FTL Ship Analysis: Mantis Cruisers

Mantis Cruiser A: The Gila Monster

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1
x7
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16
16
0


Small Bomb+Basic Laser

Maximum of 3 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with the Mantis Pheromones Augment.

Room total: 18

Your first Mantis Cruiser is pretty representative of the core of how they all work: you're boarding. You're boarding a lot.

The combination of a Small Bomb and a Basic Laser does mean you can potentially take out early ships conventionally, by having the Small Bomb knock out Shields and then chipping them down with the Basic Laser. This crucially means Autoships aren't impossible to deal with; they're a really bad matchup, but you can take them out. If the Autoship is sufficiently weak, go ahead, get the loot. Just keep in mind you should probably still run from more dangerous Autoships; looting 8 Scrap isn't worth it if you lose 5 Hull in the process.

Normally, though, you're going to be boarding. It's more reliable against the vast majority of ships, gives bigger rewards when successful, and it's usually faster than shooting even with a good selection of weapons if the enemy ship doesn't have a Medical Bay or Cloning Bay. (Most enemy ships don't have either) And you start with a Mantis-heavy crew, so you've got the edge.

The Basic Laser is thus something you mostly shouldn't be using except maybe to train Weapons skill. (If eg you get lots of extra crew early so you can man everything while boarding) Maybe consider having it auto-fire if an offensive Drone is going after you so it might get shot down. (Or you could micromanage the timing, I guess...) The Small Bomb, by contrast, is a more generally important part of your arsenal, letting you overcome Medical Bays and Cloning Bays; board as normal, then fire the Small Bomb off at enemies retreating into the Medical Bay to finish them and neuter the Medical Bay or launch it at the Cloning Bay once some of them are dead to prevent them from coming back. Selling the Basic Laser can make sense to make way for better weapons; the Small Bomb needs pretty extraordinary luck to leave your arsenal.

While I have a generally low opinion of Mantis Pheromones, in this case you should probably hold onto it until your crew size is at least six people. Your lone Engi is going to be doing a lot of repair and firefighting duties until you have other crew that aren't terrible at repairs and firefighting, and Mantis Pheromones will get them where you need them faster. By a similar token, you should probably have one Mantis assigned to Piloting, and the Engi assigned to Engines; manning Engines is the broadest level of protection possible, and Engines is the second-most-centrally located System on the ship, ensuring the Engi is in a good position to get wherever you need it whenever you need it.

You probably should sell the Mantis Pheromones eventually, though. They're not useful to offensive boarding, and they sell for a decent amount of Scrap, not to mention they take up a valuable Augment slot.

The lack of Sensors is a troubling weakness, and should be corrected as swiftly as feasible, but fortunately you should usually be overwhelming ships in short order and not have to worry about fires, breaches, or enemy boarders festering in unseen areas. The main danger to be aware of is that if you have Doors upgraded but still lack Sensors the room between the Medical Bay and Oxygen is something you'll be passing through when returning from a raid and since it has no System a fire can be raging there with no indication, potentially getting returning boarders killed. Or a breach, for that matter, though that's less dangerous.

If you're playing with advanced edition content on, you should be avoiding Abandoned Sectors if you can; Lanius ships are really hostile to a Mantis-with-Medical-Bay-based boarding strategy. If you're forced to go into an Abandoned Sector anyway, you're probably going to end up running away a fair amount if you haven't gotten a noticeably better weapon situation already.

By the way, you're pretty unlikely to get a good weapons situation. The Mantis Cruisers -all three of them, not just the A variant- suffer from the very unusual flaw of having reduced weapon slots without getting increased Drone slots. This makes it unusually difficult to get conventional damage output up to a good level -it can happen, but it requires you get a hold of very slot-efficient weapons. Acquiring three Burst Laser IIs works, for example, but it's very unlikely to happen, and your ability to supplement with Drones is not great. This tilts the odds away, where other ships can work with slot efficient options and can shrug and make somewhat less slot-efficient-based layouts work.

Fortunately, for actually winning the game this isn't really necessary. It's very feasible to reach and beat the Rebel Flagship primarily on the basis of boarding, especially if you're lucky enough to get a hold of a Zoltan Shield Bypass so you don't need to bash through the Supershield in the third phase. Your starting tools can genuinely get you through the Rebel Flagship's three stages if you're careful and not too unlucky/haven't been overly-aggressive about spending Missile ammunition.

One counterintuitive trick to making the Rebel Flagship easier -unless you're playing on Hard- is to deliberately avoid attacking its Laser Artillery, or more precisely to leave the crewmember in there alive. It's an isolated room that lasts through all three stages, and it's far less dangerous than the Missile Artillery: by leaving that crewmember alive, you'll guarantee that the Rebel Flagship never turns into an Autoship, allowing you to pick off all the crew in the main body in the first stage so you're then free to tear down Shields in later stages so even your likely-poor Weapons setup can tear through the Flagship's Hull quickly. This is useful to keep in mind with any boarding-focused ship, but it's particularly consistently useful with the Mantis Cruiser A, which starts with everything it needs to make this work -a Crew Teleporter for boarding, Manti for superior boarding ability, a crewkilling Bomb to catch enemies fleeing to the Medical Bay and finish them, and the Basic Laser means you have something for at minimum finishing off the first two stages without losing crew in the process. No other player ship actually starts with all these ingredients; indeed, if you're just trying to get a win, the Mantis Cruiser A is one of the best, most reliable ships at the job.

That said, the Mantis Cruiser A has some notable flaws. It's an absolutely massive ship with key Systems spread all over the place, making it surprisingly susceptible to boarders and fairly vulnerable to things snowballing because eg a shot hit Oxygen, knocking it out, and started a fire in the process. The fact that it doesn't start with Sensors exacerbates this issue, among other points making it easy to end up letting a fire rage in an empty room for a long time, allowing the fire to get very problematic, possibly only discovering it by eg having someone run for the Medical Bay after taking some damage only whoops their path is a fiery death zone!

Its venting is also awkward, with it being easiest to vent Piloting and Engines... when you want both of those pretty continuously manned, and no, you don't start with a Lanius. They're also both central chokepoimts crew has to pass through to get places, unavoidably, so even if you do get some Lanius, it's still problematic to vent those rooms in an emergency. You can use venting to eg drive event boarders out of Piloting, and that's useful, but for firefighting and general anti-boarder duties, the ship's layout is surprisingly awful. If you can get a hold of a Fire Suppression System, seriously consider grabbing it/holding onto it; fire is a fairly constant worry with the Mantis Cruiser A.

The Mantis Cruiser A also suffers from one of the annoying physics problems Federation Cruisers suffer from, where Defense Drones are unreliable protectors because missiles aimed at outer rooms tend to impact before the Defense Drone's shot can intercept. Between this point and the limited Drone slots, a Drone Control is a notably flawed purchase, especially if you're specifically thinking of slotting in a Defense Drone.

On a different level, the Mantis Cruiser A is one of several cases of FTL tending to produce and reward the player seeking really unfun, tedious play. As the Mantis Cruiser A cares primarily about boarding, it's very easy to justify investing unusually heavily in your defenses: in conjunction with how meagre its conventional offenses are and how boarding can be heavily impaired by eg the presence of an enemy Medical Bay, or the enemy ship being an Autoship or Lanius ship, you can readily end up in situations where an enemy ship isn't actually a threat to your own ship (As in, it literally cannot hurt you), but where taking out the enemy ship yourself is a very slow, tedious process. As FTL doesn't actually have time pressure exist on the tactical layer -did you take four minutes or four hours to kill that ship? The game doesn't care- and a fight you flee from instead of defeating is weakening yourself, optimal play in such a situation is to spend however long it takes to painstakingly work towards victory, never mind that it's uninteresting and takes forever.

That's not a flaw with its viability in-game, but it does make me personally fairly reluctant to actually play it even though it's objectively one of the game's better, more reliable ships.

Though at least it's better about this than the B variant...

Take No Prisoners!

Completely crewkill 20 different ships before leaving Sector 6.

If you're doing the thing you should be doing of crewkilling ships by preference, you're liable to get this at some point so long as you're pretty thorough about scouring Sectors. The main concern is the possibility of getting a high rate of Autoships.

This is an okay Achievement, overall.

Avast, Ye Scurvy Dogs!

Kill enemy crewmembers five times in a single beacon without suffering Hull damage and without any of your own crew dying.

On the face of it this sounds a bit rough to get, as five-crew ships tend to take a while to show up, long enough that you're generally hitting the point of it being almost impossible to reliably avoid Hull damage, but several details make it a lot easier to get than it sounds.

First of all, boarding events can trigger it. If you get a boarding event with no associated ship late in a run, it will likely be 5 crew attacking, and so long as it isn't at a Solar Flare it's going to be pretty easy to win the fight with no Hull damage and no casualties. Boom, Achievement earned.

Second, if you're playing with advanced edition content on, you can cheese the Achievement a little, as the game is perfectly happy to credit you this if you kill one person five times via Cloning Bay revival. (More realistically, you'll kill two people two times plus a third person once, but that's less funny to say) So if you're concerned about getting the Achievement, consider keeping an eye out for a ship with a Cloning Bay and weak offenses.

Third, ships later in the game tend to be equipped with slow-charging weapons, and you start with a Small Bomb and will be tying up repair crew with your boarders. It's actually pretty likely you'll be able to get the Achievement as intended without much trouble.

So this isn't too bad an Achievement.

Battle Royale

Crewkill an enemy ship with only one crewmember alive and aboard the enemy ship.

A few things to note here.

First of all, it's impossible to earn this Achievement against the Rebel Flagship, even though the game's own wording for the Achievement would seem to imply it works.

Second, your lone crewmember must personally land the final blow; it's okay to have internal Drones exist when the kill is made, but a Boarding Drone making the lethal hit will deny you the Achievement.

Third, on the positive side, the game counts crew waiting for the Clone Bay to revive them as dead for this purpose. With the Backup DNA Bank Augment, it's actually possible to deliberately kill off most of your crew with the Cloning Bay turned off so they stay dead (Just vent atmosphere to suffocate them), then teleport one crew member over to finish off the last enemy. That way a run can earn the Achievement without being basically doomed in the process.

Fourth, an edge case is that you can actually have two crewmembers alive so long as one of them is currently Mind Controlled; killing the last enemy crew will still crewkill the ship and give you the Achievement, weirdly enough.

To be honest, though, this is one of the worse Achievements in the game. Not the worst -there's far worse!- but really, really bad, as it's not something liable to happen in organic play ever and going out of your way to earn it means throwing a run in the trash if you're not doing specific Shenanigans. The primary saving grace is that the other two Mantis Cruiser Achievements aren't so bad, so you can completely ignore this awful Achievement unless you're a lunatic that insists on 100%ing FTL.

As such, it's not that hard to unlock...

Mantis Cruiser B: The Basilisk

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x11
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4
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16
0
15


Defense Drone Mark I+Boarding Drone

Maximum of 3 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with the Mantis Pheromones Augment.

Room total: 17

The Mantis Cruiser B is a shockingly powerful ship... marred by the key flaw that a run will usually have long stretches of not-even-slightly-fun play.

Thing is, if you run into an Autoship early on, optimal play is to launch a Boarding Drone, watch it cripple the Autoship, and then read a book while you wait 10 minutes for the cycle of 'Autoship repairs System->Boarding Drone destroys System, doing 1 Hull point of damage' to actually destroy the Autoship. This is incredibly tedious and boring, and most runs will run into at least one Autoship early enough for this scenario to play out at least once... and more likely 2-6 times.

Still, aside that Autoships are extremely tedious, the Mantis Cruiser B is seriously very good, one of the best ships in the game. It starts with a shocking amount of Reactor power (Eleven??), it's the only player ship to start with 4 Shields and thus 2 Shield bubbles, which early enemy ships are almost never equipped to overcome, being boarding-based means you'll generally get excellent rewards from combat including a disproportionate chance to get free crew from running into a slaver ship, the 2x2 Crew Teleporter means that, assuming you get the crew necessary, it will be able to fairly casually overwhelm ships that would give most boarding ships trouble, the immediate Defense Drone means early enemy missiles just cost a Drone Part rather than Hull points, and while using a Boarding Drone to kill an Autoship is tedious, it's still the case that the Mantis Cruiser B can kill Autoships without sacrificing crew in spite of being a dedicated boarding ship that's not using a Cloning Bay.

Indeed, Mantis Cruiser B runs can actually end up much shorter than usual by virtue of a 2x2 boarding strategy often leading to really fast victories, enough so that if your crew size ramps up reasonably quickly the shortness of later ship fights ends up offsetting the slow Autoship fights from early on.

The fact that the Mantis Cruiser B only has two crew, both of whom really need to be boarding the enemy ship, is actually not much of a flaw in the early game. Most early ships will not be able to break through the combination of 2 Shields and a Defense Drone, even with ship evasion zeroed out from not manning Piloting; only bomb-equipped ships have serious potential to cause things to go horribly wrong (Unless you get unlucky with a missile getting past your Defense Drone due to the ship being so spread out...), and against a lot of early ships two Mantis boarders is enough to wipe out the crew before a Bomb can even be launched, or at least before a second one can be launched, minimizing the danger.

Once enemy firepower reaches the point of being able to actually beat down 2 Shield bubbles, you better have acquired additional crew so someone can man Piloting and/or upgrading Piloting and Engines so you still have some evasion even with no one in Piloting. This is a bit luck-based, and is indeed the single biggest failure point for the Mantis Cruiser B, but usually you'll have gotten free crew from crew-killing a slaver ship; they're very common in the early game, and very prone to providing free crew when crew-killed. Or you'll have gotten free crew from some other event, or bought crew, whatever.

Once you're solidly in the mid-game it's important to start transitioning into having proper weapons and/or offensive Drones that aren't the Boarding Drone. The Rebel Flagship cannot be overcome by crew-killing it, and in fact crew-killing it overall makes it much more dangerous; a pure boarding strategy can get you to the endgame surprisingly reliably, but if that's all you have when you reach the Rebel Flagship you're going to die, end line. Crucially, you'll need a way to deal with a Zoltan Supershield in the third phase -a Zoltan Shield Bypass is good to acquire in general for the Mantis Cruiser B, but in particular can easily be the difference between a clean victory and a last-second death against the Rebel Flagship.

Another nice thing about the Mantis Cruiser B is that it's very easy to use venting to protect key Systems, with Shields and Drone Control outright having external doors. Though do keep in mind that Oxygen is not readily protected by venting atmosphere, and trying to do so is more likely to make it a nightmare to repair Oxygen. It's also extremely convenient that the Medical Bay is both extra-large and directly adjacent to the Crew Teleporter, among other points making it easy to fit Rockmen into your boarding crew.

The Mantis Pheromones are, as with the Mantis Cruiser A, something you should probably sell at some point. Indeed, it makes perfect sense to sell the Augment even earlier, as the Mantis Cruiser B has a more compact layout with key Systems much less spread out; crew can already respond to problems quickly simply due to the layout, especially with venting actually providing instant responses to eg fires in Shields.

If you can get a hold of a Drone Recovery Arm, that is of course strongly worth considering, but it's not actually as necessary as you might expect. Once you've got a full boarding complement, it's not unusual to crewkill a ship before heavier missile launchers even get a chance to fire! Don't feel you need to make sacrifices to buy one.

Also, you should probably sell the Boarding Drone once you've got a weapon kit capable of killing Autoships at no cost. You can technically use a Boarding Drone in combination with your Crew Teleporter to dump five boarders on a ship, and I suspect that's what the developers were thinking with the Mantis Cruiser B, but it's not actually a good plan. Rooms cap out at 2x2, so it doesn't let you cram more firepower into a single room, and you have essentially no control over the Boarding Drone; it may drop itself in a room you don't want it in -such as arriving in Piloting in a ship that's trying to run, causing the enemy to actually charge their FTL Drive because crew runs in to fight it- or get your boarders killed via its breach if you're not paying close attention, and it necessarily and irreplaceably costs you resources where using crew to board doesn't cost any resources so long as you don't let anybody get killed. Not to mention the Boarding Drone can be shot down before it ever arrives, where teleported crew bypass such measures. (Why, exactly, can't I teleport my killer robots, anyway?)

Overall, one of the better ships, and quite fun once you get past the early tedium of dealing with Autoships -or get lucky and just never run into one before you have less tedious options for dealing with them.

It is mildly disappointing you don't have a System Repair Drone, admittedly. One of the primary weaknesses of a pure Mantis crew is difficulty repairing Systems, and a System Repair Drone would handle that nicely. You'd really think a Mantis Cruiser with an innate Drone Control would come with System Repair Drones. The Mantis Cruiser B can generally get by without them and, in the very early game, wouldn't want to commit either of its slots to a System Repair Drone given you need the Boarding Drone for Autoships and the Defense Drone for missiles, but still, it's a strange omission -it's not like the Mantis Cruiser C has a System Repair Drone.

Speaking of.

Mantis Cruiser C: The Theseus

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x8
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20
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Crystal Lockdown Bomb+Stun Bomb

Maximum of 3 different weapons, 2 different Drones.

Starts with the Mantis Pheromones Augment.

Room Total: 18

The Mantis Cruiser C is one of the top contenders for the coveted position of Worst Ship In The Game.

On the face of it, it seems like it has some nice qualities, including when comparing it to the Mantis Cruiser A and B. A Cloning Bay has obvious advantages for a boarding strategy over a Medical Bay, a Lanius alongside said Cloning Bay allows a boarding-focused strategy to readily take on Autoships and Lanius ships without sacrificing crew, a 2x2 Crew Teleporter is a big advantage for rapidly overcoming enemy ships, Crystal Lockdown Bombs let the ship pick off crew even if a Medical Bay is present...

... but in practice it's an incoherent mess that struggles pretty continuously against pretty much everything.

First of all, the extra-large Crew Teleporter is essentially worthless until you've gotten additional crew. The Engi is not worth sending aboard enemy ships, between its awful fighting ability and how important it is to have somebody on hand to do repairs, fight fires, and seal breaches. If the Mantis Cruiser C had started with four Manti or Lanius, it would be worth considering defaulting to dumping them all on the enemy ship to overwhelm it as fast as possible, especially with four Lanius where you wouldn't need to be perpetually vigilant about repairing Oxygen and in fact could vent the entire ship to minimize the danger presented by fires and boarders. With its actual starting crew? The extra-large Crew Teleporter does no work to start -and depending on your luck with crew acquisition, it may never be better than a 1x2 Crew Teleporter. And if you're not teleporting at least three crew at once, the room being 2x2 is largely a disadvantage, making it more susceptible to flak, boarders, fires, and even to an extent beam weaponry!

Furthermore, a 2x2 Crew Teleporter actually makes it overall better to have a Medical Bay than a Cloning Bay. If you're successfully burying the enemy with 4 good boarders, you'll largely not be risking crew deaths in the first place, at which point you'd prefer being able to fully heal them between fights rather than having to intermittently accept skill penalties from deaths that only occur because you don't have a Medical Bay.

Secondly, your initial boarding complement being a Lanius and a Mantis is awful. Two Manti will rapidly and trivially overcome many early ships, as for a while 2 crew is common and if the enemies aren't advantaged at crew combat the Mantis will win. Not only that, they'll do so quickly, minimizing time for the ship to do damage. Two Lanius will rapidly drain the oxygen from a room on arrival, ultimately driving enemy crew out, leaving the Lanius free to knock out eg Weapons before trying to finish off the enemies that fled from them. Meanwhile, a Lanius and a Mantis is largely worse than a Mantis and a Human -without either getting your Oxygen System to level 2 or doing manipulative shenanigans, you can't just have the Lanius and Mantis sitting in the Crew Teleporter, ready to go, because the Lanius will drain the air and thus hurt the Mantis, slightly delaying initial boarding actions. Nor does one Lanius drain oxygen fast enough to help in the fighting -the Lanius and Mantis will generally either kill two enemy crew or die before the room actually drains of oxygen, making the oxygen draining all disadvantage if you don't do something about the enemy's Oxygen System or get another Lanius.

Third, the Crystal Lockdown Bomb is initially basically worthless; early ships will almost never have Medical Bays or Cloning Bays, severely limiting the utility of isolating a room. Eventually healing is semi-common on enemy ships, and at that point you might appreciate it... but not necessarily, and it's somewhat redundant with the Stun Bomb; Ioning a System and Stunning crew can be targeted at the Medical Bay to let you run in and finish off crew that retreated to it, or to disable a Cloning Bay with timing such that currently-dead enemy crew die permanently.

Fourth, the Stun Bomb is nonetheless lackluster. The Stun effect is indiscriminate, so it's not like you can lure a bunch of crew to a room with your crew and then Stun them to pick them off -not unless you have perfect timing at moving your crew out of the way, where enemies don't get a chance to escape through a door in pursuit before being Stunned. It's not like you're going to wait for it to be ready to fire and launch it before boarding -against a ship that can hurt you, you should be boarding as soon as you can to minimize damage, while against a ship that can't hurt you there's zero reason to waste missile ammo. You'd need a Weapon Pre-Igniter built in for that to be at all worth considering.

There are other upsides; you start with a level 2 Cloning Bay, and so crew healing per jump is actually respectable right out the gate, and the Cloning Bay isn't necessarily knocked out by a single hit, making it less likely crew will happen to die right as the Cloning Bay is knocked out and so die for real. The ship is extremely vent-friendly, with every room either having external doors or being directly adjacent to a room with external doors, which makes it relatively easy to deal with fires and boarders -particularly notable is that Oxygen can be instantly vented, making it effortless to protect Oxygen from boarders and fires and thus making it unusually safe to abuse venting in general, even aside the Lanius and Cloning Bay ensuring you could bounce back from the entire ship being fully drained of oxygen. In general, the layout is decent enough, with its primary flaw being the usual issue of Defense Drones being unreliable at fending off missiles...

... but these positives really do not make up for the crippling flaws. The Mantis Cruiser C is a struggle to avoid taking Hull damage in general, is aggravatingly vulnerable to snowballing, where one shot gets through and this directly leads to more Hull damage or crew being killed permanently, is slow to actually finish off ships unless you get a lot of early luck with free crew of the right types, and in the long haul is still hampered by the usual Mantis player ship flaws of limited Weapon/Drone slots.

It's not even an interesting sort of bad. This isn't a ship you do as a fun challenge to see how well you can play with key disadvantages, it's just slow and boring and heavily at the mercy of the RNG. It even retains the Mantis Cruiser B issue of being able to beat Autoships cleanly but only agonizingly slowly.

If you're looking for something fun to do, skip the Mantis Cruiser C. If you're looking to win, skip the Mantis Cruiser C. If you need to personally witness one of the most breathtakingly awful bits of FTL's design... go ahead, I guess, it's not like I can stop you.

The sad thing is, it having a 2x2 Crew Teleporter is a very rare quality and really ought to justify giving it a shot, but the Mantis Cruiser B is right there. And unlike some other ships where they're basically a bad version of another ship, the Mantis Cruiser C can't be unlocked without already having the Mantis Cruiser B! You're not going to use the C because eg it's the only 2x2 Crew Teleporter ship you've unlocked, or something.

I just don't understand how this not only got made, but was advanced edition content. Did they literally never playtest it? Just throw together something that looked good on paper, and rubberstamp it as fine? How did this happen?

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Next time, we move on to the next in the chain of standard unlocks, the Slug Cruisers.

See you then.