14 DAY TRIAL // My last Gamer Diary for FTL talked about the nice gadget that allows me to jump into a new system with weapons ready to fire, giving me a significant advantage over my enemies as long as I have the firepower required to significantly cripple them with my first salvo.
When I got the Pre-Igniter, I was still using my starting burst laser, which is good at taking down shields, and my rocket launcher, and I soon got access to another Hull Laser, which is designed to do more damage to hulls.
I was still significantly underpowered for the later sectors, so I decided to hoard some scrap and visit every vendor looking for some better offensive options.
Unfortunately, the best I managed to find way a Fire Beam, a weapon that can be very effective but needs to be managed efficiently.
Basically I needed to take down the enemy shields and then use the fire beam to set fire to the vessel I was facing and take down subsystems.
The only big problem was that I knew that enemies with four shields were going to show up and my Hermes rocket launcher was a weak weapon when it came to taking down subsystems.
That’s when I lucked out once again in this run through FTL by killing one enemy in order to recover a Fire Bomb, which also uses missiles as a resource but instead of shooting it teleports a bomb to the enemy ship, ignoring shields, and allows me to target subsystems.
For the toughest enemies this allows me to jump in, send over a fire bomb and take down one level of shielding, then use both my lasers to take down the rest of the layers and finally take out one or two subsystems.
And that’s just in the first 30 seconds of the fight.