Random event impossible outcomes

[thereaverofdarkness]

These aren't technically bugs, more just oversights. But I find the random text events to be more frustrating than anything else because they give me so little control, and the outcomes often defy logic. For instance, the game won't take your ship's features and crew into account with a lot of them aside from getting blue text options as a result of having them. But having one or multiple shield units (making you impervious to asteroids) does not stop the searching asteroid field events from causing damage to your hull. And the events which cause you to lose a crewmember will choose one at random without checking whether or not that crewmember would even be susceptible to such a thing. You can lose an engi or rockman to disease, you can lose a rockman to fire, and apparently a cornered mantis is able to kill your crewmembers in a single swipe as long as it happens during event text. Yes, once when I tried to offer up the mantis to the engi vessel, it cleaved in half--you guessed it--my rockman. I realize it takes a lot of time and work to program each event with various extra possibilities, like make sure the rockman isn't the one who dies in fire or something like that, but without those things it makes the event choices feel like gambling. But the very reason I play PC games and avoid gambling establishments like the plague is because I like to have control over the outcome!

But the worst offender of all events happens when you fly one of the zoltan cruisers. The energy shield is supposed to protect you from boarders, but you get the ship boarded events just as often, and the only explanation offered is "You don't know how the intruders managed to get past your Zoltan shield!" Would it really be that bad to just make the shield protect you from boarding parties? After all, fending them off isn't particularly difficult as the first cruiser starts with blast doors and the second one is impressively easy to "air out". So it wouldn't really make much of a difference from a gameplay perspective except that your Zoltan crew (which you probably don't take into combat much anyway) would have fewer opportunities to build their combat skills. Which brings up another interesting point: how come the zoltan cruisers have some of the best boarding defense designs of any cruiser? You'd think they would have some of the worst because of their shield!

[Whale Cancer]

Checking the race of a crewman in relation to an event is not possible in the XML.

Your other complaints are, in my opinion, legitimate (actually, so is your first one, there is just nothing that can be done about it until the devs make the game more mod friendly or FTL Overdrive is finished).