Stealth Ship B, Victory Strategy on Normal

[big4ared]

Hi guys. Long time listener first time caller.

I've been a bit obsessed with the stealth ship B, and I think I've found an early game strategy that doesn't require a tone of luck. I've beaten Normal with it, and I can breeze through the first few sectors as long as I don't get really, really unlucky (like a Zoltan cruiser with a beam drone in the first battle). And you end up with a good build for the final boss.

Early Game:
1. First upgrade, of course, is stealth 3. You don't need a reactor.
2. Next upgrade is a slot of weapons. Yes, weapons. You don't actually need a 2nd weapon or a reactor to power it. Just just need the slot so you can take a hit.
3. Beeline for shields and reactors to power them, and upgrade to shields 2.
4. Find/buy a 2nd weapon. You really want a second weapon by the time you get to enemies with 2 shields and you need one by the time enemies get enemies with 3.

- The idea is that you want to never, ever lose your glaive charge. No matter how good you are with cloak, you will take some damage, and if you lose your glaive charge then you will get pummeled.

- You'll notice that there are no engines on that list. If you upgrade two engines and two reactors to power them, you're looking at 85 scrap, and you're still in desperate situation if your weapons ever get it. But upgrading weapons is just 50 since you don't need to have a weapon or actually power it.

- You should be able to get the stealth 3 and weapon 5 upgrade in the first sector. And you can probably get your shields up by late 2nd sector or early 3rd sector.

- Remember, you can sell stuff. So if you get any beam weapons or useless drones then sell them so you can get shields faster.

- Put your zoltan in the engines. 1 power engines is much better than 0 power. Put one human in the cockpit, and another in weapons. Your weapons guy is your fix it guy. DO NOT let your zoltan power your cloak or weapons. If your weapon is powered and your zoltan leaves the room, then you lose your charge. And if you are cloaked with your zoltan powering it, and he leaves the room, you lose cloaking time (unless he gets back in). So keep him in the engines.

- You have scanners, so use them. Just don't go into solar flares or asteroid fields.

- When you only have 3, your crew is precious, so don't send them on away missions that they might not come back from. It's not worth the risk.

General Combat:
- Most early enemies will go down in a single hit with the glaive. Except Zoltan shields of course. Keep in mind that the shield blocks partial damage, but if you hit the shields first the left over rooms will take more damage. So make sure that the beam hits the shield room as early as possible.

- Since you aren't upgrading engines, you will not have 100% evade when in stealth. Don't rely on stealth to dodge. Rather, use stealth to make sure you get the first hit. The glaive has 4 bars. There is exactly one pixel between the first and second bar. You want to hit stealth EXACTLY when the charge hits the first pixel of the second bar. If you do this, you will hit the enemy before they can fire, which is much better than trying to dodge the first shot.

- It's more important to dodge a burst laser than it is a missile. If an enemy has both, then let the missile hit you but dodge the burst laser.

Drones:
Ok, the bane of the stealth ship. But they aren't that bad if you know what to do.
1. Once you get full stealth and a 5th weapons slot, they aren't so bad. And you should get that in the first sector.
2. Note that you can see where the drone is aiming at just before it fires. On the start of the encounter, you just need to hold on for a few hits. If the drone is targeting your cloak, then cloak. Otherwise, just take the hit. As long as you can keep your weapons charge and your full cloak then you'll be fine.

Zoltan Shield:
You can try the trick where you make the weapons the last shot hit. I couldn't quite get it to work reliably, but you might. But in general you can just take it.

Mid Game:
Once you get to the mid game, the strategy is the same as any other ship.

- I'd recommend a teleporter because it tends to pay for itself. You won't do massive boarding, but if you have 2 mantis/rockmen then you can do mop up duty if the enemy has only 2 regular crew and no healing bay. Boarding 3 or 4 ships will give you enough extra scrap to justify the cost. Also, once you buy all ship subsystems you won't see them in the store anymore which will give you more options to buy.

- When your ship gets boarded, try to cloak when you finish them off. That prevents them from beaming back onto their home ship, and makes it easier for you to capture.

- You eventually need a drone bay, but not soon. Once you have shields, you can use the cloak primarily for evading missiles. You need a drone bay eventually but you can hold off on it.

- With most weapons, you target a room and the creatures inside take damage. With the glaive, the enemies take damage if their cell was hit by the glaive beam. If you want to capture a ship, make sure the glaive beam actually hits the enemies, as opposed to just hitting the room.

- You don't need to upgrade your drone bay until the very end. You only need one Defense 1 drone up until you get to the final boss.

Late Game/Boss:
- The boss is not that hard if you build your ship right. You have three weapons slots, so the ideal three is your glaive, as well as some burst laser and a bomb. I'd stay away from the ion bomb. But if you can get two burst lasers that's probably fine.

- DO NOT rely on missiles. The second form will have a defense drone, so your missiles are useless. I made that mistake. Use bombs to take out the tri-missile weapon and soften the shields.

- The general strategy is to aim for the shields. Once you get the shields down the glaive makes quick work of him.

- Save your cloak for when you have a power surge.

- You want to have full 4 shields to take on the boss. You should be able to afford it, but you will have to sacrifice other upgrades such as teleporter and engines. You only need teleporter 1.

- I always upgrade the drone bay to 4 slots just before the boss fight, and ideally have two Defense 1 drones, which is far better than one Defense 2 drone. The only exception is I would consider swapping out one of the Defense 1 drones if you have a Hull repair.

That's it. The real trick is to make weapons your second upgrade, and then the whole campaign becomes much less frustrating. It's actually a lot of fun once you get the hang of the ship and don't have to cower in fear from early drones. I've done this strategy several times and it's pretty reliable. The only "luck" that you have to rely on is finding a decent weapon before you hit the mid game, but that's true for almost every ship. Enjoy!

[Galdred]

I am currently obsessed with stealth B too. I think it is quite good to let the zoltan man the cloack, because the cloack spends 80% of the time on cooldown, and during that time, you can send your zoltan power up some other system while the cooldown wears off (you only need the zoltan to be there at the exact moment you enable the cloack). But that should only be done after you have an additional crew member to man the engine.
I tend to do every high risk event in sector 1 (and in sector 2 if my game is not going too well), like securing the madman, fighting giant spiders... More often than not they give negative rewards, but I'm really in need of the scrap/manpower, and restarting early on is something I have to do a lot with Stealth B anyway (like whenever I encounter a drone or zoltan too soon).

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm finding that this approach doesn't work. By the time I manage the scrap for shields, the enemy has shields 2, and since I'm no longer disabling them before they can attack, death becomes common.

It also completely ignores boarding. I found that I died a lot from boarding events since this approach neglects blast doors for a long, long time. For example, in my most recent game, I had a 2-mantis boarding party head for my weapons station. I only had the starting 3 crew, and even with all 3 fighting they had to leave to heal or die, and then the boarders took down my Glaive Beam.

[Gus Smedstad]

Finally won with the Stealth / B, but I feel it was mostly luck. Nothing spectacular, just not getting hosed by a bad hit before getting Cloak 3, picking up a Small Bomb after a combat before I started hitting a lot of shield-2 ships, and snagging enough crew from slavers that I wasn't worried about borders and could put off upgrading the doors.

The key is getting a weapon that only sucks down 1 power. Just about any will do. Adding 1 point to your weapon station is 50 Scrap - adding two is 50 + 75 = 125. So while a Burst Laser or Hull Laser is a better match for the Glaive than a cruddy Small Bomb, you can afford to install the Small Bomb, and you can't really afford anything more power hungry. Later it's nice to pick up something better, but you need that low-power weapon around sector 3.

There's another hump when you hit shields-3 ships. Ideally you want to replace that cheap weapon, but adding another cheap weapon is better than nothing. In my case I purchased a Heavy Laser because nothing better was available. The heavy laser is really a better finishing weapon that shield reducer, but sometimes you just don't have any choice.

While by the mid to late game the cloak is no longer special, since most Kestrels will pick one up eventually, the Glaive changes how the Stealth / B plays for the entire game. Particularly since the other weapons you buy or keep will be tailored around the Glaive.

[UglyMug]

Also a tip concerning drones:

Once you get your 15 second cloak:

Let the drone fire off a single shot. Then wait for it to get in position for its next pass, wait, wait, THEN when its light turns green punch cloak. Now it's just wasted a whole pass. Done properly, the drone will only get 1-2 shots on you before the glaive can fire.

Also, I think 2nd weapon is a higher priority than shields. Doesn't necessarily have to be a weapon weapon, my first victory with the Stealth B - I never found a second weapon, just used drones with the glaive. Really strange setup.

[Gus Smedstad]

If you've got a stack of drone parts, or you lucked into a drone recovery arm, and you've got an anti-ship drone in inventory, it can definitely make sense to buy a drone control for offense. You're going to get a drone control sooner or later, the main issue with buying one early is that you absolutely must use the scrap to get another point of offense when you start regularly facing ships with 2 shields. You can't really afford to buy a drone control and an anti-ship drone - that's 130 scrap at a point in the game where you're really hurting for money.

I was thinking the same thing about a weapon being more important than shields, but beam weapons and anti-ship drones absolutely murder you until you get that first point of shields. Plus you can finally afford to go after ships in asteroid fields once you have shields. Without shields you're going to take damage from asteroids even if you can first-strike the enemy to death.

[UglyMug]

The DA-12 can hold off a little longer on getting shields than the Nessario since it's got a stronger alpha strike. With the Nessario you really want shields around late sector two - early sector 3. DA-12 can hold off till late sector 3 - early 4 if you have a good weapon to strip shields for the Glaive. Your main danger is hitting a ship running double attack drones. Particularly if they are MkII or beams. Automated ships can also be annoying since they don't have a good layout for using beams against.

For the most part, I notice the riggers are the ships that most commonly use drones, which is fortunate for you since they have a setup where the glaive can hit five rooms. Engine, Shield, Drone Control, Weapons, and can't remember the last one - O2 I think or maybe empty.

Also, the early two shield ships generally only have four energy bars in shields. If you position the beam to hit the shield either first or early, you'll often drop the shields to 1 with the 1 point of damage and rake everything afterwards for 2 damage.

I'd also stay away from boarding. You generally want to support boarders with precision weapons that can keep key systems disabled like weapons and medbay. Glaive is less a precision weapon and more a saw-ships-in-half weapon. Also you don't need boarders for the boss. Weapon pods for the boss have three health. You can rake the missile pod, helm, and shields with one glaive shot. I'd only go for the teleporter if the game insists on tossing a bunch of mantis crew at you. Plus, only two-person medbay which is not particularly close to the pads, IIRC. I think the reactor power is better used elsewhere.

But yeah the drone advice is mainly if the game seems to be pushing you towards drones with a recovery arm, or a nice schematic or two. I really like having attack drones for the boss, much more than boarders. They're really nice for not only for creating an opening for the glaive, but also following up on a good glaive hit, particularly if you destroy the helm.

Also don't worry about asteroid fields, you have Long Range scanners, no need to touch them. That is unless the game has one as the only connecting point to the exit, rare, but it happens.

[Gus Smedstad]

I can't imagine forgoing boarding on the boss. The resistance in the weapon rooms is light, and you can rapidly take down the missile launcher which is present in all 3 stages. It's your biggest threat in stage 1, and 2nd biggest after the special attacks in stages 2 and 3. Your defense drone is only going to shoot down 1 of the 3 missiles, and the others will penetrate your shields.

You can be precise with the Glaive. It's not like the artillery beam or drones where you can't control where it strikes. If you're using it in support of boarding you may be constrained to hitting only one or two rooms to avoid hitting your boarders, but that's not a huge deal since you're trying to disable systems, not do massive hull damage.

[Galdred]

But you don't need to focus on boarding if you just plan to destroy the weapons. Just buying a teleporter by sector 8 should be enough : in my Stealth B run, I lost all my crew but 2 engis in sector 7, bought 1 slug and 1 zoltan, and boarded the missile weapon room (in stage 2) with engi + slug.
I found overall boarding to be a bit underwhelming given the 2 tile medbay.

[Gus Smedstad]

But you don't need to focus on boarding if you just plan to destroy the weapons. Just buying a teleporter by sector 8 should be enough : in my Stealth B run, I lost all my crew but 2 engis in sector 7, bought 1 slug and 1 zoltan, and boarded the missile weapon room (in stage 2) with engi + slug.
I found overall boarding to be a bit underwhelming given the 2 tile medbay.

That's what I meant - even if you don't do boarding prior to the boss, and have relatively weak / inexperienced boarders, it's still worth doing for the boss since it's so easy compared to all other boarding scenarios. The weapons room guys can't run to a medbay and there's only one per room.

The 2-tile medbay is all I need for offensive boarding, since I'm only ever sending 2 guys across. The location is more of an issue because it's a long hike from the teleporter to the medbay for Rockmen. For defending against boarding actions, yeah, the 2-tile medbay sucks, but you don't really have a choice about those.