I have a game in progress at the moment and I've managed to build my ship in a way that I'm really proud of. I have a clear strategy for using it too.

I have:

Augments: Weapons Pre-Igniter, Automated Reloader

Weapons (8 bars): Hull Laser II, Burst Laser II, Ion Blast II, Breach Missile (I have the two lasers and the missile powered before jumping so they're pre-ignited)

Drones: Ship Defence II

I also have a two bar teleporter and other stuff.

My fighting strategy is to immediately shoot the enemy shields with the breach missle. This does 4 damage and hopefully breaches their hull too. I then shoot the shields and weapons at the same time with the lasers. Then, depending on how that went I will either continue attacking (swapping the breach missile out for the ion blast II) or stop attacking and just ion blast their weapons (and power up the defence drone II if they still have a missile launcher active) while I teleport onto their ship and try and kill them all.

>=D

Just resumed the above game and beat the boss for the first time, yay! It hardly scratched me either, all the previous times I've arrived at the boss feeling well equipped I've had my ass handed to me.

Awesome! I just beat the boss for the first time recently as well.
One build I was proud of was based with heavy shields and all bars in the teleporter. I had three rockmen and a mantis that I would send over in two waves, first for shields, while the enemy was focused on them I sent the others at their weapons. They would then go room to room and finish the job. It was great :D!

My most recent win was with the Osprey. I had 2 defense Drone Mk1s, a Burst laser II, a Burst Laser III and the Pegasus missile launcher that shoot 2 missiles at a time. For Augs I had 2 Re-Loaders and the Med-Dispersal. That Med-Dispersal helped so much against boarding parties, I had each post manned and a human and mantis that just went around doing repairs and fighting boarders. I had enough fire power between the lasers and the Artillery Beam that I hardly ever used my missiles, I was actually selling them for scrap throughout the game and had a total of 38 when I got to the boss ship. I didn't have the engine upgraded as much as I would have liked because I went out of my way to search for and buy a Hull Repair drone. I figured I would need to repair my hull after each stage with the boss because that is the biggest reason I lost in the past. The joke was on me however as I went through the first stage untouched and only took 2 points of damage to my hull in the second stage. It was the easiest win I ever had.

You don't need to wait for the weapons to charge before jumping. You can jump directly after shooting and as long as you have power allocated to the weapons they will be fully charged.

Which is exactly what I said. :P

I said powered, not charged. Nice!

Adjudicator (Zoltan A) ship.
What it looked like by Sector 8:

Crew - 4 Zoltans, 1 Human, 1 Rock, 1 Engi.
Weapons - Ion Bomb, Halberd Beam, Laser Burst II, Heavy Laser I
Shields - 6 bars
Cloak - 3 bars
No drones, no teleporter. Max sensors and doors.

Augs - Zoltan Shield, Long Range Scanners (to avoid Stars and Plasma Storms, my great downfalls), and a Weapon Pre-Igniter

When the combat starts, I hit their shield room with an Ion Bomb, then use the lasers to finish off the shields and hit either drones or cockpit/engines. When the shields are completely down, I use the Halberd beam to hit as many rooms as possible.
Then I hit cloak, letting my weapons charge while preventing theirs from charging. When the cloak wears off, I repeat, hitting whatever rooms I need to.

Just beat the boss for the first time with that ship. (Game #53 - Normal) Barely scratched me.

My first win: Red Tail (Kestrel B) on easy

Crew: 2 humans + 6 different aliens:
- engi on the shields,
- zoltan on the engines so that I wouldn't have to bother him,
- the two humans on weapons and piloting,
- slug guarding the piloting to the left of the airlock
- rock and mantis at the teleporter,
- crystal wandering around repairing breaches (later repurposed as the raider because of lockdown, rock to be used for repairs and fires).

First upgrade went to med room for blue reasons; laser salvos made it possible to postpone upgrading other systems and buy a teleporter. Got an Engi during a slaver event and started using the solitary Mantis for boarding ships. Tons of scrap -> win.

Never found better laser weapons; went with 4 basic lasers until i found an ion blast, and then with it + 3 blasters until sector 7, where I replaced the second laser with the Pegasus to deal with cloaked self-repairing auto-assaulters. Sold beams immediately; beams need a lot of micromanagement.

Kept a ship defense drone I for emergencies; replaced with defense II and attack II for the boss battle. Both of those turned out to be useful.

Went through the game with the scrap arm and shield recharge (+pod), ended up buying two more shield recharges for lack of better options.

Final battle:
Okay, let's see... I need to leave that one guy alive so that the AI doesn't take over and repair the flagship. Done. Now, to damage the hull... crap, I had expected Red Tail's starting lasers to be useless and de-equipped them. What a waste of missiles... wait! I can smash every ship system and do hull damage! Let's do that!
...
waitwhat
why is the ship pink
...i smashed the oxygen generator
nonononononononono DON'T DIE
[the enemy crew is dead, their awesome AI takes over]

I'm really proud of The Torus Type A (The Engi ship) I used to finally beat the game on Normal just now. I got very lucky by gaining an early Burst Laser Mark II, but other than that it seems I made just the right choices. By the end, regular enemies couldn't get a single shot before I had already disabled their weapons completely, then it was just a matter of waiting.

I used the Ion gun (given at start) + the laser and one Mark I Anti-Ship drone, until I had enough laser weapons to remove the Ion (One Laser Mark II, two Laser Mark I). By then I also had two Anti-ship drones. Shields were maxed, and when I got the Cloaking device in sector 6 I think, every piece was set for victory. I'd power up the Cloak, wait for the lasers to charge (and while waiting, the drones did minor damage); then make a full blast for their weapons. It was really awesome.

In sector 7 I got two Zoltans to join, which meant I could put one of them to the drone room, effectively reducing the power usage by one. Since I had 5 power left, this would mean I could use all my drones despite being short of power. The other Zoltan was sitting in the cloaking room, so that I could have the max 15 seconds on the timer with just two regular power. To top it off, I got the Repair Arm in the final stages of Sector 7, and it was at this point when scrap no longer was worth anything to me. I already had pretty much everything I would ever need.

I made the mistake of firing the Flagship's guns with the lasers when I should've hit just the shields, and therefor lost maybe 33% of hull in the first battle. Then I switched tactics and concentrated on its shields in the other two fights, and the poor thing didn't have a chance. Sure, they got some shots through every now and then despite my defense drone blocking some of them, but the three laser weapons (that I could safely charge with the help of the cloak) and the two Anti-ship drones made short work of their hull before they could do any serious harm.

The ship was a total powerhouse by the end, and considering the limitations of maximum power in the ship, I think the only thing that could've improved the ship further, would've been the Stealth weapons augmentation, which I unfortunately never saw. But in any case, it wasn't really needed anyway in order to win.

I was so proud of the ship and I was 100% sure I would beat the Flagship, I put together a little collage of the ship, the gear and its crew. Here it is: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/135436/DiseasedProject/Other/FTL_TheTorus_normalmode.jpg

Oh, also it was on this run that I unlocked the Type B model. However, looking at it, I don't think I wanna touch it. Just one crew member? No cameras at all? No thanks. The pre-selected drones and the augmentation didn't look appealing either.

I was proud of my third game, where I was also playing with the torus type A, and had unlocked only the 'I hardly lifted a finger' achievement*. I managed to get both of the other two, level 4 shields, a crew of a human, 4 engi and a rock (and didn't have anyone die for my whole trip), two ion weapons plus a damaging bomb, a ship attack drone, ship defence drone (mark 1, and I'd deploy it only when the enemy had missiles) and a beam attack drone. I'd even managed to unlock the slug ship.

I was halfway across the final sector, about to reach the boss, when my computer crashed and I lost my autosave :(

*By mistake, as it happened, as I was attacked by a shieldless automated ship and while I was trying to repair my weapons from the previous fight, and I was only able to deploy the drone!

Just beat the game with The Nesasio. Really didn't think I would when I first looked at the ship. I was
really skeptic even when going to battle the flagship. But I did it nevertheless, and even got
all three achievements for that ship in that run too.

I was still in Sector 1, when one shopkeeper was selling the Glaive beam. Few jumps later I had
enough scrap to buy it. I invested in cloaks a lot, but eventually got the shield upgrade too.
Stealth weapons augment helped a lot once I found it in a shop later. Eventually I used the
glaive, hull laser II and the basic laser given at the start as the weapons. And it was actually
not that hard to take down the flagship after all. I waited for the weapons to charge, then fired
all the lasers at the shields, then the glaive wherever. Proved to be worth it.

One funny thing: usually I have like 300+ scrap left when I finish the game, but with this
ship/build, I only had 6 left. Don't know why that is. Probably due to the fact that I had to buy
all my weapons, when usually I find all that I need for free. Of course, with this ship there were
lots of hull repair costs too, especially since I didn't have drone control & defense drone to
protect me from missiles.

Beat the game a few times - some real nailbiters. You really need to farm those early sectors to beat the odds.

Anyway, I beat every ship handily from 7th and 8th sector (including boss) with

Kestrel:
2 x burst laser Mk 2
Ion Bomb

Full shields
Full stealth

Stealth weapons
pre-ignitor
(shield booster, I think?)

and a big crew.

pretty swish layout.

Slug cruiser, type A

Burst Mk 3. + Burst Mk. 2 + Dual Laser (= 10 shots in total)

Augmentations: 3 auto reloaders :)

All subsystems 100% upgraded (but didn't get stealth or teleporter). The 55% evade was pretty sweet.

Full crew.


The anti bio beam was pretty good for getting scrap early on.

I managed to get the best run ever with a Vortex (Engi B), full upgraded it was something like
Shield: 6 bars
Engine: 4
Weapons: 5
Drones: 7
Cloak: 3
Teleport: 3

I started the game just to unlock the stealth cruiser, and end up with my first victory (on easy, but still), three (!) ships unlocked - stealth, slug and federation - and a bunch of achievements, all in one run without losing a single crewmember.

Well, the RNG gods were simply on my side, i managed to stumble into every good weapon/augment possible: strong drones, cheap burst and ion weapons, pre igniter, adv. FTL, preloader, you name it... more than once i had to leave one behind because i was full.

Only concern was to shuffle the energy around, because running the Defence dron Mark II is quite costly.

I've just had the most awesomest run. On first glance this build doesn't look all that special, but, oh boy, oh boy ... it's probably one of the most evil approaches possible and I was cackling madly all the way through.

Imagine you are the captain of a rebel ship, or a pirate, or even a rock assault craft and a Slug Cruiser jumps in. You scan the ship - only equipped with week lasers, unlikely to go through your three shield strong defence. A few moments later there's a breach in your shield room and your down to a single shield. The two lasers take out the rest of it; a few seconds later the medbay is breached too, but your crew are busy repairing it quickly, only to see two absolutely enraged Mantis beam in, the moment it is sealed again. And then just right before your eyes Ensign Notch bursts into many tiny pieces as a beam, unlike any you ever have seen, rampages through your ship. That is also the last thing you'll ever see.

Slug ship (Layout A).
Dual Lasers (the ones you get at the start)
Burst Laser Mk II,
Breach Bomb II
Anti-Bio Beam (that you start out with)
Auto-Reloader
Pre-Ignitor
Slug-Gel

Teleporter, Cloak, Two Mantis (bought them at shops). Game play: Fire Breach bomb first - the level two ones creates a breach AND causes three system damage AND goes straight through shields. A ship with four shields is instantly down to two, and they can't repair the shields before the breach is gone. Two lasers bring the shields down to none and do even more damage. Next breach bomb takes out medbay, lasers bring down shields again, Anti-Bio Beam starts hunting people. The moment someone repairs the breach in the medbay the two Mantis beam in. And then it's really just an absolute carnage from there on. I made tons of scrap throughout, empting ships of crews within just moments and, eventually, maxed out all systems (not that it was necessary).

And now imagine you've just been made commander of the rebel flagship and this (see screenshot) happens. Boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Just a hunk of vacuum. [The last one remaining was one of the guys at the weapon stations - no where to run, and without any air.]

It's just a flesh wound.

Edit: Gah? Why doesn't it attach that image? Oh well. Uploaded instead -see the link.