FTL Analysis: Advanced Edition Systems

Advanced edition only added three Systems, but they're sufficiently complicated to get into I've separated them into their own post to avoid having one supermassive post.

Instead you get two merely massive posts.

... plus two weeks of delay, because seriously, the advanced edition Systems are really complicated to get into.

Cloning Bay
50/35/45
Revives dead crew in 12/9/7 seconds. (Crew lost because your ship or the enemy ship Jumped are not resurrected) Revived crew lose a percentage of experience in all skills each time they're revived. (12.5-15%, specific to skill type) Additionally, all crew across the ship are healed for 8/16/25 HP every time the ship Jumps, regardless of the Cloning Bay's Power status. (Damage to the Cloning Bay, however, will reduce this healing) Cannot coexist with a Medical Bay, but if you have one of the two you may purchase the other for the base price, replacing the existing one; System upgrades will be carried over if you do so.

This is the one and only exception to the System limit, in that you can swap a Medical Bay for a Cloning Bay even if you have a full 11 Systems.

Anyway, clones in the queue revive one at a time, but also inexplicably die one at a time. Also note that revival and dying both 'charge', with all 'charge' being lost if the System's status changes; that is, if a crewmember is 75% of the way to being permanently killed and you add Power and then immediately remove it, they will reset to 0% of the way to death, and if they are 75% of the way to revival and the System is busted, Ionized, or you remove all its Power, once it is functioning again the revival will have to start from scratch if they didn't die before functionality was restored.

Also note that most events that can kill crew are less of a concern with the Cloning Bay, as the crew will be promptly revived by the Cloning Bay as with a regular death. Frustratingly and nonsensically, if an event is conceptualized as death by disease, it will still permanently kill the crewmember on the basis of your crew quickly running to cancel the revival because, supposedly, they'll just revive infected again. How that is supposed to make the slightest bit of sense is beyond me; the Cloning Bay is magic nonsense that can remotely upload current memories with minor degradation to a clone vat-grown in seconds in combat situations, but it automatically incorporates any diseases the original was carrying when they die? Why? This would kind of make sense if the Cloning Bay was presented as a device that emergency-teleports people when they're close to death and rapidly patches them up, but with magical soft scifi cloning ostensibly based off of DNA as the explanation this is completely unbelievable, in addition to being frustrating on the pure gameplay level of the Cloning Bay having a particular event-related utility that doesn't apply in some cases for no actual gameplay reason. I just don't understand why anyone thought this made any sense at any point, let alone stuck it out long enough for players to see it, not to mention never patched it to not do this.

To be fair, the Cloning Bay is kind of a fundamentally broken concept from the perspective of narrative coherency; if I take seriously the notion that it's cloning-based, this raises the issue of 'why can't I use my Cloning Bay to fab up as many Lanius as I want?' It's not like it costs Scrap to revive people, and FTL is cleaving to typical soft scifi tropes where souls ostensibly don't exist (Even though the creators still fundamentally approach the world as if they do exist) so there's no intrinsic reason why it would be impossible to go with an army of clones. Reasons why it might be ill-advised, sure, but not impossible.

On the other hand, I'm willing to largely gloss over those issues because the Cloning Bay is serving the gameplay utility of providing an interesting alternative to the Medical Bay...

... a consideration that doesn't apply to the nonsensical 'disease events still kill crew permanently' point, as no legitimate gameplay purpose is being served there. This decision can only have been made for a reason like 'the devs think this makes in-universe sense', never mind that it very obviously does not.

Ugh.

Regardless, the Cloning Bay is your Advanced Edition alternative to the Medical Bay, with its own set of implications for using it and fighting ships equipped with one.

In terms of fighting a ship equipped with one... you might expect a Cloning Bay-equipped ship to be much more of a pain to get a crewkill on than a ship equipped with a Medical Bay, but overall it tends to be easier, especially if your strategy is boarding-centric, especially against ships with a smaller crew. If the enemy ship isn't crewed by Rockmen, you can often just sit your boarders in the Cloning Bay, killing crew as they respawn and doing damage to the Cloning Bay in between until it finally breaks.

Even aside that, a big part of what's at work is AI points. With a Medical Bay, enemy crew will run to the Medical Bay when low on HP in an attempt to get healed, regardless of the Medical Bay's current status; this has the functional effect of making the AI very diligent about repairing the Medical Bay, because in addition to being able to decide to repair it per se they'll end up repairing it anytime crew ends up low on health, even if the Medical Bay's condition is otherwise not being prioritized for repairs by the AI. The Cloning Bay doesn't get this benefit; the AI does prefer to try to repair the Cloning Bay, but they're much less diligent about it in practice because the AI has to explicitly decide to repair it. The AI also doesn't 'understand' Cloning Bay mechanics; a ship that has a Cloning Bay rejiggers crew AI so they have no fear of death, regardless of the Cloning Bay's current status, which is to say it's possible to end up killing crew while the Cloning Bay is knocked out and have the crew die before it gets repaired, even if the AI could've easily had the crew in question run away. Ships with a Medical Bay have crew not only try to flee to the Medical Bay when low on health, but in general try to, y'know, not die, including stuff like fleeing the Medical Bay if it's knocked out and on fire.

The AI is in fact sufficiently bad at understanding proper Cloning Bay usage I have actually accidentally crewkilled a ship equipped with a Cloning Bay on a couple of occasions. By contrast, I've never had this happen with a ship equipped with a Medical Bay.

It is possible to be in a situation where a Cloning Bay is more of a nuisance than a Medical Bay, though, it's just atypical. For example, if your run has ended up being a Cloning Bay-based boarding strategy centered on hurling Zoltans at the enemy to suicide-bomb your way into a crewkill, a Medical Bay's healing will be casually overcome by your Zoltan self-destructs, whereas a Cloning Bay will have the enemy just get back up after you've killed them, leaving you stuck with the problem of Zoltans otherwise being poor boarders. Cloning Bays are also notably more of a nuisance for boarding strategies when the defenders are mostly or exclusively Rockmen, as they take so long to kill that you generally can't get any crew-based damage to the Cloning Bay; a new Rockman will have revived before you can even kill the first one, after all.

Cloning Bays are also mildly more of a nuisance if you're not going for a crewkill in the first place. For particularly durable ships, it's not very surprising to end up gunning down one or two enemy crew as a side effect of trying to tear through their Hull, even if a Medical Bay is present, as the AI waits until a sufficiently low amount of HP to run for the Medical Bay that your presumably-coordinated volleys can readily take them directly from 'a little too high for the AI to feel the need to run' to 'dead'. With a Medical Bay-equipped ship, that's permanent progress, and can in fact be what lets you, for example, stop burning missiles on the fight. (Because the AI now doesn't have enough crew to keep their Shields System perpetually fully repaired, among other possibilities) With a Cloning Bay-equipped ship, they'll be back in short order, which may be what makes a fight untenable, or at least not worth the costs involved in winning.

Enemy Crew Teleporters are another case where Cloning Bays tend to be more of a nuisance than Medical Bays. Killing enemy boarders before their Crew Teleporter can recharge and pull them back to get healed at the Medical Bay is really not that hard for most ships, whether you vent atmosphere and suffocate them almost immediately, or pile onto them with crew the second they appear, or some mixture of the two, and of course you can also damage their Crew Teleporter to sabotage their retreat. An enemy ship equipped with a Crew Teleporter and a Medical Bay can easily have its crew slashed in half through such strategies, without ever damaging their Medical Bay. If such a ship is instead equipped with the Cloning Bay, they have fewer points of failure, and in fact can and often do maintain more pressure on you, as they won't try to teleport crew back to their ship and if their crew is large enough will in fact prefer to send more crew as soon as the Crew Teleporter is recharged, regardless of the status of the first batch. But even for smaller ships, just the fact that you'll have to successfully knock out the Cloning Bay at around the same time you kill boarders to actually result in real crew deaths makes it much more of a nuisance to make the boarding attempts stop, which can really matter if the fight ends up dragging. (That is, as opposed to you simply blowing up the enemy ship before they can get to a second teleportation)

But by default Cloning Bays actually tend to be less of a problem than Medical Bays, bizarrely.

Note that a battle can take a while to 'notice' that the enemy Cloning Bay is smashed and all their crew are dead. I assume this is because of crew in the cloning queue taking a few seconds to properly die, and doing so one at a time, where the game doesn't declare you victorious until the Cloning Bay queue has fully emptied out. It's usually not a big deal (It's unusual for it to result in your ship taking damage it shouldn't have), but it's often a bit disconcerting, lasting just long enough to leave one wondering if the game is hanging or the like.

In terms of using the Cloning Bay, it has a fair few fiddly, sometimes counter-intuitive incentives baked in.

First of all, if you're relying on a boarding strategy, there's an awkward incentive to deliberately kill off crew that are particularly low on HP before you Jump to a new location unless you're strongly confident you're not going to be hitting a fight soon. (Because you're Jumping to a Store and then intend to backtrack through cleared beacons, for example) After all, weak crew will die anyway if you send them to board the enemy ship, and it's important to try to rapidly overwhelm the enemy to minimize the opportunity for things to go wrong; it might seem like it should be okay to just send them into die, wait for them to revive, and send them anew, but the delay can result in you taking unnecessary Hull damage, and in particular can open the way for a death spiral where some bad luck opens the way for things to go yet more wrong which opens the way for further problems, etc etc. You really want your crew at more or less full health so they can hopefully just get the crewkill before anything like that happens.

This particular issue is at its strongest early in a run. A Level 3 Cloning Bay provides enough healing that if you expect your next Jump to not trigger a fight, and you have neither Rockmen nor Crystals in your crew, non-Zoltan crew have to be on basically the verge of death to not be at or very near full health after a couple of Jumps. (Zoltan have low enough HP that it's impossible for an injection of 50 HP to not put them close to their max, and it's less important for them to be at full health anyway) Having a larger crew also gives you more ability to shuffle crew around, where you just change who handles initial boarding, such as swapping them with whoever is currently manning Sensors and the Door Control.

Enemy ships also factor into this. The earliest ships tend to have 2-3 crew, where it's entirely possible two boarders at full HP will crewkill the enemy with 0-1 losses. With later ships, probably you'll have crew die in the process of boarding, where it's less impactful the difference between sending boarders at full HP vs sending boarders who are at 87 HP or the like.

Awkwardly, Lanius are extremely difficult to kill off to better prep for the next combat. Unless you're specifically in the Rock Cruiser B, you can always suffocate non-Lanius, where Lanius can only be manually killed using Bombs. And it's really important for Lanius to go in at full HP if you want their oxygen drain to actually contribute. This all makes it incredibly frustrating that there is not even one ship that starts with a Lanius and a Medical Bay; every C variant has a Cloning Bay, as do both Lanius Cruisers! When Lanius really far prefer a Medical Bay, and are in fact one of two species whose presence helps resolve several sticky situations with the Medical Bay; the Medical Bay is breached and knocked out, and your crew are low on health? Lanius to the rescue! Same for if the path(s) to the Medical Bay are breached and your crew too low on health to run through without dying. Etc.

You can loot Lanius mid-run or switch to a Medical Bay having started with one of the ships that starts with Lanius, certainly, but... both of these require luck, and burning Scrap on swapping your healing System is a pretty big expense for the payoff. Lanius prefer a Medical Bay, yes, but a Medical Bay doesn't catapult Lanius into being borderline-overpowered or the like; you'll usually get more of a performance increase by investing that 50 Scrap into more unambiguous improvements. So this whole setup is frustrating, wasted potential.

Anyway...

Secondly, the Cloning Bay's mechanics have some odd implications in terms of crew preferences on your ship. The heal-per-Jump component is a flat amount rather than, say, a percentage of their maximum health, which is less than ideal with Rockmen and to a lesser extent Crystal crew, while being an advantage with Zoltan crew; at Level 3, 3 Jumps is enough to get a Zoltan from 1 HP to full HP and in fact 2 Jumps is usually all you'll need, vs the 4 Jumps necessary for a full heal on most species, 5 Jumps for a Crystal, and 6 for a Rockman; among other points, it's not unusual to go a Jump or two without encountering a ship because you're swinging by a Store, or you get non-combat events, or you're actually backtracking a little for some reason, whereas going 5-6 Jumps without getting into a fight is an extreme rarity. This is clunky, given the Cloning Bay's big advantage is making boarding strategies a lot easier to do without getting precious crew killed, and Rockmen and Crystals are some of the most boarding-focused species of the game; you'd expect them to go well together, not poorly.

To be fair, the converse to this is that revival time is not correlated to max HP; where a Medical Bay heals a specific amount of HP per second regardless of crew durability, a Cloning Bay's effective HP 'generation' per second is higher in combat when it's Rockmen or to a lesser extent Crystals that are dying to be revived and lower when it's Zoltan. It'd be misleading to just say the Cloning Bay hard-discourages use of Rockmen and Crystals. That said, it's certainly most biased toward using Manti and Zoltan boarders -Zoltan in particular get to use their death explosion gimmick without it being catastrophically costly, which is otherwise impossible to do.

Thirdly, the Cloning Bay can create combat situations where the smart thing is to get crew killed so they can start reviving sooner. If a fire is raging and all your crew are low on HP (And none of them is a Rockman), even though sending them in to futilely fight the fire and die in the process would normally be a waste of perfectly good crew, with the Cloning Bay it'll get you healthy crew to then properly fight the fire.

Note that the Cloning Bay queues crew revivals in the order they die. In the above scenario, if you had an Engi you'd ideally arrange for them to die first, so they'd then revive first. In general, you'll ideally try to control death order so whoever is the highest priority will die first, as perverse as that sounds. 

Surprisingly, the heal triggered by Jumps actually gets triggered by passing a turn in the Last Stand. So don't feel obligated to move to trigger heals unless you're specifically trying to get out of the Flagship's path while you heal.

The Cloning Bay's room, like the Medical Bay, has a tile eaten by a medical device, which nonetheless can have fires and breaches. Unlike the Medical Bay, this is true even in 1x2 rooms! This isn't as much a flaw as with the Medical Bay since there's no equivalent desire to cram crew in to maximize the room's benefits, but it does mean ships with a 1x2 Cloning Bay have a lot of trouble coping with the Cloning Bay going down or being set on fire in combat, since you can only assign one crewmember to repairs. A ship with a 2x2 Cloning Bay can rely on eg Engi repairs to keep the Cloning Bay in good condition with relatively little risk. A ship with a 1x2 Cloning Bay really just needs to get a hold of a Backup DNA Bank ASAP, because even with Engi crew handling the job repairs will occur at a painfully slow pace and fires can outright be disastrous if you don't have a Rockman on hand, potentially forcing you to vent atmosphere, wait for it to come back, and then repair the Cloning Bay. That's a long time to have your Cloning Bay down, a disastrously long time if your ship is relying on aggressive boarding strategies... which is what the Cloning Bay is best-suited to supporting.

Bizarrely, while the blocked tile always forbids you from assigning crew to stand in it, crew can pass through it freely in certain ship designs, such as the Engi Cruiser C. Okaaay...

Strictly speaking, the Cloning Bay is starved for blue options, with only 4 events with blue options enabled by it, one of which doesn't even guarantee an improved outcome! In practice, one of the biggest draws of the Cloning Bay is how there are literally dozens of events that can kill crew where the Cloning Bay minimizes the consequences; the crewmember still dies, but the only actual penalty is losing some skill experience since the Cloning Bay brings them right back.

Do note that the game does properly kill off the crew and then revive them at the Cloning Bay. Don't forget to send them to their station, for one. For two, some events can give you a 'super' crewmember with every experience type maxed, and events that kill a crewmember never let you influence who dies; if you get one of these 'super' crewmembers, it can be notably costly to risk crew-killing events even with a Cloning Bay.

Note that one of the handful of proper blue options the Cloning Bay does have is to fix the long-term health problems of a stranded survivor, including almost certainly disease issues. But gotta block cloning if somebody is explicitly infected with a disease! So nonsensical...

This flagrant narrative inconsistency is particularly bothersome since it also violates the otherwise ironclad rule that the Cloning Bay always prevents you from losing crew to events, and the game provides absolutely no indication ahead of time that this universal rule isn't actually universal. That's bad game design.

On a different note, I really wish advanced edition had made it a toggle whether a ship started with a Medical Bay or a Cloning Bay. There are quite a few base-game ships that would function so much better with a Cloning Bay, but where needing to purchase it is a questionable investment, not to mention requires the RNG cooperate. There's also a decent array of base-game ships where either option would be reasonably valid, but, again, it's dubious to pay to make the switch. So for one thing some replay value is being missed out on -in a game heavily focused on replaying it.

For that matter, several advanced edition ships would appreciate the option...

Mind Control
75/30/60
Requires concrete awareness of an enemy crew's position and disposition. When successful, converts them into friendly crew for 14/20/28 seconds, though they operate autonomously; you cannot issue orders to them. At higher levels, raises the victim's HP and crew-combat damage for the duration. Can also be targeted at your own crew that have been Mind Controlled to instantly cancel the Mind Control. Slugs and internal Drones cannot be Mind Controlled.

Bizarrely, Mind Controlled crew can pass through doors on either ship unimpeded, regardless of respective Door Control statuses. This can occasionally be useful, but is largely an inconvenience, as it both means that Mind Controlling a boarder will frequently lead to them running off to some System you don't want them in as they attempt to man it, and means that when Mind Controlling enemies during a boarding action of your own they're very likely to end up separated from your boarders if the ship has a Door Control, reducing their effectiveness and likely preventing you from immediately killing them when the Mind Control ends. This latter issue is uncommon at least, but the former one shows up a lot, and is less than ideal.

Also, note that canceling Mind Control with Mind Control doesn't care about the level of the two Systems. You might intuitively expect that a Level 3 Mind Control being responded to with a Level 1 Mind Control would only cancel out half the duration, or something, but nah, it just stops it instantly with no qualifiers. So for one thing if you're facing a Mind Control ship and only reserving your Mind Control for canceling theirs, you might as well only invest 1 Power into your Mind Control during that fight. By a similar token, if you mostly want the Mind Control for its ability to cancel enemy Mind Control, feel free to not bother to upgrade it.

By the way, the enemy will never use Mind Control to cancel your Mind Control. Yes, even if their Mind Control comes off cooldown while you have control of one of their crew. At least, it's not something they deliberately do; if it's something that can happen, it must be a pure chance event of them having their Mind Control come off cooldown while you have control of one of their crew and then having their 'pick a random crewmember to control' routine happen to land on the controlled unit. But I'm pretty sure they're just outright forbidden from stealing back units in this way.

Mind Control itself is a neat idea whose actual performance is a bit awkward. At a baseline level, it's only usable as a defensive measure against boarders -you need to upgrade and/or man Sensors, have a Slug in your crew, or get inside the enemy ship with crew or an internal offensive Drone to be allowed to Mind Control a target that isn't in your ship. As an anti-boarder tool it's actually pretty solid, making it easier to kill boarders instead of them teleporting away when low on HP, interfering with their ability to attack your ship (Boarders will automatically attack hostile crew over attacking the room, even if the crew in question is one of their own currently being Mind Controlled), and being an instant response tool anywhere in the ship under normal circumstances. (Unless you're in a nebula, or have Sensors knocked out entirely, or don't have Sensors at all, you can see all of your ship's internals at all times) Even just tying up attackers while your own crew run over to properly fend them off is pretty significant.

Still, boarders are uncommon in most runs, even with boarding events being a thing, and it's not like Mind Control is the only or even best anti-boarding tool. Spending Scrap and a precious System slot on it just for anti-boarding utility is dubious, especially since the Rebel Flagship only has access to boarding in its final stage and it's entirely possible to arrange things so it has no boarders available by that point. You really need to be getting offensive utility out of Mind Control for it to start being good.

And then if you're not a boarding ship yourself, Mind Control's offensive utility is very limited. You'll need advanced Sensors, Slug crew, a Lifeform Scanner Augment, offensive internal Drones, or Hacking to be able to get sight on the enemy ship's insides to thus Mind Control anyone in the first place. Then grabbing one enemy is only a mild inconvenience to the enemy ship if you're not boarding, unlikely to do more than briefly deny them a single manned (Sub)System and doing a not-particularly-great amount of crew damage. If the enemy ship has a Medical Bay or Cloning Bay, the crew damage probably doesn't amount to anything in real terms, and even if it doesn't this is an extremely slow way to kill crew, and one that can't finish the final crewmember on its own -unsupported Mind Control can't clear out a ship's crew on its own bar some improbable edge cases (eg if a Lanius is in the crew, it would be possible to have them die and then their killer suffocate... good luck actually having that happen, though), so its ability to crewkill isn't significant unless combined with other tools. (Most of which can get a crewkill without the help, it should be emphasized)

If you are a boarding ship, Mind Control becomes a fairly significant supporting tool. First of all, its utility in protecting against enemy boarding actions actually goes up, as boarding actions can end up making it problematic for you to attempt to board the enemy yourself, whether by you putting off your boarding action to fend them off or by you sending boarders back early to fend them off or by you sending boarders back to be healed and enemy boarders end up killing them. Mind Control can thus make it safer to just board aggressively, even if your current crew count is a bit low.

Second, it can be used to get System damage on an occupied room by teleporting in at the same time as Mind Controlling the occupant; if combined with Hacking, a Lockdown Bomb, or a Crystal crewmember's special ability, this can potentially let you completely trash even a relatively durable System with the enemy completely unable to stop you. Even without any of that, depending on the ship's size, layout, and the positions and speeds of the other crew, you may be able to do 1-2 System damage before enemy crew get to your boarders, which can be useful for reducing the enemy's firepower, or clearing out a low-Level Medical Bay or Cloning Bay before you start fighting crew, or making enemy Cloaking less likely to end up getting your crew trapped and killed...

Third, it of course translates to additional muscle for fighting the rest of the enemy crew. Notably, the AI isn't particularly consistent about meeting boarders with force -they'll always try to meet your boarders with crew, yes, but if you arrange to have 3-4 attackers in a 2x2 room (Such as by having a 2x2 Crew Teleporter drop in four crew directly, or more pertinently by dropping in two people while Mind Controlling an enemy in the room) the AI may well only send in two crew to fight back even if they have enough crew to send four people without abandoning essential stations. They're quite prone to trickling them in 1-2 at a time as the initial responders die or run away to the Medical Bay, which lets your boarders punch above their weight. (As in, if two boarders fight two crew, but one at a time, the boarders can win without casualties even if their fighting abilities are equal)

Fourth, the Mind Controlled target is of course a completely disposable meatshield, and the AI is dumb enough that they're often perfectly happy to keep wailing on their own controlled crew when your real boarders flee the room to avoid dying. This has all kinds of utility if you're willing to ruthlessly exploit it, not only in terms of helping secure crewkills but also in terms of allowing you to potentially do nonsense like bait the enemy into killing their own crew while your boarders run off to trash a System the AI places as a low priority. (Oxygen, for example, which can be useful to target if you have a couple of Lanius boarders)

Mind Control is notably less useful to the handful of player ships that have 2x2 Crew Teleporters since there's no room in the game that lets you cram in more than four combatants and even if there were it would be a smaller boost in terms of proportions, keep in mind. Hacking is liable to be a more useful System to install in such a case, for example. Mind Control is still useful to those ships, mind, and for boarding-centric strategies there's not much that is particularly helpful so you might purchase Mind Control anyway, but if you've gotten into the habit of buying Mind Control for other boarding ships whenever you can, you should reconsider that rubric when playing one of the 2x2 Crew Teleporter ships.

All this stuff is one more example of how frustrating and bad a decision it is that the game is so hostile to boarding-centric strategies, unfortunately; I said Mind Control is awkward earlier, and a big part of that is that it primarily supports boarding strategies, when the game actively punishes leaning really hard into boarding as a strategy. If it weren't for Autoships not only existing but being common in all Sectors, and the Rebel Flagship's ridiculous super-punishment for daring to crewkill it, Mind Control's design would honestly be pretty decent. As-is, though... not so much.

In AI hands, Mind Control is swingy randomness, unfortunately. The AI Mind Controls one of your crew at every opportunity, and picks their target totally at random aside Slugs being immune, no attempt made to have a strategy or anything. A lot of the time, it's an annoying nuisance, where you have to tie up crew while making sure to avoid them killing each other, possibly end up having to repair System damage, but in the end it doesn't really do anything except be a tedious annoyance.

But then every once in a great while a bunch of things line up perfectly, where they steal your pilot right as a Breach Missile is on its way to your Shields System, and that results in the rest of their firepower tearing into you, and before you know it your ship blows up from a freak one-in-a-thousand confluence of factors.

Less drastic but a further example of this is how it combines in a horrible way with a Crew Teleporter: in player hands, you can Mind Control enemy crew and then use the Crew Teleporter to drag them aboard your ship to die. (I didn't mention it before because there's basically always more effective things you could be doing) The AI will never do the same... deliberately. By which I mean if they send boarders and control one of your crew, and then decide to pull their boarders back, your controlled crewmember can end up pulled along by the Crew Teleporter; if you don't have a Crew Teleporter yourself, at that point that crewmember is irrevocably dead. Even if you crewkill the enemy ship, the game's 'your crew used a shuttle to come back' routine only kicks in if you have no crew on your ship: you will be forced to Jump away, losing that crewmember in the process. (I had this happen to me once: this isn't theoretical)

Slugs being immune to Mind Control is also incredibly frustrating design, because the player has strong incentives to diversify their crew, and even if you want to make an all-Slug crew, they're the second-rarest species to be available (The rarest outright if you play without advanced edition content!), and there's a lot of free crew events that offer random crew (eg slaver ships) where you should basically always accept free crew. As Slug immunity to Mind Control is only really useful if your entire crew is Slugs, this immunity is functionally an AI-only advantage 99% of the time, as AI ships are perfectly happy to be made entirely of Slugs, and in fact non-pirate ships are always mono-species. (Aside Mantis ships, which often have one or sometimes two Engi mixed in) I really wish Slugs, say, responded to encountering a Mind Controlled ally by breaking the Mind Control but stunning them in the process; this would make even a single Slug meaningfully protective against Mind Control without erasing it as a threat entirely for nearly free.

A related bit of frustration is that Autoships can have Mind Control, and of course have no crew themselves so you having Mind Control is only useful for canceling their Mind Control.

Frankly, I don't think Mind Control should've been made available to the AI at all. Certainly, it would've needed a lot more care and attention than it got for enemy Mind Control to not be fundamentally screwball.

This isn't even getting into all the narrative/worldbuilding jank; one of FTL's stranger aspects is that it simultaneously wants to write events as if you're a singular captain who is meaningfully in charge of the rest of the crew while refusing to actually have a player avatar. This has literally dozens of ways it's a broken decision, such as how a lot of events are clearly written as if the player is a human on their ship even though it's absolutely possible to have no humans on your ship; it's absolutely possible to get an event that's bluntly bigoted against Slugs... while your crew is made solely of Slugs.

And Mind Control is one more example of the brokenness of this model: if there's a specific individual who everybody on the ship obeys, why don't your enemies ever take over this person to sabotage your ship more effectively? The answer is 'because FTL doesn't want to actually pin such a role to anyone in particular, because what if they die?' Which sounds almost reasonable, except for that really big issue that this Schrödinger's Captain situation is self-evidently a really bad decision wildly at odds with so many major elements of the game that I'm baffled it ever came into existence at all, let alone persisted long enough for real players to see it.

As one more bit of bizarreness, Mind Control only has 5 blue options. You'd think literal mind control would be widely useful for an unscrupulous captain. Even more bizarre is that one of these blue options is to make a Slug slightly more helpful, never mind that Slugs are immune to Mind Control! Seriously, the narrative end of Mind Control is really incoherent.

Four of these events are a bit lackluster on the Mind Control blue option -the best of these four is the one where you have a Mantis insisting he's a Human, where Mind Control will provide a modest material reward- but the fifth one is worth noting, as it can show up nearly anywhere, and using Mind Control will force a Store to open and give you Scrap -more Scrap the higher your Mind Control System's level is. Fully upgrading Mind Control early thus has a non-trivial chance of literally paying for itself. It's still fundamentally a gamble, but still, it's worth considering, especially if your ship actually started with Mind Control.

Hacking
80/35/60
Targets a single System or Subsystem with a Hacking Drone, spending a Drone Part on use. The Hacking Drone can be shot down on the way, including that Defense Drones will deliberately target it, but once it has hit the room it's (almost) completely invincible. The hit room will have its doors close and function as friendly to the Hacking Drone's owner; thus, boarders can pass freely, while crew defending the ship will need to cut through the doors. The doors will also re-close the instant they can, and take 10 hits to be knocked down regardless of difficulty and Door Control level or absence. Additionally, repairs on the room will occur at half normal speed, the hacker gains max-level Sensors information on the hacked room (ie the room's insides are revealed and you know exactly its level, Power situation, and charge level for Artillery or Weapons), and if the System or Subsystem can be manned normally, the Hacking Drone will prevent this. All these effects will stop if the Hacking System becomes completely unpowered or destroyed, though the Hacking Drone will remain in place and the effects will resume the instant the Hacking System is functional and powered again.

Additionally, Hacking may be activated to trigger a 'hacking pulse', lasting 4/7/10 seconds at System levels 1/2/3, which forcibly closes and locks the doors even if they have been recently broken open and has an additional effect dependent on which System or Subsystem is being hacked, generally at least as bad as if the System or Subsystem were completely destroyed, and which has a cooldown of 20 seconds after finishing regardless of System level. The effects in question are...

+FTL Jump ability does not charge for the duration of the Hacking Pulse, and ship evasion is set to 0. Additionally, the player can see current enemy evasion even when the Hacking Pulse isn't running.

Completely disables Sensors. (Functionally useless against the AI)
Forces all of the ship's doors to close and become hostilely-locked to the hacked ship's crew for the duration of the Hacking Pulse.
Disables the Backup Battery, and removes 2 Reactor-derived Power for the duration of the Hacking Pulse as well.
Rapidly depletes oxygen from every room in the ship. Additionally, the player can see enemy overall oxygen level even when the Hacking Pulse isn't running.
All weapons lose 1 second of charge each second of the Hacking Pulse instead of gaining charge.
Rapidly drains Shields, taking roughly two seconds to remove each layer. (Does not remove two full Shield bubbles at Hacking level 1, bizarrely; the second layer will remain up even though the bar visually empties out completely)
Rapidly drains health from enemy crew in the room instead of healing them. (Crew friendly to the Hacking Drone are unaffected) With level 2 Hacking, this is able to kill almost all crew from full health. (Rockmen will barely survive)

All crew that belong to the hacked ship and are not on that ship are teleported to the Crew Teleporter. (Note that Mind Control flips things, and thus Hacking a Crew Teleporter can lead to you trapping one of your own crew on the enemy ship)
Prevents Cloaking from being activated, and disables Cloak if it's currently active.
All Drones cease functioning for the duration of the Hacking Pulse, and each has a chance of being destroyed by the hacking pulse. Even Drones that were offline before the Hacking Pulse started have a chance of being destroyed.
Prevents charging. (Does not remove existing charge)
Kills off clones in waiting.
Prevents the enemy Hacking System from initiating a Hacking Pulse, cancels it if it's currently ongoing, and has a chance to destroy the Hacking Drone. (Note that this is the only way to destroy a Hacking Drone once it's attached)
Cancels ongoing Mind Control and separately Mind Controls a random crewmember from the hacked ship.

A non-obvious mechanics wrinkle: the door-locking effect inexplicably ends if the Hacked (Sub)System hits 0 HP. I don't understand what the logic here is; it's inconsistent and baffling from both an in-universe standpoint and a game design standpoint, punching holes in certain strategies for no clear reason.

Hacking has a lot of things to talk about, as it has a tremendous array of possible effects; it's one of the Systems I was most excited to get exploring when I first started doing runs with advanced edition content enabled...

... though unfortunately in practice you'll tend to leverage a pretty limited pool of these, as the actual value of them is highly uneven.

The AI targets its Hacking Drone at a random System or Subsystem, so the low-value possibilities aren't completely irrelevant, but the unevenness issue is still a problem, as there's a pretty stark contrast between a fight where a Hacking Drone hits your Shields System vs one where it hits your own Hacking System. The latter takes away a tool you might not have used anyway. The former can get your run killed against a ship that usually wouldn't do more than chip off a few Hull points.

So let's go over these individually.

Piloting/Engines

Well, actually, I'm starting with two at once, but that's because Piloting and Engines being Hacked produces identical outcomes!

For the player, this should generally be avoided in the early portion of a run. Enemy evasion starts out fairly low, and combat tuning is such that you'll rarely be clear ahead of time that ensuring your shots all hit in a particular volley will be a big deal. You could theoretically use it to make absolutely sure none of your missiles miss, I guess, but you're spending a Drone Part to invisibly save a missile intermittently, when Drone Parts cost more than missile ammo and you expect to save maybe one missile this way in an early fight. The ability to pause FTL charging is also dubious -your enemies don't actually charge FTL like you do, instead having arbitrary timers kick in once they decide to run, so Hacking Pulses that occur prior to that point don't actually delay their escape any, and if you're actually using the Hacking Pulse prior to them attempting to run it's quite likely that they'll decide to escape while you're in the middle of using the Hacking Pulse (Since you presumably used it to ensure shots hit), which both means you don't get the full potential delay and also means that shorter escape timers will actually finish before the Hacking Pulse is ready again. You could use Hacking as a just-in-case that you lob if the enemy's escape is imminent and you just need a few more seconds to finish them, but for a while that's about it, and that obviously conflicts with more proactive usage of Hacking.

That said, it's worth pointing out that the AI prioritizes manning Piloting pretty highly, where the Hacking Drone hitting Piloting can let you steadily crewkill the ship thanks to the door-locking effect. Teleport a couple Manti in, kill the pilot who is of course alone in Piloting, teleport out, heal, then teleport back to kill the replacement pilot. No other (Sub)System will have the AI reliably feed crew to you one at a time like this.

Later in a run, Hacking Piloting or Engines gets a lot more consistently significant. Enemy ships largely cap out at level 5 Engines, so their evasion can't go as high as yours can go, but 35 evasion (+25 from level 5 Engines, +5 from manning Piloting, +5 from manning Engines) is already enough to regularly have stuff happen like your laser volley misses a couple more shots than 'expected' and so no damage gets through Shields and so you're delayed heavily on getting to crippling the enemy ship. Being able to eliminate that possibility can help a lot when dealing with particularly dangerous ships, letting you eg force damage onto Weapons so they can't start tearing you apart with their first volley. Similarly, being able to ensure a missile hits a key (Sub)System can be great, especially if your run has a lot more Drone Parts than missile ammo. (Which can readily happen with ships that start with a missile launcher or bomb launcher and no Drone Control and no Hacking) So this is certainly an option worth keeping in mind -especially since it will passively shave off 5 evasion just from not letting them man either Piloting or Engines. Not a ton, but hey, if you want the Hacking Pulse part anyway, it's free help.

For the enemy, Hacking your Engines or Piloting is... erratic.

As usual, the crux of the issue is that the AI mindlessly attempts to use every tool the instant it's ready. Thus, instead of coordinating their Hacking Pulse with a bunch of weapons fire to do a bunch of unavoidable damage to you, they unreliably sometimes have part of their weapons fire happen to overlap with a Hacking Pulse, which doesn't necessarily even help if the shots are inadequate to penetrate your Shields. Most egregious is their very first Hacking Pulse, as it will almost always be completely wasted; the Hacking Drone arrives fairly quickly, and the Hacking Pulse is too brief. At level 1 no weapon will be ready to fire before the Hacking Pulse finishes, Level 2 adds only the fastest-charging weapons, and at level 3 a decent number of basic weapons charge fast enough...

... except wait, the game doesn't decide a shot's hit/miss status when it's fired, it decides it when it touches the Shield bubble line, so actually even a weapon with a 9 second charge period won't actually benefit, because by the time its shot arrives the Hacking Pulse is over. In practice it's basically just Combat Drones that will realistically benefit from the first Hacking Pulse -and enemy ships with a Hacking System and Drone Control are very rare.

Every once in a great while the stars will align and the enemy will end up firing up a Hacking Pulse just as multiple weapons are all finishing charging close together, and you'll unavoidably suffer a pile of damage.

Most of the time, though, you honestly care more about the door-locking part.

Similarly, the fact that they'll keep putting your Jump charge on pause is, in most fights, completely irrelevant; you largely want to win fights, not run from them... but every so often you'll have a run end because it happened to get into a fight with a Hack-capable ship, the ship happened to target Piloting or Engines with their Hacking Drone, and the ship happened to be enough of a threat you genuinely did want to run but couldn't thanks to your Jump charge being paused...

... long odds, though, if you didn't gather.

This is a bit of a recurring issue with Hacking in AI hands, unfortunately; because they select their target totally randomly, their usage of Hack trends heavily towards having little or no impact, but then occasionally everything will line up where they picked the right (Sub)System to target in the context of a bunch of other factors and your ship takes a lot of damage, or loses crew, or straight-up gets destroyed entirely. Hacking in AI hands is thus a kind of bizarre, backwards roulette, where the metaphorical slot machine is rigged against the metaphorical house instead of the player but instead of the player sometimes getting jackpot they instead sometimes get triple skulls and the house promptly murders them.

It's... not good design, and I honestly would rather the AI didn't use Hacking at all than have them use it in this way.

Sensors

For the player, this is useless. On the plus side, enemy ships normally don't have a Sensors System for you to waste a Drone Part targeting...

... on the minus side, there are a handful of enemy ships that inexplicably have Sensors Systems, and a player's natural inclination is going to be to assume that these Sensors matter somehow. Sorry, nope. It doesn't even give you Sensors info on the enemy ship or anything like that.

For the enemy, them choosing to Hack your Sensors is generally one of the least threatening things they can do with Hacking. There's the obvious point that, as I laid out in the Subsystems post, Sensors are low-value if you don't have any of a limited set of specific tools. Less obvious but more important is that Hacking Sensors will only knock out Sensors for 4/7/10 seconds, with a delay of 20 seconds between each Hacking Pulse; even level 3 Hacking still means you spend 2/3rds of your time with Sensors functioning. It's only if you were specifically relying on manning Sensors that Hacking Sensors is a notable problem, and it'll still be the case that fires won't get much opportunity to invisibly spread, breaches won't get much opportunity to drain oxygen from a room such that you get someone killed walking through it, etc. The worst problems with not having Sensors at all are simply not there, due to the blackouts being a small portion of the time and individually short-lived; having no Sensors is dangerous when it's a continuous condition, not so much when it's an intermittent condition.

Every once in a while the stars will align and Hacking Sensors will be what gets a crewmember killed, or lets an enemy ship escape, or otherwise Matters™.

It will probably still be less consequential than whatever would've happened if they'd targeted some other System, though.

Door Control

For the player, this is rarely even an option; very few enemy ships have a Door Control in the first place.

That said, the Rebel Flagship starts with one in its first phase, and it's actually potentially a decent target. If you have a Crew Teleporter, you can lock the ship while your crew murders the enemy crew one at a time, instead of them running to the Medical Bay before you can actually kill them, or you can lock the ship while you smash a System without enemy crew interrupting the attempt. With Fire Bombs, you can lock the ship to give the fire time to spread and do System damage, instead of being immediately snuffed. If you have both, then you can do both!

Of course, the Door Control isn't present in the later phases and the first phase is overall the least threatening phase, so... the Rebel Flagship doesn't do a lot to raise the relevancy of this usage. Especially since Hacking its Shields System is far more likely to significantly pay off.

Still, don't completely write it off as an option.

For the enemy, Hacking your Door Control is... uneven. In and of itself, it's not directly threatening; if they can't break through or bypass your Shields to actually threaten crew, start fires, or open breaches, you generally won't have need to move crew about in the first place. In such a situation Hacking your Door Control isn't accomplishing anything. As Hacking ships tend to have lower-than-average firepower, this is actually a realistic scenario to run into!

On the other hand, if they can break through or bypass your Shields, Door Control can erratically contribute to killing crew -you tell someone to run to the Medical Bay as they're running low on HP fighting a boarder, only for the doors to lock, trapping them with their attacker. Same with a firefighter who runs low on health, or someone closing a breach. It can also, even more erratically, lead to run-off situations where you rush to repair an essential System, but then the doors lock and delay your repair crew's arrival by enough that still further problems stack up, likely leading to Hull damage, possibly even getting your run ended.

Usually a Hacking ship hitting Door Control won't get your run ended in that fight, but it may be the metaphorical nail that leads to your run ending a few fights later. Not... remotely consistently... but it can happen.

So: uneven.

I'm not a fan of how often this crops up with Hacking...

Backup Battery

This option is useless to the player, because no enemy ship has a Backup Battery. Presumably because they cheat on Power such that a Backup Battery would only be useful to them in an Ion Storm. So that's a bit of potential nuance simply missing.

The potential for Hacking to target your Backup Battery is another reason I'm personally not fond of the Backup Battery; the enemy intermittently eating 2 Power is potentially very dangerous depending on what the game decides to strip Power from, and you're incentivized to be perpetually operating at the limits of you Reactor anyway, virtually guaranteeing some negative consequence. As the Backup Battery's benefits are somewhat dubious overall, there's a case to be made that Hacking existing makes it an active liability to install in your ship!

Not ideal design.

Oxygen

For the player, this is a waste of time. The Hacking Pulse doesn't last long enough to meaningfully drain oxygen on its own, enemy ships are prone to having level 2 or 3 Oxygen from quite early to pump oxygen back in extremely quickly... you could Hack it to lock it while you have crew smash it or fire burn it, I guess? But Hacked rooms have their doors stop locking if the room's HP is reduced to zero, so that wouldn't stop enemy crew from running in to repair it, severely limiting the value of such a strategy.

Suffocation is also just a slow way of crewkilling. It can be worth pursuing with certain enemy ship designs whose Oxygen is separated from the rest of the ship, but why Hack those when you can smash them instead? Saves a Drone Part, not to mention actually kills the enemy crew.

For the enemy, Hacking Oxygen is one of their more dubious options, but not as close to worthless as it is for the player.

First of all, the player normally has the option of manually venting the ship, and this is a very useful tool for fending off boarders and fighting fires without tying up or risking precious crew. This means it's entirely possible for the player to have rooms whose oxygen is out of the danger zone but still quite low, where you send crew through a safe corridor and then the Hacking Pulse hits and suddenly the room starts suffocating them. If, for example, you'd had the crew waiting for the room to re-oxygenate so they could take their nearly-dead self to the Medical Bay for healing, this can result in dead crew!

Second, crew deaths are very different for the player than for their enemies. The player losing crew permanently sets them back not only for the current battle, but for all future battles. (Or more accurately unless and until they get an absurd glut of free crew such that they hit the crew max) Killing three out of four enemy crew, meanwhile, isn't something notable; each crewmember the enemy loses marginally impacts their effectiveness in the current fight, but if you end up blowing up their ship instead of getting a complete crewkill that's really all it is -damaging Systems is honestly usually more useful than killing some of the enemy's crew. And of course future enemy ships aren't affected by whether you killed a couple crew in an earlier battle.

This contrast gets exacerbated by a couple subtle points; the big one is that player crew gain skill experience, whereas enemy crew are always at the minimum experience level. So not only does the player suffer more from losing crew than they gain from killing enemy crew at the larger scale, it's also the case that the impact within the one battle is skewed; if you arbitrarily deleted one crew on the player's ship and one crew on the enemy's ship, likely the player ship's performance would be hurt more than the enemy ship's just due to the experience point!

The other subtle issue is the consideration of crewcounts; player ships start with at most 4 crew and as few as 1 crew, with zero guarantee that this number will ever go up. It usually goes up at least a couple times for free from events, but it's absolutely possible to just never get free crew. Enemy ships start from a similar range -early enemy ships tend to have 2 or 3 crew- but automatically climb up as your run progresses, where late-game enemy ships are operating on 6+ crew even if you're still stuck with whoever you started with. So past the very early game, it's entirely possible for the enemy to simply have a larger buffer of crew to lose, further minimizing the impact of a loss here or there.

More erratically, boarding events let the enemy cheat on their crew total -if you encounter a ship with, say, six crew, and then a boarding event triggers and generates five boarders? If the enemy ship has a Crew Teleporter it's entirely possible for them to end up retrieving the event-generated boarders, and now the enemy ship has 11 crew, vs the 8 that is the player's absolute limit. And the Flagship just outright starts with a larger crew than you're allowed...

Altogether, this means that the AI Hacking Oxygen and ending up with everything lining up so you lose crew as a result is not only a lot more likely than you doing the same to them, but a lot more impactful than you doing the same to them.

On top of all that, Autoships and Lanius ships don't have or need an Oxygen System...

... so yeah, once again, the enemy Hacking your Oxygen is often worthless, but will occasionally Actually Matter, and I'm not thrilled this keeps being a thing with Hacking.

Weapons

For the player, this is usually worse than Hacking Shields and then shooting Weapons now that their Shields are substantially out of the way. Sure, 10 seconds of Hacking Pulse is actually negating up to 20 seconds of charge time on every weapon, but every weapon you knock out entirely rapidly loses all its current charge and can't gain more charge until it's repowered. Among other points, weapon charge can't be in 'debt'; if your Level 3 Hacking Pulse starts when an enemy weapon is at 5 seconds, it doesn't result in the weapon taking 5 seconds afterward to resume charging. For weapons with relatively short charge times, this makes it really easy for damaging Weapons to pull ahead.

For another, FTL's combat mechanics aren't 'linear'; it's tempting to think that Hacking Weapons gains relevancy as the enemy ships fill more weapon slots and put in more powerful weapons, because after all if you Hacking Pulse four weapons that's in some sense twice the value of doing so to a ship with only two weapons... but completely knocking out a single weapon can render a ship unable to do real damage if the rest of its kit is insufficient to get Hull damage past your defenses. This can be true whether the enemy ship has two weapons or four, even though the former is taking away 50% of their weaponry while the latter is only taking away 25%.

So yeah, Hacking Shields and then pointing your fire at their Weapon System is often more effective protection than Hacking their Weapon System directly.

If you do Hack weapons for some reason, note that a lot of the time you ideally let one or two of the enemy's faster-charging weapons fire before you start the Hacking Pulse, particularly if you have the Hacking Pulse upgraded; a Heavy Laser I can't penetrate your Shields and charges fast enough that trying to preempt it will waste some of Hacking Level 3's potential against the enemy's other weapons. (That is, initiating a 10-second pulse 8 seconds in is missing 2 seconds of charge removal on weapons that take more than 10 seconds to charge), so you might as well let it fire in most contexts. Especially since letting enemies take useless shots gives your crew the opportunity to build Shields/Piloting/Engines experience in safety.

Also, reminder that Hacking Weapons gives you full Sensors information on the weaponry: this would be one of the better opportunities for the game to give a strong purpose to upgrading Sensors (So you could see the exact charge on weapons to time the Hacking Pulse perfectly), but then Hacking bakes in the benefits in so never mind that idea.

For the enemy... well, for starters they'll normally waste a good chunk of their first Hacking Pulse; it does not take 10 seconds for the Hacking Drone to reach your ship, and of course they start the Hacking Pulse the second the Hacking Drone hits. But even past that, the AI's obsession with activating the Hacking Pulse as soon as it's available leads to a fair amount of wastage, where they do stuff like activate the Hacking Pulse right after you fire a full volley instead of waiting for you to charge most of the way to your next volley. Notably, the 20 second cooldown is basically perfect for maximizing wastage; no weapon has a longer base charge time than 25 seconds, which already gets reduced to 20 seconds just from having a maximally experienced gunner, and you can potentially drag it to under 20 seconds with an Augment. So even the slowest-firing weapons can potentially fit their full firing cycle inside the cooldown, taking away nearly half the Hacking Pulse's benefits.

And then for faster-firing weapons, 20 seconds is enough to fit in 2-3 full firing cycles (Depending on how experienced your gunner is and all) and probably end up wasting a lot of its potential value from the AI obsession. (eg if you have a weapon charging in 9 seconds, you'll fire twice and then only lose an effective total of 12 seconds to a Level 3 Hacking Pulse, not the 18~ more optimal timing would take away)

The fact that the player is generally going to actually contrive to coordinate volleys also means that the player will regularly exacerbate the issue; say you have a weapon charging in 7 seconds. On the face of it, this is basically perfect for optimizing the AI Hacking Pulse; you fire twice, then get to 6 seconds out of 7 and lose it all to the Hacking Pulse, right? Except no, odds are you were slightly delaying each volley to synch it up with something that charges a bit slower, so it's got half or less that charge when the Hacking Pulse hits.

On top of all that, there's the issue of the random-targeting element rearing its head: every player ship starts with a Weapon System, even if the ship puts its focus elsewhere. Even if it doesn't start with weapons at all! So there's a certain rate at which a Hack-capable enemy ship will target your Weapons System even though it has no weapons or you had no interest in using what weapons it does have. (Because you wanted to crewkill them with boarders and your weapons are only really there to deal with problems your boarders can't handle, for instance)

Occasionally things will line up to make them Hacking your Weapons System actually pretty problematic. You'll have a cluster of weapons whose charge timing works out to the 20-second cooldown being maximally painful (11~ seconds, say), or the intersection of your firepower and their defenses is such that the Hacking Pulse keeps preventing you from initiating a proper death spiral on the enemy (You damage their Shields System, which makes it easier to damage them again -oh wait the Hacking Pulse hit and they repaired all the System damage before you could fire again), or you're relying on spending missile ammunition to get started on bashing down their defenses and the Hacking Pulse is resulting in you spending a lot more missile ammo than you'd otherwise need...

... but most of the time, it's mostly annoying, dragging a fight out without making it particularly more dangerous.

As with so many AI-side Hacking examples, it's a bad dynamic.

Shields

For the player, this is one of the primary draws of Hacking, allowing you to get damage through on a ship even if your weaponry isn't really adequate to punch through their Shields on a reliable basis. You don't even necessarily need to keep relying on Hacking Pulses for further damage; it's absolutely possible to have enough firepower to devastate Systems and remove a lot of Hull while still struggling to get through Shields, such as if you've got a beam weapon. Thus, you may initiate the first Hacking Pulse and promptly cripple the enemy Shields System, such that you're able to keep on doing damage even as the enemy scrambles to repair their Shields.

As the AI is hyper-aggressive about trying to keep their Shields System in mint condition, to the point of being willing to pull crew out of Piloting fairly quickly, this also ends up getting enemy crew killed surprisingly often, as they pile into the room you're shooting at. A 2x2 Medical Bay is the only other room type the AI will regularly concentrate crew into so you can conveniently maximize crew damage with shots, and getting 3-4 crew in the Medical Bay like that requires knocking them all low on health in the first place; if you need to rely on them being concentrated in a room to get a crewkill, the Medical Bay dynamic doesn't really help.

There's not a lot to add to this: draining the enemy's Shields is the default Good Idea for the player in a large fraction of possibly situations, for reasons I've already been over pretty extensively.

Just remember you'll want to initiate the Hacking Pulse a few seconds ahead of the point you're going to actually unleash a volley, since the drain takes time.

For the AI, this, as always, is hampered by the AI's failure to coordinate its actions. This is probably for the best given Hull damage has costs to the player that don't apply to the AI, mind, but it's easy to use Hacking on enemy Shields, see how effective it is, and freak out when the AI does the same to you... and that's rarely warranted.

The fact that the AI uses the Hacking Pulse immediately contributes, of course, as the Hacking Pulse will finish before all but the fastest-charging weapons, giving your Shields time to recharge. This is exacerbated by the overall progression of of gear; generally, a ship that has Level 3 Hacking to thus last long enough for fast-charging weapons to fire before the Hacking Pulse ends doesn't have any of those really fast-charging weapons. If you're seeing a Basic Laser alongside Hacking, it's probably Level 1 Hacking, which ends multiple seconds before a Basic Laser is charged.

Every once in a great while you'll see a ship with Level 3 Hacking and a weapon that charges fast and cares about Shield bubbles... but it's unlikely this will intersect with them actually targeting your Shields System. So actually you'd have to play hundreds of hours of the game to really expect this to come up.

Now, if you don't get a decisive advantage within 30 seconds, odds are decent a later Hacking Pulse will actually overlap with at least one weapon that appreciates your Shields being crippled. In the rare event that a ship has a Drone Control and Hacking alongside each other, has an offensive external Drone, and does in fact target your Shields, that's actually reliably really dangerous... though of course this 'reliably' statement is pretty heavily qualified since it will happen so very rarely. But still, if you have it happen to you, take it very seriously.

So, as usual, this Hacking option trends overall low-value for the AI, but can spike to incredibly dangerous on rare occasions, likely costing you a run. Still not great design there...

Medical Bay

For the player, this makes Hacking fairly attractive to boarding-focused strategies, as Hacking is a great solution to the usually-tricky issue of actually finishing off enemy crew when the enemy ship has a Medical Bay. The AI doesn't recognize that you're able to turn the Medical Bay into a death zone, and so will run people to it when low on health; you can chase them to the room they're trying to cut in from and potentially kill them while they're cutting, and if that doesn't work you can wait for the door to relock and then Hacking Pulse to kill them. Or not wait for it to relock, using the Hacking Pulse to force them to flee the room while you try to finish them with your boarders. Whatever the case, it's a great option to have for a boarding strategy.

It can also be useful for other crewkilling strategies, though less dramatically, as other strategies generally already have built-in tools for knocking out the Medical Bay, like fires damaging it and preventing repairs. Keep it in mind if you're going for a crewkill, but don't necessarily Hack the Medical Bay immediately; if you don't need it, firing the Hacking Drone is wasting a Drone Part, after all.

For enemies, this is another uneven choice, and impaired pretty heavily by the AI insisting on launching the Hacking Drone immediately, as it allows you to plan around the issue instead of sending someone to get healed only for them to get trapped and killed. If boarders are involved (Whether a Crew Teleporter or a boarding event), the Medical Bay being targeted can end up getting crew killed, whether by you refusing to send them for healing or because you do send them and mismanage their time inside such that they get locked in and killed. Alternatively, the enemy might happen to have weapons do notable damage to your crew through sheer chance, or might start fires in conditions where manual firefighting is your best choice instead of venting, and either way you could end up with crew low on health who then die from one more weapon hit...

... but most of the time, this is a bit of a dud for the AI. If your ship is at a strong advantage and no boarders are around, you're only maybe going to lose crew if you had just left crew in the Medical Bay and their Hacking System is high enough level to actually kill people in one Hacking Pulse; Hacking the Medical Bay doesn't help the AI break through your Shields and do damage. Also, them randomly dumping enough damage onto crew to kill them is very unlikely, and more precisely almost always means your ship is taking so much Hull damage probably your run is going to die in that fight or a near-future fight; the Hacking System costing you crew in the process isn't exactly helping, but honestly it's difficult to care when eg targeting your Shields instead could get your ship destroyed outright; being in a position to worry about missing crew in such a situation is a clear improvement over 'run already ended'.

It's another AI Hacking dynamic I'm not terribly fond of.

Crew Teleporter

For the player, this is usually a bit of a waste of a Hacking Drone; you're probably better off aiming it at a different (Sub)System, whatever your goal might be.

That said, there are C-variant player ships that start with Hacking while having mediocre ability to fend off boarders. Hitting the enemy's Crew Teleporter to force their boarders back can be useful to those ships if you encounter a boarding ship before you've particularly improved your ability to fend off boarders.

It also is actually a very notable option in the rare event that you get a boarding event occurring while up against an enemy ship that has a Crew Teleporter, especially if the boarding event occurs late enough in a run it's willing to drop in 4 Manti or 5 non-Mantis boarders; fending off 6-7 boarders is incredibly difficult to do costlessly, and the Hacking Pulse pulls all hostile crew to the enemy ship, regardless of how many of them there are and regardless of their positions. It's not restricted to one room the way a normal Crew Teleporter recall is. This can take a disastrous combo that's liable to kill several of your crew and leave your Hull devastated if not blow you up outright, and turn it into a clean victory -or at least a reasonably clean escape. In this specific circumstance, the Crew Teleporter probably is the best target for your Hacking Drone.

But most of the time you're better off targeting their Shields System, or hitting Piloting/Engines so they can't dodge your volleys so consistently, or hitting the Medical Bay so you can kill their crew, or... something other than the Crew Teleporter. Much of the value of targeting it with Hacking will be replicated by targeting Shields/Engines/Piloting and aiming some weapons fire at their Crew Teleporter, for one.

For the AI, this option is primarily notable for the part where it locks the room. If you're relying on a Medical Bay, needing to cut through the doors to go get healed and then cut back through them to resume the boarding action substantially slows your assault. Even if your ship has a Cloning Bay instead, you still need to cut through the doors to resume the boarding action each time your boarders wipe, so it still noticeably slows you down. This can be a pretty serious problem; you can have an enemy ship where normally your boarders would crewkill them before they could do more than token damage to you, but the Hacking slows things enough you actually lose half your Hull instead. The doors re-lock pretty quickly, too; even if your Medical Bay is adjacent to your Crew Teleporter, waiting for a full heal can take long enough the door re-locks before it's done, so consider ducking back in when mostly-healed, such as if the remaining enemy crew are low on health.

Also worth mentioning is that a Medical Bay-equipped ship has to worry about retrieved crew getting killed by weapons fire before they can cut through the door. This is a possibility anytime the enemy ship can get damage past your Shields, of course, but it makes this low-odds event noticeably more likely to occur. So that's a bit obnoxious.

The Hacking Pulse, meanwhile, is unlikely to do anything of substance, particularly if you make a habit of waiting for their Hacking Drone to hit before committing your boarders; if you don't wait, you risk your initial boarding action being interrupted and having to wait the full Crew Teleporter cooldown before you can go back. The Hacking Pulse is actually more inconvenient for a Cloning Bay than a Medical Bay; with a Medical Bay, often either you pulled them back for healing beforehand, or shrug and send them for healing while waiting for the Hacking Pulse to end. For a Cloning Bay, you can end up with crew not quite dead when the Hacking Pulse pulls them back, where now sending them back will basically partially waste a teleport; if keeping up the pressure is important (And it often is), you may be best off swapping a near-death boarder with someone manning a station so you're able to send in healthy boarders who fight for a while instead of dying having accomplished basically nothing.

Or suffocate your boarders so they can be sent in at full health in a bit.

Have I mentioned the Cloning Bay creates perverse incentives? Oh, I have? Well, it bears repeating.

Cloaking

For the player, this is hampered a bit by the part where the AI automatically instantly cloaks so you can't land a Hacking Drone before their first cloak. If the AI were a bit more strategic with its cloaking, trying to save it to waste your volleys and whatnot, you'd be able to immediately Hack it and then no-sell their attempt to no-sell your attack.

To be clear, I'm not attempting to suggest the AI should've been coded to do such. That way lies quite a few very problematic design headaches. Rather, my point is that targeting Cloaking is somewhat low-value overall, partially because the AI behavior generally doesn't create good clear motives for Hacking their Cloaking, with this particular example being a really easy to describe case of what I'm talking about.

Anyway, even once they're past their first Cloak use... well, for starters if you have a Cloak of your own it's more useful to counter-Cloak to waste their volley that happens as a side effect of AI behavior. For another, this is another case where it's often better to Hack their Shields and shoot up the other System than to Hack the non-Shields System: the Cloaking System only goes up to level 3 and so it only takes 3 damage to knock it out entirely, where Shields goes up to 8 (Except actually on the AI it can go up to 10...), and the AI places Cloak pretty low in priority for repairs. It's often the case that they'll not repair it at all if you're getting damage onto other (Sub)Systems.

Furthermore, the AI mindlessly using activatable Systems as soon as they can whenever they can means that damaging their Cloak leads to additional wastage; if you knock out their Cloak and they do bother to repair it, they'll activate it the second it's repaired to level 1 instead of trying to repair it fully before activating it. A 5-second Cloak, in AI hands, is almost always useless. So that's all another reason why Hacking their Cloak in specific is often dubious.

Sometimes a ship's defenses are such that you can't get momentum going, because they inevitably re-Cloak and repair all the System damage you did, so you don't get the runaway effect of doing damage to Shields and so your next volley gets to do more damage and so on. In such a case, it actually can be the case that Hacking Cloaking and activating the Hacking Pulse every time they initiate their Cloak is what lets you get the momentum going. It's... usually better to target Shields anyway, and it tends to take a while to be obvious that you don't have quite enough firepower, which makes it very likely that you've already lobbed the Hacking Drone at a different target and so can't target Cloaking... but if you held off on it and such a state becomes clear, yeah, it might be worth Hacking Cloaking.

For the AI, Hacking your Cloaking is usually a bit of a dud. It makes it harder to optimize Cloak-dodging, but Cloak duration at level 3 is still 5 seconds less than the Hacking Pulse cooldown, so using Cloaking for simple charge time advantage remains fully viable with minimal impact. As the AI doesn't coordinate actions, it's not like they'll disable your Cloak just in time to hit you with a Breach Missile -I mean, it can happen, but it's not something they'll actually do intentionally, and more importantly it won't happen often. Point being, you'll often still be able to Cloak-dodge when it counts.

There's things they can Hack that are more ineffectual, but... only on average, as Cloaking is one of the rare Hacking cases where it's more or less impossible for the stars to align and kill you as a result.

Drone Control

For the player, this option is rarely relevant as most ships simply don't have a Drone Control, but can be key against the few that do. Sometimes you see a Drone Control ship that has 5+ Drones and a fairly poor weapon situation, where Hacking their Drone Control will rapidly render them basically helpless. That's particularly extreme, but in general Drone Control-equipped enemy ships tend to have below-average weapon loadouts, relying on their Drone Control to make up the difference, and Hacking their Drone Control is one of the few ways the AI carrying low Drone Part counts can readily result in them actually running out.

Though keep in mind that, annoyingly, Drone Control-equipped ships tend to have at least one Defense Drone, making it more difficult to actually slip in the Hacking Drone. Engi ships are particularly consistent about this, but it's a general problem, requiring you support your Hacking attempt with some manner of distraction or Drone-counter to avoid being hard-stopped by Defense Drone presence. So even though the Drone Control is one of the better targets for Hacking, spotting a Drone Control can easily mean you have to write off the possibility of Hacking contributing to the fight. Especially since the Drone-stacking can result in layered defenses, where eg you try to distract the Defense Drone with a missile, you succeed, and whoops your Hacking Drone blows up on impact with the Supershield their Shield Overcharger Drone just made.

Still, this is one of the main options that provides stiff competition to just Hacking their Shields, when the option is available.

Do keep in mind that, though the second phase of the Rebel Flagship has a Drone Control and its 'power surge' attack throws a horde of Drones at you, Hacking its Drone Control will not help any with this 'power surge' attack; these Drones have absolutely nothing to do with its Drone Control. This is one of many examples of the Rebel Flagship being designed to functionally lie to the player and kill runs not due to bad play but because a reasonable idea didn't work because the Rebel Flagship doesn't work the way it looks like it does, or otherwise has a 'gotcha' embedded in its design.

Anyway...

For the AI, the potential to Hack your Drone Control is one of two ways advanced edition tries to make heavy Drone usage less reliably powerful, and like the other it just means there's a small chance the game will murder your run for daring to lean into a strategy that's really good 97% of the time. So it's pretty awful an attempt.

Outside that, it's another Hack target that's often kind of whatever but occasionally is key to the game murdering your run. A lot of runs that get a Drone Control at all will use it in only a limited, supplemental way, where the appropriate response to the Drone Control being hacked is to shrug and be glad it didn't hit something actually essential... but sometimes it means you can't use your Defense Drone to fend off their Breach Missiles and things go very wrong as a result, or your ship ended up relying on a Combat Drone to push your ship's firepower high enough to overcome enemy Shields and so you can't realistically win the fight because they targeted your Drone Control.

And of course it's very obnoxious if you got a hold of a Drone Recovery Arm and have really leaned into this Drone thing and whoops this ship through sheer blind chance happened to target your Drone Control so you're in serious trouble.

Reminder that the Rebel Flagship has Hacking in one of its stages and it's not acceptable to just run away from it. If it Hacks your Drone Control that you're actually reliant on, odds are pretty good your run isn't going to win.

This isn't well-considered...

Artillery

For the player, this is one more way the Rebel Flagship is mis-designed, making Hacking the Flagship's weaponry a waste of your Hacking Drone where that's not at all obvious, above and beyond the more obvious issue that you only get to Hack one of its weapons. Don't waste a Drone Part on it; even Hacking their Missile Artillery isn't worth it.

No other enemy ship has Artillery (Well, there's the under-construction Rebel Flagship, but close enough), so that really is it.

For the AI, this is erratic, trending very heavily to being worthless. If you've embraced the part where Federation Cruiser Artillery either ignores Shields or consistently overwhelms Shields, building up your ship around stalling while your Artillery kills the enemy... well, for one thing the Federation Cruiser C has a Crew Teleporter and Cloning Bay, so in that case you really ought to just be going for crewkills anyway. But okay, you're the A or B, or you're the C up against a Supershielded Hacker (ie a Zoltan Hacker, which is a rarity) and still haven't gotten a hold of any weaponry or a Zoltan Shield Bypass Augment or a Drone Control and external offensive Drones, leaving you dependent on your Artillery to pop the Supershield; in that case, Hacking your Artillery is... really annoying, but is unlikely to be particularly significant on its own. It buys them time to get in Hull damage, potentially get lucky in smashing essential Systems, and so on, but that's about it, and most of the time targeting your Weapons would have much the same effect, only with twice as much time being bought.

I really don't get what the devs were thinking with the behavior of Hacking Artillery. The game would honestly be improved by just making Artillery not Hackable. I suspect we got this outcome because just copying the effects of Hacking Weapons would interact weirdly with Artillery's heavily-variable charge time (eg that the player might be able to reduce the drain by lowering their Artillery to 1 Power just before the Hacking Pulse starts), but... seriously, making it immune to Hacking would be better.

Cloning Bay

For the player, this is similar to the Medical Bay in its general implications; boarding ships can really appreciate a direct solution to the issue of crew constantly respawning, while other crewkilling strategies can also appreciate it but are much more likely to be able to directly knock out the Cloning Bay, so you shouldn't actually assume a Drone Part is worth expending in such a case. Just remember to specifically trigger the Hacking Pulse shortly after an enemy crewmember has died, not just anytime Hacking is off cooldown.

Not a lot of additional nuance here, but it's functional enough.

For the enemy this is, surprise of surprises, another possibility that's very erratic in its effectiveness! First of all, even a level 1 Cloning Bay will revive crew in less time than it takes Hacking to cooldown; as the AI spams Hacking Pulse whenever it's ready, this means it's always possible for crew to die during the window Hacking is on cooldown and thus dodge the Hacking Pulse entirely -or to die late in the Hacking Pulse, so late it times out before actually killing the clone.

Second, if you're not a boarding ship, you may well never have crew die in the fight, in which case Hacking the Cloning Bay accomplishes nothing. And unlike a Medical Bay, it doesn't even make the room itself intermittently dangerous; a Medical Bay being Hacked can create a bad situation if its room is a chokepoint crew can't route around. A Cloning Bay in such a spot will just be slow to get crew to the other side. That can matter, sure, but that applies to any Hackable room type. Even Piloting has cases of being a key chokepoint on a player ship.

Third, if the player has the a Backup DNA Bank, they can potentially respond to the Cloning Bay being smashed after being Hacked by ignoring it until the fight is over; a System that's been completely knocked out has all the effects of Hacking it negated, unlocking the doors and not letting the owner of the Hacking Drone activate its Hacking Pulse. This quirk isn't an issue with several (Sub)Systems since the Hacking Pulse's effect is literally the same or less than the effects of the (Sub)System being knocked out; if Engines is knocked out, evasion is already zero, so a Hacking Pulse reducing evasion to zero is redundant. But in this case, with the support of an Augment, it creates a perverse situation where dead crew are safer if the Cloning Bay is knocked out than if it's kept intact. And a reminder: you can target your own ship with any bomb, so if you have bombs you can do this without needing the AI to target the Cloning Bay, not to mention not taking Hull damage in the process.

But... every once in a great while the stars will align, where the AI targets your Cloning Bay with their Hacking and proceeds to kill crew with the right timing for their Hacking Pulse to make the death actually stick.

Though even then, it may still be fairly inconsequential. If you were at crew cap and the killed crew weren't particularly essential -Manti you were using to man Sensors and the Door Control for lack of anything more useful to do, for example- and in short order you get free crew from events... then it's probably not terribly meaningful. So... the worst-case scenario tends to be more obnoxious than truly costly. Especially since Hacking can't even be encountered on enemy ships initially, and never stops being rare; early in a run is where a crew death or two can be devastating all by itself, while Hacking is largely going to show up late enough many runs have their crew hitting the surplus point.

At least it's largely inoffensively janky, unlike a lot of these.

Hacking

For the player, this is an okay panic button if an enemy with Hacking happens to target the absolute worst possible thing to target, letting you immediately minimize the harm caused by their Hacking Pulses and also letting you reroll the dice on their target until they hit something you're okay with. (Or maybe even running through their Drone Parts supply entirely) That's about it, but that's decent enough.

For the enemy, this is primarily a reason to not launch your Hacking Drone against enemy Hackers until you've seen what they're hitting. If they hit Hacking, probably you should just not try to Hack them at all, possibly even redirect Power from Hacking to elsewhere. Yes, you could Hack them between their Hacking Pulses and hope you blow up their Hacking Drone before they blow up yours, but this won't actually let you Hack anything else if it works; the game won't let you launch a new Hacking Drone as long as the first survives, and you can't manually destroy your Hacking Drone. As such, the only possible use of this would be to try to burn through the enemy's Drone Part supply.

Put another way, the enemy Hacking your Hacking is generally a dud result unless your ship is dependent on Hacking to win fights... and in that case your Hacking being Hacked means it's time to bail on the fight, because you can't actually escape that situation.

Yeah, this wasn't thought out well...

Mind Control

For the player, this is primarily notable as an alternative to using Mind Control to cancel out Mind Control, by which I mean if you have Mind Control you should probably Hack a different (Sub)System. If you don't have Mind Control, and your current conditions are particularly susceptible to Mind Control, then maybe this is worth it over the alternatives. Not likely, but maybe.

Honestly, I suspect the overwhelming majority of players would never have anything bad result from literally forgetting the option exists. It's pretty underwhelming.

For the enemy, this is pretty directly comparable to facing Mind Control. The main implications of note are that a room on your ship is locked, where depending on your ship's layout that could be pretty problematic, and that unlike proper Mind Control you can't cancel it with your own Mind Control and in fact they can cancel yours if you're thoughtless about when you time your Mind Control.

So basically if it happens it's pretty directly superior to them having an actual Mind Control System. Um... what?

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Blue options-wise, Hacking has 13 total options. Individually, most of them are a bit restricted (Often only possible in 2 Sector types), but collectively these blue options can crop up in almost any Sector, making it fairly likely for Hacking to benefit you multiple times in a run -especially if you dive into Slug Sectors, as there's a particularly high concentration of such events in Slug Sectors. Notably, most of these don't require Hacking to be upgraded, and in fact only a few offer better versions for having Hacking at level 2, and only one offers a better option for having it at level 3. (The Virus, which can only be encountered in Engi Sectors; if you never enter an Engi Sector, level 3 Hacking is unnecessary for blue options) As such, purchasing Hacking for blue options is pretty likely to pay off, but upgrading it is much less important.

Notably, the majority of these events don't even cost you a Drone Part to take advantage of; instead, they disable Hacking for the duration of the fight. As Hacking is something you shouldn't assume you'll use in every fight anyway, this is often a minor or nonexistent cost. Hacking is, in fact, one of the best Systems to consider grabbing specifically for the blue options.

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I'm actually relatively sympathetic to Hacking's design issues. For one thing, it's easy to imagine it started as a relatively simple-sounding proposal where it wasn't actually obvious to the devs what a big endeavor they were considering until they were pretty deep into implementing it. For another, a lot of its problems are 'detail-level' -that the basic concept of Hacking could've been implemented in a number of alternate ways that would escape these problems, not because these alternate implementations are self-evidently superior choices but because of multiple layers of detail-work intersecting with each other. For example, if the Hacking Pulse concept was replaced with Hacking's passive effects being a bit more severe and personal (eg maybe Shields would have max bubble count go down by 1 so long as Hacking is powered), the AI's simplistic, non-planned behavior wouldn't result in such drastic swings from 'usually not a problem' to 'you die because everything happened to line up just so'; even if there remained severe differences in quality between different Hack targets, the overall result would be more consistent.

Point being, the basic concept of Hacking isn't some major mismatch to the game's design, it's multiple details in its execution where things go very wrong. And only some of those details are pretty obvious or predictable in being problematic choices, too.

But I do think it's one of the better examples of how problematic it is for FTL that it sort of wants to have the player and AI using equivalent tools, with inadequate thought given to things like 'do we have any idea how to have the AI use this tool at all intelligently?' which all by itself significantly breaks the ostensible equivalency.

Thankfully, Into The Breach escapes these particular problems.

... mostly.

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Next time, we move on to Augments, starting with the base-game regular-access ones.

See you then.