Postby Leylite » Mon Mar 31, 2014 4:52 pm
Well, I was playing a round with the Engi B on Normal (named it the "Cardboard Tube"). I've already won with this ship on Normal (and am somewhat familiar with what you have to do with it to win), so I pursued the normal strategy - upgrade shields to level 2, engines up to around 3, and then save up scrap to get a weapon. I didn't see a shop with a weapon until the end of sector 2, so at that point I decided I absolutely had to buy a weapon so I could kill ships with 2 shields.
The shop was offering a Healing Burst, a Fire Beam, and a Heavy Laser II. Thinking that the main thing I needed to do was increase the number of projectiles I could fire, I got the Heavy Laser II, and bought an extra weapons level (so I could fire the Heavy Laser II and Heavy Laser I.)
I ended up having some severe problems penetrating 2-shield ships mostly because I had to rely on all three projectiles hitting - but once they did, they did great damage, oftentimes causing the wonderful "hull breach noise". It's too bad this ship doesn't start with Sensors 2; I'd love to see the enemy crew panicking about those.
Eventually I managed to get a Defense Drone, and some more weaponry - but always with low numbers of projectiles - so my final loadout going into Sector 7 was Heavy Laser II, Hull Laser I and Burst Laser I, for a total of six projectiles.
As far as crew was concerned, I lucked out and got a Rockman from a slaver surrender in sector 3, but unfortunately lost him by getting greedy - I happened upon the "cave madman event" without a level 2 medbay, and decided to try my luck as I only had three crew at the time. The Rockman died and I was left with 2 engi on-board. I ended up buying a Human at the start of a Mantis Homeworlds, and later picked up another human and Engi.
In Sector 7, I upgraded my weapons enough to have all three weapons online at once, and leveled up shields to 4. At the end of the sector, I saw a store and had 149 scrap. I was hoping to buy a teleporter, but despite the store having systems, the only two systems available were Sensors and Cloaking. The Rebels were two jumps away from the store, so I didn't have time to go to another encounter, get 1 more scrap, and jump back. So I went directly to the Last Stand, with nothing but shields and engines 7 to protect me.
I had a couple of battles in Sector 8 against an Auto-Scout and a Rebel Rigger; both of them were really stalemate-y - they couldn't hurt me because their weapons timings were off, but I had to keep firing until 5 out of 6 of my projectiles hit (and I damaged shields by 2 - at this point I was no longer targetting piloting since level 3 piloting was common). I eventually managed to win those battles without taking a scratch.
Finally, I was at the Flagship. I didn't have a teleporter or a cloak, so I knew ahead of time that I was going to be taking damage from the triple missile launcher until I could take it offline. I focused all my fire on the missile launcher, trying to kill the manner with the Heavy Lasers. I finally succeeded, after taking about 6 damage. After that, I just barely managed to kill the guy manning the triple lasers - I figured that would be the most important since in phase 2 the lasers can contribute to dropping the player's shields.
Phase 2 was pretty rough - despite having killed the two relevant crewmembers in phase 1, it took me quite a while to actually hit the missile launcher, and in the meantime I was taking missile damage. I was fine for the first drone surge, but the second drone surge generated 4 normal anti-ship and 2 beam, so I took about five damage for that one despite putting all my power into engines. Finally I managed to destroy the missile launcher, then the lasers, and from there I was mostly safe - shot down the shields and defeated that phase without any more issues. I checked to see if there were any repair stations left, but there were not - so I entered Phase 3 with about half hull.
It was phase 3 where things really came to a head. In theory, a Heavy Laser II, a Hull Laser I and a Burst Laser I should have been able to take down the Zoltan Shield relatively quickly. In practice, I was getting a lot of misses. It was at this point, more than any other, that I rued not having an attack drone of any kind. Missile after missile kept hitting me - some missed, and some were shot down by the Defense Drone, but I was definitely taking some damage. The first power surge completely missed me, but the missiles took me down to about half hull.
After I took the Zoltan Shield down, I finally managed to damage the missile launcher by 2, but then whiffed the next volley, and the Flagship elected to regenerate its super shields. After about three or four volleys I was able to take down the shields again.
Just as I was trying to kill the missile launcher for good, the Flagship fired three more rockets. All three of them hit, and destroyed the Engi B.
So yeah, I wasn't even particularly angry about that, just kind of bemused that, due to not really having enough projectiles in the air, I ended up taking about 20 hull damage worth of missiles due to also not having a cloak or a teleporter. Something to keep in mind for the next time!
