No, they're upgraded the same way as everything else you've already got installed - the ship button next to the jump one.

If you haven't been upgrading your shields, I'm not surprised you haven't made it past sector five. Actually, it's probably pretty good going to get that far.

So you upgrade the reactor...

That's a difficult strategy, best served by things to bust through shields combined with beam weapons. I found it easiest to concentrate on defence and wearing them down at the beginning.

Oh, just realised what your problem with shields might be: you can only power them up in two bar jumps, so adding a single bar on it's own is pretty useless.

I've had most success with the first Engi ship using drones. Not sure how I unlocked it.

It's easy to get the achievements for it as well unlocking the second variant that has more drone power but sacrifices two 'human' crew members for droids. And no CCTV. It's fairly easy to pick up a pair or more of crew members along the way.

One thing I overlooked for the longest time is upgrading and powering the engine. Having a higher dodge chance can really help.

First go with shield investment got me as far as the last boss. Barely scratched the fucker though, my missiles just weren't penetrating!

As the cliché goes: offence is the best defence.

Well, maybe not the best, but it's a damned good one; take out those gunning positions.

I prefer the bogo Ion that takes the least time to charge. And some laser and teleporting bomb jazz.

Unlocked the Zoltan cruiser tonight and looking forward to giving it a test run - it has a special overshield. Nearly got the Crystalline ship too, but the star map didn't work out right (I needed to get to rock home-worlds)

My best scores are with the starter ship (including its alternative layout) and the Engi ship which is really easy to unlock (just get to zone 5 or 6, forget which)

Like the Rock ship, but it is easy to run out of missiles and the Osprey (federation cruiser awarded for beating boss) although it's special weapon (artillery beam) takes too long to charge for my liking (you can upgrade it to cut time, but it costs a lot)

Haven't had a good run with slug ship yet. But using the anti-bio beam is wickedly evil fun.

That's why you get rapid fire lasers to bust through the shields to start with. With the stealth ship, I find that, ideally, you want to be destroying most ships with the first volley  Latter half of the game gets interesting; haven't figured out what they intend you to do with only three weapon slots, yet.

Word of warning: loading up a save wipes the save, so quitting without saving again looses your game. I have to start all over again with the Slug ship, now.

Carbon_Altered wrote:

I'm enjoying the Zoltan ship at the moment, the over shield is really handy, mainly beacue it prevents you from taking much hull damage, which in turn means cheaper repairs which in turn mean more scrap for upgrades. I am rocking two beam weapons at the moment, which if I can get rid of enemy shielding with traditional rockets and lasers, absolutely tear enemy ships to pieces. Got the "slice and dice" achievement yesterday for lasering every sector of an enemy ship at once. However, no idea how I'm going to take the 4 shields of the boss down. Maybe need to get hold of a smart bomb.

Managed to pick up an ion smart bomb at the last store before final boss - four ion damage was perfect at removing boss shields, then it was slice and dice with the beams. Very satisfying.

However, a score quite a bit lower than my other completions, and also a fair bit lower than some games where I got to the boss but lost. Still not sure how the scoring works.

Honestly, I could cry. Victory at last.

39 according to Steam. I'm guessing that counts leaving it on pause to make a cuppa etc.

beano wrote:

Mad stats.

Wait, really? I should hang my head in shame.

EDIT: I just checked my play time. Hanging my head doesn't seem strong enough.

Anyone else fancy posting their stats page? It's occurred to me that I'm quite interested in comparing them.

Using the Steam screenshot key (F12 default). Using the PrtScrn key if not then paste it into Paint or similar.