I have to say, the challenge of facing down these Elite Cruisers and other ship-killers you come up with is the main reason I play FTL:IS. It's the challenge of knowing a scenario is winnable even when it seems impossible. So here I am with another
Tales From Infinite Spaaaaaace....!
*ahem*
To this point, my favored tactic with the
Archon was using dual Heavy Ions to bring the shield down, assisted by the Sunfury where needed (usually not necessary), and burning them down with the Arc Beam. The Elite Fed however, refused to play by these rules.
Their Defense II drone picked off the slow-moving ion blasts like a hungry vulture, while the ship's evasion meant even the faster volleys from the Sunfury missed frequently - at one point,
all four shots whizzed by without so much as grazing their shield. Meanwhile, their array of weapons and offensive drones devoured the
Archon's Z-shield, basic shields, and steadily went to work on the hull.
Clearly, a different tactic was called for...
Pushing the cloak to maximum and diverting all power to weapons gave even the Arc Beam enough time to charge. A Defense II drone can handle a lot of incoming fire, but under that single alpha-strike, it crumbled. One of the Sunfury's bursts destroyed it entirely, everything else found its mark and hit hard enough to drop the shields from 4+Z to two layers, one of them temporarily in recharge. The
Archon had its opening!
To Mara's disappointment, a weapon-strategy was dropped entirely. All power now went to our Defense I & II drones, the teleporter, and medbay.
Varnas and Kirkner went in first, hitting the one critical room no one was occupying - the Feds' own medbay. Completely locked out, all they could do was bang on the door. When Varnas' lock ran down, Kirkner renewed it. Meanwhile, Slocknog and Lisandra warped into the drone room, tearing into it with a vengeance. By the time the Fed crew could finally get into the medbay, half of them (the AP drone included) did an immediate U-turn and hauled ass for the damaged drone control. The Varn/Kirk duo picked off one of the crew before being forced out by overhwelming fire. Slock and Lisa bravely held their ground until the teleporter recharged, Lisa returning on the very brink of death. They swapped places with Varn & Kirk on the pad, who then targeted the weapons room for their next Lockdown session.
And so it went. Across the battlefield, the
Archon and its defensive drones weathered everything the Fed Elite threw at it. The Fed's beam-drone hit the worst, but Drake's expert hands brought the shields up quickly enough to ward off critical damage. A hit to the cloaking and drone systems nearly did us in, but the cloak cycled just that moment and bought Mara enough time to patch them both before the Feds could compound the damage.
Varn/Kirk, Slock/Lisa warped in and out, the two Crystals keeping the crew busy while the slug/mantis pair came back to demolish the door control, then ran back to the drone room to continue their sabotage.
The Feds had one more trick up their sleeve though - two at a time, they began warping into the
Archon's port-side. The first landed in the drone room, which I quickly vented. After knocking a bar off my blast doors, they abandoned the airless room and broke into the medbay, where two more boarders joined them. And when the entire pylon had been vented, they ran for the pilot's room. Cy Heng quickly locked them out - two suffocated in the vented O2 room while the others warped back aboard, much worse for the wear.
...In the end, it was a long, drawn-out battle, but one by one they fell. My first plan had been to take out the systems doing the most harm to the
Archon, but soon enough it became clear it was easier to just pick off the crew. Even the engi nanobots couldn't heal them up when trapped in a room with two angry crystals, a professional Mantis killer, and Slocknog the Magnificent* (as he prefers to be called). When the Fed Elite was at last floating derelict, I spent some additional drone parts to patch up the damaged hull, and let my weary boarders heal up. I've never tried to do such rapid-fire assault boarding before, and though Lisa came within a scant 3HP of death, they live to fight on.
But who knows what the
next Cruiser will bring...
*Slocknog was my first boarder, earning his share of scars and ship kills alike. He was instrumental in the defeat of countless pirates, keeping damaged rooms from being repaired while the Arc Beam carved up the other half of the ship. He's earned his title.
