Still cant do this.
Im obviously shit.

Pick a ship and a strategy and try to work towards that. I'd highly suggest the Kestrel and laser barrages as the Kestrel starts with one of the best lasers in the game and it's a fairly fairly straightforward tactic. A major priority for any ship early on is getting up to two shields to save money on repairs. After that just start supplementing the Burst Laser with other weapons you come across (although be careful, it's very easy to buy a stupidly powerful weapon early on and go broke trying to power it). Almost any other burst laser will be helpful for this strategy, although the Burst Laser II offers the best value for power IMO. Get another one of those and you're set for most encounters. Still, beggars can't be choosers, in one play through I stumbled across a Hull Smasher Laser II which I used against systems almost exclusively. Generally speaking, I'd try to avoid any setup which involves heavy reliance on bombs or missiles as you will run out. Missiles also become close to useless against an enemy with defence drones (such as the final boss). Having said that, the Ion and Breach bombs are both excellent weapons to have available if you come across someone who has more shields than you can deal with with just your lasers. The Heavy Laser I (and, to a lesser extent due to power consumption, II) is excellent for firing just after a burst laser volley to target a specific system, and the Ion Blast II will, after a short time, render any enemy shieldless. Beam weapons can be a useful backup too as they can be devastating, just make sure that you don't fire them at shields. In fact, as soon as you've got more than one weapon pointing at the enemy, turn auto fire off as you'll end up wasting shots.

Your early priorities, then, are a second layer of shields and supplements to your Burst Laser. You can win almost any fight in the first couple of sectors by simply targeting the weapons system of your enemy and letting the burst laser do the work.

As far as other systems go, that's up to you. The laser barrage strategy doesn't work too well with boarders, so a Teleporter may not be that useful. Drone Control is excellent for defence against missiles, your main worry if your shields are decent. I generally don't use it offensively with this strategy unless I'm still stuck with a Burst Laser on sector three or four. Although, like with missiles, you do have to be careful with the number of drone parts you're using. Cloaking (even level one) is massively useful against the flagship. Oh, and try to get fully-crewed as well. I try not to spend too much on crew, but having a spare Engi floating around to assist with repairs is very useful (early on, I assign one to the door controls if my main systems are crewed which so they can wander off to repair things if required). Plus, a couple of floaters (preferably Mantis) to deal with boarders will also help.

If and when you do reach the Flagship, the missile launcher (immediately to the right of the cockpit) is the most dangerous weapon. Deal with that first. You'll probably want to take out the Ion gun second (far left) although that disappears in the second stage, so once the missile launcher is down, if the boss is low on health, you may want to concentrate fire on the beam weapon (far left) to try to take out the crew member manning it before the second stage.

One final tip for the barrage strategy: ships can't evade your shots if you've taken out their piloting system. Weapons and Drones take priority (usually, sometimes a ship comes along that has just one offensive drone or just an ion weapon in which case neither of these things are a threat on their own), but once those are down, taking out piloting can be very helpful.

One last thing, stick to the normal edition at first. The Advanced Edition content makes things much more complicated and reduces the likelihood of coming across what you need to make this strategy work.

Edit: @Panty

Cheers for the tips. Love this game, woke up thinking about it, always a good sign. Can't wait to get back to it.

Good tips Paul, hadn't thought of doing that.

One last tip for the boss that I forgot: try to pick up a hull repair drone. This will likely be the only way that you can repair damage during the three stages of the boss fight and, as such, will be invaluable. In fact, the first time I completed the game (using the laser barrage strategy), the only reason that I managed it was because I lucked out in receiving Advanced FTL Navigation for a quest (or whatever you want to call it), then stumbled across a store in the final sector which stayed active until the end. If it wasn't for that, I'd have been screwed.

And I am scared.

I might just leave it saved there. And never go back.

Got beated. 
Now can't get anywhere near the final sector. 
The game in its infinite wisdom has spawned a shop one jump away from my starting position on no less than 4 new games. Then throws the very first ship I encounter at me with fucking attack drones.

You can often double back for shops by the start of a sector.

"Sometimes" or "occasionally" might have been more accurate.

Not for a cloak priced at 150!

Heh. Just went to start a game and got this:



Divert power to restart button.

Is anyone else playing this on ipad?
Can they please do so and tell me I'm not absolutely hopeless by dying over and over also.

I'm playing on iPad. In fact, I've just reached the final sector with the Engii ship B, featuring two Burst Laser II's, an Ion Blast II, a defence drone II, a hull repair drone and a whole load of gold level crew I bought in shops. Annoyingly, I now have to go to work. Still, once I'm finished, that boss is going down.

That was a demolition. I ended up taking no damage on the second stage either, and just one point on the final stage. Engi Cruiser B Victory unlocked.