Stealth B Ship on Hard - Help, oh Gawd, Help

[Lutwidge]

Hello,

I'm fairly new to this forum and am hoping to get some advice - I've somehow crawled to a shop with a basically completely busted ship but a bunch of scrap and crap to sell. Trying to decide what to go for. Here's my twitch stream of it:

http://www.twitch.tv/zugaddict/c/4596246

For those not wishing to witness it first-hand, I've roughly 54 scrap, a Glaive Beam, a Laser Charger, and a Hull Repair Drone. No ship upgrades yet worth mentioning and am badly damaged: roughly 2 hull plates left.

My choices at the shop are various - I can get shields if I sell the Charger and the Drone, but then I'm left with little more than a few hull plates. Alternatively I can repair the ship and probably still have enough to increase my cloak (normally my first upgrade on this ship). There are various other things as well, such as trying to upgrade my weapons or even to ditch my glaive for the charger and, er, well, OK, that's probably very stupid. Anyhow, advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

[5thHorseman]

That's a pickle for sure.

L3 cloak is 50, you can afford that. I'd buy that, then sell the charger and/or the drone to fix up to maybe 10 hull total.

I also probably wouldn't have gone to the store. I'd have just bought the cloak and tried to muscle through. But I'm weird like that

[Lutwidge]

Hmm. OK, it's really, really tempting to get shields, but I suppose I wouldn't be able to power them anyhow. In a sense, shops are often the most dangerous things I encounter, as they often drastically alter my original plans, and not always for the better...

[5thHorseman]

I tend to ignore them in the first couple sectors unless I get gifted something awesome that I simply can't power or use (Glaive beam, hull repair drone) or a lot of scrap and I want something (It's hard to pass up sometimes if I get 65 scrap in the Red Tail. What if there's a flak cannon there?)

Also, in the Stealth A and B (C is a whole other thing and I've not really cracked it yet) it is possible to both get the next cloak AND 120 spare scrap before the end of sector 1 (Though almost never on hard mode) and in those cases I'll happily go to a store to hopefully get a quick shield.

But yeah, unless you know you can buy something, just skip stores. They're a wasted jump a lot of times.

[Twinge]

For the Stealth B, your 50 first scrap should always be spent on Level 3 Cloaking. This will be all the protection you need against anything that's not drones for several sectors.

The next most important thing is Hacking -- Hacking + Glaive is an incredibly powerful combo, and also lets your lack of Shields run longer if you're concerned with that. The existence of Hacking alone makes the Stealth B stronger than it was pre-AE.