Giant Bombcast 523: Realistic Wad of Flesh

WOO!

I love the thing!

Another fantastic title.

Nasty first

That time again.

NO EGG BEERS

Egg beer sounds like a bad time.

shave club

It's Tuesday!

When did we switch to this way of writing the Roman numeral 4?

$375 for iam8bit x playdead x realdoll

Hmm

Was excited for the 2 hour and 50 minute length, then the DOTA talk hit

I hope the PUBG emotes are just SOCOM dances.

Jeff is prepping for All Systems GoBots.

This is like the 4th time this month @brad has complained about the final boss of FTL. Going to post some things. FTL has long been a game I play while I'm doing something else: Downloading a game, or between matches in a tournament.

The final boss is all about having a good build and having a strategy to beat it. Know your enemy and know yourself really applies here, since if you go into that final battle ready for it the last boss is highly predictable and you're likely to win.

A: Get more Scrap. On Easy it's entirely possible to have all systems maxed out and every section filled out of your ship at the end of the game or close to it. Like, you might not have doors and oxygen fully upgraded at the end, but every other system should be maxed out if you played correctly.

1: Explore better.

I: This means you have to explore a good chunk of each sector. Avoid green sectors, especially later on, and emphasize red and purple ones. Always check out distress signals and try to do quests as best you can. Once you hit the exit, you can often squeeze one or two more sections if you are willing to backtrack through rebel held territory- taking some damage backtracking is good if you get 50 or 75 more scrap. Ride the red circle as close as you can afford to to maximize stars hit. Plan your route before you even take the first jump in a sector to maximize any nebula and avoid dead ends.

II: Never accept surrender unless you're desperate or the game offers you something amazing. Generally a good idea to always take the hard way out of any situation. There's a few unique story events that are the exception to this It's better to take a risk in sector 2 and lose the game, then to go into the last boss unprepared.

III: Do whatever you can to delay the rebel advance! You need to hit as many sectors as possible.

IV: Sell stuff!

2: Get better equipment.

I: Scrap Recovery Arm is the best upgrade in the game, get two if you can and as early as possible. Even if you get it at the start of sector seven you can theoretically hit a shop in sector 8 to sell it and still come out ahead. After that you can avoid or sell the rest unless it's a recharge booster or a weapon primer. Decoy beacon also pays for itself after a few sectors, especially if you sell it in sector 7.

II: Especially on Easy, the best way to handle non-conflict events is to focus on sensors 3 and then medical bay 3, as the number of neutral events dealing with those two. When you're given a choice on a random crew member, go with one of a type you don't have. Diversity is a free lunch. You shouldn't need to buy a crew member at a store unless you lose one (though you can get them discounted for sale other places).

III: Killing the enemy crew is better than killing their ship, giving much better rewards. The teleporter is one of the best ship upgrades at every stage in the game. It's used in events, and is great against the flagship. Fully upgraded, it can even be used against oxygen free ships, so you only ever need other weapons to destroy medbays and chip damage unmanned ships.

IV: Upgrading your shields early will help with repair costs. Ignoring missiles, most enemies can't reliably level 2 shields until sector 3, level 3 shields at sector 5, and level four until sector 6 and 7. This gives you plenty of time to let your weapons sync up and slowly break down your opponent. I generally avoid upgrading until I reach the end of a sector, so I always have money for the shops and events if I need to repair and refuel.

Finally, even in sector 8 you can continue to get scrap, repairs, shops, and upgrades. Even after beating the first section, you can get a small reprieve of one or two jumps for a last upgrade or repair before you have to face section 2 of the boss ship.

B: It's all about a good build.

Avoid drone builds. Drone power level is front loaded, but are very expensive for how little they give you in the late game.

Weapons: Avoid missiles and beam weapons unless you find a really good one (3 or more power). Lasers stack with themselves, so any combination you have is good. Hull damage, breach, anti-crew weapons, fire weapons, heal weapons, and bombs all sorts are all lower priority and should be sold going into this last section if something better comes along.

While each ship type is different and most kinds of builds can win, there is one that I really like and recommend. With the Special Edition content, get these three items before sector 8:

Teleporter, Medbay, and Mind Control. Max out shields, engines, and get some decent laser weapons. I also like the battery.

On facing the first form, immediately teleport your best fighters into the third weapons bay from the left. The weapons bays are isolated intentionally to help teleport strategies. Quickly take down the occupant and destroy the gun. Teleport your crew back, heal them, and then do it again with the laser part, then finally the beam and ion cannon parts. Now the fun begins.

Slowly start mind controlling enemy crew and teleporting them to your own ship. This will take a while, but you will eventually kill the entire enemy crew, forcing the rebel ship into AI mode. Which, yes this sucks because the guns will start repairing, but the AI is generally much weaker than the humans and this will make the next two sections much easier. Use your guns to quickly take down the shields, teleporting and damaging the system if you need to, and destroy the first phase. If you do things right you should take almost no damage this round. Micro energy towards your engines early, and away from them as you take down weapon systems.

You don't need the mind control to do this, for instance you can hack the opposing medbay, take out their oxygen and keep that room locked, lots of techniques. Basically you want to use this as an opportunity to kill the opposing crew if you can. Otherwise, later stages are significantly harder.

For Phase 2, again, use your teleporter crew to take out the missile and then laser weapons. If you get a spare moment, teleport them into the drone section and try to keep each of these three sections red. Do all this while micro managing your crew to handle repairs and avoid the boarding drone. Use cloaking, if you have any, to avoid surge sections, otherwise try hacking the drone section. Once you have things stabilized your weapons can bring down the ship's shields and you can tear apart the ship. If you don't have a cloak, then micro a bunch of points into engines during these surge sections.

Phase 3 is easy if you killed all the humans in phase 1 or 2. Keep one point in mind control to mind control any of your crew that the computer tries to take over, but otherwise it's just a process of destroying the green shield, teleporting in to remove weapons and shields, and micromanging damage. It's possible for the computer to mind control one of your boarding crew, which can be awkward if they also regrow their shields, but it's a recoverable problem.

Now there are various builds and technical stuff you get into for the harder difficulties, but this is a very winnable fight if you go into it with a plan. When I do rarely play FTL anymore, if I make it to the final boss, I am almost certainly going to win.

===

It's not likely you'll ever play FTL again, but the point is that the end boss is a very beatable event that isn't really unfair. The difficulty of the game is in getting to that stage of the game with a build that can beat him.

@paulunga: I'm not going to pretend I came upon this info organically. I only read about it a few days ago because of all the Blops talk but writing out the Roman Numeral of four by way of four tallys (IIII) was the original way it was written. Writing the number four as IV was used much later during the time of the Roman Empire as a means of abbreviation. It was common to see both used in a single document. Ultimately they are both acceptable usages.

What I'm hearing from Jeff is he needs to head up the Ecco the Dolphin endurance run.

Any State of Decay 2 talk? Getting real interested in that one with all of IGN's videos.

Twisted, 3DO

I can't wait for Black Ops IIIII.

@kamui97: It's actually pronounced "Black Ops Eeeeeeeeeeeee" in the EU/Asian territories and "Black Ops Ayyyyyyyye" in the US.

I spent all day trying to think of the name of the other shitty Transformers knockoff. Finally, it came to me.

Robotix.

That was a well done Dota Plus segment. Props to Ben explaining it all and props to Jeff for having quite some knowhow about the compendium stuff for someone that never touches the game!

@onemanarmyy: there’s no such thing as a good DOTA segment. That filth should be kept isolated from the purity of the Bombcast.

Loved the minor http://ukresistance.co.uk reference

Black OPS III is weird, in my opinion; its one of my favorite in terms of campaign + multiplayer, in a modern sense. I played a bunch of that multiplayer and I still go back to it from time to time. I would like to give BOIV a chance but I'm tired of buying CODs and then hating them. "Fool me once" kind of thing.

I also am tired of everything to do with their Zombies mode...I wish they would just remove that and make it it's own thing and do something interesting with the co-op. I also hope they keep the co-op campaign hooks that they had in BOIII.

Reading what missions you need to do in Warframe is very, very easy. When you select a mission it tells you the recommended level range...just compare that to your level. What levels you need to do isn't really a thing, unless you're trying to complete pre-requs for a quest or item.

Wildlands is a pretty cool game that's ultimately lacking in variety. I also really disliked how the world did not change at all in the course of campaign progression. I just wiped out the cartel in this area...same amount of enemies still show, enemies always respawn at locations, etc. I enjoyed that game enough to get the platinum in it but there were still some complaints for sure. I need to go back and try the PVP content but I hear there is a bunch of balance issues, still.

is this where i comment?

@alexandrite: How I love when people come out of the woodwork to provide unsolicited gigantic strategy guides to people just to prove them wrong. ; )

well i for one am utterly appalled that both @jeff and @benpack would be so quick to dismiss the egg beer when its place is secured for eternity in the hallowed halls of cinema valhalla.

you know, cocktail.

Buahaha $375 for a mystery box. That actually feels insane. Even if I liked that game enough to want a collector's edition, I'd want to know what I'm getting for $375. That purchase requires a little TOO much faith.

Jeff talking about Burnout: Paradise is how I talk about SSX 3. Just this lively, fun world to mess around in.

I think I'm due for a full downhill run of that ridiculous mountain, it's been too long.

@ripelivejam: “This boss fight actually isn’t hard at all. Here’s a ten page guide on how to beat it.”

Firmware 5.50 also added Supersampling

www.giantbomb.tv

PSA: Don't burn ticks. They get irritated and generate more saliva that secretes into your skin and increases the risk of getting a tick borne disease.

burnout paradise is a bad driving game. its an ok open world game tho

Uh, the last Smash came out simultaneously on Wii U and 3DS, Ben.

I know. All of that. Since writing my original comment I found out that that's how they do it in the Blops 4 logo.

Dota literally sounds like a virus you download into your life that infects your bank account slowly draining it until you are left with nothing....

After that DOTA talk, I'll just I am sooooo happy that I play League instead, because fuck paying for advantage like stats....

Kinda surprised nobody knew about the system-wide downsampling Sony introduced to the PS4 Pro in firmware 5.50. That's hardly "nothing," right?

@csl316: And like Burnout Paradise, upon revisit one realizes how terrible the SSX 3 soundtrack is but for a few saviors amongst a torrid mess of pop punk and Junkie XL remixes.

I don't understand why they're having such a hard time with into the breach. I found it to be pretty easy and usually go through my turns pretty quickly.

@alexandrite: I've beaten FTL's final boss at least a few dozen times on Normal, and I'd agree with most of your tips. So on the one hand, you're right, Brad is wrong that the boss is "impossible", but Brad is correct in generally thinking the final boss of FTL is bullshit and badly designed.

Yes, if you want to play the game as optimally as possible, where you avoid using drones, missiles, beams, etc., the boss is beatable. But the garbage part is that I've had plenty of perfectly fine runs where I have a weird weapon makeup where I had to play really creatively to do the fights, and easily made it through sectors 1-7. But say the stores in the last few sectors never offered me especially good weapons to swap out to. It's just not fun or well-designed that my perfectly valid (in sectors 1-7) weird weapon/drone combination has no chance to beat the final boss (in sector 8) because A) you need such a specific combination of ship systems to disable the flagship's OP weapons, and B) you need to ignore like 80% of the weapons in the game because they're "traps" that will generally not help you get past the especially high defense of the final boss.

The game has so many weapons, drones, and augmentations that can have value if you time them properly and micro crew and energy around well, but it's just bad that the final boss invalidates like 80% of those items because you can only afford to use the absolutely most reliable weapons and systems to overcome the boss' absurd missile weapon and completely maxed defenses. The Rebel flagship is the game's single major failing that would make me drop it from a 5-star game to a 4.5-star game.

I don't know if Subset has commented publicly on this, but I think the general fairness of Into the Breach's final encounter on the final island is a direct response to how much backlash they got about FTL's final encounter and how unreasonable it is compared to the rest of the game.

Plopping an egg into a beer and going bottom's up was introduced to myself and various other people I've met through the second season of The Wire where the dock workers in the morning go through this ritual at the bar they frequent before going to work.