Did you know? List little tips and tricks here!

[GoldenShadowGS]

Enemy crew can not put out fires on their ship if you have your crew there fighting them. So use rockmen, which are immune to fire. The fire will burn up the system and the fire will spread out of control.

[Gustav_III]

When facing an enemy ship with ion weaponry and one other weapon while having only one shield point, it's often advisable, to depower the shields for a brief moment, when the ion weapon has fired, since it will then very likely miss the shields and hit another room. This way you keep your one valuable shield point.
Performing this perfectly takes some time since you have to get used to the different recharge times of the enemy weapons.

If you fight a slug interceptor with enough firepower to overcome your shields, its often still possible to take it in one piece, by just hitting the weapon room once after disabling the oxygen, to get their weapons out of sync.

Even early in the game, try to have one more engine bar then you can power, so whenever a missile or a burstlaser is fired at you, you can depower your O2 system, granting you an additional 5% chance of staying unharmed.

Two Zoltan in the shield room will make it impossible for ion weapons to fully depower your shields.

[rannl]

Did not see any mention of this one, so here goes :

Did you know that the heavy laser does 2 damage to the zoltan shields ?

And another point - did you know that the mantis has a single blue option (regarding the mantis shup unlock acheivment) that does not effect the outcome of the event, and that the zoltan (and obviously human) have no blue options at all ?

[Number43]

Enemy crew can not put out fires on their ship if you have your crew there fighting them. So use rockmen, which are immune to fire. The fire will burn up the system and the fire will spread out of control.

That's true unless they have a system repair drone. They can even repair systems while you are fighting in them. This was a problem once when I disable their medbay and sent in two crew so they couldn't repair it, but they kept sending in one crew and a system repair drone, and managed to repair it before I could destroy it.

[Mister Sammy]

Ionizing a broken (not damaged) system will reset its repair rate back to 0 and force the being repairing it to start over. I've only managed to test this on one-power rooms so far, though.

[hobo934]

The Anti Bio Beam can damage enemy drones. I got the Disintigration Ray achievment by killing two humans and a System Repair Drone on a Rebel Rigger.

Zoltans can be used to take power out of the cloaking system, but be aware that if your cloak is active, taking power out will damage it.

Firing two Ion Blasts at the same time can't dwindle down an enemy's shields, but firing them one after the other (Best if intervals are as equal as possible) can.

An Ion Bomb will deal 8 damage to a Zoltan Shield.

In an asteroid field, you can farm experience for your shields guy and engines guy AS LONG AS the enemy ship is alive. Shields experience will only be gained in battle, which means you can also farm by depowering your shields and powering them up again (reccomended if the enemy cannot hurt you or their weapons are disabled by some kind of ion weapon)

In the eighth sector, ships can appear with five shields.

[Heyga4Huk]

If you're low on crew, you can get an improved medbay or look for slavers in the pirate sector

[UltraMantis]

This is mostly one for the Stealth cruisers as they start shieldless and must make the most of their cloaking abilities.

Allways, allways, allways squeeze every possible nanosecond out of the initial phase of combat before you engage the cloak. You don't ever want to be hit before dealing one attack to the enemy, because usually one attack if all you need.

Take a close look at the drone attacking you. Watch as it moves into position, then wastes about a second of time as it charges up the weapon, then it fires. Engage the cloak immediatly before it fires but not before, to gain a few precious moment of cloaking.

[Ranarius Webfoot]

A successful ion bomb to the cockpit will knock out enemy ship's evasion for longer than it takes to reload the ion bomb weapon. Thus, you can keep spamming ion bombs into the cockpit. After the first one hits, they will have 0 evasion for as long as you have missiles. Useful for high-evade high-shield many-repairmen late-game enemies and the boss.

[Ranarius Webfoot]

When a projectile hits another projectile (including drones!), both are canceled out. In other words, if you fire right as enemy shots are coming in, you might accidentally shoot down some of their shots. I've accidentally taken out boarding drones this way, as the drone's path to my ship passed RIGHT in front of one of my laser cannons right as it fired.

Theoretically, you could use this to shoot down anti-ship drones - just hold your salvo until the drone is moving towards a spot your shots will pass through, then try to time it. Never done it deliberately though... and they'll probably just make another drone anyway.