Advanced Edition: First impressions thread

[slattikarma]

I thought it would be nice to start a first impressions thread for AE.

Please post your experiences with your first few runs in AE.

I got tired of waiting for the Steam update so I went for the Ipad version.

Just had my first playthrough, finished the game on normal with the kestrel. All up, great port to the ipad, and the new content is very engrossing. 4 hours just flew by.

My quick first impressions:
- Loved the 'return to stations' button, makes things way smoother.
- I also loved the tweak to cut down on rebel farming by introducing a period damage similar to the solar flare, it now makes you think twice about going into a rebel occupied sector.
- Interesting new weapons. No idea what a few of the enemies guns were. There seemed to be some new weapon that shoots a shrapnel type missile at you that is slightly weakened by shields but still hits your hull.
- I made it to the Lanius sector on my first run. Very creepy race, very interesting fighting lanius borders that drain your oxygen.
- MIND CONTROL is awesome. Really made the battles unpredictable. My mindcontrolled borders seemed to want to go repair my hull-breached airlock a lot and suffocate... was quite amusing. It was also challenging to have a continual wave of boarders via an enemies clone bay.
- Hacking was also quite challenging, adds another element.
- There appeared to be loads new text, and lots of new blue options. I encountered one strange event with a mantis pretending to be a human, which generated a human blue event to talk to the mantis. Lol.
- Humans skill up faster, nice change.
- Having loads of unfamiliar events brought back the old excitement of not knowing what was going to happen, and it made me play way more cautious in sector 6 and 7, as I wasn't as sure I could handle everything that came my way.

Way past my bedtime, so better end it there. What did you encounter in your first run?

[Eji1700]

All of this is on easy so I can unlock and test things.

Game 1 was with engie B, and ended decently quick.

Game 2 was engie B and I lost on the final boss form, but got to my goal of getting engie C.

Game 3 was slug B win, and holy hell it was one of the silliest and most evil ships i've ever done.

Late game was max shield, high engine with max clone bay, max teleporter(mantis and rock maxed), max hack, max mind control, and only 5 in weapons with heal bomb, hull smasher 2(the 3 shot one), flak cannon, and pike beam to shuffle around, and a STUPID crew(seriously i love that they come with skills now, SO much better).

The amount of havoc Hack+MC+teleport can cause is just phenomenal. Hack a room, teleport your men in to kill the lone guy in there, mind control the strongest guy trying to break in just before someone else joins the room with him. At least 2 dead in a matter of seconds, no one is manning anything, and it costs you a drone part. Usually the hack is on shields so I can tank those and blow up any problem systems(mostly clone bay). My favorite part by FAR of hack is the ability to just lock down a room. It's such a versatile effect that the added "Destroy an entire system" bonus feels almost overkill.

When i was done, i saw the slug C's starting toys, and quite literally laughed as it was essentially everything i had just built(clone/hack/MC with 3 slug and a chain laser).

[arcsinus_master]

So here is my feedback after chain dying for at least 5 hours last night !

Overall :
amazing content for a FREE expansion, every other game would have make us paid 5 $ for that kind of content. Graphic and ergonomy upgrades, new weapons, redesign of enemy ships, new modules , new player ships , new random events every single aspect of the game has been improved ! it is that simple! One of the best expansion I saw for a game so far.

Graphic and ergonomy upgrades:
There is a lot to it but the best part is maybe to see the links between forward jump points on the FTL map.

New weapons and modules :

The amount of choice has become insane especially for weapons where you have now for each class of weapon at least 6 more weapons.

Those new weapons are not that great in terms of brute force. They are all weaker compared to their " classic" counterparts but they all have nice unique features. basically advanced weapons can do several things from accumulating the energy for a big blast , firing faster as the combat goes on etc...

for the new modules , hacking is by far my favorite because it can hurt where you need to with a high success rate so this is something reliable! Mind control is funny and also can be used defensively to cancel a mind control from ur opponent !


New events :

Countless of new events make the game more unpredicable which is great! New choices are available for a lot of races and new events are quiet fun I must say.

Increased difficulty of the game :

Here is the big deep part that all my friends noticed so far. I am not even talking about the hard mode (didn't try it yet) , the normal mode have increase so much in difficulty for several reasons.

First : the new ennemy ship layouts are less "boarding" friendly , one easy way to beat the game on normal mode was to abuse heavy boarding tactics, these tactics are less efficient because of the new layouts.

Second : Hacking drone , this module in 80% of encounters is not a problem as it will disable a module expandable to the victory. However , it needs just one hit at the right of your module to make you die horribly! Your shield disabled as a big laser blow destroy everything valuable on your ship. Your weapon system disabled when u need it to destroy weapon module of the enemy etc.... Among the 7 death I made last night 6 were involving a good hit with an enemy hacking drone!

Third : the new weapons! Basically the choice of weapons has so much increased that most of the time you will not find in the stores the "reliable" weapons you were used to. You have to deal with those new fancy weapons that have all a common feature :

All new weapons are bad for the first shots compared to old one. A key to beat the game in normal mode was to be able to disable the main weapon system of the enemy ship ASAP to avoid taking dommage. the new weapons don't give the ability to disable enemy ship in the first or second blow anymore. They are slower and more effective overtime.

Conclusion : To conclude on game difficulty , I would say that new strategies have to emerge as the old "EZ" ones are not so reliable with the advanced edition. I think it's great they manage to change the game to force new kind of strategies. I think Hacking drone is a key element to consider both as a threat and a solution to many problem.



Overall Conclusion : Be prepared to die and be frustrated as hell, this new expansion makes normal edition feels like a game for noobies! I didn't even try the Hard mode but I can assume it would require a perfect concentration and a lot of pause thinking to be beaten (+ an insane amount of luck ) . This FTL advanced edition gives a new challenge for people that already have beaten the game with almost every kind of ship. I guess I will spend 120 Hours more on that title


Good luck guys, you will need some

[Enkrow]

As I was quite excited for this release, I figured that I would drop by and give my thoughts on FTL:AE.
Unfortunately, my feelings are quite mixed regarding the expansion.
While I love the new systems, weapons, ship, events, etc, and the greatly needed harder difficulty, all of this love falls apart when I am confronted with the new UI.

The patch notes say that tweaks were made for the UI to be more "user friendly", and I can see why some of the tweaks such as the entire block lighting up green may be useful for a tablet player, but for a PC the massive color change just doesn't need to be there.
In addition, the pictorial reward representation is much more clunky than simply reading the words on the text pop-up, and I also greatly preferred having the consistent aesthetic instead of the glaring, out of place green block.
The "Danger" message popping up over the ship button is also unnecessary, and just adds to the general clutter of the new UI.

While I can see how some of these elements may be useful for a new player or tablet player, in my case the new UI is a charlie-foxtrot that greatly hampers my enjoyment of the game itself. the older, more minimalist design was intuitive, crisp, consistent, fluid, and had no pointless elements.

I'd just like to re-iterate that while my two cents may come off as mostly negative, that's just because of how strongly I feel about the UI. I love the other additions to the game, but I'm sure that many others are being quite vocal about their pleasure with the same features that I am pleased with, so instead I decided to focus on issues/criticism.

I'd like to see the option to roll-back to the old UI style if possible. If this isn't eventually patched in, I will certainly either be using a mod to revert to the old style or I will learn how to create such a mod to resolve this issue myself.
I don't see why this shouldn't be up to player choice, we already have the option to go with vanilla or AE after all.

[Mendel]

how to unlock c layouts?

[Elhazzared]

For the most part loved the new edition, even normal mode is actually harder due to the new weapons and stuff. Boarding is still good, but not as profitable as it used to be by comparison as far as I've noticed (maybe because I was doing it in hard?).

There are only a couple negative points I find on the game overall. One is the massive cannons firing at your from rebel fleets (or planetery cannons in rare random encounters). The reason I find this bad is not because they can damage my ship, but because they are unavoidable. Every now and then you take 3 damage and a hull breach. All other things are fair. Solar flares affect both you and the enemy, you have ways to quickly put out fire like venting atmosphere. Asteroids hit both sides and are absorved by the shield, they can also be shot down by defense drones. The new Ion pulses from that moon or whatever affect both ships and to an extent can be slightly minimise by having the subsystem that lowers ion damage. However there is nothing you can do about the cannons on the enemy fleet, it just randomly hits and hits hard, not to mention it only goes after you. It is a highly unfair tactic that just means that a player can't even make one single mistake and jump out one turn too late because if you do, your ship will either be blown to bits, or highly damaged and unlikelly to be able to take any other fights. It would be nice to redesign this or remove this cannons of doom altogether... elite ships were already hard and while it was possible to easly deal with them early on, it also needed a massive amount of luck to deal with them early on so that was already.

I am on two minds about the flak cannon. While I love the weapon and the concept I feel the weapon is terribly overpowered. The cooldown is relatively short, the damage caused by it (especially to shields) is massive, it doesn't even uses up ammunition (though all things considered it makes sense not to use any).

Actually there is a third negative but again, not very strong on it. the defense drones now are incredibly underpowered. Before there was a very small chance that they wouldn't be able to take down the enemy ordenace. Now there are actually high cances of them not being able to catch the enemy missile or hatever gets thrown your way. In fact it's almost impossible for them to shot down asterois now, something they managed to get nearly everytime before.I belive they need the reaction time to be buffed as well as have their shots travel faster in order to rebalance them. It's not like they are useless, but quite frankly they are not good enough as it is.

EDIT: Mendel, reach sector 8 with any ship to get the layout C. If you go to your ship list, click on layout C it tells you there what you need to do.

[LastDay]

The patch notes say that tweaks were made for the UI to be more "user friendly", and I can see why some of the tweaks such as the entire block lighting up green may be useful for a tablet player, but for a PC the massive color change just doesn't need to be there.

That's weird...
I don't see any changes to the UI on the PC version, aside from the save/restore crew positions buttons.


Also I see people saying that the game is harder, but aside from the boss I found it to be much easier than before.
Maybe I just had a lucky run or Easy difficulty was tweaked to be even easier.
(Or I'm just getting too good to play on Easy )


Also...
The option to show the paths between jump points has been in the options menu for a long time.
Perhaps Advanced Edition just made it default? (as it should be)

[Mendel]

There are only a couple negative points I find on the game overall. One is the massive cannons firing at your from rebel fleets (or planetery cannons in rare random encounters). The reason I find this bad is not because they can damage my ship, but because they are unavoidable. Every now and then you take 3 damage and a hull breach. All other things are fair. Solar flares affect both you and the enemy, you have ways to quickly put out fire like venting atmosphere. Asteroids hit both sides and are absorved by the shield, they can also be shot down by defense drones. The new Ion pulses from that moon or whatever affect both ships and to an extent can be slightly minimise by having the subsystem that lowers ion damage. However there is nothing you can do about the cannons on the enemy fleet, it just randomly hits and hits hard, not to mention it only goes after you. It is a highly unfair tactic that just means that a player can't even make one single mistake and jump out one turn too late because if you do, your ship will either be blown to bits, or highly damaged and unlikelly to be able to take any other fights. It would be nice to redesign this or remove this cannons of doom altogether... elite ships were already hard and while it was possible to easly deal with them early on, it also needed a massive amount of luck to deal with them early on so that was already.

It´s not supposed to be fair. It´s the enemy fleet you are running away from. You should fear them.
Why would they fire at each other? It´s you they´re aiming for!
Previously people were abusing the elite ships for points grinding. 70 000 points, no problem. Even I used to simply fight the elite ships for the 1 fuel they give, not expecting to take any damage while doing so...

Now the fleet is more like the nightmare it´s supposed to be!

[Mendel]

The patch notes say that tweaks were made for the UI to be more "user friendly", and I can see why some of the tweaks such as the entire block lighting up green may be useful for a tablet player, but for a PC the massive color change just doesn't need to be there.

Now this might sound like an odd suggestion but please try the color blind mode. You can select it in the options.
I have always, even before AE, massively preferred the look and feel of the color blind mode. It is more informative and just better. I am not actually color blind, not in the slightest. I just like to use that option because to me it looks much, much better! Try it for one playthrough, who knows, you might like it as well.

[5thHorseman]

In addition, the pictorial reward representation is much more clunky than simply reading the words on the text pop-up, and I also greatly preferred having the consistent aesthetic instead of the glaring, out of place green block.

I thought this too, the first half-dozen or so games I played. Then I got used to it. Then I went back and played the old version and hated not having the icons for stuff.