[TIPS] FTL: Faster Than Light

Some tips for playing FTL:

• Opening doors that lead to the outside is an effective way of putting out fires.  Note that not all ships have airlock doors (e.g. the Rock ship does not).
• When trying to do repairs in a room with no oxygen, open all the doors around it to improve oxygen levels in that room.
• Get used to not using the autofire.  Many weapons work better when fired in sync, even if they have differing cooldown times (e.g. using an Ion weapon to disable the shields as you fire your beam weapon to cut up their hull).
• The Crew Teleporter is not worth it unless you're planning on really committing to boarding actions.  It helps a lot if you have:
• a large crew
• Mantis crew members
• crew with upgraded combat skills
• Note that the final boss cannot be teleported onto while their shields are up.
• Power down systems you aren't using.  If your pilot ran off to put out some fires and you don't have autopilot, you can cut all power to your engines.
• Your fourth crew member helps a lot, but the marginal value of crew after that isn't much (unless you plan on aggressively boarding).
• If you plan on using missiles in the final boss fight, make sure to buy EVERY MISSILE YOU CAN during the game.  The worst feeling is to have a whole array of missile launchers and no ammo.
• At the start of the game, remove a power from your medbay and put it towards engines.  Your medbay doesn't need power unless it's actively healing someone, and the extra engine power will give you more dodges.
• If you're already comfortably killing enemies without taking damage, consider saving your scrap instead of immediately putting it towards upgrades.  You might see something in a store that you want more than an upgrade, and you can always do upgrades at any time but coming back to a store is very difficult.
• If an enemy is crippled and can't fight back, consider using weapons other than missiles to finish them off, to conserve ammo.  Alternatively, if they don't have shields, an asteroid field may kill them for you.
• Consider shooting their weapons first instead of their shields to minimize damage you receive, even if it extends the fight.  This is especially true if they have missiles.
• If you have slow-firing weapons with long charge times, cloak will be very beneficial.  Cloak is much less useful for fast-firing weapons.
• Beam I drone will not do any damage to shields and can't penetrate them either.

Weapons:

• Ion weapons do "ion damage", which temporarily reduces maximum power available to a system.  For example, if you have a shield system with two power (provides 1 point of shielding) and are hit by an ion weapon for 1 ion damage, your shield will power down (since two power is required for each point).
• Ion weapons that hit shields will also inflict their ion damage on the shield system first.  Only after the shields are down can ion weapons damage other systems.

Sectors:

• Nebula sectors will increase the total # of systems you can visit before you need to run from the Rebel fleet.  While individual stars will not slow the Rebels down as much as nebulas in "normal" sectors, it still helps.
• "Homeworld" systems can have a quest that allows you to pick up a race-specific ship for your next playthrough.  Note that this applies to "[Race] Homeworlds" systems, not "[Race]-controlled" systems.

Final Boss (Rebel Flagship):

• The first stage of the boss has lasers, ion cannons, missiles, a beam weapon, and cloaking.
• The second stage the boss has missiles, lasers, a beam weapon, and both offensive and defensive drones.
• When its "power surges" it will spawn a large number of drones to shoot at you for a short period of time.  Have your repair crews ready, or cloak to avoid all the damage.  You can also damage the drone subsystem ahead of time.
• The last stage the boss has lasers and missiles.
• Your priority in every fight should be to kill the triple missile launcher (middle-right gun).  Otherwise it'll keep doing consistent damage against you by bypassing your shields, and it's unlikely you have enough defense drones to shoot them all down.
• Damage isn't carried over from battle to battle, but the crew size is.  If you can, try to whittle the crew down in the earlier battles to make later battles easier.