History YMMV / FTLFasterThanLight

* DemonicSpiders: Plasma Storms, a randomly occurring environmental effect in Nebula nodes. Running into one cuts your reactor output in half and depowers systems at random accordingly. Your enemy, naturally, has no such issues. When you have to juggle power between your weapons, shields, engines, and life support, you can expect the enemy waiting for you to put some big holes in your hull before you make it out of there.

** BeamSpam. If you can manage to get more than three multi-beam weapons on a single ship, you can totally overwhelm any defense. Barring unlucky misses, one barrage is often enough to significantly damage or cripple a system with one volley, as long as you use an AlphaStrike. No need for strategy or tactics, just target their weapons to take them out of the fight, then either blow them up or board and kill the crew. Combine with either a cloaking device or the aforementioned pre-igniter, and even the flagship will go down in short order.
** [[spoiler: The Crystal people.]] Their ability to lock down a room, preventing anyone from entering or leaving makes whoever you are facing in the room outnumbered, outgunned and unable to escape, ensuring a certain death. Combined with their extra HP and tolerable speed, and you have the ultimate boarding crew. Their Type B ship takes this even further, with a 4-capacity teleporter right next to a medbay, and you start with three [[spoiler: Crystal people.]]

** The Weapon Pre-Igniter. Being able to open fire the moment a fight starts typically lets you crush any opponent who isn't completely immune to your arsenal. Even the final boss is a lot easier to beat thanks to being able to shut down some its more powerful abilities on the spot.

* GameBreaker: The Weapon Pre-Igniter. Being able to open fire the moment a fight starts typically lets you crush any opponent who isn't completely immune to your arsenal.
** Since 99% of ships will have 4 or less shields having enough laser weapons on your ship allows you to abandon any sense of subtlety in favour of simply {{BeamSpam}}ing your enemies to death to overwhelm their shields then hit the actual shield generator, very few ships can withstand more than a couple of strikes of this kind before being left defenceless. At which point you just take out their weapons and shields constantly until they surrender or blow up. Combine with either a cloaking device or the aformentioned pre-igniter, and even the flagship will go down in short order.
** [[spoiler: The Crystal people.]] Their ability to lock down a room, preventing anyone to enter or leave makes whoever you are facing in the room outnumbered, outgunned and unable to escape, ensuring a certain death. Combined with their extra hp and tolerable speed, and you have the ultimate boarding crew. Their Type B ship takes this even further, with a 4-capacity teleporter right next to a medbay, and you start with 3 [[spoiler: Crystal people.]]

** Boarding drones. They pass through shields, cause a hull breach in the section they impact, can't be suffocated, and are incredibly hard to kill. Oh, and if you manage to kill one, the enemy will just send another, which will put ''another'' breach into your ship. If you get hit by one, hope it doesn't hit anything vital and destroy the enemy's drone control before it causes too much damage.

* ThatOneAttack: Missiles in general are much hated by just about everyone without a defense drone. It's not that they're powerful (early on they do one or two damage a pop), it's that they pass through shields. Especially in the early game, this hurts a LOT over time. Later in the game, enemies can field larger missiles that do as much as four damage per hit.

** [[spoiler: The Crystal people.]] Their ability to lock down a room, preventing anyone to enter or leave makes whoever you are facing in the room outnumbered, outgunned and unable to escape, ensuring a certain death. Combined with their extra hp and decent tolerable speed, and you have the ultimate boarding crew. Their Type B ship takes this even further, with a 4-capacity teleporter right next to a medbay, and you start with 3 [[spoiler: Crystal people.]]
* GoddamnedBats: Slugs in general, with their system-disabling shenanigans. Add in that they live in nebulas, which people already tend to avoid for its sensor-disabling annoyances and the aforementioned plasma storms, and you get one really annoying race to deal with.
** Ion weapons, especially either Ion Blast or Ion Bombs.

* ThatOneAttack: Missiles in general are much hated by just about everyone without a defense drone. It's not that they're powerful (just two damage a pop), it's that they pass through shields. Especially in the early game, this hurts a LOT over time.
** The flagship's first power surge, the drone swarm, is possibly the single most damaging attack in the game. If your shields go down for even a second, you WILL be feeling the pain. It also has a tendency to sync with the triple laser firing or the triple missile connecting with your shields. You'd better pray that their Halberd Beam isn't also up.

* ThatOneAttack: Missiles in general are much hated by just about everyone without a defense drone. The triple missile launcher the Flagship has is especially reviled.
*** Missiles are different from the usual ThatOneAttack, in that they don't actually do more damage than their laser counterparts. Why are they hated? They completely bypass shields. Especially in the early game, this hurts a LOT over time.

* DemonicSpiders: Plasma Storms, a randomly occurring environmental effect in Nebula nodes. Running into one will dramatically cut your available reactor power and depowers systems at random accordingly. When you have to juggle power between your weapons, shields, engines, and life support, you can expect the enemy waiting for you to put some big holes in your hull before you make it out of there.

** Boarding drones. Appear on your ship through shields. Cause an instant Hull Breach wherever they appear. Attack your systems and crew. Incredibly difficult to kill. Best hope they didn't appear anywhere critical and try to go for the enemy's Drone Control.
*** Don't forget "have no need to breath", so you can't suffocate them like normal borders, either.
*** Just destroyed the boarding drone before destroying the ship? Awesome, they'll send another right away which will put ''another'' breach into your ship. Fortunately, the drones stop after the enemy ship or drone system is destroyed, and they can be blocked with a Defense drone.

** It takes some luck to pull off, but having enough laser weapons on your ship allows you to abandon any sense of subtlety in favour of simply {{BeamSpam}}ing your enemies to death. Combine with either a cloaking device or the aformentioned pre-igniter, and even the flagship will go down in short order.

* ThatOneAttack: Missiles in general are much hated by just about everyone without a defense drone. The triple missile launcher the Flagship has is especially reviled.
** The flagship's first power surge, the drone swarm, is possibly the single most damaging attack in the game. If your shields go down for even a second, you WILL be feeling the pain.

* LawfulStupid: The Zoltan. They are members of the Federation your ship is on a mission to help save and are considered peaceful. They will also constantly harass you with legal requests and government business, up to and including attempting to arrest vital crew members or ''trying to kill you over customs disputes.''

*** Just destroyed the boarding drone before destroying the ship? Awesome, they'll send another right away which will put ''another'' breach into your ship. Fortunately, the drones stop after the enemy ship or drone system is destroyed, and they can be blocked with the somewhat rare Defense 2 drone.

** [[spoiler: The Crystal people.]] Their ability to lock down a room, preventing anyone to enter or leave makes whoever you are facing in the room outnumbered, outgunned and unable to escape, ensuring a certain death. Combined with their extra hp and decent tolerable speed, and you have the ultimate boarding crew. Their Type B ship takes this even further, with a 4-capacity teleporter right next to a medbay, and you start with 3 [spoiler: Crystal people.]]

** [[spoiler: The Crystal people.]] Their ability to lock down a room, preventing anyone to enter or leave makes whoever you are facing in the room outnumbered, outgunned and unable to escape, ensuring a certain death. Combined with their extra hp and decent tolerable speed, and you have the ultimate boarding crew.

** It takes some luck to pull off, but having enough laser weapons on your ship allows you to abandon any sense of subtlety in favour of simply [[BeamSpam]]ing your enemies to death. Combine with either a cloaking device or the aformentioned pre-igniter, and even the flagship will go down in short order.

* GameBreaker: If you happen to install both a Drone Recovery Arm and a Repair Drone in your ship, you can repair yourself to full hull, ''for free''.

** Just about every ship has a certain strategy they're just not cut out to handle. For instance, boarding parties for the Type B Engi Cruiser - if they take drone control offline, the lone crewmember is screwed.

* {{What You Are in the Dark}}: Subverted. Generally when ship attacking civilian events pop up, it's far more profitable to be on the "good" side, because it usually ends up getting double rewarded, by the salvage from the enemy ship and by the person in need of rescuing. If you aren't strong enough to take on the event with only minor losses, you probably aren't going to survive for much longer, since those will be the easiest fights from there on out.
** Of course, some other events are not so forgiving. Unless you have the correct crew species, weapon, or system to have a blue option, it is up to random chance if your heroics will only get your hull damaged, crew killed, or ship destroyed if you did it at low health.

* {{What You Are in the Dark}}: Subverted. Generally when those events pop up, it's far more profitable to be on the "good" side, because it usually ends up getting double rewarded, by the salvage from the enemy ship and by the person in need of rescuing. If you aren't strong enough to take on the event with only minor losses, you probably aren't going to survive for much longer, since those will be the easiest fights from there on out.

* What You Are in the Dark: Subverted. Generally when those events pop up, it's far more profitable to be on the "good" side, because it usually ends up getting double rewarded, by the salvage from the enemy ship and by the person in need of rescuing. If you aren't strong enough to take on the event with only minor losses, you probably aren't going to survive for much longer, since those will be the easiest fights from there on out.