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stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 3:40 am
by RealmOfJustice
I must say after I have tried to kill the boss over 20 times and no luck it is very annoying.

My last try I used my teleporter to send guys over and destroy subsystems, unfortunately I blew the ship up with my guys still on board. So in the next fight as a last ditch effort I had so send my remaining guys over to fight, because my weapons were inferior. And due to a bug I couldn't send them over after I fought the boss a 2nd time, so I just got annihilated.

Another time I killed the boss 3 times and on the last time I need to kill it I was going to make a last stand at my base. If the boss reaches your base regardless of whether your there or not you still lose.

Half the time I get to the boss but I ran across so few stores or at least ones I needed... too many with just personnel and not enough weapons... and I get wasted just because my ship wasn't outfitted enough either add a few more stores in the later levels or just a 1 or 2 more levels!

I feel very stressed because I try so hard to get to the end, only to be completely out matched meaning I have to play 3 or 4 more games to have at least 1 where I am strong enough to fight the boss on some equal footing

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 4:01 am
by talhydras
EDIT: Some spoilers as to the nature of the final encounter.

In my experience, you really need cloaking - the teleporter is also very useful because the turret rooms are not connected to the main hull. You can beam over guys at your leisure to disable those and it trivializes much of the fight.

Missiles are EXTREMELY effective due to their shield-piercing nature in the first two rounds. I highly recommend doing whatever it takes to disable their piloting or engines (the teleporter can help here) and then unloading with whatever missiles you've got.

Double antiship drones can help keep their shields heavily suppressed. I need to try to take the Engi ship to the endgame and see if I can get three - that would be pretty amazing with the drone recovery arm.

Above all else - micromanage! Pause FREQUENTLY to keep track of your boarders, your power, any fires or breaches you may have on your ship, cloak to avoid incoming missiles, the works. That 4-point shield with a max-skill crewman on it is going to be all but impossible to take on with most conventional laser weapons, so don't waste the power trying. Sneak around the shield by teleporting over a pair of kung-fu mantises to beat up their guys and reduce their maneuverability. Then power up some missiles to blow away their medbay while beaming your mantises back to get healed - unload missiles on their shield generator while their guys are busy fixing other things or getting healed, then power up the drones and lasers and start chipping away at it.

And it bears repeating - Pause FREQUENTLY. Out of all the specials, cloak is far and away the most useful as it can avoid that triple missile volley and the attacks of Stage 3. Then I'd recommend teleporter second - those turrets are in their own rooms, go send some guys in with crowbars to mess 'em up. Drones can be useful, but they aren't as directly applicable as those first two.

Hope that helped!

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 4:59 am
by TenLetters
Basically what talhydras said. I think the fight isn't that bad as long as you know what's coming. This is clearly spoilers. What I think you need:

>Stealth
>Shields 3/4, manned at all times
>Some way to kill the missile launcher

I'm sure there are other ways to go about it, but I've just stuck with what I know.

>Stealth: This lets you ignore the super weapons on stages 2 and 3, namely the drone mass and the huge array of lasers and whatever. It gives you a warning, once you see it activate you hit Stealth, and it's all good.
>Shields 3/4, manned at all times: This'll let you tank everything else that shields can tank.
>Some way to kill the missile launcher. The one gun that shoots missiles (the third from the left) is your only real threat. You can't stealth it or you'll be getting hit by the moves in stages 2 and 3, so you need to just take it down. It is separated from everything else, so teleporting on two units will make short work. You can also use missiles or anything else.

Then you're basically invincible. As long as you have any way to chip down his HP you'll be golden. If you're invading, remember that when the last crew member on the boss dies, your guys do not get to teleport out, so at most only sacrifice one man for the final kill.

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 11:55 am
by ezryder
**Possible Spoilers**







The real trick is to be able to find all those things for sale/loot and have them before the final stand. :)

I've had runs where I worked each sector til the rebel wave was almost on top of me and not had the option of getting some of those upgrades. Or I upgraded my ship, then two jumps later found a store that sold a teleporter or stealth module, but I didn't have the scrap to buy it.

The randomness can really screw you over. I had one run where I visited/saw every green dot and there wasn't an Engi home world. And I was actually pretty well equipped on that run. Not well enough to take down the boss (only got to the second fight with him), but well enough to come out of every battle before that with only losing 1 or 2 points of hull (ion cannon II, heavy ion cannon, blaster II, anti ship drone 1, defense drone II, shields 2 dots, 4 bars on engines, no stealth or teleporter or mantis crew members).

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 1:15 pm
by DarkFenix
The trick with the whole fight is to take your time. Two facts are key: 1) The current fight phase doesn't end until you reduce the boss's health enough. 2) The enemy crew don't respawn.

In the first phase of the fight, the only attacks the boss has are his four weapon batteries, all four of which are isolated from the main section. You can beam crew into those sections at will, destroying those weapons with impunity. Eliminate the missile battery and ion cannons first, those are the only things that will get through your shields. It doesn't matter how inexperienced your crew are with combat, two on one they'll win anyway, mantis are best because they'll clean out enemy crew faster.

In a pretty short time you should have the boss toothless and just sitting there. Now is the lynchpin to this broken, broken strategy. Eliminate all of their crew. Hopefully at this point you have shedloads of missiles, ideally with bomb launchers (you really don't want him running off with your crew on board). It's perfectly possible without bombs, it's just a lot harder to do. Try to soften up their crew before boarding, bombs or fire-starting weapons work best for this, hitting systems the enemy are trying to repair. Then knock out their medbay and beam four of your best fighters in, it doesn't matter if you finish all their crew off in one sortie, just put a few out of action and you kill their numbers advantage.

Once all the crew are dead, you'll get the message of an AI taking over. Sabotage the shields, get your crew off, then blow the ship up. Bear in mind it'll be slowly repairing all systems now so if you take too long those weapons will start coming online again.

Second stage is now a joke, with no defending crew and no cloak you can just beam aboard and screw their systems. Take out the weapons again, only the missile battery is a real threat but the others will be nasty if the drones bring down your shields. Now target shields, engines and drone control (note that destroying drone control will only disable the boss' normal drones, not the extra waves) and it'll be another cakewalk.

Final stage, a very ordinary fight. Bring down that uber-shield then disable the weapons again. Don't cloak to avoid the boss' opening missiles, you'll need that for the super-weapon. Now just get your crew into the main section to disable engines/shields and you're all done, now it's just a case or whittling down the boss' health one last time.

Long story short, what you need is shield-piercing weapons (I'd recommend at least two), max level shields, any level cloak and level 3 teleporter (2 is fine on a small ship, but 3 gives you freedom to teleport two groups in quick succession) and a ton of missiles. Mantis/rockman crew members will help enormously, but aren't mandatory.

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 3:08 pm
by Trigeminal
talhydras wrote:That 4-point shield with a max-skill crewman on it is going to be all but impossible to take on with most conventional laser weapons, so don't waste the power trying.


Definitely possible with Lasers. I beat the boss on my first round with 3 Burst Laser II and a Fire Bomb. I think cloak is really the key here. I was able to win without the need to heal.

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 8:07 pm
by Tuuvan
I just had my first victory (of 12 total games on this computer, with another 15-20 on my work computer) with the following build:

Stealth Ship
Full Shield
All Equipment maxed except O2 and Med-bay
Burst Laser 3
Halberd Beam
Dual Lasers
Advanced Hull
Reinforced Hull
Long Range Sensors

It went down to the wire, and I sacrificed myself in the end to save the universe (my weapons blew him up before his blew me up)!

Micromanagement is certainly key. I alternated on max shield or max engine depending on the phase, and left O2 and med bay powerless whenever possible. I didn't have any opportunity to heal mid fight and the drones hit me more often than I would have liked, but the end result was successful.

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 10:35 pm
by talhydras
Ha, yeah, the shield isn't too bad actually if you have twin burst laser 2s and twin heavy ions. The stealth weapons augment was a wonderful addition as well.

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2012 10:48 pm
by Bushi
for me, the most aggravating thing is that in the drone phase of the boss fight. a system repair drone will automatically respawn in the enemy's drone control system, and your boarders will automatically attack that, no matter what

Re: stupid boss fight

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 2012 4:27 am
by LukaCola
I've found that using boarders for anything other than the weapon's subrooms is a completely fruitless effort as they can heal their men far far too fast. (I had about a 30 minute showdown for the first section doing this with weapons barely capable of breaching shields, it took a LOT of micromanage to get those shields down long enough to hit them with the beam I equipped for reasons I can't fathom)

In the second round if you wiped out the original weapon rooms there will be no one manning them anymore, but what you really need to worry about are the drones. I've found that cycling missiles to fire halfway through each other's cooldowns keeps a good amount of pressure on the drones and in that time you can use individual boarders to take out the weapons again.

And for the third round? I can't tell you, never made it that far. The boss is ridiculously powerful and I rarely, if ever, find weapons good at penetrating shields. His ability to out tank me is what usually does it.