licker wrote:lol...
I love the implication from these whiners about how every run in a rougelike should be a win too...
That's not what I said. I said every game in a roguelike should be
winnable. My deaths in, say, Angband or NetHack or even Dungeons of Dredmor are always my fault, for failing to judge how dangerous a situation was, failing to be adequately cautious, failing to have the right preparations. I can look at the death screen and go "yup, shouldn't have done that."
Whereas in FTL it is impossible to judge a situation until you're already in the thick of it. It's impossible to be adequately cautious (beyond e.g. not trying to fight giant alien spiders) because there's no concept of a cautious vs. aggressive stance. It's impossible to have the right preparations because no matter what your build is, you cannot cover all the bases and there's always a hard counter.
The win rate in any decent roguelike is going to be much much lower than the win rate in FTL. Why? Even though you can scum like made in (most) roguelikes you still eventually have to go to the death zones where one mistake means you die. FTL is like that in some ways, but it's also jacked up the 'luck' factor just in what drops you get, or what stores you hit when you have the cash to afford what you want to buy.
I can win over 50% of my Angband games. Not because Angband is easy, but because I've been playing it for years and I
don't make the mistakes in the "death zones". It's not easy! It requires skill, which is why I'm still playing Angband even with such a high win rate. But even when I was a rank newbie, when I died I could say "Well, I didn't realize that Gravity Hounds could deal that much damage, but now I know and next time I'll be prepared." Like I said in my original post in this thread, though, there's no lesson to be learned from encountering an invincible death-machine in FTL. You just die, curse, and start over.
For every 'this game screwed me because of X' there's another run through where 'this game was gifted to me because of Y'.
I find that in FTL X happens far more often than Y. The game
can be easy if it decides to just hand you everything you need -- my first win was like this -- but far more often it is difficult-to-borderline-impossible because it denies you almost everything that you need and then generates nasty events on top of that.
FTL is so simple compared to roguelikes, it's also faster paced, it's also got more 'random' to it because you can't just scum a level over and over to max out whatever you like (actually you can do this, it's called 'Easy Mode', I would hope that most competent players can beat easy mode around 50% of the time if not more, because, it is, easy).
I don't scum in Angband. I dive through the dungeon like crazy. I still usually end up adequately prepared for fighting Morgoth (the end boss) by the end of the game. Yes, you
can scum like crazy and build up levels and gear tediously fighting orcs, but it's not much fun so I don't do it. Not scumming is more difficult but it's also more fun
and the difficulty curve is still smooth! Steeper, but smooth.
FTL's difficulty curve is all over the place. I'd be seriously impressed if a master FTL player could win >50% of their games on Normal.
But if you don't like the random then you don't like it. Removing it would make this game probably too easy to beat consistently, and frankly, the re playability in this game is due to the fact that you're likely to die in 90% of your runs because you don't get the right break at the right time. That's just the design, like it or hate it, kind of pointless to complain about it.
The point isn't that the game is hard but that it's the wrong kind of hard. Games should be about testing the player's skill. When the player makes a mistake, punish them for it, and make it clear what they should have done differently. Then give them the scope, in the next game, to do that thing differently and overcome the obstacle that stopped them last time. I'm not saying there should be an optimal strategy to FTL that should win the game every time, but there needs to be more room for the player to skillfully deal with bad situations that they could not possibly have prepared for (c.f. the aforementioned "every build has a hard counter" problem).