FTL Ship Analysis: Federation Cruisers

Federation Cruiser A: The Osprey





1
1
1
x8
2
1 (Artillery Beam)
2
2
1
1


16
5
2


Burst Laser II

Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

No starting Augment.

Room total: 18

The Artillery Beam is kind of the Federation Cruiser A's defining thing, so a refresher:

First of all, Artillery weaponry is not attached to the Weapon Control System at all and is a whole separate System, upgraded and powered separately, and not possible to man nor does it benefit from manning Weapons. It is, indeed, a separate room that can be separately damaged. Its process is simply building charge over time until it maxes out, at which point it automatically fires outside the player's control, including you have no ability to aim it. It also doesn't benefit from a Weapon Pre-Igniter, though it does benefit from an Automated Reloader. Conversely, it pairs well with Cloaking, as it firing doesn't reduce Cloak's duration.

The Artillery Beam in particular is broadly a beam weapon, in terms of doing damage per room it passes over and all, but it completely ignores Shields, unlike regular beams, with a base damage of 1 per room. (Exception: Zoltan Supershields will block it, taking 1 damage twice... but this is only likely to crop up against the Rebel Flagship) It also has a low chance of starting fires in each tile it passes through, which is nice.

The actual damage the Artillery Beam will do varies wildly, since you have no control over its targeting. It can do nine damage in a single sweep against a large ship it cuts through diagonally or it can do 2 damage because it decided to path such that it only hits two rooms. It does always pick a room to start from and a different room to end on so it will almost always do at least 2 damage, but it's pretty unpredictable, in spite of not being able to miss.

Early in a run, the Artillery Beam might as well be left powered, but it's not liable to help much; 50 seconds between shots is just awful damage per second. Your Burst Laser II will do the majority of the work for a while, to the point that early on the Federation Cruiser A is basically a worse Kestrel Cruiser A.

You can try to prioritize investing into the Artillery Beam, but while getting it to level 2 isn't too bad -30 Scrap is very doable early on- it's also not much help; 40 seconds delay between shots is still awful. And early Scrap yields are just not high enough to rapidly get it to the higher levels quickly -or at least not without being at the expense of other critical purchases. Even fully upgraded, that's a 20 second delay before the first shot, which means all ships will attack before it fires; you can't just neglect defensive upgrades on the idea that dead enemies can't hurt you.

In the midgame it's more feasible to get it fully upgraded, and worth considering, especially if your run hasn't gotten a hold of a good enough kit to overcome 4 Shield bubbles readily; the Artillery Beam can be your 'foot in the door', doing the initial damage that lets your other weapons break through. If things are going really poorly on that front, it's even surprisingly effective to invest heavily in defenses and Artillery and just rely on the Artillery Beam to kill enemies -this isn't a great strategy, but it's pretty reliable about reaching the Rebel Flagship. Not so much at killing it without a lot of tactical luck, but still, the Federation Cruiser A 100%-reliably having a viable strategy for reaching the Rebel Flagship is notable; there's plenty of ships that need a minimum amount of strategic luck to not be doomed to crash and burn without ever reaching the Last Stand.

Unfortunately, overall the Artillery Beam is a bit of a trap, eating a decent amount of Power and Scrap for a poor payoff. If the strategic RNG isn't horribly uncooperative about providing weapon access, it's usually better to focus on Weapons; even the worst weapons still have better returns on their charge time/Scrap cost/Power demands, even if we completely ignore how significant control over where your weapons aim is.

This has the unfortunate result that a Federation Cruiser run going well tends to be one that essentially ignores its core gimmick -or even considers it an active burden, since it limits your System options and has to be turned off if you decide to go for boarding. At that point, one has to wonder why you're not playing a different ship, such as the Kestrel Cruiser A, which also starts with a Burst Laser II but replaces the Artillery with a Leto Missile launcher. (Which, though burdened by missile launcher flaws, at least fires in a reasonable timeframe)

Not helping things is that the layout is problematic. For one thing, due to how FTL handles its physics, Defense Drones are less reliable the further from the center a ship has its rooms; it's entirely possible to have a missile aim for one of the rooms in the 'back', by the engine graphics, and end up with an active Defense Drone firing on the missile but the missile hits the room before the Defense Drone's shot can intercept it! More compact ship designs like the Engi Cruisers will generally only have similar situations happen if enough attacks are coming in the Defense Drone's fire rate is failing to keep up; when dealing with a single launcher, a regular Defense Drone is essentially 100%-reliable for such ships.

Even aside that issue, venting starting only from either end severely limits the utility of venting, and the clustered non-mannable Systems/Subsystems in the middle make it very easy for a fire to cause a lot of very problematic damage if it starts in that area and you can't put it out really quickly -when you can't use venting to fight such a fire quickly.

The only parts of the layout that are pretty decent are that Engines and Piloting being adjacent makes it unusually easy to hold onto your evasion/keep charging the FTL Drive even when boarders are attacking either one, and that the majority of the ship offers two different routes to any given destination. Only the Medical Bay/Shields/empty room block is a chokepoint, so usually fires, breaches, or venting situations gone wrong can be walked around instead of demanding your crew walk right through danger to get where you need them. And if Shields has become an impassable dead zone, you're probably doomed regardless of ship layout, limiting how problematic that chokepoint is. Less dramatic but still worth pointing out is that Medical Bays inherently are less problematic as chokepoints; a breach can be closed if the Medical Bay is still online thanks to the healing, even by near-dead crew, for example, and firefighters won't need to retreat as readily if they get there before the Medical Bay actually breaks. So it's only really the empty 1x2 room that's particularly likely to be a problematic chokepoint.

Those are nice points, but on balance the Federation Cruiser A is pretty bad. It's especially disappointing that ideal play shuns its core gimmick -especially since Artillery is only on Federation Cruiser variants, out of player ships. There's other Systems that have only a few ships that start with them, but Artillery is unique for being outright impossible to acquire partway through a run.

At least there's the Federation Cruiser B.... speaking of, Achievements.

Master Of Patience

Destroy an enemy ship, with only the Artillery Beam used in the fight.

The in-game description indicates you're not supposed to take Hull damage in the process, but tons of people have taken Hull damage and gotten this Achievement anyway, so either that's not a condition at all or it's bugged. It's sort of unimportant in practice because the best situations for trying to get this Achievement are situations where the enemy can't damage you in the first place, so that it doesn't cost your run in-game resources to earn the Achievement.

Also note that it's fine for asteroids to contribute damage, or even to land the finishing blow, just so long as you don't fire weapons or launch Drones. Indeed, the game isn't actually checking for Artillery usage, and it's possible to get into a fight involving asteroids and have the asteroids kill the enemy before your Artillery Beam fires and earn the Achievement that way. I'm unclear if Solar Flares also work, though they wouldn't be ideal regardless so it's not super-important.

In any event, it's pretty easy to earn this in literally the first Sector, albeit it requires a minimum amount of cooperation from the strategic RNG. The most reliable method is to push hard for Shields 4 and then keep an eye out for a ship with firepower poorly-suited to popping 2 Shield bubbles, such as a ship with a pair of Basic Lasers, but you can also get lucky and find what I sarcastically call The Dreaded Double Beam Ship -an early Drone Control ship that has a Mini Beam and a Beam Drone, with nothing to actually deal with Shields. 

(Well, I say it sarcastically unless I'm playing one of the ships that doesn't actually start with Shield bubbles at all, in which case it's a completely serious statement)

Regardless, while you're unlikely to earn it totally on accident, it's really not that hard to earn. The main painpoint is the waiting, since Artillery takes so long to charge, especially when it's not even upgraded. Even then, if you get into a fight that 100%-for-sure cannot hurt you, you can just walk away from the game and get a snack or something, no need to monitor the situation.

Diplomatic Immunity

Before Sector 6, select 4 blue options enabled by crew.

This is sort of cute as an attempt to call attention to the Federation Cruiser A having as diverse a starting crew as the game allows -four crew, none of whom share a species- but as far as earning it goes, Diplomatic Immunity is... not great.

First of all, your ability to tilt the odds is a bit limited, and more importantly it's extremely opaque. Which Sectors are most filled with crew-based blue events is not obvious or readily checked in-game; that this is on one of the earlier ships in the unlock chain contributes to the jank, as an experienced player might actually have a sense of which Sectors are best to seek out, but a player who just unlocked the Federation Cruiser is probably still very much learning the game.

Second, even if you do all the right things to tilt the odds in your favor... this still fundamentally comes down very heavily to RNG. Some players will earn this on their very first Federation Cruiser A run. Others are going to spend dozens of tries waiting for the RNG to actually cooperate.

Furthermore, the odds are more against you than you might expect, as a shocking percentage of crew-based blue events specifically require a Slug... which the Federation Cruiser A doesn't have, and which are only not the rarest species in the game because Crystals are supposed to be a secret and so are very restricted while Lanius were added by the advanced edition update and only actually made to show up in the new Abandoned Sector type. Outside those two, though, Slugs are the rarest species, impossible to find in a number of Sectors, rare in others; they're only common in Nebula Sectors, and then they're only as common as Humans.

Exacerbating things is that this Achievement is one of the few cases where you actually care about the distinction between a Homeworlds Sector vs merely a (species)-controlled Sector; Engi, for example, only have two events with crew-based blue options in their Homeworlds, whereas Engi-Controlled Sectors have five such events.

In any event, you'll want to avoid Civilian Sectors (Only 4 events, one of which requires a Slug, another of which requires a Lanius), Rebel-controlled Sectors (One event), Rebel Stronghold (ZERO events!), Engi Homeworlds (2 events), and if you're not seeking out Slugs then Mantis Sectors are generally favorable. Abandoned Sectors are particularly RNG-y, as they have a lot of Lanius-based events, but then Lanius-based events basically don't exist outside Abandoned Sectors, and you can't get Lanius outside Abandoned Sectors, so it's entirely possible to eg only acquire a Lanius toward the end of an Abandoned Sector, and thus not get a chance to use them in events.

Mostly, though, you should honestly go for Nebula in hopes of getting a Slug... or ignore this Achievement entirely and go for the others.

Artillery Mastery
Reach Sector 5 without upgrading your Weapons System.

This is surprisingly easy, as a Burst Laser II is plenty solid for beating up ships almost by itself through the first four Sectors, and investing in your Artillery System, while not ideal for most runs, is functional enough. It's entirely possible to do this basically on accident, forgetting the Achievement even exists.

Furthermore, the game is perfectly fine with you eg buying and investing into a Drone Control, or Hacking, so if you feel you need more firepower to reach Sector 5, you can still get it, you just need to not upgrade the Weapons System in particular.

Between this and Master Of Patience actually being pretty easy to earn, in spite of Diplomatic Immunity being RNG nonsense it's actually pretty easy to unlock...

Federation Cruiser B: Nisos





1
1
1
x9
2
2 (Artillery Beam)
2
2
1
1


16
9
0


Dual Lasers+Leto

Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

No starting Augment.

Room total: 18

Layout-wise, the Federation Cruiser B is better able to utilize venting than the Federation Cruiser A, but otherwise is a much worse layout; crucial Systems are way too spread out, making the ship perpetually vulnerable to boarders and problems snowballing (That is, a missile hits somewhere, and your difficulty quickly responding to it leads to more problems that lead to even more problems and so on), and more in the way of chokepoints risking crew being forced to travel through hazards to get to where you need them.

It furthermore has a smaller initial crew that dumps the good crew-combat species in favor of neutral-to-bad species for such purposes and dumps the Engi, collectively exacerbating these flaws so that the Federation Cruiser B starts out much more vulnerable to boarding and to snowballing. This piece can at least be potentially mitigated by early luck with free crew...

The initial weapons loadout is also pretty flatly worse, using the same amount of Power but having to burn missile ammunition to get anywhere close to the effectiveness of the Federation Cruiser A's starting Burst Laser II. Starting with a missile launcher has some long-term value, but this is moderately redundant with the Artillery Beam, in terms of letting you penetrate any amount of Shielding, and the Artillery Beam can't miss or run out of ammo.

The Artillery Beam does start out upgraded to level 2, but this is an extremely minor bump in its effectiveness, and you'll still struggle to upgrade it to levels 3 and 4 where it starts getting to a tolerable fire rate.

Really, the only relatively significant upside is that the Federation Cruiser B starts with a Slug, which are both very rare and pretty reliably prone to providing useful blue options.

Otherwise?

The Federation Cruiser B is pretty flatly worse than the Federation Cruiser A.

sigh

On a different note; why is this series of ships called 'Federation Cruisers'? While the narrative is a bit vague in general and ship unlocking in particular makes very little in-universe sense, the game is completely consistent that you're playing Federation loyalists, and the Kestrel in particular is strongly implied to be a Federation-original design. So... what makes these ships 'Federation Cruisers', and not the Kestrel series?...

You'd think this would be the Artillery Cruiser series, or something.

It doesn't help that the game insists on the 'cruiser' name for all player ships. If the Kestrels were Kestrel Frigates, one might assume the Federation Cruisers were so named for being 'heavyweight' Federation ships, which would fit to them being visually larger than the Kestrels. Instead we're stuck with conspicuously arbitrary names completely unnecessarily -and I suspect the devs didn't bother bother to look up what a 'cruiser' even is, because the game's usage of it doesn't really fit to the actual naval term; there are tons of enemy ships that are much heavier than your 'cruisers', yet not labeled battleships or similar, as if the devs thought 'cruiser' just sounded cool instead of being a term for a specific 'weight class' that's toward the upper end. I have difficulty believing this is the Star Trek influence at work -while the Enterprise is classed as a 'heavy cruiser', this is surprisingly difficult to run down, and it seems obviously absurdist to look at the Enterprise scale, look at FTL player ship scale, and suggest these are similar sizes of ship that merit similar terms. FTL player ships are more like oversized shuttles...

Anyway, it's really quite frustrating how terrible (and boring) the Federation Cruiser B is, given you have to get to Sector 8 with it to unlock the vaguely interesting and less egregiously awful...

Federation Cruiser C: The Fregatidae





1
1
1
x7
2
1 (Flak Artillery)
2
2
1
1
1

16
5
0

No starting weapons.

Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with the Emergency Respirators Augment.

Room total: 19

The Federation Cruiser C is a... confusing ship.

It's not a bad ship, actually reasonably well-equipped to fight its way to the Flagship and kill it with a minimum of luck, but its design is somewhat contradictory.

The basics of its strategy are straightforward enough. You've got a Crew Teleporter, a Cloning Bay, and one Mantis plus two Zoltan. The Mantis is obviously a good boarder, and the Zoltan members can suicide bomb enemies thanks to the Cloning Bay, among other points potentially letting you kill enemies even when a Medical Bay is present on the enemy ship. The Emergency Respirators even make it less of a pain to kill Autoships with your suicide attacker crew.

But then you've got the Flak Artillery.

In broad terms, the Flak Artillery is kind of like a Flak II in terms of firing 7 shots in a flak ball, just operating on the same rules as the Artillery Beam: automatically fires with no input from the player when fully charged, takes 50/40/30/20 seconds at levels 1/2/3/4, and is tied to its own room that cannot be manned instead of the general Weapons System. Note that it doesn't ignore Shields, though; its projectile behaves exactly like a regular Flak projectile, unlike the Artillery Beam ignoring Shields where beams are normally very vulnerable to them.

The other odd wrinkle is that Flak Artillery doesn't have a giant circle it randomly targets in, but rather has each individual projectile pick a random room to target using standard flak rules. Its radius for these individual Flak shots is actually a bit tighter than a Flak I's radius; against a hypothetical ship with no 1x2 rooms, Flak Artillery would never aim outside a room. Even as-is, it will usually hit with all or almost all its shots, even against the Autoship designs that are made entirely of broken-up 1x2 rooms!

That's all well fine and good, I like the idea of the game experimenting with the Artillery concept, but, well... why is this on a boarding ship?

I can wave off the part where Artillery being uncontrolled is fundamentally contrary to a boarding strategy since this ship comes with a Cloning Bay. That makes killing your own crew a tolerable flaw. But Flak Artillery's big notable niche is clearing the way for other weapons to attack while the enemy Shields are momentarily down... when your ship has no other weapons to start and is heavily oriented toward a boarding strategy.

The Artillery Beam would be a much better fit to a boarding-heavy strategy, letting you gamble on knocking out the Medical/Cloning Bay and setting fires to tie up and soften up crew. The only significant advantage Flak Artillery has in this regard is being better at knocking out Zoltan Supershields. This is nice in the early game, when you probably have no alternatives, but later in a run you probably have faster weapons for getting the Supershield down.

Again, the Federation Cruiser C isn't bad. It can go all the way to the endgame and potentially win without needing to get lucky in weapon finds and whatnot, which is unusual, and has notable advantages like being able to laugh at early Ion weapons if you like by committing both Zoltan to the Shields room, and having a very venting-friendly layout. (Aside the awkwardness of a bunch of Systems and Subsystems you'd like to protect being in the center, not so accessible to venting) Indeed, it's a pretty good layout in general aside retaining the problem of Defense Drone effectiveness being impinged on by it having rooms so far out, having basically all the advantages of the Federation Cruiser A's layout but more so. (The Artillery room is its only chokepoint with no alternate paths)

It's just... very, very confusing.

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

Next time, we move on to the Zoltan Cruisers, as they're next in the standard chain of unlocks.

See you then.