[cobrausn]

The stealth cruiser is definitely hard to work with, and requires very precision timing on the part of the player. It's a tough ship to win fights with if it doesn't have the ability to outright destroy or cripple it's enemy as it comes out of stealth, which is why I had trouble in the final encounter.

First and foremost, it is tempting to get shields working early on, but I actually had better luck upgrading stealth first and then shields - early encounters can be destroyed before they fire at you if your weapons loadout is good. But be sure to upgrade to full shielding before getting to the end.

Basic idea for me was to charge all my weapons to full, fire if I had an opportunity to before the biggest enemy weapon, and wait for the largest enemy weapon to fire (usually a missile). As it fired, engage stealth. This gives you a really absurdly high dodge chance, and the weapons fire almost always misses.

Immediately drop stealth and fire all weapons. If the ship has a lot of shields, target shields, otherwise target weapons (none or low shields means you will hurt bad if they fire back). Generally this can cripple the enemy ship, making it so they can't effectively engage you - this is pretty vital to keeping the stealth cruiser alive. If it starts to go bad for you, stealth away, and consider leaving the engagement.

For what it's worth, my best loadout consisted of a large missile system for punching through shields to disable the shield system, an EMP bomb system for disabling defensive drones (or other systems), and a fire beam weapon I used to try and hit shields and weapons at the same time, all on an alpha strike after coming out of stealth. I also had a teleportation rig set up with two of the insectoid crew that could take the fight to the enemy - this was really useful at keeping them busy, and keeping the ship alive. Also good for when I ran out of missiles - could send them in to disable shields and / or weapons and get out.

I still got torn up by the drones sent in by the final boss though, so a good drone defense system would have been invaluable - if you stealth, they just hover around until you come out of stealth, then breach. Good luck. :-D

[BillyMaize]

I basically did the same thing except my volley out of stealth went for the weapons instead of shields since I wanted to make sure it couldn't hurt me after my cloak wears off. Perhaps I should start running from less than optimal fights, usually I stick out every fight because I want all the scrap.

[cobrausn]

Yeah, targeting weapons is a great idea if the enemy has low enough shields (based on your weapons load) that you can punch through them, disable weapons completely, and then do the same for the shield, while they sit there unable to shoot you, scrambling to repair.

The problem the stealth ship has is when the enemy ship has shields and weapons in abundance (those Zoltan ships are EVIL). In this case, you have to take the harder task (and almost always take damage) and knock out shields first. I loved the long beam weapons because I could drop shields for a moment and burn apart weapons and shields on most ships.

Another important thing I would always do is not fire missiles if shields were down unless weapons were still up - you will need every one of those missiles later.