FTL Ship Analysis: Zoltan Cruisers
Zoltan Cruiser A: The Adjudicator
1
1
2
x5
3
2
1
1
1
16
12
2
Halberd Beam+Leto
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Zoltan Supershield Augment.
1
1
2
x5
3
2
1
1
1
16
12
2
Halberd Beam+Leto
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Zoltan Supershield Augment.
Room total: 18
The Zoltan Cruiser A design is one of the more terrible ships in the game.
The first problem is, strictly speaking, not a problem with the Zoltan Cruiser A at all, but just a problem with the way the game teaches the player: that it's entirely possible to go a long, long time unaware that your Halberd Beam is actually able to do damage to ships that only have 1 Shield bubble, rather than requiring enemy Shields are entirely down. If you don't realize that, the Zoltan Cruiser A is a miserable experience to play, barely able to cope with early fights and only with missile expenditures you can't sustain and instantly becoming unviable once 2-Shield-bubble ships are normal if you don't luck into something to help before then.
Even once we're past that teaching hurdle... the Zoltan Cruiser A instead has a strong-but-flawed early game, and loses a lot of its luster as a run progresses, and already has serious flaws from out the gate.
The first of these flaws is that where normally ships get 8 bars of Power built in, the Zoltan Cruiser A gets 5. Yes, you have three Zoltan crewmembers, but one of them is tied up in the Pilot seat, and the others may be forced to run off and put out fires, fight boarders, seal breaches, etc, mid-combat. As such, until you get a non-Zoltan crewmember, you're actually operating at a Power deficit compared to most ships, and even once you have one non-Zoltan crewmember your Power situation is frustratingly frail.
The second of these flaws is the Zoltan Supershield.
Yes, the Zoltan Supershield is a flaw.
It's easy to be impressed by the Zoltan Supershield when looking at what all it theoretically adds. It prevents mind control and boarding actions of any kind until it goes down, intercepts missiles -which are a perpetual problem for basically every ship unless you luck into a Defense Drone and Drone Recovery Arm- forces bombs to spawn outside instead of inside the ship, and is in general 5 free HP per fight.
Unfortunately, it's burdened by issues. It interferes with your crew training Shield skill (Reminder: a hit blocked by a Supershield does not generate Shield experience), eats damage before your proper Shield bubble and so your ability to extend its lifespan is limited, it doesn't scale with the power creep of offense as you progress in a run, exacerbated by the point that unlike a regular Shield bubble the damage of an attack actually matters, and frankly enemy ships tend to outgun you. (Even aside its specific vulnerability to Ion weaponry) Against a regular Shield bubble, the AI's inability to deliberately synchronize weapon volleys means them outgunning you is often not so bad, often letting your Shield absorb a lot more punishment than it has any right to absorb because the AI doesn't fire five shots all together to overwhelm 4 Shield bubbles but instead fires a couple of shot, then three more, so three Shield bubbles is able to fully absorb this offense. Against the Zoltan Supershield, that doesn't apply; them outgunning you in general means they tear through Zoltan Supershields in no time flat, where the player actually finds enemy Zoltan Supershields genuinely a serious problem.
Indeed, you're probably best off selling it sometime before the Rebel Flagship, because it will contribute far less in it than many, many other Augments you could take.
This is all a problem because the game is clearly operating on the premise that the Zoltan Supershield is amazing. The Halberd Beam's long charge time is clearly supposed to be made tolerable by the Zoltan Supershield buying you time to charge it, and to be fair, in the earliest portion of a run this is even actually true. The Zoltan Cruiser A does bully most early-game ships, sometimes killing them before they even break through the Zoltan Supershield.
Similarly, the Zoltan Supershield is clearly meant to also buffer you against boarding parties. The fact that your crew is utterly godawful in melee combat isn't a big deal when enemies can't board you in the first place, right? And like with the Halberd Beam, this even is true in the very, very earliest portion of the game should you happen to encounter a boarding-capable ship.
The Zoltan Cruiser A design is one of the more terrible ships in the game.
The first problem is, strictly speaking, not a problem with the Zoltan Cruiser A at all, but just a problem with the way the game teaches the player: that it's entirely possible to go a long, long time unaware that your Halberd Beam is actually able to do damage to ships that only have 1 Shield bubble, rather than requiring enemy Shields are entirely down. If you don't realize that, the Zoltan Cruiser A is a miserable experience to play, barely able to cope with early fights and only with missile expenditures you can't sustain and instantly becoming unviable once 2-Shield-bubble ships are normal if you don't luck into something to help before then.
Even once we're past that teaching hurdle... the Zoltan Cruiser A instead has a strong-but-flawed early game, and loses a lot of its luster as a run progresses, and already has serious flaws from out the gate.
The first of these flaws is that where normally ships get 8 bars of Power built in, the Zoltan Cruiser A gets 5. Yes, you have three Zoltan crewmembers, but one of them is tied up in the Pilot seat, and the others may be forced to run off and put out fires, fight boarders, seal breaches, etc, mid-combat. As such, until you get a non-Zoltan crewmember, you're actually operating at a Power deficit compared to most ships, and even once you have one non-Zoltan crewmember your Power situation is frustratingly frail.
The second of these flaws is the Zoltan Supershield.
Yes, the Zoltan Supershield is a flaw.
It's easy to be impressed by the Zoltan Supershield when looking at what all it theoretically adds. It prevents mind control and boarding actions of any kind until it goes down, intercepts missiles -which are a perpetual problem for basically every ship unless you luck into a Defense Drone and Drone Recovery Arm- forces bombs to spawn outside instead of inside the ship, and is in general 5 free HP per fight.
Unfortunately, it's burdened by issues. It interferes with your crew training Shield skill (Reminder: a hit blocked by a Supershield does not generate Shield experience), eats damage before your proper Shield bubble and so your ability to extend its lifespan is limited, it doesn't scale with the power creep of offense as you progress in a run, exacerbated by the point that unlike a regular Shield bubble the damage of an attack actually matters, and frankly enemy ships tend to outgun you. (Even aside its specific vulnerability to Ion weaponry) Against a regular Shield bubble, the AI's inability to deliberately synchronize weapon volleys means them outgunning you is often not so bad, often letting your Shield absorb a lot more punishment than it has any right to absorb because the AI doesn't fire five shots all together to overwhelm 4 Shield bubbles but instead fires a couple of shot, then three more, so three Shield bubbles is able to fully absorb this offense. Against the Zoltan Supershield, that doesn't apply; them outgunning you in general means they tear through Zoltan Supershields in no time flat, where the player actually finds enemy Zoltan Supershields genuinely a serious problem.
Indeed, you're probably best off selling it sometime before the Rebel Flagship, because it will contribute far less in it than many, many other Augments you could take.
This is all a problem because the game is clearly operating on the premise that the Zoltan Supershield is amazing. The Halberd Beam's long charge time is clearly supposed to be made tolerable by the Zoltan Supershield buying you time to charge it, and to be fair, in the earliest portion of a run this is even actually true. The Zoltan Cruiser A does bully most early-game ships, sometimes killing them before they even break through the Zoltan Supershield.
Similarly, the Zoltan Supershield is clearly meant to also buffer you against boarding parties. The fact that your crew is utterly godawful in melee combat isn't a big deal when enemies can't board you in the first place, right? And like with the Halberd Beam, this even is true in the very, very earliest portion of the game should you happen to encounter a boarding-capable ship.
Except actually no, not even slightly, because literally all boarding events will utterly ignore it aside an obnoxious line about how the enemy 'must' have a Zoltan Supershield Bypass Unit. As these are the actually threatening boarding situations... that is a very serious issue with the idea that the Zoltan Supershield protects your agonizingly frail crew from boarding actions.
Oh, and once enemy ship firepower and durability rises just a little bit, even the regular boarding actions aren't meaningfully protected against. It's basically guaranteed they'll take out your Supershield bubble less than twenty seconds, at which point they'll rush to teleport aboard, and now your Zoltan crew being incredibly frail is a serious problem.
By extension, as enemy ship firepower rises it's pretty unlikely the Halberd Beam will get its first shot off before the enemy has gotten through the Zoltan Supershield, making this synergy not really existent anymore.
More understandably, the Zoltan Cruiser A is burdened by a frustratingly awkward layout. You've only got two rooms to start venting atmosphere from and all your Subsystems and your Medical Bay are fairly far from those rooms, making it difficult to rapidly respond to fires in Subsystems or the Medical Bay. This is then compounded by your initial reliance on a Zoltan crew, as they're terrible firefighters and especially terrible at repairing damaged Systems or Subsystems in oxygen-starved rooms due to their poor HP.
The fact that Piloting is all the way at the opposite end of the ship from the rest of your essential Systems also means the pilot is alarmingly vulnerable until you have a large crew. Enemies teleporting into the pilot seat can result in you being forced to have the pilot flee to avoid dying, and suddenly your evasion is zero or at least a lot worse, and in the time it takes the rest of your crew to get over and fight the boarders they may have already smashed Piloting.
Also a big issue is that the ship is fairly close to being a straight corridor as far as navigability goes, an issue once again compounded by your Zoltan crew: fires and oxygen-starved rooms are alarmingly likely to be placed somewhere you have to pass through to get to other major elements of the ship. This can easily create situations where the main of your crew is injured and needs to get to the Medical Bay, but can't because there's hazards on the way and they'll die if they try to walk through, which is liable to be a case of 'you're already dead, the game just hasn't made it official yet'.
A final, more subtle issue is that the reliance on the slow-firing Halberd Beam means it's very unlikely you'll have someone maxed out in their Weapons skill in time for the Flagship. You have to get fairly lucky with either pre-experienced crew or early free weapons to avert this issue.
Taken altogether, the Zoltan Cruiser A is one of the worst ships in the entire game. It needs strategic luck and/or Scrap expenditures to actually gain access to one of the units of Power other ships get for free, it's very sensitive to tactical bad luck (Fires, breaches, hits to crew), it needs strategic good luck to be able to fight anything past 2-Shield ships (ie looting or successfully buying a new weapon that helps with Shields), it's perpetually in extreme danger from boarders and boarding events, and in exchange it gets an on-average relatively safe first-to-second Sector.
On the plus side, the Achievements aren't so bad, making it relatively easy to unlock the later Zoltan Cruisers, both of which are fortunately much less awful.
Shields Holding
Defeat an enemy ship without your Zoltan Supershield failing.
This in particular is very easy to get. Simply make sure to prioritize knocking out Weapons while tearing enemies apart, and in some run you're liable to get this in Sector 1. If you luck into a Weapon Pre-Igniter, it's even plausible to get this in later Sectors, assuming you also get a decent weapon selection.
Given' Her All She's Got, Captain!
Have 29 Power inside Systems simultaneously.
This is more of a pain. It requires a lot of Scrap be spent into Systems to hold that Power; just fully upgrading your Reactor while having 4 Zoltan isn't good enough. Since the Zoltan Cruiser A only has 3 Zoltan to start, it also requires either acquiring another Zoltan -when they're relatively rare, not to mention unusually expensive- or getting a Backup Battery.
In conjunction with the Zoltan Cruiser A having serious issues getting to the late game, this is, more than is already fundamentally true of Achievements in the game, a bit of a luck-based mission.
Manpower
Reach Sector 5 without purchasing a Reactor upgrade from the ship upgrade menu.
This, fortunately, is hard but not actually all that luck-based. Luck can help, as thankfully it doesn't count events upgrading your Reactor against you, nor does it consider using a Backup Battery to be a fail, but the Zoltan Cruiser's early-game strength is good enough to fight your way to Sector 3 pretty reliably, at which point if your run hasn't lucked into better weapons, Reactor upgrades, etc, you can try to just run to Sector 5 as fast as possible.
With two Achievements being relatively straightforward to acquire, it's thus thankfully fairly easy to unlock...
Zoltan Cruiser B: Noether
1
1
1
x5
4
1
2
1
1
16
0
2
Ion Blast+Ion Blast+Pike Beam
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Zoltan Supershield Augment.
Oh, and once enemy ship firepower and durability rises just a little bit, even the regular boarding actions aren't meaningfully protected against. It's basically guaranteed they'll take out your Supershield bubble less than twenty seconds, at which point they'll rush to teleport aboard, and now your Zoltan crew being incredibly frail is a serious problem.
By extension, as enemy ship firepower rises it's pretty unlikely the Halberd Beam will get its first shot off before the enemy has gotten through the Zoltan Supershield, making this synergy not really existent anymore.
More understandably, the Zoltan Cruiser A is burdened by a frustratingly awkward layout. You've only got two rooms to start venting atmosphere from and all your Subsystems and your Medical Bay are fairly far from those rooms, making it difficult to rapidly respond to fires in Subsystems or the Medical Bay. This is then compounded by your initial reliance on a Zoltan crew, as they're terrible firefighters and especially terrible at repairing damaged Systems or Subsystems in oxygen-starved rooms due to their poor HP.
The fact that Piloting is all the way at the opposite end of the ship from the rest of your essential Systems also means the pilot is alarmingly vulnerable until you have a large crew. Enemies teleporting into the pilot seat can result in you being forced to have the pilot flee to avoid dying, and suddenly your evasion is zero or at least a lot worse, and in the time it takes the rest of your crew to get over and fight the boarders they may have already smashed Piloting.
Also a big issue is that the ship is fairly close to being a straight corridor as far as navigability goes, an issue once again compounded by your Zoltan crew: fires and oxygen-starved rooms are alarmingly likely to be placed somewhere you have to pass through to get to other major elements of the ship. This can easily create situations where the main of your crew is injured and needs to get to the Medical Bay, but can't because there's hazards on the way and they'll die if they try to walk through, which is liable to be a case of 'you're already dead, the game just hasn't made it official yet'.
A final, more subtle issue is that the reliance on the slow-firing Halberd Beam means it's very unlikely you'll have someone maxed out in their Weapons skill in time for the Flagship. You have to get fairly lucky with either pre-experienced crew or early free weapons to avert this issue.
Taken altogether, the Zoltan Cruiser A is one of the worst ships in the entire game. It needs strategic luck and/or Scrap expenditures to actually gain access to one of the units of Power other ships get for free, it's very sensitive to tactical bad luck (Fires, breaches, hits to crew), it needs strategic good luck to be able to fight anything past 2-Shield ships (ie looting or successfully buying a new weapon that helps with Shields), it's perpetually in extreme danger from boarders and boarding events, and in exchange it gets an on-average relatively safe first-to-second Sector.
On the plus side, the Achievements aren't so bad, making it relatively easy to unlock the later Zoltan Cruisers, both of which are fortunately much less awful.
Shields Holding
Defeat an enemy ship without your Zoltan Supershield failing.
This in particular is very easy to get. Simply make sure to prioritize knocking out Weapons while tearing enemies apart, and in some run you're liable to get this in Sector 1. If you luck into a Weapon Pre-Igniter, it's even plausible to get this in later Sectors, assuming you also get a decent weapon selection.
Given' Her All She's Got, Captain!
Have 29 Power inside Systems simultaneously.
This is more of a pain. It requires a lot of Scrap be spent into Systems to hold that Power; just fully upgrading your Reactor while having 4 Zoltan isn't good enough. Since the Zoltan Cruiser A only has 3 Zoltan to start, it also requires either acquiring another Zoltan -when they're relatively rare, not to mention unusually expensive- or getting a Backup Battery.
In conjunction with the Zoltan Cruiser A having serious issues getting to the late game, this is, more than is already fundamentally true of Achievements in the game, a bit of a luck-based mission.
Manpower
Reach Sector 5 without purchasing a Reactor upgrade from the ship upgrade menu.
This, fortunately, is hard but not actually all that luck-based. Luck can help, as thankfully it doesn't count events upgrading your Reactor against you, nor does it consider using a Backup Battery to be a fail, but the Zoltan Cruiser's early-game strength is good enough to fight your way to Sector 3 pretty reliably, at which point if your run hasn't lucked into better weapons, Reactor upgrades, etc, you can try to just run to Sector 5 as fast as possible.
With two Achievements being relatively straightforward to acquire, it's thus thankfully fairly easy to unlock...
Zoltan Cruiser B: Noether
111x5412111602
Ion Blast+Ion Blast+Pike Beam
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Zoltan Supershield Augment.
Room total: 15
The Zoltan Cruiser B is probably the best of the Zoltan Cruisers, in spite of having no Shield bubble at all to start with. Twin Ion Blasts means the Zoltan Cruiser B is immediately equipped to take down any ship no matter how many Shields it has -just set Autofire on, fire one the instant it's ready, and then once it's roughly half-charged tell the other to fire, and unless the enemy dodges too many shots in a row you'll knock out the entirety of their Shields eventually- and the Pike Beam charges reasonably quickly while having surprisingly decent damage potential due to its long beam.
Starting with Shields 1 is pretty insulting, mind. There are ships that don't start with Shields at all, and for them every Store carrying Systems at all will carry a Shield System, at a cost of 125 Scrap, and purchasing Shields sets you to Shields 2. Upgrading from Shields 1 to Shields 2 costs... 100 Scrap. So you're only saving 25 Scrap compared to not starting with a Shield unit.
Still, not being dependent on Stores showing up when you have the Scrap to spare is a non-trivial advantage, so... whatever. There's worse ships in this game.
The Zoltan Cruiser B is probably the best of the Zoltan Cruisers, in spite of having no Shield bubble at all to start with. Twin Ion Blasts means the Zoltan Cruiser B is immediately equipped to take down any ship no matter how many Shields it has -just set Autofire on, fire one the instant it's ready, and then once it's roughly half-charged tell the other to fire, and unless the enemy dodges too many shots in a row you'll knock out the entirety of their Shields eventually- and the Pike Beam charges reasonably quickly while having surprisingly decent damage potential due to its long beam.
Starting with Shields 1 is pretty insulting, mind. There are ships that don't start with Shields at all, and for them every Store carrying Systems at all will carry a Shield System, at a cost of 125 Scrap, and purchasing Shields sets you to Shields 2. Upgrading from Shields 1 to Shields 2 costs... 100 Scrap. So you're only saving 25 Scrap compared to not starting with a Shield unit.
Still, not being dependent on Stores showing up when you have the Scrap to spare is a non-trivial advantage, so... whatever. There's worse ships in this game.
Much worse.
The Zoltan Cruiser B also benefits significantly from having an actually decent layout. It's somewhat resistant to flak offense, since shots aimed at the back part of the ship (The left) will frequently have some sub-shots aimed where they have no chance to hit. The Door Control Subsystem has direct access to external venting, making it relatively easy to protect from it boarders -just vent atmosphere- while no external venting exists between it and the Medical Bay, meaning you have no incentive to screw yourself over that way. The front portion of the ship has decent interconnectivity and so when fires, breaches, etc, make rooms temporarily a terrible idea to walk through you can usually actually successfully avoid walking through them while getting healed or rushing to repair Oxygen or whatever you need to do. In general, everything has relatively centralized access, so no crewmember is ever agonizingly far from any given room, making it much easier to respond to emergencies of any sort without it necessarily directly creating complications. (ie you won't run someone from one end of the ship to the other to fight a fire, only for a new one to be started back where they were and it's such a huge walk both fires have significantly proliferated while the crewmember was walking. This is a thing that can happen with the Zoltan Cruiser A)
The Zoltan Cruiser B also benefits significantly from having an actually decent layout. It's somewhat resistant to flak offense, since shots aimed at the back part of the ship (The left) will frequently have some sub-shots aimed where they have no chance to hit. The Door Control Subsystem has direct access to external venting, making it relatively easy to protect from it boarders -just vent atmosphere- while no external venting exists between it and the Medical Bay, meaning you have no incentive to screw yourself over that way. The front portion of the ship has decent interconnectivity and so when fires, breaches, etc, make rooms temporarily a terrible idea to walk through you can usually actually successfully avoid walking through them while getting healed or rushing to repair Oxygen or whatever you need to do. In general, everything has relatively centralized access, so no crewmember is ever agonizingly far from any given room, making it much easier to respond to emergencies of any sort without it necessarily directly creating complications. (ie you won't run someone from one end of the ship to the other to fight a fire, only for a new one to be started back where they were and it's such a huge walk both fires have significantly proliferated while the crewmember was walking. This is a thing that can happen with the Zoltan Cruiser A)
The only consistently problematic bit of awkwardness is that Sensors are far from any venting options, making boarders showing up there problematic, particularly in conjunction with venting toward Sensors inherently demanding you isolate essential Systems. Even that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the aggravating bit of nonsense that boarder events all completely ignore Supershields; against regular boarding ships, they don't get to jump right in, and if you manage to knock out their Weapons fast enough they may never get the chance. And even then, Sensors largely isn't crucial -even with boarding being one of the few situations Sensors is directly useful in, you can already track boarders via rooms taking damage and doors either taking damage or opening and closing, as you can see these points without functioning Sensors even though you can't see the boarders directly.
It does still suffer from some of the Zoltan Cruiser A's issues, in that you're being denied the usual Reactor levels due to your pure Zoltan crew, never mind that somebody has to be in Piloting where Zoltan Power generation is useless, and that Zoltan Supershields are nowhere near as good as the game seems to think they are, but broadly speaking the Zoltan Cruiser B has all the tools it needs to get solidly into the midgame. It can technically theoretically beat the Flagship even if it never acquires new weapons or Systems, even. (Though in real terms this isn't going to happen: it will kill you too fast) It's also fairly flexible when it comes to strategic RNG, able to put almost any weapon type to decent use. Even an additional Ion weapon isn't complete junk.
It does have a fairly sensitive early game due to its pure reliance on the Supershield, but against initial ships with just 1 Shield bubble you can get away with having one Ion Burst lock down Shields while another locks down a Weapon. In conjunction with using the Pike Beam to hit Shields and Weapons, early ships often never make it through the Supershield. So long as you don't put off making your Shields System actually functional for too long, you should usually be okay.
Also keep in mind this is an excellent ship to buy a Drone Control with. The double Ion Blasts goes extremely well with Combat Drones, Beam Drones, and Fire Beam Drones, knocking out Shields so they can do damage very fast. An early Drone Control, with it either coming with a Combat Drone or you having previously looted one of the attacking Drones, may well be worth purchasing with funding you were saving to get your Shields online. If your enemies are torn apart before they can get through your Supershield, then you don't need regular Shields just yet.
Just keep in mind asteroids are a very, very serious problem, rapidly chewing through your Supershield and then hitting the ship underneath. An early purchase of Long-Ranged Sensors is worth considering, and you should also be prepared to occasionally restart over hitting an asteroid field in Sector 1. An early Drone Control can potentially mitigate this if you get a Defense Drone, but they're not fully reliable against asteroids so don't count on it.
On the whole, the Zoltan Cruiser B is probably the weakest of the broadly viable ships, which is frustrating since Zoltan are rare as crewmembers and Zoltan Supershields are almost impossible to acquire normally (And yes they're mechanically horrible, but it's still a little fun to play around with them), but it's actually reasonably viable and not self-defeating in its design like some ships I could name. If you're desperately wanting to unlock the Mantis ships, this is very much your best option.
Zoltan Cruiser C: Cerenkov
1
1
1
2
x2
2
3
2
2
1
1
16
2
15
Ion Charger
Beam Drone I
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Zoltan Supershield Augment.
It does still suffer from some of the Zoltan Cruiser A's issues, in that you're being denied the usual Reactor levels due to your pure Zoltan crew, never mind that somebody has to be in Piloting where Zoltan Power generation is useless, and that Zoltan Supershields are nowhere near as good as the game seems to think they are, but broadly speaking the Zoltan Cruiser B has all the tools it needs to get solidly into the midgame. It can technically theoretically beat the Flagship even if it never acquires new weapons or Systems, even. (Though in real terms this isn't going to happen: it will kill you too fast) It's also fairly flexible when it comes to strategic RNG, able to put almost any weapon type to decent use. Even an additional Ion weapon isn't complete junk.
It does have a fairly sensitive early game due to its pure reliance on the Supershield, but against initial ships with just 1 Shield bubble you can get away with having one Ion Burst lock down Shields while another locks down a Weapon. In conjunction with using the Pike Beam to hit Shields and Weapons, early ships often never make it through the Supershield. So long as you don't put off making your Shields System actually functional for too long, you should usually be okay.
Also keep in mind this is an excellent ship to buy a Drone Control with. The double Ion Blasts goes extremely well with Combat Drones, Beam Drones, and Fire Beam Drones, knocking out Shields so they can do damage very fast. An early Drone Control, with it either coming with a Combat Drone or you having previously looted one of the attacking Drones, may well be worth purchasing with funding you were saving to get your Shields online. If your enemies are torn apart before they can get through your Supershield, then you don't need regular Shields just yet.
Just keep in mind asteroids are a very, very serious problem, rapidly chewing through your Supershield and then hitting the ship underneath. An early purchase of Long-Ranged Sensors is worth considering, and you should also be prepared to occasionally restart over hitting an asteroid field in Sector 1. An early Drone Control can potentially mitigate this if you get a Defense Drone, but they're not fully reliable against asteroids so don't count on it.
On the whole, the Zoltan Cruiser B is probably the weakest of the broadly viable ships, which is frustrating since Zoltan are rare as crewmembers and Zoltan Supershields are almost impossible to acquire normally (And yes they're mechanically horrible, but it's still a little fun to play around with them), but it's actually reasonably viable and not self-defeating in its design like some ships I could name. If you're desperately wanting to unlock the Mantis ships, this is very much your best option.
Zoltan Cruiser C: Cerenkov
111
2x22
3221
116215Ion Charger
Beam Drone I
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Zoltan Supershield Augment.
Room total: 18
Like a frustrating number of the C variants, the Zoltan Cruiser C is a gimmick ship. Its gimmick is it doesn't have enough Power to run everything, and is expected to activate its Backup Battery to get its Beam Drone online. As its Reactor is painfully understrength (To the point of paying surcharges for multiple tiers), it takes a while to correct this.
Still, it's more solid than you might expect. Definitely weaker and less reliable than the Zoltan Cruiser B, but you shouldn't go in expecting to have to restart a dozen times before you even get past Sector 2 like some ships.
First of all, the use of a Clone Bay substantially eases the primary flaw of an all-Zoltan crew: that your crew is painfully frail. You don't have to panic and rush people off to get healed because they took damage other species would shrug off, boarding parties aren't automatically a high-pressure situation that's dangerously likely to cost you crew and cascade into the loss of your ship, you don't have to be ridiculously cautious in how you vent atmosphere...
... and you even have it a perfectly viable option to switch to a boarding-based strategy simply by purchasing a Crew Teleporter. Suicidal Zoltan boarding parties are actually pretty good at forcing kills through on enemies holed up in their Medical Bay, thanks to the on-death explosion, after all.
Second, the Ion Charger is probably the best Ion weapon to straight-up start with. It has one of the highest fire rates in the game, enough so that just firing the Ion Charger continuously is actually comparable experience generation to what a lot of two-weapon ships will provide to whoever is manning Weapons, it can single-handedly knock down any number of Shields if your Weapons crewmember is maxed on Weapons experience, and the ability to stockpile charges means you can actually, with a little luck, potentially overcome even 2 Shield bubbles right out the gate to let your Beam Drone fire. (eg if the ship you're fighting has absolutely no chance of hurting your ship, and so there's no risk involved in taking forever)
Third, the combination of a starting Ion weapon and a Drone Control means almost anything you loot that isn't intrinsically junk can actually help you with little or no further investment needed. Find a Combat Drone? Bolster your Drone Control one step, maybe upgrade your Reactor, and there you go you've got double attacking Drones. Find a Beam weapon? Not ideal given you have a Beam Drone, but you can make it work. Find a laser, any laser? Some Weapon System upgrades later and your ship is ready to go and can probably do some damage with it, or at least use it alongside your Ion Charger to open the way for the Beam Drone.
Fourth, you can actually be fairly fearless about entering nebula in the early game. Running into an Ion Storm is costing you literally 1 Power at the beginning of the game. Indeed, this is the only ship for which an Ion Storm will, in the early game, generally be advantageous. So dive right into those nebula and buy yourself more time to explore!
Fifth, this is the only ship in the entire game that is immediately equipped to have 2 Shield bubbles up perpetually no matter how much Ion is being thrown around thanks to starting with four Zoltan crew members. While it's a bit situational, it can be hugely useful in Pulsars, and against certain ship layouts will take them from 'threatening' to 'helpless'. (eg if they have a couple of Ion weapons and a Halberd Beam; this is rare to see, but not impossible) You shouldn't be trying to set this up right away, of course, but most runs will be able to gradually trickle Zoltan into the Shields room as new crew are acquired. It's not like you care what these other crew are for this purpose.
The overall result is that the Zoltan Cruiser C is a ship where strategic RNG is overall slanted in your favor. You do need some luck to get by, with the most likely failure point being that your initial kit demands Drone Parts to be able to destroy ships, but it's not terribly important what luck you get.
Indeed, if you can put up with the the early game experience, this is actually one of the better ships for getting diverse replayability, because you can actually end up with a variety of different builds without it requiring the strategic RNG throw crazy and overly-specific combinations at you.
All that said, the ship does have some serious problems. First of all, you're very much at the mercy of tactical RNG; boot up your Beam Drone in response to your first Ion Charger shot hitting, and then the Ion Charger misses twice in a row without the Beam Drone knocking out the Shields System? Your battery runs out and you're going to have to wait before you can go back to actually doing damage. An enemy shot happens to destroy your Beam Drone? Sorry, you can't hurt them until it can be deployed again and you're down a Drone Part through no real fault of your own. An enemy shot gets through, and hits a room that isn't empty? It almost doesn't matter what it is; only Door Control and Sensors are relatively unimportant. Everything else can rapidly cause the situation to spiral out of control, nothing you can do about it.
Second, the layout is only marginally better than the Zoltan Cruiser A's layout. The entire Cloning Bay 'arm' of the ship has no convenient doors for venting atmosphere to it and is far distant from the rest of your ship, meaning boarders and fires occurring in that arm is extremely difficult to deal with unless you eg get a couple of Lanius or Rockmen crewmembers early and have them manning Doors and Sensors anytime they're not fighting. You can readily vent Weapons, but this isn't very useful unless you get an early Lanius and assign them to Weapons, and the Engines/Shields/Backup Battery 'arm' of the ship also lacks the ability to readily vent it; it's only more tolerable an issue than the other 'arm' because you should always have crew in the vicinity in the first place, but even with a Cloning Bay Zoltan are bad firefighters. You can somewhat readily protect the Drone Control, and if you have upgraded and/or manned Doors and enemies teleport in over near Piloting you can vent atmosphere in that area without serious concern, but overall this is a really bad layout. The fact that the Cloning Bay is far from all your essential Systems also means that when crew gets revived there's an extra chunk of lag before they get back in action, which can easily be disastrous. Furthermore, the extreme difficulty defending the Cloning Bay is a serious problem since your crew is so frail: some ships with a Cloning Bay aren't necessarily all that concerned if it gets smashed in battle and they're not in a position to quickly repair it. This is not one of those ships.
Third, the Zoltan Cruiser C is even worse than the other Zoltan ships about initially not being able to function unless crew are at their correct stations. This combines nastily with the terrible layout to make it so that boarders, fires, and Oxygen damage can all force you to choose between having a ship that can fight the enemy on vaguely even footing vs running off to fight the boarders and/or put out the fires and/or repair Oxygen before things go completely to hell.
In conjunction with how incredibly tedious and unfun the Backup Battery reliance is, the early game is dangerously prone to coming apart at the seams with little warning while tending to not be very enjoyable. If you can put up with all that in pursuit of diverse replayability, have fun! But if that sounds too miserable to countenance, you should probably pass on this ship.
Thankfully, you don't need to play it to unlock anything. You can, in fact, just ignore it if you find it miserable. So that's fortunate.
----------------------------
Next time, we cover the Mantis Cruisers, as they're the next step in the standard chain of unlocks.
See you then.
Like a frustrating number of the C variants, the Zoltan Cruiser C is a gimmick ship. Its gimmick is it doesn't have enough Power to run everything, and is expected to activate its Backup Battery to get its Beam Drone online. As its Reactor is painfully understrength (To the point of paying surcharges for multiple tiers), it takes a while to correct this.
Still, it's more solid than you might expect. Definitely weaker and less reliable than the Zoltan Cruiser B, but you shouldn't go in expecting to have to restart a dozen times before you even get past Sector 2 like some ships.
First of all, the use of a Clone Bay substantially eases the primary flaw of an all-Zoltan crew: that your crew is painfully frail. You don't have to panic and rush people off to get healed because they took damage other species would shrug off, boarding parties aren't automatically a high-pressure situation that's dangerously likely to cost you crew and cascade into the loss of your ship, you don't have to be ridiculously cautious in how you vent atmosphere...
... and you even have it a perfectly viable option to switch to a boarding-based strategy simply by purchasing a Crew Teleporter. Suicidal Zoltan boarding parties are actually pretty good at forcing kills through on enemies holed up in their Medical Bay, thanks to the on-death explosion, after all.
Second, the Ion Charger is probably the best Ion weapon to straight-up start with. It has one of the highest fire rates in the game, enough so that just firing the Ion Charger continuously is actually comparable experience generation to what a lot of two-weapon ships will provide to whoever is manning Weapons, it can single-handedly knock down any number of Shields if your Weapons crewmember is maxed on Weapons experience, and the ability to stockpile charges means you can actually, with a little luck, potentially overcome even 2 Shield bubbles right out the gate to let your Beam Drone fire. (eg if the ship you're fighting has absolutely no chance of hurting your ship, and so there's no risk involved in taking forever)
Third, the combination of a starting Ion weapon and a Drone Control means almost anything you loot that isn't intrinsically junk can actually help you with little or no further investment needed. Find a Combat Drone? Bolster your Drone Control one step, maybe upgrade your Reactor, and there you go you've got double attacking Drones. Find a Beam weapon? Not ideal given you have a Beam Drone, but you can make it work. Find a laser, any laser? Some Weapon System upgrades later and your ship is ready to go and can probably do some damage with it, or at least use it alongside your Ion Charger to open the way for the Beam Drone.
Fourth, you can actually be fairly fearless about entering nebula in the early game. Running into an Ion Storm is costing you literally 1 Power at the beginning of the game. Indeed, this is the only ship for which an Ion Storm will, in the early game, generally be advantageous. So dive right into those nebula and buy yourself more time to explore!
Fifth, this is the only ship in the entire game that is immediately equipped to have 2 Shield bubbles up perpetually no matter how much Ion is being thrown around thanks to starting with four Zoltan crew members. While it's a bit situational, it can be hugely useful in Pulsars, and against certain ship layouts will take them from 'threatening' to 'helpless'. (eg if they have a couple of Ion weapons and a Halberd Beam; this is rare to see, but not impossible) You shouldn't be trying to set this up right away, of course, but most runs will be able to gradually trickle Zoltan into the Shields room as new crew are acquired. It's not like you care what these other crew are for this purpose.
The overall result is that the Zoltan Cruiser C is a ship where strategic RNG is overall slanted in your favor. You do need some luck to get by, with the most likely failure point being that your initial kit demands Drone Parts to be able to destroy ships, but it's not terribly important what luck you get.
Indeed, if you can put up with the the early game experience, this is actually one of the better ships for getting diverse replayability, because you can actually end up with a variety of different builds without it requiring the strategic RNG throw crazy and overly-specific combinations at you.
All that said, the ship does have some serious problems. First of all, you're very much at the mercy of tactical RNG; boot up your Beam Drone in response to your first Ion Charger shot hitting, and then the Ion Charger misses twice in a row without the Beam Drone knocking out the Shields System? Your battery runs out and you're going to have to wait before you can go back to actually doing damage. An enemy shot happens to destroy your Beam Drone? Sorry, you can't hurt them until it can be deployed again and you're down a Drone Part through no real fault of your own. An enemy shot gets through, and hits a room that isn't empty? It almost doesn't matter what it is; only Door Control and Sensors are relatively unimportant. Everything else can rapidly cause the situation to spiral out of control, nothing you can do about it.
Second, the layout is only marginally better than the Zoltan Cruiser A's layout. The entire Cloning Bay 'arm' of the ship has no convenient doors for venting atmosphere to it and is far distant from the rest of your ship, meaning boarders and fires occurring in that arm is extremely difficult to deal with unless you eg get a couple of Lanius or Rockmen crewmembers early and have them manning Doors and Sensors anytime they're not fighting. You can readily vent Weapons, but this isn't very useful unless you get an early Lanius and assign them to Weapons, and the Engines/Shields/Backup Battery 'arm' of the ship also lacks the ability to readily vent it; it's only more tolerable an issue than the other 'arm' because you should always have crew in the vicinity in the first place, but even with a Cloning Bay Zoltan are bad firefighters. You can somewhat readily protect the Drone Control, and if you have upgraded and/or manned Doors and enemies teleport in over near Piloting you can vent atmosphere in that area without serious concern, but overall this is a really bad layout. The fact that the Cloning Bay is far from all your essential Systems also means that when crew gets revived there's an extra chunk of lag before they get back in action, which can easily be disastrous. Furthermore, the extreme difficulty defending the Cloning Bay is a serious problem since your crew is so frail: some ships with a Cloning Bay aren't necessarily all that concerned if it gets smashed in battle and they're not in a position to quickly repair it. This is not one of those ships.
Third, the Zoltan Cruiser C is even worse than the other Zoltan ships about initially not being able to function unless crew are at their correct stations. This combines nastily with the terrible layout to make it so that boarders, fires, and Oxygen damage can all force you to choose between having a ship that can fight the enemy on vaguely even footing vs running off to fight the boarders and/or put out the fires and/or repair Oxygen before things go completely to hell.
In conjunction with how incredibly tedious and unfun the Backup Battery reliance is, the early game is dangerously prone to coming apart at the seams with little warning while tending to not be very enjoyable. If you can put up with all that in pursuit of diverse replayability, have fun! But if that sounds too miserable to countenance, you should probably pass on this ship.
Thankfully, you don't need to play it to unlock anything. You can, in fact, just ignore it if you find it miserable. So that's fortunate.
----------------------------
Next time, we cover the Mantis Cruisers, as they're the next step in the standard chain of unlocks.
See you then.
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