cockpit, if you only have level 1 oxygen, you have to leave the room with a 75% healthy boarding drone in there, heal people up, and come back in afterward to kill the boarding drone while the oxygen in the room is already gone. You might need to send people in waves. Devastating. You can lose a run just off of that alone, especially with low crew count, and then what if the flagship sends a boarding drone back into your cockpit? Now you lose for sure even if you had a fantastic run. With level 2 you can leave the doors open to keep oxygen in the room and make it easier to fight off the drone, but with level 3 you can straight up leave the doors closed for safety and just send a second guy in to help the pilot kill the drone, fix the breach, and then not drop below 100% oxygen. Even level 2 Oxygen makes runs that you are about to lose still winnable. At level 2, if you have the doors open, you can actually fill a breached room that has been drained of oxygen with enough oxygen to safely repair it and barely lose o2 any in your ship. This can be game-deciding if they breached your medbay and everyone is at 15 health. At level 3, a single hull breach can't even drop your o2 below 100% and you can leave the doors closed. Level 2-3 also gives you blue options for safely navigating slug sectors that hack your oxygen without putting a timer on the fight. If they have high evasion and good shields, one bad roll can create an unwinnable fight you have to run from. In later sectors, that can cost you upwards of 60-70 scrap, so just off one of those fights, the Oxygen system pays for both its upgrades. With level 2-3 oxygen, you can straight up let them put holes in your ship and ignore them until after the fight. It also means your O2 can take a stray bullet or two and you won't be screwed if you don't notice in time. Yes, it doesn't win the game, it only helps you Not Lose, but you could say the same about Engines and Shields and Cloaking, all of which are S tier. Some things cause you to lose extremely quickly even in an otherwise perfect run. Good engines are useless if you have no pilot, and even with level 3 piloting you lose about half your evasion with the loss of the pilot's manning bonus, so having the capability to keep your pilot in the cockpit even with a boarding drone in there is nothing to scoff at. Sometimes, you need to go through an extended period of Please Don't Kill Me because they shot your weapon system to 0, and if Engines and Shields and Cloaking are S tier for the same reasons, why is Oxygen so low when it does the same thing for way less in situations you are guaranteed to face? You don't even need to keep them powered most of the time, and that's not a strike against it. It means Oxygen upgrades don't need to be paired with a mandatory Reactor upgrade.
I upgrade piloting and sensors both to level 2 fairly early. They are cheap upgrades, don't require power, but there are number of events that use both, so they pay for themselves fairly quickly.
Mind control is just as useful as a defense. For those that don't know, if one of your crew members is taken over through mind control, you can use it on him to stop it.
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Who needs oxygen? This message was sponsored by lanius gang
dae leaf storm contrary
I died like 3 times the last two days because of oxygen (or the lack of oxygen)
Oxygen? Yeah, seems super situational to me. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t even start with the system on my ship if it were up to me… I just can’t see any consistent use for it…
Oxygen is overrated.
PLEASE GIVE US OUR OXYGEN BACK WE WILL DO ANYTHING!! -Unfortunate crew getting raided by Lanius that are on board
27:04 it’s all fun and games until you fix your sensors and realize that a quarter of your ship is in fact ablaze.
*laughs in Multiverse*
@@ISenjaya71 laughs in Megaverse
out of sight, out of mind on a slug ship. just open up those side areas and wait. all your breaches will seal themselves as well.
*Sounds of fire intensifies*
When you exit a nebula be like:
Something good about Clone Bay is that many of the events where you can lose crewmates become irrelevant. It doesn't make you 100% safe from those events but it does negate many risks.
I remember thinking that when I got one where my captain was lost, until I read the text box that said he wasnt coming back due to "intergalatic law" or something like that
@@vicenarybuffalo2296 Its any event that just takes your crew member away, i.e the sick planet or slavers.
Oh and also the Great Eye event where it literally phases your crew member out of existence.
It is exactly these kind of events where I did not power the clone bay, making it irrelevant... And I never upgraded it to a point where the DNA was saved with an unpowered or destroyed system.
@@M3dicayne I'm almost positive it still works for events (other then the few permanent death events) even unpowered but, even if it doesn't, all that needs to happen is before jumping take one power out of another system to power clone bay and if it's a battle pause and put the power back.
@@M3dicayne I’m pretty sure during crew kill events it doesn’t matter if its powered or not.
It’ll just go “you checked the clone bay”
I feel like some of the systems, I upgrade them once not for the upgrade feature, but so that they can take a hit and not get broken straight away. Piloting being the biggest one for that to me. I don't use the auto-pilot, but I don't want a single hit to take me to 0% evasion
Same.
Cloaking is the big one for me. I find higher levels of cloaking are nearly pointless, level 1 does what it needs to, but you absolutely don't want to have Cloaking broken when you need it.
Or O2.
Who cares about refill rate, it's just avoiding those scenarios where both 02 and Medbay are broken, and you're also on fire/breached.
Thank you! I recently got back into FTL and I can't for the life of me even reach the flagship. Engines, cloaks, etc were things that I've been sleeping on so hopefully it'll now improve my runs after focusing on them.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 and for flagship hack. You actually just lose if you don't have lanius crew and can't get oxygen back
@@BlueRiging The one time that the System Fixing Drone might save your run!
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 Hmm. Alot of these systems I don't even bother to upgrade to the second level until the last zone because I'm trying to get other stuff. But once you get to the last zone, your odds of being able to buy any new systems or weapons are basically the next best thing to zero (you have to be extremely lucky to find a shop in the last zone before a boss battle), so you might as well splurge whatever scrap you have left hardening whatever systems you can against damage.
BEFORE the final boss battle though, I don't usually find getting that second bar just for hardening against damage to be worthwhile unless I'm really sucking on shields and evasion for some reason.
My personal favorite strategy is to mix Mind Control with teleport. Rather than boarding a ship, you mind control an enemy crew member, use your teleporter to move them onto your own ship. Then the AI will attempt to man an unmanned system.
It does not check to see if that system is safe. So you can for example, vent the teleporter room all the way to your un manned sensor system. The AI will path through all the damage, and then stand there in the vacuum until it dies.
Repeat as needed
Profit
It’s good for the flagship, but I find it too slow for normal ships, the mind control cooldown is a pain
I prefer mind control plus hacking since you can check and mind control shields forcing everyone to try and break down the doors making the ship dead in the water.
In the multiverse mod, you can manually control a mind controlled enemy as if they were a crew member, so now you can just move them to an airlock and wait while they just stand around and not breaking down the doors.
Though in Multiverse, crew with combat bonuses are far more prevalent so it's far better to control ones such as MFK Elites and watch them murder their friends rapidly.
Thats gotta be some kinda warcrime
I like Leveling up piloting once by around sector 6/7. just for the sake of system armour. it costs very little and it stops you from dropping to 0% dodge chance if it gets hit. And if you invest in engines as much as you do, then dropping to 0% dodge can really mess you up.
I was just about to say this exact thing, once I was trying random things I discovered this and its infinitely useful in the late game
You get blue options with an upgraded engine on some events as well.
I like engines so much since it forms a positive feedback loop with your pilot. Pilots only skill up when you dodge, so the more engines you have -> more dodges -> pilot skills up faster -> even more dodge!
You can usually crew train pilot + engines in 1st or 2nd sector if you want. Engines 5 is still useful to pick up before 4th shield layer, but after that 4th shield layer wins mathematically. Though most ships should have 4 shield layers and engines at 5-7 on hard anyway.
Get fully skilled up by sector 1 itself if enemy ship has no missile weapon and your shields equal its lasers + beams
I gotta say your Thumbnail and the actual video sure tell two different stories.
but it got you to click *pepe holding wine meme*
@@actionbash2 actually, what got me to click is that this playlist was the first thing that popped up when I searched "FTL tier list" on youtube
"every ship has doors so it's not like you're going to have to buy it."
Rock B: am I a joke to you?
Hehe this!
He's done it again, the madman
In terms of the Drone System, I think one of the best uses for it is the Hull Repair Drone. Being able to heal for 3-5 HP per drone part is REALLY useful for keeping yourself healthy between fights, especially the Flagship. Worst comes to worst, you can use the Hull Rep drone mid combat to tank more damage than you really could.
Hull Repair is nice, but it also costs more than a Burst Laser II. If it drops for free then I think it's a worthy reason to get Drone Control, but buying it AND drone control is something like 160-170 scrap (depending on the drone the Drone Control comes with)--that's a lot of scrap for 3-5 hull per drone part. It's good, but that scrap is often needed more urgently elsewhere--especially on Hard mode.
But again, if one falls in your lap--especially early? Then I agree, it's good value.
Flagship has dealt me more than 40 damage many times. Hull repair drone means I don't have to depend on the repair stations still being there.
you should try using defense drones, then those pesky missles dont stand a chance! and it usually shoots 2 of 3 flagship missle volleys which is a run saver.
one neat thing is that if you have drone recovery arm, hull repair becomes free with this drone. it does 3-5 healing, but if you just use it for 2 healing then jump you keep the drone part.
@@gemstonegynoid7475 OP!
O2 level 2 is very useful. It can take 1 damage and can supply air to breached rooms. It’s a nice bonus
Spearmintz and NorthernLion spearheading the FTL renaissance. Thank you so much for the awesome content.
There's two ways to look at the Pilot subsystem: How much benefit do I get from upgrading it? or How bad is it if I DON'T upgrade it? Not upgrading the Pilot subsystem is a good way to lose the game since a single hit completely knocks out all evasion. It and the engines are essentially the same system.
Next up: ranking ships by paint job
LOL every time I think there's no way you can make another tier list, BOOM another shows up on my feed
Clonebay + Reconstructive Teleport is most OP combo tho. It only get countered by Zoltan shields and shipless boarders, but otherwise it's easy money.
I actually like Clone Bay when it's upgraded, especially for Rock boarders (they have so much health that Clone bay actually clone them faster than Medbay , and they don't need to make trip twice). It have few good blue events and can prevent "red" events when You'd otherwise lose crew.
That's the textbook definition of "situational", though. It's really really good...with a very specific augment and another system.
For even more situational goodness, with Zoltan Shield Bypass they can very much neuter everyone with Super Shields, including the final fight, even without weapons.
I Wanna try more crazy layouts like this. my last run i just got two large burst lasers.
I do this with lanius cruiser B bcs it starts with clone bay and teleporter and it’s soooooo good
Lanius B is good but very difficult to use
That thumbnail really baited my click
- Battery is cheaper per power bar than getting more when you have a lot, so it's usually worth buying. Lets you get more rolls for other systems to get it out of queue too. I'd put it generally useful.
- Arty beams/flak arty belongs in D IMO. Usually consider them worse than other subsystems and they block a slot.
- Cloaking is not the best subsystem. That would be hacking. Cloaking isn't far behind it, though, and belongs where you put it. Hacking doesn't just carry offense, you can cloak/hack weapons in perpetuity, hack medbay to ruin targets with boarding, hacking evasion for guaranteed hits. This can save otherwise bad offenses in a way that cloaking can't, and thus it gets placed a bit ahead. Especially because in vanilla FTL, it's a lot cheaper than cloaking and can depower to bypass defense drones w/o spending scrap like in MV.
- I put boarding same place as you, but it can carry flagship fight even on hard. Uncontested boarding once you crew wipe is quite good even vs RFS.
- Rock B does not have doors, so that's the only time you'd consider them for purchase.
- I put drones in generally useful, even though I hate using them. Especially if you have to micro time offensive drones with your weapon system AND power swap it to dd1 as needed. I can do it and get the benefits, but it sucks. Similar to MC, it's a lot better in Multiverse with stuff like dd4 and ancient drones that give a ton of power etc.
- MC on enemy pilot isn't as good as hacking it, but doesn't consume resources, is cheaper, and still tanks evasion by a lot. Lets you spread fires or block repairs too. I put it where you do, but am probably a bit higher on it. For most ships cloak/hack/MC or cloak/hack/crew TP are the best system combinations.
- You can hear fires if audio is on, even w/o sensors, so they're really not that important. Slug/scanner are almost strictly better.
Something that might be worth mentioning is that upgrading some of your seemingly useless systems can open up more blue text opportunities to gain new crew members. Two that come to mind are Crew Teleporters and an upgraded Medical Bay. If you have some spare scrap it can definitely be worth dumping it into a level for them. Any upgrade also acts as another tick of health for that system so it doesn’t go offline after sustaining one hit, so it’s not like you’re getting nothing out of upgrading it even if the bonus isn’t immediately helpful.
Also (just in general) I dont think you use the mind control very well. You often forget to use it. Its really good if you want to keep a system oppressed when they have multiple big targets. Say they have big weapons but also have cloaking, then its great to just get enough hits to take down cloaking, wait for a little bit for a crew to come along and fix it then MC them, and thats pretty much the cloaking gone for the rest of the fight. someone then usually goes off to fight them. so reducing the enemy crew count by 2 can be quite important. also MC'ing the pilot right as you fire can be extremely useful too as allowing all of your shots to connect can be incredibly useful.
tbh, you can sum up why cloaking is good by just saying cloaking gives you agency to control how much damage you take and where.
If your defense drones fail to shoot down a missile, or if you're failing to dodge a bunch of lasers with your engines and shields, you can easily cloak to guarantee you survive. If you evade enough shots naturally to where your shields stay up, don't need to cloak! if your shields go down and you're at risk of taking damage, use the cloak and you can get out of that situation! It's also a useful system at even level 1, as most volleys don't last more than 5 seconds. The only real exception is the need for higher levels of cloaking to avoid the phase 2 power surge, or if the missiles are not well timed with the power surge (can't cloak both in 5 seconds)
Was actually really interested in hearing your thoughts on systems as a whole. Wonderful!
One more round of counter-analysis!
-Engines: Definitely S Tier. In addition to the obvious evasion boost, the faster FTL charge gives you much more leeway in picking fights. Some ships absolutely cannot get by without early engine upgrades (Stealth B and C are prime examples).
-Backup Battery: It's a great system, but it's highly circumstantial. If you have a lot of fancy toys and high energy gunboating, then it's going to pay for itself come Flagship. That said, I beat the game in every ship before Advanced Edition, and it's not necessary. C tier is appropriate.
-Artillery Beam/Flak: D-Tier for me. It's an okay filler weapon early on and gives you inevitability. But as you say, it's inconsistent. Only time you should ever build into it is if you land an early Cloak (level 2+), because it synergizes nicely with your first barrage. Highly circumstantial.
-Cloaking: S-Tier. Utter gamebreaking system that messes with the A.I. and meta so badly. Only thing that can juke the super attacks of the Flagship with any real consistency. The only thing I will say against it is that the cruisers that rely solely on it for defense tend to have absolutely dreadful early games due to a lack of shields. With Shields+Cloak though is godly and will pay for itself several times over in saved hull repairs over the course of the game more often than not (or give you a powerful out vs the Rebel Flagship if bought late).
-Clone Bay: A-Tier at worst. I find Clone Bay to be superior to Med-Bay because it allows me to be far more aggressive with my crew. I admit, it took me a while to come around to Clone Bay myself, because it does take a completely different mindset to how you play FTL. This is especially true if you're an older pre-AE player who learned how to med-micro crew.
That said, once you learn how to adjust your risk management strategy and learn when to tactically respawn crew, it's quite rewarding and gives you some extra benefits MedBay can never offer (mostly event-related; for example, the infamous murder spider event is of little consequence with a Clone Bay at its worst, whereas your star pilot might just randomly get YOLO'd by RNGesus if you have a MedBay).
-Teleporter: A-Tier early, C-Tier late. Boarding strats provide more scrap and higher chances at getting loot vs destruction. Since scrap economy is paramount to actually winning this is obviously a very strong system and why so many boarding ships occupy the upper quartile of skilled FTL players' lists
That said, its value wanes as the game goes on, though it never truly falls off completely. The only thing holding this back from an S-Tier(Early) is the necessity for strong boarding crew and solid micro skills to provide any value.
-Door Controls: B-Tier. Doors level 2 is a life saver and fairly cheap for its effect as it slow both boarders and fires, giving you more time to ventilate either away. It's not a maximum tier priority, but I cannot count how many runs I've saved from early demise by upgrading my doors just once by Sector 3.
-Drones: B-Tier, nearly A-Tier. Shame about the ammo-dependency; I still think it's an unnecessary limitation. Anyway, contrary to what's claimed here, Combat/Beam Drones actually have a higher average DPS than all but the best ship mounted weapons. What actually holds them back vs gunboats is the ability for gunboats to coordinate barrage attacks. Due to how shields and subsystem damage works, this yields a metagame that always favors the gunboat.
Again: Drones are not nearly as bad as they're made out to be here, but they are still supplementary to your main gunboat/cannon strategy.
-Hacking: A-Tier, but only because of the exploit that prevents anti-drone defenses from working as intended.
If that exploit didn't exist, it'd be C-Tier in end game, just because so many ships have defense drones. Thankfully, the workaround is there.
-MedBay: C-Tier. A-Tier with Nano-Healing-Bots (Engi-A augment; also available as a quest reward in Engi space). Solid for funneling boarders. Otherwise, it's straight forward anti-attrition.
-Mind-Control: C-Tier. A-Tier for Boarding Strats. The ability to nullify Piloting straight up is pretty strong. Especially when you're restricted to inaccurate weapons by circumstance. It's also the best system for supporting boarding strats. Slugs are rare enemies anyway.
-O2: D-Tier. Basically exists as a technicality. Top tier FTL players run mostly vacuum ships even before Advanced Edition, and that should give you an idea of how unimportant this system really is.
-Piloting: D-Tier. You only upgrade this to pad your subsystem's health rather than the stated effect of the Auto-Pilot.
-Sensors: D-Tier. At best, a single upgrade gets you access to a handful of blue text options. Otherwise...well, it's not really that important.
-Shields: S-Tier. You do not know true suffering until you've done Stealth C on Hard and it's entirely due to the lack of Shields. Like Engines and Cloaking, it's one of those things where the collective defensive benefits are greater than the sum its parts. Tier 2 shields is usually the best early/first investment you can make.
-Weapons: S-Tier. Gunboats rule. It is technically possible to win with only boarding and drones, but the odds of success are really, really low even with the best ship for the attempt (Crystal B or Mantis B). I've personally seen that done exactly once and have never done it myself.
So for all practical purposes not related to enacting the Gambler's Fallacy over and over again, Weapons are of paramount importance.
Counter-Counter Analysis: Crew Tele can board flagship's missile room, disabling it and killing the crew member who can repair it. There is no doors to the missile room, no one to replace that dead crew member.
@@AbsurdlyLudicrous724on hard mode the rooms are connected right?
yes they are same as the event version
@@TtronX
Hacking is 100% the best subsystem in the game. Nothing else touches it. With cloaking you can cloak/hack cycle weapons indefinitely. You can drop evasion to 0 with an engine hack. You can hack shields. You can hack enemy drones. You can crew kill with it. If the drone defense thing didn't work it would absolutely be worth an extra 55 scrap to get the defense scram if you could find it. It's THAT good of a subsystem.
@@Setixir It's good, but you literally can't win without some combination of Shields/Engines/Cloak.
The same is absolutely not true of Hacking, and that's because the game's core dynamic isn't designed around it.
Still, it's very much worth picking up most of the time.
You forgot to say cloning also save your crew in events where they should have die
Also ships with 3 drones + drone recovery arm are so satisfaying and make run very easy (or i just better play with drones idk)
Drones get a bad rep because so many great gunboat options exist, while comparatively, there aren't that many good drones.
But the drones that are good are incredibly solid options. Being able to divide your offense between two subsystems has other benefits as well.
@@atmosdwagon4656 guns can be (and are by default) a primary source of winning battles. Aside from starting sectors you just can't rely on drones alone to win fights. So it is not just about of variety of good drones vs gun options. It is about the total lack of drone option to base your whole game strategy on.
So weapon system is essential for gunships and excellent thing to have on any other ship type. Drone system is an ok support system which can be substituted by better and more reliable systems most of the time.
@@tutzdesYT Pretty much, but my point was never that drones could replace guns outright.
Combat Drones have a higher DPS than all but the best guns and any sort of Ion Blast makes Beam drones incredibly strong options.
That said, I'm still scratching my head as to why they cost ammo when it's clear they were meant to supplement your offense rather than replace it outright.
Also the wiki likes to shit over the [Drone Reactor Booster], it literally increase Drones speed by 25%, in which the wiki says "dude, they boost drone movement from 50% to 62.5% how lame", yet they forget that [Combat Drones] don't have [Attack Speed] but [Movement Speed].
Tested it with the Vortex vs Torus and Yes, Vortex killed ships around ~50% faster with Combat I due to positioning faster which resulted on higher DPS.
I think it's the opposite man. If you play SUPER well, you definitely want the battery. If I play well I've got so many systems going, I've got to either have some Zoltan fxers or a backup battery if I want to run everything.
You can also depower engines/drones temporarily as needed, but yeah battery doesn't cost that much compared to power bars. Upgrading it usually isn't worth, but most ships should buy it (and remember to use it).
Advanced medbay is so useful. It feels like 1 in 5 events has a blue option for medbay, and a lot of those events don't have good outcomes if you don't have it.
The other problem with the teleporter is unless you drop 3 or 4 crew in their ship, you are not accomplishing much. Sure, in 1 v 1s you do better than the AI because you can be more clever, but overwhelming is just better.
Most ships cannot support more than 2 crew teleporters, making it relatively mediocre as a killing strategy, especially later on when enemy crews can be 5-7 aliens and you don't really have the time to mess around while they rain hell upon you.
Hacking and *select* boarding races can help with that. Although that still doesn't make things like Medbays a pain in the ass.
That's where clone bays come in though. Clone bay makes a size 2 teleporter work better. Rather than recalling your crew, you can beam more crew in.
Mind control can be great. A leveled up mindcontrol creating a "berzerk" enemy (boosted stats) can make your fights easy.
Downside:
1) against scout drones its only a battery that you can depower to give energy to other systems
2) no vision => no use. But a lvl2 sensor is cheap, but nebula fights would be a problem.
+ blue events bonus
Btw you should reconsider the rankings including blue events.
Med bay vs Clone bay are on same level if you consider blue events using clone.
Beamevents with artillery system...
etc
When you mind control the enemy pilot it drops their dodge to zero which is super useful for making sure your volleys land.
only if they have level 1 piloting, which later on ships don't
@@godlyvex5543 Correct, though ship autopilot is a lot worse than manned piloting, even at level 3. So it's a worthy consideration for MC. Competitive alternative use is to shoot out enemy weapons, then MC once they have 2 crew in there. More or less ends the fight, but it's more of a support subsystem than a primary one.
the world: no way Spearmintz could make another FTL tier list video, there simply isn't enough content in the game to rank
Spearmintz: hold my 3x fuel
You don't "play bad" and lose boarders, sometimes RNG affects you and there is little you can do, not often and yeah if you really think things through this situations are less common.
The thing is that clonebay is not to circumvent "being bad", it allows you to be extremely aggressive with your boarding as well as when defending, sure you might prefer medbay and so do I around 60% of the time but you are completely omitting the fact that with certain playstyles clonebay works nicely.
Not to mention clonebay opens up a fair bit of blue options and allows you to gamble on risky events.
Also the clone bay is always better if you can get the backup DNA bank, your people are never lost so long as your clone bay is not destroyed while everyone is dead.
Where-as Engi-medbot dispersal is so much harder to get, at least according to my experience.
also not to mention that about 2 risky lose crew events that you wouldnt take with medbay is all it takes to make your money back when you buy clonebay. Super useful!
@@harrgerth3863 yeah between that and aggressive boarding, clonebay opens up a wide array of possibilities.
I think you can actually send crew to enemy's pilot just before shooting so that he drops evasion in order to fight or send them to an important system which moves people away from their station (or into another one ) and not be afraid of shooting.
Medbay is great but clonebay is great as well.
Losing crew to boarding with medbay is not beholden to RNG in vanilla FTL. Also not MV, though there are a lot of new threats to memorize/more ships where you can't realistically do it.
Clone bay getting shot out is a risk too. I still like it for the events, but medbay boarding should not lose crew. If you do, you made a mistake. Sometimes a nuanced, detailed, hard to foresee w/o lots of experience mistake...but a mistake nonetheless.
When I played FTL, I liked using a repair drone drone recovery combo which allowed me to get 2 hull repaired for free each jump, or heal more/during a battle if you have drone part to spare.
Pretty sure pilot is the only mandatory subsystem is piloting, all others are optional on at least one ship
Spearmintz: "You can't really win with boarding."
Boarding only challenge runs: *My life is a lie!*
i find that hacking plus mind control is a good combo because if an enemy crewmember is in the hacked room, and you mindcontrol him, the rest of the enemy crew cant stop him because of the hacked doors
Mind control and teleport trivialize the final boss. You can pick off enemies one by one even without any good weapons just by mind controlling someone and then teleporting them onto your ship. Leave one and it's (almost) a guarantee. I messed up once because the one I left was in the beam weapon, so on phase 3 they died (since that part breaks off) and the ship went into AI mode.
did you know if you have both a teleporter and mind control you can teleport enemy units onto your ship? you can use this to beat the flagship with ease for all 3 phases because the crew does not re-spawn after it jumps away. just make sure not to kill the guy manning the blaster.
Great vid, and I generally agree on the list. I’d drop cloak 1 spot, bump mind control and back up battery up 1 each, and clone bay up 2 for the vast number of events it allows you to do without worrying about losing a crew member, but I’m mostly leaving this comment for the algorithm bump. You make great stuff, can’t wait to see more
24:50 the main use of upgrading piloting system main reason tank damage before becameing a seating duck
2 powers of oxygen can keep rooms with breaches oxygenated indefinitely
You can still do a quest tier list.
The video misses one key advantage of the clone bay- you can revive crew lost in events. This means you can take options that would normally be too risky.
I rate a lot of these things very very differently. First of all, boarding is very strong, assuming you have a 4 man teleporter. 2 man teleporters are still good if you have decent crew members for it. And yes, you can beat the flagship with it. (especially if you have a clone bay) Every time you smash a system they take a point of hull damage. If you kill the flagship crew it's basically over. It keeps power to the oxygen even though it has no crew. You can station someone in each weapon room, and leave them there, completely nullifying any threat on phase 1. If you have a clone bay you never have to recall your crew. You can instead send more crew. It's better with an upgraded clone bay and teleporter. Boarding allows you to completely take out their shields and cockpit pretty easily too, which allows your weapon fire to deal significant damage and support your boarders by destroying the med bay. In boarding combat, your melee skill doesn't actually matter that much, so the skill loss is irrelevant. If the flagship gets taken over by AI, you've basically won. It's very hard for the flagship to do anything after that, and as long as you have good shields and engines, you can survive the drone surge and laser burst in phase 2 and 3 with minimal effort. At that point, you really just need a way to get through the super shield in phase 3.
And of course the icing on the cake is the extra scrap from killing crew throughout the game instead of blasting the enemy ships to pieces. With this setup, even automated enemies with no oxygen are easy to handle. That's what the clone bay is for. Just send your dudes in and let them break systems before suffocating and getting cloned. You only need light weaponry to make a good boarding build work. It's far less reliant on finding good weapons, as you only need to upgrade systems to make the build better, and you can dedicate your scrap to shields and engines rather than the weapons system which is very expensive. Clone bay requires a very different playstyle compared to other builds. If you treat it too much like a bad med bay, then you aren't utilizing its strengths.
It's usually better to just leave 1 guy alive so that the flagship never gets taken over by the AI. Reason being is that if there's 1 human alive that single guy has to go around repairing everything, but once the AI takes over it does the same thing that the automated black ships do and auto-repair rooms whenever they want. So usually you can just leave the beam guy alive and essentially soft lock the flagship from repairs.
@@bloodwolf2609 It's beneficial for the enemy to repair its systems though. You need them repaired for your crew to break them again. More DPS that way, and if they get a system or two back to one bar it's really not gonna hurt you, especially if you can put a breach in the important rooms (AI can't repair a breached room)
@@Zebo12345678 oh I didnt know that about breached rooms, I suppose it makes sense for a boarding only with no weapons to let them repair and re-break for damage, but usually I just have hybrid boarding and weapons so once all their shields and weapons are gone its just free to shoot them if they cant reapair, but your way makes sense too.
@@bloodwolf2609 I play a lot of modded FTL, so breaching weapons and pure boarding loadouts are more common than in vanilla. That's why I used those strategies I mentioned.
The whole "AI can't repair breaches" thing is from vanilla though. Basically, the auto repair _tries_ to repair the room, but breaches take precedent (just like if it were crew doing it) and the AI has a 0x modifier for breach repair, which means it gets caught up infinitely trying to repair a breach it can't do.
It's unclear if that's a bug or an intended mechanic, but it's very useful vs auto ships!
Drones could need some love.
Issues:
- high energy cost
for the same 2-3 power each drone need you have a more stable, controlled weapon. The only benefit here in case the system itself is damaged/hack you dont lose your full offensive power, but... in most cases you need the full burst anyway. At lategame if you loose even one wepon there is a chance you cant peel the 4 layer shields off
- need drone part
and unlike missiles it is rares and hell expensive
- easily shut down
a weapon just shoots until you have a working system
however if a drone is fully opertional
a) maybe it isnt even effective at all (beam drone is useless until you have something to peel shields off)
b) can be shot down by a random projectile
c) can be countered (defensive drones hard counter your parts)
d) enviromental hazards effect them hard. Asteroid field? That will cost a lot.
+ can the enemy have drone jammers what you can have as augmentation?
- augments are not... amazing either.
drone recovery arm would be amazing if enemy drone parts could be collected too
or even better just pick up the schematic itself if it floats around you? This could be an interesting balance decision because +20-40 scrap IF you can collect, carry it AND take it to a store...
Love the ftl stuff. I’ve got about 200 hrs in the game. Just redownload from steam on new labtop last night and it’s so fun! Been watching your teir list videos to get a reminder and an outside opinion. The doors down one vs the med bay up one and maybe drones should be same teir as crew teleport. No risk of your crew dying. Can do board and breach for 1 drone piece or protect or heal up your damage bay. Idk it’s a great list and great insight. Thanks for all the work you put in… 2 years ago! 😂
I'd swap Hacking and Cloaking. Hacking just removes so much randomness from the game and with power on-off cheese (toggling the power to get past defense drones), you can use it against literally any target. With it, you don't rely on the RNG to get the weapons you need to get past the flagship's shields.
Cloaking is very useful, but it's expensive and on my recent Hard runs I was still able to win without it. With Hacking, you can annihilate the Flagship before it can get off too many rockets and power surges. Hacking gives the added bonus of cutting the Flagship in half, greatly slowing down repairs to their piloting / shields / rocket turret.
I'd argue that it's mandatory to have one of the Medbay or Clonebay (looking at you Slug B), but once you have it, you never need to pay scrap to change to the other. Upgrading 1 power to Medbay is useful -- it has lots of blue options that avoid crew loss. I'd also put Clonebay at "nice bonus" because it lets you take many dangerous options like the aliens spiders without much risk.
Upgrading piloting 1 bar is also very nice. It prevents a stray rocket from completely knocking it out and bringing dodge down to 0.
I used to feel exactly the same about the clonebay, but it can be really useful with certain builds. Particularly boarding, you just need to upgrade it, and you can crew kill bigger ships. Also, you don't have to worry about giant alien spiders.
I'd say in vanilla, medbay is better, but on multiverse it's a tough call if you get offered a clonebay cheap. You really don't lose that many skill points on a crew death either.
In Multiverse I actually prefer Clone Bay to Medbay due to the combinations of eg. fragile overclocked zoltans, and Medics/Regenerating Crew also nasty anti crew weapons/borders
@@EricPhail yeah, exactly. It's real easy to lose crew too, with saboteurs and such
Idk I think mind control is a lot better for boarding ships than hacking. It makes the flagship completely trivial.
Everything you said about doors is why I prefer having clonebay on non-boarding runs. I don’t often have to actually deal with boarders, and having clonebay let’s you take risky decisions and events with your crew.
Good analysis, just a few important things that you didn't mention, or that I'd emphasise, from my own runs:
-upgraded medbays and oxygen are harder to break. Also being able to heal up faster and replenish airless rooms faster (typically to fix a broken system after venting boarders) has proved decisive in quite a few battles
-upgraded sensors come into play in more than a few situations, typically attempting to find ships in nebula areas.
-Upgraded Artillery and a defensive build are really easy to do effectively. Just get Defence drone 1, good shields and settle for long battles. The only challenge was cracking fleeing ships in time before they charged their FTL. The vast majority of runs I managed to pick up suitable main weapons to deal with this. On the occasions when I failed to do so, it was admittedly disastrous though.
-Defence 1 drone is so good, it's put Drones in 2nd tier for me. It saves me so much money not repairing damage from missiles, I'd say the investment pays for itself twice over in an average run. Especially useful against that horrible triple shot launcher on the flagship.
Clone bay is always superior! Get the teleport add-on that heals your dudes when you board and un-board. And on the final battle, you shoot your guys over 2 at a time to hit the weapons systems; you start with the missiles system.
По поводу мультивселенной: можно использовать контроль разума вместе с телепортом для почти гарантированного уничтожения экипажа. Это позволит отбить потраченный лом, ослабит врага и даже даст дополнительнын варианты выбора. А ещё я считаю, есть два варианта обороны: полные щиты, 1-е двигатели и 1-я маскировка; или отсутствие щитов, минимум 5-е двигатели, 5-я маскировка и какой-нибудь защитный дрон (или 2).
Hey Spearmintz, great video! Even with several hundred hours in this game, it was nice to see what a fellow player thinks of the systems. A couple little details though I thought were worth mentioning:
Rock B actually starts without doors, being the only ship to do so.
The autopilot bonus is actually a little worse than you said. The autopilot only kicks in if there's no friendly crew in the room at all, meaning that starting with an unskilled pilot with 40% dodge with level 2 piloting, the pilot would stop manning the system, bringing evasion down to 35%, and then he would leave and the autopilot would activate, with the evasion dropping to 17% because FTL hates rounding up to make things easier for you.
Finally, Drone Control and Artillery especially can make things harder for the player, because both situational systems take up a valuable system slot that could be better used by something else. Especially on Mantis B and Federation C, where both ships are only allowed one additional system because of drones/arty, making them feel almost like a direct hindrance most of the time. Other than that, I think what you said makes sense and is correct. Thanks for reading my two cents lol
Power swapping to get the most out of drones takes more knowledge + micro too. Rarely see players use combat drone to break shields so ion can hit weapons faster than opposing weapons in Engi A for example, but in some early fights that outright guarantees against damage early on (assuming the shots don't miss, that is). Can also be used as part of a weapon system volley with depower + power at right timing (depower just before drone light turns green), which again rookies don't use at all and would be hard for the no-pause challenge players to do reliably too (though not impossible). Even used optimally it's worse than alternatives, but it's way better than artillery systems.
12:00 Killing the whole crew on the flagship actually makes it harder for you to win, because the ship turns into a giant auto scout and gets auto repair.
Not true at all. Autorepair is pretty slow, and boarding uncontested + breaking multiple systems rapidly in phases 2 and 3 makes them a lot less threatening.
Once a system is broken, a single crew hanging out in the room can prevent missiles/lasers from firing again by repeatedly breaking them. Similarly, AI can't repair hull breaches or rooms with fires, and in vanilla FTL RFS doesn't drain oxygen when it loses crew. Ships with crew TP generally should wipe out RFS crew in phase 1 and then immediately board/break missiles + drones ASAP in phase 2. Then either use Zoltan bypass or clear supershield and break weapons + MC in phase 3, too.
It's a bit harder to crew wipe RFS safely on hard in phase 1, but in phases 2/3 having missiles + lasers connected to main ship by doors means that uncontested boarding is even better there.
I agree with Trevor, killing the crew is most of the time a big mistake in vanilla. The TP is situational. The RFS AI is a 20% base dodge autoship with 30 Hull, auto repair and powersurge. You'd like to let a crew alive and bait him in O2 or medbay, preventing the ship to dodge or repair shields and artillery
@@Masteuhrcard Yes, and TP our crew, it's less people to repair domages on your ship when you have so many chance to take dommage in this partucular battle.
You never kill the whole crew, you kill everyone except for the guy in the laser department. I’ve found even tier 3 flagship fairly easy when they can’t repair shields or piloting.
I prefer to have level 2 of everything just because when a system is destroyed you take extra hull damage. So if the system is level 1 it is just a weak spot.
The clone bay is useful for certain events where someone could get killed and having a teleporter that heals you makes the clone bay more useful.
Drones would be S Tier if he knew about the hull repair drone. That saved me so many runs! So many runs the flagship did more than 40 hull damage and I still won.
I’ve actually never seen one in all my years of ftl
The only reason I would put Hacking higher personally is all the blue events it can trigger. Most of the time it's stopping yourself from getting hacked which is incredible, or even hacking an abandoned ship for free area scan and scrap. I think it's S-tier for sure.
a niche use for level 2 O2 is that (iirc) if a room has a breach, it can keep the O2 above the level where your crew suffocate
similarly, a niche use for level 2 medbay is that it heals faster than suffocation damage
also, while not at all necessary, killing all the crew of a ship gives slightly higher rewards than outright destroying it (besides in rebel controlled space; those are still only 1 fuel)
Biggest advantage to upgrading helm is the extra hit point so a stray shot doesn’t tank your evasion to 0.
Mind control can prevent enemies from repairing a system, it should be noted- any enemies that enter the same room will have to fight, instead of repair
Honestly i always get at least oxygen 2 by the 4th system. If a level 2 or 3 hacking hits your oxygen 1 you get like 20-40 seconds till you die unless you target enemy hacking (which keeps their weapons online) or have a clone bay and just accept 100% fatalities.
I love the teleporter for the final fight, especially with cloaking. Makes taking out the flagships big guns easy as you can send a crew to overpower tbe defender and destroy the system before they get a chance to fire.
My favourite strategy with boarding (against the flagship) is to teleport into it's artillery and kill the crew inside, or force them into the main hold with mind control (if you mind control someone in a room full of friendlies they'll be forced out) where they'll die due to the large amount of crew inside the main section, then I slowly but surely make my way around to killing every single crew member but one (to make sure the auto repairs come in and repair the permanently broken artillery once they have been destroyed each phase)
Mind control is definitely a great multi purpose system. It can assist with boarding offense and defense, it can counter enemy MC, it can stop a system repair from happening and help deal more damage to it, and best of all with an extra crew parked in sensors or a cheap sensor upgrade you can typically mc their pilot for your crucial first offensive volley to guarantee no misses and maximum damage. Helping to put the enemy into recovery mode on that first volley can be crucial. I agree that it isn't as useful as hacking and is way below stealth, but it has a lot of uses for almost any build or play style.
Sensors (at least until level 2) are super underrated in my opinion. They're fairly cheap to upgrade, make non-boarding crew kills easier by seeing the health of the enemy crew and fires on the enemy ship, makes it possible to use mind control aggresively without needing a Slug crew (which can be used for crew kills or lowering evasion by MCing the pilot), and comes with some neat blue options. For 35 scrap, that's some pretty great value in my opinion.
Personally I like the clone bay more because it protects you from events that kill your crew. Like the giant alien spiders, if it kills a crew then you can just clone him and move one
If you have the cash, upgraded O2 means you can repair a room with a hull breach, especially if you open the doors to the adjacent rooms. Also, it is super fun to use level 1 mind control and transporters to empty an enemy ship of crew (unless they have a cloning bay). Speaking of which, a clone bay plus reconstructive teleport is also fun for a boarding run.
This small game was released in 2012 and people are still making videos. FTL is just a great game.
I like to upgrade the oxygen if I have extra scrap late game. It gives the system some extra cushion if it gets hit so I can prioritize other things to micromanage in the flagship fight for example.
You need sensors if you use MC and don't have LF sensors or slug crew
Cloaking is great
"If you struggle winning the game, use this"
Funny you mention that, my first win on Normal before the DLC was with the Stealth Ship lol
Same.
Stealth A isn't even a good ship, but the fact that it shoves cloaking in your face was enough to push me to a win before I knew what Inwas doing.
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 Yes, it really forces you to change tactics and exploit cloaking as hard as you can. Actually doing a stealth run in Multiverse right now lol.
Additional thing about engines-upgraded engines means your pilot and engineer train more quickly (more misses == more xp). vital to get early if you aren't doing crew training cheese
Got my first win after this. Thanks!
I learned the hard way why the clone bay can be key to success, but I do agree that it's very situational. In my case, I was playing multiverse and happened to get a lot of free zoltan crew members through good luck in events, having one, I used the upgrade that doubles their power output at the cost of reducing their health and shortly after I found myself powering level 3 shields with 2 zoltans (no reactor power invested), engines with one and partially powering my weapons. I thought medbot dispersal would be good enough to compensate as it's not a hard augment in multiverse, picked up zoltan shields and became a power house.... until I found the one guy with powerful missles that can aim, quickly lost almost all my crew. I recovered but the setback eventually led to the run being thrown. So yeah, just felt like sharing that to ease the pain a bit lol, was such a good run rng wise.
I can agree that autopilot doesn't help that much, but upgrading oxygen or piloting near the end is super useful. The easiest way to death spiral on the flagship is getting smacked in the piloting and suddenly getting hit by everything.
My primary use for mind control is to hit the pilot right before my barrage hits--- ensure some quality hits to steer the combat.
Only thing I will say for clone bay, is in certain circumstances where you have a couple extras (in the lanius ship at least) for a boarding party, you don't have to worry about stat loss, cause you throw them out and get more back. But completely fair rating, cause it is very situational trying to suicide kill off some people for better loot.
The main problem with backup battery is that unless you max out your reactor power you might as well have spent the scrap you used for the battery on more reactor power
Backup battery is 35 scrap for 2 temporary power, which isn't much worse than regular power. Reactor upgrades for 2 power become more expensive than that quickly. Also, if you don't purchase it, it stays in your shop subsystem pool and you get fewer shots at cloaking/hacking in future stores. Most ships should buy it.
My main issue with the clone bay vs med bay ratio is that there are just too many run ending scenarios an upgraded med bay can solve that the clone bay can't. Venting out-of-control fires. Forcing a boarding crew to fight against impossible odds. And of course, my favorite. The doors are broken, the O2 is out, the ship is devoid of breathable air. The clone bay doesn't clone fast enough to cycle out your crew members, whereas a fully upgraded med bay allows you to relay a full size crew between surviving in a complete vacuum and fixing the problem.
But the clone bay also lets your crew survive random events that would otherwise kill them. A clone bay means you can take a lot more risk with the random text events and get more rewards for them.
The flak artillery fully upgraded fires 1 second faster than the flak 2 with the same power cost
Flak 2 is 3 power and while both receive auto-reloader bonuses, arty flak can't receive manning bonus, so flak 2 is better.
liking commenting and subscribing :) love these tierlists, ive played ftl a lot but its still interesting to see someone elses view point on it all :)
Mind controlling + bording is evil on the enemy flagship. Mind control the enemy, then teleport them on at the time and gang up on the one. Repeat until the enemy ship is empty
11:25 the clone bay negates 99% of the events that kill your crew, not being able to heal your crew is kind of annoying, but its worth it for the events. Although its also a risk if your clone bay gets destroyed or ioned while your crew are regenerating then theres nothing you can do, unless you have backup DNA bank.
slightly facetious
Whatdoesthatevenmean
Theres so much advice I disagree with in here. Clone bay is just plain better than med bay if yoire boarding. Its not about being better with micro and not losing crew its about flexibility. I can kill auto scouts with boarding if inhave clone bay. I have access to a ton of risky events with clome bay. Giant alien spiders? No problem
Boarding yields higher scrap rewards so teleporter is extremely valuable if you start with it but rarely worth buying it unless you absolutely cant find any offensive upgrades.
This reads like a tier list of someone who plays on easy and normal.
Lets gooooooo. I’m sure you already had this idea in mind but I remember suggesting something like this a few weeks ago so I’m going to take credit
Good video as always, keep it up!
Great video. Just stumbled upon the channel and im really enjoying the multiverse series. Good luck on growing the channel
New spearmintz tier list. Just when I thought he had done 'em all!!! Day = MADE
my tactic (not agains flagship) is to hack oxygen then kill it with weapon or hack the med bay + teleport (hacked med harm enemy/ turn off hacked so the door dont block enemy - use troop to lure them in - turn on hack lv 3 - all full health enemy die ). I like to this cause troop kill get more than ship kill.
I like how making tier lists on every conceivable game concept of FTL is becoming this running meme of your channel
Make a tier list of the space backdrops.
For many scraps, Hack for closing doors and cut acces to the crew + incendiary weapons. You don't specialy hack a big system with this strategy but cut acces to maidbay or/and burning systems with 2 doors locked, that's so good.
One of the two times I did win I was an Engi ship with a couple weapons pretty much solely used on the shields and ion on other systems when I had the chance. The power house though was my level 2 attack and defense drones, or at least a set up like that. Also I had a repair drone that pretty much saved my life throughout the run even though I didnt use it in the last fight
For the teleporter there are isolated weapons on the flagship that you can permanently disable with it.
You have to bet NL's viewer is watching this video now.
no lie im hoping Northernlion's viewers find my channel with the recent influx of pogged FTL content
@@spearmintz1 No lie, I literally watched a few of your tier list guides these past few days due to playing FTL again. You reminded me how addicting the game is again after all these years lol.
My hot take on o2s: I slept on them when I was a nub and now I always get at least level 2-3 by the Flagship, and my win rates went up considerably because the Flagship always, *_always_* spams Boarding Drones in phase 2, which causes a hull breach. If it goes in your cockpit, if you only have level 1 oxygen, you have to leave the room with a 75% healthy boarding drone in there, heal people up, and come back in afterward to kill the boarding drone while the oxygen in the room is already gone. You might need to send people in waves. Devastating. You can lose a run just off of that alone, especially with low crew count, and then what if the flagship sends a boarding drone back into your cockpit? Now you lose for sure even if you had a fantastic run. With level 2 you can leave the doors open to keep oxygen in the room and make it easier to fight off the drone, but with level 3 you can straight up leave the doors closed for safety and just send a second guy in to help the pilot kill the drone, fix the breach, and then not drop below 100% oxygen.
Even level 2 Oxygen makes runs that you are about to lose still winnable. At level 2, if you have the doors open, you can actually fill a breached room that has been drained of oxygen with enough oxygen to safely repair it and barely lose o2 any in your ship. This can be game-deciding if they breached your medbay and everyone is at 15 health. At level 3, a single hull breach can't even drop your o2 below 100% and you can leave the doors closed. Level 2-3 also gives you blue options for safely navigating slug sectors that hack your oxygen without putting a timer on the fight. If they have high evasion and good shields, one bad roll can create an unwinnable fight you have to run from. In later sectors, that can cost you upwards of 60-70 scrap, so just off one of those fights, the Oxygen system pays for both its upgrades.
With level 2-3 oxygen, you can straight up let them put holes in your ship and ignore them until after the fight. It also means your O2 can take a stray bullet or two and you won't be screwed if you don't notice in time. Yes, it doesn't win the game, it only helps you Not Lose, but you could say the same about Engines and Shields and Cloaking, all of which are S tier. Some things cause you to lose extremely quickly even in an otherwise perfect run. Good engines are useless if you have no pilot, and even with level 3 piloting you lose about half your evasion with the loss of the pilot's manning bonus, so having the capability to keep your pilot in the cockpit even with a boarding drone in there is nothing to scoff at. Sometimes, you need to go through an extended period of Please Don't Kill Me because they shot your weapon system to 0, and if Engines and Shields and Cloaking are S tier for the same reasons, why is Oxygen so low when it does the same thing for way less in situations you are guaranteed to face? You don't even need to keep them powered most of the time, and that's not a strike against it. It means Oxygen upgrades don't need to be paired with a mandatory Reactor upgrade.
You explained the backup battery well, but it's 35 for 2 reactor power. Pretty good once it starts costing 25+ a tick to upgrade reactor
I upgrade piloting and sensors both to level 2 fairly early. They are cheap upgrades, don't require power, but there are number of events that use both, so they pay for themselves fairly quickly.
Mind control is just as useful as a defense. For those that don't know, if one of your crew members is taken over through mind control, you can use it on him to stop it.
Also if your ship is boarded by four laniuses, mind control becomes really handy.