Suggestions and feedback for AE expansion

[Tamren]

Hi guys, I've been greatly enjoying the AE expansion and according to steam I now have over 200 hours into the game. My stat page says I've played almost 250 games of FTL, although my win percent is still only about 15%...

Anyhow I'd just like to give some feedback on what I have experienced so far. There are a number of things I would consider issues and I've come across a couple of actual bugs.

1. Missile weapons are not competitive
Since the AE patch I have played roughly 30 games, at least 10 of which have been victories, one with each of the Cruiser A variants. I have not used a missile weapon in any of those boss fights. Even if the game starts me with useful missile weapons (Rock Cruiser A) I always end up replacing them over the course of the game, and rarely purchase missile weapons at the store. Missiles are useful and powerful, but they are rather overshadowed by other weapons, particularly with the new chain and charge variants. Missiles do not compare very favourably to self-teleporting weapons. While both of them bypass shields and can miss the target, missiles charge slower, draw more power on average, and are subject to being shot down by defence drones and random chance when projectiles collide. Part of the reason I tend to eschew missiles in general is that destroying enemy ships outright is rarely as beneficial as capturing and salvaging it. The higher scrap yield is great on Easy and necessary just to survive on Normal and Hard.

I'm not entirely sure what can be done to fix this, simply making missile weapons better would punish the player too much because the AI uses the same weapons that we do. I think improvements to make missiles more versatile and useful in situations other than direct damage would make them much more useful to players. Here are some suggestions off the top of my head:

General Improvements:
- Weapon charge times could use a balancing pass in light of the new AE content
- Breach missiles should have a 100% chance of causing a breach. Considering how much time and effort goes into landing a shot with this thing, it's very frustrating when you count on it to breach a room and it doesn't.
- Hacked missile weapons should not lose their charge, only stop charging and or be unable to fire until the hack wears off. The theory is that since they are assembling a missile out of nanites or whatever, they don't just have batteries that lose their charge when disrupted. This would give missile weapons a unique advantage and counter the fact that most missiles have a charge time of 10+ seconds and will therefore never fire a single shot ever again if hit by a level 3 hack.
- The longer a missile remains fully charged in it's launcher and has a visible target, the missile could "lock on" and improve it's accuracy by 5% increments. This gives you a tradeoff between instant firepower and a more strategic aimed shot when ammunition is scarce.

Augmentations: (bonus points to whoever spots the reference)
- Fast Missile Racks: Missile weapons that are fully charged before you jump start fully charged in the next system. Essentially a more limited weapon pre-igniter that works only for missiles.
- Dauntless Guidance System: Missiles that miss the target will curve around and attempt to hit a second time. However when they do this the missile will land on a random room, not the one you targeted specifically.

2. Anti-Hull weapons far less useful now
Anti-hull weapons are stuff like the Hull Beam which have larger charge times and power draws compared to their normal equivalents. The tradeoff is that they deal double damage when hitting empty rooms. Now the problem with this is that AE added new ship systems and enemies that would normally have empty rooms no longer do! So when fighting most enemies these weapons no longer have any benefit to justify their higher costs.

I would suggest a simple change: Anti-Hull weapons deal double damage when targeting empty rooms, OR rooms with a system that has been fully destroyed.

The tradeoff is exactly the same. You can hit a room with a system in it for normal damage which knocks out that system. OR you can hit an empty or disabled room for extra hull damage instead of disabling another system.

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More to come soon. Oh and those bugs I mentioned. There are a couple of dialog errors for events in the Abandoned Sectors.

- Friendly planet w/ ASB under Lanius attack event: This particular event has a large Lanius vessel attacking a colony with an ASB. In one of these battles I happened to successfully board and eliminate the crew of the Lanius ship. However when I did this there was no victory dialog or message, only a tally of the salvage I was able to pull from the wreck.

It seems like they expected this event to always end up with a destroyed ship because of the ASB and didn't include any dialog to account for a ship capture. You still get the scrap and everything it's just a little jarring to see an empty dialog with no text. Should be an easy fix though.

- Lanius ship blue event: There is one particular even that pops up in abandoned sectors. You come across a Lanius ship who does not immediately attack. There is a blue option for lanius crew that has your crewman ask if the other ship needs assistance. The other ship will then request you give them some consumables, fuel/missiles/drones etc. Now the problem with this event is that there is no way to back out of this transaction. I didn't have enough fuel or drones to meet the amount he was asking for, the only option that wasn't greyed out was to trade 8 missiles for scrap. I really wanted to keep those missiles but there wasn't any option to refuse so I had to go through with it just to continue.

Should be another easy fix, you just need a 4th dialog option for "sorry never mind" or even "attack" and stuff like that.

[Mendel]

possible bug:

In a random event where an enemy ship tries to "hack" one of my systems before the battle starts, if I have a hacking system I get a blue option to counter this hacking.

If I choose that blue option, my hacking system will be disabled for the battle.
If I choose the normal option, no system will be disabled.
If I dont have hacking system, then random system in my ship will be disabled.




Suggestion: Ships with large clone bay rooms (that fit 3) should have some benefit compared against ship with small clone bay rooms (that fit 1) For example, faster cloning or even parallel cloning.

Suggestion for augment or special missile weapon: Enveloping missiles.
Missiles will no longer pierce shields but they will cause quadruple damage when they hit a ship that either has no charged shields, has shields disabled or has no shields to begin with.

Augmentations: (bonus points to whoever spots the reference)
- Fast Missile Racks: Missile weapons that are fully charged before you jump start fully charged in the next system. Essentially a more limited weapon pre-igniter that works only for missiles.
- Dauntless Guidance System: Missiles that miss the target will curve around and attempt to hit a second time. However when they do this the missile will land on a random room, not the one you targeted specifically.

I´ll call this in a way that wont spoil it for the others and they cant easily google it but you should know if Im right.

The intro video to that game starts something like: "this is alpha niner calling science station Hemmings"
Lovely game btw

[Tamren]

In a random event where an enemy ship tries to "hack" one of my systems before the battle starts, if I have a hacking system I get a blue option to counter this hacking.

That works as intended. There are a couple of outcomes from that event:

- X system is hacked and reduced to zero power
- X system is hacked but your upgraded systems squeak by and stay on at 1 power.

If you have a hacking system of your own the blue option allows you to counter the hack, in which case nothing happens but you can't use your hack during the battle. It's a direct tradeoff. This can be very desirable if your shields are being disabled and the enemy has fire weapons for instance.

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There are a couple visual bugs with the ship room layouts. This is some really OCD stuff but I would still like to see them fixed, it shouldn't take more than a couple minutes in Paint for each one.

- The Kestrel Cruiser B variant has some issues with the grey underlay that goes under the rooms. The underlay is offset upwards a couple of pixels compared to the rooms and looks asymmetrical. The shield room at the upper left corner is also missing the gap for its upper airlock.

- The rooms and underlay in the Man O War slug cruiser are one pixel too high to be centred properly with the ships spine. Similarly in the Stormwalker they are placed about 3 pixels too low.

- The rooms and underlay in the Nesasio Stealth cruiser are about two pixels too low and don't match the spine of the ship.

[Omaestre]

I've written this elsewhere, and forgive me if it constitutes spamming, but I really had hoped the AE had touch support for windows ultrabooks with touch screens.

It must be possible to implement, after all it is possible on the iPad. I'd buy an extra copy for this feature alone

[Mendel]

In a random event where an enemy ship tries to "hack" one of my systems before the battle starts, if I have a hacking system I get a blue option to counter this hacking.

That works as intended. There are a couple of outcomes from that event:

- X system is hacked and reduced to zero power
- X system is hacked but your upgraded systems squeak by and stay on at 1 power.

If you have a hacking system of your own the blue option allows you to counter the hack, in which case nothing happens but you can't use your hack during the battle. It's a direct tradeoff. This can be very desirable if your shields are being disabled and the enemy has fire weapons for instance.

But my point is, when I had the option to choose the blue option here but I didnt, then nothing at all was hacked in my ship. Every system was fully operation for entire battle.

[Tamren]

Oh I see what you mean. Well there is one possibility left, when you didn't see any system get disabled, did you have a number of level 1 systems? Most of the time the "event" hacking will bring a system down to one power, any bars above this will be crossed out as if they were ioned. However if the affected system is already level 1, then the hacking will "reduce" it to 1, which doesn't really do anything and has no visible effect.

I've wanted to comment on Flak weapons for a while now and I think I know exactly why I dislike them, and more importantly how to fix them. As things stand Flak weapons are simply overpowered. They seem to rarely if ever miss shields unless cloaking is involved. And they deal HUGE amounts of damage compared to their power usage and recharge times. What makes these issues worse is that flak weapons don't give great feedback to the player. When a missile flies onto your screen and hits the oxygen bay, any experienced FTL player will know what is going on and how to deal with it. But sometimes I get to watch flak hit my shields, pop up several overlapping "MISS" indicators and then still somehow smash my oxygen system to bits before... flying away as if it had missed. Yeah it can get pretty aggravating.

So here would be my recommendations:

1. Turn the 7-shot Flak II into a Flak III. Add a new Flak II weapon that fires 5 shots instead of 7. This intermediate weapon would make the Flak I more common, and the Flak III much less common. Kind of like how you shouldn't come across things like Vulcan lasers and Glaive beams too often.

2. Rebalance the recharge time and power draw of Flak weapons. Currently they do WAY more damage than contemporary weapons with little to no downsides against most targets.

3. Make Flak LESS accurate in general, this will cause the flak to spread over a wider cone and hit a wider area. Flak should be a primarily anti-shield weapon, and to a lesser extent anti-defence drone weapon. Being able to bust a shield down to zero bars in a single hit is a very powerful ability and should be the main draw of this weapon. Any resulting hull or system damage should simply be a bonus. For direct, accurate firepower lasers and missiles should be better.

4. Change how Flak displays on the combat interface to make it more clear what is happening when you fire the flak, or take a hit from it. Basically flak can do three things when fired at the enemy. It can MISS, it can hit the SHIELD and it can hit the HULL and possibly cause system damage. The current UI completely fails to indicate which of these is the case which leads to a lot of player confusion. So here is my solution:

- Flak fires a single ball of debris which splits into a cone as it approaches the target. The number of individual projectiles depends on the size of Flak weapon, in this example 3,5 or 7. Each of these flak chunks is a separate projectile for all intents and purposes.

- Flak that MISSES the target will pass UNDER the ship (and shield) and out of sight. When the flak crosses the shield perimeter a "MISS" will be displayed just as with any other weapon, but in SMALLER font. Remember you might have to display 7 misses at once! Using smaller font will prevent them from overlapping. Alternatively just have one MISS and add a numerical multiplier such as MISSx2.

- Flak that hits the SHIELD will BOUNCE OFF and away from the enemy ship. This gives a very clear indication that flak pieces have done shield damage and will not impact the hull.

- Flak that will hit the HULL of the enemy ship will fly past the shield perimeter and impact a point on the enemy ship, just like any laser projectile. The spot the flak will land is marked by a red dot, ONLY flak that penetrates the shields and does not miss will mark a dot.

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This will all seem complicated at first glance, but I really feel that it would improve how Flak weapons look and feel. There needs to be a clear separation between misses and hits to shield and hull. The current system where the flak just flies past your ship every time no matter what actually happens is far to confusing.

[Twinge]

- Friendly planet w/ ASB under Lanius attack event: This particular event has a large Lanius vessel attacking a colony with an ASB. In one of these battles I happened to successfully board and eliminate the crew of the Lanius ship. However when I did this there was no victory dialog or message, only a tally of the salvage I was able to pull from the wreck.

My guess is you accidentally pressed 1 and skipped past the dialogue. Checking the files there is an appropriate deadCrew definition.

Now the problem with this event is that there is no way to back out of this transaction. I didn't have enough fuel or drones to meet the amount he was asking for, the only option that wasn't greyed out was to trade 8 missiles for scrap. I really wanted to keep those missiles but there wasn't any option to refuse so I had to go through with it just to continue.

This is indeed a bug. I'll report it formally citing the internal event name.

There are a couple visual bugs with the ship room layouts. This is some really OCD stuff but I would still like to see them fixed, it shouldn't take more than a couple minutes in Paint for each one.

I fixed about a dozen of these in the Balance Mod for vanilla (http://www.it-is-law.com/ftl-balance/in ... ual_Tweaks); I haven't checked yet how many of these fixes made it over to AE.

- The Kestrel Cruiser B variant has some issues with the grey underlay that goes under the rooms. The underlay is offset upwards a couple of pixels compared to the rooms and looks asymmetrical. The shield room at the upper left corner is also missing the gap for its upper airlock.

- The rooms and underlay in the Man O War slug cruiser are one pixel too high to be centred properly with the ships spine. Similarly in the Stormwalker they are placed about 3 pixels too low.

- The rooms and underlay in the Nesasio Stealth cruiser are about two pixels too low and don't match the spine of the ship.

I'll see about maybe fixing these in the Balance Mod once I get that rolling for AE.

As things stand Flak weapons are simply overpowered.

Flak 1 is simply a slightly worse Burst Laser II. It's very strong, but nothing really new. It has a lower cooldown which is rarely helpful (as you're firing at the speed of your slowest weapon in a volley, usually); projectile speed is slow enough it arrives about the same time a Burst II would, it has no chance to start fires, and it's less accurate.

The main issue with it is that it's too common - it's set to 'very common' rarity. I'll be making it rarer and slightly more expensive in the new Balance Mod; I probably won't worry about making it less accurate.

Flak 2 is basically in-between a laser and a beam weapon. It's very strong for 3 power, but has a high cooldown and is very inaccurate (80% less accurate than Flak 1). It has the advantage of being able to both take down shields and do damage and possibly does that combo job a tad too well, but like the Flak 1 it's not crazy OP or anything.