FTL Ship Analysis: Engi Cruisers

Engi Cruiser A: The Torus





1
1
1
x10
3
2
2
1
1
3

16
0
15


Ion Blast II


Combat Drone Mk I

Maximum of 3 different weapons, 3 different Drones.

Starts with the Engi Medibot Dispersal Augment.

Room total: 16

It's fortuitous that the Engi Cruiser A is relatively easy to unlock, as it's a surprisingly solid ship right out the gate; the less time new players are liable to be trapped with the Kestrel Cruiser A, the better. An Ion Blast II plus a Combat Drone Mk I can theoretically beat any amount of Shields, as the Ion Blast II can self-chain Ion indefinitely -at max Weapons training, it can even do so if it misses, so long as it never misses twice in a row. (Which is never that likely to happen, given the AI's limits on evasion)

Realistically, you're going to need additional offenses at some point, but you can coast surprisingly far on just your starting kit plus upgrading defenses, especially if you get a hold of a Defense Drone to fend off missiles.

Long-term prospects are also surprisingly decent. The Ion Blast II fires fast enough all by itself to often result in a crewmember with maxed Weapons before you've finished Sector 2, and starting with both the Weapons System decently high and a Drone Control System at all means the Engi Cruiser A isn't as finicky about strategic RNG as most ships; looting a good selection of weapons is something you can lean into just fine, same for Drones, and same for a mix of the two, where other ships can end up looting a bunch of Drones and never even get an opportunity to buy a Drone Control System.

The Engi Medibot Dispersal Augment also means the Engi Cruiser A is surprisingly resistant to boarding in spite of having an Engi-heavy crew, as well as making fires, breaches, and general incidental crew damage much less problematic; you can have crew keep working after taking a hit or two, because they're going to heal passively, as opposed to needing to interrupt their work by sending them to the Medical Bay. It's also not too hard to justify selling it later if you approach maximum crewcount, which can help you get a hold of something your run needs, such as a good weapon.

Also, you have a decent array of blue option triggers built in between having Combat Drones, an Ion weapon, and Engi aboard the ship, making this one of the ships more prone to getting lucky.

That said, it's not all sunshine and roses.

First of all, the total reliance on a Combat Drone adds a shocking amount of RNG to tactical combat, as you can't tell the Combat Drone to aim for specific rooms, its movement is randomized and is the sole determiner of its fire rate, and it's always possible for it to completely randomly happen to be in front of an enemy weapon when the weapon fires and so be destroyed. One fight might go effortlessly because the Combat Drone hits Weapons, knocking out a missile launcher before it can fire, then knocks out Piloting so no dodges can occur, and the enemy ship rapidly falls apart from there. A different fight against the exact same ship may instead go catastrophically wrong because the Combat Drone refuses to do System damage and gets randomly shot down three times, leaving the enemy ship free to pile on Hull damage to your ship, the player having done nothing different between the two fights.

Second, while Drone-using enemy ships are very rare, if you run into a a ship with an Anti-Combat Drone, you can technically win, but only if you're willing -and able- to spend some ludicrous amount of time on fishing for your Ion Blast II hitting and destroying the Anti-Combat Drone, and either quickly getting lucky with deploying your Combat Drone and it crippling the enemy's Drone Control (Very unlikely, and if the enemy repairs it the Anti-Combat Drone will immediately respawn) or be willing and able to fish for hits on the Anti-Combat Drone until the enemy runs out of Drone Parts.

More realistically, you're just going to run from such ships if you haven't lucked into anything to let you get past them.

Similarly, if a ship has a Defense Drone Mk II, this kit can't get past it except by fishing for destroying the Defense Drone Mk II... and if you deploy your Combat Drone, it's very likely to get destroyed. So once again, such a ship is something you basically have to run from if you haven't gotten a hold of any relevant offensive boosts.

Then there's the consideration of Drone Parts. You have to spend a Drone Part on every single fight you want to win until you get a hold of some non-Drone form of Hull damage, and the problem of completely at random having them shot down means you can end up burning through Drone Parts at a fairly shocking rate if the game decides it hates you. Indeed, in fights occurring in asteroid fields, it may be better to not deploy a Combat Drone at all, and just suppress the enemy's Shields with the Ion Blast II while the Asteroids do damage for you -asteroids can kill Drones, too!

As Drone Parts are expensive to buy from Stores, come in small numbers in Stores, and are given at low rates as loot in general, if the strategic RNG doesn't get you eg a laser in a timely manner, your run can end up dead in the water simply from running out of Drone Parts in spite of not making any bad decisions.

Additionally, the ship's layout is awkward. Your Drone Control System is off in a corner away from your essential manned Systems in spite of being essential, as is your Oxygen System, the external venting is poorly-placed for helping defend... everything, basically... and while the Medical Bay's placement is fairly convenient in its centralness overall, this comes with the caveat that the Engi Medibot Dispersal Augment drastically reduces the utility of the Medical Bay being well-placed -the ship would honestly tend to perform better if the Medical Bay and Drone Control were swapped.

As such, while the Engi Cruiser A has one of the stronger starts, it's also disproportionately vulnerable to being rendered doomed by factors you can't mitigate.

Also, from a fun-factor perspective it tends to be a very frustrating, unfun ship to play once you're past the novelty factor of trying out Drones, as a fight going well tends to mean setting up initial conditions and then just waiting for the game to give you victory, while things going wrong is almost always some form of blatant RNG-screw you can't do anything about. That's boring in the best case scenario, and an incredible aggravation in the worst-case scenario.

On the plus side, the Achievements aren't particularly painful. Let's look at those.

Robotic Warfare
Have three Drones active at the same time.

Earning this with the Engi Cruiser A requires a decent amount of strategic luck, since of course you only start with one Drone. Since only two Drone types use just 1 Power, you also will usually need to spend a fair amount into upgrading your Drone Control even if you loot enough Drones, which can be a nuisance if the set isn't particularly complementary, or can mean you die before you actually pull off the Achievement even though you had the necessary tools.

It's not terrible overall, but it is annoying, and thanks to the other Engi Cruiser Achievements being overall easier to pull off, you're honestly pretty likely to unlock the Engi Cruiser B and casually earn Robotic Warfare with that -it literally starts with three Drones, just not enough Drone Control upgrades to run them all immediately.

I Hardly Lifted A Finger

Destroy an enemy ship without ever firing a Weapon.

The game frames it as 'destroy an enemy ship using only Drones', but that's not the actual mechanics: you can get the Achievement even if you have no Drones of any type on your ship. The game only actually cares about whether you ever let a Weapon fire at any point in the fight.

As such, this is actually surprisingly easy to earn, though you're unlikely to earn it completely on accident simply because all three Engi Cruisers start with a spammable weapon of some kind.

Now, the game obviously expects you to do something like get a second Combat Drone early and overwhelm enemy Shields that way, but in practice you can...

-Get lucky and find an early Autoship with no Shields, and just turn on the Combat Drone.

-Stumble into an asteroid field early on and just turn on the Combat Drone. The asteroids plus the Combat Drone will be plenty to push past a single Shield bubble and start doing damage, and if they hit the Shields System things will snowball from there.

-Stumble into an early Pulsar, let it knock out the enemy Shields, and have your Combat Drone start attacking.

-Stumble into an early Solar Flare and just stall for time, waiting for the Solar Flare to kill the enemy ship for you. Deploying a Combat Drone isn't even necessary, though it's preferable so the enemy will take more Hull damage and have more fires spawn. (By virtue of their Shield bubble being down when the Solar Flare goes off)

-Stumble into an early Ion Storm, where the enemy decides to leave their Shields down, and deploy a Combat Drone.

-Get a Crew Teleporter, and win purely through boarding the enemy, no Drone deployment necessary.

Yeah. This ostensibly-Drone-focused Achievement is really more readily done by getting lucky with environmental hazards. It's silly.

At least it's pretty painless, so long as you remember to not fire a Weapon when you're in a situation to potentially earn it.

The Guns... They've Stopped

Have four enemy Systems/Subsystems in an Ionized state at the same time.

This is different Systems/Subsystems, to be clear; encountering an enemy with four weapons and smacking the Weapons System until all of them are disabled doesn't count. Yes, that makes this Achievement's name extremely ill-considered.

Nonetheless, this is actually very easy to achieve without even really trying.

First of all, going into a Pulsar can easily Ionize enough Systems/Subsystems for you without you having to actually do anything in particular. The game doesn't care about why the Ionization is widespread.

Second, Systems with cooldowns are mechanically going into an Ionized state for their cooldown. As such, with a ship that has Hacking, Mind Control, Cloaking, or a Crew Teleporter, you don't actually need to Ionize as many Systems yourself. A ship that has two such Systems makes it fairly easy to get the Achievement with just your starting Ion Blast II -simply aim it at a System other than Shields, and you may well knock out Shields and then Ionize the System you actually targeted with Shields still Ionized. If two Systems are on cooldown... there you go. If a ship has three such Systems, you just need to hit their Shield bubble once while they're collectively cooling down!

While it's certainly possible to try to earn it 'legitimately' by collecting enough Ionizing tools to do it with just your own gear, you're honestly probably going to earn it on accident through one of the prior methods.

Like the second Achievement, this is thus fairly silly but at least also fairly painless; I meant it when I said the Engi Cruiser Achievements aren't particularly unpleasant.

And with two fairly painless Achievements in the list, it will rarely take long to unlock...

Engi Cruiser B: The Vortex





1
1
x9
3
2
1
1
1
3


16
0
6


Heavy Ion+Heavy Laser I


Antipersonnel Drone+System Repair Drone*2

Maximum of 3 different weapons, 3 different Drones.

Starts with the Drone Reactor Booster Augment.

Room total: 14

I like the idea, conceptually, of the Engi Cruiser B. The idea of a largely-automated crew is something games are strangely reluctant to explore; when the idea does come up, it's generally a blatant excuse for why you only have like ten people aboard a ship that should require dozens or hundreds of people to function smoothly. Which is an understandable thing to do, mind, but my point is it's an interesting concept in its own right, and then games largely don't care to explore it. And here's a game exploring it!

Unfortunately, the mechanical execution in FTL makes it... janky.

The big thing is that the Engi Cruiser B has the specific consideration of crew-related RNG particularly swingy in its relevance -for most ships, free crew from early events or from beating up slaver ships is a modest boost. For the Engi Cruiser B, these are essential. Conversely, early events that risk killing crew -which the game is terrible at communicating what event choices actually risk crew lives, and some events just kill crew with no chance to make a decision- can be an instant game over, where for other ships this would be a notable blow but entirely possible to recover from.

Furthermore, Drone behavior is awful. System Repair Drones assign themselves to the first task that calls for them without input from you, and then stick to that task until it's done, even if something much worse has happened that more urgently demands attention, with no way for you to reassign them. (Turning a Drone off and on won't change its assignment) It's incredibly easy to have things go very mildly wrong in the early game and have it uncontrollably spiral into a game over, regardless of whether you're willing to send your lone Engi off to deal with such issues, where literally any other ship would usually shrug off eg a particularly problematic missile hit.

Similarly, Antipersonnel Drones will never retreat for repairs as long as there's enemies to fight, and boarders -whether event boarders or 'natural' boarders- almost never occur as less than two people attacking. Unless they happen to target the Drone Control, the Antipersonnel Drone is extremely prone to dying completely unnecessarily, far more so than eg a Rockman would, in spite of on paper having similar combat profiles, and then you're stuck with a lone Engi for fending off the remaining boarders until the Antipersonnel Drone is allowed to be replaced.

One idea is to vent atmosphere from the majority of the ship, leaving only Piloting, the Medical Bay, and the hall between the two oxygenated, and upgrade Doors fairly early so that boarders will almost always take a fair amount of damage from asphyxiation. This is a risky thing to do, though, able to easily backfire and get your one and only Engi killed, earning you an immediate game over, whether by actively herding boarders into attacking your only crew or by virtue of dangers popping up in the 'safe' section such that the Engi has nowhere safe to go, potentially dying of asphyxiation even if you immediately close all doors -for one thing, the Oxygen System can be smashed. This 'strategy' also exacerbates the problems with Antipersonnel Drones being slow and out of your control, as boarders will end up continuously fleeing rooms, and a couple boarders cutting through a door actually get through tier 2 Doors fast enough an Antipersonnel Drone will contribute more or less nothing in damage to them until they actually stop somewhere. So even though this seems like the perfect ship to heavily vent atmosphere with, it's really not.

The Drone Reactor Booster is nice and all, but while internal Drones being slow is a flaw with them, it's not really the key flaw with them... not to mention they're still far too slow even with it. In practice, you should probably just sell it -the 40 Scrap you'll get can be invested into real crew or Shields or something else actually helpful.

Indeed, in general your overall goal should be to completely abandon the ship's central gimmick; you shouldn't sell off the Drones right away, but in the long haul you should probably sell off the Antipersonnel Drone and at least one of the System Repair Drones. They don't sell for a lot, but they don't help much, either, so it's still worth it once you've got a crew of 4+ people.

Among other points, while manning Systems has a relatively mild impact, and crew experience has a relatively small difference between 'nothing' and 'maxed', the cumulative effect of manning Systems is actually pretty dramatic, as is the cumulative effect of having experienced crew. Starting with literally one crewmember means you start with awful evasion and will in turn be slower to improve it, your weapons fire rate is going to be behind most enemy ships with comparable loadouts, you'll take more damage from fights you decide to run from due to slower FTL Jump charge rate, more shots will slip through your Shields due to a slower Shield recharge... and if you don't get lucky and get 3+ crew in the first couple of Sectors, you'll probably never get any maxed experience cases except maybe the one Engi with maxed Piloting, so these problems tend to stick with you all the way to the end of the game, leaving the Engi Cruiser B behind most ships forever.

This isn't even getting into how you straight-up lack initial Sensors, have the unusually terrible Engines tier of 1, and have a somewhat awkward layout that has access to venting but can only rarely make real use of it. Also not helping is that this ship has the single lowest room count of player ships; the Engi Cruiser B's vulnerabilities to System damage are exacerbated by how enemies will hit Systems noticeably more often than with other player ships.

Your manned Systems are actually placed pretty decently once you have enough crew for them, where nobody is fully isolated and both your pilot and your Shields person can quickly duck off to the Medical Bay and back, and Oxygen is convenient to both Engines and Weapons making it easy to stay on top of damage to it, so it's not all bad. Starting with a Drone Control at all is also a pretty significant edge, as I covered with the Engi Cruiser A. The Heavy Ion I plus Heavy Laser I can also carry you surprisingly far before you absolutely need additional offenses or Hacking or something.

But overall, this is a surprisingly bad ship unless you get a very specific type of luck (Early free crew, and lots of them), and is one of the ships most likely to have things go so horribly wrong in the first Sector that you might as well just restart.

It's especially aggravating that optimal play is so heavily 'abandon what defines your ship as fast as possible'. Most ships with a strong gimmick ultimately require you diversify, but 'diversify' is 'add more to what you're doing', not 'completely trash what you're doing in favor of something entirely different'. Optimal play with the Engi Cruiser B basically tries to become the Engi Cruiser A! At which point... why not just play the Engi Cruiser A? ("The Engi Cruiser B's color scheme is better" is a reason, I suppose, but not a good one)

Which is unfortunate, since you need to reach Sector 8 with it to unlock an actually pretty neat ship, specifically...

Engi Cruiser C: Tetragon





1
1
1
x9
3
2
2
1
1
2
1


16
0
25


Dual Lasers


Beam Drone Mark I

Maximum of 3 different weapons, 3 different Drones.

Starts with the Defense Scrambler Augment.

Room total: 17

First of all: immediately reassign the Lanius. Piloting is where new crew show up, and having the Lanius suck all the oxygen out is gratuitous damage to people. It's not like Lanius are exceptional pilots anyway.

I prefer assigning them to Weapons since that's not a central traffic zone while being very important to protect, but the same sort of logic applies to Engines, so it's not like Weapons is objectively correct even by those metrics.

Regardless, this is a... clunky design that lends itself to having optimal play be tedious -if you encounter a ship with 1 Shield bubble that can't hurt you, you should just Dual Laser it to death, in spite of how slow that will be. The ship is clearly tuned under the expectation you'll use the Beam Drone as your primary damage source, with the Dual Lasers just clearing the way, or Hacking clearing the way; you even start with the Defense Scrambler so Anti-Combat Drones and Defense Drones can't leave you helpless.

Unfortunately, while Dual Lasers are overall a good weapon, they're not the most slot-efficient, making them undesirable in the long haul given you have only three weapon slots; a Flak I would've been better, honestly. The intent of using Hacking and the Beam Drone is also Drone Part-intensive, and you don't have a Drone Recovery Arm to halve the costs; in practice, you should tend to be reluctant to use your Hacking unless you successfully switch away from relying on the Beam Drone for damage. Yes, you start with quite a lot of Drone Parts, but deploying a Hacking Drone and a Beam Drone in every fight will burn through Drone Parts extremely quickly, even if they never get shot down at random.

As such, starting with Hacking is... awkward. In the long haul it can be appreciated, letting you transition more smoothly to eg a flak-and-lasers strategy, but it eats a System slot permanently without necessarily helping at any point in a run; you have, in fact, room for only one additional System. This is limiting, making it harder to justify installing a System if the opportunity shows up, or if you're quick to do so making it more likely to go badly because it ultimately turns out a different System would've been better and whoops you can't buy it no matter how much Scrap you saved up!

Like the A and B before it, the Engi Cruiser C does at least benefit from starting with a Drone Control, meaning it's overall more likely for any given random loot to be usable. It's also overall unlikely to die early, and access to Hacking means you can always invest in that to overcome even quite serious Shields. The dangers are from running out of Drone Parts, failing to invest in Hacking quickly enough while failing to get the right kind of luck in terms of weapons and so on, or gambling on making a transition that doesn't work out somehow or another.

Also on the plus side, the ship is fairly resistant to some of the usual reasons for a fight to get your ship killed; Engi are quick to patch up breaches, put out fires, and repair critical Systems in combat, while the Lanius ensures that even if your oxygen situation goes horribly wrong you can always fix it -even though normally a Cloning Bay is problematic when it comes to fires and oxygen loss. The Lanius is also good at fending off boarders in a pinch, and makes it more viable to switch to a boarding-centric strategy if you get a Crew Teleporter opportunity and decide to take it. Abandoned Sectors are also relatively rewarding, since there's so many Lanius-based blue events in them, which is uncommon a perk.

I don't rate this a bad ship (I actually enjoy it overall; I meant it earnestly when I called it interesting), but it's very much an awkward ship, and you want to shed its core fighting style fairly quickly for something more sustainable -or find a Drone Recovery Arm. That's almost as good. Regardless, like many of the less-great ships, the strategic RNG needs to cooperate to a minimum extent for a run to not be doomed, which is a recurring flaw with FTL's design; that its use of RNG is prone to overshadowing skill, rather than being used to test your risk management or otherwise emphasize skill.

-----------------------------

Next time, we cover the confusingly-named Federation Cruisers, as the next step in the standard unlock chain.

See you then.