Ah. In that situation that makes sense. But I usually (at least on easy) don't have a surplus of energy bars. I usually max out. I guess it would be better to just take a dodge chance hit and lose 2 bars in the engine. Maybe I'll try that next time
I agree with Jorbles,
two less energy bars is much more manageable than basically anything else (barring something stupid like sensors, doors or medbay). In my run without cloaking or the battery, shields got hacked. That lowers your shields to zero in five seconds, and keeps them there for five more seconds. It takes five more seconds to go up to four layers. The flagship has a modified halberd beam (2 damage per room, can hit five rooms). You do the maths :p
It's unusual to be able to power all your systems from the midgame onwards, unless maybe you took the Zoltan ship. Micromanaging your energy is a core part of the game, even more than managing your crew (with some exceptions). If you find yourself depowering your oxygen often, you are doing it right.
I'm doing another run with the rock cruiser B, bought mind control. I'm not as impressed as with hacking (which is extremely powerful, thank God most random ships don't use it correctly), but it's useful. I appreciate that you can't buy all the systems you want, so maybe now endgame builds will be a bit more varied than teleport, cloaking and oh-I've-got-some-spare-scrap drone control.
I really, really like the new augmentations though, more than anything else, some of them really change the way your ship plays. There is one that fully heals your teleported crew, completely bananas with a rock boarding party and a high level teleporter.
EDIT: beat the flagship with teleport, mind control and cloaking, with very little hull damage. I had the battery, but I regularly forgot to use it, I don't think I know how to use it yet.
The flagship hacked the teleport room, which was annoying rather than dangerous, since it sent my boarders back to my ship regularly. I needed two trips to destroy the missile launcher, but my own cloaking ensured that I took minimal damage until then. Mind control eliminated the crew one by one, since once you turn one of them two other crewmen gang up on him and kill him. Also the mindcontrolled guy was regularly teleported back to my ship because of the hack. Second phase was trivial with the cloak and teleport, I kinda wish they had replaced the regular boarding drone with an ion intruder, now that would be scary. Third phase would have been easy too thanks to the cloak, but the augmentation that let me bypass zoltan shields made it trivial. Also my own mind control negated the flagships mind control, so there was nothing it could do.It looks like unlocking the secret ship in the advanced edition is both harder and easier, since there's more events to chose from. I've played close to eight hours, and only encountered one of the two random events needed to kickstart the quest once. On the other hand, you can now unlock it automatically if you beat the flagship with all layouts A and B.
Also Rock Cruiser C starts with one member of the secret race, so you can stumble across the ancient device in the Rock homeworlds and activate it without all the fuss of the first two events.Also: Have you guys found that they don't give you nearly enough time to get to the boss? Multiple times I have gotten to the ship in as few jumps as I could and it was 1-2 jumps away from the base...
The flagship needs to spend three turns in the base for you to lose, so it should be fine. You shouldn't dally in the last sector anyway, the drops are not good and there are no shops AFAIK.PS: My posts keep getting longer and longer, I should self-impose some sort of limit on the number of times I can edit a post.
\golf_clap