Build synergies?

[RobotGenie]

Hello there! I've been paying ftl for a few months with no outside advice outside of right now.I've been having trouble defeating the mothership in all of my fights(the furthest I've gotten it's the third phase on easy) would you guys have some possible ideas that maybe I haven't thought of?

If used a fire build, burst laser and also a rather good mix of different weapons. I'd have to say that I've made it all the way to the mothership over ten times to no avail. Any suggestions? Thanks for any support I get on this!

Edit- I've been using the first build engi cruiser if that helps. Thanks!

[stylesrj]

Have you tried boarding the Flagship?
There are four rooms you can teleport two crew into where the enemy only has one guy defending. You should take out those rooms first (except for the top left one with the triple lasers) and kill the enemy crew within. That'll make the fight much easier as you can destroy those systems without the enemy crushing you.

As for what weapons? Well buy any Flak.I's you see in stores and any Burst Laser II's. You'll need them if you want to bring out the dakka.
Cloaking is highly recommended for any Flagship run too. Those Power Surges can be turned into jokes if you cloak through them.

[Portaller]

Teleporter, cloak level 1 (and it is important that you only power it to level one for the power surges), and anything that can get through shields or fires several times on one shot. Flak cannons, powerful missiles, crystal weapons (inapplicable to this scenario, but.), etc.

And even when you do that, you'll still end up dead most of the time. Or maybe that's just me.

[stylesrj]

Missiles are probably not your best option. What they do is in the name.
Bombs on the other hand... slightly more useful, especially if a Breach Bomb as you can destroy a Medbay with it and then drop your boarding team inside... where they hopefully won't die from suffocation first.

[MightyThor2000]

I play FTL off and on, played it a ton when I got it in 2013, then got the advanced edition patch and played a bunch more. Tried to unlock all the ships sometime last fall but didn't quite do it. Well, I spent about 15 hours playing last week and finally got everything done.

There's a ton of ways to approach the final boss battle but there are a couple keys you have to understand in order to defeat it.

1. You have to be able to break through 4 shields somehow. Whether it's missiles, flak cannons, drones, whatever, that's how much shields the flagship has. If you have a glaive beam you better have 2 or 3 regular shots to get shields down to 2 or 1 for the beam to hit for example.
2. Boarders won't kill the ship. Boarding is very good for taking out specific weapon systems and that's about it because killing off the whole crew causes an AI to take over the ship command and it's actually *more* powerful than the normal crew, plus when you kill the ship in phase 1 and 2 it'll jump out with your troops on it and you'll lose them. Very bad.
3. You can't stop everything the ship throws at you so you need balance. You don't need maxed engines, but you want 40-45% dodge rate if possible and you want at least shields 3. Preferably you want a clock, otherwise you want a couple defense drones to dodge missiles. If you have no cloak I'd suggest 4 shields for the phase 3 super weapon.

After than it just kind of depends. Obviously some weapons are way better than others, some aren't worth the power slots. Like the burst 3, fires 5 shots but takes 4 power and has a super long cooldown. I could put 2 flak 1's in the same setup and fire almost twice as fast and do 6 dmg. On the rebel flagship it doesn't matter about the flak spread cus the shields room is so big they'll all hit. What I generally try to do in a run is get a cloak and get enough reliable weapons to take out their shields. That could be 4 burst laser 2's, that could be a flak 2 and a halberd beam, whatever. Just remember it costs a ton of scrap to upgrade the last two levels of weapons so keep that in mind. I recently won with the stealth cruiser B layout. I had two flak 1's and the glaive beam it comes with, but my system was only upgraded to 6 power at the time. A shop had another flak 1. I debated... do I really want to spend another 190 scrap to get all my weapons to fire, or should I just trade in the glaive beam and go with 3 flak 1's for less power requirements and put the scrap to use elsewhere? I opt'd for second choice cus it's much easier and more reliable since the weapons fire faster. Say my weapon system takes dmg, I only lose a 3rd of my firepower instead of potentially shutting down my glaive beam.

Couple other things are have at least 2 doors, 2 medbay and 2 o2. Then if you need to heal quickly divert power, or if your o2 gets hacked you can refill between cooldowns.


Phase 1 is mostly about dodging the missiles. Nothing else the ship has hurts that much. Just use level 1 cloak at the right time if you have one, else boarders to kill that system work wonders. Level 3 hacking module is amazing at taking down the shields here for your lasers.

Phase 2 is about being able to hit their ship despite that stupid defense drone and being able to fight the boarders off yours, and you still gotta dodge missiles. Again, cloak for the super drones is great, try to take out the missiles asap. This phase is probably the biggest reason I advocate beams and lasers vs drones and missiles, cus the defensive drones shot those down and they shot down the hacking module which is pretty much worthless for the phase.

Phase 3, you need cloak to dodge the super weapon basically, while pounding their missiles yet again. When you get mind controlled just leave the guy alone, hopefully he's locked in a room until he can come to his senses. Just keep pounding their shields and weapon systems, lock your doors and hold on, it doesn't matter if your entire ship is down to 1 guy and all on fire as long as you kill theirs, so try to keep weapons and shields functional and you'll win.