FTL Ship Analysis: Rock Cruisers
Rock Cruiser A: Bulwark
1
1
1
x8
3
2
2
1
1
16
28
0
Artemis+Hull Missiles
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Rock Plating Augment.
Rock Cruiser B: Shivan
1
1
x8
3
2
2
2
1
16
18
0
Heavy Pierce Laser+Fire Bomb
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Rock Plating Augment.
1
1
1
x8
3
2
2
1
1
16
28
0Artemis+Hull Missiles
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Rock Plating Augment.
Room total: 18
The Rock Cruiser A is depressingly awful, and probably the ship most deserving of the label of The Worst Ship In The Game.
It doesn't look so bad if you frame it in terms of the total Scrap value it brings to the table, being worth over 1000 Scrap in Systems, ammo, etc, and with no glaring deficiencies like having an unusually low maximum weapon cap, where a lot of ships hover in the 800-900 range of Scrap value and some of the competition have notable holes here. Indeed, it has the 6th-highest Scrap value of all starting ships. (Well, if you use this table's assumptions as your metric, which has a few arbitrary premises that can affect the rankings, but they're mostly reasonable and don't directly impact talking about the Rock Cruiser A)
Having Rock Plating is also a notable plus, resulting in less Hull damage from hits and thus saving Scrap here and there, not to mention reducing the odds of being killed outright. It's also unique for effectively increasing your peak durability: all player ships have 30 max HP, period, but Rock Plating means that's on average effectively 36~ HP, a non-trivial advantage, and with large enough numbers involved that the RNG is unlikely to completely abandon you. Plus, Rock Plating has some blue options, which is atypical of Augments that are more-or-less restricted to starting ships -which Rock Plating is such a one.
Unfortunately, the Rock Cruiser A burdened by the major flaw of being an all-missiles-all-the-time ship.
There's a variety of reasons why this is intrinsically terrible for a ship class to start out specialized in.
The first problem is that in the early Sectors it's wasteful. Enemy ships only have the 1 Shield bubble, two if you're fighting an out-of-depth ship, with low enough Evasion you expect to be able to tear them down in a reasonable timeframe with just dual-shot laser weapons, and occasionally early ships will be unable to hurt your ship. (Such as by rolling a Beam weapon and a Beam drone, with nothing to overcome Shields) The Kestral Cruiser A can easily tear through a notable fraction of these encounters with just its Burst Laser II, breaking out its own Artemis only to punch through tougher encounters or minimize damage in them. The Rock Cruiser A is obligated to spend limited missile ammunition on every single fight, until such time as it loots or buys something that can costlessly kill enemies.
Right out the gate, this means the Rock Cruiser is at the not-particularly-tender mercy of the RNG. If you are never given a chance at a costless killer, you're doomed. No amount of skill or planning will mitigate this fact. FTL is in general designed so RNG can kill you through no fault of your own, but on most ships it requires a perfect storm of bad luck, where multiple bad things happen close together to compound into a catastrophe. The Rock Cruiser A can be blessed with mounds of good luck, but so long as it's not the right kind of good luck, sorry, your run is doomed to fail early regardless.
Furthermore, I can point out that the generous Scrap total is misleading, because in actual fact you start behind from the need to purchase or loot basic functionality. For something like the Kestral Cruiser A, finding or buying a Burst Laser in the mid-early game is helping to pull ahead, letting you beat down enemies that you might otherwise be forced to run from. For the Rock Cruiser A, doing so is getting you to bare minimum competency, and you'll need more weapons to be remotely competitive. Which, if you're buying these in a Store, is dozens of Scrap you're not spending on other things that some other ship would get to buy.
Furthermore, Scrap rewards rise as you get to later Sectors, whereas the costs for stuff in Stores does not rise. (Aside repairing your ship) The important point here is the inverse element -that in early Sectors you get barely any Scrap at all, so even if you do find a Store carrying a weapon that will help you not spend missiles early in the run... whoops, sorry, you probably can't afford it, unless maybe you're willing to sell both your missile launchers. (You should be willing, incidentally)
On top of all that, where for most ships a mid-early Defense Drone on an enemy ship is irrelevant or merely discourages trying to use your missiles until you've done some damage to the Drone Control, for the Rock Cruiser A a mid-early Defense Drone is crippling, usually making the ship not worth engaging with at all unless you're specifically trying to get the Defense Drones Don't Do D'anything achievement.
By the time you're hitting the phase of the game where it's actually useful to be able to do a lot of damage through Shields, you're probably running low on ammunition and better be transitioning to a weapon set that can kill enemies without using missiles.
For a pure missile boat strategy to be viable, the Rock Cruiser A would've needed much better support for the missiles. Either something like 100 starting missiles, or better yet 50 starting missiles and the Explosive Replicator Augment; 28 missiles is so few that if you're engaging every enemy you encounter it's entirely possible to run out of missiles before leaving the first sector, even aside the issue of missing! 100 missiles would at least be enough to mostly-reliably ensure you get far enough to buy viable alternatives. 50 missiles and the Explosive Replicator might even be able to take you to endgame with a bit of luck, since the Explosive Replicator effectively doubles how much you get when buying and looting missiles. But 28, with no Explosive Replicator and no initial way to fight without spending missiles? It's horrifyingly bad.
On top of all that, the Rock Cruiser A's layout is bad. In and of itself it's not actually all that terrible, but the problem is you've got a pure Rockmen crew on a ship where all your essential systems are spread out, and your Oxygen in particular is nowhere near Piloting, Weapons, and Engines. This maximizes the issues with your Rockmen crew being slow to get anywhere, forcing them to slog long distances and abandon essential stations for long periods anytime something goes wrong with other essentials.
Oh, and your Oxygen is directly adjacent to your Door Control, so in a nasty boarding situation where you try to solve the problem by venting atmosphere, it's entirely possible to end up with them smashing the Door Control and leaving all your doors open, and then running off to smash Oxygen, at which point if you're in the middle of fighting a ship you're probably just plain dead. Which, reminder, your crew are all slow and so trying to vent atmosphere is by far your quickest way to respond to boarding. Great! You're just screwed all-around!
The only good news about the layout is that if you buy a Crew Teleporter it will be placed in the lower-right corner, directly adjacent to the Medical Bay, minimizing the travel time on your probably-Rockmen boarders and thus allowing them to sustain a fairly aggressive boarding strategy.
But that comes back to your primary form of offense having limited ammo and you needing to buy or loot actual essentials to achieve core competencies other ships just start with.
On top of all that, let's look at the achievements:
Is It Warm In Here?
Kill a burning enemy with a boarder.
So okay, you have an achievement you need luck to even be able to achieve, since your ship doesn't actually start with a Crew Teleporter and there's no guarantee you'll ever acquire one, and on top of that you can't reliably start fires. Yes, the Artemis and Hull Missile launchers both have a chance of starting fires, but the odds per-missile are low, and so for one thing they're unlikely to start a particularly raging fire.
Oh, and the game is bizarrely stringent on what constitutes killing a burning enemy. They must be sitting still in the room, not currently fleeing it. Which has the issue that the AI crewmembers will basically always try to flee a burning room when low on health if it's at all physically possible. So basically this is borderline impossible without access to Hacking or a Crystal crewmember, or when fighting the Rebel Flagship to take advantage of the weapons all being isolated while having a crewmember.
Okay, but that's just one achievement, and you only need two to unlock the Rock Cruiser B, that's not so-
Defense Drones Don't Do D'anything
Destroy a ship that has a Defense Drone without using any form of offense aside missiles.
-oh wait never mind.
This is, horrifyingly, actually less unreasonable than the prior achievement. If you're dead-set on getting it in particular, simply redo the first Sector until you run into a Defense Drone-carrying ship, and then painstakingly kill it by simultaneously firing the Artemis and Hull Missile launchers to get around the Defense Drone.
But as part of natural, organic play where you're trying to win?
This isn't going to happen.
But still, this is kind of reasonable, and you do only need-
Ancestral
Find the Secret Sector.
-WHY.
Okay, to be entirely fair, the Rock Cruiser A is, out of A ships, actually the best at completing the entire stupid chain of events involved here, as the Rock Plating provides a blue option at the first step that removes a layer of RNG-screw potential.
However, without delving into the full details here, the Secret Sector is both not remotely intuitive to find if you're not consulting an actual guide, and worse yet even if you know exactly what you're doing it's a low-odds luck-based mission. Depending on initial Sector generation, it may be 100% impossible for a run to do. Even if initial Sector generation makes it possible to do, it's still very, very easy to fail a step through no fault of your own. It's possible to cheese the third step and earn this Achievement... using the Rock Cruiser C, which requires reaching the final Sector with the Rock Cruiser B, which is locked behind these stupid achievements.
So yeah. The Rock Cruiser A is horrible, and you'll be forced to play this horrible ship a lot, hoping for the RNG to finally cooperate, if you want to unlock the actually good Rock Cruisers.
Wow.
And no, they didn't do anything to make this whole situation less godawful with the advanced edition update.
Whyyyyyyyy.
The Rock Cruiser A is depressingly awful, and probably the ship most deserving of the label of The Worst Ship In The Game.
It doesn't look so bad if you frame it in terms of the total Scrap value it brings to the table, being worth over 1000 Scrap in Systems, ammo, etc, and with no glaring deficiencies like having an unusually low maximum weapon cap, where a lot of ships hover in the 800-900 range of Scrap value and some of the competition have notable holes here. Indeed, it has the 6th-highest Scrap value of all starting ships. (Well, if you use this table's assumptions as your metric, which has a few arbitrary premises that can affect the rankings, but they're mostly reasonable and don't directly impact talking about the Rock Cruiser A)
Having Rock Plating is also a notable plus, resulting in less Hull damage from hits and thus saving Scrap here and there, not to mention reducing the odds of being killed outright. It's also unique for effectively increasing your peak durability: all player ships have 30 max HP, period, but Rock Plating means that's on average effectively 36~ HP, a non-trivial advantage, and with large enough numbers involved that the RNG is unlikely to completely abandon you. Plus, Rock Plating has some blue options, which is atypical of Augments that are more-or-less restricted to starting ships -which Rock Plating is such a one.
Unfortunately, the Rock Cruiser A burdened by the major flaw of being an all-missiles-all-the-time ship.
There's a variety of reasons why this is intrinsically terrible for a ship class to start out specialized in.
The first problem is that in the early Sectors it's wasteful. Enemy ships only have the 1 Shield bubble, two if you're fighting an out-of-depth ship, with low enough Evasion you expect to be able to tear them down in a reasonable timeframe with just dual-shot laser weapons, and occasionally early ships will be unable to hurt your ship. (Such as by rolling a Beam weapon and a Beam drone, with nothing to overcome Shields) The Kestral Cruiser A can easily tear through a notable fraction of these encounters with just its Burst Laser II, breaking out its own Artemis only to punch through tougher encounters or minimize damage in them. The Rock Cruiser A is obligated to spend limited missile ammunition on every single fight, until such time as it loots or buys something that can costlessly kill enemies.
Right out the gate, this means the Rock Cruiser is at the not-particularly-tender mercy of the RNG. If you are never given a chance at a costless killer, you're doomed. No amount of skill or planning will mitigate this fact. FTL is in general designed so RNG can kill you through no fault of your own, but on most ships it requires a perfect storm of bad luck, where multiple bad things happen close together to compound into a catastrophe. The Rock Cruiser A can be blessed with mounds of good luck, but so long as it's not the right kind of good luck, sorry, your run is doomed to fail early regardless.
Furthermore, I can point out that the generous Scrap total is misleading, because in actual fact you start behind from the need to purchase or loot basic functionality. For something like the Kestral Cruiser A, finding or buying a Burst Laser in the mid-early game is helping to pull ahead, letting you beat down enemies that you might otherwise be forced to run from. For the Rock Cruiser A, doing so is getting you to bare minimum competency, and you'll need more weapons to be remotely competitive. Which, if you're buying these in a Store, is dozens of Scrap you're not spending on other things that some other ship would get to buy.
Furthermore, Scrap rewards rise as you get to later Sectors, whereas the costs for stuff in Stores does not rise. (Aside repairing your ship) The important point here is the inverse element -that in early Sectors you get barely any Scrap at all, so even if you do find a Store carrying a weapon that will help you not spend missiles early in the run... whoops, sorry, you probably can't afford it, unless maybe you're willing to sell both your missile launchers. (You should be willing, incidentally)
On top of all that, where for most ships a mid-early Defense Drone on an enemy ship is irrelevant or merely discourages trying to use your missiles until you've done some damage to the Drone Control, for the Rock Cruiser A a mid-early Defense Drone is crippling, usually making the ship not worth engaging with at all unless you're specifically trying to get the Defense Drones Don't Do D'anything achievement.
By the time you're hitting the phase of the game where it's actually useful to be able to do a lot of damage through Shields, you're probably running low on ammunition and better be transitioning to a weapon set that can kill enemies without using missiles.
For a pure missile boat strategy to be viable, the Rock Cruiser A would've needed much better support for the missiles. Either something like 100 starting missiles, or better yet 50 starting missiles and the Explosive Replicator Augment; 28 missiles is so few that if you're engaging every enemy you encounter it's entirely possible to run out of missiles before leaving the first sector, even aside the issue of missing! 100 missiles would at least be enough to mostly-reliably ensure you get far enough to buy viable alternatives. 50 missiles and the Explosive Replicator might even be able to take you to endgame with a bit of luck, since the Explosive Replicator effectively doubles how much you get when buying and looting missiles. But 28, with no Explosive Replicator and no initial way to fight without spending missiles? It's horrifyingly bad.
On top of all that, the Rock Cruiser A's layout is bad. In and of itself it's not actually all that terrible, but the problem is you've got a pure Rockmen crew on a ship where all your essential systems are spread out, and your Oxygen in particular is nowhere near Piloting, Weapons, and Engines. This maximizes the issues with your Rockmen crew being slow to get anywhere, forcing them to slog long distances and abandon essential stations for long periods anytime something goes wrong with other essentials.
Oh, and your Oxygen is directly adjacent to your Door Control, so in a nasty boarding situation where you try to solve the problem by venting atmosphere, it's entirely possible to end up with them smashing the Door Control and leaving all your doors open, and then running off to smash Oxygen, at which point if you're in the middle of fighting a ship you're probably just plain dead. Which, reminder, your crew are all slow and so trying to vent atmosphere is by far your quickest way to respond to boarding. Great! You're just screwed all-around!
The only good news about the layout is that if you buy a Crew Teleporter it will be placed in the lower-right corner, directly adjacent to the Medical Bay, minimizing the travel time on your probably-Rockmen boarders and thus allowing them to sustain a fairly aggressive boarding strategy.
But that comes back to your primary form of offense having limited ammo and you needing to buy or loot actual essentials to achieve core competencies other ships just start with.
On top of all that, let's look at the achievements:
Is It Warm In Here?
Kill a burning enemy with a boarder.
So okay, you have an achievement you need luck to even be able to achieve, since your ship doesn't actually start with a Crew Teleporter and there's no guarantee you'll ever acquire one, and on top of that you can't reliably start fires. Yes, the Artemis and Hull Missile launchers both have a chance of starting fires, but the odds per-missile are low, and so for one thing they're unlikely to start a particularly raging fire.
Oh, and the game is bizarrely stringent on what constitutes killing a burning enemy. They must be sitting still in the room, not currently fleeing it. Which has the issue that the AI crewmembers will basically always try to flee a burning room when low on health if it's at all physically possible. So basically this is borderline impossible without access to Hacking or a Crystal crewmember, or when fighting the Rebel Flagship to take advantage of the weapons all being isolated while having a crewmember.
Okay, but that's just one achievement, and you only need two to unlock the Rock Cruiser B, that's not so-
Defense Drones Don't Do D'anything
Destroy a ship that has a Defense Drone without using any form of offense aside missiles.
-oh wait never mind.
This is, horrifyingly, actually less unreasonable than the prior achievement. If you're dead-set on getting it in particular, simply redo the first Sector until you run into a Defense Drone-carrying ship, and then painstakingly kill it by simultaneously firing the Artemis and Hull Missile launchers to get around the Defense Drone.
But as part of natural, organic play where you're trying to win?
This isn't going to happen.
But still, this is kind of reasonable, and you do only need-
Ancestral
Find the Secret Sector.
-WHY.
Okay, to be entirely fair, the Rock Cruiser A is, out of A ships, actually the best at completing the entire stupid chain of events involved here, as the Rock Plating provides a blue option at the first step that removes a layer of RNG-screw potential.
However, without delving into the full details here, the Secret Sector is both not remotely intuitive to find if you're not consulting an actual guide, and worse yet even if you know exactly what you're doing it's a low-odds luck-based mission. Depending on initial Sector generation, it may be 100% impossible for a run to do. Even if initial Sector generation makes it possible to do, it's still very, very easy to fail a step through no fault of your own. It's possible to cheese the third step and earn this Achievement... using the Rock Cruiser C, which requires reaching the final Sector with the Rock Cruiser B, which is locked behind these stupid achievements.
So yeah. The Rock Cruiser A is horrible, and you'll be forced to play this horrible ship a lot, hoping for the RNG to finally cooperate, if you want to unlock the actually good Rock Cruisers.
Wow.
And no, they didn't do anything to make this whole situation less godawful with the advanced edition update.
Whyyyyyyyy.
Rock Cruiser B: Shivan
11x83222116180
Heavy Pierce Laser+Fire Bomb
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Rock Plating Augment.
Room total: 16
The Rock Cruiser B is one of the more interesting ships in the game, thanks to two unique qualities that connect with each other and its Rockmen crew: it has no Door Control Subsystem, and no external venting.
The Rock Cruiser B is one of the more interesting ships in the game, thanks to two unique qualities that connect with each other and its Rockmen crew: it has no Door Control Subsystem, and no external venting.
The funny thing is, for enemy ships lacking both of those is completely normal.
Anyway, normally the lack of a Door Control Subsystem would be a big flaw. Similarly, the lack of external venting would normally be a big flaw. Put together, alongside starting with plenty of Rockmen, they're considerably more minor of flaws.
The Door Control Subsystem is normally important for three reasons: to slow the spread of fire, to let you open external venting to kill enemy boarders and/or put out fires, and to make boarders have to work to get to their targets if they didn't happen to teleport right on top of something. With no external venting, a Door Control Subsystem wouldn't get to do one of its most important duties anyway. Meanwhile, your Rockman crew is entirely immune to fire, extra-effective at putting out fires, and you have enough of them that your Systems and Subsystems all have a firefighter inside or very close.
The closest thing to an exception is Oxygen, which has a minimum of a 3-tile gap for the shortest route from an essential System. This could easily have been a serious flaw in conjunction with the crew all being slow, but the Rock Cruiser B has the unusual quality of starting with the Oxygen System already upgraded -it's actually pretty unlikely to be completely knocked out in the early game, and you have time to pick up more crew or otherwise patch this weakness before it reaches the point of being potentially lethal. Furthermore, the lack of external venting takes away the ability to sabotage yourself by dumping oxygen and then losing the Oxygen System, and Rockmen are tough enough they can more readily get away with working through asphyxiation for a bit.
Additionally, Rockmen are one of the two best fighters in the game, and so you have a lot less need for doors stalling boarders. Only groups of Mantis boarders are a particularly high concern, and you have time to patch that weakness before they're allowed to occur in seriously concerning numbers, as well as a crew that's unusually large and so still less vulnerable to large numbers of boarders than most ships.
This is all before even looking at the actually rather nice starting weapon situation; the Heavy Pierce Laser will singlehandedly carry you through the first couple of Sectors, with the Fire Bomb being something you can switch to in a pinch if you do encounter a ship with two Shield bubbles -or upgrade Weapons early so you can run both. Furthermore, the Fire Bomb can very easily let you crewkill ships that lack Medical Bays and Rockmen -you'll need to man or upgrade Sensors so you can see what's going on, but Sensors is directly adjacent to Shields, so early on you can cripple a ship's weapons and then move your Shields crewmember to Sensors at no meaningful cost to assess and correctly target Fire Bomb usage.
Starting with a Fire Bomb is also appreciated just for being one of the better tools for dealing with the isolated sections of the Rebel Flagship. You'll need other offenses to properly overcome it, but being able to rapidly take out its missile battery is a big help. (... unless you're on Hard mode, anyway) It's also just generally ammo-efficient and makes it a little easier to incorporate other Missiles or Bombs into your arsenal if you like.
That said, one weakness to keep in mind is that an Autoship with 2 Shield bubbles is essentially immune to your starting kit, and can potentially be encountered fairly early. Early Lanius ships are much rarer and slightly less problematic when they do occur -it is possible to crewkill them even with fires going out nearly instantly- but also noteworthy as problems if they have 2 Shield bubbles.
Overall, though, the Rock Cruiser B is one of the stronger ships, and genuinely pretty fun, too.
It's too bad you have to jump through the insane hoops of the Achievements with the godawful Rock Cruiser A to unlock it...
Rock Cruiser C: Tektite
1
1
1
x8
3
2
2
1
1
16
15
0
Heavy Crystal I+Swarm Missiles
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Rock Plating Augment.
Rock Cruiser C: Tektite
111x83221
116150
Heavy Crystal I+Swarm Missiles
Maximum of 4 different weapons, 2 different Drones.
Starts with the Rock Plating Augment.
Room total: 17
On paper, the Rock Cruiser C is pretty solid. The Heavy Crystal I makes the early game fairly easy -just make sure to move it to the left at the start so damage to Weapons knocks out the Swarm Missiles instead- since you don't care about initial Shields, and Swarm Missiles give you a backup for getting past those rare ships equipped with a Defense Drone or that have 2 Shields worryingly early. You also have a ton of locations to start external venting from, with a good variety of paths through the ship so it's actually fairly difficult to create a situation like being forced to path crew through corridors open to vacuum to reach your knocked-out Doors or Oxygen, and don't have any unusual holes like missing Doors or Sensors.
On paper, the Rock Cruiser C is pretty solid. The Heavy Crystal I makes the early game fairly easy -just make sure to move it to the left at the start so damage to Weapons knocks out the Swarm Missiles instead- since you don't care about initial Shields, and Swarm Missiles give you a backup for getting past those rare ships equipped with a Defense Drone or that have 2 Shields worryingly early. You also have a ton of locations to start external venting from, with a good variety of paths through the ship so it's actually fairly difficult to create a situation like being forced to path crew through corridors open to vacuum to reach your knocked-out Doors or Oxygen, and don't have any unusual holes like missing Doors or Sensors.
In practice, it's surprisingly poor.
First of all, you need to luck into an alternative weapon in time for 2 Shield bubbles being normal, or you're in trouble. Needing to use Swarm Missiles to knock out Shields is a serious problem that delays your ability to knock out Weapons, Engines, or whatever else is most crucial in a given fight, having to spend a minimum of one missile ammo per fight is a problem and realistically you end up spending much less sustainable amounts like 3+ per fight. A ship with 2 Shield bubbles and a Defense Drone isn't literally invincible, but it's going to be a costly fight, even if it happens to be poorly-equipped to actually damage your ship.
Second of all, your starting crew is slow and only the pilot position is in ready reach of Oxygen and Doors. Having your pilot abandon their post to do repairs is horrible in most fights. The Cloning Bay is also not convenient to any of your major Systems, which can go very badly wrong very suddenly. You need a minimum of 5 crew to realistically have this layout work out decently, meaning at least 2 crew added.
Together, these mean you need the strategic RNG to cooperate to not crash and burn, you need it to do so fast, and you need it to do so on two major topics. (Or, less probably, be bizarrely consistent about not hitting you with boarding events or ships with Crew Teleporters)
You're going to have a lot of runs that get through the first couple of Sectors and then uncontrollably crash and burn through no fault of your own, is what I'm saying.
The Cloning Bay is also anti-synergistic with the crew and ship layout -Rockmen and Crystals would benefit much more from an accessibly-placed large Medical Bay (eg replacing the Shields or Weapons slot and moving the replaced room to a 2-tile room), and the ship layout makes it very easy to suffocate boarders and put out fires without bothering to fight them, making it low-value to have a crew that's resistant to boarding actions and above-average at fending off fires. This would be a great setup for a Mantis or Zoltan-heavy crew. Not so much for a couple Rockmen and a Crystal.
The Crystal crewmember is particularly underwhelming due to the ship lacking a Crew Teleporter and being so naturally effective at suffocating boarders -you need luck to get a shot at using Lockdown offensively, and defensively Lockdown is rarely going to be decisively helpful.
The weapon combination also makes this a ship poor at generating Weapons experience; while you can use Swarm Missiles as a rapid-fire tool, you should generally endeavor to go for triple-fire bursts, which only generates 1 Weapons experience. You have to get very lucky with crew rewards or an early and good rapid-fire weapon to be liable to have maxed Weapons experience on someone in time for the Flagship.
The Heavy Crystal I also becomes a bit of an anchor around your neck once you're done seeing ships with 1 Shield bubble. It sells poorly, yet is fairly awful once Shield levels rise, making it difficult to swap out for something more suitable yet really important to do so.
There's worse ships to pick, but the Rock Cruiser C is pretty bad, which makes it frustrating that it's by far your best option for trying to unlock the Crystal Cruisers...
Sector-wise, the problems presented by Drones make Engi and, to a lesser extent, Zoltan Sectors unusually dangerous to try to go through, since Engi ships are so fond of Drones. (Zoltan Supershields are also a bit of a problem for your weapons layout, for that matter) Conversely, Mantis Sectors aren't so bad, due to tending to have depressed Shield counts (Delaying the point at which your Heavy Crystal I is borderline-useless) and their love of boarding. (Which the Rock Cruiser C is absurdly resistant to)
--------------------------------
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To be entirely fair to FTL on the Rock Cruiser A and indeed on the problems with missiles in general, my understanding is that FTL's pre-Kickstarter prototype that was getting positive enough responses to prompt the Kickstarter was mostly, maybe even entirely, a prototype of the ship-to-ship combat, not so so much all the strategic stuff.
To jump apparent topics for a moment, imagine if FTL had shipped with a 1v1 multiplayer death match mode, where players could pick a basic ship design and then customize it within a Scrap budget, upgrading Systems, slotting in weapons, buying ammo, etc. For the purposes of this illustration we'll just assume more or less all prices are as per the actually-existent single-player mode, no multiplayer-specific balance tweaks.
In such a mode, a lot of the design problems around things like crewkilling tools, missile ammunition, etc, would simply vanish, or at least become far more mild. Like yeah, spending Scrap on missile ammunition would be pricey, but in a one-off deathmatch mode both players would effectively be operating under the same rules as AI ships in the sense that there'd be no long-term cost to firing said missile ammunition. I suspect missiles under their current numbers would still be a little weak in such an environment, but less 'needs a massive overhaul' and more 'the competitive scene would like slight bumps in performance to missiles to keep them properly competitive'.
And this is pretty general; the ship-to-ship combat in FTL certainly could be better, but it's reasonably compelling and when you remove the strategic context it's mostly pretty well-designed. It's just... y'know... the game is fundamentally continuously placed in a strategic context, where 'the tactical combat would be pretty nice if only the strategic elements weren't intersecting with it' is constantly a serious problem, and indeed the strategic layer is necessary for the game to have particularly significant depth and replayability. (ie it was never really an option to do 'FTL, but minus the strategic elements')
Anyway, point is I suspect FTL suffers in no small part from playtesting in the early prototype days -the days when the game had little or no strategic component- leading to experiences that informed decisions in how to handle the commercial product that didn't align with its reality. Missiles are powerful when decoupled from their strategic management limits (As seen readily in-game from how problematic enemy ships having missiles tends to be), so I can imagine the devs doing playtesting, going 'wow these are powerful', and then carrying that conclusion forward even as they added in elements that undermined why they'd had that original experience.
This is in fact one of the invisibly-common issues with game design, where players see confusing decisions that serve no apparent purpose in the final product, unaware of the history behind that decision. Sometimes the decision even does serve an important purpose in the final design, such as by closing off some major glitch or otherwise problematic behavior, but in a manner where it doesn't look like it's doing anything.
... though it being possibly-understandable how the Rock Cruiser situation came to be doesn't make it any less miserable for players...
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Next time, we cover the Stealth Cruisers, as the final link in the standard chain of ship unlocks.
See you then.
Next time, we cover the Stealth Cruisers, as the final link in the standard chain of ship unlocks.
See you then.
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