Bought, became addicted to, and conquered said addiction of FTL in 25 hours. Was a bloody pain to beat the Flagship, I took like 5 times, first time was going in blind with default Kestrel A and not even getting past the first stage with its godforsaken 4 layer shields, and without drones and cloak to survive the broken weapons....yeah, went about as well as you would expected. Basically the first run was letting me get a hang of what the monstrosity is capable, probably wouldve been better if I didn't get scammed by loads of slugs events and lost my crew to bad micromanagement when I suffocated my shields operator. On the bright side, I think I unlocked layout B because of how noob I am and how many coincedences it took for me to even make it to The Last Stand. Its amazing, but I'll get to that later.
Took some notes, died a few times and again went for a second shot after reading some general tips (didn't cheat on knowing what the Flagship has on the next stages), because of luck and stuff and I realized I needed to prepare all I could, so I avoided all nebulaes and hostiles if I could, and went in (still with Kestrel A), and proceeded to arm myself with (I think) a charge laser thing and a missle launcher, bought cloak, hack and drones, didn't have enough power for them all unfortunately, and I still wasn't comfortable with teleports, so yeah, survived initial wave of triple missles and lasers just fine, but then I got royally screwed up my butt.
After this I was starting to doubt if the A layout is even suitable for the boss fight, because I was having so much difficulty amassing enough firepower to take on the boss, I started experimenting alot with the B layout, unlocked the C layout, Torus and the Stealth Cruiser along the way, was having loads of fun skirmishing enemies in the early. With that very simple autofire (target systems, bam, win) and fantastic anti-boarding airlock system, its a walk in the park to collect scrap and make it to the lategame, therefore I also attempted a few not very serious runs when encountering the flagship, but, while I do sometimes gain enough firepower to actually do damage (and avoid some of them) on these runs, the most Ive made it was always to the 2nd stage, and always I will get slaughtered by the drones. I tried a combination of hack+drone+cloak, but none of those worked. Besides, with scrap going into the additional firepower its often difficult to also be lucky enough to level up my engines and shields.
I've had one serious run with the red-tail, after all of these trials and resets, I was bloody determined too. I felt like I had to make a run for it when the star map revealed that I have a clear line of green sectors, meaning more peaceful encounters and less risky events. I happened upon a powerful (but very scrap intensive) fire beam and charge laser + teleporting bombs combo which means I can deactivate the shields and choke+burn the flagship, allowing me to constantly put pressure on their shields system and kill the crew who would otherwise be repairing the flagship, it went surprisingly well, even without upgrading drones, my upgraded shields and engines were barely enough to outlast everything but the missle barrage, but finally, very irritatingly, my fate was sealed when I got their entire ship on fire and was about the kill the rest of the crew, an inopportune missle deactivated my shields, forcing me to reroute power to my engines instead, but beams don't give two fucks about evasion, they care about me not having my shields only, and the AI rekted my ship, hard. I was fuming furious.
I thus took a break from the red-tail and tried out one trip with the Nessasio A, the beam was suprisingly nice, since it has about the same power as red-tail (abeit with more micro) and I am already pretty comfortable with cloak usage. I was one shotting ships and taking even less damage than I would from usual red-tail (since cloak is cloak, after all), and before I knew it I made it to the flagship again with a halberd beam and teleporting bombs, I actually don't remember very well how I lost this one, but I pretty easily rekted its first stage because beams are op, but I knew without killing off the crew I can't survive the power surge in stage 2, so I took a detour to a repair station and instead got ambushed by a rebel elite...mopping off the few hull points I have left as I exploded pathetically....yeah, that was stupid.
Final run was done earlier, I happened upon 4 mantises and I knew I had to make a boarding focused build. It was pretty fun because I spent very little on weapons, I pretty much used exactly what I salvaged since I got a mixed bag of goodies, I got an ion bomb, two heavy lasers (pretty useless) and a small bomb, bypassing shields with ion and bombs is fun because I can then lock down their medbay as their crew helplessly cower in the might of my gold mantis boarders is damn fun while they are stationed to crush the cockpit and shields, oh, and did I mention I got money to invest in hacks, drones (defense AND hull repair) and engines and shields precisely because of how much I saved on weapons update? Things went pretty smooth, although phase 3 did give me some trouble because I lost 2 boarders during the first stage and isn't killing off the flagships systems fast enough, the power surge happened along with the triple missles and I got an oxygen breach, my teleporter was busted and my medbay is also busted, but they lasted long enough that I took the shields and artilery out anyway, so afterwards I just teleported back and leisurely repaired while my lasers were set on auto-fire until they killed the thing, I think I also sended in my boarders again though to bust their engines because dodgerate is a bitch and I ran out of missles.
tldr ftl was fun, worth the two tf2 keys