NJC2 wrote:One time I reached the final ship, and I had an anti-bio beam, a fire bomb and a couple of hull damaging weapons when I reached the final ship. I tried to kill off the crew using the anti-bio beam and fire bombs, and taking out the oxygen system, but I kept doing too much damage to the ship and it would engage its FTL and escape. I thought the enemy ship got a fresh crew after each FTL jump, but I guess I just didn't kill them.
*Spoilers below*
With the Carnelian crew it's of course easy to take out the rebel crew because of lockdown. However, even without crystal crew members, it's still a good idea to take out the crew (minus the laser cannon guy), since then all of their stations will be unmanned. This makes it much easier in future forms since the dodge-rate is lower, and there is no crew to put out fires (so taking out shields, or the drone station is much easier).
With a load-out like that, I'd actually recommend fire-bombing the cloaking room first, and using the anti-bio beam to hurt the crew who try to repair it. If you can get all 4 squares in the cloaking room full of fire, no crew will go in there anymore. Taking out the oxygen room is actually a bad idea - with the rebel flagship's high O2 system, it will keep the blaze going indefinitely. So you want to leave O2 untouched (similarly leave their door system intact, otherwise the fire might spread to where you don't want it to go...) After the cloaking room is gone, it's much easier to firebomb the med-station - again, once you get all 4 squares on fire, the crew give up on repairing it. Once cloaking & med station are gone, you can just teleport your guys in anywhere (I usually go to the scanners room) and start taking out the crew without worrying about getting stuck during a cloak. You could go straight for fire-bombing the med-station if you want, but I generally find that they'll cloak and have enough time to repair/put out fires. If you hit the cloaking station first, once that burns to red it's a lot easier to just keep peppering them with more firebombs.
A fire beam also works nicely with the above strategy, since you don't have to worry about missiles. You can generally get it to set fire to 3 squares in the cloaking/medbay right away, plus some extra fires in nearby empty rooms just to distract the crew.
With just the one guy in the laser room, you should find the other 2 boss forms a lot easier to fight!
. However, the hull stays maxed through the whole game, and all the crew survive.