Subset Games Forum

Zoltans can simply invoke surrender standards according to law, which ocasionally might be worse than what those crazy pirates are prepared to beg with.

After entering a red sector (6, i think) named something with "Penal Colony", and hitting jump after getting the entry beacon message, the game crashed.
Feels pretty bad, such a nice match with the crystal ship so far...

Also, a sector before that (one of the quarantine sectors), the whole game glitched one beacon before the exit. I managed to win the fight, save-quitted and reloaded, the problem was gone.

Oh hey, I've seen this one before with my own eyes. You installed whichever Backgrounds mod of choice you have after CE, which ends up causing this to happen on any event where CE calls its unique backgrounds. Install that mod before CE and it should hopefully punch this one in the facicle.

Just an idea, but perhaps the Zoltan surrender options could be redone in this manner...
In vanilla FTL you would look at surrender options and if you didn't like them you would reject the offer and brutally murder your opponent. Usually then you would get something you liked better, but occasionally you would wish you had taken the surrender. So maybe the Zoltan surrender should just be a reroll of the surrender that you don't see until after you choose the option, and then you can still reject the surrender after the negotiation. And each Zoltan surrender could be a copy of the ship's normal surrender probability (+a little extra scrap).
It may also be possible to make the surrenders have a little extra resources by "stacking" the rewards in the files. You could have "normal reward" implemented by the Devs. Then (1-2 missiles/drones, 5-10 scrap) afterwords which I'm pretty sure just stack on top of each other, based on my previous testing, and this would make the Zoltan surrenders slightly better. Anyway, I just see a lot of people talking about this so throwing ideas out there.

I also will reiterate what I said earlier. I feel like CE events tend to give me more augments and weapons then vanilla which is a GOOD thing and, even if it's just my luck up until now, should be encouraged. Because there are way more weapons in CE so it is unlikely you will find what you are looking for in stores. If you get weapons or augs you don't like you can sell them for the extra scrap you need to repair your ship from those certain horrible CE encounters. It also showcases the new CE arsenal and allows you to experiment with the new weapons you normally wouldn't have. Like I saw the effectors in the store the first time I played CE and didn't like them, then I got one from an event and saw that it was a "hacking" weapon making them my new favorite weapon instantly! Same with Radiation Projector, I had no idea it would actually work! So I'm saying keep throwing events into the mix that have à slight probability of giving us weapons.

Another thing I see A LOT of people talking about lately are the AI's so that gives me an opportunity to share my thoughts on them. I think the AI's were created by the Zoltan and they are rebelling against them, kind of because of the fact that they appear in Zoltan ship and that trade event where if you have the Zoltan legal codex they say that it gives them all the rights they demand anyway. I think the Zoltan created the Engi as well, but the Engi turned out to be smarter then expected so the Zoltan let them be free and stayed allies with them. I think the AI holograms were supposed to not be as smart as the Engi and less dangerous, because they're just holograms. However, the inner HAL9000 and GlaDOS arose within the AIs and they too began to think for themselves but the Zoltan tried to enslave them instead of freeing them. Leading the whole hostile AI situation we have now. I say this only because it may help you with the flavor text. Perhaps you could say at the beginning that this sector once belonged to the Zoltan before the AI uprising, or you could throw in some Blue Zoltan or Engi events for the AI. Also, if there isn't already there should really be a special mission from talking to your AI crew member at the beginning of an AI sector.
Either way I love the AI, they remind me so much of the Replicator's from Stargate, and the Lanius remind me of the Wraith from SG: Atlantis!!

There was an event having to do with supplies missing or something. I chose the Advanced Sensors blue option, and nothing happened. Dialog box closed, and that was it.

"Your Mantis asks if you want to see its collection of human thumbs, then it bursts into badly auto-translated* laughter. You remain silent,** the creature explains that it still does not understand how jokes work. ..." - 1) autotranslated; 2) insert "so" before "the creature."

Allow shuttle to close, next box: "Rebel elite forces beamed aboard. ...
1. Continue ... (Missiles:2 Drone Parts:1 Scrap: 10)"* - Huh? Why are these quantities listed?

Next box: "internal scans indicate that they teleported some advanced equipment...
Missiles: 2 Drone Parts: 1 Scrap: 10"* - Listed again, though this time as a separate line instead of in parentheses.

Mantis chat, next box: 'You put your Mantis on the comm* and it sends a broadband hail.... "Sorry** Captain, but I need to*** have my revenge." ' - 1) add comma after "comm"; 2) add comma after "Sorry"; 3) "must" instead of "need to" adds a stronger nuance, I think.

"A few kilometers* ahead a Rebel AI turret floats in the middle of this wide clearing in the nebula...." - I don't know if I mentioned this before, but a few kilometers in space is really right on top of each other, as it can be traveled in a couple of seconds at the slow speed of 10^-5 c. I think a few hundred thousand kilometers is pretty close.

"The smoking remains of a Federation sub-fleet* is limping.... The ships all show heavy damage,** some are losing oxygen through hull breaches,*** others can only power impulse drives." - 1) is "squadron" too small a term? if so, why not just use "fleet"?; 2) replace comma with colon; 3) replace comma with semicolon.

'A Rebel drone drifts completely frozen near this beacon*. This doesn't seem right,** the auto ships should be little effected*** by the relatively low radiations**** levels.... "It's just in sleep mode, captain*****..." The icy cocoon shatters as the scouts****** weapon pods swing into firring******* position.' - 1) A Rebel drone, completely frozen, drifts near ...; 2) replace comma with period, capitalize "The"; 3) hardly affected; 4) radiation; 5) Captain; 6) scout's; 7) firing.

After exploring wreckage, next box: "Some debris parts* pierce the shields." - remove "parts," "debris pierces."

In events where the ship gets damaged, couldn't Rock Plating have a blue option to reduce or maybe even negate the damage?

'A small gang vessel hails you,* "Glad you are here** friend. See that ship on your nine? ..." ' - 1) replace comma with period or colon; 2) add comma after "here."

slowriderxcorps wrote:Oh hey, I've seen this one before with my own eyes. You installed whichever Backgrounds mod of choice you have after CE, which ends up causing this to happen on any event where CE calls its unique backgrounds. Install that mod before CE and it should hopefully punch this one in the facicle.

I installed Better Planets and Backgrounds before CE...
All the new backgrounds are working fine.

Kartoffelr wrote:Also, a sector before that (one of the quarantine sectors), the whole game glitched one beacon before the exit. I managed to win the fight, save-quitted and reloaded, the problem was gone.

Do you remember what happened in the event? Although this bug might not be exactly CE related... Quarantine Sectors do very little with backgrounds.

The crash in the Pirate sector is somewhat unexpected. I'll try to look into that.

Sleepy, here's an idea to improve on the out-of-fuel situations on radioactive clouds, based on slowy's idea.

Slowy thought (and brought to action) of making the shipwrecks not auto-ships and giving them one human crew, and giving them disabled LS systems, so that he would eventually run out of oxygen and asphyxiate, at which point the fight would end and you could jump.

And here's my idea to further expand on that:

First (I'm not sure if slowy already did this), make the fight-ending event take away the radioactive background, as your standard thrusters got you out of the radioactive zone, so it makes sense for LS to come back online and the radioactive cloud wouldn''t disappear when you waited.

Make radioactive clouds disable medbay too. Now, if you've run out of fuel and don't have any healing weapons or a lv3 medbay, by that point all your crew with asphyxiations times equal or below humans will have died before you get out of the zone. If you only take away one medbay bar, then a lv3 medbay might ensure survival of all crew, while a lv2 might do so too but only of a fraction of the crew (if it's one of the worst cases explained below), and would suffice to activate medbots.

And here's the best part:If you make the dummy enemy crew member be of a different species, you can simulate radioactive clouds of different sizes or positions relative to the beacon. If it's a Zoltan it wouldn't take you that long to get outta there, and only your Zoltans would die. It would escalate to human (or mantis or engi), rockman and crystallite depending on how many species will survive. And, as an extreme case, you can have a disconnected medbay and engi medbots on the shipwreck so that only your AI Avatars will survive (I'm not sure if having an enemy human would be enough for your crystallites to die, or you would need him to be a rockman. Crystallites can survive airlessly with medbots, so that's a nono).


Sounds beautiful now, doesn't it? Well, you can see that something's fishy if you have a slug, but whatever: as long as the enemy doesn't move (you could give them dummy cockpits so it spawns and stays there), you can't guess its race.


EDIT: Slowy makes another point:

And to prevent the cheesing of the timer by defeating the Human early, I also disabled the Teleporter so you can't just beam over and punch him in the face.

EDIT 2: I guess you can also have different exit-timers if the wreck has disconencted medbay and medbots, but not LS, so it starts without oxygen already.

As for lore discussion about AI - they were not created by Zoltan's only, but by Engis, too. There are AI ships that resemble Engi's vessels. In sector-entry text, it is also stated that Zoltan's and Engis are known for creating AI's, that sometimes get rogue (Engi's are AI of they own, but, hey, we're also creating robots that try to resemble us ). I don't buy the idea of Engi being create by Zoltans - it feels far beyond league of even mighty greenies.

BTW, others are creating AIs too (hint: rebels BTW, they strange spawn of AI's is quite interesting, I would suspect they have found something ancient that allowed them to drown galaxy in endless reinforcements of unknown-design ships and AIs, that seems to be not fully understood by rebels - see auto turrets, that starts to feel destruction), and sometimes, AI sector is named "Joni me" in "l33t l4nguag3" - so, different AIs are getting quite independent.

OK, enough of the rabble - it's time for bugs!

Tested version: FTL Captains Edition 1.098.ftl

1. Killing whole holo crew of AI ships in nanocloud, results in getting reward *twice* - event text about killing whole AI crew appears, alongside prize, then, after closing it, another event text about killing them on board appears, and reward us again. This way, I was getting ~120 scrap for every AI ship killed While I won't say that I wasn't - for once - feeling properly rewarded for my heroic deeds I think it need quick fix. (Severity: Major)

2. Event, when we aid ship being chased by pirates and it turns out, that saved ships was in fact rebel scout - there is option to kill and loot them (rightly so), but it doesn't state, how much scrap we're going to get (and after event, we're not told, too - scrap and things just get added to our total). Not that it is necessary, but feels quite off, because everywhere else, we're given that info. (Severity: Minor)

3. Finding derelict ship in nebula results in boarders beaming to our ship - they try to capture in place of they destroyed vessel, just like mantises/pirates/whatever close to the sun. So, we can assume, that they would be taking their stuff with them, just like sun-huggers. Still, no reward is given for dealing with them. (Severity: Medium)

I'm reporting it, as I've finally run into working reward for boarders, elsewhere - close to the sun.

4. We're not given option to pirate those unkind guys in engi's ship:
http://s29.postimg.org/62rakxvat/engi_unpirated.jpg
(Severity: Minor)

Cheers,
/Estel

It's impossible to change backgrounds mid event. Also without a working medbay, Radiation events become more dangerous in general, for example if you jump there with injured crew and damaged engines, low life support to start with, or if you happen to jump to two consecutive radiation events. This might actually put you into more dead-end situations than the unlikely case of jumping there when out of fuel.

It also feels quite odd to disable the medbay. Of course you can make some reasons up for why this happens, but it still feels forced. Slugs sensing the crew over at the husks is kind of odd as well.

Still might put in slow riders solution... Although it's hard to make it obvious that the event will eventually let you go. Players that do not read the description might think that they are stuck anyway. Even when the event clearly tells you that you try to get away from the radiation zone or whatever... players might loose trust that this is actually happening, and might just quit after waiting a minute with nothing going on but the crew slowly dying. And on the other hand, knowing that you will eventually be released might just make this whole radiation thing feel a little like a scare crow. *shrug*

Estel wrote: 3. Finding derelict ship in nebula results in boarders beaming to our ship - they try to capture in place of they destroyed vessel, just like mantises/pirates/whatever close to the sun. So, we can assume, that they would be taking their stuff with them, just like sun-huggers. Still, no reward is given for dealing with them. (Severity: Medium)

Yeah, you can stop reporting these, I do not plan to reward the player every time there are some boarders incoming, even it seems remotely plausible that they bring free stuff. Balance reasons. There will be selected boarding events with some rewards and usually higher difficulty. Thanks for the reports by the way, already went through the first batch.