The Basics
--- Warning! This entire guide could be viewed as a spoiler. It took me quite a few hours of gameplay to figure most of this out and I had a lot of fun doing it. There are some useful monster killing tips in here, but if you want to figure it out on your own, you might want to skip this guide. /end spoiler warning ---
The first time I encountered a zombie infested system I had a very rough time. I spent at least a couple of hours in my first zombie mission because they just kept coming. Eventually I learned how to deal with them and the purpose of this guide is to help anybody who might be struggling when fighting them.
First things first.
The Basics
Zombies come in two flavors. 1) Infested ships and 2) Breeder ships.
1) Infested ships are the same as regular ships except that they have a zombie crew that replenishes. Some infested ships can lay eggs, many don't ever seem to lay eggs. They may spew some of their zombie crew members at you as they are fighting. Fighting them is pretty much the same as fighting a normal non-infested ship. They may be a little more challenging because they have infinitely regenerating crew and therefore an enhanced ability to repair, but they generally don't have any special extra gimicks to remember.
If one of your ships or one belonging to a non-zombie faction gets infected, it will become able to drop blueprints and data. It is possible to lose one of your own huge class ships (or let an ally lose one of theirs) and recieve a nice data bonus for taking it out.
(I won't discuss fighting infested ships because its the same as fighting a regular ship. You wont encounter zombie infested zones until Act 3. If you've gotten that far, then you know how to fight regular ships. Hence, you know how to fight infested ships.)
2) Breeder ships are the zombie's special homegrown ships. They look dramatically different than any other ships because they are made almost entirely of zombie goop holding bits of lesser ships together. The easiest way to tell them apart from the infested ships is that they have no armor or shields in their Heads Up Display graphics. This is important because it makes them much easier to kill than any of the infested ships. However, like infested ships, they also have quickly replenishing crew pools which means they can repair quickly. Breeder ships do not drop blueprints and cannot be controlled by the player.
Special abilities of breeder ships:
Laying eggs. This is one of the main reasons you want to kill them off. Any kind of breeder ship, from the tiny ships that cloak and run away, all the way up to infested stations and the zombie hives, will all regularly lay eggs. If you leave a breeder alone for too long, you may find that the zombies have more reinforcements than you expected.
Breeder ships have a special weapon that demolishes shields. It is green and the graphic could be best described as looking like a cartoon splat. The weapon is breeder only and, short of some kind of mod, the player has no access to it. The attacks are usually dogeable. If you are fighting a breeder and you get some zombies on your ship and they land a few hits with the green goo weapon, you may find that you rapidly lose your shields and then your ship.
Breeder's second weapon (and as far as I've seen, the only other one they have) is a sort of zombie missile. When it hits a ship it explodes and releases a bunch of zombies. They will track you like a normal missile although they are a bit slower. They are easy to dodge, but it is often hard to dodge the zombie missile, the green goo, and the stray zombies all at the same time. Point defense weapons will take them out and they can be hit by beams and cannons. It is highly recommended that you destroy zombie missiles as the zombies they release can be a real problem.
Breeders regularly spew zombies into space, even if they do not detect any enemies around. You can witness this if you take a cloaked ship in and watch breeders for a while. This means the area around breeder ships will be loaded with zombies for any unsuspecting uninfected ships flying around.
The whole point of a breeder ship is to knock out your shields and hit you with zombies so that your ship will be infested.
|Zombie breeder ship shooting green goo and zombie missiles. The screenshot also shows all the eggs it layed as well as the sizeable swarm of zombies it had been spewing out.|
Zombies
The zombies themselves are little maroon/purple guys that float around in space. They might decay over time, although I'm not sure if I've ever seen any of them fade out. They can propel themselves in space and will actively pursue any nearby non zombie ships.
When they get to a non-infested ship they will attack its shields. A high amount of research into shields will prevent a small number of zombies from taking them down. But if they get 5 to 10 or so on a ship, they will rapidly deplete its shields. After the shields are down there is nothing to prevent the zombies from boarding the ship. Once aboard they will fight the crew until there is no crew left, at which point the ship becomes infested.
If your crew numbers significantly outnumber the zombies, you will probably win the combat and keep your ship. Keep in mind, however, that if your shields are down and there are other zombies floating around nearby (or you are actively fighting near any zombie ships that are spewing out more zombies), the ship is vulnerable to recieving more zombies. It's best to send your ship away from the combat zone so it doesn't get more invaders. Then repair it so it can replenish its' crew.
Stray Zombie Tips
Dealing with Zombies
Floating zombies can easily be hit by beams and cannons. If you see zombies crawling around your shields it is highly recomended that you try to hit them with your guns so that they don't deplete your shields.
SRM missiles will actively target zombies. While SRMs can be less effective because they don't target what you are trying to shoot, they can be a good way to help keep zombies off of your ships.
Zombies will spawn from infected asteroids. Infected asteroids sometimes appear as asteroid belts. If you are at risk of being overwhelmed, don't fight in infected asteroid belts. (Incidentally, if you blow up an infested asteroid in a zone your mothership happens to be in, it will fire on stray zombies if there are no real ships for it to hit. This was a big surprise the first time I saw it do this!)
Point defenses will target stray zombies. Sometimes they wont hit zombies that are already on the shield (probably a bug?) but they will definitely help thin out the waves when you are in the fray. And the best part is, you don't have to control point defenses. I try to have a point defense on all of my ships when I'm fighting zombies. Point defenses also target missiles, torpedos, zombie bombs, normal bombs, mines, drones, suicide pods, and shuttles. They are a pretty useful thing to have around
Drones will target loose zombies if they happen to come across them.
The best way to stop zombies once they are on board your ships is to have a lot of crew hanging around. You can achieve this by increasing the amount of crew you assign to your ships in the hanger (Pictured below). Having a large crew buffer is the best way to fight off infection. For me this meant that the 'cheap hotel' missions were a frequent visit. You take a crew heavy ship (Carrier, Big bus, etc) go fly over to the station, and park it there. Eventually the civilians will literally (inadvertently) give you dozens or even hundreds of new crew members.
|The crew slider in the lower right hand corner of the screen. It defaults to 20 percent. I like to keep it up to 60 percent or so when I'm in zombie territory. If you use ships that have extra crew capacity, you can fight off quite a lot of zombies before you lose them.|
Eggs
Zombie ships lay eggs wherever they happen to be. Breeders seem to do most of the egg laying. I thought they were the only ones that did, but I witnessed a cloaked bombing ship lay one while I was taking screenshots for this guide. Breeders will lay eggs even while in combat. I don't think I've ever seen a breeder lay an egg of its own size class, or any of a bigger class. So large breeders can lay medium eggs, mediums lay small, etc. The exception is the tiny ships, which seem to be able to lay eggs that spawn more tiny ships. If there is one tiny cloaked ship left, you may notice small clusters of zombie eggs appearing far away from where the fighting is.
Eggs themselves have no defenses and are easy to blow up. When they blow up, they usually release a small number of zombies. No rez and no data. Your reward for killing the egg is that it didn't hatch.
If an egg hatches, it spawns a new zombie ship. That new zombie ship can go on to lay more eggs which will spawn new ships which will spawn more eggs and so forth. This is how my first encounter with the zombie ships lasted a really long time.
The most important thing you can do when fighting zombies is to kill their eggs. This kills their reinforcements and makes it easier to survive. If you do not control the number of eggs on the battle field you can easily become overwhelmed.
Whenever you kill the last zombie ship on a field, if there is an egg around, it will hatch. At least one egg will always hatch. This is part of the reason why fighting zombies can feel never ending. If you don't kill off the eggs and the egg layers, there really is an unending stream of zombies ready to fight you.
Controlling the eggs
Whenever I'm fighting zombies, I've made it a habit of sending one or two ships out on cleanup duty; usually the two smallest ones. I'll order the fastest one to go kill stuff farthest away, and the other one to the other end of the map so that I'm thinning the eggs from both directions. My main ships will be attracting the attention of the zombie ships and keeping them occupied. If a ship hatches near one of the cleanup crew and they can't handle it, I send them reinforcements. The newly hatched ship could lay more eggs and needs to be dealt with.
How you do this: Hit space bar to bring up the map. Select the ship you want to send away by clicking on it. Then right click wherever you want to send it. As long as that ship is in defensive mode, it will go to where you ordered it, circling the area and shooting any eggs, zombies, or enemy ships that happen to be near it. If the ship is in aggressive mode it will fly anywhere on the map to attack any enemy ships that appear. In defensive mode it guards a small area and doesn't chase ships after they leave that area.
|Sending my smallest ship to kill a straggler. The same method works for eggs.|
I check up regularly on the cleanup crew and move them to new areas as they clear out the areas they are patrolling. Usually by the time I've completed whatever the objective is of the mission, I've cleared out all of the eggs (and made the mission itself much easier to complete).
General Tips
General Tips
If you are about to lose a ship to zombies (example: you have 5 crewmembers left and there are 50 zombies on board) you have two options. 1) Hit the jettison crew button or 2) Hit the self destruct button. Jettisoning the crew ejects both the zombies and your crew. Do this if you think you can safely get your ship away from the zombies. Once you get it away, hit the repair button and it will repair and return with more crew if you have them on hand. Do not let the ship fly around without crew, because if it gets more zombie invaders it will instantly become a zombie ship. Only self destruct if you do not think you can safely get the ship away or if you dont want to fight the ship once it becomes a zombe ship. In the screen shot below I had just self destructed my carrier because it had lost all crew (I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing, I was trying to setup for screen shots ;P) and I didn't want to fight it off when it was zombified.
|Showing where the self destruct button is. It is in the menu that pops up when you click that purple button at the top right of the button bar in the center of the screen. The jettison crew button is in the same little menu.|
Floating zombies can detect cloaked ships in a fairly small radius. They will pursue your ship and can quickly wreck your cloaking field. So if you are doing one of the stealth missions, steer clear of them if you can. They will rapidly lose track of you if you fly away.
Floating zombies generally can't fly faster than your ship. This means you can 'kite' them and shoot them if you realize that there is a swarm of them coming for you. If your ship can't outrun them, give it some speed boosters so it can.
By sometime in Act 4 you should have access to both the fortress shield and the quick charge shield. I prefer the quick charge shield, but I've seen youtube playthroughs of people successfully playing with the fortress shield. The quick charge shield can charge through a number of zombies, while the fortress shield simply has a ton of shield hit points. If you have problems with one kind of shield, switch to the other.
Cloaking can work well, but they can also be susceptible to zombies. Cloaks usually have less hit points and are easy to disrupt. The trade-off in boosted damage can be worth it.
A cloaked fast tiny or small ship is an excellent cleanup ship and can be great for killing off straglers. In my last playthrough they've been lasting a lot longer than my previous run when they weren't cloaked.
Repair. Repair. Repair. The repair button is one of the best ways to turn a struggling game around. Reparing is free, which is a lot less expensive than a blown up ship. If I see a ship fall into the yellow, I try to send it away from the battle before I tell it to repair. Once you hit the repair button on a ship it immediately drops its shield/cloak and sits there for a few seconds before it warps back to the mother ship. I've had some ships take a heavy beating and still manage to warp out without getting killed, but sometimes they don't make it. So I usually send them out of the fray before repairing. On my last run through I didn't have to go mining at all because I was religiously repairing ships.
Some missions will have multiple items that you collect or destroy. Often zombies spawn in waves every time you collect/destroy the object. If you collect multiple items in a row you can end up spawning multiple waves, which can get overwhelming fast. On the other hand, some of these missions can be gamed by selling your ships and using a single fast cloaked ship to complete the objective.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=127993419
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