So we meet them just in time for them to die?
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Oh tish pshaw. Pessimism. 24-carat badasses, the lot of you. We may not actually die fighting the flagship. Or, this is the crew at their very best on the eve of battle, if it is one-way-ticket-to-Valhalla time. Half a league onwards and all that.
4 Likes
We are a rather impressive lot!
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I think I’ve enjoyed this writeup more than actually playing the game.
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If I were on the ship, I’d be screaming, “We’re all gonna die!” going into the final battle. I’m bad for crew morale.
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Quite looking forward to the conclusion for this narrative. Can’t help but feel like when I play the game myself it will seem mundane by comparison.
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That, and I see how much I suck!
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Sector 8
Prelude: Today. I Shall Let You Live. Tomorrow, Who Knows
The last sector. This is it. The big one.
Of course, we have to deal with admin and a few small ones first. Starting with the admin, we can hand over the message and stop being glorified postmen.
Personally I think we could have rung the doorbell, left it on the doorstep and flown away. But sure, let’s give the message ourselves.
Our message is “the rebels have a really big ship. You should blow it up”? No wonder the rebellion is winning if we he have to tell our military leaders that, explains a lot.
Oh, right, we have to blow up the really big ship. With this extra fuel, awesome. Space Molotov cocktails all round then. Fine, where are these repair shops?
Nowhere terribly useful then. Marvellous. Let’s go on our date with destiny.
Ok, word of warning here, so you’re not shocked, but we accept all surrenders from here on in. There’s nothing much to be gained by fighting to the death and risking a lucky hit.
First rebel who gets to live.
We visit the one accessible junk shop and retrieve a pretty good haul. We’re happy about the missiles and drone parts.
Second rebel. They send in a boarding party, it’s so sweet.
We shoot them a bit and then accept their surrender.
Much to our bafflement, in the epicentre of the war zone we run into some expansionist gardeners with crappy equipment.
Yeah, they call themselves terraformers but that just means a centuries-long project to grow a lot of really nice lawns and herbaceous borders,
We help out and find out that they’re unprincipled gardeners. I had an aunt like that. I can’t believe this but we go into bat on behalf of the slime mould.
We take the bribe and slink away, feeling morally compromised. Not the first time this trip. Maybe they and the mould will get along. Anyway, sod simple organisms, we have a base to defend.
Time for a final upgrade. We max out the reactor and add a bar to the weapons.
A ping appears on the scanner. Incoming.
And there it is. Big, yellow, and horribly beweaponed.
Stations, guys.
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The tension is thick enough to cut with a knife. Or maybe that’s just the whiff of Snotty not having changed his socks since Sector 2.
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There’s been a couple of instances where I’ve had to change my undies though. This coming battle might be one of them
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This has inspired me to fire the game up again… and never fear all, I am just as bad at it as I once was. The hair on my head may be less, the belly a bit more, but some things never change.
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Sector 8
Round 1: We Are Just Too Pretty For God To Let Us Die
It does start badly.
A hacking drone makes it past our defence drone and suckers onto the shield room. It will now unplug the shield bubbles one by one, while the flagship shoots at us with its ion guns, huge green laser things, triple missile battery and terrifying beam weapon. We should probably do something about that.
That is plan C, which is plan A with added away party to the enemy missile room.
The missile battery dealt with, we retrieve the redshirts. Thanks to Snotty and js619 and our excellent evade, we’ve only taken 7 damage despite the haxxors messing up our shields.
Back to plan A, in the knowledge our missile supply is effectively bottomless and the flak cannon is knocking chunks off the enemy on an nice even tempo. It works with remarkably little drama.
Ok, the helm and engines get shot up and we lose more hull. I said relatively little drama. Off the flagship runs. We pick up the jetsam and - yes - launch the hull repair drone.
We have a job to finish. Onwards.
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We shoot them a bit and then accept their surrender.
Oh my Great Mantis God we’ve gone soft. The serrated edges of my forefathers forelegs are blunt with disgust.
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Sector 8
It Can’t Be Reasoned With And It Absolutely Will Not Stop
We catch up with the flagship and see it’s missing a wing. It’s fixed its missile launcher though.
This round it’s going all-in on drones, which include a defence drone. Plan A is going to need a bit of adaptation, as a lone missile will just be picked off. There’s also one surprise as well.
A projectile hurtles across space, dodges our defence drone, and smashes a breach in the camera room. A terminator has come to visit.
We send out the redshirts to go and break the flagship’s missile launcher again, and consider what to do about the boarding drone.
To the possible surprise of the crew, the answer is “nothing”. The thing is, boarding drones are easily distracted. So long as it’s in there smashing up the camera room, it’s doing no real harm. We have two crew in the flak cannon room should it come through the door, which it won’t any time soon because we have paid for solid blast doors.
“Power surge” just means the enemy combat drones get a bit excitable, briefly. With our awesome shields and evasion, we are completely unbothered.
No real damage. In the meantime, synchronising the missile and flak cannon works well.
The flagship’s shields are down. The boarding drone is trying to get through the door to the flak cannon room, bless its little electronic heart.
On the verge of winning this round. You’ll see we’ve switched to the lasers for more rapid fire in the absence of enemy shields.
Horrendous space kablooey. Done. We took 1 point of damage.
A spot of fixing-up and magic green hull spray and we’re good to go. Maybe round 3 will be tougher.
6 Likes
Oh, I never find the “magic green hull spray” in my runs. Maybe that’s why I’m so bad at this game. (spoiler: that’s not the reason)
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Sector 8
Round 3: Their Shoulders Held The Sky Suspended
You can run but you can’t hide, especially if you’re a gigantic yellow spaceship trailing smoke and debris.
You do have time for quite sophisticated ad hoc engineering though. The thick Zoltan shield means we can’t teleport in and are not going to be doing real damage any time soon. There is also a mind controller, and a super-weapon of some kind. Nice.
The battle begins. Two sets of boarders appear, Mirefox is mind-controlled and we pick up a breach in the forward passageway. I have absolutely no idea how that happened.
One boarding party is introduced to vacuum while OhBollox and Tamsk punch the other. Mirefox is allowed to smash up the much-abused camera system. The charge laser is set to plink, to chip away the Zoltan shield every 5 seconds.
You’ll also see that the enemy superweapon fires a cloud of green laser bolts that converge on the ship. The shields absorb four and most of the others miss thanks to Snotty and js619.
The Zoltan shield is now through and we launch plan A. The intruders are dealt with and a newly self-controlled Mirefox starts fixing his damage.
The superweapon blast gets through our shields this time and causes more damage, but we can’t see where without the cameras.
The cameras come back online. Ok, third breach up front, Snotty needs to do a spot of urgent repair work and we’re on fire. Tamsk, go and put that out. We target their shields and mind control system.
The next level of cameras work again and we can see just how much damage plan A has done to the enemy.
Quite a lot. The shield room looks nicely irreparable. Their mind controller still works and shadowfax starts hitting the flak cannon controls with a strange distant look in his eyes.
The MC room is destroyed. We target the weapons turrets. It is only a matter of time now.
A last burst from the superweapon clips the hull but we shrug it off.
And there it goes.
Certified badasses. Big damn heroes. We did it.
8 Likes
I don’t think I’ve ever made it far enough to realize that the final ship comes around more than once.
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I remember the first time that happened to me–I thought, “Yes, I beat it! … wait, what?” string of expletives
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Congratulations on your victory, guys!
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Postscript: After The Battle, Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen
And they lived happily ever after. Perhaps our heroes were feted as saviours of peace and justice, or perhaps they were quietly forgotten as reminders of the Federation High Command’s gross incompetence
If we’re honest, the storyline of FTL doesn’t really bear close examination.
For completeness, the final victory splash;
and the session stats;
That was a nice game and we got an achievement for winning with a new ship, so I’m happy with that. I was pretty confident about the win once we got into the sixth sector and the scrap starting piling up.
There was some less than optimal play. I mentioned forgetting to launch a defence drone, but there were a couple of points in the flagship battle where I just forgot to fire a charged weapon, should have sent a boarding party or chosen the burst laser instead of the missile. I also skipped over a couple of slightly cheesy double jumps to ensure that the crew were at full health.
That said, we took 22 hull damage in total during the flagship battle, so we’d have survived even without the magic hull repair drone.
One last thought:
It really is almost a decade since FTL was launched, and I still come back to it because nothing, not even ITB, surpasses it.
Oh yes.
Thank you all for reading along. It was fun to fly in company. 
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