Hey all.

OK so as some of you know I was very kindly gifted this game by Celton88

I love the design of the ship that is called the Osprey by the game but im having a little difficulty with the tactics to use. As you know it has its party piece that needs time to charge and a single gun. What should I focus on in the early stages?

Increasing its shield to give it a longer life allowing it to use the beam more,
Increase its normal weapon slots and try to get another gun ASAP (i did get a bomb transport thing that i always set to target the shield of ememies first and then the gun to their weapons.)
Also regarding crew, how do you increase the crew, in my initial game I found one on a planet and traded a slaver ship its life for another but that was it, and when i tried in the Osprey i never got another crew member at all

Osprey is great for turteling - you have a gun that always hits and goes through all shields. So build up your defence (shields first) and increase the speed of the artillery gun as second priority. [Pushing up shields to level two is pretty much a decent first step with fairly much any ship.] Get a defence drone or up your engines to 40% dodge next to take less damage from missiles (those become more frequent as you proceed).

You get more crews in two way: Through events in the game or by purchasing them (shops / slavers and in AE the one or the other event where you can recruit crew for a scrap payment). As everything else in the game it's random. Sometimes you'll get loads of crew. Sometimes I've had a run that I finished with just one or two peeps on my ship.

A level 2 medbay seems to be a good way of increasing your chances of getting crew from events.
Teleporter also helps sometimes but doesn't work too well with the Osprey...

Other than that, you basically need to survive long enough for the beam to perform its magic.
With the Advanced Edition I can imagine the hacking station would be useful for slowing down the weapon charging of enemy ships.
Saving your scrap for a cloaking decvice is not a bad idea either...

Regardless of the ship, I think the best systems are (in the order of preference):
1. Cloaking (although I don't think you can get this for the Osprey?)
2. Hacking
3. Crew teleporter
----------------------------
4. Mind control
5. Drone control

- Cloaking is very useful early on against missiles (a hull spared is a scrap spared), and especially useful against the Flagship's missile swarm and power surge attacks. Use it at the very second the enemy fires their missiles.
- Hacking drains the enemy shields really fast: that is if you can find an opportunity to launch the drone. Combine this with mind control: first possess the enemy pilot (their evade goes down at least 50%, if not 100%), then disable the shields. You're free to fire at anything then and it will hit.
- Crew teleporter earns you extra scrap during the main game, and in the bossfight you can go disable the singular weapon rooms with ease. Once their crew is (hopefully) dead, you're free to do whatever you want on that ship.

I'm not really fond of drones: I think most of them require too much power and their efforts are mostly minimal. Sure, they can help defend against missiles early in the game, but in the bossfight I think the power they require is better spent elsewhere. For example, once a combat drone gets any damage in, you're already at the mark where you're able to destroy the ship by yourself. Then again, you might be able to survive for a long time with just the Artillery beam, a couple of shields, and a defense drone (against missiles).

I'd say go ahead and experiment! Eventually, you'll find a setup you feel you're most efficient with.

You can now. From the list of changes -
"Federation Ship’s Cloaking: Federation Cruiser can obtain the cloaking system (or any other systems, up to the now standard limit of 8)"

Thank you all.

Ill try a few of these tonight

Sounds impressive. Lots of luck you must have had :>

The A and B layouts of the Federation Cruiser are among the best ships in the game. Turtling up and trying to rely on your artillery beam is a viable-ish strategy, though that alone isn't going to beat the rebel flagship.

The C variant on the other hand... seems sort of nuts. Like Mantis B and Crystal B, it starts with a teleporter and no weapons and the artillery beam is replaced with a Flak Cannon.

Yes, should have mentioned that up there. It'll see you through the first few sectors easily, but eventually you'll have to turn to offence. There should be enough scrap collected by that point though :).

One game, I got 4 burst lasers mk II (12 shots per volley, always in sync without manual intervention), max cloak, stealth weapons and 2 reloader augmentations.

For a non-missible/non-drone setup, it doesn't get much better than that. It was one of those few games where I took out the end boss without having to teleport crew to the triple missile launcher.

However, that's just luck which won't get you very far in the game if you play with the mindset that you MUST find augment X or weapon Y. Part of the charm of this game I find is that you need to come up with a viable strat on the go with what you find. It sometimes forces you to come up with some interesting combos.

I reckon it's designed for total nutters all right!

A possibly viable strategy for the Federation Cruiser C - which I haven't tried yet - could potentially be to use it as a suicide-bomber factory/transporter.

OK so you only have a 2-person teleporter, but Zoltans explode upon death, and you have 2 of them and a clone bay... Once upgraded you could have an infinite stream of Zoltan suicide bombers assaulting the enemy. All the while occasionally pounding them with the flak cannon for good measure. If the enemy is mostly beaten, send the lone Mantis in to clean up (turning the flak cannon off of course).