Gaming

Finally. First the mission stats:

Ship: Kestrel Model A

Ships defeated: 38
Beacons explored: 100
Scrap collected: 2114
Crew hired: 7

Augments at Flagship:
Scrap Recovery Arm
Long-range scanners

Weapons at Flagship:
Burst Laser Mark II
Burst Laser Mark II
Glaive Beam
Artemis Missile

Drones at Flagship:
Defense Drone Mark I
Hull Repair Drone

The Federation scout DemUnderground departed with its crew of three, Pilot Obama, Engine Specialist Carter, and Weapons/Shields Specialist Clinton. Early in the first sector, President Obama made the controversial decision to forego an early medbay upgrade and instead bumped up the shields to L2 at the earliest opportunity.

This immediately paid off when a pirate armed only with a basic laser and a beam weapon unwisely engaged. The crew spent approximately one hour practicing evasion and shield restarts, resulting in each President being fully upgraded to L2 in their primary fields, L2 in a secondary system, and L1 in a third system before dispatching the pirate with the Burst Laser. With these skills, the crew of the DemUnderground always evaded more shots, powered up their weapons first, and restored power to shields better than all enemies.

The Burst Laser Mark II installed at the outset proved more than capable of dealing with all early opponents, and permitted the DemUnderground to explore approximately 85% of the beacons in the first two sectors. Also in the first two sectors, the DemUnderground acquired a teleporter and a Scrap Recovery Arm, which allowed it to upgrade most of its systems early.

President Obama noted a rare opportunity to jump through seven civilian sectors, allowing the DemUnderground it to stay within friendly territory for the entirety of the mission, no doubt assisted by the sterling diplomatic skills of the crew. This allowed the DemUnderground to visit numerous stores along the way, while hiring a highly capable two-Mantis away team, but not before both Presidents Carter and Clinton leveled themselves up in hand-to-hand combat skills (President Clinton leveled up in every category: Piloting: L2, Engines: L1; Weapons: L2; Shields, L2, Repair: L1; Combat: L1.)

Eventually, a friendly Zoltan was hired to permanently man the shields, though the occasional expertise of Presidents Carter and Clinton were sometimes required while the fragile Zoltan healed himself. The two-Mantis away team kept the scrap rolling in, 50-70 per ship sacked. In Sector 6, friendly Zoltans provided a Glaive Beam, which allowed the DemUnderground to saw through all automated opposition and all but the most powerful Rebel ships. Once weapons were fully maxed, six laser bursts and up to 20 hull damage from the Glaive beam made destroying ships easy. Critical late-game acquisitions were a cloaking system and a hull repair drone.

Tragedy struck in Sector 7 when two random and unforeseen incidents resulted in the death of both Mantises. The hasty acquisition of a Slug crewmember left only this one rookie available for roving repairs and as an away team in the final battles.

Knowing that the final boss would likely damage the Glaive Beam and keep it unpowered for most of the fight, missiles were carefully husbanded and the Artemis missile system had no less than 46 missiles to fire in the three boss battles. Over half of them were used in the battles to come.

The first battle with the flagship went quite well. The Defense Drone Mk. I handled incoming missiles while the weapons focused on the enemy's rocket weapon, set fire to it and breached the hull, resulting in the death of the crewmember assigned to it. The Flagship's ion weapon did not go down as easily, but once that weapon's crewman was severely injured, President Obama assigned the rookie Slug to teleport in, kill the crewman, and manually destroy that weapon. When the flagship fired its spread of rockets and lasers, President Obama deftly paused and engaged the ship's cloaking system. Eventually, time was found to power up the mighty Glaive beam, ripping through four rooms and killing three enemy crewmen who were desperately trying to keep the shields online.

The second battle did not go nearly as well. Massive swarms of drones and missiles quickly damaged the cloaking controls, and the DemUnderground took twenty-tine out of a possible thirty points of hull damage. With five hit-points left, President Obama himself left the controls to repair the nearby drone system, as the DemUnderground floated helplessly in space, while Presidents Carter and Clinton heroically restored the cloaking system just in time to hide from another power surge. The Slug was again teleported into one of the now empty weapons rooms and eventually disabled the Flagship's rockets. The DemUnderground was aflame from stem to stern when President Obama restored drone control and made the critical decision to start popping off hull repair drones instead of defense drones. In the meantime, the Artemis missiles again pounded the enemy shield room until only four enemy crewmembers remained when it jumped out. No less than nine more hull repair drones were required to restore the DemUnderground to full hull integrity, leaving it with fewer than ten drone parts going into the final battle.

The third battle was complicated by an unforeseen event. While waiting for the enemy Flagship to complete its jump to an adjoining sector, a Rebel cruiser moved into attack range and deployed an away team onto the DemUnderground. Rather than fight this insignificant enemy, President Obama jumped away with two boarders trying to break through the DemUnderground's maxed blast doors. Then, on arrival in the Flagship's sector, two more boarders teleported into the Medbay.

Doubting President Clinton's ability to connect with the enemy weapons, President Obama dispatched the Slug into one of the weapons rooms while the Artemis pounded the other. Presidents Carter and Clinton, retaining their combat skills from the early sectors, evacuated the room the two non-Flagship interlopers were trapped in while heading to the medbay to take out the other two. About the time the two in the Medbay died, the other two intruders burst in, choking and nearly dead. Once dispatched, Presidents Carter and Clinton ran to the engine and weapons rooms, greatly improving the evasion and weapon charging of the DemUnderground.

Now, with only two crew members left and one highly damaged weapon (the Slug was still trapped aboard the Flagship in a dead weapon room), the Flagship proved difficult, but not entirely possible to deal with. Every minute or so it would either fire a massive burst of lasers, which could be dodged by cloaking, or it would deploy a ten-shot Zoltan shield. The two Burst Lasers and the Glaive Beam eventually managed to cut through the Zoltan shield, and once it did, the Glaive provided one final ripping blow that killed the enemy crew and destroyed the ship in the same shot, so that the enemy AI never took over the Rebel flagship.

Presidents Obama, Clinton, and Carter were the first and only crew to succeed in defeating the enemy Flagship, unique among ninety tries by other, less fortunate crews. It could not have come at a more opportune time, as the Great Girlfriend who controls the ultimate fate of the FTL universe and all who dabble in it expressed her concern that FTL might be becoming an unhealthy obsession for a certain someone playing it.



However, the victory unlocked a new Federation Cruiser, so it is entirely possible that FTL will not remain dormant for long....