| All I learned I learned from Star Trek, er, FTL

 - I too grant mercy 90% of the time, unless the Rebel "scum" are working me over in the final, or next to final, system.  Then I go for the kill if I can, simply because I know that there is NO WAY I will be able to get satisfaction from attacking the final capital ship as that fight has been an absolute joke the first 3 times I have made it to the end.

 - Fires: Rockmen are impervious to fire, so send them in to put the fires out, or open the doors to space and that room to suffocate the fire.  Sure, your O2 levels drop, but that way you can sort of forget about the fires and keep fighting.

 - Boarding parties:  If possible, vent the ship and gently direct the assaulting scum to fight you in the medical bay.  Sometimes they will run toward your other rooms, but I always abandon them to try and corral the bastards into the medbay.  Your crew cannot be killed (in my experience) while fighting while being healed in the medbay.  Hopefully your ship can withstand the pounding it takes while you abandon all systems mid-fight...

 - Lasers rule: You draw a little line with a laser across enemy rooms, and to do damage you only need a tiny bit of the line to touch a room, NOT the icon of the system in the room. That means you can usually hit 4 rooms, sometimes only 3, and each room takes 1 or 2 hull damage AND system damage... nice.

 - Crew: The different races you can have as crew will occasionally grant you different blue colored responses to some RPG interactions and will often allow quests to begin.  It pays to have a varied crew.  And it pays to have A LOT of crew....

 - No matter how badass you think you are (and I REALLY thought I was last night) all it takes is one ship, one bad combination of disasters to reduce your 8 crewed, 3 shielded WITH a super alien soaking shield, rad weaponed, cloaked ship to a scattered mess of metal and bio material....