Subset Games Forum

I've played a lot of Dwarf Fortress, probably over 200 hours, but no one is counting. While the environment is random, and the ores you find are random, and the sieges the game throws at you are all random, you can still have a shot of having a fun time. It doesn't feel punishing when your fortress goes up in flames, so to speak. Its because you aren't the best player and need to try another strategy or learn more of the game's systems.

In FTL, often enough, you won't even stand a chance. Missiles are too overpowered when they can take off 4+ damage per shot and god help you if it hit something vital, like engines, or your weapons. You might as well restart.
In Dwarf Fortress, you always have a way to get armor and weapons for your military. If you can't smith them yourself, you can at the very least trade with a caravan to aquire some or booby trap your entrances and loot the dead goblins for weapons(goblinite). It doesn't make sense in FTL when we capture a ship intact and we can't even loot the weapons off of the ship and use them on our own.

Honestly I'd just not complain it's first freaking version of the game. I'm pretty sure they do have more planned for it but it's been out for a couple of days. Dwarf Fortress when it started no you didn't have a way to win in most situations due to it not being in the game yet. Really freaking random and next to nothing would ever go your way.

Icehawk78 wrote:Why are we looking at other games to determine how to play this one, again?

We are looking at other games not to determine how to play FTL, but to see how they utilize randomness, without sacrificing the player's sense of achievement.

Icehawk78 wrote:Then this likely isn't the game genre for you.

Maybe. I do however quite enjoy the general premise and simplicity of the game.

Icehawk78 wrote:I actually would prefer a way to further increase my play-style variety. Playing the same game the same way every time sounds boring and tedious to me.

What you are looking for is more play-through time, and the proper way of doing that is introducing more equipment/crew/foes/etc. And not by letting all the knowledge you gained the last time around go to waste.

I think the main problem with FTL is that the most fun stories come from things like somehow managing to win a fight despite half of your ship being on fire or when your captain sacrifices himself to fix the life support so that the rest of your crew could live, yet in practical terms all those really mean is that you will now need to waste a lot of scrap on repairs or new crew and that you might end up with too few upgrades to beat the boss.

Now there is certainly something to be said for the fact that the game does things the way it does, yet all I'm saying is that a little auto balancing could potentially go a long ways. Heck, maybe if there were just 2 different endings: once you reach the end you can choose to either try to take out the rebel flagship and crush the rebellion once and for all (best ending) or if you make it to the end with a ship looking like swiss cheese you can simply deliver your intel and use it to negotiate a peace settlement (because let's face it, compared to what you are told at the beginning the final boss is sort of a bait and switch).

Timmy wrote:We are looking at other games not to determine how to play FTL, but to see how they utilize randomness, without sacrificing the player's sense of achievement.

(Yes, I know, I was being glib with that )

Timmy wrote:What you are looking for is more play-through time, and the proper way of doing that is introducing more equipment/crew/foes/etc. And not by letting all the knowledge you gained the last time around go to waste.

All of those things that you've mentioned are what I'm getting out of this.

Each time I play, I tend to notice more and more things that I missed the previous time around. And I sure as hell have gained a lot of knowledge from numerous plays which have all cumulatively helped me immensely, to the point where with most ships now, I can almost guarantee that I'll at least be able to survive about halfway through (obviously, sometime the random number gods deem a particular ship unworthy of their attention, and throw the absolute worst enemy for that ship at me in sector one - in which case my ship valiantly goes up in flames with my crew running around headless, lol.)

I'm not a huge fan of merely "adding more stuff" to make my time with a game last longer - that's not replayability, that's implementing the Pokemon strategy, lol. However, there really isn't a "right" and "wrong" way of making a game fun for people - it's fun if people enjoy playing it, it's not fun if they don't. That's all.

zacen299 wrote:Dwarf Fortress when it started no you didn't have a way to win in most situations due to it not being in the game yet.

Technically you can't win DF. It doesn't have a win condition, just a long list of lose conditions.

GoldenShadowGS wrote:
In Dwarf Fortress, you always have a way to get armor and weapons for your military. If you can't smith them yourself, you can at the very least trade with a caravan to aquire some or booby trap your entrances and loot the dead goblins for weapons(goblinite). It doesn't make sense in FTL when we capture a ship intact and we can't even loot the weapons off of the ship and use them on our own.

You should think about it more as the adventurer mode of DF. This game can't really be compared to DF fortress mode, few games can. In adventurer mode, however, you can create characters that get wiped out 1 square on the overland map away, or you can create characters that wander around and kill dragons and anything else they come across. It all depends partially on your luck, skill, and knowledge of the game world. Oh, and not having anything hitting your head and tearing your brain.

I do wish you could loot weapons, too, though.

TBH, i don't know what people are talking about with the randomness making you lose. I've been playing it almost every night since its release on steam now, and at first the game was extremely harsh and the randomness did seem to be a problem, but since beating the boss for the second time, ive not failed once to reaching him and beating him, with any of the ships ive played with. getting good at the game and not losing to its randomness just comes down to enough experience. i dont know if the issues ur having are coming from playing on normal, but if u are and your finding it too hard, play it on easy, there's nothing wrongh with that

GoldenShadowGS wrote:I've played a lot of Dwarf Fortress, probably over 200 hours, but no one is counting. While the environment is random, and the ores you find are random, and the sieges the game throws at you are all random, you can still have a shot of having a fun time. It doesn't feel punishing when your fortress goes up in flames, so to speak. Its because you aren't the best player and need to try another strategy or learn more of the game's systems.

In FTL, often enough, you won't even stand a chance. Missiles are too overpowered when they can take off 4+ damage per shot and god help you if it hit something vital, like engines, or your weapons. You might as well restart.
In Dwarf Fortress, you always have a way to get armor and weapons for your military. If you can't smith them yourself, you can at the very least trade with a caravan to aquire some or booby trap your entrances and loot the dead goblins for weapons(goblinite). It doesn't make sense in FTL when we capture a ship intact and we can't even loot the weapons off of the ship and use them on our own.

I'm afraid I do not know these "overpowered missiles" you speak of.

Seriously, just slap on a cloaking device, when your pilot and engineer are well trained and you have 4 engine power, the cloak buffs you to a whopping 100% evasion just before that nasty missile can hit you. Assuming, of course, you can time your cloaking correctly.

As for looting ships, you CAN do so. Board the enemy (or kill crew using fire beam, destroying life support, or anti-bio beam), and you have a decent chance of getting a good weapon. Or at least enough scrap to buy one.

dalolorn wrote:I'm afraid I do not know these "overpowered missiles" you speak of.

Seriously, just slap on a cloaking device, when your pilot and engineer are well trained and you have 4 engine power, the cloak buffs you to a whopping 100% evasion just before that nasty missile can hit you. Assuming, of course, you can time your cloaking correctly.

As for looting ships, you CAN do so. Board the enemy (or kill crew using fire beam, destroying life support, or anti-bio beam), and you have a decent chance of getting a good weapon. Or at least enough scrap to buy one.

In this case, I assume he meant literally looting the weapons that the ship had - ie if they had a bio-beam in the fight, you should get a bio-beam as a reward.

I don't think for balancing that this would actually work out very well, and can be handwaved away, but it would be possible via a mod to make most captured ships both have the option of giving up one of their weapons, and having it specifically be one of the weapons they were using. However, without a way to alter the "resale value" of weapons, I have a feeling that this would wildly overinflate the amount of scrap in the game, making it vastly easier.

The game would need to be rebalanced. Ships with very good weapons should be harder to capture intact.