Stealth B Ship: Stabbing my eyes out

[robolove]

Let's be frank here. This ship is bonkers. I've played 57 hours and beat the game several times, once with the Stealth A layout. I'm not stupid. So by process of elimination that leaves this ship. In about 15 games I made it to sector 4 once.

The whole crux of the Stealth A is in getting the first hit on the weapons so they can't return much fire. Try that with a Glaive Beam.

The Glaive Beam is supposed to make this thing a contender, but let's review the facts. You start with a 10 second cloak. The beam takes 25 seconds to charge. Most weapons are around 10-15 seconds charge wise.That means many times even if you wait till they fire to cloak they will still get another shot at you before your beam is charged. If they damage your weapons system you are out of business at minimum an additional 35 seconds. Ships with 2 shield bubbles only take 1 damage per room, meaning depending on the weapons involved they will still be able to fire at you while your cloak is on cool down and potentially can repair the offline gun and fire it again before your second attack.

Hope their layout keeps priority systems next to the weapons, like the O2. And hope they don't have many people to repair.

It can kill some sector 1 ships with one shot, which is thrilling. Unfortunately the number of combos that overpower this ship makes that pretty meh.

Supershields absorb one beam, meaning you have to make it 50 seconds before you can deal damage assuming your weapons system doesn't take a hit.

Drones are awful. They automatically get 15 seconds of free firing 100% hits before you can damage their drone system. Pray they're not beam drones.

Pray nobody has beam weapons, you can't dodge them and you can't cloak to evade them- they are either firing and hitting you or they are stalled while you're invisible.

Boarding parties are difficult because your medbay only holds 2 and you start with a Zoltan. He has to be in engines or weapons to take advantage of his power bonus. So pull the pilot and lose your 20% evade? Well sure, because engines and cockpit are already exploding. WHY NOT.

Which begs the question... You don't start with the damage absorption augment that the stealth A does. Why not? It needs it far more because it's destined to take more hits.

I can't see a viable use for this ship unless you get a new weapon ASAP. Lately I've been saving for shields but on normal mode that hasn't happened for me until halfway through sector 2. I can get teleporter in sector 1 but that doesn't solve the problem of taking damage, it just helps me get more scrap for repairs. And that's assuming you get extra crew immediately.

Anyway, at this point it seems like the warpgates must allign to have a good run with this thing. Like, facing craft with single fire lasers and missiles. How do you manage this thing? Put everything into upgrading engines? It helped me get to sector 4 but at that point you need shields and I don't know where the scrap is supposed to be coming from. Scrap doesn't grow on space trees, people.

/rant

[RandomGuy928]

I agree entirely. The Stealth B is borderline impossible to use, and the only amount of success seems to come from incredibly lucky runs.

The Glaive Beam takes far too long to charge for a ship with no way to absorb damage.

[Sporemaster18]

I haven't unlocked it yet but this ship does seem extremely hard. The only thing I can think of for this would be to get some other weapons and/or get the weapon pre-igniter which once I got very lucky and got it in sector 1 or 2 for free. It was a pretty epic run. Glaive beam, artemis, burst laser mk 2, heavy laser mk 1, and weapon pre-igniter. Made pretty much everything but the boss seem very easy.

[4lge]

I've seen one (actually three) attempts of playing this ship on YouTube. It appears extremely easy to get unlucky with it.

One hit on the weapon sys and you're extremely far behind and eventually lose battles even early, since shieldless (and evasion RNG isn't always with you). On the other hand, the inbuilt Glaive Beam is such a glorious weapon, cutting low-shield enemies like cheese if you get to charge it.

So seeing, the main problem seems that it has cloaking and evasion as the only means of protection and the risk of the one long-charging weapon to get interrupted by unevaded incoming shots, so we got two odds that are likely to work against you.

Raising this proposal of solution: Install special Augment to reduce Cloak Cooldown. (Shhh.! It's a Stealth Ship!)