Subset Games Forum

Hey all,
I have been playing this game for about 2 weeks now and I have beat it a couple times on the more weapon based ships in the first week. I finally unlocked the mantis ship variant B and everyone says it's super easy, I have played with this ship for a week straight and cannot do it. I get a full crew, I get full shields, good enough weapons, good enough engines but either I can't get out of the first sector without running into a rebel ship with a healing station so my hull just gets decimated by the time my crew finally kills theirs or I get to the second to last sector and run into a rebel ship that literally has the strongest missiles I have seen in this game, no joke like 9-10 bars of health per strike on easy, never happened to me on other ships. How can it be this hard? I want to throw my iPad at the wall! I created an account just for this post!! What am I doing wrong? Do I just suck? Help please....

As you've mentioned, it's extremely difficult to take down a ship purely with boarding with 2 crew if they have their medbay up, and slightly less so if they have their clone bay up. To this end, you need to drop the med/clone bay. Once it goes down, teleport on top of it to stop anyone from fixing it, and unleash the murdertrain.

Since you don't start with any weapons with Mantis B (it's the one weakness it has to start), then you need to find something to damage the med/clone bay. Ideally a bomb launcher or a missile launcher. Until then, you can launch your boarding drone. If it happens to breach the room with the med/clone bay then you've already won. Otherwise, it can provide the distraction you need to try to take down the med bay by hand. Finding more crew can also help this a lot, as sending over 4 crew (and a boarding drone if you're really into it) can pretty well out-bash a clone bay or medbay.

That said, sometimes you just have to wave off and chalk that enemy up as "unattainable" and move on.

The way I deal with those ships is try to engage in multiple fronts. First through the drone and them my boarders. It is possible to distract them enough in 2 sides with a crew member and a drone to get the last one into the healing bay and destroy it unoposed.

AS for the damage you take in the slow proccess. normally you don't. You have 2 shields and if they have missiles play the waiting game. Drop the defense drone first and play harrasing games. Missiles aren't going to go in most likelly and once they run out of missiles (and they do run out of missiles eventually) swap for the boarding drone and follow the previous steps. I't rare for the enmy to have 3 laser shots early on so it's somewhat easy to avoid damage with your 2 shields.