On boss Normal Kestrel B - help

[LordJ]

I have beaten the boss several times on easy
I just now made it to the boss with Kestrel B on Normal for the first time.

The problem is I only have the 4 Basic Lasers that came with the ship (1 shot each).
(I'm telling you not one shop that I visited in the second half of the game had a weapon for sale.
There were a couple early (sector 1 and 2) but I didn't have the money for them.)

So I'm at the boss with Cloak 1, Level 4 shields, Teleport level 2 and no drone control.
My crew consists of 4 humans, 2 mantis, 1 rock, 1 engi.

I have Teleported and taken out all the weapons.
But now I can't, obviously, get through the 4 shields with the 4 puny lasers.

The boss has 7 crew left, a med bay and fully upgraded doors. I don't see how I can win by Teleportation.
Should I just concede or can anyone think of a strategy that might have a chance?

Thanks,

Brian

[SDEngineer]

Sadly, I think your game is a lost cause.

You don't have the DPS to actually damage the ship, without sabotaging something internal (like the shields), but without a 4 slot teleporter, I don't think you can get enough crew in fast enough to do damage to the shields before he overwhelms you with his counterattack.

The only thing I can think of would be to use a rock and a human as a sacrificial boarding party as far away from the shield room as you can go (who will die), and hope that pulls his defenders away for long enough for you to slip a second boarding party (the two mantises) into the shield room for long enough that they can do enough damage that your lasers can get a lucky shot or two through into the shield generator. Unfortuanately, even if you get this to work, I don't see you as being able to do enough damage that it won't be repaired next time he cloaks - and I think you'll run out of crew before you manage to do any significant damage using this strategy.

[magicwalker]

Well you only need 1 crewmember to have evade... 2 crew if you want to have +5% from the engine room. I would recommend sending two mantises into a 2 person room somewhere. And then send another team of two over, each in two 2 person rooms, then send a THIRD team of 2 people over- so you would have 6 people on board. Move them into the shields and helm. When the helm is down, move them forward to the teleporter (so you occupy the shield room and the teleporter).

You might have to rotate people out, so I don't know how well this strategy is going to work- but I don't think that opponents will walk through rooms to attack you in another... so if you can draw people out of the helm and the shield room, get a team INTO the teleporter room- they would bottleneck and not send reinforcements to the shield room. Then you rotate your wounded into the shield room- where they won't take damage and will be able to hit the shields. If you can get the helm to 0 and the shield below 4, atleast 1 shot will get through each time.

You should have an easier time achieving this in the later phases, because the crew will all be dead ('cept for the 3 burst laster gunner).

[SDEngineer]

Well you only need 1 crewmember to have evade... 2 crew if you want to have +5% from the engine room. I would recommend sending two mantises into a 2 person room somewhere. And then send another team of two over, each in two 2 person rooms, then send a THIRD team of 2 people over- so you would have 6 people on board. Move them into the shields and helm. When the helm is down, move them forward to the teleporter (so you occupy the shield room and the teleporter).

You might have to rotate people out, so I don't know how well this strategy is going to work- but I don't think that opponents will walk through rooms to attack you in another... so if you can draw people out of the helm and the shield room, get a team INTO the teleporter room- they would bottleneck and not send reinforcements to the shield room. Then you rotate your wounded into the shield room- where they won't take damage and will be able to hit the shields. If you can get the helm to 0 and the shield below 4, atleast 1 shot will get through each time.

You should have an easier time achieving this in the later phases, because the crew will all be dead ('cept for the 3 burst laster gunner).

Yeah, if he had a 4 person teleport pad, I think this could work. The problem is that with a 15s teleport refresh, by the time he gets his third team in, the first one will almost certainly be dead, and the second one more than half dead (and with a working medbay on the flagship, almost certainly no enemy casualties).

Maybe this might work:

1) Send a boarding team into the enemy sensor room. I wouldn't use my mantises for this (you'll want them later for the bottleneck), but use the rock (and maybe a human). That will probably occupy two crew. If you're lucky, the guy in the shield room will respond. It's as far away from the Medbay as possible (so that enemy crew healing is delayed) and still be a two space room, but reasonably close to the shield room guy so he might respond to the threat here. It's also the furthest two space room from any other reinforcments (the drone station not usually being manned), so any reinforcements have a long way to run and will hopefully arrive with the first guy about ready to bug out and go get healing in MedBay, leading to another 2v1 situation until yet another guy can run over to the room, which should hopefully reduce the amount of damage this first boarding party takes.
2) Send the two mantises into the teleport room. Hope like hell that either the shield guy went to fight the first boarding party, or that he goes to fight this party - I think it pretty likely that one of the two will happen. If not, you may have problems with the next step, and may need to ignore the pilot and just go after the shield room first.
3) Immediately order the first boarding party (which is hopefully still alive, and with the rock at a decent amount of health) to the (hopefully) now empty shield room. Have the human wait for the rock to come in (he'll start damaging the shields. Move the rock into the pilots room first, then follow with the human (to have a 2 on 1 as long as possible).
4) Bring the last two humans into the shield bay. When the mantises get low on health (and they likely will be), move then to the shield room, and the humans to the bottleneck, and as soon as the teleport has recycled, teleport the mantises out and get them to the medbay to heal.
5) Hope the injured rock & the heavily injured human from the first boarding party can take out the pilot and the helm and move to the shield room.
6) Once the shields have been damaged, auto volley on the Medbay. Your only hope is to get that taken care of so you can actually kill the enemy crew. If you can't kill the enemy crew in Phase one of the boss, you'll have to repeat this strategy in P2 and P3 - but likely having taken some crew losses even if everything else in this goes optimally.
7) Hope the humans can hold the bottle neck for another 15s to get the mantises back to replace them.
8) If all of the above has actually happened, you might have a chance - since you should actually be able to put a point or two of damage on the Medbay each firing cycle, and hopefully knock that out of commission rapidly.

Unfortunately, I don't know the boarding AI well enough to know whether all the things you need to have happen will actually work, particularly the bottleneck (if excess enemy crew will just run through them to get to repairing the helm or shields, or to attack your guys trying to damage them, while other crew are keeping the bottleneck defenders occupied, the strategy pretty much falls apart) and getting the shield room crew out of there to put the bottleneck in place.

[SDEngineer]

Just to add this - this really sounds like an interesting challenge. I normally don't "save-scum", but I think I might run a game through tonight just to set this scenario up and backup the save game to see if I can get a working strategy to beat this scenario.

[SDEngineer]

Bah, just realized - the Flagship has fully upgraded blast doors, so unfortunately, the room they teleport into is the only room they're ever likely to see. The attrition rate would be too high trying to break down a door, let alone multiple doors, while being shot in the back by even a single defender.

Still, I might try to set this scenario up to see if there is some combination that you can actually gain a foothold in the enemy ship using.

[LordJ]

Yeah, the hitch is going to be when I desperately need to teleport a crew back. That will probably be the exact time that the flagship employs cloak.

Here's a picture of the situation in case it's hard to visualize:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mdhkvdn3j6wgu ... sshot1.jpg

I assume that teleporting to the pilot room will drop his evade chance. But isn't that moot since the shields will block all shots?

[LordJ]

Just to add this - this really sounds like an interesting challenge. I normally don't "save-scum", but I think I might run a game through tonight just to set this scenario up and backup the save game to see if I can get a working strategy to beat this scenario.

I can't convince myself to "save scumm" in order to try and try again.
Although since I feel it's probably un-winnable, maybe I could justify it..

[SDEngineer]

Yeah, the hitch is going to be when I desperately need to teleport a crew back. That will probably be the exact time that the flagship employs cloak.

Here's a picture of the situation in case it's hard to visualize:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mdhkvdn3j6wgu ... sshot1.jpg

I assume that teleporting to the pilot room will drop his evade chance. But isn't that moot since the shields will block all shots?

Yes. However, you only need to kill (or remove to the medbay) the pilot and do two points of damage to the room to drop his evade to zero. If you then do a single point of damage to the shields, at least one shot from each volley will hit and damage the ship, and as you do more points of damage to the shields, more shots are guaranteed to hit.

If you instead do 3 points of damage to the shields, you have dropped the shields to 2, so you could potentially do 2 points of damage per volley to the ship - but if the flagship has an evade chance somewhere around 50 (and I think it does - if the flagship is fully upgraded, which I believe it is, and the crew are considered "gold", then it'd have a 55% evasion until you deal with the pilot or the engines), on average, you will do 0 points of damage to the ship. Of course, going after the shields first, you can conceivably (if you're lucky) start doing damage immediately - but you need luck on your side for that. You would need to do at least 5 points of damage to increase your average damage potential above 0 (once you did 5 points, your average damage would be roughly 1, the same as doing 2 points of damage to the pilot room and 1 point of damage to the shield room).