Game over

[shadowcrust]

I think most arguments have been exchanged, but I just came up with another wonderful analogy which will be revealed in the last paragraph.

Because [high score is] not interesting, in short.

I don't mind you thinking so, but I disagree, and a number of other people that have achieved high scores (or tried to) in FTL obviously disagree as well. Only now that I hold the top 3 winning high scores on normal difficulty I don't feel like competing against myself anymore.

There is no limit to how high a score can become beyond how long you want to grind Rebel Elites.

This is not correct, but it's easy to think that when you've never tried it yourself. It's not that much of an investment of time, your winning streak certainly took longer than you'd need to get the new World High Score. Incidentally, I looked at the end of your videos where you show the best scores for your ships, and it puzzles me how low not only your winning streak runs score (which can be explained by playing extremely passively and defensively, I haven't watched the rest of the movies), but even your best scores shown in the overview are way lower than those of all other people I know that are playing FTL. You seem to be actively avoiding high scores, just as I am actively avoiding low scores.

You're allowed your opinion, but the rest of the community disagrees.

Heh, well, I don't think you are the spokesperson of the community, which, looking at this forum, isn't quite brimming with activity anymore anyway. I think most people interested in high score competitions have moved on, which I would have done as well if I could. I'm now playing from scratch to get all ships with (no) as few losses as possible, which is a bit of a drag and not nearly as interesting as going for high scores. I'm actually more motivated to type this important post than to play.

Other than high scores, challenge runs are an option to keep the game interesting. People have done shieldless runs, no oxygen runs, only one crew member runs, no upgrade runs and what not. Now for the super analogy. I think those runs are interesting, but only the first time they are shown to be feasible, like a mathematical proof. First time, awesome, then extremely boring. The problem is now to come up with other possible challenges, and I couldn't think of one that hasn't been tried before. - High scores, on the other hand, are exploring boundaries and in principle remain interesting (at least for some), like exploring ever new prime numbers and calculating more digits of Pi remain interesting and new (at least for some).

awkward silence

[itg]

There is no limit to how high a score can become beyond how long you want to grind Rebel Elites.

This is not correct, but it's easy to think that when you've never tried it yourself. It's not that much of an investment of time, your winning streak certainly took longer than you'd need to get the new World High Score. Incidentally, I looked at the end of your videos where you show the best scores for your ships, and it puzzles me how low not only your winning streak runs score (which can be explained by playing extremely passively and defensively, I haven't watched the rest of the movies), but even your best scores shown in the overview are way lower than those of all other people I know that are playing FTL. You seem to be actively avoiding high scores, just as I am actively avoiding low scores.

Believe it or not, I actually decided to try grinding for a couple hours with a strong ship, just to see if it was really as boring as I thought it would be (it was). Based on that run, I can say conclusively that you can get a setup which can kill rebels until your CPU goes bad. Why bother trying for a high score with anything less? The time investment is so high it isn't worth trying when there's any risk of failure.

[shadowcrust]

So why don't you show your run? With a couple of hours of fighting Elite ships, and with a strong ship at that (what ship, what setup?), you should be close to the top 3 already. With the only strong ship I did score runs with, the DA-SR 12, it is incredibly fast to destroy opponents.

I think all sides have shown their feelings of what is and what is not fun to do in the game, I think there's no point arguing who's right, because really everyone is. It may be Thread over.

[itg]

The setup was Stealth B with glaive beam, burst II, burst I, a pre-igniter, and an auto reloader. It was also a shieldless ship, incidentally. When I got to the end of sector 7, I made a backup of the save, then went on and beat the flagship, and only later did I try farming the rebels with the backup file. I haven't gone back to beat the flagship a second time yet.

Incidentally, each battle was still relatively slow because I had to fight off boarders and then heal my guys pretty much every time.

Here's a link to the save, if your'e interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7y1OA ... sp=sharing.

[shadowcrust]

So is this an Infinity Ship (TM)? I don't think so. You only got 5 laser shots with that ship, and it's relatively common to have 4 of 5 shots missing, and if this happens twice in a row, then you'll get eradicated by the Elite Fighter.

You're very welcome to prove me wrong and defeat 1000 fighters in a row, though, but I think attrition will kill you first before you run out of patience.

(also, technically it's save-scumming what you're doing)

[itg]

It may not be an "infinity ship," but it's definitely a "several million or more ship." If you stick to the ion storms (I was in a nebula sector, so that's 85% of the map), the enemies have to cut shields and engines, but my ship has enough juice to fully power weapons and cloaking. With cloaking, I get two full volleys before the enemy can fire once, and a lasers-only volley in between the full volleys. Try it yourself for a while, and see what you think.

I really don't care that it's technically save-scumming. I just as easily could have hacked that save together with the FTL profile editor (or just not mentioned that I was playing from a backup), just as you could have used it to type some really big numbers into your high score box (I don't believe you did that, for the record). I guess my point is, if we don't take each other at our words that we're keeping to the spirit of the game, why bother with any of this?

[shadowcrust]

In an ion storm, it's (very close to) an Infinity Ship, agreed. Heh, it's one of the few ships that could make use of two Glaive Beams at that

I'm aware that you're not actually save-scumming (or even trying for a highscore) here, that's why I wrote "technically".