Mantis B ship... whooo-boy, that's a hard one to play under CE! I just did a little experiment, 100 games using the Mantis B. Out of those 100 games there were 76 that never even made it out of the first sector, and of the remaining 24, only 8 made it to the third sector, and none made it to the fourth.
Set on EASY.
Now yeah, I could have just had a really bad string with the RNG, but I think a better answer is that the ship configuration pretty much sucks. The only offensive weapon the ship has is that boosterless boarding drone, and the possibility of any kind of functional weapons upgrade is pretty damn slim.
The boarding drone is fine if you're facing an opponent that has no medbay, no defense drones, and all ship's rooms connected. Which describes maybe 1 ship in 3 in the first couple of sectors. Against anything else the bloody thing is just a waste of power and drone parts.
Meanwhile, you have no other weapons at all, and even if you find one or get lucky enough to make it to a store that actually
has weapons (instead of high priced drones or just more crew), you then need to hope it doesn't require more than one bar of power (because the price for that next bar is 60 scrap, which you don't have because you don't have any decent weapons to get more scrap with - rinse, lather, repeat), doesn't require a missile (you start with zero), and that you can hold your breath long enough to use it without dropping shields. And speaking of shields, having level 2 shields is nice, but you have no evasion ability at all, so every enemy shot is almost guaranteed to hit. Against an enemy with multiple weapons (ie: just about ALL of them) you're a sitting duck. And your damn Mantis crew is all thumbs (claws?) when it comes to fixing what's going to get broken.
I'm all for giving the player a challenge, but this goes beyond "challenge" and gets deep into "you
bleeping sonofabi..." territory.
Something needs to change, maybe even multiple somethings. The inability to meaningfully upgrade weapons in the first sector (for all intents and purposes due to the extreme cost and negative likelihood of locating anything to upgrade
to) is what I'd address. Maybe a slow missile weapon? Lower cost for that second weapons bar? Start with two bars (and one more bar of power)?
Or how about ditching the useless defense drone (the only purpose it really serves is its trade-in value when you finally get to a store with something you want to buy - or for trying to just survive long enough against a missile wielding foe, or in an asteroid zone, to power up the FTL and jump) in favor of an offensive drone?
Hell, I'd even be happy with a couple more crew! As it is now you only get two, and while you can teleport you're pretty much condemning anyone who does to death because the enemy crew will likely kill them before your teleporter recharges and you can bring them back. And sending any crew off the ship completely negates whatever evasion ability you may have upgraded to, since that requires two crew to function (one at the helm, the other in the engine bay), and pretty much turns the ship into a space-going pinata. At least if you had a third or fourth crewman you could teleport them. (Provided you're not battling one of those mother fwonking AI ships with no air and no fwonking doors between compartments that seem to make up 50% of the ships you encounter... and most will have level 3 or 4 missile weapons to boot.)
However, semicolon has more uses than that (wikipedia page presents them quite nicely).
