Federation C

This ship takes a lot of early damage, since it has no quick way to disable enemy weapons. Rush shields, then look for weapons or hacking. A Small Bomb is ideal.

Emergency Respirators help a lot against Automated ships. Your crew are safer and can do 5 damage to weapons instead of 2 damage. Nevertheless, I would take a first-jump store to sell Respirators for shields-3. With a slightly later store instead, I might do the same thing for shields-4.

When completely safe, destroy systems for surrender offers (as low as 1 hull).

Mantis and Human are the strongest and safest boarding party. Keeping Zoltans at home also has tactical advantages: they can ion-proof your clone bay, ion-proof one shield layer, or de-ionise shields even when you have multiple layers.

You should often board with all four crew, as that lets you switch off enemy weapons. When enemies have a teleporter, try making them double-board.

Start the engines Zoltan in sensors. This gives information on enemy crew, and they are close enough to steal teleporter power before a hack lands. To neutralise a teleporter hack with the Zoltan, you must not have any spare reactor power during the hack. With more crew, you can start them in the middle of the clone bay and run towards artillery.

As usual, the artillery is too expensive to upgrade, unless you are late in the game with plenty of scrap. Unlike a normal flak weapon, it does not disrupt cloaking.

Sector 1 distress beacons are worth visiting. You have a clone bay, plus an okay teleporter blue option.