How do you unlock Federation cruiser

[Bloody_Lemon]

I actually dislike the federation cruiser. The beam is basically a total waste. It consumes a system slot you could do something useful with. The beam itself rarely lines up to hit more than 3-4 rooms, putting it about as effective as a small beam. It rarely provides any damage at a useful point unless you fully upgrade it, at which point you've spent 250 scrap (for weapon and energy) which basically costs like a glaive beam you can't aim, but does the damage of a small beam.

I might not dislike it if it did one of the following:

• Just hit every single room on the other ship, irrespective of position
• Powered up like a normal weapon and let you target it like a beam
• Had a smaller beam but did more damage, like a halberd beam
• Just make it equivalent in damage/size of the beam for that same energy output. so 1 pip is small, 2 pip is pike, 3 pip is halberd, 4 pip is glaive.

That's what I thought before as well. Now with cloak Artillery Beam straight out rocks.
Seriously:
1) It's devastating against the flagship with its insane number of rooms!
2) Shield-piercing!
3) Shield-piercing in ion storms!
4) Beam, cloak and recharge, beam, repeat!
5) Hit a lot of rooms and destroy crew bonuses as they run to fix stuff.
6) Shield-piercing fires!
7) Sync with other weapons to get 5-weapon ship!

Certainly all of the above is viable at level 4, but still. Seriously, defense-oriented Federation A + maxed Artillery Beam early on = awesome power. Unless your opponent runs away of course

[itg]

I'm in the camp that thinks the Fed ships are solidly below average (not outright terrible, to be fair). You point out some strengths of the artillery beam, but the fact is, none of those strengths matter if the fight ends before you actually fire the damn thing, and it'll take 4-5 sectors to upgrade it to the point that that doesn't happen on a regular basis. Best case, you've sunk a ton of scrap and power into the system, and it's decent but not fantastic. Compare it to hacking, for instance, which is cheaper to upgrade, faster to activate, and can take the enemy shields down to zero, which is sort of like giving shield piercing to all your weapons.

Meanwhile, you've got a mediocre starting loadout (yeah, Fed A's burst II is great, but it's all you've got, and you're a sitting duck if you get hit in the weapons bay. Fed B's loadout is no better), and one of the weakest layouts in the game.

[spacecadet13]

Agree with itg, the Fed cruisers A + B are mid-lower tier at best, and the C is just U-G-L-Y

IMO the beam only starts to be useful once upgraded to level 3, and on the A especially you've got to commit a fair amount of scrap to get it there, so that's less scrap for shields/drones/engines/doors/weapons, all of which the Fed cruisers badly need. And even at level 3, you've got a slow firing pike beam you can't aim that's taking 3 power that could possibly/probably give better value used on other systems. Yes it goes through shields, but with hacking that feature of the artillery beam is far less impressive now. That said, the Fed cruisers can finish up being diabolically OP with a maxxed out beam and a good 'normal' weapons loadout.