A drawing of The Kestrel about to blow up because it's on fire

See, this is why I'm glad I'm not a real starship captain.

A drawing of Engi, Slug, and Zoltan.

Man, I was having another great run with the Carnelian--got two Scrap Recovery Arms early on and had a zillion scrap by Sector 7--and the game crashed on me. Ugh. I was totally going to beat the Rebel Flagship, too.

So then I thought I'd take a break from Crystals and try the Stealth Cruiser instead, since that's now the only one whose alternate layout I haven't unlocked yet. No luck, though: I keep dying. Nesasio starting out with no shields is real rough. The cloak helps a lot for dodging the first volley, but it's useless against beam weapons, and past the first couple sectors, trying to keep their weapons down with dual lasers and a mini-beam can be a hopeless endeavor.

My hope is to make it to the last stage of the final boss. If I can manage that, I should have the "Avoid 9 damage in one cloak" achievement in the bag by dodging the power-surge attack. But it looks to be easier said than done.

I also have yet to unlock the Slug Cruiser or the Mantis Cruiser, which is sad, since I really want to try them out. I know the Mantis one is about boarding, and I doubt it'll be much better than Carnelian, but it could still be fun. And with the Slugs, I really just want to kill their crew with Fire Beams or Anti-Bio Beams or whatever sadistic crap they got going. (And the telepathy ability is neat.)

My first victory on Normal. Woot.

I have to admit, those beam drones may be weak against a lot of encounters, but against the Rebel Flagship's final form? Wow, do they tear through the super-shield. And that Glaive Beam, too. Doing work.

This was with the good ship Carnelian, which is getting to be one of my favorite layouts. SPOILERS.

Starting out with a teleporter and cloak and three awesome crew members for fighting -- pretty awesome. On another ship, I'd have to drop 75 scrap for that teleporter and another 150 for the cloak, but Carnelian gets them free, and even has Crystal Vengeance to sell for another bonus 40 scrap. And as if it weren't good enough already, the teleporter has four squares, so it can send in some truly frightening boarding parties. Oh, and of course, you get more scrap when you win by killing their crew. Naturally. With a loadout like this, who needs weapons anyway?

Crystals are awesome for boarding. They've got extra HP, so they fight well, but more importantly they can use their special ability to lock down a room. So you can teleport into their weapons bay and activate lockdown to keep them from getting in. Your crew gets to go to town breaking their weapons unmolested, and if they manage to fire off a salvo before the systems go down, just cloak up to dodge it. And then once the weapons are down, you can fight their crew without fear of their medbay: just lock down the room when they get low on health, and they won't be able to escape.

Automated ships and Zoltan Shields are a pain in the ass, but picking up a beam or laser weapon isn't too difficult.

It's also got a pretty decent layout. The most important systems are grouped together on the left side. The teleporter is right next to the medbay. The airlocks are positioned so that you can keep half the ship perpetually vented to fight fires and make boarders' lives very difficult.

In this run, I goofed up and let two of my Crystals die, so I couldn't chain-lockdown. That made things more difficult; the enemy was often able to break through into their weapons room before I could finish destroying it, and I frequently had to make strategic retreats so Maloney's lockdown could recharge. However, I picked up two Mantises and a Rock to round out my boarding party, and I even found up a Slug so I could see the enemies' positions without needing to worry about my sensors.

I found the Glaive Beam towards the end, and it tore the Rebel Flagship to pieces. I just sent in my boarding party to kill all but one of their crew (don't want the AI to take over), and then destroy the shields. Fire bombs took out the weapons, and the cloaks and upgraded engines held back the surge attacks. With the shields down and no crew to repair them (since the one remaining crew member was isolated in the laser room), I could rip into the unprotected hull for 9-12 damage at a time, and the enemy went down in short order. I took so little damage, I didn't need to use any of my nineteen available Hull Repair drones.

END SPOILERS.

So, woot!

If I had known I were going to successfully destroy the Rebel Flagship, I would have given my ship a better name!

[here is where I would post a picture of the victory screen if I were on my computer instead of my Kindle]

But default name or no, the good ship Shivan and her crew managed to pull off a harrowingly-tight victory against the juggernaut of a final boss that is the Rebel Flagship. The first form was easy--teleporting my guys directly into their weapon systems left them completely impotent. The second form was tougher: I had enough dodge and cloak to deal with the drone spam, but the boarding drones and their hull breaches took out one of my crew before I pulled it out. The final form was the hardest. Its uber-shield made it impossible to effectively damage. I had to send my boarding crew to sabotage the missiles, since they ignore my shields, but that left them unable to attack anything else. I timed my cloaking to dodge the surges but I couldn't dodge everything forever. They scored a hit to set my engine on fire and things started to spiral, but luckily by then my saboteurs had gotten to the shields and my lasers could tart tearing them up. Slowly. Slooowly Slooooooowly. While they were puking lasers and missiles at me.

But we did it! With our ship burning and our hull critically damaged, Shivan's crew fired the shot that destroyed the Flagship and made them the heroes of the Federation. I can only assume there was a medal ceremony with an epic soundtrack afterwards.

FTL: Faster Than Light

I heard about this game on reddit the night before it was released. It was one of the earliest games to get funded through Kickstarter, or so I'm told. FTL is a space game. Basically, it's a roguelike-esque game where you play as Star Trek. I watched the gameplay video and I decided right there and then that I was gonna buy this game. So the next morning I mashed F5 on the developer's website until I could buy it. Then I bought it. Then I installed it and played it for about eleven hours. Yay!

I even did a video stream of the gameplay that nobody watched.

So anyway, I'm happy with this purchase. Uh...hmm...yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. I might be slightly in a sleep-deprived space-exploration trance right now.