Remember, like most other strategy games, the beginning of the run is extremely important for getting out in front of The Curve, and the Crystal A thoroughly dominates the early portions of the game. That said, Crystal A is still effectively like starting with a Burst Laser I and a Heavy Laser I - those are very strong starting weapons! And since all ships at the start of the game have either zero or one shield bubble, your opponents are effectively shieldless for the first two sectors. I rate these weapons as very slightly weaker than their non-crystal counterparts, as the extra chargeup time will more often let an enemy ship get off a shot before your own ship gets to fire. They also have a chance to breach the enemy hull (and can get shot down by enemy defensive drones like missiles) in exchange for losing the ability to set fires. These are essentially a weird crystal version of the Burst Laser I and the Heavy Laser I, with slower chargeup times and the ability to pierce one shield layer. The Crystal A starts with some very unconventional weaponry in the Burst Crystal I and the Heavy Crystal I. While this design is no Mantis B or Zoltan A, the ship nevertheless has an excellent setup. I don't agree with that sentiment at all, as I placed the Crystal A at the top of the 'above average' ships in my FTL Tier List. Some of the commentary I've seen online rates this as a mediocre to poor ship. The Crystal A often seems to get overlooked, however, possibly because it doesn't stand out as much as its overpowered brother.

The Crystal B Cruiser is generally considered to be the strongest in the entire game: 4-tile Teleporter + Cloaking + Crystal crew = serious rebel smackdown. I defeated the rebel flagship with all the other ships and unlocked the crystal ship that way.

Of course it should be tough to unlock the game's secret ship! What's the point of it being secret otherwise? With this second non-RNG dependent way of opening up this ship added in the Advanced Edition, the system feels pretty fair to me. I still hear people complaining about this all the time on FTL Reddit, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

The difficulty level doesn't matter (Easy is fine), just win with all of the other ships and the Crystal Cruiser is yours. (First finding the stasis pod, then getting a crystal crewmember out of it, then finding the beacon leading to the secret crystal sector in the Rock Homeworlds.) Fortunately, the Advanced Edition added another condition for unlocking the Crystal Cruiser: beat the game with the A and B layouts of the other nine ships. In the pre-expansion version of FTL, the only way to unlock this ship was to complete the secret crystal quest, a very difficult feat indeed that involves hitting three different quests in the same run. If I remember correctly, the crystal ship and the crystal race itself were added to the game by a fan who pledged the top donation when FTL was doing its Kickstarter funding drive. The Crystal Cruiser is FTL's secret ship.

Crystal ship ftl