FTL Tips for Wubby (and beginners)

I have almost 300 hours FTL and I really enjoyed seeing Wubby give it a try, so I wanted to give some tips to help him and other beginners jumpstart their FTL journey. Also, I don't think FTL is as complex/complicated as Isaac, but I'm happy to sherpa for you Wubby, if you would want it.

1. Pausing is your best friend. Things happen fast and you can pause at basically any point in the game to analyze the situation and route power and crew to different

2. Engines are the most important system on the ship; every upgrade to engines basically increases your odds of dodging an enemy attack by 5%. Having shields is good against laser based attacks, but things like missles can bypass shields, so IMO, in early game it's critical to focus on upgrading engines.

3. Timing of attacks is super important, if you find that you can't get a single shot past an enemy's shields, try to sync your missle and laser attacks to fire consecutivley. I.e. your missle will target the enemy's shields, and before they have time to repair the shields you fire your laser, basically getting a free hit on them.

4. This may be unintuitive, since your initial thought may be to avoid fights as much as possible, but the more fighting you do the more scrap and resources you get. So in an optimal run, you visit as many areas on the map as possible

5. You can't always win every fight, and it may be more adventageous to run away. However, you can only leave mid fight if you have a pilot, engines have atleast 1 unit of power, and your FTL drive is charged. Keep in mind that engines have to be on and the ship has to be manned to charge the FTL drive (another reason why engines are so important)

6. Like chat already pointed out, you almost always want to have a crew member piloting the ship, since without a pilot your odds of evading an attack is 0% (ignoring auto pilot upgrades)

7. Try to keep crew members on the same task for the entire run, as the more a crew member mans shields or engines, the more experienced they get and the better boost those systems get.

8. Fire is going to be one of your biggest enemies. Upgrading the door subsystem early can help prevent the spread, but using the vaccuum of space to extinguish fires are your best bet early game.

9. Most encounters will typically end in a fight, but sometime you are able to talk or haggle your way to a better opportunity, like free scrap or an extra crewmate, so don't be afraid to explore the dialogue trees. There are only a handful of random interactions that occur, so after a few runs you should learn the optimal choice for most of them

10. Different species have different specialties. For example, Engi are good at repairing things, while Mantises are good for fighting. This is something you'll learn as you play more, just try to be thoughtful of how you station your crewmembers

11. When repairing systems on the ship, if a crew member starts a repair then leaves, all repair progress is lost. So, if something is damaged and in a dangerous condition, like no oxygen or on fire, it is good to rotate crew members repairing that system. So send crew member A until they get low on life, send in B, then send A to the medbay.

12. Building on #3, if your weapons have a compatable charging time, you can set them to autofire immediately once they're ready. This'll help reduce the cognative load and allow you to focus on repairs or some other aspect of the game

13. This is less important, but a bunch of the buttons on screen have keyboard shortcuts, which can really help you enter a flow state while commanding the ship

Hopefully this list was helpful and not a waste of my time,

Stay Regarded!