Suggestions to improve gameplay and interface

[Tamren]

Some more things I would like to see.

- Boarding drones have a chance to be recovered as long as A. The ship they are attacking is destroyed (sending the drone into space). B. You have a drone recovery arm. And C. Assuming the drone survive this process, so it would be a %chance scaling to how much health the drone has when this happens. If successful the drone will appear back on your ship

- Secondly, boarding drones should be recoverable by teleportation. (if this isn't already possible)

- If enemy boarding parties are dumb enough to go into my teleporter room, I should be able to beam them back to their ship. Or maybe even into space!

- Every two upgrades to a drone control bay increases the repair speed of drones positioned there.

- Engi crew members are capable of repairing shipboard drones at a low speed.

I have been putting some time into playing as the Engi ships and these cover my two major annoyances. Antipersonnel drones get damaged a lot but take FOREVER to repair. And boarding drones, while awesome, can't be recovered.

Some other misc stuff:

- There should be an option on the interface to direct Defense Drone IIs to either target ONLY incoming missiles or ONLY incoming lasers. I find that the drones tend to get distracted by lasers (which move too fast to be countered most of the time) and this results in them missing a lot of the bigger slower missiles which are far more of a threat. This might seem a silly addition, but micromanagement is the name of the game isn't it? Being good at micro allows you to get more performance out of your systems and crew, I don't see why drones should be any different.

- Change the colour of level 1 doors to light grey. They currently interfere with the depressurized room border (which is also orange). And they make it VERY hard to read health bars. By comparison Level 2 doors would be a darker grey, and Level 3 doors would be dark grey with stripes through it (unchanged basically).

- The shield bubble drawn around the Engi Stealth Ship is off-center.

[HelloLion]

While I feel like some of the suggestions in this thread are legitimate interface oversights, overall a lot of these feel like they'd just make the game too easy. Frantic multi-tasking is part of the fun!

[Tamren]

While I feel like some of the suggestions in this thread are legitimate interface oversights, overall a lot of these feel like they'd just make the game too easy. Frantic multi-tasking is part of the fun!

But there is a distinction to be made here.

Crazy and frantic fighting action where you have to make dozens of choices and everything is happening so fast that you mess some of them up and have to deal with the problem while still juggling more things. THAT is fun, that is what makes the game fantastic.

But once the fight is over, the ship is in no danger and you have all the time in the world to twiddle your thumbs. Doing things like getting my rockman pilot to move his fat ass over to the medbay, wait for him to heal and then move back again... That's just boring! Have you ever vented your entire ship in order to suffocate boarders? It takes AGES to pressurize the ship again with level 1 oxygen systems. Some times I turn off auto-pause and watch youtube because the game takes so long to do some things. That is the part that's no fun.

The way I see it you can deal with this problem in two ways.

1. Add a timer to the game, maybe through some kind of Hard mode. The timer resets every time you jump, and ticks down the longer you stay in a system. It doesn't matter what you are doing or whether or not a fight is going on. If the timer ticks down to zero the rebels get a little closer! This would give the game a constant set of urgency and make you second guess doing things like healing each and every crewmember to full, or waiting a couple minutes for your oxygen to rise up from 10%.

In this way you make that "pointless busywork" meaningful because now it's a part of the game you can become good at. And more importantly its a part of the game you can FAIL as well.

2. The other way of dealing with this problem is automation. Assuming there are no environmental dangers the FTL drive jumps to fully charged the moment combat in a system ends. This is an obvious shortcut meant to save the player from having to watch the bar tick up to full when nothing else is going on. Why not apply this ease-of-use feature to the rest of the game? This is why I suggested duty stations. Figuring out which room you want each crewmen to stand in is a fun part of the game. Actually telling them to go stand there after every single mission is a chore, nothing more. "Man Duty Stations", "Crew Seek Healing", all of these automation features could be disabled UNLESS the ship is in no danger.

It's not about making the game easier. It's about saving time. I despise games with timesinks purposefully built into them which is why I don't play MMOs anymore. FTL is not one of them obviously, but these pre-jump chores are sufficiently annoying that it's starting to detract from the experience for me. The game should do everything in it's power to keep the pace going, things like these are just stumbling blocks and I see no reason to retain them.

[Tamren]

I think I found another bug. Every time I am in Zoltan space and I get a "Mantis vs Zoltan ship battle who will you support?" event. Whenever I pick the option to fight the Zoltan ship it's ALWAYS a slug ship. Does this happen to anyone else?

[Tamren]

Here are some ideas for augmentations/ship abilities I thought of during my most recent game.

- Secondary Oxygen Tanks: Increases oxygen capacity of a ship by 50% When a room depressurizes it draws oxygen from this surplus until the overall level reaches 100% after which it will drain normally.

- Hull Sealing Membrane: Hull breaches will slowly fill with a green gummy substance. This halts depressurization but the hull breaches still need to be repaired. If a room with sealed breaches is hit by damage they will all break open and have to seal themselves again.

- Emergency Fire Suppression: Adding this Augment to a ship gives you another subsystem on the bottom right of the UI beside doors and sensors. It has a button beside it, and when pressed it floods all rooms that are currently on fire with retardant foam. This instantly puts out fires, but any room foamed up in this way slows the movement of crew and prevents stations from being manned for 20 seconds. The system also has a cooldown of 30 seconds.

- Point Defense Laser: This adds a small automated turret to your ship that functions like a Defense Drone II. However since the system does not draw power it has drawbacks. The turret overheats quickly and each shot reduces it's rate of fire by 5% to a minimum of 10%.

- Counter-Missile Battery: Adds a button to the UI. When activated instantly destroys all incoming missiles and asteroids for the next 10 seconds at the cost of 1 missile ammo.

- Nanofuel Recombiner: Allows the player to transmute 2 Missiles or 1 Drone Part into Fuel. 25% chance of failure!

- Ablative Armour: Increases the hitpoint capacity of your ship by 5. You can only have 1 of these augments. These extra hitpoints count double when it comes to repairs of any kind. (in other words it costs the same to repair to 35 as it does to repair to 40)

- High Resolution Teleporters: Allows you to abduct crew off the enemy ship! This does not function through shields.

[Tamren]

I had an idea just now about how to improve the power system. Situations where you run out of power are very irritating and deadly (like an ion storm). However the game doesn't give us any tools to deal with this. My suggestion would be to add a Battery subsystem. This is how it would work:

Batteries store power for emergencies. You can upgrade the system from level 1-4. Each level of battery provides enough power to run one "bar" of system power for 30 seconds. However there is no limit to the number of systems that can draw from the battery. If you draw two bars worth of power, the battery will only last for 15 seconds. Make sense? Batteries are useful in two situations. A surplus of power that you can tap for a short time to run more systems and perform better at the start of a fight. Or an emergency backup that you can tap if you get caught in an Ion storm and your reactor only runs at half capacity.

When the battery system takes damage any stored power can still be used as long as one level of battery remains. If the system is disabled any stored power is lost. Damaged batteries can't be charged until they are repaired.

In order to charge up the batteries you simply need to have surplus power available. If you have bars of power not assigned to any system, that power goes to the batteries and charges them up at the same rate as they drain. This would not create significant downtime during each jump, all you need to do is deactivate weapons or drones and that would charge up the batteries in a jiffy.

Does that sound interesting/useful?

I should point out this would have an interesting bonus for ships with Zoltan crewmembers. Each zoltan generates one bar of power, but if they don't stand in a room with a subsystem that power is "wasted". Having a battery would mean your zoltan could charge it by standing in that room. One zoltan would charge the battery as fast as one system could drain it, so you could instantly direct the power anywhere on the ship instead of having them run around.

This would help solve one the most irritating thing about having a lot of zoltans which is the "push-pull" effect where a zoltan moving through multiple rooms will rapidly shuffle the power bars of those systems. This can cause problems in the middle of a fight when your strategy revolves around careful and precise power management.

[ftl_raptor]

I would like to see the following improvements, some which have already been mentioned in this thread but I'd just like to get them off my chest:

• An indicator that you have doors open or that certain rooms reside in a vacuum
• A "Go to Medibay" button for crew members
• A way to open doors by just keeping the left mouse button pressed and dragging a route towards the room that needs to be vacuumed or closed. (Well, that'd just be a gimmick I suppose! Alternatively, a button that opens only doors to rooms that are on fire because this can be a tedious task if the room is far away from an airlock!)
• A clearer indicator in the ship itself that a room has no power (I oft times send my crewmembers to a powered down medi-bay without realising it because I'm too busy to look at the HUD)
• A more useful auto-pilot skill; it should also charge the FTL. The evasion is far too low to make up for the FTL not spinning up. If my pilot has to leave the helm, it's because the ship is going to be doomed if he doesn't help out. And it'll be doomed even more if I can't jump out so I'll lose either way. Perhaps power the FTL at 1/4th and 1/2th speed as well? Even with Auto-pilot, I still feel obliged to keep a teammate locked up at the helm.
• The difference between targetting the helm or the engines seems minimal. You don't have to destroy both, just one of 'm. All other rooms have specific tasks. Perhaps only destroying the helm should disable FTL-spinning?
• The higher levels of evade seem to offer far less of a bonus to evade than the lower levels do, making the (so far for me, any way) salvage a poor investment that is better spent elsewhere.
• I would really like to see a way to tell what kind of chances I will have of something happening when I click on a random encounter. For example: I am NEVER going to go help out with the spider infestation anymore because it seems I always end up losing a crew member. If there is a positive outcome to this mission I will never know because by now, I have been conditioned to believe it is just a way to make me lose the game early on.
  Say, for example, add a small piece of text stating "25% chance of losing team member or 15% chance of gaining loot" (With random variables as there are now, I suppose)
  If you believe this will make the game too easy, consider adding a "sensor" subsystem that requires the player to invest in in order to find out more accurately what the chances of an outcome of an encounter are.

[Tamren]

Finished playing a game just now and I discovered several issues which I consider serious enough to be called bugs.

1. I selected a system to jump to that had a DISTRESS marker on it. Upon jumping there, fighting a battle and winning. I went back to the jump menu and discovered another jump beacon a little to the east of that one which had a STORE tag on it. Now I think what happened was the game generated the position of the two systems just right so that one tag covered up the other.

Not being able to see a the position of a store is a pretty serious deal in this game. It's not exaggeration to say that it could be the difference between victory or defeat, so this problem should be fixed.

I have a simple solution. The tags that denote special systems are always displayed a little above and to the right of systems with a little arrow pointing to the star. It should be possible to have the game detect when these are obscuring each other, and place them in different positions. There are four spots where the arrow could go and there should not be any confusion because the arrows point directly to the system and the tags highlight when you mouse over that system.

2. Secondly I have been having trouble with my zoltan crew members. When I put a zoltan into the weapons room he provides 1 energy to the first weapon on the list. The problem is this stops you from de-activating that weapon. Normally what I do when boarding another ship is to turn off all of my weapons completely, but just now I very nearly lost half my crew on the enemy ship because a heavy laser I thought was off kept shooting on automatic!

Normally you would never want to turn off a system. But weapons are the exception to this because it's very easy to misclick with them. Turning them off is the only way to put them on "safe".

I think this occurred specifically because the weapon in question (a heavy laser) only needed 1 bar of power. But you should be able to deactivate the weapon regardless.

3. Lastly, I noticed that if you click on the screen during the credits it dumps you back at the main menu and skips the stats screen.

[Tamren]

]An indicator that you have doors open or that certain rooms reside in a vacuum

I noticed that the game does have warning indicators (glowing red text) that pop up when certain events happen. They are highly useful, but the problem is they only show up for a couple seconds and do not repeat. They should appear and STAY until whatever problem has been resolved. Things like:

- FIRE DETECTED
- BOARDERS DETECTED
- HULL DEPRESSURIZING
- OXYGEN SYSTEM UNPOWERED
- LOW OXYGEN (shows 75,50 or 25%)
- WEAPON SYSTEM DAMAGED (this one would display above/below the specific weapon on your hull that lost power because of the damage)

Also it could be useful to give each of them unique sound cues. You guys probably don't know much about commercial aviation but the cockpits on passenger jets are full of warnings. Buzzers, alarms, even voice commands like "TOO LOW, TERRAIN", "ALTITUDE, ALTITUDE". etc. These warn the pilot when bad things are happening. Considering the dozens of things that can go FUBAR in FTL we could use more stuff like this

A way to open doors by just keeping the left mouse button pressed and dragging a route towards the room that needs to be vacuumed or closed.

Click and drag to open a path through multiple doors? GENIUS!

A clearer indicator in the ship itself that a room has no power

It could be as simple as dimming the lights in unpowered rooms. Or maybe adding little red warning lights to the room itself.

A more useful auto-pilot skill; it should also charge the FTL. The evasion is far too low to make up for the FTL not spinning up. If my pilot has to leave the helm, it's because the ship is going to be doomed if he doesn't help out. And it'll be doomed even more if I can't jump out so I'll lose either way. Perhaps power the FTL at 1/4th and 1/2th speed as well?

I agree completely. A little while ago I got stuck in a frustrating fight where a boarding drone hit the bridge and my pilot started to fight instead of charging up the engine. Moments later I cut power to the drone by damaging the enemy ship, but my pilot was still distracted. Auto-calculations would be fantastic, even if you had to upgrade to level 3 to use it because it would give us an option to escape when there is fire, boarders or hull breaches on the bridge.

The higher levels of evade seem to offer far less of a bonus to evade than the lower levels do, making the (so far for me, any way) salvage a poor investment that is better spent elsewhere.

It's supposed to be diminishing returns because higher dodge ratings are extremely powerful protection against basically everything. It might seem like a poor investment on the Kestrel, but the others player ships have wildly different pros and cons and max engines benefits some more than others.

I would really like to see a way to tell what kind of chances I will have of something happening when I click on a random encounter. For example: I am NEVER going to go help out with the spider infestation anymore because it seems I always end up losing a crew member.

I'm ambivalent on this one. This is the kind of thing you need to learn the hard way. Though I do agree the game should make it more clear that the spiders will eat your face.

That event does have a good ending as well as a bad one, but if my experience is anything to go by it's NOT a 50-50 chance of success.

[ftl_raptor]

1. I selected a system to jump to that had a DISTRESS marker on it. Upon jumping there, fighting a battle and winning. I went back to the jump menu and discovered another jump beacon a little to the east of that one which had a STORE tag on it. Now I think what happened was the game generated the position of the two systems just right so that one tag covered up the other.

Not being able to see a the position of a store is a pretty serious deal in this game. It's not exaggeration to say that it could be the difference between victory or defeat, so this problem should be fixed.

I had the same problem yesterday, I was in dire need of finding a store and instead I ended up in the middle of a fight. Perhaps I wasn't looking right but I could have sworn the tag for the store was pointing at the one I was jumping at.

I'll probably pay more attention next time but sometimes you have to like twice or even thrice before you can tell where the store really is. Could indeed use some tweaking.

I think the simplest solution would be to denote stores in a different colour on top of having a tag.