Why do people enjoy this game?

General discussion about the game.
Skull
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby Skull » Tue Apr 01, 2014 11:36 pm

I didn't vent the air in the medbay or cockpit. I vented everything except that, and then when my O2 system got destroyed by the enemy ship, the medbay and cockpit ran out of oxygen as well.


Well that`s the risk right. If you vent and stick the crew in the medbay until the boarders go there and then take hits in the doors, O2 or both it`s gonna be pretty hard to salvage the situation. But with more experience you`ll remember to look at the weapons array of the ship you`re facing and adjust accordingly. If there`s no sun to worry about and the enemy has ion weaponry and no missiles you can probably just run the whole crew into the medbay and vent the rest safely. If the enemy has missiles or powerful lasers then you`ll probably be better off venting one room at a time to herd the boarders around a bit. One of my personal gripes about FTL is that the enemy ships never vent you when you board, making a player boarding strategy a bit OP.
As for the suns unless you are under threat of taking hits in the doors or O2 from an enemy ship it can be effective to vent all the rooms in the ship not occupied by someone to reduce the area fires can start in while the FTL charges. Again though you might wanna keep the door room oxygenated just in case a flare blows out the system, which it will on occasion. Also, upgrading the doors and o2 supply will make it less likely that solar flares will knock them out and it pretty cheap to do early on.
But it`s almost all situational is the main point and why I like the game. There are many very bad ways to deal with most problems and lots of good ones, and because you have so many moving parts it all gets quite complicated and strategical. Of course you`ll have bad luck sometimes and narrowly flee something impossible only to land somewhere even worse and die. Sometimes blind alleys appear where you`d think there should be a path, forcing you back into the federation fleet, which is fine after zone 5 or so but hardly in zone 1 or 2. Sometimes you just cannot find a weapon no matter what you do and die pathetically somewhere in zone three when your starting weapons can`t break enemy shields anymore and just an endless number of similar things that have the potential to go bad on you without warning.
As for the FTL forum elitists, I once played a game where I died halfway through zone 6 without having found a single store. So how people can claim it`s possible to win 99% of games I have no idea. Skill and experience matters yes, but sometimes random acts of sabotage just won`t let you win no matter what you do. So unless these braggarts have a cheat for the game or something that lets them avoid all the randomness normal people experience, or simply pretend their games ending in zones 1-4 never happen so as not to mess up their shiny stats, I refuse to take these claims seriously.
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5thHorseman
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby 5thHorseman » Wed Apr 02, 2014 1:03 am

Skull wrote:As for the FTL forum elitists, I once played a game where I died halfway through zone 6 without having found a single store. So how people can claim it`s possible to win 99% of games I have no idea. Skill and experience matters yes, but sometimes random acts of sabotage just won`t let you win no matter what you do. So unless these braggarts have a cheat for the game or something that lets them avoid all the randomness normal people experience, or simply pretend their games ending in zones 1-4 never happen so as not to mess up their shiny stats, I refuse to take these claims seriously.


Your losing once due to no fault of your own does not mean that people can't win 99% of games. 99% wins means 1% losses, and that 1%* of losses is what you just described: Random Number Screw.

The problem is, people think that every time they come across a ship they can't beat, that they got RNG screwed. The fact is however, the vast majority of those times, they lost due to a dozen or more suboptimal choices they made before they came upon that ship that totally handed them their ass. Is it NEVER your fault? Of course not. Is it USUALLY your fault? By all means yes.

*Or whatever the number actually is. Some say 0.2% though I don't think that's reasonable. I personally can't get above a 10% loss ratio but I tend to be lazy because I don't want to play a spreadsheet, I want to play a computerized space combat board game.
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Skull
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby Skull » Wed Apr 02, 2014 10:39 am

Yes but the unavoidable disasters do not translate to 1% defeats by any stretch of the imagination. More like 50%-75% depending on the session. Anyone who claims 99% wins in FTL is an internet fibber. One good example are the dead ends, which sometimes make absolutely no sense at all. If you`re forced back into the federation fleet in zone two you`re dead. 100% of the time.
I agree that the game requires skill and planning, but some of the claims made on this site are simply laughable.
beefinator
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby beefinator » Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:12 am

Skull wrote:Yes but the unavoidable disasters do not translate to 1% defeats by any stretch of the imagination. More like 50%-75% depending on the session. Anyone who claims 99% wins in FTL is an internet fibber. One good example are the dead ends, which sometimes make absolutely no sense at all. If you`re forced back into the federation fleet in zone two you`re dead. 100% of the time.
I agree that the game requires skill and planning, but some of the claims made on this site are simply laughable.


Okay, looking at that example, it's still your fault. You can either have the game show beacon jumps (in options) and see that it's a dead end; or just be cautious and plan ahead your route. Whether or not you can jump is just based on the distance between beacons, so if it looks risky, you don't have to take that route.
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5thHorseman
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby 5thHorseman » Wed Apr 02, 2014 11:34 am

Skull wrote:Yes but the unavoidable disasters do not translate to 1% defeats by any stretch of the imagination. More like 50%-75% depending on the session. Anyone who claims 99% wins in FTL is an internet fibber. One good example are the dead ends, which sometimes make absolutely no sense at all. If you`re forced back into the federation fleet in zone two you`re dead. 100% of the time.
I agree that the game requires skill and planning, but some of the claims made on this site are simply laughable.


Are you saying that 50-75% of ALL games have an unavoidable game-ending situation in them? That is simply not true. I consistently win 90ish percent of my games and those I lose can FREQUENTLY (more than 50% and probably a lot more) be traced back to a mistake I made. A lot of those, I knew it about 3 seconds after making the mistake.

In the hundreds of games (if not thousands) I've played, I've been screwed by a dead end once. One time. And I got through it after fighting about 12 elites in a row.

I've handily trounced 6 enemy mantises on my ship while near a sun. I've fought off a Zoltan with drones in the first sector with both stealth ships on multiple occasions. I've run through a half dozen jumps (one a sun) with a single hull point looking for a store. I've seen all these "must lose" situations and lived through them.

And to get back to the subject of this post... That's why I enjoy this game.
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Twinge
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby Twinge » Wed Apr 02, 2014 4:55 pm

Skull wrote:Yes but the unavoidable disasters do not translate to 1% defeats by any stretch of the imagination. More like 50%-75% depending on the session. Anyone who claims 99% wins in FTL is an internet fibber. I agree that the game requires skill and planning, but some of the claims made on this site are simply laughable.


The game FEELS luck-heavy at first - it did for me too. But then I learned more about the game and got better, and gradually realized luck doesn't determine a victory or a loss.

In an effort to prove the game's skill factor, I streamed myself winning 18 games in a row on Normal difficulty, once with every different ship layout. While it IS possible to just be screwed by luck, it is incredibly rare; always try to focus on what you could've done better, even if that was 10 beacon jumps ago. (And by the way, if there were only a 50% chance of success, my win streak was a 0.000381% chance, or 1 in 262144.)

I should note that I still make multiple mistakes every single run, so there is plenty of room for me to improve. These mistakes still let me win on Normal, but Hard may not be as forgiving...
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shadowcrust
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby shadowcrust » Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:15 am

With a 90% winning probability, about 1 in 7 attempts to win 18 runs in a row would be successful. Considering how few people have tried (and posted) about this, this seems to in the realm of possibility. With your proposed 99.8% winning probability, on average about 96 out of 100 people trying would have a successful 18 win streak. Now you could claim you are way, way better than all other players in the world (who are posting), but I think the numbers speak for themselves.
Skull
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby Skull » Mon Apr 07, 2014 6:42 am

Well I`m not new to the game. I`ve beaten the game with all the ships too, but I didn`t edit it together online to make it look as if it was consecutive because that is statistically impossible.
I am accusing the 99% people of lying and doctoring their results so they can brag. I base this like I said on all the random crap that can happen to you in the first 4 zones or so, which is very often beyond your control. This wouldn`t be the first forum in the world to have such things happen in it. Prove me wrong if you can. But I know how to play video games and all the bragging here does not match either my experience with FTL or anything I`ve seen from people playing the game online. That`s why I don`t believe you.
Like I said, if the game forces you to choose between two meteor showers when you`re playing the stealth ship in zone 1 you`re going to die, and this has happened to me twice. If you can`t find a weapon upgrade in the first two zones, which has happened to me about 200 times, and then miss one of the lasers you need to hit to take down a 2 shield so you can`t use your beam and take a hit in the weapons while reloading etc etc.
There`s just no way you an convince me that I experience stuff like this consistently while you do not, or that you somehow magically survive when it happens.

Cough up some proof of these ridiculous claims and I`l admit I was wrong and shut up. Until then give it a rest with the bragging.
Last edited by Skull on Mon Apr 07, 2014 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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5thHorseman
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby 5thHorseman » Mon Apr 07, 2014 7:06 am

Skull wrote:*snip calling people liars*

Cough up some proof of these ridiculous claims and I`l admit I was wrong and shut up. Until then give it a rest with the bragging.


You don't know what a stream is, do you?

Twinge played the game LIVE and streamed his playing on the internet, and won 18 consecutive games in a row.

Me, you can call a liar if you want. I won't say what that makes me think of you because I like to keep things civil.

Or maybe you don't think I'm a liar because I only "claim" to win 90% of my games. Is that an acceptable number for you? Or do you insist that it must be closer to 50%? or 25%?
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Twinge
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Re: Why do people enjoy this game?

Postby Twinge » Mon Apr 07, 2014 10:38 pm

I'm also always amused that the examples people give usually tend to be things that aren't a big deal for an experienced player. Asteroids come in slower when you have no shields, and while you don't want to jump into one with the Stealth Cruiser it usually means you eat ~8 damage rather than losing the game.
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