If you have upgraded doors to level 3 and dock with the refueling platform the boarding party wont be able to board and you get free fuel. Found out by happy accident once.

This man got the Zoltan peace event and chose violence... smh

AmbiguousAmphibian years ago: I don't really like flak. AmbiguousAmphibian today: I would have crawled through the rebel fleet and sold everything I had just for the chance to have two flaks running at the same time. When you become convinced of a weapon's worth by it silently kicking so much ass even when you didn't like it at first.

46:25 - generally attacking everyone you meet IS the best policy, but ironically this was one of the few counter-examples. That was the Zoltan Homeworlds quest ship, which gives you a 50/50 shot at getting a Zoltan shield if you play it correctly.

Quick tip for dealing with bad stuff that happens in nebulae, where your sensors are down. Spoilered in case you do not want any freebie backseating style help, you can just not click to expand it. 1. The red fist icon, indicates one or more enemy boarders that are not mind controlled by you. Okay, look to the bottom of the screen at 7:21 - 7:28, you can see there is a red fist on your medbay and a red fist on your oxygen. Since 3 boarders were also visible in your medbay, you knew at that moment that there were 4 boarders on your ship. More could occur if you were also fighting a ship with a teleporter, but 4 I believe is the maximum for a non ship boarding event, which can also be combined with a ship so be aware. It is rare, but it happens. Anyway, the point is, without sensors, you can see when there is a boarder of some kind in any room with a system in it, and since they cannot damage your crew or your ship unless they're in a room with crew or systems in it, you only need to know if they're in such rooms. You will see a red fist anytime they're in a room with a system or subsystem in it, even if you have no sensors, because the ship registers that the system itself is taking damage, and will always do so by indicating a red fist. The red fist doesn't disappear even if the hostile crew is otherwise occupied fighting your own crew, making no progress damaging the system, the display will still show you a red fist even when no damage is occurring. The boarder in oxygen decided to head for piloting instead of knocking out the oxygen after this point. You can tell by watching from this moment in the video forward, as the red fist in oxygen went away, and later appeared in piloting after your pilot was reassigned. What's really funny is if you watch the video really closely, the boarder had to have entered the room next to your piloting the same moment you exited that same room, as the boarder isn't even visible, so you didn't see the boarder even as your pilot literally walked straight through his body as the boarder headed for piloting and your pilot headed for the medibay. But half a second later, you can see the red fist over the piloting. Caught me off guard as well as the timing would have needed to be exactly perfect for neither you nor the enemy crew to notice each other visually. This could only ever happen with disabled sensors, so it doesn't come up very often, maybe the first time I've ever seen a crew sneak by so undetected. You'd otherwise have been able to see the fourth boarder by being in the room with him and crossing paths, even with sensors down. 2. The red fire icon, for the same reasons This is also true for fires on board your ship, while they'll be undetected in rooms not seen with sensors or crew and no systems, any time there's a fire in a room with a system or subsystem, you will see the fire icon, and also, see the damage it is doing to the system. So for the slug ships that don't have sensors, or when sensors are down, or when you're in nebulae, remember you can see fires and enemy crew which are going to damage your systems via those indicators. You can also vent all rooms without systems in them to kill enemy boarders and fires just to be in the safe side, if you're not sure, and both boarders and fires will eventually spread to a room with a system if you leave them alone. So, if you've had a fire, or had boarders, once your crew is in a safe position and the oxygen and doors are both fixed, you can vent any systemless room to be double sure there's no threats on board. 3. Breaches don't get an indicator. The only kind of hazard you cannot see without sensors is a breach, so you will need to walk your entire ship on foot to look for breaches before your next jump, if you think you've been hit by rocks, missiles, or breach causing lasers, but since these hazards cause you no issues once you're not in a battle, your doors and oxygen are working, and you have a working med or clonebay, and there are no boarders or fires, you can prioritize fixing breaches in systemless rooms dead last. Breaches in system rooms need to be fixed before the system can be fixed, so those are a priority if the system is important. A bad place for a breach is in the doors room while the doors system is down and you've been venting fires or boarders, so most of the doors on the ship are locked open to space. Then you cannot restore oxygen to the ship until you fix the doors enough to close them, and you need to fix the breach first before you can fix the doors, all oxygenless repair work. Breach in the doors room after you've been venting is a terrible, terrible thing to expose your ship to in a fight, so do not risk opening all the doors in your ship during a fight with a ship that can shoot you, or near a sun which can damage your systems with fires, or in an asteroid belt when your shields can ever be offline. It's often better to take the system and hull damage due to fires during the fight and then vent the ship after your doors room cannot be damaged while the doors are stuck open, because you can soft lock yourself or kill all your crew before you can fix the doors if you have a breach in the doors room and no way of restoring oxygen to the ship until it the breach and the doors are both fixed. Add a busted oxygen system to this mess and that likely is a game over unless you have a functional clone bay. 4. The doors themselves You can watch the boarding event, look at your orange doors. You can see when they open or close anywhere on the ship, indicating someone is passing through them. When boarders are attacking upgraded doors, i.e. blast doors, they make a firing sound and the door itself visibly takes damage. 5. Audio cues Breaches being caused in the first place, followed by the sound of air venting, boarders teleporting aboard, and fires actively burning all make noise. It's hard to hear, but it all makes noise. Boarders going through your doors or firing at them also make noise. There's just a lot of noises, so it's easy to miss them especially if the game volume is low because you're focused on chat. None of the hazards should be completely silent, although air venting from a breach is very quiet and I don't remember if it lasts until it is fixed.

debris comes from french probably. the americans say duh-BREE and the brits say DEH-bree (the all caps syllable is the stressed one)

Hey AA, discovered a merciless strategy recently. If you have hacking and a way to hurt enemy crew, wait until a few, or all, of them are in their medbay. Then hack the medbay. It will lock the doors to the medbay and quickly UNHEAL the people trapped inside. The flagship did this to me and bodied my borders. I still won because they weren't my main strat...but my jaw dropped at how efficiently it melted them away. Lol

Just wanted to say thank you, AA! It's super silly to say, but you sound exactly like my older brother, who I'd always watch play games as a kiddo (early 90s lucasarts games/tex murphy/fallout etc). A fun, comforting, semi-sarcastic, goofy fellow. Thanks for taking me back to the DOS era in a moldy-smelling semi-finished basement with a particularly sketchy/fire-hazard space heater and getting reminded it's past my bedtime when I'd witness rodger wilco get murdered in weird ways. Peak comfy :)

Been loving the ftl vods lately honestly one of my favorite games. Any chance of getting some more slay the spire or even some darkest dungeon 1/2 long form content like this?

Dodge is super useful even early game. Excellent survival benefit for scrap spent. Engine points also give you some buffer in case of damage, allowing you to jump away more readily in tough situations. You also power to jump faster. You can game engine power by diverting it to/from as needed too, being sure it's maxed when possible when enemy vollies. You also want it for missile defense, as shields don't help with this. If you have a defense drone that is less urgent. You do start hitting diminishing returns , but I almost always upgrade engine to this point before shields.

This one is less obvious, but regarding mind control, here's a apoilery hint about how to maximize it's effect. Notice how badly your ability to dodge drops when your PILOT gets mind controlled. If there is no upgrade to the piloting system to make there be an auto pilot, which is only half as effective as manning the station at all, the dodge chance drops to zero when not cloaking. If you're facing down a ship and have weapons that can be dodged, use your mind control to smackeldorf their pilot. Then your shots that can miss will almost always hit unless they randomly miss the ship anyway, like flak can when it lands outside of the room. Mind controlling any other person manning a system causes the system to act as if it is unmanned, which for the person on engines is like a 10 percent drop in dodge. 100 percent drop in dodge is better, so do pilot, not engine person. It's hard to tell unless you can see the enemy ship's dodge chance or watch your own when your pilot gets smacked, but yeah, mind control the pilot. Hack shields or weapons, mind control pilots. Although, for similar reasons to mind control a pilot, you can hack piloting if you don't have mind control. If the hacking is very short, it's more useful preventing the ship from dodging than draining the shields, because it won't drain the flagship's shields in the short time frame, and it won't really prevent the ship's 4 different weapon systems from firing either, so an unupgraded hacking and no mind control means hack piloting. Otherwise, mind control piloting and hack shields so you can almost directly target enemy weapons. You can punch through 3 shields with the amount of shots you have, so lowering 4 shields to 3 is still a viable use of hacking. Just time it with your weapon volley.

Debris is pronounced deh-bree, as it is a french loanword. So it uses the french pronunciation which is not phonetic.

The fact he's using flak but refusing to knock out their engines to improve hit chance infuriates me 😂

Hey AA! Absolutely loving the FTL content. I watch every single one when I get the time. I would love if you included the whole VOD including failed runs. They tend to be quite entertaining, and your commentary and realizations during provide amazing content. I also just finished going back to the dwarf fortress series, and in a similar vein, I really wish I could have been there to see you learn and make mistakes. If you just prefer uploading this style of content then by all means it's your channel, and I will be here to watch whatever you upload. Keep up the "stellar" work you glorious amphibious mastermind!

If you stop and think about it, this is several magnitudes of sadistic horror. You are firing bits of your slain adversaries back at your foes. The flak is composed of scrap metal and assorted metal bits but it's never stated where or how the scrap is acquired. What if you're hoovering up the remains of your vanquished foes to repurpose as ammunition?

At 1:48:46, check this out AA, spoilery for those who are reading teh comment instead of watching the video. Notice how your flak weapons are missing the 1x2 room a lot that you're firing on, which is the missile room. Flak 1 can hit a 2x2 room no problem but has extra trouble over even the ship's dodging power to hit a 1x2 room. Flak 2 is even worse at hitting a small room. You're hitting the shields repeatedly enough to bring them down, but causing no damage. Your burst laser mark 2 is on auto fire, it should fire as soon as the shields are down, firing it separately from the flaks mean it is also just hitting those same shields again and not causing damage. Better is to use all your flaks on the 2x2 shields room, because that's nine shots, and none of them will miss the room itself unless the flagship dodges them specifically. It will almost always cause severe damage to the shields, and in the next volley, cause even more damage, wiping them out. (Which is what happened as soon as, later in the fight, you targeted the shield room. After you did that the fight was over, see how quickly the damage got racked up after that compared to the volleys beforehand?) Now your burst laser can hit anything it wants, because the flagship's shields are permanently suppressed by the flaks, which are also causing direct hull damage every volley. Basically to improve at the game you just need to focus on being more effective with your shots, and letting them auto fire when they are not synchronous suddenly throws away almost all of the firepower you had such a brilliant run to gather up. It's like deciding to fight the flagship with only 2 of your weapons instead of all four, it's such an enormous handicap to let them desynchonize and auto fire. you can keep the flaks autofiring together, but manually fire the weapon that is the odd one out, dont fire it as soon as it is ready, fire it when shields are down due to flak. You will pick up on stuff like this more after the fact than during the fight, in the actual fight you're focused on too many things, but watch the fight back afterward, when you're uploading the video. You yourself will notice things that the people doing nothing but watching will also notice, and when you notice it personally, it sticks with you better for the next fight. The fight is already kinda won but this is fight three, if you leave it long enough it comes back with a full zoltan super overshield and continues firing its super spread shot at you, and that hits you enough times things can go pear shaped. In this case, a good defense is having a more focused offense. As in, firing your flak at 2x2 rooms that contain shields, which is ridiculously good for you and very bad for them. That's why certain slug ships are hard to kill, their rooms are usually 1x2, so it's hard to flak their ships to death, you miss half your shots. The flagship's shield bay is nice and big, so it's the perfect target for your shotgun. Your burst laser is great for those precision shots, hitting their piloting or their 4 artillery weapon systems, or their cloaking, or whatever is small, and when the enemy shields are down and they cannot dodge, your burst laser will destroy that system for a good long while. Best to do it that way than put all your flaks on the missile bay and then miss and then also have your burst laser hit shields and do no damage to the missile bay. And then once the missiles are down it's an even bigger waste to keep firing there. Just do like all responsible gun owners do, and make sure you're actually aiming properly at something you definitely want to hit, every time you fire. Never fire without aiming. Line up the shot, make sure you want to take it, pause the game if need be. You're clearly getting much better, but this will immediately make you loads more effective in battle and it's easy enough to remember. It's also illustrative to anyone who wants to get into FTL and watches this video and reads the comments. Make minor changes like that and your run where you get 3 flaks actually will end up being more effective because you knew where to aim the flaks for maximum effect. That's just as important as getting them in the first place, because missing half your shots in the flagship battle is exactly like coming to the battle with only 2 weapons instead of 4. Not a fight you're likely to win, but it can happen.

Your run inspired me to go back and win with the Torus, mostly because I picked up 2 flak 1s due to seeing how busted they are.

I think shields are excellent to go for first because each layer of successive shield creates another chance for a dodge to occur, so heavy shields multiplies the defensive benefits offered by the engine upgrades.

I watch your FTL VODs while playing FTL on my iPad. Love it.

If you have medbay level 2 you can put 2 power in that and it will keep your crew healed through the damage from not having oxygen and the enemies will die faster. A little dangers with a Zoltan crew member though.

This has always been my go-to strat, pretty much by the letter. It used to be a lot more consistent, whereas now droprates for a weapon you already own are reduced. People would say 'no way you can do that without Cloaking' but I did a few times, those lasers chew hard.

I am literally playing Kenshi while watching this, with a full squad a 22 martial artist cyber-hivers (Beep & 21 Hiver workers, all with masterwork skeleton limbs). I mean, nothing compares to Kenshi.

I would have picked the breach bomb II any day instead of the pegasus. Yes, 2 missiles for the price of one is nice, but the breach bomb is a precise shot at whatever you aim.

4 burst lasers on that thing go so crazy

I always seem to miss these

Hey, shout out to my dude and his editor for absolutely CRANKING out the vids.

Cloaking over drone control is my preference, but here's the deal, if I end up in a situation where I am rich with shields and weapons and can afford the 85 scrap for drone control and I'm not boarding so I don't need a teleporter, then... drone control just for defense drone mark I specifically is 2 power to make yourself immune to almost all ships with missiles. They need to have 2 missiles set to fire together, and I have seen ships with that, and even a ship with 3 missile launchers on it that wasnt the flagship, but.... I can knock out their other missiles with my weapons and I can deflect the first missile with the drone part. I will then save up for cloaking and get that before I fully upgrade the ship, because missiles will never impact you when you have cloaking and defense drone mark 1, even when your cloak is recharging you have some missile defense. The 85 scrap is more expensive than just fixing the ship from missile damage, but just retroactively negating the damage taken doesn't help you when the missiles hit your weapons system or shields instead, and you suddenly find your run ending in a single battle due to not being able to fight back while your defenses are also down. The peace of mind you get for 85 scrap for the drone control with the defense drone mark 1, especially when it comes with the system for free, almost makes it a must buy for me. Even if I never use any other drones, even if I need to hack the flagship so i get hacking as well, even if i never upgrade it, defense drone mark 1 to kill incoming enemy missiles is my friend. It's half as expensive as cloaking and it will save you scrap on fixing your ship and stop a lot of instantly your run is over kinds of shots from enemy missiles. It can get overwhelmed by spammed missile fire but that only happens with the flagship and very rare ship battles with multiple missile launchers, where you'd still want to have at least one of those missiles shot down every volley anyway. ANY amount of missiles negated per volley is worth it when cloaking doesn't come up in stores first or when you can afford it, and I don't want to face the flagship without cloaking or defense drone mark 1. Hopefully both, but if I can get one of the two, I am grabbing it. Mind control or hacking can be foregone, I hate missiles that much and cloaking does not stop them all from the flagship, and you also want to dodge the flagship's ion and laser spam so you have shields for their beam gun, and there's also the drone spam in fight two, and the special multi shot attack in fight three, so having your cloak for that and your dodge and defense drone for the missiles is also pretty good. I think of defense drone mark 1 as my anti-missile shield, I always want to have at least one layer, and then I want it upgraded. Cloak also counts as an anti missile shield, and it's better, so I prefer that, but getting both is so good. at that point you have the defenses to hang with the flagship and you just need the firepower to take it down.

He was clearly saying debrIS it stands for debris in space

The Morse code is messing with my head I can’t figure out what it is supposed to say. The closest I have is either… TMIKIM or MXREM or maybe TZKEW . - - . . . - - or - - . . . - . - - . would fit better with laser themes imo

So glad to see FTL on the channel!! Im a long time veteran and i fucking love this game. I know all the metas muahhahhaha

I think the red tail is the easiest ship overall. It has the weapon system, as well weapons themselves, handled from the start, so you can safely focus on other areas.

🙂Burst laser II will win you the game on easy, but if you want to try hard mode you need a lot more money. For anyone who's curoious, here's my thoughts... *_SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SERIOUSLY SPOILERS OMGWTFSOSBBQ:_*. . . . . . You'll want several different races of crew, equipment, etc for the blue events, and will want boarding, mind-control, or other ways to kill crews. (Note, there are actually a few blue events in the game which give bad outcomes.) Fire beams are OK in general, and good if you've got rockmen, but I really like starting with the bio-beam from the slug ship. The best all-around gun in the game though, is hull lasers, because it's only medium-priced, the breaches will slow down people and robots from repairing the ship, and it'll suffocate the crew. The _extra secret sauce_ though, is that if you breach an un-manned / robot ship, *it cannot repair those systems at all!* This makes it really easy to farm weapons or shields, if you leave the AI ship with only enough system-points to run something small and harmless - go get a coffee! (Note, if you kill all the crew during the final boss fight and the AI takes over, *it can still repair itself*.) Mark II hull lasers are the most efficient for energy vs damage, and mark III will save you gun-space if you want to be able to switch to another set of weapons temporarily during a battle.

I just finished unlocking every ship in FTL! :>

shield hack is almost always worse than weapon* hack, even against final boss, because then you start taking big hits, tho iirc this is most notable phase 2 when drone surge happens

Ahhh why Always with the Spoiler 😅

Does AA stream on YT or only twitch?

Does he have any plans of playing with the dlc for the game once he finishes the vanilla runs?

has aa ever modded ftl cause there is a great mod that adds alot to the game

34:42

@1:12:47 nice

6:28

there’s so much tech these noobs don’t know lmao got a breach? open doors to adjacent rooms to give extra air hack medbays to kill enemies inside hack shields if you want to deal damage fight in piloting so pilot gives most of his effect, etc

LET'S GOOOO

What does 12 shot mean?

Really? Debris = debree yall...it's like flotsam and jetsum haha it's trash, recyclable or other wise..debris is usually leftovers, or shrapnel from crashes and or explosives...a debris field...in space..

PLEASE increase the difficulty!!!

when you streaming

Bro i never catch your FTL stream ffs

5 minute gang

upgrading cloak is worse for the flagship. sooner it runs out the sooner its recharged for the next volley. surprised no one has told you this.

I really like these, but I wish he didn't put WIN at the end of the title, takes some of the excitement of the run away if I know he's going to win in advance. Still very fun to watch and learn from as a newer player who recently jumped back into the game after several years.

2nd like

Astroid systems are probably just debris fields from soo many flak connons 🤣🤣