Missiles can be very annoying since they can bypass any amount of shields you have to deal damage, and can also start fires on create breaches. In sector 1, you can encounter a lot of small missiles and usually don't have reliable answers (Cloaking, Defense Drones, Zoltan Shields) for them.

And sure, you may be able to dodge one, especially if you have cloaking, but you might not be able to disable the weapon by the time it fires another missile at you, especially if it’s a small missile (Leto or Artemis) with a fast charging time.


However, there’s one very useful thing to know: when you damage an enemy’s weapon system, the weapon(s) with the longest remaining charge time go down first.

That means if you cloak just after a missile is fired then put one point of damage (or more, but not more than the missile’s power level) in the weapons, the missile will always go down.

If you don’t have cloaking and the other weapons are not too scary, it can be correct to wait for a small missile to fire (and tank some damage) to ensure you disable it.

You don’t always want to disable all weapons, but you always want to disable a missile. If you see the missile go down and the other weapons are not dangerous, just aim for other systems (unless you’re confident you can destroy the weapons in one volley). Otherwise the missile might come back online sooner than you want.

This is very useful when the following conditions are met :

• you see one ion weapon (or several with similar loading times), enough to disable your shields
  
• those weapons are paired with hull damaging weapons which will fire after the ion

What will happen is that the ions will disable your shields, and then you will take damage from the other weapon… unless you flash your shields.


Flashing your shields means manually disabling them for a short period of time. Ideally, you disable them just as the ion weapon fires, and re-enable them soon after. Timing is key: ions are slow to travel, but so are your shields to recharge. You want your shield bubble(s) to be up just after the ion(s) hit your ship.

If done correctly, the ion will strike a non critical room (Oxygen, sensors, empty room), and then your shield will absorb the damaging shots. Worst case scenarios involve the ions hitting your weapons (you just lose a bit of time) or your shields (which leads to the same result as not flashing your shields).


Don’t just auto-flash your shields as soon as you see ion weapons, however. If you see an Ion Blast (8 seconds) with a Heavy Laser (9 seconds), or a Heavy Ion (13 seconds) with a Mini beam (12 seconds), there’s no point in flashing your shields. The damaging weapons need to fire a good 2 seconds (probably 3) later than the ion weapons.

Of course, if the ion damage isn’t enough to bring your shields down, then don’t bother. Which leads to another tip…

The power bars given by the Zoltan are immune to ion damage, from any source (including pulsars). Which means if you stack two Zoltan in the shield room, you have a shield bar immune to ion damage (which can make you invulnerable in some fights).

It is not a good idea to have two zoltan permanently stationed in your shields. But you can learn to recognize the situation and move them there if you can take advantage of it.

Hull damaging beams (meaning all beams but fire and anti-bio) are superior to other weapons because :

• they can’t miss (you can use them to destroy piloting at the beginning of a volley, starting your swipe in piloting is very often a correct play) ;
  
• they can fire through enemy cloaking, provided you had preemptively aimed them (selected a room on the enemy ship to start the swipe from).

Yes, a beam needs to be complemennted with other weapons, or hacking, to bring down shields. But a beam adds a lot of consistency and damage output to your volleys.

Remember a n-damage beam can pierce n-1 layers of shield!


Mini beam is amazing (fast charge, 4 damage for 1 power, possible fires).
Hull beam is very good (14 seconds to charge – syncs well with fast weapons liks Flak I, BL I and II, Heavy Laser I).
Pike beam is not as good as hull beam (Slower, hard to efficiently use the long size of the beam sometimes) but very good.
Halberd is amazing (a bit slow with 17 seconds, but 2 damage per room hit is worth that price).
Glaive beam is usually too slow and power-hungry.

If you have Hacking level 3 and cloaking level 2, you can hack the weapons, then cloak when your hacking is finished. The hacking will come back online before the enemy’s weapons can fire, allowing you to permanently shut them down.

That means you have to be able to beat the ship without hacking shields (to lower them) or piloting (to nullify the enemy’s evasion). Also, if you can’t hit the enemy consistently they might run away. That is not a no-brainer choice – think and evaluate the enemy defense and your offense!

Turtle strats are very good on boarding ships, since you can just kill the crew. Still, it’s not auto-win either, since you need to be able to deal with medical units or anti-personal drones. That can be done with clever manipulation of the AI and not necessarily weapons, but again, be aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

Enemies will always try to meet up in the room where the first boarding party is heading – that includes mind controlled crew. So if your shields guy gets MC’ed, and then you’re boarded in piloting, the latest boarding party will try to reach the shield room and ignore your other crew and system – until the MC’ed crew gets killed or comes back to their senses.

Enemy boarders will not stay in a vented room, unless they’re figthing there. A quick way to dispatch enemy boarders is to vent the room they’re in, and send some crew to fight them and block them here. Pull of your crew when they’re low, heal them (or clone them later), and see the enemies suffocate.

Because of this, you can also force enemies and MC’d crew out of critical systems (piloting, weapons, shields) and into the medbay.

Sometimes your enemies board a 2-squared room (like piloting) and start fighting your crew 2v1 in there. You’ll notice if you mind control one of the boarders, he’ll leave the fight instead of helping. However, you can pull your crew member out of the room – the MC’d enemy will turn back and fight the intruder. After that, you can get your crewmember back to their post and they fill fight in a 2v1.

Enemy ships always want to have a pilot, as much as possible. They will also prioritize shields when it comes to defense and repairs.

Want to mind control an enemy to get several of them in the room? Target the shield guy if it’s a 4-squared room, otherwise the pilot.

Need to take care of a medbay with boarders? Double board, bring the fresh boarding party in shields and the other one in the medbay to smash it. Or just board, MC the shield guy and then go smash that medical unit.

How do you know what’s going on the enemy ship without seeing anything on it? Well, you always see at least one thing on the enemy ship: the doors. By looking at doors, and how many of them open and when, you can gain valuable intel.

Some ship layouts always have 2 crew (which means one in piloting, one in engines), other have more (so there will be extra crew in weapons, shields, etc.).

See two doors open after shooting a 2-crew ship? There’s a fire in there. Same if you see one door open on a 3-crew ship after shooting weapons, or another non primary manned system. If you see any door open after shooting a primary manned system (piloting or engines), there’s also a fire in there. This also applies to breaches, but you only need sound to know they’re there.

For instance, a fire in a 2-squared room gets 2 crew members here. They will stay unless they put out the fire (and then both repair the system) or flee if their health gets too low.

On the contrary, if you see crew leaving a 4-squared room, in means there are 4 fires. The AI will always give up fighting those.

Looking at which door first opened, and the obvious destination (damaged system), and then the speed at which other doors open on the way there, you can also guess who is moving, judging at the differences in speed. Super slow door activity? There’s a rock. Fast? Mantis. A door opened in drone control after you damaged weapons? There’s a system repair drone, etc.

Learning to recognize movement patterns on the enemy ships can help you getting crew kills (using fire, abusing mantis repairs on the oxygen), and in turn, better rewards. When you play ships with sensors, try to memorize the ship layouts, and the crew’s patterns when reacting to system damage, fire, breaches, etc. With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to exploit them without sensors as well.

Note: this can apply to your own ship as well. You can listen to the sound of fires to know if there's one on your ship (you can also look at your systems' icons, but remember there can be fires in a systemless room). When enemy boarders are on your ship, you can know where they are by looking at which doors are taking hits (if they're attacking a system, a fist icon will appear above it).

This is especially relevant with subsystems, since buying systems isn’t really an option. Some ships do not start with Sensors, and the Rock B has no Doors subsystem. There’s also the Backup Battery.

Now, buying doors is honestly kind of bad, because they’re way too expensive ; on the contrary, the Battery is pretty cheap, and usually a good buy (although not a priority). But things get interesting when it comes to sensors.

As you’ve already learnt by now, you don’t need sensors to know what’s going on on the enemy ship. But buying sensors, if you have 40 scrap to spare, can have two beneficial impacts in the long run:

• it removes them from the pool, which means any other store you see after the purchase has more chances to show you actual systems ;
  
• it gives one more system for the flagship to hack, and a sensor hack is basically no threat to you.

Of course, it doesn’t mean you should always buy sensors, especially if you’re already behind on scrap and / or have more critical purchases. But there are niche situations where those two benefits make the sensor purchase a correct decision.

This one is fairly easy. Whenever you see Defense Drones or Anti Drones on an enemy ship and still want to hack, well, follow these steps:
1. have your hacking system at 1 power
2. launch your hacking drone
3. wait for the enemy drones to fire and immediately deactivate your hacking
4. the enemy shots miss
5. reactivate your hacking immediately after
6. profit

Now, it’s easy but you want to pay attention to the angle the drone is using to fire. If the drone’s cannon is straight in front of your hacking drone’s position, just deactivate your hacking preemptively and wait for the drone to move. Basically, you don’t want the defense drone’s shot to follow a vertical or horizontal line – the angle must give a diagonal line instead. That way the trick will be easier to perform.

That trick also makes the Defense Scrambler pretty bad.

Some ships start with no weapons (Crystal B, Mantis B, Fed C), or with systems you don’t want to use (the artillery on Federation ships is trash, and you shouldn’t build your ships around those).

If those systems get destroyed, don’t repair them until you feel you will actually use them. That way, if a fire gets in the system and you can’t put it out quickly, you won’t take one extra damage due to the system breaking – since it will already be broken.

NOTE: this is a debatable advice, as the enemy AI is not going to target a broken system. Sometimes, like on the Fed C ship, you'd rather have the enemy ship target a useless system than your Oxygen or Teleporter (thanks to tiberiansun371alexw for pointing this out in the comments).

A comment to add? A mistake you think I've made? A suggestion?

Please let me know in the comments section below!

Thanks for reading the guide and have fun in FTL!

Note: there have been some very good suggestions in the comments. Thanks to everyone who commented already! I might not have the time to update the guide with news tactics based on the feedback I received there, so if you want to learn morn hidden tactics feel free to explore the comments as well!