Boarders and Sun jumps

[BKT]

Kestral_A does have a major but not-so-obvious weakness in that the ship is extremely vulnerable to on-board hazards (fire, breach, boarders), much more than almost all other ships IMO.

[Jason_Webb]

Thanks for the advice! I'll try to put em into use.

[UltraMantis]

Kestral_A does have a major but not-so-obvious weakness in that the ship is extremely vulnerable to on-board hazards (fire, breach, boarders), much more than almost all other ships IMO.

Not really.

The game engine does not treat ships differently when it comes down to such hazards. Sounds like just extra bad luck. The only difference is the placement of airlocks, as a few ships take a longer time to vent air or make it difficult to vent the ship without venting important station.

Not to brag, but i have never even considered playing on easy. But if normal isnt fun to play, by all means switch. It doesnt lead to bad habbits like in some other games. If anything, easy mode would make more sense with certain ships that you can unlock because the Kestrel is a well balanced and fairly strong ship. Probably the easiest ship to win with.

[BKT]

The only difference is the placement of airlocks, as a few ships take a longer time to vent air or make it difficult to vent the ship without venting important station.

That's what I'm talking about.

Kestral_A's Medbay is very far from the O2 room, which can be deadly if you have bad luck with solar flare + random missiles. And most of the airlock are very far from the important (systems) + vulnerable (subsystems) rooms (which also vary far apart from each other) as well, made it difficult and risky to vent the room to deal with boarders and fires when you don't have a good crews. Not to mentioned that her start-up crews are terrible to deal with this kind of problems.

On the other hand, because of its layout, I found Slug_A to be surprisingly resilient to these problems even if you sold the slug repair gel and have shitty crews (i.e. 2 slugs).

[UltraMantis]

Curses, there's my bubble burst. I allways touted the Kestrel as a ship without weakness.

[afedyuki]

Not to brag, but i have never even considered playing on easy. But if normal isnt fun to play, by all means switch. It doesnt lead to bad habbits like in some other games. If anything, easy mode would make more sense with certain ships that you can unlock because the Kestrel is a well balanced and fairly strong ship. Probably the easiest ship to win with.

^This, pretty much. In this game, Easy mode is good for learning to play a new ship or learning to play in general as there are no game mechanics changes from normal. Just a bit more scrap and bit easier opponents so that you can get away with few mistakes and experiment a bit.

[Mataza]

That you need your mans at the consoles to win the ship battle is an illusion. The only important position is the helm, as you need it manned for the jump to charge and to have evasion at all.

Also as long as your medbay has oxygen, you don't need to fear venting most of or the whole ship. It's possible with cycling repairmen(Kestrel has 3 men) to repair the door and the oxygen system without any of them dying.
Send full hp guy out to repair, wait some seconds, send next, when he arrives, pull the first one back to heal and send the next out. May need practice for the right timing.

It's important to abandon stations if you need manpower and to vent freely. If you fear doing either, you will probably have a high rate of dying.

[BKT]

I still remembered this sequence very clearly ....

1) - Battle = Enemy mantis ship + Flare
2) - 2 Mantis tele over door control; venting the room is ineffective since it won't be fast enough before it will be destroy and only left you with lots of airless room without door control. Engine+Weapon system crew abandoned to fight them.
3) - Solar flare destroy O2 and put it and the medbay on fire; no ploblem, I'll just vent the engine room+O2 to put the fire out plus save the engine from catching fire and sent the 2 crew to deal with the fire in medbay + get some medical care and let the mantis destroy the door control, I'll kill the mantis and just fix the door later, then I will deal with the O2 later once I'm done with the battle.
4) - Door destroyed. 2 Mantis ran to the Helm.
5) - Once the fire in the medbay is put out and still have some oxygen left, sent 1 men with most HP left to the helm to help fight the mantis, and the other guy to fix the door.
6) - Artemis hit and destroy medbay and hull breach it...
7) - After the enemy ship is destroyed, sent all 3 guys to fix the medbay.
8) - Solar flare imminent; couldn't deal with yet another fire in the helm or the medbay since I barely have O2 left, sent 1 guy to the helm and jump away
9) - All previous explored area are under rebel control; jump to a new area.
10) - 4 human boarders event; my crews do not have full health but still desperately try to kill the boarders inside medbay.
11) - Medbay ran out of O2; all the enemies are almost dead now, and so are my crews, but they have 4 guys vs mine's 3...
12) - Evacuvated all my crews the to front of the ship, where there's still some air, in hope that all the boarders die by the lack of O2
13) - Wishful thinking; medbay destroyed and 4 guys with yellow health bar ran into the room that I put my 3 crews; they all have red health bar...
14) - All my crews were killed and my ship are left to drift for eternity.

Good strategy can help cover the ship's weakness; but only to a certain degree...

[AstralStorm]

With upgraded doors, you should've just vented everything except medbay and door control vs the mantises. Even with door control down you should be able to repair it later. Not sure whether to vent or not the O2 room, as you can get unlucky with missile hits.
The mantises would've been softened enough by the vacuum for the crew to take them down with minor rotation.

[BKT]

With upgraded doors, you should've just vented everything except medbay and door control vs the mantises.

So that the enemy ship can happily throw missiles at my ship? No thanks...

I did killed all the mantis; it's the pressure of Oxygen being blown up by the flare early in the fight + a lucky missile that hull-breached my medbay + another flare coming + the 4 human boarders right in the next jump that I finally succumbed...

At any rate, it's quite amazing how trivial it is to deal with on-board problem on Slug_A ... Non of my system ever get destroyed by boarders even with only 2 Slug crew. Fire can be dealt with easily using the same tactics (for the most part at least), and hull breach is self-repair. It's so much less hassle in comparison to Kestrel_A.

One of the notable different between the 2 ships is the placement of engine room and the airlock:— Kestrel engine is right next to the airlock, Slug is in the deepest part of the ship. So a stark difference of philosophy between the two ship is that Kestrel is bad at dealing with hazards but can quickly jump away to (if lucky) safety when thing gets really bad, while the Slug have to be turtling through the whole mess with fewer crew available, but is less prone to a catastrophic failure and can recover from said situation during battle more readily, which I can confirmed this from my experiences.