Whining

[Gorlom]

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...

I don't see the problem with haveing a pressurized room adjacent to your medbay and rotating the guys in the medbay with the guys outside.
But if you are tricky you can get around that. You can issue orders to have your guys that doesn't fit in the medbay walk back and forth between the doors to rooms on the opposite ends of the medbay. That way they will be inside the medbay despite there not being any room in there (and they will receive healing too)
It requires a bit more micromanageing but you can asphyxiate the extra boarders.

[licker]

There are unwinnable situations in FTL, sure. There are unwinnable situations in angband as well. Sometimes you just can't get a resist covered, and sometimes that tengu teleports you into a hound pit.

I grant that it is easier to control your risk in angband than in FTL, but FTL takes a fraction of the time to play. The devs themselves said that 'roguelike' should be applied loosely anyway, the entire premise of the rebel fleet chasing you makes FTL far different from any roguelike I've ever played (other than some ironman modes, and if you can beat Angband playing ironman at a 50% clip more power to you).

I don't really understand the 'smoothing out the difficulty curve' stuff either. The game is sometimes incredibly easy, sometimes impossibly hard, and usually somewhere in between where you are going along well until a bad combat/event kills your momentum, or you just can't find the right kind of store, and your scrap hoard evaporates on hull repairs.

In the end what matters is do you enjoy it or not. If not, well, hope you enjoyed it enough to feel good about spending the $9.

[Derakon]

There are unwinnable situations in FTL, sure. There are unwinnable situations in angband as well. Sometimes you just can't get a resist covered, and sometimes that tengu teleports you into a hound pit.

Angband's been won without even using ego-items, meaning the only available resists were from dragon scale mail (multihued or balance for preference -- power DSM is functionally impossible to get) and spells, and stat boosts were severely limited. I wouldn't want to play that game -- it required absurd levels of caution on the part of the player -- but I have trouble believing that if that game can be won, then any other game of Angband would be "unwinnable".

But that's just being pedantic, really. Yes, you can get yourself into unwinnable situations in Angband. If you hand me a savefile where the player has 1HP left, is surrounded by dragons, and has an empty inventory then I'd be hard-pressed to find a way to survive it. But at some point before ending up in that situation, the player had an opportunity to a) recognize that things were going badly, and b) do something about it.

I grant that it is easier to control your risk in angband than in FTL, but FTL takes a fraction of the time to play. The devs themselves said that 'roguelike' should be applied loosely anyway, the entire premise of the rebel fleet chasing you makes FTL far different from any roguelike I've ever played (other than some ironman modes, and if you can beat Angband playing ironman at a 50% clip more power to you).

I admit I don't play ironman much, and it'd probably take me a bit to reliably find a way to survive the early game in particular. I rarely play the same level twice, but being able to return to town to stockpile consumables and swap gear is incredibly valuable even if you never buy anything from the stores.

A recently-released roguelike, Sil, has a time limit that determines how high up the dungeon you're allowed to retreat to. Thus it pushes you onwards much like the Rebel fleet does. However, I expect that the fleet in FTL is much more aggressive than Sil's time limit.

I don't really understand the 'smoothing out the difficulty curve' stuff either. The game is sometimes incredibly easy, sometimes impossibly hard, and usually somewhere in between where you are going along well until a bad combat/event kills your momentum, or you just can't find the right kind of store, and your scrap hoard evaporates on hull repairs.

I want a consistent level of challenge. One game on Normal difficulty with a given ship ought to be roughly equivalently difficult as another game on Normal difficulty with that same ship. Otherwise I feel like the game is dictating whether I'm allowed to win or not, rather than my skill being the determinant. If the game decides to be generous, then I win...but I didn't really earn that win. Contrariwise if the game decides to be stingy, then I lose, but I didn't really deserve to lose.

It's like playing a game where you control the wind and try to influence an arrow to hit the bullseye. If the initial launch of the arrow is too badly off, then no matter what you do you aren't going to get that bullseye, though of course some actions you could take would get you closer than others. But if the initial launch was spot-on, then you don't really even have to do anything. FTL's current difficulty curve is like that -- some games are way too hard, others are way too easy. Tightening up the difficulty curve means constraining the random variables such that the right amount of difficulty is created.

Of course, if the devs did that, they'd probably have to create a new difficulty level for it so that the purists here wouldn't have their precious game tarnished.

In the end what matters is do you enjoy it or not. If not, well, hope you enjoyed it enough to feel good about spending the $9.

I'm coming to the conclusion that playing this game on Normal at least is just bad for my health. Of course, on Easy it's just easy, so it's not very interesting.

[Fredchuckdave]

The skill ceiling in this game is very very low, so the random element is really everything. It's possible to be incompetent at the game, but I don't really think it's possible to be "good." Once you've played half a dozen games or so you've seen 90% of the events and can figure out which ones aren't worth taking, whether you win or lose is largely out of your hands after that.

[Gorlom]

The skill ceiling in this game is very very low, so the random element is really everything. It's possible to be incompetent at the game, but I don't really think it's possible to be "good." Once you've played half a dozen games or so you've seen 90% of the events and can figure out which ones aren't worth taking, whether you win or lose is largely out of your hands after that.

I disagree. read the "advanced tips" and "core tactics: basic, intermediate and advanced" threads in the strategy sub forum.
The game looks like it has a shallow strategy layer, but it has deceptively subtle strategies.

[licker]

Angband's been won without even using ego-items, meaning the only available resists were from dragon scale mail (multihued or balance for preference -- power DSM is functionally impossible to get) and spells, and stat boosts were severely limited. I wouldn't want to play that game -- it required absurd levels of caution on the part of the player -- but I have trouble believing that if that game can be won, then any other game of Angband would be "unwinnable".

I don't think you mean ego, I think you mean artifacts. Or is DSM not considered an ego item? Angband isn't exactly hard to win if you play super cautiously, but as you've said, it's also not much fun to play that way. Always have X CCW/Heal, Y tele, Z... Pick your battles, ...

But FTL doesn't comp to that remotely. You can't pick your battles, you can't scum for gold for pots or scrolls or whatevs, you always have to simply take what you get and make the most of it. I don't think it's a game where the intention is that every run through is supposed to be winnable. That style of game may not suit everyone, but that's the style it's adopted.

But that's just being pedantic, really. Yes, you can get yourself into unwinnable situations in Angband. If you hand me a savefile where the player has 1HP left, is surrounded by dragons, and has an empty inventory then I'd be hard-pressed to find a way to survive it. But at some point before ending up in that situation, the player had an opportunity to a) recognize that things were going badly, and b) do something about it.

Not if you play ironman... Though that's what I was getting at earlier. If you simply scum enough to always have whatever staffs/pots/scrolls you need to escape then fine. Still, there are unwinnable situations even there. You can tele into a worse situation, you can even TL into a worse situation, more likely if you lack certain resists. But if you're not interested in scumming for rConf and rPoison (and rNexus too...) then you may wind up boned. A risk you don't have to take, but not an option for a game like FTL, or ironman mode Angband.

I admit I don't play ironman much, and it'd probably take me a bit to reliably find a way to survive the early game in particular. I rarely play the same level twice, but being able to return to town to stockpile consumables and swap gear is incredibly valuable even if you never buy anything from the stores.

And that's the more direct comp to FTL I think. No town, depending on the variant there may be dungeon stores though. Also no repeating levels. Try it, I don't care for it myself, but it plays entirely differently. QuickBand is a nice little variant capitalizing on the concept.

I want a consistent level of challenge. One game on Normal difficulty with a given ship ought to be roughly equivalently difficult as another game on Normal difficulty with that same ship. Otherwise I feel like the game is dictating whether I'm allowed to win or not, rather than my skill being the determinant. If the game decides to be generous, then I win...but I didn't really earn that win. Contrariwise if the game decides to be stingy, then I lose, but I didn't really deserve to lose.

I don't think the notion of 'deserve' remotely applies, but to each their own. Angband isn't so different frequently anyway. You may get a RoS+10 before level 20 and just cake walk through most of it. Or you may not get much of anything useful for ages and die from boredom Just because those events happen less frequently than their cousins happen in FTL doesn't change the math that much to me. Because you can play an entire game of FTL in under an hour. You can't play a game of Angband in under an hour (well you can certainly die that fast...).

Tightening up the difficulty curve means constraining the random variables such that the right amount of difficulty is created.

And now we're in opinion land. You prefer one constraint, I prefer another, and everyone else prefers something else. There isn't a right or a wrong, there's just a 'I like it or I don't'. Personally I'm fine with how FTL does it. I'd probably be fine if it were tweaked too. I just like the pace of the game, and I like the feel of the game. I've learned what events to avoid, and I've learned what fights to prioritize escaping over combat. You can just take your guy off weapons and stick him in shields/engines/whatever to repair faster should anything get hit. If you're running away no need to worry about how much damage you do anyway. Of course I find all early encounters to be almost pathetically easy to beat (depending on what ship you took), but around sector 3 or 4 if you didn't get lvl2 shields, or improve your starting weapons (or hopefully both) you're pretty boned. Of course knowing this it's easy to just take more risks and live or die more quickly.

I'm coming to the conclusion that playing this game on Normal at least is just bad for my health. Of course, on Easy it's just easy, so it's not very interesting.

I played on Easy once and thought it was retardedly easy (no I didn't win, I got bored and started doing stupid stuff for grins )

I want to play through on normal and unlock everything on normal. More of a challenge, but not every playthrough is necessarily to beat the boss, some are to try and hit achievements. Granted, I agree that the achievements which are purely based on how lucky you are finding things are annoying, but on the other hand they don't really make it harder to just try and win

[Derakon]

I don't think you mean ego, I think you mean artifacts. Or is DSM not considered an ego item? Angband isn't exactly hard to win if you play super cautiously, but as you've said, it's also not much fun to play that way. Always have X CCW/Heal, Y tele, Z... Pick your battles, ...

We're getting way off-topic, but DSM is technically a base item, just an unusually powerful one. More recent versions of Angband have some rare ego DSMs, and of course there are artifact DSMs as well. Here's a character dump of an ego-less winner. Of course, recently the game's been made harder so such victories may not be so feasible any more.

Anyway, as you said, a lot of this is just a matter of opinion. I like a lot of FTL's concepts, but I wish it were less swingy. Obviously lots of people like the game as-is, which is why any theoretical "more constrained" difficulty mode would have to be an option.

[Fredchuckdave]

I disagree. read the "advanced tips" and "core tactics: basic, intermediate and advanced" threads in the strategy sub forum.
The game looks like it has a shallow strategy layer, but it has deceptively subtle strategies.

Care to actually post an argument instead of a "go read this?" The game's interface is extremely elegant and the gameplay is more or less unique, which are huge positives; but ultimately you go for a handful of setups varying depending on what ship you chose. If you're good at RTS's I can't imagine ever having any issue with all of the micromanagement, stimulating though it may be. I think the most advanced strategy is get 2 shields as early as possible, find a ship that can't cut through them and then level your shields and pilot guy to maximum rank while afk for 10-20 minutes. It's not necessarily a knock on the game that randomness is the core element, but removing said randomness and normalizing the difficulty would lead to a very repetitive experience.

[Gorlom]

I disagree. read the "advanced tips" and "core tactics: basic, intermediate and advanced" threads in the strategy sub forum.
The game looks like it has a shallow strategy layer, but it has deceptively subtle strategies.

Care to actually post an argument instead of a "go read this?" The game's interface is extremely elegant and the gameplay is more or less unique, which are huge positives; but ultimately you go for a handful of setups varying depending on what ship you chose. If you're good at RTS's I can't imagine ever having any issue with all of the micromanagement, stimulating though it may be. I think the most advanced strategy is get 2 shields as early as possible, find a ship that can't cut through them and then level your shields and pilot guy to maximum rank while afk for 10-20 minutes. It's not necessarily a knock on the game that randomness is the core element, but removing said randomness and normalizing the difficulty would lead to a very repetitive experience.

Aah, so that's the problem. you aren't even looking for more depth. You have decided that you know everything there is to do in this game and when you lose it is solely because RNG.

If that is the way you want to play then fine, I wont argue anymore with you.

[jamotide]

The skill ceiling in this game is very very low, so the random element is really everything. It's possible to be incompetent at the game, but I don't really think it's possible to be "good." Once you've played half a dozen games or so you've seen 90% of the events and can figure out which ones aren't worth taking, whether you win or lose is largely out of your hands after that.

On the contrary, it is extremely difficult to master and do everything right, at almost every minute of the game there are many little things where you can do stuff wrong, what to target,when to target, where to board,what to upgrade,what to buy and so on, it is not very obvious, but when you lose, you can (at least with the easy ships) always figure out what you did wrong.
The game is not "hard" like some action platformer, it is complex and difficult with many layers from bad to good decisions.