Subset Games Forum

FYI, catsclaw, crew only get combat experience for kills (or for damaging systems, but we're looking at being boarded). Don't fight fair - if you can outnumber your boarders, try to do that. If you don't have enough crew yet, see if you can get the boarders to fight you in the medbay.

Rooms next to space vent very fast; internal rooms more slowly, so depower your life support so they run out of air faster (and remember to power it up later). If the boarders are in a room with a system you don't want them to damage, keep a couple crewmen fighting until air runs out so the boarders don't have time to fully damage a level, then run to the medbay. You can even dance one crewman in and out of the room to distract boarders.

Pause is your friend - pause often.

Okay, here's another situation: I had just jumped into the second sector. I jumped to a location which had a sun, and was immediately boarded by two Rocks. I retreated back to the medbay, and just watched as they destroyed everything in the ship and the solar flares set the entire ship on fire. By the time they reached the medbay, there was no oxygen in the rest of the ship, and I had no opportunity to repair anything.

What should I have done?

As always, immediately pause after a hostile event happens. Tell everyone except the pilot to retreat to the medbay. Then, open every door on the ship except the ones to the medbay and the helm (you need a pilot to charge your engines to get away from the sun). This will make the rooms vent particularly fast and get the Rockmen to stop attacking your systems quickly. If they head toward the helm, vent that too (Your pilot should be able to survive for a bit. If he gets low on health, just temporarily send him to the medbay). Once the Rockmen are in your medbay, you can close all the doors on the ship; they won't try to leave even when there is air in the ship again. This will prevent your pilot from suffocating and won't leave you completely screwed over if the first flare damages your door control or life support. And even a lvl 1 medbay can keep a single person alive against 2 Rockmen for quite a while, so if you really need everyone else on fire control, you can.
An extra trick if you have more than 3 crew that you need in the medbay is to have extras move back and forth between rooms that would take a path through the medbay; they will still heal while walking through.

Another thing you should know is that you can control the arrangement of people in a room. The positions go like this:
- _ _
|1|2|
|3|4|
So the first person sent to a room will go to spot 1, second to spot 2, etc. (If the room contains a mannable system, the manning station takes first priority) This is useful because if someone getting attacked in position 1 is almost dead, but someone in position 2 is full health and not getting attacked, you can pause, tell them both to leave the room, tell person 2 to re-enter the room, and then tell person 1 to re-enter the room. Unpause and the crew will switch spaces, letting person 1 continue fighting without dying.

catsclaw wrote:Okay, here's another situation: I had just jumped into the second sector. I jumped to a location which had a sun, and was immediately boarded by two Rocks. I retreated back to the medbay, and just watched as they destroyed everything in the ship and the solar flares set the entire ship on fire. By the time they reached the medbay, there was no oxygen in the rest of the ship, and I had no opportunity to repair anything.

What should I have done?

You forgot to vent the o2.

Everything I said about Mantises works for Rockmen. And the lack of air means fires go out quickly.

Watch out, though, as solar flares sometimes take systems down and if your doors go down you can't close them, and if O2 goes down you can't get air back in your rooms. So in those situations I would only selectively vent air from rooms to herd the rockmen around.

You should (almost) never allow an enemy boarding team to just break your stuff. You have airlocks for a reason. Use them!

I had vented all the air in the ship. That was the problem. The boarding party destroyed the door controls, and when I sent someone to fix it, they asphyxiated.

You vented ALL the air in the ship? Don't do that.

Vent ALL the air in the ship EXCEPT the medbay and cockpit. Boarders won't stay in an air-free room if there is a room with air available to go to, even if they can't get to that room they'll try to go to it.

Literally: In normal circumstances if the boarders damage ANY system, you're doing something wrong.

This is actually one of the biggest issues with FTL - it *feels* luck-heavy when in reality it has a deceptively high skill-ceiling and can be won virtually every single time. When I had 20 hours in the game, I admit I thought the game was luck-heavy - I figured luck has a huge factor on Normal difficulty and somewhat dismissed the game (one of only 2 cases I can think of where this happened in some 1500 different games played in my life). Eventually I came back to it, got better, and proved that luck is not required to win in front of hundreds of people.

I think it's actually the opposite. It's possible to run with astonishingly GOOD luck for so long, that once you hit an enemy that you should have been ready for, you're not because the lucky enemies you were facing previously were no match for your actually subpar ship.