Timmy wrote:Take a look at conventional RPGs - you have say 1% chance of finding "Item X" after defeating "foe X". But the game allows you to fight hundreds of foes if you deem the item that vital to your strategy.
This seems to imply that you've determined a strategy
prior to starting a game. Precommitting to a specific strategy is a rather poor meta-strategy for FTL.
Timmy wrote:Take a look at Minecraft. That is randomly generated too - but you are still guaranteed that the next biome (desert/forest/etc.) won't be thousands of miles away.
Take a look at Dwarf Fortress. That is randomly generated, and you're not guaranteed to find anything particular ore upon embark. Take a look at Pac-Man. That's not randomly generated at all.
Why are we looking at other games to determine how to play this one, again?
Timmy wrote:Now compare this to how FTL works. You have (I'm guessing here) 20% of finding "upgrade X" in a shop and 2 shops in one sector - that means that there's a very realistic ~41% chance of not finding the upgrade during the first 2 sectors. (And that is without considering that sectors often enough have just 1 shop in them). The same applies to the chances of finding "passenger/crewmen X", meeting "foe X"/"condition X" etc.
I'd imagine it's actually even lower than that, for any single arbitrary weapon/drone/system/augmentation/crewmember out of all of them in the game. If your precommitted strategy relies upon "I must get Weapon X to win" then you're gonna have a bad time. And lose. So a better strategy - learn to win with whatever you can find.
Timmy wrote:Thus the game forces you to to pretty much forget everything you learned the last time around, since it will be useless for the current game run.
Maybe this is true of the immediately last time around. Definitely untrue for all of the rounds as a whole - you should be continually learning to determine "oh, this event means X might happen, or Y might happen - if I can't afford Y right now, I should pick X" and "oh look, new weapon/augmentation/etc in a shop - I should try different things with this and figure out how to work this into my growing list of strategies".
Timmy wrote:I understand the necessity for randomness to keep the game exciting. But this isn't the way. I know the dev-team was very small and could not have come up with more foes/scenarios during the game, but this still isn't the right way to stretch out the play-through time. Forcing the player to adopt an entierly new play style every time is anything but exciting - it's tedious. Now combine this with the ability of not being able to save and you pretty much have a recipe for frustration.
Then this likely isn't the game genre for you. Others who enjoy that disagree - 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. (Thus why I was working with mod-makers to implement some sort of "random ship" starting game event.) Obviously, though, different people enjoy different things.
Timmy wrote:The appeal of a roguelike is to learn how to handle the situations. To know when to fight and when to retreat. To be able to prepare for upcoming fights by improving your stats - to learn how to handle the game. But if you have to deal with altered gameplay mechanics each time (since you can't apply the tactics you learned last time) it feels like a cruel joke.
This is like complaining that your playstyle as a Wizard in Nethack doesn't help you win as a Tourist because you can't apply your same tactics. Obviously, you can. Just not every single one, and not in the exact same way each time.