Not sure if anyone has had much fun with the clone bay - here are my thoughts.

THE GOOD:

Never have to worry about losing guys in battle. Can send a never-ending stream of boarders to the enemy ship (if it's fully upgraded and you have a decent teleporter to match).

THE BAD:

Slight skill loss each time you clone someone from death. This is pretty small though - I found for combat guys I'd get them back up to full experience by killing a few guys.

Healing can only be done when you jump, and it's limited. This also isn't that bad - most of the time you'll be healing either during combat (which you can't do here - you just get cloned instead) or after combat. In the latter case, a fully-upgraded clone bay can normally heal your guys to full from a battle (in most cases I've found anyway).

THE UGLY:

If you're like me, you'll think: GREAT! Never again will I lose a crew member to annoying random events! Now I can try them all out and if they die, so what?

Well if you think that you'd be WRONG. There are at least two events - and there may be more - where you CANNOT clone your dead crewman! He stays dead (the reason for which is logically explained - well kind of). I found this out the hard way - fully upgraded clone bay, yet lost two of my three-man starting crew in one sector, leaving me with one guy at about sector 4 since I hadn't found or bought any others at that time!

I won't say which events these are - I don't want to spoil the surprise entirely... For all I know I happened to find the only two events in the game where this happens, and I just happened to have the luck to encounter both of them in the same freaking sector. But as they say, forewarned is forearmed...

I really like it a lot more than the healing bay, really. It's ok that it's not a 100% success thing - that'd make it too easy. Once you start combining it with some of the new augments it can become really powerful (say the healing on transport one, for example) and fun (loads of rather whacko play-styles, too). Yay for rockmen beating auto ships to death using only their fists.

Yeah the healing on transport is pretty good when fully upgraded, and I'm starting to like it as well. Just the fact that it doesn't always clone your guys in events caught me a little off guard.

One thing I'll have to try soon is the Federation Cruiser C. It starts with level 2 clone bay, has 4 crew members and a crew transporter.

One of them is a mantis - he would be for mop-up duties I reckon.

But the main action will be from the 2 Zoltan - normally not a choice for boarding. However, with a clone bay and the fact that Zoltans now explode upon death, it' s basically a suicide-bomber transporter!

Not sure how effective it will be as a tactic, but at the least it will be kind of funny. The only issue I see here is if the enemy manages to destroy the clone bay as the boarding party dies (unless I have the DNA storage augment of course).

I can't speak for others but I find the Zoltan one the hardest to defeat the enemy boss. I have unlocked all 3 of them and I can reach the final sector but defeating the boss is too much for me. The main reason I find is lack of firepower. No matter what I do, the game screws me over.

I've defeated the flagship with the B layout Zoltan ship - before Advanced edition though. The Zoltan A layout is probably one of my least favourite ships so have hardly played it. Haven't tried with the Zoltan C yet. I can't remember whether I ended up defeating the flagship after I got the unlock though - most of those C-layout unlock runs ended in a caning by the flagship.

Partly because I didn't care any more once getting the unlock, partly because I focused too much on trying out the new systems without realising that some are not that useful on the flagship, and partly because the flagship has some new systems and its AI doesn't seem as retarded as it used to be (at least a little bit). Then I'd end up with no cloak, no defense drones and engines that are too slow (so I'd get creamed by missiles/drones). Or just as bad, end up (like you presumably) with no way to deal damage to the flagship: no bombs, no teleporter, just a heap of ion weapons that all miss.

Well, you can send guys to go clean out the airlock - What? The outer door is open? Can't be - I'm sure I closed it.

Lanius: "Yeah, the draft was a bit inconvenient, but, you know, don't need to breathe oxygen and all, so it was a bit of a breath of fresh air."

"After you clean out the airlock, Lanius, take care of that bomb." *BOOM!*

LOL!

BTW that Fed Cruiser C strategy with the Zoltans doesn't quite work out the way I'd planned. The damage they do when they explode is too small, and it takes too long to regenerate them, for this to work effectively.

What does work is sending one of them in with a Mantis. Better still is when you find other crew members (non-Zoltan) and use them instead. With a fully upgraded clone-bay you can send streams of enemies over (though this works with any ship with a clone bay and teleporter).

The artillery barrage from the Fed Cruiser C isn't bad. It's not as effective as the artillery beam from the other Fed cruisers though, especially in the last few sectors. On the plus side, it complements the teleporter better due to the clone bay - when you do accidentally hit your own crew (and/or destroy the ship with them on it), it's hilarious instead of frustrating. :)