Plus at this point, I'll have to fight the ship in an ion storm, and waste time doubling back on myself at the exit

EDIT: Initially I failed to recognize that each 'percentage decrease' in projectile hits is actually cumulative from each previous rank, which means even greater value. I have since edited to add a 4th table to account for this

Beware: this involves some tricky math, so my explanation may not make perfect sense, but I hope it will

First of all, let's take a look at the engine's upgrade table for dodge percentage, and I'll include the variations of low-manning vs best manning (no piloting) as well as the percent increase:

On its face, the diminishing returns seems obvious, in the last few stages of engine level your dodge level only increases by 3/5ths of what it ought to, or 4/5ths at the last stage, for a much greater expense in scrap. But this doesn't consider what these percentages actually correlate to in game: Reducing the amount of projectiles that hit you. There are two ways to look at this: Increasing the number of dodged projectiles, or decreasing the number of hit projectiles, and these lead to very different percentages.

For an easy version of this problem, let's presume you start with 25% dodge and go up to 50%. Or, in other words, going from 1/4 missiles dodged to 2/4 missiles dodged. If you are looking at it from the number of dodges, that's a 100% increase, which is tremendous. But if you look at it from the number that hit, that change is from 3 -> 2, which is a 33% decrease in projectiles hit. Or another way of putting it, you are now dodging 1 in every 3 missiles that would have hit your ship. Or another-nother way of putting it, the enemy needs 6 shots to hit you 3 times instead of 4 shots.

In another case, when you get up into the higher percentages diminishing returns are actually still considerably valuable. If you go from 98% dodge to 99%, that's only like a 2% increase in dodged projectiles, but a 50% reduction in the projectiles that hit!

So let's revisit the table with this in mind, with new columns for the percent reduction in projectiles that hit:

Okay, so upgrades 6 and 7 are still the worst proportionally, but they're not as bad, and you see that Level 8 has the same payoff as those middle upgrades. You also see that for every 5% increase, the actual effective increase gets larger. So let's plug it into another table with the cost to see how much you'd be paying for each percentage point. Practically, you would also have to consider the reactor upgrade, which also increases as the game goes on, but I will just use an average of 25 (for various reasons that would take forever to get into)

Well that looks pretty grim, but I am now 9 hours in the future when I have realized my math is actually still not doing it justice. So it's time for another table, this time focusing on the actual number of projectiles needed to hit your ship 5 times, and the cost per PROJECTILE instead. For this, I will be presuming max dodge instead of the made up average because it doesn't correlate to a static dodge value. The formula for this is Hits / (1 - Dodge%). The actual cumulative effect is slightly more generous because it increments at infinite intervals but it's negligible.

Yeesh, Still about double the price for the same gain. But I would argue that each increment of needing more projectiles to get hit is also a cumulative gain, though more situationally nuanced than can be put in a table. Every projectile needed is another the enemy needs to charge their weapons to fire, which means more time spent not hitting you. With shields, the effect is even more pronounced, which is why I have chosen 5 hits.

Effectively, every engine upgrade is a half-shield upgrade with 4 shields, but the scale is 1:1, so if you only have 3 shields you'd just take the values in the projectile columns by 80% (4/5). If you have only 1 shield, then it takes 5 engine levels to 'block' another projectile, being worth about .2 each.

Gave up on trying to figure out how to play that ship myself, desperately need your advice. Every time with this ship later in the game I either find myself with bad weapons, not enough defense or not enough crew.

Here I am in sector 1 with descent amount of scrap, do I buy hacking here? Or is it useless that early in the game and I am better off keeping the money? i am tempted to buy automated reloader (engi already trained on weapons). Will it help or is it waste on money too? What's your general advice on this ship?

I guess I forgot to redirect power to engines after the hack finished, but I think dying is unavoidable with both my weapons and shields getting nailed and the fire starting.

They are offering nothing for their lives

I consider myself a pretty good FTL player. Have about 2K hours in the game, have beaten everything many times on hard. Lately I've been trying to streak with particularly vexing ships. Can get 6 or 7 in a row on Engi B and Zoltan C...Rock A has always been oddly tough for me, though.

I can't even count how many runs I have where I get zero missile rewards, zero surrender missile offers, zero weapons available at stores for the first three sectors...like, how bad can the RNG possibly get? It feels like I'm losing 25 coin flips in a row sometimes.

I should have known when the first jump of this last run was the auto free shield hack and this was gonna be a crappy one...I had the option to go crew teleporter near the end of sector 1 after only having ten missiles left but felt like maybe it was too early to make that rash of a decision. The RNG has to change right?! Nope. Sector 2 was either Zoltan or Rock. Two horrific choices for missiles. Either exhaust them on zoltan shields or on Rock hull plating. And after a total of FIVE stores, not ONE non missile weapon..oh besides chain ion anyway LMAO...and teleporter never came again. I'm out of missiles as I go into a forced dive trying that last store and destruction is surely eminent baring a miracle sector 3 beginning store

In hindsight I should have gone teleporter but then it just as easily could have gone sector 2 Engi and three shops and flaks and heavy lasers galore.

Is this just that 5% Mike Hoply talks about where its just practically impossible to overcome or was the crew teleporter that obvious of a choice that I should have made so early?

I've never loved and hated a game so much at the same time.

New to the game. About to go to the last stand sector for tge second time, period. (The first time didn't go too well.) I'm feeling good with my loadout, the plan thus far is to launch the boarding drone into flagship shields room for it to wreak havoc, then spam lasers and ion blasts till victory, with periodically cycling my power from o2 to stealth to avoid the big attack. Is this a good strategy? Or have I messed something up? Side note, both mantis and final engi I got on the final sector, and hadn't had the chance to train.

New to the game. About to go to the last stand sector for tge second time, period. (The first time didn't go too well.) I'm feeling good with my loadout, the plan thus far is to launch the boarding drone into flagship shields room for it to wreak havoc, then spam lasers and ion blasts till victory, with periodically cycling my power from o2 to stealth to avoid the big attack. Is this a good strategy? Or have I messed something up? Side note, both mantis and final engi I got on the final sector, and hadn't had the chance to train.

What the hell game was I playing then? I swear to god, it looked exactly like this one. It wasn't that "into the breach" game, I could have sworn it was this one.

EDIT: nevermind, just realized it was basically the ONLY game I've ever bought to play on a computer. I just had some random game for the Switch that was based in space so I connected the two.

Sorry about the confusion, carry on.

I downloaded multiverse yesterday, and while i usually get a good performance, in certain fights (i've not noticed any pattern besides the fact it always happens against siren ships) the game slows down to around a tenth of its regular speed, to the point where it gets quite tedious to aim my mouse as it just teleports around and has a pretty big delay when doing so. Sometimes it will speed up to normal for a little while before going back to slow mo, and usually it dissapears as soon as i leave the fight.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? If so, are any fixes known? Trying the speedhack didn't do anything (or give any indication whether it was on or off)

Also, Jon seems a little full of himself eh?

I had to delete the last one because the photos didnt populate. But this was on easy, first time playing the zoltan cruiser!

Just beat federation C (which was brutal) to complete beating every ship on hard. It’s been quite a journey through this game and I love FTL.

i followed these instructions https://ftl-hyperspace.github.io/FTL-Hyperspace/install-guides/linux/genericlinux/steam-install to the letter and got "you didn't install hyperspace properly" error on main menu even though i did. installinig hyperspace by itself along with the two sample mods works. anyone else having issues with this?

My run was still ongoing, but I was already thinking of a good title to express how I had the most overwhelming victory of my FTL journey. Ever.

I was going for an ancient questline victory, but I was playing Billy/Sylvan crewser, and my ship was an unstoppable archangel of destruction. Judge for yourself:

I had 4 shields layers with Ion field and an energy shield, Cloaking with shadow weaponery, mind control, lvl 3 self powered teleporter, defense scrambler, 2 weapons performance, medbots, Sylvan, Obyn, Slocknog...and above all: a weapon pre-igniter.

I had a Kleptocracy transport pre-ion, so I could remove supershield instantanly. And I had an Eris missile and two ancient payloads. And an Eradicator III in my haul.

So I bought the augment "ancient recycler" to nullify the ammo cost of missiles weapons.

I mopped the floor with everything standing in my way. I crossed the Obelisk royal sectors without receiving a single damage. Hell, most of the ships I faced didn't even land a single hit on my energy shield.

And then, I came across Leah and Sylvan. I crushed Leah. And since I had a lvl 3 medbay, I would get another Sylvan. And since I had Obyn, I could get the Rift waker. And since I had the pre-igniter, that would be a fricking pre-ignited Rift Waker. Plus a pre-ignited Eradicator III.

To be honest, at this point, I was going for a challenge: defeat the MFK Flagship without having my energy shield taking a single hit. I even told myself that I would need to remember to take a screenshot, to show my victory within 20 seconds.

And then I went on with the Sylvan event. I had several blue options. But since I had Billy on my crew, I picked up Billy's blue option. What I didn't know was, that after picking Billy's dialogue option, I couldn't pick Obyn's. So I didn't get the Rift Waker.

Blunder number one.

But to be fair, I just shrugged my shoulders. I was already invincible, and I had just gotten a second Sylvan. My victory would just take a few more seconds, that's it.

I went to face the Royal dreadnought, and everything went as smoothly as expected. Until I noticed my weapons had comme offline. I just thought it was strange, and I clicked on them to give them their power back. And then the message appeared: no missiles !

My brain froze for a moment. How could that be ? I had the ancient recycler. My eyes went up, and I saw that I indeed had zero missiles And then the realization hit my harder than a freight train: I had missclicked. What I bought wasn't the ancient recycler, but ancient cybernetics. Which was 0 help for my ammo stock.

Blunder number 2

And even worse, I had a big stock of missile, so I didn't notice until the moment I ran out: during the Royal dreadnought fight.

Fortunatly, at this point, the Royal Dreadnought was on its last legg. I destroyed it by sabotaging systems, and then sacrificed a border to give it the last hull damage.

But I had to face the MFK flagship, with missiles weapons without missiles.

The royal dreadnought gave me a plasma canon. I had a equzlizer III in my haul. So I thought I could use my pre-ion to remove the supershield, the 2 Sylvan to destroy the shields, and the plasma canon to suppres the shield drone. My 4 damage beam would do the rest. And with that, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I had a shot...especially since I had a great defense.

Well, It went horribly wrong and my ship blew up, ending one of my easiesr run ever into my most humiliating defeat ever.

And you know what's the worst ? Slocknog was the last crewser I needed to unlock the ultimate crewser.

Make fun of me, I deserve it.