Subset Games Forum

So...maybe I'm somehow missing something (or several somethings) that drastically change how difficult this game is to succeed in, and how to not get screwed over by the RNG that randomly generates events, maps, and resources.

WARNING: LONG POST. DO NOT TL;DR, AS IT CONTRIBUTES NOTHING EXCEPT SPAM.

But after well over a dozen hours of play, hours of watching much better players play, and reading through tip threads, I'm still utterly incapable of beating the game's boss, even on Easy.

So unless I'm some kind of absurd outlier here, this game--for all of its strengths and feats--receives an F in game balance. Let me run through the list of reasons, and please feel free to offer constructive feedback on them:

1) No save feature or carried-over progression.

I get the idea of permadeath, and I appreciate the elements it adds into the game. But when you combine this with an absurdly difficult and luck-based game, it becomes crippling. Worse, you carry no kind of progress or advantages over to subsequent playthroughs, other than experience--which is not nearly as valuable as it should be, as so much of the game is random and luck-based. The one exception is ships you unlock, but the problem is that they aren't customizable or upgradable whatsoever, and unless you play the game extensively (and/or know exactly what to do and what to look for), you hardly get anything until you've already beaten the boss. If the experience I carry over from failed playthroughs counts for little in the face of extreme randomness and high difficulty, and there is no way to give myself a better chance in my next run through unlockable upgrades/options/progress, I feel like I'm wasting time and banging my head against a wall.

2) Resources are, for the most part, stupidly scarce and also entirely random. Resources are also vital in both the short-term and long-term of every playthrough.

You're under a very strict time limit the whole game. It costs one type of your precious resources in order to progress at all, let alone explore. Running low on fuel--even if you did everything you could to avoid that situation--makes getting more fuel almost entirely a matter of luck. Exploring can be just as risky or worthless as beneficial, so there is a massive discrepancy between the risk/cost/reward dynamics.

Scrap is essential for upgrading your ship, repairing your ship, buying necessary supplies, buying new components to your ship, buying new weapons, and buying more crewmembers. There is nowhere near enough scrap to make more than a couple of those factors a priority for entire sections of the game unless you are very lucky (or starting with a far, far better ship than the Kestrel...which is completely moot, as the sole available ship to start with should not be the most difficult ship to beat the game with, even on the easiest difficulty. Period.).

So I try to plan ahead for various builds, contingencies, trouble areas, etc, when managing my scrap and spending. The problem is that this inevitably leaves me with few options even when I am lucky enough to not have the entire plan shredded to pieces by some unforeseeable random event or result.

3) Combat is laughably broken.

Missiles completely bypass shields, deal significant damage to both hull and subsystems, and are only disadvantaged by using a finite ammo source. But the enemies you face have no such restrictions or concerns, and this becomes extremely problematic when combined with...

BOARDING. Mother of god, this is beyond frustrating. After the first sector or two, nearly every hostile ship you run in to has a teleporter, and their ships will always have enough excess crewmembers to send a sizable boarding party over while still having enough to man and maintain vital systems. Obtaining crewmembers yourself requires incredible luck or or a fair amount of scrap...often both. Counters to teleporters are completely nonexistent--nothing short of being cloaked can block it from happening right away, and even fully upgraded cloaking doesn't last long (and requires a moderately lengthy recharge cycle). It's like being able to fire an alpha strike right at the start of every battle, without any special augmentations. Countering boarding attacks themselves requires anywhere between moderate to heavy investment in fairly specialized upgrades or tech, whereas boarding itself requires little investment beyond a strong enough boarding party, which is more dependent on what ship you start with than any given strategy. Boarding allows for bypassing shields entirely, by default, and directly targeting subsystems *and* crew at your leisure. Even more broken is that every boarding requires you to send your own crewmembers to at least stall them, meaning that the enemy is hampering your tactics, survivability, and your options just by using a simple, generic attack that is impossible to defend against/prevent, can be used immediately in every fight, and requires no skill whatsoever to at least succeed in that hampering.

But hey, at least the sole ship you have access to starts with this incredibly broken system that is otherwise very common and only extremely expensive to obtain in the early sectors and enough crewmembers (or access to new ones) to utilize it, right? Um...right?

Well, hey, the only other ship you can relatively easily unlock has a teleporter to start with! Awesome! Wait, what's that? Its crew are all of a species that completely sucks at boarding actions--offense or defense--and finding new crewmembers is at best uncommon, and almost always expensive? Well, fuck.

Oh, right, almost forgot: beams are simply too niche until the late-game, where you have the power, weapons, tech, and setup to reliably knock down (and keep down) an enemy's shields so that you can do anything with your beams at all. Of course, then the Rebel Flagship throws that entire build into the wind when its max shields, high-evade, full-cloaking, drone-heavy composition make even your extensively effective/reliable shield-suppressing abilities nowhere near sufficient, and making any beam you carry into battle a waste of space and power.

Fires are way more threatening than they have any right to be. The few airlocks I have on a given ship are often poorly positioned, and having to vent every room connecting the airlock to the fire in question in order to extinguish a single flame is utterly absurd. By nature of the environmental and oxygen systems of any spacecraft, you can easily vent the air in one room remotely, without opening any doors--but nope, you're forced to vent half your ship before your oxygen system can start refilling the air in the segregated, individual rooms remotely. Wait, what?

4) The pursuing fleet--especially its speed--makes your options even fewer and more luck-based than before.

You're lucky if you manage to explore half a sector before moving on ahead of the rebel fleet. The RNG strikes again, as god help you if the randomly generated sector has one viable route with some systems just being entirely out of the question to visit (even if you do nothing else but run for the exit afterwards).

The Last Stand is probably the worst culprit, though, as you not only have the rebel fleet advancing rapidly from the get-go, you have to prevent the Rebel Flagship from even getting close to the other side of the sector...and doing so means beating the final boss three times in a row in enemy territory. My second playthrough to make it to this sector was so laughably screwed over by the RNG that it was insane: I started in the bottom-right corner, with every single beacon within about three jumps being fully occupied by the enemy from the start, and the three repair stations were literally at the opposite corners of the sector, with all but one of them being taken over by rebels by the end of the first turn. I never had any chance to repair my damaged hull, even when starting the sector, even when every game ever gives you easy access to healing items/full health before taking on the final boss. In my case, I had to run through half a dozen Elite Fighters just to get to the final boss in the first place, and I had only 2/3rds hull to begin with.

5) Long-Range Scanners should be a default, cost-free and space-free ability.

Because having a *slight* idea of what you might face in an adjacent system (not even the real nature of the encounter, just something as basic as 'there's some kind of ship here' or 'this system is in the middle of a solar flare storm') is the kind of mercy that makes the painfully random, luck-based gameplay and decision-making a bit less intolerable.

6) So permadeath...but you can only have one in-progress save at a time?

This is both entirely unnecessary and really bad design. It's kind of analogous to forcing the player to fully beat the game with the current save file/character in a given RPG before being able to start a new one without erasing all the others. Also, something about giving the player options and control.

7) You start with access to one ship, no variants, no customization or upgrades available, and only very vague hints on how to unlock all but one of the others. And the starting ship rather sucks.

It's like if you start Super Smash Bros with a single playable character, and all of the rest require major time, effort, and Guide-Dang-It knowledge (oh, and lots of luck! Can't forget that) to unlock...and only a single vague hint on how to do so for each of them. It's bad design, boring, and frustrating.

8) Your options in the early game are pitifully few.

You lack the scrap to buy much of anything, not very much fuel, a modest number of missiles, and a skeleton crew. You're probably limited to one weapon in combat, no drones even if you start with a drone control system, and forced to ration your scrap for a number of other vital upgrades first before you can even think about buying (to say nothing of *using*) new weapons, like power, shields, weapon system power, etc. You better hope that you don't have to waste scrap on hull repairs because too many of your opponents had missiles, or you jumped into a solar flare storm.

Starting with a skeleton crew just sucks, and your chances to obtain new crewmembers even if you're willing to pay a good bit for them are low until later in the game. You don't even have enough to man the vital systems, and god help you if you get boarded, a fire breaks out in a bad place, or random weapons fire kills any of your crew. And when a missile bypasses your shields and hits your oxygen system? Well, who are you going to send to fix it before your crew suffocates: the guy piloting the ship (necessary for jumping, having any evade chance), the guy manning the shields (and thus helping to avoid further damage to your ship and its systems, like the pilot), or the guy manning the engines (helps you charge your jump drive faster so that you can escape if need be, also increases your evade chance)? If you only have two crewmembers left, it gets downright absurd (there's a fire in the oxygen room, the engines are damaged and I need a jump charge ASAP, and I need my pilot to maintain my evade chance and be able to jump when ready--though having my shields recharge slightly faster would certainly help too).

Most of the time, in the first couple sectors, the stores will sell almost entirely a small selection of items that I can't possibly afford or power that early in the game. I'm sorry, but need *crewmembers*, not a cloaking system that costs more than I could possibly have in this sector. And since you can't even go back to an earlier store beyond a couple turns at most (depending on how early you find it before the rebel fleet catches up, and how out-of-the-way it is from the exit point), there is literally zero purpose for this other than to make the game even more frustratingly difficult and luck-based in an entirely bland and artificial way.

9) Why do the rebels have cruisers and fighters lying in ambush for you ludicrously ahead of the rebel fleet? They even regularly set traps for you that involve a lengthy deceit by civilian ships to lead you out of your way into them. I mean, aren't constant pirates, slavers, suicidally insane solar flare storm chaser pirates, hostage-takers, automated rebel scout fighters, giant spiders overrunning space stations, and mantis boarding parties in every nebula enough?

And why can't *I* ever offer a bribe or surrender in exchange for some scrap, fuel, and/or missiles? That's a great deal for pirates, who make a living off of this tactic alongside boarding undefended (or lightly defended) ships?

10) ...why can't I fire upon a ship that just surrendered or bribed me but ended up completely ripping me off after I accepted? I mean, I can be a total dick at any other point in the game, but I can't finish off a pirate ship that ambushed me with intent to kill after his surrendering bribe turned out to be jack shit after I accepted the offer?

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...and this is on Easy Mode. If your game is this absurdly difficult due to bad design, extreme randomization and unpredictability, and luck-based gaming at every turn, at least have the decency to not call it "Easy Mode".

SaltyWaffles wrote:3) Combat is laughably broken.

You must be really, really mad... Since no sane people could possibly say this.

SaltyWaffles wrote:Well, hey, the only other ship you can relatively easily unlock has a teleporter to start with! Awesome! Wait, what's that? Its crew are all of a species that completely sucks at boarding actions--offense or defense

Which ship are you talking about? ... The only ship which has telepad at start up that its crew are not exactly strong at boarding is Slug_B ... But you got Healing burst for that (plus Artemis, which I think is the best missile in the game), which make it more than viable at boarding.

Also... Slug ship is one of the more difficult ship to unlock. I have no idea why do you think it's relatively easy.

BKT wrote:

SaltyWaffles wrote:3) Combat is laughably broken.

You must be really, really mad... Since no sane people could possibly say this.

SaltyWaffles wrote:Well, hey, the only other ship you can relatively easily unlock has a teleporter to start with! Awesome! Wait, what's that? Its crew are all of a species that completely sucks at boarding actions--offense or defense

Which ship are you talking about? ... The only ship which has telepad at start up that its crew are not exactly strong at boarding is Slug_B ... But you got Healing burst for that (plus Artemis, which I think is the best missile in the game), which make it more than viable at boarding.

Also... Slug ship is one of the more difficult ship to unlock. I have no idea why do you think it's relatively easy.

I might be confusing the Engi Cruiser with something else. I know it starts with a Drone Controller, at least, which gives you a defense against missiles as soon as you can acquire (and power) a defense drone. My bad on that one, sorry.

SaltyWaffles wrote: 1) No save feature or carried-over progression.

You are able to take a lot of playing ability with you if you try. The randomness means that the experience you take with you has to be understanding of the game and not simply memorization. What I find amazing about this game is how hard it is and yet how much easier it gets once you understand what it going on. Maybe this kind of game is not for you but it does what it is supposed to very well. You get 18 pretty different ships throughout the game and you can download mods if you need even more variety.

2) Resources are, for the most part, stupidly scarce and also entirely random. Resources are also vital in both the short-term and long-term of every playthrough.

Yes. The game is about using what you get to the best of your ability. It is hard at first but once you get a hang of what your priorities actually are and spend smart you can make what you get stretch a long way. Knowing when to save for a weapon or when to upgrade your shield, what path is best to take, what weapons are strong and work well together let you get way more bang for your buck. You don't get enough stuff to brute force your way through the game but if you are smart and flexible you can win on normal more often than not. Also worth noting, the kestrel is not the worst ship in the game. It is actually one of the better ones.

3) Combat is laughably broken.

No, not really. Here are a few tips that may help you where you are having problems.
Missiles are pretty easy to avoid. Cloak, which is fairly cheap, very common, and worth every bit of scrap it costs, or a defence drone should make you almost missile proof.
Boarding can be dealt with in numerous ways. If you have extra crew with fighting skills you can usually take them head on and forget about them. Upgrading your doors is cheap and lets you do tons of suffocation damage before they get to a point where you want to fight them. If you have a tiny crew you can put them in the medbay and empty the rest of your ship of oxygen. Do you know how to control where your crew stands in a room? This lets hurt crew do damage but not take any as long as you outnumber your foes.
The way you use beams is to pair a beam up with as many laser shots as you can get. The lasers lower the shields and the beam tears up the ship before the bubbles recharge. They are very powerful when used correctly.
Fires have never bothered me so I don't know what to say on that one. Just put them out with your people if you are in a hurry.

4) The pursuing fleet--especially its speed--makes your options even fewer and more luck-based than before.

That is why choosing where you jump is so important. You can generally pass by almost all of the jump points to find stores and distress beacons. How many of them you hit is another important choice you must make. It is just one more thing you will learn if you pay attention that goes toward skill in the game.

5) Long-Range Scanners should be a default, cost-free and space-free ability.

It really isn't needed. I like running into the occasional star or ion storm to create some bonus tension. They spice up the story of my current ship and provide some unique challenges. They may not be for you but they are also fairly rare. No game with be exactly perfect for every person.

6) So permadeath...but you can only have one in-progress save at a time?

A single completed game is less than two hours long. You don't lose weeks of character progression every time you die or anything just 30 to 90 minutes or something.

7) You start with access to one ship, no variants, no customization or upgrades available, and only very vague hints on how to unlock all but one of the others. And the starting ship rather sucks.

The starter ship is actually really good. Unlocking other ships happen pretty quickly.

8) Your options in the early game are pitifully few.

Maybe but that is offset really well by the fact that each ship plays the early game very differently. They each have their unique strengths and weaknesses which you have to transition into a stable midgame ship.

9) Why do the rebels have cruisers and fighters lying in ambush for you ludicrously ahead of the rebel fleet? They even regularly set traps for you that involve a lengthy deceit by civilian ships to lead you out of your way into them. I mean, aren't constant pirates, slavers, suicidally insane solar flare storm chaser pirates, hostage-takers, automated rebel scout fighters, giant spiders overrunning space stations, and mantis boarding parties in every nebula enough?
And why can't *I* ever offer a bribe or surrender in exchange for some scrap, fuel, and/or missiles? That's a great deal for pirates, who make a living off of this tactic alongside boarding undefended (or lightly defended) ships?

That is just this game's universe. Not all of fiction needs to make iron clad sense.

10) ...why can't I fire upon a ship that just surrendered or bribed me but ended up completely ripping me off after I accepted? I mean, I can be a total dick at any other point in the game, but I can't finish off a pirate ship that ambushed me with intent to kill after his surrendering bribe turned out to be jack shit after I accepted the offer?

While it might make sense to do that it is not done for gameplay reasons. Why eliminate one more game altering choice?

The problem really is your playing ability, not the difficulty of the game. Games that challenge you appeal to many players. Just because a design does not appeal to you does not make it bad.

I can see where the OP is coming from. I have yet to beat the boss once and I have all the ships and a save editor...on easy. I personally will probably never beat the end boss as I am just sick of the frustration of it all. Not sure what I was thinking when I bought this game.....I enjoy SPAZ and it was 5 bucks. There should have been a warning on this game that its harder than The binding of Issac and Space Chem combined and should never be played by anyone.

I may try again every once in a while but at least those two other games have some company in the "total waste of money" section of my steam library now. I have thought about how to make the game fun. Play it like golf and go for the lowest score possible. So Play to lose as grandly as possible. I mean the game is a guaranteed fail nearly 100% of the time anyway, so embrace it. lol

Trust me OP the other ships are not that great either. It still comes down to being very lucky with stores for getting good weapons and augments. So don't feel bad abut not being able to beat this game. You are not alone, I would say at least 50% of the people that bought this game regret it and have never killed the end boss, probably more.

If you're looking for help, all I can say is that the "Easy" difficulty of this game makes other games "Hard" look wimpy. You should see Normal.

Some others have gone through your post point by point, and to an extent it seems like you are venting frustration. This is a hard game. It is not supposed to be beaten every time you play. Sometimes limping to Sector 4 can be chalked up as a "Good run." That's just the nature of the game (and rogue likes in general).

So welcome to FTL. It's punishing, but you've gotta keep playing to learn.

You want help with the final boss? Here is some basic advice:

1) Get a crew teleporter. at the beginning of phase 1 and 2, and ASAP in phase 3 port your boarding team in to take out the missile launcher (second from right).
2) Phase 2 and 3 much easier if you have cloaking and can cloak through the power surges
3) Killing all the rebel ship's crew makes the AI take over, which complicates and make the fight a good deal harder.
4) P1 & 3, focus fire the shields with weapons. Phase 2? get the shields down then focus fire drone control until the boarding drone is out. Then FF shields.

Tarlok wrote:I mean the game is a guaranteed fail nearly 100% of the time anyway, so embrace it. lol

Trust me OP the other ships are not that great either. It still comes down to being very lucky with stores for getting good weapons and augments. So don't feel bad abut not being able to beat this game. You are not alone, I would say at least 50% of the people that bought this game regret it and have never killed the end boss, probably more.

I started out the game near launch and put it down for about 3 months after getting frustrated against the final boss.

I picked it up a month ago again with the right mindset, and now I am sitting on 43% winning percentage on Normal Difficulty (after resetting my data after learning the game on Easy). It can be done, but it takes perseverance and the willingness to work with what the game hands you.

OP: Your post makes me think that this is not the right game for you.

I enjoy challenges and like hard games and puzzles. Having played lots of real roguelikes (I don't consider FTL to be a roguelike just because it has permadeath), there's much to be said about player experience being the takeaway between sessions. All things considered, though, losing a game of FTL when you've put < 2 hours into it is nothing like losing a roguelike where you've put 20-40 hours into a character.

I've played this game for about a week and now beat it six times with five different ships, 3 on easy and 3 on normal. My first win on Easy was after about 20-25 hours. Easy actually is easy compared to normal. And the Kestrel is a good ship. A few big tips that made a difference for me (no idea if you do them already though):

1) Use PAUSE often. Evaluate what is going on, look at your opponent's ship, plan accordingly. Get hit big? Pause and think of your next move. A no-pause run is an incredible challenge.
2) Ditch autofire. I relied on autofire too much at first. Time your shots to work together.
3) Learn to use your power and carefully reroute it as needed. I turn off Med and sometimes Oxygen when I'm not using them. For example, if you have improved Oxygen, you can usually turn it off during a fight and then boost it up for a quick refill before jumping.

I find it hard to believe that you can't at least try the Engi A since you get it at, what, Sector 5?

The two constructive thoughts I took from your criticism are:
1) Making Easy-->Normal, Normal-->Hard, and adding a "real" Easy mode could be helpful for new players. Though no roguelikes I've played have an easy mode.
2) Multiple save slots would be nice, though other players have already pointed out that the game is short and it's not really necessary.

Ohaider, OP!

Here's my reply to your post
Please don't be offended and read the whole thing, thank you ^-^

First of all: Stop bitching about the hardness of this game, it's hard, but you're probably playing for 5 hours and quitting the game, like every other 10 year old that have played a permadeath game. Yes, the luck is ridiculous, but oh well. I know a few good players with ~50% win rate, only failing when they accidently forget to pause and micro the s*** out of the enemy or sometimes just meet a ship which is the counter of their ship. Also, if you don't like the system of these permadeath games, don't whine and call this game stupid. Live with it, or simply don't play it. IMO, you should've waited and seen some reviews/gameplays first, before buying.

1. THIS. IS. PERMADEATH. No frick'n permadeath game has a save option, only if you want to quit and come back. Not that you'd have situations like: "Let's explore the s*** out of this sector, so I can plan out my route with maximized resources etc.". All permadeath games are based on skill and luck. Like this one. Also, out of the mistakes you make (ex. in sector 3, there are 2-shielders, so you should have a ship which can deal with them) while trying this game, you earn experience and get better. Trust me.

2. You have a point, but it's not stupidly random, if you're lucky, you'll end up with 50 missles (like me, lol) in sector 8, spamming the rebel ship to death with the pre-igniter or you'll end up buying fuel 3 times, because you ran out of fuel, 3 times. But yes, the resources are random, but not in a way that you can't play the game anymore, without luck.

3. Missiles have a counter: DRONES and above all, it's limited and expensive as hell in the shops. Lasers are great, in combination with missles. Missiles destroy shields, you can continue destroying weapon system or w/e. Laser Beams are so overpowered when the enemy has no/little shields. Glaive beam for example, if the enemy has no shields (you can either destroy them or weaken them), it does 3 damage a room, you can hit 4/5 (depending on the ship layout) and thus either 12 or 15 hull damage. Ridiculous enough?
Boarding can easily be countered by opening doors and fighting in the med-bay etc. that's just lack of experience, that you don't know how to counter boarding.
P.S. this game has a pause option, which makes combat stupidy easy. But otherwise, it'd be stupidly hard

*squeeeeeeze* forgot to tell, but I'm not answering every point on your article, that'd be too long.

4. Because then, you can't explore the whole sector and earn that much scrap, that you're 3x as powerful as the flagship. Also, if you do it right, you can squeeze 10+ beacons out of each sector.

5. No. That's the fun part of this game, otherwise, it'll be too easy... Where's the fun if you can do everything that easy? Also, with the scanners, the enviromental disadvantages would be nonsense.

6. You don't get the permadeath system. You really don't...

7. First of all: STARTING SHIP IS THE BEST. <3 And yeah, you have a point on the s*** being vague and that Smash Brothers Brawl comparison was kinda good, but most of the ships only require lucky encounters, not major amounts of time...

8. Uhm.. This one simply makes no sense. It's like complaining that you start at level 1, instead of level 9000... What's a skeleton crew? Humans? Humans have no disadvantages... Also, you always have enough men. If you know how to micro, vent (using doors) and use drones... You're just complaining now. This is a part of the game: making decisions and using your frick'n brain. For example, 2 breaches, a fire and oxygen's down. I only have 3 men. Easy, 2 men to go oxygen, one for w/e you want, preferably steering if you want to flee. Vent the fire, continue going with the 2 men to the breach, go back for health and then go to the last breach, but by then you'd already have escaped/killed the enemy (BECAUSE YOU CAN PAUSE MID-BATTLE ). Multitasking/microing isn't hard... Just practice and learn!

9. Those rebels aren't hard to beat, barely better than pirates. Your simply telling me BS.

9,5. OK. This is a good point. Although, bribes make the game easy, they don't have an explanation, nor I do have one. Good one!

10. Uhm... We don't participate in lying, sorry. Either just don't accept the bribe or don't complain.


11. Easy? This is normal, my friend. "Normal" is hard. I bet that you've only played <10 hours because of your complaints and lack of experience. I'd strongly suggest you to play this game more and stop whining about it, instead. If there was an easy mode, permadeath wouldn't make any sense, this whole game is about the rougelike, permadeath, lucky ass hard game.
That's what makes it fun: the losing part.
also this part is fun too, especially to watch [DON'T READ IF YOU'RE EASILY OFFENDED&Sorry for my language!]: "GODDAMNIT FUGGING SHIT THAT WAS MY BEST GODDAMNED SHIP IN AGES. C'MON, FUG THIS GAME. AARGH. I QUIT. FUUUUUUUUUU!".

Sorry if I sounded harsh or w/e, I'm a sort of offended of you calling this game batshit crazy/horsecrap. It's one of my favorite games in my gaming life and I've played a lot. Although I'm not very good, nor have beaten the Final boss more than once, I know the basics and you shouldn't complain. But in the first place: you should've watched gameplay, before you've bought this game...

I hope that my reply was useful and not too long-dreaded.


Yours truly,
Simon "Raytiger3" Chen.

SaltyWaffles wrote:So...maybe I'm somehow missing something (or several somethings) that drastically change how difficult this game is to succeed in, and how to not get screwed over by the RNG that randomly generates events, maps, and resources.

WARNING: LONG POST. DO NOT TL;DR, AS IT CONTRIBUTES NOTHING EXCEPT SPAM.

But after well over a dozen hours of play, hours of watching much better players play, and reading through tip threads, I'm still utterly incapable of beating the game's boss, even on Easy.

Hi SaltyWaffles, unlike many of the people around here who seem to beat the game regularly on Normal, I'm more in the camp of those who lose most of the time, and if I do manage to beat the boss, well I'm still ecstatic. That said, I do play on Normal now, Easy really is considerably easier once you do that.

So unless I'm some kind of absurd outlier here, this game--for all of its strengths and feats--receives an F in game balance. Let me run through the list of reasons, and please feel free to offer constructive feedback on them:

1) No save feature or carried-over progression.

I get the idea of permadeath, and I appreciate the elements it adds into the game. But when you combine this with an absurdly difficult and luck-based game, it becomes crippling. Worse, you carry no kind of progress or advantages over to subsequent playthroughs, other than experience--which is not nearly as valuable as it should be, as so much of the game is random and luck-based. The one exception is ships you unlock, but the problem is that they aren't customizable or upgradable whatsoever, and unless you play the game extensively (and/or know exactly what to do and what to look for), you hardly get anything until you've already beaten the boss. If the experience I carry over from failed playthroughs counts for little in the face of extreme randomness and high difficulty, and there is no way to give myself a better chance in my next run through unlockable upgrades/options/progress, I feel like I'm wasting time and banging my head against a wall.

FTL's randomness can be a problem, yes. I remember a run in Sector 2 where it was sun -> asteroid field -> asteroid field -> sun, and that was kinda irritating. That said, I usually have a set path that is rarely affected by random luck (That is, Shields 2 by end of Sector 1, Engines 3/4 somewhere in 2, Shields 3 in 3, with any of that delayed if I find a weapon to use.). Most of the "experience" I gain is not "what order to upgrade" any more, it's "what should I target (usually weapons)/how to board Mantis ships (ie in the Shields with the Engi)" and all sorts of little instinctive things that I can't really quantify in words very well. And yes, this does require you to play the game extensively. I stand at 12 hours played on Steam since the most recent patch, and that comes AFTER runs in November and December when I didn't have Steam yet. It takes time to learn this stuff.

2) Resources are, for the most part, stupidly scarce and also entirely random. Resources are also vital in both the short-term and long-term of every playthrough.

You're under a very strict time limit the whole game. It costs one type of your precious resources in order to progress at all, let alone explore. Running low on fuel--even if you did everything you could to avoid that situation--makes getting more fuel almost entirely a matter of luck. Exploring can be just as risky or worthless as beneficial, so there is a massive discrepancy between the risk/cost/reward dynamics.

Ah, fuel is one of those tidbits I'm talking about. It's gotten to the point that I buy fuel when I still have 12 left. Sub-10 is never a good thing. So yes, running out of fuel means getting more fuel is luck-based, so if you want to avoid that, be extra careful. I buy out stores worth of fuel at ~13, I still get some at 17. I ALWAYS buy the "6 fuel for 12 scrap" event.

Don't assume I'm perfect, though. I've gone to stores many times and forgotten to look at my fuel, and then leave and promptly run out of it. That sort of stupidity is what I try to remedy in future runs, although it is still not 100%.

Scrap is essential for upgrading your ship, repairing your ship, buying necessary supplies, buying new components to your ship, buying new weapons, and buying more crewmembers. There is nowhere near enough scrap to make more than a couple of those factors a priority for entire sections of the game unless you are very lucky (or starting with a far, far better ship than the Kestrel...which is completely moot, as the sole available ship to start with should not be the most difficult ship to beat the game with, even on the easiest difficulty. Period.).

The thing about scrap is that yes, you CAN'T buy everything. So you have to go with what's most effective. If there are Augments and Drones in a store, but you can get 3 shields instead, the shields should be your priority. They are more effective by far. Fuel is the only necessary bit; I for one don't buy missiles and drones much because I don't like relying on an ammo system. Teleporter is a situational thing, either absolutely necessary or worthless. Cloak is a luxury; I'd do 4 shields or 5 engines before cloak. Crewmembers are usually iffy: unless I'm at two people, I rarely buy them, and nearly every time I buy one at all, it's Engi. Humans and Rocks are not worth it, period, and Mantis are only really useful on boarding ships. The great majority of weapons are not worth it. Unless I see Halberd or Burst II/III, nothing is a must buy. If I buy out of a shop anything other than those two, it's largely based on what I need done, usually shield breaking. Do I need more lasers to break down shields? Do I want to use missiles to bypass them entirely? (For me, unless they're Pegasus, I don't even consider missiles. I hate single shots that are prone to missing.) The flipside to that is that the majority of weapons and drones I find are also worthless to me. 20-40 scrap per extra item I don't need really adds up in the early game.

So yeah, you have to prioritize. My weapons tend to be whatever I start with, and whatever I find. Is that leaving me to the whim of luck? Of course it is. But at least my scrap is going toward things I can guarantee will help me live. Anything beyond my shields and engines are a luxury.

On the Kestrel, it's not my favorite ship, I've not won with it yet. That said, Artemis and Burst II are two of the better weapons in the game. They should be able to get you out of the sectors where this is more of a problem. My main problem with Kestrels is that for some reason, I tend to be underpowered in the later game. But that's something for me to figure out, as I haven't played a Kestrel in a long time. Other ships are too much fun.

So I try to plan ahead for various builds, contingencies, trouble areas, etc, when managing my scrap and spending. The problem is that this inevitably leaves me with few options even when I am lucky enough to not have the entire plan shredded to pieces by some unforeseeable random event or result.

That's the thing. Never have a plan. If I were to say "if I want to win, I need 2 Burst IIs, a Halberd and an Ion Bomb", that will never happen. I've had 2 Burst IIs ONCE in all my games, and it was wonderful. Every time I start FTL, my thought is "I'm going to start this ship and see where it goes." I really like Slug A, but I've not gotten past Sector 5 with it. I HATE Rock A (that bit about hating reliance on ammo? This is my worst nightmare.), and yet by some chance I managed to defeat the Flagship on Normal, with Artemis, Burst II, Heavy Laser I, and a last minute Halberd that didn't show up until like the last jump in Sector 7. Luck? Most certainly. But I'd like to think some amount of skill got me through 7 to get a Halberd in the first place.

3) Combat is laughably broken.

Missiles completely bypass shields, deal significant damage to both hull and subsystems, and are only disadvantaged by using a finite ammo source.

Missiles are very, VERY annoying. I can't tell you how many runs were wrecked by bad run-ins with Breach Missiles. However, they DO have ammo sources. It's just that every ship is carrying 15 missiles, like you are at the start of a Kestrel run, and are attacking you fresh, while you need to conserve.

Defense Drones are nice, but I rarely get a Drone Bay even for that. I greatly prefer more Engine evade, which helps all around. Nothing beats targeting weapons before anything else, though. [/quote]

BOARDING. Mother of god, this is beyond frustrating. After the first sector or two, nearly every hostile ship you run in to has a teleporter, and their ships will always have enough excess crewmembers to send a sizable boarding party over while still having enough to man and maintain vital systems. Obtaining crewmembers yourself requires incredible luck or or a fair amount of scrap...often both. Counters to teleporters are completely nonexistent--nothing short of being cloaked can block it from happening right away, and even fully upgraded cloaking doesn't last long (and requires a moderately lengthy recharge cycle). It's like being able to fire an alpha strike right at the start of every battle, without any special augmentations. Countering boarding attacks themselves requires anywhere between moderate to heavy investment in fairly specialized upgrades or tech, whereas boarding itself requires little investment beyond a strong enough boarding party, which is more dependent on what ship you start with than any given strategy. Boarding allows for bypassing shields entirely, by default, and directly targeting subsystems *and* crew at your leisure. Even more broken is that every boarding requires you to send your own crewmembers to at least stall them, meaning that the enemy is hampering your tactics, survivability, and your options just by using a simple, generic attack that is impossible to defend against/prevent, can be used immediately in every fight, and requires no skill whatsoever to at least succeed in that hampering.

I'm guessing you've not tried the combo of Level 2 doors + venting out the airlocks? They help go some way to countering boarders for really cheap. Another thing is to be ready to take your people off other systems if absolutely necessary and swarm them. Ships with teleporters tend to port their people back once they're low health. Venting out the airlock takes about a 1/4 of their health away. Your people can typically do the rest. They're heading for the medbay? Let them in and fight them there. Sure, you're lessing your efficiency by attacking them with crew that way, but the alternative is them breaking your oxygen. Weapons and shields recharge on their own. They won't mind much if you take people off them for awhile. Again, it's a matter of priorities. Don't take them off, nothing's stopping you. Just be willing to accept that you might not have oxygen for awhile.

Or, avoid Mantis sectors altogether. Only Mantis have teleporters in the amounts that you say they do. The rest have far fewer.

But hey, at least the sole ship you have access to starts with this incredibly broken system that is otherwise very common and only extremely expensive to obtain in the early sectors and enough crewmembers (or access to new ones) to utilize it, right? Um...right?

Well, hey, the only other ship you can relatively easily unlock has a teleporter to start with! Awesome! Wait, what's that? Its crew are all of a species that completely sucks at boarding actions--offense or defense--and finding new crewmembers is at best uncommon, and almost always expensive? Well, fuck.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Mantis A? Mantis are great at combat. That's the easiest ship I can think about that starts with teleport.

Oh, and teleporters are hideously broken for you. If I get one Mantis, I get a teleporter and look for Engi or Mantis sectors to get another one. If it means boarding with an excess human for awhile, so be it. The extra scrap you get from boarding yourself makes buying a second Mantis really easy too, if that comes first.

Oh, right, almost forgot: beams are simply too niche until the late-game, where you have the power, weapons, tech, and setup to reliably knock down (and keep down) an enemy's shields so that you can do anything with your beams at all. Of course, then the Rebel Flagship throws that entire build into the wind when its max shields, high-evade, full-cloaking, drone-heavy composition make even your extensively effective/reliable shield-suppressing abilities nowhere near sufficient, and making any beam you carry into battle a waste of space and power.

On this I have to heartily disagree. This is absolutely true if you fire every weapon the moment it comes off cool down. This is exactly what you shouldn't do. If you time your shots for the exact same moment, you can bring the shield down for an instant. THAT instant is when you should fire a beam. I like Halberds the most because you can beam the enemy ship even if they have one shield bubble still up, but all beams work this way. The amount of damage you get in return is WELL worth waiting (10 damage on a well placed Halberd? Yes please, every time). Even the Flagship doesn't have enough evade to dodge all your lasers if you have enough. And the moment it doesn't, *bzzt*!

Now, all this assumes you have enough lasers. How much is enough? 2 weapons worth should be enough, 3 would be preferable if you could. I'm not talking top of the line, 3 Burst IIs and stuff. Even two-shot weapons can be enough if you have enough of them; it's not ideal, but they work. I've done it with exactly 4 shots, a missile and a Halberd; if I'd had a run that made it to the Flagship, it HAD to have at least the 4 shots to survive the last few sectors.

Fires are way more threatening than they have any right to be. The few airlocks I have on a given ship are often poorly positioned, and having to vent every room connecting the airlock to the fire in question in order to extinguish a single flame is utterly absurd. By nature of the environmental and oxygen systems of any spacecraft, you can easily vent the air in one room remotely, without opening any doors--but nope, you're forced to vent half your ship before your oxygen system can start refilling the air in the segregated, individual rooms remotely. Wait, what?

I'll base my response off the Kestrel, since there are some ships that do have poor airlock placement (the one with NONE comes to mind).
#1 Do you have Doors 2 for boarders? They prevent fires from spreading too. If they're in an empty room, let them burn and deal with it later. With Doors 2, the fire will burn out oxygen long before it spreads through a door.
#2 Priorities. Fire in the medbay? Unless you have boarders, who cares? Cloak, sensors, even teleport are non-essential at most times, they can burn out. On the flip side, fires in the shields or engines? Get other people (ideally spares, which yes I do have about 50% of the time) there immediately. Take your weapons guy off if need be. The slightly longer cool down on weapons is greatly preferable to having your shields/engines burn out. This is true of all repairs (and it has cost me when someone promptly shoots me in the weapons too, but you can't win them all.)
#3 The Kestrel has decently placed airlocks. Fire in the engines? Move your engine guy out, vent the airlock behind it. Venting should be the #1 way to put out fires, having crew as last resort. Yes, this is more of a problem in the bridge area, but what's there? Sensors, Medbay, Drones, Doors, Pilot. Except for those last two, you can ignore fires at your leisure, and in my experience even doors can wait for the venting.

Another reason I like Engi? They put out fires really fast. Having Engi on weapons is really nice for this strategy overall.

4) The pursuing fleet--especially its speed--makes your options even fewer and more luck-based than before.

You're lucky if you manage to explore half a sector before moving on ahead of the rebel fleet. The RNG strikes again, as god help you if the randomly generated sector has one viable route with some systems just being entirely out of the question to visit (even if you do nothing else but run for the exit afterwards).

Priorities again. You CANNOT visit every beacon, that would make you overpowered. If you have one viable route, you take that route. Sure, the maps can be really bad at times, and I have rage-quitted when a good ship got stuck in a dead end. However, ultimately the route you take is your choice. The RNG cannot dictate where you jump. It is up to you to maximize your jumps. Lose a jump because of poor map layout? Ah well, there's usually more jumps (and jumps worth more, moreover) ahead. Far better than fighting the fleet for basically nothing.

The Last Stand is probably the worst culprit, though, as you not only have the rebel fleet advancing rapidly from the get-go, you have to prevent the Rebel Flagship from even getting close to the other side of the sector...and doing so means beating the final boss three times in a row in enemy territory. My second playthrough to make it to this sector was so laughably screwed over by the RNG that it was insane: I started in the bottom-right corner, with every single beacon within about three jumps being fully occupied by the enemy from the start, and the three repair stations were literally at the opposite corners of the sector, with all but one of them being taken over by rebels by the end of the first turn. I never had any chance to repair my damaged hull, even when starting the sector, even when every game ever gives you easy access to healing items/full health before taking on the final boss. In my case, I had to run through half a dozen Elite Fighters just to get to the final boss in the first place, and I had only 2/3rds hull to begin with.

The Last Stand can easily screw you in that way, I agree. Only thing for it is to just jump away ASAP. Better to run with nothing than take tons of damage. I will admit though, that I've never had a run in the last stand where I had to fight three Elite Fighters, though, maybe you got really unlucky. The sign says the Flagship has 5 jumps to go, but because it only moves once every other jump, you really have to get to the first stage in 9 jumps. That's doable.

5) Long-Range Scanners should be a default, cost-free and space-free ability.

Because having a *slight* idea of what you might face in an adjacent system (not even the real nature of the encounter, just something as basic as 'there's some kind of ship here' or 'this system is in the middle of a solar flare storm') is the kind of mercy that makes the painfully random, luck-based gameplay and decision-making a bit less intolerable.

Eh, I can see why people could want that. If you can't tell, I kinda LIKE the randomness where every bit that goes well is a blessing, and every bit that goes poorly goes with "Shit happens". But, some of the randomness can be kinda annoying. (especially Ion Storms. Ugh. No sensors is fine and dandy, but half my power gone too? Rah!) These days though, I find suns and asteroids overrated. I greatly prefer not running into them, but I treat them almost like any other battle.

Long Range Scanners are really nice, admittedly. I do like them a lot on the Steath A. But really, they're not necessary for me any more.

6) So permadeath...but you can only have one in-progress save at a time?

This is both entirely unnecessary and really bad design. It's kind of analogous to forcing the player to fully beat the game with the current save file/character in a given RPG before being able to start a new one without erasing all the others. Also, something about giving the player options and control.

Ah yes, this. I agree entirely. Multiple save files are something I've wanted for a long while. Couldn't agree more. (Though I tend to do one run all at one time, sometimes you don't want to continue on the same ship from day to day. Know what I mean?)

7) You start with access to one ship, no variants, no customization or upgrades available, and only very vague hints on how to unlock all but one of the others. And the starting ship rather sucks.

It's like if you start Super Smash Bros with a single playable character, and all of the rest require major time, effort, and Guide-Dang-It knowledge (oh, and lots of luck! Can't forget that) to unlock...and only a single vague hint on how to do so for each of them. It's bad design, boring, and frustrating.

On the one hand, it is very much Guide-Dang-It knowledge, and that is indeed a problem. On the other hand, figuring out how to survive the game by yourself is itself very difficult, and chances are you found this game by watching someone else. (I won't lie, I found FTL by watching DocM of Minecraft fail miserably in his first runs. So I didn't come in completely blind.) Chances are they unlocked one of the other ships.

Maybe I'm a bit more resistant to looking at wikis on how to do stuff. I've played Dwarf Fortress before. That's as Guide Dang It as games get. FTL holds my hand by comparison.

8) Your options in the early game are pitifully few.

You lack the scrap to buy much of anything, not very much fuel, a modest number of missiles, and a skeleton crew. You're probably limited to one weapon in combat, no drones even if you start with a drone control system, and forced to ration your scrap for a number of other vital upgrades first before you can even think about buying (to say nothing of *using*) new weapons, like power, shields, weapon system power, etc. You better hope that you don't have to waste scrap on hull repairs because too many of your opponents had missiles, or you jumped into a solar flare storm.

The whole game is based on rationing your scrap and your power carefully for what is most effective. There is nothing stopping you from upgrading oxygen first if you so please.

A trick I've learned is that medbay doesn't need to be on all the time. On the Kestrel, that's enough to power everything else immediately. Turning on the medbay only when it's needed goes a long way. I will take power out of engines to put into Level 2 shields if need be. I can pull power out from oxygen for one second to dodge an incoming missile ("Reroute power to engines!").

On hull repairs, it's rarely necessary to repair your entire ship at once. If your health is still green, don't take repairs, you don't need them. Your health is yellow? Bring it to green. Hull critical? Spend just enough to get it to half, it's not the safest, but you need to buy other things.

This is sufficient for someone who plays on Normal, where there are some games I don't have enough scrap to power Shields 2 by the end of Sector 1. (That's 90 scrap. Not much.) On Easy, this should be overkill. They give way more scrap in Easy.

Starting with a skeleton crew just sucks, and your chances to obtain new crewmembers even if you're willing to pay a good bit for them are low until later in the game. You don't even have enough to man the vital systems, and god help you if you get boarded, a fire breaks out in a bad place, or random weapons fire kills any of your crew. And when a missile bypasses your shields and hits your oxygen system? Well, who are you going to send to fix it before your crew suffocates: the guy piloting the ship (necessary for jumping, having any evade chance), the guy manning the shields (and thus helping to avoid further damage to your ship and its systems, like the pilot), or the guy manning the engines (helps you charge your jump drive faster so that you can escape if need be, also increases your evade chance)? If you only have two crewmembers left, it gets downright absurd (there's a fire in the oxygen room, the engines are damaged and I need a jump charge ASAP, and I need my pilot to maintain my evade chance and be able to jump when ready--though having my shields recharge slightly faster would certainly help too).

General purpose repair/fires/boarders:
1. Never assume one person will repair it fast enough. Unless they're Engi, they won't.
2. Priority of repairs: Spares -> Weapons guy -> Shields guy. In the early game, it's Weapons -> Engines -> Shields. You have less evade at the the start, the extra you get from manning it doesn't mean much early on. Later, it matters a lot more. And firing weapons is less important than either of those two.
3. If I'm ever in a situation where I'm getting wrecked as badly as you describe, I'm long since been underpowered for the sector, and this is the moment that's Game Over. (The one exception was when my two boarders, returning to heal up from a boarding attack, got gibbed with a Breach Missile. But that's basically Game Over anyways. Sometimes you gotta cut your losses.)

Most of the time, in the first couple sectors, the stores will sell almost entirely a small selection of items that I can't possibly afford or power that early in the game. I'm sorry, but need *crewmembers*, not a cloaking system that costs more than I could possibly have in this sector. And since you can't even go back to an earlier store beyond a couple turns at most (depending on how early you find it before the rebel fleet catches up, and how out-of-the-way it is from the exit point), there is literally zero purpose for this other than to make the game even more frustratingly difficult and luck-based in an entirely bland and artificial way.

#1: Anything that is not Shields and Engines are entirely secondary to what you need. Sure, you need weapons to break shields most of the time, but even that's not entirely necessary. Heck, if I'm really desperate, I have a contigency plan of taking a teleporter, and boarding with whatever crew I have, even the pilot if necessary. I have not yet gotten that desperate, because I get blown out of space before that happens.

Getting unlucky? Well, no matter what, you've only got what you've got. I can guarantee myself Shields 4 and 5 Engines if I get far enough. Anything beyond that, I let luck decide what to do, and make the best of it. Don't expect to succeed every time, or even most times. I've won 5 times since November, and I have every ship except the Crystal. Winning is a bonus, cloak is a bonus, WEAPONS are a bonus. In the end, that makes finally winning this game so much more satisfying, because you can't expect it.

9) Why do the rebels have cruisers and fighters lying in ambush for you ludicrously ahead of the rebel fleet? They even regularly set traps for you that involve a lengthy deceit by civilian ships to lead you out of your way into them. I mean, aren't constant pirates, slavers, suicidally insane solar flare storm chaser pirates, hostage-takers, automated rebel scout fighters, giant spiders overrunning space stations, and mantis boarding parties in every nebula enough?

The Rebels seem like the Take Over the Galaxy type, and war was scatted throughout the galaxy even before this game. Presumably they're leftovers from the main Fleet, which is now coming around to wipe your face from existence.
Also, this game feels like the events happen over the course of weeks, not 2 hours. Surely that's enough time to get some ridiculously convoluted traps going? (Hey, it's an Excuse Plot at best. We're not here for riveting stories other than that of MY RIDICULOUSLY UNLIKELY SURVIVAL.)

And why can't *I* ever offer a bribe or surrender in exchange for some scrap, fuel, and/or missiles? That's a great deal for pirates, who make a living off of this tactic alongside boarding undefended (or lightly defended) ships?

Well technically there's that "surrender" where you give a crew member to slavers, but who really takes that ever? It would be a nice touch, but if you're ever in the position to need to surrender, chances are your ship is doing poorly enough that the next person who won't take your surrender (ie Rebel Scum who want you dead, no ifs ands or buts) will kill you anyways.

10) ...why can't I fire upon a ship that just surrendered or bribed me but ended up completely ripping me off after I accepted? I mean, I can be a total dick at any other point in the game, but I can't finish off a pirate ship that ambushed me with intent to kill after his surrendering bribe turned out to be jack shit after I accepted the offer?

Well, for most people they tell you what you get if they surrender. So if you took the "jack shit", they told you fair and square, and you deserve not to get more. That's like saying "I accept your surrender, give me your money, thanks now I shoot you". For the most part, the narration seems to imply you're a somewhat honorable person, so that would be really out of character.

Unless you're talking about Slugs, who are assholes who hide in an asshole nebula and are well reputed for ripping people off in-universe. In which case you are absolutely justified, but which you can do nothing about because the goddamn Slugs ran off into their asshole nebula and you can't follow them. (If you haven't noticed, I really hated the Slug Cruiser quest.)

...and this is on Easy Mode. If your game is this absurdly difficult due to bad design, extreme randomization and unpredictability, and luck-based gaming at every turn, at least have the decency to not call it "Easy Mode".

Sure, I could take that. That's acceptable. We'll call them Normal and Hard. Sounds good.

A few final notes: Don't worry about taking damage too much unless you're low. You WILL take damage, but your ship works fine until it goes BOOM. I've had runs that got down to critical multiple times. One of my victories had a ship get all the way down to 1 hull before I could repair it. Just keep going. If you die, well, that was expected. If you survive, you'll be elated.

If victory eludes you, start lower. Start with "Survive to the Last Stand consistently" or "Get to sector 5 consistently" or "Get 3 shields before Sector 4". I know with certainty I still can't do the "Survive to Last Stand consistently" on Normal.

If you're interested in this game at all despite all this, watch the FTL series of one VanguardOfValor on Youtube. He's beaten the game with every ship, but more to the point, he gives REASONS for why he does the things he does in-game. More than any other Let's Players, I've learned a lot of FTL from him. (And yes VoV, I gave you an advertisement. Enjoy.)

I hope any part of this post helps you in some way, and I didn't come off as a snob in it. Because that's not what I intend.