FTL Analysis: Original Systems
All Systems operate on the same basic HP concept as Subsystems, except Systems have the additional wrinkle of requiring Power. Simply having Engines at level 2 with no damage doesn't give you level 2 Engines benefits; you also need to slot in 2 Power. If you only have 1 Power in it... you're functioning as level 1 Engines. Damaged and Ionized Systems automatically have their Power released into the general pool, fortunately, so you can reshuffle Power distribution in a crisis reasonably readily.
Note that any given ship can only equip up to 11 Systems at once, and aside one exception added by the advanced edition update you can't get rid of or replace a System you've already got installed. As such, you shouldn't just throw in a System without thinking simply because you can afford it; if it doesn't fit into your final strategy, and prevents you from purchasing a System that does... that's a problem.
This also makes it frustrating how ridiculously sub-optimal some ship initial setups are, because if they have a System that's a terrible fit to their primary strategy? You're stuck with that slot being eaten by that System you don't actually want, no possibility of selling it off or replacing it with a better System or anything.
Note that any given ship can only equip up to 11 Systems at once, and aside one exception added by the advanced edition update you can't get rid of or replace a System you've already got installed. As such, you shouldn't just throw in a System without thinking simply because you can afford it; if it doesn't fit into your final strategy, and prevents you from purchasing a System that does... that's a problem.
This also makes it frustrating how ridiculously sub-optimal some ship initial setups are, because if they have a System that's a terrible fit to their primary strategy? You're stuck with that slot being eaten by that System you don't actually want, no possibility of selling it off or replacing it with a better System or anything.
This gets particularly frustrating with ships that start out with System combinations that are directly anti-synergistic...
Engines
-/10/15/30/40/60/80/120
Evasion: +5/+10/+15/+20/+25/+28/+31/+35
FTL Charge Time (Base): 68s/53s/43s/37s/32s/28s/25s/23s
Provides evasion and FTL Jump charge. Can be manned to provide additional evasion and accelerate FTL charge, based on Engines skill level.
Engines are the first, most essential System, since it's literally impossible to do anything of meaning without them. As such, they're one of a handful of Systems every ship has.
They're also one of the better Systems to prioritize upgrading initially, as the initial levels are dirt-cheap -Reactor upgrades will be the main of the cost initially- and yet provide extremely general benefits. Beams are the only weapon type that can't be evaded, and beams largely require your Shields are knocked down beforehand by other tools, so in practice upgrading your Engines effectively provides protection against beams, too. (Excepting Stealth Cruisers initially, plus one Zoltan Cruiser variant) After all, if you dodge a laser shot that would've opened the way for a Mini Beam to actually do damage, then your evasion has protected you from beam damage.
Since FTL charge rate is dramatically accelerated by the initial Engines upgrades, upgrading your Engines also makes it much more practical to escape if confronted with a ship you either can't actually hurt or at least can't afford the process of defeating, as well as helping you escape hazards before they do damage, such as ASBs and solar flares. This can avert run-ending catastrophe, but even when it's not quite that dramatic it's still helping to reduce how much damage you take from such encounters.
Oh, by the way, the AI usage of FTL Jumps has nearly no connection to your usage. They do require that their Engines are online and that Piloting is online and has someone in its room, but the AI's actual Engine level has no bearing on how quickly they'll escape. They just have arbitrary timers, set individually for the encounter. (No, not the ship type; the event that produced the ship is what matters) As such, damaging their Engines before they start trying to escape does nothing to slow their escape, and you should only bother if you've already smashed Piloting or are trying to reduce their evasion.
Conversely, the AI will never have an Engines level greater than 5, aside the final stage of the Rebel Flagship, which has an Engines level of 6. As such, you will normally never see more than 35% evasion outside the one Rebel Flagship stage, as AI crew are always at the lowest level of experience in all realms, where the player can achieve up to 55% evasion on a continuous basis. This isn't much comfort, as it's almost never realistically worth maxing Engines; 45-48% is a much more likely final player evasion. Furthermore, 35% evasion is already high enough that significant miss streaks aren't that uncommon; missing three times in a row against a ship with 10% evasion is a one-in-a-thousand event. Missing three times in a row against a ship with 35% evasion is a one-in-twenty-seven event.
This is important, because one of FTL's problems is that its use of unbounded randomness means that it's always possible to go from 'everything's perfect' to 'dead' in the space of one encounter through absolutely no fault of your own and with nothing you could've done to correct it; a one-in-a-thousand result is liable to take several runs to encounter even once. A one-in-twenty-seven result expects to happen pretty much every single fight in FTL's late game. "Just Jump away," is not a rebuttal; it technically disqualifies you for the 'in one encounter' part of my words, but the point I'm making is that this isn't a natural and organic part of the roguelike feast-and-famine dynamic. Said dynamic fundamentally demands feast and famine durations cannot be predicted, and therefore it's inherently inevitable that a feast-and-famine roguelike carries the potential for a run to collapse from a famine going on for a little too long, or the feasts in between being a little too brief.
FTL being willing to kill you with combat RNG is a whole different ballgame, as FTL has the player engage with combat as a complex, difficult-to-master experience... and then sets it up so that a run progressing has the following effects;
1: Player-hostile RNG results have more opportunities to come up. (Enemy ships have more Hull, meaning combat takes longer, meaning you take more shots, meaning it's more likely any given shot will be a miss)
2: Player-hostile RNG results are more common in the more direct sense. (You will miss more often because they will have more evasion)
3: Player-hostile RNG effects are more hostile in their actual effects. (Enemy ships do more damage when they manage to do damage to the player; failing to cripple enemy Weapons in the early game, before a Leto Missile fires, means you take 1 damage and maybe a System takes rapidly-repaired damage. The same in the late game can mean a Breach Missile knocks off 4 Hull and does catastrophic System damage)
This is all intrinsically problematic by itself -essentially, the above can be boiled down to 'player skill is increasingly trumped by RNG as a run progresses', to the point that one has to wonder why the game even bothers to force the player through the rigmarole of managing combat given it's so willing to make your input a moot point on a moment's notice- but is then further magnified by FTL's design fundamentally having RNG open the way to further RNG.
That is, if you're fighting a ship that has a Burst Laser II and a Small Bomb and nothing else, and you have 3 Shield bubbles, the expected result is that the Small Bomb is a nuisance that forces you to repair System damage and maybe fight a fire, but your ship will take no damage from the fight...
... but if the Small Bomb drops into your Shields room, the Burst Laser II can suddenly do damage through your Shields. It can then potentially get lucky and do further damage to your Shields System, and it could even potentially get doubly lucky and set a fire in your Shields room. This would rapidly result in you being knocked down to 1 Shield bubble and thus each volley is doing potentially 2 Hull damage and has a not-quite-20% chance to set a new fire (And can potentially set two new fires...), and if the hostile RNG persists for long enough you could literally be taken from 30 Hull to dead by this one ship that, 99% of the time, would do absolutely no permanent damage.
This is nuts. Mastering the combat system isn't very rewarding, because the combat RNG can completely overrule any amount of skill and kill you on a moment's notice, and in fact gets more likely to do so the later you get into the game. Mastering the roguelike strategic resource management isn't very rewarding, because the combat RNG can completely overrule any amount of positive strategic luck and skill and kill you on a moment's notice. Mastering the intertwining of these two things isn't very rewarding, because the combat RNG can completely overrule all of it and kill you on a moment's notice.
This is bordering into the territory of betting on horse races or something, rather than actually playing a game. The combat RNG is simply too dominating, not only in theory but in practice. It's especially frustrating how the combat RNG gets more dominating as you progress; typically in a roguelike design the player consolidates resources and closes holes in their build's design and just generally gets less likely to die as they progress, with the vast majority of RNG-screw-you-couldn't-do-different deaths happening in the extreme early game. Among other points, this means that when the RNG does slaughter a run in such a game, it's usually only a fairly small portion of time that was eaten; a player spent ten minutes on that run before it ended, not ten hours.
FTL's runs are, admittedly, shorter than a classic Roguelike design, but it's still infuriating to spend 2 hours getting to The Last Stand and then die not because you did anything wrong or even because your run was underprepared due to strategic RNG never quite giving you what you needed when you needed it, but because you got into a fight you 100% should have won with basically no harm and then the combat RNG stepped in and turned it into a disaster.
Part of the problem is that FTL just plain doesn't give you the right information at the right time. Without Long-Ranged Sensors, the only info of any use you have about your destination before a Jump is 'Store y/n' and 'nebula y/n'. With Long-Ranged Sensors, the only info of actual use you gain is what, if any, hazard is actually attached to that beacon; yes, the game marks some beacons with 'distress', and yes, Long-Ranged Sensors will display whether a location has a ship or not, but these are both useless. A ship being displayed by Long-Ranged Sensors means it's probably a fight, but not necessarily, and it not having a ship displayed probably means that if there is a fight you don't have to actually engage with it...
... but these are trends, nothing more, and you don't get any of the actually important information, like what class of ship you'd be fighting or what gear it's equipped with.
Typically in a roguelike, there are situations that will kill learning players because there's no in-game way of knowing ahead of time how bad the danger is until it's too late to actually back out. However, note that I said learning players; in Angband, for example, there are floors you really should just not go into before you have certain key resistances, because otherwise your run is going to unceremoniously end with, 'It breathes. You die.' A player avoiding spoilers won't know what floors and resistances these are, and indeed a true no-spoilers player won't even have any idea this is a concept they should be concerned about at all... but a player can, simply by playing the game, work out this information on their own and play later runs such that they don't end up in these situations in the first place. Or, as a more FTL-equivalent example, in Dungeon Crawl one Unique is lightning-fast, can generate a massive aura of silence, and is a highly lethal combatant; a first-time player will probably pick a fight with him, realize in short order that they're horribly outmatched, and then discover they can't actually escape because he's far faster than them and his aura of silence disables almost all ways of escaping more quickly than normal movement, and so have only figured out they shouldn't be fighting this guy when it's too late.
FTL retains the potential for a player to end up doomed with no proper forewarning, but completely removes the ability to gather information and figure out how to avoid such a fate. It's not that beacons have an arcane color-coding system that tells you everything you need to know but is never explained by the game itself, or something of the sort. You just plain cannot make decisions like 'I don't want to deal with Breach Missiles, I'll avoid those fights' or 'Slug ships in the late game are too powerful, I'm not going to fight them'.
This, itself, is hugely frustrating in part because FTL is nonetheless quite happy to give matchup-dependent tools to the player. A player with a Defense Drone Mk I and a Drone Recovery Arm basically has nothing to fear from missile-equipped ships, and indeed would ideally seek them out, since such ships effectively have a dead weapon slot at that point... but the player can't actually do that. You can tilt the odds in your favor a little by paying attention to trends like 'Rock ships are heavy on missile use', but Rebel ships, Autoships, and pirate ships can be encountered essentially anywhere, anytime, and pirate ships in particular are a random mishmash of all over-categories; it is 100% possible to go into a Rock-Controlled Sector and then fight nothing but Mantis ships in pirate form, or go into a Slug-Controlled Nebula Sector and fight nothing but Rockman ships in pirate form, or whatever, and indeed Sector influence on combat encounters is so minor I spent dozens of runs wondering if Sector types did anything. There's only a handful of hard-and-fast rules in this regard relating to Sectors, like that Lanius ships will only appear in Abandoned Sectors. (Even pirate versions of Lanius ships can't appear outside Abandoned Sectors, in fact)
So yeah. FTL horribly misuses RNG such that player mastery of the game systems can always be thrown out entirely by RNG, and the game is prone to wasting hours of your life as a result, and it's all completely unnecessary.
Engines
-/10/15/30/40/60/80/120Evasion: +5/+10/+15/+20/+25/+28/+31/+35
FTL Charge Time (Base): 68s/53s/43s/37s/32s/28s/25s/23s
Provides evasion and FTL Jump charge. Can be manned to provide additional evasion and accelerate FTL charge, based on Engines skill level.
Engines are the first, most essential System, since it's literally impossible to do anything of meaning without them. As such, they're one of a handful of Systems every ship has.
They're also one of the better Systems to prioritize upgrading initially, as the initial levels are dirt-cheap -Reactor upgrades will be the main of the cost initially- and yet provide extremely general benefits. Beams are the only weapon type that can't be evaded, and beams largely require your Shields are knocked down beforehand by other tools, so in practice upgrading your Engines effectively provides protection against beams, too. (Excepting Stealth Cruisers initially, plus one Zoltan Cruiser variant) After all, if you dodge a laser shot that would've opened the way for a Mini Beam to actually do damage, then your evasion has protected you from beam damage.
Since FTL charge rate is dramatically accelerated by the initial Engines upgrades, upgrading your Engines also makes it much more practical to escape if confronted with a ship you either can't actually hurt or at least can't afford the process of defeating, as well as helping you escape hazards before they do damage, such as ASBs and solar flares. This can avert run-ending catastrophe, but even when it's not quite that dramatic it's still helping to reduce how much damage you take from such encounters.
Oh, by the way, the AI usage of FTL Jumps has nearly no connection to your usage. They do require that their Engines are online and that Piloting is online and has someone in its room, but the AI's actual Engine level has no bearing on how quickly they'll escape. They just have arbitrary timers, set individually for the encounter. (No, not the ship type; the event that produced the ship is what matters) As such, damaging their Engines before they start trying to escape does nothing to slow their escape, and you should only bother if you've already smashed Piloting or are trying to reduce their evasion.
Conversely, the AI will never have an Engines level greater than 5, aside the final stage of the Rebel Flagship, which has an Engines level of 6. As such, you will normally never see more than 35% evasion outside the one Rebel Flagship stage, as AI crew are always at the lowest level of experience in all realms, where the player can achieve up to 55% evasion on a continuous basis. This isn't much comfort, as it's almost never realistically worth maxing Engines; 45-48% is a much more likely final player evasion. Furthermore, 35% evasion is already high enough that significant miss streaks aren't that uncommon; missing three times in a row against a ship with 10% evasion is a one-in-a-thousand event. Missing three times in a row against a ship with 35% evasion is a one-in-twenty-seven event.
This is important, because one of FTL's problems is that its use of unbounded randomness means that it's always possible to go from 'everything's perfect' to 'dead' in the space of one encounter through absolutely no fault of your own and with nothing you could've done to correct it; a one-in-a-thousand result is liable to take several runs to encounter even once. A one-in-twenty-seven result expects to happen pretty much every single fight in FTL's late game. "Just Jump away," is not a rebuttal; it technically disqualifies you for the 'in one encounter' part of my words, but the point I'm making is that this isn't a natural and organic part of the roguelike feast-and-famine dynamic. Said dynamic fundamentally demands feast and famine durations cannot be predicted, and therefore it's inherently inevitable that a feast-and-famine roguelike carries the potential for a run to collapse from a famine going on for a little too long, or the feasts in between being a little too brief.
FTL being willing to kill you with combat RNG is a whole different ballgame, as FTL has the player engage with combat as a complex, difficult-to-master experience... and then sets it up so that a run progressing has the following effects;
1: Player-hostile RNG results have more opportunities to come up. (Enemy ships have more Hull, meaning combat takes longer, meaning you take more shots, meaning it's more likely any given shot will be a miss)
2: Player-hostile RNG results are more common in the more direct sense. (You will miss more often because they will have more evasion)
3: Player-hostile RNG effects are more hostile in their actual effects. (Enemy ships do more damage when they manage to do damage to the player; failing to cripple enemy Weapons in the early game, before a Leto Missile fires, means you take 1 damage and maybe a System takes rapidly-repaired damage. The same in the late game can mean a Breach Missile knocks off 4 Hull and does catastrophic System damage)
This is all intrinsically problematic by itself -essentially, the above can be boiled down to 'player skill is increasingly trumped by RNG as a run progresses', to the point that one has to wonder why the game even bothers to force the player through the rigmarole of managing combat given it's so willing to make your input a moot point on a moment's notice- but is then further magnified by FTL's design fundamentally having RNG open the way to further RNG.
That is, if you're fighting a ship that has a Burst Laser II and a Small Bomb and nothing else, and you have 3 Shield bubbles, the expected result is that the Small Bomb is a nuisance that forces you to repair System damage and maybe fight a fire, but your ship will take no damage from the fight...
... but if the Small Bomb drops into your Shields room, the Burst Laser II can suddenly do damage through your Shields. It can then potentially get lucky and do further damage to your Shields System, and it could even potentially get doubly lucky and set a fire in your Shields room. This would rapidly result in you being knocked down to 1 Shield bubble and thus each volley is doing potentially 2 Hull damage and has a not-quite-20% chance to set a new fire (And can potentially set two new fires...), and if the hostile RNG persists for long enough you could literally be taken from 30 Hull to dead by this one ship that, 99% of the time, would do absolutely no permanent damage.
This is nuts. Mastering the combat system isn't very rewarding, because the combat RNG can completely overrule any amount of skill and kill you on a moment's notice, and in fact gets more likely to do so the later you get into the game. Mastering the roguelike strategic resource management isn't very rewarding, because the combat RNG can completely overrule any amount of positive strategic luck and skill and kill you on a moment's notice. Mastering the intertwining of these two things isn't very rewarding, because the combat RNG can completely overrule all of it and kill you on a moment's notice.
This is bordering into the territory of betting on horse races or something, rather than actually playing a game. The combat RNG is simply too dominating, not only in theory but in practice. It's especially frustrating how the combat RNG gets more dominating as you progress; typically in a roguelike design the player consolidates resources and closes holes in their build's design and just generally gets less likely to die as they progress, with the vast majority of RNG-screw-you-couldn't-do-different deaths happening in the extreme early game. Among other points, this means that when the RNG does slaughter a run in such a game, it's usually only a fairly small portion of time that was eaten; a player spent ten minutes on that run before it ended, not ten hours.
FTL's runs are, admittedly, shorter than a classic Roguelike design, but it's still infuriating to spend 2 hours getting to The Last Stand and then die not because you did anything wrong or even because your run was underprepared due to strategic RNG never quite giving you what you needed when you needed it, but because you got into a fight you 100% should have won with basically no harm and then the combat RNG stepped in and turned it into a disaster.
Part of the problem is that FTL just plain doesn't give you the right information at the right time. Without Long-Ranged Sensors, the only info of any use you have about your destination before a Jump is 'Store y/n' and 'nebula y/n'. With Long-Ranged Sensors, the only info of actual use you gain is what, if any, hazard is actually attached to that beacon; yes, the game marks some beacons with 'distress', and yes, Long-Ranged Sensors will display whether a location has a ship or not, but these are both useless. A ship being displayed by Long-Ranged Sensors means it's probably a fight, but not necessarily, and it not having a ship displayed probably means that if there is a fight you don't have to actually engage with it...
... but these are trends, nothing more, and you don't get any of the actually important information, like what class of ship you'd be fighting or what gear it's equipped with.
Typically in a roguelike, there are situations that will kill learning players because there's no in-game way of knowing ahead of time how bad the danger is until it's too late to actually back out. However, note that I said learning players; in Angband, for example, there are floors you really should just not go into before you have certain key resistances, because otherwise your run is going to unceremoniously end with, 'It breathes. You die.' A player avoiding spoilers won't know what floors and resistances these are, and indeed a true no-spoilers player won't even have any idea this is a concept they should be concerned about at all... but a player can, simply by playing the game, work out this information on their own and play later runs such that they don't end up in these situations in the first place. Or, as a more FTL-equivalent example, in Dungeon Crawl one Unique is lightning-fast, can generate a massive aura of silence, and is a highly lethal combatant; a first-time player will probably pick a fight with him, realize in short order that they're horribly outmatched, and then discover they can't actually escape because he's far faster than them and his aura of silence disables almost all ways of escaping more quickly than normal movement, and so have only figured out they shouldn't be fighting this guy when it's too late.
FTL retains the potential for a player to end up doomed with no proper forewarning, but completely removes the ability to gather information and figure out how to avoid such a fate. It's not that beacons have an arcane color-coding system that tells you everything you need to know but is never explained by the game itself, or something of the sort. You just plain cannot make decisions like 'I don't want to deal with Breach Missiles, I'll avoid those fights' or 'Slug ships in the late game are too powerful, I'm not going to fight them'.
This, itself, is hugely frustrating in part because FTL is nonetheless quite happy to give matchup-dependent tools to the player. A player with a Defense Drone Mk I and a Drone Recovery Arm basically has nothing to fear from missile-equipped ships, and indeed would ideally seek them out, since such ships effectively have a dead weapon slot at that point... but the player can't actually do that. You can tilt the odds in your favor a little by paying attention to trends like 'Rock ships are heavy on missile use', but Rebel ships, Autoships, and pirate ships can be encountered essentially anywhere, anytime, and pirate ships in particular are a random mishmash of all over-categories; it is 100% possible to go into a Rock-Controlled Sector and then fight nothing but Mantis ships in pirate form, or go into a Slug-Controlled Nebula Sector and fight nothing but Rockman ships in pirate form, or whatever, and indeed Sector influence on combat encounters is so minor I spent dozens of runs wondering if Sector types did anything. There's only a handful of hard-and-fast rules in this regard relating to Sectors, like that Lanius ships will only appear in Abandoned Sectors. (Even pirate versions of Lanius ships can't appear outside Abandoned Sectors, in fact)
So yeah. FTL horribly misuses RNG such that player mastery of the game systems can always be thrown out entirely by RNG, and the game is prone to wasting hours of your life as a result, and it's all completely unnecessary.
sigh
Anyway, in terms of blue options, Engines actually only has 5... only it's more like 4 in practice, because one of them is exclusive to the Hidden Crystal Worlds... and two of the remaining ones can only trigger in nebula Beacons -in fact, one can only trigger in a Plasma Storm- so if you avoid nebula beacons those two will basically never come up... one of the remaining two is exclusive to Rock Sectors, and it's actually a decent reason to get to Engines 5 because the event forces itself on you. Strictly, a Beam Drone is better for this, but Beam Drones are kind of terrible. Alternatively, you could use a missile of some sort, but that blue option always costs you; Engines 5 is the safe choice that doesn't require a dubious decision to have access to.
The final Engines blue option is to... run away from a pirate slaver ship... when pirate slavers are great to fight and not particularly prone to being dangerous... and using your improved Engines just means nothing happens. You don't get anything useful. Why does this blue option exist?
Fortunately, Engines 5 is a good target to hit overall anyway, so... it could certainly be worse.
Oxygen
-/25/50
Refill Rate: 1x/3x/6x
Provides oxygen to all rooms in the ship. Most crew will lose 6.67 HP per second if in a room with insufficient oxygen.
Oxygen is the second System that is found on literally every player ship, though enemy Autoships and enemy Lanius ships skip it.
Upgrading Oxygen shouldn't be a high priority, but getting it to level 2 is something you should do relatively early, regardless of whether you intend to power it or not. There are events that will disable Oxygen if you don't have it at least level 2, and in general having it at level 1 means any random hit on it will instantly knock it out. In conjunction with other issues like breaches, or fires that you try to deal with via venting, this can snowball a few unlucky moments into an out-and-out disaster, possibly costing you the entire run. Having Oxygen at 2 substantially mitigates this risk.
Furthermore, powering Oxygen to 2 has several situational advantages. It refills rooms faster than a lone Lanius drains it, allowing you to do stuff like have a Lanius operate Shields while Zoltan power the Shields, as well as more easily fend off Lanius boarders, and is fast enough that the enemy using Hacking on your Oxygen will never drain Oxygen to dangerous levels. It can also let you more easily get away with temporarily pulling Power from Oxygen, such as in an Ion Storm or if you're using Backup Batteries and need other Systems powered, since you can shunt two units of Power to Oxygen briefly -such as when protected by Cloak- to rapidly undo the oxygen drain.
Though conversely using Oxygen level 2 means taking away the anti-boarder advantage of Lanius, so it's not clear-cut whether you should use Oxygen 2 with Lanius crew or not.
Upgrading Oxygen to level 3 is much more situational. At level 3 the Oxygen System refills rooms faster than breaches drain them, but that and the additional resistance to damage are the main new benefits, and a notable fraction of weapons that do more than 1 damage in a hit do 3 or 4 damage, such as Breach Missiles, in which case having 3 System HP is no better than having 2. (And since the AI spreads fire even with multi-shot weapons, the per-shot damage really is the important part; a Burst Laser I doing 2 damage via a pair of 1-damage shots is actually very unlikely to have both shots hit your Oxygen, between AI randomized targeting and the possibility of one missing)
On the topic of oxygen management, note that when doors are opened between rooms oxygen will attempt to equalize across all of them. This can be used to pump oxygen back into a room that's been depleted if Oxygen is currently busted, such as if a fire destroyed Oxygen and depleted it of oxygen, which can save a run if eg the Medical Bay is also smashed and your crew are too injured to repair Oxygen before the oxygen deprivation kills them. Note that this will not work if the issue is a breach; opening rooms to a breached room will just get them all drained, and indeed even if Oxygen is online at level 1, opening a breached room up will just drain oxygen from the other rooms.
Weapons
-/40/25/35/50/75/90/100
Allows usage of weapons, with higher levels providing more support for Power to weapons. Can be manned to reduce charge time on all weapons to 90/85/80% of base, depending on crew skill level.
Weapons is probably the most broadly blatant example of enemies straight-up cheating. The player is capped at a maximum of Weapons 8, with player ships usually having 4 slots for weapons but some ships only having 3 slots, while weapons can individually demand up to 4 Power; thus, player ships have the slots for 12-16 Power usage, but can only tap 2/3rds to half of this theoretical potential.
Enemy ships, meanwhile, uniformly can go up to 4 weapon slots, and have no Power cap through the Weapons System. The only reason you're not going to regularly see enemy ships running 16 Power of weapons simultaneously is because the AI tries to not equip multiple copies of a given weapon, only a handful of weapons actually demand 4 Power, and a given enemy ship doesn't actually pull from the entire pool of possible weapons. (Indeed, no ship set has more than 3 weapons that draw 4 Power, even with advanced edition content, so you will actually never see more than 15 Power of weapons on a given ship)
The Crew Teleporter provides 11 blue options. 10 of these are actually enabled by simply having the Crew Teleporter installed at all; only one blue option requires level 2, and level 3 has no blue option benefits. It's a bit weird, and is one more reason why upgrading the Crew Teleporter is generally a low priority.
Cloak
150/30/50
Duration: 5/10/15 seconds
When activated, the ship gains +60 evasion, enemy weapons cannot gain charge until the effect ends, and Crew Teleporters cannot be used by either ship until the effect ends, not even via Hacking forcing it. Additionally, Boarding Drones, Ion Intruder Drones, and Hacking Drones will all pause in their travel if they haven't hit the ship already.
Note that all non-beam weapons reduce Cloak's duration each time they fire from inside an active Cloak, with this being per shot in the case of burst-fire weapons. The Federation Cruiser's Artillery attacks are another exception, and won't shorten duration when firing. The Stealth Weapons Augment negates this particular penalty, though that's a bit of a mixed bag, as being able to shorten the Cloak duration by firing can be useful and Stealth Weapons takes away that option. Which is a weird setup: why can't I turn off my Cloak manually?
Cloak itself goes on a cooldown of 20 seconds starting from when the Cloak ends. This is true regardless of System level, and the fact that it starts when Cloak ends means that the cooldown won't be any longer if you use weapons fire to cut it short. This is particularly important when fighting the Rebel Flagship, as its 'power surge' effects all charge and fire even when your ship is Cloaked, so it can be desirable to fire weapons to shorten your Cloak duration after those have finished in an attempt to have Cloak ready for the next power surge.
Oxygen
-/25/50Refill Rate: 1x/3x/6x
Provides oxygen to all rooms in the ship. Most crew will lose 6.67 HP per second if in a room with insufficient oxygen.
Oxygen is the second System that is found on literally every player ship, though enemy Autoships and enemy Lanius ships skip it.
Upgrading Oxygen shouldn't be a high priority, but getting it to level 2 is something you should do relatively early, regardless of whether you intend to power it or not. There are events that will disable Oxygen if you don't have it at least level 2, and in general having it at level 1 means any random hit on it will instantly knock it out. In conjunction with other issues like breaches, or fires that you try to deal with via venting, this can snowball a few unlucky moments into an out-and-out disaster, possibly costing you the entire run. Having Oxygen at 2 substantially mitigates this risk.
Furthermore, powering Oxygen to 2 has several situational advantages. It refills rooms faster than a lone Lanius drains it, allowing you to do stuff like have a Lanius operate Shields while Zoltan power the Shields, as well as more easily fend off Lanius boarders, and is fast enough that the enemy using Hacking on your Oxygen will never drain Oxygen to dangerous levels. It can also let you more easily get away with temporarily pulling Power from Oxygen, such as in an Ion Storm or if you're using Backup Batteries and need other Systems powered, since you can shunt two units of Power to Oxygen briefly -such as when protected by Cloak- to rapidly undo the oxygen drain.
Though conversely using Oxygen level 2 means taking away the anti-boarder advantage of Lanius, so it's not clear-cut whether you should use Oxygen 2 with Lanius crew or not.
Upgrading Oxygen to level 3 is much more situational. At level 3 the Oxygen System refills rooms faster than breaches drain them, but that and the additional resistance to damage are the main new benefits, and a notable fraction of weapons that do more than 1 damage in a hit do 3 or 4 damage, such as Breach Missiles, in which case having 3 System HP is no better than having 2. (And since the AI spreads fire even with multi-shot weapons, the per-shot damage really is the important part; a Burst Laser I doing 2 damage via a pair of 1-damage shots is actually very unlikely to have both shots hit your Oxygen, between AI randomized targeting and the possibility of one missing)
On the topic of oxygen management, note that when doors are opened between rooms oxygen will attempt to equalize across all of them. This can be used to pump oxygen back into a room that's been depleted if Oxygen is currently busted, such as if a fire destroyed Oxygen and depleted it of oxygen, which can save a run if eg the Medical Bay is also smashed and your crew are too injured to repair Oxygen before the oxygen deprivation kills them. Note that this will not work if the issue is a breach; opening rooms to a breached room will just get them all drained, and indeed even if Oxygen is online at level 1, opening a breached room up will just drain oxygen from the other rooms.
In fact, the actual mechanics of breaches mean that opening doors between rooms that each contain breaches can cause oxygen to start being lost even if your Oxygen level is enough to keep the rooms oxygenated when the doors are closed. It's... weird, and fortunately not usually important to remember.
Outside breaches, though, room-sharing oxygen is useful to remember if Oxygen gets smashed.
Oxygen has precisely one blue option, which can only occur in Slug Sectors. If you have Oxygen above level 1, you'll get a blue option to avoid Oxygen being completely disabled. (It gets reduced to level 1 functionality for the battle) So basically if you're planning on going into a Slug Sector, you should get Oxygen to level 2 beforehand, or as quick as you can once inside the Sector. If you're going to route to avoid all nebula Sectors... then this blue option consideration is irrelevant to you.
Alternatively, Hacking can be used in this event, but it disables your Hacking completely, and you don't actually need Oxygen at more than level 1 functionality. So... this is only worth considering if you have Hacking but haven't upgraded your Oxygen yet.
Oxygen is one of the stranger Systems in implementation. In a direct representational sense, oxygen mechanics are just absurdly bizarre; this model attempts to represent 'crew need to breathe or else they die' by constructing the mechanics such that oxygen just bleeds out of every room in the ship at an equal rate unless fires, breaches, or external doors being opened get involved, and then having crew lose HP if they happen to be standing in a room that's running low on oxygen. You'd think oxygen would first drain from the rooms crew are in, more or less in proportion to crew count. This gets especially bizarre with the advanced edition update, where we have a crew type that drains oxygen from the room they're in, but inexplicably they're an extremely alien species that doesn't need to breathe?
It's really weird that fire mechanics relate to oxygen more like I'd expect a living organism to relate than your, you know, organic crew that ostensibly need to breathe to survive. Particularly absurd is the interaction with the Medical Bay, where crew can be kept alive indefinitely in the face of vacuum killing them, and in fact if the Medical Bay is upgraded it can actively heal them faster than oxygen deprivation is killing them.
But even leaving aside how unutterably bizarre it is as a model of the need to breathe, as a gameplay mechanic the Oxygen System is in a pretty strange place. Its scaling is a good example; Oxygen has 3 levels because the devs clearly committed to 3 and 8 as numbers for (Sub)Systems, not because they had actual ideas for how to have Oxygen scale. Prior to the advanced edition update, level 2 didn't have any notable breakpoints to provide a clear reason to want to upgrade to it in particular, and even with the advanced edition update honestly the primary reason to upgrade Oxygen is to make it less prone to being completely knocked out in combat, not to pursue the super oxygen generation rate of higher levels.
More generally, Oxygen exists in an awkward place of being essential, yet uninteresting. Every player ship has to have it installed, and the player almost always need to prioritize keeping it online, among other points tying up a unit of Power on it basically continuously, but it's not interactive or the like; you generally only give thought to the Oxygen System when it takes damage, and even there it's a bit awkward in that it's too high priority to even consider ignoring it more than very briefly, taking away a lot of the potential for judgment calls and decision-making.
The advanced edition update helps a little bit, as the Cloning Bay makes it potentially bad-but-acceptable to ignore Oxygen being knocked out entirely, and Lanius theoretically make Oxygen optional outright... but the Lanius point is functionally purely theoretical since you can't get Lanius outside the rare Abandoned Sector type, no player ship starts with a pure-Lanius crew, and Oxygen's mechanics mean that even a single non-Lanius demands just as much Power going into Oxygen and whatnot; if Oxygen's Power demand scaled to how many rooms were being fed oxygen, or something of that sort, then Lanius presence would at least offer the option of reducing how much Power you fed into the Oxygen System.
Similarly, the Cloning Bay helps less than you might expect. If your crew has no Lanius or Crystals, the entire ship ending up de-oxygenated with the Oxygen System broken is probably still a game over, just one that won't cause the game to recognize your run is dead and end it, because crew need enough time to repair a full System bar or else their repair work accomplishes nothing; you can't have an Engi revive, dash to the Oxygen System, repair 20% of a bar, and repeat that five times to get back in action. And there's no guarantee that a given ship has Oxygen placed close enough to the Cloning Bay to get that full bar of repairs done before dying.
So even in advanced edition, you should almost always treat Oxygen getting smashed as a dire emergency requiring an immediate response, so we're right back to 'what choices'?
AI ships having Oxygen has more theoretical potential to be interesting, and there are indeed cases where it's notable. Certain enemy ship designs inexplicably have their Oxygen System inaccessible from the rest of the ship, where you can knock out Oxygen and then watch the enemy crew inevitably suffocate; this is one of the few ways you can get a crewkill with typical 'shoot the enemy ship to death' toolkits.
But the AI is sufficiently aggressive about repairing Oxygen, and their ships generally sufficiently advantaged in realms like firepower, that shooting up their Oxygen is rarely relevant as anything other than temporarily tying up crew. Especially since oxygen drains fairly slowly; you can theoretically do things like smash Oxygen and then teleport crew into its room to prevent repairs, but the oxygen drains so slowly that if you can sustain that without losing crew you're liable to just beat the enemy crew to death before they can start suffocating.
I like the idea of life support getting representation in a game about spaceships -games often just take it as a given that even the tiniest starfighter never runs out of oxygen or otherwise runs into problems with life support- but FTL's implementation largely ends up being one of its more frustrating elements, where it usually is pretty irrelevant but sometimes the stars align such that a lucky shot on your Oxygen is key to your run failing.
It's... not ideal.
Weapons
-/40/25/35/50/75/90/100Allows usage of weapons, with higher levels providing more support for Power to weapons. Can be manned to reduce charge time on all weapons to 90/85/80% of base, depending on crew skill level.
Weapons is probably the most broadly blatant example of enemies straight-up cheating. The player is capped at a maximum of Weapons 8, with player ships usually having 4 slots for weapons but some ships only having 3 slots, while weapons can individually demand up to 4 Power; thus, player ships have the slots for 12-16 Power usage, but can only tap 2/3rds to half of this theoretical potential.
Enemy ships, meanwhile, uniformly can go up to 4 weapon slots, and have no Power cap through the Weapons System. The only reason you're not going to regularly see enemy ships running 16 Power of weapons simultaneously is because the AI tries to not equip multiple copies of a given weapon, only a handful of weapons actually demand 4 Power, and a given enemy ship doesn't actually pull from the entire pool of possible weapons. (Indeed, no ship set has more than 3 weapons that draw 4 Power, even with advanced edition content, so you will actually never see more than 15 Power of weapons on a given ship)
On the one hand, I've commented repeatedly that high-Power weapons tend to be awful. On the other hand, a big part of why they're so awful is that they tie up tons of resources -Scrap, Power, and weapon slots- for dubious payoffs, which is a concern that doesn't apply to enemy ships. The Burst Laser III, for example, is (almost) flatly inferior to a couple Burst Laser IIs if the player can arrange to get such, but this doesn't matter to the AI. The game isn't invisibly assigning a Scrap amount for a procedural generation routine to spend into ships, or anything even slightly like what the player deals with; ships get arbitrary slot counts and arbitrary lists of what they're allowed to slot in, and later in a run the game raises those slot counts and adds in higher-Power-demanding weaponry to the pool of allowed weapons, and then just automatically assigns the resultant ship exactly enough Power to run everything at full capacity at once.
So when an enemy ship slots in a Burst Laser III, the only 'cost' involved is that the slot could've been filled by a different weapon. And yes, even on the slot level the Burst Laser III is not particularly great, but when slot count is the only concern the trade it's making is just 'worse charge time and no chance of starting fires, but bigger bursts', which is a trade with actual advantages. Comparing a Burst Laser III to a Burst Laser II where the slot and combat parameters are the only things that matter actually casts the Burst Laser III in a favorable light -especially when we consider the AI is too stupid to coordinate its fire, and so an individual weapon being able to potentially do damage through a full 4 Shield bubbles is inherently useful.
This warping of weapon quality is janky enough all on its own -I've similarly been over how missiles are far more problematic in enemy hands than they are useful in player hands- but the AI getting massively more Weapons capacity and laughing at the idea of Power mattering creates a bunch of frustrating problems with the late game. The biggest one is it draws to the fore a baked-in bit of jank -that all weapons being attached to the one Weapons System room takes away a lot of potential for deliberate strategy. In the early game, this is noticeable, but not too bad: it's frustrating to hit Weapons in an attempt to disable the enemy's missile launcher, only for them to randomly shut off their other weapon instead, but usually hitting Weapons accomplishes something useful, and managing to get a little ahead of the expected firepower curve neatly resolves the problem by completely knocking out Weapons.
Late in a run, though, firepower that will disintegrate a ship in short order is often still inadequate to reliably disable whatever weapon you most want disabled; if you need to deal 13 damage to Weapons to ensure the enemy's Breach Missile launcher doesn't fire, and the AI doesn't feel like letting it get disabled on lesser damage, then you're probably going to destroy the ship without ever actually knocking the Breach Missile launcher offline. This takes away a lot of strategy from the late game, where targeting Weapons in an attempt to stop key threats is somewhere on the range of 'gamble' to 'completely futile' -and that's not even getting into the more direct combat RNG of shots being able to miss.
I really feel Weapons should've been broken up into a number of rooms matching the number of weapon slots a ship gets. This would've reduced the player's ability to protect their preferred weapons, but good play is centered pretty heavily around trying to prevent damage from getting through to your ship at all, whereas Weapons being broken up into multiple rooms would let the player actually act in a more strategic manner late in a run. For that matter, it would make Sensors showing enemy weapon charge actually useful on a consistent basis. If each room was separately manned as well, this would also have mitigated one of the design's current bits of jank -that a full crew tends to end up with idlers who have nothing to do if no fires, Breaches, boarders, or System damage need to be dealt with, when a lot of the nuance on the defensive end is based on needing to balance crew dealing with such issues vs crew manning Systems and Subsystems. Idlers does away with this balancing act. It would even make Weapons experience on crew less 'spiky' in its impact; instead of intermittently getting an all-around boost to weapon fire rate, it would be spread out across a run. This itself would do away with a problem I'll get into later, where player ship quality is noticeably influenced by how quickly a ship's initial loadout generates Weapon experience. Tons of benefits!
Anyway...
As for the playing-the-game end of things, Weapons-the-System is... kind of boring. There's some mid-term judgment stuff, in terms of managing the progression in as smooth a manner as possible, but overall the game's design has implications in a manner that is low on interactivity. You upgrade Weapons as your need for firepower rises, Scrap comes in to afford such upgrades, and (useful) weapons are looted (Or bought), and most of the implications there are non-interactive things I've already been over, like that the Glaive Beam having high Power demands while needing support to accomplish anything is a serious problem for its viability.
Having a Drone Control helps, particularly if you have a Drone Recovery Arm, since you can actually choose whether to focus on Weapons or Drones instead of being forced to scale Weapons period. A ship with a Crew Teleporter also has some wiggle room to reduce focus on Weapons, and same for Hacking, but only so far in both cases; it's still not very interactive.
There's a reason I opened up with talking about what a mess the design here is; that's the main of what there is to talk about.
I will point out that the last three tiers in particular are a lot of Scrap. It's usually best to try to branch out into other tools rather than push Weapons yet harder, if at all possible; among other points, level 4 Weapons is the last 'magic number', in the sense that you need level 4 Weapons to be able to use 4-Power weapons at all; 6, 7, and 8 don't have an equivalent reason to care about them in particular, while being really expensive.
Surprisingly, there are blue events for the Weapons System; technically there's four in the code, but only three get used. All three of these events offer you the option to threaten someone into giving rewards if you have Weapons upgraded to at least 6. Apparently this is being used as an indication your ship is bristling with weapons -rather than, say, having 3 or 4 weapon slots filled so you are bristling with weapons. It's a bit weird. In any event, if you're waffling in a given run on whether to stop at 5 Weapons or go on to 6, here's an extra bit of incentive to go to 6 in particular.
Shields
125/100/20/30/40/60/80/100
Every second level adds an additional Shield bubble. Shield bubbles intercept most attacks, with a single Shield bubble lost per hit regardless of the damage the attack would do upon hitting the ship. Can be manned to increase Shield recharge rate by 10/20/30%, depending on crew skill level.
Like with Weapons, the AI cheats when it comes to Shields. Your maximum Shields level is 8. The AI's is 10.
I've personally never seen the AI get a fifth Shield bubble out of this, though the wider internet claims it can happen, but I've certainly had cases where eg an Artemis Missile smashed into their Shields System without negatively impacting their Shield bubbles at all. This is frustrating and dumb, but an extra layer of 'what??' is that the Rebel Flagship does not cheat in this manner. It's absolutely possible to be able to tear down the Flagship just fine and yet be utterly helpless against a generic ship in The Last Stand, which is pretty clearly nonsensical design.
Shields
125/100/20/30/40/60/80/100Every second level adds an additional Shield bubble. Shield bubbles intercept most attacks, with a single Shield bubble lost per hit regardless of the damage the attack would do upon hitting the ship. Can be manned to increase Shield recharge rate by 10/20/30%, depending on crew skill level.
Like with Weapons, the AI cheats when it comes to Shields. Your maximum Shields level is 8. The AI's is 10.
I've personally never seen the AI get a fifth Shield bubble out of this, though the wider internet claims it can happen, but I've certainly had cases where eg an Artemis Missile smashed into their Shields System without negatively impacting their Shield bubbles at all. This is frustrating and dumb, but an extra layer of 'what??' is that the Rebel Flagship does not cheat in this manner. It's absolutely possible to be able to tear down the Flagship just fine and yet be utterly helpless against a generic ship in The Last Stand, which is pretty clearly nonsensical design.
This is actually less egregious than the cheating with Weapons, but still has a distortive impact on the late game, and one way it's actually worse is that it's invisible and in a way that directly messes up the game's learning curve! This is already something of a problem with Shields, as enemy ships are allowed to generate with their Shields System at level 3, level 5, or level 7, which can lead to a player hitting the Shields System and being unsure why the maximum Shield bubbles didn't change, but level 9 and 10 Shields are extra-egregious since the natural assumption is that enemies cap at level 8 just like the player and the game provides zero feedback to suggest this is not so. In conjunction with the general chaos of battle, how much information is poorly-explained or hidden -at least by default- or otherwise murky, it's easy to be jumping to guesses like 'I just didn't notice my shot missing', or to guess that an Augment is at work if you've noticed some enemy ships have Augments that are in no way announced, or otherwise guess something logical-but-wrong.
But even aside the learning curve issue, it also just means that extremely late ships are secretly harder to break through their Shields than a seemingly-equivalent player ship is; if your Shields System takes a hit when you've got four Shield bubbles, that's it, you've lost a Shield bubble and won't get it back until repairs are done, no matter how little damage was done. Meanwhile, you launch a barrage at the enemy's Shields and just barely manage to overwhelm it and get a little damage through... and inexplicably, it doesn't actually help. Or even if you get a decent amount of damage through, you'll still be perpetually removing 1 less Shield bubble than the AI would if they did the same to you.
Notably, Shields doesn't really have any defensible design excuses for being this way. The AI cheating on Weapons frustrates me less because they cheat and more because the details work out to damaging the depth of the game; it seems extremely likely the AI cheats on Weapons to make up for the AI's own limitations, where the player will get more real work out of the same amount of firepower through coordinating volleys and targeting key enemy Systems in a deliberate way, where the AI is, in short, dumb when it comes to Weapons management. That's understandable; I've always had sympathy for games making the AI cheat in some realms to directly offset the AI's deficiencies in other realms.
But why do Shields have this hidden AI cheating? The player can't use Shields more optimally than the AI; Shields are technically interactive, but only barely, and the AI cheating on Power renders almost irrelevant the one capacity in which the player can be smarter in managing Shields: that of deciding how much priority they merit at any given moment. There's no possible design need served by this decision, so why did it happen?
Moving on to actual player-decision type stuff...
Shields is the System the game is most blatantly built around an expectation that you'll be upgrading it. For example, at the start of a run, most player ships have level 2 Shields and thus 1 Shield bubble; enemy ships have their bare minimum number of weapons be 2, aside that really early Drone Control ships lose one of the weapons in the expectation that a Drone will sub in for the missing weapon, and enemy ships have a bunch of loadout rules that collectively work to ensure that those two weapons can in fact overcome your 1 Shield bubble and do Hull damage; they can't generate with a pair of Mini Beams, for example, or a pair of Ion weapons. The devs managed to miss the possibility of an early Drone Control ship generating with a Mini Beam and a Beam Drone and nothing else, but that's the only way an early ship can be unable to overcome the player's standard level of initial Shielding.
By a similar token, while a handful of player ships don't start with Shields, for those ships Store behavior is altered; any Store that is offering System upgrades will have Shields on offer until such time as you've bought Shields, guaranteed. This is a particularly blunt example of the game being designed in the expectation of Shields rising over the course of a run.
Notably, the Drone Control point is the only case of the game being willing to have enemies sacrifice weapon competency in favor of another capability, and is clearly premised under the idea that Combat Drones and Beam Drones are essentially interchangeable with lasers and beam weapons. While there are player ships that are so boarding-centric they literally don't start with a weapon equipped, enemy ships with a Crew Teleporter throw it in 'for free', without giving up a weapon slot or the like.
The mirror to all this is that enemy Shields are in basically the same boat in terms of design expectation; they rise very consistently over the course of a run, culminating in the Rebel Flagship being guaranteed to have 4 Shield bubbles (Aside the bizarre wrinkle of regular enemy ships being allowed to have Shields invisibly at level 10...), correlated pretty closely to Sector number. There's a little variability, where some ships can be one bubble 'behind' and other ships can be one bubble 'ahead', and Autoships are (very rarely) allowed to generate with no Shield System at all, but for one thing these effects are capped (-1 bubble can't take a ship to 0, +1 can't take a ship to 5), and for another the game uses this sparingly. (Mostly, Mantis ships are allowed to have weak Shields, and the ships you fight if you go to a beacon the rebel fleet has reached get stronger Shields)
Anyway, as upgrading Shields is quite demanding per bubble, strategically timing your Shields upgrades is one of the trickier things to manage, especially if you insist on only ever upgrading in bubble-count steps -so two Shields upgrades or no Shields upgrades at any given moment. As upgrading by a half-step is very unreliable in its utility (It only helps if the Shields System takes an odd amount of damage, when the AI targeting is completely random), there's a good argument for defaulting to this; Scrap tied up in half a bubble of upgrades is Scrap not doing something more useful, after all.
Regardless of whether you insist on upgrading in full bubble counts or are more willing to stagger the relevant purchases, the judgment call of when to start saving up for or pushing for the next bubble is an important part of FTL's learning curve, and difficult to provide simple rules of thumb for; I could broadly talk in terms of bubble count to Sector count and that wouldn't be wrong or useless, but it would certainly be overly-simple. Among other points, some defensive tools (eg Cloaking) can make it more okay to put off upgrading Shields, as can some offensive tools, and furthermore you always have to consider what all else might be a higher priority for your run in the moment; mindlessly getting your Shields to X upgrade level by Y Sector can easily put you in a situation where things would be going fine if you'd prioritized some other upgrades, but are going very badly because you prioritized Shields.
This makes the consideration of when to upgrade Shields one of the bits of FTL's design that has actual depth and nuance to it, which is nice... the exact mechanics of Shields have several clunky or downright bad elements to them, but they're well ahead of, say, Oxygen, in terms of good and useful design that provides depth and replayability.
Conversely, the AI Shield progression is much more predictable and imposes much clearer rules on your offensive progression. It's okay to have offenses that can only penetrate 1 Shield bubble layer initially, but is a lethal problem by Sector 3. Similarly, by Sector 5 you really need to be able to reliably get through 3 Shield bubbles, and by Sector 7 it's crucial to be able to penetrate a full four Shield bubbles. I'm... not a fan of this predictability, surprising as that might be; from a narrative perspective, it's jarring how everybody you fight rises in just-about-lockstep when it comes to Shield count as you progress through a run. Why are the pirates in later Sectors so reliably at the same Shield counts as rebel ships, among other things?
More importantly, its impact on gameplay is weird and oppressive, particularly in conjunction with several other decisions that can be summarized as 'you must be able to shoot problems to death with tools Shields can block'. Weaponry (And Drones) that completely bypasses Shields all uses limited resources you can't use too freely. Boarding bypasses Shields and is mostly a really great strategy, but against Autoships it's horrible for a whole host of reasons, and against the Rebel Flagship a pure boarding strategy is a guaranteed loss. So it really is the case that if your firepower-that-cares-about-Shields doesn't rise to certain minimum bars, your run is more or less doomed; this quietly invalidates a lot of seemingly-viable strategies or playstyles for no real design reason (The fact that multiple player ships start life as pure-boarding for their strategy? Yeah, that doesn't mean dedicated boarding is meant to be viable), and it intersects poorly with the game's preference for fairly wildly random generation of loot/purchasable. There's functionally a fairly high rate at which you will have runs fail not because you made mistakes, but because the game doesn't actually try to ensure you can meet its minimum demands on Shield-busting.
This is particularly so for the ships with particularly poor initial Shield-busting, like the dedicated boarder ships, but basically only the Federation Cruisers (technically) escape this.
It also intersects in a frustrating way with evasion mechanics, in that evasion is functionally a weird, awkward way for the game to quietly scale its Shield-busting demands higher than they appear to be. That is, when you're fighting a ship with 3 Shield bubbles and 30% evasion, having two Burst Laser Is is technically enough to get through, but you will only occasionally actually land all four shots to thus get a shot past the Shields. This also doubles as an unintuitive learning curve issue, since the beginning of a run will likely mis-teach a player; at the beginning of the run, having your shot count just barely beat the enemy's Shield bubble count is actually fine, as their evasion will be so low (And the shot/Shield bubble counts also so low) that you expect to have every shot hit on most volleys. This can readily lend the impression that your rule of thumb should be to be at least 1 shot over their Shield bubble count, when in actuality this only holds up fairly early in a run; when enemy ships routinely have 30% evasion, you actually need more than 40% more shots than that to expect to get a point of damage through on a given volley.
As a player learning the game is liable to repeatedly crash and burn before even getting to that part of the game... they're liable to have such misapprehensions pretty firmly entrenched by the time they're good enough to start seeing that actually those rules of thumb are wrong.
Nnnnot ideal.
It's difficult for me to articulate how I'd want to see this particular bit improved, because there's so many alternative designs that would be vastly less frustrating while being recognizably related to the current model. Even the relatively tame option of 'rescaling' the game so almost every combat number is doubled (By which I mean twice as many Shield bubbles, twice as much Hull, twice as much System HP/levels, twice as many shots from assorted weapons...) would do a lot to ablate the jank.
It's frustrating, because Shields is one of the main bits of depth to the game, yet I can't help but feel it's one of the bits of the design that could've been so much better without too much changed.
Weirdly, Shields never offers any blue options. Making this especially weird is that multiple events assume you have Shields even though multiple player ships don't start with a Shields System. Probably for the best overall given how blatantly the game is balanced around an expectation of every ship having Shields at level 6 or 8 by the end of the run, but still. A bit weird.
Medical Bay
50/35/45
Restores 6.67/10~/19~ HP to all friendly crew inside the room per second.
Note that level 1's healing is exactly equal to the damage suffocation does to most crew. If you want to be able to actually heal even if the ship is completely vented, you'll need to upgrade the Medical Bay.
Also note that while you can only order so many crew into a room, any crew passing through the Medical Bay will be healed at no penalty regardless; crew don't have to actually be sitting in a specific slot to be healed. Thus, you can get more than 2 crew healed in a 1x2 Medical Bay by simply ordering other crew back and forth into rooms on either side of the Medical Bay. (Unless the Medical Bay is in a dead end...)
Further note that the Medical Bay has the bizarre quality that, if the Medical Bay is a 2x2 room, one corner is inaccessible to crew, apparently taken up by a medical device. Among other points, this makes 2x2 Medical Bays unusually vulnerable to fire and breaches -the blocked slot can still be occupied by fires and breaches, but you can't cram four crew in to deal with them as fast as you could in most any other 2x2 room- and also means that ships with 2x2 Medical Bays are less advantaged than you would expect, relative to rooms with 1x2 Medical Bays, since you can only cram in 50% more healing, not twice as much. (Aside the movement thing...)
Medical Bay
50/35/45Restores 6.67/10~/19~ HP to all friendly crew inside the room per second.
Note that level 1's healing is exactly equal to the damage suffocation does to most crew. If you want to be able to actually heal even if the ship is completely vented, you'll need to upgrade the Medical Bay.
Also note that while you can only order so many crew into a room, any crew passing through the Medical Bay will be healed at no penalty regardless; crew don't have to actually be sitting in a specific slot to be healed. Thus, you can get more than 2 crew healed in a 1x2 Medical Bay by simply ordering other crew back and forth into rooms on either side of the Medical Bay. (Unless the Medical Bay is in a dead end...)
Further note that the Medical Bay has the bizarre quality that, if the Medical Bay is a 2x2 room, one corner is inaccessible to crew, apparently taken up by a medical device. Among other points, this makes 2x2 Medical Bays unusually vulnerable to fire and breaches -the blocked slot can still be occupied by fires and breaches, but you can't cram four crew in to deal with them as fast as you could in most any other 2x2 room- and also means that ships with 2x2 Medical Bays are less advantaged than you would expect, relative to rooms with 1x2 Medical Bays, since you can only cram in 50% more healing, not twice as much. (Aside the movement thing...)
Also note that I've given guesstimates for the level 2 and 3 healing values, because I'm not entirely sure how the game handles the math 'behind the scenes' in detail; level 2 is 50% more than base, and level 3 is triple base, as stated by the game, but I don't know if any odd rounding or the like occurs. The base number I know because people have definitively established suffocation damage's exact number, and an unupgraded Medical Bay exactly counters suffocation damage.
The Medical Bay itself is technically optional, but FTL is clearly designed as if this isn't really true. Only one player ship in the entire game starts with neither a Medical Bay nor a Cloning Bay, and that ship still starts with an option for healing crew. Conversely, crew healing is pretty rare on enemy ships; in the very early game it can't happen at all, and even late in a run it's not that unusual to encounter a large, well-equipped ship that can't do anything about damage to its crew.
As for more player-level utility... well, for one thing having a Medical Bay makes it really easy to trivialize boarding events if they're not paired with an enemy ship or certain environmental hazards, particularly early in a run where your crew count is low. Outside the Rock Cruiser B, you can just open every door except the Medical Bay's to vent atmosphere from most of the ship and have your crew huddle in the Medical Bay; boarders will flee vacuum in pursuit of rooms with oxygen if they're not Lanius (Who I'm not sure can be spawned by boarding events), and so even though they latch onto a random (Sub)System to smash you can still herd them into the Medical Bay to lose.
I'm actually not sure why the game even bothers to have boarding events that aren't paired with some other threat; in the context of the initial release, they're basically always timewasters that have no possibility of doing anything except giving your crew some free crew combat experience. Advanced edition adding in the Cloning Bay gives them more opportunity to matter, at least?
Regardless, the Medical Bay is of course also very important if you have a Crew Teleporter, since boarding inevitably involves your crew taking damage. Whether upgrading the Medical Bay is important to a boarding strategy is another matter -if your ship places the Medical Bay and Crew Teleporter adjacent to each other, it's far more relevant to upgrade the Crew Teleporter to reduce time spent not fighting. If they're placed further apart, especially if you're using slower crew (Rockmen, Crystals, or Lanius), upgrading the Medical Bay can be a higher priority than upgrading the Crew Teleporter for improving turnaround, since a lot of the Crew Teleporter's cooldown will be eaten just by walking to and from the Medical Bay. If you're using Zoltan as boarders... well, firstly, you really shouldn't be doing that unless you have a Cloning Bay. But if circumstances conspire so you feel obligated to do so anyway, then it's a lot more important to be upgrading the Crew Teleporter, so you can pull them off the enemy ship before they die, and also because the Medical Bay's healing is 'flat'; a Zoltan at 1 HP takes just over 10 seconds to be fully healed by a Level 1 Medical Bay because they only have 70 HP in the first place, while a Rockman takes over 20 seconds to go from 1 HP to full with a Level 1 Medical Bay.
And of course the Medical Bay is by default essential to keeping your crew from dying to fires, oxygen loss, weapons fire hitting their room, and enemy boarders popping in. This is one of the main ways things can spiral into a defeat, in fact; crew end up injured, you end up sending them to heal, and this means they're not manning Systems/not putting out fires/not repairing System damage/not preventing enemy boarders from doing more damage, any of which can lead to still further problems. It's not like sending badly wounded crew in to die is a better choice; it's maybe marginally better in an immediate sense, sometimes, but it drastically worsens your odds in following fights, so it's not really a learning curve thing, just an example of how things going wrong can lead to still more things going wrong until the cascade kills your run entirely.
I actually think the Medical Bay is functional enough overall, but like much of FTL, it's still clunky in execution. The ability to heal any number of crew at once through micromanaging crew movement is an example that's easy to point to of the clunkiness, even though it's actually probably one of the less relevant bits of clunkiness.
An AI point to note is that enemy crew will retreat from your boarders if they get low on HP and their ship has a Medical Bay... unless there's no more room in the Medical Bay for them to fit in, in which case they'll happily hang around and die for no reason. This is true even though enemy crew will, if they can't reach the Medical Bay without dying to a fire or a room with no oxygen, still try to retreat from your crew to other rooms.
This isn't much of an exploit since enemy ships tend to have small crew sizes, but it's something to keep in mind, particularly with the Rebel Flagship with its super-massive crew.
The Medical Bay offers blue options in 9 events. In most cases this will reliably prevent you from losing crew and/or cause you to reliably gain a crewmember, making them pretty good payoffs. Most of them require the Medical Bay be at level 2 to be on offer, while a couple require it be at level 3 for best results; it's probably a good idea to get the Medical Bay to level 2 early, between it allowing you to heal even when aggressively venting (Or if dealing with a Boarding Drone that hit the Medical Bay) and it being a bit of a sweet spot on blue events.
Crew Teleporter
90/30/60
Can be used to either teleport all friendly crew in the room to a target room in the enemy ship, or to target a room in the enemy ship and pull all friendly crew in that room back to the Crew Teleporter's room. Either way, crew beyond a room's capacity will 'spill' over into adjacent rooms. Has a 20/15/10 second cooldown after use.
Note that until the teleportation animation is completely done, crew are not actually considered to have left their prior location. They can be killed by enemies attacking them even though they've already visually jumped back to your ship, and if you eg attempt to teleport them out and Jump away once you can see their graphics in your ship... sorry, you just left them behind in the enemy ship, even though that's visually nonsense. This is a frustrating bit of design that will almost certainly cost a player crew through bad visual communication on the developer's part, rather than from the player making any kind of mistake.
On the flipside, the game is unexpectedly merciful if your entire crew ends up on the enemy ship with the Crew Teleporter broken; if you successfully crewkill the enemy ship in that situation, your crew will automatically be transported back to your ship, with a justification about using a shuttle from the enemy ship to make it back. (Even though shuttles otherwise don't seem to exist...)
Lanius ships and Autoships completely lack oxygen and so present issues with teleporting aboard them. It's still doable, however, even using a Medical Bay, though of course it's highly undesirable to rely exclusively on boarding to destroy an Autoship. At level 1, a Crew Teleporter will be able to retrieve Rockmen and Crystals before they suffocate, assuming no other damage sources. At level 2, only Zoltan will suffocate before the Crew Teleporter is ready, again assuming no other damage sources. At level 3, even Zoltan can be retrieved before they suffocate.
As such, a boarding-focused ship really wants its Crew Teleporter upgraded once as fast as possible, unless you happen to be heavy on Rockmen and/or Crystals.
When it comes to crew combat, if you assume that exactly one crew is fighting a given boarder at any given moment (eg you teleport 2 crew into a 1x1 room, or teleport 4 crew into a 2x2 room), and also assume no other damage sources, most crew can reliably be pulled away before being beaten to death by most crew even when the Crew Teleporter is at level 1; Zoltan will die if left to fight anything other than an Engi in those conditions, and only Rockman will survive being torn into by a Mantis in that timeframe, but otherwise a level 1 Crew Teleporter is adequate, if slightly risky due to how precise the timing is; it's possible to be distracted for a second and so lose someone that way, for example. At level 2, all crew will survive the cooldown when fighting non-Mantis, and only Zoltan will die when fighting Mantis. At level 3, if somebody dies before you can pull them back, it's because you let them get swarmed, or had them fighting in a room on fire, or something.
The above figures are ignoring the issue of Lanius, it should be noted. This is a minor omission, as Lanius do not show up in pirate ships except in Abandoned Sectors, and actual Lanius ships have no oxygen in them in the first place, making it a terrible idea to rely on boarding strategies against them without some degree of suffocation resistance. (Rockmen, Crystals, the Emergency Respirators Augment, or of course your own Lanius) In conjunction with the fact that Lanius on pirate ships cannot be reduced to a reasonably simple axiom, I'm not doing that one concretely. It's useful to think of them as more lethal than most crew but less lethal than Mantis when you are fighting a pirate ship that includes a Lanius, but even there it depends on how many Lanius there are and how quickly they stack up and so on, so don't take that rule of thumb as an absolute.
Regardless, a level 3 Crew Teleporter is more than enough for the vast majority of possible needs, and indeed you can usually get by with just a level 2 Crew Teleporter, particularly if your boarders are Rockmen and/or Crystals, since they have enough wiggle room to shrug off stuff like a stray flak hit.
Note that Mantis Cruisers B and C, and the Crystal Cruiser B, all have 2x2 Crew Teleporters, but for every other ship their Crew Teleporter will be a 1x2 room. This applies even to some of the ships that have a large number of empty 2x2 rooms and no starting Crew Teleporter, where you might expect them to drop it into one of the 2x2 rooms. Disappointingly, this means it's basically impossible to pull off a 4-Lanius drop, since only the Mantis Cruiser C has any Lanius out of those, and it only has the one Lanius, and it's exceedingly unlikely a run will have the chance to acquire three Lanius, let alone actually successfully afford it. This is unfortunate given Lanius boarding effectiveness does not scale linearly.
Crew Teleporter
90/30/60Can be used to either teleport all friendly crew in the room to a target room in the enemy ship, or to target a room in the enemy ship and pull all friendly crew in that room back to the Crew Teleporter's room. Either way, crew beyond a room's capacity will 'spill' over into adjacent rooms. Has a 20/15/10 second cooldown after use.
Note that until the teleportation animation is completely done, crew are not actually considered to have left their prior location. They can be killed by enemies attacking them even though they've already visually jumped back to your ship, and if you eg attempt to teleport them out and Jump away once you can see their graphics in your ship... sorry, you just left them behind in the enemy ship, even though that's visually nonsense. This is a frustrating bit of design that will almost certainly cost a player crew through bad visual communication on the developer's part, rather than from the player making any kind of mistake.
On the flipside, the game is unexpectedly merciful if your entire crew ends up on the enemy ship with the Crew Teleporter broken; if you successfully crewkill the enemy ship in that situation, your crew will automatically be transported back to your ship, with a justification about using a shuttle from the enemy ship to make it back. (Even though shuttles otherwise don't seem to exist...)
Lanius ships and Autoships completely lack oxygen and so present issues with teleporting aboard them. It's still doable, however, even using a Medical Bay, though of course it's highly undesirable to rely exclusively on boarding to destroy an Autoship. At level 1, a Crew Teleporter will be able to retrieve Rockmen and Crystals before they suffocate, assuming no other damage sources. At level 2, only Zoltan will suffocate before the Crew Teleporter is ready, again assuming no other damage sources. At level 3, even Zoltan can be retrieved before they suffocate.
As such, a boarding-focused ship really wants its Crew Teleporter upgraded once as fast as possible, unless you happen to be heavy on Rockmen and/or Crystals.
When it comes to crew combat, if you assume that exactly one crew is fighting a given boarder at any given moment (eg you teleport 2 crew into a 1x1 room, or teleport 4 crew into a 2x2 room), and also assume no other damage sources, most crew can reliably be pulled away before being beaten to death by most crew even when the Crew Teleporter is at level 1; Zoltan will die if left to fight anything other than an Engi in those conditions, and only Rockman will survive being torn into by a Mantis in that timeframe, but otherwise a level 1 Crew Teleporter is adequate, if slightly risky due to how precise the timing is; it's possible to be distracted for a second and so lose someone that way, for example. At level 2, all crew will survive the cooldown when fighting non-Mantis, and only Zoltan will die when fighting Mantis. At level 3, if somebody dies before you can pull them back, it's because you let them get swarmed, or had them fighting in a room on fire, or something.
The above figures are ignoring the issue of Lanius, it should be noted. This is a minor omission, as Lanius do not show up in pirate ships except in Abandoned Sectors, and actual Lanius ships have no oxygen in them in the first place, making it a terrible idea to rely on boarding strategies against them without some degree of suffocation resistance. (Rockmen, Crystals, the Emergency Respirators Augment, or of course your own Lanius) In conjunction with the fact that Lanius on pirate ships cannot be reduced to a reasonably simple axiom, I'm not doing that one concretely. It's useful to think of them as more lethal than most crew but less lethal than Mantis when you are fighting a pirate ship that includes a Lanius, but even there it depends on how many Lanius there are and how quickly they stack up and so on, so don't take that rule of thumb as an absolute.
Regardless, a level 3 Crew Teleporter is more than enough for the vast majority of possible needs, and indeed you can usually get by with just a level 2 Crew Teleporter, particularly if your boarders are Rockmen and/or Crystals, since they have enough wiggle room to shrug off stuff like a stray flak hit.
Note that Mantis Cruisers B and C, and the Crystal Cruiser B, all have 2x2 Crew Teleporters, but for every other ship their Crew Teleporter will be a 1x2 room. This applies even to some of the ships that have a large number of empty 2x2 rooms and no starting Crew Teleporter, where you might expect them to drop it into one of the 2x2 rooms. Disappointingly, this means it's basically impossible to pull off a 4-Lanius drop, since only the Mantis Cruiser C has any Lanius out of those, and it only has the one Lanius, and it's exceedingly unlikely a run will have the chance to acquire three Lanius, let alone actually successfully afford it. This is unfortunate given Lanius boarding effectiveness does not scale linearly.
In enemy hands, the Crew Teleporter can be frustrating at times but is... honestly usually a disadvantage to the enemy ship. Enemy crew technically try to load into the Crew Teleporter in groups, but often once one of them is in the room they teleport instantly, with the other crew that was clearly on the way finding something else to do until the Crew Teleporter is off cooldown again. The AI has zero concept of the differing crew competencies in combat, perfectly happy to send a lone Engi to flail at your crew with their noodle arms while their Mantis buddies try (and fail) to put out a fire aboard their ship. The AI teleports its boarders into a random room of yours (Including potentially dropping them into an active fire or a room with no oxygen), and once there's boarders on your ship they pick a random room to actually target aside that it must have a (Sub)System inside it; this includes that you will see nonsense like two Manti drop inside your Shield System, and then go bashing down the doors in an attempt to go to your Sensors and smash it. The AI will retrieve nearly-dead crew if possible, but enemy boarders who get low on HP won't try to run away if their Crew Teleporter is still recharging, and the AI is perfectly happy to do stuff like send in more boarders when one of their current boarders is already missing health and being beaten on, thus ensuring they can't rescue that boarder before you kill them.
The overall result is that a Crew Teleporter on enemy ships tends to basically just mean they have less crew for essential tasks, with you killing them or at least driving them off with minimal disruption. They can end up creating problems, especially if it comes up early in a run where you're playing one of the ships that's poor at fending off boarders, but... not often.
So even though I find it pretty obnoxious enemy ships get the Crew Teleporter 'for free' where player ships that start with a Crew Teleporter make actual sacrifices to fit it in, it's less problematic than it could be.
The Crew Teleporter provides 11 blue options. 10 of these are actually enabled by simply having the Crew Teleporter installed at all; only one blue option requires level 2, and level 3 has no blue option benefits. It's a bit weird, and is one more reason why upgrading the Crew Teleporter is generally a low priority.
Cloak
150/30/50Duration: 5/10/15 seconds
When activated, the ship gains +60 evasion, enemy weapons cannot gain charge until the effect ends, and Crew Teleporters cannot be used by either ship until the effect ends, not even via Hacking forcing it. Additionally, Boarding Drones, Ion Intruder Drones, and Hacking Drones will all pause in their travel if they haven't hit the ship already.
Note that all non-beam weapons reduce Cloak's duration each time they fire from inside an active Cloak, with this being per shot in the case of burst-fire weapons. The Federation Cruiser's Artillery attacks are another exception, and won't shorten duration when firing. The Stealth Weapons Augment negates this particular penalty, though that's a bit of a mixed bag, as being able to shorten the Cloak duration by firing can be useful and Stealth Weapons takes away that option. Which is a weird setup: why can't I turn off my Cloak manually?
Cloak itself goes on a cooldown of 20 seconds starting from when the Cloak ends. This is true regardless of System level, and the fact that it starts when Cloak ends means that the cooldown won't be any longer if you use weapons fire to cut it short. This is particularly important when fighting the Rebel Flagship, as its 'power surge' effects all charge and fire even when your ship is Cloaked, so it can be desirable to fire weapons to shorten your Cloak duration after those have finished in an attempt to have Cloak ready for the next power surge.
Also, a bizarre, aggravating mechanics point that is really important to proper Cloak usage is that incoming attacks have their hit/miss status decided once they cross through where a ship's Shield bubble blocks shots. (Even if you don't have any Shields at all!) As such, if you activate Cloak to try to do a last-second dodge of eg missiles that are inside your Shield bubble... too late, the game already decided they've hit!
Less important to know about but still pretty janky is that an active Cloak will suppress the popups that occur when shots do damage or miss. As the AI caps out at a base Evasion of 35%, their usage of Cloak is never actually guaranteed to force a dodge, but it's easy to not notice only depleting 1 Hull when the messages are suppressed, especially with flak weaponry where there's fake projectiles that make impact noises but don't do damage.
Overall, Cloak usage is... janky. Fundamentally, FTL is suffering from the fact that stealth mechanics are generally only meaningfully interesting when spatial considerations matter; being able to get behind an enemy undetected in a game where attacking from behind gives damage bonuses, for example. FTL itself is not such a game; you don't try to flank enemy ships, you only try to 'sneak past' ships in text events that don't even necessarily pay attention to whether you have a Cloak System, and indeed the game cares so little about the idea of positional information that weapon shots from each ship arrive from completely random directions with no attempt to even pretend to model the ships flying around each other. (That is, the game doesn't even do something as basic as perpetually rotating the shot-entry-point, which would cause volleys to all arrive at roughly the same location and suggest the ships circling about each other or the like)
So instead Cloak usage ends up focused basically entirely on a common side effect of stealth mechanics in video games: being a button to become essentially invulnerable for a bit, where the 'balancing' factor is that trying to fight from that state is somehow discouraged. Games that take this approach often have it work out poorly, but FTL's concept of how to approach this is particularly cringe-y, as the discouragement is... your Cloak duration is reduced.
This is difficult to care about, as the design is such that the primary usage of Cloak is to get a weapon charge time advantage, as it blocks the enemy ship from charging its weapons while allowing your weapons to continue charging. Which, by the way, is absolutely bizarre, as this is the only mechanic in the game that treats weapon charge mechanics as a target acquisition effect rather than as 'you need to feed enough electricity into the gun for it to be able to shoot'; why does going into stealth mode cause the enemy weapons to stop charging?
But that's a whole other bit of jank; my current point is that the 'punishment' for firing from under Cloak doesn't really accomplish much. The player already generally wants to coordinate their weapons fire, and if every weapon is fully charged, there's no further benefit to maintaining the Cloak. Since Cloak's cooldown starts when it ends, there's no incentive to let the full Cloak duration play out from that perspective; it will be on cooldown for 20 seconds regardless of whether you let a Level 3 Cloak play out its full 15 seconds or interrupted it 4 seconds in with a massive volley of weapons fire. Indeed, this coordination issue means that the 'advantage' of beam weaponry not reducing the Cloak duration is largely not an advantage in practice; most of the time, you wouldn't want to fire the beam without waiting until you'd fired weapons that do reduce Cloak's duration.
In theory the Glaive Beam would appreciate this quality since it has a long charge time and can penetrate through even 2 Shield bubbles without requiring assistance, but in practice this is extremely unlikely to ever matter in real play: a Cloak System is absurdly expensive to purchase and can never be looted for free, so a ship that doesn't start with it is very unlikely to have it online in time for the Glaive Beam to still be able to function without assistance. Slightly more plausible is playing a Stealth Cruiser and happening to luck into a Glaive Beam as a loot, but this is still something that will happen so rarely I'm willing to technically lie by saying it doesn't matter; sure, if you, the person reading this right now, happen to be one of the tiny handful of players that has this exact circumstance happen, then maybe you'll get to revel in the synergy, but 100% of the time for 99% of players this synergy essentially doesn't exist.
Anyway, point is the Cloak duration being reduced by weapons fire isn't... really a limiter. It reduces the maximum potential effectiveness of firing from under Cloak, but... not by much.
Oh, and it should be explicitly pointed out that weapons -in the exact and specific sense of stuff attached to the Weapons System- are the only tool the game attempts to limit in this way. Cloaking will not prevent external offensive Drones from firing, deploying Drones of any kind has no effect on an ongoing Cloak's duration, you can freely use the Crew Teleporter to board the enemy ship and to flee back to your ship, Hacking can be used freely... so it's a really limpwristed attempt to balance out 'become essentially invulnerable'. A ship with a Cloak System, Drone Control, and Drone Recovery Arm is able to spend long chunks of time freely tearing apart enemy ships with nearly no danger to itself.
It's one of the more egregious examples of Drones being heavily favored by the game in problematic ways.
Anyway, there are other implications to Cloak's mechanics in terms of its usage. Probably the most significant is that it can be used to buy time to flee in the event that you're outmatched. Fleeing is rarely a relevantly helpful option in FTL, but for one thing the Cloak System ablates one of the reasons why fleeing is usually a terrible idea; often, fleeing a bad fight means taking almost as much damage as you'd take in winning the fight, but with no payoff to cover the expenses you racked up. With a Cloak System, it's a lot more plausible that fleeing will result in no damage where persisting in trying to win would actually cost you several Hull points.
Cloak can also be used to trap enemy boarders so you can finish them instead of letting them get teleported away. This generally isn't worth specifically saving the Cloak for, but it's often a beneficial side effect, and it's worth considering activating it a little sooner or later than you might otherwise if you think that slightly different timing will let you secure the kill(s).
Cloaking also can be used to substantially reduce the effectiveness of some of the longer-charging weapons. Not... as much as you might hope, as almost no weapons have a charge time equal to or higher than 20 seconds, especially when considering the manning bonus (The Breach Missile is 22 seconds base, for example, but if Weapons is manned it will be a little under 20 seconds), and one of the main exceptions can't miss, but even just eating every other shot on some of the weapons in the mid-teen range is a pretty significant reduction in their effectiveness.
One option if your Shields and evasion are a bit ahead of the curve is to hold off on activating the Cloak until a volley either pops all your Shield bubbles or is virtually guaranteed to. (eg the initial hits take you to 1 Shield bubble, and there's 4+ more shots already on the way) This can potentially be more effective than just dodging a volley preemptively, if a ship happens to end up with a relatively closely-spaced volley that isn't quite close enough to just dodge the whole thing by Cloaking before any shots reach your Shield bubble line. This... is a narrow scenario, but still.
And of course there's the Rebel Flagship, which in its second and third phases has its 'power surge' superweapons it intermittently releases without regard to your current Cloaking status but which a Cloak will absolutely let you fully evade. I've sometimes wondered if the Rebel Flagship was basically designed around the assumption the player has Cloaking even though that's not remotely guaranteed... these 'power surge' weapons are fairly ridiculous, and Cloaking is the only defensive countermeasure that is a strong help against them. If you don't have Cloaking, you basically just have to try to kill the Rebel Flagship fast enough it doesn't get hit you with them more than once, maybe twice -which is doable, mind, but I still have to wonder.
But overall, Cloak, though conceptually a stealth mechanic, is largely a weapon charge advantage mechanic. It's... strange.
Moving onto enemy usage... one of the more blatant examples of enemy ships having simplistic decision-making processes is that enemy ships with Cloak will always immediately Cloak at the start of combat. This isn't completely pointless -it gives them time to charge their weapons while preventing yours from charging, and takes away options like trying to immediately board them- but it misses out on the opportunity to force your initial fire to miss. Even if you have a Weapon Pre-Igniter, the AI Cloaks so fast you don't get the opportunity to waste weapons fire!
One of the more subtle implications of Cloak in enemy hands is that it effectively makes your enemies fight slightly smarter: normally, enemy ships won't attempt to perform alpha strikes, simply firing each weapon as it reaches full charge, and attacks being spread out in that way gives your defenses the opportunity to recover from preventing a given attack to then hopefully block another attack. An enemy with a Cloak System will usually hold its fire for the duration of the Cloak, and then once the Cloak drops all their weapons will fire simultaneously, likely overwhelming your defenses. With a bit of bad luck, this can spiral out of control, as fires are started or essential Systems become crippled, allowing following attacks to get even more damage and possibly create further problems until you death spiral.
The only saving grace is that enemy ships are mindless about Cloak and will simply activate it every time it's ready. As such, the enemy may push you into a state that would be a game over if only they pressed their advantage, but instead they stop attacking and give you time to repair Systems, put out fires, close Breaches, and heal crew -or even to simply escape. Ships with fully upgraded Cloak can easily end up being less dangerous, simply because the Cloak duration buys you so much time to recover while rarely producing more synced-up weapons fire than with a Cloak that's only at its second tier.
Caveat: the Rebel Flagship's first phase is a major exception, as most of its offensive tools are non-standard and will be fired even while Cloaked without shortening the Cloak's duration. You want its Cloak down if at all possible, because it's just buying time for the Flagship to kill you.
Anyway, a sub-implication of this whole thing is that a Cloak System is actually particularly helpful against enemy ships with Cloaking. Normally, the ability to use Cloaking to force a dodge through is a bit mild of an advantage, because most of the time you'll only be able to dodge one attack at a time, maybe two against ships with a full set of four weapons from a couple happening to sync up. Since enemy Cloaking ships will often end up performing a massive alpha strike, your own Cloaking lets you dodge a volley of all their weapons fire, and the AI is not coded to account for you having Cloak: in a Cloak-off, the player can consistently come out ahead. (Even against the Flagship, though less dramatically)
Overall, I don't like the Cloaking System. Conceptually I like it -I tend to find stealth systems cool in most games- but the actual mechanical execution lends itself primarily to dragging out runs, where you repeatedly spend ten or fifteen seconds with gameplay essentially paused because nothing is really happening, you're just waiting for the enemy's Cloak to time out so you can resume play. With a level 3 Cloak, almost half of combat will be spent waiting for the enemy's Cloak to turn off! FTL already suffers from having a non-trivial rate of 'dead air', where you can't just walk away and make a sandwich but you're not really playing the game, but Cloak in enemy hands is by far one of the most egregious examples.
It really should've had radically different mechanics, honestly, and I'm sad the advanced edition update didn't do anything to change it.
Blue options-wise, Cloaking is surprisingly solid; it only has 7 events it provides blue options for, but one of them can be found nearly anywhere and gives increasingly good rewards for having an increasingly upgraded Cloak, one is avoiding fighting an Autoship in a Plasma Storm, another is a widely-common event where level 2 or better Cloaking guarantees a chance at a reward with no risk of an Autoship fight... these are pretty nice. The others are not so great; they just (Sometimes unreliably) dodge not-particularly-dangerous fights. Notably, one of them is a no-Fuel event, where you should generally be accepting fights in hopes of getting Fuel out of them; you shouldn't just mindlessly click a Cloak blue option just because it appeared.
Drone Control
75 or 85/-/20/30/45/60/80/100
Allows usage of Drones, with higher levels providing more support for power to Drones.
Drone Control's second level is never possible to buy, hence the dash there; purchasing a Drone Control sets you to level 2, and no ship that starts with a Drone Control starts at level 1. Buying Drone Control in a Store has a variable cost because it always comes with a Drone to start; if it starts with a System Repair Drone, you pay 75 Scrap, while if it starts with a Combat Drone Mark I or Defense Drone Mark I you pay 85 Scrap... even though those cost 20 Scrap more than a System Repair Drone, not 10.
Like with Weapons, the AI blatantly cheats with Drone Control, only even more so. Player ships are restricted to 2 Drone slots by default, with some Drone-specialized ships getting a whole 3 slots, and of course are restricted to 8 Power total. AI ships can have more than 4 Drones active at once, and have no Power limit I've ever noticed. Also, unlike with weapons, the AI is not disinclined to have duplicate Drones. I have, in fact, seen nonsense like a ship with 3 System Repair Drones, a Defense Drone Mk 1, a Defense Drone Mk II, and a Shield Overcharger Drone, all of them running simultaneously.
The AI does kind of try to pretend like Drone Control and Weapons are competing with each other, in that Drone Control-equipped enemy ships generally have fewer weapons equipped than ships that lack a Drone Control -an early Rebel Rigger may be equipped with one weapon, for example, when enemy ships normally have a minimum of two weapons- but it tends to break down late in a run, where you'll start seeing Drone-equipped ships with 3-4 weapons that demand 2-4 Power apiece while still having 12+ Power worth of Drones running around.
The only good news is Drone Control access is locked to the specific class of ship -that is, a Rebel Rigger is always equipped with a Drone Control, where a Rebel Elite Fighter is never equipped with a Drone Control- and the classes of ship that have Drone Control are pretty rare. Notably, while Engi ships are always equipped with Drone Control, the game is very reluctant to have you actually fight Engi ships, even in pirate form. It's not actually all that unusual for a run to simply never encounter a Drone Control-equipped ship before fighting the Rebel Flagship, making this particular cheating relatively limited in its impact in real play.
... especially because the AI is very un-optimized in how it selects Drones. You can get terrifying stuff like a Beam Drone Mk I, Combat Drone Mk I, and Combat Drone Mk II tearing your ship into little pieces while weapons fire helps pop your Shield bubbles, but it's plenty normal to see stuff like a Rebel Rigger that has one Basic Laser and a bunch of internal Drones, or an Engi ship that has a couple of weak weapons, a Defense Drone Mk I, and two Anti-Combat Drones. (Never mind that one Anti-Combat Drone is enough to make deploying attacking Drones not worth it...) ie ships where a large proportion of their design is tied up in useless junk.
Drone Control
75 or 85/-/20/30/45/60/80/100Allows usage of Drones, with higher levels providing more support for power to Drones.
Drone Control's second level is never possible to buy, hence the dash there; purchasing a Drone Control sets you to level 2, and no ship that starts with a Drone Control starts at level 1. Buying Drone Control in a Store has a variable cost because it always comes with a Drone to start; if it starts with a System Repair Drone, you pay 75 Scrap, while if it starts with a Combat Drone Mark I or Defense Drone Mark I you pay 85 Scrap... even though those cost 20 Scrap more than a System Repair Drone, not 10.
Like with Weapons, the AI blatantly cheats with Drone Control, only even more so. Player ships are restricted to 2 Drone slots by default, with some Drone-specialized ships getting a whole 3 slots, and of course are restricted to 8 Power total. AI ships can have more than 4 Drones active at once, and have no Power limit I've ever noticed. Also, unlike with weapons, the AI is not disinclined to have duplicate Drones. I have, in fact, seen nonsense like a ship with 3 System Repair Drones, a Defense Drone Mk 1, a Defense Drone Mk II, and a Shield Overcharger Drone, all of them running simultaneously.
The AI does kind of try to pretend like Drone Control and Weapons are competing with each other, in that Drone Control-equipped enemy ships generally have fewer weapons equipped than ships that lack a Drone Control -an early Rebel Rigger may be equipped with one weapon, for example, when enemy ships normally have a minimum of two weapons- but it tends to break down late in a run, where you'll start seeing Drone-equipped ships with 3-4 weapons that demand 2-4 Power apiece while still having 12+ Power worth of Drones running around.
The only good news is Drone Control access is locked to the specific class of ship -that is, a Rebel Rigger is always equipped with a Drone Control, where a Rebel Elite Fighter is never equipped with a Drone Control- and the classes of ship that have Drone Control are pretty rare. Notably, while Engi ships are always equipped with Drone Control, the game is very reluctant to have you actually fight Engi ships, even in pirate form. It's not actually all that unusual for a run to simply never encounter a Drone Control-equipped ship before fighting the Rebel Flagship, making this particular cheating relatively limited in its impact in real play.
... especially because the AI is very un-optimized in how it selects Drones. You can get terrifying stuff like a Beam Drone Mk I, Combat Drone Mk I, and Combat Drone Mk II tearing your ship into little pieces while weapons fire helps pop your Shield bubbles, but it's plenty normal to see stuff like a Rebel Rigger that has one Basic Laser and a bunch of internal Drones, or an Engi ship that has a couple of weak weapons, a Defense Drone Mk I, and two Anti-Combat Drones. (Never mind that one Anti-Combat Drone is enough to make deploying attacking Drones not worth it...) ie ships where a large proportion of their design is tied up in useless junk.
In terms of usage, there's... not a lot to say that I didn't cover in the Drone posts. You can't man the Drone Control? I always feel like you should be able to, but you can't. The game also has a pretty strong preference for slotting it into 2x2 rooms, presumably to accommodate internal defensive Drones -even though most player ships only have two Drone slots and so only need two room tiles to repair their internal Drones. Were Drone slots higher earlier in development?...
Surprisingly, even though Weapons has blue options tied to it, Drone Control does not. You'd think you'd get to remotely pilot local Drones or something for an event, but nope, nothing. As such, you should only upgrade it as much as you need for your Drones per se.
Artillery
-/30/50/80
Gradually charges an artillery weapon that automatically fires with no player input when full charge is reached. Base charge time is 50/40/30/20 seconds, regardless of Artillery type. Adjusting current power level will change the rate at which charge is accumulated, but not affect the proportion of current charge; a max-level Artillery that charges for ten seconds and then takes two damage, for example, will take another twenty seconds to finish charging if not repaired and re-powered before firing.
Only the Federation Cruiser -all variants- and the Rebel Flagship have this System.
Artillery
-/30/50/80Gradually charges an artillery weapon that automatically fires with no player input when full charge is reached. Base charge time is 50/40/30/20 seconds, regardless of Artillery type. Adjusting current power level will change the rate at which charge is accumulated, but not affect the proportion of current charge; a max-level Artillery that charges for ten seconds and then takes two damage, for example, will take another twenty seconds to finish charging if not repaired and re-powered before firing.
Only the Federation Cruiser -all variants- and the Rebel Flagship have this System.
The actual attack outputted depends on model of ship and, in the case of the Rebel Flagship, which of the four different Artillery it has that you're looking at. The Federation Cruiser A and B share a beam weapon that ignores Shields entirely, while the Federation Cruiser C has a flak weapon.
I'll be covering them primarily when we get to the Federation Cruisers, but a few things to keep in mind;
First of all, Artillery taking damage delays the shot, but doesn't actually drain any charge. Say you have Artillery at level 4, and further say you've charged for ten seconds when your Artillery System suffers a point of damage; it will now take 15 seconds to fire, instead of the 10 it would've taken if it hadn't been hit, because the game retains the part where it was charged halfway and just changes how fast more charge is accumulated. Artillery charge is only actually lost if the System is completely depowered or destroyed; this is different from Weapons, where a given weapon is instantly disabled and starts rapidly losing charge if damage or Power modification means the weapon is no longer fully powered.
Second, Artillery is largely outside the player's control; it fires when it hits maximum charge, period, and you get no input on where it even gets targeted. You can count on Hull damage from Artillery, but System damage is something to hope for, not to plan for. Correlated to this lack of control is that Artillery fires when it hits full charge even if its ship is currently Cloaked, but doesn't affect Cloak duration at all, just like beams.
Before the advanced edition release this interaction with Cloaking was effectively one more example of AI cheating, because the player was unable to combine Cloaking with Artillery, while the Rebel Flagship reliably combined the two. Thankfully, you don't actually have to enable advanced edition content to be allowed to buy Cloaking on Federation Cruisers, you just have to have the update downloaded at all.
Third, the fact that Artillery reduces the charge time by a flat number of seconds per step (-10 per upgrade) puts it in a strange place relative to other Systems. With most Systems, there's something of a diminishing returns aspect to upgrading them, where getting them to level 2 is overall more impactful than bringing them from there to level 3, especially since the Scrap costs rise with each upgrade tier. Weapons, for example, can be roughly described as raising your firepower in a linear fashion, where going from 2 Weapons to 4 Weapons roughly doubles your damage potential, and to roughly double it again you'd need to upgrade Weapons to level 8, not to level 6. With Artillery, though, each upgrade is overall more impactful than the last; the first upgrade improves Artillery's damage-per-time by 25%, while the final upgrade improves its effective damage by 50%!
This decision to have Artillery's effectiveness improved by a reduction in charge time puts Artillery in a very awkward place in terms of the game's design. Fully upgraded Beam Artillery having a 20-second charge time is respectable for a weapon that ignores enemy Shields, can't miss, and does okay damage per volley, but kind of a poor payoff for having invested 160 Scrap plus however much you spent on upgrading the Reactor. (Bringing the Scrap costs to somewhere over 200) The 50-second charge time at the start is just atrocious, so bad it's not unusual to kill a ship with your ship's regular starting weaponry before the Artillery can fire even once.
And within the charge time reduction framework, this isn't really fixable.
If you improve the base charge rate to the point it's reliably okay in the early game... well, you'd basically have to bring it down to about 20 seconds, honestly. Early fights in FTL are often pretty firmly decided by around 30 seconds, where the Artillery firing doesn't really add anything if it fires at that point. 25 seconds might be workable. Anything higher is too slow -among other points, Artillery can't be manned, so direct comparisons to weapon charge times are deceptive. 25 seconds is the charge time of the slowest regular weapon in the game, but realistically you probably have Weapons manned, shaving off more than 2 seconds even with untrained crew.
So okay, you make the base charge time 20 seconds. What do your three upgrades do at that point? If you make them an impactful number, things turn rapidly ridiculous; taking off 5 seconds per upgrade would result in a 5 second charge time when fully upgraded, and an Artillery Beam firing every 5 seconds would be an absurd gamebreaker. If you tone back the upgrades so they don't arrive at such a ridiculous speed, you make it very difficult to care about upgrading it at all; why bother upgrading it at all if each upgrade only shaves off 1 second? Even shaving off 2 seconds per upgrade could easily end up either worthless or a gamebreaker, honestly.
Frankly, I don't understand why Artillery wasn't given a better baseline charge rate (eg 20 seconds, or even 15) and set up so that upgrading it improved the damage per volley. (More projectiles on Flak Artillery, for example) This would make its upgrade behavior much more directly comparable to upgrading Weapons in myriad senses, and be much more capable of being tuned to be good-but-not-ridiculous at each stage of the game.
Fourth, related to the above is that Artillery has the unique distinction of being the only tool in the entire game that allows a player to 100%-reliably improve their ability to take down enemy ships. Every other tool is dependent on external RNG; it doesn't matter how much Scrap you dump into your Weapons System if you have a spectacularly unlucky run in which you never get a chance to acquire additional weapons. (This is not hypothetical. It's happened to me) Same for upgrading Drone Control; if you're not finding Drone blueprints, upgrading your Drone Control doesn't help.
This frankly is probably part of why Artillery is so undertuned; its very existence substantially undermines a lot of what the rest of the design is trying to build toward. If Artillery was tuned so that it was solidly decent throughout the game, it would make the Federation Cruisers the only player ships that could beat the game reliably off just their initial kit, no need for the strategic RNG to cooperate. Notably, the devs have said explicitly that part of their goal with FTL was to have players feeling like their odds of success were low, that they were on a doomed mission where success was a surprise, not an expectation; an assured path to success from the start would obviously undermine this.
Of course, this raises the question: why did they construct Artillery like this at all, then? If it was a System the player could purchase mid-run, and never found on player ships to start, that might've made sense, but it's the opposite, where you can only start with Artillery, never purchase it in a Store.
I'm genuinely confused at Artillery existing as a player tool, in the form it does.
On that note, something communicated extremely poorly by the game is that the Rebel Flagship, when you fight it, does not use Weapons, but rather has four distinct Artillery systems unique to it. I'm... not a fan of this on several levels, starting from the part where it makes it much more likely a player will have multiple runs fail not because they made real mistakes but entirely because they didn't realize the Rebel Flagship is operating off completely different rules from the rest of the game -the only other enemy ship to make use of Artillery is just another variation on the Flagship fight, and it's easy to go several runs without seeing this other fight. Adding to the confusion is that the game makes a point of having enemy crew start in every single Artillery room in both these fights; there's an actual reason for this (The crew are there to repair the Artillery rooms), but it makes it easy to misinterpret these rooms as Weapons System rooms. Especially since the crew partially block the room icon and the Artillery icon is already a close variation on the Weapons icon. And sure, multiple separate Weapons rooms is unprecedented, but so is multiple separate Artillery rooms.
All this means that a player's intuition of how to handle the Rebel Flagship is liable to be very, very wrong for several attempts. Damaging the Flagship's 'weapon' rooms will never disable a given attack unless you knock it out entirely, the Flagship is free to fire while Cloaked with no Cloak time lost, and tying up the crew in the rooms doesn't actually help because they're not manning anything anyway.
Also not helping is that, as I noted earlier, your Sensors are inexplicably capped at Level 2 functionality for the Rebel Flagship fight. If they worked fully in that fight, a player who upgraded and manned Sensors would have more information pointing to the actual setup and so be more likely to figure things out faster.
It's... not great design all-around.
Blue options-wise, Artillery has... zero options in the direct sense. If you're talking the Federation Cruiser A or B, they actually count their Artillery as a beam weapon for the one event that beam weapons provide a blue option for. The Federation Cruiser C's Flak Artillery, meanwhile, doesn't ever provide any blue options, presumably in part because flak weapons have no blue options. Either way, the level of your Artillery is completely irrelevant; don't upgrade your Artillery on the idea that it might pay off via a blue option being unlocked.
----------------------------
Next time, we cover the Systems introduced by the advanced edition update. There's not many of them, but there's a lot to say about them.
See you then.
Comments
Post a Comment