Persistence has its reward

[kiowa]

Today, when flying the Kestrel A, I jumped into a rebel rigger with my last FTL fuel. I had starting weapons, 2 shields and stealth. The enemy had dual laser + laser drone + defense drone (rendering my Artemis missile useless).

For the enemy, if both dual laser bolts land, then if either shot fired by the laser drone before or after the dual laser volley lands, I would take damage. I could mitigate some of this by hitting cloak when my shields are down, but the enemy could still do me damage from time to time. For me, I could only do damage if all 3 burst laser bolts land, and the enemy could patch up any system damage within 12 seconds, so I had no way of making subsequent hits easier. Also, the enemy had around 30% evasion I guess. And the worst part is that, even with full micromanagement of stealth, my hull still dropped quicker than my enemy's. So in short, I was dying a slow, agonizing death.

Soon(?),one by one, my crew leveled up, cutting me some slack, but things were still grim. Not too much later, my hull meter began to flash red. I set Artemis to autofire to see if I could score a lucky hit, to no avail. Both sides just exchanged laser fire calmly, until my gunner scored another 3 consecutive shots and some radio chatter broke the silence.

Guess what, the enemy captain broke down and offered to surrender some goods in exchange of their lives! And to my utmost delight, he offered 6 fuel. I took the goods, opened the star map, and found a store just next to me.

The game went pretty smooth afterwards and I beat the boss without losing more than 10 hull points. This is not my closest call (I unlocked tough little bird achievement without aiming for it), but I was extremely happy with it because I tried really hard. The victory never tasted so sweet.

[UltraMantis]

Congratulations!

Victory after such a close call does taste sweet.