Subset Games Forum

I am not sure what exactly is happening, however I feel as though the game has gotten significantly harder. First a bit of background so you know I'm not someone who just thinks its too hard; I bought the game about a week after release. I spent my first week on easy mode learning the game. Once I got to the point where I was winning about 1/2 the games I played, I moved on to normal mode. I played normal mode for quite a bit, eventually ending with around a 30% win rate on normal. Then X-Com came out... I quit playing FTL up until 3 days ago so I could concentrate on X-Com's clasic mode. When i started back at FTL I went to easy mode. I noticed imediately that the game felt much harder, even though I had grown accustomed to normal mode by the time I quit. I chalked it up to being rusty. I worked at it for a day (about 10 games or so) and built my skills back up. I then moved back up to normal mode only to be crushed repeatedly by randomness... or so I thought. I have since done quite a bit of careful observation while playing. I noticed a few things...

1: It seems as though the AI ships utilize set ups specifically to counter the starting ship I use. If I had a starting ship with shields the enemies would have enough ion to get through. If I had a ship that relied on bording parties, the AI would throw nothing but AI ships at me. If I took a ship that uses missles the AI would have defensive drones. (Note, this was not 100%, but the AI tended towards those set ups that were strong against me). This was over the course of 15 games now, and it continues. It isn't a major issue by itself, because by sector 3 or so I would have my ship set up to deal with hard counters.

2: The shops seem to either all have the same type of stuff (I.E. first shop I find has sub systems and drones, then the next 5 shops have the same thing). If I skipped refueling a couple of times (getting below 20 fuel) I would stop seeing shops, and stop looting fuel. If I purchased a drone control bay, it would be 5 more sectors before I would find any drones in a shop to buy. (the upside to all of this, i got the living off the land achievement)

3: The enemies would have spot on accuracy, or I would have zero accuracy. This one was pretty hard to notice, and my sample size isn't large enough to prove anything (only have stats for the past 500 shots split into catagories with dodge chances). I would constantly encounter enemies who could hit me constantly through cloak (I generally have 90% dodge rate in cloak), but I get hit an average of 25% in cloak mode (keep in mind this is a small sample size, I have 29 shots recorded so far). Meanwhile even with the enemy only having 2 engine power, I am at a 64% hit rate (small sample size, 42 shot 27 hit).

So I was wondering if there was a patch that caused the game to become harder, or if this is how its been since release and I just have really bad luck.

I don't know anything, but it could be just really, really bad luck.

Think of it like this. It has to happen somewhere to somebody.

It took me ages to unlock stealth ship, I would get the event every time I didn't have an engi and never when I did.

Once my engi died in an event just one jump before I jumped to the unlock event.

Sounds like you just had a bunch of coincidental bad luck, or the previous times you played on normal you had a string of uncommonly good luck.

In any case, someone did make a mod that makes the game significantly harder.

The patches have mostly been made to solve graphics card compatibility issues, a few bug fixes, and only one significant gameplay change (an option to display links between nodes, that actually makes the game easier). I don't remember the devs making any change to "make the game harder" in the patches.

Also, it's the first time someone comes complaining on the forum about game difficulty change in the patches.

There were questions about asteroids becoming more lethal in the past iirc. But anyway no the game hasn't been made more difficult. Some starts on Normal are very challenging, esp. for unlocked ships such as the stealths, zoltans or mantis B.

There is no scaling difficulty to players power level, no deliberate targeting of rooms by AI ships, even if it sometimes feels that way. The only time the game cheats is in sectors 1 and 2, and it tries to remove enemy ships that roll absurdly overpowering scores. This and the 25% difference in score is the only difference between Easy and Normal.

Thank you for responding. I browsed the patch notes before I asked, so I was already fairly sure I was just having crap luck. I've given up on trying to keep track of my combat stats at this point. On the upside I had an exceedingly easy run on normal a few hours back. Ended up with 4x burst mk2 and 2x anti-ship drones 1. Just tore through those shields like paper.