Idlemessiah said:
Are there items that you specifically aim to get before the final encounter?
How much harder is Normal difficulty?
Normal is a fair bit harder than Easy, but not nearly as luck-driven as Hard (for some ships; you need to have good airlock management to handle early boarders in Hard as most cruisers).
As for items...the "traditional" Flagship Kit is Teleporters + Cloak
Teleport to the enemy missile turret room, kill the crew and destroy the subsystem. Then proceed to Cloak-stall while it recharges so you can pick off all but one of the enemy crew. (don't kill the last one, trust me. Bad shit will happen.)
With Advanced Edition content, Hacking and Mind Control are both excellent new subsystems, though Hacking is better in general. With Hacking, you can employ a variety of strategies, though it perfectly supplements a boarding strategy. (I prefer hacking the cockpit to ensure a barrage connects at a critical time)
The weapon strategy varies greatly, but in general you want something to take out their shields quickly OR something that bypasses their shields to disable specific key systems.
-Ion Bombs are phenomenally useful; definitely a standout. With these, you can easily shut down the enemy shields, drone control, cockpit or medbay. It's extremely effective vs the Stage 3 Zoltan Shield too.
Some noteworthy weapons:
-Burst Laser MkII. Always pick these up. They're among the best general purpose weapons in the game. Stacked up, they can win fights on their own thanks to their excellent, ammoless damage ratio and good overall charge times.
-Vulcan Cannon: Similar to above, but it needs some stalling strategy to get rolling. Given enough time, an active Vulcan will destroy any ship by itself.
-Ion Blast Mk2: Basically required for beam strategies. With a trained gunner, it fires very quickly; enough to suppress any amount of shields permanently with enough time tolerance to miss a shot here or there. It's a boon for ships that only have 3 weapons slots, since it packs so much utility and combo potential into one slot (combos brilliantly with combat and beam drones too).
If you bought a Drone Control (usually a good idea)..
-Ion Boarders are the gold standard. They just wreak havoc inside the flagship. Boarding drones are a close second for the first and third stages.
Apart from that, Combat, Shield+, and Defense Drones are all very useful.
(Avoid Beam Drones unless you have a way of disabling their shields reliably and quickly.)
NuclearKangaroo said:
yes, its amazing i love how hacking is useful for everything even boarding
board a ship, once the idiots on the enemy ship start running to their med bay after breaking one of their nails battling your crew, launch your hacking device at their medbay, and as soon as it latches onto the medbay, activate it, the hacking device closes the doors and causes the medbay to decrease the health of the occupants instead of increasing it (i dont know if this affects your crew as well), its a really effective way to kill off those crew members that always try to heal themselves mid battle, its very hard for them to get out of the med bay alive
Hacking is fucking crazy OP.
The drone cost is so worth it, since there are so, SO many ways to just end an enemy ship's strategy with it.
