Cheaters never prosper

[barsooma]

So having become frustrated with trying to unlock the crystal ship, but not yet ready to download a save file, I decided to make things a bit easier on myself.

Downloaded bitslicer and started poking around, things began innocently enough with just a little scrap infusion, enough to buy me some nice engines right off the bat on each run... but of course I couldn't stop there.

The next step down my dark path began when I amassed a lovely collection of weapons (easy when you're paying with fairy gold!), but couldn't upgrade enough to charge them all at once. Hmm, I wondered, is there a way around this?

Indeed there was, by careful memory tweaking I found I could equip a weapon, reduce the weapons system load, then equip the next! A ship with 4x4 power weapon systems is a lovely thing, especially with the pre-igniter. But while this was exciting, it required a lot of tweaking whenever an ion hit or nebula disabled one of my weapons - almost more trouble than it was worth.

Suddenly inspiration struck - perhaps I could tweak the upgrade level itself!

Now the universe was truly mine for the taking - teleporter lvl.4 (instant recharge!), medbay lvl.5 healing my crew in under 5 seconds, stealth so long i got bored timing it and lvl.6 shields, basically impenetrable. Drunk with power, I was altering memory left and right.

And then - disaster.

Warped into an asteroid field, paused and prepared to unleash the fury of my glaive beam on the unsuspecting enemy. Imagine my surprise as before the beam even finished, the enemy ship exploded under the near-simultaneous impact of a dozen asteroids. Then my horror as I realized my shields were down and my hull was at 75%. Even my maxed-out engines weren't up to dodging this, and a few seconds later I had joined the enemy in destruction, a victim of my own wanton manipulation of reality.

[CrazyDave]

Similar thing happened to me, though I wasn't messing with the game files.

I was playing in the Crystal B, and I was nearing the final sector. I was facing a drone ship, and I found that his weapons were incapable of penetrating my shields. I also had a weapon that wouldn't penetrate his (some burst laser of some kind), and so I just sat there for a good 10 minutes while I grabbed a snack, farming up crew skills.

The very next battle, I boarded the enemy while opening fire on their medbay. ...Sadly, I forgot to turn off autofire, and the enemy ship was destroyed without my realizing it, with my awesome fully-trained four-man boarding crew gone down with it.

The game knows when you're messing with it. I swear it's partly self-aware.

[boa13]

Imagine my surprise as before the beam even finished, the enemy ship exploded under the near-simultaneous impact of a dozen asteroids. Then my horror as I realized my shields were down and my hull was at 75%. Even my maxed-out engines weren't up to dodging this, and a few seconds later I had joined the enemy in destruction, a victim of my own wanton manipulation of reality.

Excellent post, thanks for sharing your adventure on the dark side!