FTL - Faster Than Light

All i thought was "space... The Final Frontier...

That sounds really cool but i doubt it will happen. Would it be Real time or turn based?

 

Woot? I just discovered that the rebel flagship has two stages and can repair during one jump while I'm still damaged. I will never beat this game :( First stages works fine. Just board the weapons rooms one after another and take out their systems and have enough firepower to get through the shields after that. But what helps against millions of beam drones plus 3/4 of the weapons I just destroyed?

 

Whatever you do, don't kill all the crew!

 

Took me 10 hours of playing, but I beat it on Normal with my first Red-Tail run today. The secret, as you can see by the crew records, is to name your crew after people from the forum. I know he's not shown here, but Arcrave was my Weapons specialist Zoltan, who surprisingly survived. I was shocked. Radpipe was in Engineering.

And I still haven't played on Easy. Normal gives out just enough scrap most of the time- I've seen playthroughs on Easy, and the enemies there are pinatas.

Also- TIP STORM!

• Explore as much as you can before the rebels hit the exit. Otherwise, you'll be severely underpowered late game.
• If you do get caught in the rebel fleet, try to incap their weapons and run. Beating them gives you no bonus, but it will wear down your ship.
• Crew Teleporter is quite useful for maximizing scrap gains in later sectors, but you really don't need it early. Drone Systems are way more useful early on (particularly the free defense drone, which alleviates missile issues).
• Similarly, Cloaking has its uses to either dodge shitstorms or get some breathing space to recover from them, but that 150 scrap could be put to a lot better use early game.
• I find Engine 5 to be a comfortable level of dodging- shields should be 2 by sector 3 (or earlier!) and 3 by sector 5, along with enough firepower to punch through similar shield levels.
• Don't waste missiles early on, but don't be stingy with defense drones if they're needed. Accept surrenders if they offer you large amounts of either.
• Venting fires is generally better than fighting them (unless you have rock men or critical systems aflame). Similarly, leaving a breach in an empty room is better than pulling a crewmember out of their battle stations to fix it.
• Power management is key. Don't leave a defense drone floating about using 2 power- activate it quickly when you see a missile fired and deactivate it right afterwards (except in asteroid fields). Need 2 power for that 5 seconds? Steal it from Medbay and Oxygen, or Engine if you're using the other two to power weapons. The crew can breathe later, after the battle!
• Always grab the Long Range Scanner if you have space. It's 30 scrap, and it lets you avoid solar flares and ion storms and seek out battles. Plus, it gives quite a few blue options.

 

You have to be more creative with ship names! I finished game for 1st time on normal with ship named USS Buttfucker. It was my most successful run ever, I used Federation Cruiser (Name was kinda adequate for ships look).

 

bought on steam, one of the best games I've ever played! :D

 

I really like the game, mostly because it's a roguelike, although I think the game commits some major roguelike sins:

1) Sometimes, you can't win. You are always suppose to have a chance (no matter how small) in any scenario in a roguelike, if not then what's the point? I typically just quit if I can't manage to get weapons capable of destroying level 3 shields half-way through the sectors. That's not what roguelikes are about, they're about desperately clinking to life that you can lose in an instant, if you fuck up, not about preparing, or hoping to be lucky enough, to survive a certain milestone.

2) Not varied enough. I played pretty much the same game on about my 7th play-through. That is not very good for a roguelike, I felt like the quests were basically all the same, and almost everything ended with just one of a few outcomes. The game felt repetitive way too quickly for a game designed for you to play over, and over, and over.

3) TOO much luck. Random is good, but the fact whether you win or lose is solely based on the RNG is just bullshit. Almost all of my deaths in that game felt abrupt and undeserved. A roguelike is suppose to wear you down, make you feel like it's getting harder and harder to live, so you cling more and more desperately, it's not suppose to let you do okay and then suddenly kill you because you warped a sector. I've had multiple drastically different runs with no difference in play-style.

4) Not enough enemies. All the enemies feel the same, and there really is barely any different types. There are a variation or two for every race with sometimes some extras, but that's it. It feels really limited, and makes the bulk of the game feel like a grind.

5) The ending is simply too hard and luck-based. I honestly didn't feel accomplished when I won, I thought "Glad that bullshit is over." It's two entirely different things, because I didn't feel as though I did something different on my winning run as I did on my last 20 some runs.

6) Lastly, your development isn't varied enough to merit the pain-in-the-ass ships to get. Again, I didn't feel accomplished when I unlocked ships, I felt happy, but it was complete and utter luck. There was huge spans of runs between some unlocks, so I just played the same build over and over, just mild differences in weapons. Again, way too much of a grind.

I wouldn't say these things ruined the game for me, but I do think that I didn't enjoy the game because it was a roguelike, I enjoyed it because being a space-captain is fucking awesome, and I could bond with those blocky little space-farers. Lots of games can't give me that feeling. Still though, to me, this game is nothing compared to the likes of Binding of Isaac or Dungeons of Dredmor, which I sorta see as the pinnacles of modern roguelikes.

And for multiplayer, the game would really have to be re-written for that. The game is a roguelike, pretty much as single-player as it gets, it was never, ever designed for multiplayer. Sure, it's do-able, but it would need so much balancing, and the novelty would wear off fast.

EDIT: Jeebus that's long (yes I know that's what she said, so don't even fucking try).

 

Dredmor being the "pinnacle of modern roguelikes"? Are you actually being serious? It was a noble attempt, and I appreciated its humor, but Dredmor is such a boring, repetitive grindfest by midgame. I don't know if any of the expansions fixed that or if they just added new fluff, but I was gifted it when it came out, and all I had to say was "eh... yeah, it was alright. Thanks".

Binding is good, but if you get to the womb without either heavy offense or spectral shots, and flight, you might as well give up because no amount of skill will let you outlast the final bosses. Also, the spectral hearts system is pretty annoying, as well as the horribly luck-based spike rooms. It suffers from many of the problems you point out for FTL.

I did have trouble at first with heavy shields, but after 4 or 5 playthroughs, I realized that there are many alternatives to straight firepower. Pick up a breach bomb, an ion bomb, or any missile to soften the shield, then volley to wear the rest down. Send over a boarding crew if you've got one. Focus down the weapons instead for the slow kill, or jump away if it's too much. The chances of the "unwinnable" situation in which most ships in the sector have high enough shields that you can't possibly do anything are really low if you consider the shield ramp-up will happen and plan ahead, you shouldn't have to quit any more than you would in Binding of Isaac. In both games I won, I ran away from some early high-shield and high-weaponed enemies, but I still kicked ass at the Flagship.

I do agree that the enemies really aren't that varied (They need more rebel ships, definitely), and although I kind of like the randomness of the unlock path, I'm sure it'll be a pain once I go for completion. Also, the final boss is quite annoying, and I hate the final zone map, mostly because it all but forces you to fight the flagship consecutively or risk instant game over.

On the other hand, if you really like roguelikes- have you tried Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup yet?

 

I finally bought the game during this Steam Christmas Sale and goddamn I played it like for the last 3 days straight.

I still didn't beat the boss's 2nd stage and right now I'm doing a run where I'm totally miserably underpowered with only 4 crew of which I'll need 2 to capture and destroy the weapons and kill all (!) the crew after I destroy their medbay. I'm really excited and looking forward to finish this run however, because it was probably my shittiest run ever that somehow still managed to get to the final boss by hanging on to its bloody fingernails.

First stage should be manageable even with just my 3 shields and my trusty Level II defense drone, but damn I bet those lasers in stage 2 will cut me up, I don't even have that damn cloaking system installed. What's exciting about this is that I could still conceivably win with an absolutely ridiculous shitton of luck.



Anyway I'm just gonna pick out some things I read on my read-through of this thread and comment on them:

Nice and very true way to put it. I still play it on easy only to unlock the ships.

Yeah, the boss is really something, but on the other hand anything else would be kind of anticlimactic, wouldn't it?
I do not agree about the rebel fleet chasing your ass. I like that because it forces tough decisions from you at every turn - do I visit that store and risk being caught up to or do I wait for another opportunity? Nebula slows them down but you can bet there's some fucking electric shitstorm raging or 4 random bastards trying to take over your ship.

Without that sense of rush you could visit every beacon and it would totally ruin the game. However, I heard there's a mod for that so go ahead - but I would consider it cheating because it allows you to get more resources and build a much better ship than you would be able to. I usually don't like games with a time limit, but here the fleet only moves when you do a jump as well too, so it's really only a way to force you into taking uncertain decisions which is the whole point of roguelikes. If you just had the option to visit every beacon at your own pace it would be fucking boring like every single other space game out there. I know they are not really comparable but S.P.A.Z suffers from this... there is just nothing interesting to do in space if you can cruise all planets and do everything at your own pace.

Agree, there should simply be more content. I've stumbled across the Zoltan "Jehova's Witness" peace ship for the 3rd time, so I would have unlocked the Zoltan ship for 3 times now, but other ships still are quite challenging. I really want that fucking pirate mantis ship because it's awesome for boarding, but you need all the right ship upgrades and it can be hard to take out the crew without taking too much damage in the meantime.

On my first playthrough I also got the rare Crystal alien with its lockdown ability to join my crew but didn't get to the Rock Homeworld sector afterwards to redeem the ship. Damn it, this ship is dependant on getting fucking 3 random events during your playthrough!

So yes, repetitive but I think this could easily be redeemed by making more content that also interacts in unforseen ways.
</br>--- merged: Dec 31, 2012 2:38 PM ---</br>
This epic-fail-story just happened to me:

http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10317

 

How the heck LOL.. Anyway, I only managed to get to the final boss twice or three times. Never managed to beat him. The second stage is too hardcore for me. But I bet anyone could beat it with 2 Defense Drone Mark II and missiles.

 

I actually managed to get to the boss on my second game and was like: "pfft, lame roguelike I'm such a bloody noob and reached the boss already". Afterwards I realized that I must have had wicked luck on that run because I recall my crew dying left and right but every other beacon was like: "here, we decided to throw this free stuff/new crewmember at you, enjoy"

Good times. Fact is you can really have monstrous luck in this game sometimes. I recall someone on the FTL forums practically maxed out all ship upgrades by sector 5 and had another 200 scrap to go.

 

Rayne you badass mofo, remind me never to be in the same room as you and anything sharp.

 

How do you people get that luck? I was only able to unlock the Engi and Rock ship..