New subsystems on the news page

[LastDay]

http://www.ftlgame.com/?page_id=106

They sound really interesting to me!
I can just imagine playing as Lanius and teleporting enemy crew on my ship to make them suffocate..
The mind control might be a nice alternative for ships with weak crews as well.
Don't need to teleport your squishy Zoltan as a boarding party if you just use a well upgraded mind control instead.

The hacking system sounds fun as well, I'd imagine the door locking effect of it to make for a nasty combo with a Mantis boarding party.
I'd imagine hacking the engines to be nice for FTL jumping ships when playing as a defensive ship.

And maybe, just maybe hacking Oxygen will actually make oxygen depriving a valid strategy?
Reverse the flow? Who knows!

I really like how you'll no longer have the same subsystems every game, but get to experiment with strange combinations of them!

[Elhazzared]

Indeed one of the things that I am liking about this as much as you is that there is a whole bunch of new systems now and it isn't just that they are new systems but the fact that you don't get to have them all like you could before (though power used to be a problem to have it all working but you could adjust what to use to each enconter). Now you actually have to chose what you will have on your ship (although I hope it is possible to actually rip a system out to put one in place)... Hopefully the stores will have more wares as well cause there will be a lot more stuff and randomisation of what you get was balanced for the number of things you could get, if you can get a lot more stuff now, odds are you need a bigger selection to keep the randomisation within balance so there isn't a huge dependence on RNG.

Hopefully (and they didn't say much about this yet so it's just what I hope) they will also increase the duration of the campaign rather than just the usual 8 sectors. Heck hope they even squeeze in an infinite mode and overall, new ways to enjoy the game giving it that much more replayabillity.

I just hope I can get the crystal cruiser prior to the update coming out but I am not that hopeful with the current difficulty to get it.

EDIT: Another thing I'd like to see is a change to the payment system. Taking over a ship by killing the crew yileds better rewards, in fact much better rewards than destroying them. While this could make some sense since you are scraping a whole ship for useful stuff rather than whatever survived the explosion, it also means that any ships that function through taking over the enemy ship are just vastly superior to all other ships and as result they are going to reach the end with a ton more scrap and probably better armed (due to having more expendable scrap) than all other ships. Thus I'd like this to be changed, be it through taking over or destroying the ship the yields should be the same.

[LastDay]

Yeah you have a good point, I very rarely destroy ships because killing the crew gives so much more profit over time.
I don't think that the risk vs reward would work correctly if boarding didn't give you more, but at the same time some ships are plain easier to board than to destroy, so the reward is odd at times.

Just raising the costs of Teleporters and it's upgrades could balance it somewhat, though.

[Elhazzared]

Speaking for myself, almost always it's easier to board the enemy ship and destroy it like that, even putting the teleporter at level 2 will allow you to board automated ships since you can teleport back just before the crew dies.

You can have a bad run where you don't find weapon to break through shields as they start becoming biggr, but teleporting will always work and this is why boarding is most of the times easier... Course there are other important factors to take in mind but still I find boarding much more profitable and much easier, especially if you grab something like mantis B which already gives you 2 mantis to board and you can go up to 4.

Some situations weapons handle easier but most actually are much more easly handed by boarding. There is less risk involved in boarding, you only lose crew if you are not paying attention so the risk/reward factor doesn't applies in my opinion.

EDIT: Also the idea of making both being equally profitable is to actually give the player a claer choice. You can blow the ship or kill the crew, it doesn't matter which you chose so you can play to your heart's content rather than, go this way cause it's the optimal way in terms of rewards.

[Elhazzared]

There is a post about this now! When I posted this here there was no posting about boarding VS destoying a ship.

[Red Rocket]

They said it before, but if you look at this photo you can see it as well, manneble subsystems.
I'm very currious how that will work!

Maybe you can only open or close doors when someone is manning that station.
Oxigen could replenish faster when manned, or you could deplete induvidual rooms (would be slower than opening doors)
Scanners i have no idee
Cloaking could be a little longer or the cooldown could be shorter
Drone control, drones could be a little bit faster shooting/flying

Very interresting, indeed

[UltraMantis]

The new systems certainly open up the gameplay.

Hacking seems brief but potent, though which system to hack would be an interesting question. If there's a nasty missile on their ship and you've no defense drone, you could interrupt their weapons. Depleting enemy shields could be a lifesaver if you have barely enough firepower to get through. On the other hand hacking engines/piloting would make them sitting ducks. Suddenly there's lots of options and choices available without disturbing the balance.

Mannable systems seem a bit of a mystery. If nothing else it will give your crew more to do if you have a full complement. Rather than stand around, go man something. On the flipside i very much like to have all important systems manned, so i wonder how badly i would swear if i had to shuffle crew around during a battle.

The Clone bay seems a bigger addition then the rest. From what you can see in the image, your crew can keep respawning. They lose some skill but you're damn bulletproof when it comes to enemy boarders. But ofc if anything should happen to that system, or should boarders attack you there...
Clone Bay offers minor healing only when jumping so during combat you better make sure nothing happens to it. It all sounds like a very powerfull system, but with a huge disadvantage should it be knocked offline. But it doesn't end there. As someone who often resorts to boarding, i'm wondering how boarding would work IF you had no medbay to heal between rounds. Keep letting your crew die? Sounds good! Maybe i can finally disable o2 permanently without the crew whinging about needing to breathe. But ofc, if anything should happen to the Clone Bay...

The new additions seem carefully thought out, rather than the more common "let's shovel some new crap into our game" too many developers resort to (or are forced to). Playing FTL could be a whole new game with these systems alone.

[Elhazzared]

All of this is true but quite frankly I don't see people liking the cloning bay. It's nice not to lose the member so long as the cloning bay is active but to look at it from other angle, healing is minimal which means if you have to deal with boarders or want to board your options are very limited. the main problem of this suposed invencibillity of the crew lies with the loss of skill. Quite frankly I cannot imagine a single time where I wouldn't curse a revive because of the skill loss. So you have guys specific for boarding, their combat skills will never go up even if they are immortal which means much longer to take over enemy ships not to mention it becomes harder to kill ships with healing stations due to the need to keep the med bay down and kill hte crew slowly. On the other hand you don't have healing, if you keep taking damage and more damage as well as deal with dangerous boarder or just high numbers of boarder, you can kiss your skills goodbye because your crew will probably die quite a few times... At the end of the day, while this is an option I don't see it as a viable option to the medbay, the penalties severly outweight the beneficts in my opinion.

If there was no skill loss then it would be an option, an options with it's advantages and disadvantages. So if you get your crew killed yeah it would revive as it was but revival takes time and that is time a system is not maned which is a penalty in and of itself and it can be a quite deadly penalty. Similarly boarding doesn't carries the fear of losing the crew however boarding after boarding means that sometimes you are sending a crew severly hurt only to die so that you could on the next teleport send a crew full health which translates into waste of time... I feel this would be a much better approuch, even at no skill loss there are advantages and disadvantages to having a clonebay but with the skill loss the clone bay is just not good enough to justify ever taking... Which kinda makes me think... Will I ever play the C version of the ships? I will unlock them, I might play them a few times but with such a huge penalty of a cloning bay over a med bay... They are certainly not going to be played a lot unless these ships bring something rather spetacular.

[UltraMantis]

You place too much emphasis on crew lives.

Consider this: Even if their skills never advance a bit (which is simply not true for non-boarders), your crew never dies. Endless clones are provided to be sent in wave after wave. Until the killbots reach their kill limit. It's beauty. Poetry. OP.

Who gives a monkey's about health? Either they heal up over time or they get replaced by a fresh and healthy clone. Skill loss would have to be devastating to offset this benefit. Even if it were halved it would still be worth it because your crew would not die. Ever. Theoretically you can win by boarding against every manned ship and even wreck airless ships. All this by not giving a crap about crew health. Count me in!

Only Pilot and Engineer would need to be protected against skill loss because their combined evasion bonuses would be valuable at all times.

EDIT - You can still use weapons or hacking to take out an enemy medbay.

[Elhazzared]

Your crew won't die, yes but they will take very long to kill enemies, you'll need to send wave after wave of invaders until you can finally kill the enemy crew all the while you need to keep the enemies weapons down so you need to shoot them, as well as the medbay so again, shoot them. Shooting a ship means damage to the ship and the time frame for which the boarding is setling is going to mean that in many cases you'll just end up destroying the ship rather than actually take it over... If you don't destroy the enemy ship then you are to take damage, to a more or less critical point is to be dictated by the situation you're in... One thing remains true in any battle, you don't want it to drag out because the longer it drags out, the more damage you are likely to take. Thus the cloning bay is worse than the medbay when it means boarding. On the other hand if skill wasn't lost you still would have battles drag out longer because your crew is likelly to come out of a battle heavly damaged, that means the next battle they will still be heavly damaged so they need to go in, die, be cloned, be sent again, kill the opposition and then return with severe to heavy damage... This si still worse than having a medbay, the only advantage is that you could board airless ships without giving a "scrap" about it. So the beneficts would somewhat balance the penalties since the skills would keep going up and eventually the crew would be efficient at killing even if still having a bit of a loss for a bit of a gain.

As for non boarding situation you first have 4 systems than need to be maned at all times (if possible), piloting, weapons, shields and engine. With the medbay it's incredibly hard for them to die and having those crew members gaining skill as fast as possible is really necessary. With the cloning bay you are perhaps in some rare ocasions better protected against being boarded and lack of oxygen, but the skill loss on every time a crew member dies isn't worth those small bonus. You need weapons firing fast, you need shields replenishing fast and you need your high dodge chances and to lose on any of those is incredibly bad. If there was no skill loss it wouldn't just be everything good, a crew member dies, wait for him to revive, while you wait your ship is operating in worse conditions and thus is less capable of mounting an effective counter to the enemy... It would be a temporary loss of control on the ship for immortal crew. An advantage for a disadvantage. but with skill loss, it's just not good, the penalty is so incredibly bad that's just not worth it.