Whining

[Scase]

You sound a little angry bud.

You should see the first post he even made on this forum. He complains about Matthew being rude because he signed his post "cheers, Matthew" and trying to help the guy.

He constantly refers to people performing sexual favors to the devs.

I think he has 2 posts out of 25 where he does not insult someone or use explicit language.

I could care less if you've played the game more than me

Gotta love people who played a game 50 to 100 hours and then complain how horrible it is,though.

Haha yeah if I had known he was just a stupid troll I wouldn't have bothered with him in the first place.

@Derakon

As Vind said, you can in most cases simply jump away from a bad fight. So you have an "Oh shit" ability that you can use to get out of virtually every encounter. Is it 100% reliable? No but, why should it be. That would trivialize the entire game.

I'm sure if they toned down some of the randomness the game would be easier but really, isn't that what the EASY difficulty setting is for? If they dick around with the way normal is setup it becomes yet another easymode, then they will have to create an arbitrary "Hard mode" to appease the majority of people who aren't complaining about the difficulty. If you are really having such a hard time play easy, that's the reason it's there.

[Derakon]

Honestly you can jump out from 80% of "impossible" fights. Granted sometimes AI get lucky and destroy bridge and engine room almost instantly but chance is really low. You cant complain game is hard - because in beacons you are not visited may be loads of free weapons and crew - you just missed it and blame the game for it? It is your choice which places to visit and which to avoid.

Hell yes I blame the game for punishing me for making literally blind decisions.

Pop quiz: you come to a fork in the road. Both possible routes look identical. Which one do you pick?
- Go left
- Go right

(Go left: you find a sandwich shop. Good thing too, since you're pretty hungry)
(Go right: some asshole drops a rock on your car as you drive under an overpass, smashing your windshield)

This is roughly what the "pick a zone to warp to" decision boils down to. Oh, sure, you can tell if there's a distress signal, shop, or nebula, and with the long-range sensors you can tell if there's a hazard and sometimes if there's a ship present (though plenty of zones with ships don't show the ship icon because they're e.g. slavers and you have the possibly-painful option to not fight them). But that's still incredibly little information on which to base your decision, and it's very easy to miss the "good stuff" in a sector through no fault of your own. An optimal search strategy in each sector will still regularly fail to find the stores even (unless you're willing to spend a lot of time backtracking through Rebel-controlled space), and you can see those from a jump away!

[jamotide]

I can look at the death screen and go "yup, shouldn't have done that."

Whereas in FTL it is impossible to judge a situation until you're already in the thick of it. It's impossible to be adequately cautious (beyond e.g. not trying to fight giant alien spiders) because there's no concept of a cautious vs. aggressive stance. It's impossible to have the right preparations because no matter what your build is, you cannot cover all the bases and there's always a hard counter.

Sorry but that is true for FTL as well, in the standard ships I always knew why I lost, what mistake I made. And I am pretty sure most players can win at least 50% of their games in the Kestrel or Fed Cruiser, more like 90%. Just get enough shields and a defense drone (Mark 1!), voila, pretty much invulnerable. And almost every store has drone control for only 80. All you then need to worry about is breaking through their defenses.
I think the game is way to easy in those ships, but thats ok, other Ships and Layouts provide more of a challenge.

[Icehawk78]

Hell yes I blame the game for punishing me for making literally blind decisions.

Pop quiz: you come to a fork in the road. Both possible routes look identical. Which one do you pick?
- Go left
- Go right

(Go left: you find a sandwich shop. Good thing too, since you're pretty hungry)
(Go right: some asshole drops a rock on your car as you drive under an overpass, smashing your windshield)

Rarely does the game actually directly punish you for this, though.

More accurately would be "Go left: Sammich shop, yay! Go right: You see a station which looks dangerous. Do you want to explore it? Yes: 50/50 "Pile of gold" or "Rock in the face"; No: Nothing happens."

I understand your complaint about not knowing whether left or right is "better" in advance (except that you can to a slight degree with the Long-Range Scanners...), but realistically in numerous other dungeon crawl games, you don't know whether a particular branch is going to lead to a room with an awesome weapon vs a room with a named demon who will pitchfork you five ways til Sunday. The main difference is that with those games, you tend to have much less of a "RUSH RUSH RUSH THE EVIL REBELS ARE GONNA GET YOU" push, which allows you to more fully explore a floor.

An optimal search strategy in each sector will still regularly fail to find the stores even (unless you're willing to spend a lot of time backtracking through Rebel-controlled space), and you can see those from a jump away!

I'm not really sure you're likely to regularly miss every store in a sector with a nearly optimal search strategy. I have certain had the difficult decision to either go to a shop node or distress node and then have to backtrack to the previous node in what is now rebel-controlled space, or to skip it. Typically, unless my ship is currently underpowered, it's worth the risk.

(Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, that would be a fun project/program to make. Take a screenshot of a star map, and between that and the known rebel progression rate, map out a completely optimal travel route to hit the most stars on a map.)

[Disc10]

Disclaimer, to quell the potential flames thrown in my direction. I LOVE the game, and I'm very glad I bought direct from the devs the day it came out (soundtrack too). HOWEVER...

Those people saying luck is too much of a factor? Well it's really hard to disagree. All of the arguments against this that I've read revolve around the fact that you know where stuff is, you know when you're going to get that important gear and that you KNOW what's just around the corner.

You don't though. And that's fine, and as it should be. It wouldn't be much of a rougelike if you could predict exactly how a game is gonna go. I've had a situation where I deliberately went for the "Tough Little Ship" achievement on a whim, and honestly thought I was gonna lose quickly after that. I ended up getting to the boss and getting to the second phase!

But more often than not the game will dump stuff on you that you have no way to deal with, and could not possibly have prepared for, especially (as has been mentioned before) it's EXTREMELY hard to prepare for everything. Boarding parties are a common example. Small teams of two or three, they're tricky but workable. A team of 5 mantis men however? With no means to stop it? Or have any idea it was coming beyond "they're here now, enjoy!"? Yes they're technically possible to deal with (I've done it once) but generally that's a big fat game over, because of a situation you had no control over whatsoever.

Now take a game like The Binding Of Isaac (mostly since that's the only other rougelike I've played so far). For the most part, the game rarely puts you in situations you can't deal with. Unless you've been EXTREMELY unlucky with the drops, all the enemies can be dealt with if you have the skill to fight them off. You don't know exactly what's coming around the corner, but you can take an educated guess based on past experience. It's much harder to do that in FTL beyond "don't go after the alien spiders" or "wait for a blue option". This encourages a more cautious style of game play, but in my experience that's not going to get you very far. I know I've lost a couple of times because I tried to minimise my risks, and thus minimise the number of auto-lose encounters I get.

The other thing TBOI does right in terms of what to expect is unlocks. Drops are random, but you have just as much chance of getting them one game as you do another. Unlocks here are also extremely luck based. Didn't find the random sector a ship unlock quest starts in? Sorry, maybe next time! If one or two of the ships were like this, such as the secret ship, that'd be fine. But most of the ships (bar the Engi ship and Federation cruiser) are locked off to you until you arbitrarily stumble upon the right sector before the Rebels catch up to you.

To counter the negativity here I wanna go into things I think FTL does right, if only to prove I'm not just here to bash the game.

Back onto unlocks, whilst I really dislike that lots of the ships are completely unavailable to you unless you happen to stumble into the right sector (with no indicator of where may be the best place to go), I do like that the Type B ships are for the most part skill based with achievements. You know exactly what you need to do, and can plan your game accordingly (since mercifully you don't need to beat the game to keep the unlock ). This is how I got the Type B Kestral. It feels a lot fairer than blindly groping in the dark.

Game length is something that I feel is very good as well, especially combined with how random good chunks of the game are. At the most you're probably gonna take an hour to get to sector 8, and this means that you're always gonna be able to get a good game in a short sitting. This is something TBOI doesn't do as well, especially as every time you beat it (more or less), it gets even longer. And you can't even save to carry on at a later time (something else FTL does right!).

And finally the bread and butter of the game, the combat, is stellar. Combat situations are definitely fair, usually. I've never gotten into a combat that I felt I couldn't recover from, even if it means jumping away. Well, there are two exceptions, those being that I had a hard time finding missiles for the final boss (but even that was mostly my fault, I sold a Heavy Ion Cannon eariler. Big mistake ), and when you're being shot at whilst being attacked by a larger boarding party (but that's mostly due to me not being very well practiced at micro).
And that's kind of why the random encounters you have no way of assessing until it's too late irk me a little (and I imagine the others who have a problem with luck in the game). The main, skill based part of the game is fine. You can usually deal with a lot of what's thrown at you combat wise, but then you can get shot in the foot by an event you had no control over AT ALL.

So I hope I've explained the "too much luck" stance without looking like I'm just bashing the game. As I say, I love it and I will continue to sink more hours into it, but if there was anything I'd change it would be the random backstabbing the game can give you if it feels like it. Well that and the inability to trade fuel, missiles and scrap at stores, but hey.

[jamotide]

But more often than not the game will dump stuff on you that you have no way to deal with, and could not possibly have prepared for, especially (as has been mentioned before) it's EXTREMELY hard to prepare for everything. Boarding parties are a common example. Small teams of two or three, they're tricky but workable. A team of 5 mantis men however? With no means to stop it? Or have any idea it was coming beyond "they're here now, enjoy!"? Yes they're technically possible to deal with (I've done it once) but generally that's a big fat game over, because of a situation you had no control over whatsoever.

Those boarding things seem to end many peoples games , but it is very easy to deal with, just open all doors, except of the medbay and send your crew there, the boarding party will either suffocate or fight in the medbay and lose. Also it is extremely easy and cheap to prepare for it, its called blast doors and costs 20 scrap.
What other stuff does the game dump on you? I can't think of anything thats not possible to deal with or prepare for, at least with the easy ships. Just practice more, improve your strategies and you will realise there is no problem with randomness.

[Vind]

So as i understand people want some indication of dangers or bonuses then choosing. The point is due to random maps no 100% right choices exist. No ideal walkthrough either. Still after playing you can easily memorize the best/worst each random encounter can offer and make your choice risk it or not. If you playing it safe all the time you will be unable to aquire upgrades and new crew almost all the time. This game teach how to make a choice and live through it consequences no matter how bad they are. Basically if you have more than 4 crew and dont have boarding party you can risk it all away. Same with ship hitpoints - full - risk it, one or too - well you got to really think about it

[Derakon]

Those boarding things seem to end many peoples games , but it is very easy to deal with, just open all doors, except of the medbay and send your crew there, the boarding party will either suffocate or fight in the medbay and lose. Also it is extremely easy and cheap to prepare for it, its called blast doors and costs 20 scrap.

Blast doors can help, certainly, but they aren't a panacea. And the nastiest boarders come alongside an attacking ship, in which case pulling your crew away from their stations (especially the pilot -- and the boarders will know if you try to leave the cockpit pressurized) will make a marginal fight go very badly.

The specifically listed example was having to fend off 5 Mantis -- presumably 3 from an event and 2 from the attacking ship. You can only fit 3 crewmembers into most medbays (only 2 in some of them!), so what are the others supposed to do? Run around in the unpressurized parts of the ship and asphyxiate? If you keep an adjacent room pressurized and try to cycle your crew in and out of the medbay, then the extra boarders will also go to that pressurized room...

Bottom line is, depressurizing your ship is a great way to get an edge on the boarders, since you'll damage them a bit while they fight to reach the medbay. But it carries some hefty penalties when done during a fight, and it doesn't always work.

[Scase]

Those boarding things seem to end many peoples games , but it is very easy to deal with, just open all doors, except of the medbay and send your crew there, the boarding party will either suffocate or fight in the medbay and lose. Also it is extremely easy and cheap to prepare for it, its called blast doors and costs 20 scrap.

Blast doors can help, certainly, but they aren't a panacea. And the nastiest boarders come alongside an attacking ship, in which case pulling your crew away from their stations (especially the pilot -- and the boarders will know if you try to leave the cockpit pressurized) will make a marginal fight go very badly.

The specifically listed example was having to fend off 5 Mantis -- presumably 3 from an event and 2 from the attacking ship. You can only fit 3 crewmembers into most medbays (only 2 in some of them!), so what are the others supposed to do? Run around in the unpressurized parts of the ship and asphyxiate? If you keep an adjacent room pressurized and try to cycle your crew in and out of the medbay, then the extra boarders will also go to that pressurized room...

Bottom line is, depressurizing your ship is a great way to get an edge on the boarders, since you'll damage them a bit while they fight to reach the medbay. But it carries some hefty penalties when done during a fight, and it doesn't always work.

Again I pose the question then, what's the point of playing a game if everything works ALL the time. Where is the challenge in everything being winnable?

Is it tricky to keep everyone aline when having a med bay with 3 slots and a crew of 6 with the entire ship depressurized? Yes but, it's also doable with the right amount of pausing and micromanagement, again bringing me back to a previous point that there are virtually ALWAYS ways of rectifying a bad situation.

Bad luck sucks, that's why it's called bad luck. It's also an integral part of the game and without it, it would be predictable, boring, and would lose tons of the re-playability it currently has.

[Whale Cancer]

Kobayashi Maru guys.

How you face defeat is at least as important as how you achieve victory.