ftl-faster-than-light
I just unlocked the slug cruiser and it seems extremely weak to me. Having only two crew members and no sensors makes fires and enemy boarders extra deadly. The shielding is only average, and the weaponry seems much worse than every other ship.
What strategy (including layout choice, build order, upgrade order, and combat tactics) will lead to defeating the final boss with the Slug Cruiser (either layout, on Normal difficulty) the highest percentage of the time?
I have beaten him 5 or 6 times now, all on easy. General strategy is:
4 points in shields, duh.
a dodge around 40%. This takes 4 power to engines and having both the engine crew and pilot crew be maxed out in their skills (actually, that's about 37-39% I think?).
Some good, old fashioned luck.
Plenty of spare crew. You'll need the usual party of Rogers and Hammerstien men to run around and punch intruders and also provide back up repairing. Don't underestimate that last part. Racing to get systems back to health ASAP can really help.
There's nothing fancy about how you attack. You throw every single thing you have at him, try to overwhelm the shields, and then do damage. My preferred strategy is beam heavy, but I will use launchers depending on what I find along the way. Since he's got excellent dodge and 4 shields, you've got to alpha strike every time you hit him (that is, fire everything or nearly everything). Once you damage his shields enough that you can get to critical systems easily, you still need to periodically attack the shields because they'll get repaired.
Another good trick I learned is do not fire your weapons as soon as it comes up. Wait till you can fire all your weapons at once for the first barrage. This will help overwhelm the shields helping you bring them down and damage them. Once the shields are down feel free to fire at will.
Now, ideally I would have something like Blaster mark III (5 shots, 1 damage each, 4 power), blaster mark 2 (3x1, 2 power) and maybe a heavy laser (2x2, 2 power). Or a small bomb launcher (underrated, it does 2 system damage). But really any number of things can work. I think I just beat him with the Kestrel using a Blaster Mk II, Heavy Laser, Halberd Beam, and Small Bomb Launcher. Obviously a crew member with maxed weapons skill is really important. Barring an accident, you should have that no problem. If you have less than 6 points of active weapons, you are probably going to have a rougher time of it. I prefer to have 7 or 8.
I will say this, I believe I have observed that e.g. the Heavy Laster (shoots twice, 2 damage each) will only eat 2 shield points up if it hits both times. I always like to have a blaster in my arsenal, but fate won't always help there.
There are two augments that, other things equal, really help in this fight:
The "decrease weapon recharge time" augment. Nuff said. This is always the augment I hope to get first unless I'm going early cloaking.
The "when you warp in all weapons are charged". You might think this one won't matter as much but do not under-estimate it. It's a free volley to open the fight!
With the first augment and a great gunner you'll be attacking every 13-14s at most I think. From there, it's back to luck. If he rolls exceptionally well on dodges (and you don't), it can go south and there's nothing you can do about it. I've lost to him with a number of promising ships for this reason. Tip your cap and go have a drink.
Cloaking is really powerful for ships who can get it, e.g. the kestrel. My poor federation cruiser is no longer cloaking eligible, but I have beaten the last guy several times with cloaking + cloak weapons. For form 1, the weapon on the inner-right side of the boss ship (actually, this one is always there but see below) is a freaking Gatling missile launcher. It shoots 3 missiles and it's super scary. I prefer to cloak when this is fired (and hopefully he'll be shooting other stuff too). Ditto for form 2. Form 3 will be something you have to discover on your own. Obviously if you run cloaking stealth weapons is a huge priority. But the 100% dodge you get from cloaking is really useful in the fight, so not having stealth weapons is not the end of the world. If I have cloaking I always try to get it to 3 points, but I consider 2 the minimum. That can buy you a lot of time to repair systems or deal with borders.
Doors 3 is really useful starting on form 2 of this fight (and really useful in the last few sectors!). I usually save that upgrade for late though.
Andrzej Doyle is absolutely right that boarders can be really useful in this fight. It's important to keep in mind that there is no one path to victory. After the beta update that took away cloaking Fed cruisers, I managed a few more wins. Mostly beam-heavy stuff but I made great use of bombs in two cases (I love small bombs because they only eat up 1 power but do 2 damage). I had a mixed-arms game (using some boarders) go really well until I ran out of places to repair and then lost in the second form.
Targeting priorities: Shields are first priority, obviously.
Lastly, it takes more luck. Sometimes you'll prepare to do this series of fights and have repair nodes/stores near by that you can use to stay fresh. Sometimes you won't. I have lost promising ships that way too - a node got swallowed while fighting the first or second form and I was too beat up to finish him. Them's the breaks.
It took me a number of tries to beat him, and it can get frustrating. Stick with it. You'll break through eventually.
The Stealth Cruiser does not appear to have built in Stealth Weapons capability.
For the sake of testing I upgraded the stealth capability so I had a maximum duration, engaged an enemy, waited until my weapons were charged and then stealthed. Upon first impression it seemed as though Stealth Weapons capability was built in, as I was able to fire both weapons while cloaked without being pulled out of cloak.
However, upon further testing it appears that the duration of the cloak was affected quite significantly once weapons had been fired:
In this image, I activated my fully upgraded cloaking system the moment I heard the enemy fire at me. This was just enough time for all of my weapons to come online, so while the game was paused (and I was taking this screenshot), I targeted the enemy ship with my two lasers and then unpaused the game:
You can see the lasers firing on the screenshot, I only unpaused the game for a brief second before pausing again, and as you can see this halved the duration of cloak. It appears that for each weapon fired about 20% of the overall cloak duration is removed, so if I had fired my beam weapon as well I would have expected the remaining cloak time to be around 30% of its total duration.
Firing the same weapons in the same way with the Stealth Weapons augmentation completely negates this drain on the cloak duration, so I can only conclude that no - the Stealth Cruiser does not have innate Stealth Weapons capabilities.
Best Answer
The slug cruiser is actually a fairly easy ship to win with, if you get over the initial hump. Use your dual lasers and, if pressed, the breach bomb to disable the enemy's weapons (a one-two shot with dual lasers will knock the shields down on early enemies and do damage to their weapons system), then immediately fire the anti-bio beam at the enemy crew (red dots) revealed by your Slug crewmembers' telepathy.
The goal is to kill the enemy crew before their ship explodes due to damage for maximum scrap. Obviously you must never use auto fire; timing is everything - the anti-bio beam will do nothing if the enemy's shields are up. Disabling the medbay on the enemy ship may be necessary, in which case a quick breach bomb should do the trick. If faced with an AI ship, destroy it if you have enough damage output to kill it without taking significant damage or get the hell out if you don't. You can also use the breach bomb to damage enemy crew, using the beam and the bomb at the same time should 1-shot most enemies.
Slugs' telepathy will provide you with a fairly good view of the rooms on your ship despite the lack of sensors (they see rooms adjacent to the one they currently occupy). If you believe there's a fire, but don't see it in the visible rooms, you can either send them to recon the ship or just vent the rooms you don't have sight of - slug repair gel will heal any hull breaches, allowing you to quickly regenerate lost oxygen after the fires are out.
Build-wise, you will want to find some extra crew as soon as possible, as well as upgrade your weapons and shield (standard procedure, really). Getting level 2 sensors will obviously help. Weapon pre-igniter is a good augmentation, because it allows you to disable enemy weapons before they have a chance to attack, and the scrap arm will make you even more obscenely rich.
For tips on how to deal with the boss specifically, see this question, but the most important thing to remember is that wiping out the enemy crew is the worst idea when fighing the boss, you should leave at least 1 of them alive.